Global Research

As a young farmer, Bill Westrate would walk outside most nights with a white sheet and black light to lure swarms of insects to the side of his barn in Cass County. “It would scare most people,” he said. But he didn’t much mind the bugs that would land in his hair and crawl down his shirt.

“It was just an absolute cloud of life.”

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Westrate would fill specimen cases with insects on his land, where he farmed corn, soy and Christmas trees. Sometimes, he would try other methods — putting ladders up to collect insects from porch lights,  or using malaise traps, tents made of fine mesh that collect a variety of arthropods.

Then, a couple of years ago — while watching a local television show where someone was using a similar trap — it occurred to him: The insects that once blanketed his land were mostly gone. And he wondered what happened to them.

He began to survey his southwest Michigan farm with a closer eye. He noticed that common insects like leafcutter bees, mud dauber wasps and orb weaver spiders were vanishing. And his holly bushes and wisteria vines no longer bore fruit, suggesting a lack of pollinators.

Of course, Westrate is just one farmer. But he’s also the former president of the Michigan Entomological Society; a “citizen-scientist extraordinaire,” in the words of Jennifer Tank, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame.

And what he saw as he walked his land was in line with insect declines observed across much of the United States and Europe.

A sphinx moth from Bill Westrate’s collection. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)

In one oft-cited study in Germany, for instance, total biomass of flying insects studied in preserves fell as much as 82 percent over 27 years. It wasn’t just a loss in the diversity of insect populations, but in total numbers, imperiling organisms at the base of the food web.

It’s unclear exactly what’s causing the declines. Scientists say they’re likely a result of a host of variables including habitat loss, climate change, pests, disease and new classes of pesticides such as glyphosate (the primary ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup) and neonicotinoids.

Together, these factors could help dramatically reorder the landscape in Michigan, affecting insects and in turn “every aspect of ecosystem function,” according to ecologist Nick Haddad of Michigan State University’s W.K. Kellogg Biological Station.

Audrey Sebold, a horticulture specialist at the Michigan Farm Bureau, notes that “most of Michigan’s fruits and many of our vegetables” require pollination from insects. Honeybees and native pollinators like bumblebees are important to fruit crops that thrive in Michigan, including tart cherries and blueberries, and vegetables such as tomatoes and squash.

Beyond the impact on agriculture and wildlife, continued declines in insect populations could lead — eventually — to “a tipping point,” said Haddad, “where we go from a habitable earth to basically uninhabitable.”

That may sound extreme, but scientists such as Francisco Sánchez-Bayo from the University of Sydney point out that with studies showing a rate of insect decline of 2.5 percent per year, “in 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”

Hence, the appearance of cheerful hashtags like #insectarmageddon.

Alas, not all scientists view the future as so bleak, citing both the resilience of a million-plus species of insects and a shortage of comprehensive research around the globe.

“Not going to happen,” Elsa Youngsteadt of North Carolina State University told The Atlantic of insects’ demise. “They’re the most diverse group of organisms on the planet. Some of them will make it.”

Insects are certainly diverse and adaptable, lending credence to the they-will-survive chorus. However, as a study in the journal Science showed, wildflowers have been declining in correlation with their pollinators, raising “the possibility of community-level cascades of decline and extinction.” In other words, it’s more than just bugs we have to worry about losing.

“But that’s in the future,” Haddad said. “We’re not at the extreme yet and we’ve got to head things off now…”

Preventing a worst-case scenario means getting a better picture of what’s driving the decline of insect populations.

A much-noted 2018 report in the New York Times titled, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” was based on studies in Europe, which were geographically limited.

Clearly, more research is needed and likely much of it will come from “citizen scientists” like Bill Westrate, volunteers who can record insect data where they live to paint a detailed picture of what’s happening to insects in Michigan.

Butterflies and bumblebees

Haddad, the MSU ecologist, studies butterflies.

He says they provide an historically important record for documenting insect declines. “If we go back 150 years, the way people knew about the natural world is what they knew about butterflies,” he said.

Butterfly collecting has helped create a wider record of insect numbers and diversity, especially in Europe where several of the most significant studies on insect declines have taken place.

Michigan’s butterfly numbers seem only to go reliably back about seven years. But to our south, Ohio has extensive data across the state, showing losses of two percent a year, and 33 percent over 20 years, results comparable to those from the United Kingdom and northern Europe.

“Butterflies are just indicators for the rest of insects that we don’t have the ability to monitor,” Haddad said. The factors driving down butterfly numbers also could be reducing those of other invertebrates like tiger beetles and stoneflies, and probably don’t stop at the Ohio-Michigan border.

Bumblebees — the large and fuzzy cousins of honeybees — offer a better barometer of insect numbers in Michigan, but here too the news is not good. The decline of domesticated honey bees has received plenty of attention, but bumblebees are important and efficientpollinators for many crops and wild plants.

A study of bumblebees based on specimens from all Michigan counties going back to 1887 found about half of 12 species once common in Michigan were in decline by 50 percent or more. One, the rusty-patched bumblebee, is effectively extinct in the state, while American bumblebees declined 98 percent.

Tearing out fencerows, eliminating weeds 

Westrate, who is now mostly retired, said he’s noticed that farms are getting bigger and growers are tearing out fencerows and woodlots that once served as wildlife corridors to make more room for crops.

He also noted increased reliance on various sprays, genetically modified crops and seed treatments that have become ubiquitous in farming communities.

In the early 1990s, farmers began using glyphosate, an ingredient in  Roundup, to dry out crops so they could be harvested sooner. This allows farmers to clear their fields before the onset of bad weather. The practice started in Scotland but increased dramatically in the U.S. Midwest as GMO “Roundup-ready” crops came online.

These wasps are part of a collection that fills much of Bill Westrate’s dining room. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)

Such crops could withstand being sprayed with Roundup, but surrounding weeds — which provided insects with food and habitat — were eradicated. The chemical has been implicated in the huge loss of monarch butterflies as milkweed plants — where monarchs lay eggs, then feed on them as caterpillars — nearly vanished from fields.

Another class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or “neonics,” have flooded Michigan farms as a seed treatment since 2000, typically for corn and soybeans. As the name implies, neonicotinoids are chemically similar to nicotine and can work systematically through a plant, even showing up in pollen and nectar.

Neonics have been shown to impact pollinators including bees, songbirds, bats and, though originally thought safe for mammals, deer. By 2011, roughly 80 percent of corn seeds and a third of soybeans were planted with neonic-treated seed.

Farms relying heavily on neonicotinoids and glyphosate cut a wide band across southern Michigan and into the state’s thumb region.

“It’s uncanny the decline [of insects] that happens concurrent with the arrival of those two pesticides,” Haddad said. He adds, however: “I don’t think there is one smoking gun, so it’s not fair to say that, but…there’s good reason for concern.”

Some Michigan growers — including blueberry producers — may suffer pollinator declines while spraying neonicotinoids. Rufus Isaacs, an MSU entomologist specializing in pollinators, said roughly 80 percent of blueberries are pollinated by honeybees, which often are trucked in from out of state. Despite dramatic die-offs, beekeepers can usually regenerate colonies. So far, pollinator declines don’t seem to have affected blueberry production as much as unpredictable weather during flowering.

Sebolt, of the Farm Bureau, said fruit growers have good incentive to spray responsibly, so as not to hurt honeybees or other pollinators. Growers who rent honeybee hives “try as best they can, and they do a pretty good job of not spraying when the honeybees are out,” she said.

Kevin Robson, executive director at the Michigan Blueberry Commission, has been involved in efforts to protect pollinators in the state. He defends the use of neonicotinoids, citing the Environmental Protection Agency’s continued approval of most neonics as evidence of their safety and said they’re an important part of integrated pest management, which requires a range of strategies.

In Europe, some growers have argued that banning neonics could make farmers resort to even more dangerous chemicals.  And, as Robson noted, neonics are “normally cheaper,” for blueberry growers, who are also dealing with labor shortages and a competitive global market for their crop.

“If they’re not able to sell their blueberries for a profit, they’re not going to be in business, anyway,” Robson said.

European bans on neonicotinoids (and glyphosate in Germany and Austria) may help Michigan farmers get a better view of what might happen if these chemicals “are removed from the landscape,” Haddad said.

A way forward

Studies in Germany and the Netherlands also show how citizen scientists can play a crucial role in monitoring insect populations. The data at the core of the New York Times story was collected by a network of volunteer entomologists in the German city of Krefeld, whose entomological society keeps records dating from the 1860s.

Technology can help as well. Isaacs, of MSU, recommends a smartphone app calledBumble Bee Watch, which allows anyone to gather photos or data and submit them to taxonomic experts for a database that tracks bumblebee numbers across the country.

The Michigan Butterfly Network organizes volunteers to conduct field counts of butterflies, similar to the Audubon Society’s “Christmas Bird Count,” one of the oldest and most successful examples of volunteer-led research.

“The best data coming out about why monarchs are declining come from these citizen science efforts,” Haddad said. It’s also a productive way for people who might be concerned about climate change to manage anxiety.

Land conservation programs might be an easier sell in farm country.

In Michigan, the Department of Natural Resources’ Large Grasslands project was created to preserve and restore prairie ecosystems. The project mostly focuses on creating habitat for birds like the Henslow’s sparrow and ring-necked pheasant. But Isaacs said such efforts are also likely to benefit insect species.

Nationally, the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program is set to see modest increasesin funding that would pay farmers to set aside environmentally sensitive land for wildlife and create corridors for the migration and dispersal of species, while helping farmers with pollination and erosion control.

This aligns with another Haddad project: creating wildlife corridors, which can be connected parkland or land along waterways to help preserve insect habitats and increase breeding populations threatened by urbanization or large farms.

Westrate, meanwhile, said he’s on board with efforts to find more folks like him — amateur entomologists happy to gather data to study insect declines, losses he still can’t seem to wrap his mind around.

He said he recalls back in the 1980s when he first noticed five-lined skinks (slinky lizards) and leopard frogs disappearing from his farm, another dramatic change that’s never been fully explained.

“But who could have imagined the insects?” Westrate said. “Who could have imagined that?”

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Featured image: Bill Westrate’s home near Cassopolis is surrounded by large farms. (Bridge photo by Brian Allnutt)

The Eastern Partnership is a joint policy initiative created in 2009 which aims to deepen and strengthen relations between the European Union (EU), its Member States and its six eastern neighbors: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova  and Ukraine. Although many of the EU’s eastern neighbors have aspirations to become EU Member States, for Brussels the Partnership is an opportunity to maintain some cohabitation relations with states directly on or near Russia’s borders by giving them the illusive promise of so-called European integration. This promise of European integration is of course to also limit their economic and infrastructural integration with Russia.

Most curious though is the participation of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Caucasus. With the current state of affairs in Ukraine and Turkey, it is unlikely that the EU will be engaging in any further expansions into the former Soviet bloc, especially ones in the Caucasus that border Turkey, and will focus primarily on the Balkans. With the coronavirus pandemic devastating the economies of Europe, the EU is not prepared to subsidize the economies of these particular post-Soviet states, especially as many are rampant with corruption and Brussels is unwilling to give the likes of autocrats, like Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, the right to vote and veto.

The last wave of EU expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries in 2004 and 2007, specifically into Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as others, led to a serious political and economic crisis in the EU as Brussels found it difficult to integrate the new members culturally and economically. Therefore, the issue of new members joining the EU has been sidelined, with the exception of Albania and North Macedonia in the Balkans.

However, the current impossibility for the post-Soviet states to join the EU at the moment, especially at a time when Russia wants greater influence in the region, means the Eastern Partnership was created to give a false illusion and a perpetual limbo for these countries. The EU has already said that the Eastern Partnership should not be considered a step towards Membership. However, the sublimation of European integration is in fact a surrogate of Membership, thus giving Eastern Partnership members contradictory messages. The Eastern Partnership is a process which allows these countries to be institutionally attached to the EU through free market philosophy guided by European advice, especially since they are allocated European-funded money for various programs to be further integrated into a European economic and social model.

After more than a decade of integration, some of these post-Soviet countries are increasingly proposing to legalize the relationship into the EU. Last week, Moldovan Prime Minister Ion Chicu during the sixth summit of the Eastern Partnership that was teleconferenced due to the coronavirus pandemic, said “Even before the pandemic, the Eastern Partnership got closer to a ‘moment of truth.’ Now, after 10 years of cooperation, [the Eastern Partnership] either reinvents itself and we get ‘a new breath’ or it slowly but surely loses its political relevance. The pandemic accelerated this process.” He then called for the boosting of high-level strategic political dialogue and for more joint projects.

Source: InfoBrics

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenski backed Chicu and said that the Eastern Partnership should “not limit the ambitions of the partners,” adding that “for some a political dialogue is enough.”

European Commission, Ursula von der Lainen, is not committing to elevating the Eastern Partnership into a Membership path and rather spoke only about investments, as well as about setting so-called common goals. Effectively, the EU will continue to have some influence over these countries even though they have essentially blocked their paths towards full membership.

Not all post-Soviet states adhere to the demands of Europe, particularly Belarus and Azerbaijan. But some remain completely hopeful, such as Ukraine that is desperate to join any project or organization that can be perceived as anti-Russian or against Russian interests.

However, despite this, the majority of Eastern Partnership member countries accept the limitations and continue to participate in the project in its current form. Some to maintain a European face in the hope of joining the EU one day, and other just to simply maintain good relations with Brussels. Therefore, both the EU and Moscow will continue vying for influence in this region. This actually puts these particular countries in an advantageous position to leverage both Brussels and Moscow to their own advantages if they can maintain a balance, something we can argue only Belarus is doing to great effect.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Newspaper executive Peter Wright has slammed big tech for secretively developing and changing algorithms for news distribution without giving the industry any indication whatsoever of what they are doing.

Wright of DMG Media, which is the parent company of The Daily Mail, was testifying before the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee Tuesday.

He accused companies like Google and Facebook of ‘monopoly behaviour’ as they seek to seize ‘all the power’ in online news and advertising.

Wright claims that the Mail’s online daily traffic from Google searches has been diminished by 50 per cent in just one year after the company changed the algorithm for news content in 2019.

“Google and Facebook in our view are market dominant companies and they behave in the way that market dominant companies do,” Wright stated, noting that it is significantly impacting journalism.

“Google and Facebook both distribute our content via algorithm. Those algorithms are what is known in the digital world as a ‘black box’ – they are secret, you have no idea how they work. But we can see and measure the results,” Wright said.

Wright also implied that the Mail’s pro Brexit stance led to it being targeted by big tech for diminished online distribution.

He noted that last June

“over the space of three days, our search visibility, which is the measure of how often your content is appearing against a basket of search terms, dropped by 50 per cent, and it was particularly marked against some particular terms. One of them for instance was ‘Brexit’.”

Wright noted that after his group protested, normality eventually returned.

“But this is monopoly behaviour. You can’t do this if you’re in a business relationship with someone where there’s any semblance of equality of power,” he urged.

Wright noted that Google and Facebook are not regulated and so they are getting away with a secretive takeover of content.

“As far as the commercial relationship between news publishers and the platforms is concerned, it’s a business relationship between two partners in which one partner has all the power,” Wright declared.

He described Google as “completely dominant” in search and digital marketing, the two main avenues for distributing news content, and Facebook (which also owns instagram) as “dominant in social media”, pointing out that they make “more money out of advertising than our newspapers do.”

Despite the vast power that these companies have in such areas, Wright noted that their terms of service are completely “opaque”.

“Even the contracts that we sign to use their services are often presented to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. So what we’re asking for here is for regulation, and the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) are about to report on a massive piece of work they’ve been doing, to address the complete imbalance in the business relationship,” Wright asserted.

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The US administration under Barack Obama drafted “Caesar’s Law” in 2016 to subdue Syria but kept it in the drawer. President Donald Trump and his administration dusted it off and are now implementing “Caesar’s Law”. In fact, Trump’s policy is manna to Iran: the US administration is playing straight into the hands of Tehran. Iran is reaping huge benefits, including more robust allies and resistant strongholds as a result of the US’s flawed Middle Eastern policies. Motivated by the threat of the implementation of “Caesar’ Law”, Iran has prepared a series of steps to sell its oil and finance its allies, bypassing depletion of its foreign currency reserves.

Iranian companies found in Syria a paradise for strategic investment and offered the needed alternative to a Syrian economy crippled by sanctions and nine years of war. Iran considers Syria a fertile ground to expand its commerce and business like never before. It has also found a way to support the Syrian currency and to avoid digging into its reserves of foreign currencies, skirting US sanctions in both Syria and Iran, while aiding the rest of its allies.

Iran supplied Syria with precision missiles and other anti-air missiles notwithstanding the hundreds of Israeli air attacks which managed to destroy large quantities of these Iranian advanced missiles but without removing the threat to Israel.

Moreover, following the announcement of the implementation of “Caesar’s Law”, Iran sent a large business delegation to Syria to schedule the supply of first necessities and goods in a time of sanctions. Iran has great expertise in this business and, after living for 40 years under sanctions, is in an excellent position to advise President Assad.

Russia also announced – via its vice Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov – that his country rejects the illegal sanctions on Syria, and that Russia will provide President Assad with whatever his country needs.

Idem in Syria: Iran proved its capability to break the fuel siege on Syria by sending several oil tankers to its ally in the Levant. Iran is ready to be paid in Syrian Lira rather than US currency for its oil. By doing this, Iran can pay its tens of thousands of allied persons spread across Syria with local currency, marginalising the US dollar.

The US and Israel, who worked throughout the years of war in Syria to remove Iran, were in fact the impetus for Iran’s presence (and that of Russia) in the Levant in the first place. The US is now imposing “Caesar’s Law”, which will help Iran cement its presence in the Levant and Mesopotamia. It is planning to build a railway between Tehran and Damascus (and possibly Beirut): this axis will be able to transport hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and tons of merchandise. The only way for the US to reduce the collateral damage is to finally accept that all of its “maximum pressure” and harshest sanctions on Iran and its allies have little chance of working. In the meantime, it is Iran that is moving ahead with a robust ring of allies, and the US and Israel which are left with Middle Eastern allies who are both inefficient and insignificant.

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Featured image is from EJM

Recently we alerted our supporters to an amendment to the UK’s Agriculture Bill, proposed by Julian Sturdy MP chair of the APPG for Science & Technology in Agriculture. If adopted the amendment would effectively deregulate GMOs.

We have been very gratified by your responses. Many of you joined us in writing to George Eustice, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, expressing concern not just for the proposed amendment itself but also for the lack of democratic process in the way it was being introduced. This was the thrust of our letter to the Secretary of State and the emails we received showed many of you expressed the same concerns to the Minister.

There is no doubt that these views have given the government pause because the amendment, was not mooted in the June 10^th debate in the House of Lords as expected.

However we are not out of the woods yet. We still expect the amendment to surface in some form – either from government or as an individual initiative. Last week’s debate was used as an opportunity for many in the Lords to prime the pump by showing their support for genome editing.

Toeing the Tory line

The full text of the debate is here. Reading it clearly shows that, on the day, support for genome editing came exclusively from the Conservative peers, many of whom have interests in agribusinesses.

In his introduction to the debate, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who is tasked with seeing the Agriculture Bill through to its adoption, spoke of the “need for innovation and technology” to help “ensure sustainability”.

In his closing summary he noted:

“On gene editing, again the Government agree that the EU approach is unscientific. We are committed to adopting a more scientific approach to regulation in the future”. He added that “the Government will not adopt a new approach without proper consultation”.

He did not expand on what constituted “proper consultation” in the government’s view.

Lord Taylor of Holbeach spoke of gene editing as a “game changer” which is an “acceleration of plant breeding” that could lead to “enhanced yields and reducing our use of fertilisers and pesticides and benefit small and medium enterprises”. By small and medium enterprises he means biotech firms not farmers. He affirmed that the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture strongly endorsed these techniques”.

Baroness Browning applauded Lord Taylor adding that

“As an Agriculture Minister, I introduced the first GM product in this country, way back in the 1990s. It all fell apart, as we know, for all sorts of reasons. But with the right controls I believe that there is much to be gained from looking at this science, particularly in respect of plants. We must make sure that we are not left behind because of people’s fear of the word “gene”.

Viscount Ridley said that

“To be sustainable, agriculture needs innovation in precision farming, robotics, drones and other technologies so as to use fewer chemicals more precisely targeted. It needs innovation in genome editing particularly – a precise new breeding technology that enables plant breeders to achieve exactly what they have achieved in the past but much more quickly and precisely”.

Lord Krebs, spoke of “harnessing all the power of science and technology to produce more with less: more food with less impact on the environment, the climate and animal welfare” and asked “What is the Government’s plan for enhancing the necessary science base, including gene editing, and ensuring that this new knowledge will be taken up by farmers?”.

Lord Cameron of Dillington asked for “a clear message in this Bill that we will move forward to allow gene editing in our research programmes. This is a way of speeding up the natural methods of farm breeding to ensure that we can improve the environmental and nutritional outcomes of feeding our ever-expanding human population, both at home and – more particularly, as far as I am concerned – in the developing world”.

The Earl of Lindsay said:

“I believe this Bill is an opportunity for the Government to adopt an amendment that would enable future access to precision-breeding tools such as new gene-editing technologies”.

Baroness Redfern expressed her hope that the Bill will “make improvements and create more robust and resilient domestic agricultural and horticultural sectors, giving scientists, farmers, plant breeders and animal breeders the same access to new gene editing technologies as the rest of the world”.

Challengers speak out

Those who expressed concern about the ‘liberation’ of genome editing technologies in farming and food included Baroness Parminter – a Liberal Democrat – who said:

 “I will oppose any attempt to use the Bill to overturn existing legislation on gene editing, which would be a serious step backwards for animal welfare and public trust in our food. We need to retain the European model of regulation that we are currently signed up to, where no gene editing is allowed outside the lab and mandatory labelling is required, and we should not enable trade deals with countries such as America, where products from genetically modified animals can be marketed”.

Baronesse Ludford – also a Liberal Democrat – acknowledged the deep links between this Agriculture Bill and the Trade Bill and noted:

“The US produces food to standards that many of us regard as very bad practice and which EU law prevents. Even if the response was, ‘We won’t ban them but will require them to be labelled’, that is not an adequate substitute in all cases – and anyway, we know from the experience over GMOs that the US will fight that tooth and nail”.

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle – AKA Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party – noted that

“Some are arguing that we should downplay nature and sustainability and dial up food production, but that is a false dichotomy that risks doubling down on a food system that is contributing to a perfect storm of a spillover of diseases from wildlife to people, and, like the proponents of genetically modified organisms and crops, it chases after a failed industrialised monoculture”.

What happens next?

The second reading debate in the Lords  was an opportunity for general discussion and for members to raise issues in a broad-brush way. Some used the opportunity to give notice of their intended amendments. The next meeting of the Lords will be more forensic, allowing a detailed consideration of Bill and amendments put forward in the time between the two meetings.

Proposed amendments to the Bill will be put forward until this next meeting likely on July 7. A running update of these is posted on the parliamentary website here.

As we write, some of the proposed amendments appear to change in language to the Bill in a way that makes it more amenable to a more substantive amendment around genome editing.

For instance, Lord Lucas (Conservative) wants to make sure the amendment “allows for the support of possible new livestock species” and “new crop species”. And supports “the advancement of agricultural technology, including robotics and genetics”.

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Labour), who is the  Chair of the Enterprise Board at Rothamsted Research, is seeking language that enables “the application of the latest scientific research to food technology” and gives “consideration to various means of achieving different food-related goals”.

The list of amendments will likely grow in the coming weeks and we are watching it closely.

PR before policy

That we have not seen the text of the Sturdy amendment, does not mean it has been abandoned.

Indeed, there is a concerted PR effort behind it. Long before the Lords met, the APPG for Science & Technology in Agriculture began a PR blitz by issuing a press release signalling its intent to propose an amendment. This was quickly picked up by the farming press. The National Farmers Union (NFU) signalled its support by issuing a press release too. The day of the Lords debate Viscount Ridley published a piece in the Times newspaper entitled Genome-edited Crops Help Farmers and the Environment.

Over the weekend, following the Lords debate, the APPG for Science & Technology in Agriculture posted a tweet that featured a news brief and ‘fact file’ which featured a UK sugar beet farmer as a poster boy for the benefits of genome editing.

There were also two articles in the Observer newspaper; one an opinion piece by plant scientist and pro-GM advocate Sir David Baulcombe, the other a news item on the Lords debate quoting both Baulcombe and Lord Gardiner on the benefits of gene editing and acknowledging clear evidence that the government would be sympathetic to deregulating the products of genome editing in the name of sustainability.

One of our supporters who wrote to the Observer letters page with concerns of the lack of balance that the two pieces represented, received the following response:

“The first article is an opinion piece by a plant scientist. It’s not intended to be, and neither does it pretend to be, a news report on the subject. It’s one person giving his own view on the issue. I’m sure that many will disagree with that particular view, but these types or articles are commissioned precisely for writers to be able to express their own views and add to the overall debate.

“The second article is of course a news story, but is a report of the progress of legislation through the Lords. As I understand it from speaking to the writer, no-one spoke out against it at the second reading, which is what being reported on.

“I do understand that there are a variety of views around the whole subject, and I’m not seeking to dismiss them; only to suggest that this was not the right place to air them.”

The Observer clearly made no attempt to understand the dynamics of the issue – or even fact check the pieces it published. Natalie Bennett did, however, publish a thoughtful piece on the Ecologist website on the same day noting that “The public is very clear in its view on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We don’t want them in our food system.”

While the response from the newspaper is polite, it’s also problematic (and symptomatic). First of all, as detailed above, several Lords did speak out against the proposed amendment during the debate and, secondly, if a national newspaper is not the place to air a diversity of opinion on a subject of national import, where is?

• While we await more developments, if others wish to write to the Secretary of State to encourage him not to table this amendment you can do so at: [email protected]. You might also consider sending a copy to Lord Gardiner of Kimble [email protected] (mark it FAO Lord Gardiner of Kimble in the subject line)
• If you’d like to write to the Observer you can do so at [email protected].
• We’d be happy to receive copies of any letters and/or replies.
• You can check the progress of the Agriculture Bill here.

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Featured image is from Beyond GM

Ethiopia, by all standards, is a reputable country in East Africa. It gains popularly from different angles. In terms of politics, Ethiopia has been touted as a country with an excellent model of democracy in Africa. For his efforts in ending the 20-year-long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, President Abiy Ahmed was awarded with the Nobel prize for peace in 2019.

More crucially, research studies and several reports have documented additional worth of Ethiopia. It bears the flag of Africa, as its capital Addis Ababa represents the center for most of the regional and foreign organizations down the years.

The African Union [AU] is headquartered in Addis Ababa. The primary task of this super continental organization is mobilizing and coordinating available natural and human resources for solving existing and emerging multifaceted problems inside Africa. Some experts argue that the AU has within its mandate and further within the slogan “African problems, African solutions” to showcase the continent’s practical ultimate independence.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed social and economic conditions in many African countries, and disparity between the West, Europe and Asia, all on one side and on the other Africa. In fact, the time also present challenges and opportunities. For many Africa countries and for the African Union, it is an opportunity for harnessing external assistance, not exhausting the opportunities at home. Definitely, it is a bitter joke, but it reflects the reality.

More than half a century since it was declared politically independent from “colonialism” or whatever, Africa has been presented as a region engulfed with abject poverty, even in the past has benefited grossly from development aid and received substantial assistance from various external sources.

Ethiopia, and many African countries, has to rethink carefully about “humanitarian aid” in its bilateral relations [its contemporary diplomacy] with foreign countries. Instead, it should focus more on how diplomacy could support sustainable development efforts, such areas as health, agriculture, industry and other employment generation sectors.

“The world is in a new and dangerous phase,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing recently from the World Health Organization [WHO] headquarters in Geneva. “The virus is still spreading fast, it is still deadly, and most people are still susceptible.”

Tedros Ghebreyesus, who comes from Ethiopia in East Africa, has urged countries to maintain extreme vigilance, mobilize and direct resources toward the fight against the global pandemic.

In mid-June, Ethiopian Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Alemayehu Tegenu Aargau said in his interview with a local Russian news agency that Moscow had promised to assist Addis Ababa in its fight against the pandemic, and Ethiopia expects promptly deliveries from Russia.

Tegenu Aargau further said that

Ethiopia “still requires some support from friendly countries. The leaders of the two countries [Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed] had a telephone conversation and one of the issues [was] cooperation to combat the pandemic. The Russian side promised to assist Ethiopia in its fight against the pandemic. I believe that we expect material equipment from Russia. We are waiting for it.”

The Ethiopian ambassador further compared Russia to other foreign countries, when he said Ethiopia had received deliveries from China and other friendly powers that enabled it to, significantly boost its testing volumes of the large population.

“Test indicators, ventilators, and other support are welcome,” the diplomat noted.

By his statement, it implies exerting pressure for a promised gift. After all, the Soviets helped Africa in attaining political independence, that was during the cold war days. The Soviet Union, and now Russia has consistently helped many African countries thereafter. Thus, pressurizing for food assistance and COVID packages seemed “undiplomatic and odd” and worse, reminding through the media. Significantly, Ethiopia, among a number of African countries, has had a lot from Russia. It still looks for enormous harvest of external humanitarian aid.

It was a fact that, in separate early April discussions with South African and Ethiopian leaders, President Vladimir Putin pledged Russia’s support in collaborating with Africa fight coronavirus that is currently spreading among the population across the continent. The phone discussions was not limited to “give and take” humanitarian aid, but rather outlining comprehensive innovative efforts at sustaining the hard-won development and economic gains. Beyond that, looking at possible collective plans to prevent such large scale of the pandemic in future.

Data released by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Africa CDC] on June 20, showed the top-five highest recorded coronavirus cases, generally, on the continent. In total, Africa has reported 286,141 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as at June 20. Still far below the figures obtained in the United States, Brazil and Russia, and many countries in Europe.

According to the Africa CDC figures, South Africa, in the first position, has recorded 83,890 cases, followed by Egypt and Nigeria with 50,437 and 18,480 cases respectively. Ghana with 12,929 cases, took the fourth position. Ethiopia, so far, has 3,954 infections among a population of about 115 million.

After all, Russia has already pledged to increase its corporate investment portfolio, and to strengthen existing economic cooperation that includes military technical agreements under a renewed strategic plan in Ethiopia. Russia has also written-off debts owed by Ethiopia. This debt relief allows Ethiopia, [among other African countries] to recover from the economic shock of the pandemic.

On June 11, during the media briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, revealed that Russia had received official requests from 29 African states and the African Union [AU] to assist in countering the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

She further explained that, this year, Russia has made an additional annual contribution of $10 million to the UN World Food Program [to be distributed equally between Burundi, Djibouti, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic]. Russia has allocated $10 million to the Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] fund for fighting a massive locust onslaught in East Africa [to be distributed between Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia – $3 million each and South Sudan – $1 million].

According to analytical reports and reviews, the pandemic could trigger a lot more socio-economic problems, fuel violence and domestic conflict, while the economies of many African states may sustain heavy damage. It certainly poses new challenges, on one hand.

On the other hand, African leaders and official representatives have to leave behind their “begging bowls” at home, talk and negotiate more on investment cooperation. Humanitarian aid is only a short-term solution, even that said, Africa could look at its domestic resource mobilization as exemplified by many foreign countries in the West and in Europe.

It is worth recognizing the fact that Ethiopia holds the flag of Africa. It is time to deal with long-term solutions rather than look for shortcuts for coronavirus pandemic. After all, Ethiopia has only a small fraction of infected numbers among its population, as compared to Russia that is dealing with more than half a million of coronavirus cases during the months of May and June.

Indeed, Russia declares it fight by mobilizing its own resources. It has a structured plan, and that includes President Vladimir Putin weekly meetings with regional governors and related ministry officials. Under these time-testing conditions, Russia takes the initiative with little external assistance, put in place a long-term roadmap for future.

Ethiopia should rather lead the African diplomatic community in Moscow into evolving elaborate discussions on cooperating on Russia’s vaccine, its health initiatives and learning lessons from how Russia is currently handling its pandemic. The priority now, most probably, has to be directed on Russia-African cooperation in health sector in this era of COVID-19. Russia is at the forefront of producing a vaccine for the virus, this scientific success must, at least and necessarily, awaken heads of Ethiopia and Africa.

Arguably, in a widely circulated letter, various co-signatories in April, including 100 leading academics and writers, have called on African leaders to govern with compassion and see the current global health crisis as a chance for a radical change of direction in the continent. For it is in the most trying moments that new/innovative orientations must be explored and lasting solutions adopted.

Nevertheless, Africa has to make a complete departure from endless request for humanitarian aid. More than ever, it is important for leaders to ponder the necessity to adopt a concerted approach to the economic sectors related to public health system, strengthen fundamental research in all health disciplines and close the pitfalls in its public policy.

The time has come to make progressive changes. Despite the boast of abundant natural resources, Africa remains the world’s poorest and least-developed continent, the result of a variety of causes that may include corrupt governments and policies fraught with dubious methods. Africa is the world’s second largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. With an estimated 1.3 billion people as of 2019, accounts for about 16% of the world’s population.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Prologue

One of the graver risks for big-time criminals is that investigators will be able to identify them and their deeds by ‘following the money’. The criminals have to hide the proceeds of their crimes. This is done by depositing their monies into legitimate finance houses and businesses. It often requires some fancy book-keeping tricks and intricate transactions. This is called layering by the afficionados of this dark art. Once it is done, the criminals can draw on the accounts created and mix the ill-gotten gains with legally garnered capital. The term for this is ‘integration’ and it makes the investigators’ tasks much harder. The rotten fruit of crime will have been laundered.

In 2012, HSBC, a global bank, whose origins are connected to Hong Kong and Shanghai and whose headquarters are now in London, admitted that it had participated in funneling what it acknowledged to have been suspect money, including some used to breach sanctions imposed on US enemies. It had helped launder $881-million for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, including the notorious Sinaloa cartel headed by Chapo Guzman. The US Department of Justice, which obtained HSBC’s admission, reported that the cartel’s operatives deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars daily and that it was made very convenient for them: HSBC branches designed teller windows with the precise dimensions to fit the cartels’ boxes when they were delivered by their employees. Caught with its fists in drug money boxes, a settlement was agreed-to by HSBC. The bank agreed to pay what was then the largest fine ever, $1.9-billion (which was the equivalent of 5 weeks of the bank’s global income), and entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement that promised that they would not do any of this again. The bank is currently the 7th largest bank in the world.

Extradition

For some time now, Hong Kong has seen massive street protests as many people want more of a say for themselves in governance and less of a say for Beijing. In the midst of the chaos, Hong Kong’s legislators proposed to ink an extradition agreement to which China would be the other signatory.

Extradition treaties are arrangements whereby a nation state agrees to return to its partner-nation to the treaty people alleged to have committed criminal acts against that other nation’s laws. It is meant to prevent alleged criminals from avoiding the consequences for their misconduct by escaping to another jurisdiction. When a request for extradition by a signatory to a treaty is received, a court there is to determine whether the application should succeed. It is not its task to question whether the person actually committed a crime. It merely has to determine whether it is the kind of crime which could lead to prosecution if the conduct had occurred in its jurisdiction. This gives the process its legitimacy because it gives effect to legal values shared by both parties to the extradition treaty. The court considering the request has no interest in whether the conduct actually amounted to a crime, either in the applicant nation or in its own. It assumes the facts as alleged by the applicant nation and then determines whether that conduct would amount to a violation of its own laws if it occurred in its jurisdiction.

It is, then, a judicial exercise which is purely formal. It does not make any findings about the issues between the applicant for extradition and the person resisting extradition.

Although this was the essential nature of the Hong Kong Bill, it met with fierce resistance: huge marches, physical fights in the legislature. The protests added fuel to the already widely burning fires of dissent and the Hong Kong government withdrew the Bill. In addition to the upheaval and violence in the streets, the government was likely somewhat influenced by the great show of support for the anti-Extradition Bill movement in countries such as the UK, the US and Canada. This anti-extradition stance by these nations seemed to sit uneasily alongside the fact that they had signed on to many similar extradition treaties themselves. But, they bought into the argument made by the Hong Kong dissidents. This was that, even though an extradition request made by China would be vetted by Hong Kong courts steeped in the principles and values of English common law, the proposed treaty would allow China to use extradition requests for crass political purposes, to help it chase down political opponents and agitators. It would lead to attacks on precious freedoms. Even though the proposed treaty ‘looked’ much like any other, it was likely to be used for unacceptable purposes. This sort of thing would never occur in the UK the US or Canada because, unlike China, they respected and lived by the Rule of Law.

The Lore and Lure of the Rule of Law

Canada’s legal system presents itself as embodying society’s shared values and norms. They are embodied in principles and the instrumental rules devised to give these fundamental principles life. This presupposes that the basic principles can be found and defined and that the rules will be appropriately fashioned and applied. The conventional view is that the judiciary is an independent institution and can be trusted to go about the finding of principles and the interpretation and application of rules in a non-partisan, in a non-political, manner.

Courts will treat all private individuals, whatever their social or economic circumstances, as legal equals whose disputes must be settled by the application of known, rational criteria. Rationality, of the legal kind, is to replace political and economic power, that is, irrational power.

The courts abide by generalizing principles and specific rules. The rules have to be spelled out clearly; citizens are to know of the existence of those rules; new rules should not apply retroactively. The principles and rules are to be applied even-handedly, regardless of status and class. The access to this justice system should be equally available to one and all. These are some of the ingredients of what is so often termed the Rule of Law. It is an attractive system because it suggests that everyone is subject to the same laws and requirements, that political or economic power is not allowed to deny anyone their entitlements or rights established in law. The UK, US and Canadian view is that it, or any equivalent, regime does not exist in China. But, while the idea of it certainly exists in our rather self-satisfied Anglo-American settings, its implementation may leave something to be desired.

While our courts are punctilious about following the procedural safeguards which make up the Rule of Law, they have an enormous amount of leeway when determining how substantive principles and rules are to be interpreted and applied. They are in a position to launder otherwise politically troubling, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, policies and decisions. What happens is a mixing of the adherence to procedural formalities which abjure bias and prejudice with the manipulation of substantive laws which incorporate bias and prejudice. The integrated outcome is analogous to the consequence of the criminals’ mixing suspect monies with legally acquired assets. It makes it hard to see whether there was a political wrong in the first place. It is a form of laundering, legalized laundering.¹

The recent proceedings in Canada dealing with the US demand that the Chief Financial officer of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, be extradited to the US brings some of this into the open. The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that Meng’s argument that there was no legal basis for extradition was rejected. Canada’s talking heads and chattering class sighed with relief. The self-proclaimed liberal Toronto Star’s editors welcomed and characterized the virtue of the decision: “Beijing must understand: out courts don’t serve the government… It’s called ‘rule of law,’ a concept foreign to China’s Communist Party and its mouthpieces.” Apart from their evident cold war genre chauvinism, the editors undoubtedly were glad to have any doubts about the Trudeau government’s and Canada’s allegiance to the Rule of Law stilled.

The recent embarrassment caused by the tawdry behaviour of almost every cog in the ruling class’s legal engine room during the SNC-Lavalin scandal which involved the government forcing its own Minister of Justice to resign because she wanted to act independently and deny a flagrantly wrongdoing corporation any kind of soft landing, now could be pushed aside as an uncharacteristic violation of Canada’s basic principles. To them, the Meng ruling signified that, once again, Canada was entitled to be smug, to assert that it was to be envied because of its stout adherence to an unalloyed good, the Rule of Law.

The Ruling in the Meng Case

It all began with a warrant issued by a New York court for Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in August 2018. She was not there. On December 1, 2018, after an extradition request from the US, Meng was arrested by Canadian authorities when she landed in Vancouver. On 28 January 2019, formal charges were laid by the US Department of Justice, accusing Meng’s employer, Huawei, of misrepresentations about its corporate organization which had enabled it to circumvent laws that imposed economic sanctions on Iran. Huawei was also charged with stealing technology and trade secrets from T-Mobile USA. Meng, the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei, was charged with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. Huawei pled not guilty to the charges of violating the Iran sanction provisions in a New York court and not guilty to the stealing charges in a Seattle court. After a number of preliminary legal skirmishes, the extradition hearings against Meng began in 2020. Associate Justice Holmes issued her ruling on 27 May, 2020. Law takes its time.

Meng had told HSBC officials who met with her in the back of a Hong Kong restaurant in 2013 that, despite the allegations in a newspaper article, Huawei had not made improper use of a closely associated firm, named Skycom Tech, to supply US materiel to Iran. The reason she had made this statement to HSBC, it was alleged, was that Huawei used HSBC as a banker when transacting business. If Huawei, as alleged, was implicated in violations of the Iran sanction laws, HSBC might well be held to be complicit in such crimes. The US alleged that Meng’s representations to HSBC constituted fraud under its law.

Meng Wanzhou argued that, for a case of fraud to be made out, in both the US and Canada, it was necessary for the prosecution to prove that the fraud materially contributed to a tangible loss. This could not be made out here. For Meng’s deception of HSBC to cause it a tangible loss in the US, it was necessary for US prosecutors to invoke the impact of another law, the Iranian sanction law. Without it there would not be any harm and, therefore, no fraud in the US. As Canada did not have any such sanction provisions in place, Meng’s deception would not have led to any tangible loss in Canada and there would have been no fraud committed in Canada. This argument that the basic requirement for extradition – mirroring laws – had not been met, was rejected by Associate Chief Justice Holmes.

She deployed standard legal reasoning that is, she looked for previous holdings and used the imprecisions she found in them and in the wording of the legislation she was interpreting. Holmes found that previous decisions had held that, in order to determine whether the conduct in the applicant jurisdiction created an offence, it was necessary to assess the essential nature of that conduct. That meant evaluating the foreign conduct in its context, in its legal environment. Meng argued that looking at the legal environment required taking a foreign law, one distinct from the laws being compared, into account, something which should not be done under the Extradition Law.

The presiding judge responded that only some aspects of the legal environment, constituted by that other law, had to be taken into account, not all of it. It was her job to say which aspects could be so used. Holmes admitted that she was going out on a limb because the distinction between looking at some aspects of a foreign law and taking the actual law into consideration is fraught, both as a matter of logic and of established law. She wrote that “the issue is at what level of abstraction… the essence … of the conduct is to be described… there is little authority or precisely what may be included in ‘imported legal environment’.”

Undeterred by the lack of any known criteria (remember the Rule of Law!), she used what she likely calls her common sense and what Meng’s supporters probably think was her unconscious bias. Associate Justice Holmes decided that, in this case, it was appropriate, when looking for the essential nature of the foreign conduct, to look at the effects of that US law, the Iran sanction law. As its effects made Meng’s deceiving conduct fraudulent in the US, and as deception is the core of fraud in Canada, the essential/contextualized nature of Meng’s conduct satisfied the essence of fraud as defined under Canada’s Criminal Code. Lawyers call this sort of finessing good lawyering; in the wider community it is seen as legal chicanery. Holmes ruled that Canada was free to extradite Meng.

Laundered

All that effort to put Wanzhou Meng’s fraud into legal context and not a scintilla of regard for the political, social and economic context of the case!

Everyone, literally everyone, knew what had led the US to charge Huawei and its CFO. It was to obtain bargaining chips in its fight with China. It was to persuade its citizens that it was right for the government to deny them access to cheaper goods and a better 5G system because China would abuse its growing economic influence and enhance its spying potential. It was to make China more pliable when the US demanded better trade terms and more protection for its intellectual property, etc. There was no attempt to hide any of this.

Did the Canadian government understand this? Of course. Did it feel it had to allow the US to use Canada’s supposedly neutral legal machinery to further its political project? Of course. Could the Canadian government have said “no” and simply turned a blind eye when Wanzhou Meng landed in Vancouver? Of course.

Was Associate Justice Holmes, at the very least, in a position to guess all of this? Of course.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia had the timelines of the saga before it. All the events that led to the fraud charges occurred years before the tug-of-war between the US and China turned into a full blown version of a new cold war. Meng’s alleged misrepresentations to HSBC occurred in August 2013, several months after Reuters had published its report on the links between Huawei and Skycom Tech. that supposedly led to Iran being supplied with US materiel.

It took five years for the US to charge Huawei and Meng. It took five years for its righteous indignation about Huawei’s and Meng’s violations to reach fever pitch. It took five years for the US to decide that a deception of one set of private entrepreneurs by other private entrepreneurs ( a garden variety event in an aggressive competitive milieu), a deception which took place in a far away jurisdiction, presented a danger to the integrity of the US justice system. That integrity had not been seen as severely threatened when the masters of the universe deceived millions of people during the subprime mortgage scandals, at least not sufficiently to charge any of the more senior perpetrators. None of this was of any concern to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The court was only concerned with the narrowest of decontextualized legal issues before it. Its certainty that its only responsibility was to the Rule of Law signified to it that it should not be troubled by the possibility that it might be used as a pawn, by either the US or the Canadian government or both.

Nor was this lack of concern shaken by President Trump’s highly publicized statement to Reuters (the outfit which had written the report which started the ball rolling), made just after Wanzhou Meng was released on bail. Trump said that he would certainly intervene in her case “if I thought it necessary” to help forge a trade deal with China. Undoubtedly some people (especially lawyers) might think it right and proper for a court to ignore a blatant admission by a craven politician that the supposedly independent system of law of both the US and Canada was being used for partisan political purposes. After all, the statement had been made extrajudicially and had not been put before the court. While the judge might have known about the Trump intervention, much as she knew that the US and China were having a political tug-of-war and that Canada had been drawn into it, the wilful blindness demanded by the Rule of Law demanded that she make no reference to any off this knowledge.

This reasoning makes no sense to anyone not held in rapture by the Rule of Law fantasy. Immediately after Trump made his provocative statement, Trudeau realized that the public might draw the inference that Canada was just bowing to its Big Brother ally and permitting it to abuse the Canadian justice system. It evoked the notion that the US and Canada were just one country with two systems. He was forced to respond.

Trudeau issued the following statement: “Regardless of what goes on in other countries, Canada is and will always remain a country of the rule of law.” The message was clear: we, the elected government and its executive have nothing to do with any of this; we rule an independent country; we have an independent legal system and it makes these kinds of decisions. We respect this and abide by the results. When it comes to the extradition of Meng, we, the politicians, like Pontius Pilate, wash our hands off the whole mess. It has nothing to do with us. It is not a political matter.

This is why the editors of the Toronto Star and all other opinion moulders greeted the ruling in the Meng case with such acclaim. By ignoring all the real facts underlying the dispute, the court had given support to the Canadian government’s pretence that the Meng case had not raised questions about its participation in a complex set of political, economic and ideological controversies. Their role had been laundered. If the outcome suited the US in its struggle with China, this was incidental; Canada’s government had not pushed for such an outcome because it believed in the Rule of Law. These cheerleaders pointed out that, if Canada had interfered with the judiciary’s operations, it would certainly have pushed for a different result.

As it was, the judicial ruling could only strain relations between Canada and China, a most undesirable state of affairs as Canada hoped to have China release two Canadians accused of committing serious offences in China; more Canada had no interest in imperilling important trade relations with China, as the judicial ruling might well do. That is, the result may be a political win for Trump, but a loss for Trudeau, two Canadian citizens and, likely, some farmers and manufacturers if China uses its economic clout to punish Canada.

So viewed, the judicial outcome gives the impression that the government had not played any part in the decision-making. It should, therefore, not be held politically responsible for the consequences. The government had acted righteously, it had been true to the Rule of Law. Its conduct had been sanitized, laundered.

Of course this argument is not as strong if the judicial outcome is not seen as inimical to the government. What did Canada actually want? We can only guess. But it is to be remembered that the government did detain Wanzhou Meng; if it had not done so, the worst that would have happened is that the US might have been annoyed. Assuming, as it makes sense to do, that Canadian officials understood full well what the US was up to, the detention suggests, although it does not prove, that the government was not opposed to the obvious political and economic goals of the US. More strongly, it indicated that it was willing to support those goals. After all, it knew the risks it was taking. The headline in the Ottawa Citizen on 15 December, 2018, read: “Abelev: In the Huawei case, Trump has enlisted in a game Canada can’t win.”

Another glimpse of the Canadian government’s thinking is provided by Prime Minister’s request that John McCallum resign from his post as Ambassador to China after he had made public statements which indicated that he thought the case against Meng was trumped up and, therefore, should lead the government to reject the extradition request. This would help Canada in its negotiations with China which, in apparent retaliation, had jailed two Canadian citizens.

Implicit in McCallum’s intervention was a reference to a legal power that Canada has reserved for itself over extradition processes. The Minister for Justice can, at any moment after a request for extradition is received, abort the process. In Trudeau’s angry reaction to McCallum, he made no reference to this, pretending political interference with the judicial system was to be eschewed.² While to some people, then, Trudeau’s publicized disapproval of McCallum’s views (and of similar ones by former Prime Minister Jean Chretien a little later), did dovetail with the claim that the government should not take a position on matters to be determined by a judge, it also suggested that the government would not object too much if the ruling went against Meng, regardless of what it might mean for Huawei, Meng and the prisoners. After all, the justification for the hands-off the justice system proffered by Trudeau should not have been given too much credence.

At that time a full-blown scandal was raging over the SNC-Lavalin affair. Trudeau was brazenly trying to get rid of an independent Minister of Justice precisely because she was thwarting his enactment of a law which was to apply retroactively (remember the Rule of Law!) to save a serial wrongdoing corporation. A curious symmetry weirdly surfaces. The Trudeau government was trying to give its rogue actor, SNC-Lavalin, the kind of gentle treatment the US had given HSBC by giving it access to a deferred prosecution agreement of the kind that the US had given that deviant bank.

There were many polluting particles in the ambient air as the Meng case was processed in the supposedly politically unpolluted atmosphere of law. Undoubtedly, Associate Justice Holmes did her best to blow all these toxic particles out of her mind, as all judges claim to do. But this does not mean that they did not influence her mind-set. We will never know. That is how laundering works: if the dirt which soiled the cloth is rinsed out, all that one is left with is clean cloth. Just what the government needed.

Epilogue

The legal processes have not ended. Meng may appeal the ruling on double criminality handed down by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, arguing the Holmes’ reading of how the essential nature of conduct in a foreign state was to be found was erroneous. Her lawyers do have some plausible arguments to proffer on this issue. Before that will take place, a hearing will be held into Meng’s allegation that, when she was detained in Vancouver, prior to being turned over to the RCMP, the border official obtained Meng’s telephone numbers and passwords and then passed these on to the RCMP. She was detained and questioned for three hours before she was told of her arrest. She claims her constitutional rights were violated and that the RCMP and Canada’s Border Services Agency acted, improperly, as US agents.

This is a claim that procedural safeguards essential to the proper operation of the Rule of Law had been breached. If successful it would make the arrest wrongful and mean that the committal process which led to Holmes’ ruling should be voided. The result of the adjudication on this action by Meng can also be the basis for an appeal. If all of it, the denial of proper process and the Supreme Court of British Columbia’s ruling on double criminality, are settled in favour of Canada, the extradition process can continue, although, as seen, the Minister for Justice can always set the whole thing aside.

There are many other hurdles to clear. The Trump Administration may be replaced, the Trudeau government (in a minority position) may fall before all this is over. It is also difficult to know what steps China will take and how this will influence political minds in Washington and Ottawa. These unknowns highlight how artificial it is to pretend that a request for extradition is a legal, non-political, struggle based on rational aseptic criteria.

To underscore this point, note that, on 4 June, 2020, the US State Department issued a threat. It will reassess its sharing of intelligence with Canada (a member of the so-called Five Eye intelligence network) if Canada chooses to let Huawei market its 5G technology in Canada. This makes it clear that the extradition case was never about a fraudulent misrepresentation to a ‘vulnerable’ foreign bank, but about furthering US efforts to ward-off the danger of an economic and political threat posed by China.

Law and its Rule of Law are convenient tools, no more no less. They should not be granted too much respect. Certainly they should not permit our governments to present themselves as unsullied, as if they have come out of the washing machine, smelling fragrantly.

And, oh yes, after its agreement with the US Department of Justice, HSBC had made much of its new approach and had spent money on better systems to inhibit wrongdoing. On 8 April, 2020, it was reported that HSBC had admitted it had engaged in money laundering in Australia. Maybe it does not require Huawei or Meng to engage in fraud to get HSBC to participate in criminality.

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Harry Glasbeek is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. His latest books are Class Privilege: How law shelters shareholders and coddles capitalism (2017) and the follow-up, Capitalism: a crime story (2018) both published by Between the Lines, Toronto.

Notes

1. ‘The legalization of politics’ is the name given by Harry Glasbeek and Michael Mandel, “The Legalization of Politics in Advanced Capitalism: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (1984), Socialist Studies, 2:84, and by Michael Mandel, The Charter of Rights and the Legalization of Politics in Canada, rev. ed., Toronto; Thompson Educational, 1994, to a process which removes class and history from political discourse and consciousness.
2. As well, there is a rarely used law on the books, the Foreign Extra Territorial Measures Act, that the Attorney-General can deploy to repulse measures of a foreign state that are likely to significantly affect Canadian interests. This is the legislation used to allow Canada not to comply with the US sanctions on Cuba. Arguably, but not certainly, it could be used to block the extradition of Meng.

Featured image is from The Bullet

UN chief Antonio Guterres has called on ‘Israel’ to cancel plans to annex parts of the West Bank, saying such a decision would be “the most serious violation of international law.”

Guterres said the Israeli annexation plans would be destructive. He expressed his wish for fresh negotiations and a final two-state solution.

Guterres also added that

“this would be a catastrophe for Palestinians, Israelis and the region and the plan threatened efforts to advance regional peace.”

The UN chief’s comments came one day after thousands of Palestinians protested in Jericho against the Israeli annexation, in a march that was attended by dozens of foreign diplomats.

Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, warned that the annexation will send one message that bilateral negotiations cannot achieve a just peace, and “we cannot allow this to happen so diplomacy must be given a chance.”

He added that the annexation “could dramatically alter local dynamics, triggering instability among the occupied Palestinian territories. This conflict has been marked by periods of extreme violence but never before has the risk of escalation been accompanied by a political horizon so distant, an economic situation so fragile and a region so volatile.”

Last week, the PA leadership proposed a plan that seeks to create a “sovereign Palestinian state”, with Jerusalem as its capital.

The Palestinian proposal came as a reply to US President Donald Trump’s controversial plan that gave a green light for the occupation state to annex large swaths of the occupied West Bank, including settlements considered illegal under international law, and the Jordan Valley.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials have threatened to abolish bilateral agreements with ‘Israel’ if the latter goes ahead with the annexation, which would further undermine the two-state solution.

The European Union does not recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the territories it has occupied since 1967.

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One of the fascinating phenomena in the JFK assassination is the fear of some Americans to consider the possibility that the assassination was actually a regime-change operation carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment rather than simply a murder carried out by a supposed lone-nut assassin.The mountain of evidence that has surfaced, especially since the 1990s, when the JFK Records Act mandated the release of top-secret assassination-related records within the national-security establishment, has been in the nature of circumstantial evidence, as compared to direct evidence.

Thus, I can understand that someone who places little faith in the power of circumstantial evidence might study and review that evidence and decide to embrace the “lone-nut theory” of the case.

But many of the people who have embraced the lone-nut theory have never spent any time studying the evidence in the case and yet have embraced the lone-nut theory. Why? My hunch is that the reason is that they have a deep fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” which is the term the CIA many years ago advised its assets in the mainstream press to employ to discredit those who were questioning the official narrative in the case.

Like many others, I have studied the evidence in the case. After doing that, I concluded that the circumstantial evidence pointing toward a regime-change operation has reached critical mass. 

Based on that evidence, for me the Kennedy assassination is not a conspiracy theory but rather the fact of a national-security state regime-change operation, no different in principle than other regime-change operations, including through assassination, carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment, especially through the CIA. 

Interestingly, there are those who have shown no reluctance to study the facts and circumstances surrounding foreign regime-change operations carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon. But when it comes to the Kennedy assassination, they run for the hills, exclaiming that they don’t want to be pulled down the “rabbit hole,” meaning that they don’t want to take any chances of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

For those who have never delved into the Kennedy assassination but have interest in the matter, let me set forth just a few of the reasons that the circumstantial evidence points to a U.S. national-security state regime-change operation. Then, at the end of this article, I’ll point out some books and videos for those who wish to explore the matter more deeply.

I start out with a basic thesis: Lee Harvey was an intelligence agent for the U.S. deep state. Now, that thesis undoubtedly shocks people who have always believed in the lone-nut theory of the assassination. They just cannot imagine that Oswald could have really been working for the U.S. government at the time of the assassination.

Yet, when one examines the evidence in the case objectively, the lone-nut theory doesn’t make any sense. The only thesis that is consistent with the evidence and, well, common sense, is that Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent.

Ask yourself: How many communist Marines have you ever encountered or even heard of? My hunch is none. Not one single communist Marine. Why would a communist join the Marines? Communists hate the U.S. Marine Corps. In fact, the U.S. Marine Corps hates communists. It kills communists. It tortures them. It invades communist countries. It bombs them. It destroys them.

What are the chances that the Marine Corps would permit an openly avowed communist to serve in its ranks? None! There is no such chance. And yet, here was Oswald, whose Marine friends were calling “Oswaldovitch,” being assigned to the Atsugi naval base in Japan, where the U.S. Air Force was basing its top-secret U-2 spy plane, one that it was using to secretly fly over the Soviet Union. Why would the Navy and the Air Force permit a self-avowed communist even near the U-2? Does that make any sense?

While Oswald was serving in the Marine Corps, he became fluent in the Russian language. How is that possible? How many people have you known who have become fluent in a foreign language all on their own, especially when they have a full-time job? Even if they are able to study a foreign language from books, they have to practice conversing with people in that language to become proficient in speaking it. How did Oswald do that? There is but one reasonable possibility: Language lessons provided by U.S. military-suppled tutors.

After leaving the Marine Corps, Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union, walked into the U.S. embassy, renounced his citizenship, and stated that he intended to give any secrets he learned while serving in the military to the Soviet Union. Later, when he stated his desire to return to the United States, with a wife with family connections to Soviet intelligence, Oswald was given the red-carpet treatment on his return. No grand jury summons. No grand-jury indictment. No FBI interrogation. No congressional summons to testify.

Remember: This was at the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. national-security establishment was telling Americans that there was a worldwide communist conspiracy based in Moscow that was hell-bent on taking over the United States and the rest of the world. The U.S. had gone to war in Korea because of the supposed communist threat. They would do the same in Vietnam. They would target Cuba and Fidel Castro with invasion and assassination. They would pull off regime-change operations on both sides of the Kennedy assassination: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1960s), Congo (1963), and Chile (1973).

During the 1950s, they were targeting any American who had had any connections to communism. They were subpoenaing people to testify before Congress as to whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party. They were destroying people’s reputations and costing them their jobs. Remember the case of Dalton Trumbo and other Hollywood writers who were criminally prosecuted and incarcerated. Recall the Hollywood blacklist. Recall the Rosenbergs, whom they executed for giving national-security state secrets to the Soviets. Think about Jane Fonda.

Indeed, if you want a modern-day version of how the U.S. national-security state treats suspected traitors and betrayers of its secrets, reflect on Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. That’s how we expect national-security state officials to behave toward those they consider traitors and betrayers of U.S. secrets.

Not so with Oswald. With him, we have what amounts to two separate parallel universes. One universe involves all the Cold War hoopla against communists. Another one is the one in which Oswald is sauntering across the world stage as one of America’s biggest self-proclaimed communists — a U.S. Marine communist — who isn’t touched by some congressional investigative committee, some federal grand jury, or some FBI agent. How is that possible?

Later, when Oswald ended up in Dallas, his friends were right-wingers, not left-wingers. He even got job at a photographic facility that developed top-secret photographs for the U.S. government. How is that possible? Later, when he ended up in New Orleans, he got hired by a private company that was owned by a fierce anti-communist right-winger. Why would he hire a supposed communist who supposedly had betrayed America by supposedly joining up with America’s avowed communist enemy, the Soviet Union, and to whom he had supposedly given U.S. national-security state secrets, just like Julian and Ethel Rosenberg had?

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. Send him email.

Israeli settlements breach international law, an indisputable fact.

The UN Charter bans use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as well as forcible acquisition of territory not its own.

A joint statement by nearly 50 human rights experts said the following:

“The annexation of occupied territory is a serious violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions, and contrary to the fundamental rule affirmed many times by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly that the acquisition of territory by war or force is inadmissible,” adding:

“The international community has prohibited annexation precisely because it incites wars, economic devastation, political instability, systematic human rights abuses and widespread human suffering.”

“What would be left of the West Bank would be a Palestinian Bantustan, islands of disconnected land completely surrounded by Israel and with no territorial connection to the outside world.”

“Israel has recently promised that it will maintain permanent security control between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.”

“Thus, the morning after annexation would be the crystallization of an already unjust reality: two peoples living in the same space, ruled by the same state, but with profoundly unequal rights.”

“This is a vision of a 21st century apartheid.”

“The world community has a duty not to recognize, aid or assist another state in any form of illegal activity, such as annexation or the creation of civilian settlements in occupied territory.”

“The lessons from the past are clear: Criticism without consequences will neither forestall annexation nor end the occupation.”

Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states:

“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 2016) said the following:

Settlements have “no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation under international law.”

The resolution demands “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

It recognizes no territorial changes “to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.”

It “(c)alls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”

It “(c)alls for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction, calls for accountability in this regard…”

On Wednesday, 14 of the Security Council’s 15 members rejected the Netanyahu regime’s annexation scheme, the US the sole outlier.

During a virtual online session, opposition to the scheme was voiced by SC members, the Trump and Netanyahu regimes alone supporting what has no legal standing.

According to Pompeo, the question of annexation is for Israel alone to decide, ignoring the illegality of settlements and occupation of historic Palestinian land.

Regional peace, equity and the rule of law matter most.

Breaching them defies the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, other international law, and for US ruling regimes and Congress — America’s Constitution.

On Wednesday, White House counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said he’ll soon make a “big announcement” on the Netanyahu regime’s plan to annex (historic Palestinian) West Bank land, adding:

“There are conversations being had. Obviously the president will have an announcement.”

“He’s talked about this in the past and I’ll leave it to him to” him to explain his regime’s position on the issue.

His no-peace/dead before arrival/Deal of the Century OK’d illegal annexation.

Clearly he’s highly unlikely to walk away from what his regime took many months to prepare, at most perhaps intending to advise Netanyahu to advance his annexation scheme incrementally — his apparent plan, according to Israeli media reports.

On Monday according to Reuters, an unnamed senior Trump regime official said the following:

As Israeli annexation “approaches, the main thing going through our heads is: ‘Does this in fact help advance the cause of peace (sic)?’ ”

For the US, NATO, and Israel, the  notion of peace is anathema.

Endless US-led preemptive wars on nonbelligerent states threatening no one speak volumes about its aversion to world peace and stability.

The same goes for Israel, at war on historic Palestine for decades, along with waging undeclared aggression against Syria.

The Trump regime more one-sidedly supports Israel at the expense of fundamental Palestinian rights than any of its predecessors.

There’s virtually no chance of softening its position other than perhaps rhetorically.

Addressing the Security Council Wednesday, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia read a statement by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the Netanyahu regime’s annexation scheme, saying the following:

“We are…a few days away from a decision that could undermine efforts to achieve a just and sustainable Middle East settlement.”

“Russia has always stood and stands against unilateral actions or plans that, as history has shown, are not capable of bringing peace to the Middle East and prejudge final settlement.”

“(W)e see no alternative to the two-state solution. We see no alternative to the two states – Palestine and Israel – coexisting in peace and security.”

Lavrov’s diplomatic language ignored reality. What may have been possible long ago, no longer is now.

Only two viable options exist under international law, no others.

Israel and Washington reject both: Palestinian statehood within June 1967 borders free from occupation, or one state of Israel/Palestine for all its people.

The alternative is an apartheid Jewish state, its Arab population treated like 5th column threats, Occupied Palestinians abused as enemies of the state.

Lavrov also stressed other major issues that need addressing, including “Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water, (other resources), settlements,” adding:

“(A)nnexation may permanently block the path to their solution and to direct dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis.”

It “will entail negative and even dangerous consequences for the entire Middle East region.”

“It will directly affect the neighbors of Israel and Palestine — Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. It will affect the destiny of Palestinian refugees around the world.”

Lavrov “reiterate(d) the need to abandon the annexation steps and launch the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process as soon as possible in order to achieve a just and sustainable Middle East settlement and peace in the region.”

He left unsaid what he clearly understands. The Israeli/Palestinian peace process is a colossal hoax.

Stillborn from inception, journalist Henry Siegman years ago called it “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history.”

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once said he wanted to drag out peace talks for a decade while vastly expanding settlements.

Netanyahu earlier called the peace process “a waste of time.”

When surfacing, it’s always dead on arrival because the US and Israel demand Palestinian surrender to their interests, not equitable conflict resolution.

The US and Israel use the peace process ruse to advance their regional agenda.

It’s all about dominating this oil-rich part of the world — peace and stability defeating, not furthering, their diabolical aims.

Israel’s longstanding objective is maximum land with minimum Arabs.

Supported by the US, Palestinians were long ago abandoned.

Like virtually always over most of the past century, they’re ill-governed, ill-served, ill-treated, dying to live free, and on their own to pursue fundamental rights denied them.

A Final Comment

International criticism of Israel surfaces time and again, Wednesday in the Security Council the latest example.

Criticism without punitive actions with teeth accomplish nothing, the way it’s been throughout Jewish state history.

How it’s treated by the international community reflects the old adage, saying: Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me.”

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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.

The U.S. Naval Command in the southern region announced on Wednesday, that a warship belonging to it sailed near the Venezuelan coast, hours after an Iranian tanker was docked in the port of Caracas.

According to the Southern Command’s official website, the U.S.S. Nitze sailed in an area outside Venezuelan territorial waters, which extends for approximately 12 nautical miles from its coast.

“Today, while peacefully operating in the Caribbean Sea, the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Nitze (DDG 94) conducted a freedom of navigation operation, contesting an excessive maritime claim by Venezuela,” they said.

The Southern Naval Command indicated that

“U.S. Navy ship conducted the operation in international waters outside Venezuela’s 12 nautical-mile territorial jurisdiction.

“The United States will continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, preserving the rights, freedoms and lawful use of the sea and airspace guaranteed to all nations,” said Adm. Craig Faller, Commander of U.S. Southern Command. “These freedoms are the bedrock of ongoing security efforts, and essential to regional peace and stability.”

The move comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to send and increase the military presence in the Caribbean, for military and security purposes related to U.S. national security.

On Tuesday, an Iranian oil tanker entered Venezuelan waters to deliver its contents to the South American nation.

In addition to the oil delivery, the Iranian tanker was also carrying equipment to fix the Venezuelan facilities that are in desperate need of repair.

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The United States government expanded their indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to criminalize the assistance WikiLeaks provided to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when staff helped him leave Hong Kong.

Sarah Harrison, who was a section editor for WikiLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former spokesperson, and Jacob Appelbaum, a digital activist who represented WikiLeaks at conferences, are targeted as “co-conspirators” in the indictment [PDF], though neither have been charged with offenses.

No charges were added, however, it significantly expands the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge and accuses Assange of conspiring with “hackers” affiliated with “Anonymous,” “LulzSec,” “AntiSec,” and “Gnosis.”

The computer crime charge is not limited to March 2010 anymore. It covers conduct that allegedly occurred between 2009 and 2015.

Prosecutors rely heavily on statements and chat logs from Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson and Hector Xavier Monsegur (“Sabu”), who were both FBI informants, in order to expand the scope of the prosecution.

In March, Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed the grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that was investigating WikiLeaks. U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who refused to testify before the grand jury, was released from jail after spending about a year in confinement for “civil contempt.” She was still ordered to pay $256,000 in fines.

Activist Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his involvement in the hack against the intelligence consulting firm Stratfor, refused to testify as well. Trenga ordered his release, and he was transferred back into the custody of the Bureau of Prisons.

Prosecutors accuse Assange and other WikiLeaks staffers of engaging in “efforts to recruit system administrators” to leak information to their media organization.

WikiLeaks Openly Displayed ‘Attempts To Assist Snowden In Evading Arrest’

“To encourage leakers and hackers to provide stolen materials to WikiLeaks in the future, Assange and others at WikiLeaks openly displayed their attempts to assist Snowden in evading arrest,” the indictment declares.

It notes Harrison (“WLA-4”) traveled with Snowden to Moscow from Hong Kong, leaving out the part where the State Department revoked his passport and trapped him in Russia.

During an interview for “Democracy Now!” in September 2016, Sarah Harrison said WikiLeaks understood Snowden was in a “very complex legal and political situation” and needed “some people to assist with technical and operational security expertise.

“I went over there, as the person on the ground in Hong Kong, to help him, not only for him, himself, because he had clearly done something so brave and deserved the protection, I felt, but also for the larger objective to try and show that despite [President Barack] Obama’s war on whistleblowers, that actually there was another option.”

Harrison added.

“At the time, the Obama administration was intent upon putting alleged source Chelsea Manning into prison for decades—as she is now in prison for 35 years—and we really wanted to try and show the world that there are people that will stand up, there are people that will help. And The Guardian, for example, did not give any additional help to Edward Snowden as a source, as a person there, and we wanted to show there are publishers that will help in these scenarios.”

Prosecutors note WikiLeaks booked Snowden on “flights to India through Beijing” and Iceland as examples of how Assange engaged in an alleged conspiracy.

At the annual Chaos Computer Club conference in Germany on December 31, 2013, Assange, Appelbaum, and Harrison participated in a panel discussion called, “Sysadmins of the World, Unite! A Call to Resistance.” (Assange appeared via video.)

The indictment criminalizes Assange’s speech in support of Snowden and any future whistleblowers and twists his words into a prime example of WikiLeak “encouraging” the “theft of information” from the U.S. government.

Prosecutors even omit particular words to make the message Assange shared seem more nefarious than an endorsement of radical transparency.

From the indictment:

…Assange told the audience that “the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations” showed that “it was possible now for even a single system administrator to…not merely wreck[] or disabl[e] [organizations]…but rather shift[] information from an information apartheid system…into the knowledge commons…

But here is the full quote:

…And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations, that it’s possible now for even a single system administrator to have a very significant change to the—or rather, apply a very significant constraint, a constructive constraint, to the behavior of these organizations, not merely wrecking or disabling them, not merely going out on strikes to change policy, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system, which we’re developing, from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information, into the knowledge commons, where it can be used to—not only as a disciplining force, but it can be used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.

Assange’s video message to Chaos Computer Club conference attendees in 2013. (Screen shot from “Democracy Now!” broadcast.)

Assange encouraged young people to “join the CIA. Go in there. Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out—with the understanding, with the paranoia, that all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation, by an ideology that is spread across the Internet. And every young person is educated on the Internet.”

“There will be no person that has not been exposed to this ideology of transparency and understanding of wanting to keep the Internet, which we were born into, free. This is the last free generation,” Assange added.

The government presents this message as evidence that WikiLeaks solicits government employees to steal classified information. However, what Assange did was appeal to young people to help the public address a crisis of corruption in government by forcing transparency at a time when the government abuses the classified information system to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, and other illegal actions.

Appelbaum is singled out for saying Harrison “took actions” to protect Snowden, and “if we can succeed in saving Edward Snowden’s life and to keep him free, then the next Edward Snowden will have that to look forward to. And if we look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning, we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned.”

This is a fairly innocuous observation numerous people in the news media, including this author, have shared. It means if whistleblowers do not believe they will be punished with decades of prison or forced to flee their home country then we will have more whistleblowers because they will not believe it so dangerous to come forward.

At no point does the Justice Department attempt to connect the alleged “recruitment” of “hackers” or “leakers” to an actual individual, who heard these words and acted upon them.

Of course, the Justice Department refuses to accept the public benefit that came from Snowden’s disclosures. He still faces an indictment for allegedly violating the Espionage Act, which is why he remains in Russia, where he obtained asylum in 2013.

On May 6, 2014, the indictment alleges Harrison “sought to recruit those who had or could obtain authorized access to classified information and hackers to search for and send the classified or otherwise stolen information to WikiLeaks by explaining, ‘from the beginning our mission has been to public classified, or in any other way, censored information that is of political, historical importance.’”

It is one of the clearest indications that the “conspiracy” charge is a not-so-subtle effort to criminalize the journalism of an adversarial media organization that the United States has spent the last decade working to destroy. At no point in this statement does Harrison ask any specific persons to steal information.

If what Harrison did—and by association, Assange supported—is a crime, then there are countless news media organizations which pride themselves on publishing documents they obtain from sensitive sources that must worry they are opening themselves up to prosecution if they boast about their work in a public setting.

Conspiracy Charge Depends On Statements From Paid FBI Informants

The section of the indictment on Assange’s alleged role in “conspiring” with “hackers” mentions a “Teenager, who Assange met in Iceland. This individual is Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.

As Wired Magazine reported,

“When a staff revolt in September 2010 left the organization short-handed, Assange put Thordarson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers, journalists, potential sources, and outside groups clamoring to get in with WikiLeaks at the peak of its notoriety.”

Thordarson was fired from WikiLeaks in November 2011 after the media organizations discovered he embezzled about $50,000.

After the FBI asked to talk with him in person following his termination, Thordarson “begged the FBI for money. Agents initially ignored his requests, but eventually they paid him $5,000 for “the work he missed while meeting with agents” in Alexandria, Virginia, where the grand jury investigation was empaneled.

In 2013, WikiLeaks stated,

“Because of requests from people close to him and his young age [Thordarson] was offered the opportunity to repay the stolen funds, which amounted to about $50,000. When it became clear he would not honor the agreement the matter was reported to the Icelandic Police.”

Thordarson apparently embezzled funds from several other organizations in Iceland that were not related to WikiLeaks. The Icelandic authorities process charges of embezzlement.

“It has materialized that the individual has engaged in gross misrepresentations of different types to obtain benefit from a range of parties,” WikiLeaks added. “We will not identify him by name in light of information that he has recently received institutional medical treatment.”

“In light of the relentless ongoing persecution of U.S. authorities against WikiLeaks, it is not surprising that the FBI would try to abuse this troubled young man and involve him in some manner in the attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks staff. It is an indication of the great length these entities are willing to go that they will disrespect the sovereignty of other nations in their endeavor. There is strong indication that the FBI used a combination of coercion and payments to pressure the young man to cooperate,” WikiLeaks contended.

Hammond was the target of an FBI operation. As Dell Cameron previously reported for the Daily Dot, chat logs, surveillance photos, and government documents showed it was Monsegur who introduced Hammond to a hacker named Hyrriya, who “supplied download links to the full credit card database as well as the initial vulnerability access point to Stratfor’s systems.”

According to Hammond, he had not heard of Stratfor until Monsegur brought the firm to his attention. Monsegur transferred the details for at least two stolen credit cards.

In December 2011, Monsegur gave “AntiSec” or the group of hackers targeting Stratfor access to the private intelligence firm’s systems. He pushed Hammond and others to “unknowingly transfer ‘multiple gigabytes of confidential data’ to one of the FBI’s servers. That included roughly 60,000 credit card number and records for Stratfor customers that Hammond was ultimately charged with stealing,” according to Daily Dot.

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman wrote in her book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, that AntiSec went to the WikiLeaks internet relay chat server. Monsegur was largely unaware. A deal was made to provide files from Stratfor to WikiLeaks.

”When talking to WikiLeaks,” Hammond recounted to me, “they first asked to authenticate the leak by pasting them some samples, which I did, [but] they didn’t ask who I was or even really how I got access to it, but I told them voluntarily that I was working with AntiSec and had hacked Stratfor.” Soon after, he arranged the handoff. When Sabu found out, he insisted on dealing with Assange, personally. After all, he told Hammond, he was already in contact with Assange’s trusted assistant “Q.”

Thordarson was “Q.”

According to Hammond, Monsegur attempted to entrap WikiLeaks by suggesting the organization pay him “cash for the leaks.” But WikiLeaks already had the documents they planned to publish.

The U.S. government had a deadline in June 2019 for submitting an extradition request. It seems improper to add these substantial details to the request, especially since a one-week hearing was already held.

While the conspiracy charge includes sensational claims of collaboration with hackers, it is no less of a political charge than the seventeen Espionage Act offenses Assange faces for publishing information.

The additional sections in the indictment represent an attempt to give the illegitimate prosecution a greater veneer of criminality. Unfortunately, it does not take much to scrape it off and expose the contempt for press freedom that still lies behind this vindictive prosecution.

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Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.”

Featured image is from InfoBrics

It appears that despite achieving so-called independence from the Soviet Union and joining the EU and NATO in 2004, Lithuania does not have full sovereignty. In yesterday’s negotiations with US President Donald Trump, the interests of Vilnius were not represented by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, but by Polish President Andrzej Duda. Lithuania has effectively announced that it is a satellite of not only the US in Eastern Europe, but also of Poland, delegating Warsaw the right to vote and lobby in international affairs on its behalf.

“The President spoke with the President of Poland, Duda, before leaving, and we received such assurance that President Duda would represent our interests as well,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told reporters on Tuesday before the meeting.

“We have stressed numerous times that the Baltic states and Poland are one territory, if we speak about the defence logic and NATO defence planning,” Linkevičius said, adding that “therefore, we find what is happening in Poland of direct importance to us in the national [security] sense.”

This raises significant questions like whether this is in violation of the Lithuanian constitution; will Poland begin to dominate domestic issues; and, are we seeing a re-emergence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?

Nausėda’s agreement for Duda to represent Lithuania in Washington comes at a time when not only anti-Russian rhetoric is growing stronger in Poland, but also anti-Lithuanian, with many politicians, organizations and movements shouting out that the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius “is ours” as it was once a prosperous city under Polish rule.

Source: InfoBrics

Trump and Duda discussed the supply of LNG to the European continent and energy independence from Russia, as well as the deployment of an additional contingent of US troops in Poland, and by extension, potentially even in Lithuania when we consider Linkevičius words  that “the Baltic states and Poland are one territory.” He has risked a major scandal with not only neighbouring Latvia and Estonia, but also with Russia via its Baltic Kaliningrad region. Although the strategic security interests of Latvia and Estonia may overlap with Lithuania, by speaking on their behalf, Linkevičius undermined their own presidents and foreign ministries. Therefore, Linkevičius decided that Latvia and Estonia were part of an ephemeral version of a new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but this time under NATO patronage.

NATO is strengthening pressure at Russia’s borders, particularly in the Baltics, justifying its actions as a possible “Russian threat.” Moscow has repeatedly emphasized that it is not going to attack any country, and NATO are fully aware of this despite their constant rhetoric of a supposed Russian threat. In addition, the Baltic States, especially Lithuania, are actively concluding large-scale defense agreements with the US and deploying NATO military contingents on their territories. Washington is trying to maintain a high level of military presence and tension in the Baltics.

Most significantly, Duda was the first foreign leader to visit Trump since the coronavirus pandemic. During his visit to the White House, Trump was full of praise for Poland, highlighting that it was only one of eight NATO countries that committed to 2% of GDP spending on the military. Trump proudly boasted of the “close personal relationship” he had with Duda, saying “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Poland than right now.” Duda in response said it was a “privilege and an honour” to be at White House and he hoped to discuss building an even “stronger alliance.”

With Duda being the first foreign leader to meet Trump in Washington, it demonstrates how important the US president finds Poland in escalations against Russia. It is for this reason that Trump said Warsaw “will be paying for the sending of additional troops, and we will probably be moving them from Germany to Poland,” adding that the US is decreasing its military presence in Germany “very substantially.”

Trump did not hide that the likely relocation of American soldiers from Germany to Poland is aimed against Russia, saying

“It sends a very strong signal to Russia, but I think a stronger signal sent to Russia is the fact that Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars to purchase energy from Russia through the pipeline.”

With this, we can see a tier system where Poland is becoming a tool aimed against Russia and willing agent of Washington to dominate affairs in the Baltics on behalf of the US. It remains to be seen how Estonia and Latvia will react to being under Polish influence and dominance, but Lithuania appears to be willing and confident for Poland to control the external affairs of the Baltics on behalf of Washington’s interests.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Department responsible tells MEE it has no documents about botched import of medical gear, raising concerns of cover-up ahead of inquiry into government’s response to Covid-19

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The British government’s health ministry says it has no record whatsoever of its shambolic attempt to import life-saving personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers from Turkey at the height of the coronavirus crisis.

Officials say they do not have a single report or memo about the affair, nor a single email, either generated within the ministry or sent to it.

The claim raises concerns that Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) files are going missing in advance of a public inquiry into the UK government’s handling of the pandemic.

More than 200 healthcare and care home workers have died in the UK due to Covid-19, following months of complaints about shortages of PPE items such as face masks, visors and gloves.

Among members of the public, the country has one of the highest death rates in the world.

Asked repeatedly whether it was destroying files – an act that would be unlawful in the UK – the DHSC refused to comment.

“We have nothing further to add,” a department spokesperson told MEE.

The UK’s Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates the work of the prime minister’s office and government departments, also denied that it had any records about the matter. It too declined to say whether any records had been destroyed.

The two departments made the claims after receiving requests made by Middle East Eye under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. Appeals are now under way at the request of MEE.

The UK’s defence ministry and foreign office said that it did hold relevant material and are now considering requests that the material be released.

Calls for inquiry

Prominent scientists, doctors’ and nurses’ leaders and bereaved families are demanding a public inquiry into the UK’s handling of the pandemic, and ministers have conceded that there will be “lessons to be learned” once it has passed.

At the height of the Covid-19 crisis in the UK in mid-April, when rates of infections and deaths were starting to soar and when healthcare workers were wearing bin liners because PPE was in such short supply, a government minister had claimed that the following day the UK would be importing 84 tonnes of PPE from Turkey.

A few hours earlier, the Financial Times had published a highly critical report on the British government’s attempts to encourage companies to design new ventilators, and ministers were aware that the Sunday Times was about to publish a lengthy investigation into their failure to respond quickly to the crisis, and secure more supplies of PPE.

Insiders within Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Downing Street office say that his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has “an obsession with announcements”, using them to deflect attention from the government’s problems, but showing little interest in delivering the substance of ministers’ pledges once those announcements have been made.

When the 84 tonnes of PPE failed to arrive in the UK the following day, a British Royal Air Force (RAF) cargo plane was dispatched to Istanbul, with the British defence ministry briefing journalists that this was intended to “put pressure on Ankara” to release the consignment.

The Turkish government told MEE that it was doing all it could to assist its fellow Nato ally, but said that there was a major problem: the private company that was selling the PPE had only ever had the capacity to supply 2,500 items.

Officials in Ankara appeared bemused that the British government should be suggesting that it had got to grips with its PPE crisis by entering into a contract with such a tiny firm.

Referring to the current requirement that Turkish firms must apply for permission to export PPE from the country, one official said:

“God, the company doesn’t even have the capacity to apply online for the export exemption.”

The Turkish government says it appealed to garment manufacturers across the country, which had been repurposed to manufacture PPE, asking them to assist the UK amid its deepening crisis.

Cargo plane returned nearly empty 

The RAF cargo aircraft eventually returned to the UK three days later than promised, but with less than a quarter of the PPE supplies pledged in the ministerial announcement.

There were subsequently claims that some of the material was substandard, although the Turkish company responsible for the shipment said the British government knew that it had provided – free of charge – some PPE that was intended not for use in intensive care units, but which was instead designed to be donned by visitors to hospitals and care homes.

The episode led to a well-publicised row between the DHSC and Number 10, with Boris Johnson’s aides suggesting to journalists that the health secretary, Matt Hancock, would be blamed for the affair. Healthcare unions warned that all confidence in Hancock was “draining away.”

For his part, Hancock telephoned his Turkish counterpart, Fahrettin Koca, to thank him for the support that Turkey had offered British healthworkers.

Yet according to the DHSC’s response to MEE’s freedom of information request, all this happened without any documents or memoranda being retained within the department, and with not a single email about the episode, written or received by anyone working there, being preserved.

Meanwhile, a health service procurement agency known as NHS Supply Chain told MEE that it held no records on the affair as they would be held by the DHSC.

Following publication of this report, the DHSC maintained that it did not have any records relating to the matter – not even keeping a note of Hancock’s telephone conversation – because the importation had been the work of a local NHS organisation in London.

IIt is unclear whether the health ministry and Cabinet Office have destroyed records relating to the affair, have simply handled the freedom of information request in an incompetent fashion, or have decided to flout their obligations under the law.

However, critics of Cummings say that his contempt for the UK’s Freedom of Information Act is well-known: in 2011, when he was an adviser at the UK’s Department for Education, the Financial Times caught him using a personal email address in an attempt to evade the requirements of the act.

In one email to colleagues, Cummings wrote:

“I will not answer any further e-mails to my official DfE account  … i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they are. [sic] i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this .”

The Information Commissioner, the official responsible for enforcing the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, was reported to have been shocked by that email.

Subsequently, the Financial Times reported that Cummings and other senior advisers to then-education secretary Michael Gove had systematically destroyed official government correspondence. Gove is now the minister responsible for the Cabinet Office.

Destruction of government documents that are of historical significance – such as those that would assist any public inquiry – is unlawful under the UK’s Public Records Acts, while destruction or alteration of any document that has been requested under the Freedom of Information Act is a criminal offence.

Polls suggest that the British public’s trust in Johnson’s government has plummeted since May, when Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, a journalist, were discovered to have ignored the lockdown rules that he had helped develop for the British public.

After Wakefield felt ill, the couple drove more than 400 kilometres to Cummings’ parents’ home with their young son.

A magazine article that Wakefield had written in which she falsely implied that the couple had remained at their London home has been referred to the UK’s press regulator.

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Late on June 23, the Israeli Air Force conducted airstrikes on alleged Iranian-linked targets near al-Sukhna and Kabajab in central Syria and near Tel Al-Sahn in the countryside of as-Suwayda in southern Syria. A second wave of Israeli strikes early on June 24 targeted Salamyieh and al-Sabboura in the province of Hama. Syrian state media denied that the strikes hit Iranian targets saying that 2 soldiers were killed, 4 others injured and some material damage was caused by the attack. As was expected the airstrikes took place just a few days after Hezbollah-affiliated media had released a video with threats to strike targets inside Israel in the event of an escalation.

Since June 23 intense fighting has been ongoing in the countryside of Idlib and the southern part of the province between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and the recently formed coalition of al-Qaeda-linked groups, Fa Ithbatu.

The Idlib central prison area, the village of Arab Said, and the towns of Barisha, Sarmada and Ariha were the main focal points of the confrontation. According to pro-militant sources, the fighting broke out as a result of recent tensions caused by the arrests of some members of Fa Ithbatu by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham security forces. From demands to release its members, Fa Ithbatu forces moved to a direct confrontation with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. However, as of the morning of June 24th, they had not yet achieved any major successes in these efforts.

Simultaneously, tensions grew between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and another al-Qaeda-linked group, the Turkistan Islamic Party, in the town of Jisr al-Shughur. Turkistan Islamic Party members reportedly surrounded a local HQ of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Fa Ithbatu and the Turkistan Islamic Party are apparently very unhappy with the recent actions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which had indirectly supported the implementation of the Turkish-Russian de-escalation agreement on southern Idlib and pressured other al-Qaeda-linked groups in the area to gain more support from Turkey.

While the close cooperation with Turkey allows Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to increase its military and financial capabilities, the implementation of the de-escalation deal poses a direct threat to interests of smaller radical groups such the ones from Fa Ithbatu. Thus, there is a clear conflict of interest that may yet turn into a full-scale military confrontation.

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In December 2019, the Washington Post released a reviews of The Afghanistan Papers. A series of interviews and documents “compiled in secret” and then the subject of a “legal challenge” from the US government. The WaPo baldly called it: “A secret history of the war”. But there’s nothing here that’s really secret, and very little actual history. What do they tell us? Absolutely nothing, except what we’re supposed to believe.” ( Kit Knightly, December 20, 2019)

What is the unspoken “secret truth” which has not been featured in the Afghanistan Papers? The 2001 US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan sustains the surge in heroin and opioid addiction in the United States.

The following article (first published in December 2018) is brought to the attention of Global Research readers as a contribution to the June 26 2020 United Nations “global observance to raise awareness of the major problem that illicit drugs represent to society”. 

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Afghanistan’s opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of  heroin addiction in the US. 

Despite president Trump’s announced US troop withdrawal, the Afghan opium trade continues to flourish. It is protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of a nexus of powerful financial and criminal  interests. 

Today a rough estimate based on US retail prices suggests that the global heroin market is above the 500 billion dollars mark. This multibillion dollar hike is the result of a significant increase in the volume of heroin transacted Worldwide coupled with a moderate increase in retail prices.

Based on the most recent (UNODC) data (2017) opium production in Afghanistan is of the order of 9000 metric tons, which after processing and transformation is equivalent to approximately 900,000 kg. of pure heroin.

With the surge in heroin addiction since 2001, the retail price of heroin has increased. According to DEA intelligence, one gram of pure heroin was selling in December 2016 in the domestic US market for $902 per gram.

The Heroin trade is colossal: one gram of pure heroin selling at $902 is equivalent to almost a million US dollars a kilo ($902,000) (see table below)

Flash back to to 2000-2001.

In 2000, the Taliban government with the support of the United Nations implemented a successful drug eradication program, which was presented to the UN General Assembly on October 12, 2001, barely a week after on the onset of US-NATO invasion. Opium production had collapsed by 94 percent.

In 2001 opium production had collapsed to 185 tons down from 3300 tons in 2000. (see Remarks on behalf of UNODC Executive Director at the UN General Assembly, Oct 2001, excerpt below)

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The US-NATO led War against Afghanistan served to Restore the Illicit Heroin trade

The Afghan government’s drug eradication program was repealed.  The 2001 war on Afghanistan served to restore as well as boost the multibillion dollar drug trade. It has also contributed to the surge in heroin addiction in the US.

Opium production had declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001 as a result of the Taliban government’s drug eradication program.

Immediately following the invasion (October 7, 2001) and the occupation of Afghanistan by US-NATO troops, the production of opium regained its historical levels.

In fact the surge in opium cultivation production coincided with the onslaught of the US-led military operation and the downfall of the Taliban regime. From October through December 2001, farmers started to replant poppy on an extensive basis.” (see Michel Chossudovsky, op cit.)  

Since 2001, according to UNODC, the production of opium has increased 50 times, (compared to 185 ton in 2001) reaching 9000 metric tons in 2017. It has almost tripled in relation to its historical levels. (See Figure 1 below)

Heroin Addiction in the US

Since 2001, the use of heroin in the US has increased more than 20 times. Media reports rarely report how the dramatic increase in the global “supply of heroin” has contributed to “demand” at the retail level.

There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. By 2012-13, there were 3.8 million heroin users in the US according to a study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Extrapolating the 2012-2013 figures (see graph below), one can reasonably confirm that the number of heroin users today (including addicts and casual users) is well in excess of four million.

In 2001, 1,779 Americans were killed as a result of heroin overdose. By 2016, the number of Americans killed as a result of heroin addiction shot up to 15,446. (see graph below)

“My Administration is committed to fighting the drug epidemic” says Donald Trump.

Those lives would have been saved had the US and its NATO allies NOT invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 2001. 

The first thing they did was to undermine the drug eradication program, restore the opium economy and the drug trade.

Source: National Institute of Drug Abuse

Opium production has increased 50 times in relation to 2001 (following the Afghan government’s drug eradication program). In 2001, the areas of opium cultivation had fallen to 8000 hectares (185 metric tons of opium).

War is good for business. It contributed to spearheading heroin use. The Afghan opium economy feeds into a lucrative trade in narcotics and money laundering.

What this new methodology has done is to obfuscate the size and criminal nature of the Afghan drug trade, intimating –without evidence– that up to 20% of Afghan opium is no longer channeled towards the illegal heroin market.

More than Half a Trillion Dollars

The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions, an issue which is not addressed by the Vienna based UNODC.

The global monetary value of the heroin market (which is protected by powerful groups) is colossal.

Estimation

The retail price of heroin (sold by the gram) can vary dramatically from one country to another, it also depends on the percentage of pure heroin. This does not facilitate the process of estimating the monetary value of the global trade in heroin.

Recorded retail street prices for heroin with a low level of purity must be converted to a dollar value which corresponds to pure heroin.

What is sold at the street level usually has a low percentage of pure heroin. The process of estimation requires transforming the street level prices into what the DEA calls heroin price per gram pure (PPG)

From one ton of opium you can produce 100 kilos of pure heroin. The US retail prices for heroin (with a low level of purity) was, according to UNODC (2012) of the order of $172 a gram (namely $17,200 per kilo)

The estimated price per gram of pure heroin, however, is substantially higher.

In December 2016, the heroin price per gram pure (PPG) was of the order of $902 in the US, according to DEA intelligence  ie. $902,000 a kilo.

Heroin Prices in the UK

In the UK which is the entry point of Afghan heroin into the EU market, the recorded retail price (according to a 2015 estimate quoted by the Guardian) is consistent with that estimated for the US market by the DEA:

“An imported kilo [of heroin] cut at 25% street purity provides enough raw material for 16,000 individual deals at £10 a hit – pushing the takings to £160,000 [a kilo] (The Guardian, December 20, 2015)

GBP160,000 (25% purity) converts into GBP 640,000 per kilo for pure heroin, ie. approximately  US$960,000 per kilo (December 2015 GBP USD exchange rate).

Rough Estimate of the  Monetary Value of  Afghanistan’s Global Heroin Market

According to the UNODC, 7600-7900 tons of opium were available for heroin production and export (out of a total of 9000-9300 metric tons). According to the UNODC, approximately half of the opium is processed into heroin within Afghanistan.

The global monetary value for heroin can be roughly estimated using the US price equivalent PPG measurement for pure heroin of US 902,000 a kg. (December 2016, DEA) and the (lower) production figure of 790,000 kg of pure heroin (estimated by the UNODC).

Using the US retail price equivalent of pure heroin (DEA), the global monetary value generated by the Afghan heroin trade (2017) is of the order of  $712,580,000,000 (712.58 billion dollars), an amount equivalent to the US defense budget.

This is a conservative estimate based on adopting the “lower figure” of 7900 metric tons (2017)  (recommended by the UNODC methodology which is arbitrary and questionable, see above).

If we had based the calculation on the total production of opium which is in excess of 9ooo metric tons (2017), the global monetary value of the heroin market would have been in excess of $800 billion. It should also be mentioned that this estimate relies solely on the the US price for pure heroin (DEA).

Back in August 2018, President  Trump signed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act “which authorizes a top-line [defense] budget of $717 billion”, just a few million dollars in excess of the estimated global monetary value of the Afghan heroin market.

The global monetary value of the heroin market is of the same order of magnitude as the defense budget of the USA.

Needless to say, the Pentagon not to mention the CIA which launched the opium economy in Afghanistan in the late 1970s  are intent upon protecting this multibillion dollar industry. The proceeds of the Afghan drug trade were initially used to finance the recruitment of Al Qaeda Mujahideen mercenaries to fight in the Soviet-Afghan war.

“The protests, riots, violent and non-violent actions sweeping across the United States since May 25, including an assault on the gates of the White House, begin to make sense when we understand the CIA’s Color Revolution playbook,” writes economic researcher, historian, and freelance journalist F. William Engdahl. 

Engdahl then breaks down the connections between Black Lives Matter, socialist organizations, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation (as previously noted, a CIA front organization), the Foundation to Promote Open Society, Borealis Philanthropy, the Kellogg Foundation, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, and the Heinz Foundation (John Kerry). 

Following the murder of George Floyd, “major corporations such as Apple, Disney, Nike and hundreds others may be pouring untold and unaccounted millions into ActBlue under the name of Black Lives Matter, funds that in fact can go to fund the election of a Democrat President Biden.”

#BlackLivesMatter (1/3) pic.twitter.com/k4sIcUiPwP

— Sony (@Sony) May 31, 2020

BLM is part of the Movement for Black Lives Coalition (M4BL), a cutout created by the Ford Foundation, in other words, the CIA. It has called for “defunding police departments, race-based reparations, voting rights for illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a universal basic income, and free college for blacks,” according to its website. 

"The initiative of the Movement for Black Lives needs to be picked up by others…. A coalition of movements that joins a future whirlwind moment to win the struggle can at last make racial justice a reality."—Quaker activist @GeorgeLakey_ at @wagingnv https://t.co/ITwFBv4q5g

— Friends Journal (@friendsjournal) June 16, 2020

As Engdahl points out, B4BL and BLM are Democrat-dominated operations. They receive money from ActBlue Charities, a “progressive” organization in support of the Joe Biden campaign. “ActBlue is a pass-through organization and service for donations to left-of-center nonprofits and PACs,” notes InfluenceWatch.

B4BL takes money from Google (also linked to the CIA)  and a host of labor unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education.

An article posted back in 2009 by Human Events states that despite “its stripped-down appearance, ActBlue is frothing with the elitist pretension characteristic of the modern Left. The hip tenets of ‘grassroots’ campaigning, highbrow blathering and self-possessed pseudo-coolness seep through the slogans, descriptions and thematics of the [ActBlue] website.”

As Engdahl points out, the “role of tax-exempt foundations tied to the fortunes of the greatest industrial and financial companies such as Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg, Hewlett and Soros says that there is a far deeper and far more sinister agenda to current disturbances than spontaneous outrage would suggest.”

The founders of BLM admit to being Marxist revolutionaries determined to destroy capitalism (no longer recognizable as such).

“The policy platform proposed by BLM in August [2016]… calls for collective ownership of resources, banks, and businesses, a highly progressive income tax, a guaranteed minimum income, and government jobs are lifted straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto,’” writes Thurston Powers. “BLM has simply substituted Marx’s class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie for class conflict between blackness and whiteness.”

BLM co-founder confirms what anyone who’s read their work knows: they’re proudly marxists. pic.twitter.com/vvUk5jTp7j

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) June 18, 2020

The black vs. white dichotomy creates a permanent enemy class, to which defection is always incomplete. And unlike the proletariat class consciousness, race consciousness already exists, making mobilization easier. This can be seen in the comments of a Milwaukee protester from August: “We do not want justice or peace anymore. We done with that shit. We want blood. We want blood. We want the same shit ya’ll want. Eye for an eye. No more peace. F–k all that. Ain’t no more peace. Ain’t no more peace. We done. We cannot cohabitate with white people, one of us have to go, black or white. All ya’ll have to go!”

It is nonsensical to believe the transnational corporations and banks now funding BLM buy into the Marxist rhetoric and objectives of BLM—that is to say, they are not supporting their very own destruction as evil capitalist enterprises. 

BLM and its Marxist leaders will be jettisoned after Biden wins the election. Either BLM will conform to the democrat masquerade—a kinder and gentler face plastered on the neoliberal project—or it will become irrelevant to national one-party politics pushed on the American people by a corporate propaganda media. 

After a Biden victory, BLM will be expected to head for the bleachers where they will be required to cheerlead “diversity,” which is basically yet another ruling elite control mechanism. 

Instead, they will go to the streets. 

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CODEPINK

From the first paragraph of “Venezuela Libre”, the ninth chapter of John Bolton’s upcoming book, The Room Where It Happened, it is obvious that the tale Bolton spins is full of fabrications, half-truths, propaganda and the occasional kernel of truth. The chapter is a 35-page screed in which the infamous warmonger places blame for the Trump administration’s disastrous Venezuela policy on everyone from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, to State Department bureaucrats and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and, of course, President Trump. The criticism also extends to opposition figure Juan Guaidó and Colombian President Ivan Duque. Exempt from criticism are the policy’s two architects: Mauricio Claver-Carone (handpicked by Bolton as the National Security Council’s Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere) and Bolton himself.

Per Bolton, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro remains in power only because the Trump administration lacked the determination to keep the pressure on. He argues that sanctions were neither strict nor swiftly applied. Yet during Bolton’s tenure, the Trump administration blocked Venezuela’s ability to trade gold, froze the assets of state oil company PDVSA (including U.S. based subsidiary Citgo Petroleum), sanctioned Venezuela’s Central Bank, and imposed an economic embargo. All of this occurred between November 2018 and August 2019, during Bolton’s tenure as Trump’s National Security Advisor.

Four major sanctions over 10 months that crippled the Venezuelan economy are hardly indicative of an administration that “vacillated and wobbled”, in Bolton’s words. There was nothing slow about the implementation of these sanctions; they were applied in reaction to events on the ground and designed to cause as much economic damage as possible. The gold industry sanction came as Venezuela was exporting it to Turkey. The PDVSA sanctions were intended as a death knell for Venezuela’s oil industry, preventing Citgo from refining its oil and sending diluents to process Venezuela’s heavy crude (it was also meant to hand over Citgo and its assets to Juan Guaidó). The Central Bank sanction froze Venezuelan assets abroad, essentially freezing it out of the international financial system and impeding the country’s ability to import goods, including food and medicine. The August 2019 economic embargo prevented any U.S. business from working in Venezuela, was compared to sanctions “faced by North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba” and was announced just as the Venezuelan government and opposition were to engage in talks in Bermuda.

The most useful piece of information to come out of “Venezuela Libre” is Bolton’s assertion that in January 2019, then-UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was “delighted to cooperate on steps [the UK] could take, for example freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England.” Days later, the Bank of England (BoE) froze over $1.2 billion in gold belonging to Venezuela, despite the fact that it is supposed to be an independent institution “free from day-to-day political influence.” This revelation by Bolton will likely be used in the Venezuelan government’s lawsuit against the BoE. The lawsuit seeks to free Venezuela’s gold in order to transfer it to the United Nations Development Programme, which will purchase food and medical supplies for the country to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton even lays out an added benefit of his grim pursuit of sanctions: “central banks and private bankers weren’t looking for reasons to be on the Fed’s bad side”, meaning that they would cease to do business with Venezuela or freeze its assets. Known among sanctions experts as “overcompliance”, Bolton exposes this as a feature, not a bug, of his sanctions regime.

The State Department even boasted of how tough these sanctions were in a since deleted fact sheet, yet if they had been applied all at once – like Bolton presumably wanted, there is no reason to believe regime change would have followed. The Maduro government demonstrated its capacity to adapt to the sanctions, staving off the worst of COVID-19 and, despite the economic devastation, showing economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2019.

In addition to being cruel, the sanctions were counterproductive in terms of their desired goal to have the population rise up against the government. One survey found that 82% of Venezuela reject the sanctions, and even the country’s most prominent opposition pollster admitted that the majority of Venezuelans “strongly reject the general, economic, oil and financial sanctions that affect the population.” At the risk of praising Bolton, he at least remains honest about the sanctions. While the State and Treasury Departments routinely insist the sanctions only affect Venezuelan government insiders, Bolton admits “the harm [they] would cause the Venezuelan people.”

It wasn’t just the sanctions that were counterproductive from the perspective of the White House. The military threats, attempted coups and provocations also helped unite Maduro’s base. While Bolton laments Trump’s fixation on military threats and his calls for the Pentagon to draw up plans for an invasion, it wasn’t because the notorious hawk suddenly developed dove-ish sensibilities, rather it was because of the “inevitable congressional opposition” and his belief that regime change would not require U.S. troops.

Bolton dedicates a substantial portion of the chapter to detailing the events of Guaidó’s April 30 coup attempt, still believing that they were so very close to achieving their goals that day. Bolton and the White House thought they had convinced Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López to defect, along with other key figures, including the head of Venezuela’s Supreme Court. They did not defect. Instead, the coup fizzled within hours and all Guaidó managed to do was look foolish as he and around a dozen soldiers briefly took over a highway overpass. In the media, Bolton insisted that Padrino López betrayed the coup plotters at the last minute, but everything indicates that Bolton “got played”, as President Trump put it in June 2019, when he was reported – not for the first time – to have lost interest in Venezuela.

He certainly got played by Fabiana Rosales, Guaidó’s spouse, who appealed to Bolton’s vanity by claiming that the Venezuelan government is “most afraid when John Bolton starts tweeting.” Bolton brags about his tweets and stunts (like when he flashed a notepad with “5,000 troops to Colombia” scribbled on it during a press conference), but these were used as propaganda to solidify the Maduro government’s base. To wit, in January 2019, Venezuela’s civilian militia had under two million members; today, that same militia has over four million enlisted. Bolton, with his constant tweeting about Venezuela and to Venezuelan officials, as well as his history of warmongering, did much more to make Venezuelans believe the U.S. might invade than Trump’s own threats.

President Nicolás Maduro addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters on May 1, 2019, a day after Guaidó’s attempted coup. 

Bolton’s hubris has long been known, but what’s rather stunning about the Venezuela chapter is his poor analysis of the situation and (willful?) ignorance of facts. Delving into all of Bolton’s lies and misstatements would take another thousand words, but here are three of the many examples. He writes that President Maduro was “held under the tightest security for several days… [and] remained invisible, not coming out in public” after the April 30 coup. Yet the photo above shows Maduro addressing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of supporters on May 1. He claims that government supporters burned humanitarian aid trucks on February 23, despite the many reports that came out proving the opposition itself that burned the aid. He cites the Daily Mail in claiming that National Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello sent his children to China on February 23, yet they appeared live in Caracas on Venezuelan television four days later.

The White House is caught in an echo chamber, believing the very propaganda it seeds in the mainstream media. Ironically, propagandist-in-chief Trump, as quoted by Bolton, appears to be closest to breaking out of the information bubble. Here are a few of Trump’s quotes in Bolton’s chapter “Venezuela Libre”:

• Maduro is “too smart and too tough” to fall.

• “I don’t like where we are… The entire army is behind him… I’ve always said Maduro was tough. This kid [Guaidó] – nobody’s ever heard of him.”

• On Guaidó: “He doesn’t have what it takes… Stay away from it a little; don’t get too much involved.”

Of course, Trump isn’t immune to propaganda, claiming that Venezuela “is really part of the United States” – a damning statement of Bolton’s beloved Monroe Doctrine.

May Day 2019 rally in support of the Venezuelan government – the largest chavista demonstration since President Chávez’s death in 2013. Photo courtesy of @OrlenysOV

In another turn of irony, the best analysis of the situation in Venezuela in The Room Where It Happened comes from Russian President Vladimir Putin, which Bolton dismisses as a “brilliant display of Soviet-style propaganda.” Putin concludes that the White House’s policy has strengthened President Maduro, offering the massive May Day rallies in support of the Maduro government as evidence. Apparently, the Russian President was the only person offering Trump an alternative perspective on Venezuela.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Bolton’s “Venezuela Libre” chapter is that he and others in the administration dissuaded Trump from engaging in dialogue with the Venezuelan government. Unfortunately, even with Bolton gone from the White House, other actors continue to influence Trump in the same way. On June 19, in an Axios interview, Trump expressed a willingness to meet with President Maduro and once again expressed skepticism of Guaidó. He retracted his remarks the day after they were published, following pressure from the media, Florida politicians and presidential candidate Joe Biden, who predictably tried to outflank Trump from the right. As Bolton put it, “support on both sides of the aisle for [the] hard line in Venezuela was almost uniform.” Regardless of who wins in November, there appears to be little hope for lifting the cruel sanctions, if even suggesting dialogue is akin to a third rail in American politics.

Yet in Venezuela there is a sense of hope that cooler heads will prevail, as moderates are breaking off from the hardline opposition, negotiating with the government and preparing for upcoming legislative elections. Bolton’s book, and his time in office, proves that the United States – try as it might – is no longer capable of imposing its will. Hopefully, both that chapter of history and Bolton’s career have finally come to an end.

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Leonardo Flores is Latin American policy expert and campaigner with CODEPINK.

Featured image is from Alliance for Global Justice

President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton would have been confident.  His indulgent The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir pitted him against the administration in a not infrequent battle over material that is published by former officials recounting their giddy days in high office.  On June 17, the US government filed a civil suit seeking a preliminary injunction ahead of the planned release of the memoir on June 23, and a “constructive trust” arising from all profits issuing from the publication of the work. 

Bolton had, as Jack Goldsmith and Marty Lederman point out, signed two separate, fundamentally similar non-disclosure agreements, “corresponding to two different sets of Specialized Compartmented Information programs to which he was afforded access.”

Publishing sensitive national security information in the US context is governed by that driest of documents known as Standard Form 312.  Bolton undertook that he would “never divulge classified information to anyone unless: (a) [he has] officially verified  that the recipient has been properly authorized by the United States Government to receive it; or (b) [he has] been given prior written notice of authorization from the United States Government … that such disclosure is permitted.”  The second feature of the agreement is that Bolton agreed that, should he be “uncertain about the classification status” of any information in question, he would “confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before [he] may disclose it.”

This was not all.  To further supress information that would otherwise make it into the public domain is Standard Form 4414, which covers “Special Access Programs”, referred to in the field as sensitive compartmented information (SCI).  The policing authority in this case is the National Security Council, which required Bolton to submit to review “any writing … that contains or purports to contain any SCI or descriptive of activities that produce or relate to SCI or that I have reason to believe derived from SCI, that I contemplate disclosing to any person not authorized to have access to SCI or that I have prepared for public disclosure.”

Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia was not convinced by arguments made by the administration for a preliminary injunction halting the memoir’s publication.  But this did not necessarily make Bolton an endearing defendant.  The judge admitted that “Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns” but found that “the horse is out of the barn”.    

Ultimately, Bolton’s decision to go forth with the publication without final clearance from the intelligence censors was incautious but irreversible.  The judge even conceded that “Bolton may indeed have caused the country irreparable harm.”  The point was rapid, vast distribution and spread, assisted by the nature of technology.  In “the Internet age, even a handful of copies in circulation could irrevocably destroy confidentiality.” All was required was for a determined individual, armed with the contents of such a publication, to “publish [it] far and wide from his local coffee shop.” Resigned, the judge conceded that “the damage is done.  There is no restoring the status quo.” 

To that end, any injunction “would be so toothless”.  The other obvious point – that over 200,000 copies of the book had already been shipped domestically, with thousands of copies being exported to booksellers in Europe, India and the Middle East – rendered the need for such a restraint moot.  “By the looks of it,” mused the judge, “the horse is not just out of the barn – it is out of the country.”

The Bolton episode underscores the very legitimacy of the prepublication review process.  Former CIA operative John Kiriakou makes the unimpeachable point that such documents, however sympathetic their authors, need to get into open circulation.  The republic needs the oxygen of revelation.  The process of review, he attests, is “deeply flawed and frequently political.”  As Kiriakou reminds us, such a system of suppression drew breath from the case of Victor Marchetti, who worked as an analyst at the CIA between 1955 and 1969.  Serialised versions of his book reflecting on the grand old days were slated to run in Esquire.  The CIA took issue, filed a temporary injunction against publication of the book citing the presence of classified information and the naming of undercover operatives.  The case made its way to the US Supreme Court, which held that the initial judgment in favour of an injunction was sound.  The non-disclosure regime was appropriate.  “We find the contract constitutional and otherwise reasonable and lawful.”  What followed was an arduous process of review, cutting and redaction, with Marchetti seeking clearance, and the CIA being miserly in concession.

Not all was lost for former members of the intelligence community and publishers.  Texts might still make it into circulation, provided they were cleared, and done so within 60 days by the relevant prepublication board.  Those not cleared might see profits confiscated.  But this did not address the issue of zealous overclassification, unnecessary redaction and violations of the 60 day rule.

The battle against the very constitutionality of the prepublication review system has begun in earnest.  On January 27, 2020, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information request seeking records related to the review of the manuscripts of 25 former federal officials, among them Bolton’s memoir.  In April 2, 2019, the Knight First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit challenging the very constitutionality of prepublication review.  Along with the ACLU, the action was undertaken on behalf of five former public servants arguing that the prepublication system spanning the CIA, the Defence Department, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, violated the First Amendment right “to convey and of the public to hear, in a timely manner, the opinions of former government employees on issues of public importance.”  

The action further argued that the prepublication process violated the First Amendment in not providing former employees “with fair notice of they can and cannot publish without prior review”, one that also invited “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement by censors.” 

On April 16, 2020, the District Court in Maryland found in favour of the government, holding the prepublication review system to be constitutional.  Judge George Hazel found that the ACLU and Knight First Amendment Institute had standing to challenge the review process, but felt governed by the forty-year old Supreme Court case of Snepp v. United States.  The defects of the prepublication system, be it in terms of vagueness on classification, the certainty of review standards, and the absence of procedural safeguards, had little bearing on the question of constitutionality.

The plaintiffs have duly appealed. Among their arguments is the fact that Snepp focused on remedies rather than First Amendment principles, sidestepping the very merits of the CIA review system.  The limits of government authority in imposing prepublication review obligations also remained untested.  The reasoning of Snepp has also aged, both in terms of the law of pre-restraint on employee obligations and the factual environment.  As the Knight First Amendment Institute urges, “We need to hear these voices [of former employees of the intelligence services], but if we want to hear them, we have to fix the obstacle course that prepublication review has become.”

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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 by Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock

“We beseech independent African states to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States Government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the grounds that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace…. In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.” (Quote from the memorandum presented by Malcolm X on behalf of the Organization of Afro-American Unity to the Organization of African Unity second summit in Cairo, Egypt, July 17, 1964)

Nearly 56 years ago Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) visited the city of Cairo, Egypt for the second time within three months.

His mission was to take the plight of the African American people to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor today’s African Union (AU), in order to solicit the assistance of the-then 33 independent nations on the continent in bringing the gross human rights violations committed by the U.S. government to the United Nations.

In 2020, the dramatic shift in mass activity and political debate surrounding the role of policing within the context of institutional racism and national oppression has come to the fore once again in the U.S. These developments prompted by demonstrations involving millions across the U.S. and internationally, along with the attacks on private property and symbols of slavery and colonialism, have drawn the attention of the modern day UN Human Rights agency which held a hearing on these issues during the third week of June. A series of extra-judicial killings of African Americans Ahmaud Abery, Breonna Taylor and later George Floyd sparked outrage which is still being manifested.

Image on the right: Burkina Faso Ambassador to UN Human Rights Council in Geneva during session on racism in the U.S.

On June 12, 54 member-states within the continental AU demanded a debate in Geneva over the events which have transpired in the U.S. surrounding the police and vigilante attacks against African Americans. A memorandum was sent to the UNHRC President Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger of Austria, signed by the government of the West African state of Burkina Faso requesting the convening of a session to discuss this pertinent issue.

In light of the unrest which spread throughout the U.S. and the world in the immediate wake of the brutal police execution of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police on May 25, Washington under the administration of President Donald Trump has failed miserably in adequately addressing the present situation. Trump in response to unrest in Washington, D.C. and other cities, evoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, threatening to deploy federal troops to areas where demonstrations are occurring to purportedly restore order.

The situation created such an embarrassing conundrum for the White House that existing and former Pentagon officials were compelled to make statements in an attempt to distance themselves from the president. Nonetheless, there have been more than 20 people killed by law-enforcement agents and National Guard over the previous month, while thousands have been beaten, gassed and detained by police.

Even the Voice of America (VOA), the broadcasting organ of the State Department, which has come under criticism by the Trump administration, reported on the international diplomatic maneuvering surrounding the racial turmoil in the U.S. saying:

“In a letter written on behalf of the 54 countries of the African Group, of which he is coordinator for human rights questions, the ambassador of Burkina Faso to the United Nations in Geneva, Dieudonné Désiré Sougouri, asked the body to the U.N. to organize an ‘urgent debate on the current racially-inspired human rights violations, systemic racism, police brutality against people of African descent and violence against peaceful demonstrations. The tragic events of May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, USA, which resulted in the death of George Floyd, sparked worldwide protests over the injustice and brutality faced by people of African descent daily in many regions of the world,’ wrote the ambassador. ‘The death of George Floyd is unfortunately not an isolated incident,’ he wrote, adding that he was speaking on behalf of the representatives and ambassadors of the African Group.”

The Outcome of the UN Human Rights Debate

As a result of the UN Human Rights Council discussions on June 17-18 in Geneva, the body decided to conduct further investigations on the question of racism and brutality in the U.S. Such a decision portends much for the effectiveness of international solidarity related to the African American struggle.

Amid a burgeoning economic crisis directly stemming from job losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has impacted the U.S. more than any other country, African Americans are being disproportionately affected. This same situation prevails in regard to the infection rate for the virus itself. In cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and in rural and less densely populated areas of the South and Southwest, the pandemic has taken a devastating toll particularly among oppressed peoples.

A rising antiracist and class consciousness is bound to escalate during this period of uncertainty and dislocation. Consequently, the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state will continue its efforts to suppress the demonstrations, rebellions and political demands which call for the defunding and dismantling of police.

The UN News Service said of the session in Geneva that:

“Michelle Bachelet, is to spearhead efforts to address systemic racism against people of African descent by law enforcement agencies, the Human Rights Council decided on Friday (June 19). The resolution – decided unanimously without a vote – follows a rare Urgent Debate in the Council earlier in the week, requested by the African group of nations, following the death of George Floyd in the US state of Minnesota…. The text also calls on Ms. Bachelet – assisted by UN appointed independent rights experts and committees ‘to examine government responses to anti-racism peaceful protests, including the alleged use of excessive force against protesters, bystanders and journalists.’ Overseeing the resolution, Ambassador Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger (Austria), President of the Human Rights Council (14th cycle) announced that the text was ready for their consideration and asked whether a vote could be dispensed with, in light of the general consensus.”

Ambassador Sougouri of Burkina Faso described the debate in Geneva as historic. Senegalese Human Rights Ambassador Coly Seck echoed the protests in the U.S. saying “Black Lives Matter” and that racism runs contrary to the Charter of the UN.

The Future of the Struggle Against Racism in the U.S.

As recognized in the opening quote from Malcolm X’s intervention at the July 1964 OAU Summit in Cairo, the importance of internationalizing the movement to end institutional racism and national oppression in the U.S. is an important aspect of the overall effort to secure victory. Although Washington and Wall Street oversees the largest economy on the globe, the fragility and contradictory character of the U.S. capitalist system has been exposed in recent months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent financial downturn and the eruption of social unrest.

The testimony of the younger brother of George Floyd, Philonise, on June 17 before the UN Human Rights Council, spoke volumes in relationship to the nature of racism and policing in the U.S. The younger Floyd said to the Director:

“My brother, George Floyd, is one of the many Black men and women that have been murdered by police in recent years. The sad truth is that the case is not unique. The way you saw my brother tortured and murdered on camera is the way Black people are treated by police in America. You watched my brother die. That could have been me.” (See this)

This process of internationalizing the African American struggle against racism is protracted. One scholar who wrote on the intersection between the liberation movements of Africans on the continent and the Diaspora emphasizes the importance of creating and maintaining these working relationships.

Image below: Malcolm X at OAU Summit in Cairo during July 1964

Prof. Azaria Mbughuni raises an important point in his assessment of Malcolm X’s OAAU visit in 1964 illustrating that:

“One of the highlights of his last trip to Africa was the passing of a resolution addressing the plight of African Americans in the U.S. This resolution was passed with the assistance of the President of Tanzania, Julius K. Nyerere (1922-1999). The contact between Malcolm and East African leaders contributed to the strengthening of linkages between the struggles of African people in Africa and African Americans and to Malcolm X’s own growth as a revolutionary…. Writers studying Malcolm (Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik Shabazz) often focus exclusively on his pilgrimage to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia and to his tours in West Africa. Furthermore, most writers dismiss the resolution on the African American struggle passed by the Second Summit of Organization of African Unity as insignificant…. The passage of a resolution on the struggle of African Americans and racism in the U.S. by the Cairo OAU Summit in July 21, 1964 was an important step in connecting the struggles of African Americans and that of African people in Africa.” (See this)

Therefore, moving forward the importance of independent organizing to build a sustainable antiracist and African American liberation movement becomes paramount. Events in recent weeks have forced the international community to take notice of the ongoing social strife emanating from the racist-capitalist system.

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

Featured image: George Floyd’s brother addresses the UN Human Rights Council on June 18, 2020/All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

On June 17, the Trudeau government suffered a humiliating defeat by losing its bid for a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seat to Ireland and Norway. It was a strong rebuttal of Trudeau’s policy of “colonialism at home, imperialism abroad.” It should be obvious by now that serious questions need to be asked about Trudeau’s foreign policy, especially with regard to Venezuela and the Lima Group.

Over the last several months, and in the lead up to the UNSC vote, an open democratic and critical discussion of Canada’s colonial heritage and its treatment of Indigenous peoples—along with Ottawa’s Trump-aligned foreign policy—has been largely absent from the mainstream media.

During the last federal election, Trudeau had to deal with challenges from the grassroots. In a mocking and insulting manner, he fended off interruptions from Indigenous complainants suffering from mercury poisoning. He also skated around peace activists questioning him and then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland about their double standards with respect to sanctioning Russia for its annexation of Crimea, but ignoring Israel’s ongoing and illegal settlement building in the West Bank.

Canada quickly recognized the fraudulent election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (after the judiciary imprisoned front-runner Lula da Silva on spurious charges), while at the same time refusing to recognize constitutionally elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trudeau and his cabinet also faced protests by activists opposing Canada’s weapons sales to notorious human rights violator Saudi Arabia and Ottawa’s unconditional support for Israel at the expense of Palestinian self-determination. While corporate media outlets had no choice but to show these disruptions, it soon went back to business as usual by obediently keeping all these critical issues away from public scrutiny.

For those of us in Canada involved in the #NoUNSC4Canada campaign, including Canadian Dimension, it is clear we managed to break through the virtual corporate media blackout. This censorship was mainly directed at putting a lid on the much-needed debate on both Canada’s foreign policy and its notorious colonial practices at home against Indigenous peoples.

President Maduro among other Latin American leaders participating in a 2017 ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) gathering. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The #NoUSNC4Canada campaign takes shape

On May 19, this media posturing was forced to shift. That day, an open letter signed by hundreds of international, Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous figures was published in the Toronto Star, criticizing the Canadian government’s foreign policy and its continued encroachment onto unceded Indigenous territory to push through new oil and gas pipelines. The letter argued that Canada does not deserve a UNSC seat due to its US-oriented foreign policy on Venezuela, Haiti, Bolivia and other countries in Latin America, along with its neocolonial ambitions in Africa, its open contempt for Palestinian rights, and so much more.

Following the publication of the letter in the Star, Trudeau was asked during his daily COVID-19 presser about the divided public opinion surrounding his UNSC bid. Instead of discussing the issue, Trudeau arrogantly dismissed it, saying there was no division whatsoever, and then took a snipe at Maduro to distract attention from the question.

Seemingly from that point forward, additional criticism of the Trudeau government’s UNSC bid continued to mount.

On June 11, the Canadian organization Just Peace Advocates, published an open letter on Palestine which was then sent to all 193 UN ambassadors and signed by 100 organizations and dozens of prominent individuals. It immediately impacted the Canadian political scene, forcing Canadian Ambassador to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, to write a reply to all UN ambassadors, defending Canada’s one-sided Israel policy. This obviously desperate move did not go unnoticed, even by mainstream media outlets, fuelling further doubts about the credibility of Canada’s UNSC bid.

Canadian Dimension columnist and author Yves Engler appealed to the CARICOM nations to vote against Canada. This was followed up by a similar appeal I made that was sent to each of the UN ambassadors of CARICOM nations. The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute published my YouTube appeal in English, Spanish and French. It consisted of a widely-disseminated call to many UN ambassadors to vote against Canada because of its violation of international law based on its pro-US regime change policy for Venezuela, a clear violation of UN principles.

There are many other examples. Did our campaign within Canada and internationally contribute to Trudeau’s UNSC defeat? We may never know for sure. However, we do know that Trudeau had been calling and meeting with international leaders on every continent since 2017 on the issue of Venezuela. He had been exhorting them to side with Trump and his hand-picked “interim president” Juan Guaidó. Trudeau went out of his way to give Guaidó an official reception in Ottawa in February. In fact, an embarrassing selfie shared between the two at that meeting (since taken down from the Canadian government website but made immortal by activists) is emblematic of Canada’s servile foreign policy.

Ties to Trump cost Trudeau dearly

Since the June 17 vote, it is generally accepted within progressive circles, and even grudgingly now by some corporate media, that Trudeau lost as a result of being too closely and openly tied to Trump. Perhaps the #NoUNSC4Canada campaign provided added impetus to the anti-Trudeau sentiment already brewing as part of growing worldwide resistance to Western liberal hypocrisy, spurred on by such issues as Trudeau’s support for Israel and disdain for Palestinian rights.

It has also been noted, and justifiably so, that Trudeau’s support for Israel was a key factor in his defeat. However, one should not underestimate Venezuela. Trudeau fell prey to his own mythical belief that the “world is against Maduro.” In fact, one only has to point to the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, which does recognize Maduro. The influence and esteem that Venezuela and its leaders enjoy all over the Third World should not be underestimated. Former president Hugo Chávez is respected in many corners to a degree Trudeau cannot even begin to imagine.

In many ways, Maduro is following in the footsteps of his predecessor. In May, Maduro struck a deal with Iran to have the Middle Eastern nation send fuel vessels to Venezuela to mitigate a refinery operations collapse caused by the tightening of punitive US sanctions. Defying the Americans, five Iranian tankers brought 1.5 million barrels of fuel to Venezuelan ports. On June 22, Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela, Hojjatollah Soltani, confirmed the arrival of the ship “Golsan” in Venezuelan waters with a load of foodstuffs destined for the Islamic Republic’s first supermarket in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s international diplomatic efforts are also impressive. It skilfully combines revolutionary defense of its sovereignty based on a civic-military alliance backed by a dizzying, globetrotting corps of young diplomats. They have developed a tradition of battling on every stage that the international community affords, and they are holding their own against all odds.

Some additional truths were highlighted in a June 17 tweet by Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s Vice-Minister for North America. The message was retweeted by Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza:

Not surprised with UN Security Council election results today. A subservient foreign policy may win you Trump’s favor, but the peoples of the world expect an independent voice that will stand for diplomacy, respect for self-determination, and peace.

— Carlos Ron (@CarlosJRonVE) June 17, 2020

To achieve a positive result from Trudeau’s UNSC election defeat, Canadians must demand a public debate on foreign policy. The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, which initiated the #NoUNSC4Canada petition, is continuing this discussion by publishing pieces in the mainstream media and hosting webinars during the pandemic.

Although progressives may be happy with the result of the vote on June 17, it is necessary that this rejection of Trudeau’s foreign policy translates into Canada exiting from the Lima group, rescinding its sanctions against Venezuela and pressuring Trump to do the same.

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This article was originally published on Canadian Dimension.

Arnold August is a Montreal-based journalist and author of three books on Cuba–Latin America–U.S. whose articles appear in English, Spanish and French in North America, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, including occasional contributions to Canadian Dimension. He is also a speaker currently concentrating on Trudeau’s foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.

The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) has effectively turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, nations put restrictions on the flow of capital. Domestic firms and banks could not freely borrow from banks elsewhere or from international capital markets, without seeking permission, and they could not simply take their money in and out of other countries.

Domestic financial markets were segmented from international ones elsewhere. Governments could to a large extent run their own macroeconomic policy without being restrained by monetary or fiscal policies devised by others. They could also have their own tax and industrial policies without having to seek market confidence or worry about capital flight.

However, the dismantling of Bretton Woods and the deregulation of global capital movement has led to the greater incidence of financial crises (including sovereign debt) and has deepened the level of dependency of nation states on capital markets.

If we turn to India, we can see the implications very clearly. The increasing deregulation of financial capital flows means that global finance is in a position to dictate domestic policy. Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital and India’s foreign exchange reserves have been built up by borrowing and foreign investments. For policy makers, the fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign capital inflows.

The author(s) of a recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) notes that instead of imposing controls on flows of foreign capital and pursuing a path of democratic development, the Indian government has chosen to submit to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend, giving up any pretence of economic sovereignty.

Anxious to shore up foreign exchange holdings, the Modi-led government is trying to attract even more risky foreign investments. Moreover, in a time of economic and social crisis, resulting from the draconian coronavirus-related lockdown, public spending to ameliorate the desperate situations of those affected has been abysmally low. This falls into line with the imperatives of global capital, which requires nation states to curb spending so that private investors can occupy the arena left open.

RUPE notes that the Indian government is also appealing to the US for help in addressing India’s foreign exchange conundrum (its foreign exchange reserves are largely based on borrowing which could exit). This will require some kind of ‘payback’.

Such payback could come in the form of a future trade deal. India is currently involved in ongoing trade talks with the US. If this deal goes through and India capitulates to US demands, it could devastate the dairy, poultry, soybean, maize and other sectors and severely deepen the crisis in the countryside.

Ranil Salgado, mission chief for India at the IMF, says that when the economic shock (resulting from the coronavirus lockdown) passes, it’s important that India returns to its path of undertaking long-term reforms. This would mean global conglomerates being able to further hollow out the remnants of nation state sovereignty.

Foreign capital is in the process of displacing the prevailing agrifood model before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control. Millions of small-scale and marginal farmers are already suffering economic distress and leaving farming as the sector is deliberately made financially non-viable for them. The Modi administration is fully on board with the World Bank’s pro-corporate ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ and other such policies aimed at further incorporating nation states into the neoliberal fold and which equate neoliberal fundamentalism with ‘development’.

Recent developments will merely serve to accelerate this process as we see with regard to the Karnataka Land Reform Act, which will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land (resulting in increased landlessness and urban migration) and the undermining of the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (mandis), part of an ongoing process to dismantle India’s public distribution system and price support mechanisms for farmers. These ‘reforms’ are ultimately about ‘liberalising’ agriculture to further ease the entrance of foreign agribusiness interests like Cargill – even as ordinary Indians suffer.

And have no doubt, they are suffering. A recent news analysis report claims India let 65 million tonnes of grain go to waste in four months, even as the poor went hungry as a result of the coronavirus lockdown. The authors claim that this resulted from the government being wedded to neoliberal ideology and the dogma of ‘fiscal prudence’. They also ask why the Food Corporation of India has been holding such a large surplus of grain and conclude that it is because the government has been unwilling to expand the public distribution scheme.

In effect, US agribusiness wants India to tighten ‘fiscal prudence’, reduce subsidies and public sector spending on agriculture. The aim is to further displace peasant farmers thereby driving even more people to cities and ensure corporate consolidation and commercialisation of the sector based on industrial-scale monocrop farms incorporated into global supply chains dominated by transnational agribusiness and retail giants.

This runs counter to what is actually required. The various lockdowns around the globe have already exposed the fragility of the global food system, dominated by long-line supply chains and global conglomerates – which effectively suck food and wealth from the Global South to the richer nations.

What we have seen underscores the need for a radical transformation of the prevailing globalised food regime founded on one which reduces dependency on global conglomerates, external proprietary inputs, distant volatile commodity markets and patented technologies.

Practical solutions to the (global) agrarian crisis must be based on sustainable agriculture which places the small farmer at the centre of policies: far-sighted and sustained policy initiatives centred on self-sufficiency, localisation, food sovereignty, regenerative agriculture and agroecology.

On a macro level, economist Prabhat Patnaik argues that India must delink from neoliberal globalisation via capital controls; manage foreign trade and expand the domestic market through the protection and encouragement of petty production, including peasant agriculture; increase welfare expenditure by the state; and commit to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and income.

Rather than have transnational agribusiness corporations determining global and regional policies and private capital throttling democracy, we require a system of healthy food and sustainable agriculture that is run for human need.

In fact, what may actually be required is an alternative to ‘development’ because, as post-development theorist Arturo Escobar explains, global inequality remains severe, both between and within nations, and environmental devastation and human dislocation, driven by political as well as ecological factors, continue to worsen. These are the symptoms of the failure of ‘development’, a concept based on capitalism’s overproduction-overconsumption ‘growth’ logic with all that follows in terms of environmental degradation and the economic plunder of nations and peoples.

Looking at the situation in Latin America, Escobar says development strategies have centred on large-scale interventions, such as the expansion of oil palm plantations, mining and large port development. And it is similar in India: commodity monocropping; immiseration in the countryside; the appropriation of biodiversity (the means of subsistence for millions of rural dwellers); unnecessary and inappropriate environment-destroying, people-displacing infrastructure projects; and state-backed violence against the poorest and most marginalised sections of society.

Perhaps we should be taking our cue from the world’s indigenous peoples whose societies display a deep connection with and respect for nature. Their economics and cultures often represent the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation: the promotion of long-term sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature, rather than hierarchy and competition.

This was echoed by Noam Chomsky during a 2014 interview:

“There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations – the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”

With this in mind, soil, water, seeds, land, forests and other natural resources must be democratically controlled and recognised as common wealth and the scaling up of agroecological approaches should be a lynchpin of genuine rural development, which in turn must be modelled on the notion of food sovereignty.

Renowned agronomist MS Swaminathan says:

“Independent foreign policy is only possible with food security. Therefore, food has more than just eating implications. It protects national sovereignty, national rights and national prestige.”

Genuine food security in principle derives from food sovereignty, which, in a very broad sense, is based on the right of peoples and sovereign states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies.

The struggle to assert genuine self-determination and democratic development in India involves challenging the dominance of private (international) capital. It also entails disputing the authority of a central state and its machinery that, at independence, was designed to consolidate power at the centre, quell dissent, divide the masses and, with the undemocratic and unaccountable influence of foreign interests like the Ford Foundation and more recently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ultimately serve the interests of both old and new colonial masters.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Featured image is a VCG Photo

2015年5月北京首次推出的 “中国制造2025 “中国制造2025，基本内容包括支持高科技领域，同时也提升中国制造业的工业基础。中国制造2025议程还 “突出了绿色制造、节能与新能源汽车、高端装备制造，包括新信息技术和机器人……” (2015年5月20日《环球时报》)

中国制造。美国的零售贸易

想象一下，如果特朗普总统从某一天开始决定大幅削减美国的 “中国制造 “进口，会发生什么？这绝对是毁灭性的，会扰乱消费经济，是一场经济和金融的混乱。

在美国的商场，包括各大品牌的商品陈列中，有很大一部分是 “中国制造”。

“中国制造 “还主导了各种工业投入品、机械、建材、汽车、零部件等的生产，更不用说中国企业代表美国企业集团进行的大量分包了。

特朗普政府没有理解的是，美国贸易逆差最终如何使美国经济受益。它有助于维持美国的零售经济，它也维持了美国GDP的增长。

 

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The Corona Pandemic and Trump’s Trade War against China: America’s Dependence on “Made in China”. Potential Disruption of the US Economy

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 14, 2020

 

Did you know the normal human virome contains a multitude of different viruses, including many strains of coronavirus? And did you know that some of these viruses sound scary – the type people normally associate with disease – even though the person carrying them may be completely healthy and/or asymptomatic? As discussed in previous articles, the word virome (similar to the word microbiome for bacteria) refers to the community of viruses that naturally and usually live within us. Far from causing harm, they form a vital part of our bodies and immune system, existing in symbiosis with us and playing an important role in our healing response. The COVID coronavirus event has exploited people’s ignorance over the nature of the virus and the nature of disease. This is an opportunity for us to educate ourselves, to come out of fear, to understand the base assumptions and deceptions behind the COVID propaganda, and to be prepared when the New World Order (NWO) controllers try to pull their next trick in Operation Coronavirus, the 2nd wave.

Introducing … Your Wonderful Virome

It’s high time for us to examine the whole narrative of the killer virus. This narrative itself is founded on germ theory, the idea that there are dangerous, infectious pathogens ‘out there’ which can spread quickly and invade our bodies no matter seemingly what we do. It makes for a good Hollywood movie (Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman) or Netflix series (the Explained series episode titled The Next Pandemic with our good friend and NWO frontman Bill Gates), but is it a good theory to actually describe and predict disease? I would say no, especially when we consider the alternative model of host theory or terrain theory. Host/terrain theory emphasizes the importance of the inner terrain or bio terrain – your gut, bloodstream and the environment inside of you. Host/terrain theory teaches that your state of health or disease is dependent upon how well or poorly you develop and maintain your inner terrain. It speaks of the microbiome (the community of bacteria inside of you). Many people have heard of the microbiome, but how many have heard of the virome? The virome is to viruses just as the microbiome is to bacteria. Both are fundamental to who we are and our state of health. These small companions are present in our body in massive numbers: the number of bacteria in our body outnumber the ‘human’ cells in our body at a 10:1 ratio, while the virome is estimated to contain 380 trillion viruses.

2017 Scientific Study: Normal Human Virome Full of Many Viruses in 42% of Test Subjects

With this in mind, take a close look at this 2017 study entitled The blood DNA virome in 8,000 humans. It found that a staggering 42% of people had all sorts of viruses in them despite being in fine health! Some of these were even viruses we have been taught to fear, such as HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), hepatitis, influenza and herpes. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

“The characterization of the blood virome is important for the safety of blood-derived transfusion products, and for the identification of emerging pathogens. We explored non-human sequence data from whole-genome sequencing of blood from 8,240 individuals, none of whom were ascertained for any infectious disease. Viral sequences were extracted from the pool of sequence reads that did not map to the human reference genome. Analyses sifted through close to 1 Petabyte of sequence data and performed 0.5 trillion similarity searches. With a lower bound for identification of 2 viral genomes/100,000 cells, we mapped sequences to 94 different viruses, including sequences from 19 human DNA viruses, proviruses and RNA viruses (herpesviruses, anelloviruses, papillomaviruses, three polyomaviruses, adenovirus, HIV, HTLV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, parvovirus B19, and influenza virus) in 42% of the study participants. Of possible relevance to transfusion medicine, we identified Merkel cell polyomavirus in 49 individuals, papillomavirus in blood of 13 individuals, parvovirus B19 in 6 individuals, and the presence of herpesvirus 8 in 3 individuals. The presence of DNAsequences from two RNA viruses was unexpected: Hepatitis C virus is revealing of an integration event, while the influenza virus sequence resulted from immunization with a DNA vaccine. Age, sex and ancestry contributed significantly to the prevalence of infection. The remaining 75 viruses mostly reflect extensive contamination of commercial reagents and from the environment. These technical problems represent a major challenge for the identification of novel human pathogens. Increasing availability of human whole-genome sequences will contribute substantial amounts of data on the composition of the normal and pathogenic human blood virome.”

Other Recent Studies on Viruses

Here are some quotes and conclusions of other studies on the virome. This 2019 study entitled The gut virome: the ‘missing link’ between gut bacteria and host immunity? analyzed the importance of the virome on human immunity:

“Despite its predominance, the virome remains one of the least understood components of the gut microbiota, with appropriate analysis toolkits still in development. Based on its interconnectivity with all living cells, it is clear that the virome cannot be studied in isolation.

The human intestinal microbiome represents one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth and has taken millions of years to coevolve.

DNA and RNA viruses that collectively make up the intestinal virome outnumber bacterial cells by as much as 10:1, and include eukaryotic viruses which infect eukaryotic cells, endogenous retroviruses, bacterial viruses (i.e. bacteriophages) and archaeal viruses that infect archaea.

Diet is an important and constant environmental and lifestyle factor that can influence the gut microbiome, including its viral component.

Transkingdom interactions between virome components and bacteria highlights that there are additional layers of complexity to consider in terms of host–microbial homeostasis.”

This 2019 study Human Virome and Disease: High-Throughput Sequencing for Virus Discovery, Identification of Phage-Bacteria Dysbiosis and Development of Therapeutic Approaches with Emphasis on the Human Gut suggested we intake prebiotics and probiotics to affect our virome:

“Although virome-directed therapeutic research is still in the relatively early stages of development, it has been suggested that directly or indirectly altering the virome may improve health outcomes in disease phenotypes associated with virome perturbations. The use of prebiotics (e.g., inulin and fructooligosaccharides) and probiotics, for instance, may indirectly target the virome since these may potentially affect bacterial membership and function.”

Finally, this 2018 study The Intestinal Virome and Immunity concluded that viruses can play a beneficial role in human health:

“While we continue to perform essential research into the pathogenic role of viruses and develop antivirals and vaccines, we can no longer ignore the possibility that they function as components of the microbiome. Like bacteria, the effects that viruses have are critically dependent on their tissue location, microenvironment and host. These factors will directly influence whether the virus acts beneficially, detrimentally or remains neutral for the host … This research will certainly lead to the discovery of novel ways in which viruses interact with the host that we can potentially harness for disease prevention and therapies. It may even be possible to engineer enteric viruses with desirable traits, much like current attempts at administering oncolytic viruses as adjuvants for cancer therapy.”

Final Thoughts

A study of human history shows that it is frequently those who think creatively and originally – outside of the established groupthink – who become the pioneers of new models and technologies which better serve humanity. In one of my previous articles linked to above (here), I discussed the brilliant German virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka, who won a landmark case in the German Supreme Court proving that measles was not a virus. Dr. Andrew Kaufman has made a name for himself during this time of COVID by speaking out strongly against the idea of a killer virus and instead pointing to the evidence that the body makes exosomes (tiny particles) which in turn become bacteria and viruses. Kaufman reiterates the research of others, namely that viruses have never been proven to be the cause of COVID or any disease at all! In its essence, the virus is information; RNA encapsulated in a protective lipid or fat layer. As a community of viruses, the virome is, therefore, a sort of library or central database of information, one in which we are very much in our infancy of understanding. My hope is that people can use Operation Coronavirus to wake up, including doing such things as learning about the virome and radically transforming the way they look at viruses and disease. This must be done quickly, before the next wave of fear, hype, propaganda, lockdown, tyranny and array of forced medical interventions by the State. We know it’s coming and we have to act now – while we still can.

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Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

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COVID-19 and the Dire Living Conditions of India’s Bottom Half Billion

By Joseph D’Souza, June 24, 2020

Go less than eight miles north along the coastline and you will reach Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world. Measuring .81 sq mi, the slum is home to over 1 million Indians, making it one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. Entire families cram into one-room houses inside Dharavi’s labyrinthine neighborhoods, where diseases run rampant because of the confined and unsanitary conditions people live in.

NATO 2030: How to Make a Bad Idea Worse. Expanding the “Atlantic Alliance” into the Pacific…

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, June 24, 2020

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

Video: The Social Impacts and Economic Dimensions of the Drug Trade

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Mehrnews, June 24, 2020

The issue of drugs is a global scourge and there is the need for wide-scale cooperation at the international level so as to tackle this problem. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran has adopted an interactive approach with the global community concerning the issue of drugs and has virtually indicated that it spares no efforts in enhancing cooperation with other countries and international organizations in the campaign against illicit drugs.

Behind the Veil of the Protest Movement, the War on the American People Is Gaining Pace

By Mike Whitney, June 24, 2020

$100 million is alot of money. How has that funding helped BLM expand its presence in politics and social media? How many activists and paid employees operate within the network disseminating information, building new chapters, hosting community outreach programs, and fine-tuning an emergency notification system that allows them to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets in cities across the country at a moment’s notice? Isn’t that what we’ve seen for the last three weeks, throngs of angry protestors swarming in more than 400 cities across America all at the beck-and-call of a shadowy group whose political intentions are still not clear?

Bayer Pays $10 Billion to Settle Thousands of Monsanto Glyphosate Lawsuits

By Zero Hedge, June 24, 2020

After decades of widespread use as company scientists played down research showing a definitive link between the product and growing rates of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Monsanto parent company Bayer has agreed to pay up to $10 billion to settle claims that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer.

China vs India: Who Benefits? US Meddling

By Tony Cartalucci, June 24, 2020

A recent border dispute between China and India have resulted in multiple casualties including deaths. It is the first time in decades that this scale of violence has been seen between the two nations. Western headlines have immediately tried to play up the notion of conflict between China and India, but to what end?

Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid, “Global Financial Giant”

By Ellen Brown, June 23, 2020

BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do.

“Violence creates many more social problems than it solves…. If they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.”—Martin Luther King Jr.

Marches, protests, boycotts, sit-ins: these are nonviolent tactics that work.

Looting, vandalism, the destruction of public property, intimidation tactics aimed at eliminating anything that might cause offense to the establishment: these tactics of mobs and bullies may work in the short term, but they will only give rise to greater injustices in the long term.

George Floyd’s death sparked the flame of outrage over racial injustice and police brutality, but political correctness is creating a raging inferno that threatens to engulf the nation.

In Boston, racial justice activists beheaded a statue of Christopher Columbus. Protesters in Richmond, Va., used ropes to topple that city’s Columbus statue, spray-painted it, set it on fire and tossed it into a lake. Columbus’ crimes against indigenous peoples throughout the Americas are well known.

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, protesters tore down a statue of Francis Scott Key, who penned “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key was also a slaveholding lawyer who tried to prosecute abolitionists vocally opposing slavery.

Activists who object to Yale University being named after its founder Elihu Yale, a slave trader, are lobbying to re-name the school.

Students at Harvard University want to re-name Mather House, one of the dorms named after Increase Mather, the college president from 1685 to 1692 and a slave owner.

Administrators at Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, N.J.—named after the nation’s 28^th president, who guided the nation through World War I while upholding segregation policies—are now looking for a new name.

In an apparent bid to be more culturally sensitive, Land O’ Lakes has removed from its packaging the image of a Native American princess that had been featured on its products for a hundred years.

The distributors of Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup, Uncle Ben’s Rice and Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup have also announced plans to re-brand and re-name their products in an effort to avoid perpetuating racist stereotypes. Cream of Wheat is considering what to do about the smiling black chef that graces its breakfast porridge (his visage has been criticized for being stereotypically subservient).

Not to be outdone, Dreyer’s Ice Cream plans to retire the 99-year-old name for its Eskimo Pie frozen confections on a stick because “Eskimo” has been denounced as a racist nomenclature used by “colonizers to Arctic regions to refer to Inuit and Yupik people.”

Gone with the Wind, the Civil War epic that won 10 Academy Awards and has long been considered one of the greatest films of all times, was temporarily pulled from HBOMax’s streaming service in response to concerns that it depicts “ethnic and racial prejudices” that “were wrong then and are wrong today.”

The University of Georgia’s marching band has removed “Tara’s Theme,” the opening orchestral theme from Gone with the Wind, from its musical repertoire.

What is the end sum of all these actions?

What started as a movement to denounce police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of killer cops has become a free-for-all campaign to rid the country of any monument, literal or figurative, to anyone who may have at any time in history expressed a racist thought, exhibited racist behavior, or existed within a racist society.

The police state has got us exactly where it wants us: distracted, distraught and divided.

While protesters topple statues of men with racist pasts who are long dead, unarmed Americans continue to be killed by militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

While activists use their collective might to pressure corporations to rebrand products in a more racially sensitive fashion, the American police state—aided and abetted by the Corporate State—continues to disproportionately target blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.

And while politically correct censorship is attempting to sanitize the public sphere of words and images that denigrate minorities, it is not doing anything to rid hearts and minds of racism.

Muzzling speech, censoring discourse, erasing history: that’s the worst possible antidote.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone, concluded in the “Deaths-Head Revisited” episode:

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes, all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it, they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”

In other words, what we need is more speech, more discourse, and a greater understanding of history and the evils perpetrated in the name of conquest, profit and racial supremacy. Because if we bury the mistakes of the past under a sanitized present, if we fail to at least provide context to the past, we risk allowing the government to repeat those past mistakes—rewritten for a new age—and no one will be the wiser.

It has happened already: we have allowed the government strip people of their humanity; to segregate them into polarized classes; to treat them as chattel; to deny them basic human rights; and to reduce them to figures on a ledger sheet.

Censoring speech—toppling monuments—kowtowing to political correctness—is not the answer to what ails this nation.

As long as we focus on words and ignore the systemic injustices that undergird the words, the disease will spread.

As long as we continue to allow the most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—to serve as battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support, we will all eventually lose.

Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree—whether it’s by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling them, or criminalizing them—only empowers the controllers of the Deep State.

Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.

Offensive, politically incorrect and “unsafe” speech: Disguised as tolerance, civility and love, political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite. Consequently, college campuses have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.

Bullying, intimidating speech: Warning that “school bullies become tomorrow’s hate crimes defendants,” the Justice Department has led the way in urging schools to curtail bullying, going so far as to classify “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.”

Hateful speech: Hate speech—speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation—is the primary candidate for online censorship. Corporate internet giants Google, Twitter and Facebook are in the process of determining what kinds of speech will be permitted online and what will be deleted.

Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on “extremism,” the government partnered with the tech industry to establish a task force to counter online “propaganda” by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks (the program started under President Obama). In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted. They might even find themselves pulled from their homes, arrested by the police and thrown into a mental hospital for expressing their opposition to government policies, as happened to Marine Brandon Raub.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship.

It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of presenting a united front against the threats posed by the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.

The antidote to intolerance is more tolerance.

What this requires is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.

Understanding that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the media freely.

The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world.

When there is no steam valve—when there is no one to hear what the people have to say—frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation. By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.

By becoming so fearfully polite, careful to avoid offense, and largely unwilling to be labeled intolerant, hateful or closed-minded that we’ve eliminated words, phrases and symbols from public discourse, we have entered into an egotistical, insulated, narcissistic era in which free speech has become regulated speech: to be celebrated when it reflects the values of the majority and tolerated otherwise, unless it moves so far beyond our political, religious and socio-economic comfort zones as to be rendered dangerous and unacceptable.

Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) have conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good.

On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

The end result: free speech is no longer free, and injustice persists.

So what we can do to end racial inequality, police brutality, and systemic injustice that does not involve sacrificing free speech on the altar of political correctness or adopting violent tactics?

Stop tiptoeing around, easily offended or afraid to cause offense. Stop allowing the government and its architects to micromanage your life and curtail your freedoms. Stop being a pawn in someone else’s game.

Find your own voice. Give voice to your own outrage. Speak truth to power nonviolently. And throughout it all, love your enemies and put that love into action.

That last point, to love your enemies, is the hardest of all, yet it was the principle that Jesus Christ spoke of most often: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”

This principle was also at the core of Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts to combat racism and injustice. In fact, King delivered an entire sermon on what it means to love one’s enemies even when they continue to wrong you.

King was not speaking in abstracts. This was a man who, despite having faced down water cannons, police dogs and police brutality, intimidation and prejudice and assassination attempts, still insisted that “mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love” was his best weapon.

The first step in loving one’s enemies, says King, is to discover the element of good in them. “Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it… There is an element of goodness that he can never slough off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”

Second, says King, focus on defeating evil systems, rather than vanquishing individuals caught up in an evil system. “Love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape [the love of God working in the lives of men] in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, ‘Love your enemy.’ This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.”

Third, says Kings, cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe with love. “If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends… And that is the tragedy of hate, that it doesn’t cut it off. It only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe… Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody.”

Fourth, says King, hate ends up in tragic, neurotic responses. “Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. So Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.” Instead, use love to redeem and transform those who would do you harm.

Lastly, don’t resort to violence.

King’s conclusion to his sermon is a timeless message, sent through time, to our present age. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are still fighting the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism. We are still struggling to find our way in the world dominated by corporate greed and political ambition. We are still being manipulated into focusing our anger on flawed individuals rather than working to defeat evil establishments.

Sixty-three years later, King’s words are still relevant:

“Our world is in transition now. Our whole world is facing a revolution. Our nation is facing a revolution. History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are … ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love… This is the only way. And our civilization must discover that. Individuals must discover that as they deal with other individuals… [T]o a power-drunk generation … love is the only way… to a generation depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence…love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe…. [T]hrough the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed… because we had the power to love our enemies, to bless those persons that cursed us, to even decide to be good to those persons who hated us, and we even prayed for those persons who despitefully used us.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

Featured image is by BruceEmmerling / Pixabay

The demand for raw materials used to manufacture rechargeable batteries will grow rapidly as the importance of oil as a source of energy recedes, as highlighted recently by the collapse of prices due to oversupply and weak demand resulting from COVID-19, according to a new UNCTAD report.

The report, Commodities at a glance: Special issue on strategic battery raw materials, documents the growing importance of electric mobility and the main materials used to make rechargeable car batteries.

Ongoing efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions are expected to spur further investment in green energy production, which has been steady over the years, standing at around $600 billion per year on average.

“Alternative sources of energy such as electric batteries will become even more important as investors grow more wary of the future of the oil industry,” UNCTAD’s director of international trade, Pamela Coke-Hamilton, said while launching the report.

Electric car sales have boomed in recent years, rising 65% in 2018 from the previous year to 5.1 million vehicles, and are expected to reach 23 million in 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Rechargeable batteries will play a significant role in the global transition to a low-carbon energy system and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions if the raw materials used in their manufacture are sourced and produced in a sustainable manner, the report says.

The worldwide market for cathode for lithium ion battery, the most common rechargeable car battery, was estimated at $7 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $58.8 billion by 2024, according to the report.

“The rise in demand for the strategic raw materials used to manufacture electric car batteries will open more trade opportunities for the countries that supply these materials. It’s important for these countries to develop their capacity to move up the value chain,” Ms. Coke-Hamilton said.

Raw materials in a few countries, value addition limited

Reserves of the raw materials for car batteries are highly concentrated in a few countries. Nearly 50% of world cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 58% of lithium reserves are in Chile, 80% of natural graphite reserves are in China, Brazil and Turkey, while 75% of manganese reserves are in Australia, Brazil, South Africa and Ukraine.

The highly concentrated production, susceptible to disruption by political instability and adverse environmental impacts, raises concerns about the security of the supply of the raw materials to battery manufacturers.

The report warns that supply disruptions may lead to tighter markets, higher prices and increased costs of car batteries, affecting the global transition to low-carbon electric mobility.

According to the report, investing more in green technologies that depend less on critical battery raw materials could help reduce consumers’ vulnerability to supply shortfalls in the current mix of materials such as lithium and cobalt, but this would cut the revenues of the countries producing them.

The report indicates that the bulk of value added to raw materials used in making rechargeable batteries is generated outside the countries that produce the materials.

For instance, value added to cobalt ores by the DRC is limited to intermediate products or concentrates. Further processing and refining are mostly done in refineries in Belgium, China, Finland, Norway and Zambia to obtain the end products used in rechargeable batteries as well as for other applications.

The DRC, which accounts for over two-thirds of global cobalt production, has not maximized the economic benefits of the mineral due to limited infrastructure, technology, logistical capacity, financing and lack of appropriate policies to encourage local value addition.

The manufacture of positive electrodes for car batteries is dominated by countries in Asia. In 2015, China accounted for approximately 39% of the global market, Japan 19% and Republic of Korea 7%.

Social and environmental impacts stain production

The report shines a light on the social and environmental impacts of the extraction of raw materials for car batteries and underlines the urgent need to address them.

For instance, about 20% of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines where child labour and human rights abuses have been reported. Up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income, according to UNICEF.

And in Chile, lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells.

This has caused groundwater depletion and pollution, forcing local quinoa farmers and llama herders to migrate and abandon ancestral settlements. It has also contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination.

The adverse environmental impacts could be reduced by increasing investment in technologies used to recycle spent rechargeable batteries, according to the report.

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Four years ago, New Internationalist travelled to West Africa to hear the stories of communities in recovery from the deadly Ebola epidemic. Hazel Healy gets back in touch.

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In early April, Sierra Leone confirmed its first case of coronavirus, one of the last nations in the world to do so. A low-income country, it has limited intensive care capacity, a total of 18 ventilators and a population of six million, the vast majority of whom lack the financial means to ‘stay at home’ or observe social distance.

In this context, a full-blown outbreak would be devastating. To date, the country’s strategy has hinged on meticulous testing, contact tracing and isolating, which is aimed at keeping Covid-19 out of its under-equipped general hospitals. Borders are closed, the airport shuttered and there are short, periodic countrywide lockdowns.

Sierra Leone is still in the early stages of the pandemic. Authorities are quarantining all who test positive for coronavirus. The asymptomatic go to community care centres – a relic from the fight against Ebola – as close-quarters living rules out self-isolation for most, while those who get sick are sent first to isolation wards and then on to dedicated Covid-19 treatment centres.

This decisive action has so far kept the number of cases and fatalities low. But infections are rising steadily. As the first community transmissions – which are unconnected to known clusters of cases – start to emerge, we speak to a market trader, a junior doctor, a community activist and an aid worker about Sierra Leone’s fight against Covid-19 – and the immense challenge of combating a virus without the drugs to treat it.

Flip-flop seller

Theresa Jusu is a 31-year-old market trader from Koindu, on the border with Guinea and Liberia, one of the early epicentres of Ebola.

Since coronavirus, the government closed the cross-border markets. Those of us who live on the border make our living through trade and Sunday was our market day. People travelled far to come to the Koindu market. It was chock-a-block; people made the town look lively.

The Guineans used to sell pepper and onions, cows’ milk and textiles. You could buy greens, potato leaves, cassava leaves; I sold dry goods, clothes and flip-flops. I might sell 10 in a day.

Now people are only looking to buy food. So, I sell rice and oil instead, at the local market. I get it on credit from shopkeepers, sell it on and keep any profit. But I can go a whole morning without selling a single thing.

With what I make, I support my four children plus my younger sister and her child, who are living with me. Before, we would eat two meals a day – breakfast and dinner – now it’s down to one.

People are scared of the coronavirus in Koindu, because of the way Ebola came in and destroyed our people. But we are getting to understand that people are surviving – they are going into 14-day quarantine and then they are coming home. With Ebola, they never came back.

At least, because of Ebola, we know how to protect ourselves. At the market, there are handwashing stations, some people have sanitizer. And they were giving out African-made masks for free. I got one, but there wasn’t enough for everyone.

There have just been short lockdowns so far. If people are hungry, they start breaking into houses looking for food. And if you go out, the police will beat you. Sierra Leone doesn’t have the economy to pay people, but at least the government should give them something to eat.

Infectious diseases specialist

Marta Lado is a Spanish clinician who has worked in Sierra Leone for the past six years. Chief Medical Officer at the NGO Partners In Health, she trains hospital staff and is treating coronavirus patients at 34 Military Hospital in Freetown.

The response to Covid-19 was fast, and it was easy to do because of our experience with Ebola. We knew how to manage a crisis – what structures to put in place. But just because we went through Ebola doesn’t mean we can deal with any pandemic that comes. The problem is that in a poor country without resources you can never really be ‘ready’.

In Europe, hospitals were overwhelmed by numbers, which are hard to predict. But they had a system in place. Our health system is weak. In 34 Military Hospital we have 10 ventilators. But to intubate someone you need to sedate them first. We don’t have sedation drugs, we don’t have an intensive care specialist or specialized nurses and we don’t have enough nurses to maintain a patient with a mechanical ventilator. But before that, the thing that will kill the patient is likely to be the lack of insulin, antibiotics or steroids – or even intravenous cannulas. So – what do you want me to do with a ventilator?

The basics are not in place. Most of the hospitals here don’t have oxygen. They might not even have running water, or electricity to be open for 24 hours. Patients need to pay for their own medication to treat common conditions. Now, if you put Covid into that system…

We are dealing with it, but because individuals have had to fight to get things: doctors buy drugs for their patients, friends with private pharmacies donate drugs, the Lebanese community gives us cylinders for oxygen, the Indian community pays for some medication. You end up begging for favours because we don’t have the money, nationally, to buy these things.

I’m not blaming anyone. But we need to recognize that Sierra Leone doesn’t have the financial capacity. Later, when this is over, we have to reflect on how to improve the basics so next time this happens we don’t find ourselves trapped with no resources.

Community advocate

Mohamed Camara is an activist and On Our Radar reporter from Magazine Wharf slum community in Freetown.

In my community, houses are close together. Social distancing would be a very difficult. It’s crowded – you might have seven or eight people living together in a small, single room. We’re a close-knit community, we see each other as family and we share what we have.

So far, we’ve had no cases in Magazine – either confirmed or suspected. But if there is a Covid-19 case in our community it will spread like a fire in the Amazon. We experienced one of the worst outbreaks during Ebola here, and were the last to be declared ‘Ebola-free’.

This environment is not safe, it’s not hygienic – that’s how I contracted polio as a child. Freetown’s drains empty out into Magazine Wharf; it’s muddy, people rear pigs in the rubbish. During the rainy season, the community is flooded, and this can cause cholera.

The three-day lockdown was a bit crazy here because people rely on the income that they earn each day. The government just imposes things without trying to minimize the impact. If there’s a total lockdown, there will be chaos if people have no way to survive.

We also had 14 days of restricted movement. Most people make a living from petty trade, fishing or cutting firewood so it’s very difficult for them if you stop them moving across the district. And food prices are rocketing up – people are taking advantage. How can we adapt to the new rules, if the government doesn’t pay attention to this?

People are suspicious – that’s another problem. They aren’t really wearing masks and social distancing because they don’t trust the government. People are saying each president brings a virus: first Kabbah: HIV, Koroma: Ebola, now Julius Bio has come with coronavirus. They think the government wants to get rich, not to protect them. When the election comes, they say, we will vote these guys out.

Juris doctor

Mamadu Baldeh heads up the Infectious Diseases Unit at Connaught Hospital, the main tertiary referral facility in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown.

We have 10 beds in the Infectious Diseases Unit, which serves as our isolation ward. So, we work on having a rapid turnover of patients: get suspected cases tested, send people to treatment centres, the general ward or discharge them.

As of now, we’re not overwhelmed with Covid-19. But work is hectic. In one day, I might see 10 new patients, dispatch 10 more patients and write their referrals. Everything has to move fast and it’s exhausting – at the beginning I was even sleeping at the hospital.

Now there are two more doctors with me, and we work on rotation. My facility is full right now, which is why I have time to do the interview – but if more patients come in, we may have to start looking for another isolation facility. Ours is already the biggest isolation ward in Sierra Leone. We have supplies of Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) but sometimes we do run out of things – boots or gloves.

Until now, we have lost 11 people to Covid-19 in my unit. At first, people were dying because they couldn’t afford to pay for their medication. Since then a Sierra Leonean journalist called Vickie Remoe has raised funds through a public campaignand – thank God – Covid medicines are free to patients.

But donations can’t fix everything. Right now, you see ambulances everywhere. Now we have oxygen. The challenge is that they don’t disappear, without a crisis like Covid.

We need a national effort, to remodel all aspects of the health sector: resources, budget, personnel. Many Sierra Leonean doctors who train here leave in frustration. But I trained in Venezuela and I saw the dedication of the Cuban doctors who do so much with limited resources. And then I came back to serve.

Additional reporting by Moses James, from the On Our Radar reporter network.

Staff at Connaught Hospital and 34 military hospitals are supported by Kings Health Partnership Sierra Leone and Partners in Health.

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Hazel Healy is a co-editor at New Internationalist.

Featured image: Dr Asamte Fidel, one of the local Sierra Leonean doctors working at Connaught Hospital, which was on the frontline of the Ebola epidemic when it hit in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Credit: Simon Davis/DFiD

If you have ever walked by Mumbai’s southern seacoast, you may have noticed a strange-looking tower rising above the apartment complexes. Measuring 27-stories high and featuring three helipads, an 80-seat theater and an 168-car garage, among other amenities, the skyrise is the residence of India’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani. It’s estimated to be worth at least $1 billion, making it the most expensive private home in the world.

Go less than eight miles north along the coastline and you will reach Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world. Measuring .81 sq mi, the slum is home to over 1 million Indians, making it one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. Entire families cram into one-room houses inside Dharavi’s labyrinthine neighborhoods, where diseases run rampant because of the confined and unsanitary conditions people live in.

This is not the first time the opulence of Ambani’s home has been compared to Dharavi, which was famously depicted in the film “Slumdog Millionaire.” Since it was erected in 2010, Ambani’s home has served as the quintessential metaphor that captures the absurd scope of India’s economic inequality, which is among the worst in the world.

But the economic fallout of Covid-19 is exacerbating India’s inequality to a point beyond what metaphors can capture. Economic forecasts estimate that India’s GDP will contract by 4-5% in the coming year, severely impacting major industries and India’s emerging middle class. But it is India’s informal economy, where nearly 81% of Indians work, that will be hit hardest. This bottom half of India, as Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee calls it, is not simply facing an economic crisis but an existential one as they struggle to put food on their tables. These are the people who earn daily wages, work on a contract basis and have no safety net or personal insurance of any kind. They may not succumb to Covid-19, but they will succumb to lack of access to food and health care.

The plight of India’s migrant workers offers a glimpse of the grim reality millions will face because of the Covid-19 economic fallout. When India entered a state of lockdown on March 24 — the largest lockdown in the world — more than 100 million men and women who had migrated from their rural towns and villages to look for work in big cities and slums such as Dharavi were suddenly left jobless. The vast majority live hand to mouth, depending on their daily earnings to meet their needs, and many of them don’t own homes but sleep at their place of employment.

In the days following the lockdown, images from across India started to emerge of a mass exodus of people walking 310, 621 or even 932 miles (500, 1,000, 1,500 km, respectively) under the scorching sun to reach their hometowns, most of them in the north. Lack of public transportation — which was either unaffordable for many or closed due to the pandemic — forced these men and women to carry their children or tow them behind on carts and even luggage cases. Stories soon began to circulate of children dying due to exhaustion and starvation, fatigued migrants falling asleep on railway tracks and being run over by trains and others dying in road accidents and because of extreme exhaustion. Cases of police violently trying to enforce curfews and lockdowns on migrants were also reported.

Beyond the financial catastrophe that will impact millions of poor Indians, there is a very real possibility the arrival of Covid-19-positive migrants in rural towns may trigger a health crisis in areas that are ill-prepared to handle the virus. India now has surpassed Italy and become the fourth country with the most Covid-19 cases — and it’s quickly climbing up the ladder. Allowing migrants to return home first before implementing the lockdown could have slowed the spread, according to a joint task force of India’s top public health organizations.

The sad truth is that it’s only in this time of crisis that India’s upper and middle classes have slowly begun to recognize the crucial role migrant workers and daily laborers play in keeping the country’s economy running and maintaining their comfortable lifestyle. They are the invisible class — the construction workers, plumbers, cleaners, maids, factory workers in middle sized and larger companies — that keeps India’s economic engine running.

While some of them may come back when the economic conditions improve and the pandemic is under control, many may not want to return. Why should they when India did not consider their plight in the midst of a lockdown? Though the Supreme Court of India has finally stepped in and ordered states to help migrants get home, initially the court dismissed a petition to address the issue.

The prospect of returning to cramped living conditions in places such as Dharavi, where physical distancing is nonexistent, and to usurious contracts that flout any sense of decent labor regulations also may prevent many migrants from returning.

As lockdown restrictions begin to ease, India now faces the imposing challenge of finding a way to restart its economy. Stimulus packages can help keep businesses, corporations and those employed in the formal economy afloat, but special consideration must be taken for daily laborers who cannot access economic relief provided to the private sector. The central government, as well as individual states, should consider setting up an emergency task force dedicated to addressing the needs of this half of our population.

In the short term, disbursing 7,500 INR (approximately $100 USD) for the next six to 12 months has been proposed by economists to help these families survive, as well as providing food grains from the surplus of the government’s granaries. Welcoming NGOs and the U.N.’s World Food Program will also go a long way in providing food to those in need. But in the long run, India’s archaic labor laws and health care infrastructure need to be reformed so migrant laborers get paid fair wages and have access to health care, which includes proper accommodation.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had advocated for India to become fully self-reliant in every respect, economically and in its food production. This vision can only be achieved if we acknowledge the worth and value the laborers in the organized sector bring to our nation.

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Most Rev. Joseph D’Souza is a Christian theologian, author and human and civil rights activist. He is the founder of Dignity Freedom Network, an organization that advocates for and delivers humanitarian aid to the marginalized and outcastes of South Asia. He is archbishop of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India and serves as the president of the All India Christian Council.

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”– T.S. Eliot

One of the earliest casualties of the COVID-19 lockdown was the public library.  It seemed evident, even in the weeks leading up to its demise, that this unusually vibrant and very necessary hub of community life was destined for closure – especially given its unique feature as a “hands on” sort of venue where people are frequently handling the same physical materials day in, day out. 

After all, the library is a place where people are continuously leafing through pages that have been pinched, pressed, folded and gently tugged at by hundreds (if not thousands) of other patrons.  Not to mention the casual touching and fondling of the many covers and spines themselves, as is the nature of some casual strollers to simply pull a book out from the shelf, examine its exterior and simply slide it back in among the other volumes before trailing their finger along the rest of the row, as though they were reading Braille.

To be sure, the public library is a hub of physical touch just as much as it is one of community and social gathering.  People come to such a place for that very reason; to feel and to experience.   For this reason, perhaps it is one of those rare and special exemptions in our current climate of germ phobia that we actually don’t mind fondling something that has been in intimate proximity with a complete stranger (indeed many, many complete strangers), before finding itself in our hands, in our laps, or in our children’s laps for that matter.  We don’t seem to care that the very book we are holding in our hands has been in somebody else’s home for several weeks.  Likewise, it seldom crosses our minds that another person may have been blowing their nose while reading it or perhaps even kept it in their bathroom for those opportune moments of reading pleasure whenever nature happened to call.

For that matter, how many of us ever questioned whether these thousands upon thousands of books were ever wiped down, let alone sanitized by the library staff once they were returned?  Personally, I’ve always assumed they were returned directly to the shelves in precisely the same condition as they were when they were hastily dropped off by their previous borrowers.  A little more worn, maybe, with perhaps a lingering scent of the private home from whence they briefly took residence.  And while sometimes noticeable to you and I – the fresh and prospective borrower – did we even care?

The truth is that we don’t come to a library with nearly the same expectation as when we go to a bookstore.  Bookstores, for the most part, are for shopping.  Though I would argue that they, too, are fundamentally necessary in our society, they are there to serve a role in the marketplace and thereby aim to provide a product.  The bookstore promises ownership; a small piece of collective literary content that we can call our own and with which we either build a private collection or else gift to someone else.  It is a sweet and marvelous aspect of human culture, though clearly not a library.

I would argue that a library (as opposed to a bookstore) exists purely for the transmission of ideas.  Like a proverbial union station of sorts, the library is responsible for the transfer of specific content from writer to reader, and thereby facilitates an education of sorts that is quite unique from other community venues.  The reader is there simply to access the information provided by the book itself, and is quite happy – once the information has been ingested – to leave the book for others to enjoy and to glean from. Additionally, the fact that the books are considered completely communal in nature, coupled with the understanding that libraries are funded predominantly by the readers themselves through their tax dollars, renders the whole concept of a library as a highly-regarded social agreement of sorts.  In other words, the contract is made possible because the community agrees to pay the cost of the operation while expecting, in turn, to be able to benefit from it. Furthermore, every taxpaying citizen expects that the service will be made available in equal proportions to every other citizen as well.

To a greater or lesser degree, patrons of library services recognize that the written word carries a considerable type of value in a community of persons; a society’s own cultural currency that is virtually priceless. Indeed, some would even consider books to be more essential than money itself, serving to promote humanity’s sense of integrity and responsibility as “mirrors of the soul,” as Virginia Woolf once put it.

Without a doubt, the library is that rarest of places where a person is invited to spend as much time as possible to simply loiter the content (though arguably not the property exclusively) and to peruse the creative inventory without any pressure or market agenda as to which item is worthy of consuming and which is not.  Plainly put, the very fact that a book exists on a shelf warrants it as being worthy of reflection and consideration.  Likewise, upon ingestion, it is worthy of being argued against and either philosophically or morally debated.  Finally, the fact that such an eclectic array of words is made freely available to virtually every person on a daily basis is what places the public library near the very top of what I would call “essential services.”

While it is fair to point out the merits of online and digital services that are now being provided by public libraries, I would warn that this feature is purely complementary or supplemental at best.  After viewing the landing pages of several public library websites across the planet during our current COVID climate, it is clear that these institutions are trying to preserve whatever literary relevance they can by offering things like online  book discussions, virtual story time, and (perhaps most obviously) the promotion of e-book collections.  These are helpful and certainly worth taking advantage of, though I would insist that these measures are but a mere stipend of what a library is able to offer us simply through its nature as an entrenched part of a community; a visible, physical space in which the user is free to actually roam rather than merely “search.”

To be sure, the library is a space.  We must never mistake the beauty and sanctity of this space as being equal to a digital one.  Indeed, the library offers us a very physical and distinct set of chambers, corners, hallways and nooks which – by their very oddity in comparison with the gloss and the concrete of our modern world – have a way of inviting us into a different realm of concentration; a different realm of consciousness even.  My concern, therefore, is that the sanctity and fundamental importance of this space is not being considered as importantly as it should right now.

Almost daily, I check the local library’s website to see whether any administrative agent, in their sudden wisdom, has seen fit to open the doors to one of our community’s most precious intellectual commodities. Instead, I get the chilling and utterly sterile advisory that “All Library Branches and Book Drops Closed Until Further Notice to Minimize the Risk of COVID-19.”  How ironic is it that what is intended as a public health precaution comes across as a thinly-veiled agenda to keep people away from books; away from ideas themselves, and away from a space where one will have the natural opportunity to peruse an idea without having to run a search for it on Google.  How ironic that such a move has only helped the regressive surge of humanity as it retreats to the comforting enclaves of screens and digital devices or, as Aldous Huxley aptly put it in “Brave New World,” to the ‘soma holidays’where difficult emotions never have to be experienced.

In the first couple of months of library lockdown, my children pleaded for the chance to be able to go to their local book hub.  Pleas eventually turned to questions about the reasons for it, and questions eventually morphed into anger for the knee-jerk reactions of provincial and city officials, and regional controllers.  Now, sadly, my children seem to ask about the library less and less.  It’s almost as though the removal of this fundamental part of their lives has gradually become accepted.  And while I try to teach my children about the myth of powerlessness in our everyday life, every so often I am struck with the reality that we live in a world where so many people accept powerlessness as being synonymous with being “socially responsible.”  In such a world, teaching the virtues of accountability and leadership can sometimes be more challenging – mostly because we are teaching things that go against the grain of entrenched submission, blind acquiescence to directives, and the pervasive addiction of entertainment.

For this reason, I remind my children that they are privileged to live during the time of COVID, as it will help them to better recognize human passivity in a collective form and – more importantly – to understand the importance of expressing one’s truth when it is difficult to do so.

In my view, the public library is extremely essential in that it permits the individual as well as the family unit to healthfully loiter a space where diversity naturally exists in the written form and entrenched ideas are historically challenged.  It is one place where the concept of healthy deviance is traditionally entertained, and where materials on this subject are freely available.

And I, for the record, am willing to take full responsibility for my own health by entering into its premises and leafing through its pages – despite the so-called risk of COVID-19.

I am told that the public libraries will be gradually phasing in access measures until we eventually reach a point of (hopefully) restored in-house service.  Apparently such a time is coming.  In the meantime, I simply wish to convey my deep disapproval over the library’s poor decision-making in the face of our government’s COVID curriculum over society. The decision to close and to keep closed our libraries has been nothing less than a key element in the progressive disemboweling of our culture.  It is a neutering of our human spirit, and a stain on our sense of reason.

And though I don’t consider myself an alarmist, I would simply warn that the brief closure of such an institution this time around will only serve to lubricate additional (and potentially longer) closures in the future. You see, the library is merely the symbol of a much larger thing.  It is an icon of human exchange and the free trade of ideas.

Surely, we take such a thing seriously in society.  Do we not?

 “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”– Albert Einstein

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Brett Jordan, BSW, MSW, RSW, is a Registered Social Worker who works in a hospital ER in Metro Vancouver.  He writes predominantly on issues of spiritual, emotional and social phenomena.

Featured image is from Canada Immigration

Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”

In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).

Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”

In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years- offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.

The Engine of War Heats Up

As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.

Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”

Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.

With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to loose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).

The Resistance to the Warhawks

I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.

On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.

This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belife that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”

Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:

“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.

This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9000 as of this writing.

Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”

Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.

In Defense of President Trump

In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.

Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.

Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.

To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:

“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”

Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.

For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.

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

Trump’s unlawful Deal of the Century scheme green-lighted Israeli annexation of illegally established settlements on stolen Palestinian land and the Jordan Valley.

Netanyahu earlier vowed to press ahead with annexation. 

Reportedly on or around July 1, he’ll initially announce the annexation of what the Times of Israel called “three West Bank (settlement) blocs,” not the Jordan Valley for now, adding:

“Well-placed sources told The Times of Israel last week that the joint mapping committee tasked with delineating the contours of the annexation move still had weeks if not months of work, and the IDF has not been told precisely what Netanyahu has in mind.”

For starters, Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion, three large settlements, will be annexed in the coming days, ruling coalition partner Benny Gantz reportedly going along with what’s clearly a flagrant breach of international law.

According to the broadsheet, there’s “relative consensus, domestically and in Washington,” to making the move.

Or is there? The Times of Israel added the following:

“The US initially said it would recognize annexation immediately, but subsequently appears to have at the very least tempered its enthusiasm for the controversial move before the joint mapping committee can complete its work.”

“The (Trump regime) is highly unlikely to approve an Israeli move to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank by the July 1 date envisioned by Netanyahu,” according to an unnamed “well-placed source.”

Annexation of historic Palestinian land in whole or in part will formally end the two-state illusion — what long ago was possible, clearly not now.

Trump regime hardliners are on board with the most extremist of Netanyahu regime policies — time and again blaming victims of US/NATO/Israeli high crimes for what’s committed against them.

At most, Trump and Pompeo et al may only press Netanyahu to slow, not abandon, illegal annexation of Palestinian land.

It’s highly unlikely that Biden will soften US policy toward long-suffering Palestinians if he succeeds Trump in January.

Throughout his time as US senator and vice president, he one-sidedly supported Israel, including three preemptive wars on Gaza based on Big Lies.

On June 16 at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and four Palestinian human rights groups discussed the illegality of Israel’s annexation scheme.

They warned that it’ll “normalize Israel’s colonial project and amounts to apartheid via the continued expansion and construction of illegal settlements, displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and demographic manipulation,” adding:

“The Israeli plan would further entrench racial, ethnic, and religious segregation as a legal norm, and Israel will formally establish itself as the sole sovereign regime over the Palestinian people in historic Palestine.”

On the same day, 47 UN special rapporteurs denounced the annexation scheme as “a vision of 21st century apartheid.”

A presentation by Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies’ international advocacy officer Nada Awad to the UNHRC on behalf of Adalah and the four Palestinian human rights groups said the following:

“Last month, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Israel swore in a new government seemingly committed to formally annexing parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) in the West Bank in July, in a blatant violation of international law.”

“This annexation, part of the so-called Trump-Netanyahu ‘Deal of the Century’ and the Netanyahu-Gantz coalition agreement, normalizes Israel’s colonial project and amounts to apartheid via the continued expansion and construction of illegal settlements, displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and demographic manipulation.”

“The principles of this plan are enshrined in Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Basic Law enacted in July 2018.”

“This law established a constitutional order based on systematic ethnic supremacy, domination, and segregation in the so-called ‘Land of Israel’ and the denial of the realization of national self-determination for the Palestinian people.”

“Article 7 of this law provides that Jewish settlement is a national value to be encouraged and strengthened, giving the state authorities further constitutional legal tools to justify the illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories.”

“This law intends to justify as constitutional segregation in land and housing that targets all Palestinians in historic Palestine, including Palestinians citizens of Israel, who have suffered decades of systematic oppression.”

“Annexation would further entrench racial, ethnic, and religious segregation as a legal norm.”

“In this context, Israel will formally establish itself as the sole sovereign regime over the Palestinian people in historic Palestine.”

“We call on the UN and the international community to call for the dismantling of all settlements, to vehemently oppose any annexation, and to guarantee the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right of return to their homes and property.”

Separately, Adalah called Netanyahu’s annexation scheme a flagrant breach of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and other international law, including binding Security Council resolutions.

Israeli occupation, settlements, land confiscations, resource theft, and related abusive practices are “profound” high crimes against peace and the fundamental rights of all Palestinians.

If annexation proceeds as planned, the West Bank will resemble Gaza, a second open-air prison for a bludgeoned into submission people.

It’ll resemble Dante’s hell, its gate bearing the inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

A Final Comment

On Monday, thousands of Palestinians rallied in Jericho against Netanyahu’s annexation scheme.

Dozens of foreign diplomats joined them, including Nickolay Mladenov, UN special coordinator for Middle East peace — a position accomplishing nothing because of the US/Israeli regional imperial project.

As long as Washington supports Israeli aims, views of other nations never made a difference because a price to pay by the world community on its ruling authorities for the worst of their high crimes was never imposed.

The so-called peace process was and remains a colossal hoax, a notion the US, NATO and Israel reject.

Yet the illusion of what never was and isn’t now persists, establishment media, Western officials, and UN secretary general fostering it.

Palestinians were abandoned over a century ago by the infamous Balfour Declaration, the beginning of the end of historic Palestine.

Generations of political, military and cultural repression of its people followed, including dispossession from their land, other property, their fundamental rights, and in countless thousands of cases their lives.

Establishment of a nation for Jews on stolen Palestinian land was and remains a scheme to advance Western interests in the oil-rich region.

It led to over 100 years of endless conflict, occupation, dispossession, and repression, along with social and cultural fragmentation,

Historic Palestine and rights of its people were and continue to be abandoned in deference to Western/Israel regional control.

Palestinians are largely on their own, resistance their only option, staying the course no matter the long odds against them.

The world community never offered more than lip service help — the plight of ordinary people everywhere, exploited to benefit privileged interests.

It’s much the same in the West as in the Middle East and Occupied Palestine.

Ordinary people are largely on their own to press for positive change they’ll never get any other way.

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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 Another Day in the Empire

A longstanding line of control dispute along the border separating China and India flared up weeks earlier.

Both countries claim sovereignty over the disputed territory. Until April, forces of both countries hadn’t used live fire for decades.

According to Indian media, the Modi government gave commanders along the line of control freedom to handle things on their own tactically.

Live fire used by forces of both countries killed and wounded unclear numbers of soldiers.

Tensions remain high, risking escalation. It’s in the interests of both countries to resolve differences diplomatically.

Both sides deployed more forces along the disputed line of control.

The Trump regime supports India, a US intelligence report claiming Chinese General Zhao Zongqi authorized an attack on Indian forces in the Galwan River valley last week — no evidence cited backing the claim.

Supporting India is part of Washington’s aim to press Modi against working with Chinese tech giant Huawei to develop its 5G infrastructure.

Beijing and Delhi are trying to resolve differences. Conflict serves the interests of neither country.

Last week, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Indian forces of “cross(ing) the Line of Actual Control,” calling it a “deliberate provocation,” causing casualties, adding:

“The adventurous acts of the Indian army have seriously undermined the stability of the border areas, threatened the lives of Chinese personnel, violated the agreements reached between the two countries on the border issue, and breached the basic norms governing international relations.”

“China has lodged solemn representations and strong protests to the Indian side.”

He stressed that Beijing urged Delhi to maintain bilateral communications and pursue efforts for mutual accommodation.

In response to last week’s clash, Pompeo tweeted:

“We extend our deepest condolences to the people of India for the lives lost as a result of the recent confrontation with China.”

He’s been very vocal in expressing Trump regime hostility toward China.

A similar 1962 border dispute escalated to war between both countries, what neither Beijing or Delhi want now.

If skirmishes continue, they’re likely be limited. Both countries best serve each other’s interests as allies, not adversaries.

For the US, it’s the other way around, its hardliners wanting China marginalized and weakened, a prescription for rupturing relations.

On Monday, China’s Global Times reported that Beijing “doesn’t want to escalate conflict with India, but (it has) sufficient capacity to smash any provocations from the Indian troops,” adding:

“It’s hoped that Indian troops can remain sober and Indian elites keep rational.”

“It’s in the India’s interests to work with China to put the border disputes under control.”

In 1996 and 2005, both countries signed agreements, stressing that neither side will use military force against the other.

Did Modi change India’s position? After last week’s clash, he sounded conciliatory, saying “(n)obody has intruded into our border, neither is anybody there now, nor have our posts been captured.”

India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishanka was more hardline, accusing Beijing of responsibility for “violence and casualties,” adding:

“The Chinese side (must) reassess its actions and take corrective steps.”

In response, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi demanded that Delhi “severely punish those responsible” for last week’s violence,” adding:

Indian “frontline troops (must) immediately cease all provocative actions. (Delhi) must not underestimate China’s firm will to safeguard its territorial sovereignty.”

Modi is playing a dangerous game, allying with the US in provoking China, a reliable ally — polar opposite how Washington operates, exploiting other countries to serve its interests.

US strategy aims to co-opt other countries, Months earlier, Sergey Lavrov warned India about its intentions, saying:

Washington’s “us(e) (of) term the Indo-Pacific instead of Asia-Pacific” is all about “contain(ing) China,” what Modi and other Indian officials surely understand.

There’s nothing “benign” about US strategy. It’s “divisive,” not “inclusive.”

US interest in India is co-opting its government, using it as a “counterweight” to China, aiming to undermine its economic and technological development.

Beijing is working more closely with Pakistan strategically and economically, including by construction of pipeline, rail and road links to its Gwadar Arabian Sea port.

The China Pakistan Economic Corridor includes Beijing’s Aksai Chin region — near where clashes with Indian forces occurred.

Pretending to want differences between China and India resolved diplomatically, conflict between both countries serves US interests at their expense.

Beijing is much stronger militarily, why India’s show of force is limited.

If things escalate ahead, China will force Modi to back off.

According to Beijing-based military expert Wei Dongxu, his tough talk aims to please his base — with no intention of wanting an escalated clash with a militarily superior neighbor he’ll lose.

Asian Studies expert Lin Minwang said while it’s “normal to see heated nationalism in India, (it won’t) hijack (its) policymaking…to further provoke China.”

Tough talk may be heard, little more. India’s plate overflows with domestic problems.

Modi won’t invent a major new one by challenging China militarily, what he’ll lose, gaining nothing but lots of casualties and egg on his face.

Beijing’s military superiority “is why India hasn’t dared to launch a full attack against the PLA in decades but keeps creating low-level tensions occasionally,” Lin explained.

A Final Comment

On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said both sides “agreed to take necessary measures to promote a cooling of the situation,” adding:

“Both sides want to deal with their disagreement, manage the situation and de-escalate the situation through dialogue and consultations.”

A statement by India’s military said talks between both sides were “positive.”

“There was mutual consensus to disengage. Modalities for disengagement from all friction areas in Eastern Ladakh were discussed and will be taken forward by both sides.”

Clearly China wants confrontation ended. It’s up to both sides to back their statements with commitment, notably the belligerent Modi regime.

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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.

Being a neighbor to one of the biggest producers of drugs in the world has caused the Islamic Republic of Iran to shoulder a heavy burden as one of the main routes for drug transport.

Iran is at the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking and thousands of Iranian forces have been so far martyred to protect the world from the danger of drugs. Despite high economic and human costs, the Islamic Republic has been actively fighting drug trafficking over the past decades.

Iran has spent more than $700 million on sealing its borders and preventing the transit of narcotics destined for European, Arab, and Central Asian countries.

The war on drug trade originating from some regional countries has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police officers over the past four decades.

According to reports, in 2018 alone, Iranian forces carried out 1,557 operations against drug traffickers, seizing approximately 807 tons of different types of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.

Tehran has always asked for international help in such operations, noting that the other countries, especially European states, should take responsibility and play a positive role in this fight or face its threats themselves.

The issue of drugs is a global scourge and there is the need for wide-scale cooperation at the international level so as to tackle this problem. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran has adopted an interactive approach with the global community concerning the issue of drugs and has virtually indicated that it spares no efforts in enhancing cooperation with other countries and international organizations in the campaign against illicit drugs.

On this basis, Iran has always voiced its resolve for countering illicit drugs and reducing its harms at the global level. Iran’s performance in countering drug trafficking has been effective in maintaining the security of different regions of the globe.

On the eve of ‘International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking’ observed annually on 26 June, the geopolitical and economic dimensions of the drug trafficking were discussed with Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa.

Addressing the geopolitical and economic dimensions of the drug trafficking Chossudovsky said,

“Despite President Trump’s announced US troop withdrawal, the Afghan opium trade continues to flourish. This multibillion-dollar operation is protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of a nexus of powerful financial and criminal interests.”

“In 2004, the proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade yielded an estimated global revenue of the order of 90 billion dollars. Today a rough estimate based on US retail prices suggests that the global heroin market is above the 500 billion dollar mark. This multibillion-dollar hike is the result of a significant increase in the volume of heroin transacted Worldwide coupled with a moderate increase in retail prices.”

“Based on the most recent (UNODC) data (2017) opium production in Afghanistan is of the order of 9000 metric tons, which after processing and transformation is equivalent to approximately 900,000 kg. of pure heroin.”

Referring to the role of the US waged war on Afghanistan which resulted in an increase in opium production in the country, he noted,

“The 2001 war on Afghanistan served to restore as well as boost the multibillion-dollar drug trade. It has also contributed to the surge in heroin addiction in the US. Opium production had declined by more than 90 percent in 2001 as a result of the country’s drug eradication program. Immediately following the invasion and the occupation of Afghanistan by US-NATO troops, the production of opium regained its historical levels.”

He went on to say,

”The 2017 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in May 2018 by UNODC confirms that the farm areas allocated to opium are of the order of 328,000 hectares with opium production in excess of 9,000 tons.”

Answering a question about the reasons behind an increase in production of the opium in Afghanistan after being occupied by the US, Chossudovsky said that big money coming from the drug trade and political dimensions of the issue are the two main reasons behind the increase.

Referring to the political dimension of the issue he said for example George Bush, former US President’s family including his son and brother had good personal relations with heads and members of drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia.

Commenting on the significance of Iran’s role in the fight against drug trafficking, he said that as Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan so it plays a significant role in fighting drug trafficking on behalf of the international community and in protecting its national interest.

He added that people of Afghanistan that share historical relations with the Iranian people are victims of the international drug cartels.

On the seriousness of the European countries which are target market of the narcotic drugs in the fight against drug trafficking and fulfilling their international commitments in supporting Iran in the fight against drug trafficking, Chossudovsky believes  European countries and generally the western countries not only have done nothing to fight drug trafficking but also they have been complicit in allowing drug trade.

He also added that the CIA which is behind allowing the entrance of the narcotic drugs to the US is using drugs as a tool to marginalize the black people community of the country.

Chossudovsky further said that due to increasing of synthetic drugs all over the world, pharmaceutical factories also have significant responsibility and role in combating drugs.

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Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

“This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized political movement…It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious, it will grow. It’s goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization itself. This is an ideological movement… Even now, many of us pretend this is about police brutality. …We think we can fix it by regulating chokeholds or spending more on de-escalation training. We’re too literal and good-hearted to understand what’s happening. …But we have no idea what we are up against. ..These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political movement and someone needs to save the country from it.” Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy. The Black Lives Matter protests are just the tip of the spear, they are an expression of public outrage that is guaranteed under the first amendment. But don’t be deceived, there’s more here than meets the eye. BLM is funded by foundations that seek to overthrow our present form of government and install an authoritarian regime guided by technocrats, oligarchs and corporatists all of who believe that Chinese-type despotism is far-more compatible with capitalism than “inefficient” democracy. The chaos in the streets is merely the beginning of an excruciating transition from one system to another. This is an excerpt from an article by F. William Engdahl at Global Research:

“By 2016,… Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network….. That year the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), “a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition” in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros foundations had already given some $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement….

The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations.” (“America’s Own Color Revolution“, Global Research)

$100 million is alot of money. How has that funding helped BLM expand its presence in politics and social media? How many activists and paid employees operate within the network disseminating information, building new chapters, hosting community outreach programs, and fine-tuning an emergency notification system that allows them to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets in cities across the country at a moment’s notice? Isn’t that what we’ve seen for the last three weeks, throngs of angry protestors swarming in more than 400 cities across America all at the beck-and-call of a shadowy group whose political intentions are still not clear?

And what about the rioting, looting and arson that broke out in numerous cities following the protests? Was that part of the script too? Why haven’t BLM leaders condemned the destruction of private property or offered a public apology for the downtown areas that have been turned into wastelands? In my own hometown of Seattle, the downtown corridor– which once featured Nordstrom, Pottery Barn and other upscale retail shops– is now a checkerboard of broken glass, plywood covers and empty streets all covered in a thick layer of garish spray-paint. The protest leaders said they wanted to draw attention to racial injustice and police brutality. Okay, but how does looting Nordstrom help to achieve that goal?

And what role have the Democrats played in protest movement?

They’ve been overwhelmingly supportive, that’s for sure. In fact, I can’t think of even one Democrat who’s mentioned the violence, the looting or the toppling of statues. Why is that?

It’s because the Democrats think that kowtowing to BLM will give them the winning edge in the November balloting. That’s what it’s all about. That’s why they draped themselves in Kente cloth and knelt for the cameras. They think their black constituents are too stupid to see through their groveling fakery. They think that blacks will forget that Joe Biden pushed through legislation “which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior.”

According to the Black Agenda Report: “Biden and (South Carolina’s Strom) Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.” Biden also spearheaded “the attacks on Anita Hill when she came forward to testify against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas”. All told, Biden’s record on race is much worse than Trump’s despite the media’s pathetic attempts to portray Trump as Adolph Hitler. It’s just more bunkum from the dissembling media.

Bottom line: The Democrats think they can ride racial division and social unrest all the way to the White House. That’s what they are betting on.

So, yes, the Dems are exploiting the protests for political advantage, but it goes much deeper than that. After all, we know from evidence that was uncovered during the Russiagate investigation, that DNC leaders are intimately linked to the Intel agencies, law enforcement (FBI), and the elite media. So it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that these deep state agents and assets work together to shape the narrative that they think gives them the best chance of regaining power. Because, that’s what this is really all about, power. Just as Russiagate was about power (removing the president using disinformation, spies, surveillance and other skulduggery.), and just as the Covid-19 fiasco was essentially about power (collapsing the economy while imposing medical martial law on the population.), so too, the BLM protest movement is also about power, the power to inflict massive damage on the country’s main urban centers with the intention of destabilizing the government, restructuring the economy and paving the way for a Democratic victory in November. It’s all about power, real, unalloyed political muscle.

Surprisingly, one of the best critiques of what is currently transpiring was written by Niles Niemuth at the World Socialist Web Site. Here’s what he said about the widespread toppling of statues:

“The attacks on the monuments…were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.

It is worth noting that the one institution seemingly immune from this purge is the Democratic Party, which served as the political wing of the Confederacy and, subsequently, the KKK.

This filthy historical legacy is matched only by the Democratic Party’s contemporary record in supporting wars that, as a matter of fact, primarily targeted nonwhites. Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and under Obama destroyed Libya and Syria. The New York Times was a leading champion and propagandist for all of these war.” (“Hands off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!, WSWS)

What the author is referring to is The 1619 Project, which is a racialized version of American history that was published by the Times on August 19, 2019. The deliberately-distorted version of history was cobbled together in anticipation of increasing social unrest and racial antagonism. The rioting, looting and vast destruction of America’s urban core can all be traced back to a document that postulates that the country was founded on racial hatred and exploitation. In other words, The 1619 Project provides the perfect ideological justification for the chaos and violence that has torn the country apart for the last three weeks. This is an excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

“The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development….Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes….where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions….

…. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, World Socialist Web Site)

Keep in mind, this essay in the WSWS was written a full year before BLM protests broke out across the country. Was Hannah-Jones enlisted to create a document that would provide the dry tinder for the massive and coordinated demonstrations that have left the country stunned and divided?

Probably, after all, (as noted above) the author’s theory is that one race is genetically programed to exploit the other. (“Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”) Well, if we assume that whites are genetically and irreversibly “racist”, then we must also assume that the country that these whites founded is racist and evil. Thus, the only logical remedy for this situation, is to crush the white segment of the population, destroy their symbols, icons, and history, and replace the system of government with one that better reflects the values of the emerging non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.

The 1619 Project is a calculated provocation meant to exacerbate racial animosities and pave the way to open conflagration. And it has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The nation is split into warring camps while Washington has devolved into fratricidal warfare. Was that the objective, to destabilize the country in preparation for the dissolution of the current system followed by a fundamental restructuring of the government consistent with the identity politics lauded by the Democrats?

The Democrats, the Intel agencies and the media are all in bed together fomenting unrest with the intention of decimating the economy, crushing the emerging opposition and imposing their despotic one-party system on all of us. Here’s a clip from a piece by Paul Craig Roberts that sums up the role of the New York Times in inciting race-based violence:

“The New York Times editorial board covers up the known indisputable truth with their anti-white “1619 project,” an indoctrination program to inculcate hatred of white people in blacks and guilt in white people.

Why does the New York Times lie, brainwash blacks into hatred of whites, and attempt to brainwash whites into guilt for the creation of a New World labor force four centuries ago? Why do Americans tolerate the New York Times fomenting of racial hatred in a multicultural society?

The New York Times is a vile organization. The New York Times attempts to discredit the President of the United States and did all it could to frame him on false charges. The New York Times painted General Flynn, who honorably served the US, as a Russian agent and enabled General Flynn’s frame-up on false and now dropped charges. The New York Times spews hatred of white people. And now the New York Times accuses the American military of celebrating white supremacism.

Does America have a worse enemy than the New York Times? The New York Times is clearly and intentionally making a multicultural America impossible. By threatening white people with the prospect of hate-driven racial violence, the New York Times editorial board is fomenting the rise of white supremacy.” (“The New York Times Editorial Board Is a Threat to Multicultural America“, The Unz Review)

The editors of the Times don’t hate whites, they are merely attacking the growing number of disillusioned white working people who have left the Democratic party in frustration due to their globalist policies regarding trade, immigration, offshoring, outsourcing and the relentless hollowing out of the nation’s industrial core. The Dems have abandoned these people altogether and –now that they realize they will never be able to lure them back into their camp– they’ve decided to wage a full-blown, scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on them. They’ve decided to crush them mercilessly and fill their ranks with multi-ethnic, bi-racial groups that will work for pennies on the dollar. (which will keep the Dems corporate supporters happy.) So, no, the Times does not hate white people. What they hate is the growing populist movement that derailed Hillary Clinton and put anti-globalist Trump in the White House. That’s the real target of this operation, the disillusioned throng of working people who have washed their hands of the Democrats for good. Here’s more background from Paul Craig Roberts:

“On August 12 Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, met with the Times’ employees to refocus the Times’ attack on Trump…. The Times, Baquet said, is shifting from Trump-Russia to Trump’s racism. The Times will spend the run-up to the 2020 presidential election building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. Of course, if Trump is a racist it means that the people who elected him are also racists. Indeed, in Baquet’s view, Americans have always been racist. To establish this narrative, the New York Times has launched the “1619 Project,” the purpose of which is “to reframe the country’s history.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — ‘Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.’

The premise that America originated as a racist slave state is to be woven into all sections of the Times — news, business, sports, travel, the entire newspaper. The project intends to take the “reframing” of the United States into the schools where white Americans are to be taught that they are racist descendants of slave holders. A participant in this brainwashing of whites, which will make whites guilty and defenseless, says “this project takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country’s history.” In other words, the New York Times intends to make slavery the ONLY explanation of America.

At the meeting of the executive editor of the New York Times with the Times’ employees to refocus the Times’ attack on President Trump, Baquet said: “Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.” (“Is White Genocide Possible?“, The Unz Review)

Repeat: “Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.” Either Baquet has a crystal ball or he had a pretty good idea of the way in which the 1619 Project was going to be used. I suspect it was the latter.

For the last 3 and a half years, Democrats and the media have ridiculed anyone who opposes their globalist policies as racist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic, Bible-thumping, gun-toting, flag-waving, Nascar boosting, white nationalist “deplorables”. Now they have decided to intensify the assault on mainly white working people by preemptively destroying the economy, destabilizing the country, and spreading terror far and wide. It’s another vicious psy-ops campaign designed to thoroughly demoralize and humiliate the enemy who just happen to be the American people. Here’s more form the WSWS:

“It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the world.

The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history” WSWS)

Can you see how the protests are being used to promote the political objectives of elites operating behind the mask of “impartial” reporting? The scheming NY Times has replaced the enlightenment principles articulated in our founding documents with a sordid tale of racial hatred and oppression. The editors seek to eliminate everything we believe as Americans so they can brainwash us into believing that we are evil people deserving of humiliation, repudiation and punishment. Here’s more from the same article:

“In the months preceding these events, the New York Times, speaking for dominant sections of the Democratic political establishment, launched an effort to discredit both the American Revolution and the Civil War. In the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the American Revolution was presented as a war to defend slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was cast as a garden variety racist…

The attacks on the monuments to these men were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, WSWS)

Ideas have consequences, and the incendiary version of events disseminated by the Times has added fuel to a fire that’s spread from one coast to the other. Given the damage that has been done to cities across the country, it would be nice to know how Dean Baquet knew that “race was going to play a huge part” in upcoming events? It’s all very suspicious. Here’s more:

“Given the 1619 Project’s black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts that “we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military,” and celebrates the fact that “we” have fought “in every war this nation has waged.” Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a “volunteer” army whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the “War on Terror” and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria—all supported by the Times—that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably “color-blind.” She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of “people of color” butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world histor y”, WSWS)

So, black nationalists like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are excluded from the The 1619 Project’s narrative, but the author boasts that blacks “are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the US military”?? How does that happen unless Hannah-Jones was coached by Democrat leaders about who should and shouldn’t be included in the text? None of this passes the smell test. It all suggests that the storyline was shaped by people who had a specific goal in mind. That isn’t history, it’s fiction written by people who have an ax to grind. The Times even admitted as much in response to the blistering criticism by five of “the most widely read and respected authorities on US history.” The New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein rejected the historians’ objections saying:

“The project was intended to address the marginalization of African-American history in the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?”

WTF! “We are not ourselves historians”? That’s the excuse?? Give me a break!

The truth is that there was never any attempt to provide an accurate account of events. From the very onset, the goal was to create a storyline that fit the politics, the politics of provocation, incitement, racial hatred, social unrest and violence. That’s what the Times and their allies wanted, and that’s what they got.

The Deep State Axis: CIA, DNC, NYT

The three-way alliance between the CIA, the Elite Media, and the Democratic leadership has clearly strengthened and grown since the failed Russiagate fiasco. All three parties were likely involved in the maniacal hyping of the faux-Covid pandemic which paved the way for Depression era unemployment, tens of thousands of bankrupt businesses and a sizable portion of the US population thrust into destitution. Now, these deep state loyalists are promoting a “falsified” race-based version of history that pits one group against the other while diverting attention from the deliberate destruction of the economy and the further consolidation of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent.

Behind the veil of the protest movement, the war on the American people is gaining pace.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

Late on June 22, Russian air defense units repelled a massive drone attack on Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Syria. According to local sources, Russian Pantsir and Tor systems launched almost two dozen missiles at unmanned aerial vehicles launched by militants from the southern part of the Idlib de-escalation zone. Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported that Syrian air defenses were also activated in the Jableh area of Latakia province, where the Russian airbase is located.

Firefights between the Syrian Army and Turkish-led forces broke out near the village of Abu Rasin in the province of al-Hasakah. According to pro-government sources, the fighting erupted when Turkish-backed militants tried to set on fire crops being grown in nearby fields.

Earlier, the Damascus government accused pro-Turkish forces of intentionally burning crops in the area of Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring and nearby areas in order to pressure farmers that do not want to pay bribes to pro-Turkish militants.

The Turkish Army and the Russian Military Police regularly conduct joint patrols along the contact line between Turkish-backed forces and the Syrian Army in northeastern Syria. This allows to prevent the sides from initiating large-scale offensive operations against each other. However, the situation on the ground remains tense.

On June 22, pro-government locals blocked a US military convoy near the village of Fares Kabir in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah. The protesters burned a US flag and forced the convoy to retreat from the area. Positions of the Syrian Army near Kafr Mus, Kawkabah and as-Safah in southern Idlib came under fire from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies early on June 23. Pro-militant sources claim that several army troops were either injured or killed.

On June 21, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement released a new video threatening Israel with a retaliation strike on its strategic facilities in the event of a new escalation.

“Today, we can not only hit the city of Tel Aviv but also, if God wills it and with His help, we can hit very precise targets within Tel Aviv and anywhere in occupied Palestine,” Nasrallah can be heard as saying during the video.

Israel is pretty sensitive towards such threats and uses them to justify the continuing military campaign against Iranian-backed forces.

In its own turn, Hezbollah often intensifies its propaganda efforts against Israel as the situation in the region is once again heading to a military confrontation or its leadership expects possible Israeli hostile actions that would impact its interests.

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It is totally unbelievable to imagine that Trump purportedly solicited China’s support for his re-election campaign via international economic means and even endorsed the country’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang. Nothing could be further from the truth.

在电晕危机的原因和后果方面，世界正在被误导。

COVID-19危机的特点是卫生组织主持的公共卫生 “紧急状况”，它被用来作为引发全世界经济、社会和政治结构调整进程的借口和理由。

正在实施社会工程。各国政府迫于压力，不顾其毁灭性的经济和社会后果，延长了封锁期。

正在发生的事情在世界历史上是前所未有的。

著名的科学家们眼都不眨地支持封锁，认为这是解决全球卫生紧急情况的 “办法”。

有充分的证据表明，对COVID-19疾病包括死亡率的估计被严重操纵。

反过来，人们也在服从他们的政府。为什么呢？因为他们害怕？

原因与解决方案？

在世界范围内应用的国家经济的关闭将不可避免地导致贫困、大规模失业和死亡率的增加。这是一种经济战争的行为。

第一阶段：对华贸易战

2020年1月30日，世界卫生组织总干事确定冠状病毒疫情构成国际关注的公共卫生紧急事件（PHEIC）。作出这一决定的依据是：中国境外确诊病例150例，人与人传播的首例病例：美国6例，加拿大3例，英国2例。

世卫组织总干事得到了比尔和梅林达-盖茨基金会、大药厂和世界经济论坛（WEF）的支持。世卫组织宣布全球紧急状态的决定是在瑞士达沃斯世界经济论坛（WEF）期间作出的（1月21日至24日）。

在WHO全球紧急状态启动一天后（1月31日），特朗普政府宣布将拒绝 “过去14天内在中国旅行过的外国公民 “入境。这立即引发了航空运输、中美贸易以及旅游业的危机。意大利也紧随其后，取消了1月31日所有飞往中国的航班。

第一阶段伴随着对华贸易关系的中断以及出口制造业的部分关闭。

一场针对中国以及华裔的运动立即展开。经济学人》报道说

“冠状病毒传播对华裔的种族主义和华裔中的种族主义”

 

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你可以点击下面的链接阅读整篇文章的英文版，也可以用手机翻译

Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 18, 2020

 

After decades of widespread use as company scientists played down research showing a definitive link between the product and growing rates of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Monsanto parent company Bayer has agreed to pay up to $10 billion to settle claims that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer.

Citing people familiar with the matter, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the company has agreed to settle tens of thousands of glyphosate-related lawsuits in the US for between $8 billion to $10 billion.

Of that number, $2 billion is considered a “reserve” which can be used to settle future claims.

The rest will be used to settle all of the lawsuits pending in the United States from users of the controversial weed killer, the number of active lawsuits against the Roundup purveyor recently numbered more than 50k.

Talks for an out of court settlement have been ongoing since last summer.

Last year, scientists evaluated a batch of existing studies and determined that Monsanto’s ubiquitous weed-killer Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate increased cancer risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) by 41%, according to a research published in February 2019. Back in 2018, a San Francisco Jury awarded $289 million in damages to a former school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, who said Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller gave him terminal cancer. That award consisted of $40 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.

Bayer inherited the glyphosate problems during its $60 billion acquisition of Monsanto. After losing three lawsuits and getting stuck with high damages judgments pertaining to risks with the weed killer, Bayer changed its strategy and abandoned its aggressive defense in favor of trying to negotiate a sweeping settlement of the tens of thousands of US lawsuits pending. Analysts had feared the settlement could cost as much as €20 billion, which is roughly double the final amount, which should be a positive for the company’s shares.

So far, science has not been able to conclusively clarify whether glyphosate is carcinogenic or not. Bayer holds numerous studies against the classification of the IARC and other researchers. The US environmental agency EPA supports the group and, despite the heated debate about glyphosate, has so far maintained that the controversial pesticide poses no health risk to people if used properly.

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A recent border dispute between China and India have resulted in multiple casualties including deaths. It is the first time in decades that this scale of violence has been seen between the two nations. Western headlines have immediately tried to play up the notion of conflict between China and India, but to what end?

China and India respectively have the two largest populations. Both find themselves within the top 5 largest economies on Earth. Both have tremendous historical, cultural, and political influence regionally as well as growing influence globally.

Recent headlines have focused on a simmering conflict along China and India’s borders, but at other times in recent years, Chinese and Indian cooperation have been on the rise – a fact conveniently underreported in many articles.

Of course, neither China nor India as nations benefit from armed conflict between one another. Both nations possess large conventional armed forces and both nations possess nuclear weapons. Both nations have suffered from the impact of COVID-19 economically. A large-scale conflict would be costly and catastrophic for China and India.

China has maintained that it was merely responding to Indian aggression along the border and claims it seeks to quickly deescalate tensions.

China’s CGTN in an article titled, “China’s military urges India to stop provocative actions along border areas,” would claim:

China’s military voiced strong dissatisfaction and opposition Tuesday to India’s provocative actions on Monday evening in the Galwan Valley region, which caused severe clashes and casualties. It urged India to go back to the right track in properly managing disputes.

Conversely, India’s media tells a different tale. The violence has been immediately leaped upon by hawks to bolster entirely unrelated issues involving China’s “challenge” to the international “status quo.” It is a narrative that sounds torn straight from a Washington-based think tank’s white papers.

The Indian Express in an article titled, “Explained: What the clash in Ladakh underlines, and what India must do in face of the Chinese challenge,” cites Indian politicians, explaining that the incident serves as impetus to create a wider confrontation with China in a bid to roll back not only its regional influence – but its growing global reach.

It claims (emphasis added):

According to Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Congress leader in Lok Sabha, this escalation “underlines the scale of the problem and the challenge ahead” for New Delhi in its dealings with Beijing. Chowdhury argues in The Indian Express that “China has clearly twisted the crisis into a strategic opportunity by taking advantage of the geo-political distraction”.

That China is becoming more belligerent across strategic theatres, challenging the status quo, is supported by multiple examples from the South China Sea. For the Government of India, this is a moment to guard against complacency, fostered by decades of nimble diplomacy that led to equilibrium, however precarious, on the border issue with China.

The issue regarding the South China Sea is one entirely manufactured out of Washington, with many of the actors involved – including the Philippines – having long since distanced themselves from the potential conflict in favor of building better ties with Beijing.

For certain Indian politicians to cite Washington’s game in the South China Sea, and to then lump it in with this most recent border dispute – rather than simply seeking to deescalate tensions is highly suspicious.

British state media – the BBC – in its article, “India-China clash: An extraordinary escalation ‘with rocks and clubs’,” would claim:

Mr [Shivshankar] Menon, who served as India’s ambassador to China, believes that China is resorting to strident nationalism, due to “domestic and economic stresses” at home. “You can see it in their behaviour in Yellow Sea, towards Taiwan, passing laws without consulting Hong Kong, more assertive on India’s border, a tariff war with Australia.”

The BBC fails to point out that China’s policies toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, and recent trade disputes with Australia are all – without exception – owed to US meddling in China’s internal affairs. The US which officially recognizes Taiwan as China’s territory has all but worked to carve it off from China and establish it as a US foothold on China’s doorstep.

The same can be said of Hong Kong with recent violence there openly sponsored by the US.

Australia – who counts China as its largest trading partner – and whose government is increasingly friendly with Beijing, has recently caved to US pressure and joined in political campaigns accusing China of unleashing COVID-19 – thus kicking off renewed tensions between the two nations.

If Indian politicians and diplomats see the recent border incident as “related” to US-driven conflicts aimed at encircling and containing China – does that mean this most recent border incident and the decidedly more aggressive reaction by some of India’s politicians falls into the same category?

Cui Bono? 

China and India have had border issues in the past. Total war has been avoided and the conflicts have done little to change any significant aspects of either nation’s regional or global influence. In other words, even if India felt it was losing out to China’s rise – using a border incident to start a wider conflict would harldy help India change this fact.

For India – seizing on this conflict regardless of who really initially provoked it – does nothing to serve India’s interests in the short, intermediate, or long-term. They do – however – perfectly serve the interests of the United States who would prefer neither China nor India rise as regional powers – and would find it as ideal for both nations to destroy one another partially or entirely while the US reasserts itself across the region.

Provocations and those attempting to exploit them may represent Washington’s best interests, but they do not represent India’s or China’s. Those involved are hawkish and decidedly pro-Washington serving US interests at India’s expense.

Meanwhile, other Indian leaders and their Chinese counterparts have worked since the conflict arose to deescalate and resolve border issues – or at least resolve them to where military exchanges are no longer an option.

Even the BBC, at the very end of its article, admitted that despite the illusion of imminent war – China and India have enjoyed growing ties, stating (emphasis added):

“For 10 years, Sino-Indian rivalry has steadily intensified, but remained largely stable,” he [Shashank Joshi] said. India and China have also been more engaged. Bilateral trade increased 67 times between 1998 and 2012, and China is India’s largest trading partner in goods. Indian students have flocked to Chinese universities. Both sides have held joint military exercises.

It is unlikely that the vast majority in both China and India benefiting from constructive ties between the two nations will give in to a tiny minority who ultimately serve the interests of neither nation and instead the interests of Washington far abroad and away from the consequences of unchecked conflict.

For these reasons it’s safe to say that while this conflict is dangerous and both sides need to treat it with maximum caution and care, the fact that neither side benefits from the conflict unraveling out of control means it is very unlikely to do so.

While the recent violence has been unseen in decades, it can be hoped that it is one of the last disputes between China and India that involves violence, and the last gasp of malign interests seeking to sabotage and set back both nations.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Environmental groups and an Alaskan Native village council filed a formal request Monday for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reconsider its approval of the Alaska LNG project, which would export U.S. fossil fuel to Asia.

The appeal says the May 21 approval failed to consider the project’s impacts on climate change and endangered species, including polar bears, Cook Inlet beluga whales and North Pacific right whales.

The Alaska LNG proposal calls for an 807-mile pipeline, a facility to liquefy Arctic gas, and the shipping of about 20 million tons of the condensed fuel abroad every year. The rehearing request was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center and Sierra Club.

“It makes no sense to fuel climate change to export American fuel to Asia,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This risky project would be a disaster for our climate, Alaska and its endangered wildlife. FERC’s approval ignored climate change and federal law, and this decision needs to be reconsidered.”

The project’s pipeline would have a daily capacity of 3.3 billion cubic feet of gas. Burning that amount of gas could result in more than 76 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually. That’s almost the same global warming impact as building 20 coal-fired power plants.

“Even those who support this project should be appalled at how dismissively FERC has treated its numerous significant impacts on Alaska and the climate, telling the public essentially not to look behind the curtain,” said Erin Whalen, an attorney at Earthjustice. “The agency needs to scrap its order and start over.”

Today’s request cited comments by FERC Commissioner Richard Glick, who was appointed to the commission by President Trump in 2017, dissenting against the approval.

“The Commission once again refuses to consider the consequences its actions have for climate change,” Glick said. “Claiming that a project’s environmental impacts are acceptable while at the same time refusing to assess the significance of the project’s impact on the most important environmental issue of our time is not reasoned decisionmaking.”

The pipeline would connect drilling operations on the North Slope to an export terminal on Cook Inlet and bring tanker ships through the habitat of endangered North Pacific right whales and Cook Inlet beluga whales. FERC estimates the project would increase large vessel traffic in the Inlet by nearly 75%.

Alaska is currently warming at twice the global rate, and the state’s infrastructure is being compromised by thawing permafrost and related subsidence. The project, with a price tag of at least $43 billion, would also involve the construction and operation of a gas-treatment plant and associated 60-mile pipeline on the North Slope.

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A new scientific paper warns that the world cannot lower its guard on protecting elephants.

The paper, published yesterday (24 June), presents rigorously peer-reviewed analysis showing that while elephant poaching has declined in East Africa, it has not diminished in the rest of the continent since 2011.

Poaching levels remain high in West, Central and Southern Africa – and are likely unsustainable in West and Central Africa, meaning some elephant populations in these regions are at risk of extinction.

The sobering news comes as there appears to be a creeping, unsubstantiated and arbitrary perception that elephant poaching is in decline across Africa. Indeed, certain governments in southern Africa – Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – support the resumption of commercial international trade in ivory and last year attempted to sell their ivory stockpiles despite increasing poaching in the region and the risk of such trade further exacerbating it.

Mary Rice, EIA’s Executive Director, said:

“This is a reminder to those who think we have solved the problem of elephant poaching that it is a reckless belief. Let us be clear – elephant poaching is not declining across Africa and in fact remains high and unsustainable.”

EIA investigations and engagement with wildlife traffickers show that elephant poaching and ivory trafficking continue to pose a serious threat to elephants, particularly in West and Central Africa. EIA is also very concerned about increasing poaching in in countries such as Botswana and South Africa, previously considered safe havens for elephants.

In 2019 alone, more than 44 tonnes of ivory were seized, representing at least 6,500 dead elephants, with more ivory seized last year than in the previous three years (2016-18); this includes the world’s largest ivory seizure of 9,120kg of ivory, in Vietnam in March 2019.

Rice added:

“While certain developments such as the ivory ban in China and improvements in enforcement in East Africa are having a positive impact on elephant populations in East Africa, we cannot ignore the onslaught of poaching in all other regions across the continent.

“We cannot afford to take our collective eye off the ball and must continue to enhance our efforts to tackle wildlife crime and the associated corruption and poor rule of law which facilitates such crime.”

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Featured image is from EIA

Trump regime hardliners want the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal eliminated to facilitate escalation of sanctions war on Iran — risking things turning hot. 

Decades of US hostility toward the country are all about wanting it transformed into a vassal state subservient to its interests.

Approved unanimously by Security Council members, the JCPOA is binding international and US constitutional law.

Yet geopolitical know-nothing Trump, manipulated by hardliners surrounding him, illegally abandoned the agreement in May 2018.

His action and what followed reflect reflect how Washington always operates — by its own rules exclusively, at the expense of world peace, stability, and the sovereign rights of all nations.

E3 countries Britain, France and Germany, along with the EU, breached the landmark agreement — opposing the US pullout rhetorically, supporting the move by their actions.

Last week, the E3 countries introduced a hostile to Iran IAEA Board of Governors resolution in deference to US/Israeli interests — adopted overwhelmingly through pressure tactics.

Most BoG members went along with what demanded rejection. Russia and China alone voted against it, seven of the BoG’s 35 member states abstaining.

Based on fabricated information supplied by the Trump and Netanyahu regimes, their aim is all about wanting the JCPOA eliminated to pave the way for reimposition of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.

If things go their way, regional tensions will be greatly heightened, the threat of unthinkable war on Iran increased, risking possible global war with nuclear weapons.

Saving the landmark JCPOA is greatly jeopardized by the E3’s failure to uphold its principles — followed by introducing and supporting the unacceptable/hostile to Iran IAEA resolution.

On Monday, a strongly worded statement by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following:

“Reassurances of British, German and French colleagues that they are committed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program and looking for ways to minimize negative effect of American sanctions against Iran run counter to their actions to heighten tensions surrounding the Iranian nuclear program in the IAEA as well as speculations about triggering the dispute resolution mechanism under article 36 of the JCPOA,” adding:

“The adoption of IAEA Board of Governors resolution on Iran was not dictated by the reality of applying guarantees in Iran.”

“We are certain that all questions arising, including the agreement of access to facilities that the agency is interested in, could be resolved in the framework of standard procedures of cooperation between states and the IAEA Secretariat.”

“It is not coincidental that the resolution in the end was not supported by states representing more than half of the world’s population, including two UN Security Council permanent members,” — China and Russia.

“We repeatedly urged against playing up to backers of the policy of maximum pressure on Iran which completely discredited itself both politically and practically.”

“The root cause of all difficulties and faults in the process of implementation of the Iranian nuclear deal has been and remains the destructive actions of the United States (that) unilaterally quit the JCPOA and to this day continues to systematically violate demands of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.”

“Clearly, this is understood in European capitals, since they deemed it necessary to remind (the world community) about their regrets and concerns in this regard.”

“We believe it is vital that all current parties (to the JCPOA) reaffirm their unwavering commitment to (its) high goals.”

“The great occasion to do that seems to be July 14, the fifth anniversary of (its) signing.”

“We are urging the European parties…to seize this opportunity to return to the unifying agenda and continue fighting for the common good.”

Earlier in June, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov slammed the Trump regime’s aim to eliminate the JCPOA, saying:

Its “actions are out of line with (SC) Resolution 2231. And if these actions are continued, it will inevitably lead to a serious crisis of the UN Security Council and undermine its authority.”

Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted:

“E3 must stop public face-saving & muster the courage to state publicly what they admit privately: their failure to fulfill even own JCPOA duties due to total impotence in resisting US bullying.”

“Behind facade, E3 are accessories to Trump & Netanyahu—& in no position to counsel Iran.”

The IAEA “BoG should not allow JCPOA enemies to jeopardize Iran’s supreme interests. E3 should not be an accessory, after failing own JCPOA duties.”

“We’ve nothing to hide. More inspections in Iran over last 5 yrs than in IAEA history.”

“An agreeable solution is possible, but (adopted) Res will ruin it.”

Former Iranian Defense Minister/current Ayatollah Khamenei  advisor Hossein Dehqan minced no words saying the following:

“Iran will never engage in negotiations with…Trump, because we consider him to be a criminal, not a president.”

It’s very much uncertain whether Iranian relations with the US improve if Biden succeeds him in 2021.

Since Iran’s 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US installed despotic rule, bilateral relations have been dismal.

As long as the Islamic Republic remains independent of US control, the aim of both right wings of its one-party state will be to replace its sovereignty with subservient to Washington puppet rule.

The same objective applies to all nations, notably Russia and China, the only ones standing in the way of its aim for unchallenged global dominance.

It’s a prescription for endless conflicts, instability, and risk of unthinkable global war 3.0.

Humanity’s fate hangs in the balance.

US presidents, Trump included, are hostage to dark forces controlling its domestic and geopolitical policies.

The US is a belligerent state, an imperial state, a plutocratic state, an undemocratic state, a lawless state, a nation from inception run by its privileged class for its own self-interest by its own rules exclusively.

Throughout most of its history, it’s been at war on invented enemies at home and abroad — peace, stability, equity, justice, and the rule of law considered anathema notions for standing in the way of its diabolical aims.

No matter who serves in high US executive, congressional, and judicial positions, dirty business as usual will continue like always before.

A state of permanent US war on humanity exists at home and abroad.

The aim of its ruling class to control planet earth, its resources and populations — by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives — may kill us all if not challenged and stopped while there’s still time.

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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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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

I ministri della Difesa della Nato (per l’Italia Lorenzo Guerini, Pd), riuniti in videoconferenza il 17/18 giugno, hanno preso una serie di «decisioni per rafforzare la deterrenza dell’Alleanza». Nessuno però in Italia ne parla, né sui media (social compresi) né nel mondo politico, dove su tutto questo regna un assoluto silenzio multipartisan.

Eppure tali decisioni, dettate fondamentalmente da Washington e sottoscritte per l’Italia dal ministro Guerini, tracciano le linee guida non solo della nostra politica militare, ma anche di quella estera. Anzitutto – annuncia il segretario generale Jens Stoltenberg – «la Nato si sta preparando a una possibile seconda ondata del Covid-19», contro cui ha già mobilitato in Europa oltre mezzo milione di soldati.

Stoltenberg non chiarisce come la Nato possa prevedere una possibile seconda pandemia del virus con un nuovo lockdown. Su un punto però è chiaro: ciò «non significa che altre sfide siano scomparse». La maggiore – sottolineano i ministri della Difesa – proviene dal «comportamento destabilizzante e pericoloso della Russia», in particolare dalla sua «irresponsabile retorica nucleare, mirante a intimidire e minacciare gli Alleati Nato». Essi rovesciano in tal modo la realtà, cancellando il fatto che è stata la Nato, finita la Guerra fredda, a estendersi a ridosso della Russia con le sue forze e basi nucleari, soprattutto statunitensi. È stata metodicamente attuata, con la regia di Washington, una strategia mirante a creare in Europa crescenti tensioni con la Russia.

Per decidere nuove misure militari contro la Russia i ministri della Difesa si sono riuniti nel Gruppo di pianificazione nucleare, presieduto dagli Stati uniti. Non si sa quali decisioni in materia nucleare abbia sottoscritto il ministro Guerini per conto dell’Italia. È comunque chiaro che, partecipando al Gruppo e ospitando armi nucleari Usa (utilizzabili anche dalla nostra aeronautica), l’Italia viola il Trattato di non-proliferazione e respinge il Trattato Onu per la proibizione delle armi nucleari. Stoltenberg si limita a dire: «Oggi abbiamo deciso ulteriori passi per mantenere sicuro ed efficiente il deterrente nucleare Nato in Europa». Tra questi passi vi è sicuramente il prossimo arrivo, anche in Italia, delle nuove bombe nucleari Usa B61-12. L’altra crescente «sfida», di cui hanno parlato i ministri della Difesa, è quella della Cina, che per la prima volta è «in cima all’agenda della Nato».

La Cina è partner commerciale di molti alleati, ma allo stesso tempo «investe pesantemente in nuovi sistemi missilistici che possono raggiungere tutti i paesi Nato», spiega Stoltenberg. La Nato comincia così a presentare la Cina come militarmente minacciosa. Allo stesso tempo presenta come pericolosi gli investimenti cinesi nei paesi dell’Alleanza. In base a tale premessa i ministri della difesa hanno aggiornato le linee guida per la «resilienza nazionale», miranti a impedire che l’energia, i trasporti e le telecomunicazioni, in particolare il 5G, finiscano sotto «proprietà e controllo stranieri» (leggi «cinesi»).

Queste le decisioni sottoscritte dall’Italia alla riunione Nato dei ministri della Difesa. Esse vincolano il nostro paese a una strategia di crescente ostilità soprattutto verso Russia e Cina, esponendoci a rischi sempre più gravi e rendendo franoso il terreno su cui poggiano gli stessi accordi economici.

È una strategia a lungo termine, come dimostra il lancio del progetto «Nato 2030», fatto dal segretario generale Stoltenberg l’8 giugno per «rafforzare l’Alleanza militarmente e politicamente» includendo paesi come Australia (già invitata alla riunione dei ministri della Difesa), Nuova Zelanda, Giappone e altri asiatici, in chiara funzione anti-cinese.

Per il progetto della Grande Nato Globale 2030 è stato formato un gruppo di 10 consiglieri, tra cui la prof. Marta Dassù, già consigliera di politica estera nel governo D’Alema prima e durante la guerra Nato alla Jugoslavia, a cui l’Italia partecipò nel 1999, sotto comando Usa, con le sue basi e i suoi bombardieri. 

Manlio Dinucci

Amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration has made numerous reckless decisions to combat the virus, demonstrating a deadly incompetence. Indeed, with even minimal intelligent preparedness in the richest country on the planet, up to eighty percent of the more than one hundred thousand deaths from the virus in the US so far could have been prevented. 

Navarro is Trump’s Advisor on Trade and Manufacturing Policy as well as  National Defense Production policy.

Assigning Peter Navarro with the responsibility of managing the US production of emergency medical supplies is one such asinine decision. With Trump’s little regard for common sense, it is no surprise that he chose Navarro for this job.

Trump seems to see himself in Navarro’s ability to confidently (and laughably) assert his opinions in matters that he has no knowledge of or background in whatsoever. Navarro does not have either the experience of the private sector nor the skills or expertise of supply chain management – skills required for the task at hand. Also, his unconventional ideas about the economics of trade lack an iota of credibility even amongst the most rabid of either neoliberal or neo-isolationist economists.

Navarro strongly advocates the increase in trade tariffs in order to protect American manufacturers/manufacturing jobs and to help the economy. What he foolishly misunderstands is that this would not only harm the consumers due to price increases, but the economy and the manufacturers as well who need to import intermediate goods for their manufacturing. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics would understand this. His ideas, to emphasize again, are hardly agreed upon by anyone but he has been the chief advisor to the President on trade policy since 2016. To benefit from Navarros’ abundance of economic rigmarole, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was created, and he was appointed Director.

Through his position, Navarro was able to gradually advance his project of preventing Chinese products from entering the American market, to supporting heavy tariffs and effectively escalating a trade war with China. Tariffs have been imposed on goods worth billions of dollars imported from China. These policies have also been extended to countries like Germany, Japan, Mexico and South Korea. They are likely to retaliate with similar policies thereby curbing world trade and retarding economic growth, including, most of all, in the United States itself. That’s how Navarro is helping Trump to ‘Make American Great Again.’

Navarro’s real notoriety springs from his unrelenting and bigoted vitriol against the Chinese. He has written a series of books on China including Death by China, The Coming China Wars and Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World. President Trump seems  to gravitate toward Navarro precisely because of the message contained in these books, with Trump’s particular favorite being the Coming China Wars. In his books, Navarro not only blames China for worker abuse, intellectual property infringement and currency manipulation but also selling cheap, dangerous goods to the United States in order to become the “planet’s most efficient assassin.”

The China experts, both in scholarly and journalistic circles, regard Navarro’s writings on China as an absolute farce based on next to knowledge about the subject on which he loves to pontificate. He has hardly spent any time in the country and does not know an iota of Mandarin. His ideas essentially stem from the hatred that he has for the country. In five of his books, Navarro uses an imaginary character that he has named Ron Vara. Ron Vara is an anagram of his own name. He is used to affirm his own ideas about China. It is rather comical how Ron Vara accompanied Navarro to the White House and Navarro even created a fake email for him to support his ideas about increasing tariffs since he could not find any support elsewhere.

Since Navarro is managing the US production for emergency medical supplies, his ideas about trade, particularly with China, become incredibly relevant. Navarro is on a quest for making the United States completely self-reliant and avoiding any help from China. The need of the hour is to trade with China but unfortunately, it is also precisely the right time for Navarro to further his anti-China agenda. China has successfully controlled the spread of the virus and has aided many countries in the world to fight the virus. The United States could use this help as well. Navarro has been blaming China for the pandemic in ways such as naming the COVID-19 as the ‘China virus’, for hacking vaccine research, and for hoarding medical supplies and data on COVID-19 to profit from creating the first vaccine.

It is the perfect time to give rise to anti-Chinese sentiments to cease trade with China (to ostensibly make America self-reliant and bring manufacturing jobs back – all rhetorical pipedreams sold to a gullible support base of Trump), and provide a distraction from the incompetence of the Trump administration. People are confused, scared and dying because of the pandemic so it gives the perfect opportunity to feed racist sentiments into the population. Navarro’s utter lack of expertise and willful ignorance to manage his newfound responsibility is one huge handicap, but, in addition, his racist tendencies are certainly bound to break down the pre-existing chain of medical supplies from outside of the United States. This diabolical agenda is going to cost millions of lives.

Navarro has not only abused his power to further his anti-Chinese agenda and accelerate the collapse of the global economy. But in an attempt to buffoonishly demonstrate how vast his knowledge is beyond simply economics – in an sycophantic manner to foolishly back Trump on his ideas, he has shamelessly argued with the leading infectious disease expert in the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, for the treatment of the novel coronavirus. Navarro has no background in medicine or science. He still acquired the drug and promoted it to Americans even when Dr. Fauci explained that there was no evidence of the drug being beneficial in treating COVID-19. Upon being questioned about his qualifications for making such recommendations, Navarro said, “My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist. I have a PhD. And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”

Navarro’s incompetence is not only reflected in his ideas, writings and claims, but in his five election losses from his hometown in San Diego. In addition, his memo from the 29th of January that supported a Chinese travel ban in order to, according to ‘expert’ Navarro, to prevent about half a million people in the country dying from the disease was not taken seriously. Nonetheless, his incompetence, racist agenda, laughable reputation, sheer lack of empathy and plain disregard for common sense seems to merely make Trump like him more. He is addressed as “My Peter” by the President.

His current role requires establishing good relations to channel resources towards the United States. Instead, he is accelerating the collapse of an already crumbling global economy as well as provoking a dangerous conflict. He is playing with the lives of countless people not only in the form of the pandemic but a potential clash with China and the world.

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Dr. Junaid S. Ahmad is director of the Center for Global Dialogue and professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Whatever can be said, we have been about three or four billion people locked down on the five continents, forced to experience a kind of “house-arrest”. Unexpectedly, in a few weeks, this “exception” has become the standard status for crowds of honest citizens, blowing on the planet a backward wind and generating a crazy surrealistic atmosphere. However you call it a “lockdown”, it is a real “containment” of the populations evoking warfare, cold war, repression, fear and mistrust.

Some questions and some answers

Of course, this staggering episode will sustain thoughts, reflections and questions about the origin of this mysterious virus that was capable to plunge all of a sudden our familiar society into an unknown but very disturbing future.

What is unprecedented indeed in the Covid 19 crisis is not the event in itself, but its uncommon impact, resulting from its huge, systematic, world-wide, at first sight irrational instrumentation. Why did it get such an extraordinary importance, as soon as pandemics, far from being an exception, are rather usual? Looking back to a recent past, remembering or not that an epidemic alert used to be launched every two or three years, every individual will discover at that occasion the many types of fevers or influenzas possibly fraught with dangers he has escaped from. So we have a right to wonder and ask why or for which reasons this famous Covid19 has become so extravagantly famous and fearsome. Of course, we can’t predict the final toll. Let’s say it is not a mild epidemic, but to believe daily figures, it has nothing to do with a pandemic of the millennium. There must be an explanation…

“Containment” being conducive to reflection, it’s within everyone’s capabilities to ponder about the impact of media coverage of the crisis, since everything has been done everywhere to condition the populations and bring them to focus on the so-called “War on Coronavirus” at every moment, every detail in their daily life, 24/24 and 7/7.. It is indeed a permanent brainwash that is imposed on those millions of house-locked down citizens through an omnipresent TV propaganda, the channels altogether centering unremittingly their programs on the “coronavirus”.

Intentionally or not, this oppressive context makes it possible to push into the far-off background some of the upsetting realities that were unveiled at the occasion of the pandemic, insofar as those realities were bringing to the fore the profound geopolitical reversal which stood out during the last ten years. Indeed the obsessive campaign makes the viewers forget the evidence that the Atlantic hegemony is quickly swinging to the Eurasian Block, thus reshaping the World on new bases. This bias raises some questions.

If the tidal wave we are referring to were just an “illuminati” illusion, would the virus have been dramatized to this extreme as it has been, so as to relegate to the rank of memories the geopolitical mutation? Would the situation – that is not really to the advantage of the West – raise so violent attacks demonizing Russia and China? Unless we consider that the pandemic – or the storytelling – has been a catalyst favorable to the advent of this messianist “New World Order” preached and prophesied by Henry Kissinger, Attali, Gordon Brown, George Soros, Rockfeller, Bill Gates&Co… In fact, these visionaries of bad omen seem to be ready to bank on the most vicious or haziest plans to preserve the US/Atlantic hegemony as if it were a divine privilege: business as usual. But their approach is distorted by their misperception of the realities.

Corona as a geopolitical tool

If the debate on the ins and outs of the crisis can last for ages, there is no doubt as regards the conclusion: it is firstly because of the geopolitical context that the Corona episode made such an impact. Those prominent public figures above-mentioned, leading from behind or on the frontline the so-called “World Government Project”, do not belong exactly to the new generations, rather looking like figures of the past, at the relative exception of their present leader, Bill Gates (aged 64). In spite of their presupposed “genius”, they are blinkered in their vision, misguided by the conviction that the World will remain forever under western rule. It is true that God’s will and “elected peoples” destiny used to be omnipresent in the American political speech as well as in the minds of many citizens, as a deeply-rooted conviction since the Pilgrim Fathers and the founders of the United States, but this self-centered conviction gained a renewed favour in the seventies/eighties with the arising of neoconservatism, a neocapitalist doctrine religiously permeated by Zionism. It reached the height of its glory during George W. Bush administration, when the White House meetings used to look and sound like religious services.

To a lesser extent, this bigot inspiration remains alive in the political speech, including in immoderate statements by Donald Trump. Beyond differences and conflicts, most US politicians – with few exceptions – do agree about the innate supremacy of their country and its vocation to lead the World. A British writer (living in the States), S. Mallaby, wrote: “Neo-imperialist America is still in charge of the Burden chanted by Kipling, but The Burden of the White Man has changed into the Burden of the Rich Man”.

Taking this conviction for granted, we can understand how difficult it is for American leaders to bow before the first conclusions that can be drawn from the ongoing global Grip, namely the gradual but fast decline of the US Atlantic Empire in front of the arising or the come-back of two rival powers to begin with. Economically, China has become number one in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reckoned in PPP (Parity Purchasing Power) some years ago, as well as the “Factory of the Planet”: by the way, 80% of the medicines produced in the World are “made in China”. Last but not least, the OBOR project (One Belt One Road) referred to as the “Silk Road” is for Peking “the Great National Strategy for the Century”, reflecting the ambition to propose to the World a counter-balance to the “Greater Middle East” of George W. Bush…

Militarily, and according to many standards, US seem to have been outclassed by Russia with regard to nuclear, ballistics, Navy and Aeronautics, telecommunications high technology. Moreover one can say that Moscow has become the referring political and diplomatic power, not only where it used to be influential, but in many regions, including in well known US backyards (Middle East, Africa, Latin America).

Even more impressive is the loss by the US of their moral, intellectual and ideological power. Legacy from World War 2 and imposed on the “Free World” in the framework of the struggle against communism, this US magisterium had overcome the whole “international community” in the aftermath of the unexpected implosion of USSR, but the coronavirus will have ruined this stereotype of America and Europe. Most countries, even unexpected ones, have fetched assistance from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Asian partners) but also from Cuba.

Therefore, the Coronavirus episode is doubtlessly and straightly connected with the battle raging between the US flanked by its allies, and the block headed by Russia and China, gathering the Asian partners above mentioned. What is at stake? The World leadership…

The American dream at all costs

Just as Zbigniew Brzezinski (who died recently), Kissinger is one of those prominent “advisers” who survive the alternations and turbulences of the spoils-system, thus becoming permanent references. Whispering in the ear of all the presidents since the seventies, he symbolizes this continuity of the US foreign policy, inspired by the neoconservative messianism, and the total faith in the American natural supremacy. Kissinger served as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford. He accessed to celebrity in 1973 at the occasion of the arabo-israeli Ramadan War, promoting an innovative “shuttle diplomacy” between Damascus, Cairo and Tel-Aviv in order to reach cease-fire agreements. Praised to the skies for being a peacemaker, “Dear Henry” succeeded to conceal that he had played in the meantime a leading role in bombing campaigns (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), inspiring violent regime-change operations in Argentina and Chile and supporting horrible anti-communist repression in Indonesia.

In 1974 he presented to President Gerald Ford a comprehensive study on the population of the World and its evolution up to 2070, expressing his concern about the high level of world birth rate increase, the disparities between developing and industrialized countries, the discrepancy between developmental needs and demographic pressure in poorer societies, suggesting that “dramatic events” could happen just in time to solve the problem (sic). The paper remained unpublished until 1989. Kissinger was a confident or spokesman for Rockefeller and G. Soros. He got acquainted with the inevitable Bill Gates and inspired his projects. Those good guys are apparently well-intentioned, but they have never concealed their purpose: their Health Programs supposed to “eradicate poverty” are to some extent ambiguous, involving some eugenicist concepts and perverse technical tricks under the cover of Welfare. The guidelines can be read as follows: taking into account the limited potential of earth resources, a small elite of intelligent “happy few” could easily have a much longer life (Kissinger is 97 while life-expectancy in the Rockefeller’s family is over 100 years) and enjoy more welfare in the frame of a world population reduced to its minimum level (sic), if you see what he means.

The noble concept is the devotion to the needs of populations and the welfare of mankind….Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and his foundation could be the financial fountain of universal vaccination firstly in Africa, usual experimental field for West activist “witches”, with the dream of launching this worldwide operation in the aftermath of the “containment”. Bill and his wife Melinda are warm supporters of Kissinger’s thesis, a position widespread among the “Rich Men” (cf.supra): World Economic Forum, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Morgen, etc….

The notion of pandemics being used as a drastic opportunity to march towards a “Global World Order” or a “Government of the World” has been integrated in all the CIA and intelligence reports for many years. In this context, was Covid19 just a splendid opportunity or a man-made virus? Some CIA strategic reports in past years (2014) are very instructive in this regard.

Many honest people have doubts about the reality of these ugly rear thoughts. That’s why their attention must be drawn to the mechanisms that have been and are still used by the Atlantic Empire with a view to extend its global dominance, through a noble “democratization” project. (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, etc…).

Come back to the Bad Tricks

It was once upon a time, but it is still today. At Kissinger’s peak of glory,and because the Cold War balance of forces and the right of veto made impossible to pass resolutions according to the sole western views, US and other Atlantic thinkers, experts or leaders were already searching for a mechanism making possible to counter the communist bloc. The first step of this demarche was taken in the late sixties during the so-called “Biafra War” in the newly independent republic of Nigeria, where the richest oil-producing region of the country was the theater for a secession attempt, supported by foreign countries (France and Ivory Coast). This bloody War generated a huge humanitarian crisis attracting foreign western volunteers, including a young medical doctor, Bernard Kouchner, and a lawyer Mario Bettati. The first NGO “Médecins sans Frontières” will be created in the wake of this conflict. The idea was to instrument a new “Humanitarian Law” to by-pass the basic UN principles. It was the “Right of Interference” that won’t be theorized before the late eighties (1987) by the two initiators during a conference on “Morale and Humanitarian Law”. But the context was not suitable.

It got more favorable some years later, with the disintegration of USSR. The new idea was presented again as a “Duty of Interference”, that was to change to a “Duty To Protect” before being crystallized into a terminology in tune with the times: the “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P)was presented as a subsidiary responsibility of the “international community” reduced in fact to the three western permanent members of the Security Council (US, UK and France) and some like-minded countries on occasions. This demarche was of course in contradiction with the international law, since it limited, for the sake of globalization, the reach of the “westphalian” principles of the UN charter (equal sovereignty of the States and non-interference). But the World was entering a new era, the dissolution of the communist bloc paving the way for the US neocons determined to impose the United States as the Ruler of the World.

If you leaf through the pages of a “Book of Tricks” of the Axis of Good, you won’t need to go very far to drive out one of the favorite stratagems of the “Indispensable Nation” which had undertaken to “annex” the World, no more no less. The technique consisted of waving a noble concept in order to reach a shameful goal. Of course, this trick is old as imperialism, but “the most powerful Empire that ever existed on the earth” couldn’t poison international life as it wished until 1991. But in the following years, boosted by the divine surprise above-mentioned, America would catch up. The “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) would be this “noble pretext” selected to render acceptable the crazy adventure of “democratization” without any significant resistance of an “international community” deeply shocked by the political earthquake. As it is well known, this “false flag” has been used for thirty years (until today) to cover interferences in order to destabilize the “regimes of concern”: “Rogue States” if they support terrorism, detain Arms of Mass Destruction and violate International Law, or “Failed States” if they are accused of not fulfilling their duties, the “international community” (US and allies) thus being entrusted to intervene in order to “protect the people”.

After a running period, George W. Bush, under the pressure of fanatics inspired by the Zionist neoconservative doctrine (Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Donald Rumsfeld, etc…), will engage the World in “an endless war on terror” against interchangeable enemies. In February 2004, he will introduce his « Greater Middle East » project (published on 13/02/2004 by Al Hayat newspaper): the plan was about reforming, bringing democratization, security, and above all “liberalizing” the “Muslim Green Belt” from Mauritania to Pakistan. In fact, it had nothing to do with democracy, but aimed at taking control of the natural resources, besieging Russia and marginalizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the destruction of the Iraqi State, “Democratization » ought to make the region more “receptive” to American wishes and « friendlier » to Israel.

Anyway, the ancestors of our Bill Gates and Co Globalists had the dream to get the UN to shoulder the “Responsibility To Protect” so as to integrate it into the Charter, thus opening the way to military actions for “humanitarian reasons”. They needed the blessing of the Council, which was theoretically an impossible task. Guardian of the international law and guarantor of the UN principles, the Council plays the main role in the field of peace-keeping and That’s whyfor years,security. He has the monopole in conflicts and crises settlement. even though recognized by the General Assembly in 2005/2006 about Darfour, the R2P will just remain a casual reference.

In March 2011, the R2P will be invoked again, with a view to engage in Libya the well-known “humanitarian” operation that will result in tens of thousands of victims and destroy the country. Russia and China will realize – but too late – that they had been fooled by their western “partners”. Consequently, in October 2011, after Kadhafi’s murder, Moscow and Peking will use for the first time (after twenty years of prudent abstention) their veto to bar any intervention in Syria, apparently closing the road to R2P based resolutions.

From the New Middle East to the New Global Order

2011was a turning-point in the post-Cold War “American Century” and a partial stop to the global dominance of the US, opening a challenging period of contest, not on an ideological basis as it had been during the East-West conflict, but between US unilateralism and supporters of a multilateralism to come.

There is nothing new in the “New Global Order”, which is to the World what the “international community” used to be years ago: three Atlantic permanent members of the Security Council and like-minded countries talking on behalf and in the name of the United Nations. Obviously, the project is nothing else than a new version of the strategy aiming at the maintenance of the US hegemony on the World.

To get convinced, so try to find in the starring list of the initiators and leading figures involved in this “World Government Project” any non-western, non anglo-saxon “Big Man”? The sole exception is Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian doctor with a british training background, Director General of the World Health Organization, coming under World Health Assembly (a part of the UN network), widely in the clutches of the lobbies. As for the rest, the “World Government” network is intricate and compact: GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and immunization), World Economic Forum, World Bank, UNICEF, pharmaceutical corporations, Gates Foundation, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Most of those structures are turning around Bill Gates and thepublic figures already cited, and under the supervision of Agenda ID2020, initiated by the Gates Foundation. We should not forget to mention Neil Ferguson, the guru of the London Imperial College, a member of the “Covid 19 Response Team” comprising 50 scientists linked to the WHO. Ferguson was the promoter of the “Total Lockdown”, propagating apocalyptic reports which convinced the UK and US governments and (according to the New York Times) the French president, in spite of many disputable predictions forecasting hundreds of thousands or millions of victims, in absence of any total containment.

Just replace some words in the “toxic” coverage : democratization with Global Welfare, “Responsibility to Protect” with Health Security, vaccination and immunization, International community with Global World Order, and endless War on terror with endless War on pandemics, and you will perceive the continuity of the western project of dominance.

And so what?

If it is carried out, this world-scale operation (ID 2020), carefully planned in the United States at mid-october 2019 by a numeric simulation of coronavirus, would realize a new razzia led by the West under the pressure of the so-called “Big Pharma” lobby and the guidance of powerful sectors of the American “Deep State”. If it were successful, it would bring back to some extent the geopolitical balance to the situation that prevailed ten years ago. But there is noinevitability in the success of Bill Gates and Co, whose projects are coming within the scope of a global hegemony. For the strategists, intellectuals and zealous followers of Westernism, as well as for some UN institutions, traditional go-between for US plans, there is no room for another prospect than a “New American Century”. But they are probably wrong. The Atlantic Empire has lost its global supremacy. This shift in the balance from the West to Eurasia is observed by all analysts. It is hard for Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Bolton and Co, but also for the supporters of Gates, Soros and Rockefeller to admit that the nightmare is coming true.

One of the possible options, feared by many, is a gradual evolution towards a totalitarian system spreading all over the World. But it is hardly conceivable. Completely outdated, the Westernism dream implies that Russia and China would accept nowadays, in the new international order, any kind of transnational Gates-style vaccination and/or a Global Government suiting Kissinger’s views. Russia emerged as born again on the ruins of USSR, while China carries on its irresistible ascent on the Great Game Chessboard. It doesn’t mean that the future will be a paradise on earth. It depends of course on the real visions of the forthcoming leadership, but even more on the strength of popular aspirations. This is the main stake of the crisis.

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Consult Michel Raimbaud’s Archive of articles in French at mondialisation.ca/author/michel-raimbaud

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Our thanks to Basma Qaddour for sharing Michel Raimbaud’s analysis via Mark Taliano’s blog site.

Based on an interview held in the White House last Friday, June 19, the U.S. website Axios reported:

“Asked whether he would meet with Maduro,” Trump said, “I would maybe think about that…. Maduro would like to meet. And I’m never opposed to meetings — you know, rarely opposed to meetings. I always say, you lose very little with meetings. But at this moment, I’ve turned them down.”

The context of what may appear to be a sudden reversal in Trump’s Venezuelan policy is to be found in John Bolton’s recently released memoir on life under Trump, The Room Where It Happened. According to Bolton (cited by Axios), after throwing the full diplomatic weight of the U.S. government behind Juan Guaidó, Trump’s private feelings about his protégé were ambivalent:

“He thought Guaidó was ‘weak,’ as opposed to Maduro, who was ‘strong.’”

“By spring [of 2019], Trump was calling Guaidó the ‘Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,’ [Democratic Party candidate for the 2016 presidential elections won by Hilary Clinton] hardly the sort of compliment an ally of the United States should expect.”

In the Trump lexicon, the honorific applied to O’Rourke generally means “loser,” a term to deprecate political opponents. It may be that this tentative reaching out to Maduro, as opposed to hanging on to what was appearing even in Trump’s eyes as a lost cause, has its roots in previous discussions among Trump’s Cabinet.

Any eventual contact between Trump and Maduro is an ongoing but controversial story emerging from U.S. corporate media, the White House and perhaps Bolton. In fact, only one day after Trump seemed to have opened the door to discussing with Maduro, he tweeted on June 22.

“I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!“

However, “meeting” and “discussing” is still in the news. Moreover, the fact remains, following the latest divulgations cited above, that Trump is evaluating “discussion” from a position of weakness. As Trumps has admitted, his anointed “president“ is a complete failure to date.

The situation in Canada is different. Action can be taken now as there is nothing to wait for. The Trudeau government plays a leading role in carrying forward Trump regime-change policy through the right-wing Lima group, with its avowed intention of overthrowing Maduro and installing Guaidó.

The time is ripe, because on June 17 the Trudeau government suffered a humiliating defeat in its high profile bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. In the spotlight during the weeks leading up to the vote, we saw just how close Trudeau’s relationship is to Trump. In fact, many Canadians viewed it as subservience. This evaluation even found its way into some corporate editorials on the defeat. Also under scrutiny in the UNSC debacle was the Trudeau government’s lack of respect for international law and UN resolutions.

In a word, since June 17, Trudeau does not have either an international or domestic mandate to conduct foreign policy as he has carried out since winning office. Along with other grassroots organizations and personalities, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute was instrumental in pushing for the NO vote and creating domestic support to back up the international appeals.

If Trudeau would like to make up for his past errors and show the world there is indeed a difference between the U.S. and Canada, and that we do not perhaps stand behind every Trump move, what better opportunity that to build on Trump’s short-lived opening to Maduro? Why should Trudeau not declare that, unlike Trump, he would like to have fair and open discussions with Maduro, as anyone who believes in an “international rules-based order” should do? Surely it would take courage to do so. But this is far closer to “Canadian values” than what Trudeau has been repeating over the last few weeks. Such a courageous stand would also constitute a rebuttal of Trump’s heavy-handed, dictatorial methods. Since the vote on the 17th, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, encouraged by its and others’ success in breaking through the usual mainstream media blackout, is following up on what many see as a mandate from the grassroots. It is calling for a popular discussion and consultations on foreign policy in these terms:

“Dear PM Trudeau,

Time to Fundamentally Reassess Canadian Foreign Policy

One of the 10 subjects raised is:

• Why is Canada involved in efforts to oust Venezuela’s UN-recognized government, a clear violation of the principle of non-intervention in other country’s internal affairs?”

Trudeau has admitted that he has to take stock of a foreign policy that has been so soundly rejected by United Nations’ member states. By revising its failed and harmful policy toward the Venezuelan people, it would contribute to a much-needed atmosphere of discussion and consultation on Canada’s outdated and unpopular foreign policy.

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Featured image is from The Santiago Times

Accountability has always been a problem in the nuclear industry, despite praises to the contrary.  Constantly keeping its muddled head above water with government handouts to remain competitive; ostensibly keeping a hand in the energy sector despite a sketchy record, there has always been a sense that “going nuclear” is a term that simply will not die. 

Even during the novel coronavirus crisis, those within the nuclear industry stressed their plumed credentials.  The World Nuclear Association rosily describes the role of nuclear technologies in their use “to detect and fight the virus”.  The body is insistent that nuclear reactors are to be celebrated for keeping the house in order as electricity supplies are maintained.  Those operating reactors have also been considerate of their staff. “Reactor operators have taken steps to protect their workforce and have implemented business continuity plans to ensure the continuing functioning of key business activities where appropriate.” According to a Forbes contributor, the industry “first developed pandemic response plans in 2006,” plans which were revised in March by the Nuclear Energy Institute to “align with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended actions for COVID-19 as well as those of the World Health Organization.”

A good deal of this is deceptive.  It is true that 2006 saw the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) broach the issue of pandemic threats to the industry, floating the possibility of having response plans.  It duly conducted a workshop with the title theme “Sustaining Safe Nuclear Operations During an Influenza Pandemic”.  This did not prove successful.  As Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Societies noted,

“A number of difficult policy questions were discussed, including the potential need to sequester workers early in an outbreak and the effect of high rates of absenteeism.  But little was done to resolve these questions.”

The Nuclear Energy Institute went so far as to recommend a Pandemic Licensing Plan for the NRC to review, recognising “the potential for an influenza epidemic to reduce nuclear plant staffing below the levels necessary to maintain full compliance with all NRC regulatory requirements”.  The white paper was intended to balance “projected staffing reductions with the importance of continued operation to help maintain grid stability and provide reserve power to offset losses of other sources of generation.”  Greater discretion in terms of enforcement on the part of the NRC was suggested, one that would square regulatory standards with the integrity of a continued system. More risk, in other words, might tolerated during a pandemic. 

The response from the NRC was terse, finding that “without bounding entry conditions and more specific technical bases for the proposed regulatory relief, NEI’s approach still presents significant challenges that may prevent meaningful overall progress in pandemic preparation.” 

Across the globe, nuclear power plants, and nuclear armed states, face critical issues with COVID-19.  At stages, the safety of workers has been gravely compromised.  In April, the US Navy announced that a sailor who tested positive for COVID-19 on the nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt the previous month had died.  The virus had scored a veritable hit on the crew, with 600 sailors testing positive.   The scrappy handling of the entire affair led to the resignation of acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, who had, in turn, dismissed the aircraft carrier’s captain Brett Crozier.  Crozier had warned of the threat posed to his crew in a memo to the Navy’s Pacific Fleet that was subsequently leaked.  “We are not at war.  Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset – our Sailors.”

The Russian nuclear corporation, Rosatom, revealed in March that it had been assailed by the coronavirus at the construction site of a nuclear power plant being built in Grodno, Belarus.  According to Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev, the site of the plant had been locked down, but an easing of physical distancing measures saw a viral return of some vengeance.  His address to employees did not inspire confidence. “Now we are facing the busiest season as in the coming weeks we are about to obtain a license and get ready for the physical launch [of the first VVER-1200 reactor].  At the same time we should protect and take care of our staff as much as possible.”

Workers have found themselves quarantined and monitored on site.  Rosatom’s utility subsidiary Rosenergoatom took such measures in April, isolating workers in dormitories at the plants of their employ.  Similar measures are supposedly being implemented in the various nuclear cities in Russia that remain sealed and concealed from external scrutiny. 

William Toby, Simon Saradzhyan and Nikolas Roth are almost complimentary regarding efforts being made by nuclear organisations in coping with COVID-19.  They are, for instance, “implementing broad public health measures, having employees work from home when possible, use personal protection equipment, wash their hands frequently, and keep a proper distance at workstations.”  The temperatures of employees are also being checked prior to entering the facility.

In certain cases, nuclear related activities have been halted.  In Britain and France, the Sellafield and La Hague plants were shut down.  Mining of uranium was halted in South Africa and Namibia.  But all these point to a laundry list of items that mask the deep troubles that beset the industry. 

In the United States, movement since the disagreements on regulation and safety in 2007 has been minimal.  NRC staff doddered over enforcement criteria; the NEI remains committed to its Pandemic Licensing Plan, gathering dust for 13 years.  We are left with the less than comforting words of Lyman.  “The NRC assured me … that its risk standards for granting enforcement discretion have not changed and that if they deemed any plant unsafe they could and would issue an order to shut it down.”

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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]

For months, this has been a story that I have wanted to share with young readers in Hong Kong. Now it seems to be the really appropriate time, when the ideological battle between some West superpowers and China is raging, and as a result of it, Hong Kong and the entire world is suffering.

I want to say that none of it is new, that the West superpowers already destabilized so many countries and territories, brainwashed tens of millions of young people.

I know, because in the past, I was one of them. If I weren’t, it would be impossible to understand what is now happening in Hong Kong.

I was born in Leningrad, a beautiful city in the Soviet Union. Now it is called St. Petersburg, and the country is Russia. Mom is half-Russian, half-Chinese, artist, and architect. My childhood was split between Leningrad and Pilsen, an industrial city known for its beer, at the Western extreme of what used to be Czechoslovakia. Dad was a nuclear scientist.

The two cities were different. Both represented something essential in the Communist planning, a system that you were taught, by the Western propagandists, to hate.

Leningrad is one of the most stunning cities in the world, with some of the greatest museums, opera and ballet theaters, public spaces. In the past, it used to be the Russian capital.

Pilsen is tiny, with only 180,000 inhabitants. But when I was a kid, it counted with several excellent libraries, art cinemas, an opera house, avant-garde theaters, art galleries, a research zoo, with things that could not be, as I realized later (when it was too late), found even in the US cities of 1 million.

Both cities, one big and one small, had excellent public transportation, vast parks, and forests coming to its outskirts, as well as elegant cafes. Pilsen had countless free tennis facilities, football stadiums, even badminton courts.

Life was good, meaningful. It was rich. Not rich in terms of money, but rich culturally, intellectually, and healthwise. To be young was fun, with knowledge free and easily accessible, with the culture at every corner, and sports for everyone. The pace was slow: plenty of time to think, learn, analyze.

But it was also the height of the Cold War.

We were young, rebellious, and easy to manipulate. We were never satisfied with what we were given. We took for granted everything. At night, we were glued to our radio receivers, listening to the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other broadcasting services aiming at discrediting socialism and all countries which were fighting against Western imperialism.

Czech socialist industrial conglomerates were building, in solidarity, entire factories, from steel to sugar mills, in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. But we saw no glory in this because Western propaganda outlets were simply ridiculing such undertakings.

Our cinemas were showing masterpieces of Italian, French, Soviet, Japanese cinema. But we were told to demand junk from the US.

The music offering was great, from live to recorded. Almost all music was, actually, available although with some delay, in local stores or even on stage. What was not sold in our stores was nihilist rubbish. But that was precisely what we were told to desire. And we did desire it, and copied it with religious reverence, on our tape recorders. If something was not available, the Western media outlets were shouting that it is a gross violation of free speech.

They knew, and they still know now, how to manipulate young brains.

At some point, we were converted into young pessimists, criticizing everything in our countries, without comparing, without even a tiny bit of objectivity.

Does it sound familiar?

We were told, and we repeated: Everything in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia was bad. Everything in the West was great. Yes, it was like some fundamentalist religion or mass-madness. Hardly anyone was immune. Actually, we were infected, we were sick, turned into idiots.

We were using public, socialist facilities, from libraries to theaters, subsidized cafes, to glorify the West and smear our own nations. This is how we were indoctrinated, by Western radio and television stations, and by publications smuggled into the two countries.

In those days, plastic shopping bags from the West became the status symbols! You know, those bags that you get in some cheap supermarkets or department stores.

When I think about it at a distance of several decades, I can hardly believe it: Young educated boys and girls, proudly walking down the streets, exhibiting cheap plastic shopping bags, for which they paid a serious amount of money. Because they came from the West. Because they were symbolizing consumerism! Because we were told that consumerism is good.

We were told that we should desire “freedom”. Western-style freedom.

We were instructed to “fight for freedom”.

In many ways, we were much freer than the West. I realized it when I first arrived in New York and saw how badly educated local children of my age were, and how shallow their knowledge of the world was; and how little culture there was in regular midsize North American cities.

We wanted, we demanded designer jeans. We were longing for Western music labels in the center of our LPs. It was not about the essence or the message. It was form over substance.

Our food was tastier, ecologically produced. But we wanted colorful Western packaging. We demanded chemicals.

We were constantly angry, agitated, confrontational. We were antagonizing our families.

We were young, but we felt old.

I published my first book of poetry, then left, slammed the door behind me, went to New York.

And soon after, I realized that I was fooled!

This is a very simplified version of my story. Space is limited.

But I am glad I can share it with my Hong Kong readers, and of course, with my young readers all over China.

Two wonderful countries which used to be my home were betrayed, literally sold for nothing, for pairs of designer jeans, and plastic shopping bags.

The West celebrated! Months after the collapse of the socialist system, both countries were literally robbed of everything by Western companies. People lost their homes and jobs, and internationalism was deterred. Proud socialist companies got privatized and, in many cases, liquidated. Theaters and art cinemas were converted into cheap secondhand clothes markets.

In Russia, life expectancy dropped to African sub-Saharan levels.

Czechoslovakia was broken into two parts.

Now, decades later, both Russia and Czechia are wealthy again. Russia has many elements of a socialist system with central planning.

But I miss my two countries, as they used to be, and all surveys show that the majority of people there miss them too. I also feel guilty, day and night, for allowing myself to be indoctrinated, to be used, and in a way to betray.

After seeing the world, I understand that what happened to both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia also happened to many other parts of the world. And right now, the West superpowers are aiming at China by using Hong Kong.

Whenever in China’s mainland, whenever in Hong Kong, I keep repeating: Please do not follow our terrible example. Defend your nation! Do not sell it, metaphorically, for some filthy plastic shopping bags. Do not do something that you would regret for the rest of your lives!

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. He is the author of 20 books including“China’s Belt and Road Initiative”, and “China and Ecological Civilization”.

In Russia Today, Helen Buyniski reflects on corporate responses to the depiction of Black people in brand labeling. Buyniski highlights the comments of B and G Foods as it jumped onto the bandwagon of corporate virtue signaling. The company signaled its intentions to “proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism.” The company informs consumers that B and G Foods “unequivocally stand against prejudice and injustice of any kind.”

Two of the brands Buyniski highlights were introduced at the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. Whooopeee! The World’s Columbian Exposition is exactly the kind of event that merits close consideration in any meaningful re-examination of American history.

Both Cream of Wheat and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix were introduced at the Columbia Exposition during an era when brands were still a relatively new form of capitalist commodity.

The Columbian Exposition introduced America to a vast array of new products, concepts, celebrities and systems, everything from hamburgers to motion pictures to Harry Houdini and Antonín Dvořák. The US identification with Columbus’s westward expansion of Christendom was calculated to advertise the emerging role of the United States as the self-declared leader of “Western Civilization.”

There was at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 a “Colored Peoples Day” when “negroes” attending the Fair were given a free slice of watermelon. I’m serious. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show touched down in Chicago at the edge of the Fair. The Buffalo Bill spectacle featured for a time the real Sitting Bull as part of the primal dramatic interaction of cowboys and Indians.

(Looking West From Peristyle, Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Public Domain)

The competition for providing electricity to the Fair featured Edison’s Direct Current system versus Tesla’s Alternating Current system. Backed by George Westinghouse, Tesla’s system won the contract to provide the fair with electricity. After the Chicago Exposition, Tesla and his backers went to Niagara Falls to build up their AC “hydro” system.

Swami Vivekananda captured huge attention at the World’s Parliament of Religions that was part of the 1893 Exposition. And a young historian from the then-frontier jurisdiction of Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered the academic essay that would become the most famous ever published on US history. The essay is entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

In his presentation Turner extended the civilizational meme of the Columbian Exposition.  He explained his vision of the conquest of primitive Amerindians on the westward-moving frontiers of US expansion. This violent expansionary push was said by Turner to form the basis of an American nation founded on the rugged individualism of its pioneers. Where is there any informed discussion in the current political tempest in a teapot on the implications of Turner’s hugely influential Frontier Thesis emphasizing American “civilization’s” conquest of Indigenous peoples?

I find it amazing how this current round of riotous revisionism so far has all to do with slavery and its aftermath. Alternatively it has almost nothing to do with the treatment of Indigenous peoples. The absence exposes the gaping blind spot of the current organizers of the media-highlighted extravaganza, “Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America.”

There is nothing in this bizarre spectacle of BIG BUCK political intervention by the wealthy on behalf of the oppressed to highlight the original genocidal history at the roots of America. This blind spot signals the inauthenticity of this mob and its Obamameisters who fail to consider who was pushed aside in order to make living space available for the newcomers including Africans. It is written that Hitler studied the Trail of Tears carefully in contemplating policies for Germany’s planned removal and subordination of Slavs in Eurasia.

Thus bigotry prevails on all sides of the current media-driven scam. When the real thing was developing back in the day, the Black Panthers took organizational and ideological form along with the American Indian Movement, AIM. Remember AIM’s return to Wounded Knee in 1973. Remember the civil war at Pine Ridge Reservation where the FBI-backed regime of Chief Dick Wilson assassinated dozens of AIM members. Emerging from these episodes, the saga of Leonard Peltier remains America’s number one example of the creation and holding of political prisoners in the United States. Will Trump grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier?

I wonder how much history is actually being read by the well-funded and well-covered media darlings pushing forward the protests and the riots and the property destruction and the monument wrecking? As I see it, the ring leaders of this anarchy revolve around Barack Obama and the operations he and his Democratic Party agents set in motion through the Organization for Action and its Antifa offshoots.

The seedbed of these Antifa revolutionaries is our corrupt and ADL-controlled university systems where weak-minded progressives try to compensate for giving in to the threats of the Israel Lobby. All but a handful of pseudo-leftist faculty members compensate by directing their virtue signaling energies into anti-capitalism, anti-racism (except when it comes to Israel-Palestine) and “climate change” hocus-pocus. What happened to the project of limiting the proliferation of pollution, an honest word describing a broad array of environmental contaminations?

The change of topic away from the pandemic is currently taking place with the blessing of our governors and their media flunkies. To refer to them as “presstitutes” does an injustice to honest sex trade workers.

One of the main aims in the sudden alteration of highlighted topics is meant to divert attention from the huge public scandals coming to light in the US health care system. The stream of revelations being brought forward in genuine truth telling operations like Trunews and Del Bigtree’s The Highwire have been exposing the leadership of the public health care system in America as a new version of war profiteers.

In an era of hybrid warfare, war profiteering is becoming manifest in many new ways. Vaccine warfare on humanity is one the most significant new theatres of battle. For the war profiteers, the proliferation of indemnified vaccines in a cradle to grave system of injections has long since crossed the threshold of a genocidal assault on almost all of humanity.

The problems we have to address go way beyond racism into the realm of eugenics and reverse Robin Hood— to steal systematically from the poor and middle class in order to further enrich the already disgustingly wealthy. With their offshore money hideouts and high priced accountants the rich pay no taxes yet expect full obedience from their indentured servants in governments.

These same governments perpetuate themselves by taxing average folks to the hilt. These governments answer the dictates of their multibillionaire masters by plunging us deeper into debt, incessantly lying to us, spying on us, abusing us and condemning us as “conspiracy theorists” when we try to speak truth to power. As Harry Vox has so eloquently states, basically the multibillionaires and their captive governments want to kill us.

The unaddressed kleptocracy of the rich extends to massive financial, political and logistical support for Wall Street’s current favored project of genocidal national expansion. The Trail of Tears extends from the domain of the uprooted and genocided Cherokees to the uprooted and genocided Palestinians.

The manufacturing of enemies has gone from the “merciless Indian savages” referred to in the Declaration of Independence to the new targets for the robotization of almost everything including human consciousness. The aim is to “depopulate” our numbers as well as to render the survivors sickly and subordinate with lifetimes of needs for all sorts of exotic and expensive pharmaceutical products. The founder of Microsoft, the vaccine czar Bill Gates, intends to go a step farther. The patrons, clients and lackies of Bill Gates are intent on exploiting weaponized compulsory vaccines to render us all AI compatible and ultimately AI compliant.

I draw many of these points from my text, Earth into Property, which starts out with a full chapter on the World’s Columbian Exposition.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. 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.

Featured image: Oakland California, May 30, 2020. Credit: Thomas Hawk/ Flickr

It is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though he has come dangerously close in the cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be considerable incentive in the next four months to begin something to bolster his “strong president” credentials and to serve as a distraction from coronavirus and black lives matter.

Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch up to the record set by his three predecessors Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led, including in his administration Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.

Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.

So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. The America the exceptional mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief that the United States is empowered by God to play only by its own rules when dealing with other nations. That would include following the advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

One of the first families within the neocon/liberal interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing 500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was “worth it.” Nuland also has significant neocon connections through her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick Cheney.

Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supportinggovernment opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And make no mistake about Nuland’s broader intention at that time to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony she cited how the administration was “providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia.” Her use of the word “frontline” is suggestive.

Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine on the proper way for the United States manage what she sees as the Russian “threat.” It is entitled “How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia.” Foreign Affairs, it should be observed, is an establishment house organ produced by the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal interventionists.

Nuland’s view is that the United States lost confidence in its own “ability to change the game” against Vladimir Putin, who has been able to play “a weak hand well because the United States and its allies have let him, allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe… Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown.”

What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state threatening the “liberal world.” She sees Russian rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares her fear that Putin might seek “…reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors. Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin’s agenda to see Europe in zero-sum terms.”

Nuland’s view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had provided assurances that expansion would not take place. She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin’s great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his having “…always understood that a belt of increasingly democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a direct challenge to his leadership model and risk re-infecting his own people with democratic aspirations.”

Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her analysis is ridiculous, as “Russian troops regularly test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain access to the country’s oil fields and smuggling routes. If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian oil or smuggled drugs and weapons.”

Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She accuses the Kremlin of having “seized” Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand.

Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House’s threats against countries that do not toe the American line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of those nations threaten the United States and all the kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington, not from “undemocratic” leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas or Beijing.

Victoria Nuland recommends that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine.

Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those who are interested in the current state of interventionism in Washington should not ignore her. Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an interest in what goes on right on top of its border while the United States five thousand miles away and possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden of being the world’s self-appointed policeman.

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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 coronavirus mutation discovered to be currently dominating the world has been pinpointed as the cause of the latest COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing, which experts say indicates that the virus was imported from outside China.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released the viral genome sequence from the recent clusters of COVID-19 infections related to Beijing’s Xinfadi wholesale market late Thursday, which came from both COVID-19 case samples and environmental samples.

The [China] CDC has submitted the relevant genome sequence to the World Health Organization and the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data to share the data globally.

Data shows that the virus carries a point mutation in the Spike protein D614G.

According to previous research and media reports, the mutation Spike D614G began spreading in Europe in early February, and increased significantly to 26 percent of the total isolated sequences available in the GenBank. In May, this viral strain had become the most dominant strain spreading around the world, presenting itself in 70 per cent of sequenced samples in the Genbank.

According to a research paper released on the bioRxiv on June 14, the mutation can increase transduction of the virus across a broad range of human cell types, including cells from the lung, liver and colon.

The mutation is also more resistant to proteolytic cleavage during production of the protein in host cells, suggesting that replicated viruses produced in human cells may be more infectious due to a greater proportion of functional (uncleaved) Spike proteins per virion.

The mutation Spike D614G has been discovered in the virus spreading around Europe, Taiwan island and Colombia in South America. But it has not been discovered on the Chinese mainland so far, media reported citing a virologist.

Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the Pathogen Biology Department at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Monday that the results potentially indicate that the virus causing the latest outbreak in Beijing was imported from outside China.

Yang said the fact that cases in Beijing rocketed from zero to more than two hundred in just more than one week indicate that the virus is more contagious than the strain that spread in Wuhan, which Yang deemed maybe a reason for why the epidemic outside China still cannot not be controlled while most parts of China have not witnessed new domestic cases for months.

From June 11-21, Beijing reported 236 COVID-19 cases, all of whom have been hospitalized. Another 22 asymptomatic cases are under medical observation, Beijing health authorities said.

According to the Hubei provincial health authority, COVID-19 cases in Wuhan reached 270 as of January 20, nearly one month after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in the city on December 27.

Concerns mounted if the more contagious strain would increase the difficulty for Beijing authorities to curb the outbreak.

Experts explained that with the path of the virus causing the clustered infections at Xinfadi Market being clear along with the infection source, the outbreak in Beijing can be quickly controlled.

Beijing discovered nine new cases on Sunday, the first time the city’s new daily cases fell below single digits since June 12.

Some experts reached by the Global Times estimated that the outbreak could ease within the week due to Beijing’s strict measures and city-wide screening.

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Featured image: Volunteers from the Beijing Blue Sky Rescue Team spray disinfectant in Yuegezhuang wholesale market in Fengtai district, Beijing. The market is about 12 kilometers from the Xinfadi market, which is linked to the recent COVID-19 outbreak in the capital city. Photo: people.cn

According to a local information centre, in the past decade alone, Israel has demolished 200 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem leaving 440 Palestinians homeless. In the cruellest and most vicious way, the occupation forces obliged the owners of these houses to demolish their own properties or be charged for the Israelis to do it. The Israeli authorities issue demolition orders and impose huge fines — amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars — on Palestinian Jerusalemites who are already strained financially. It is an outrageous and under-reported injustice.

The same Israeli information centre reports that from January 2006 until 31 May 2020, Israel demolished at least 1,554 Palestinian residential units in the occupied West Bank (not including East Jerusalem), causing 6,780 people – including at least 3,403 minors — to lose their homes. The figures reported by the Palestinian Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission are much higher. It says that the occupying authorities demolished 6,114 Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the past decade. We should also consider the 19,000 homes destroyed by Israel during its three military offensives against the Palestinians in Gaza since 2008/9.

The Commission documented the demolition of 1,841 houses in the city of Jerusalem alone from 2009 until July last year. In a provocative manifestation of arrogance and sadism, apartheid Israel often uses the pretext that the buildings were built “without a permit”. Israeli courts rule routinely that the structures have violated a construction ban. In reality, it’s almost impossible for a Palestinian to obtain a building permit from the Israeli authorities.

There is tiny amount of land allocated for construction and the Israeli-run Jerusalem Municipality routinely denies Palestinian applications for such permits. As such, they find themselves forced to violate the unmanageable and crippling Israeli orders and build or extend their homes “illegally” without permits.

According to the Palestinian Land Research Centre, since the Nakba in 1948, the Israelis have wiped more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages off the face of the earth, and an estimated 170,000 homes have been demolished. During the Nakba, of course, around 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by armed terrorist groups. There are now an estimated seven million Palestinians in the global diaspora.

While Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes, it is building more and more on illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. This has continued even during the so-called “peace process”; the number of Israeli settlements on land occupied since 1967 doubled from 144 pre-Oslo to 515 in 2018. There are even more now.

Israel’s demolition policy is enforced within the context of a comprehensive strategy targeting the Palestinian presence, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The discernible target is to have large swathes of the West Bank emptied of the indigenous population and annexed to Israel.

The story doesn’t start with Donald Trump’s promises; it’s well-established in the doctrines espoused by Israeli politicians since the 1967 Allon Plan which proposed that Israel relinquish the main Palestinian population centres in the West Bank to Jordan while retaining land along the Jordan Valley under Israeli military control. In fact, Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, has always sought to get as much Palestinian land, with as few Palestinians on it, as possible.

The ultimate goal of the apartheid system in Israel is to keep Palestinian communities in Jerusalem besieged and marginalised in the hope that they will move out voluntarily. The areas thus emptied of their residents will be classified as “nature reserves” or “military zones” in which Palestinians are forbidden to live. Settlements will then appear, as such a restriction doesn’t apply to Jewish settlers.

While this has been happening for decades, there are reportedly new tactics to replace Jerusalemites. Palestinian middlemen apparently financed by Israeli settlers’ organisations and, shockingly, by individuals in the United Arab Emirates are trying to buy land for use by others. This was exposed early last year when the deputy head of the Islamic Movement in Israel accused agents from the UAE of attempting to buy a home near Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. Sheikh Kamal Al-Khatib accused the UAE’s Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of being behind this endeavour.

Although the attempt failed despite the owners being offered $20 million, an investigation showed that some of the Palestinians involved in buying houses in Jerusalem received funds from a company owned by Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah official who has lived in the UAE since 2011. Dahlan was expelled from Fatah by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and is now a serious political rival. He also works as a special adviser to Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed.

Back in 2019, Amnesty International stated clearly that,

“These demolitions are a flagrant violation of international law and part of a systematic pattern by the Israeli authorities to forcibly displace Palestinians in the occupied territories; such actions amount to war crimes.”

Moreover, the European Union reiterated that Israel’s demolition policy in occupied territory is illegal under international law. The Palestinian Authority should thus be acting to take Israel to the international courts for these violations.

The PA’s legal case can rely on documents dating back to the Ottoman era from the archive in Turkey which proves Palestinian ownership of land and buildings well before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This may not stop house demolitions and further ethnic cleansing, but at least it will serve to expose even further the brutal nature of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Palestinian refugees — like all other refugees anywhere in the world — have a legitimate right to return to their land; that’s the law. If Israel allowed them to return, then they would not be forced to build and extend homes “illegally” without permits. Nor would they be forced to demolish their own homes to avoid paying Israel to do so.

There is a clear breach of human rights and international law happening in front of our eyes. Palestinian Jerusalemites shouldn’t be left alone to face the Israeli bulldozers. We must stand in solidarity and do something about this massive injustice.

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Dr. Ahmed al-Burai is a lecturer at Istanbul Aydin University. He worked with BBC World Service Trust and LA Times in Gaza. He is currently based in Istanbul and mainly interested in the Middle East issues. His article appeared in MEMO.

Featured image is from TPIC

The International Atomic Energy Agency has once again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel, provoking a needless conflict with Iran

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The approval by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of a June 19 resolution calling on Iran to comply fully with agency demands for cooperation marks a new stage in the long-running Israeli campaign to isolate Iran over alleged covert nuclear weapons activities. 

The IAEA has demanded that Iran provide “clarifications” regarding “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities,” as well as access to two sites in question.

Those demands are based on alleged Iranian documents that Israeli intelligence supposedly stole from Iran in 2018. And as The Grayzone has reported, their authenticity is highly questionable, and their theft may have never occurred.

The Israeli pressure campaign gains way with US help

The latest phase of the Iran crisis erupted in June 2018, when the Israeli government informed the IAEA that its intelligence services had discovered a new “secret atomic warehouse” in the Turquzabad district of Tehran. In his September 2018 United Nations speech announcing the find, Netanyahu demanded that IAEA Director General, Yukio Amano “do the right thing. Go inspect this atomic warehouse, immediately, before the Iranians finish clearing it out.”

Amano pushed back publicly against the Israeli pressure in October 2018, however, asserting his independence from Netanyahu’s agenda. Under his watch, the IAEA also failed to accede to Israeli pressure to publicize documents from the “archive” they had provided.

When Brian Hook, a neoconservative operative serving as the State Department’s lead official on isolating Iran, visited Israel in November 2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s political director told him his government was furious with the IAEA for failing to take the documents seriously. Hook assured the Israelis that his administration would apply pressure on the IAEA to take action. He assigned the new U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA, a protege of John Bolton named Jackie Walcott, as his point person.

In January 2019, as an apparent result of the pressure campaign, the IAEA asked Iran to visit the warehouse that Netanyahu had identified and take environmental samples. Iran agreed, suggesting that Iranian officials did not believe the agency would find anything supporting the Israeli allegations.

Months later, laboratory results showed the presence of what the IAEA called “natural uranium particles of anthropogenic origin.” That meant that the particles had been subject to a process of uranium conversion but not enrichment. The most likely explanation for the finding was that that a part of retired equipment or other material that had been used in Iran’s fully-monitored uranium conversion program had ended up in that warehouse. 

The logical next step for the IAEA at that point would have been to have to request visits to sites where Iran’s declared conversion program has operated so the results could be compared with the those of the samples found at the warehouse. That was what precisely Iran proposed to the Agency in January 2020. The IAEA did carry out the sampling, but the laboratory tests on those samples are not yet available.

While the IAEA stalled on requesting environmental samples from the declared uranium conversion sites for several months, when it would have made the most sense to do so, the Israeli government exploited the lab results to resume its political offensive against Iran. With backing from the US, they pushed a dubious argument that particles of natural uranium confirmed their claim that Iran had run an undeclared program to process natural uranium for use in covert nuclear weapons-related testing.

Israel enhances its position in the IAEA

The Israeli lobbying coincided with the first phase of a transition within the IAEA that would ultimately advance their position. Amano underwent an unspecified medical procedure in September 2018, grew steadily weaker with a serious illness and died on July 2, 2019. 

Before his physical decline, Amano had announced plans to step down by March 2020, touching off a competition between senior IAEA officials for election to the Director General position. US and Israeli influence was immediately enhanced by the race, because any interested candidate required substantial U.S. support to for the requisite votes among the agency’s board of directors.

The Israelis had focused IAEA’s attention on an alleged Iranian overt conversion program the very beginning.  Drawn from a covert program that took place from 2000 to 2003, the collection of supposedly purloined documents included a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting uranium ore into a form of uranium that could be enriched. 

But in its December 2015 “Final Assessment” of questions of “possible military dimensions,” the IAEA had concluded that the process shown in the document “was technically flawed and of low quality in comparison to what was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle.” In other words, it wasn’t taken very seriously.

Netanyahu’s new “Iranian Nuclear Archive” included what was purported to be a May 2003 letter from the “project manager” of the “Health and Safety Group” for that same alleged covert nuclear weapons program.  The letter described a large covert uranium conversion plant and three plant designs.  But the letter bore no marking that connected it with any Iranian government entity — only a crudely drawn symbol that could have been drawn by anyone.

What’s more, nothing about the facility designs supported the documents’ authenticity, especially considering a senior Israeli intelligence official’s acknowledgment to pro-Israel lobbyist David Albright that no such plant was ever built. Nevertheless, the Israelis continued to deploy those dubious documents to hammer home their point.

The IAEA caves to Israel and the US

The documents and photos the Israelis pushed with U.S. support eventually prompted the IAEA to cave in to their demands. The agency sent three letters to Iran on July 5, August 9 and August 21, 2019 based entirely on the Israeli claims about three “undeclared sites.”  In the missives, the IAEA claimed to have “detailed information” about what it called “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities” at each of site. It demanded “clarifications” in each case.

According to the IAEA, the first letter related to the “possible presence” between 2002 and 2003 of a natural uranium metal disc which it said “may not have been included in Iran’s declarations.” The letter was obviously referring to Lavisan-Shian in Tehran, when it said the site “underwent extensive sanitation and leveling in 2003 and 2004.” At the time, the Agency decided there was no point in visiting it.

The U.S. and Israel have always argued that Iran had completely removed the topsoil at the site in order to avoid detection by environmental sampling of some kind of nuclear-related work at the site. But that claim was false. In fact, the buildings belonging to the military contractor of Lavisan-Shian had been torn down, but topsoil remained.

The IAEA did undertake environmental sampling of the site in June 2004, acknowledging that the vegetation and soil samples collected at Lavisan-Shian revealed no evidence of nuclear material. Reuters reported at the time that an IAEA official had said that “on-site inspections of Lavizan produced no proof that any soil had been removed at all.”

In its July 5 letter, the IAEA demanded to know whether an undeclared natural uranium metal disc had been present at the site and, if so, where it was located. That question was clearly based on a slide in the Israeli collection that Albright’s organization has described as summarizing how to make uranium deuteride, which has been used to create a neutral initiator for a nuclear explosion, with uranium metal chips and deuterium gas.

The second site, which has not been otherwise identified, “may have been used for the processing and conversion of uranium ore including fluorination in 2003,” according to the IAEA letter. It said the site “underwent significant changes in 2004, including the demolition of most buildings,” as though that constituted evidence of wrongdoing.

The claim made little sense given that in April 2003, Iran had formally declared to the IAEA that it was opening lines at its Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center for production of natural uranium metal for use in the production of shielding material.

At the third site, the IAEA stated, “outdoor conventional explosive testing may have taken place in 2003” on “shielding” for use with “neutron detectors.”  As part of the rationale for demanding clarification,” the agency cited supposed efforts beginning in July 2019 to “sanitize part of the location.” This language was designed to imply that evidence of wrongdoing had been removed from the Iranian site.

We know that the site in question was near Abadeh, because Netanyahu showed satellite photos of the Abadeh site in June 2019 and again in late July of this year, when a set of buildings had been removed by the latter date. Netanyahu bragged that he was revealing “yet another secret nuclear site…exposed in the archives.” However, IAEA wording suggested its letter was prompted not by any concrete evidence of nuclear activity at the Abadeh site, but by some evidence of the destruction of those buildings.

The IAEA thus chose the three sites based on nothing more than the fact that buildings were razed, and thanks to pressure applied by the Israelis and the the United States. The notion that Iran “may have” used and stored undeclared nuclear material at undeclared site, moreover, was based solely on unvetted Israeli documents, contrary to the IAEA claim of “extensive and rigorous corroboration process.”

In provoking a needless crisis over obscure hypotheticals, the IAEA has once again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel – just as it did during the Bush and Obama administrations. But this time the IAEA’s highly politicized campaign is serving the Israeli aim of making it political impossible for the next administration to return to the Iran nuclear deal.

On June 8, Iran’s Permanent Mission the IAEA demanded that any request for clarification under the Additional Protocol should be based on “authenticated information” and expressed “concern” over attempts to “reopen outstanding issues” that had been closed in 2015. Iran views the new IAEA exercise as yet another salient of the U.S.-Israeli “Maximum Pressure” strategy. It has therefore insisted the IAEA cease its role as a de facto prosecutor for the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

Nobody should have the false expectation that the virtual Foreign Minister’s meeting between the Russian, Chinese, and Indian dignitaries, nor the presence of the latter two’s Defense Ministers in Moscow this week to attend the delayed Victory Day celebration there, will see Russia’s globally renowned and highly skilled diplomats broker peace between their country’s strategic partners since the best that they can do is “balance” its response to the Himalayan Crisis in order to ensure that the Eurasian Great Power isn’t perceived as taking either of their sides.

In a sign that the Federal Reserve is growing increasingly desperate to jump-start the economy, the Fed’s Secondary Market Credit Facility has begun purchasing individual corporate bonds. The Secondary Market Credit Facility was created by Congress as part of a coronavirus stimulus bill to purchase as much as 750 billion dollars of corporate credit. Until last week, the Secondary Market Credit Facility had limited its purchases to exchange-traded funds, which are bundled groups of stocks or bonds.

The bond purchasing initiative, like all Fed initiatives, will fail to produce long-term prosperity. These purchases distort the economy by increasing the money supply and thus lowering interest rates, which are the price of money. In this case, the Fed’s purchase of individual corporate bonds enables select corporations to pursue projects for which they could not otherwise have obtained funding. This distorts signals sent by the market, making these companies seem like better investments than they actually are and thus allowing these companies to attract more private investment. This will cause these companies to experience a Fed-created bubble. Like all Fed-created bubbles, the corporate bond bubble will eventually burst, causing businesses to collapse, investors to lose their money (unless they receive a government bailout), and workers to lose their jobs.

Under the law creating the lending facilities, the Fed does not have to reveal the purchases made by the new facilities. Instead of allowing the Fed to hide this information, Congress should immediately pass the Audit the Fed bill so people can know whether a company is flush with cash because private investors determined it is a sound investment or because the Fed chose to “invest” in its bonds.

The Fed could, and likely will, use this bond buying program to advance political goals. The Fed could fulfill Chairman Jerome Powell’s stated desire to do something about climate change by supporting “green energy” companies. The Fed could also use its power to reward businesses that, for example, support politically correct causes, refuse to sell guns, require their employees and customers to wear masks, or promote unquestioning obedience to the warfare state.

Another of the new lending facilities is charged with purchasing the bonds of cash-strapped state and local governments. This could allow the Fed to influence the policies of these governments. It is not wise to reward spendthrift politicians with a federal bailout — whether through Congress or through the Fed.

With lending facilities providing to the Federal Reserve the ability to give money directly to businesses and governments, the Fed is now just one step away from implementing Ben Bernanke’s infamous suggestion that, if all else fails, the Fed can drop money from a helicopter. These interventions will not save the economy. Instead, they will make the inevitable crash more painful. The next crash can bring about the end of the fiat monetary system. The question is not if the current monetary system ends, but when. The only way Congress can avoid the Fed causing another great depression is to begin transitioning to a free-market monetary system by auditing, then ending, the Fed.

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Mexico and US are two countries that have a curious political history, alternating in long periods of rivalry and Mexican subordination. In fact, Mexico was the first country to suffer the consequences of American expansionist ideology, both for its policy of expanding westward and for the old “Monroe doctrine”, which aimed to consolidate a supremacy of Washington on the American continent. However, what few people realize is that these expansionist policies on the continent are still active in many areas, such as the economic one.

The economic war that Trump is waging against Venezuela is well known. The American government has tried in every way to overthrow Nicolás Maduro in recent years, financing an attempt of colorful revolution, appointing Maduro as an international criminal for drug trafficking (without any evidence), sending Colombian mercenaries to invade the country by the coast and now imposing a severe economic blockade, aiming to overthrow the regime by a suffocation tactic. Washington has entered a global economic and tariff war where any company, individual or state that maintains economic relations with Venezuela is subject to sanctions.

Recently, some Mexican companies adopted an unusual method to maintain their economic ties with the South American country: to abolish the money of the negotiations and to adopt an exchange system. Under this method, these companies received millions of barrels of oil from Venezuela and delivered tons of food in exchange. The measure was positive to alleviate the economic and supply crisis imposed by the blockade, which severely undermines the country’s food security. This was the case of the prominent Mexican companies Libre Abordo S.A and Schlager Business Group, which signed agreements with the Venezuelan government establishing an exchange of millions of barrels of oil daily for tons of food – mainly corn and derivatives – and water. In theory, these negotiations would be excluded from sanctions because they do not involve real money, but this was not the American interpretation.

The US accuses Mexican companies of reselling Venezuelan oil to other companies, mainly Asian ones. The question, however, remains: in this resale, what would be the economic advantage for Venezuela, which would be receiving only food? This does not seem to matter to Washington, which has not hesitated to impose severe sanctions on Mexican companies. The pressure, finally, fell on the Mexican State itself, who was left with the decision to adhere or not to the American measures. Just two days after Washington announced the sanctions, Mexican financial authorities chose to adhere to American policy. Santiago Nieto, head of the Mexican Financial Intelligence Unit, announced the freezing of bank accounts for all Mexican companies and citizens sanctioned by the United States.

The Mexican decision directly affects Mexican citizens and companies, who are already suffering international sanctions outside their country and will now have to deal with the blockade by their own State. In addition to the aforementioned companies, Mexican citizens Verónica Esparza Garcia, Olga María Zepeda Esparza and Joaquín Leal Jiménez, who maintained individual economic relations with the South American country, are included in the sanctioned list. All those cited in the list provided by the US Treasury Department have maintained relations with Venezuela since the end of last year, however, the international devaluation of Venezuelan oil affected severely the supply of food, creating instability in the negotiations. Mexican companies alleged that only 500 tankers with drinking water have been sent to Venezuela, but the Mexican State still supports the US in punishing its own citizens.

However, we should analyze the measures taken by the Mexican State taking into account the history of the country’s current government. Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador came to power in 2018 amid great popular pressure against neoliberal policies that were destroying the country. The president took the position of rebuilding Mexico and started a crusade against neoliberalism, saying repeatedly that he would start a new age of Mexican politics, in which the neoliberal model would be completely rejected. In fact, the president has managed to impose successful economic policies that have brought improvements to the people of his country, however, he is still a long way from something like “a new political era for Mexico” – as he had promised.

The government has been extremely ineffective in dealing with the growth of the new coronavirus pandemic in Mexico. The speed of the spread of the infection is truly impressive, with the country currently occupying the seventh position in the ranking of countries with the highest number of deaths. The country already counts more than 21 thousand deaths and more than 180 thousand cases, having registered impressive records of daily cases, having already passed 5,300 new cases in 24 hours. Even so, President Obrador maintains a minimalist stance, having for a long time denied the gravity of the situation, adhering to the speech promoted by the American government.

In fact, there is no point in announcing a crusade against a flawed economic model and maintaining an international policy of subordination to another country and failing to protect the population against a deadly virus. The attitude of adhering to any measure imposed by the American State departments while the population dies infected is extremely inadequate and reveals a serious error regarding the Mexican government’s priorities. The next step to be taken by Obrador is precisely to realize that no economic measure is sufficient in itself and depends substantially on the guarantee of national sovereignty.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from dreamstime via InfoBrics

An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I can’t breathe.”

There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only minor attention – even in Israel.

An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds like an aberration – a peculiar case of mistaken identity – quite unlike an established pattern of police violence against poor black communities in the US. But that impression would be wrong.

The man attacked in Jerusalem was no ordinary Israeli diplomat. He was Bedouin, from Israel’s large Palestinian minority. One fifth of the population, this minority enjoys a very inferior form of Israeli citizenship.

Ishmael Khaldi’s exceptional success in becoming a diplomat, as well as his all-too-familiar experience as a Palestinian of abuse at the hands of the security services, exemplify the paradoxes of what amounts to Israel’s hybrid version of apartheid.

Khaldi and another 1.8 million Palestinian citizens are descended from the few Palestinians who survived a wave of expulsions in 1948 as a Jewish state was declared on the ruins of their homeland.

Israel continues to view these Palestinians – its non-Jewish citizens – as a subversive element that needs to be controlled and subdued through measures reminiscent of the old South Africa. But at the same time, Israel is desperate to portray itself as a western-style democracy.

So strangely, the Palestinian minority has found itself treated both as second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality. That has resulted in two contradictory faces.

On one side, Israel segregates Jewish and Palestinian citizens, confining the latter to a handful of tightly ghettoised communities on a tiny fraction of the country’s territory. To prevent mixing and miscegenation, it strictly separates schools for Jewish and Palestinian children. The policy has been so successful that inter-marriage is all but non-existent. In a rare survey, the Central Bureau of Statistics found 19 such marriages took place in 2011.

The economy is largely segregated too.

Most Palestinian citizens are barred from Israel’s security industries and anything related to the occupation. State utilities, from the ports to the water, telecoms and electricity industries, are largely free of Palestinian citizens.

Job opportunities are concentrated instead in low-paying service industries and casual labour. Two thirds of Palestinian children in Israel live below the poverty line, compared to one fifth of Jewish children.

This ugly face is carefully hidden from outsiders.

On the other side, Israel loudly celebrates the right of Palestinian citizens to vote – an easy concession given that Israel engineered an overwhelming Jewish majority in 1948 by forcing most Palestinians into exile. It trumpets exceptional “Arab success stories”, glossing over the deeper truths they contain.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been excitedly promoting the fact that one fifth of its doctors are Palestinian citizens – matching their proportion of the population. But in truth, the health sector is the one major sphere of life in Israel where segregation is not the norm. The brightest Palestinian students gravitate towards medicine because at least there the obstacles to success can be surmounted.

Compare that to higher education, where Palestinian citizens fill much less than one per cent of senior academic posts. The first Muslim judge, Khaled Kaboub, was appointed to the Supreme Court only two years ago – 70 years after Israel’s founding. Gamal Hakroosh became Israel’s first Muslim deputy police commissioner as recently as 2016; his role was restricted, of course, to handling policing in Palestinian communities.

Khaldi, the diplomat assaulted in Jerusalem, fits this mould. Raised in the village of Khawaled in the Galilee, his family was denied water, electricity and building permits. His home was a tent, where he studied by gaslight. Many tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in similar conditions.

Undoubtedly, the talented Khaldi overcame many hurdles to win a coveted place at university. He then served in the paramilitary border police, notorious for abusing Palestinians in the occupied territories.

He was marked out early on as a reliable advocate for Israel by an unusual combination of traits: his intelligence and determination; a steely refusal to be ground down by racism and discrimination; a pliable ethical code that condoned the oppression of fellow Palestinians; and blind deference to a Jewish state whose very definition excluded him.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry put him on a fast track, soon sending him to San Francisco and London. There his job was to fight the international campaign to boycott Israel, modelled on a similar one targeting apartheid South Africa, citing his own story as proof that in Israel anyone can succeed.

But in reality, Khaldi is an exception, and one cynically exploited to disprove the rule. Maybe that point occurred to him as he was being choked inside Jerusalem’s central bus station after he questioned a guard’s behaviour.

After all, everyone in Israel understands that Palestinian citizens – even the odd professor or legislator – are racially profiled and treated as an enemy. Stories of their physical or verbal abuse are unremarkable. Khaldi’s assault stands out only because he has proved himself such a compliant servant of a system designed to marginalise the community he belongs to.

This month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself chose to tear off the prettified, diplomatic mask represented by Khaldi. He appointed a new ambassador to the UK.

Tzipi Hotovely, a Jewish supremacist and Islamophobe, supports Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the takeover of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She is part of a new wave of entirely undiplomatic envoys being sent to foreign capitals.

Hotovely cares much less about Israel’s image than about making all the “Land of Israel”, including the occupied Palestinian territories, exclusively Jewish.

Her appointment signals progress of a kind. Diplomats such as herself may finally help people abroad understand why Khaldi, her obliging fellow diplomat, is being assaulted back home.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

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

Featured image is from Ishmael Khaldi

Another attempt to resolve the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over a large Chinese-funded hydroelectric dam built on the Nile River has failed. This has increased tensions over control of the most important water source in the region, especially for Egypt that has relied on the Nile for thousands of years.

Cairo sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council requesting it to intervene in the dispute over the Great Renaissance Dam of Ethiopia (GERD). A hasty filling of the dam in Ethiopia threatens food and agriculture in Egypt and Sudan, and for this reason Cairo wants the UN Security Council to lend a hand in tripartite negotiations.

In its letter, Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs activated Article 35 of the UN Charter, which allows member states to warn the international entity of any crisis that threatens peace and security. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry decided to appeal to the UN after tripartite negotiations stalled due to Ethiopia’s “non-cooperative behavior.” The GERD, that Ethiopia has been working on since 2011, is to provide electricity for not only the whole country, but also its neighbors. The main problem Egypt and Sudan have with the Ethiopian project is the timeline to fill up the $4.8 billion dam with water.

Source: InfoBrics

Leaders in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa insist on continuing to fill the GERD unilaterally and without consideration how it will affect waterflows in Sudan and Egypt, according to Cairo. Ethiopia’s activities would be a violation of the Declaration of Principles that is supposed to prevent Addis Ababa from taking any action that would detriment the interests of Egypt and Sudan.

Egypt proposes that the dam should be filled gradually over a 10-year period, something that Ethiopia rejects as it wants to fill the dam in only three years. As a result of this rush, Egypt and Sudan may run out of 25 billion cubic meters of water a year that could lead to a severe drought and crop destruction.

Before Cairo appealed to the UN Security Council, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew warned on Friday that if his country were forced to “wait for others’ blessing” then “the dam may remain idle for years.” He added that “we want to make it clear that Ethiopia will not beg Egypt and Sudan to use its own water resource for its development.”

This raises the question on whether Cairo and Addis Ababa are on the brink of a war over water.

“We will never allow any country to starve us, if Ethiopia is prudent, we, the Egyptian people, will be the first to call for war,” Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire with nearly 7 million followers on Twitter, wrote in a tweet. This comment comes as Egypt has consistently said for many years that it is willing to airstrike the dam if drought is imminent because the dam is not filled up over a 10-year period. Egypt is concerned that once the dam’s locks begin controlling the flow of the Nile, Ethiopia may not release water in times of drought because it needs it for itself. Ethiopia says once the dam is filled, it will not affect the water supply to other countries.

In 2015, the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan agreed to appoint a neutral consultant to assess the impact the dam would have on these countries. Ethiopia should have carried out this consultation before the construction of the GERD began. Egyptian officials believe this reluctance from Ethiopia was due to the country seeking to establish “hydro-hegemony” in the region. This suspicion is heightened because of the Gibe III Ethiopian dam on the Omo River that was built without prior cross-border consultation with Kenya. In 2018, the UN warned that Gibe III was taking water from Lake Turkana in Kenya and threatening national parks that are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The GERD, which will generate up to 15.7 gigawatts of electricity a year, represents a matter of national survival for Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. Egypt obtains 97% of its water from the Nile, while for Ethiopia the dam is vital because it would increase energy production by 150% at a time when more than half of its population does not have access to electricity.

Although the Nile is more than 2,480 kilometers long, its flow is low and it transports only 1.4% of the water that the Amazon is capable of, or one sixth of that of the Mississippi River in North America, and less than half of the Danube. Furthermore, its volume is expected to be further reduced by climate change, making it critical for Egypt and its 100 million people for their very survival. It is for this reason that Cairo will exhaust every diplomatic effort possible, but will likely take military action if Egypt suffers a drought as a result of the dam.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.