Global Research

Viewing the COVID-19 pandemic as a purely exogenous shock, Canadian economists and policymakers have tended to predict a quick return to economic growth once health restrictions are lifted. As an account of current events, this turns a blind eye to the uneven forms of adjustment produced by years of neoliberal cutbacks and how these both make a quick recovery unlikely and impose the burden of loss on care workers, racialized populations, and the working class more generally. Moreover, such framing of events warns of a new age of hyper-austerity when the health crisis abates, as governments either use debt to justify rollbacks or passively embrace financial discipline. The further erosion of public planning and investment this would entail makes avoiding another lost decade and addressing the environmental crisis ever more difficult to imagine. And yet, while many progressive commentators have called out these contradictions, not enough has been done to rethink the operation of key neoliberal institutions and put forward practical reforms that ultimately challenge their class constitution.

This reflects above all in the reluctance to see the Bank of Canada (BoC) as anything more than a neutral arbiter of the nation’s financial and monetary stability. Despite the bank’s obvious economic power and the key role it continues to play backstopping fiscal intervention during the pandemic, there has been very limited debate about its evolving responsibilities and the opportunities and limits these pose for democratic reform and just transition. At work here is the assumption that the bank is a relatively static and purely technocratic institution with limited political capabilities. Starting from this position, we can be easily fooled into ignoring the bank’s institutional adaptability and political saliency, and into thinking it can be magically reborn as a progressive institution.

Against Neutrality  The Bank of Canada from 1938 to 2020

The Bank of Canada has important monetary and financial system responsibilities and “far-reaching powers” that can “wield a heavy (if indirect) influence on people’s day-to-day lives,” but it lacks the democratic accountability of other policy institutions (Berg 2018: 2). The bank’s “independence” means that the government sets its basic priorities, but does not interfere in day-to-day operations. As a result, the bank’s six-member Governing Council essentially controls the decision-making process.¹ Particularly important is that the Bank of Canada Act, the statute governing the bank’s operations, provides a wide interpretation of its central authorities: the bank is responsible for regulating currency and credit in a way that “protects the external value of the national monetary unit” and “promotes the economic and financial welfare of Canada.”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The flexibility provided by the Bank of Canada Act has been a key source of the BoC’s organizational plasticity, since it provides space for institutional learning and trial-and-error experimentation, and allows adaptation to changing policy ideas as well as wider economic shifts. While there are no clear dividing lines, we can separate the bank’s development following nationalization in 1938 into three distinct periods. From 1938 to 1974, the bank tended to accommodate fiscal policy expansion by purchasing a relatively large share of government treasury bonds (Ryan 2018).² This prevented private financial markets from disciplining public borrowing through high interest rates, and allowed the government to fund its obligations cheaply, thereby setting the conditions for the development of social citizenship rights through the post-war expansion. During this period, the bank associated inflation with variations in aggregate demand and often utilized the Philips curve, which predicted an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, to make policy decisions: “the predominant view… was that a focus on the demand side of the economy was entirely appropriate for understanding aggregate fluctuations and changes in inflation” (Ragan 2011; Crow 2009).

This changed following 1974 amid the development of new economic ideologies and class relations, which aimed to liberate sections of the economy from government intervention and saw Keynesian demand policies as a barrier to free market prosperity. The rise of a new international monetary framework stressing the removal of post-war financial and monetary constraints was essential as well, since it established new broad constraints on the bank’s actions. Like other central banks, the BoC gradually adopted a quantity theory approach to inflation and began targeting money supply growth. As the bank forced governments to fund debt through private channels and no longer passively absorbed treasuries by issuing money, government debt rapidly outpaced real output growth (Protopapadakis and Siegal 1986).

While the bank stopped monetary targeting in 1982, marking the end of monetarist experimentation, this helped set the stage for its commitment to price stability in 1988 and the development of its inflation targeting regime three years later. The period from 1975 to 2007 thus marked the bank’s so-called “modernization,” characterized by its acceptance of orthodox economic theory and commitment to maintaining inflation at or near two per cent.³ More significant than these ideational and policy commitments were the economic relations they reflected and supported. At its core, this period signified a turning point in the bank’s approach to labour, as its low inflation target insured a degree of “slack” in the economy and a level of unemployment that held wages relatively stagnant.

The period following 2007 heralded another qualitative shift in the bank’s institutional development, as the financial crisis shifted the terms of monetary intervention and exposed major contradictions in the bank’s inflation agenda. Indeed, as interest rates fell to nearly zero in 2009 and remained persistently low in the post-crisis period, deflation now emerged as a key threat to financial stability, and the bank’s conventional policy tools no longer seemed up to the task of steering the economy. This was reinforced by the performance of global financial markets, which had proven far more volatility and far less rational than the bank anticipated. In this context, the bank searched for new ways to influence market outcomes, closely following the innovative policies developed elsewhere, and modified the terms of its inflation targeting approach by making it more “flexible” and “symmetrical.”⁴ This basically softened its low inflation objective by accepting a longer inflation targeting horizon⁵ and expressing equal concern about the inflation rate falling below two per cent.

But the major change took shape in 2016 when the bank renewed its inflation targets and added crisis-era innovations developed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, such as large-scale asset purchases and funding for credit, into its policy toolkit. As much as these programs fit within the bank’s lender-of-last-resort responsibilities, this move toward unconventional policy involved the development of new institutional capacities and a high degree of policy learning. More importantly, although such programs were forward-looking, they involved an adjustment in the bank’s relationship to the financial system and “a giant increase in [its] power and responsibility”: behind the new modes of interaction with key financial institutions and ways of transmitting liquidity these measures entailed, stood a greater preoccupation with the stability of the financial system and a wider view of its role in the economy (Tooze 2020).

Thus, while the transformation of the bank’s policy tools and goals over the past decades is more complicated than can be described here, we can see it as both cautiously innovative and far-reaching. The bank adapted to changing circumstances and economic power relations from the 1970s through to the present, developing new institutional capacities to discipline labour and manage increasingly complex financial processes, whereby it greatly increased its economic influence and altered the terms of its relationship to private and public financial markets. Whether deliberately or not, this established the essential conditions for the financialization of Canadian capitalism, leading public policies “to become more accommodating to both domestic and foreign investment” (Davis and Kim 2015: 217; Stockhammer 2004).

Putting aside these wide-ranging impacts, what is primarily notable about the bank’s most recent policy shifts is that they have important distributive consequences. The bank trivializes the impact of its policies when it measures them solely in terms of overall economic performance and dismisses their wider political implications. According to the BoC’s own analysis, in fact, low inflation targets favour the interests of lenders over borrowers (Bank of Canada 2016: 15).⁶ This is consistent with a wider body of political science research which ties inflation targeting to growing inequality and the declining power of unions and labour organizations during the neoliberal period (Kirshner 2001, Blyth; Panitch and Gindin 2012). The large-scale asset program also shows clearly the distributive consequences and non-neutrality of central bank policy. This strategy aims to push investment out along the risk curve by “encouraging” the acquisition of a broad range of financial products and therefore attempts to improve financial conditions by boosting asset values and reducing longer-term interest rates (Bank of Canada 2015: 2). Such “rebalancing” of private portfolios increases access to credit while exacerbating existing patterns of wealth inequality, as asset inflation disproportionally favours those with large concentrations of financial wealth (Bank of Canada 2015: 2; Montecino and Epstein 2015).

All this cautions against associating the political independence of central bank policy with the political neutrality of its policy decisions and speaks to how the bank’s evolution under neoliberalism reflects the “institutional victory” of “certain groups and coalitions over others” (Kirshner 2001: 58; Blyth 2016). Moreover, we can see the Bank of Canada faces real constraints stemming from the international monetary system that impose clear limits on policy development: privatized currency markets and the global mobility of capital link Canada’s economic well-being to financial and monetary stability and to the bank’s credibility in fighting inflation. Yet neither these constraints, nor its anti-democratic orientation, suggest that the bank has reached the end of its history or is incapable of adjusting to new conditions.

Austerity and Public Banking

On April 1, the Bank of Canada began a major bond-buying program, following the tracks of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world. Reminiscent of the bank’s post-war investment strategy, this program provides at least $5-billion per week (and certainly upwards of $200-billion in cumulative total, depending on how long the program lasts) to support the federal government’s recent spending plans. On top of this, it has increased the share of treasury bills it acquires at primary auctions to 40% and created new purchase programs to support provincial and corporate debt markets.⁷ Yet while the bank has made it easier for governments to fund deficits and lowered the cost of debt, there is a major contradiction in its rescue strategy: whereas the thrust of the bank’s policies have aimed at supporting credit conditions in the near term, the deficits governments accumulate will have long-term political implications, especially since the additional debt load will not build new productive capacity. Making matters worse, the bank has not committed to any form of yield curve control to ensure that government funding costs remain low in the years following the crisis, nor provided forward guidance regarding provincial debt markets, despite provinces having broad responsibility for health, education, and social services.⁸ This is consistent with the actions of other central banks who have framed similar interventions as “temporary short-term source[s] of additional funding” and explicitly rejected using monetary financing in the long-term (Elliot 2020; Bailey 2020).⁹

As the health crisis abates, then, Canadian governments will be forced to contend with unprecedented budget shortfalls and the need to use private markets as their main source of financing. Such conditions are likely to produce a new age of hyper-austerity: even if public debt markets are vastly different following the pandemic, governments will face pressure to reduce spending and to limit debt and will encounter the same conservative forces and logics that proudly restrained public investment following 2008 (Foroohar 2020). Preventing this is no doubt a top priority, not least because such policies would further erode the public planning capacities which allow governments to coordinate the distribution of labour and scare resources to strategically important sectors of the economy, and address pressing community and environmental needs. But this is not simply about adjusting the terms of fiscal policy by demanding governments accept budgetary shortfalls or raise the top income tax rate. Such demands are necessary but not sufficient, for they fail to address the discipline imposed on governments by private debt holders in the form of higher interest rates or investment strikes, and how even the threat of such outcomes can be mobilized to reduce the size and scope of government intervention in the economy.

Here we must acknowledge that while there is no simple solution to these underlying pressures in the near-term, the Bank of Canada has unique institutional capacities that can limit financial discipline and pre-emptively de-rail austerity measures. Utilizing these would require more innovative thinking and unconventional policies that further reimagine the bank’s relationship to private and public markets. More broadly, it would require social mobilization aimed at dislodging the bank from its neoliberal proclivities, and the articulation of specific demands regarding the bank’s role in supporting public investment that reset the terms of its cautious approach to policy innovation. These demands must acknowledge the constraints imposed by capital liberalization and financial interconnectedness, while offering the ability to develop democratic planning capacities that set the conditions for additional change in the future.

A logical starting point is calling for the bank to provide more comprehensive support to provincial and subnational governments, given they face unheard-of budget shortfalls and lack the revenue tools available to the national government. As Harold Chorney once suggested, no doubt aware it was one of the goals in creating the Bank of Canada, this might entail “allowing the provinces access to their relative share of the central bank’s debt acquisition capacity” (Chorney 1999:199). A more ambitious strategy involves the development of a new public bank, backstopped, but independent from, the BoC, that aims to support public investment and give governments access to cheap credit over the long-term.¹⁰ This would transform debt into a public asset while addressing two central constraints facing the BoC. First, such a bank could be democratically organized, with local branches across the country linked to regional and national offices capable of coordinating decisions and ensuring investment is efficiently allocated to projects Canadian’s truly prioritize. Second, it would avoid the potential or perceived limits on monetary financing created by the international monetary system and by the bank’s need to maintain credibility.

Needless to say, a public investment bank of this nature could play a key role in the decarbonization of the economy and in addressing the environmental crisis more generally, especially since it could engage in “loss making operations” as well as “highly subsidized programme lending” (Marois and Gungen 2019). It could also invest in equities with the aim of influencing corporate governance strategies, and support other kinds of publicly mandated investment in strategic industries. Finally, it would create space for democratic control over investment and allow some escape from the power relations within private debt markets, which give lenders control over the terms of public borrowing.

Thus, even if the return of austerity politics following the crisis is still far from certain, it is important to underscore the Bank of Canada’s adaptability and non-neutrality, and remind ourselves of the progressive opportunities this institution offers, even within the constraints imposed by neoliberal globalization. As the COVID-19 crisis has provided an x-ray of the precarious and vulnerable working conditions underpinning economic growth and exposed the vast socio-economic fault lines produced by years of cutbacks and market-friendly policies, it has provided powerful evidence about the feasibility of innovative spending programs and put central banks “in the political crosshairs” (Politi 2020). Taking the opportunity to rethink the bank’s role in the economy and the still one-sided view of its political and institutional capabilities, suggests extending its responsibilities may in fact push us closer to addressing today’s overlapping political, economic, and health crises.

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

This article was adapted from an earlier essay published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives(CCPA).

Scott M. Aquanno is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ontario Tech University. He has published widely on monetary policy development and the political economy of finance and globalization.

Sources

• Bailey, A. (2020) “Andrew Bailey: Bank of England is not doing monetary financing,” Financial Times, April 5.
• Bank of Canada (2015) “Framework for Conducting Monetary Policy at Low Interest Rates,” Bank of Canada, December.
• Bank of Canada (2016) “Renewal of the Inflation Control Target,” Bank of Canada, October 24.
• Berg, R. van der. (2018) “Balancing the Independence and Accountability of the Bank of Canada,” Library of Parliament, November 23.
• Blyth, M. (2016) “Global Trumpism: Why Trump’s Victory was 30 Years in the Making and Why It Wont Stop Here,” Foreign Affairs, November 15.
• Braunstein, E. and J. Heintz (2008) “Gender bias and central bank policy: employment and inflation reduction,” International Review of Applied Economics, 22(2).
• Crow, J. (2009) ‘Canada’s Difficult Experience in Reducing Inflation: Cautionary Lessons. Commentary 299, Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute.
• Davis, G. and S. Kim (2015) Financialization of the Economy, Annual Review of Sociology, 41: 203-221.
• Elliott, L. (2020) “Bank of England to finance UK government Covid-19 crisis spending,” The Guardian, April 9.
• FMC (2020) “Protecting vital municipal services: Urgent federal recommendations to address the financial crisis in our cities and communities due to COVID-19,” Federation of Canadian Municipalities, April 23.
• Foroohar, R. (2020) “We are entering a new age of American austerity,” Financial Times, April 19.
• Kirshner, J. (2001) “The Political Economy of Low Inflation,” Journal of Economic Surveys, 15(1): 41-70.
• Marois, T and A.R. Gungen (2019) “A US green investment bank for all: Democratized finance for a just transition,” The Next System Project, September 19.
• Montecino, J.A and Gerald Epstein (2015) “Did Quantitative Easing Increase Income Inequality,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper 28.
• Panitch, L. and S. Gindin (2012) The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, New York: Verso.
• Politi, J. (2020) “Fed’s bailout role could put it in political crosshairs,” Financial Times, April 24.
• Protopapadakis, A. and J.J. Siegel (1986) “Are Government Deficits Monetized? Some International Evidence,” Business Review: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, November/December.
• Ragan, C. (2011) “The Evolution of Canadian Monetary Policy: Successful Ideas Through Natural Selection,” eds. Gorbet, F. and A. Sharpe, in New Directions for Intelligent Government in Canada, Ottawa: Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
• Ryan, J. (2018) “The Bank of Canada Should be Reinstated to its Original Mandated Purposes,” Canadian Dimension, March 21.
• Stockhammer, E. (2004) “Financialization and the slowdown of accumulation,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 28(5): 719-741.
• Thiessen, G. (2000) “Can a Bank Change? The Evolution of Monetary Policy at the Bank of Canada 1935-2000, lecture given to the Faculty of Social Science University of Western Ontario, October 17.
• Tooze, A. (2000) “The Death of the Central Bank Myth,” Foreign Policy, May 13.

Notes

1. The Bank of Canada is a crown corporation owned by the national government. However, it operates at arm’s length and is relatively insulated from political intervention. The Minister of Finance appoints the members of the bank’s Board of Directors and is represented on the board by the Deputy Minister of Finance (as a non-voting member). Subject to the approval of Cabinet, the board selects the bank’s Governing Council, which “sets monetary policy and strategic direction” (Berg 2018: 3). While Cabinet also has the power to dismiss the bank’s directors and governors, this cannot be done for political reasons.
2. This period could be further divided. For example, the bank’s activities from 1938 to 1950 were more focused on keeping interest rates low and shaped by the currency restrictions established by the Bretton Woods system in 1944. The government of Canada moved to a flexible exchange rate system in 1950 and removed important controls on foreign investment and foreign exchange (Thiessen 2000).
3. The bank also established a “control range of 1 to 3 per cent around this target” (Bank of Canada 2016: 2)
4. Typically, the Bank of Canada influences economic output by adjusting its policy rate. This impacts the price of short-term credit and alters spending habits in the economy. At zero (or near zero) interest rates, the bank no longer has the same capacity to stimulate the economy, since consumer rates cannot drop below zero. The bank refers to this as the effective lower bound (ELB).
5. This is the time-period for returning inflation to two per cent. According to the bank’s 2016 inflation targeting report, “different interest rate paths could be broadly consistent with achieving the inflation target over a reasonable horizon” (Bank of Canada 2016: 3).
6. Beyond this, a 2018 report prepared by the Library of Parliament found “evidence that lowering inflation may disproportionately increase female unemployment rates” (Berg 2018: 2).
7. In addition to these unconventional measures, the bank has reduced its policy rate 150 basis points.
8. Yield curve control involves targeting a specific longer-term rate on the yield curve. This is typically accomplished through forward guidance and bond purchases, and involves central banks purchasing whatever volume of bonds is necessary to achieve the target rate. Conventionally, the Bank of Canada influences economic conditions by setting short-term interest rates in the overnight market. Forward guidance involves communicating the anticipated future course of monetary policy with the aim of influencing market/public action.
9. Monetary financing often refers to the process whereby central banks purchase government debt to fund deficits and support government programs.
10. This could also involve dramatically altering and expanding the mandate of the Canada Investment Bank. While the CIB focuses on long-term economic growth, is not democratically organized and is severely limited in terms of its financing and lending capacities.

Featured image is from The Bullet

It is interesting to watch how the folks in Congress and the White House have been using the at-least- somewhat self-generated crisis over COVID-19 to serve as cover for legislation and other activities that many Americans just might object to. They are assuming that the public is so consumed with the virus, as well as with the riots over the police killing of George Floyd, that it is not paying attention to other high crimes and misdemeanors that the government might be engaged in.

There are three rather interesting stories that have received minimal attention from the mainstream media during the past several weeks that one might think are worthy of press coverage and even of some genuine debate in Congress. A little light shed on some important issues might actually help the public to understand the probable consequences of certain unwise or unnecessary actions undertaken by the federal government.

The first story relates to the Senate vote approving the USA Freedom Re-Authorization Act of 2020 (H.R. 6172). The renewal is particularly important because the act includes some features of the expired Patriot Act that have been exploited by government to surveil Americans without regard for the Fourth Amendment right to be free from searches without a clearly established probable cause that is related to a criminal investigation. It also includes endorsement of the powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA), which was the weapon used without any real justification by the Russiagate co-conspirators in the FBI, the White House and the National Intelligence Office in their illegal surveillance of Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.

The so-called Freedom Act’s reauthorization had been cynically delayed to avoid any attempts to include protections for individual rights in the document. As it stands, under Section 215 the legislation will continue to permit large scale collection of personal and private information as well as bulk collection relating to American citizens. Individuals who are being spied upon on by the Act cannot be made aware that they are being scrutinized and the government is meanwhile under no obligation to limit its searches, being permitted to obtain literally “any tangible thing” to include phone records, tax returns, medical and other health information, gun registrations, internet search history and even library records. Any information collected by the government can be retained and used for five years.

H.R. 6176 passed the Senate but it then had an amendment attached and went back to the House of Representatives for re-approval before being returned to the upper house. Waiting for it in the House is another amendment sponsored by congressmen Zoe Lofgren and Warren Davidson, which would compel the government to obtain a warrant to collect an individual’s internet history. It is a small enough step, and it may fail to pass, but it is at least limited recognition by some legislators of government overreach. In any event, the process whereby the legislation is being approved is nearly invisible even though it is something that can affect the freedoms enjoyed currently by all Americans.

The second bit of government-by-deception inevitably relates to America’s best friend Israel. One recalls that Congress frequently returns from recess and finds that its first order of business is doing something for the Jewish state, pandemic or no pandemic. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently passed, without any public discussion or floor debate, the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020.

The purpose of the Senate bill, S.3176, is to codify into law the military aid, inclusive of extra funding for missile defense, committed to by the United States for Israel in a 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Readers will recall that the package, negotiated by President Barack Obama, uniquely guarantees $3.8 billion per year for ten years. S-3176 was introduced to the upper chamber and co-sponsored by boy-Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who enthused

“I was proud to reintroduce this bipartisan bill that strengthens our nation’s strategic security alliance with Israel, a vibrant democracy that faces growing and unprecedented threats to its security and stability.”

When the original MOU was issued, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that he and other Senators would regard the annual payment as a minimum, that Israel would still expect, and receive, special authorizations as needed. S.3176 would appear to reflect that pledge by Graham, as it includes revised language stating that the annual payment would be “not less than” the $3.8 billion.

The bill also extends Congressional permission for the Pentagon to increase “forward-base” weapons stockpiles in Israel, which the Jewish state can now access as needed without having to provide any notice or seek any approval. Beyond that, the lengthy document is positively dripping with more money for Israel in the form of various co-production and cooperative schemes that will bring absolutely no benefit to the United States.

After the Senate bill is approved in its final form, which will occur imminently, it would then need to reconciled with a similar but possibly even more extreme bill passed by the House in July 2019 by a voice vote, also without any debate or discussion. The House version was introduced by passionate Zionist Congressman Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida. It would allow Donald Trump or whoever succeeds him to determine that if “Israel is under an existing or imminent threat of military attack” the White House could “direct the immediate transfer to Israel of such defense articles or services the President determines to be necessary to assist Israel.” In other words, the president acting alone could involve the United Starts in a war on behalf of Israel without any approval process, only relying on what Israel is telling him or her about an alleged impending threat.

Finally, there is the latest outrage over Iran. Secretary of State Pompeo has completed his demolition of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, a process which was begun by his boss shortly after taking office. Pompeo has now indicated that any foreign companies and businesses that continue to work at Iranian nuclear facilities under the authority of the JCPOA will be subject to economic sanctions. Astonishingly, the companies in question that include some from China, Russia and Western Europe, have been working to dismantle some of Iran’s former nuclear powerplants to make them usable for other purposes. It was a development that was permitted under the JCPOA and was intended to make sure that Iran would have only limited downstream capability to ramp up its production of enriched uranium. Also, the presence of foreign companies would serve as a guarantee that Iran would not engage in any cheating on the agreement.

Ironically, if the intention of Pompeo and Donald Trump truly is to eliminate Iran as a possible nuclear weapon proliferator, it is now taking steps that are actually counter-productive as the latest move could easily suggest to the Iranian leadership that there is no hope in dealing with the United States, possibly motivating them to begin a secret weapons program.

Pompeo explained in a statement that he could not permit the work to continue because Iran has been “…expanding proliferation sensitive activities. A regime that just days ago invoked ‘the Final Solution’ and which regularly threatens to wipe Israel off the map must never obtain a nuclear weapon…nuclear extortion will lead to increased pressure on Iran and further isolate the regime from the international community.”

As usual, U.S. interests are subordinated to those of Israel, even in a statement that is essentially incoherent. U.N. inspectors believe that Iran might currently have enough enriched uranium in its stockpile to construct one small bomb, but the infrastructure is lacking and it would be a long and laborious process to actually come up with anything usable, so the whole Pompeo pretext is little more than a fabrication. Of course, the Trump Administration’s actual motive might be to provoke the Ayatollahs into doing something reckless so that Washington could play victim and claim grounds for attacking Iran either independently or jointly with Israel. With so many bad things going on simultaneously in the United States, a little hot war in an election year might well be welcomed by the Trump Administration.

So, it appears that Congress and the White House are up to their usual tricks operating in the shadow created by coronavirus. Americans will lose even more of their rights in all probability and only Israel will benefit from still more handouts from the U.S. Treasury as well as shortsighted moves that will inevitably bring about a war between Washington the Tehran.

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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

Na base aérea de Nellis, no Nevada – anuncia o Pentágono – começará em Julho, a construção de uma rede experimental 5G que ficará operacional em Janeiro de 2021. Nesta base ocorreu, no passado mês de Março, o Red Flag, – o exercício aéreo mais importante dos Estados Unidos – com a presença de forças alemãs, espanholas e italianas. Estas últimas também incluiam caças F-35 que – comunica a Força Aérea – foram “integradas com os melhores activos da aviação americana”, de modo a “aproveitar ao máximo o potencial dos aviões e dos sistemas de armas fornecidos”, compreendendo, seguramente as armas nucleares.

No Red Flag 2021, provavelmente já estarão em funções para serem testadas num ambiente real, as redes móveis 5G formadas por torres que podem ser montadas e desmontadas em menos de uma hora para serem transferidas rapidamente, de acordo com as operações em curso. A base de Nellis é a quinta seleccionada pelo Pentágono para testar o uso militar da 5G: as outras encontram-se no Utah, na Geórgia, na Califórnia e em Washington.

Um documento do Serviço de Pesquisa do Congresso (National Security Implications of Fifth Generation 5G Mobile Technologies, de 22 de Maio de 2020) explica que esta tecnologia de transmissão de dados móveis, da quinta geração, pode ter “inúmeras aplicações militares”. Uma delas diz respeito a “veículos militares autónomos”, ou seja, veículos robóticos aéreos, terrestres e navais, capazes de realizar missões de ataque autonomamente, sem sequer serem pilotados à distância.

Este processo requer o armazenamento e processamento de uma enorme quantidade de dados que não podem ser executados só a bordo do veículo autónomo. A tecnologia 5G permitirá que este tipo de veículo use um sistema externo de armazenamento e processamento de dados, semelhante ao Cloud actual  para armazenagem de arquivos pessoais. Este sistema pode possibilitar “novos conceitos operacionais militares”, como o do “enxame” no qual cada veículo se liga automaticamente aos outros para realizar a missão (por exemplo, de ataque aéreo a uma cidade ou de ataque naval a um porto).

A 5G permitirá fortalecer todo o sistema de comando e controlo das forças armadas dos Estados Unidos à escala mundial:actualmente – explica o documento – usa comunicações via satélite, mas, devido à distância, o sinal leva algum tempo a chegar, causando atrasos na execução de operações militares. Esses atrasos serão praticamente eliminados pela 5G. O mesmo terá um papel decisivo, em particular no uso de armas hipersónicas que, também equipadas com ogivas nucleares, viajam a velocidades superiores a 10 vezes superiores à do som.

A 5G também será extremamente importante para os serviços secretos, tornando possível sistemas de controlo e espionagem muito mais eficientes do que os actuais. “A 5G é vital para manter as vantagens económicas e militares da América”, salienta o Pentágono. Particularmente vantajoso é o facto da “tecnologia 5G emergente, disponível comercialmente, oferecer ao Departamento de Defesa a oportunidade de usufruir este sistema a custos mais baixos para as suas exigências operacionais”. Por outras palavras, a rede comercial 5G, criada por empresas privadas, é usada pelos militares dos Estados Unidos com um custo muito menor do que seria necessário se a rede fosse construída apenas para fins militares. O mesmo também acontece noutros países.

Compreende-se, portanto, que o contencioso sobre a 5G, em particular entre os Estados Unidos e a China, não faz parte só da guerra comercial. A tecnologia 5G cria um novo campo de corrida aos armamentos, que acontece não tanto no plano quantitativo, mas no qualitativo. Esta realidade é silenciada pela comunicação mediática e amplamente ignorada até pelos críticos desta tecnologia, que concentram a sua atenção nos possíveis efeitos nocivos à saúde.

Implicação de grande importância, que deve ser combinada ao uso militar desta tecnologia, financiada sem o conhecimento dos usuários comuns dos telefones móveis da quinta geração.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

5G, nuovo campo della corsa agli armamenti

Alla base aerea Nellis in Nevada – annuncia il Pentagono – inizierà in luglio la costruzione di una rete sperimentale 5G, che diverrà operativa nel gennaio 2021. In questa base si è svolta lo scorso marzo la Red Flag, la più importante esercitazione aerea degli Stati uniti, cui hanno partecipato forze tedesche, spagnole e italiane.  Queste ultime erano composte anche da caccia F-35 che – comunica l’Aeronautica militare –  sono stati  «integrati con i migliori assetti dell’aviazione americana» così da «sfruttare al massimo le potenzialità dei velivoli e dei sistemi d’arma in dotazione», compresi sicuramente quelli nucleari.

Alla Red Flag del 2021 saranno già probabilmente in funzione, per essere testate in un ambiente reale, reti mobili 5G formate da torri montabili e smontabili in meno di un’ora per essere rapidamente trasferite a seconda dell’operazione in corso.

La base Nellis è la quinta selezionata dal Pentagono per sperimentare l’uso militare del 5G: le altre si trovano nello Utah, in Georgia, in California e nello stato di Washington.

Un documento del Servizio di ricerca del Congresso (National Security Implications of Fifth Generation 5G Mobile Technologies, 22 maggio 2020) spiega che questa tecnologia di quinta generazione della trasmissione mobile di dati può avere «numerose applicazioni militari». Una di queste riguarda i «veicoli militari autonomi», ossia i veicoli robotici aerei, terrestri e navali in grado di effettuare autonomamente le missioni di attacco senza neppure essere pilotati a distanza.

Ciò richiede l’archiviazione e l’elaborazione di una enorme mole di dati che non possono essere effettuate unicamente a bordo del veicolo autonomo. Il 5G permetterà a questo tipo di veicolo di usare un sistema esterno di archiviazione ed elaborazione dati, analogo all’odiernoCloud per l’archiviazione personale di file. Tale sistema può rendere possibili «nuovi concetti operativi militari», come quello dello «sciame» in cui ciascun veicolo si collega automaticamente agli altri per effettuare la missione (ad esempio di attacco aereo a una città o attacco navale a un porto).

Il 5G permetterà di potenziare l’intero sistema di comando e controllo delle forze armate statunitensi su scala mondiale: attualmente – spiega il documento – esso usa le comunicazioni satellitari ma, a causa della distanza, il segnale impiega un certo tempo per arrivare, causando ritardi nell’esecuzione delle operazioni militari. Tali ritardi saranno praticamente eliminati dal 5G. Esso avrà un ruolo determinante in particolare nell’uso delle armi ipersoniche le quali, dotate anche di testate nucleari, viaggiano a velocità superiore a 10 volte quella del suono.

Estremamente importante sarà il 5G anche per i servizi segreti, rendendo possibili sistemi di controllo e spionaggio molto più efficaci di quelli attuali. «Il 5G è vitale per mantenere i vantaggi militari ed economici dell’America», sottolinea il Pentagono.   Particolarmente vantaggioso è il fatto che «l’emergente tecnologia 5G, commercialmente disponibile, offre al Dipartimento della Difesa l’opportunità di usufruire a costi minori di  tale sistema per le proprie esigenze operative». In altre parole, la rete commerciale del 5G, realizzata da società private, viene usata dalle forze armate statunitensi con una spesa molto più bassa di quella che sarebbe necessaria se la rete fosse realizzata unicamente a scopo militare. Ciò avviene anche in altri paesi.

Si capisce quindi che il contenzioso sul 5G, in particolare fra Stati uniti e Cina, non fa parte solo della guerra commerciale. Il 5G crea un nuovo campo della corsa agli armamenti, che si svolge non tanto sul piano quantitativo ma su quello qualitativo. Ciò viene taciuto dai media e largamente ignorato anche dai critici di tale tecnologia, che concentrano la loro attenzione  sui possibili effetti nocivi per la salute.

Impegno questo di grande importanza, che deve però essere unito a quello contro l’uso militare di tale tecnologia, finanziato inconsapevolmente dai comuni utenti dei cellulari di quinta generazione.

Manlio Dinucci

This carefully research article first published in 2016 shows that Black Lives Matter has been funded by philanthropists and corporate foundations including Soros’ Open Society Initiative  and the Ford Foundation which has links to the CIA.

The underlying objective is ultimately to control Black Power.

How can activists take an effective and meaningful stance against neoliberalism and racism when their NGO is funded by the financial establishment.

“Manufactured Dissent”.  The philanthropists  are “funding dissent” with a view to controlling dissent.

The Rockefellers, Ford et al have funded the “anti-globalization movement” from the very outset of the World Social Forum (WSF).

The WSF is said to have transformed progressive movements, leading to what is described as the emergence of the “Global Left”. Nonsense.

Wall Street foundations support the protest movement against Wall Street? How convenient.

We are dealing with a network of corporate funding of so-called “progressive” organizations. This networking of funding dissent is a powerful instrument.

Real progressive movements have been shattered, largely as a result of the funding of dissent.

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A campaign is ongoing across America. Black Lives Matter (which is playing a key role in combating racism and the police state) is funded by the same financial interests which are behind the deadly lockdown: WEF, Gates Foundation, Rockefeller et al.

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The Movement for Black Lives has started turning to foundations for funding. But the history of the Black Power movement offers a cautionary tale about the warping effects of liberal philanthropy’s soft power.

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In 2016, the Ford Foundation, the nation’s second-largest philanthropic foundation, announced a major new initiative to support the Movement for Black Lives — the network of fledgling organizations that coalesced as #blacklivesmatter to protest the police killing of black people across the US.

Offering over $40 million in “capacity”-strengthening funding to M4BL organizations over six years, the foundation’s support came at a new stage for Black Lives Matter. Moving beyond protest to institutionalize its social vision, the Movement for Black Lives had crafted an ambitious policy platform to take on state violence writ large. Ford’s announcement followed its work with (and $1.5 million donation to) Borealis Philanthropy, which in 2015 established the Black-led Movement Fund to attract and consolidate major gifts from other liberal funders, most notably George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and support the movement even longer term.

But there was a catch: foundation officers framed their support of M4BL as a response to the murder of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge during a period of otherwise nonviolent protests against the police killings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Highlighting the “larger democratic principles at play,” Ford officials explained that the

“officers died while protecting the right to freedom of expression and peaceful protest, and are inexorably linked to Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.” These moments of violence, they warned, had “the potential to either deepen empathy and understanding among Americans or divide us even more sharply along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender . . . Now is the time to stand by and amplify movements rooted in love, compassion, and dignity for all people.”

Holding the Strings

From 1966 until the mid-1970s, Bundy’s foundation led the way on social development, partnering with other elite liberals and black activists on a number of initiatives that are today considered among Black Power’s major legacies.The foundation helped plan and underwrite black community control school demonstrations in New York City, including the infamous one in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and funded the Black Power incarnation of the Congress of Racial Equality. It pioneered the community development corporation, a model that continues to predominate in public-private efforts to spur economic growth in inner-city neighborhoods. And it bankrolled all-black and even radically Afrocentric performing arts organizations for the cultural uplift of ghetto residents.Yet despite their high profile, these initiatives did little to mitigate the plight of poor urban communities. Working from the postwar liberal premise that economic and political power were unlimited in the US — bottomless resources that, with minor fixes, could be shared without conflict among all members of society — the foundation looked to black behavioral pathology, rather than structural racism, as the primary source of racial inequality. The foundation’s nationalism and racial ideology thus prevented it from gaining a clear-sighted understanding of the problem, let alone its solution.And it enforced that myopic understanding with pecuniary discipline. When grantees betrayed the foundation’s social vision or agenda, they got cut off. The most overtly liberationist Black Power beneficiaries, like those in Cleveland CORE and New York’s community control movement, saw their funding slashed or curtailed when their demands and actions for self-determination created more, rather than less, social conflict.

Increasingly, the foundation became more partial to the cultural wing of Black Power, which was often involved in less contentious endeavors. But even in these cases, more radical projects, like that of the leftist theater director Douglas Turner Ward and his Negro Ensemble Company, faced a funding hammer that relentlessly chipped away at their aims for social transformation.

Out of the rubble of this experimentation, the Ford Foundation found the right vehicle for its assimilationist goals. While it institutionalized black arts and black studies within the nation’s cultural and educational establishment, Bundy’s foundation also promoted a program of black leadership development (fostered through initiatives like making community development corporations the incubators of black “public entrepreneurs”) and an ambitious college scholarship program (which played a significant role in expanding the black professional class).These efforts — not liberationist ventures that butted up against the foundation’s conciliatory ethos — were the concrete and lasting accomplishments of the Ford Foundation’s efforts. In fact, this model of elite affirmative action paved a path of least resistance against the claims of Black Power, one that would be followed by the federal government (starting with the Nixon administration), corporate America, and public and private institutions across the United States.By that point, the foundation had long since abandoned any remnant of an ambitious social-development agenda. Despite ongoing ghettoization, the nation-threatening conflict and disorder of the riots had faded away — and so had the urgency of dealing with the fundamental problems facing inner-city communities. The foundation’s goal was clear: fostering individual minority leadership to ensure that, in spite of ongoing racial inequality, African Americans could be represented appropriately in the nation’s public life.It had thus found its answer to the problem of racial inequality, and the nation had been saved once again from the fundamental contradiction between the liberal creed and social reality.

The Limits of Liberal Philanthropy

The Ford Foundation’s engagement with Black Power proved to be at best constricting and at worst destructive for most of its grantees. It spawned a new regime of race management that has served the nation’s elites, not black freedom. It helped lay the seed for the “progressive neoliberalism,” which celebrates elite multiculturalism and promotes “diversity” while ignoring or masking structural inequalities.Nevertheless, there are good reasons why black activists took the money, then and now. For one thing, it’s hard to turn down such magnificent sums.

For another, the Ford Foundation is one of the few foundations (and by far the richest) ready to fund black activism. One could even argue that progressive social movements can’t afford to reject philanthropic funding because they have to compete in a plutocratic political environment shaped by the ideological convictions of conservative billionaires and grandiose schemes of high-tech magnates. For example, criminal justice reformers have worked with George Soros, Ford’s partner in the Black-led Movement Fund, who has helped bankroll their efforts.But foundation imperatives will likely clip the wings of radical dreamers today, just as they did in the 1960s and ’70s.

Again, the Ford Foundation is instructive. The foundation’s current president, Darren Walker, is the embodiment of its decades-long strategy of elite racial liberalism. Walker, a black, gay Southerner who was born in poverty, rode the “mobility elevator,” as he put it, “fast and hard, and as far as I wanted to go,” to become a lawyer, investment banker, and philanthropic leader, thanks in part to the Great Society’s Head Start and Pell Grants program. He leads an organization whose senior staff and trustees are remarkably diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality (and who haven’t had a white male president since Bundy resigned in 1979).

To his credit, Walker is working hard to make the foundation’s elite multiculturalism finally bear fruit for more than a fortunate few. In 2015, he positioned the foundation outside of the philanthropic mainstream by refocusing all of its grant-making to address the causes and consequences of inequality, dedicating $1 billion to the effort. In announcing this shift, he declared a “new gospel of wealth” in which he frankly acknowledged that the fortunes that create philanthropy are deeply implicated in inequality, and urged his fellow philanthropists to ask, “Why are we still necessary?” The foundation has since broken with its formerly ironclad financial orthodoxy by investing a small percentage of its endowment for social impact, not just financial return.

Walker’s foundation is also notably humble in this age of overbearing, top-down “strategic” philanthropy by Silicon Valley “disruptors”; unlike many of his peers he refutes the philanthropist’s fantasy that “foundations are central protagonists in the story of social change, when, really, we are the supporting cast.” Following up on this credo, the foundation has offered long-term institutional support to “anchor” organizations, like M4BL, and then promised to step back, offering the grantees security and freedom from the “proposal economy” that sucks up the energy and so often redirects the program and mission of nonprofits. In the world of philanthropy these are not trivial interventions, and Walker’s leadership deserves some praise.

But McGeorge Bundy also stretched the limits of philanthropy’s innate conservatism by expanding the range of its social responsibility, dabbling in social investment and promising not to interfere in the work of the foundation’s Black Power grantees. And despite its brave talk about philanthropists’ connection to inequality, Walker’s “gospel” includes an “obligation to capitalism,” in which he dreams of “bridg[ing] the philosophies of [Adam] Smith, and [Andrew] Carnegie, and [Martin Luther] King,” by “bending the demand curve toward justice” — a heretical blending of market fundamentals with the maxim King made famous. Needless to say, he doesn’t reckon with King’s later understanding of the intertwining of American capitalism and racial inequality, an understanding at the core of M4BL’s platform.

Walker asks his fellow philanthropists to “leverage our privilege to disrupt the levers of inequality,” not to eliminate either the privilege or the levers. No matter how multicultural its leadership or reformist its agenda, the Ford Foundation and liberal philanthropy writ large remain within and committed to the systems that spawned their creation and that undergird the American political economy. As many Black Power activists learned fifty years ago, immersion into that liberal funding stream can inexorably redirect their quest for freedom.

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Karen Ferguson is associate professor of history and urban studies at Simon Fraser University and author of Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism and Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.

Featured image: Future Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy visiting South Vietnam in 1965. (Source: Francois Sully / Flickr)

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Combat Troops Coming to US Streets?

By Stephen Lendman, June 02, 2020

On Monday, Trump threw more fuel on a national inferno of public rage instead of showing leadership to calm things by pledging transformational change to serve all Americans equitably.

Last week, he inflamed things by tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Focus on Looting Detracts From Racism

By Robert Fantina, June 02, 2020

What this writer finds troubling is the focus away from the systemic racism that is inherent in U.S. governance, and plainly manifested by the U.S. police force, toward a ‘blame the victim’ mentality that allows the government to maintain business as usual. As yet another unarmed, defenseless Black man is brutally murdered, on video, for all the world to see, it is the protesters and the destruction resulting from the demonstrations that are being condemned by all ‘mainstream’ news outlets.

Floyd Murder Sparks Violent Protests in US – Citizens at Breaking Point with Police State Oppression?

By Joachim Hagopian, June 02, 2020

The brutal oppression and slaughter of darker skinned people on this earth for centuries has colored human history blood red, the same color we all bleed. Conquering, colonizing, slaughtering and inhumanely exploiting races deemed “inferior” or “weaker” that happen to possess darker skin pigment is sadly an entrenched historical fact. That “the great melting pot land of the free” called America has always been at the epicenter of this raging battlefield over race should come as no shock. After all, America’s roots were founded on racism from its very genesis, first with the genocide inflicted on the indigenous race calling the Western Hemisphere its home for centuries, and then the barbaric uprooting of a darker skinned race from its African home for nearly four centuries of legalized enslavement. If that’s not tragically diabolical enough, the fact is, out of the 244-year history of the United States, it’s been warring almost exclusively against virtually every nonwhite nation on earth throughout its entire existence – 93% of the time to be precise.

Anti-Racist Demonstrations Continue Despite Escalating Government Repression

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 02, 2020

Even though Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ordered the National Guard into the Twin Cities, it would take a full mobilization of these military forces which spread out around the unrest areas utilizing teargas, pepper spray, igniting concussion grenades and the random firing of rubber bullets into large crowds of people to clear the streets. In Minneapolis there has been at least one death since the rebellion and demonstrations erupted. Many others have been arrested and abused by the police. Journalists and bystanders are routinely arrested and held without being charged for hours.

A Superpower in Chaos

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, June 02, 2020

Minneapolis could not have happened at a worse time for the US elites. While violence perpetrated against African Americans by White police officers has happened a number of times before, its occurrence right in the midst of a huge health emergency that has already claimed more than a 100,000 lives and a related massive economic disaster that has robbed 30 million people of their jobs, is truly unprecedented. The mayhem and chaos accompanying the violence have spread to a number of other cities right across the United States of America.

African American Mayors and Sheriffs Stand Among George Floyd Protestors in Central North Carolina

By Danica Jorden, June 02, 2020

Walking in the crowd was Fayetteville mayor Mitch Colvin. Wearing a promotional polo shirt and plain pants, he was a nondescript member of the group, without retinue or escort. With Rakeem Jones’ help, Colvin and a coalition of other regional mayors and sheriffs quickly decided to refrain from visible police presence as they organized their towns’ participation in the mounting protests sweeping the country.

“Let’s Burn the Whole Thing Down”: Death, Protest and George Floyd

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, June 01, 2020

With the United States topping the global chart in coronavirus deaths, with numerous parts of the country easing lockdown restrictions as unemployment has surged, the release over the week became atavistic, vengeful.  Mixed in were also protests of desperate sadness and anger, with sentiment very much against violence as a weapon of choice.  Police were attacked but in other cases, notably that of Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson in Flint, Michigan, they joined protests and expressed a wounded solidarity.

Author’s Note

This interview was first published in November 2011. It focussed on the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, both of which were funded by corporate foundations.

Who is behind the protest movements in the US?

Who is behind the movement against racism and poverty in America. 

We are dealing with a network of corporate funding of so-called “progressive” organizations.

This networking of funding dissent is a powerful instrument. It constitutes the basis whereby the economic elites retain control over the protest movement. 

The Occupy Wall Street Movement as well as the World Social Forum are funded by Wall Street. 

You cannot organize a meaningful mass movement against the Empire and then ask the Empire to pay for your expenses. 

And today Black Lives Matter has taken a firm stance in leading the campaign against Racism and Social Inequality.

Black Lives Matter, however, is generously funded by corporate charities and foundations ( Soros, Ford, et al) which are firmly committed to neoliberalism.

That has to be addressed. 

It’s called “Manufactured Dissent”. 

Michel Chossudovsky, May 1st 2016, updated June 2, 2020

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[Potent News] We’re here with Michel Chossudovsky, and we’re having a little chat. I believe we were talking about, basically, the protests that are happening here that were started up by the Adbusters initially. I’ve got a couple of questions. Are you encouraged by what you see happening with the protests?

[Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I’m encouraged by the fact that people across the United States and Canada are rising up against an economic and political agenda. And they are the victims of the neo-liberal agenda. I’m not encouraged by the way this Occupy Wall Street movement is proceeding, because it was initiated by a couple of organizations: Adbusters, which is a magazine in Vancouver, and the other one was Anonymous, a social media hactivist website, which does not reveal its identity in any way.

I think the problem is that these promoters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been actively planning a whole network of activities across America with social media, websites, and so on, for several months. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street website was launched back in, I think, in July [2011]. We don’t know who these people are. When we go to their websites, there’s no contact information. We don’t know who the leaders are. These are shadow leaders.  [scroll down for complete transcript of interview]

PART I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fLDkilPSEs

PART II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtgM7eLdRRI&feature=related

PART III

On the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

How do the Rich Enrich themselves at the Expense of the 99%

War on Libya 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63jeEusOsU&feature=related

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Transcribed from the videos by Tara Carreon, American Buddha Online Librarian

[Potent News] We’re here with Michel Chossudovsky, and we’re having a little chat. I believe we were talking about, basically, the protests that are happening here that were started up by the Adbusters initially. I’ve got a couple of questions. Are you encouraged by what you see happening with the protests?

[Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I’m encouraged by the fact that people across the United States and Canada are rising up against an economic and political agenda. And they are the victims of the neo-liberal agenda. I’m not encouraged by the way this Occupy Wall Street movement is proceeding, because it was initiated by a couple of organizations: Adbusters, which is a magazine in Vancouver, and the other one was Anonymous, a social media hactivist website, which does not reveal its identity in any way. I think the problem is that these promoters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been actively planning a whole network of activities across America with social media, websites, and so on, for several months. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street website was launched back in, I think, in July. We don’t know who these people are. When we go to their websites, there’s no contact information. We don’t know who the leaders are. These are shadow leaders.

“Leaderless Movement”: Occupy Wall Street WS  Confronts “Organized Wall Street”

Now what’s coming out of the Movement is, “We don’t need leaders; we are the leaders.” But in effect, any organization that challenges Wall Street, and wants to yield some form of concrete results, has to have a very solid organizational structure. You don’t go and fight against Wall Street, because Wall Street is organized. Wall Street is a whole structure: institutions, banks, insurance companies, linked up to intelligence, and then linked up to the U.S. government. So if you want to change the tide, you have to organize, and you have to organize in a very solid way.You have to have a program.

Unseat the Leaders Who are Supporting Wall Street

You can’t just have a program that says, “Please Mr. Bush, or Mr. Obama, or whoever happens to be in power, could you be more gentle, have less wars, could you tax the rich?” You don’t demand of a system which is in crisis, and should be replaced and reformed, you don’t ask the leaders to act on your behalf. That’s rule no. 1.

Those leaders have to be unseated because they are the problem. They are not the solution. And it’s no use presenting a shopping list of demands, and then submitting it to the U.S. government, or to Wall Street, or to Warren Buffett.

Wall Street Supports Occupy Wall Street

Now, what troubles me in this Movement is that there is a covert element with organizations such as Anonymous and Adbusters, as well as their main websites. Who is behind it? Who is financing it? I recall that immediately when the Movement got going, that several prominent personalities came to the support of Occupy Wall Street. And these were people like Warren Buffett, Howard Buffett, Ben Bernanke, and Al Gore. Now these people, from my standpoint, do not constitute the solution to the crisis, they are the cause. They are the actors behind this crisis. Warren Buffett is the third richest man on planet earth, and his sympathy for the Movement should be viewed with some suspicion. That’s the way I see it.

Now I should also mention another organization which is OTPOR!

OTPOR! was an organization involved in Serbia in the year 2000. It was not a pro-democracy organization, it was actually an organization which shunted the 2000 elections in which Kostunica, who was the runner-up together with Milosevic, would have won in any event. But they prevented the second round of elections from occurring. And they essentially established the conditions for regime change. That was a colored revolution.

And OTPOR! subsequently became a consulting firm, which is called CANVAS. It’s non-violent forms of action which were implemented in a large number of countries. CANVAS, it’s logo is the clenched fist. And they were involved in Georgia; they were involved in various former Soviet republics; they were involved in Iran; they were involved in Egypt, and in Tunisia. They’ve provided consulting to so-called revolutionary groups. But they are also backed by Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, which are U.S. foundations closely allied both with the State Department on the one hand, the U.S. Congress, as well as U.S. Intelligence. So that in effect, CANVAS is really acting as a consulting arm of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus supporting a training program of CANVAS.

Now we know that the Egyptian leaders of the protest movement of the so-called Arab Spring, they were trained in Belgrade. They were trained by OTPOR! And it should come as no surprise that the clenched fist was used also in Egypt. And it was used in a number of countries. It’s of interest that the name of the resistance movement in Georgia was “Enough.” And in Egypt, the Kifaya movement, also in Arabic, means “Enough.” So that in fact, you find the same names, the same logos, the same catch phrases in several countries. And this is no coincidence, because CANVAS is operating as a professional consulting arm assisting the movements in various countries.

Now what this suggests is that this movement, at least the grassroots of this movement, who are committed people — we have to acknowledge that; these are people we should support, people in the street, people who are unemployed, students who can’t pay their tuition fees, people who are committed to social change — we must support them. But they are being manipulated by a framework which from the very outset is pernicious, because it’s based on links to the seat of power. In other words, if its linked to the National Endowment for Democracy, or to Freedom House, or to the CIA, it cannot have an independent stance in challenging Wall Street.

And then the question is, “Who is funding this undertaking?” You cannot challenge Wall Street, and then ask Wall Street to pay for your travel expenses. And that is not something that is not limited to these events in New York City and around the United States. It’s something that has characterized progressive movements for a long, long time.

Trade unions have been infiltrated, their leaders invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, then you also have other organizations such as those that joined the World Social Forum, or the People’s Summits. All those organizations are funded by tax-free foundations.

The World Social Forum

I’ve been looking into the World Social Forum, which was created some ten years ago. It started off in Brazil. And the World Social Forum was in effect funded by the Ford Foundation. Now we know that the Ford Foundation has links to the CIA. And many of the organizations didn’t realize that by being funded by the Ford Foundation, their hands were tied. The Ford Foundation would set the outer limits of dissent. And this is what I call “manufactured dissent.” It’s when the elites, through their tax-free foundations, will go in, and they will support limited forms of dissent which do not threaten their fundamental interest, which is the interest of making money and enriching themselves and so on.

So you have an expression of support to this Occupy Wall Street Movement which is coming from various corners, and which is also supported by Establishment figures, and which is receiving a fair amount of media coverage. I recall events where you had mass rallies in Washington, D.C., and anti-war movements against the U.S. government, and there was a total media blackout. There was simply absolutely no coverage. And also in Egypt, there was coverage initially of the events at Tahrir Square when people were getting rid of Mubarak, but once they started mobilizing against the new regime, which in effect was Mubarak without Mubarak, because the same military establishment were calling the shots, well then the media simply didn’t cover those events.

Egypt and The Arab Spring

And what I also noticed in the case of Egypt was that at no time were the main organizations, which consisted of Kifaya, the April 6th movement, and the Muslim Brotherhood, at no time did they actually challenge the macro-economic reforms of the IMF and the World Bank, the neo-liberal agenda, which were imposed on Egypt starting in 1991 at the height of the Gulf War. And I so happened to be in Egypt at that very moment. I was in the Minister of Finance’s office. And that was imposed. And you had that whole period, over a period of 20 years, when the country was subject to these deadly macro-economic reforms, leading to the destruction of agriculture, and the massive unemployment in the public sector.

And that framework remains today. It hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s gotten worse, because in effect, in the wake of Tahrir Square, the Egyptian economy ran into certain difficulties, particularly with increased levels of external debt. And so the clenched fist of the IMF and the World Bank is still there. And the protest movement did not, from my standpoint, change the fundamental relationship which exists within Egyptian society, which is the whole state apparatus that is controlled by external creditors, as well as by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Military. That we know.

So Tahrir Square cannot be presented as a model of pro-democracy protest, because essentially they have achieved virtually nothing. And they have achieved nothing precisely because the main groups — Kifaya, April 6 and Muslim Brotherhood — are controlled precisely by the U.S. Government. U.S. and British Intelligence in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood — that relationship is well established — and the links between the April 6th Youth Movement and the U.S. Embassy are well-documented. So you cannot run a revolution against the Empire — which is Washington — and then ask the Empire to give you money through its various foundations to fund your resistance against the Empire. It doesn’t make sense.

And Occupy Wall Street is in a very similar situation. First of all, it is using Egypt and Tunisia as a model. They are not a model. They are failures. They are colored revolutions which have manipulated the grass roots, and which have led these countries into coup de sac, into a status quo. So the end game of the protest movement is the status quo. It’s a semblance of democratization, but in effect, what happens is that the people in power who are in positions of government are replaced by other people who are in effect playing the same role on behalf of the U.S. and the external creditors of those countries.

Now there was one thing which disturbed me in a statement by Occupy Wall Street. I recall that there was a statement by a number of personalities, including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Vandana Shiva among others. And part of the statement was alright. But then they said they had to fight against “a global al-Assad, a global Gaddafi”, and that these dictators personified the IMF and the World Bank. They said the IMF and the World Bank are behind this agenda, and they are treating us in the same way Gaddafi and al-Assad are treating their people. Now that kind of comparison is totally misleading because it is demonizing the IMF and the World Bank through the image of a political personalities, rather than focusing on the IMF and the World Bank as economic demons in their own right. [In fact the objective of this misleading comparison is to demonize Assad and Gadaffi, M.Ch.]

[Potent News] A two-part question here. First, how can we keep this movement as pure as possible as opposed to a media spectacle that is coopted? And what would you advise for people whose hearts are in the right place, and want to make a difference?

Organized Protest. Confronting Wall Street requires a Strong Organizational Structure

 [Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I think a movement which is confronting the World Economic Order, the New Economic Order, has to be organized across the land not solely in terms of street events, it has to have an organizational structure in towns, and cities, and villages, and workplaces, and parishes, in universities and colleges. In other words, all the various entities of civil society. It also has to permeate mainstream organizations such as trade unions and human rights organizations. It has to have a very strong organizational structure which can confront the corporate agenda. Corporations are very well organized, but they still constitute a minority. Now if the 99% want to ultimately reverse the tide, they have to organize. They have to have strong leadership. They have to have a program. And they are not there to make demands. They are there to question the legitimacy of the corporate agenda. They are there to unseat these powerful actors whose legitimacy actually is sustained by a very crooked and fraudulent apparatus. So that’s what you have to tackle.

The Tobin Tax: Taming the Speculators

I recall many years ago when the World Social Forum started up, there was another movement which was called ATTAC, which was one of implanting a tax on speculative transactions. It was called the TOBIN tax. And everybody joined the bandwagon of the TOBIN tax. saying we have to put a tax on speculative activities, and use the proceeds of this tax to help the poor.

I was opposed to that for various reasons, but more fundamentally, if you want to get rid of highway robbery, you don’t put a tax on highway robbery. If you want to get rid of speculation, which is ultimately the instrument for transferring wealth, you do not provide legitimacy to the speculators by taxing him 1%, or whatever, of his transactions. You freeze those transactions. And that is something that can be achieved. In other words, their whole series of speculative instruments on Wall Street which affect, let’s say the price of food, the price of oil and which are impoverishing people worldwide.

Putting a Freeze on Derivative Trade

Now, how do you reverse the tide? You put a freeze on derivative trade. You don’t tax the speculator. The speculators were the first people to endorse the TOBIN tax. Why? Because they’re stealing from the 99% by using very complex financial instruments. And if a tax is imposed, the legitimacy of their undertakings is not questioned. They pay the 1% tax that is used to compensate the people who have been expropriated and impoverished as a result of their actions, and it provides a human face to the speculative onslaught. That is what is behind this complicity of people like Warren Buffett and Ben Bernanke in this Occupy Wall Street movement. You do not reverse the tide by taxing the rich. You have to tax the rich, but ultimately you have to address the broader question of how do these people enrich themselves at the expense of the 99%.

NATO Atrocities in Libya

[Potent News] So one last question. Apparently, yesterday at the conference at the university [St Mary’s University, Halifax] there, apparently was someone doing the video that was actually shedding light on what’s actually happening in Libya. I heard that one of the people there cried and walked out. How important do you think it is to be able to gain the strength to face what is being done in our world and often in our name?

[Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I think in Libya, atrocities have been committed by NATO. Thousands of people have been killed. The media is not reporting those atrocities. It has a responsibility as media, as journalists, to report the facts on the ground. But that is not happening. In fact, it’s the reverse: they are obfuscating. They are acting as a camouflage, as a cover-up. And they are providing a human face to the rebels, which are in large part are made up of al-Qaeda militia. This is not a pro-democracy movement. And what has happened is that the media has supported this war.

NATO: “We are running out of bombs”

Without the media, they could not have run this war, because they would not have been able to camouflage the impacts of those bombings. Anyone who has a minimal understanding of fighter aircraft knows that if you have 10,000 strike sorties, with a dozen missiles on each of these fighter planes, you’re going to kill a lot of people. You’re talking above 50,000 bombs. And it’s certainly worth noting that already in the month of April [20111], after one month of bombing, NATO has said, “We’re running out of bombs.” They’re running out of bombs?! That’s an incredible observation against a country of 6 million people. And then they would make the same statement, “We haven’t killed anybody.”

So people don’t analyze necessarily that data which comes out from NATO. Every week they will publish the number of strike sorties. But the military analysts working for the mainstream media, who know the planes, who have an understanding of war, and of the impacts of advanced weapon systems, they have a responsibility to report those, to analyze them. They are not doing it.

Killing Gaddafi. Destroying an Entire Country  

And yes, atrocities are being committed. But what I find disturbs me is that when you go to Occupy Wall Street, they say we must implement pro-democracy following the example of our brothers and sisters in Libya. And they are referring to the transitional counsel which is made up of a bunch of criminals, and which does not represent the Libyan population.And then they present Gaddafi as the enemy of democracy.

I’m not particularly a fan of Gaddafi, but Gaddafi is not the enemy of democracy, it’s the United States of America, which in the course of the last 100 years has supported dictatorships all over the world. And now they say we’re pro-democracy. The fact is, if they don’t like a particular head of state, or head of government in the case of Gaddafi, they go in and they kill him, and they kill the members of his family, and his grandchildren. And that is not the way you implement democracy. You implement democracy by respecting the sovereignty of countries, and the rights of people in those countries to decide on how they want to run their own affairs.

Libya Had the Highest Standard of Living in Africa

And I think it’s important for the record that Libya was one of very few countries in the world that did not obey the diktats of Washington and the IMF. And as a consequence of that, whether we like Gaddafi or not, the figures published by the United Nations, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization, confirm that the standard of living in Libya is the highest in Africa. There’s full employment, there’s almost 100% literacy, 50% of students who graduate from high school go to university, and it is by African standards an advanced welfare state. Whether we like the political regime or not, we have to acknowledge that.

And what has happened with the bombings over a period of several months since March [2011], is the destruction of a country, of its water system, of its food supplies, of its schools, its hospitals, its universities. Because these are being bombed, and we have evidence that they are being bombed. And if the Occupy Wall Street movement is a significant pro-democracy movement in the USA, Canada, and the Western world, it should take a stance against those NATO bombings. It should not present NATO as the role model, and all the rebels as the role model.

And that is precisely what was implied in some of those statements made by Occupy Wall Street that ultimately we should support our brothers and sisters in Libya who are fighting against Gaddafi. Those brothers and sisters are essentially al-Qaeda. They don’t represent the majority of the population, which ironically was supportive of the government. I mean, there’s opposition within all of those societies, but broadly speaking that society, that country had a project, had a high standard of living, had an educated population, and the result of this seven months of bombing has been to destroy a country. And it’s certainly not a role model for Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street Must Take a Stance against War

And so Occupy Wall Street has to take a stance not only against Wall Street, but against all the wars which are led by Wall Street, by the oil companies, by Washington, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Libya, and in other parts of the world where they come in, in the Congo, in Rwanda, in Somalia, which is characterized by The Agenda. It’s the Agenda of going off the terrorists, going off to al-Qaeda. But then we discover that al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA, and that al-Qaeda in effect are the foot-soldiers of NATO in Libya. It’s the Libya Islamic Fighting Group which constitutes the main paramilitary force.

And then we discover that in Syria, the gunmen involved in the confrontation with the government forces are paid mercenaries who are Selafists, al-Qaeda-affiliated, and they are also supported by Western Intelligence. And this is an insurgency which purports to destabilize a sovereign country. Whether we like al-Assad or not, I respect the right of the Syrian people to decide on their own future without the intrusion of armed gunmen paid by foreign powers. And that is what is happening.

And the media also has the responsibility of reporting what’s going on in Syria. And when they have protesters armed with heavy machine guns, they have the responsibility to acknowledge that; because that’s not a protest movement, that’s an insurgency.

[Potent News] Thank you for joining us and donating your time Professor Michel Chossudovsky. Thank you very much.

[Michel Chossudovsky] Thank you very much. Delighted.

Annex

The Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) was launched by Adbusters, a Vancouver based NGO.

Adbusters is funded by the Tides Foundation. The latter is in turn funded by a large number of corporate foundations and charities, including the Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation  and the Open Society Institute. Ford is known to have links to US intelligence. 

While Tides makes its name by facilitating large pass-through grants to outside groups, many of Tides’ grantees are essentially activist startups. Part of Tides’ overall plan is to provide day-to-day assistance to the younger groups that it “incubates.

(https://www.activistfacts.com/organizations/225-tides-foundation-tides-center/)

Wall Street foundations support the protest movement against Wall Street? How convenient. 

Russia has intensified its military involvement in the Syrian conflict.

On May 30, Syrian state media announced that it had received a batch of MiG-29 multirole fighters from Russia. Damascus did not provide details regarding the number of the received jets, but said that they are entering service with the Syrian Air Force on June 1. They are set to conduct regular patrols in Syrian airspace. Prior to the delivery, the Syrian Air Force had at least 20 MiG-29 jets.

Moscow is also working to expand its military infrastructure. On May 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a directive tasking the Defense Ministry, in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry, with holding negotiations with Syria on transferring more real estate and water territory to the Russian military’s possession. Russia currently has two permanent military bases in the war-torn country — the Hmeimim air base in Latakia province and a naval facility at the port of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea.

The intensification of Russian support to the Damascus government comes as Turkey continues its military buildup in northwestern Syria. On May 30, May 31 and June 1, the Turkish Army deployed additional troops and equipment, including at least four M110 self-propelled howitzers, in Greater Idlib.

The configuration of Turkish military positions and Ankara’s attitude towards Damascus demonstrate that Turkey is not going to use these force against Idlib terrorists.

Rather, these reinforcements are needed to secure their safety in the event of any advance by the Syrian Army. On May 30, pro-government sources even claimed that Turkish artillery carried out several strikes on positions of the Syrian Army near Urem al-Kubra.

In response to the Turkish posture, the Syrians created additional fortifications at their positions in Saraqib and Ma`arat al-Nu`man as well as the Zawiya Mountain. Pro-militant sources also claim that the army from time to time conducts limited precision strikes on militant positions along the contact line in southern Idlib.

On top of this, late on May 31, an unidentified unmanned combat aerial vehicle delivered a series of airstrikes on militants’ positions on the al-Zawiya Mountian. At least 3 militants were reportedly killed. The material damage remains unclear.

On May 30, ISIS cells targeted a Syrian Army vehicle with an IED and then shelled it near al-Sukhna. 3 soldiers were allegedly killed. The anti-ISIS raid that came in response to the attack led to no results. On the next day, reports appeared that an officer and a soldier were killed in two separate ISIS attacks in the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor. Over the past weeks, government forces have contributed notable efforts to hunt down ISIS cells hiding in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Despite this, the terrorist threat still remains high in the area.

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In his book titled “The Psychology Science (1966),” psychologist Abraham Maslow said the following:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Others made similar comments. It reflects how the US operates domestically and abroad, what’s gone on throughout its history — notably post-WW II, waging endless wars on humanity for control over planet earth, its resources and populations.

The US is addicted to war and its state-sponsored horrors, ordinary people suffering most — including on militarized US streets, cops armed with battlefield-type weapons for use in defending privilege against popular change.

In his book titled “Terrorism and War,” historian/anti-war activist Howard Zinn said war is the most extreme form of terrorism.

In public comments, he said the “feeling I get when I wake up in the morning (is that) I’m living in an occupied country.”

“A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will” — referring to the US ruling class.

Stressing that “(n)o human is alien,” he said “that’s true, except for the people in Washington.”

“They’ve taken over the country…driven us into…disastrous wars…sucked up the wealth of this country and g(ave) it to the rich…ruining the environment” at the same time.

Its “nuclear weapons” can kill us all. “(H)ow has this been allowed to happen? How have they gotten away with it? They’re not following the will of the people.”

“If the American people really knew history, if they learned history, if the educational institutions did their job, if the press did its job in giving people historical perspective, then a people would understand” they’re being lied to, manipulated, exploited, and greatly harmed by the self-serving policies of the US ruling class at the expense of most others.

Americans are ruled through the barrel of a gun. Baseball isn’t the national pastime.

It’s endless US preemptive wars against invented enemies. Domestically and abroad, core US policy reflects Orwell’s dystopian “vision of the future…”

It’s no longer one day. It’s now: “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The root cause of rage in US streets is institutionalized racism, inequality, and injustice.

Privileged interests are served exclusively at the expense of vital social change gone begging.

At a time of economic collapse, deepening main street Depression conditions, mass unemployment, growing millions without healthcare coverage, and ruling class indifference toward public health, welfare, and jobs creation to put people back to work, tinderbox conditions exploded nationwide.

African American George Floyd’s killing by four Minneapolis cops — not one, three others involved not charged or arrested — sparked what’s going on.

If not that, it would have been something else because of pent up rage against a hugely unjust system.

It’s getting worse, not improving, in the United States of Special Interests at the expense of the great majority — exploited, not served, by the privileged few.

On Monday, Trump threw more fuel on a national inferno of public rage instead of showing leadership to calm things by pledging transformational change to serve all Americans equitably.

Last week, he inflamed things by tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

On Monday, he called on state governors to get tougher on protesters, ignoring blood in the streets already.

The vast majority of protesters are peaceful, exercising their constitutional free expression and assembly rights, along with petitioning the government on city streets for redress of legitimate grievances.

Small numbers alone are involved in unacceptable violence and vandalism.

On Sunday and Monday, I saw the results of what’s happening on Chicago’s North Michigan Ave., its Magnificent Mile — a sight I never could have imagined throughout the half century I’ve lived in the city’s Streeterville neighborhood.

The entrance to my own residential building on a side street is boarded up, no one allowed in except residents, a county deployed security guard in the lobby overnight to protect the property from vandals.

Upscale shops along the avenue on both sides of the street are boarded up, including Walgreens’ flagship pharmacy, temporarily closed, a problem for neighborhood residents needing prescriptions filled.

The surreal scene looks like something out of a Hollywood horror film, including mostly empty streets that overflow with people and vehicular traffic during normal times — cops now patrolling them.

Despite opposition by Dem governors over Trump’s threat to send combat troops to restore order to US streets through the barrel of a gun, he may choose this option anyway, saying:

“If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

According to USA Today, “(m)ilitary helicopters, vehicles and personnel began to descend on the streets of Washington, DC, Monday night, hours after…Trump promised to ‘dominate the streets.’ ”

ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi called his threat to deploy federal troops to US city streets “irresponsible and dangerous,” adding:

“No level-headed governor is asking for an even more militarized response to civilian protests against police brutality and systemic racism — for good reason.”

“There are already many reports of civilian police and some state National Guard forces engaging in serious abuses, and the deployment of military personnel, who are generally not trained for civilian law enforcement, only escalates the risks.”

“This president must not cause the country and its people even more harm.”

Despite the risk of making a bad situation worse by taking this step, he can do it according to 19th century federal law — by federalizing National Guard forces and/or deploying Pentagon combat troops to US city streets.

According to the 1978 Posse Comitatus Act, he cannot deploy federal troops to “execute the laws…except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”

Under the 1807 Insurrection Act, he can order what Posse Comitatus prohibits.

He can act on his own “to suppress an insurrection, domestic violence, (an) unlawful combination or conspiracy” — with or without a request by state or local authorities.

He can also deploy federal troops domestically to restore order if federal, state, or local laws are breached in the streets.

Nine earlier US presidents invoked the Insurrection Act, deploying federal forces to local communities to restore order.

They included Thomas Jefferson in 1808, Rutherford Hayes (1878), Grover Cleveland (1894), Woodrow Wilson (1914), FDR (1943), Dwight Eisenhower (1957), JFK (1962 and 1963), LBJ (three times in 1968), and GHW Bush (1989 and 1992).

By federal law and precedent, Trump can deploy federal troops to US cities as president and commander-in-chief.

Eisenhower did it to protect the rights of nine Black Arkansas students to be educated in Little Rock High School — enforcing the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.

Jack Kennedy did the same thing, enforcing desegregation orders in Mississippi and Alabama.

A major difference between earlier federal troop deployments to US communities and what Trump may order is the extent of what he may do — potentially affecting many US locations compared to specific ones alone earlier short-term.

Another major difference is that taking this step will challenge the right of thousands of aggrieved Americans — demanding equity and justice they deserve, denied by them the nation’s ruling authorities.

On Monday, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said

“(a)t this moment…it feels like the country is plummeting into a kind of deranged chaos” — noting unacceptable “inequalities” in the country, adding:

Trump’s “calls for violence against protesters, using racist tropes, makes our country far more dangerous.”

“His denunciation of protesters as ‘terrorists’ not only threatens civil liberties, it encourages violence not just by law enforcement, but by right-wing groupings — violence that will surely be directed primarily at people of color.”

“And his threat to deploy the military in our cities is a frightening warning of his existential threat to” fundamental freedoms.

“Against the backdrop of the daily (COVID-19) death toll and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, Trump stands ready to divide us and spread chaos.”

“He may well believe, with reason, that chaos is his best hope for political survival.”

Ongoing protests in US cities for the past week are all about rage against the system.

Police brutality symbolizes hugely unfair and unjust governance at the federal, state and local levels.

Rage in the streets is happening at a time of economic collapse with unprecedented numbers of working-age Americans without jobs, students out of school because of COVID-19 related lockdowns, more normal life nationwide greatly disrupted and harmed by the nation’s ruling authorities.

Human deprivation, despair, and anger over government dismissiveness toward public health, welfare, and fundamental rights explain what’s going on in US cities nationwide.

If violently quelled and order restored without addressing the root cause of public anger, it’s just a matter of time before things will explode again.

When people lose hope, they lose it because there’s nothing more to lose.

Psychology Today earlier asked: “What happens when hope is lost?

“Reading our newspapers recently is like waking up in some kind of Orwellian nightmare,” the report said, an untenable situation.

“A man who takes pride in spreading lies, hatred and fear across borders is” is the US president, surrounded by a cadre of militant warmongers, indifferent toward the rights and welfare of ordinary people everywhere.

Instead of transforming hope into positive change, policies of the nation’s ruling class crushed it.

When despair turned to rage replaces hope, how things are today in the US, dreams of a better life become nightmares.

It shows by what’s going on, thousands taking to the streets to vent pent up rage against the system.

Small numbers involved in violence and vandalism are world’s apart from the vast majority of peaceful protesters.

They’re expressing justifiable anger against a nation serving the privileged few alone at the expense of most others — including during a state of economic collapse when vitally needed federal help is absent.

That’s the stuff revolutions are made of. If not now, ahead if major inequities aren’t corrected.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is by Fibonacci Blue/Flickr

On Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The standard Western canonical sources of record, namely international institutions, non-governmental organizations and media outlets, practically universally contend that all three countries are authoritarian or even tyrannical regimes, denying their peoples’ basic democratic rights. The current COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the reverse is true.

Cuba has led the world as an example of human and scientific solidarity, while Venezuela and Nicaragua have clearly protected their people’s well being better than their neighbors. But the same North American and European governments falsely accusing Venezuela and Nicaragua of tyrannical repression, have themselves addressed a complex public health problem by mobilizing police forces to enforce aggressive, ill-conceived restrictive measures against populations deliberately cowed by fear.

For their part, Cuba and Venezuela have overcome the COVID-19 crisis despite cruel, illegal, unilateral extortion measures seeking purposefully to diminish popular support for their governments. So far, Nicaragua has faced somewhat less aggressive financial coercive measures, but they have still seriously affected the country’s ability to access resources to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These criminal coercive measures denying the basic rights of people in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have proven of little interest to the Organization of American States, or to unjustifiably prestigious human rights NGOs like Amnesty International or the International Federation for Human Rights and of no interest at all to chronically mendacious Western news media. Since these sources also form the basis for much academic research, their false witness in turn contaminates the historical, economic and social science record.

In the case of Nicaragua, reporting in North America and Europe on the country’s policy against COVID-19 follows identical patterns to false Western reporting of the violent failed coup attempt of 2018. Back in 2018, the media and NGO disinformation offensive in support of the violent failed coup attempt from April 18th to July 17th insistently repeated two main lies. The first lie was that the sandinista government used lethal force to repress spontaneous peaceful protests supported by a majority of Nicaragua’s people. The second lie began even before the coup attempt was defeated in mid-July, namely, that  in Nicaragua opposition activists suffered unjust persecution for crimes of which they were falsely accused.

No impartial review of the available sources supports these two falsehoods. Opposition representatives and the international media spreading their lies, deliberately avoid addressing many unanswered questions about numerous lethal opposition crimes of violence. The enduring false witness of Amnesty International’s reports on Nicaragua reflects the typical human rights à la carte culture of all the main international human rights institutions especially the consistent doubletalk on Nicaragua in relation to concerns about freedom of expression. This inherent breakdown in conventional reporting standards inevitably also results in examples of academics compounding those institutional, NGO and media falsehoods, leading to a systematic contamination and corruption of the historical record.

Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nicaragua’s US controlled opposition has also insistently emphasized two main lies. Firstly, that the sandinista government has been negligent and incompetent, doing nothing to prepare for the pandemic. Secondly, that it has systematically hidden a disporportionately high number of people dying from the virus, while silencing responsible critics recommending quarantine measures. In fact, Nicaragua has been very successful in the careful balance it has struck protecting its population fom the virus while facilitating relatively normal social and economic life. This contrasts sharply with the way its northern neighbors, particularly El Salvador and Honduras have tended to use COVID-19 as pretext for repression.

In regional terms, Nicaragua’s preventive community approach to health care has emerged as model for how an impoverished country can control the virus while ensuring that social and economic life continue. However, Nicaragua’s US funded opposition suppress that regional context, focusing on false accusations which their propaganda outlets often illustrate with audiovisual material or photographs from other countries, just as they did in 2018, for example using photographs from Ecuador of bodies awaiting burial. In effect, the current opposition psychological warfare offensive is simply another stage of the US government inspired endless push for regime change.

Opposition aligned doctors are promoting a false campaign on COVID-19 in Nicaragua, setting up spurious medical associations and a propaganda  “observatory” spreading false information and statistics. They claim falsely that the government’s Ministry of Health is rigging data when in fact it is impossible in a small country of just 6.5 million people to hide cases of COVID-19. Like its revolutionary allies in Cuba and Venezuela, Nicaragua’s government is battling both COVID-19 and disinformation aimed at destabilizing and damaging the economy, exactly the same opposition objectives as in 2018, resulting from their chronic inability to win democratic elections.

In both the failed coup attempt in 2018 and in the current psychological warfare campaign, the fundamental tactic has been to deploy cynical reporting dressed up as concern for human rights. Opposition politicians in Nicaragua hysterically calling for quarantine measures have deployed the same “guided by science” demagoguery as their counterparts elsewhere. In fact, as even Richard Horton of the “Lancet” journal of medical science has conceded, “Scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world…” further noting, “Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours”. His own editorial practice as regards Nicaragua confirms that frank admission, despite a belated effort to give both sides of the current story.

From Ukraine, Syria and Iran to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, examples abound of Western institutions, NGOs and news media bearing false witness. Bodies such as those of the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization of American States have cynically misreported events, falsely seeking to justify efforts at illegitimate, coercive regime change by the United States and its European allies. Over time, the persistent false witness embodied in phony, faithless reporting crystallizes into false memory, becoming for all practical purposes the canonical historical record for the great majority of people living in North America and Europe.

It often seems that no amount of rational argument can roll back a dominant irrational narrative deployed via wholesale false coverage from mainstream news media, reinforced by mass deception campaigns on social media. However, Nicaragua demonstrated in 2018 that a large number of people can certainly be fooled and bewildered for a short while, but only for a matter of weeks. President Daniel Ortega and his sandinista government team trusted Nicaragua’s majority to understand their own material and national interests in 2018, just as they know they can do now, as they work to overcome COVID-19. Whatever Western history books may end up saying, Nicaragua’s people have repeatedly elected their authorities based on their lived experience of the country’s broken, perverse, US-owned opposition and the formidable strength of  the sandinista model of national development.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Featured image: Cuba’s “Henry Reeve” medical brigade arrives in Nicaragua (Photo: La Voz del Sandinismo)

It has been 75 years since the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II in Europe. Amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Russia postponed its annual Victory Day celebrations last month due to the health crisis as did other former Soviet states, with the sole exception of Belarus which went ahead with its gathering at the insistence of President Alexander Lukashenko who has taken a mitigated response to the outbreak similar to Sweden and in contrast with the rest of Europe.

Initially, Western media were disappointed by the relatively small amount of cases in Russia, but now that its infections have risen to second behind only the United States except with a significantly smaller death rate, the Kremlin has been accused of concealing its true mortality statistics. This allegation has also been hurled at China, when the discrepancy is likely explainable by the differences in criteria for the recorded causes of death between countries, along with an epidemic of pre-existing respiratory diseases in the U.S. which has an inferior healthcare system. Predictably, when Moscow sent a plane loaded with unconditional medical aid to the U.S. to help with the fight against COVID-19, the Anglo-Americans interpreted it as a threat because warmongering is the only language they speak.

Prior to its deferral, U.S. President Donald Trump initially entertained the idea of attending the 75th anniversary Victory Day commemorations in Moscow before caving in to pressure from his advisors who thought it too potentially damaging to his reelection bid, with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien tapped to be the American delegate at the events. Even though no evidence was found of ‘collusion’ between Trump and the Kremlin by the special counsel investigation of the alleged Russian election interference in support of his 2016 campaign, the 45th commander-in-chief remains dogged by a portrayal that he seeks to curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin. How the Democrats manage to reconcile this with the subsequent impeachment over his allegedly colluding with the Ukrainian government is beyond comprehension.

Even though Trump’s rhetoric has occasionally embraced the idea of détente with Moscow, his policies have been arguably even more hawkish than his forerunners. Even though the former businessman-turned-politician has often leveled harsh criticism of NATO, the alliance has only expanded during his tenure to fifteen countries with the accessions of Montenegro and the renamed North Macedonia as member states. The U.S. is now supplying arms to Ukraine in its eastern conflict against Russian-backed rebels, a move Obama declined and the temporary suspension of which got Trump impeached. The U.S. has not only withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty which ended the Cold War but also recently pulled out of the Treaty on Open Skies reconnaissance agreement, with the New START Treaty likely to be scrapped next. The Trump administration has even been considering lifting a moratorium on nuclear testing for the first time in decades, a dangerous development that could push the hand of the doomsday clock closer to midnight. Yet despite restoring a doctrine of mutually ensured destruction, mass Trump-Putin derangement syndrome persists.

While no World War II ceremonies were held in Red Square, the White House did use the occasion on social media to credit the U.S. and Great Britain solely for the defeat of Nazi Germany which set off a fierce backlash online. This was the latest instance in an ongoing campaign of historical falsification by the West which culminated in a controversial European Union resolution last year. Then again, from the very beginning of Germany’s unconditional capitulation, the U.S. tried to take undeserved credit for the Allied victory starting on May 7th, 1945, when the initial version of the ceasefire text was signed in Reims, France. The parties were Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht , and U.S. General William Bedell Smith, Dwight Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, while the Soviet attaché in France, General Ivan Suslaporov, was present as a witness. Upon learning this development, a furious Stalin quickly realized that the Soviets were being backstabbed in a Western propaganda move. After all, the USSR had sacrificed not only the most troops but civilians during the war and seized the capital of the Third Reich, so why should the location of surrender be in France without the most senior German and Soviet officers as signatories?

The first surrender document also reneged on what had been agreed to by the Allies in July of the previous year that the German state would be liquidated and its war criminals subject to extradition. In fact, it did not even truly specify the surrender of German troops at all, stating units were “to remain in the positions occupied at that time.” The Soviets would later discover this was because the British were actually mulling over the rearmament of German divisions for an invasion of the USSR in the aborted Operation Unthinkable just as the Red Army was liberating Berlin. When the final Instrument of Surrender was formally signed at Moscow’s insistence by German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov the following evening in the German capital, this time it included conditions of immediate surrender while Keitel was reportedly even surprised at the presence of the Allied delegation as witnesses.

By some estimates, more than 50% of every Soviet household lost a family member in the Great Patriotic War. In spite of the unprecedented large-scale destruction and incalculable loss of life, the perseverance in the Soviet victory against the German invaders was in keeping with history where in previous centuries Russia had been conquered several times — but never defeated. Even the first and arguably most successful attempt by the Mongol Empire back in the 13th century during the Kievan Rus state still resulted in a Mongol retreat after the destruction of several Russian cities. In the 17th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had it’s turn when it invaded the Tsardom of Russia in the Polish-Muscovite War which resulted in territorial losses and a two year occupation until a popular revolt finally drove the Poles out. A century later, Charles XII sent the Swedish army in the Great Northern War to overtake Russia but were driven south where the Swedes eventually suffered a defeat by Peter the Great in the Ukraine.

In the following decades, Sweden would repeatedly attempt to regain its lost territory, including starting the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790 by some historical accounts using possibly the earliest known instance of a ‘false flag’ operation when King Gustav III ordered a squad of Swedish troops to don Russian military uniforms and stage an attack one of their own outposts. Eventually the Russian Empire would retake Finland from the Swedes who would continue to decline as a world power, but not long before Napoleon Bonaparte would send the Grande Armée in half a million French soldiers to invade the Russian Empire in 1812. This time their foes would actually capture an evacuated Moscow and proclaim a French victory, but the Russian strategy of attrition warfare and scorched-earth tactics eventually forced Napoleon to withdraw — a tactic they would revive to defeat the Nazis a century later. To guarantee a defeat of the French Empire, this time Russia pressed onward until Napoleon fully surrendered in Paris and vacated his throne.

The following century, not even the collective strength of the Allied intervention in 1918 during the Russian Civil War could vanquish Moscow. The invading coalition included American participation whose own Civil War in the 1860s had received Imperial Russian help on the Union side with an armada of warships and the U.S. acquiring Alaska from Moscow in the aftermath. Following the Russian Revolution and the end of its involvement in World War I, the Bolsheviks withstood not only the Whites but their backers in the Allied Powers whose invasion at one point consisted of more than a dozen European countries occupying various Russian territories before the White Movement collapsed and the Allies were forced to withdraw. In the ensuing decade when Adolf Hitler rose to power, it was Western industrialists and bankers which violated the Treaty of Versailles and invested in German rearmament while gifting Czechslovakia and its millions in gold to Hitler in the hopes he would eventually turn east and attack the Soviets, a strategy which backfired when Moscow signed a non-aggression pact with Berlin in August 1939 and the Nazis turned westward toward Poland.

The treaty of non-belligerency between Moscow and Berlin would last less than two years, as the ultimate geopolitical goal of Nazi Germany was to expand the Lebensraum and drive to the east in the ‘Generalplan Ost’ to colonize the USSR while exterminating and deporting its millions of slavic inhabitants. Launched in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa would become the largest and most deadly military operation in the history of human civilization, with as many as 27 million Soviet citizens losing their lives as a result of the military bombardment and crimes against humanity. The German invasion extended over most of the European portion of Soviet territory, capturing Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. However, after the long and devastating battle of Stalingrad in southern Russia, the Wehrmacht beat a retreat back to Berlin where they were finally conquered by the Red Army, in the same way the French invasion of Russia in 1812 imploded and Napoleon was pushed back to Paris. Given all this history, it is understandable why Russia would have security concerns about the expansion of NATO on its borders in violation of what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the George H.W. Bush administration verbally agreed to at the end of the Cold War.

The barbarity of the German invasion still haunts the Russian national psyche and collective memory to this day. The atrocities committed by the Nazis against slavs in Eastern Europe was not limited to conventional warfare, but included human experiments on prisoners of war and Allied nationals in germ warfare research. Contrary to popular imagination, it was actually slavs who were the biggest victims of the Nazis, a reality always downplayed in the sacred cow of the conventional holocaust narrative where the full range of groups who perished are regarded as inferior by the Zionists who have made the Palestinians atone for Germany’s sins ever since. At Dachau, Nazi scientists conducted malaria research and experiments on Polish, Russian, and Yugoslav subjects who were exposed to infected mosquitoes and then inoculated with lethal doses of synthetic drugs. While some of the high-ranking scientists and war criminals were convicted in the Nuremberg Trials, many like Kurt Blome evaded justice and were acquitted after intervention by the U.S. who subsequently recruited them for their bacteriological expertise in the Cold War. The work begun by the Nazis became the basis for the American biowarfare program and its legacy continues in the many bio-laboratories dispersed around Eurasia today.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, China and the U.S. have each pointed the finger at one another as being the source of the coronavirus as a possible biological attack. While both countries are signatories to the multilateral Biological Weapons Convention, it is only the U.S. which has a history of germ warfare, from the U.S. army deliberately distributing smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans to the Korean War where the entomological warfare tactics of the Imperial Japanese Unit 731 were duplicated by the U.S. to drop disease-carrying bombs on North Korean and Chinese targets. On the face of it, Washington suspended its program in 1969, limiting any research and development to ‘bio-defense’ alone. However, there is evidence showing the U.S. is in non-compliance with the restrictions in the gene-editing and modification research of disease-carrying insects conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use by the military. While there is no clear proof that the U.S. government is working on biological weapons, the ostensibly defensive pretext for the billions spent on bio-security is likely shielding the actual offensive purposes behind such research and technology.

Russia has also stated that the origins of the coronavirus are unknown and has backed calls for an independent inquiry — for good reason. Not only has the expansion of NATO included the deployment of missile systems on its borders, but there is currently an overabundance of shadowy U.S.-controlled installations conducting research in bacteriological agents under the guise of medical research in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva has extensively documented the suspicious activity of the U.S. military and its dozens of secret bio-labs overseas, particularly those in the Republic of Georgia and Ukraine. In April, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev confirmed the presence of such laboratories in the country, prompting the Ukrainian political opposition torebuke the Western-puppet government allowing it to be used as a virtual petri dish. More disturbingly, in recent years the Kremlin has also sounded the alarm about the the U.S. Air Force’s medical branch collecting large amounts of ethnic Russian DNA samples, arousing suspicion that the Pentagon is seeking to create genetic-specific bioweapons. Contrary to what one might assume, the ability to create such instruments of war is not out of the realm of possibility and scientists have warned of it for years.

It has become abundantly clear that ‘we the people’ are being subjected to a divisive and derisive ‘leadership’ pantomime of truly global proportions and we cannot any longer simply hope some sanity will emerge to change this situation. 

Stand back for a moment and admire the view. Politicians, civil servants, billionaires, bankers, telecom chiefs, pharmaceutical CEO’s – you name them – are all acting as though the standard procedures of responsibility and the rule of law have been abandoned and anyone wearing a suit or uniform – and displaying an air of importance – can now step in and make up the rules as they go along.

The Covid Contrivance has provided the necessary fear cover to enable “Satanic” forces to declare an open day. Behaviour patterns are being ‘directed’ through the application of behavioural psychology, social engineering and undisguised indoctrination procedures. The net affect is that people can receive completely contradictory information communicated by some ‘figurehead’ and yet remain transfixed by his/her instructions and carry them out – with barely any need for coercion.

It is a process of mass hypnosis which is keeping this demonic show on the road. Put anyone of these mind-bent/mind-bending authority figures in the psychiatrist’s chair and with little hesitation, he/she would be diagnosed as clinically insane. Yet, my friends, these are the very people we have allowed to dictate our futures.

We have witnessed, on a daily basis, politicians and self styled ‘experts’ tell their audience stories in which there is absolutely no underlying logic or rationale to what they are saying; however the instruction is clear – ‘obey!’ – and to a far too large degree, people do. What is on show here is a paralysis of servitude wedded with political correctness. A deadly and dastardly combination if there ever was one. 

What is termed ‘the new normal’ is supposed to be based upon this model of  fear based uniformity.

But what does ‘the new normal’ mean in the context of this present Covid parody? The impression one gets is that it means politically obedient zombies walking around in 5G WiFi operational zones which suck the oxygen out of their blood molecules – while continuing to wear masks that afflict them with ‘apoxia’. The combination making them barely able to breathe.

All this while still failing to question the fact that they must maintain their observation of ‘the rules’. Well, if this is the new normal, the ‘old normal’ mess we are accustomed to will start looking like Shangri-La!

Let us explore what further kind of theatre might develop out of such a scenario. Perhaps ‘the new normals’ on recognising they are having a serious problem breathing, will decide they need to go to the doctor for a diagnosis of their condition. Once arriving in the surgery they find their doctor happily branding the very latest ‘made in China’ Covid-19 test kit which, on being put to use, informs the customer that he/she is ‘asymptomatic’ and has tested ‘positive’ for having antibodies against CV-19. A diagnosis which simply leads to nobody knowing what to do next, other than going home and turning on the TV to await the next important pronouncement from Big Brother. 

Whatever that turns out to be on the surface, underneath it will be a message concerning the further imposition of a New World Order depopulation programme.

A purely factual assessment of what’s going on has the affect of simply re-enforcing the underlying insanity at work within this mind bending comedy of errors.

But are they errors?

My conclusion must be that they are not. The social engineering and mind control techniques being employed are time tested and known to be effective. And because the implementers are so sure of the effectiveness of these tools, they are playing with humanity in much the same way as a cat plays with a mouse en route to killing it.

However, the difference between a human being and a mouse is that the human has the God given ability to become ‘aware’ of the threat being perpetrated against human kind and to take action to counter that threat. Once we become aware that we are being cynically played with – rather than ‘looked after’ – as governments would make us believe – our natural reaction is to be outraged!

It is precisely this outrage we should all be feeling at this critical juncture. The latest demonic attempt to hoodwink a large segment of the population of the planet is more than just a nasty kink in the road, it is a hiatus in which the future of humanity itself hangs in the balance. Our reaction to this global in your face exploitation is going to determine the future for generations to come. 

The work we have at hand to expose and reverse this diabolical situation is now an absolute imperative for each and every one of us. Suddenly we all have the same job and it is not one anyone is going pay us to do.

That job is nothing less than fighting for the retention and restoration of a fundamental value system for mankind. A resolute insistence on holding the line for the maintenance of liberty, dignity and humanity. Drawing upon the inner courage necessary to fight our way out of this physical and psychological corner we have been so complicit in allowing ourselves to be backed into.

The possibility of meekly offering ourselves up as victims of some satanic corporate/billionaire sponsored sect called ‘government’ is more monstrous than the monsters themselves. 

If you ‘get’ the urgency of this message, don’t just nod your head knowingly and retire contentedly into the armchair in front of the TV screen. That level of hypocrisy can only serve to greatly extend the prison sentence. 

Throw out the TV as I did twenty years ago – along with the cell phone – in recognition of the fact that they are indeed Big Brother technologies. Technologies that have played an unprecedented role in the mass dumbing down of an entire generation and the eclipse of millions of once thoughtful and creative individuals, from one end of the planet to the other.

Mankind is being tested. At this epoch making time we are all being set an examination. One which will reveal the emergence of the true human and the submergence of the fake look-alike. To quote Aldous Huxley

“That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to co-operate with the blind forces that are propelling us” (1955, Brave New World Revisited).

“If we so desire”, says Huxley. But now, some 65 years later and in the midst of a near totalitarian take-over encompassing criminal acts of physical and psychological exploitation, we do not have the luxury of choice. We are surrounded, so break-out we must. No choice. 

As I have said before and will repeat, the challenge we are faced with is unprecedented, so the response we are called upon to manifest must be equally unprecedented. We are breaking new ground here, and what lies in front of us is bursting with extraordinary liberating portent.

During the immediate weeks, months and years ahead we have this unparalleled opportunity to break-out of centuries of servitude to cold, calculating masters of deception who count on our remaining forever on our knees to their pronouncements. But their game plan is unravelling and we are increasingly alert to its intentions.

By seizing this auspicious moment and rising up in defiance against all attempts to impose a culture of death over the celebration of life, we will be demonstrating our deepest instinct for the power of love to overcome all expressions of hate.

Love is, after all, the one force which has always been – and will always be, the God given prerogative of mankind to make gloriously manifest.

Every action we take in standing-up against the dark forces of occupation on this planet, is a true expression of our love of Life. Once enough of such actions are made manifest, the light will most surely break through!

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Julian Rose is a writer, organic farmer, international activist and holistic practitioner/teacher. Two of Julian’s books ‘Creative Solutions to a World in Crisis’ and ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ are particularly prescient reading for this time. See www.julianrose.info for more information. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from American Friends Service Committee

How is it possible that anyone could go hungry in the world’s richest country?

The scourge of neoliberal indifference toward public welfare caused the disturbing reality.

It’s the American way, supported by both right wings of the one-party state — Dems as dismissive toward what just societies cherish as Republicans.

The nation’s resources increasingly go for global militarism, endless wars on humanity, enforcing homeland police state harshness, and open-checkbook handouts to corporate America.

Ordinary people have no say over how they’re governed, no way to secure “the General

Welfare (and) Blessings of Liberty” as the Constitution mandates.

Nor can they “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” so fundamental rights guaranteed by the nation’s founding document are enforced.

The nation’s ruling class ignores them, serving themselves and other privilege interests at their expense.

That’s what “America the beautiful is all about” — enforced by police state harshness “from sea to shining sea.”

The American dream is a mirage — an insult to the hungry, food insecure, homeless, and impoverished.

Only asleep can ordinary people believe it, as the late George Carlin explained.

Operating nationwide, Feeding America (FA) “is the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization.”

It expressed shock “that anyone in America” goes hungry.” Yet it’s a national epidemic at all times — today at an unprecedented level because of economic collapse, the nation’s ruling class making an untenable situation worse by indifference toward vital public needs.

In a late May report, FA analyzed hunger and food insecurity “for the overall population and children by state, county and congressional district.”

At a time when America’s billionaires never had things better, FA estimates that about 54 million people in the world’s richest country (1 in 6), including 18 million children (1 in 4) face the specter of hunger.

FA CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot said the following:

Economic collapse in the US triggered by COVID-19 “continues to impact the lives and livelihoods of our neighbors nationwide, putting millions of additional people at risk of hunger while continuing to hurt people already familiar with hardship,” adding:

“The long-term effects of COVID-19 may be substantial, but the Feeding America network of 200 food banks and over 60,000 partner food pantries and meal programs has a footprint in every community to help serve our neighbors during this time.”

“(F)ood banks are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of surges in demand, declining food donations, fewer volunteers and disruptions to our operating procedures.”

It’s an untenable situation made worse by no help from Washington to address the most basic of public needs.

Hunger and food insecurity are highest in inner-city America, communities ravaged by unemployment, underemployment, and deep-seated poverty in more normal times — conditions far worse today because of economic collapse.

America’s least advantaged communities have endured over a decade of main street Depression conditions — festering today at an unprecedented level in the United States of I Don’t Care.

They’re exacerbated by neoliberal harshness when greatly enhanced social justice programs are needed, along with federal jobs creation initiatives.

What’s vital at a time of great public duress is ignored by the nation’s ruling class, things likely to worsen ahead, not improve, the nation’s most disadvantaged hardest hit with no relief coming.

Will it take a national convulsion, far exceeding what’s now going on nationwide, to change things?

Self-liberated from slavery, noted abolitionist, statesman, and social activist Frederick Douglas explained the following:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress…Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions…have been born of earnest struggle.”

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”

Nothing in America will change without sustained mass activism in the streets nationwide for equity and social justice denied the vast majority Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow Americans by the nation’s ruling class.

A nonviolent/ordinary people-led social revolution for transformational change is needed.

It won’t come any other way — from the grassroots bottom up, never top down in the US or anywhere else.

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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.

As people of conscience in the United States rage against the institutional racism most recently demonstrated in the savage, brutal murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump and a government-compliant media are struggling to take control of the narrative.

This writer views a variety of sites to glean not only what is going on in the world, but also the different ways in which it is all being interpreted. With the current civil unrest, he sees some ‘news’ outlets criticizing Trump, his response and the responses of other government officials (see CNN news), and other programs condemning the protesters (see FOX News). These difference are subtle, not stark. Real analysis is available, but not always easy to find.

What this writer finds troubling is the focus away from the systemic racism that is inherent in U.S. governance, and plainly manifested by the U.S. police force, toward a ‘blame the victim’ mentality that allows the government to maintain business as usual. As yet another unarmed, defenseless Black man is brutally murdered, on video, for all the world to see, it is the protesters and the destruction resulting from the demonstrations that are being condemned by all ‘mainstream’ news outlets.

Certainly, the arrest of the savage police officer who killed Mr. Floyd is a positive step. But National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien states that “I don’t think there is systemic racism” in the U.S. police force, despite the evidence that clearly contradicts that view. One would like to believe that O’Brien is merely naïve and not racist himself, but that would stretch the imagination beyond any reasonable boundaries. Clearly, he is part of the problem.

Why do protests against racist murders and against racism itself turn violent? Are the protesters, as Trump has said via ‘Tweet’, thugs? Trump has praised white supremacists, and now threatens to designate the loosely organized anti-fascist group, Antifa, as a terrorist organization (designating a domestic organization a terrorist group is probably not legal, but that hardly matters to Trump).

The rage at the brutal murder of Mr. Floyd is only the tip of the iceberg, bringing to the fore the centuries old, generational oppression of people of color in the United States. Education and employment opportunities for them are far more limited than for whites. While the public education system in the U.S. is dismal compared to any other industrialized nation, for people of color living in urban areas, schools are plagued with violence due to unregulated guns, abject poverty, and the racist ‘war on drugs’, not to mention the despair these factors cause. Police officers constantly harass the residents, apparently hoping to scare them into ‘staying out of trouble’, not caring that such harassment only feeds the hatred that so many people have for law enforcement representatives. And employment opportunities are generally limited to fast food restaurants, or other menial jobs.

Children, youth and adults stuck in areas that the government ignores because, after all, these are brown and Black people, can clearly see what they are missing. They are not ignorant of the fact that their white peers in more prosperous areas grow up with cell phones, computers and name-brand clothing. They know, as they toil over a grill in a fast food establishment, that their peers are studying at colleges and universities and, if working in fast food, are only doing so temporarily to have spending money until they finish school. They see the new cars sold to graduating seniors to whom finance companies are happy to extend credit. As older adults, they see the many things their children are missing in the ‘land of opportunity’, because for Black and brown people, that opportunity simply doesn’t exist.

People of color are stopped and killed for routine traffic violations (Philando Castile, age 32, was executed in Minnesota because a bulb in the taillight of his car had burned out); for being in their own home (Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was executed in her Texas home after a neighbor, concerned that her front door was open late at night, called police for a wellness check); for playing with a toy gun (Tamir Rice, 12, (yes 12!) of Cleveland, was shot immediately when police officers arrived on the scene), and countless other reasons, too numerous to name here.

So when a Michael Brown or an Eric Garner dies simply because a white cop decides to execute him, rage at the injustice erupts, but not only within Black communities, but among people of conscience regardless of race. Pictures from the current unrest show Black, white and brown people joining together to vent their anger against a society that allows these executions to continue. And if some of that rage results in the perennial victims of U.S. oppression looting stores, it must be seen not as the problem, but as one manifestation of the much larger and insidious problem of U.S. racism. Desperation to have what is dangled in front of someone, but which is out of their reach, is not a crime. The institutional, government-supported circumstances that put them in that situation is.

The late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “A riot is the language of the unheard”. It is long past time that the prosperous minority in the United States started listening to the unheard majority. Destruction and looting are the only vocabulary the disenfranchised have, and if not heard, will only get louder.

A complacent public must not fall for the government distraction, supported by much of the press, that the victims are at fault. That public must take responsibility for the injustices done in their name, and work to alleviate them. Failure to do so will be our shame, and future generations will so name it.

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Robert Fantina is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Pixabay

A scientific study published today concludes that natural life-support systems crucial to the survival of humanity could collapse if action isn’t taken to save wildlife populations.

The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 29,400 species of terrestrial vertebrates for which data are available and determined that 515 species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are down to fewer than 1,000 individuals each. The authors warn that extinction is accelerating and that these irreversible losses could contribute to the collapse of human civilization.

“This new study shows yet again that the very survival of humanity is at stake if we don’t end the heartbreaking wildlife extinction crisis,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re no longer looking at the loss of obscure species that most people aren’t interested in. We’re looking at biological annihilation if we don’t act to save life on Earth.”

The study, Vertebrates On the Brink as Indicators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction, was authored by Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven.

More than 400 vertebrates have already gone extinct in the past 100 years. Animals recently lost in the United States include the Tacoma pocket gopher, South Florida rainbow snake, dusky seaside sparrow and black-faced honeycreeper. U.S. land vertebrates on the brink of extinction include the Humboldt marten, Sierra Nevada fisher, eastern red wolf, Kauai ‘Akepa, Maui parrotbill and Attwater’s prairie chicken.

In a statement unusual in a scientific journal, the authors move beyond science and state that is a “moral imperative” for humans to take action to stop extinction.

“Extinction is a political choice,” said Curry. “We’ve reached a crossroads where our own future is at stake if we don’t move away from fossil fuels and end wildlife exploitation, and at the same time, necessarily, address poverty and injustice. Meanwhile the tone-deaf Trump administration has gutted nearly 100 environmental regulations, including the Endangered Species Act.”

The United Nations has warned that one million species are at risk of extinction. The authors of today’s study support the U.N. estimate and conclude that future rates of extinction are probably underestimated. They support estimates that one-fifth of all species are in danger of extinction by midcentury, and half or more by 2100, if governments don’t take action to stop extinction.

In January the Center released a plan for Saving Life on Earth. The plan calls for the United States to become a global leader in protecting wildlife by declaring the extinction crisis a national emergency, creating new protected areas, and prioritizing wildlife protection over other uses of public lands.

“The response to the coronavirus outbreak has shown us that rapid change is possible and that funding is available to address the extinction crisis,” said Curry.

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His decision to walk away from the Open Skies Treaty is part of a pattern aimed at converting the bipolar era arms control regime into one which could unrestrain the US and hold China down.

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US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the vital if obscure Open Skies Treaty (OST) represents a tangible and symbolic step towards the deconstruction of the international arms control regime between the major nuclear powers, an escalation of a new arms race, and the continued attempt to bind and freeze Chinese military power.

It is also another material gift to the largest arms manufacturing firms which have benefitted enormously from Trump’s destabilising rhetoric and actions undermining peace and security in numerous world regions. Finally, it is an ideological-electoral move to further assuage his far right and paleo-conservative ideological cronies, and his loyal America First voter bank.

Thus far, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from several significant international institutions and agreements that were the hallmark of its post-1945 global strategy. While other postwar administrations withdrew wholly or partially from such organisations, or sometimes refused to join when US sovereignty was considered at stake, no previous administration has philosophically and methodically challenged the very idea of the international.

Under Trump, there has been a veritable bonfire of global alphabet agencies: One of his earliest acts upon taking office in January 2017 was to disown the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Since then, the US has withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), UNESCO, the INF treaty, and the JCPOA. Most recently, of course, the US has accused the World Health Organisation (WHO) of China-centrism, promptly defunded it during the worst global pandemic since 1918 and has just announced the US withdrawal from the global body. The message could hardly be more starkly conveyed.

In addition, we might note US threats to other international bodies unless their members comply with demands for greater resourcing or funding. NATO is a prime example. The World Trade Organisation is also in the administration’s cross-hairs.

And the violation of international law – on asylum seekers, refugees, and the assassination of foreign leaders, for example – indicates the other front on which the US is acting unilaterally in a systematic fashion.

None of the above is new in and of itself, of course. What is new is the systematic, concentrated, and determined character of the zero-sum thinking at the heart of the Trump administration. This suggests a basic philosophical shift – not to withdrawal from world affairs, not towards ‘isolationism’. – but in mentality towards the ‘global’.

President Trump is a national Darwinist. In world politics, he represents a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, a reverence for power as the arbiter of disagreements. Hence, US power is being systematically weaponised – the dollar, the international payments system, the “whole-of-society threat” and ‘response’ to China, the US market, trade tariffs to incentivise greater investment inside the US, the threat of withdrawal from international treaties when others exercise independence. And US military predominance is adding a ‘space force’ to its plans, to add to its cyber and other forces.

Another international regime unravelling

In the mid-1950s, Moscow rejected President Eisenhower’s proposal to allow aerial reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory. Towards the end of the Cold War, President George H.W. Bush pushed for negotiations on the proposal between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries. After painstaking negotiations, the Open Skies Treaty entered into force on January 1, 2002, with 34 states party to the treaty.

The OST aimed to establish a regime of unarmed observation flights over the territories of state parties to assure they are not preparing for hostile military action. It was a confidence-building measure that worked.

Yet, some say Trump apparently grew uneasy with the OST when a Russian aircraft flew directly over his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2017. With due notice of 72 hours, the plane was legally permitted to fly through the restricted airspace under the treaty.

As ever, Trump’s idiosyncratic behaviour is encased within a strategic logic – record levels of US military spending including on new nuclear missile systems and forces can now no longer be observed by Russia. And allegations of Russian violations of the OST – that Russia excludes over-flights in Ossettia, South Abkhazia, and the enclave of Kaliningrad, for strategic reasons – though correct, have been tolerated for over a decade. They could have formed the basis of discussions between the signatory powers.

Since 2002, the US has undertaken three times as many over-flights of Russia than vice versa. In 2019, for example, the US made 18 such flights compared to seven by Russia. Given the sophistication of US satellite technologies, however, it has clearly decided that such over-flights are either unnecessary or that the OST regime needs to be broken and replaced with a comprehensive global treaty that also includes China.

This is another move that undermines, if not dismantles, the existing nuclear arms-control regime, breaking the confidence-building mechanisms that reduced the threat of nuclear exchange. This may well lead to greater misunderstanding between Russia and the US. This happened at the height of the Cold War in 1960, for example, when the erstwhile Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane on a reconnaissance mission over its territory.

However, the OST move is also ‘red meat’ to Trump’s far right ideological allies, the GOP leadership, and to his political base. In an election year, “Trump-stands-up-to-Russia” and moves to pressure China takes the heat out of the impeachment decision and allegations that he’s been ‘soft’ on Russia, too cosy with Putin, and with Xi Jinping.

Nuclear agreements melting down, an eye on China?

In May 2018, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA), despite Iran’s compliance with its protocols and conditions, including the most intrusive inspection regime administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Again, the other major signatories, including Germany, France, China, and Russia, objected to US withdrawal but to no avail.

In August last year, the Trump administration completed the process of withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, leaving the nuclear arms control regime in the lurch. One aim is to extend the agreement to include China’s cruise missiles.

It is now pretty clear that President Trump will seek an exit from the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the only remaining agreement to ensure that the United States and Russia limit their deployed nuclear missiles to 1,550 each. This pact is due to expire in February 2021. It could hardly be clearer that the aim is to seek a new trilateral pact that includes China. The basic idea is to bring Beijing’s nuclear arsenal under control and to curtail any desires to attain nuclear parity with Washington. But Beijing is not interested; its nuclear arsenal (numbering in the hundreds) is tiny in comparison with the US and Russia (numbering in the thousands).

But such a move would be in line with the longer-term strategic aim of simultaneously containing, engaging and now, rolling back, China’s great power capabilities and ambitions, real, imagined, or potential, to knock the US from its sole superpower position.

The idea of a winnable nuclear war remains

But there is one other factor that should be borne in mind. The idea of a winnable nuclear war – however horrific it may sound – has never been fully excised from US strategic thinking. Ever since the dropping of two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945, and the ever-present talk of using tactical or low yield nuclear bombs over North Korea in 1950-53, the very idea of containable, limited nuclear war remains embedded. A so-called low yield nuclear bomb is the equivalent of the size that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The US has around 1000 low yield bombs in its stockpile – about 150 of them deployed in Europe. President Trump has indicated a desire to attach low yield nuclear warheads to submarine-launched ballistic missiles, thus multiplying America’s nuclear arsenal.

While such weapons have been available for decades, they have never been used.

Having low or high yield nuclear weapons is either a reflection of ‘mad man theory’ – a rational irrationality – or it’s for real: and that’s the point. It keeps everyone guessing. As Charles Kupperman, Trump’s former  deputy national security adviser, argues: “a nuclear war is winnable in the classical sense if one side emerged the stronger, even if there were tens of millions of casualties.”

American paleo-conservatives want to integrate the nuclear with non-nuclear military options to legitimise the use of strategic nuclear weapons in a “limited” way.  Donald Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) released in early 2018, brought low-yield nuclear weapons back into the nuclear debate. It stated that the US was not averse to resorting to the use of nuclear arms in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” against it. The NPR approved the production of a low-yield nuclear warhead, increasing nuclear tensions. Trump favours an aggressive nuclear policy and is willing to rock the boat moored to mutually-assured destruction (MAD).

More recently, it is rumoured that the US is considering conducting nuclear tests again for the first time in decades. Administration sources suggest, without evidence, that Russia and China are already conducting low yield nuclear tests, to justify their possible shift of position. It is also suggested that the threat of new nuclear testing, which would violate the de facto compliance by all nuclear powers (except North Korea) of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996, would give the US leverage to force Russia and China to trilateral talks to hash out a new agreement.

For Trump, the moves are driven by personal preference – he gets more headlines; a geopolitical great game; material gain to arms firm donors to his re-election campaign; a sop to the Republican leadership; encouragement to his far right nationalist unilateralists; and gives his voters something to shout about. And he can call Joe Biden “soft on China” – “Beijing Biden”.

It’s win-win politics, for him. The only problem is that the fate of the world then rests on unilateral American decision-making.

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Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, a visiting professor at LSE IDEAS (the LSE’s foreign policy think tank), and visiting fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

Dr Atul Bhardwaj is an honorary research fellow in the department of international politics at City, University of London. He is the author of  India-America Relations (1942-62): Rooted in the Liberal International Order (Routledge, 2018)

Featured image is from Syria News

“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
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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.”
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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   

How many times are we going to see another appalling episode of racist white cops maliciously murdering another unarmed black man, before we realize this repugnant injustice fueling our anger at this point is multilayered, penetrating to the core of what’s gone wrong in this world.

The brutal oppression and slaughter of darker skinned people on this earth for centuries has colored human history blood red, the same color we all bleed. Conquering, colonizing, slaughtering and inhumanely exploiting races deemed “inferior” or “weaker” that happen to possess darker skin pigment is sadly an entrenched historical fact. That “the great melting pot land of the free” called America has always been at the epicenter of this raging battlefield over race should come as no shock. After all, America’s roots were founded on racism from its very genesis, first with the genocide inflicted on the indigenous race calling the Western Hemisphere its home for centuries, and then the barbaric uprooting of a darker skinned race from its African home for nearly four centuries of legalized enslavement. If that’s not tragically diabolical enough, the fact is, out of the 244-year history of the United States, it’s been warring almost exclusively against virtually every nonwhite nation on earth throughout its entire existence – 93% of the time to be precise.

So this piercing, volatile issue of difference in skin color still remaining a deep, unresolved bloody thorn in America’s psyche since its very inception is hardly surprising. The surprise is how little progress has been made toward healing this open wound. Many believe anti-white racism is on the rise, especially so called victims of white male bashing, which has partially led to Trump’s ascendancy. But of course the 21^st century scourge of racism enflamed by Covid-19 is not unique to just the United States alone, just because this Empire nation of nonstop war and never resolved race issues is currently in freefall in its waning reign as world’s richest, most powerful country. Racism has been an unresolved worldwide human phenomenon that’s existed for as long as the conquering long boats began arriving on distant shores over a millennium ago.  

Justice for 46-year old George Floyd should be a unifying catalyst for oppressed people the world over to get behind a grassroots movement of universal justice against all institutionalized racism, demanding fundamental change, not just heat of the moment passion that dies out in a few days’ time, until the next in-our-face disgrace splashes across our computer screens and headlines. Former 6-term Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney recommends a viable potential solution: 

I propose the establishment of a permanent, independent board, similar to the National Transportation Safety Board, empowered with all necessary authority to investigate and impose solutions, including prosecution, to end criminal police behavior and prosecutorial misconduct.

Two months before George Floyd was asphyxiated to death by police in Minneapolis, in Louisville, Kentucky EMT worker Breonna Taylor was killed in on a botched search warrant when police were breaking into her home and her boyfriend fired thinking it was a home invasion robbery which resulted in indiscriminate gun spray needlessly killing Breonna. A month before that in February it was a young black jogger Ahmaud Arbury in Georgia gunned down by two white men.

The resultant violence erupting in cities across America of looting and rioting this last week has led to 4,000 arrests nationwide, symbolizing the growing frustration and anger of people everywhere, reacting to this latest unacceptable murder allowed to viciously repeat itself ad nauseam against people of color. The mass protests are spreading to Dublin, London, Berlin and Toronto. But this reactionary wave to white thugs in blue uniform callously beating and ending another black man’s life is more intense this time around, complicated by the pent up hostility and rage resulting from the protracted Coronavirus lockdown.  

In recent years the US has become a divide and conquer battleground between the polarizing Trump presidency versus the Obama-Clinton-Bush Deep State enemy camp, the right vs. the left, conservative vs. liberal, Republican vs. Democrat, white vs. nonwhite, blue state vs. red state, blue pill vs. red pill, USA vs. Russia, China and Iran, patriots vs. Gates, Fauci, WHO, CDC and the global elite, and on and on the battle lines are being drawn. Obama national security advisor Susan Rice and others are even regressing back to the tired dead-end game of blaming Russia for the riots. George Siros forces that predatorily exploit these tragic deaths as opportunity to foment global destabilization and regime change with an ultimate agenda towards a fascist totalitarian Marxist world dictatorship has been surging for years now and divisively pitting races, classes, religions, Western vs. Eastern nations against each other, ever since Trump won the 2016 election.

In the past George Soros has paid out-of-state Antifa provocateurs to incite violent chaos and civil unrest. Initial reports claim that out of state agitators were stoking the flames of unrest in Minneapolis and other cities. Trump’s threatening to place Antifa on the terrorist list. There’s nothing all that new in today’s horrifying events except one huge elephant in the room, the Coronavirus lockdown unleashed purposely to collapse the world economy, criminalize dissent, remove Trump from office and mandate vaccination rollout. 

Today’s violence and turmoil cannot be separated from the surrounding backdrop of government sponsored militarized police state oppression and violence directed against citizens of all colors spreading to virtually every nation worldwide. A calculated plan to militarize US police forces with weapons from lost US wars while training American police in Israel since IDF is so experienced in its genocidal practice against Palestinians. The global lockdown that’s gripped humanity for months now perpetrated by a centralized elite has imposed imprisonment and enforced isolation planet-wide over a bogus engineered Coronavirus pandemic. The ruling international crime cabal is seeking absolute tyrannical control over the global masses through a falsely overblown bioweapon designed to depopulate the planet.

Never before has the exasperated sentiment of the fictional newscaster character Howard Beale from writer Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetically profound 1976 film “The Network,” been more apropos: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” The American populace is an incendiary powder keg about to blow sky high, creating mass political and financial upheaval that’s certain to spread worldwide.

By design, the planetary controllers have used their induced crisis to destroy the global economy, and inflict life and death hurt on millions, if not billions of people across the globe. It’s been planned since the 2010 Rockefeller viral playbook. The global supply chain breakdown is underway and in a domino crashing effect, food shortages and hyperinflation could make the Great Depression look like a bad hair day.

With every planned and staged false flag crisis, global oligarchs controlling the national governments through bribery and sexual blackmail and the global economy through monopolized debtor theft move another step closer to their long coveted one world government tyranny. They’ve been calculatingly dumbing us down through mass media propaganda brainwashing, a broken education system pushing sexual identity confusion and communist collectivism, chemically processed GMO dead food, heavy metal poisoning through decades of geoengineering, fluoride in the water supply system, ecocide degradation ushering in the earth’s sixth and first manmade life extinction. For several years in a row Americans lifespan has been decreasing. Meanwhile, for decades the cabal has deceitfully been pushing the Malthusian overpopulation myth, killer virus scares and the global warming/climate change hoax due to manmade increasing carbon dioxide emissions as their arsenal of deployed weapons of mass destruction. Homicidal global genocide against humanity has long been their murderous agenda.

Through one orchestrated crisis after the next, vis-à-vis Gladio-like strategy of tension, the cabal uses through Machiavellian means theHegelian Dialectic formula of “problem-reaction-solution” in order to ratchet up their draconian control matrix. The elite has utilized this pandemic to deceitfully create fear and panic to more easily control the masses by over-exaggerating the virus danger as the identified problem. The reaction component has been to falsely inflate worldwide deaths attributed to Covid-19 in order to come close to fulfilling the initial logarithm model that was exceedingly high by intentional design. The mandatory vaccine as cabal’s solution increases biometric control over the masses. All the while, these extreme draconian measures effectively demolish what’s left of our constitutional rights and freedoms, and finish off obliterating our next to no rights of privacy through increased invasive electronic biometric surveillance, and without our consent, insidiously collect massive data to track our every move, expression, expense, habit and conveniently lock up the dissidents and non-compliers.

Already the most monitored and surveilled population in the history of humankind, we’ve been intrusively violated beyond our awareness. Again without consent or proper testing, we’re having 5G crammed down our radiated, throats and compromised immune systems. And now we are being herded and kept in curfew lockdown, indefinitely imprisoned on house arrest. And when we can venture out we’re seeing unprecedented checkpoints and travel restriction, warrantless search and seizure violations, mandatory vaccination now pending as the eugenics depopulation agenda, free of all death and injury liability. Our corrupted sciences and overpriced universities are corporatized propaganda mills, Big Pharma controls all our med schools and grotesquely unaffordable healthcare system while through deceptive advertising killing millions drug pushing killer opioids.

It’s time to fight back by not allowing ourselves to be further divided and conquered, allowing hate, blame and ignorance to keep us fighting amongst ourselves, too weak and too blind to unite and defeat the real enemy – the financial elites which control the banking system are pulling strings to finance both sides to every conflict and war. 

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Featured image: Mural portrait of George Floyd by Eme Street Art in Mauerpark (Berlin, Germany) (Photo by Singlespeedfahrer via Wikimedia Commons)

Four years ago, Rakeem Jones was punched unawares by John McGraw at a Donald Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 8, 2016, as police looked on. Today Jones, a young black man who wears his hair in long twists, was outside in the brutal humidity of an incipient Southern summer. Exhausted and probably saving his energy for the day ahead, Jones said simply, “You can talk and you can talk, but then you got to do something.”

Hundreds had already gathered at noon, walking along Fayetteville’s main artery, Skibo Road. Despite the dripping heat, despite the threat of Covid-19 spreading in groups and gatherings, many felt compelled to make their presence felt and their voices heard after the callous murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubery and Breonna Taylor at the hands of white police officers.

Walking in the crowd was Fayetteville mayor Mitch Colvin. Wearing a promotional polo shirt and plain pants, he was a nondescript member of the group, without retinue or escort. With Rakeem Jones’ help, Colvin and a coalition of other regional mayors and sheriffs quickly decided to refrain from visible police presence as they organized their towns’ participation in the mounting protests sweeping the country.

Emotions were high in Raleigh, the state capital about an hour north of Fayetteville, at 6:56pm, where the protest had already grown from 900 to 3,000.  Suddenly one group of protestors let out of a collective scream and ran to join another group turning onto Salisbury Street, which had not been cleared of vehicular traffic. Still the police, barely noticeable, did not interfere, as the two groups merged in and around the honking cars and noisily returned to the march’s preordained path.

By 7:00 pm, the hour at which organizers agreed to end the gathering, Raleigh police instead emerged to shut down Raleigh’s eight lane Capital Boulevard in both directions, allowing protestors to fill the main road into the city from its northeastern suburbs.

The sheriff of Wake County, where Raleigh is located, is Gerald Baker and he explained how drones were surveying the crowds and undercover officers were present on the streets. He quickly added, “It’s not about enforcement, but safety.” Fayetteville Police Chief Gina Hawkins reiterated the sentiment, saying she instructed officers to stand down.

Durham County Police Chief Clarence E. Birkhead issued a statement in which he described how he felt when he joined the force 35 years ago, “to help diversify a profession that had few people of color, like me, in its ranks.” He also led a restrained police presence throughout today’s protest in his city, citing safety while “protecting free speech.”

“Let us be resolved to fight for justice for all here in Durham,” he wrote. “Let us commit to stand up or kneel down when injustices are identified.”

Meanwhile back in Fayetteville, Rakeem Jones was interrupted as he spoke to a reporter on Hay Street. Smoke could be seen coming out of broken second story windows in the city’s historic Market House, and Jones ran to literally put out the flames. Market House has recently been the subject of debate, with calls to remove its outline from official Fayetteville correspondence because of its ties to the slave trade. Constructed in 1832, Market House sits atop the square where African people were once sold to European colonists. A plaque reads, “In memory and honor of those indomitable people who were stripped of their dignity when sold as slaves at this place.”

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This article was originally published on ZNet.

Featured image is by Fibonacci Blue/Flickr

When the videotaped public execution by a white Minneapolis police officer of African American George Floyd, 46, was posted in social media, a firestorm of opposition, protests and rebellion swept throughout the United States and internationally.

In just a matter of one day, the streets of Minneapolis and later the twin city of St. Paul were ablaze with militant demonstrations and denunciations.

These manifestations spread to other cities by May 27 where the response to the calls for marches and rallies were meet with enthusiasm and persistence. From the western states of California and Washington to the east coast with cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. there has been widespread unrest where people gathered and blocked streets and highways while others engaged in direct action related to property damage and arson attacks.

Chicago rebellion during May-June 2020 in response to the police execution of George Floyd

Atlanta, Georgia responded to the police execution of Floyd by demonstrating in the downtown area and laying siege to the Cable News Network Center. CNN and other corporate television and print networks have consistently distorted the actual circumstances surrounding the demonstrations seeking to create divisions between those utilizing nonviolent tactics against others carrying out attacks on visible symbols of exploitation and oppression including multi-national chain retail outlets, banks and police vehicles.

The forms of resistance in Minneapolis-St. Paul represent a sophisticated level of opposition to racism and state repression. The Third Precinct police station was destroyed on May 28 while the following day unrest spread to neighboring St. Paul where over 200 businesses were impacted by the rebellion.

Even though Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ordered the National Guard into the Twin Cities, it would take a full mobilization of these military forces which spread out around the unrest areas utilizing teargas, pepper spray, igniting concussion grenades and the random firing of rubber bullets into large crowds of people to clear the streets. In Minneapolis there has been at least one death since the rebellion and demonstrations erupted. Many others have been arrested and abused by the police. Journalists and bystanders are routinely arrested and held without being charged for hours.

These repressive tactics by police agencies and the National Guard are being encouraged at the highest level of government. United States President Donald Trump has castigated governors for not enacting more drastic measures against the demonstrations. Beyond the suggestion that those damaging and taking private property from businesses should be shot on sight, the administration has offered to deploy federal troops in an effort to halt the unrest.

Trump blamed the “radical left” for the demonstrations and rebellions saying that the proliferation of protests make the state governments appear weak. Although the president initially stated that the Justice Department would conduct a thorough investigation into the Floyd killing, there was no mention of the systematic racism within law-enforcement agencies around the U.S.

During the conference call with the governors on June 1, Trump was quoted as saying:

“You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have every one of these guys on tape. Why aren’t you prosecuting them?” The tougher you are, the less likely you’re going to be hit.”

Demonstrations in Washington, D.C. have been held right outside the White House. In other areas of the nation’s capital, extensive property damage and arson attacks were carried out by angry youth. On June 1, military personnel from Fort Bragg, North Carolina were deployed to the city.

Trump has evoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 allowing for the deployment of federal troops domestically. The same Act was utilized during the 1992 rebellions in the aftermath of the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King.

As of early June, thousands of National Guard soldiers are patrolling the streets of U.S. cities while demonstrations are continuing. Curfews are being imposed in Minneapolis-St. Paul and a host of other cities including New York City and Detroit.

The Escalation of Crowd Control Weapons and Tactics

In Detroit on May 31, the corporate –imposed Mayor Mike Duggan, gave a four-hour notice of a citywide curfew from 8:00pm to 5:00am. This was done after two straight days and nights of demonstrations which concluded during the evening hours with provocations by the police. The curfew has been extended for an entire week beginning on June 1. More people marched for the fourth day from the area around the police headquarters into the southwest side of the city violating the curfew.

The city administration is attempting to protect the private property interests of the leading capitalists such as Quicken Loans and Illitch Holdings. The two firms have taken over large swaths of land in downtown Detroit. Such corporations rely on tax breaks and revenue captures as a means of subsidizing their profitmaking operations. On the first night of the demonstrations, May 29, a 21-year-old youth was killed by gunfire under suspicious circumstances. Police say that the death was unrelated to the protests yet further investigation into the shooting is required in order to make a definitive conclusion.

Just 45 minutes after the curfew went into effect on May 31, riot police charged the youth-dominated crowd gathered outside police headquarters on Third Street downtown. The police used teargas, pepper spray, pellets and rubber bullets. There were unjustified arrests while several participants along with journalists were hit by the gas and rubber bullets. Several journalists were detained after they had identified themselves as media workers. (See this)

New York City demonstrations against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd

New York City police were shown on television networks attacking demonstrators and journalists. Thousands have taken to the streets of the city in various boroughs since the beginning of the mass outrage in response to the police execution of Floyd. The Democratic Governor Cuomo and Mayor DeBlassio, announced a curfew on June 1 after law-enforcement agents have been documented in engaging in brutal behavior towards the demonstrations.

Despite the declaration of a curfew thousands remained in the streets of New York City. In areas such as Manhattan, widespread property destruction and the seizure of consumer goods was the order of the night. The same situation prevailed in California where from Los Angeles to Oakland the unrest was not subsiding.

New York City police attack anti-racist demonstrators

In Louisville, Kentucky where Breonna Taylor, 26, an emergency medical technician, was killed in her apartment by the police exercising a search warrant at the wrong address on March 13, demonstrations have become larger since the videotaped police execution of George Floyd on May 25. On the evening of May 31, police officers opened fire on a group of people not involved in the demonstrations killing a local small business owner David McAtee, 53. The following day the chief of police was terminated as the city attempted to halt further disturbances.

A report on the incident published by vox.com claimed that police and National Guard were fired upon from the area and the security forces responded by shooting into a crowd of people in a parking lot. Nonetheless, this same article noted that:

“Several sources say the crowd in the parking lot was not actually protesting when police arrived. One bystander told reporters they were not engaged in protest and were merely out past the city’s curfew. And McAtee’s sister told WAVE 3 News that McAtee and others meet in the area every Sunday night for food and music, and that her brother was serving food. According to NBC, Conrad did not specify who shot the man. However, the Louisville news station WLKY is reporting that he was shot by law enforcement. Police say they are collecting video and investigating the killing. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered an independent investigation by state police. ‘Given the seriousness of the situation, I have authorized the Kentucky State Police to independently investigate the event,’ he said in a statement Monday (June 1).”

Prior to the law-enforcement killing of McAtee, on May 31, seven people were shot during mass demonstrations in Louisville just three days before. The mayor of the city stated that the shooting had nothing to do with law-enforcement. The following day on May 29, two journalists were hit with pepper balls even after they had complied with police instructions in regard to positioning and movement.

Atlanta’s Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms criticized the demonstrations downtown on May 29 saying that violent acts discredited the legacy of civil rights in the city. However, that very same night, two Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) students were attacked without provocation by several Atlanta police officers. Two of officers were fired after a video of the assaults on the two students from Morehouse and Spellman were aired on the news as well as social media.

Officers were captured breaking the windows of the vehicle the two students, Messiah Young and Taniyah Pilgrim, were riding, in addition to slashing the tires, tasing them and placing both under arrest. Pilgrim was admitted to hospital and later released while at the time of this writing, Young is still being held by the local authorities.

According to BET.com, a social media post about the status of the two students said:

“As of yesterday (May 31), Taniyah was released and is now home with a family member. Messiah is still in custody at the Fulton County Jail. He is being charged with eluding/flee police and driving without a license. His court hearing is today at 2pm.’” The Spelman College student government association released a statement of support on social media.”

Meanwhile Indianapolis police have attacked demonstrations prompting retaliatory actions against property. News reports say that 30 businesses have been damaged. Four people were shot over the May 30-31 weekend, one fatally. Police claim that their officers were not responsible although this has not been verified independently. (See this)

Indianapolis rebellion leave two dead at the hands of the police

Ruling Class Propaganda on “Outside Agitators” and “Radical Leftists”

The general tone of the corporate media talking points since the advent of the widespread mass discontent over racist police violence is designed draw a wedge between demonstrators seeking an end to racist violence. The commentators from the ruling class news outlets seek to isolate those considered outside agitators and radicals.

Even the notion that white supremacists are carrying out attacks under the protection of masks and darkness is being advanced to stoke confusion and mistrust. These corporate entities are attempting to shape how the African American people and their allies feel about the police execution of Floyd and the epidemic of law-enforcement misconduct.

Obviously these talking points are aimed at ending the demonstrations through contrived demoralization and outright state repression. This line says that there are “good protesters” and bad ones. Nonetheless, the underlying systematic problems of racism and national oppression are never addressed.

Only when there is a revolutionary structural transformation in the U.S. can the historical problem of racism be eradicated completely inside the country. The current wave of mass demonstrations and rebellions could constitute a renewed struggle to end the exploitative system in the U.S. leading to a society based upon genuine equality, economic justice and social liberation.

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

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Minneapolis could not have happened at a worse time for the US elites. While violence perpetrated against African Americans by White police officers has happened a number of times before, its occurrence right in the midst of a huge health emergency that has already claimed more than a 100,000 lives and a related massive economic disaster that has robbed 30 million people of their jobs, is truly unprecedented. The mayhem and chaos accompanying the violence have spread to a number of other cities right across the United States of America.

What has sparked outrage among thousands of Americans (and not just those of African descent) was the way in which an unarmed Black civilian, George Floyd, suspected of using a counterfeit banknote was killed by a White police officer. The officer had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 5 to 9 minutes forcing him to plead that he could not breathe until he went silent and limp. The officer has now been charged with third degree murder though a lot of the protesters are demanding that three other police personnel who were with him at the time of the incident should also be punished.

If there is a lot of anger among thinking, caring Americans about the Floyd incident, it is mainly because they know that discrimination against African Americans is still pervasive and is a manifestation of the larger marginalisation of the community. True, through education there has been some mobility for groups within this minority especially in the decades following the civil rights movement but large segments remain trapped at the bottom of the heap.  The current economic devastation has underscored the vulnerability of these segments just as the coronavirus pandemic has also revealed how the poor and disadvantaged in the US and elsewhere are more likely to be the victims of the scourge than others.

That the US is not really able to protect the well-being of the poorer and weaker segments of society is obvious when we look at the situation of yet another minority, the Hispanics. In the last few decades their economic and social burdens have been exacerbated by an irrational fear of their alleged demographic challenge to the White majority. This fear was exploited successfully by candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election as it will be manipulated again in the forthcoming November 2020 election through issues such as building a wall to protect the US’s southern border.

There is a third minority, better positioned than the first two, which is also the object of racist attacks from time to time. Broadly classified informally as ‘Asians,’ they are often equated with Americans of Chinese origin. Since the coronavirus crisis and president Trump’s attempt to pin the blame upon China, the harassment of Chinese and Chinese looking Americans has escalated. Indeed, verbal and even physical abuse of members of the community has been going on for a while given the constant negative targeting of China by some US elites on a variety of issues ranging from trade and technology to alleged human rights violations and suppression of minorities. Though independent research has shown that there is a great deal of distortion and exaggeration in these allegations, they appear to have impacted upon ordinary Americans through community and social media.

Why China is subjected to such vile treatment, it is not difficult to understand. The US elites and a section of the media see the ascendancy of China as a challenge to US dominance and control of the planet, or US hegemony, and are therefore determined to tarnish and subvert China. Other countries which are independent-minded and unwilling to submit meekly to US power are also often targeted. Sometimes, prejudice against a particular religion or specific ethnic communities — this is true of the prevailing attitude of certain segments of American society towards Islam and Muslims — tends to warp inter-community relations.

The US pursuit of global hegemony has affected adversely the rights and interests of millions of Americans in a number of ways. By spending so much on the military — in 2019 it was 732 billion US dollars — and maintaining some 800 military bases encircling the world, the US has sacrificed the essential needs of its people such as well-equipped hospitals and schools. Gross neglect of the economic and social rights of the people has emerged as a tragic reality for everyone to witness when the nation is confronted by a twin health and economic crisis of gigantic proportions.

Indeed, given its wealth, the US failure to enhance the rights of millions of its citizens including the underclass within the White majority is simply criminal.  In the domestic arena, as in international politics, it is the height of hypocrisy of the US political elite to present itself as a champion of human rights and democratic rule. In fact, on a number of occasions in international politics —- Iran 1953; Chile 1973; Palestine 2006; and Egypt 2013 —– the elite had directly and obliquely participated in the suppression of democratic principles.

Today, through the two crises that have overwhelmed the superpower and the righteous anger vented in the streets of the nation by ordinary citizens of all shades —- anger that stems from centuries of contempt and scorn heaped upon a people —- the truth about the elites’ lack of respect for human rights and human dignity is exposed for all to see. Will this lead to some sincere soul-searching especially among young Americans?

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

Six hundred physicians recently signed a letter to President Trump calling for an end to the coronavirus lockdowns. The physicians wrote that, far from protecting public health, the lockdowns are causing “exponentially growing negative health consequences” for millions of Americans.

Since the lockdowns began, there have been increases in alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence. There has also been an increase in calls to suicide hotlines. This is a direct result of the mass unemployment and limitations on people’s activities resulting from the lockdowns. As long as millions of Americans are sitting at home wondering how to survive until the government says they can go back to work — assuming the lockdowns did not drive their employers out of business, there will be more substance abuse and suicides.

At the start of the lockdowns, Americans were told to stay away from emergency rooms and doctors’ offices to avoid exposure to coronavirus. This has led Americans to neglect their health. US hospitals have seen a 40 percent decline in the number of patients admitted for severe heart attacks since March. Does anyone believe that the coronavirus panic just happened to coincide with a miraculous decline in heart attacks?

Physicians have also become unable to help many stroke victims who coronavirus lockdowns have kept from seeking medical assistance.

Early in the coronavirus panic, hospitals were told to cancel elective procedures to ensure space was available for an expected wave of coronavirus patients. But hospitals were not overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. Beds and other resources were unused.

According to the American Hospital Association, this has cost healthcare providers tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue. Inner-city and rural hospitals that already operate on slim profit margins are especially hard hit by the financial impact of the lockdowns. These hospitals may have to cut back on services. Some may even close. This will make it even more difficult for rural and inner-city Americans to obtain quality, affordable healthcare.

Postponing needed surgeries will have serious consequences. Many patients whose surgeries have been delayed will find that their once easily treatable conditions now require intensive and expensive care.

Some people are forgoing disease management and checkups that could keep them from developing more serious problems. The coronavirus lockdowns have even caused the canceling of chemotherapy treatments.

According to the physicians’ letter to President Trump, the coronavirus lockdowns are preventing 150,000 Americans a month from finding out they have cancer. Skipped routine cancer screenings mean cancer is not detected in an early stage, when it is most easily treated.

The coronavirus lockdowns have upended the lives of Americans to “protect” them from a virus with a 0.2 percent fatality rate, with the majority of those fatalities occurring in nursing homes and among people with chronic health conditions. Instead, the rational response would be to protect the vulnerable, and let the rest of the people live their lives. But politicians and government-anointed “experts” do not respond rationally to a “crisis,” especially when a panicked reaction can increase their power and prestige.

The lesson of the unnecessary lockdowns is clear: Government bureaucrats and politicians, even the media’s beloved Dr. Fauci, must be stripped of the ability to infringe on our liberty and prosperity.

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On May 27, the political movement Italia Libera submitted a constitutional bill to the Supreme Court of Cassation demanding a referendum for Italy to leave the EU. After years of discussions, the foundation stone was laid for Italians to debate whether they want to remain in the EU or follow the United Kingdom out of the bloc. The draft bill presented by Italia Libera to the Supreme Court of Cassation is entitled “Call for a referendum on the withdrawal of the state from the European Union.”

Effectively, Italia Libera has demonstrated that it is possible to follow an institutional path to allow citizens to decide whether they want to remain in the EU or not – and for those who want to leave, now is the best time considering the massive decline in popularity for the bloc after their abandonment of Italy when it was at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Gian Luca Proietti Toppi, a lawyer involved in the bill, said that it is necessary to reach ordinary Italians and “open their eyes to the harmful effects of participating in a Union without a soul and based only on finance. It is clear that with the filing of the 50,000 signatures necessary to start the parliamentary process of the proposal, a broad debate will open on the opportunity to exit the cage of the EU and the Euro.”

He continued to explain that

“the effects of liberating the old continent from this bureaucratic and oppressive superstructure will certainly be complex to manage. However, Italia Libera, who is the first promoter of the Committee that collected the signatures needed, has already put experts and academics to work to draw up a plan that will secure the savings of Italians and from the debt.”

Although he did not mention the EU’s abandonment of Italy during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, he did emphasize how the bloc financially exploits Italy, just as it does to all of Mediterranean Europe with the exception of France.

There are many positive aspects to the EU, most notably the free movement of people and a coordinated effort to fight crime through Europol, but these multilateral agreements can exist without a European Parliament and domineering institutions based in Brussels and Strasbourg. As Toppi explained, Italy imagined the EU to be “a community of peoples and not of bankers.” It is for this reason that they announced the bill on the same day an unprecedented European Union Recovery Fund became official. This fund was only established because of the backlash received due to the bloc’s initial disinterest in assisting already struggling economies of the EU that were being further devastated financially by the pandemic.

With widespread southern European dissatisfaction with how the EU abandoned its supposed liberal ideals, particularly Germany, in favour of serving inward self-interests, bloc leaders are now playing catch up. President of the European Commission and Angela Merkel’s right-hand man in previous German governments, Ursula Von Der Leyen, and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who was also a former member of the Troika of bankers, announced the unprecedented measures to assist Europe through its financial woes. This time they promised real aid that would not completely decimate state structures and entire economies like what happened to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy, for the entirety of the 2010’s. The Governor of the Bank of Italy expects a 13% drop in GDP in 2020, and for this reason Toppi emphasized that Italy does not need any further indebtedness which will increasingly put Italy in the hands of international speculators.

However, Italians remember that Lagarde announced on March 13, just as coronavirus was truly beginning to overwhelm hospitals, that the pandemic was an Italian problem only. This was the catalyst that saw ordinary Italians begin to remove EU flags from public display and replace them with Russian and Chinese flags in gratitude to the significant assistance that these two countries gave to Italy when it was abandoned by Brussels and Berlin.

An “Italexit” would be a bigger blow to the prestige of the EU then Brexit. Italy, as a G20 country, uses the Eurodollar unlike Britain which maintained currency sovereignty and continued to use the pound. Therefore, to prevent the strong possibility that Italy in the coming years could leave the EU, Brussels and Berlin must take note of its political failures and work to design a new community that has respect for national sovereignty and identity, and on the basis of reciprocity. It is not acceptable that Germany remains the dominant country of the EU and effectively rules over the European Commission, the European Central Banks, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament.

A Europe free of unscrupulous bankers, self-referential bureaucrats and inadequate politicians is at the forefront of those pushing for their respective countries to exit the EU or call for its reformation. However, for this to be achieved, a major state must lead the charge, and it appears that Italy will take on this mantle and could very well be the first Eurodollar state to leave the EU if drastic reformations are not made. And Italian exit will surely have a domino effect felt all across Europe.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Why is the media so preoccupied with Sweden? And why is the media so determined to prove that Sweden’s approach to the coronavirus is wrong? Are we supposed to believe that the same MSM that promoted every bloody coup, intervention and war for the last 30 years has suddenly become a selfless advocate for elderly Swedes fighting off a lethal infection?

That’s baloney. The reason the media publishes roughly 15 articles blasting Sweden for every one article voicing support is because the media has a stake in the outcome. The media wants to dispel the idea that there is any alternative to the authoritarian lockdown approach. Thus, the Swedish model– that leaves parts of the economy open and trusts people to follow the government’s “distancing” guidelines — has to be obliterated. That’s what’s really going on. The media has no interest in a smallish north European country of 10.4 million people. What they care about is the example that Sweden is setting for other countries around the world. If those other countries follow suit and settle on an approach that is based on science and trust rather than politics and coercion, then the elitist plan to prolong the crisis and restructure the economy begins to unravel. So, Sweden must be annihilated. It’s that simple.

The first line of attack against Sweden is its “death rate” which is significantly higher than its neighbors in Norway or Denmark. And while there are only 4,395 deaths in Sweden today as opposed to over 100,000 in the United States, the information is always presented in the most sensationalist terms, like this goofy clip from the National Review:

“There have now been ten times as many COVID-19 deaths in Sweden than Norway on a per capita basis. According to the Worldometers website, 435 out of every one million Swedes have died from the virus, while the virus has killed 44 out of every million Norwegians.” (National Review)

Wow, “435 out of every one million Swedes have died from the virus!” Those barbaric Swedes, they’re killing their own people!

This is alarmist nonsense. Think about it: “435 out of every million” is just 1 in every 2,500. Is that enough to justify the shutting down of the economy and suspending civil liberties? Of course, not. And, keep in mind, the great majority of these fatalities are among people that are 70 years-old and up with underlying health conditions. Like everywhere else, roughly 90% of Covid fatalities occur among the over 60-crowd with co-morbidities”.

So I put this question to you: Is one death in every 2,500 sufficient reason to strangle the economy and put the country under house arrest?

The answer is “No”. The lockdown was not only a mistake, it was a fear-fueled, knee-jerk reaction to the exponential spike in Covid-positive cases for which policymakers were completely unprepared. So, instead of consulting a broader range of experts with varying opinions on the topic, the Trump administration adopted the Chinese model that was supported by Dr Fauci and the Vaccine Mafia. As as result, 40 million Americans have lost their jobs, every sector of the economy is in freefall, and the US is headed for another Great Depression. In contrast to this madness, Sweden’s infectious disease experts developed a sensible, science-based plan which was laid out in an article by Dr. Johan Giesecke at The Lancet. Here’s an excerpt:

“It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes—a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK’s experience with that of other European countries…

These facts have led me to the following conclusions. Everyone will be exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and most people will become infected. COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in all countries, but we do not see it—it almost always spreads from younger people with no or weak symptoms to other people who will also have mild symptoms. This is the real pandemic, but it goes on beneath the surface, and is probably at its peak now in many European countries. There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in 1 year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.

Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future —it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain that vaccines will be very effective.

In summary, COVID-19 is a disease that is highly infectious and spreads rapidly through society. It is often quite symptomless and might pass unnoticed, but it also causes severe disease, and even death, in a proportion of the population, and our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care.” (“The Invisible Pandemic”, The Lancet)

As you can see, the Swedish team that developed the policy was not “gambling” with Swedish lives as the idiot media likes to say. They were applying decades of science to a problem that required them to make tough decisions about the best way to navigate an epidemic for which there is no known cure and no effective treatment. And their choice was clearly the right one. They elected to keep the economy open as much as possible while making every effort to protect the old and vulnerable. It was an excellent plan despite the notable failures in its implementation, the biggest of which was the surge of fatalities at the rest homes which has been nothing short of a catastrophe. More than half of Sweden’s death toll comes from these homes for the elderly, while a whopping 4,200 of the 4,386 people who have died from the virus have been over 60. That is NOT a misprint. (See Sweden’s official state statistics here) A mere 186 people under 60 have died from the infection.

While these statistics may be shocking, they don’t suggest the policy was wrong, only that there wasn’t enough effort put into protecting the elderly. So, is it fair to blame Sweden for its higher death rate?

Of course, it is, provided we allow sufficient time to see whether the lockdowns actually prevented deaths or if they just postponed them until the restrictions were lifted. That’s the only way we’ll know for sure whether they worked or not. Some experts predict that the percentage of deaths will balance out in the long-term and that Norway and Denmark’s fatality rate will look very similar to Sweden’s. But only time will tell.

It’s also worth noting that Belgium, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy and France all lead Sweden in terms of “deaths per million”, which is the standard metric for measuring the success or failure of a particular approach. So why is Sweden –which has 405 deaths per million– so savagely raked over the coals, while Belgium–that has 817 deaths per million — gets off scot-free? It’s because Belgium hasn’t veered from the official lockdown policy which achieves the elitist dream of universal martial law. Sweden rejected that option which is why the agenda-driven media has hung a bullseye on it’s back.

Did you know that the Norwegian Prime Minister admitted that the lockdown was a mistake? It’s true, here’s what she said:

“Last Wednesday night, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on television to make a confession: she had panicked at the start of the pandemic. Most of the tough measures imposed in Norway’s lockdown were steps too far, she admitted. “Was it necessary to close schools?” she asked. “Perhaps not.”

She isn’t the first Norwegian official to acknowledge that the lockdown wasn’t necessary. On May 5th, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) published a briefing note reporting….“Our assessment now… is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures,” Camilla Stoltenberg, NIPH’s Director General said in a TV interview earlier this month….

(“Norwegian Prime Minister Admits Lockdown Was Mistake” Lockdown Skeptic)

Interesting, eh? So while Norway is invariably used to prove that Sweden “got it wrong”, Norway’s own PM thinks they “got it right”. It’s no surprise that this story didn’t appear anywhere in the western media.

And, did you know that the UK Government has released the classified minutes from the SAGE (The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) meetings which show that the government’s decision to lockdown the country was not based on science but on politics? Check it out:

“…at no point did SAGE discuss anything resembling a full lockdown. Indeed, SAGE noted at a meeting on March 10th that banning public gatherings would have little effect since most viral transmission occurred in confined spaces, such as within households….

In other words, Boris Johnson and his advisors were not following “the science” when they took the decision to lock down the country on March 23rd – they weren’t acting on any specific recommendations by SAGE. Nor can the Government claim this is one of the options that was discussed at SAGE meetings and it was basing its decision, in part, on SAGE’s analysis of the impact of a full lockdown. That option was not discussed at any of the meetings before March 23rd. In this respect, it was a political decision.” (“Was the Government Really Following “the Science”? Lockdown Skeptics)

There it is in black and white, the British lockdown isn’t science-based anymore than the American lockdown is science-based. The policy was adopted by hysterical politicians who overreacted to a public health crisis for which they were totally unprepared. That’s what these classified SAGE documents prove.

No “Herd Immunity” after all?

“Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, has been widely criticized for claiming that Sweden would achieve “herd immunity” by the end of May. “But a recent study found that just 7.3 percent of Stockholm residents tested positive for coronavirus antibodies at the end of April. “I think herd immunity is a long way off, if we ever reach it,” Bjorn Olsen, professor of infectious medicine at Uppsala University, told Reuters.” (National Review)

But there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Not everyone who is exposed to the virus manifests an antibody response. According to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, (who produced a rival model to Ferguson’s back in March.)

“The antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don’t show up on antibody tests — either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities to related coronaviruses such as the common cold.

The implications of this are profound – it means that when we hear results from antibody tests the percentage who test positive for antibodies is not necessarily equal to the percentage who have immunity or resistance to the virus. The true number could be much higher. Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19 progression:

“In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.”

Asked what her updated estimate for the Infection Fatality Rate is, Professor Gupta says, “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.” That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%”. (“Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out”, unherd.com)

Gupta makes a important point, but it needs to be better explained. If, for example, “just 7.3 percent of Stockholm residents tested positive for coronavirus antibodies at the end of April”, that does not mean that only 7.3% of Stockholm residents are immune. No. Some people have an innate immunity (due to their genetic makeup) or have “existing immunities” linked to prior infections like Sars. Gupta believes that immunity is more widespread than is evident by the results of antibody tests. This suggests that the percentage of Stockholm residents that are immune could be much greater than we think. Given the virulence of the infection, as well as the interaction of the city’s population, Stockholm could be very close to herd immunity already. The decline in “new cases” strongly suggests that immunity is blocking the spread of the pathogen which means the virus is gradually dying out. If that’s what is currently taking place, then Sweden will likely be spared a “second wave” of the pandemic.

Sweden’s Economy; Not so hot

Sweden’s economy is expected to contract at a rate that is comparable to that of its neighbors. . Check out this excerpt from an article at NPR:

“Even without a nationwide lockdown, the Sweden’s economy has taken a hit as people continue to follow their government’s guidelines and stay at home….Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, provided two potential scenarios for the country’s economic outlook in 2020.

“Despite the comprehensive measures both in Sweden and abroad, the economic consequences of the pandemic will be considerable. The consequences for the economy will vary depending on how long the spread of infection continues and on how long the restrictions implemented to slow it down are in place,” the Riksbank said in a statement in April.

Both scenarios predict a rise in unemployment rate and a contraction of the country’s gross domestic product. The central bank expects unemployment to rise from 6.8% to 10.1% and GDP to shrink by up to 9.7% this year as result of the pandemic.” (“Sweden won’t reach herd immunity in May”, NPR)

Bottom line: Sweden is going to face a deep recession just like the countries that implemented harsher measures. So what was gained by bucking the trend?

Maybe nothing, but I expect it will be much easier and less costly for Sweden to gear-up to full capacity than any of the lockdown states. And Sweden will not have to deal with disruptive shutdowns due to sporadic outbreaks like we’ve seen recently in Germany, South Korea and China. In fact, this could be a recurrent problem in countries that put their hopes in contact tracing or quarantines. In contrast, Sweden bet the farm on old-fashioned immunity developed through controlled exposure of younger, low-risk people who strengthened their own natural defenses by interacting with their friends and families as they normally would. It’s clear, they made the only sensible choice.

Sweden has shown that it’s possible to counter a deadly pandemic and preserve personal freedom at the same time. They alone have triumphed where others have failed.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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We bring to the attention of our readers the Summary of this important leaked report conducted on behalf of Germany’s Ministry of the Interior.

Click here for the complete report in German.

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b. Aufgrund Einschränkungen der Klinikverfügbarkeiten (und Behandlungsmöglichkeiten) verschobene oder abgesagte Folgebehandlungenvon (z.B. an Krebs, Schlaganfall oder Herzinfarkt) Erkrankten:

Die negativen Wirkungen von unterbrochenen Versorgungsstrukturen bei Tumorpatienten, seien es Krebsnachsorge oder auch unterbrochene Krebsvorsorgeprogramme, wie beim Brustkrebs, liegen auf der Hand, denn diese Maßnahmen haben ja ihren Nutzen in langen Studien belegt und sind auf dieser Basis eingerichtet worden.

Es ist auch hier von jährlichen Behandlungszahlen in Millionenhöhe auszugehen. In einem Teil der Fälle werden die Verfügbarkeitseinschränkungen der Kliniken ebenfalls zum vorzeitigen Versterben von Patienten führen. Eine Prognose dieses Effekts ist schwierig. Experten, die sich dazu äußerten, gingen von bis zu mehreren tausend zusätzlichen Toten aus, die bereits in März und April 2020 verstarben oder noch versterben werden.

c. Bei der Versorgung von Pflegebedürftigen (in DEU insgesamt 3,5 Mio. Menschen) sinkt aufgrund von staatlich verfügten Beschränkungen das Versorgungsniveau und die Versorgungsqualität (in Pflegeeinrichtungen, bei ambulanten Pflegediensten sowie bei privat / innerfamiliär durchgeführter Pflege). Da erwiesenermaßen das gute Pflegeniveau in DEU viele Menschen vor dem vorzeitigen Versterben bewahrt (das ist der Grund dafür, dass dafür so viel Geld aufgewendet wird), wird die im März und April 2020 erzwungene Niveauabsenkung vorzeitige Todesfällen ausgelöst haben. Bei 3,5 Mio. Pflegebedürftigen würde eine zusätzliche Todesrate von einem Zehntel Prozent zusätzliche 3.500 Tote ausmachen. Ob es mehr oder weniger sind, ist mangels genauerer Schätzungen nicht bekannt.

d. Zunahmenvon Suiziden (bisherdurchschn.9.000proJahr); Gründefürdie Zunahme von Suiziden: langeandauernde erhebliche Beeinträchtigung aller Lebensbedingungen, die für psychisch instabile Persönlichkeiten kritisch werden können; aber auch mit zahlreichen Suiziden als Reaktion auf die wirtschaftliche Vernichtung von Existenzen ist zu rechnen; diverse Berufsgruppen, die sich ihrer Belastung durch die gesellschaftlichen und persönlichen Veränderungen und ihrer persönlichen (Mit)Verantwortung nicht gewachsen fühlen.

e. Zusätzliche Todesfälle durch Herzinfarkt und Schlaganfall

Über die letzten Jahre und Jahrzehnte wurden integrierte Konzepte entwickelt, die erfolgreich die Morbidität und Mortalität beeinflusst haben und darauf beruhen, dass möglichst frühzeitig (im Krankheitsverlauf), möglichst rasch (Zeit bis zur Versorgung) und möglichst kompetent eine Versorgung erfolgt. Diese inter-sektoralen/- disziplinären Ketten sind in vielfacher Weise geschädigt (ambulante Versorgung, Ressourcenentzug) und leiden auch maximal darunter, dass bedingt durch einseitige und übertriebene Informationspolitik die Betroffenen unberechtigter Weise Corona mehr als diese Erkrankungen fürchten und Warnzeichen unterdrücken und auch befürchten mit diesen Erkrankungen in der derzeitigen Corona-Fixierung im Krankenhaus nicht gut behandelt zu werden. In Konsequenz suchen derzeit viele Betroffene nicht/zu spät den Arzt auf, was bei diesen Erkrankungen erhöhte Morbidität, verschlechterte Rehabilitation und erhöhte Mortalität bedeutet.

Dear Readers,

While we must always hold on to hope, true peace can only be achieved through awareness and action. With recent tragic events in the US, we are reminded of Professor Peter Dale Scott’s words: “The future of our threatened world urgently requires the strengthening of a global public opinion, to resist and overcome the wrongdoings of oppressive local powers.”

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Stranger things have happened.

Everyone was expecting US President Donald Trump to go nuclear by de facto sanctioning China to death over Hong Kong. In an environment where Twitter and the President of the United States are now engaged in open warfare, the rule is that there are no rules anymore.

So in the end, what was announced against China amounted to an anti-climax.

The US government, as it stands, is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO). The geopolitical repercussions are immense and that will take time to sink in. In the short term, something must be blamed for the US’ appalling Covid-19 record, so it might as well be a UN institution.

Hong Kong’s preferential trade status will also be terminated, but in a hazy future in still undetermined terms.

Phase 1 of the US-China trade deal still stands – at least for now. Yet there’s no guarantee that Beijing itself won’t start to doubt it.

The bottom line: “Investors” were duly appeased, for now. Team Trump seems not to be exactly versed in the niceties of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, as the president stressed the “plain violation of Beijing’s treaty obligations with the United Kingdom.” The national security law was blasted as “the latest” Chinese aggression against its own special administrative region.

Now compare all this with the Two Sessions in Beijing ending the day before, with an intriguing, quite Keynesian performance by Prime Minister Li Keqiang. This was compelling as much for what Li did not say as for what he chose to put on the public record.

Let’s review some of the highlights. Li stressed that the NPC’s resolution putting forth a national security law for Hong Kong is meant to protect “one country, two systems,” and not as an “aggression.”

Instead of demonizing the WHO, Beijing is committed to a serious scientific investigation of the origins of Sars-Cov-2. “No cover-up” will be allowed, Li said, adding that a clear, scientific understanding should contribute to global public health. Beijing also supports an independent review into the WHO’s handling of Covid-19.

Geopolitically, China rejects a “Cold War mentality” and hopes China and the US will be able to cooperate. Li stressed the relationship could be either mutually beneficial or mutually harmful. Decoupling was described as a very bad idea, for bilateral relations and for the world at large. China, after all, will start to import more and that should also profit US companies.

Domestically, the absolute focus – 70% of the available new funding – will be on employment, support for small and medium enterprises and measures to encourage consumption rather than investment in infrastructure building. In summation, in Li’s own words: “The central government will live on a tight budget.”

If not completely Sisyphean in the long term, it will at least be a “daunting task” in Li’s terminology considering the previously stated end-of-2020 deadline would be to reach President Xi Jinping’s goal of eliminating poverty across China.

Li said absolutely nothing about three key themes: the alarming Himalayan border stand-off between China and India; the prospects for Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects; and China’s complex geopolitical and geo-economic relationship with the European Union (EU).

The non-mention of the last theme is especially noticeable after Chancellor Merkel’s quite encouraging assessment earlier this week and EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell’s remark to a group of German ambassadors that “the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century” is now “happening in front of our eyes.”

Confirming steady rumors emanating from Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels and Paris, China and East Asia are taking precedence as the EU’s top trading partner. This is something that will be extensively discussed at the upcoming EU-China summit next autumn in Germany. The EU is going Eurasia. Team Trump won’t be amused.

Dancing with wolves, remixed

Predictably, the Beijing leadership needs to focus on domestic consumption and reaching the next level on technological production so as not to fall into the notorious “middle-income trap.” Fine-tuning the balance between domestic stability and a very strong and wide global reach is another tak that brings Sisyphos to mind.

Xi, Li and the Politburo very well know that Covid-19 hugely affected migrants, farmers and small-scale family entrepreneurs. The risk of social unrest is very high. Unemployment protection is far from Scandinavian levels. So back to business, fast, has to be the top priority.

Enveloping this strategy is a new diplomatic offensive. Foreign Minister Wang Yi, usually meticulously nuanced and polite, is now increasingly exasperated. Earlier this week, Yi defined the demonization of China by the US over Covid-19 as “a product of the three no’s”: no grounds, no factual basis and no international precedent.

Moreover, he described attempts to blackmail China through threats as “daydreaming.”   The Global Times, for its part, has blasted the Trump administration for “typical international hooliganism” and additionally stressed that “labeling Chinese diplomacy as ‘wolf warrior’ reflects an extreme ideology.”

The “wolf warrior” plot is bound to thicken. Beijing does seem ready to deploy its diplomatic force as wolf warriors. One should always keep in mind General Qiao Liang: if China is forced to dance with wolves, it might as well set up the rhythm.

That applies perfectly to the Hong Kong question. Whatever Team Trump thinks, Beijing has no interest whatsoever in disturbing the Hong Kong financial system or collapsing the Hang Seng index. That’s exactly what the black block protesters last year were accomplishing.

What we saw during this week is the result of what a task force, sent to Shenzhen last year to examine every angle of the protests, relayed back to the leadership in Beijing.

The sources of financing for the hardcore black blocks have reputedly been cut. The local 5^th columnist “leaders” have been isolated. Beijing was being very patient tackling the whole mess. Then along came Covid-19.

The economic consensus in Beijing is that this will be an L-shaped recovery – actually very slow on the bottom of the L. So the West will buy much less from and invest much less in China.

This implies that Hong Kong is not going to be very useful. Its best bet has already been offered many times over: integrate with the Greater Bay Area and be part of a booming Pearl river delta southern cluster. Hong Kong businesses support it.

Another conclusion was that, whatever Beijing does, the Sinophobic hysteria in the US – and in this case also the UK – is unabated. So now is the right moment to go for the national security law, which of course is against subversion, against British-era “wigs” (judges) acting as 5^th columnists and, most of all, against money laundering.

A Global Times editorial cut to the chase: the national security law is the “death knell” for US intervention in Hong Kong.

Cold War 2.0

As much as Yi may have said, this time diplomatically, that we’re “on the brink” of a new Cold War, the fact is the Trump administration’s hybrid war on China – or Cold War 2.0 – is now fully established.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is openly threatening Five Eyes allies and vassals, as well as Israel, with consequences if they fail to ditch any projects linked to Belt and Road.

That is intimately linked to the avalanche of threats and measures against Huawei and everything connected to Made in China 2025, which proceeds at a fast pace but without using the terminology.

The official Trump re-election campaign strategy “China, China, China,” detailed in a 57-page memo to Republicans, is bound to be deployed as total hybrid warfare, including non-stop propaganda, threats, infowar technologies, cyber warfare and breaking news fabrications.

The ultimate objective shared by every Sinophobic strand, whether commercially-minded or think tank-based, is to derail the Chinese economy – a top level competitor – by any means necessary and thus cripple the ongoing Eurasian integration process whose three key nodes, China, Russia and Iran, happen to be top “threats” according to the US national security strategy.

Once again, the gloves are off. And Beijing won’t stop counterpunching in kind.

It’s as if Beijing had so far serially underestimated the Deep State and Beltway’s larger than life obsession with always remaining the undisputed hegemon, geopolitically and geo-economically. Every “conflict” erupting across the chessboard is and will continue to be directly linked to the twin objectives of containment of Russia and disruption of the Belt and Road.

I previously referred to the Empire of Chaos, where a plutocracy progressively projects its own internal disintegration upon the whole world. But only now is the serious game starting, complete with Trump’s intention to test nuclear bombs again. Not against a bunch of low-life “terrorists,” but against a serious, peer-competitor: the Eurasian strategic partnership.

It would be too much to expect Team Trump to learn from Gramscian analyses of Belt and Road, which demonstrate how the Chinese Dream – a Confucianist variant of neoliberalism – marks the evolution of China into a core production zone in the neoliberal world economy by profiting from the existing global legal structure.

Team Trump has vociferously announced its own strategy. Expect serial, silent Sun Tzu counterpunches.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in a file image. Image: Youtube

Instead of serving the public interest by reporting truthfully on major issues, establishment media serve as press agents for powerful interests.

Their managed news misinformation and disinformation includes the myth of barbarians at the gates to support endless wars on nations threatening no one, along with handouts to Wall Street and other corporate favorites — notably Big Pharma.

US pharmaceutical and biotech companies have gotten billions of taxpayer dollars to finance their research — drugs developed sold to US consumers at unacceptably high prices.

In 2017, attorney James Young involved in Big Pharma litigation, health fraud, and consumer protection, asked:

“How do we make $1 billion?”

“Big Pharma’s focus on profits often comes at the expense of patient safety,” he added.

“If there is no disease criteria consistent with the symptoms that a company’s drug treats, then the company creates a disease” or a pretext to use its drugs for maximum profits.

“They pay physicians, research institutions, and universities to come up with different disease criteria that are consistent with the symptoms that the drug treats.”

While required to inform consumers of possible harmful side effects, at times they’re hidden, including results of clinical trials.

Making “a billion dollars” requires selling a drug “to a broad market.” Promotion is key, especially by television advertising and getting physician endorsements.

Other methods are also used to market drugs, including unsafe ones, notably vaccines.

All vaccines are hazardous to human health, often causing diseases they’re supposed to protect against.

Even the WHO admitted that more polio cases were caused by vaccines than from the virus itself.

When available, the risk will be extremely high that COVID-19 vaccines may cause serious health problems to individuals permitting themselves to be vaxxed.

At this time, no drugs exist to cure COVID-19, hydroxychloroquine a promising exception.

It’s an anti-malarial drug around for decades that showed positive results in treating COVID-19 patients.

Big Pharma and Bill Gates, in cahoots with Anthony Fauci and other corrupt officials it bribed to support its agenda, want nothing interfering with their diabolical plot to mass-vax humanity with toxins able to kill or otherwise seriously harm human health — substances to be included in a COVID-19 drug when available.

Vaccine development takes around three to four years. Most clinical trials fail.

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are racing to develop COVID-19 vaccines because of the potential profit bonanza.

Instead of following vaccine development protocol, they’re cutting corners at the expense of safety and efficacy.

It’s virtually impossible to develop a vaccine in months as opposed to required years of testing.

Among others, two companies in the news are Germany’s CureVac and Massachusetts-based Moderna.

Thailand Medical News (TMN) reported that “CureVac’s CEO resigned, and the company received a huge public investment, with the promise to deliver a vaccine by autumn 2020,” adding:

“CureVac’s promises for a different vaccine ended up with nothing to show for but a failed phase 2 clinical trial.”

Moderna began human trials “without any previous preclinical testing for efficacy or safety,” TMN explained.

At least three individuals involved as test subjects for its COVID-19 vaccine had adverse reactions.

One individual said he developed a 103 degree temperature and needed urgent medical treatment.

Potential longer-term hazards to his health remain to be discovered.

TMN noted that Moderna never successfully brought a drug to market through required clinical trials.

According to vaccine experts, the company failed to disclose data on its vaccine development, focusing instead on non-specific PR information to the public.

TMN criticized its approach, calling it “words, not data,” the latter what science requires.

Moderna reportedly enlisted 45 test subjects for its phase 1 trial, publicly reporting early results on 8 alone. What about the other 37?

According to vaccine researcher Dr. Anna Durbin, “(w)e don’t know if (reported) antibodies (in 8 subjects) are durable?”

When asked for more data on its test results, Moderna’s communications director Colleen Hussey said disclosure will come later — in what form and how detailed not explained.

According to TMN, the company “doesn’t publish on its work in scientific journals.”

“What is known has been disclosed through press releases. That’s not enough to generate confidence within the scientific community.”

Separately in mid-May, Pompeo said the Trump regime is “committed” to holding China accountable for widespread COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths it had nothing to do with.

Blaming others for its own wrongdoing is longstanding US policy, including nations victimized by US aggression.

Trump regime hostility toward China ignited a new Cold War that could turn hot if Washington pushes things too far.

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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.

If anyone needed another reminder that Black lives simply don’t matter in the United States of America, the police in Minneapolis have clearly demonstrated that fact.

It will be a long time before I will forget the picture of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. Even that statement is shocking. I still have not forgotten a very similar picture from 2014: a Black man on the ground being choked by a white policeman. In that earlier time, the victim was Eric Garner. His murderer, Daniel Pantaleo, faced no charges. Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder three days after his crime was committed. The Minnesota attorney who announced those charges commented how quickly they came about: only four days after the crime was committed.

For those four days, Chauvin was a free man. All it took was four days of investigation, coupled with major protests across the country, for the charges to be laid. Why in the ‘enlightened’ United States, is video evidence of a violent murder not sufficient? Why is it necessary for the people to rise up in protest for any semblance of justice to be achieved?

The late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” If the people of Minneapolis believed that this crime against an unarmed Black man would be treated the same way as the murder of an unarmed white man, the third precinct building might still be standing today. The other stores and buildings that have burned to the ground might still be operating. This destruction is part of the ‘language of the unheard’. People who are ‘unheard’ for generations, and who face the kind of repression, harassment and discrimination that people of color in the United States experience, will, eventually, take their rage to the streets.

Chauvin has been charged; we will see how his trial proceeds. But one of the many meaningless gestures we can now expect from elected and appointed officials is for additional training of the police, so they know how to handle such situation.

After I heard of the tragic death of Mr. Floyd, I picked up a book I had obtained sometime earlier called This Stops Today written by Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner. In the book, she quotes the Rev. Al Sharpton: “You don’t need training to stop choking a man saying ‘I can’t breathe.”

The police in the United States can be trained from now until the end of time, but until the racism that is so inherent in U.S. governance, including within the so-called justice system, ends, there will be more Eric Garners, George Floyds, Michael Browns, Philandro Castiles, etc., etc.

Just a few days prior to Mr. Floyd’s murder, a man in New York City’s Central Park escaped a deadly fate. Christian Cooper, a Black man, was bird watching in a section of the park where dogs are required to be leashed. He encountered Amy Cooper (no relation), a racist, entitled white woman, walking in that section with her dog unleashed. When he asked her to please leash her dog, as required by law, so the many ground-nesting birds and the plants in that particular section would not be disturbed, she refused. She then threatened to call the police and tell them that an African-American man was threatening her in the park. She did so, imbuing her voice with a sufficient amount of alarm to give her lie credence. However, before the police arrived, both she and Christian Cooper left the area. One can only wonder at the outcome if both had been present when the police arrived. Mr. Cooper was indeed fortunate.

And it doesn’t stop with the immediate victim. Ramsey Orta was one of the people who filmed Mr. Garner’s death in 2014. As a result, his name and face became well-known. A year after this murder, his house was raided, and he was arrested on a drug charge and accepted a plea deal that included incarceration. During that time, he was sometimes denied visitors, spent time in solitary confinement, and was moved from facility to facility for no apparent reason other than to make it difficult for anyone to visit him.

Taisha Allen, who also filmed that murder, was continually harassed by the police. In addition to verbal harassment (“Oh, you are that bitch that filmed the Eric Garner video”), on various occasions she was thrown to the ground, dragged by her feet and beaten with a baton. She, like Ramsey Orta, was guilty of attempting to hold criminal police accountable.

None of this should be surprising. The earliest documents establishing the United States as a country stated that governance would be by white, male landowners only. This occurred years after the settlers began sailing to the continent of Africa, kidnapping thousands of people and bringing them to  North America as slaves. By the time of the nation’s founding, the Natives who lived in North America were seen as less than human, and their destruction is one of the most horrific genocides the world has ever known. It seems to be a given in the U.S. that to be white is better than to be Black or Brown, and to be white and male is the highest honor with which one can be born.

Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination this year and is now hoping to be selected as apparent nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, is under scrutiny for her time as Hennepin County Minnesota’s top prosecutor. It appears that she was, at best, lax in dealing with earlier crimes committed by Chauvin. She referred them to the local Grand Jury, which generally sides with the police over the public. Had Chauvin been prosecuted for some of his earlier crimes, perhaps Mr. Floyd would be alive today. In the long tradition of chameleon-style U.S. politicians, Klobuchar now says this: “I think that was wrong. I think it would have been much better if I took the responsibility and looked at the cases and made the decision myself.” And Biden says he was wrong to vote for the Iraq war. And former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he was wrong to enforce racial profiling in that city. It seems that many politicians do many things wrong until they run for higher office, when they suddenly have an epiphany and realize the errors of their ways.

It seems that the Ku Klux Klan has exchanged the white robes and hoods of the first half of the twentieth century for a new uniform, this one blue and adorned with a badge. The lynchings of an earlier day have been substituted for the shootings and strangulations of today, with the consequences mainly being unchanged. Panteleo was fired from his job five years after he murdered Mr. Garner, but he was never charged with any crime. The Grand Juries in most, if not all, states act as accomplices to the many murders committed by the police.

What is to be done? How will such deeply ingrained racism ever be defeated in the United States? It will never change as long as the special interests are in charge. If only the members of the voting populace realized the power that they have! Electoral choices are not limited to the Republican and Democratic Parties; their continued election only validates their awful policies. It is long past time to vote for third-party candidates. They are there; the two major parties will do all that they can to supress them, but with the Internet, they are not hard to find. This year, let’s let those two parties know that we know we have choices, and that we are going to use them.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

“Without trampling through all the historical details, we can designate the entire history of [Americans]—the glorious past so eulogized by our fathers—as the history of shame, for in that history there is more betrayal, apostasy, perfidious intrigue, ignominious defeat, well-deserved failure, base vengeance, merciless retaliation and brutality that no hypocrisy can mask… So let’s forget about the past and old glories, namely let’s leave it be, let’s no longer bring up those shames of the past and the jumbled mendacities considered worthy of praise, it’s more than enough for us just to remain on the surface of that swamp if at all possible, the swamp denoting the state of moral values today…Whoever is [American] continually postpones his present, exchanging it for a future that will never arrive.” Baron Wenkheim’s Homecoming, Laszlo Krasznahorkai

What subcategory of human being takes a knee on a handcuffed man, mashed face down on the pavement and, ultimately, forces him to die? Such was the action of a psychopathic white Minneapolis, Minnesota, police-paramilitary officer named Derek Chauvin, that resulted in the death of a black man, George Floyd.

Right there, on the street, recorded live by a bystander. Chauvin continued his personal application of the death penalty even as he knew he was being filmed. Idiot or no? Did he think he’d be exonerated by his superiors. Now the world can watch a uniformed member of the Minnesota State paramilitary apparatus snuff the life out of a human being. For what? An allegedly forged $20 bill?

And the result?

A long overdue protest movement in major cities across the United States that is posing a challenge to the State-Wall Street monopoly on violence that disproportionately eliminates blacks, Latino’s and poor whites. And let’s not forget those citizens in foreign countries wiped off the map by perpetual US bombing and drone attacks. (State-Wall Street: referring to corporations, lobbyists, finance houses, politicians, mainstream media, upper echelon military, etc.)

Power to the State-Wall Street, Not the People

It’s not the death of a black, white, Latino, Syrian or Iraqi, that is of concern to the State-Wall Street, rather it is the fear of the violent challenge posed by the protestors here at home (or insurgents abroad, China, Russia) to the State-Wall Street monopoly on violence.

The fear of the State-Wall Street crowd is so intense that the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, called the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to talk about strategy and tactics to subdue the protestors. Is that such a good idea given that the Taliban is pushing the US military out of Afghanistan?

The Pentagon is finally going to go to open war against its own—again— people first starting with the National Guard deployment in Minneapolis and followed by active duty military police. Most Americans will not care as they have been pummeled with constant propaganda about the military being a divine institution. What’s next? Another Jackson State?

The protests underway have at their foundation the totalitarian economic conditions which the State-Wall Street benignly incarcerate the larger population leaving them with the sham outlet of elections that simply replaces one prison warden with another.

Vote for what? Another fascist like President Donald J. Trump or governors around the country who have their eyes on senate or house seats?

Why would someone like Floyd, allegedly, try to pass off a $20 note?

You can’t separate that act from the grueling austerity measures and unemployment in the USA that leaves the young and poor, and lower classes of all stripes with no economic future and struggling to make ends meet each day, even to put food on the table.

Yeah, sure, the COVID19 Pandemic has been really tough on most Americans. But where are the trillions of federal dollars in the form of food aid, unemployment benefits, jobs programs for the Floyd’s and others in this country?

The State-Wall Street act as if over 100,000 Americans deaths from COVID19 (largely poor, elderly, black) don’t matter at all. Nothing to see here, move along, the dear leaders say. Put the American flags at half mast, the president says. Here’s $1200 for each household, the US Congress says. Bow your heads in remembrance of the 100K religious leaders say. With this kind of American psychopathic leadership mentality that seems now to have infected nearly all American political and economic leaders, what’s one more George Floyd to them?

And it was chaotic ineptitude by the Trump administration, and his predecessors, that led to so many deaths. Even the nonpartisan Lancet weighed in on the matter with an unsigned editorial:

“Funding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from China CDC in July 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge.”

If You Can Kill 1 or 100K Americans, Why not Kill the Environment and Wildlife?

Everywhere across the spectrum that you look you can see the State-Wall Street turning the clock back to the early 1960s. Nowhere is this more evident than in the repeal of environmental and wildlife protections.

The Trump administration is relaxing a rule on the hunting and killing of bear cubs and wolves in their dens. According to Newsweek this report:

 “The National Park Service described the new rule as an effort to reinstate federal alignment with the state’s hunting regulations, according to an NPS news release. The rule, which is expected to go into effect in late June, would reverse course on hunting restrictions introduced in 2015 by President Barack Obama’s administration.

NPS spokesperson Peter Christian told the Anchorage Daily News that hunters would be allowed under the new rule to use artificial lighting to entice black bears out of their dens, employ bait to attract black and brown bears, hunt wolves and coyotes during their denning season, and catch caribou while they are swimming.”

The New York Times has a running list of Trump’s assault on the environment. It notes that

“The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times have been carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which repealed and replaced the Obama-era emissions rules for power plants and vehicles; weakened protections for more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants. At the same time, the Interior Department has worked to open up more land for oil and gas leasing by cutting back protected areas and limiting wildlife protections.”

And, Oh, The Joy of Watching People Suffer and Die

Isn’t it enough for Americans to have hunted down Osama Bin Laden and killed him (a video somewhere); captured Saddam Hussein only to watch him hang in a stairwell; or have Muammar Gaddafi killed and stabbed in the anus with a bayonet?

Isn’t it enough for Americans to have lived with nearly 10 to 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and hear/see the daily reports of civilian casualties killed by US and Coalition forces and the millions of displaced persons caused by US wars, combat action?

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John Stanton can be reached at [email protected]. John Stanton is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Public rage in dozens of US cities goes way beyond the killing of African American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Like countless others in the US, Floyd was a victim of institutionalized racism, inequality and injustice.

Notably three other Minneapolis cops complicit with Floyd’s killing remain free uncharged.

Chauvin alone was arrested, belatedly because of days of public rage.

Charging him with 3rd degree murder and 2nd degree manslaughter by no means assures that justice will be served.

Rarely ever are cops convicted by the US judicial process, especially not for killing Black Americans.

Days of protests reflect generations of pent up rage over state-sponsored inequality and injustice against America’s most vulnerable, notably its Black population.

Time and again, Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip remarks lack supportive evidence.

Claiming “violence and vandalism (in US cities) is being led by…radical left (elements) who are terrorizing” others ignores pent up rage over generations of institutionalized racism, inequality and injustice in the self-styled “land of the free and home of the brave.”

According to USA Today, most arrested individuals nationwide are locals, not out-of-town white supremacists or other radicals.

There’s no ambiguity about America’s racist roots.

From colonial America to today, Blacks have gone from chattel to wage slavery, Jim Crow to its modern-day version, and mid-19th century emancipation to mass incarceration in the world’s largest gulag prison system — operating globally.

Law Professor Michelle Alexander earlier explained that “(m)ore black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 before the Civil War began.”

Racist drug laws largely affect “poor communities of color.”

In America’s inner-cities, most Black youths can expect criminal injustice prosecutions one or more times during their lives — because of the color or their skin and opportunities denied them by institutionalized racism.

Over 60% of Black men born in 1965 or later without high school degrees (following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination) have prison records.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura explained what a highly educated Black American told him.

Before setting off in his car, he places his driver’s license and vehicle registration on the passenger side seat beside him.

It’s so if stopped by a cop for driving while Black, he doesn’t have to reach for it in the glove compartment and risk being shot — police pretending he may be reaching for a weapon.

It’s inconceivable that a white American would take similar precautions for his or her safety — what their African-American counterparts endure daily, one of countless examples of a nation off he rails.

Fantasy democracy from inception, America transformed itself into a police state — based on Big Lies.

Inner-city streets are battlegrounds — Blacks, other people of color, and immigrants from the wrong countries terrorized by racial hatred and discrimination.

Since Floyd’s May 25 brutal murder, protests raged in Minneapolis and numerous other US cities nationwide — including in St. Paul, NY, LA, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, Washington DC, and elsewhere.

In Chicago, protestors gathered near Millennium Park, a few miles south of where I live.

Signs read “Justice 4 George” and “Black Lives Matter.”

Crowds shouted: “Say his name! George Floyd,” also chanting: “I can’t breathe.”

As of 10PM Friday, police reported no arrests.

In response to Trump’s racist tweet about when “the looting starts, the shooting starts”, Mayor Lori Lightfoot accused him of “foment(ing) violence,” adding:

“I will code what I really want to say to Donald Trump. It’s two words: It begins with F and ends with YOU.”

“I will not remain silent while this man cynically tries to turn this incredibly painful moment into one for his own political gain.”

Thinned-skin Trump notoriously tolerates no criticism. Will he retaliate against Lightfoot by denying Chicago badly needed federal aid?

Nothing is too low for him to stoop, notably how his war on humanity operates at home and abroad.

Chicago protesters marched down Michigan Ave. on the city’s south side, near the Loop business district.

“No justice, no peace. Prosecute the police,” they shouted in Minneapolis, ignoring a curfew imposed by Governor Tim Walz.

Trump’s racist tweet and other unacceptable remarks further enflamed things, instead of calming tensions and urging accountability for culpable cops whenever incidents like Floyd’s killing happens anywhere in the US.

Sending combat troops to Minneapolis and/or other US cities will make a bad situation worse if he takes this step.

Hundreds of National Guard forces were sent by Minnesota Gov. Walz to protect infrastructure near where protests are ongoing.

Rage against the system on city streets reflects separate and unequal America, the growing disparity between privilege and exploited masses to serve the nation’s wealth and power interests.

The United States of inequality and injustice reflects the deplorable state of the nation.

Both right wings of the one-party state share guilt. When predatory capitalism prospers at the expense of ordinary people, economies are hollowed out.

Neofeudalism follows. The US and other Western nations are headed toward becoming ruler-serf societies, enforced by police state harshness.

Their power elites never had things better, at the expense of ordinary people, exploited to serve them.

In the US, Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants from the wrong countries suffer most.

Hardwired inequality and injustice, along with war on humanity, define today’s America.

Poverty and debt are its leading growth industries. In the last 30 years, the national debt increased from $3 trillion to nearly $26 trillion.

When Alan Greenspan became Fed chairman in 1987, its balance sheet was around $250 billion.

Today it exceeds $7 trillion because of money printing madness, handing near-unlimited amounts to Wall Street banks and other corporate favorites by buying financial assets and other actions.

Long before today’s public health and economic collapse crisis, David Stockman summed up the neoliberal 90s through well past the 2008-09 financial crisis, saying:

“What has been growing is the wealth of the rich, the remit of the state, the girth of Wall Street, the debt burden of the people, the prosperity of the beltway, and the sway of the three great branches of government which are domiciled there – that is, the warfare state, the (corporate) welfare state and the central bank.”

“What is failing, by contrast, is the vast expanse of the Main Street economy where the great majority has experienced stagnant living standards, rising job insecurity, failure to accumulate any material savings, rapidly approaching old age and the certainty of a Hobbesian future where, inexorably, taxes will rise and social benefits will be cut.”

“And what is positively falling is the lower ranks of society whose prospects for jobs, income and a decent living standard have been steadily darkening.”

Dystopia is the new normal for most Americans today, notably for its least advantaged — especially for people of color with African Americans topping the pecking order for exploitation, incarceration, and impoverishment.

That’s what public rage in the streets is all about, things worsening, not improving.

As long as what’s unacceptable continues, perhaps things will boil over from sea to shinning sea as the only hope for changing the dirty system.

It may be the only way, a popular revolution for change because everything else tried failed.

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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.

In 1966 Crispian St. Peters wrote and sang the hit song ‘The Pied Piper’. It resonates well in 2020 with this current Snake Oil Salesman:

The Pied Piper

Crispian St. Peters

You
With your masquerading, and you
Always contemplating what to do
In case heaven has found you
Can’t you see
That it’s all around you
So follow me

Hey, com on babe
Follow me, I’m the Pied Piper
Follow me, I’m the Pied Piper
And I’ll show you where it’s at
Come on, babe
Can’t you see
I’m the Pied Piper
Trust in me
I’m the Pied Piper
And I’ll show you where it’s at

We are living in an era where being unsophisticated is the rule, not the exception.

Sadly, the dumbing down of our nation’s populace has been successfully operating for at least 40 years… maybe longer. What is termed as ‘Fake News’ is really just, in many instances, different slants on news by this embedded empire’s media. Of course, our current ‘Pied Piper’ does actually shovel out lots of misinformation and disinformation and, well, LIES to those who will listen to his rhetoric. Imagine how many of his supporters still believe that this pandemic is a hoax, blown out of proportion by what he incorrectly labels as the ‘Deep State’. As people die and die and die, the Pied Piper smirks as he pretends to be presidential while asking us to all be careful… so long as the economy is opened up. Perhaps if in the France of Louis XIV, and a similar pandemic attacked them, Marie Antoinette would change her famous retort to ‘Let them just die!’

How long will the Pied Pipers supporters, the ones who do NOT have great wealth, stay on board his runaway administration’s train?

They bought into his lies about ‘Rapists and drug dealers coming over the border to get their wives and daughters impregnated’.

That ‘Wall’ he sang them about was not from Pink Floyd. Rather, it was to stop the chambermaids, dishwashers, roofing and landscaping cheap laborers and other assorted low wage workers from getting employed here…. all DEAD END jobs for bum paychecks.

How many of those people were or are employed by the Pied Piper’s properties? Interesting. As one drives around in towns like this writer’s, we can see and feel the misplaced anger of all of us. Yet, those who still support this Pied Piper have had that rage come front and center as soon as he ran for president. Once in office, many of these folks just felt that his lies and disinformation became theirs! Psychiatrists have a term for this, not vital to this discussion, because the connection is frightening. As Richard Nixon famously stated during the Watergate era: “If the president does it, it CANNOT BE ILLEGAL!”

What must be stressed now is this fact: NO one man (or woman) can influence the masses on his or her own. No!

The Pied Piper must have backing, and not just by the lemmings who follow him over the ‘cliffs of reason’. He needs, and has received, the total backing of those in the Deep State who use him to get what they want. All he has to do is ‘sign off’ on the small fortune that this Two Party/One Party Congress allocates to the Super Rich who comprise this Deep State. Look how it did not matter whether it was a Bush Jr. or Obama in office… or now a Trump.

The Military Industrial Empire gets their meat in way of obscene and excessive military spending. All the lapdog Republicans and Democrats always play that sick joker card and sign away our national treasure to the ‘Gods of War’. Ditto for this most recent giveaway to the banking, Wall Street and large corporate interests to ‘Save our Economy’. Meanwhile, over 300 million of us are going to fight amongst ourselves for crumbs from the table of empire. When the day comes when the ‘Trump Thumpers’ begin to realize that they are in the same sinking boat with we who disdain the Pied Piper and his administration, maybe we can have useful dialogue and see what really matters to us all.

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

Featured image is by Windover Way Photography

Mobs are unruly, headless things.  The message is the action.  The platform is often violence.  But what is happening across the United States cannot simply be labelled as a looting-leads-to-shooting episode.  It ranks as another chapter of enraged despair.  

It all began with a savage act in South Minneapolis, a killing grotesque for its indifference.  The hunter in this gruesome Monday spectacle of cruelty proved to be a policeman from the 3^rd Police Precinct, Derek Chauvin; the quarry, a black man by the name of George Floyd.  As Floyd was held down by the knee for almost nine minutes, suffocating to death as he pleaded for his life, the Chauvin impassively went about his deadly task.  The pulse ceased.

A country began to spasm, though it first began with a peaceful march of sorrow at the corner store next to the site of Floyd’s arrest. 

With the United States topping the global chart in coronavirus deaths, with numerous parts of the country easing lockdown restrictions as unemployment has surged, the release over the week became atavistic, vengeful.  Mixed in were also protests of desperate sadness and anger, with sentiment very much against violence as a weapon of choice.  Police were attacked but in other cases, notably that of Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson in Flint, Michigan, they joined protests and expressed a wounded solidarity. 

Buildings were left burning; stores destroyed and looted. Curfews were imposed.  The National Guard was called out – in Minneapolis, for the first time since the Second World War.  Tear gas and rubber bullets have been used liberally.  Vehicles have been driven into protesters in Minneapolis and New York City. In the chaos, even a crew from CNN was arrested.  A fog of militarisation has descended heavily.

The panoramic violence provided sustenance for every interpretation on cause and inspiration. There was the civic-society hating hooligan said to be in the ascendancy; the daring, incendiary white supremacist having a go; the antagonised Black American furious and redressing grievances; the foreign agitator keen to exploit divisions.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s own assessment put the blame on agitators from out of state who cared not one jot for the demise of Floyd.  Justice for him, and any endeavours to achieve it for the slain resident, did not “matter to any of these people who are here firing upon the National Guard, burning” businesses and “disrupting civil life”.  In agreement, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey dismissed any idea that this was a local poison, making its way through the body of the city. 

“The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents.  They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region to prey on everything that we have built over the last several decades”.   

Such diagnoses ignore the scarring caused by killings inflicted since 2016.  Floyd’s death was the fifth caused by police forces since 2018. 

The norm, generally speaking, has seen those involved spared charges.  As Hugh Eakin observes on such prevalent impunity, “Behind such a dismal record of failed accountability, there is now a widespread sense that structural racism in the city’s administration and law enforcement runs deep.” Charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter have been filed, but will they stick?  Hennepin County Prosecutor Mike Freeman was pleased to note that this was “by far the fastest that we’ve ever charged a police officer.”

Then there was the Trump administration’s own stretched interpretation, presenting it with a chance to settle a long standing score. 

In a divided country, you take to barricades rather than remove them.

 “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” came the aggressive tweet from President Donald Trump.  A flavour of what is to come was also given by Trump’s ever loyal US Attorney General William Barr on Sunday. 

“The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.” 

Such measures are likely to fall foul of the Constitution, but that is a procedural irrelevance in the game of electioneering rhetoric.  Trump’s point is to show that the US is broken, and that he is the best manager of a ruined MAGA Republic.

The brutality and poignancy of this Minnesota decline into pyromanic purgatory and tear-stained sorrow was captured by the words of rapper Killer Mike, a man who professes to having “a lot of love and respect for police officers”, being the son of one.  “I watched a white police officer assassinate a black man.  And I know it tore your heart out.”

At a press conference with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, he felt “duty-bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn down your house for anger with an enemy.”  Fortify it, he suggested with biblical intonation, “so that your way be a house of refuge in times of organization.” 

But it was the words that followed that bring the matter into crystalline focus. Unalloyed anger; a desire to build from the ashes, was vital.  To have purpose and worth, you needed to burn the whole thing down.  Killer Mike’s suggestion, as you preserve your own home, is to take the matches to the system itself, one “that sets up for systemic racism”.  Prosecute the offenders; get convictions.  Unfortunately for him, that distinction may prove too fine in the groans and recoil that follows.  Justice for Floyd, even before it starts in earnest, has already been eclipsed. 

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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]

Nationwide Uprisings Against Failed States Triggered by Police Killings

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, June 01, 2020

The nationwide uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd and other recent racially-motivated events is a response to the bi-partisan failed state in which we live. It comes in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic and the largest economic collapse in the US in more than a century. These three crises have disproportionately impacted people of color and added to longterm racial inequality and injustice.

From Soft to Hard Fascism: “Get in Your House Right Now!”

By Kurt Nimmo, June 01, 2020

There can no longer be any doubt—America is now a full-blown fascist state. In the past, authoritarian fascism was kept reserved in the shadows, largely out of the public eye, but in a remarkably short period of time it has emerged from the darkness to show its fangs and snarl menacingly at the people, many of them cowed and dutifully following irrational orders from on high. 

Racist Killing and Impunity

By Craig Murray, June 01, 2020

A court will judge whether there was intent to kill George Floyd; what is absolutely apparent is there was certainly no intent by the police to preserve his life or health. It is also plain that the force used was wildly disproportionate for the alleged offence. It is further undeniable that police violence in the USA impacts particularly on black people, and that in dealing with black people the police act with an arrogance founded on anticipated impunity. The societal change whereby the majority of adults have camera phones at the ready has given a new power of resistance to the public in this regard. That must be reinforced by exemplary sentencing.

Lenses on Riots, Murder, and Racism in the US and Hong Kong

By Kim Petersen, June 01, 2020

The despicable police murder of a person, another Black person, who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill has caused widespread revulsion among Americans. This time, however, authorities acted relatively quickly calling in the FBI and firing all four police officers at the scene — Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng.

“Social Identity” Is Not “The Answer”

By Robert Abele, June 01, 2020

The point here is that unless identity groups include a similar objective universal concept of “humanity” in their platforms that call me into unity with them, by virtue of a moral claim made on me, then they remain just small groups clamoring for a self-interested piece of the socio-economic pie that they feel has been denied to them and that they desire.

Systematic Racist Violence in America: Minnesota National Guard and State Police Deployed in Twin Cities Rebellion

By Abayomi Azikiwe, May 31, 2020

A cell phone videotaped deadly encounter between African American George Floyd and several Minneapolis law-enforcement officers resulting in a brutal strangulation has proven to be a turning point in the long saga of systematic racist violence in the United States.

The Human Heart and the Unspeakable Death of George Floyd

By Elizabeth Woodworth, May 31, 2020

We cannot unsee what we witnessed in the Floyd video.  This unspeakable murder is the only story that has broken through the Covid-19 headlines – showing that justice is as important as life itself.

Officials need to understand that the protests across America represent a core value of humanity:  The need for justice that is embedded in the human heart.

Can you help us keep up the work we do? Namely, bring you the important news overlooked or censored by the mainstream media and fight the corporate and government propaganda, the purpose of which is, more than ever, to “fabricate consent” and advocate war for profit.

We thank all the readers who have contributed to our work by making donations or becoming members.

If you have the means to make a small or substantial donation to contribute to our fight for truth, peace and justice around the world, your gesture would be much appreciated.

The ranks of Republican consultants are filled by hoaxsters, swindlers and crooks.  In the era of Trump, this phenomenon has become even more pronounced.  One of them is Walid Phares, a former ideological commissar for the Lebanese Phalangist militia which warred against the Muslim forces during the Civil War.  Phares was the burning spear of the Maronite Christians in its fight to the death with their Muslim enemies.  He allied himself with the most savage and brutal of the Christian milita leaders.

At the time, he advocated a separate Christian state for Lebanon’s Christians.  He even specified that it should be located in southern Lebanon, which would of course mean the expulsion of the Muslim population that occupied these lands. Phares also lobbied Israel intensively to prolong its support of the South Lebanon Army, which acted for years as Israel’s proxy in the south.  He failed in these efforts and, using the contacts he had developed among conservative Christians and Republicans lobbying for the Phalange, he moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Here he again allied himself with some of the vilest Islamophobes in the country including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Briget Gabriel.

But unlike them, he cultivated powerful contacts in the GOP and the evangelical Christian community, which led to increasing influence in national politics.  In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney named him to his foreign policy team.  Later, he told people that Romney had promised him a senior foreign policy position should he win the presidency. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Phares again activated his contacts and insinuated himself into the Trump entourage.  But unlike the earlier campaign, Phares was stymied in his attempts at influence.  There were intelligence reports claiming that Phares was tainted in some way.  Jared Kushner, who played a crucial role in Trump’s foreign policy apparatus, was said to detest him for unspecified reasons.  Which is quite something for someone as tainted himself, as Kushner is.

Now we’ve learned what blocked Phares’ ascendancy in the Trump camp.  Robert Mueller primarily investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.  Almost all of the targets he investigated (Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, Stone) were involved as intermediaries for the Russians.  But the transcripts of Mueller’s report omitted the name of the fifth individual who was targeted by his team: Walid Phares.

He, like a number of other middlemen (Elliot Broidy, Erik Prince, Joel Zamel) in the Trump orbit, was plying his trade on behalf of a foreign government: Egypt.  The NY Times report says:

Mr. Phares had high-level contacts in the Egyptian government and connections to a deputy minister for education, another Trump campaign official, Sam Clovis, told Mr. Mueller’s investigators. Mr. Phares told Mr. Clovis that he had friends who could broker meetings between the campaign and the Egyptian government, but Mr. Clovis rejected that idea, he said.

Mr. Clovis and Mr. Phares had met with an Egyptian official at a hotel in Georgetown, according to Mr. Clovis, who could not recall the man’s name for investigators. Mr. Phares tried to set up another meeting with the official, but Mr. Clovis demurred.

…Then the Republican nominee for president, Mr. Trump met in September 2016 with Mr. el-Sisi. Mr. Phares took credit for that meeting, telling Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka in an email shortly beforehand that he had traveled to “Egypt last week, worked with them on the meeting between President Sisi and your father.”

“Great that the meeting will take place tomorrow,” Mr. Phares added in the email, according to congressional investigators. “This is a major victory in foreign policy. It will generate more votes.”

Mr. el-Sisi visited the White House a few months after Mr. Trump was elected, the first visit by an Egyptian president to Washington since 2009. The president has embraced Mr. el-Sisi, bestowing validation on a strongman who took power in a military coup and has cracked down on dissent as he consolidates power.

Al-Sisi murdered thousands of innocent, unarmed protesters in his rise to power after overthrowing the democratically elected President, Mohammed Morsi.  Morsi represented the Muslim Brotherhood and became the country’s leader after it threw out the previous dictator, Hosni Mubarak.  Al-Sisi’s violent overthrow of Morsi, leading to the imprisonment and death of the former president, made him persona non grata for the previous U.S. administration.  He was damaged goods as far as most democratic countries were concerned.  That’s why the junta leader needed assistance in turning things around and burnishing his reputation.  A meeting with the president would work wonders on that score.  And Phares delivered.

If you read his Twitter feed you will find the same anti-Muslim Brotherhood propaganda pumped out by Al-Sisi and his kleptocratic patrons in Saudi Arabia.  Vague conspiracies that the Brotherhood is infiltrating the U.S. government with plans for an Islamist takeover.  These dictators need a bogeyman to maintain their hold on their citizens.  Without an enemy, they are afraid the people will stop cowering and begin questioning who drove their economy into a ditch; and who is siphoning off billions for their own benefit.

Phares is a canker sore in GOP politics.  The thought that he could have in the past, or might still in the future, rise to a position of consequence in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is frightening beyond belief.

But he’s certainly not the only one.  Earlier the NY Times reported that Elliot Broidy performed the same role on behalf of the UAE, for whom he served as both a weapons dealer and political rainmaker.  He also arranged for a meeting between the country’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, and Trump.  He also lobbied intensively for Trump to fire Secretary of State Tillerson for his opposition to close ties with the Gulf states and his purported sympathy for Qatar.  Broidy, like Phares, was reported to be under federal investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, for some of these matters.

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Featured image is from Tikun Olam

In recent weeks, soldiers have repeatedly shot holes in water tanks on the roofs of homes in Kafr Qadum. The shooting takes place during the weekly protests against the closure of the eastern exit from the village, which connects the village to the city of Nablus and passes through the expansion of the settlement of Kedumim. The residents have been holding the weekly protests since 2011.

As a result of Israel’s policy, Palestinians in the West Bank suffer severe water shortages and an irregular supply. To alleviate the hardship, residents place water tanks with volumes of 500 or 1,000 liters on their roofs to stock water during supply hours, for use during the many hours when there is no running water.

B’Tselem’s investigation indicates that the shooting is deliberate and has resulted in residents losing hundreds of liters of water. They will now have to purchase expensive new tanks at about 500 NIS (~125 USD) per unit. Since the beginning of April, soldiers have damaged 24 water tanks on rooftops of homes in the village, some more than once. In some homes, water tanks were damaged three or four times over a month and a half.

The damage to the water tanks is sheer abuse and constitutes an illegal act of collective punishment. As residents now have to follow strict hygienic measures, including frequent handwashing, due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, this conduct is even graver. Nevertheless, the shootings have continued unabated for several weeks. This indicates that rather than the random initiative of a particular soldier, this conduct that is at least condoned by the commanders on the ground, in blatant disregard for residents’ lives and property.

The testimonies were given to B’Tselem field researcher Abdulkarim Sadi.

Home of ‘Assem and Nuha ‘Aqel

On Saturday, 25 April 2020, around 1:30 P.M., about an hour after the weekly demonstration began, soldiers opened fire at the water tanks on the roof of ‘Assem (42) and Nuha (43) ‘Aqel’s home, where the couple live with their five children and his brothers’ family. When the demonstration was over, ‘Assem went up to the roof and temporarily fixed a bullet hole in a water tank.

In a testimony he gave the next day, he recounted:

During the protest and the clashes with the soldiers, who were waiting for the protestors, I was at home with my wife and sons. Every now and then we heard live fire and the sound of “rubber” bullets and tear-gas canisters being shot. Meanwhile, I also heard shooting coming from the hill behind our house, about 200 meters away. After a few moments, I heard water flowing from the roof into the courtyard through the drainpipes. Since the soldiers were still up on the hill, I was scared to go up to the roof. I only closed the main water faucet, so the tanks wouldn’t fill up.

I waited for about an hour until the demonstration was over. When I was sure the soldiers were gone, I went up to the roof. I saw a hole in the plastic tank and temporarily fixed it by putting in a screw and adding adhesive material around it to seal the hole, but it’s still leaking. We lost about 450 liters of water. Last year, the Israeli military also shot at our water tank and we were forced to replace it.

Now, because of the coronavirus, we have to be especially careful about cleanliness. We have to shower, wash our clothes and wash our hands more often. It’s also the water we use for cooking and drinking. I don’t understand how the soldiers can be so heartless and damage water tanks like that. Water is the main source of life for every human being.

Because of the coronavirus, it’s now harder to travel between the villages. In any case, the stores selling plastic tanks in the neighboring villages are closed. The repair I made is only temporary. I’ll have to buy a new water tank and the cost of buying and assembling it is 500 shekels.

Home of the extended Shteiwi family

Since the beginning of April, soldiers have fired at water tanks of the extended Shteiwi family three times. The tanks are used by three apartments in a three-story building – the apartments of ‘Awni Shteiwi (38), his wife Ruwaa (31) and their four children; the apartment of his brother Mu’in (45), his wife Nahil (36) and their two children; and the apartment of ‘Awni’s mother Nazikah (67) and aunt ‘Ablah (65).

In a testimony ‘Awni Shteiwi gave on 3 May 2020, he recounted:

The first time the soldiers fired at our water tanks was Friday, 10 April 2020, at around 2:00 P.M. My mother’s water tank and ours were hit by two bullets each, and my brother Mu’ins’ water tank was hit by one bullet. The water leaked from the three tanks, through the drainpipes into the courtyard and then to the road by the house. I went out and closed the tanks’ faucets so the water would stop running. I waited until the protest was over and only then went up to the roof. I think the shooting came from the top of the hill called Jabal al-Aqra’ , which lies about 100 meters from our house. Usually, during the protests, about 10 or 15 soldiers stand there. I consulted my brother and we decided not to buy new water tanks but to fix the ones we have temporarily with screws and adhesive material. Three new water tanks would cost us 1,500 shekels (~ 430 USD).

Two weeks later, on Friday, 24 April 2020, soldiers fired at the water tanks again. The water flowed through the drainpipes into the courtyard. My sons went out and closed the main faucet. This time, my brother and I decided to make a temporary fix to keep the water from leaking. A week later, on Saturday, 2 May 2020, it happened again. This time, I closed the faucets before the demonstration began, to avoid losing any more water. Again, we sealed the holes with screws and adhesives.

The repairs we made are only temporary and won’t last long. These water tanks were hit three times. Some of them have five or six bullet holes. We’ll have to replace them, but there’s no point in doing it now. We’ll wait for the soldiers to stop shooting at them. In the houses next to us, many of the tanks were also hit by bullets fired by soldiers from the hill.

We use the water in the tanks on a daily basis – for drinking, cooking, laundry, bathing, and cleaning in general. Shooting at them is immoral and inhuman. Maybe the soldiers think it will make the weekly protests stop, but if that’s the case, they’re mistaken and delusional. Even if they keep this up, we’ll just fix what they damaged. We will never give up or surrender.

Home of Ashraf and Athnaa Shteiwi

The water tank on the rooftop of Ashraf Shteiwi, a 44-year-old police officer, his wife Athnaa and their children, has been punctured three times since the beginning of April.

In a testimony he gave on 26 April 2020, Shteiwi recounted:

On Friday, 24 April 2020, the first day of Ramadan, I finished praying at the mosque and return home. Shortly after the demonstration began, clashes developed between the protestors and the soldiers, and we heard the noise of stun grenades and the shooting of live fire and “rubber” bullets.

About an hour later, we heard water flowing through the drainpipes. The courtyard filled with water. Then a bullet shattered the kitchen window. There’s a hill right in front of the window where soldiers stand , so I was sure they’d fired at the house from there.

Image on the right: The smashed window in the Shteiwi family home. Photo courtesy of the family

My wife and little kids got scared. I put them in the living room to keep them out of the range of fire. I went outside and closed the main faucet, so we wouldn’t lose a lot of water. Since our house is right in front of the hill, I waited until the clashes were over. Only then, I went up to the roof to check the damage to the tank and tried to fix it with screws.

It was the third time this month that soldiers fired at our water tanks. Every time, we lost a lot of water and I put screws in the bullet holes. The next day, it happened for the fourth time. It was late afternoon. The soldiers on top of the hill fired two bullets at the water tank and it drained out completely.

Firing at the water tanks is collective punishment and destruction of our property by the Israeli soldiers because of the weekly demonstrations. I cannot pay 500 shekels every time they shoot at a water tank. So, every time they start shooting, I close the main faucet and temporarily fix the tank with screws and glue.

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All images in this article are from B’Tselem

You can be forgiven for never hearing about The Franck Report that was issued on 11th June 1945, it was kept highly secret at the time and is one of those many WWII documents whose un-censored versions have only become public several decades later.  The Franck Report was a document signed by several prominent nuclear physicists who had been working on the development of an atomic bomb recommending that the United States not use the atomic bomb as a weapon to prompt the surrender of Japan in World War II.

This entry in our 1945 timeline provides the reader with an easy explanation of the nuclear fission process that underlies the so-called “atom” bomb and a short summary of the history of the secret Manhattan Project which produced the two bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 (which events will be described on those dates in this timeline).​

It was German physicists who first discovered, in December 1938, that one could force a uranium atom to split into two much smaller atoms by bombarding it with a moving neutron. The smaller atoms have kinetic energy and the other products of this fission process are 2 or 3 free neutrons and a lot of energetic photons, these fragments heat up the bulk material. If there are more uranium atoms close by the free neutrons will cause them to split if they hit them, and if enough uranium is assembled in one place, or if the escaping neutrons are sufficiently contained, then these freshly emitted neutrons outnumber the neutrons that escape from the assembly, and a sustained nuclear chain reaction will take place. A critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. This chain reaction of so-called fissile material produces lots of energy and it became obvious to the European physics community, both those physicists who stayed in Germany, and those European physicists who fled to the USA and the UK to avoid being persecuted or killed by the Nazis, that it would be relatively straight forward to make an “atomic”  bomb based on the fission of uranium.

An atomic bomb design was relatively simple. When you bring together a sufficient amount of fissile material, it forms a critical mass, and if you continue to bring that material together as a critical mass, it will then begin the nuclear chain reaction. That chain reaction will occur very, very rapidly. Once the reaction starts you have a competing race. What’s happening is, you’ve slammed the two pieces of nuclear material together so they have a certain inertial momentum that is holding the assembly together. And at the same time, the nuclear reaction begins and that starts to generate energy. And what happens when you heat something up? It expands. And it starts to disassemble and blow itself apart. So a nuclear weapon is a race between the energy of holding it together and the energy generating in the system blowing it apart. And the faster you can make the energy during the actual implosion or chain reaction process, the more powerful the output of the bomb. Taking the fact that these fission reactions occur so rapidly–it turns out you can just slam together two pieces of uranium using a gun or a gun barrel and get a pretty decent explosive yield.​

This photograph is one of the most famous photographs made by Ed Westcott and is the Calutron Control Room in Beta 2 (Building 9204-2) at Oak Ridge Manhattan Facility, Tennessee in 1944. Photo credit:  National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

In April 1939 the military applications of nuclear fission were recognized by the Ministry of War in Germany, and it started a high-priority program to develop them. The Nobel-prize winning German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, was amongst the leaders of the German physics community who were investigating the whole process needed to produce enough uranium of the correct type to create a critical mass and engineer the device where it would become an explosive bomb. For reasons that no-one is completely sure of, in the autumn of 1941 , he wrote a report for the German government in which he said that an atomic bomb could not be ready before 1945, and that it would require immense applications  of German manpower and German money. And within weeks after that late 1941 report was received by the War Ministry, they reduced the priority on the atomic bomb program (which was not a very large program at the time) and shifted resources to programs related to the immediate war effort.

But this 1942 reduction in the level of German work on developing an atomic bomb was not known about in the USA where research into nuclear fission had begun in the summer of 1939 and was making good progress towards producing a controlled nuclear chain reaction by late 1942. Why had physicists in the USA received money from the US Government to work on understanding the nuclear fission process and its possible uses since late 1939? Mostly because the very famous physicist, Albert Einstein, had written a letter to President Roosevelt on 2nd August 1939 (but not delivered until 11th October 1939,  by which time Britain had declared war against Germany) and the  letter warned that Germany might develop atomic bombs and suggested that the United States should start its own nuclear program.

At the time of this Einstein letter, the estimated material necessary for a fission chain reaction was everal tons. Seven months later a theoretical calculation breakthrough in Britain, who had their own nuclear research program, would estimate the necessary critical mass to be less than 10 kilograms, making delivery of an atomic bomb by air a possibility. This critical mass discovery by German refugee physicists working in Britain was shared in August 1941 with the physicists working in the USA, many of whom were also European refugees who had seen the need to escape from Nazi Germany. Prompted by Einstein’s letter, Roosevelt had authorized, in late October 1939, a small amount of funding for research into understanding nuclear fission and its possible use to produce electrical power, which was being carried out mostly in universities.

One outcome of this research was the understanding that the element uranium comes in 14 different types, called isotopes, which differ in how many neutrons their nuclei have, the most prevalent isotopes have 235 or 238 neutrons. Uranium which is mined from the earth is composed of 99.3% of U238 and 12 other minor isotopes and 0.7% of U235, and it was only the U235 that could make a nuclear chain reaction.

Various government committees had been in charge of disbursing funds for this research through late 1941, and on October 9th 1941 Roosevelt was told about  the new estimate of the quite small critical mass needed to make an atomic bomb- from mostly U235. More money was swiftly assigned to confirming the British calculations; the engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush, who had been in charge of disbursing the above-mentioned funds was told, on December 6th 1941, to start an accelerated project for discovering how to extract U235 from mined uranium.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7th 1941 and by December 11th the USA had declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan. On December 18th a new US governmental agency dedicated to developing nuclear weapons had its first meeting. On 19th January 1942 Roosevelt formally authorized an atomic bomb project that later became known as the highly secret Manhattan Project.

By  mid 1943 three different brand new and top-secret facilities had been built/were being built in Hanford, Washington State, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico. By the end of 1944 over 100,000 people were working in the Manhattan Project at these 3 army-run, military sites.

 The vast amounts of money spent on the Manhattan Project were not spent on designing the atomic bomb, that was relatively straight forward as described above, the money and huge personnel effort were spent on extracting or enriching U235 from the raw uranium, mined from the earth in the Belgian Congo  and Canada, or on creating plutonium which was to be used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. For an ideal atomic bomb, you want to enrich the raw uranium to at least 80% to 90% of the U235. But because it’s an isotope, you can’t use chemical means to separate it, so it takes other long and arduous processes, the two main methods developed and used were gas centrifuges, and magnetic separators called Calutrons.

Which brings us to the photo at the top of this section. There were 1152 Calutrons built and operated, 24/7 as we would say now, at the Oak Ridge facility, called Y-12, in 9 large buildings. Young women were hired to keep the electric current running through the electromagnets at just the right value, they sat at control panels such as the ones in the above photo and remained constantly focused on the meter reading and the necessary adjustments they made to keep the beam current maximized in the Calutrons. They had no idea that was what they were doing, during their training they were told “We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing.  I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!” Such repetitive tasks done without any understanding of why were common in the Manhattan Project, which considering its ~100,000 workers, was kept remarkably secret throughout the war.

So uranium separation plants were built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and they used the electric power from the Tennessee Valley Authority.  It has been rumored that, during the Manhattan Project, as much as 5% of the electrical output of the United States was used to power the uranium enrichment processes that were occurring at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The outcome was that enough U235 was enriched from raw uranium to make the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and there were just a few more bombs that had been made and could have been used on other Japanese cities.

Ironically, the development of the American bomb was motivated by the fear that the Germans would get one first, but in fact, the Germans did not seriously pursue their program because Hitler was so sure they would win the war before the bomb was ready, and by the time it was ready in the United States, Germany had already surrendered.

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The ongoing pandemic makes us obsessively aware of the precariousness of life, and if from the U.S., the mendacious incompetence of our political leadership. Yet, it also makes most of us as obsessively complacent when the threats seem remote and abstract. This complacency with respect to contagious disease greatly worsened the level of fatalities, as well as the profound social and economic dislocations associated with the still unfolding COVID-19 experience. Such a pandemic was unimaginable until it became too real and omnipresent to be imagined, but only experienced at various degrees of separation. Being obsessed, fearful, and resentful is not the same as being imagined.

The linkage between contagious disease and climate change is too evident to ignore altogether: The falling price of oil, the declining carbon emissions, the global imperative of cooperation, uneven vulnerabilities, and the relevance of justice and empathy.

With respect to nuclear hazards, especially from the weaponry and their possible use, there is a growing disconnect between risk and behavior, a combination of nuclearism prevailing among the political elites of the nuclear weapons states and public disregard. There is a greater appreciation of the dangers associated with nuclear energy. The disaster at Fukushima, and longer ago at Chernobyl, are grim reminders of risks and potential catastrophe.

Yet surrounding nuclear weaponry there is an aura of complacency reinforced by a false sense of self-interest. The complacency arises from the startling fact that no nuclear weapon has been exploded during a combat situation in the 75 years since the horrifying attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Complacency also feeds off the suppressed realization that governments base their ultimate security on threats to annihilate tens of millions of innocent persons and subject our natural habitats to extreme disaster. With regard to nuclear dangers assuming the dreaded will never happen could turn out to be the greatest bio-ethical folly in the entire history of the human species. We forget folk wisdom at our peril: ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ Governments need to invest their energies and resources in anticipatory approaches to impending disasters and not entrust the collective fate of humanity to reactive responses when various dark unimaginables happen as they certainly will.

In this spirit, I argue for a better understanding the distinction between arms control and disarmament approaches to nuclearism, which helps explain why choosing the disarmament path is vital for the human future. Despite this contention, nuclear disarmament is currently so low on the policy agenda of the nuclear weapons states as to be dismissed as either superfluous or utopian.

The Distinction

It is often argued that arms control is a realistic approach to national security in the nuclear age that can be thought of as satisfying preconditions for negotiating a verified nuclear disarmament agreement when international conditions are right. Arms control measures have the added benefit of reducing risks of an accidental or mistaken use of nuclear weapons and of avoiding wasteful costs associated with arms competition designed to maintain security in relation to adversaries. There are good faith beliefs present in this support for arms control, but this advocacy hides, often unconsciously, an important quite different more complex and confusing parts of a broader story. In addition to reducing risks and miscalculations of intended nuclear war or expensive and dangerous extensions of competition in nuclear armaments, arms control seems to have as its primary goal bringing as much stability as possible to a structure of world order that is presumed to be nuclear armed. It also has a secondary seldom avowed goal of providing an instrument useful in the conduct of foreign policy. It allows some nuclear weapons states to take tactical advantage of their posture of nuclear superiority when confronting one another or of positing nuclear threats, especially against non-nuclear hostile countries in confrontational situations.

In contrast, the advocacy of nuclear disarmament believes unconditionally that the only safe and decent course of action is to do everything possible to get safely rid of nuclear weaponry as soon as possible. Nuclear weapons pose threats to human wellbeing and ecological stability in the form of catastrophe and even extinction. Disarmament goals are as a practical matter at odds with the arms control approach for at least three major reasons. First of all, a disarmament process threatens widely accepted ideas about nuclear stability. Instead, it generates uncertainty, especially if not coupled in its latter stages with a global demilitarization. process. The arms control view is that the more stable the overall political environment with respect to the weaponry the safer and more secure the world. The attainment of such stability carries with it a lessened incentive for political leaders to embark upon a denuclearizing disarmament alternative. This reluctance is not primarily, as often alleged, because of destabilizing risks of cheating and fears that any renewal of nuclear arms competition would be more dangerous than is a world order in which the nuclear weapons states exercise prudence and prevent further proliferation of the weaponry, but reflects militarist habits and geopolitical calculations.

Secondly, there exists a powerful nuclear establishment joining parts of the governmental bureaucracy with weapons labs and war industry private sector interests. Thirdly, and least acknowledged, is the degree to which foreign policy planners in several nuclear weapons states find and propose roles for these weapons to deter provocations, to solidify alliances, exert geopolitical and tactical leverage, and provide a hedge against future uncertainties.

Although such considerations are not unfamiliar in the strategic literature, the link to arms control rarely is explicitly made, or if made, is done so in a rather misleading and superficial manner that presupposes its compatibility with disarmament advocacy. Sometimes, the argument is made that arms control is a confidence-building step toward disarmament or that nuclear disarmament, although not presently attainable, remains the ultimate goal, but the time must be right. The lesson drawn is that in the meantime given existing world conditions, arms control is the most and best that can be hoped for, while nuclear disarmament remains the shared hope of humanity if conditions ever become suitable to move seriously toward the elimination of the weaponry.  Underlying these justifications for relegating the prospects of getting rid of nuclear weaponry to forever horizons—by proclaiming disarmament as the ‘ultimate’ goal—is to signal that it is not really a goal at all except as a way of keeping genuine disarmament advocates appeased and confused.

The true story is that the national security establishment, at least in the U.S., and undoubtedly elsewhere, is opposed to nuclear disarmament as a policy option, for two interrelated reasons. First, possession of nuclear weapons gives states international prestige and leverage even if never actively relied upon. Secondly, avoiding disarmament keeps in being a regime of ‘nuclear apartheid’ enabling nuclear weapons states to pose unspeakable threats in crisis situations that are likely quite effective, given the extreme vulnerability of non-nuclear states. Merely having a nuclear weapons arsenal sends an intimidating message to potential adversaries, especially if nuclear weapons are being designed and developed with future combat missions in mind.

The ambiguities of arms control are most vividly exposed with respect to the establishment and maintenance of the anti-proliferation regime. The United States claims that it is carrying out a positive world order role by taking responsibility for ‘enforcing’ the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). This form of geopolitical enforcement, that is, without UN authorization or legal prerogative, is directed against certain outlier countries (e.g. Iran, North Korea) that are accused of seeking such weaponry. It is questionable whether such behavior should be treated as arms control. It seems more appropriately viewed as an integral nuclear component of global hegemony.

The Anti-Proliferation Regime

There are other features of the anti-Proliferation regime that occasion suspicion.

Double standards pervade the implementation of the NPT. The standards of nonproliferation found in this widely ratified treaty are not applied consistently. If the government evading proliferation controls is a strategic ally (Israel) or if the country crossing the nuclear threshold is too large to challenge (India, Pakistan), the enlargement of the nuclear club will be tolerated, or even encouraged. Yet if a hostile country seeks the weapons for credible deterrence reasons, then it will experience various forms of pressure, and even become subject to sanctions and threats of attack.

Nuclear deployments and threats to use nuclear weapons confer geopolitical advantages and options on the nuclear weapons states, besides giving some security about the threats of being attacked. Qaddafi was undoubtedly correct when he said that Libya would not have been attacked in 2011`had it possessed nuclear weapons, and Iraq in 2003 was likely attacked because it didn’t have a nuclear deterrent. It is instructive that North Korea was not attacked once it crossed the nuclear threshold even in a small, largely symbolic, manner.

This rationale for retaining nuclearism was starkly confirmed by the formal statement issued by the U.S., France, and the UK on July 13, 2017 as to why they totally rejected any connection with the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, emphasizing the positive role of nuclear weaponry in keeping the peace. In view of these considerations, why do NGOs in civil society continue to act as if they are working for nuclear disarmament when they do not reject  the essential elements of an arms control approach?

Above all, despite experience and evidence, ‘the arms control first’ community believes that reducing the size of the arsenal and agreeing not to develop some weapons systems are helpful measures on their own as well lending themselves to being promoted as stepping stones to disarmament negotiations. Additionally, there is the belief that the retention of nuclear weapons is so entrenched that only arms control agreements are feasible, and disarmament a diversionary pipe dream. From this perspective, arms control arrangements are better than nothing even if completely unrelated to achieving nuclear disarmament. Finally, as arms control activism is concentrated in Washington, the only way for political moderates in civil society to get a seat at the table set by government is to shed the utopian image of disarmament advocacy and settle for what is feasible although it means dancing with the devil.

We can ask, then, where does this leave those dedicated to peace, and especially to avoiding any threat or use of a nuclear weapon in the course of a war?  In my view, it is not appropriate to adopt an either/or position of saying no disarmament because unattainable or never arms control because it legitimates nuclear apartheid, and closes its eyes to geopolitical reliance on the leverage gained by wielding the weaponry. It is currently important to challenge public complacency about nuclear weaponry because these weapons have not been used since 1945, and to become attentive to the warnings of impending danger signaled by moving the highly credible, risk-assessing Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to within 100 seconds to midnight, or closer to doomsday than it has ever been since established in 1947. In effect, it is delusional to suppose that we can indefinitely co-exist with this infernal weaponry, especially given the lethal blend of demagogues and nationalist passions that dominate the governance structures of the world.

It would also be helpful to call attention to the fact that the NPT in Article VI imposes an unconditional obligation of nuclear weapons states to engage in good faith nuclear disarmament negotiations as part of the agreement reached with other states to forego the nuclear weapons option. The obligatory character of this legal commitment was unanimously affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion delivered in 1996, and yet by continuing to invest heavily in the continuous modernization of the nuclear weapons arsenal, including the development of new nuclear weapons designed for possible combat use means that this central legal obligation of the NPT regime is being defiantly ignored. There is no disposition on the part of any state to call for the geopolitical enforcement of Article VI, and until this happens the treaty is mainly functions as a disguise for nuclearism and nuclear apartheid.

Even if this Article VI legal commitment did not exist, the idea of resting security on discretionary threats to retaliate by destroying tens of millions of innocent civilians and contaminating the atmosphere of the entire planet quite possibly causing what experts call ‘a nuclear famine’ and widespread disease. Such omnicidal courses of action underline the immorality of resting security on such massive indiscriminate nuclear strikes that would fill the air with contaminating radioactivity. The UN ICAN Treaty, now formally ratified by 37 of the 50 States needed to bring the agreement into force is an important move in the right direction, and far more a helpful signpost than is an uncritical endorsement of this or that arms control proposal. Yet unless the ICAN Treaty is extended in its coverage to the nuclear weapons states it remains in the realm of rhetorical moralism lacking behavioral consequences.

There are arms control measures that can be supported in good conscience, including No First Use Declarations removing ambiguity from threats to use the weapons, and de-alerting measures that gives leaders more time to avoid accidental or unintended uses. Such measures rarely motivate champions of arms control because their advocacy hampers cooperation with geopolitical pragmatists who are running the world. The refusal to embrace No First Use thinking in doctrine and practice is revealing: it suggests that the real interface of compatibility is between arms control and geopolitics rather than as proclaimed, as between arms control and disarmament.

In the end, anyone genuinely devoted to world peace needs to recognize the urgency of taking an unconditional stand against retaining nuclear weapons as an indispensable step toward achieving peace for all peoples on earth and part of the challenge of being ecologically responsible guardians of planetary viability.

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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 60 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration and its media accomplices waged a relentless propaganda campaign to win political support for what turned out to be one of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in American history.

Nearly two decades later, with perhaps a million dead Iraqis and thousands of dead American soldiers, we are still paying for that mistake.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were key players behind the propaganda—which we can define as purposeful use of information and misinformation to manipulate public opinion in favor of state action. Iraq and its president Saddam Hussein were the ostensible focus, but their greater goal was to make the case for a broader and open-ended “War on Terror.”  ​

So they created a narrative using a mélange of half-truths, faintly plausible fabrications, and outright lies:

• Iraq and the nefarious Saddam Hussein were “behind,” i.e., backing, the Saudi terrorists responsible for 9-11 attacks on the US;
• Hussein and his government were stockpiling yellowcake uranium in an effort to develop nuclear capability;
• Hussein was connected with al-Qaeda
• Iran was lurking in the background as a state sponsor of terrorism, coordinating and facilitating attacks against the US in coordination with Hamas;
• Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and other terror groups were working against the US across the Middle East in some kind of murky but coordinated effort;
• We have to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”;
• The Iraqis would welcome our troops as liberators.

And so forth.

But the propaganda “worked” in the most meaningful sense: Congress voted nearly 3–1 in favor of military action against Iraq, and Gallup showed 72 percent of Americans supporting the invasion as it commenced in 2003. Media outlets across the spectrum such as the Washington Post cheered the war. National Review dutifully did its part, labeling Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Justin Raimondo, Lew Rockwell, and other outspoken opponents of the invasion as “unpatriotic conservatives.”

Tragically, the American people never placed the burden of proof squarely with the war cheerleaders to justify their absolutely crazed effort to remake the Middle East. In hindsight, this is obvious, but at the time propaganda did its job. Disinformation is part and parcel of the fog of war.

What will hindsight make clear about our reaction to COVID-19 propaganda? Will we regret shutting down the economy as much as we ought to regret invading Iraq?

The cast of characters is different, of course: Trump, desperately seeking “wartime president” status; Dr. Anthony Fauci; epidemiologist Neil Ferguson; state governors such as Cuomo, Whitmer, and Newsom; and a host of media acolytes just itching to force a new normal down our throats. Like the Iraq War architects, they use COVID-19 as justification to advance a preexisting agenda, namely, greater state control over our lives and our economy. Yet because too many Americans remain stubbornly attached to the old normal, a propaganda campaign is required.

So we are faced with a blizzard of new “facts” almost every day, most of which turn out to be only mildly true, extremely dubious, or plainly false:

• The virus aerosolizes and floats around, so we all need to be six feet apart (But why not twenty feet? Why not one mile?);
• The virus lives on surfaces everywhere, for days;
• Asymptomatic people can spread it unknowingly;
• Antibodies may or may not develop naturally;
• People may become infected more than once;
• Young healthy people are at great risk not only themselves, but also pose a risk to their elderly family members;
• Thin, permeable paper masks somehow prevent microscopic viral spores from being inhaled or exhaled toward others;
• People are safer inside;
• The rate of new infected “cases” in the first few weeks of the virus reaching America would continue or even grow exponentially;
• Social distancing and quarantines do indeed “save” lives;
• Testing is key (But what if an individual visits a crowded grocery an hour after testing negative?);
• A second wave of infections is nigh; and
• Our personal and work lives cannot continue without a vaccine, which, by the way, may be two years away.

Again, much of this is not true and not even intended to be true—but rather to influence public behavior and opinions. And again, the overwhelming burden of proof should lie squarely with those advocating a lockdown of society, who would risk a modern Great Depression in response to a simple virus.

How much damage will the lockdown cause? Economics aside, the sheer toll of this self-inflicted wound will be a matter for historians to document. That toll includes all the things Americans would have done without the shutdown in their personal and professional lives, representing a diminution of life itself. Can that be measured, or distilled into numerical terms? Probably not, but this group of researchers and academics argues that we have already suffered more than one million “lost years of life” due to the ravages of unemployment, missed healthcare, and general malaise.

By the same token, how do we measure the blood and treasure lost in Iraq? How much PTSD will soldiers suffer? How many billions of dollars in future VA medical care will be required? How many children will grow up without fathers? And how many millions of lives are forever shattered in that cobbled-together political artifice in the Middle East?

Propaganda kills, but it also works. Politicians of all stripes will benefit from the coronavirus; the American people will suffer. Perversely, one of the worst COVID propagandists—the aforementioned  Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York—yesterday rang the bell as the New York Stock Exchange reopened to floor trading. He now admits that the models were wrong and that his lockdown did nothing to prevent the Empire State from suffering the highest per capita deaths from COVID. Like the architects of the Iraq War, he belongs on a criminal docket. But thanks to propaganda, he is hailed as presidential.

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Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, and as an attorney for private equity clients. Contact: email; twitter.

Featured image is from Mises Wire

Alarms are sounding in Europe as Turkey, Russia and Arab states could potentially agree on shared influence in Libya, and therefore the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean, according to some experts. This comes as European states have no influence over the war in Libya despite it occurring on its southern doorstep and Turkey, Russia and Arab states continue to gain influence.

The direct intervention of Turkey in Libya, which has sent its own intelligence officers, military advisers and thousands of Syrian jihadists to support the Muslim Brotherhood Government of National Accords (GNA), based in Tripoli and led by the ethnic Turk Fayez al-Sarraj, has limited further gains by the Libyan National Army (LNA).

The mobilization of thousands of Turkish and Syrian jihadists and the massive shipment of weapons to Tripoli has slowed down the offensive of the LNA, led by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. Haftar was proclaimed on April 27 as the only leader of the country, in which most of the international community found to be a provocative move as they believe it limited the likelihood of a political settlement to the conflict.

Confident of his past military superiority and assured in the determination that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have to counter Turkey’s efforts to create hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, Haftar continues to ignore calls for a political solution to the war. Sarraj also ignores such calls confident in the backing he has from Turkey.

Russia also condemned Haftar’s offensive and called for negotiations on peace. However, the U.S. claims that Russian fighter jets arrived in Libya to protect the withdrawal of volunteers from the Russian Wagner group in a decision agreed upon with Ankara, something that Moscow denies. Both Europe and the U.S. fear that Russia may obtain the use of a naval base in eastern Libya, that the LNA securely controls, in the future.

Despite these potentialities, it is unlikely the war between GNA-backed jihadists and the LNA will come to a conclusion anytime soon, unless there is a drastic change caused by external forces. Turkey in the midst of an economic crisis is unwilling to use the full force of its military in Libya and is rather acting as a conduit between the GNA and Qatari-funded but Turkish-trained Syrian jihadists. Egypt is contemplating using its military in Libya to “fight against Libyan extremists and terrorists supported by Turkey.” This too could be a game changer since Egypt has the means, logistics and capabilities to successfully intervene in Libya in favour of the LNA.

France has also not hidden away with its support for Haftar, finding him to be a leader that would advance French interests in the Mediterranean that is in direct conflict with Turkey. The GNA has also signed a memorandum with the Muslim Brotherhood government to cut through Greece’s maritime space for the exploitation of gas in that area of ​​the Mediterranean, forcing Greece to get embroiled in the Libyan mess. Meanwhile, Italy has backed the GNA while Germany is trying to act as referee, showing once again there is no common European position.

The European ‘Irini’ (meaning peace in Greek) operation is committed to prevent maritime-bound arms delivery to Libya, i.e. Turkish arms to Libya. This is a maritime surveillance operation to enforce the United Nations-imposed arms embargo on Libya, but in reality, it has not prevented Turkey’s deliveries to the GNA while Egypt continues to supply the LNA over the land border.

The situation shows that the European Union is unable to establish itself as a main actor in a conflict that brings together strategic political and economic interests a few nautical miles from its southern coast. With the U.S. realistically absent, Turkey backing the GNA and Russia and the Arab + Greece alliance backing the LNA, these are the main protagonists.

In Paris, and seeing the failure of his diplomacy parallel to the EU, the Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, warns about the “Syrianization of Libya,” while spokesman of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s gloats: “France and other European countries supporting Haftar are on the wrong side of history.” Seen in this light, the balancing role Russia can play in Libya to contain Ankara could even be positive for Europeans.

However, the main reason that shared influence will not be agreed upon is because the GNA-Turkish deal to steal Greece’s maritime space relies on a supposed share maritime space between Libya and Turkey. And therein lays the problem – it is the LNA, who has rejected the memorandum, that controls the eastern Libyan coast that supposedly shares a maritime border with Turkey. So long as the LNA controls eastern Libya, Turkey will always strive for a GNA victory to legitimize the memorandum. Once again, the European Union remains divided on Libya, despite the Muslim Brotherhood government aiming to carve out the maritime space of a member state.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The nationwide uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd and other recent racially-motivated events is a response to the bi-partisan failed state in which we live. It comes in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic and the largest economic collapse in the US in more than a century. These three crises have disproportionately impacted people of color and added to longterm racial inequality and injustice.

Black Lives Matter erupted six years ago when a police officer shot and killed Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. Since that time, police have murdered approximately 1,100 people every year. The response of the government at all levels to the crisis of police killings has been virtually nonexistent. While people seek to avenge the death of George Floyd, the problems are much deeper and the changes needed are much broader.

The Root Of The Problem Is A Failed State

During the COVID19 pandemic, millionaires and billionaires have been bailed out by the government with trillions of dollars while working people were given a pittance of $1,200 per person and a short term increase in unemployment benefits for the more than 40 million people who have lost their jobs. Many workers who provide essential services have had to continue to work putting themselves and their communities at risk.

Urgently needed healthcare is out of reach for millions with no or skimpy health insurance resulting in people dying at home or not going to the hospital until their illness became serious. For this and other reasons, COVID19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color.

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report puts the mass revolt in the context of the long history of white supremacy that has existed since Africans were brought to the United States. Chattel slavery was enforced by the earliest form of policing,with the first formal slave patrol created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. After the Civil War and a brief period of Reconstruction where African people could participate in civic life, Jim Crow followed with white racists, often allied with Southern police, inflicting terrorism against the Black population through lynchings and other means. Black people were arrested for laws like vagrancy and then punished by being forced to work picking cotton or other jobs. This new form of slavery continues as inmates are forced to work for virtually no pay in prisons, are leased out to dangerous jobs like meat processing, or are used as scabs.

George Floyd’s murder enraged people who have seen too many deaths as a result of police violence. The murder in broad daylight with cameras filming and scores of witnesses showed the impunity of police who are used to not being held accountable for their violence. During the uprising, police have used extreme violence and targeted people with cameras and the media even saying they were the problem.

The root of the problem is a failed state that does not represent the people and has a deep history of racism and inequality that are being magnified by the current crises. The failure to respond to these crises is resulting in an ungovernable country as the social contract has been broken.

Lawlessness among the wealth class, corruption of politicians by campaigns financed by the wealthiest with payoffs to their children and relatives has set the stage for no respect for the law. As one protester exclaimed, “Don’t talk to us about looting, you are the looters. You have been looting from black people. You looted from the Native Americans. Don’t talk to us about violence, you taught us violence.”

Last Words of people killed by police from Twitter, Washington, DC May 30, 2020

The Failed State Cannot Reform Itself

George Floyd’s final words, “I can’t breathe,” echoed the same words of Eric Garner, who was killed six years ago by a New York police officer. Although there were protests then, not much has changed. The system failed to respond.

Failure starts at the top. There have been years of inaction at all levels of government. The New York Times reports “The administration has largely dismantled police oversight efforts, curbing the use of federal consent decrees to overhaul local police departments. Mr. Barr has said that communities that criticize law enforcement may not deserve police protection, and Mr. Trump has encouraged officers not to be ‘too nice’ in handling suspects.”

Trump poured gasoline on the current fire with incendiary rhetoric promising ‘looting leads to shooting’ echoing racists of the past and promising to send in the US military if Democrats can’t stop the uprising. Trump has put the military on alert to deploy to civilian protests. He maintains power by dividing people praising armed protesters who demanded reopening the economy despite the pandemic and calling unarmed protesters against police violence “thugs”.

On Friday, the White House locked down on security alert because of protests. Trump responded by calling for MAGA protesters to come to the White House. They did not come but protests at the White House have continued to increase.

Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for the current rebellion. Joe Biden has described himself as a ‘law and order’ Democrat from the beginning of his career. He was the primary architect of the federal mass incarceration of Black people and helped add hundreds of thousands of police with militarized equipment to urban communities. He courts police unions that defend killer cops. And Biden opposed the integration of schools.

The failure of leadership continues at the state and local levels with politicians closely tied to the Fraternal Order of Police, which aggressively defends police who kill civilians. Every city can point to a series of police killings with no prosecutions or acquittals and few convictions. Minneapolis is a city with a long history of race-based police violence. Indeed, violence against Indigenous peoples led to the formation of the American Indian Movement.  Tne Intercept summarizes some of the cases:

• In 2015, the police killed Jamar Clark a  24-year-old black man. Protests lasted two weeks but led to no prosecution.
• In 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black motorist, was killed in a Minneapolis suburb. More than two weeks of protest followed and two years later the officer was acquitted.
• In 2017, Justine Ruszczyk, a 40-year-old white woman, approached a Minneapolis police car to report a sexual assault. The police officer, Mohamed Noor, who shot and killed her was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and her family was awarded a record $20 million settlement.
• In 2018, body camera footage showed Minneapolis police chasing Thurman Blevins, a 31-year-old black man, and shooting him to death. Prosecutors refused to file charges against the officers who killed Blevins.

Protests have led to some changes but they haven’t solved the problem. Money has been spent on body cameras, which have rarely had any impact. Similarly, training on de-escalation and racial sensitivity has made little difference.

Over the last six years, cities have increased funding for police departments at the expense of health, education, and other underfunded urban programs. Rather than providing people with necessities, the government has relied on controlling neglected communities with an occupying police force. Some of the police are even trained by the Israeli occupiers.

Even in the midst of a pandemic and economic collapse, the government cannot give people access to healthcare, protect their jobs, suspend their rents or control food prices. As Rosa Miriam Elizalde writes in her comparison of the United States to Cuba, the difference is a matter of values. The United States government spends more than 60 percent of the discretionary budget on weapons and war. It should be no surprise that the government acted more quickly to suppress people with militarized police, thousands of National Guard troops, and curfews than it did to protect their lives when the pandemic and recession started.

Reform Is Not Enough: Defund The Police, Give Communities Control, Build Alternatives To Police

The country must look more deeply at policing. Retired police major, Neill Franklin, the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership told the Intercept, “We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there.”

The Minneapolis group, Reclaim the Block, wrote a statement calling on the city council to defund the police department. Last week, they made four demands of their city council:

1. Never again vote to increase police funding.
2. Propose and vote for a $45 million cut from MPD’s budget as the city responds to projected COVID19 shortfalls.
3. Protect and expand current investment in community-led health and safety strategies.
4. Do everything in their power to compel MPD and all law enforcement agencies to immediately cease enacting violence on community members.

This is an agenda that makes sense for cities across the country. A growing movement demands the defunding of police departments. It is evident that the way to reduce police violence is to fund alternative non-law enforcement approaches to conflict resolution, safety strategies, and mental health as well as investing in neglected communities.

Another growing movement calls for democratic community control of the police where communities elect a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). The critical difference between this and Civilian Police Boards is that the Accountability Council is democratically elected not appointed by the police chief or politicians who are allied with the police. Neill Franklin urges a national database of officers terminated for misconduct so they will not be hired by other police departments.

The New York Times reports that “in 2012, the civilian board in Minneapolis was replaced by an agency called the Office of Police Conduct Review. Since then, more than 2,600 misconduct complaints have been filed by members of the public, but only 12 have resulted in an officer being disciplined.”  The most severe censure was only a 40-hour suspension. Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd, has at least 17 misconduct complaints, none of which derailed his career, in nearly two decades with the Minneapolis Police Department.

Chauvin was involved in the fatal shooting in October 2006 when Senator Klobuchar was Minneapolis’ district attorney. Rather than prosecuting Chauvin, she sent the case to a grand jury that declined to indict Chauvin. In 2011, Chauvin was involved in a high-profile shooting of a Native American. He was placed on administrative leave but was reinstated to the force when no charges were brought. If democratic community control of the police were in place, it is highly likely Chauvin would have been removed as a police officer and George Floyd would still be alive.

Support for change is growing. Bus drivers refused to transport arrested protesters for the police in Minneapolis and New York. Payday Report wrote transit union leaders nationwide are instructing members not to cooperate with police in arresting protesters. And Universities are dropping their contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department.

Protests continue nationwide. Thus far escalating police violence and the use of the National Guard has failed to stop them. The government may use the military, although by law there are restrictions on that. There will be efforts to pacify the protests by political leaders and non-profits who will try to take over the leadership. These must be rejected.

To achieve the changes we need, people must stay in the streets and connect the problems we face to the demand for systemic changes. We will need to support each other as many are doing by distributing food and providing medical care, jail support and legal representation. We urge people to meet in assemblies to discuss what their goals are, their vision of how communities could be organized differently and what actions they can take.  We need to build confidence in each other that we can work together for the future we want. That is how we will get there.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

All images in this article are from Popular Resistance unless otherwise stated

There can no longer be any doubt—America is now a full-blown fascist state. In the past, authoritarian fascism was kept reserved in the shadows, largely out of the public eye, but in a remarkably short period of time it has emerged from the darkness to show its fangs and snarl menacingly at the people, many of them cowed and dutifully following irrational orders from on high. 

As the following video demonstrates, state violence is not directed exclusively at rioters and Antifa goons pretending to be anarchists (most would be unable to define the term) as they loot, burn, and attack the media and innocent bystanders. Violence is used to frighten and intimidate the real enemies of the state—the American people, or those who casually and defy the COVID lockdown and others peacefully protesting murder at the hand of a psychopathic cop.

Minneapolis under curfew pic.twitter.com/rYQYug6M5f

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) May 31, 2020

Fortunately, the woman in the video was not seriously injured. She wasn’t looting Target or burning down Walmart. The woman made the mistake of venturing out on the porch of her home, her private property, and for this crime, she was shot with a paintball by a member of a “state militia” (now federalized). 

The social fabric is coming apart at the seams. First mandatory lockdowns, state-imposed impoverishment, followed by an unfolding Greatest Depression as a result of a shutdown economy, and now social unrest, violence, theft, and arson in two dozen large cities across the country. 

If this degree of violence and destruction is possible centered around the death of a single man, imagine what will happen when millions of people are in desperate straits, unemployed, many evicted, and homeless. It will not be simply police stations that go up in flames. It will be statehouses.   

However, the American people have demonstrated repeatedly they are gullible and easily steered into dead-end diversions pumped up and hyped 24/7 by a corporate propaganda media. The Trump hatefest and political polarization—worse than any in recent memory—will no doubt go by the wayside as millions of Americans face the “new normal” envisioned by their masters—a standard of living in rapid freefall, soon to crash on the rocks. None of this is happenstance or coincidental. 

Most Americans may not have protested the endless wars and criminal economic scams of the ruling elite (mostly due to decades of incessant propaganda), but they will raise their voices and fists when they are unemployed for months on end, evicted from homes and apartments, have their cars repossessed, and are confronted with hunger, want, and homelessness.

In order to enforce the latest manifestation of psychopathic neoliberalism and predatory crony capitalism, the state will depend on steroid-headed soldiers and cops to frighten and intimidate the people. 

It may be paintballs today, but tomorrow it might be live ammo. 

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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 Abayomi Azikiwe

Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois is proposing the Orwellian (and improperly capitalized) COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act, offering states and locales $100 billion with which to become total police states.

The bill would provide funds for localities to contact trace, test, and quarantine infected individuals, and while its sponsor claims testing and quarantining would be on a “voluntary” basis, given how states and localities are already accessing and using technology in the name of the CoronaCrisis, more funding would provide them even more tools that would make Big Brother green with envy:

“Armies” of Contract Tracers

States across the country are building “armies” (their term) of contract tracers: Gov. Newsom says California will “start” with 20,000 and may build to 100,000; Washington, West Virginia, Iowa, North Dakota and Rhode Island are using the National Guard for their contract tracing “armies;” while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg committed $10.5 million to create an “army” of Tracers for New York, in coordination with New Jersey and Connecticut.

And just what will all these soldiers do when they’ve traced the infection to your door? Assess the suitability of your home as a quarantine location, and if they deem it not suitable, you may well find yourself escorted to an “isolation center,” which in New Jersey could include a “field hospital,” or in New York, Mayor de Blasio suggests following the Chinese model of using sports facilities such as the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

Drones

Police agencies are already using drones to enforce stay at home orders and social distancing, as well as detect fevers—which they do very inaccurately. Even without Rep. Rush’s additional funding, 43 law enforcement agencies in 22 states have already purchased drone technology from just one Chinese company. Who knows how many others there may be?

Cameras

Face recognition cameras are being hawked to governments to track people violating mandatory quarantine orders. American technology apparently falls behind in this area: an ACLU study of Amazon’s “Rekognition” software showed it misidentifying 28 members of Congress against a mug shot database. Once again, China offers a better way for Big Government, including technology that provides recognition of even people wearing masks (think: Hong Kong protestors).

Technology company Clearview AI is in talks with the government to create a system that would use face recognition in public places ostensibly to identify unknown people who may have been infected by a known carrier. The proposal, however, would in reality result in a massive surveillance infrastructure, linked to billions of social media images, that could allow the government to readily identify all people in public spaces for any reason.

License-plate reading cameras are another handy way for Big Brother to keep tabs on where you are. In Kentucky, church attendees were so surveilled, then issued orders to self-quarantine for 2 weeks.

Phone Tech

China, again, seems to lead the way in quarantine tech a/k/a keeping you where the government wants you. There, residents are assigned color-coded QR codes on their phones—yours must be green to leave home. But American companies such as Apple and Google are eagerly stepping forward to offer home-grown tech: proximity tracking Apps and location data for enforcing social distancing and contract tracing; and all manner of House Arrest Tech, from GPS-enabled ankle bracelets to smartphone tracking apps, are being retooled and/or developed for quarantine enforcement. The maker of the detainee-tracking smartphone app E-Cell was asked by a state agency to swap out the word “client,” the company’s term for arrestees, to “patient.”

Apple and Google promise that their technology will protect individual privacy by “anonymizing” the location data, but our cell phones are already tracking and providing our locations to tech companies and the government all the time—which data is stored to allow for virtually anyone’s location to be pin-pointed, any time.

Most alarmingly, under the guise of a coronavirus pandemic, local law enforcement, bureaucrats, and lowest-rung clerks are gaining access to massive surveillance capabilities and police powers, with no provision for privacy protection or redress against their misuse.

We’ve already learned—in full, gory detail from NSA whistleblowers and others—the massive number of people who have access to and can misuse our personal data collected by the federal government. Now just imagine all your personal data in the hands of your local beat cop, public health employee, or city hall clerk, now endowed with the power to use it as they see fit.

Because remember, this is a “Crisis:” the ordinary Rule of Law and rights don’t apply. As Louisville’s chief of public services, in imposing GPS-enforced stay-at-home orders, put it, “We don’t want to take away people’s freedoms but at the same time we have a pandemic.”

But just try to get your freedoms back once the “pandemic” has passed. As Crisis and Leviathan and recent history has shown, once they have a power, they keep it. The only way to keep your rights is to keep them all the time. Just say “No” to TRACE and every other “emergency” decree.

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Mary L. G. Theroux is Senior Vice President of the Independent Institute.

Featured image is from the II

The science of the coronavirus is not disputed. It is well documented and openly admitted:

• Most people won’t get the virus.
• Most of the people who get it won’t display symptoms.
• Most of the people who display symptoms will only be mildly sick.
• Most of the people with severe symptoms will never be critically ill.
• And most of the people who get critically ill will survive.

This is borne out by the numerous serological studies which show, again and again, that the infection fatality ratio is on par with flu.

There is no science – and increasingly little rational discussion – to justify the lockdown measures and overall sense of global panic.

Nevertheless, it’s always good to get official acknowledgement of the truth, even if it has to be leaked.

Here are three leaks showing that those in power know that the coronavirus poses no threat, and in no way justifies the lockdown that is going to destroy the livelihoods of so many.

1. “IT’S ALL BULLSH*T!”

On May 26th Dr Alexander Myasnikov, Russia’s head of coronavirus information, gave an interview to former-Presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak in which he apparently let slip his true feelings.

Believing the interview over, and the camera turned off, Myasnikov said:

It’s all bullshit […] It’s all exaggerated. It’s an acute respiratory disease with minimal mortality […] Why has the whole world been destroyed? That I don’t know,”

2. “COVID-19 CANNOT BE DESCRIBED AS A GENERALLY DANGEROUS DISEASE”

According to an e-mail leaked to Danish newspaper Politiken, the Danish Health Authority disagree with their government’s approach to the coronavirus. They cover it in two articles here and here (For those who don’t speak Danish, thelocal.dk have covered the story too).

There’s a lot of interesting information there, not least of which is the clear implication that politicians appear to be pressing the scientific advisors to overstate the danger (they did the same thing in the UK), along with the decision of some civil servants to withhold data from the public until after the lockdown had been extended.

But by far the most important quote is from a March 15th e-mail [our emphasis]:

The Danish Health Authority continues to consider that covid-19 cannot be described as a generally dangerous disease, as it does not have either a usually serious course or a high mortality rate,”

On March 12th the Danish parliament passed an emergency law which – among many other things – decreased the power of the Danish Health Authority, demoting it from a “regulatory authority” to just an “advisory” one.

3. “A GLOBAL FALSE ALARM”

Earlier this month, on May 9th, a report was leaked to the German alternate media magazine Tichys Einblick titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management”.

The report was commissioned by the German department of the interior, but then its findings were ignored, prompting one of the authors to release it through non-official channels.

The fall out of that, including attacks on the authors and minimising of the report’s findings, is all very fascinating and we highly recommend this detailed report on Strategic Culture (or read the full report herein German).

We’re going to focus on just the reports conclusions, including [our emphasis]:

• The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.
• The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.
• During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.

After being attacked in the press, and suspended from his job, the leaker and other authors of the report released a joint statement, calling on the government to respond to their findings.

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If the current crisis was being approached rationally by all parties, these leaks would seal the debate.

Evidence is piling up that the people in charge knew, from the very beginning, that the virus was not dangerous.

The question remaining is: Why are these leaks happening now?

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Parts 1 and 2: introductory, diagnosis
Part 3: the fraudulent threat analysis that fuels militarism
Part 4: some theories and concepts about human security and how those concepts differ fundamentally from state-anchored dominant military policies

A Canadian political analyst said the US is well aware that its oil tankers that are freely moving in the Persian Gulf would be exposed to retaliation if it attempts to seize Iranian oil shipments carrying fuel to Venezuela.

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“The fact that Iran militarily responded to the Trump administration’s murder of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the murder of Iraqi officials showed that Iran would protect its rights if the American’s seized the oil shipments. The United States has many oil tankers that transit the Persian Gulf and they would be exposed to retaliation. The Americans also realize that their military bases in the Middle East are exposed and not welcome by many host countries in the Middle East. They are vulnerable,” Edward Corrigan from Ontario told Tasnim.

Edward C. Corrigan is certified as a specialist by the Law Society of Ontario, Canada in Citizenship, Immigration and Immigration and Refugee Law. He is also an analyst and commentator for a number of media outlets around the world.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: Iran is providing Venezuela with 1.53 million barrels of gasoline and refining components defying US sanctions against both nations. The 4th cargo of an Iranian tanker flotilla carrying fuel for Venezuela reached the South American nation’s exclusive economic zone on Wednesday Refinitiv Eikon data showed. What are your thoughts on this?

Corrigan: These sanctions are unilaterally imposed by the Trump Administration. They are not imposed by the United Nations Security Council. Accordingly, they are not legally binding on Iran or Venezuela. The United States cannot unilaterally impose its sanctions on other countries to stop legal trade between Iran and Venezuela or any other country. The American unilateral sanctions are illegal under International law and Maritime law. To impose unilateral sanctions on another country and to enforce them by military means is seen as an act of war.

Tasnim: The United States has criticized the shipment, as both OPEC nations are under unilateral US sanctions. A Washington official said earlier this month that President Donald Trump’s administration was considering responses to the shipment, prompting the Iranian government to warn Washington against military action. Why do you think the vessels did not appear to encounter interference?

Corrigan: Apparently saner and cooler heads prevailed. The United States would look like a bully and also foolish in the eyes of World opinion. Venezuela and or Iran could go to the International High Court of Justice for a ruling. The United States would lose. Iran and Venezuela could also go to the UN General Assembly for a symbolic vote and again the United States would lose. In my opinion, the Europeans would not support unilateral sanctions by one country that would jeopardize free trade and break International law and accepted principles of Maritime law.

The fact that Iran militarily responded to the Trump administration’s murder of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the murder of Iraqi officials showed that Iran would protect its rights if the American’s seized the oil shipments. The United States has many oil tankers that transit the Persian Gulf and they would be exposed to retaliation. The Americans also realize that their military bases in the Middle East are exposed and not welcome by many host countries in the Middle East. They are vulnerable. The fact that Venezuela sent ships and fighter aircraft to escort and protect the Iranian oil tankers also showed Venezuela’s resolve to not be intimidated by American sanctions. The fact that there are Russian troops in Venezuela also would give a strong reason for the Americans to not to come into direct conflict with the Russian military.

Tasnim: President Nicolas Maduro has expressed gratitude to the Iranian leadership, government, and nation from “the bottom of my heart.” He said Iran and Venezuela had a right just like any other nation in the world to engage in trade. We are “two revolutionary nations that will never kneel down before US imperialism. Venezuela has friends in this world, and brave friends at that”, he said. What is your take on this?

Corrigan: I agree with President Maduro. Under International law and Maritime law, free trade and free transit are protected. The United States cannot use the argument for free navigation in the South China Sea against China and then turn around and not allow free trade in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. It would show that the American administration was being hypocritical and would look foolish. This episode is a clear victory for Iran and Venezuela. It is also a victory for the principle of free trade, Maritime Law, and International law and supports the view that no country can unilaterally impose its law on a third country and impose sanctions on other countries.

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Featured image is from TNA

A social culture where perception of others is not conditioned by skin tone is obtainable. In the process of getting there, a system of law with no impunity for racism and with exemplary punishment for agents of the state in contravention is essential.

A court will judge whether there was intent to kill George Floyd; what is absolutely apparent is there was certainly no intent by the police to preserve his life or health. It is also plain that the force used was wildly disproportionate for the alleged offence. It is further undeniable that police violence in the USA impacts particularly on black people, and that in dealing with black people the police act with an arrogance founded on anticipated impunity. The societal change whereby the majority of adults have camera phones at the ready has given a new power of resistance to the public in this regard. That must be reinforced by exemplary sentencing.

The law currently takes the opposite approach:

If a police officer unlawfully harms a citizen, the officer is subject to assault or homicide charges—no different than if the officer committed these crimes off duty. [2] However, if a citizen unlawfully harms a police officer, the citizen is automatically subject to aggravated assault or aggravated homicide charges, which carry more severe punishment. [3] In fact, some states make the intentional killing of an on-duty officer a capital offense. [4] Enhanced charges in police encounters are thus asymmetrical. They only apply if a citizen harms an officer but not if an officer harms a citizen.

Police who kill in the course of their duties are given every latitude by the courts and far lower sentences than others who kill. That attitude needs to reverse. Police need to understand that their duty to protect and deal fairly embraces both the alleged victim and the alleged criminal. Breach of this public duty to protect should be an aggravating factor when the police kill, and sentences should be stiffer than for the general public. There are moments in public discourse where you need to come down off the fence and decide which side you are on; I am on the side of Black Lives Matter.

Here are two murdered men who have even less chance of receiving justice than George Floyd.

There is a stark contrast between the justified international outrage at Floyd’s death, and the unremarked killing of just a couple more Palestinians. I recommend this twitter thread by the ever excellent Ben White, and the links it gives. Ben does not mention that Iyad, on the left, was on his way to classes for those with special needs when he was chased and gunned down by Israeli soldiers.

This may surprise you. The police in the USA have less impunity for killings than the police in the UK.

Even as straightforward a case as the murder of Jean Charles De Menezes, who did nothing wrong whatsoever, brought no action against the police in the UK. The killing of Sheku Bayoh in Fife had obvious parallels with that of George Floyd, yet nobody was charged. 457 people have died in police custody since 1998, from all causes. From 2005-2015 10% of 294 deaths were “restraint related”. That is 30 people in the UK in ten years who have died at the hands of police in much the same way George Floyd died. That figure excludes those shot by the police.

Not one British policeman has been convicted of an unlawful killing in all these deaths. – not one. The last British policeman convicted was in 1969. That is what I call real impunity.

Source

And that is without examining the similar impunity enjoyed even by private contractors in the UK responsible for the many deaths in the prison system and in immigration detention.

Impunity is a major problem all round the world, and everywhere it enables disproportionate use of state violence against minorities. But it is most sinister in a state like the United Kingdom, where the support of the prosecutorial and judicial institutions of the state for those who enforce the state’s monopoly of violence is absolute, and where the public are so conditioned to the power of the state they do not even notice the impunity.

The United Kingdom is full of people, right now, looking at the images of unrest from the USA and telling each other that the way the police kill black people in the USA is terrible. We do not process that in the UK law enforcement officers enjoy still greater impunity than in the USA.

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The American liberal tradition has become increasingly superfluous with the triumphal ascendancy of a corrosive and reactionary conservative political ideology that was consecrated during the ‘Reagan Revolution’ of the 1980s and steadily gained influence in every succeeding presidential administration that came to power in the United States. The Reagan revolution, or more precisely, counter-revolution, comprised a concerted effort to roll-back the gains of labor, socialist and progressive struggles around the world on behalf of corporate capital.  The offensive is being intensified by the hideous Trump regime.

Domestically, Reagan’s premeditated assault on ‘big government’ involved a deliberate attack on social welfare programs that had been constructed over five decades prior to his elevation to the presidency, primarily as a response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the urban rebellions of the 1960s and the ravages of an unregulated capitalistic system.  His expressed intention was to dismantle social welfare programs that were created by FDR’s ‘New Deal’ and LBJ’s ‘Great Society’.

Reagan also waged unrestrained class warfare by signing into law the largest tax cuts for the rich in U.S. history and brutally attacking organized labor by firing the striking Air Traffic Controllers in 1981.  The firing began a decades-long campaign of union busting that reduced the level of union membership from a high of 33% of the American working class in 1955 to approximately 10.5% in 2020.

In foreign policy, Reagan launched a frontal attack on the ‘Evil Empire’ of the Soviet Union by instigating the first phase of the ‘War on Terror’.  The center of world terrorism for Reaganites was the ‘Red Menace’ that ruled the Kremlin.  Soviet extension of military and material aid to third world countries was classified as sponsorship of international terrorism by Reagan’s imperious Secretary of State, George Shultz.

The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Reagan regime was revealed by its support for murderous proxy forces such as the Islamic Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua.  Reagan and CIA Director William Casey also deployed death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala in their desire to deny communism a ‘beach head’ in Central America.

In Europe, Reagan and Casey conspired closely with the Vatican to install a Polish Pope while working hand in hand with the deeply reactionary labor movement ‘Solidarity’, led by the erstwhile electrician, Lech Walesa to destabilize the Communist government of Poland.

Reagan also conducted an unprecedented nuclear arms buildup that deployed the MX missile, with its multiple warheads, in U.S. silos and placed intermediate range Pershing and Cruise missiles in Western Europe, triggering a dangerous military escalation with the Soviet Union. The offensive missile buildup was simultaneously undertaken with research and development of a ‘Star Wars’ missile defense shield that violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and militarized space.

The ‘L’ word was further stigmatized by George Herbert Walker Bush during his 1988 presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis whom Bush race-bated with the infamous Willie Horton television advertisement that claimed Horton, a black convict, raped a white woman and murdered her partner after being furloughed from prison by the Massachusetts governor.

It was no coincidence that during the 1992 presidential campaign, Governor William Jefferson Clinton returned home to the State of Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally ill, black inmate, Ricky Ray Rector.  The lesson of the Willie Horton ad campaign was well learned by the crafty Clinton who defeated Bush Senior in the general election by appearing ‘tough on crime’.

Clinton’s subsequent ‘Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994’ enhanced his reputation and led straight away to mass incarceration of the black underclass.  The law was partially written by Senator Joseph Biden, who chaired the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.  Supporting her husband’s ‘law and order’ posture was First Lady and former Goldwater Girl, Hillary Clinton, who referred to young black males as “Super predators.”  The ‘War on Poverty’ had been officially replaced by the ‘War on Crime’ under the Clinton syndicate.

The electoral success of the Reagan/Bush years pushed the Democratic Party to the right.  Leading the way were the ‘New Democrats’ whose centrist politics would eventually devolve into a tawdry conservatism that justified the continued evisceration of the social safety net.  The remorseless task was undertaken by the Clintonites with the sickening persistence of gnawing mice.  Clinton’s ‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996’, ended federal government control of welfare and provided the poor with an opportunity to work in an economy that offshored and outsourced millions of jobs to Mexico thanks to Clinton’s ‘North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) now renegotiated as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) by Trump.

The Clinton regime, led by his grotesque Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, maintained a lethal and unscrupulous imperialistic foreign policy indistinguishable from its Republican predecessors, as exemplified by the continuation of a starvation blockade in Iraq that killed 500,000 children, dismemberment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia prior to the bombing of Serbia in 1999, forced repatriation of Haitian refugees fleeing political persecution from a military dictatorship installed by the United States during a coup d’état in 1991, launching of cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 and subjugation of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization through implementation of theOslo and Camp David Peace Accords of 1993 and 2000, respectively.

The election of Barack Obama as America’s second black president, Bill Clinton having been anointed its first by the African-American novelist Toni Morrison, saw the former Columbia Law professor conciliate a rabid Republican congressional opposition with economic, human rights, military and national security policies that could only be described as resolutely conservative.  Obama continued Bush’s bailout of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street during the sub-prime financial crisis and extended Bush’s tax cuts for the rich during his first two years in office.  Obama was the first president to cut Social Security benefits by freezing cost-of-living increases for retirees. Obama’s ‘Affordable Health Care Act’ pushed aside demands for a single payer program of nationalized health care in favor of the for-profit private insurance system that ravages Americans today.

Obama also presided over the NSA’s prism program of mass surveillance, institutionalization of preventive detention,persecution of journalists and whistleblowers, a system of drone warfare, expansion of Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into five additional Muslim counties, coup d’états in Ukraine and Honduras and a ‘New Cold War’ with Russia.

Both Clinton and Obama claimed the mantle of centrism, a weak-kneed political philosophy that adopted moderately conservative policy positions while appearing somewhat liberal when contrasted to Reaganite ultra-conservative politics of the Republicans.  In effect, the entire U.S. political spectrum has shifted to the right in the post-Reagan era.

The economic principles of John Maynard Keynes that were adopted by FDR in the face of the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s and advocated by the Brookings Institute for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s, have been replaced with the neoliberal policies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman that were endorsed by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute during the 1970s to deregulate and privatize the U.S. and global economy on behalf of the American plutocracy.  The first neoliberal experiment took place in Pinochet’s Chile after the CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.

Gone is the domestic politics of reform and melioration that characterized the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.  The progressive social welfare programs of the ‘New Deal’ and the ‘Great Society’ are under continuous attack to eliminate the last pillars of the American social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

What remains is a legacy of political repression.  It should be noted that Roosevelt interned the Japanese while ordering the FBI to surveil isolationist critics of World War II.  The Truman administration forged the National Security State and inaugurated the second red scare while prosecuting the Korean War.  And the Kennedy and Johnson regimes conducted the Vietnam War while extending the FBI’s Cointelpro program, thus illustrating the efficacy of ‘Cold War’ liberalism that combined social reform with domestic repression to stabilize the bastion of imperialism.

Economic policies that favor the rich have always been advanced by the Republicans and their corporate conservative coalition.  Not so for the Democrats who formed a liberal labor coalition for the greater part of the 20^thcentury.  The ‘New Democrats’ have repudiated the coalition and its’ social base of organized labor.  The ‘New Democrats’ have betrayed the labor movement during the era of globalization and NAFTA.  The ‘New Democrats’ have turned their backs on the poor and racial minorities with their emphasis on ‘law and order’, ‘welfare reform’ and ‘mandatory drug sentencing’.  The ‘New Democrats’ have also betrayed civil libertarians with their support for the Patriot Act, the NDAA of 2012 and NSA warrantless surveillance.

The venality of centrist politics perfectly illustrates the repudiation of an American liberal tradition that once provided a genuine safety net for the poor, the elderly and the downtrodden.  The social dimensions of that tradition advocated some modicum of justice for those who suffered from race and sex oppression.  With the rise of mass incarceration and the militarized police state, the victories won before the liberal Warren Court by Brown, Miranda, Gideon, Yates and Katz, have disappeared beneath a wave police murders, tortured confessions and warrantless surveillance, behind which lies the threat of indefinite detention.

Perhaps the most articulate intellectual advocate of liberal reform in the United States during the early part of the 20^thcentury was the American philosopher John Dewey.  Dewey’s instrumentalist philosophy is a pristine expression of middle-class liberalism as it emphasized the possibilities of progressive change and liberal democratic governance. Dewey’s thought represented an extension of the progressive era that arose in the late 1890s to combat the monopolization of commerce and industry by avaricious bankers and industrialists.  Even Franklin D. Roosevelt was moved to use the term “economic royalists” to decry what his cousin Teddy Roosevelt once called the “malefactors of great wealth.” By doing so, they reflected populist opposition to industrialists, financiers and Wall Street speculators who were hated by the common people.  The foremost demands of progressives such as free public education from elementary school through the university level, building public parks, libraries and settlement houses, extending the franchise for women, abolishing child labor and passing public health and anti-trust legislation were all championed by Dewey who saw the need to extend these reforms.

Today, the Democrats espouse a politics of social identity blind to its own contradictions.  They have completely abandoned class politics for identity politics.  Keynesian economic reform has given way to the neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation and rule of the market. The progressive features of liberal reform have been jettisoned for the rapacious economics of wealth concentration and social repression.

Underlying the political and ideological metamorphosis is a shift in class relations with the onset of globalization, a process that generated capital flight, deindustrialization and the decimation of organized labor.  The American working class is fragmented in a financialized economy that is structured to produce economic contingency and debt for wage and salaried workers alongside the exponential growth of wealth for predatory financiers.  With the cutting of social benefits along with wages, the ranks of the poor have swelled dramatically.  The middle class is cast adrift, its social stability under constant threat.

The triumph of the corporate rich and their Washington Neoliberal Consensus has marginalized a majority of the American population, the most oppressed sectors of which can only respond by adopting a revolutionary politics to face their condition as the doctrine of liberal reform, itself the product of class struggles of a bygone era, has become a rotting corpse without significant influence within the corridors of power.  The repulsive capitulation of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to the corrupt Joseph Biden and the Democratic Party tragically illustrates the irrelevance of an increasingly dissolute liberal ideology whose adherents actively collaborate with American imperialism.

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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War.  He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective.  His recent book is titled, The Politics of Terrorism, and is available at amazon.com

The despicable police murder of a person, another Black person, who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill has caused widespread revulsion among Americans. This time, however, authorities acted relatively quickly calling in the FBI and firing all four police officers at the scene — Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng.

George Floyd, who did not resist, was forcibly extricated from his vehicle by police, handcuffed, whereupon officer Derek Chauvin knelt for 8 minutes on Floyd’s neck while he pleaded that he was unable to breathe. Floyd’s death was the result.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has called for the arrest of Chauvin, although not by the officer’s name. Said Frey,

“If you had done it or I had done it we would be behind bars right now and I cannot come up with an answer to that question.”

In contradistinction protestors have been hastily arrested while protesting Floyd’s murder.

Even the media were not safe from being arrested for covering the story of another police murder of a Black man. The Save Journalism Project responded in a press release:

The arrest of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew on live television this morning simply for reporting on the protests of police violence in Minneapolis violates the most basic tenet of press freedom: the necessity of reporting what are at times uncomfortable truths for government authorities. The government possesses enormous coercive power, that as this episode clearly shows, can be all too easily applied to limit or prevent the press from reporting on their actions. The First Amendment exists precisely for this reason.

The arrest of Jimenez even underscores the reasons for the protests he was covering. No one has been arrested in the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But Jimenez, who like Floyd is black, has been arrested. There was even another CNN crew near Jimenez at the time of his arrest, but Josh Campbell and his producers were, according to Campbell, “treated much differently,” and were obviously not arrested.

In the US, American journalists, especially if Black, can be arrested … for what? Reporting a live story? To curtail racism and prejudice from wider exposure? To protect the crimes of the US gendarmerie from becoming public knowledge?

Prejudice in US and China

Why did the police murder another black citizen. NBA star Lebron James had no doubt.

Despite rampant racism and racism-inspired violence in the US, the US continues to inveigh against the alleged Chinese maltreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans in Tibet. It has been refuted by others, such as journalist Caleb Maupin, as propaganda that seeks to demonize the Chinese government.

Arresting versus expelling journalists

In mid-March, the Chinese government announced the expulsion of journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

The US mass media struck back: “[N]ewsroom leaders criticized China’s move, which comes in the midst of a global public health crisis over COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.”

Trump said, “I’m not happy to see it. I have my own disputes with all three of those media groups — I think you know that very well — but I don’t like seeing that at all.”

The Chinese action comes after Washington imposed limitations on staff at Chinese state media outlets in the US.

Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said,

The United States cannot proceed from ideological prejudice, use its own standards and likes and dislikes to judge the media of other countries, let alone suppress the Chinese media unreasonably…. We urge the US to take off its ideological prejudice, abandon cold war mentality…. China is not one to start trouble, but it will not blink if trouble comes. We urge the US side to immediately stop suppressing Chinese media, otherwise the US side will lose even more.

Notably, Americans have also been prohibited from working as journalists in Macau or Hong Kong.

A Comparison to China’s Response to the Riots in Hong Kong

What about the protests/riots that have resumed in Hong Kong? What triggered those protests? Some citizens were opposed to extradition of alleged criminals? How has China responded to rioting, sabotage, terrorism, separatism, and even murders by the so-called protestors? Hong Kong is a territory having been a under British colonial administration from 1841 to 1997 when it reverted to mainland China as a special autonomous region; it must be noted that once the original demands for rescinding the extradition bill were met, the goal posts of the NED-supported protestors transformed into a purported democracy movement.

Has China responded with military force? No. With arrests of law-abiding journalists? No. With police brutality? Most observers will acknowledge that police have been incredibly restrained, some would say too restrained in the face of protestor violence.

The protestors, largely disaffected youth, as is apparent in all or most video footage, by and large employ random violence as a tactic, which they do not condemn. This was made clear by Hong Kong protest leader Joey Siu, during an interview with Deutsche Welle, who said she “will not do any kind of public condemnation” for the use of unjustified violence by protesters against residents who do not share their political views.

How has Beijing responded? Legislatively, by seeking to uphold the Basic Law, whose Article 23 mandated Hong Kong to enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government. It is the normal case that nations everywhere protect their national security. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post ran an opinion piece titled “If Hong Kong had enacted national security laws on its own, Beijing wouldn’t be stepping in” which pointed out:

Beijing trusted Hong Kong to implement Article 23, but its trust was misplaced. The Basic Law is a two-way street – it isn’t fair to accuse the central government of failing to comply with the mini-constitution when Hong Kong itself has not fulfilled its obligations.

Extradition for crimes committed versus extradition for exposing war crimes

The Hong Kong imbroglio stems from the attempt to enact a bill to permit extradition between Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. This was given impetus when Hong Kong resident Chan Tong-kai, 20, murdered his girlfriend, Poon Hiu-wing, 20, while they were on vacation in Taiwan. To be convicted of murder, he’d have to return to the jurisdiction in which it occurred for trial. But there is no extradition treaty between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chan did agree to return to Taiwan to face the charges, but Taiwan blocked his entry.

The absurdity of this extradition conundrum is laid bare by the fact that Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with Britain and the US and not with its motherland, China. Thus, the lack of an extradition arrangement prevents justice for criminal acts such as murder among certain regions of China.

Meanwhile another bombastic evidence of western infidelity to justice is the extradition that is sought for a man whose “crime” was to reveal to the world the war crimes of the US war machine. For this Julian Assange, a man who should be protected by all humanity, has seen his human rights obliterated and any shred of western adherence to the concept of justice obliterated.

Update: In the course of writing this article, Derek Chauvin was taken into custody. The other three officers who were aware of officer Chauvin’s brutal and lethal act are in essence accomplices and ought to be held culpable under the law for their roles.

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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen.

The collapse of the culture of Enlightenment rationality has been filled from within and without by rationality’s enemies: irrationality; uncontrolled desire and emotion; and the deliberate destruction of the academic rational-theoretical disciplines, all replaced by aspects of human activity which can be translated into marketplace productivity—i.e. can produce money for someone.

Of all the possible replacements for the rejection of reason as a common cultural practice, the weakest and most tenuous in attempting to hold a culture together is a desire-based egoism and the individualism of free and self-interested economic (personal) gain—i.e. the fundamental assumption of neoliberalism. Even a superficial examination can see that the consequences of such a paradigm when given primacy in a culture would cause far greater pain and further collapse of the culture than the paradigm they replaced. Granted that the primacy of reason was largely rejected by Western culture as a result of the series of brutal and inhuman wars fought under its banner in the early 20^th century, the consumption model that took its place only led to more and more inhumane wars, and has pit one person against another, and economic elites against the rest of the people, in particular the economic underprivileged.

Many people saw the shortsightedness of this philosophy, turned away from its values, and adopted instead the relativism of the primacy of “the social” and of language itself as a way of viewing human interchange. They see societal bonds established by language and the growth of cultural practices and ideas to be primary in human nature and the unifying of social groups of identity. However, we are now seeing that such relativistic social values have an even shorter shelf life than an overvalued reason, because if values are simply socially-originated or maintained, they are insusceptible to normative analysis (e.g. why is oppression bad?) and insufficient as normative guides. Instead, socially based norms are limited to the group which identifies with them and agrees to them and only for as long as they agree to them. Distinctively reasonable and normative guides for formulating beliefs, for acting, and for analyzing group values require a primacy of thinking objectively over small-group intersubjective agreement. This is because both reason and norms have an objective dimension to them and are interrelated in just that way (e.g. being nonfactual). So  no norms, no future should be the motto of those who see the end coming to our current cultural fascinations with self, money, desire-fulfillment, and a relativism of beliefs and values that comes with postmodernism and identity politics, and who seek an alternative to this collapsing worldview. Norms, as “ought” statements, cannot and should not ever have been rejected or reduced to the empirical, the linguistic, or simple social agreement. “Ought” has its own domain, in both logic and ethics, and both are quite necessary and applicable in and to social life. Cultural norms will simply not fill the “ought” gap left from the rejection of reason, because such cultural interpretations are too ephemeral and fleeting due to their focus only on what is, rather than on what should be. That such social or linguistic givens per se can’t and won’t hold a culture together should be evident by now.

But with what will we replace them? Generation Z seems to be searching for a normative guide that has not yet been found. If the unifying paradigm to come does not involve reason and its objective normative concerns at some primary level, then that paradigm too, whatever it is, will fall, just as the “social is primary” philosophy is failing us right now. We should face the plain fact that human history shows that cultures need primary normative and appealed to (not just “agreed to”) objective guides in order to unify, survive, and thrive, and these guides must not only have primacy in the culture, but they must be taken as holding for all involved. If not, then, for example, rule of law becomes a matter of opting in or opting out, a behavior we regularly see with the U.S. attitude toward international law and its very own treaties. If rationality is not involved in this objectivity (indeed, rationality is the very condition of understanding and acknowledging such objectivity), then it cannot be properly normative. As a consequence, it has no claim on me and I have been given no reason to respond to it. Such is our collapsing culture today.

The same problems with the “primacy of the social” are seen in the postmodern fascination with identity groups. If objective norms are rejected, the best alternatives are said to be groups with which individual egos self-identify, or with whom they are comfortable identifying. This is more of the desire/ego-based alternative to a collapsing cultural unity that cannot last. Why should anyone outside of a given “identity group” care about what that group says about their self-interest simply because they are members of a group whose interests have not been taken into account in social-political policies? Unless that group has an objective argument or principle as a primary part of their public agenda, such as that their humanness has been abused or ignored by social and/or political institutions, and unless they are willing to unite together with every other group to make changes that an objective view of justice requires—i.e. that will benefit all (and not just their own group interest) under a principle that calls upon society to respect their human dignity—then the simple fact that they might “self-identify” in one way and that they “feel oppressed” qua group by a ruling class, in itself makes no claim on anyone else in society. But the moment they appeal to such a principle as “human dignity” or “equality,” they cease to function as an identity group, per se. Hence one of the internal contradictions of identity politics comes to light.

As a counter example to the normal identity group, look at how the “Black Lives Matter” frequently (but not always) operates. What one normally hears from that movement is not the message that says “we identify as Black, so respect us,” but rather that black lives are human lives and have a human dignity. While sometimes the spokespeople stray into the former message of self-identity (and thus lose their moral claim on others to that degree), the notion of “humanity” and “respect” involved in the latter set of claims is a set of objective concepts, and betokens a degree of rationality in order to maintain what “Black Lives Matter” represents. I hear those claims, and as human being (not just as a white male who identifies as such, listening to a black person who identifies themselves as such), I must (i.e. am called to) condemn their oppressors and abusers, and I must work against those who perpetrate actions that harm them. The horror and outrage that we experience in watching the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd does not come primarily from a “Black man” being murdered, but from a human being being murdered, made all the worse in its offense by it being a Black man being murdered, and worst of all, being murdered by a cop. The moral abhorrence is just that: a gross violation of a moral principle that all people should not be subject to cold-blooded murder. This principle of the inherent dignity of humans is further evidenced by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, in the “I am a man” refrain.

The point here is that unless identity groups include a similar objective universal concept of “humanity” in their platforms that call me into unity with them, by virtue of a moral claim made on me, then they remain just small groups clamoring for a self-interested piece of the socio-economic pie that they feel has been denied to them and that they desire. More specifically, the only equality identity groups per se can call out is “our equality.” But that is not a principle; it is a desire. Hence the left’s current socio-political malaise. Ethical obligation on otherwise diverse individuals with equally diverse interests comes only in the assertion of objective ethical principles that bind everyone. But that is something identity groups generally fail to do. Thus, their argument is not a very compelling one, because it only claims that dominant groups have a responsibility to appease them simply because their group desiressomething. [The pragmatic argument “If the cops abuse black people, they’ll abuse white people in time,” is not an ethical argument nor a social-ethical argument against police brutality, because its premise is completely self-interested.]

This focus on “differences” between groups of people rather than their common humanity that is one of the pillars of postmodern ideas is quickly illustrated in the writings of the postmodernist feminist author Iris Marion Young. Her denial of such objective concepts as “human nature” is stated forthrightly in her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, where the emphasis is on our differences, not the unity of our common humanity. The logic of identity such as “humanity” that applies to all, for her, represses difference. In opposition to Young, I would argue that unless identity groups that form on the basis of this “difference” are willing to embrace the idea that their identity, their self-understanding, is one of being part of “humanity”—and that means belonging in solidarity to other humans who do not share their group’s specific, contingent, ever-changing cultural identification—then they have nothing to say to anyone else except a call to fulfill their (self-interested) desires and/or press others to share in power, for no other reason than that they as a group want it. In short, identity groups per se simply continue to splinter a culture already economically and racially splintered, and just celebrates that splintering. If that continues, the postmodernist, neoliberal, baby-boomer belief would be right: no culture-wide unity is possible, and thus there is no solution to the ills for which they seek redress is ultimately within their grasp.

To the degree that reason in the past was seen as primary in the sense that it existed as complete in itself, as apart from and in complete isolation from the senses, body, world, language, etc., that is a god of reason that rightfully died and was buried. But that its progeny—a view of rationality that, although anchored in the world is able to partially transcend it by conceptual expressions of that world in the form of beliefs and values—is a view of reason that, if dead, means the death of humanity. This seems to have escaped the notice of the most radical identity politics and “resist” supporters of postmodern views. Irrational creatures of the human kind that reject the view that humans are in fact creatures with reason reject their own humanity and end up celebrating their narcissism and perhaps animal passion instead, as we have seen in the current neoliberal consumption culture. They end up committing species suicide, as we are seeing ourselves do right now in our allowing our leaders to continue to deny the reality of and delay action on the world’s climate crisis, and to stockpile their so-called “tactical” (i.e. “usable”) nuclear weapons.

If we don’t look back and grab onto what is left of the primacy of reason, as Western culture now collapses and disperses, there is no reason to be optimistic for a future for humanity. Nowhere do we see that failure to regrasp the primacy of the objectivity of reason more clearly than in the denials of climate change, denials of science, in the racism of immigrant bans, indefinite jailing of immigrants without due process (the latter another objective value!), and proposed wall-building, and on the reliance on military force to impose the will of those in power. The immigrant issue in particular represents the denial of the rational understanding of an objective concept of human equality and human dignity.

In the face of the urgencies that confront us, the debate should not be centered around the issue that siloed groups of identity desire to be recognized, but rather what norms can express a unified humanity that is being abused by its own institutions . The concept of humanity (a objective concept) by definition cannot be limited to the self-interest of identity groups. If one is focused on “difference,” as many postmodernists such as Young are, then one must deny “humanity” in any significant sense. That is part of the current standoff today within liberal and progressive thought: it is frozen in its ability to act, because it is not unified around central themes that unite all groups. The solution to this problem would be to transcend identity into humanity. Our climate crisis calls us to do this, because it is our  “humanity” that faces its extinction, not our “identity groups,” and such cases may force us to come out of our self-woven group cocoons and to understand our commonality. You don’t see identity groups protesting that climate change is affecting them, qua identity! Rather, without an objective concept of humanity to unify us, our parochial, desire-based interests will inevitably lead to our own demise.

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Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University He is the author of three books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2009). He contributed eleven chapters to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice, from The Hague: Springer Press (October, 2011). Dr. Abele is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill, California in the San Francisco Bay area. His web site is www.spotlightonfreedom.com

Featured image is by Fibonacci Blue | Public Domain

Photographs surreptitiously taken inside a British courtroom and provided to The Grayzone show a visibly disoriented Julian Assange confined to a glass cage and unable to communicate with his lawyers.

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Photographs taken inside London’s Woolwich Crown Court and provided exclusively to The Grayzone highlight the un-democratic measures the British security state has imposed on jailed Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange.

Captured during Assange’s extradition hearing, which took place between February 24 and 28, the images highlight the confinement Assange has been subjected to, as well as the physical deterioration he has experienced since he was arrested in April 2019 and jailed in a maximum security prison.

On February 26, Judge Vanessa Baraitser vowed to hold anyone in contempt of court for taking photographs. However, an observer had taken several photos a day before the judge’s warning.

Anonymous Scandinavia, a Sweden-based group of Wikileaks supporters, provided the photos to The Grayzone in order to expose what they considered to be the state repression of an investigative journalist.

The images show Assange confined to a glass cage, physically sequestered from his legal team, and unable to follow his own trial.

Throughout the hearing, Assange protested his isolation, complaining to Judge Baraitser,

“I am as much a participant in these proceedings as I am at Wimbledon. I cannot communicate with my lawyers or ask them for clarifications.”

He told members of his legal team he was unable to hear from inside the glass cage.

Below, a seemingly dejected Assange can be seen gazing through the bulletproof glass panes at two of his lawyers, Stella Morris and Baltazar Garzon.

In a heartfelt video testimonial released this April, Morris disclosed that she was the mother of two infant sons with Assange.

Throughout 2017, Morris was spied on by a Spanish security firm apparently hired by the CIA through Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands. At one point, the director of the firm ordered an employee to steal a diaper from one of Morris’s sons in an attempt to match his DNA to that of Assange.

“I understood that the powers that were against Julian were ruthless and there were no bounds to it,” Morris commented after learning of the surveillance campaign. “And that’s why I feel that I have to [reveal myself as the mother of Assange’s children]. Because I’ve taken so many steps for so many years and I feel that Julian’s life might be coming to an end.”

“Prolonged exposure to psychological torture” continues in court

Since its foundation in 2010, Wikileaks has published troves of documents exposing American war crimes, meddling, and corruption around the globe. Following the release of thousands of classified State Department cables provided by military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Vice President Joseph Biden denounced Assange as a “high-tech terrorist.”

As VP, @JoeBiden called Julian Assange a "high-tech terrorist," helping set the stage for the US-UK prosecution of the publisher and the most pernicious assault on a free press in recent years. pic.twitter.com/w7izfxVTSR

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 3, 2020

In April 2017, then-CIA director Mike Pompeo labeled Wikileaks a “hostile foreign intelligence agency,” denigrating Assange as a “fraud” in a speech telegraphing Washington’s malicious campaign against the publisher.

That December, US federal prosecutors filed a secret indictment charging Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. He now faces 175 years in a US prison.

Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, warned that, if extradited,

“Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Melzer was disturbed by the traits he observed after meeting Assange in May 2019. In a report published by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the expert noted,

“in addition to physical ailments, Mr. Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”

The photo below reveals a visibly disoriented Assange with a grim pallor and expressionless gaze.

Courtroom cages through history

Though Assange has never been convicted of a crime and has no record of violent behavior, his cage was more restrictive than the enclosure reserved for Adolph Eichmann when the top-level Nazi bureaucrat was placed on trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Unlike Assange, Eichmann was able to communicate freely with his lawyer and listen to a live translation of his trial.

During his corruption trial in Moscow in 2005, the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was similarly held in a cage. Following a formal protest of the confinement by his business partner and co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, who claimed that the cage represented a breach of the right to a presumption of innocence, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the two were subjected to “inhuman and degrading conditions in the courtroom.”

When Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, collapsed and died in a soundproof cage in a courtroom, six years after he was deposed in a 2013 military coup, Western media and human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International erupted in a chorus of condemnation.

These same rights groups have said little about the draconian restrictions imposed by the British security state on Assange throughout his extradition hearing. But their reticence might be excused on the grounds that clear images of his unwarranted courtroom isolation were not publicly available until now.

Assange’s hearing postponed, his isolation extended

The Belmarsh supermax prison where Assange has been held is regarded as the UK’s version of the US facility at Guantanamo. Aside from Assange, the jail is home to mafia henchmen, al-Qaeda members, and neo-fascist enforcers like Tommy Robinson. Around 20 percent of prisoners in Belmarsh are murderers, and two-thirds have committed a violent crime.

117 licensed medical professionals from around the world have written to the British and Australian governments to condemn “the torture of Assange,” “the denial of his fundamental right to appropriate health care, “the climate of fear surrounding the provision of health care to him” and “the violations of his right to doctor–patient confidentiality.”

Since the doctors’ open letter, Belmarsh has become a site of Covid-19 infection. As journalist Matt Kennard reported, a 2007 report by the UK’s Chief Inspector of Prisons found that “infection control was inadequate” in the detention facility.

Rather than allow a temporary medical furlough for Assange, however, Judge Baraitser has postponed  his extradition trial for four months, disappearing him again from public view.

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution,” the UN’s Melzer said of the Wikileaks founder’s treatment, “I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

When Assange returns to court this September, the glass cage awaits.

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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Imagine living through 1945. As World War II ended 75 years ago, the UN was born and two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. To commemorate and reflect on these pivotal events, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has created a timeline. Ever since 1945 people, their governments and civilization itself have been faced with a momentous dilemma: how to choose law and cooperation over power and domination. Check out the WILPF timeline,  follow the history of that momentous year, and start local discussions of the events that changed our world. For example, release of The Franck Report on June 11, 1945…

You might not recognize the name, since the report was kept secret at the time, one of many WWII documents whose un-censored versions only became public decades later.  Signed by several prominent nuclear physicists who worked on development of an atomic bomb, the Franck Report recommended that the US not use the atomic bomb as a weapon to prompt the surrender of Japan. 

Here are some thoughts on a related topic: Can the UN be reformed? World Order and Cultivating Community

The liberal international order is currently being challenged by populism in nations that built and long supported it. It is also being tested by rising powers, particularly China, and other states that hope to restore their prominence. Some go so far as to say the old order is fractured at the core, which makes a major conflict more likely. At the same time, the world faces a growing number of global challenges that cannot be managed effectively by national governments alone. 

The United Nations is still considered by many people as the key feature of this fragile World Order, and is certainly treated as one of its major institutions. When nations don’t abide by its resolutions, they are often accused of violating international norms or even law. In short, the UN is assumed to be a global democratic government. But this is at best aspirational, and, in some serious respects, misleading. 

The UN Security Council certainly isn’t democratic or liberal. Veto power is held by the winners of World War II; large parts of the world have no say. A handful of nations can impose sanctions, with immunity from counterclaims. And even if all other nations acted together, they could not impose sanctions on the Big Five.

So isn’t calling the UN General Assembly “the most democratic and representative body” a bit misleading? Beyond the power imbalance already described, India (1.3 billion people) and Luxembourg (613,000) each have one vote! And although the General Assembly passes all manner of resolutions, its members know there is no credible way to enforce them. Is it democratic when most of the votes are cast by representatives of authoritarian regimes, with leaders who couldn’t care less what their people feel? Is it accurate to call the UN liberal when representatives of brazen human rights violators have for years led its human rights bodies?

Given all of this, do nationalists have a valid point when they charge that the UN violates national sovereignty? Shouldn’t it at least be more representative? And how about all the international governance carried out by other international organizations, and through informal bodies like the G7, G8, and G20? Their decisions aren’t binding on those who dissent, but at least they try to operate by consensus, Is this a more viable way to go?

The world obviously needs stronger, more effective forms of global governance. But it doesn’t look ready at the moment to be governed like a liberal democracy. Instead, premature attempts to overcome nationalism have fed populism.

One of the problems may be insufficient community building. People have a basic need for recognition and respect, and these are linked to a sense of identity and community. Since the 1980s the US has tilted too far toward individualism and lost a sense of communal values. If that is part of the problem, does it also point toward a solution?

At the same time we have lost a sense of shared values we have experienced rising alienation, resurgent populism, institutional breakdown, and Donald Trump. It is not a coincidence. But perhaps we can cultivate a greater shared sense of community, even in supranational forums, and eventually extend it to their governing bodies. The trick is how to do it without creating more alienation and pushback.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Greg Guma / For Preservation & Change.

It is imperative to realize that what is happening in Minneapolis and other cities throughout the U.S. is not only a revolt against the police brutality but also an indication of the potential uprising against an unbearable political and economical situation that the working people in the U.S. have been enduring for decades which has been intensified by the coronavirus crisis. 

The fascistic minded President Trump (who has been inciting violence against his opponent throughout his presidency) did not waste time directing the “Officers of Law” with a simple tweet that

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd … when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

So Mr. Trump is “thanking” law enforcement shooters in advance. He also threatens the protestors outside of the White House “with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons”. This ferocious perspective is the source of VIOLENCE in the U.S. today; which is proudly echoed by a fascistic minded President from the White House. Unleashing the “vicious dogs” against protestors; kneeling on the neck of already handcuffed people (the favorite practice of the Israeli police and military) is nothing new in the U.S.  However, it is the first time in the history of this country that this type of savagery is encouraged outright by an American President.

Those so-called “Black leaders and preachers” who suggest that it is time to “come together in peace” and start a “dialogue” are nothing but opportunists who have lost their magic wands. The pitiful politicians like St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms are hiding behind the “teachings” of Jesus or Dr. King to only serve and protect the interest of the wealthy elite in their cities against the poor working people. They have become the new favorite Democrat stooges among many other Black Trump lovers at Fox News!

Photo by the author

The spontaneous demonstrations have shown that the Democratic Party has no control over these protests. The sad and boring message by Vice-President Biden in regard to the killing of George Floyd was another pathetic and failed attempt to win the Black community’s trust and vote for the coming Presidential Election. People still remember that Eric Garner was choked to death in 2004 by police when Mr. Biden was the Vice President of the first and only Black President in the White House. So in regard to the killing of George Floyd; Mr. Obama’s “we can and must be better” statement on May 29, 2020 at best is hypocritical.

Now that people in huge numbers are demonstrating their outrage in many forms and in many words, the clueless pundits (mostly in the comfort of their homes) have become the preachers for peace!

The corporate media suddenly forgot their constant gleeful reports from Hong Kong which showed the young demonstrators who threw bricks and petrol bombs at the police. They justified those actions in support of the pro-democracy movement against China! Now, that the same scenario is happening on streets of America, the Democratic Party politicians along with Trump’s loyal servants no longer think that the Hong Kong model is appropriate for showing outrage!

In any case, more than anything else, the corporate media is reflecting the fear of the American ruling elite of the genuine outrage of the poor working people in the U.S. which is growing like a wildfire.

The true peace and justice activists, the revolutionary socialists don’t see themselves as sideline critics but conscious participants. They suggest and advocate objective historical working people solutions and not the subjective “good versus evil” divine verses. They understand the main source of violence is the wealthy ruling class who has burned entire cities and people in Japan and Iraq. The true activists have no illusion that any revolt will sooner or later come to its conclusion. Therefore, the true activists advocate for the unity of the community organizations to rally around specific demands. Those diverse and vital demands must come from the heart of the community and independent of the influence of billionaires’ founded organizations and the Democratic Party.

The 1% is organized and equipped with the most brutal and destructive forces. They easily can sacrifice many of their servants like the killer Officer Derek Chauvin if they feel it would pacify the demonstrators. The true activists know that police brutality will not end with sentencing one or two killer police. More importantly, all true activists know wholeheartedly that a Death Penalty option which has been suggested by some will legitimize the death penalty against poor innocent victims of all races. The outstanding work of the great people of the Innocent Project shows that the victims of the U.S. unjust system who have been exonerated are the poor minorities.

Social science like any other field of science is the progress of a proven phenomenon in deed. Therefore, in different societies, the wealthy elite in power will try their own way to deal with their internal and “foreign” challenges. In the U.S., the “most powerful man in the world” actually is a simple bankrupt fascist armed with the most destructive arsenal in the world. So for a weak and frustrated leader like President Trump who is facing intense internal and international challenges, the best way out of this critical political and economical situation is igniting a war. Historically, WAR has been the best solution for the powerful but frustrated ruling classes. That is why President Trump and Mr. Pompeo continuously are propagating anti-China bizarre statements as the main enemy of the American people to prepare public opinion for outright war against that country.

Today (May 31st) is the 6th day that the American people have shown their outrage in different ways since Memorial Day when an innocent George Floyd was murdered in public by a coldblooded murder cop.  The fact is that the Trump administration and Congress do not like to see the multiracial demonstrators protest peacefully or not. The 1% is in agreement to crush these demonstrations as soon as possible by any means necessary. Killing, injuring and arresting protestors or reporters are on their agenda. Police and politicians see the “looting” and “burning” as blessings. In most cases, they send their own provocative agents (as they have done this before through COINTELPRO Project by FBI since 1956) to excite protestors and create chaos.

True activists seek for POLITICAL solutions independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties and reject their agents among their ranks. What is needed is a list of demands which must come out of discussions among the activists and concerned working people of the different communities.

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Massoud Nayeri is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In an interview with corrupt casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s free newspaper, Israel ha-Yom, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the quiet parts out loud.

Although he did not use the word, he described an Apartheid regime in the Israeli-controlled Palestinian West Bank.

He openly referred to the stateless Palestinians as “subjects.”

Netanyahu will annex the Jordan Valley formally to Israel, where 60,000 Palestinians live and which is one of the areas Israel had pledged to relinquish to the Palestine Authority in the 1993 Oslo Accords. He will also annex the land on which Israeli squatters established settlements in Palestinian territory.

Israel ha-Yom asked, “Q: Nevertheless, several thousand Palestinians live in the Jordan Valley. Does that mean they will receive Israeli citizenship?”

Netanyahu replied:

“No. They will remain a Palestinian enclave. You’re not annexing Jericho. There’s a cluster or two. You don’t need to apply sovereignty over them, they will remain Palestinian subjects if you will. But security control also applies to these places.”

How about if we won’t?

I have long argued that the crux of the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is the denial to Palestinians of citizenship in a state. In calling the Palestinians “subjects,” Netanyahu is acknowledging that they are not citizens. In Hannah Arendt’s phrase, citizenship is the right to have rights. Palestinians have no citizenship in a state. They do not have a right to have rights.

They are subjects, they way medieval people living under an absolute monarchy were subjects. Only democratic states really have citizens.

The Israeli right wing is afraid that Netanyahu, in leaving un-annexed the rest of the Palestinian West Bank, is acceding to the demand for a Palestinian state. These fears are exacerbated by Netanyahu’s championing of the Kushner plan for the Mideast, which does contain language about a Palestinian state, although as described it isn’t actually a state.

It is what was called in Apartheid South Africa a Bantustan.

Netanyahu admitted as much, saying of the Palestinian leadership:

“They need to acknowledge that we control security in all areas. If they consent to all this, then they will have an entity of their own that President Trump defines as a state. There are those who claim and – an American statesman told me: ‘But Bibi, it won’t be a state.’ I told him, call it what you want.”

I said at my Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture:

“Statelessness means the complete lack of citizenship in a recognized state. It means you don’t have a passport; you have a laissez-passé. That means a lot of countries won’t accept the laissez-passé. It means you can’t travel freely, you don’t have constitutional protections, you often can’t get a work permit, your property is not secure because people can take it away from you and you don’t have access to national courts that could adjudicate those disputes . . . what does a state do? It controls land, water, air. If a North Korean MiG flew over San Diego, all hell would break loose . . . If an Israeli plane flies over the West Bank, eh? Not a state. If substantial water resources, a river or something, were expropriated by Canada, there would be trouble because that’s America’s water, it’s owned by the federal government. But if 85 percent of the water on the West Bank is diverted to Israeli settlers, that’s all right because there is no Palestinian state. The water doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s a no-man’s land. States control immigration. But the Palestinians would deport somebody, how? There are lots of [Israeli] undocumented people on the West Bank, but their state is behind them.”

As for the notion of a “Bantustan,” here is what the Wikipedia article says:

“Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the Government stripped black South Africans of their citizenship, which deprived them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these homelands . . . he process of creating the legal framework for this plan was completed by the Black Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, which formally designated all black South Africans as citizens of the homelands, even if they lived in “white South Africa”, and cancelled their South African citizenship… Bantustans within the borders of South Africa were classified as “self-governing” or “independent”. In theory, self-governing Bantustans had control over many aspects of their internal functioning but were not yet sovereign nations. Independent Bantustans (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei; also known as the TBVC states) were intended to be fully sovereign. In reality, they had little economic infrastructure worth mentioning and, with few exceptions, encompassed swaths of disconnected territory. This meant that the Bantustans were little more than puppet states controlled by South Africa. Throughout the existence of the “independent” Bantustans, South Africa remained the only country to recognise their independence.”

Palestinians in the Jordan Valley are about to be made like the Black South Africans who lived in South Africa but were declared aliens in their own country and assigned to a toothless, puppet-like “Bantustan” for their citizenship. That is what Netanyahu means when he calls them “Palestinian subjects.” Bantustan subjects.

In those areas that the Israelis are not (so far) annexing, Palestinians are still under the security control of the Occupying Israeli military. But, again, they have no citizenship in a state. Israel makes policies for them, but they cannot vote on those policies. They are stateless. As for the Palestine “Authority,” “call it what you will.” It is not a state. It will not be allowed to undertake the functions of a state.

I said in 2013 that you can’t keep 5 million people stateless forever, that this is monstrous. but apparently you can do so for many decades, maybe a century or more.

Shame.

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Featured image is from Informed Comment

First published in April 2015. The H1N1 vaccine fiasco ordered by the (corrupt) WHO Director General is of relevance to the current debate on a COVID-19 vaccine.

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The 2009 swine flu vaccine caused severe brain damage in over 800 children across Europe, and the UK government has now agreed to pay $90 million in compensation to those victims as part of a vaccine injury settlement.

This is the same swine flu vaccine that the entire mainstream media ridiculously insists never causes any harm whatsoever. From the quack science section of the Washington Post to the big pharma sellout pages of the New York Times, every U.S. mainstream media outlet exists in a state of total vaccine injury denialism, pushing toxic vaccines that provably harm children.

“Across Europe, more than 800 children are so far known to have been made ill by the vaccine,” reports the International Business Times.

The vaccine caused narcolepsy and cataplexy in hundreds of children. Both are signs of neurological damage caused by vaccine additives which include mercury, aluminum, MSG, antibiotics and even formaldehyde.

As the IBTimes reports:

Narcolepsy affects a person’s sleeping cycle, leaving them unable to sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time, and causing them to fall unconscious during the day. The condition damages mental function and memory, and can lead to hallucinations and mental illness.

Cataplexy causes a person to lose consciousness when they are experiencing heightened emotion, including when they are laughing.

See the animated educational video here: If car companies operated like vaccine companies.

Children brain damaged in Norway, too

“Norway has seen more than 170 reported cases of children developing narcolepsy after receiving the Pandemrix vaccine,” reports the Global Post. “The government has so far paid $13 million to 86 victims, including 60 children…”

Just as in the USA and everywhere else, a contrived swine flu panic campaign was launched by the WHO and the CDC, creating widespread fear that would sell more vaccines. (Disneyland measles operation, anyone?)

As the Global Post write:

Back in 2009, the Norwegian health authorities urged everyone, not just at-risk groups, to receive vaccinations after the World Health Organization designated swine flu a pandemic.

More than 2 million Norwegians, or 45 percent of the country’s population, were given Pandemrix in an unprecedented drive. The vaccine is produced by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and was used to inoculate up to 30 million people in 47 other European countries.

Vaccine damage is Big Pharma’s route to selling more medications

Incredibly, even those children who are damaged by vaccines end up being big profit centers for the same pharmaceutical companies that damaged them in the first place.

In case after case being reported in the media, children who are damaged by defective vaccines are reported to be on multiple medications. For example, as the Global Post reports:

Tove Jensen, whose son developed severe narcolepsy after receiving the vaccine, also wants compensation from GSK.

“The situation is terrible,” she says. “He’s 100 percent disabled. We don’t know if it’s going to get better, he’s on so much medication. But we hope something will happen, that he will get his life back.”

Similarly, as the IB Times reports:

Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times: “…The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”

In other words, children who are damaged by vaccines generate even more profits for Big Pharma by being damaged! It’s the perfect sinister revenue model for an industry run like a criminal mafia.

GlaxoSmithKline swine flu vaccine brain damaged medical staffers, too

“Among those affected are NHS medical staff, many of whom are now unable to do their jobs because of the symptoms brought on by the vaccine,” reports the IBTimes. “They will be suing the government for millions in lost earnings.”

The paper goes on to report:

Among [those damaged] is Josh Hadfield, 8, from Somerset, who is on anti-narcolepsy drugs costing [$20,000] a year to help him stay awake during the school day.

“If you make him laugh, he collapses. His memory is shot. There is no cure. He says he wishes he hadn’t been born. I feel incredibly guilty about letting him have the vaccine,” said his mother Caroline Hadfield, 43.

Despite a 2011 warning from the European Medicines Agency against using the vaccine on those under 20 and a study indicating a 13-fold heightened risk of narcolepsy in vaccinated children, GSK has refused to acknowledge a link.

Pharma-controlled U.S. media claims ZERO children were harmed in America

If 800 children were brain damaged by the swine flu vaccine in the UK and across Europe, how many children were damaged by the same vaccine — or other vaccines — in America?

According to the pharma-controlled lamestream media, that number is ZERO.

Vaccine Injury Denialism — a particularly dangerous form of delusional junk science — is the present-day mantra of the pharma-controlled press, which includes all the usual suspects such as the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and so on. They simply pretend no children are ever harmed by vaccines… and they hope the U.S. public is stupid enough to believe the lie that “all vaccines are safe.”

Right now, there are 800 children in the UK whose lives have been destroyed by the swine flu vaccine and who will never lead a normal life again. Every year, tens of thousands more children are diagnosed with autism. The vaccine industry is destroying a generation of children — committing what Robert Kennedy Jr. correctly compared to a “holocaust” — while the sellout media covers it up.

How is this not a crime against children?

Shame on all of those sellout editors and professional liars in the mainstream media who cover up the truth about an industry that’s maiming and killing our children by the thousands. Do you have no sense of humanity?

US Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander, US Africa Command, released a statement on May 26 accusing Russia of sending Russian military aircraft to Libya to support the Libyan National Army (LNA).  The accusations are detailed and include photos and images, which are supposed to convince the reader that Russia sent planes to Syria, where they were repainted to disguise their source, and then flown on to Libya. However, the photos don’t provide evidence of the accusations. The US statement uses the word “assesses” five times, and also uses the phrase “are likely to”.  Those are statements of opinion, and not based on facts or evidence, which could have been presented, had they existed.

Viktor Nikolaevich Bondarev is a Colonel General and former Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, and the former Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force branch of the Aerospace Forces, who now heads the defense committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament.  Bondarev stated on May 27, “If the warplanes are in Libya, they are Soviet, not Russian,” and further characterized the US accusations as “stupidity.”

Repainting planes to disguise their source is antiquated, given the modern technology of advanced electronics and friend-foe detection (IFF), which can be used to easily identify any military object.

While the US accuses Russia of interfering in Libya, the US is interfering in many countries around the world, such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Hong Kong, and Libya. Russia, by contrast, is legally in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.

Not only Russia could have supplied these planes to Libya. MiG-29s of various modifications are in service with Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Cuba, Peru, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, the Republic of Chad, Eritrea, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bulgaria, Poland, and several other countries.

LNA spokesman Ahmed Mismari denied the US accusations. He referred to “media rumors and lies” that the US has spread, and explained that last week the LNA repaired four old Libyan jets for use and announced the start of a new series of airstrikes against the Muslim Brotherhood Government of National Accord (GNA) which was founded in 2015 under an UN-led political deal, and had a two-year mandate which expired in 2017.

Stefan Keuter, German politician for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a member of the Bundestag since 2017, urged caution when he told the media, “When it comes to violations of the international treaties and the arms embargo in Libya, the accusations of the United States African Command (AFRICOM) is not enough.”

Before the US-NATO attack to destroy Libya in 2011, the country was the most prosperous in all of Africa, and its leader Qaddafi was planning projects to allow Libya to be free of western domination and neo-colonialism.

Turkey has sent thousands of Syrian terrorists, including ex-ISIS fighters, to Libya to defend the Muslim Brotherhood government of Sarraj.  Lindsey Snell, an American journalist, has created a video in which features Syrian terrorists that are fighting in Libya for the Sarraj militia, on the promise of being paid $2,000 to $2,500 per month by Turkey.  In the video, one of the terrorists declares, “We have Turkey, Qatar, and the US with us. We are NATO, so every country is with us.”  Snell had been kidnapped by Jibhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria supported by Turkey. She managed to escape to Turkey only to be arrested by the Turkish military on the accusation of being a CIA operative.

Libyan National Army (LNA) has been led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar since April 2019 and is appointed by the Libyan parliament, which is the only legitimate body in Libya today.

Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) leader Fayez al-Sarraj appears to have his hands tied by the Muslim Brotherhood, who have dominated Libya’s Presidential Council.  Sarraj has the direct backing of Turkey and support from many jihadist organizations in Libya. His private militia RAAD has kidnapped and held a Russian sociologist and his translator since May 2019 in a private prison near Tripoli airport.

Libyan National Army spokesman Ahmed al-Mismari had said in March, the Muslim Brotherhood had appointed members to high positions in the Tripoli-based Central Bank to “finance its groups and militias”.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

Of all the theaters of militarized international rivalry in the early 21^st century, the Arctic promises to be the most complex and unpredictable. In terms of domain, military operations there would be conducted on land, in the air, on the sea surface, but also in the depths of the Arctic Ocean under ice cover. The geographic remoteness and climactic harshness of the climate and terrain mean any conflict there would be fought the gaze of international media or citizen reporters. Next to the Antarctic, the Arctic is one of the few areas of the global commons that has not yet been apportioned among the major and minor powers. And the stakes for all the players are quite high.

Military presence in the Arctic and extension of one’s national sovereignty over it promises to yield the interested states and alliances with several sets of benefits. The first and most obvious is the access to copious natural resources, starting with hydrocarbons, lurking under the still relatively unexplored continental shelf there. The second one is the surveillance and/or control over maritime shipping routes whose importance will only increase as polar ice cover retreats. Thirdly, the Arctic does include some militarily very valuable real estate, in the form of great many islands and archipelagoes that may be used for advanced military outposts and bases.

In all three cases, the United States is acting as the spoiler, unhappy with the current state of affairs. It aims to extend its control over natural resources in the region, establish permanent presence in other countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) through the use of the so-called “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPs), and continue to encircle Russia with ballistic missile defense (BMD) sites and platforms.

In view of the urgent and evident US preparations to be able to fight and prevail in a war against a nuclear adversary, by defeating the adversary’s nuclear arsenal through the combination of precision non-nuclear strikes (including by the broad range of hypersonic missiles currently under development) and BMD systems, it would appear that third benefit is of the greatest importance to the United States, though certainly not the only one. The recent sortie by a force of US Navy BMD-capable AEGIS destroyers into the Barents Sea, the first such mission since the end of the Cold War over two decades ago, shows the interest United States has in projecting BMD capabilities into regions north of Russia’s coastline, where they might be able to effect boost-phase interceptions of Russian ballistic missiles that would be launched in retaliatory strikes against the United States.

US operational planning for the Arctic in all likelihood resembles that for the South China Sea, with only a few corrections for climate. The key similarity of both potential theaters of war is that the decisive fighting would be in the air or at or under the sea, culminating in comparatively small amphibious operations and battles for relatively small and/or isolated islands. Once one side prevails in the air and at sea, the outcome of these land battles would be all but foreordained. As the experience of World War 2 “island-hopping” campaigns in the Pacific shows, no isolated island fortress can survive for very long once it is isolated from own air and naval support. Every Japanese outpost targeted by the US eventually fell, and did not require masses of troops to overcome their resistance thanks to overwhelming naval and aerial firepower US forces brought to bear. Campaigns in the Arctic would follow a similar course, with US naval task forces pushing into the teeth of Russia’s submarines, land-based missile batteries, and land-based fighter and bomber squadrons. The recently announced plans to revamp the US Marine Corps that include doing away with its tank battalions and much of field artillery, while adding land-based anti-ship missile capabilities for the first time ever, suggest USMC is being tailored for such small-scale island-hopping operations in the Arctic, South China Sea, and other such theaters of war, to the detriment of its ability to conduct counter-insurgency or large-scale high-intensity combat operations.

The small size of forces used by both sides also means a premium will be placed on the element of surprise, since a small garrison on a remote Arctic island garrison could be overcome relatively quickly, in the manner similar to which the original Argentinian invasion of the Falklands succeeded in routing the Royal Marine garrison so quickly that no real fighting took place.

The remoteness of these islands, the small size of the military forces, and the practically non-existent potential for collateral damage due to absence of large civilian populations also mean that the use of low-yield nuclear weapons, against both land facilities and naval forces at sea, is far easier to contemplate than in any conflict in Europe or Asia. The remoteness of this theater of operations also means nuclear strikes would have a lower risk of strategic escalation, as long as all the nuclear adversaries refrained from targeting enemy mainland.

At the outset, however, the dominant weapon systems would be intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, launched from land-based launchers as well as aerial and naval platforms. The US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty means the US Army will have a large number of ground-launched missiles with ranges exceeding 500km in service, such as the Precision Strike Missile. The US Marine Corps is planning to organize Littoral Regiments whose armament will include Naval Strike Missiles on unmanned truck-based launchers, and which are intended for such island campaigns in the South China Sea but also elsewhere. Moreover, US Navy and US Air Force plan to introduce hypersonic missiles into their arsenals by the end of the decade as well. The current US procurement plans mean that by 2030 the United States could expect to concentrate overwhelming intermediate-range missile firepower in any given single theater of operations, be it the Persian Gulf, the Pacific Rim, or the Arctic.

At the same time the United States will have to solve the problem of disunity within its own camp. United States covetous eye has been cast not only on those areas of the Arctic within Russia’s continental shelf, but also Canada’s Northwest Passage and even Denmark’s Greenland.

The US intent to procure a small fleet of icebreakers is intended to enable “Freedom of Navigation Operations” in what Canada views its territorial waters, and Donald Trump actually may have revealed a state secret when he spoke of the United States buying Greenland from Denmark and setting up a Trump Tower there. With the COVID-19 revealing America’s weakness for all the world to sea and the Europeans discovering an urgent need for unity and cooperation, United States might yet discover a unified European Union to be a formidable opponent when it comes to protecting its own interests.

The United States is slowly but steadily losing the geo-economic race in the Arctic with Russia and China.

In the situation when there is no chance to push forward own successful projects, Washington has opted the strategy of undermining efforts of other states. The fast development of Russia’s Northern Sea Route is the source of the especial concern of the US strategists. Therefore, the US diplomatic activity and the so-called “freedom of navigation operations” are now mostly focused on undermining and limiting the freedom of navigation in the way that would allow to contain the Chinese-Russian cooperation in the region. If Washington cannot catch-up Moscow and Beijing in the field, it will do all what it can to at least slow down the progress of their joint projects.

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From a recent report by the Insider publication: “George Floyd and Officer Derek Chauvin actually worked for the same Minneapolis night club- Chauvin as a security guard for many years, and Floyd as a bouncer during 2019.” It begs the question of just how well these two may have known each other, or worse, if Chauvin had some sort of ‘racially prejudiced’ ulterior motive for doing this heinous deed. The report also states:

‘This was not the first time Chauvin had been involved in a violent incident during his 19 years in the Minneapolis Police Department. He was involved in violent incidents before, including three police shootings. And he has been the subject of 10 complaints filed to the city’s Civilian Review Authority and the Office of Police Conduct….

Two years later, just after 2 o’clock one morning in 2008, Chauvin responded to a 911 domestic-assault call in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, the Pioneer Press reported.

Chauvin and his partner entered the home, confronting Ira Latrell Toles, whose partner had made the 911 call. Toles ran from the pair, but ‘they caught and tried to subdue him,’ a police statement said. The statement said Toles ‘grabbed at one of the officer’s guns, and Chauvin shot him in the torso.’ ” 

Is this not shades of the George Zimmerman case regarding his murder of Trayvon Martin?

More from the Insider piece:

“In 2011, Chauvin was involved in a third police shooting. He was among five officers to respond to reports of a shooting. Leroy Martinez, a 23-year-old Alaska Native, was spotted running from the scene, and the officers gave chase, local news reported. The police said Martinez brandished a pistol as he fled. Terry Nutter, one of the responding officers, shot Martinez. An eyewitness account, reported by the Star Tribune, challenged the police’s claim that Martinez was holding a pistol when he was shot.”

“‘He had no reason to shoot that little boy,’ Delora Iceman told the Star Tribune. She said Martinez had dropped the weapon and held his arms in the air before the police shot him.

During his nearly two decades with the Minneapolis Police Department, Chauvin has been the subject of several internal complaints… three separate reviews from the Civilian Review Authority found  Chauvin to have used ‘demeaning tone, and’ ‘derogatory language.’ No other details were available. He has also been the subject of seven reviews by the local Office of Police Conduct. Each review concludes: ‘Closed – No discipline.’ No other details were available.”

Derek Chauvin should never have been in the Minneapolis Police Department for as long as 19 years. When one reviews the above news piece, isn’t it pretty plain that this dude should never have been in any position of control over anyone! He, and his fellow thugs are right out of the Pinkerton or Baldwin Felts school of law enforcement. Go and get the 1987 film classic Matawan, written and directed by John Sayles, based on the 1920 Matawan, West Virginia coal miners’ strike. See how those who ‘Own the Manor’ use their paid ‘Thugs with badges’ to keep the rabble in line. Similar to how Officer Chauvin and Co. protected the pure white world outside of the inner city from men like George Floyd. Imagine those neighbors of Floyd who had to stand behind the Blue Wall of Chauvin’s three partners (in crime?) and listen to a dying man gasp for help. Amazing what power those four had over the community because ‘They are the Law!!’

One thinks that maybe our local police should realize that the overwhelming majority of us are all Working Stiffs the same as them. The color of the person shouldn’t mean squat! We all need to go and punch out the hours for our survival the same as those four cops. I remember how my friend’s older sister (foolish white woman) pontificated at a  Christmas party about the poor: “Let’s face it, most of them are either drug addicts or alcoholics”.

She failed to understand that, in most poor neighborhoods, the overwhelming majority of the residents have to get up early (sometimes earlier than folks from better neighborhoods) for shitty paying jobs, shit conditions with few or NO benefits. Yet, they do it. Yes, the study of Socialism teaches this writer that Capitalism as it exists today in Amerika has set up the deck their way. In poorer areas the liquor stores abound, along with Payday loans, food stores that overcharge and of course… the flow of illicit drugs goes unabated. The scene from Godfather 1 when the heads of five Mob families discuss the drug trade, one of the mobsters says “In my city we would keep the traffic in the dark areas for the colored people. They’re animals anyway so let them lose their souls.”

I have been on the soapbox for over 30 years saying that only four year college graduates with majors in either sociology or criminal justice should qualify to be police officers… period! Perhaps if we lived in a more equitable economic system, whereupon ALL who work for the owners get a bigger piece of the pie, the pay would be enough to attract new, more educated police officers. The higher one goes up on the ladder of intellect, I believe rational behavior can follow. The motto ‘Protect and Serve’ should resonate more than it does now. Too many who stand behind the Blue Wall keep the rest of us away from Truth. I remember speaking to my lawyer’s Criminal Defense partner. He had been an Assistant DA for years before jumping ship. “Here’s my experience”, he said,

“If they want to get someone real bad, they will plant a gun or plant drugs when they arrest. They also will, in more cases than not, LIE on the stand to help a fellow officer. I have seen it too many times.”

Who suffers from this ‘Perjury Mill’? Well, all those good officers who go by the book and treat everyone the same, regardless of color, creed, religion or sexual orientation. They need to speak up… loudly!

Perhaps it is time for all our governments, local, county, state or federal, to insist on a much higher standard for policing. Chauvin wouldn’t have his jackboot on Floyd’s vulnerable neck if he wasn’t a cop in the first place!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. 

Judging by US foreign policy – China is a massive global threat – and by some accounts – the “top” threat. But a threat to what?

AFP would report in its article, “Trump nominee to lead intel community sees China as top threat,” that:

President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US intelligence community said Tuesday that he would focus on China as the country’s greatest threat, saying Beijing was determined to supplant the United States’ superpower position.

Were China doing this by using news agencies like AFP to lie to the public to justify invading Middle Eastern nations, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, installing client regimes worldwide, and using its growing power to coerce and control nations economically and politically when not outright militarily – US President Donald Trump’s “pick” – John Ratcliffe – might be justified in focusing on China and its “determination” to “supplant the United States’ superpower position.”

However, this is not what China is doing.

China Building Rather than Bombing 

China is – instead – using economic progress to rise upon the global stage. It makes things. It builds things. It creates infrastructure to bring these things to others around the globe who need or want them, and enables other nations to make, build, and send things to China.

One example is China’s One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR) also referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This includes a series of railways, highways, ports, and other infrastructure projects to help improve the logistical connections between nations, accelerating economic development.

Only in the US could the notion of building railways connecting people within and between nations seem like a dangerous idea.

By building such networks, people are better empowered to trade what they are making and what they seek to buy and sell. China, which possesses the largest high-speed railway network on Earth carrying 2 billion passengers a year, is extending this network beyond its borders – deep into Southeast Asia and even across Eurasia via Russia and beyond. Alongside it are a raft of other projects ranging from ports to power plants, and more.

The political and economic power China is gaining by expanding real economic activity both within its borders and beyond them, and both for China itself as well as for its trading partners – represents a global pivot away from America’s century-long unipolar global order and closer toward a now emerging multipolar world order.

The US with a population of over 300 million and some of the best industrial potential in the world could easily pivot with this sea change – but entrenched special interests refuse to do so. Paying into a genuinely pragmatic method of generating wealth and stability exposes Washington and Wall Street’s various rackets, making them no longer tenable. So instead, US special interests are labeling China’s One Belt, One Road initiative a global threat and China itself as one of America’s chief adversaries.

Fighting Fire with Fire or Pushing Rope Uphill? 

To combat this adversary – the US is not building bigger and better global networks to facilitate economic progress – but is instead marshalling the summation of its “soft power” to hinder and sabotage it. It has ringed China with a series of sociopolitical conflicts, cultivating opposition groups in various nations aimed at destabilizing them and spoiling them as constructive economic and infrastructure partners for Beijing.

The US is leveraging its still massive media monopolies to portray these political conflicts as otherwise inexplicable opposition to closer ties with China and against infrastructure projects jointly developed with China.

In some nations  – like Cambodia – this has all but failed with swift and definitive action taken by the Cambodian government against US proxies to clear them from Cambodia’s media, political, and public space. In nations like Thailand, the opposition has been left to linger – neutralized at the moment but ever threatening to overturn sociopolitical stability if given the opportunity.

Nations like Japan, South Korea, and even Australia – who are generally perceived as being staunch US allies – have even begun slowly but surely shifting their foreign policy to benefit from the economic rise of China.

Australia – for example – has even been recently threatened by the US after the state of Victoria signed a trade deal with China.

An ABC article titled, “US threatens Australia’s intelligence ties over Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ pact with China,” would report:

The US Secretary of State has said his nation could “simply disconnect” from Australia if Victoria’s trade deal with Beijing affects US telecommunications.

Mike Pompeo said while he was unaware of the detail of Victoria’s agreement, he warned it could impact the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership with Australia.

Of course, the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership is an abusive combine of invasive surveillance used to enhance the power and profits of the special interests that created it – not to actually protect the people living in any of the “Five Eyes” partner nations.

While US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hints at possible security risks associated with doing business with China and its telecom giant Huawei – “Five Eyes” governments have regularly been exposed and confirmed to be partnering with Western tech giants to violate privacy and spy on innocent people.

It is just one example of how the US seeks to shape the world and bend nations into joining or doubling down on its abusive axis and steering them away from constructive partnerships.

Australia’s economic trade is mainly done within Asia – not with the West. As China continues to rise, common sense will compel Australia to continue building better and more constructive ties with Beijing and divesting from otherwise costly and unconstructive alliances with nations like the US built on military intervention, spying, and political subversion.

The US finds itself pushing the geopolitical rope of hegemony up hill – offering up unconvincing criticisms of China and its foreign policy while offering no viable alternative.

Delusion is the Worst Defense 

Op-eds like Foreign Policy’s “One Belt, One Road, One Big Mistake,” help illustrate the West’s thinking regarding China’s rise and its OBOR project.

The article claims:

This might not matter if BRI projects were driving favorable political outcomes. They aren’t. Prolonged exposure to the BRI process has driven opposition to Chinese investment and geopolitical influence across the region.

FP can make this claim because it entirely omits any mention of the vast sums of money and effort the US has spent to create this opposition. The example FP uses is the Maldives – never mentioning that the pro-Beijing government there was overturned by a convicted criminal literally hiding in Western Europe and fully supported by the US State Department in his bid to return to power.
Thus – this isn’t an example of OBOR failing to create a favorable political outcome for Beijing – it is an example of US soft power overturning these favorable political outcomes nonexistent American alternatives to OBOR are incapable of doing. How durable these US successes are is a matter of debate.

The article also claims:

Far from being a strategic masterstroke, the BRI is a sign of strategic dysfunction. There is no evidence that it has reshaped Asia’s geopolitical realities. The countries that have benefited most from it are those that already had strong geopolitical reasons for aligning themselves with Chinese power, such as Cambodia and Pakistan.

Here again – FP depends on omitting facts including the fact that many nations previously bent to US foreign policy are exiting out from under it via China’s One Belt, One Road.

Of course it is not. In an international order where might makes right, the US finds itself with diminishing might and a growing inability to convince the world it is “right.” Luckily for the US and much of Western Europe strong-armed into following Washington’s cues, the rest of the world still seeks to constructively work with the West and inevitably will do so.

It will just be a matter of weathering the damage being done by the current circle of special interests still dominating Western foreign policy, waiting for them to wane and disappear from positions of power and authority and be replaced by leadership willing and able to move the West into a constructive role amid a multipolar world.

Either way, OBOR will connect the rest of the world together leaving the West just beyond its terminus. It will be up to Western leaders – particularly in Washington – whether or not they choose to benefit from the wealth left just beyond their doorstep or not.

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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

Sawing off the branch you sit on can hardly be the best of policies.  But that all depends on the nature of the branch.  US President Donald Trump has huffed himself into another small historical moment, going on the offensive against social media companies using the very language his faux progressive opponents use against them.  All seem to be in agreement on one point: the Silicon Valley giants have become too powerful, runaway monsters in the stakes of high influence.  But sharp divergences and attitudes exist on how such companies are to be controlled, let alone disciplined.

The view on how best to chastise such companies come from opposite ends of the information spectrum. For the enraged and the offended, these internet giants should be punished for distributing content created by users who might, for instance, be seen to be glorifying violence or giving truck to the unsavoury.  Their view seems to be that humanity cannot be trusted with viewing matter that might, on the off chance, prove dangerously galvanic. 

This is the view taken, for instance, by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. 

“One thing is pretty clear to me,” he scoldingly told his audience at last year’s Never Is Now Summit hosted by the Anti-Defamation League.  “All this hate and violence [in the world] is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.”   

For Baron Cohen and travellers of like mind, the problem in all of this is the protection provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The provision confers immunity on internet companies for the use-generated content they host.

For Trump, such companies should be punished for misusing their immunity from prosecution for actually banning or flagging undesirable content or opinions.  In short, there should be no limits on the quality or nature of user-content used or posted.  For the first Twitter President in history, it was all too bruising to be “flagged” for content posted on Twitter taking issue with the response to Monday’s lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  On Friday, Trump tweeted the line, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. It was a phrase Miami’s police chief Walter Headley used in 1967 in response to, as reported at the time, a “crackdown on … slum hoodlums”.  He spoke with reassurance for the head-kicking enthusiasts.  “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.” 

Trump spruced up that version – slightly.  “Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night – or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot.  I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means.”

Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night – or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

Twitter has shown interest in the US president of late. Flagging and hiding Tweets, it also added a fact-check link to one of Trump’s messages.  All this was simply too much, a lingering, cyber stain.  The Executive Order that followed was cranky and a bit confused, taking issue with the wielding of power by internet companies “over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.”  Accordingly, “Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.”  In removing or restricting access to content, such companies were “engaged in editorial conduct” and would, for that reason, have she shield of immunity removed.

Twitter is doing nothing about all of the lies & propaganda being put out by China or the Radical Left Democrat Party. They have targeted Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States. Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

The order is not likely to have much effect. The legal cognoscenti see it has having little bearing, a wasteful act of sinister flatulence.  Former Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich considered it “a hoot.  Unlawful and unenforceable.”  According to Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, it would be hard to make a case that Twitter’s labels on Trump’s tweets fell outside the immunity of section 230.  Nor could Trump sue for defamation, given that Trump, not Twitter, added the element of falsity to the affair.   

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sees the birth of the order as “unconstitutional because it was issued in retaliation for Twitter’s fact-checking of President Trump’s tweets.”  The concern for Jaffer is that the order entails the possibility of intimidation and investigation of internet companies. “There may well be regulation, and legislation worth considering in this sphere, but whatever else this order may be, it is not a good faith effort to protect speech online.”

What the latest moves have done is precipitate something of a conflict within the usually amoral social media sphere.  The titans seem to be in disagreement on how to approach the demagogue in the White House.  Do we let him bark and bellow without inhibition, or should some health warning label be attached? Mark Zuckerberg makes Facebook’s position disingenuously clear: such companies should not be arbiters of truth.  (Unfortunately for the CEO, he expressed that view on a news outlet that often prefers the fictional narrative to the sturdy truthfulness.)  “Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.” 

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sees it differently. 

“Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.” 

 Neither CEO should be taken too seriously. Twitter will make its policies as it sees fit (consider, for instance, its righteous civic integrity policy); ditto Facebook.  Neither – and here Zuckerberg is right – should be arbiters, but they are.  They have shaped, directed, cajoled, mocked and massaged the gullible, the idiotic and the deluded.  And for all the fuss being caused by this Order, Facebook it is not considered a serious target.  As Ian Bogost and Alex Madrigal insist, the Trump campaign effectively ceded“control to Facebook’ ad-buying machinery” in 2016, as it is doing now.  Internet boffin Zeynep Tufekci can only agree: the relationship between the president and the Facebook CEO “is so smooth that Trump said Zuckerberg congratulated the president for being ‘No.1 on Facebook’ at a private dinner with him.” Time to break bread again.

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

The extrajudicial murders of African/Black people, such as Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, by agents of the U.S. government and armed civilians have sparked urban rebellions in cities across the United States. Such murderous acts cannot be understood outside of the context of the U.S. state’s ongoing assault on the human rights of African/Black people.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet—“…when the looting starts, the shooting starts…”—demanding lethal violence requires the United Nations to intervene.

Trump’s threat comes as the U.S. state has tragically failed during the COVID-19 pandemic to recognize and protect the human right to health of poor and working-class people, including Africans and undocumented migrants.

African/Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, yet represent one-third of COVID-19 related deaths. In some areas, the death rate has been as high as 70 percent.

Yet, the Trump administration, the U.S. Congress and state governments have responded by driving African/Black workers—who occupy the lowest rungs of the U.S. labor force—back to work with little or no protection. An inadequate for-profit healthcare system that discriminates against the poor ensures disproportionate death rates for African/Black people will continue.

Police authorities have been documented for abusing their power while enforcing COVID-19 mitigation efforts such as social distancing, which has been impossible for overcrowded African/Black communities and households to maintain.

Despite various United Nations bodies—such as the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Human Rights Committee (HRC), the Universal Periodic Review Process (UPR), and various special human-rights rapporteurs and special representatives—calling several times on the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations to protect the human rights of African/Black people, what remains is a precarious situation that borders on genocide.

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Featured image is from National Review