Global Research

Your Freedoms Don’t Have to be Muzzled Just Because You’re Wearing a Mask

By John W. Whitehead, April 29, 2020

It was 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, when this masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

Covid-19 Is the Perfect Catalyst for Trump’s War Against China

By Johanna Ross, April 28, 2020

It was just a matter of time before the blame game would begin. Donald Trump has long viewed China as an economic adversary. On the presidential campaign trail in 2016 he was accusing China of ‘raping’ the US and that the nation was responsible for the ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world’. The rhetoric has not changed much since then. Trump vigorously pursued his trade war with China in 2018 when he literally ‘ordered’ US companies to cease trading with the east asian nation. The President has attempted to influence policy beyond its borders too; pressurizing the UK not to embark on a deal with Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone network provider, to set up 5G across Britain. The US has never disguised its hatred of the firm, launching its own special vendetta against it, including the organisation of the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter and Chief Financial Officer in Canada in 2018.

The U.S. Wants to “Purchase” Greenland from Denmark

By Andrew Korybko, April 28, 2020

Greenland returned to the news late last week after an American official disclosed that his country will grant the world’s largest island $12.1 million in economic aid following reports last summer that the US was interested in purchasing this strategically positioned and energy-rich territory from Denmark. The author wrote about that at the time in his piece about how “Greenland Is Trump’s For The Taking If He Really Wants It“, which explained how the US could simply seize it from Denmark without suffering any serious consequences apart the negative press coverage that it would inevitably provoke across the world. Instead of undertaking that dramatic course of action, however, Trump is almost somewhat uncharacteristically opting for a much more subtle approach aimed at gradually swaying the island’s inhabitants and their local authorities to his country’s side through what can best be described as “economic diplomacy”.

Iraq: Official Warns of US Plot to Transfer ISIS Terrorists from Syria to Iraq’s Al-Anbar

By Drago Bosnic, April 28, 2020

The official warned of the US attempts to transfer a large number of ISIS terrorists from occupied regions of Syria to Iraq’s western desert province of al-Anbar. The terrorists pose a great danger to inhabitants of this area, as well as the bordering areas with Syria.

The aim of the US and its NATO and regional Wahhabi partners in crime is quite obviously fomenting tension and unrest in Iraq in the future, giving them an excuse to continue occupying Iraqi and Syrian territories, all under the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.

Is Trump Using the U.S. Military for Regime Change in Venezuela?

By Barbara Boland, April 28, 2020

U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a head-spinning series of contradictions lately, with no end in sight. From placing a bounty on the heads of President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen current and former Venezuelan officials, to upping sanctions and sending the largest fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to stop drug trafficking from Venezuela, the U.S. appears to be pursuing an inexorable path towards regime change.

Reports of North Korean Leader’s Death Greatly Exaggerated

By Stephen Lendman, April 28, 2020

CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto claimed he was “told by a US official with direct knowledge that the US is monitoring intelligence that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is in grave danger following a surgery.”

US Launches Campaign to Accuse Syria of Inability to Curtail Coronavirus, Claims Syrian-Russian Joint Statement

By Sputnik, April 25, 2020

The United States has launched a propaganda campaign by accusing Damascus of its inability to effectively combat the spread of COVID-19 in Syria, the Russian and Syrian coordination centres said in a joint statement.

According to the statement, the United States has influenced the development of a UN plan for sending a humanitarian medical mission to the camp.

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Last Wednesday, during the daily UK Government Coronavirus livestream, the head of the British Army, General Sir Nick Carter, bragged:

We’ve been involved with the Cabinet Office Rapid Response Unit, with our 77th Brigade helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also to counter disinformation. Between three and four thousand of our people have been involved, with around twenty thousand available the whole time at high readiness.

To understand the implications of this statement, we have to go back to 2018, when Carter gave a speech to the Royal United Services Institute.

“In our 77th Brigade,” he said, “… we have got some remarkable talent when it comes to social media, production design, and indeed Arabic poetry. Those sorts of skills we can’t afford to retain in the Regular component but they are the means of us delivering capability in a much more imaginative way than we might have been able to do in the past.”

77th Brigade

Previously known as the ‘Security Assistance Group’, 77th Brigade was stood up in 2015 as part of ‘Army 2020’. The Security Assistance Group had been established following the amalgamation of the Media Operations Group, 15 Psychological Operations Group, Security Capacity Building Team, and the Military Stabilisation and Support Group.

77th Brigade is described on their website as being about ‘information and outreach’. But what does that mean? General Carter again:

We also, though, need to continue to improve our ability to fight on this new battlefield, and I think it’s important that we build on the excellent foundation we’ve created for Information Warfare through our 77th Brigade, which is now giving us the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level. [Emphasis mine]

It is in this context, then, that Carter’s words from last week’s livestream should be viewed. Carter has acknowledged that the British military is waging war on a section of its own population.

A Rapid Response

Carter mentioned working with the Cabinet Office’s ‘Rapid Response Unit’. Established in April 2018 and also known as the ‘fake news unit’, the Rapid Response Unit was given an initial six months’ funding. It brought together a “team of analysts, data scientists and media and digital experts,” armed with cutting-edge software, to “work round the clock to monitor online breaking news stories and social media discussion.”

According to the RRU’s head, Alex Aiken:

The unit’s round the clock monitoring service has identified several stories of concern during the pilot, ranging from the chemical weapons attack in Syria to domestic stories relating to the NHS and crime.

For example, following the Syria airstrikes, the unit identified that a number of false narratives from alternative news sources were gaining traction online. These “alt-news” sources are biased and rely on sensationalism rather than facts to pique readers’ interest.

Due to the way that search engine algorithms work, when people searched for information on the strikes, these unreliable sources were appearing above official UK government information. In fact, no government information was appearing on the first 15 pages of Google results. We know that search is an excellent indicator of intention. It can reflect bias in information received from elsewhere.

The unit therefore ensured those using search terms that indicated bias – such as ‘false flag’ – were presented with factual information on the UK’s response. The RRU improved the ranking from below 200 to number 1 within a matter of hours.

The Rapid Response Unit was given permanent funding in February 2019.

Three months following the establishment of the Rapid Response Unit, Theresa May attended the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada.

There she announced the establishment of “a new Rapid Response Mechanism“, following Britain’s proposal for “a new, more formalised approach to tackling foreign interference across the G7” at the G7 Foreign Minister’s meeting the previous month.

The agreement sends “a strong message that interference by Russia and other foreign states would not be tolerated,” she said.

“The Rapid Response Mechanism,” she continued, “will support preventative and protective cooperation between G7 countries, as well as post-incident responses”, including:

• co-ordinated attribution of hostile activity
• joint work to assert a common narrative and response

The UK government’s Rapid Response, then, is to create international agreement on a common narrative (via the ‘mechanism’), and then wage an information war on its own people to make sure that narrative is protected in the media (via the ‘unit’).

Fusion

During Carter’s 2018 RUSI speech, he explained the role of the mainstream press in “setting up a well-informed public debate”. He spoke about “political warfare” being war by other means, and he said that winning that war would require a “fusion” approach.

Here, he is referring to the Fusion Doctrine, which was launched during the Theresa May regime, as part of the 2015 National Security Capability Review.

“Many capabilities,” it said, “that can contribute to national security lie outside traditional national security departments and so we need stronger partnerships across government and with the private and third sectors.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit is not only working with the military’s 77th Brigade, but is “leading on the ‘rebuttal of false narratives’ as part of the unit … [that also] involves the Home Office, DCMS, Number 10 and other agencies.”

The Corona-Narrative

General Carter said his 77th Brigade is “helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also to counter disinformation.”

What misinformation and disinformation is 77th Brigade helping to quash? How much of the ‘disinformation’ originates from 77th Brigade in the first place?

Part of 77th Brigade’s role is:

Monitoring and evaluating the information environment within boundaries or operational area

They not only ‘counter’ disinformation, but also watch social media, analysing how disinformation, including their own, spreads; mapping the internet and the networks of people sharing content between each other.

And for that, they have thousands deployed, and tens of thousands in reserve, not only in 77th Brigade directly, but right across government and the third sector.

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Featured image is from UK Column

“If 2019 was the year of the street protest, of tear gas and rubber bullets, 2020 might be the year the street protest died, or perhaps fell into a deep sleep, and went online.”—Journalist Christopher Miller

Despite all appearances to the contrary, martial law has not been declared in America.

We still have rights.

Technically, at least.

The government may act as if its police state powers suppress individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

Indeed, while federal and state governments have adopted specific restrictive measures in an effort to lockdown the nation and decelerate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the current public health situation has not resulted in the suspension of fundamental constitutional rights such as freedom of speech and the right of assembly.

Mind you, that’s not to say that the government has not tried its best to weaponize this crisis as it has weaponized so many other crises in order to expand its powers and silence its critics.

All over the country, government officials are using COVID-19 restrictions to muzzle protesters.

It doesn’t matter what the protest is about (church assemblies, the right to work, the timing for re-opening the country, discontent over police brutality, etc.): this is activity the First Amendment protects vociferously with only one qualification—that it be peaceful.

Yet even peaceful protesters mindful of the need to adhere to social distancing guidelines because of this COVID-19 are being muzzled, arrested and fined.

For example, a Maryland family was reportedly threatened with up to a year in jail and a $5000 fine if they dared to publicly protest the injustice of their son’s execution by a SWAT team.

If anyone had a legitimate reason to get out in the streets and protest, it’s the Lemp family, whose 21-year-old son Duncan was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home.

Imagine it.

It was 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, when this masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

Now what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

So instead of approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.

This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.

This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.

This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.

These red flag gun laws allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to “stop dangerous people before they act,” where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to arrest and detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you are most likely at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Needless to say, if you happen to be passionate about the Constitution and a vocal critic of government corruption, you’ve already been flagged in a government database somewhere.

Likely, Lemp was, too.

Now Lemp is dead and his family is devastated, outraged and desperate to make sense of what appears to be an insensible act of violence resulting in an inexcusable loss of life.

As usual in these kinds of shootings, government officials have not been forthcoming with details about the shooting: police have refused to meet with family members, the contents of the warrant supporting the raid have not been revealed, and bodycam footage of the raid has not been disclosed.

So in order to voice their objections to police violence and demand answers about the shooting, Lemp’s family and friends planned to conduct an outdoor public demonstration—adhering to social distancing guidelines—only to be threatened with arrest, a year in jail and a $5000 fine for violating Maryland’s stay at home orders.

Yet here’s the thing: we don’t have to be muzzled and remain silent about government corruption, violence and misconduct just because we’re wearing masks and social distancing.

That’s not the point of this whole COVID-19 exercise, or is it?

While there is a moral responsibility to not endanger other lives with our actions, that does not mean relinquishing all of our freedoms.

Be responsible in how you exercise your freedoms, but don’t allow yourselves to be muzzled or your individual freedoms to be undermined.

Understandably, no one wants to talk about individual freedoms when tens of thousands of people the world over are dying, and yet we must.

The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, or outright villains.

Sometimes that is true, but not always.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

We must find ways to mitigate against this contagion needlessly claiming any more lives and crippling any more communities, but let’s not lose our heads: blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

Featured image is from American Friends Service Committee

Sinclair Lewis wrote an important novel in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here. In the fictitious book, based on the threats at the time of fascism taking root in the USA, we see how this virus spread.

As with Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America we see how Charles Lindbergh’s leadership in the America First movement of the 1930s planted the seed for what has NEVER  subsided. That being simply the growth  of a  Proto Fascist mindset that resonates well today in 2020 Make Amerika Great Again (for the super rich!) Sadly, nothing ever real changes in the minds of some people… only the faces.

In David Talbot’s 2007 study of the Kennedy brothers during JFK’s administration, aptly entitled Brothers, we see the forces of Proto Fascism at work.

JFK inherited the Joints Chiefs of Staff from the Eisenhower administration, with General Curtis LeMay and General Lemnitzer leading the way for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. History now tells us what those in the ‘ Know’ knew since our U-2 flights over the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1950s: The Soviets were much weaker than us when it came to missile strength. The Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended such a pre-emptive attack, knowing full well that some of our cities would be severely damaged as we totally destroyed their entire country. JFK is said to have walked out of that meeting, saying to someone with him “Those guys are really crazy!”

What was also going on during those less than three years of JFK’s presidency, was a far right wing movement to infiltrate our military. This revealed itself to the leadership in the field by many ‘Born Again Commie Haters’ like General Lucius Clay, hero of WW2 and the 1948-49 Berlin Blockade. In October of 1961, as Talbot tells us, General Clay precipitated a nerve wracking confrontation with the Soviets at the Berlin Wall. Our tanks and their tanks stood facing each other like the ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ of western lore. Right before the **** would hit the fan, JFK, through a back channel arrangement his brother Bob had with the Russians, got the other side to agree to a mutual withdrawal. Meanwhile, far right wing forces here at home, like the John Birch Society, had been calling Eisenhower, hero of WW2, a “Dedicated , conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”. Men like ‘Off the reservation’ Major General Edwin Walker announced on many occasions that the JFK administration was stocked with “No win Ivy Leaguers and confirmed Communists”. Throughout our domestic and foreign US military bases leaflets and films were offered to our personnel on a regular basis, ALL sounding the trumpet for a final war with the godless Soviets. When Arkansas Senator Fulbright took to the Senate floor to contradict far right wing forces like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, the other side called for hearings when General Walker was relieved of his command in Europe. Things got testy, especially when Defense Sec. McNamara was called to testify. Dozens of white suburban housewives wearing Stop Communism tags swarmed him and joined 250 spectators in booing him.

Years before those aforementioned hearings, Senator Fulbright, in one of his speeches on the Senate floor, warned of a future ‘Military Coup’ … Isn’t that what happened in November of ’63? Hadn’t the French right wing generals attempted something like that earlier in 1961 against DeGalle’s plans to grant Algeria their independence? Few students of our jaded political history recall what happened a year later, in 1962, when Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited Dallas with his wife. He was there to support the Democratic Party candidates for the upcoming midterm elections. Johnson and his wife were attacked, once again by white suburban women, calling him and his wife, and JFK ‘Nigger Lovers and Commie Lovers’. It is said that Johnson and his wife had to be ‘spirited out’ of the hotel they were staying in, as if they were fugitives from a chain gang.

Now we are in the middle (beginning? I pray not) of a terrible pandemic. It threatens our economy along with the health of millions, especially the elderly and infirmed. What needs to be understood is what history reveals when right wing movements gain momentum during tough times, as with Germany during their terrible economic depression in the 1920s and early 30s. Why? Because right wing movements always find scapegoats to satisfy the rage of the many. We are already seeing this administration, and those who believe in Trump’s convoluted logic, pushing to reopen our nation’s businesses. Yet, because of the utter incompetence and ‘Pandemic denial’ by he and his administration, NOTHING EFFECTIVE  was begun during January, February and parts of March. No stocking or manufacturing of masks, ventilators, hand sanitizers;  NO sending of federal funds to strengthen our hospital systems and first providers; NO quarantine efforts and shutdowns in the early stages of this Pandemic USA. All of the above are reasons why this economy has NOT been reopened by now. Imagine if Trump acted as the Chinese did, and jumped all over the spread of this virus early on. He didn’t! So, his base, the ones demanding a totally OPEN economy, may very well march in lockstep as this Proto Fascist movement strengthens.

My fears, as a student of history, are REAL! We have a possible Army of citizens who may be easily influenced to join such a demagogue led movement. The anger and the frustration of many out of work and out of bread (the kind you eat AND the kind you spend) people can be the very fodder used by the actual super rich who helped create such movements. As with Germany in the late 1920s, and with Amerika just a few short years ago, frustrated and angry working stiffs got directed to go against their economic interests by propaganda masters. They blamed ‘Big Government’ and supported the super rich who controlled government for their own selfish interests. We who ‘Know better’ need to influence our fellow working stiffs about what we all not only need, but deserve! And it sure ain’t Fascism!

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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, Cross Currents 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]

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) on Monday ordered an investigation against President Jair Bolsonaro, due to accusations by former Justice Minister Sergio Moro. 

Moro, who resigned from his post at the Ministry of Justice last Friday, accused Bolsonaro of interfering in police investigations.

In response to these accusations, the STF established on Monday that the Federal Police must interrogate the former minister within 60 days.

Brazilian Federal Supreme Court Judge Celso de Mello also requested that the conclusions of the investigation are delivered to the Attorney General’s Office.

Brazilian Supreme Court authorized an investigation on whether President Jair Bolsonaro sought to interfere with the Federal Police and gain access to confidential materials- as his former Justice Minister Sergio Moro accused https://t.co/mnUH8slQwH

— Raquel Krähenbühl (@Rkrahenbuhl) April 28, 2020

From the Prosecutor’s Office it will be possible to move forward with a request for a political trial against the president or an indictment for false testimony against Moro.

If the Supreme Court confirms Moro’s accusations, it will be up to Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against Bolsonaro, which could lead to his dismissal from office.

This Monday, the Workers’ Party presented the STF with a criminal action against Bolsonaro and Moros on suspicion of prevarication, concussion and corruption.

These crimes were exposed after the war of accusations that took place between the two Brazilian officials last Friday.

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Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop is being protected by the Trump administration. In its latest act of abdication, the Environmental Protection Agency published its Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register on April 21. The rule is scheduled to go into effect June 22, completing the elimination of the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule.

The original rule was designed to protect the majority of America’s water  based on hydrologic science, which clearly shows that water flows on many more surface and subsurface paths than just rivers and other obvious waterways. These many pathways in turn connect wetlands and tributaries with large lakes and wide rivers. Indeed, a 2015 EPA report that drew upon 1,200 peer-review studies found that all tributaries, even intermittent and ephemeral streams “are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.”

The Trump administration rejected this indisputable science in favor of an eyeball test. The new rule essentially says that if you cannot see the connection between bodies of water, it does not exist.

On that basis, the Trump administration removed environmental protections from half of the nation’s wetlands and a fifth of streams and tributary headwaters. That makes them available for unregulated pollution from mine operators, chemical companies, fossil-fuel facilities, and pesticide-spewing factory farms. This is despite the fact that according to federal assessments, half of the nation’s rivers and streams, a third of our wetlands, and a fifth of our coastal waters and Great Lakes waters are in “poor biological condition.”

The EPA, run by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, made a mockery of the rule’s public comment period by claiming to listen to a “wide range” of stakeholders in “robust public outreach.” And yet the only “stakeholders” highlighted in EPA press releases were lobbyists for polluters, partisan Republicans, and right-wing think tanks that also happen to specialize in suppressing voter rights, renewable energy, and gun control. Groups behind Wheeler’s rule include the American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Farm Bureau, the Heritage Foundation, and American Legislative Exchange Council.

To help out polluters, Wheeler arbitrarily eliminated consideration of most of the economic benefits and co-benefits of clean water.

The Obama administration calculated that up to $465 million in clean water compliance costs were outweighed by up to $572 million of benefits for recreational fishing, hunting, flood control, and enforcement savings. New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that the value of wetland mitigation under Obama’s proposed protections was worth up to $1 billion. Indeed, by the Trump administration’s own reports, fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and other recreation associated with wildlife annually pumps $157 billion into the economy.

None of that factored into Wheeler’s dubious math, however, as he decided to ignore benefits and only focus on the purported costs to his industry cronies. But the problem is, the Clean Water Act doesn’t say anything about costs and benefits. It says: make our waters clean. So, no matter how Wheeler might want to fiddle with the numbers, his rule is a license to pollute—a  recipe for dirty water despite the law.

No science at the table

The blatant dismissal of the importance of clean water, from tap water to wildlife, caused scores of former federal scientists and environmental officials and the heads of virtually every major scientific society concerned with conservation to write Wheeler to emphatically protest the new rule. Wheeler did not listen to them or even to his own Science Advisory Board (SAB), which wrote Wheeler two months ago to say the agency did not incorporate the “best available science” to formulate Navigable Waters.

The SAB reminded Wheeler about the 2015 report emphasizing that “functional connectivity [in our water system] is more than a matter of surface geography.” In blunt wording, the board said the EPA, “offers no comparable body of peer reviewed evidence, and no scientific justification for disregarding the connectivity of waters accepted by current hydrological science.” By plowing ahead with a rule lacking scientific justification, the SAB said the EPA was “potentially introducing new risks to human and environmental health.”

Already derelict in enforcement

In reality, the Trump administration’s EPA has probably already introduced plenty of new risk into the water we drink and into the bodies of water we use for recreation. The day before the new rule was published, the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC), a Chicago-based advocacy group focusing on natural resources in the Midwest, issued a report documenting a dramatic decline of state and federal clean water enforcement in the heavily-industrialized states sharing the Great Lakes.

The report quoted the Environmental Integrity Project’s recent findings that state pollution control budgets in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana dropped between 16 percent and 36 percent between 2008 and 2018. The staff at the state level responsible for environmental protection in Illinois dropped from 1,028 employees to 639; in Michigan it fell from 1,568 to 1,228.

The ELPC, in its own data, says this these realities are compounded by the Trump administration’s very public dismantling of the EPA, not to mention its recent suspension of environmental enforcement during the pandemic. Staffing in EPA’s Region 5, responsible for Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Minnesota, has dropped 25 percent since 2011. Just as the EPA has fallen to its lowest national staffing levels since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, Nicole Cantello, an EPA lawyer who heads the union representing most EPA career staff in Region 5, said the numbers in her region are the lowest she knows of.

Correspondingly, enforcement cases under the Clean Water Act have plummeted from 340 case initiations and 351 case closures in 2012 during the mid-point of the Obama administration to 208 initiations and 205 closures last year. In the same time span the number of major facilities in serious noncompliance with the Clean Water Act have nearly doubled, from 122 to 211 (not including Michigan because of recording problems). Yet penalties and industry compliance costs assessed by the EPA have dropped dramatically.

Cantello said the loss of enforcement staff is particularly devastating because it takes many months of training and experience “to know a violation when you see it.” Plus, many staff members who have remained at the EPA have found themselves subject to a reorganization that has often taken inspection and enforcement powers away from seasoned investigators. As one defanged EPA veteran told me for the American Prospect Magazine last year, she felt like a like “a glamorized customer service worker—for industry.”

Worse still, Trump appointees throughout the EPA have turned even the process of documenting violations into a morass. Overall EPA inspections in Region 5 have dropped by 80 percent, from 4,706 in 2012 to 840 last year according to Better Government Association, an Illinois non-partisan watchdog group.

The critical veins of water systems

“One reason the EPA made a lot of progress in cleanups over the years was because we could go after polluters big and small,” Cantello said. “We used to be able to go inspect a site and file a violation. Now, the process creates weeks of delays and makes it so you’re only going for the cases that are way over the bar on pollution. You’re not as likely to pursue garden variety cases, even though small cases can still add up to lots of pollution.”

For Loreen Targos, “garden variety” translates into tributaries, canals, groundwater, and wetlands that play a role in a Great Lakes system containing 84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water and 21 percent of the surface fresh water on Earth. She knows this intimately as a Great Lakes remediation officer who has worked on major oil cleanups and who is also a Region 5 union steward.

She rattled off several places throughout the Midwest where pollution does not simply billow straight out from a lakeshore, but instead is found more inland from active and defunct industries that leave a toxic soup in channels, creeks, and estuaries. “These are the little veins that funnel into the lakes,” Targos said. “We can’t stop protecting them. If you listen to the president, it’s like, we don’t know where groundwater goes so we can’t do anything about it. But we have decades of watershed science that does tell us where it goes, even if you don’t see it.”

With just two months remaining before the rule goes into effect, and lawsuits on the way from environmental groups, it is likely that actual implementation of the Navigable Waters Rule will depend on who wins the November presidential election. The decline of EPA enforcement that has already occurred should serve as a harbinger of what is to come if this new rule dictates which water the government chooses to protect. In the end, the science is clear: toxins in the veins can still poison the heart of our water systems.

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Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. He is an award-winning journalist and co-author and photographer of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock, published by Yale University Press (2015).

Featured image is from UCS

O líder ultraconservador, no intuito de desviar as atenções globais da magnitude de suas próprias ações, volta a tentar incluir a pandemia na conta chinesa, em meio à crescente guerra econômica contra este seu principal oponente geopolítico da atualidade. 

Contudo, a “investigação” que os EUA efetivamente deveriam realizar para, não só descobrir os “responsáveis” pela pandemia, mas evitar outras similares no futuro, não precisaria ir muito além de seu próprio país – talvez até a Europa Ocidental. 

Se suas intenções de resolver o problema fossem sérias, bastaria observar o que já foi pesquisado e comprovado por infinidades de cientistas naturais e historiadores ao longo das últimas décadas, e inclusive está relatado como “principal causa” da atual calamidade sanitária pela própria ONU: a destruição acelerada do meio ambiente por um capitalismo em crise que, nos obstáculos do caminho, perdeu suas últimas rédeas éticas.

A origem “animal” do coronavírus

A Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) declarou – e ora reafirmou – que um animal é a provável fonte de transmissão do novo coronavírus. E cientistas de variadas partes do mundo têm confirmado tal hipótese; embora não haja ainda consenso. 

Já o relatório “Fronteiras 2016: sobre questões emergentes de preocupação ambiental”, elaborado pelo Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente (PNUMA), afirma que os recorrentes surtos de zoonoses (transmissíveis de animais para humanos, como é o caso dos variados coronavírus), são reflexos da degradação ambiental intensa. 

Tais enfermidades estão em significativa ascensão nesse novo século; cenário que só piora, na medida em que os habitats silvestres são cada vez mais destruídos pela atividade humana. Nos últimos anos, várias doenças similares à COVID-19 se tornaram preocupação global por sua capacidade de causar pandemias, tais como ébola, gripe aviária, febre do Vale do Rift, ou zika vírus.

De acordo com o PNUMA, as zoonoses têm se imposto crescentemente como ameaças contundentes ao “desenvolvimento econômico, ao bem-estar animal e humano, e à integridade do próprio ecossistema” – em que todos habitamos. Em duas décadas estas enfermidades tiveram “custos diretos” de “mais de 100 bilhões de dólares”, o que poderia ter-se multiplicado (“vários trilhões de dólares”), caso tivessem efetivamente se tornado pandemias. Como agora… 

Para se evitar que surjam tais zoonoses, afirma o órgão da ONU, seria fundamental que “o homem” (leia-se com menos imprecisão: “a indústria capitalista”) freie suas múltiplas ameaças aos ecossistemas e à vida silvestre, reduzindo a agressão e fragmentação dos habitats de animais selvagens, bem como a poluição generalizada, e sobretudo estancando as mudanças climáticas. 

Controvérsias sobre a origem “espacial” do novo vírus

Quanto à origem “espacial” deste coronavírus, há ainda controvérsias. Controvérsias que seriam tolas, se não fossem justamente destinadas a tirar o foco do cerne do problema: a devastadora concorrência capitalista por sempre mais territórios e recursos naturais. 

Ambas as hipóteses que vêm sendo consideradas – que o vírus tenha surgido primeiro nos EUA, ou na China –, ainda que plausíveis, não mudam muito a constatação predominante: a de que a grande responsabilidade pela pandemia (questão que vai muito além da simples “origem do coronavírus”) é um sistema de produção desgovernado e agressivo que, em época de agudização da crise econômica global (crise estrutural do capitalismo, que se aprofunda desde 2008), desregula  temerariamente o metabolismo entre o homem e a natureza. 

Em outras palavras: o desequilíbrio do ecossistema planetário está em situação-limite; rapidamente se aproxima de um ponto de não-retorno, e isto abre espaço para que venham a ser recorrentes tais tipos de catástrofes sanitárias.

Portanto, a questão que deve ser colocada e equacionada, prioritariamente, não é a de se este vírus, em si, é resultado de mutação genética ou de má segurança em laboratórios de virologia (hipóteses possíveis e já verificadas na história), mas sim: como a comunidade internacional poderia fazer um esforço conjunto para reorientar o desenvolvimento de um mundo que, durante séculos de “modernidade”, vem sendo refém de um “progresso instrumental”, meramente “tecnológico”; falso “progresso”, pois não visa o “desenvolvimento social” e a “emancipação humana”, mas pelo contrário, é francamente voltado ao “crescimento dos lucros” (corporativos), através do cada vez mais intenso controle do homem e da natureza.

Se há cinco séculos, o filósofo Francis Bacon, entusiasmado com os incipientes avanços científicos – que começavam a chegar a uma Europa ainda periférica, atrasada e pobre –, definiu a função da ciência como sendo a “vitória sobre a natureza”, durante todo este tempo somente piorou esta visão rasa, controladora e sem perspectiva da “totalidade” complexa que compõe a vida social e natural. 

Conspirações são possíveis na geopolítica do vale-tudo

No início da epidemia, enquanto o surto ainda estava localizado na China, um Trump bonachão, quase com um sorriso, desdenhava da calamidade em descuidadas mensagens por redes sociais; enquanto seu Secretário de Comércio, Wilbur Ross, sem nenhuma vergonha, explicitava publicamente seu otimismo com o problema “chinês”, que se agravava, chegando até a declarar (digamos, com “pouco humanismo”) que o novo coronavírus: “ajudará a acelerar o retorno de empregos nos Estados Unidos”! 

No mês passado, já menos alegre, Trump mostrou por fim preocupação com o surto de coronavírus, denominando-o provocativamente de “vírus chinês” – à medida que via desabar as perspectivas econômicas de seu país.

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Ocorre que a pandemia, que já infectou mais de dois milhões de pessoas em todo o mundo e vem afetando violentamente a economia global (sobretudo a dos EUA, ameaçando sua posição geopolítica dominante desde a Segunda Guerra), tem a peculiaridade de ser em certo aspecto “democrática”, já que (apesar de ameaçar mais aos pobres e aos sem recursos, como toda doença) tem também atingido os ricos e poderosos. Este fato tem levado neoliberais convictos (mas com alguma racionalidade, o que não é o caso de terraplanistas e neofascistas afins) a se absterem de sua ambição por lucros velozes, optando pela paralisação econômica; não por sentimentos humanos, é claro, de que dispõem tão pouco, mas por projetarem prejuízos maiores em caso contrário. 

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O gesto intempestivo e xenófobo de Trump logo recebeu resposta – contundente! – do porta-voz do Ministério de Relações Exteriores da China, Zhao Lijian: “Pode ter sido o Exército estadunidense que levou a epidemia a Wuhan”. 

Em sua alegação, Lijian fazia referência a alguns curiosos episódios, ainda hoje não investigados a fundo:

i) Em outubro de 2019, teve lugar em Wuhan, os Jogos Olímpicos Mundiais Militares, com a participação de mais de 100 países; em reportagem, o jornalista estadunidense George Webb afirma que o piloto e ciclista militar Maatje Benassi teria levado o vírus à China em sua participação na competição; publicação do Departamento de Defesa dos EUA confirma que este atleta realmente participou de prova ciclística em Wuhan, pouco antes do começo da epidemia;

ii) De acordo com matéria do jornal The New York Times, o Pentágono detectou, no mesmo período, casos de coronavírus entre seus militares (que a princípio estariam atuando na Coreia do Sul e na Itália);

iii) Outro fato a ser investigado é o fechamento – por “falta de segurança” – de laboratório de “armas biológicas” no Centro Médico Militar Fort Detrick, em Maryland (EUA), que se dedicava a pesquisas sobre vírus, germes e doenças infecciosas, e encerrou suas atividades, em julho de 2019, alegadamente devido a problemas com o “descarte de materiais biologicamente perigosos”, e que inclusive teriam vazado, de acordo com o Centro de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças dos EUA (CDC).

O porta-voz chinês, em sua resposta, citou ainda o próprio diretor do CDC, Robert Redfield, que, recentemente questionado sobre se foram descobertas, postumamente, mortes por coronavírus nos Estados Unidos, respondeu: “Alguns casos foram, agora, realmente diagnosticados desse modo nos EUA”.

Suscitados pelo debate, diversos pedidos foram feitos aos EUA para que expusessem os exames de saúde de Benassi à época e realizassem novas provas, tornando esses dados públicos, com vistas a dirimir possíveis especulações e facilitar as investigações sobre a pandemia. 

Mas o governo Trump desconsiderou os pedidos por transparência (“transparência” que agora “exige” aos chineses). 

O terrorismo biológico tem história

Junte-se as peças, e está aberta interessante margem para se pensar que o misterioso “paciente zero” poderia ter sido um estadunidense, como afirma o repórter; e que portanto poderiam ter sido, não animais silvestres de um mercado chinês, mas competidores militares dos EUA – previamente contaminados – os responsáveis por fazer o vírus chegar a Wuhan: propositalmente ou não! 

E de fato, há exemplos infelizes na história que comprovam a plausibilidade da hipótese “proposital”. 

Por exemplo, durante a Guerra da Coreia, no âmbito da Guerra Fria, a União Soviética e a China acusaram os Estados Unidos de usar agentes biológicos contra a Coreia Popular; Washington, mais tarde, admitiu que havia estudos para produzir tais armas (!), mas que não foram usadas. 

Já em 1963, de acordo com documentos ora desclassificados (divulgados pelo Arquivo de Segurança Nacional dos EUA), a CIA – com apoio da própria Casa Branca – tentou contaminar com bacilos de tuberculose Fidel Castro, através do advogado-espião James Donovan, que então negociava com o comandante cubano a libertação de alguns mercenários ianques (fato que aliás já rendeu livros e filmes). 

Outro caso ocorreu logo após o fracasso da invasão da Baía dos Porcos, em Cuba, quando, com aval do governo de R. Kennedy, a CIA aliada à máfia dos EUA (veja-se episódio recentemente abordado pelo próprio cinema hollywoodiano), pôs em prática a famosa “Operação Mangusto”, que incluía entre suas ações o uso de agentes biológicos e químicos para destruição de colheitas cubanas e contaminação de camponeses. 

Dentre tantos outros exemplos, vale lembrar ainda a confissão de Eduardo Arocena, em 1984; este agente da CIA de origem cubana, em julgamento realizado em Nova Iorque, declarou à corte que a missão do grupo que ele chefiava era a de obter organismos infecciosos (patogênicos) e introduzi-los em Cuba – documento que consta em ata pública, mas que jamais foi investigado pelas autoridades “competentes” dessa nação-império. 

Não sendo a intenção deste artigo enveredar por esses tantos casos de “guerra suja” – que mostram a que níveis de baixeza o homem-moderno foi e é capaz em sua busca por lucros e poder –, fecha-se o “capítulo”, mencionando que, em julho de 2001, George W. Bush vetou um protocolo da ONU que visava dar mais poderes à Convenção Internacional sobre Armas Biológicas, argumentando que isso poderia causar interferências em “pesquisas legítimas” dos EUA. Na ocasião, especialista entrevistado pela BBC (Nicholas Sims, da London School os Economics) considerou tal atitude como “isolacionista”, obviamente vista como “obstáculo ao fortalecimento da Convenção”. Gesto que, portanto, desde então facilitou a possível disseminação de “vírus” enquanto armas de exterminação humana.

Considerando-se, no caso desta específica calamidade, que (na melhor das hipóteses) o vírus tenha se originado “naturalmente”, ou antes “ao acaso provocado” (motivado pela destruição do meio ambiente), voltamos então ao afirmado no início: a responsabilidade pela atual pandemia deve ser investigada no chamado “progresso moderno”; em seu falso “desenvolvimento”, meramente técnico, espetaculoso e controlador; em um mundo desregulado entregue aos desígnios dos interesses corporativos (sobretudo após a consolidação neoliberal nos anos 1980), e cuja capacidade autodestrutiva é conhecida ao menos desde a catástrofe da Primeira Guerra Mundial. 

[Continua…]

Yuri Martins-Fontes

Referências

https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-1-toda-a-verdade-tem-tres-etapas/5707017

https://rebelion.org/la-cia-la-conexion-italiano-francesa-y-el-trafico-de-drogas-en-cuba-y-sudamerica/#sdfootnote23sym

https://operamundi.uol.com.br/politica-e-economia/43352/cia-cogitou-matar-fidel-com-equipamento-de-mergulho-infectado-com-bacilo-da-tuberculose

https://super.abril.com.br/blog/contaoutra/a-cia-apelou-ate-para-a-mafia-para-matar-fidel-castro/ (em que se cita o livro: Legado de Cinzas: uma História da CIA (Record), do jornalista Tim Weiner)

Early on April 27, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of airstrikes on alleged Iranian targets in the countryside of Damascus. As always, pro-Israeli sources claimed that the missile attack hit and destroyed weapon depots and HQs of Hezbollah and Iranian forces. Syrian state media reported that 3 civilians were killed and 4 others wounded in the villages of Hujaira and Adliya as a result of the strike.

Tensions between Idlib militants and their Turkish sponsors and protectors have been growing since the last weekend.

On April 26, the Turkish Army clashed with Idlib radicals near their camp blocking the M4 highway near the town of Nayrab. At least 7 people were killed or injured, when Turkish forces opened fire at protesters blocking their column in the area.

According to pro-militant sources, Turkish troops tried to remove the protest camp from the area in order to expand the chunk of the highway used for joint patrols with the Russian Military Police. Another reason is the hostile posture of Idlib protesters towards Turkish troops deployed in the de-escalation area. Earlier in April, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants deployed at the highway and recorded a video threatening to behead Turkish soldiers. Ankara likely opted to give a lesson to its restive proxies.

However, the situation went out of control.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants shelled a Turkish observation post south of Nayrab with mortars injuring a Turkish soldier. He was evacuated by military helicopters to Turkey. The clashes continued with at least two drone strikes on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham positions near the village of San. Two militants were killed in the attack.

In response to Turkish actions, militants shelled Turkish MRAPs moving near Nayrab with heavy machine guns and reportedly launched anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) at a bulldozer and a battle tank of the Turkish Army. The impact of the ATGM strikes remains unclear.

These clashes became a visual demonstration that Idlib terrorists remain terrorists and are not ready to abandon their radical ideology and make concessions needed to propel Turkish interests. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda-linked groups receive funding, weapons and even direct military support, but put their own goals and plans first. So, all the while Turkey is pouring money and resources into the al-Qaeda-infested black hole.

The lack of loyalty among Idlib groups forces Turkey to extensively use its own troops to keep at least a semblance of control over the situation. Since the establishment of the new ceasefire regime in Idlib on March 5, the Turkish military has reportedly sent 2,810 military and logistical vehicles to the region. Pro-militant sources claim that approximately 10,000 Turkish troops are deployed in Greater Idlib.

The Syrian Army and security forces are conducting an extensive security operation in the province of al-Suwayda.

Government forces neutralized a criminal gang in the town of Salkhad seizing a large number of fire arms, ammunition, hand grenades and improvised explosive devices. Despite this, the gang leader, Nawras al-Eid, was able to flee. Pro-government sources claim that some local armed groups posing as the local self-defense forces are in fact criminal organizations.

The relative stabilization of the situation in southern and central Syria allowed the Damascus government to allocate additional resources to combat this organized crime. Nonetheless, if large-scale military hostilities once again resume in western or northeastern Syria, organized crime will have another chance to lift up its head in the relatively calm areas.

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The phrase ‘Yellow Peril’ – pertaining to the alleged threat of the Far East – was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in the 1880s after he had a dream featuring a Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe. It’s unclear whether Donald Trump has experienced a similar premonition during his lifetime but one thing is certain: he leads an administration which has been intent on escalating tensions with China, even prior to the outbreak of coronavirus.

It was just a matter of time before the blame game would begin. Donald Trump has long viewed China as an economic adversary. On the presidential campaign trail in 2016 he was accusing China of ‘raping’ the US and that the nation was responsible for the ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world’. The rhetoric has not changed much since then. Trump vigorously pursued his trade war with China in 2018 when he literally ‘ordered’ US companies to cease trading with the east asian nation. The President has attempted to influence policy beyond its borders too; pressurizing the UK not to embark on a deal with Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone network provider, to set up 5G across Britain. The US has never disguised its hatred of the firm, launching its own special vendetta against it, including the organisation of the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter and Chief Financial Officer in Canada in 2018.

The coronavirus pandemic has therefore provided the perfect catalyst to a war which began much earlier against China (see John Pilger’s film The Coming War with China). The main difference before was that the US was pretty much on its own. The UK for its part had been courting China for years, trying to be its ‘best friend in the West’ so as to encourage inward investment. Not any more, the Tory hawks say now. According to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab there will be ‘no more business as usual with China’. He has promised a ‘deep dive review’ as to how coronavirus was able to spread from China. And he’s not alone.  Last week a new Conservative China Research Group was founded with the goal of reassessing Britain’s future relationship with the country. There’s to be a completely new approach.  A senior Conservative MP told the FT:

“The pressure from our MPs and the public to punish China is huge. They are going to be blamed for the worst effects of this pandemic and we will have to shift our foreign policy to be more aligned to [US president Donald] Trump’s’.

And therein lies the rub.  For Trump’s posse aren’t holding back when it comes to threats against China. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has already warned he will ‘make China pay’ for the Covid-19.

Trump lays full responsibility at Beijing’s door for the outbreak, despite how effectively the nation of 1.4 billion people has managed the crisis. (Through a range of measures, including strict quarantine and thorough testing it has drastically reduced the number of cases across the country, with the city of Wuhan, the official source of the virus, back open for business.)  The US needs a scapegoat now; more to the point Donald Trump needs a distraction if he is to have any chance of winning the next election.

But for the UK to go along with any such aggressive policy against China is ludicrous at a time like this when the world ought to be pulling together. The British security services announced last week they would begin their ‘investigation’ into precisely where the coronavirus originated, focusing on the laboratory in Wuhan, which, it has been speculated, the virus could have escaped from before appearing at the fish market (the location that was first publicised as being the source of the outbreak).

However the reality is we have no evidence that the virus has any connection with the Wuhan laboratory.  Further still, there is scientific evidence to indicate that the disease did not originate in Wuhan at all, but in southern China.

Cambridge scientists have carried out research suggesting that coronavirus may be months older than originally thought and did not come from the fish market. Peter Forster, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge said that the virus may have mutated into its final ‘human-efficient’ form months ago, but stayed inside a bat or other animal or even human for several months without infecting other individuals.’ Even more interestingly, Forster said that if pressed, he ‘would say the original spread started more likely in southern China than in Wuhan.’ The idea that Wuhan is not the original source  is backed up by Chinese reports which now state the first case of coronavirus can be traced back to Hubei province, not Wuhan, in December 2019.

‘I listen to the scientists’ UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson keeps saying. Well, surely this is the one time when our conclusions must be led by the scientific evidence. Or will we dance to the tune of President Trump, whose understanding of science begins and ends with the possibility of injecting people with disinfectant to treat Covid-19? We cannot allow this pandemic to be used as an excuse for waging a war, whether hot or cold, against China. Such thinking belongs, and should stay in the 19th century. Enough people have suffered as a consequence of this pandemic already. China as a nation, wants to be successful, wants to have a thriving economy and is extremely proud. If provoked, despite not having a history of invading other countries, one can be sure it will defend itself to the hilt.

‘Handle with care’ says the label on the package I just ordered from China. That says it all really, doesn’t it?…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from FinanceTwitter

In December 1917, Europe was immersed in the First World War—one of the most vicious, insane wars the world had ever witnessed. After learning about the high casualty toll and the horrific nature of trench warfare, which included the use of poison gas, Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided in a private conversation to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian:

“If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course, they don’t know, and can’t know.” 

Just over a century later, here we are, yet again, immersed in a global war. However, this war, which is ostensibly sold to all of us as a battle to “stop the spread of the coronavirus,” is in reality a war devised by “the powers-that-shouldn’t-be” to remove the last remnants of humanity’s inherent freedoms and liberties.

And, just like all of the previous criminal wars throughout human history—the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and every other subsequent conflict—if people around the world knew the truth about this war, it would come to a screeching halt overnight.

Through all of my years of research in matters relating to war, I have come to understand one very important thing: When human societies lose their freedom, it’s usually not because the monarch, the state, or some dictator has overtly taken it away. Rather, it is lost because too many people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection from some perceived (real or imagined) menace.

That menace is typically manufactured by the state and is designed to stir up such a torrent of fear in the mind of citizens that they pressure their politicians to implement measures against the fabricated threat.

Unfortunately, it rarely occurs to the public to ask:

Are we simply reacting to an orchestrated threat?

Will the protective measures we’re demanding of our leaders actually work?

Or will “the cure” being offered to us be worse than “the disease”?

Sadly, we seem to have not learned from history that, once the state is asked by the citizenry to respond to a danger, it will do so with a drastic course of action—with rights-restricting rules that will never be removed once imposed. This is exactly how societies become despotisms. 

To be sure, there is a seasonal influenza, a coronavirus, currently sweeping around the world, just as the flu does every year, like clockwork. And, yes, this particular coronavirus seems to pose a serious health hazard to the elderly and to anyone with underlying medical issues. However, one crucial question has being avoided by officials and the public alike: Is this outbreak of an infectious disease called COVID-19 serious enough to warrant the draconian countermeasures that all governments—with the exception of Sweden—have initiated?

Those counteractions have done a number on communities everywhere:

• collapsing local economies and, in a ripple effect, the world economy
• sending millions upon millions of people to the unemployment line
• imprisoning millions of honest, hard-working citizens in their homes
• bankrupting countless mid-size and small businesses (and destroying the dreams and livelihoods of their owners)
• bringing out of the woodwork rules-obsessed busybodies who take delight in snitching on neighbours and strangers alike for not “social distancing”
• unearthing every petty tyrant whose main mission in life is to ensure that every mask-less person is arrested and carted off to jail
• policing quarantined areas with drones
• tracking and surveilling all human beings who are ambulatory and have cell phones (if ants carried mobile phones into and out of their mounds, they’d doubtless be subject to  triangulation tracking)
• increasing stress and the incidence of flaring tempers among the homebound, which has resulted in a sharp escalation of domestic violence
• saddling future generations with massive debt that can lead debtors into deep depression, permanent homelessness, possible suicide 

Medical professionals are observing the entire state of affairs with increasing alarm. They are questioning the official coronavirus infection rates and noting the detrimental effects of the lockdown. Examples abound.

Take Dr. Erickson, co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County, California, who, with his partner, Dr. Massihi, has gone on record saying that, in contrast to the high numbers of people contracting this coronavirus, there has been only “a small amount of death . . . similar to what we have seen every year with the seasonal flu.”

Stanford University epidemiologist and professor of medicine John Ioannidis has made the same observation. In an April 17 interview, Dr. Ioannidis he claimed that “COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza.” Moreover, he said, the devastation and deaths caused by the imposed lockdown on the entire world economy “can be far worse than anything the coronavirus can do.” Based on a study he conducted, Dr. Ioannides said that “the data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable.”

Indeed, we have seen ample evidence of this “utterly unreliable” data—less euphemistically known as manipulated data—coming out of Italy. Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific advisor to Italy’s minister of health, referred to a report produced by the Italian COVID-19 Surveillance Group and observed that “only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity—many had two or three.” The report cited by Prof. Ricciardi pointed out that half of the patients who died had three or more other underlying diseases at the time of death.

In the United States, meanwhile, the death toll figures attributed to the virus are no more accurate. Doctors are being told to write on death certificates that the cause of death is “presumed” to be COVID-19 or that COVID-19 “contributed” to the death, when, in fact, there is absolutely no proof that COVID-19 caused the death, nor did any lab test indicate a COVID-19 positive.

The United Nations’ Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO), which has been entrusted to be an impartial global health guardian, has proven itself no better than national governments at truthfully disseminating critical information. WHO’s questionable statistics on COVID-19 only serve to cement its reputation as an organization that, since 2009, has been plagued by corruption, conflict-of-interest scandals linked to Big Pharma, and a lack of transparency. Few citizens are familiar with the WHO’s transgressions, and even fewer understand how it is financed.

So let me briefly explain the latter. The WHO’s principal advisory group for vaccines and immunization is called the Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE). This team of so-called “experts” is dominated by individuals who receive significant funding from either the major vaccine makers, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or from Wellcome Trust. In his informative article, “Can We Trust the WHO?” author F. William Engdahl writes that, in the latest posting by WHO:

“. . . of the 15 scientific members of SAGE, no fewer than 8 had declared interest, by law, of potential conflicts. In almost every case the significant financial funder of these 8 SAGE members included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck & Co. (MSD), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (a Gates-funded vaccine group), BMGF Global Health Scientific Advisory Committee, Pfizer, Novovax, GSK, Novartis, Gilead, and other leading pharma vaccine players.”

Moreover, unlike in its early years, when the WHO was primarily funded by UN member governments, today it receives funding from a “public-private partnership,” which vaccine companies dominate. The WHO’s financial audit for 2017 indicates that by “far the largest private or non-governmental funders of WHO are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation together with the Gates-funded GAVI Vaccine Alliance, the Gates-initiated Global Fund to fight AIDS.” That year, the Gates Foundation alone donated a staggering $324,654,317 to the WHO, second only to the US government, which contributed $401 million. According to statistics posted in 2018, “the second-largest funder after the US government is still the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides 9.8 per cent of the WHO’s funds.” 

In light of these relationships, it is not surprising that WHO data on COVID-19 has been found to contain repeated errors—false positives—and inconsistencies, all of which it refuses to correct. As a result, Oxford University and various countries have ceased using WHO data on coronavirus infection rates.   

Because of the inaccurate and incomplete data that WHO has been collecting from around the world, we will never know exactly how many people have died from the virus. 

Of course, in order to successfully prosecute their war on our civil liberties, these global overlords must maintain a monopoly on the information that shapes their official narrative.

If they were to release videos of empty hospitals or reveal the very low mortality rates actually associated with the virus, they would not be able to foster the element of fear required to keep the public credulously accepting their every pronouncement and obeying their every edict. It is this single factor of fear, fomented by false information emanating from “trusted sources,” which is the vital element our health-state/police-state nannies rely upon as they deliberately, calculatingly fan the flames of the collective hysteria that has engulfed the world.

Why do I say “deliberately, calculatingly”? Because, by now, most readers have undoubtedly seen the smoking gun proof that the COVID-19 pandemic is in fact a plandemic. That smoking gun took the form of a simulation exercise called Event 201.

More aptly termed a drill, Event 201 was held in mid-October of last year, just weeks before the reports of the first recorded case of a contagious novel coronavirus disease starting seeping out of Wuhan, China. Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the John Hopkins Center for Health, and the World Economic Forum, this tabletop exercise simulated “a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic.” That its sponsors have the gall to insist there is no connection between their exercise (I mean “drill”) and the near-simultaneous unrolling of the actual “live” event (dubbed COVID-19) speaks to their hubris—and their hypocrisy.

At best, maybe 10 percent of the entire simulation was devoted to actually helping people infected with the coronavirus. The remainder of the exercise was concerned with how officials would disseminate information and maintain all-important control of the official narrative—including the statistical narrative. Predictably, the participants discussed strategies for how to silence the misinformation and disinformation that would surely spread in the wake of this “hypothetical” pandemic. In other words, they were super-intent on shutting down any and all information, whether leaked or hacked or accidentally discovered, that was not sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), by WHO officials, and by MSM corporate stenographers.

Key talking points included an elaborate plan of action for governments that would enable them to work in cooperation with social media giants like Facebook and Google and Twitter. Specifically, governments were told how they could troll social media sites and request that any voices countering the official narrative be removed; how they could silence independent journalists, while elevating their own so-called “authoritative voices”; and how they could join forces with Big Pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson to develop a vaccine to ward off the coronavirus .

What happened to the action plan when it was applied to the on-its-heels real-life scenario? Unsurprisingly, it was fully implemented and made fully operational. So, thanks to Event 201’s meticulous pandemic planning and WHO’s replication of it, the power of the police state is rising to unprecedented levels. Our global overlords and their CDC and WHO and MSM lackeys have succeeded in generating fear in the planet’s populace. This pandemic panic has, in turn, caused people to voluntarily, though unwittingly, surrender their hard-won freedoms. These freedoms are articulated in the constitutions of countries around the world, including the US Constitution, with its Bill of Rights—notably the First Amendment. These documents are now nothing more than meaningless pieces of paper. They may as well be blank.

A few for instances: Facebook is removing all voices that counter the official COVID-19 narrative from its platform. Google is monitoring (read: snooping) to check up on whether people are “social distancing.” The Clinton Global Initiative is promoting another Orwellian concept called “contact tracing” (read: total government surveillance grid), which involves monitoring, tracing, and, if need be, quarantining the entire US population. The plan is being sold to the American population as a critical component of a universal healthcare system, when, in reality, if implemented, it will be nothing more than a marketing ploy to disguise the arrival of George Orwell’s 1984.

Throughout the US, companies like VSBLTY and public-private partnerships are spreading a ubiquitous surveillance network of CCTV cameras with the ability to measure heartbeat and social distancing without any legal or legislative restraint—a true police state dystopia.

Power-grabbing governments the world over have locked down their societies and are dreaming up legislation to stop the spread of “dangerous misinformation” about the pandemic. British MP Damian Collins, for one, is calling for just such measures to silence free speech in the UK. In Canada, Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc has admitted that the Canadian government is “considering introducing legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people.”

Not to be outdone, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of “a new United Nations Communication Response initiative to flood the Internet with facts and science while countering the growing scourge of misinformation.” In addition, the Secretary- General, like Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and various other leaders, is advising us precisely where to place our trust: in vaccines.

Vaccines are not the answer. If the mandatory vaccination agenda is ever implemented by these globalist kingpins, the coup against our fundamental rights and freedoms will be complete. Our governments—or, more likely, a one world government!—will force-vaccinate us with our own unique digital ID and chip that, once in place, will further heighten their surveillance of and tighten their control over all human beings. At that point, the police state will be complete and will be here to stay.

Contrary to what Trudeau believes, the way that governments have implemented oppressive edicts to combat the hyped virus is not the “new-normal.” Their actions are hardly normal, whether old or new.

Precisely the opposite is true: This is the forever abnormal.

Abnormal because, whether the virus was developed in a bioweapons lab or if it is the annual seasonal influenza, it is a manufactured crisis designed to infuse us with fear, induce us to willingly surrender our freedoms, and steer us away from seeing the ever-scarier, underlying agenda of a technocratic takeover by the New (or Flu!) World Order. (Think AI, 5G, Internet of Things, digital body chips, Data Fusion Centers, the NSA’s Project Prism, ad infinitum).

This collective insanity will come to an end only if we all leave behind the MSM nest of lies and seek out sources—independent online and in-print investigative journalists like James Corbett, F. William Engdahl, Derrick Broze, Ryan Cristián, Patrick Wood, Jon Rappoport, and countless others—who have been probing for (and finding and relaying) the truth about world events for anywhere from a decade to several dozen years. We must cease buying into propaganda and accept only provable facts from dependable sites—the ones that are called “fake news” by the real fakers and fearmongers.

To men like David Lloyd George and his ilk, we reply: Yes, we will learn the truth, and with this knowledge we will stop the war on our liberty and our lives!  

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David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering. He served as a Captain in the Canadian Forces for nine years. During his two tours of duty in the Air Force he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia as well as in Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. 

The 9/11 Consensus Panel mourns the loss of the great Italian journalist, Giulietto Chiesa, whose life was devoted to upholding the foundations of democracy, not just in his native Italy, but in Russia and worldwide.

The Consensus Panel was honoured to have Giulietto as a voluntary reviewing member of its evidence-based 9/11 research – from 2011 until its findings were published in 2018.

In 1999-2000 Chiesa had founded the association Megachip – Democracy in Communications, which presents critical analysis of how the mainstream media actually works. By April 2009 its website had over 60 million hits, and by 2010 it had reached 100 million.  On the website appeared the words:

A whisper was enough to create a wave.

A simple whisper,

Nothing compared to the incessant noise of the thousand media that surround us.

Yet it was enough.

From Megachip sprang the 2008 documentary Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11, which challenged many assumptions surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Featuring such luminaries as Gore Vidal and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, it has been seen by millions of people.  The Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere de da Sera, described the “sequence of contradictions, gaps, and omissions of stunning gravity” that it exposed in the official story.

In 2003, just before the American invasion of Iraq, he promoted – together with a large group of volunteering journalists – the experimental independent satellite TV project, NoWar TV.

From the late 1990s onwards Chiesa had covered issues related to globalization, in particular how they affect the world media system. This led to his involvement in the foundation of the global think tank, the World Political Forum, based in Turin and chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 2010 Gorbachev founded the New Policy Forum in Luxemburg, placing Chiesa on the Advisory Board.

Chiesa also served for 19 years as a Moscow correspondent, was a former member of the European Parliament, and was a Fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

He was the Chief Editor of the web TV, Pandora TV.  His Il Fatto Quotidiano blog was among the top ten political blogs in Italy. He was deeply mourned and honoured at Megachip.

Giulietto Chiesa was clearly a diverse man whose immense energy and compassion drove a lifelong quest for democracy.  In the words of 9/11 Consensus Panelist Dr. Graeme MacQueen, co-founder of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, “I found him to be extremely kind and generous…it was a great honour to have known him; we have lost a brave companion. What a loss.”

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Welcome to “Coronavirus in Context.”

Today we’re going to talk about whether we’re managing coronavirus correctly; do we need to think about a change in our treatment regiments?

My guest is Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He’s a physician trained in emergency medicine and critical care, and he practices at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Dr Sidell.

Below is the full transcript.

John Whyte, MD, MPH: Hello. I’m Dr John Whyte, chief medical officer at WebMD. Welcome to “Coronavirus in Context.” Today we’re going to talk about whether we’re managing coronavirus correctly; do we need to think about a change in our treatment regiments? My guest is Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He’s a physician trained in emergency medicine and critical care, and he practices at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Dr Sidell.

Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

Whyte: You’ve been talking a lot about the number of patients, the percentage of patients dying on ventilators. When did you first notice this trend?

Kyle-Sidell: In preparation of opening what became a full COVID-positive intensive care unit, we scoured the data just to see what was out there—those who have experienced it before us, primarily the Chinese and the Italians; it was hard to find exactly, like the rate of what we call successful extubation—meaning, someone was put on a ventilator and taken off. And that data are still hard to find. I imagine there are a lot of people still on ventilators. But from the data we have available, it appears to be somewhere between 50% and 90%. Most published data puts it around 70%. So, that’s a very, very high percentage in general, when one thinks of a medical disease.

Whyte: You’ve been talking on social media; you say you’ve seen things that you’ve never seen before. What are some of those things that you’re seeing?

Kyle-Sidell: When I initially started treating patients, I was under the impression, as most people were, that I was going to be treating acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), similar in substance to AIDS, which I saw as a fellow. And as I start to treat these patients, I witnessed things that are just unusual. And I’m sure doctors around the country are experiencing this. In the past, we haven’t seen patients who are talking in full sentences and not complaining of overt shortness of breath, with saturations in the high 70s. It’s just not something we typically see when we’re intubating some of these patients. That is to say, when we’re putting a breathing tube in, they tend to drop their saturations very quickly; we see saturations going down to 20 to 30. Typically, one would expect some kind of reflexive response from the heart rate, which is to say that usually we see tachycardia, and if patients go too low, then we see bradycardia. These are things that we just weren’t seeing. I’ve seen literally a saturation of zero on a monitor, which is not something we ever want and something we actively try to avoid. And yet we saw it, and many of my colleagues have similarly seen saturations of 10 and 20. We try to put breathing tubes in to avoid this very situation. Now, these patients tend to desaturate extremely quickly, so these situations have occurred. Still, what we’re seeing—that there was no change in the heart rate—is just unusual. It’s just something that we are not used to seeing.

Whyte: This is more like a high-altitude sickness. Is that right?

Kyle-Sidell: Yes. The patients in front of me are unlike any patients I’ve ever seen., and I’ve seen a great many patients and have treated many diseases. You get used to seeing certain patterns, and the patterns I was seeing did not make sense. This originally came to me when we had a patient who had hit what we call our trigger to put in a breathing tube, meaning she had displayed a level of hypoxia of low oxygen levels where we thought she would need a breathing tube. Most of the time, when patients hit that level of hypoxia, they’re in distress and they can barely talk; they can’t say complete sentences. She could do all of those and she did not want a breathing tube. So she asked that we put it in at the last minute possible. It was this perplexing clinical condition: When was I supposed to put the breathing tube in? When was the last minute possible? All the instincts as a physician—like looking to see if she tires out —none of those things occurred. It’s extremely perplexing. But I came to realize that this condition is nothing I’ve ever seen before. And so I started to read to try to figure it out, leaving aside the exact mechanism of how this disease is causing havoc on the body, but instead trying to figure out what the clinical syndrome looked like.

Whyte: You talked a little about the data from Italy.

Kyle-Sidell: Yes.

Whyte: [From Luciano] Gattinoni. Were you aware of what was going on in Italy before you noticed these observations or did that come after the fact?

Kyle-Sidell: That came a little bit after. And I wasn’t aware. I can’t even remember the exact timeline. But in my reading, I came upon decompression, pulmonary sickness, which is essentially the bends—when divers dive and come up too quickly—which seemed to mirror the clinical picture of these patients. And in discussions of other people, it came up that they do appear similar clinically. This is not to say that the pathophysiology underlying it is similar, but clinically they look a lot more like high-altitude sickness than they do pneumonia. Regarding, Gattinoni, he published something on March 20th, which was about 2 days before I opened the ICU. I don’t know that I read it then, but somehow it got passed around. In my mind, by the time I read what he was saying, I’d come under the impression that this just wasn’t what we were used to seeing. It was a high-compliance disease, which every pulmonologist had. Anyone managing a ventilator can see. That’s not a question. So when I read his stuff, where he is suggesting that the management strategy that we use is essentially somewhat flipped, at least in these high-compliant patients, it just became more clear that that if we operate under a paradigm whereby we are treating ARDS in these high-compliant patients, we may not be operating under the right paradigm.

Whyte: Have you changed your protocols, then?

Kyle-Sidell: To be honest, I’ve run into a great deal of resistance within my institution, which is not to say that anyone is trying to stymie the progress at all. These are the protocols that are in every major (and minor) hospital.

Whyte: You talked about in your videos.

Kyle-Sidell: Yeah.

Whyte: Against a long-standing dogma. So what’s been the response from your clinical colleagues as well as hospital administrators?

Kyle-Sidell: I started to try to not my own protocols, but to treat patients as I would have treated my family, with different goals—which is to say, ventilation. However, these didn’t fit the protocol, and the protocol is what the hospital runs on with the respiratory therapist, with the nurses; everyone is part of the team. We ran into an impasse where I could not morally, in a patient-doctor relationship, continue the current protocols which, again, are the protocols of the top hospitals in the country. I could not continue those. You can’t have one doctor just doing their own protocol. So I had to step down from my position in the ICU, and now I’m back in the ER where we are setting up slightly different ventilation strategies. Fortunately, we’ve been boosted by recent work by Gattinoni, which was formally published today and which does outline the best evidence, based on at least expert recommendations, for changes in our overall protocols. [Editor’s note: Dr Kyle-Sidell is referring to an unedited proof, soon to be published formally in Intensive Care Medicine.]

Whyte: Can you tell us what some of those changes are that you’re going to make?

Kyle-Sidell: First, I’ll describe what Gattinoni was saying, which is that really what we’re seeing in ARDS are two different phenotypes: one in which the lungs display what you call high compliance, low elastance; and one in which they have low compliance and high elastance. To say it simply for people who are not pulmonologists, if you think of the lungs as a balloon, typically when people have ARDS or pneumonia, the balloon gets thicker. So not only do you lack oxygen, but the pressure and the work to blow up the balloon becomes greater. So one’s respiratory muscles become tired as they struggle to breathe. And patients need pressure. What Gattinoni is saying is that there are essentially two different phenotypes, one in which the balloon is thicker, which is a low-compliance disease. But in the beginning they display high compliance. Imagine if the balloon is not actually thicker but thinner, so they’d suffer from a lack of oxygen. But it is not that they suffer from too much work to blow up the balloon. As far as how we’re going to switch, we’re going to take our approach differently from the traditional ARDSnet protocol in that we are going to do an oxygen-first strategy: We’re going to leave the oxygen levels as high as possible and we’re going to try to use the lowest pressures possible to try to keep the oxygen levels high. That’s the approach we’re going to do, so long as the patients continue to display the physiology of a low elastance, high-compliance disease.

Whyte: Do you feel that somewhere the world made a wrong turn in treating COVID-19?

Kyle-Sidell: I don’t know that they made a wrong turn. I mean, it came so fast. I think that one thing we benefit from is that the Chinese and the Italians were hit first and they were hit hard. New York is being hit so hard. It’s hard to switch tracks when the train is going a million miles an hour. In that sense, we’d benefit from their shared experience. And I think it’s important that we listen to that experience. But I do think that it starts out with knowing, or at least accepting the idea, that this may be an entirely new disease. Because once you do that, then you can accept the idea that perhaps all the studies on ARDS in the 2000s and 2010s, which were large, randomized, well-performed, well-funded studies, perhaps none of those patients in those studies had COVID-19 or something resembling it. It allows you to move away from a paradigm in which this disease may fit and, unfortunately, walk somewhat into the unknown.

Whyte: You’re advocating something a little different. What are the consequences of you being wrong, albeit well intentioned?

Kyle-Sidell: Right now we have some of the greatest experts in the world giving their opinions. By that, I mean the Italians and Dr Gattinoni. I certainly could be wrong. What I’m asking for is not even not an immediate change in the ventilation strategy, because I’m critical care trained, I’m not pulmonary trained and I’m not as experienced as many around the country and many in my own hospital. But what I would like to see is all of these great minds get together. If they can accept this notion that perhaps we need to switch paradigms, and they’re able to better create a path forward that fits the disease. I would gladly follow them. Really, what I’m asking and what I’m requesting is that all of the experts in the field get together and perhaps come up with some fresh recommendations.

Whyte: You’ve been active on social media, as I mentioned. Are you a whistleblower?

Kyle-Sidell: This is sort of my first foray into social media. I don’t know that I’m a whistleblower. I don’t know that anyone was trying to purposely do any harm. I think that, all of the physicians involved and all of the nurses and everyone writing protocols—everyone is working as fast and as hard as they can with good faith and pure intention. For me, I saw something clinically that didn’t make sense. And seeing that New York is about 10 days ahead of the rest of country, I just felt compelled to get that information out.

Whyte: Has speaking up impacted your professional career?

Kyle-Sidell: I don’t know yet. In one sense, I have not felt qualms about it. For whatever reason, I trained in critical care and I was an ER doctor, and I think part of that allowed me to see it a little bit better. Because if you just received these patients in the ICU on breathing tubes, it’s very hard to see this physiology. I was running around the hospital from the ER to the floors to the ICU, and I saw them in all stages of this disease. When you see them in all those different stages, you’re able to see that something physiologically doesn’t make sense. So, in a way, I do feel that somehow my training and my position, being in New York City, allowed me to see this. I have not felt any conflict about coming forward, per se. And I don’t know what it will do for my career, but I hope that people know that I’m not doing this with any kind of— I’m not trying to stymie anything. It’s really that I’m doing what I think is right.

Whyte: What are the two things that we need to be doing right now to really address the mortality?

Kyle-Sidell: That goes back to your question of “if I am wrong.” We are desperate now in the sense that everything we are doing does not seem to be working. So we’ve reached a point that most other diseases have not reached, where many physicians are willing to try anything that may help because so little seems to be helping. One of the reasons I speak up, and I hope people at the bedside speak up, is that I think there may be a disconnect between those who are seeing these patients directly, who are sensing that something is not quite right, and those brilliant people and researchers and administrators who are writing the protocols and working on finding answers. The first thing to do is see if we can admit that this is something new. I think it all starts from there. I think we have the kind of scientific technology and the human capital in this country to solve this or at least have a very good shot at it. I think the second thing is that whatever collaboration we can do with those who came before us—and by that, I mean the Chinese and the Italians and the Egyptians and whoever else has experienced this—if there’s anything we can learn from them, I think we need to open up and be ready to receive their help.

Whyte: Dr Kyle-Sidell, I want to thank you for speaking up and sharing your story with us.

Kyle-Sidell: Thank you very much. I appreciate you allowing me to speak.

Whyte: I want to thank you for watching “Coronavirus in Context.” I’m Dr John Whyte.

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British bank HSBC has told customers in the UK that it will stop processing standing order payments to the Palestinian aid charity Interpal from next month.

The bank sent out letters earlier this month to account holders who make regular donations in support of the London-based charity, informing them any payments would stop on 17 May. It gave no reason for taking the action.

The move from HSBC will come as a particularly heavy and bitter blow to Interpal because it has been announced during Ramadan, when traditionally Muslims give far more than at any other period of the year.

Muslims donated more than £100m during Ramadan of 2016 alone, according to the UK Charity Commission.

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the board of trustees of Interpal, told Middle East Eye:

“It is disappointing that a major bank would do this during Ramadan, which is so important for donors and our beneficiaries. But also during the coronavirus pandemic. No reason has been given, neither to the donors nor the charity. That is quite astonishing.”

Founded 25 years ago, Interpal is described on the Charity Commission’s website as “one of the leading British charities focusing on providing relief and development aid to Palestinians” in the West Bank, Gaza, and in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan.

Many of the vulnerable people who have benefited from Interpal’s work over the last quarter century seem certain to suffer if donations cannot reach the charity.

Hewitt told MEE:

“The people we help are ordinary people struggling under siege to find the basic necessities for ordinary life.”

He said that Interpal tried to bring “a semblance of normality to an abnormal situation”.

Bank accounts shut down

HSBC, which is one of the world’s largest banks, has a record of closing down accounts, including those of prominent Muslim customers, without explanation, withdrawing banking facilities from a number of organisations and community leaders in 2014 and 2015.

Those affected included the Finsbury Park Mosque in London and Anas Altikriti, founder and CEO of the Cordoba Foundation, a think tank which says that it devotes itself to building bridges between Islam and the west.

At the time, HSBC said that the account closures had taken place in the context of a global review of its businesses conducted after it agreed to pay a $1.9bn fine to US authorities for allowing Latin American drugs cartels to use its banks to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.

It denied that the closures were based on race or religion.

Last night the bank confirmed to MEE that it will be stopping any standing order payments to Interpal.

An HSBC UK spokesperson said: “As part of a global bank, sometimes we may decide to prevent certain transactions, even if they are allowed under local laws. We recognise that some people may be disappointed with this decision, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.”

MEE asked HSBC what reasons it had for taking this action and whether Interpal had made any specific action that brought on this decision.

MEE also asked why this decision was being announced around the time of Ramadan.

These questions were met with no response.

Interpal targeted by pro-Israel lobbyists

This is the first time that HSBC is thought to have taken action against Interpal.

However, as MEE reported last year, the charity has had other banking or donation processing facilities withdrawn.

At that time, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a pro-Israel lobbying group, claimed a role in the withdrawal of Interpal’s BT MyDonate and JustGiving services, and the withdrawal of credit card services.

UKLFI’s actions against Interpal were based on the US Treasury designation of Interpal as a terrorist organisation in 2003.

This followed charges that the group supported Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement designated by the EU and US as a terrorist group.

While Canada and Australia follow the US terrorist designation of Interpal, many other countries and international organisations – including Britain and the United Nations – do not.

Interpal helps fund the UN Relief and Works Agency, which offers support to Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East.

Investigations and libel cases

The UK Charity Commission investigated Interpal in the wake of the US designation and on two other occasions. Each time, it cleared the group of all allegations of illegal activity.

The third investigation insisted Interpal review their due diligence and monitoring processes as well as break off all ties with a group which the Charity Commission was concerned had links to Hamas.

The Charity Commission later confirmed that Interpal had complied.

Interpal has also won a series of libel cases. The first came against the Board of Deputies of British Jews in 2005 after it denounced Interpal as a terrorist organisation on its website.

The Jerusalem Post apologised to Interpal in 2006, while the Express newspaper paid damages to the charity in 2010 after claiming it was linked to Hamas.

Last year, the Daily Mail paid damages of £120,000 to Interpal and issued an apology which stated: “The Trustees assure us, and we accept, that neither Interpal, nor its Trustees, have ever been involved in or provided support for terrorist activity of any kind. We apologise to the Trustees for any distress caused.”

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Summary

After being attacked by monetarists and others for many decades, MMT and the idea that running government budget deficit is stabilizing instead of destabilizing are suddenly gaining applause from the parts of the political spectrum that long opposed MMT: the banking and financial sector, especially the Republicans. But what is applauded is in many ways something quite different than the leading MMT advocates have long supported.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was developed to explain the logic of running government budget deficits to increase demand in the economy’s consumption and capital investment sectors so as to maintain full employment. But the enormous U.S. federal budget deficits from the Obama bank bailout after the 2008 crash through the Trump tax cuts and Coronavirus financial bailout have not pumped money into the economy to finance new direct investment, employment, rising wages and living standards. Instead, government money creation and Quantitative Easing have been directed to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors. The result is a travesty of MMT, not its original aim.

By subsidizing the financial sector and its debt overhead, this policy is deflationary instead of supporting the “real” economy. The effect has been to empower the banking sector, whose product is credit and debt creation that has taken an unproductive and indeed extractive form.

This can clearly be seen by dividing the private sector into two parts: The “real” economy of production and consumption is wrapped in a financial web of debt and rent extraction – real estate rent, monopoly rent and financial debt creation. Recognizing this breakdown is essential to distinguish between positive government deficit spending that helps maintain employment and rising living standards, as compared to “captured” government spending to subsidize the FIRE sector’s extraction and debt deflation leading to chronic austerity.

Origins and Policy Aims of MMT

MMT was developed to explain the monetary logic in running budget deficits to support aggregate demand. This logic was popularized in the 1930s by Keynes, based on his idea of a circular flow between employers and wage-earners. Deficit spending was seen as providing public employment and hence consumer spending to absorb enough production to enable the economy to keep producing at a profit. The policy goal was to maintain (or recover) reasonably full employment.

But production and consumption are not the entire economy. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was formally developed in the 1990s, with roots that can be traced by Abba Lerner’s theory of functional finance, and by Hyman Minsky and others seeking to integrate the financial sector into the overall economic system in a more realistic and functional way than the Chicago School’s monetarist approach on the right wing of the political spectrum. A key point in its revival was Warren Mosler’s insight that a currency-issuing country does not “tax to spend”, but instead must spend before its citizens can pay tax in that currency.

MMT was also Post-Keynesian in the sense of advocating government budget deficits as a means of pumping purchasing power into the economy to achieve full-employment. Elaboration of this approach showed how such deficits created stability instead of the instability that results from private-sector debt dynamics. At an extreme, this approach held that recessions could be cured simply by deficit spending. Yet despite the enormous deficit spending by the U.S. and Eurozone in the wake of the 2008 crash, the overall economy continued to stagnate; only the financial and real estate markets boomed.

At issue was the role of government in the economy. The major opponents of public enterprise and infrastructure, of budget deficits and market regulation, was the financial sector. “Austrian” and Chicago-style monetary theorists strongly opposed MMT, asserting that government budget deficits would be inflationary, citing Germany’s Weimar inflation of the 1920s, and Zimbabwe, and portraying government deficits (and indeed, active government programs and regulation) as “interference” with “free markets.”

MMTers pointed out that running a budget surplus, or even a balanced budget, absorbed income from the economy, thereby shrinking demand for goods and services and leading to unemployment. Without government deficits, the economy would be obliged to rely on private-sector banks for the credit needed to grow.

That occurred in the United States in the final years of the Clinton administration when it actually ran a budget surplus. But with a public sector surplus, there had to be a corresponding and indeed identical private sector deficit. So the effect of that policy was to leave either private debt financing or a trade surplus as the only ways in which economic growth could obtain the monetary support that was needed. This built in structural claims for interest and amortization that were deflationary, ultimately leading to the political imposition of debt deflation and economic austerity after the 2008 debt crisis.

Republican and Financial Sector Opposition to Budget Deficits and MMT

If governments do not provide enough purchasing power by running budget deficits to enable the economy to grow, the role of providing money and credit will have to be relinquished to banks – at interest, and for purposes that the banks decide on (mainly, loans to buy real estate, stocks and bonds). In this respect banks are competitors with government over who will provide the economy’s money and credit – and for what purposes.

Banks want the government out of the way – not only regarding money creation, but also for financial and price policies, tax policy and laws governing corporate behavior. Finance wants to appropriate public monopolies, by taking payment in natural resources or basic public infrastructure when governments are, by policy rather than necessity, short of their own money, or of foreign exchange. (In times past, this required warfare; today foreign debt is the main lever.)

To get into this position, banks need to block governments from creating their own money. The result is a conflict between private bank credit and public money creation. Public money is created for social purposes, primarily to maintain production and consumption growth. But bank credit nowadays is created largely to finance the transfer of property and financial assets – real estate, stocks and bonds.

Opposing the Logic for running Budget Deficits

The Reagan-Bush administration (1981-82) ran budget deficits not to pay for social spending, but as a result of tax cuts, above all for real estate.[1]  The resulting budget deficit led to proposed “cures” in the form of fiscal cutbacks in social spending, starting with Social Security, Medicare and education. This aim became explicit by the Clinton Administration (1993-2000), and President Obama convened the Simpson-Bowles “National Commission on Budget Responsibility and Reform” in 2010. Its name reflects its recommendation that “responsibility” meant a balanced budget, which in turn required that social spending programs be rolled back.

Opponents of public spending programs saw the rise in government debt resulting from budget deficits as providing a political leverage to enact fiscal cutbacks in spending. Many Republicans and “centrist” Democrats had long sought a reason to scale back Social Security. Austrian and Chicago-School monetarists urged that government shrink its activity, privatizing as many of its functions as possible to let “the market” allocate resources – a largely debt-financed market whose resource and monetary allocation would shift away from governments to financial centers – from Washington to Wall Street, and in other countries to the City of London, the Paris Bourse and Frankfurt. However, no such critique was levied against military spending, and the government responded to the 2000 dot.com and 2008 junk-mortgage financial crises by enormous monetary subsidy and bailouts of the economy’s credit and asset sector.

The Obama and Trump Financial Bailouts as a Travesty of MMT

To advocates of MMT, and indeed to most post-Keynesian economists, the positive function of budget deficits is to spend money and therefore income into the economy. And by “the economy” is meant the production-and-consumption sector, not the financial and property markets. That “real” economy could have been saved in a number of ways. One way would have been to scale back mortgage debts (and debt service) to realistic market prices and rent rates. Another would have been simply to create monetary grants and subsidies to enable debtors to remain in their homes. That would have kept the financial system solvent as well as employment and existing home ownership rates.

But Obama double-crossed his voters by not rolling out bad mortgage debts and other obligations to realistic market prices, and instead bailing out the banks for credit creation in the form of bad loans (“liars’ loans” to NINJA borrowers, and bad financial bets on derivatives by brokerage firms that were designated as “banks” in order to receive Federal Reserve credit and bailouts. With bank balance sheets impairing their ability to create new credit, the government stepped in by creating its own credit. This gave the banks, shadow banks and other non-bank financial institutions a bonanza of credit – replete with the opportunity to buy up foreclosed homes and create rental properties This policy was organized by Blackstone, and turned the crisis into an opportunity to make enormous rates of return for its participants. The effect was to intensify the economy’s polarization, as investors typically needed a minimum $5 million tranche to join.

The Federal Reserve’s $4.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing did not show up as money creation, because it was technically a swap of assets – like Aladdin’s “new lamps for old, in this case “good credit for junk.” The effect of this swap was much like a deposit inflow. It enabled banks to ride out the downturn while making a killing in the stock and bond markets, and to lend for takeover loans and related financial speculation.

Wall Street’s Financial Capture of MMT To Inflate Asset Prices, Not Revive the Economy

At issue is how to measure “the economy.” For the wealthy One Percent, and even the Ten Percent, “the economy” is “the market,” specifically the market value of the assets that they own: their real estate, stocks and bonds. This property and financial wrapping for the “real” production-and-consumption economy has steadily risen in proportion to wages and industrial profits. It has risen largely by government money and credit creation (and tax breaks for property and finance), along with its economic rent, interest and financial charges and service fees, which are counted as part of Gross Domestic Product [GDP], as if they were actual contributions to the “real” economy.

So we are dealing with two economic spheres: the means of production, tangible capital and labor on the one hand (what is supposed to be measured by GDP), and the market for financial and property assets, along with their rentier charges that are taken from the income earned by this labor and real capital.

Financial engineering replaces industrial engineering – along with political engineering by lobbyists seeking tax breaks, rent-extraction privileges, and government subsidy. To increase property and financial asset prices and corporate behavior, companies are drawing on credit and government subsidy not to increase their production and employment, but to bid up their stock prices by share buyback programs and high dividend payouts. Buybacks are called “repaying capital,” so literally this policy is one of disinvestment, not investment. It is favored by tax laws (taxing “capital” gains at a lower rate or not at all, as compared to taxes on dividends).

The Blind Spot of Vulgarized MMT: The FIRE Sector vs. the “Real” Economy

Much superficial confusion between the FIRE sector and the production-and-consumption economy comes from repeating the over-simplification of classical monetary formula MV=PT, namely, dividing the economy into private and government sectors. Setting aside the balance of payments (the international sector), it follows that government spending will pump money into the domestic economy, and that conversely, budget surpluses will suck money out.

The problem is that this analysis, used by many MMTers, for instance, the Levy Institute’s typical chart, does not distinguish between government spending into the FIRE sector and asset markets as compared to spending into the “real” economy on employment and production (including the building of public infrastructure, for instance). Without this distinction it is not possible to see whether deficit spending is productive by aiming at supporting employment and output, or merely aims at supporting asset prices and making sure that creditors do not lose the value of their financial claims on debtors – claims that have become unpayable and thus are a bottomless pit of government deficit spending in the end.

Trying to keep the financial sector and its debt overhead afloat implies imposing austerity on the rest of the economy, IMF-style. So “MMT for Wall Street” is an oxymoron, and is the opposite of MMT for a full employment economy.

MMT, Public and Private Debt

Money is debt. Government money creation for public purposes – to pay for employment and output – spurs prosperity. But in its present form, private-sector debt creation has become largely extractive, and thus leads to the opposite effect: debt deflation.

Governments can pay public debt without defaulting, as long as this debt is denominated in their own domestic currency, because the governments can always print the money to pay. To the extent that public debt results from spending that supports output, employment and growth, this process is not inflationary. The government gives value to money by accepting it in payment of taxes. So the monetary system is inherently bound up with fiscal policy. The classical premise of such policy has been to minimize the economy’s cost structure by taxing mainly unearned income (economic rents), not wages and profits in the production-and-consumption sector.

The problem nowadays is private debt. Most such debt is created by banks. This bank credit – debts owed by bank customers – tends to increase faster than the ability of debtors to earn enough income to pay it. The reason is that most of private debt is not used for productive, income-generating purposes, but to finance the transfer property ownership (affecting asset prices in proportion to the rate of credit growth for such purposes). That use of credit – not associated with the production-and-consumption economy – leads to debt deflation. Instead of providing the economy with purchasing power (as in running government budget deficits), private debt works over time to extract interest and amortization from the economy, along with servicing fees.

The typical mortgage, including its interest charges ends up exceeding the value that the property seller received. As a result of compound interest, the mortgage debt is repaid several times to the bank. The effect is to make banks the main recipient of rental income (as mortgage debt service) and ultimately the main beneficiaries of “capital” gains (that is, asset-price gains).

What gives bank credit its monetary characteristics – and enables debt to be monetized as a means of payment – is the government’s willingness to treat banks as a public utility and guarantee bank deposits (up to a specified limit) and ultimately to guarantee bank solvency.

A budget deficit resulting from a financial bailout reflects the inability of the economy to carry its exponentially growing debt overhead. Because this overhead increases as a result of the mathematics of compound interest, the size of bailouts must increase – and with it, the budget deficit (plus swap agreements) to subsidize this debt overgrowth as an alternative to imposing losses by banks and financial investors.

That is what we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008, both in Europe and the United States. Led by the financial sector, much of the economic mainstream finally has come to embrace the idea of budget deficits – now that these deficits are benefiting primarily the financial and other parts of the FIRE sector, not the population at large, that is, not the “real” economy that was the focus of Keynesian economics and MMT.

This kind of endorsement for government money creation thus should not be considered an application of MMT, because its policy goal is almost diametrically opposite. Much as the Reagan-era budget deficits were used as the first part of a one-two punch to roll back social spending (Social Security, Medicare, education, etc.), so today’s Obama-Trump deficits are being used to warn that the economy must preserve fiscal “stability” by rolling back social programs in order to bail out the financial economy. Wall Street magically has become transmogrified into “the economy.” Labor and industry are viewed simply as deadweight expenditures on the financial sector and its attempted symbiosis with the central bank and Treasury.

The Financial Sector, Private Capital and Austerity and Central Planning

If Wall Street is bailed out once again at the expense of the “real” economy of production and consumption, America will have turned decisively away from democracy into a financial oligarchy. Ironically, the initial logic is the claim that an active state is inherently less efficient than the private sector, and thus should be shrunk (in the words of lobbyist Grover Norquist, “to a size so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub”). But relinquishing resource allocation to the financial sector leads to its product – that is, debt – creating a crisis that requires unprecedented government intervention to “restore order,” defined as saving banks and financial investors from loss. This can only be achieved by shifting the loss onto the economy at large.

Today, the financial sector – banks and financial investors – play the role that the landlord did in the 19^thcentury. Its land rents made Britain and continental Europe high-cost economies, as prices exceeded cost-value. That is what classical economics was all about – to bring market prices in lines with actual, socially and economically necessary costs of production. Economic rent was defined as unnecessary costs, which were merely payments for privilege: hereditary landownership, and monopolies that creditors had carved out of the public domain or won as legal compensation for financing public war debts.

The rentierclass not only was the major income recipient of the economic surplus, it controlled government, via the upper house – the House of Lords in Britain, and similar houses across continental Europe. Today, the Donor Class controls electoral politics in the United States, via the Citizens United ruling. Political office has become privatized, and sold to the highest bidders. And these are from the financial sector – from Wall Street and financialized corporations.

The post-2008 stock market and bond-market boom raised the DJIA from 8500 to 30,000. This gain was engineered by central bank support far in excess of what a “free market” would have priced stock at. Before QE, U.S. shares had fallen only slightly below the market average for the previous century. QE drove it to its highest level outside the 1929 and 2000 bubbles. Even after the Coronacrash, shares are still overpriced compared to pre-“Greenspan Put” prices.

The result is best thought of as a blister, not a bubble. Its only hope of surviving without bursting is for the government to continue to support it in the face of a drastically shrinking post-coronavirus economy.

So the question is what will be saved: The economy’s means of livelihood, or an oligarchy of predators living in luxury off this shrinking livelihood?

All this was explained by classical economists in their labor theory of value, which was designed to isolate economic rent and other non-production overhead charges (perceived to be mainly services in the 18^th and 19^th century, especially by the wealthy classes).

The Hudson Paradox: Money, Prices and the Rentier Economy

Without distinguishing between the FIRE sector and the “real” economy there is no way to explain the effects of government budget deficits on asset-price inflation and commodity-price inflation

Here is a seeming paradox. Bank credit is created mainly against collateral being bought on credit – primarily real estate, stocks and bonds. The effect of increasing loans against these assets is to raise their prices – mainly for housing, and secondarily for financial securities. Higher housing costs require new home buyers to take on more and more debt in order to buy a home. Their higher debt service leaves less disposable income to spend on goods and services.[2]

The asset-price inflation effect of money creation by banks is thus to exert a downward impact on commodity prices, to the extent that the carrying cost on bank credit reduces the net purchasing power of debtors to buy goods and services. This deflationary effect of bank money ends in a bad-debt crash, to which the government responds by bailing out the financial sector with a combination of money creation and central bank swaps (which do not appear as money creation). This is just the reverse of the MV = PT tautology, which only measures the volume of new money (M) without considering its use– what it is spent on. By failing to distinguish the use of bank credit to buy assets (hence, adding to asset-price inflation) as compared to government deficit spending, both the old monetary formulae and the frequent MMT contrast between public and private sectors neglect the need to distinguish the FIRE sector’s “wealth and debt” transactions from how wages and profits are spent in the production-and-consumption economy.

The commercial banking system’s “endogenous” money creation takes the form of credit at interest. The volume of this interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, absorbing and extracting more and more income from industry and labor. The effect on the overall economy is debt deflation.

It may be epitomized as

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day;

Teach him how to fish, and you lose a customer.

But give him a loan to buy a boat and net to fish, and he will end up paying you all the fishes he catches. You have a debt servant.

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Michael Hudson is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year

Dirk Bezemer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands..

Steve Keen is a Professor and  Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security of University College London (www.isrs.org.uk). He blogs at www.patreon.com/profstevekeen

Sabri Öncü ([email protected]) is an economist based in İstanbul, Turkey

Notes

[1] Real estate was given a fictitiously short accelerated depreciation allowance – as if a building lost its entire value in just 7½ years, providing all rental income to be charged as an expense and even to generate a fictitious tax-accounting tax loss. This catalyzed the great conversion of rental properties to co-ops. Landlords (called “developers”) took out a mortgage equal to the entire market price of the building, and then sold apartments at a price not only greater than zero, but typically equal to the entire mortgage. It was one of the great “wealth creation” ploys in modern history. And it was left out of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), which used “realistic” depreciation – which still pretended that buildings were losing value, despite the maintenance and repair expenditures to prevent such loss.

[2] Higher stock and bond prices lower the yield of dividend income. (Most such income is spent on new financial assets, not goods and services, so the effect of lower yields probably is minimal, and may be offset by a “wealth effect” of higher asset prices and net worth.)

Last month Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey called for the bold and urgent launch of what he called “a Manhattan Project-type approach” to fight the coronavirus pandemic given the enormity of the health and economic impact, increasingly even harming US defense readiness.

Apparently there has been such a group operating behind the scenes, but very unlike the original Manhattan Project it’s a private sector initiative, funded by a tiny network of ultra-rich industry titans working closely with government contacts. Meet “the secret group of scientists and billionaires pushing Trump on a Covid-19 plan” profiled in a lengthy Wall Street Journal investigation Monday:

These scientists and their backers describe their work as a lockdown-era Manhattan Project, a nod to the World War II group of scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb. This time around, the scientists are marshaling brains and money to distill unorthodox ideas gleaned from around the globe.

They call themselves Scientists to Stop Covid-19, and they include chemical biologists, an immunobiologist, a neurobiologist, a chronobiologist, an oncologist, a gastroenterologist, an epidemiologist and a nuclear scientist. Of the scientists at the center of the project, biologist Michael Rosbash, a 2017 Nobel Prize winner, said, “There’s no question that I’m the least qualified.”

The until now secretive group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, and is described as an elite go-between the pharmaceutical industry and Trump administration decision-makers, or an “ad hoc review board” of sorts pursuing cutting edge outside the box ideas.

The scientists include a dozen world renowned researchers, pathology experts and inventors closely networked at institutions ranging from The Scripps Research Lab in La Jolla, California, to Yale University School of Medicine to Harvard to MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy to private companies and labs like Merck and others.

Recommendations and ideas floated by Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have already reportedly had far-reaching influence, including affecting policy inside FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the group is reportedly advising close Pence aide Nick Ayers.

Among other billionaire influencers and backers to the private initiative include Peter Thiel, Jim Palotta, Michael Milken, Brian Sheth, and Steve Pagliuca, among others.

I was reading this thinking: There’s no way Peter Thiel isn’t involved in this and then . . . yup. https://t.co/anj1BJCBUz

— Elliot Kaufman (@ElliotSKaufman) April 27, 2020

The until now secretive group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, and is described as an elite go-between the pharmaceutical industry and Trump administration decision-makers, or an “ad hoc review board” of sorts pursuing cutting edge outside the box ideas.

The scientists include a dozen world renowned researchers, pathology experts and inventors closely networked at institutions ranging from The Scripps Research Lab in La Jolla, California, to Yale University School of Medicine to Harvard to MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy to private companies and labs like Merck and others.

Recommendations and ideas floated by Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have already reportedly had far-reaching influence, including affecting policy inside FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the group is reportedly advising close Pence aide Nick Ayers.

Among other billionaire influencers and backers to the private initiative include Peter Thiel, Jim Palotta, Michael Milken, Brian Sheth, and Steve Pagliuca, among others.

I was reading this thinking: There’s no way Peter Thiel isn’t involved in this and then . . . yup. https://t.co/anj1BJCBUz

— Elliot Kaufman (@ElliotSKaufman) April 27, 2020

As an example of how the group was previously able to get a confidential 17-page report (since published by the WSJ) recommending various introductory unorthodox approaches to fighting and treating the pandemic, the WSJ details :

“Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and the co-chairman of Bain Capital — as well as one of Dr. Cahill’s investors — helped copy edit drafts of their report, and he passed a version to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive David Solomon. Mr. Solomon got it to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.”

“Much of the early work involved divvying up hundreds of scientific papers on the crisis from around the world,” the report describes of the team’s daily communications.

“They separated promising ideas from dubious ones. Each member blazed through as many as 20 papers a day, around 10 times the pace they would in their day jobs. They gathered to debate via videoconference, text messages — ‘like a bunch of teenagers,’ Mr. Rosbash said — and phone calls.”

Among the ‘big ideas’ described by the network of researchers led by scientist-investor Dr. Cahill, who first gained the attention of aides within the Trump administration when they listened on an early March conference call tailored toward answering investors’ questions, include the following:

• Experimenting with treatments utilizing powerful anti-Ebola drugs in heavier dosages.
• The possibility of renaming the virus “SARS-2,” after the 2003 China animal virus, so that the connection is better made in the public mind with a deadly disease: “the name sounded scarier and might get more people to wear face masks. They dropped it.”
• The group considers Hydroxychloroquine, long a focus of interest and debate in Trump administration circles, to be “a long shot at best”.
• The team has looked negatively on recent efforts to push antibody testing and ‘immunity passports’ that show recovery from the virus.
• They’ve sought to reduce FDA hurdles and red tape in order to get potential successful drugs out faster, especially to streamline hoped-for ‘miracle’ cures.
• The WSJ emphasizes further: “The scientists had in their research identified monoclonal antibody drugs that latch onto virus cells as the most promising treatment.”
• A saliva test which is easy to administer with ultra-fast results is being pursued, one that offices and companies could utilize to make sure employees come into work virus-free each day.
• Tech like smartphone apps to help track and gauge symptoms is a major focus.
• The scientists are also helping to craft state and national reopening strategies for the near and long-term.

Read a copy of the 17-page report drafted by the Scientists to Stop COVID-19 here.

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Featured image: Brian Sheth, co-founder of Vista Equity Partners (Photo via Bloomberg/WSJ)

For all the uncertainties the COVID-19 pandemic poses to the world, especially in the US, one thing seems evident.  Our neoliberal capitalist civilization has proven itself to be unprepared for unexpected crises and catastrophes. For decades, the US has been falling behind other developed nations to infuse economic resiliency in society. Not only has the American medical system and federal health agencies been shown to be naked, we are also discovering we cannot rely on epistemological statistics and computer modeling alone to account for our flawed health policies.

Aside from the pandemic’s toll on people’s lives, there is also its impact upon the national economies and the global economy at large that is barely being discussed in any depth. Rather, hopes and wishes are being directed towards life returning to normal. We are expected to believe that our addiction to unconscionable consumerism will return, employment will rise and the American dream can again be mentally photo-shopped on the horizon. In short, we are persuaded that the comfort of our illusions and denial of harsh realities will return.  However, if a past Nobel laureate of economics, Joseph Stiglitz, is correct, then “if you leave it to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell we will have a Great Depression.” Likewise, former Federal Reserve chair Jenet Yellen has also warned that the 30% GDP decline is leading us towards Depression. In fact, we may already be there.

As of today, the federal government has guaranteed $5.2 trillion dollars to keep the economy afloat as a depression worse than 1932 looms overhead. Some economists believe that this massive bailout is insufficient and upwards to $10-15 trillion may be necessary.  In 2008, with one broad stroke the Obama administration rescued Wall Street.  What was believed to be just the TARP bailout of $700 billion was in fact over $4 trillion worth of outlays, including TARP and other FED and Treasury expenditures.  The Levy Institute at Bard College calculated the outlays may have been as high as $29 trillion, a number the Sanders’ campaign had quoted.

Obama’s bailout was to assist the incompetency and corruption of Wall Street and the financial industry. Today it is a submicroscopic organism, approximately 120 nanometers (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter or about 20 oxygen atoms lined up), that threatens the financial well being of most Americans.

However before the COVID-19 reached our shores, the US was already in a horrible debt crisis.

Fiscal conservatives are angered that the US National Debt has reached $24.5 trillion while at the same time adamantly ignoring that the US Total Debt now hovers above $77 trillion. Neither party shows concern about Americans’ increasing personal debt (mortgage, credit card, auto, student loans, etc), nor the rise in corporate, state and city debts.

When we take into consideration $144.6 trillion in US Unfunded Liabilities, $20.4 trillion in Social Security Liability, and $31.6 trillion in Medicare liability, the nation lingers on the precipice a total collapse.

Before the pandemic, Trump boasted an unemployment level as low as 3.6 percent. But in the US, there are different ways to calculate unemployment figures. There is the official figure (U-3) that Wall Street and presidential administrations rely upon and then a more realistic statistic or U-6 that includes those underemployed and those only marginally attached to the work force.

Before the pandemic the “real” or U-6 employment was 6.9 percent.  Finally there is the shadow statistic, which adds the millions of Americans who have dropped out of the work force because their benefits ceased or because they are homeless or unaccounted for by the Labor Bureau.  When those adjustments are made, the shadow unemployment is likely around 23 percent.

Now, unemployment is skyrocketing.  The most recent estimate is that over 26 million people lost work during the past month and, according to Fortune magazine, the official unemployment rate may be as high 18 percent. 

Consequently a more accurate unemployment figure would be approximately 32 percent or almost a third of population. This is far worse than at the height of the Great Depression when unemployment stood at 25 percent.

The dark side of American jobs has been decades of large layoffs, workers being replaced by automation, downsizing, corporate consolidation due to equity partnerships, mergers and off shoring of manufacturing. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign professionals have received work visas and are eager to take the place of middle seniority positions in firms for lower salaries and without full benefits.  The system is so corrupt that the millions of people who work full time for less than a living wage are completely ignored. Hence most Americans are deep in debt and frequently live paycheck to paycheck. The fact of the matter is that there is no security whatsoever for millions of people who may not find work for a very long time.

Even if the lockdown were to end tomorrow, the lights would not immediately switch back on.

Throughout the financial news, we are reading headlines of companies eyeing bankruptcy as credit ratings are being rapidly downgraded.  Retail stores are being especially hit badly. According to Global Data Retail, over 190,000 retail stores have closed, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the nation’s retail square footage. Forbes has listed Dillards, JC Penny, Kohl’s, Levi Strauss, Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Signet to likely go under.  Others include Pier 1 Imports, Rite Aid, J Crew that is loaded up with private equity debt, Fairway supermarkets, and niche organic grocer Lucky’s. Macy’s capital alone dropped from $6 billion to $1.5 billion since February. This trend had already been rising since Trump came to office with large chain companies increasingly closing outlets including Walgreens, Gap, GNC, H&M and Victoria’s Secret. For sure, when and if the pandemic ends, there will be far less retail stores. The New York Times predicts very few are likely to survive. And we are not even looking at the hundreds of their vendors that are also being affected.

With 60 percent of Americans eating regularly outside the home, the restaurant industry is also being hit fiercely. Restaurants employ more minority managers than any other industry — approximately 60% — and employs almost 16 million people. Between 2010 and 2018, it represented the largest number of low middle class jobs ($45,000 to $75,000), 300 percent more than the overall economy. Now a restaurant apocalypse is underway, with an estimated 20 percent of restaurant operations going under. Larger chains are far better equipped. They are simply closing down dining room facilities and only offering carryout, pickup, delivery or drive-thru. Smaller independent restaurants are at the greatest risk.

Then there are the farms, the concentrated agriculture feeding organizations (CAFOs) and food chain suppliers. In the past it was very rare to enter a large grocery store and find empty shelves. Now it is a common sight because the food supply chain has been upended.

Pork and other meat suppliers such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson and Cargill are forced to close plants. Due to Trump’s draconian position on immigration of foreign workers, farm produce will not be harvested.

Niv Ellis at The Hill reports that “some $5 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables have already gone to waste.”  The pandemic, therefore, is contributing to rising food insecurity throughout the nation. Before the pandemic, Ellis notes, 37 million Americans were already food insecure.  The additional 26 million unemployed will increase that number, and it is sure to continue to climb. Finally, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization expects that the frantic efforts underway by countries to import basic staple foods may launch global food inflation.

We are also facing “the quickest and deepest oil demand crash in history,” says Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute. Oil prices plunged to an inconceivable negative minus $37 a barrel last week as global fossil fuel demand dropped roughly 30 percent. “The entire petroleum industry,” writes Heinberg, “is teetering.”  Natural gas producers relying on hydrofracking shale, which had already been burdened with high debt from private equity, are scrambling for bankruptcy protection. According to Reuters, “numerous midstream companies [in the energy sector] backed by private equity are in danger of bankruptcy.” With the collapse of hydrofracking companies, the pipeline firms have also entered troubled waters. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City predicts that 40 percent of energy producers may be insolvent “if oil prices remain around $30 a barrel” for the year. Then consider the larger picture of the impact this has on the 6.4 million people working in the energy sector.

Also we might consider the future of 15 million Americans who work in the tourism industry, including hotels, entertainment, parks, museums, etc. It is estimated that 96 percent of global tourism has vanished in the blink of an eye.

State and local city governments are also “staring at budget shortfalls that will substantially exceed what they faced during the great recession.” States are reporting significant gaps in their capacity to remain fiscally afloat. The Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell seems determined to withhold $150 billion of emergency funds to the states in the CARES Act before Congress — less than half of the $300 billion to $1 trillion state legislators are demanding. Consequently, states are staring into a deep abyss.

Americans who will either return to a job or seek work when the pandemic slows will be further imprisoned by an economy buried in greater debt.

• Downsizing will accelerate along with borrowed money to continue operations while the White House refuses to pass a rent holiday, forgive student loans and other debts, cease payday loans, reduce interest rates on credit nor provide free healthcare for those infected with COVID-19;
• The average person without a steady paycheck is living off savings and credit cards. Therefore, when the economy reopens, large numbers of people will be unable to return to the marketplace to circulate dollars;
• As corporate debt mounts, the most insidious truth are the vultures of capitalism who will profit. These are the great white sharks in the finance industry that smell blood. For the trillions of dollars Trump is dishing out to the 1 percent, these are the first to get the lion’s share of the quarry.

Nobody in the mainstream media has properly criticized the huge monetary allocations being made for the pandemic. The FED is buying corporate debt in order for companies to off load their mistakes and receive fresh, new money. But the average small business receives the left over pennies.  The virus is teaching us the harsh reality about Washington pervasive culture of corruption. On this account both parties have no empathic regard for average citizens and small business owners.  Even the money from Trump’s and Mnuchin’s stimulus package given to citizens can be confiscated by debt collectors.

Imagine if you are an average citizen, not an insider, at the conference table with executives from Facebook, Google, the major banks and mega-corporate industries. You have no income or savings and no health insurance. If you are hungry, where do you get money for food? Where do you get money if you are sick or gas for your car? The unintended consequences of Trump’s and the Congress’ irresponsible and inhumane policies are literally bankrupting the nation.

By extension the millennial and iGen generations are the victimized recipients of this debt bequeathed to them by older generations. They are further compromised with the inability to secure jobs equal to their educational level nor secure a satisfying living wage. They are burdened with high interest student loans. They also are far more aware of the impact climate change will have on their futurs. Therefore, millions of young adults are rapidly losing faith in America’s neoliberal capitalist system and our self-centered culture of predation.

Similar to waking up the day following September 11, 2001, we will be emerging into a new world after the COVID19 pandemic subsides. It is now being called the “shut-in economy.” The pandemic is not solely a health crisis; it is equally an existential crisis, an impasse in the global civilization that is forcing us to realize that our over dependence and perverse reliance upon natural resources, such as fuel, energy, food and corrupt banking and healthcare services, is fragile. We are learning that at every level there are numerous cracks in our structures of governance and our economic and social bases.  Yet the virus did not break the nation; it has been broken for a long time. Only now more people are waking up from their dream. Furthermore, few people, including the mainstream media, now believe there will ever be a return to the normalcy of life that ended after Wuhan had its first patient infected with the virus. It is time for every individual to reassess her or his priorities. A life full of well-being is more possible today if we realize the virus has also been our teacher. But it is living a life that is founded upon simplicity, insight and wisdom, and community rather than consumption and competitive power.

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Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null co-direct Progressive Radio Network. They are frequent contributor to Global Research.

The US’ plan to leverage economic aid to Greenland for strategic ends is exactly the same thing that it accuses China of doing in Africa, suggesting that its infowar against Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative is driven more by jealousy than anything else since Washington is now emulating its rival’s strategically effective policy.

“Mr Assange will be facing a David and Goliath battle with his hands tied behind his back.” – Edward Fitzgerald QC, lawyer for Julian Assange, April 27, 2020

Julian Assange must have had time amidst cramped and hostile surrounds, paper work, pleas and applications, to ponder what circle of Dante’s Hell he finds himself in.  Ailing but still battling, the WikiLeaks publisher, through his lawyers, made another vicarious appearance at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday to delay the next stage of extradition proceedings slated for May 18.  He would have appeared via video link, but medical advice suggested it would be unsafe for him to do so at Belmarsh prison. 

Assange, one of the most conspicuously wanted individuals by US authorities for fancifully broad claims of espionage and computer intrusion, had a range of eminently sensible reasons for seeking the delay.  The defence continued in relentless fashion, making arguments they have done throughout.  The feeling for the observer is that, at some point, the District Judge Vanessa Baraitser might bite, or at least shift ever so slightly. 

Assange’s legal team, spearheaded by Edward Fitzgerald QC, noted that adequate case preparations were, in the current circumstances, impossible.  There had been the briefest of phone calls with their client; the defence team had been unable to speak to Assange for over a month.  The case, claimed Fitzgerald, had gone “from difficult to impossible”.  There were “no person-to-person meetings.  The alternative of video conferences is medically dangerous.”  A meeting that was due to take place last week in the holding cells of Woolwich Crown Court never transpired, as prison authorities refused to permit it.

According to the written submission, “It is not possible to take Mr Assange’s instructions in order to respond to the recently served declarations of Mr Kromberg, the US Attorney representing the case for the US.”  Those representing the publisher were “unable to fulfil their professional obligations to him in the circumstances and he is deprived of equality of arms with the prosecution”.

The second ground followed from the first: no full extradition could take place in May that would enable Assange to “participate effectively in the hearing”.  Abiding by principles of open justice would also be improbable given the ongoing pandemic restrictions that would prevent the press and public “to attend and follow proceedings”.  The fourth ground focused on Assange’s own vulnerable constitution, already ravaged by stress and pressure occasioned by his confinement at HMP Belmarsh.  The sum of this was that “he could not fairly be expected to participate in a full evidentiary hearing in May.”

The ever unsympathetic Baraitser, usually unmoved by any defence application that might suggest favour to Assange, accepted the argument that the May 18 date be vacated, and an administrative hearing scheduled for May 4, enabling lawyers on all sides to consider a new date for the full hearing.  The measure was granted, in no small part because of lack of protest from the prosecution.  As James Lewis QC, putting the case for the United States, submitted, “In this extraordinary time, we would support the application.”  Given the circumstances (the judge finally acknowledged the obvious: that Britain was in a coronavirus lockdown), it was unlikely that Assange and his lawyers would be able to physically attend the scheduled May 18 hearing. “Remote attendance by the parties in this case will not be appropriate.  It is now appropriate to vacate that hearing and fix it to a later date.”  At the earliest, a three-week block from November 2 can be made available.

On other points, Baraitser remained cold and tenaciously blind.  She could not see how the lockdown itself had any evident impact on case preparation, nor affect the proper attendance of witnesses.  “I have been given no reason to believe that pre-hearing discussion with expert witnesses can’t take place remotely.”  The issue of Assange’s safety in being transported to a video conference room was a matter for the prison to make.  Nor would press reporting be impaired, despite witnessing, in her own court, the distinctly shonky coverage for media offered by the teleconference facility.

As the UK Bureau Director of Reporters Without Borders Rebecca Vincent would comment, reflecting upon the day’s technical challenges, “resuming the full extradition hearing in such conditions would not allow for open justice.  This case is of tremendous public interest, and the press and NGO observers must be able to scrutinise proceedings.”

Assange supporters and case watchers were relieved by the change of heart shown from the bench.  Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof opined that a May 18 hearing during the COVID-19 pandemic “would’ve significantly undermined due process rights of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange”.

Then came the next question, a spectre over the stuttered court proceedings: Would Assange be able to obtain bail?  His father, John Shipton, certainly thought so, as obtaining such relief would alleviate the danger of contracting COVID-19 in a “prison where two people have died of the disease”.  According to Renata Avila, a key human rights lawyer and board member for Creative Commons, such a delay would surely entitle Assange to the measure.  “Under current conditions, he cannot prepare his legal defence and he is risking his life.” 

The hope for legal, and compassionate sense to prevail, remains admirably optimistic.  Assange is bound in a cruel legal purgatory, a shackled David facing the Goliath of the US imperium.  But even with his hands tied, Assange is still putting up a most resolute fight.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

Rahm Emanuel, up until recently the mayor of Chicago and before that a top advisor to the president in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama White Houses and still earlier a volunteer in the Israeli Army, famously once commented that a good crisis should never be allowed to go to waste. He meant, of course, that a crisis can be exploited to provide cover for other shenanigans involving politicians. It was an observation that was particularly true when one was working for a sexual predator like Bill, who once attacked a “terrorist” pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to divert attention away from the breaking Monica Lewinski scandal.

To be sure, the United States government is focusing its attention on the coronavirus while also using the cover afforded to heighten the pressure on “enemies” near and far. As the coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have increased the ferocity of their sabre rattling, apparently in part to deter Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Ironically, of course, none of the countries being intimidated are actually threatening the United States, but we Americans have long since learned that perceptions are more important than facts when it comes to the current occupant of the oval office and his two predecessors.

The latest bit of mendacity coming out of the White House was a presidential tweet targeting the usual punching bag, Iran. Based on an incident that occurred two weeks ago, Trump threatened “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.” Iran’s flying gunboats are clearly a formidable force but it is certainly reassuring to note that naval anti-aircraft fire has been directed to deal with them. The U.S. Navy ships in question are, one might also observe, in a body of water generally referred to as the Persian Gulf, where they are carrying out maneuvers right off of the Iranian coast. Meanwhile, Iranian flying gunboats have not yet been observed off of New Jersey, but they are probably waiting to be transported to the Eastern Seaboard by those huge trans-oceanic gliders that once upon a time were allegedly being constructed by Saddam Hussein.

I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 22, 2020

Given the cover provided by the virus, it should surprise no one that Israel is also playing the same game. The Jewish state has been continuing its lethal bombings of Syria, with hardly any notice in the international media. In a recent missile attack, nine people were killed near the historic city of Palmyra. Three of the dead were Syrians while six others were presumed to be Lebanese Shi’ites supporting the Damascus government. Israel de facto regards any Shi’ite as an “Iranian” or an “Iranian proxy” and therefore a “terrorist” eligible to be killed on sight.

But the bigger coronavirus story has to do with Israel’s domestic politics. Benjamin Netanyahu and his principle opponent Benny Gantz have come to an agreement to form a national government, ostensibly to deal with the health crisis. The wily Netanyahu, who will continue to be prime minister in the deal, has thereby retained his power over the government while also putting a halt to bids from the judiciary to try and sentence him on corruption charges. As part of the deal with Gantz, Netanyahu will have veto power over the naming of the new government’s attorney general and state prosecutor, guaranteeing the appointment of individuals who will dismiss the charges.

And more will be coming, with the acquiescence of Washington. U.S. elections are little more than six months away and Donald Trump clearly believes that he needs the political support of Netanyahu to energize his rabid Christian Zionist supporters, as well as the cash coming from Jewish oligarchs Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer. So, it is time to establish a quid pro quo, which will be Israeli government behind the scenes approaches to powerful and wealthy American Jews on behalf of Trump while the White House will look the other way while Israel annexes most of the remaining Palestinian West Bank. Pompeo has welcomed the new Israeli government and has confirmed that the annexation of the Palestinian land will be “ultimately Israel’s decision to make,” which amounts to a green light for Netanyahu to go ahead.

A vote on West Bank annexation will reportedly be taken by the Knesset at the beginning of July followed immediately by steps to incorporate Jewish settlements into Israel proper. According to the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, the planned annexation has raised some concerns among a few liberal American Jewish organizations because it will convince many progressives in the U.S. that Israel has truly become an apartheid state. J Street warned that annexation “would severely imperil Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people, along with the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship” and has even suggested cutting U.S. aid if that step is actually taken. Most other ostensibly liberal groups have adopted the usual Zionist two-step, i.e. condemning the move but not advocating any effective steps to prevent it. And it should also be noted that the largest and most powerful Jewish organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) have not raised any objections at all.

Unaffiliated individual liberal Jews, to include those who consider themselves Zionists, have generally been concerned about the move, though their argument is quite hypocritical, based on their belief that annexation would pari passu destroy any possible two-state solution, damaging both Palestinian rights and “Jewish democracy.” Some have even welcomed the change, noting that it would create a single state de facto which eventually would have to evolve into a modern democracy with equal rights for all. Such thinking is, however, nonsense. Israel under Netanyahu and whichever fascist retread that eventually succeeds him regards itself as a Jewish state and will do whatever it takes to maintain that, even including dispossessing remaining Arabs of their land and possessions, stripping them of their legal status, and forcing them to leave as refugees. That is something that might be referred to as ethnic cleansing, or even genocide.

And those Americans of conscience who are hoping for some change if someone named Joe Biden defeats Trump can also forget about that option. Biden has told the New York Times that “I believe a two-state solution remains the only way to ensure Israel’s long-term security while sustaining its Jewish and democratic identity. It is also the only way to ensure Palestinian dignity and their legitimate interest in national self-determination. And it is a necessary condition to take full advantage of the opening that exists for greater cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors. For all these reasons, encouraging a two-state solution remains in the critical interest of the United States.”

Unfortunately, someone should tell Joe that that particular train has already left the station due to the expansion of the Jewish state’s settlements. Nice words from the man who would be president aside, Biden is bound to the Israel Lobby for its political support and the money it provides as tightly as can be and he will fold before AIPAC and company like a cheap suit. He has famously declared that “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist – I am a Zionist” and “My Name is Joe Biden, and Everybody Knows I Love Israel.” His vice-presidential candidates’ debate with Sarah Palin in 2008 turned embarrassing when he and Palin both engaged in long soliloquys about how much they cherish Israel. Indeed they do. Every politician on the make loves Israel.

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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 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

A senior official in Iraq’s al-Anbar province warned of the increasing presence of the ISIS terrorists in the desert areas of the province which are controlled by the US forces.

“These areas are controlled by the US military men and are a safe haven for the terrorists,” the official was quoted as saying by the Arabic-language al-Ma’aloumeh news agency on Saturday.

He added that the Americans are supplying the ISIS terrorists with the necessary weapons and logistical equipment.

The official warned of the US attempts to transfer a large number of ISIS terrorists from occupied regions of Syria to Iraq’s western desert province of al-Anbar. The terrorists pose a great danger to inhabitants of this area, as well as the bordering areas with Syria.

The aim of the US and its NATO and regional Wahhabi partners in crime is quite obviously fomenting tension and unrest in Iraq in the future, giving them an excuse to continue occupying Iraqi and Syrian territories, all under the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.

In relevant remarks in March, another Iraqi official had also warned that the ISIS terrorists were being supported by the US in the western desert areas of the al-Anbar province along the border with occupied parts of Syria.

“The US is increasing its forces in al-Anbar and monitors the bordering line between Iraq and Syria,” Head of Badr Organization’s Office in al-Anbar Qusai al-Anbari said.

He added that the US is attempting to transfer the largest-ever number of ISIS terrorists into Iraq, adding that they are supported by the US in the desert areas of al-Anbar after arriving from Syria through US heliborne operations. Al-Anbari warned that “certain Iraqis” are also attempting to facilitate the ISIS traffic into Iraq’s western deserts in support of terrorism following a clandestine agreement with the Americans.

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Featured image is from AMN

The Brazilian government was shaken by a new controversy on Friday after the General Director of the Federal Police, Maurício Valeixo, was sacked by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Following threats made on Thursday, the Minister of Justice and Public Security, Sergio Moro, responsible for the appointment of Valeixo, decided to leave the administration of Bolsonaro, giving a controversial farewell speech with serious accusations against the president.

According to Moro, Bolsonaro’s desire to change the command of the Federal Police was motivated by a desire to interfere politically in the institution, and to gain access to confidential content of investigations about the president’s allies and family members, including his own sons. The accusations made by Bolsonaro had a great impact on the local media, but none-the-less the Brazilian president denied the allegations later that day.

Speaking a little longer than usual, Bolsonaro tried to defend himself against Moro’s accusations by talking about several different issues, but, when he spoke about his former minister, he concentrated on damaging his image before the electorate, placing him as the new enemy of his government. This is a usual tactic by the Brazilian president who always seeks an enemy to legitimize his policies and popularity.

Bolsonaro who modelled himself as the “Tropical Trump” continuously took aim against local Leftists, Venezuela, Cuba, China and anybody else that U.S. President Donald Trump also did not like. By casting an enemy, he could galvanize the Brazilian people behind him. As expected, the president’s main strategy in his speech in response to Moro was to find a new enemy.

Bolsonaro’s statements to the press were divided into three parts: focused attacks on the reputation of his former minister, describing him as an egocentric person with electoral interests; highlighting the presidential prerogative of appointing the commander of the Federal Police; and, trying to focus on valuing his own profile, talking about the assassination attempt he suffered, resources he failed to spend and the importance of his position. So, what we perceive from the speech, essentially, is what was already expected – the attempted polarization to put public opinion against Moro, while at the same time minimizing his decision to interfere with the Federal Police.

A dichotomy between Moro and Bolsonaro is emerging on social media, and it appears that Moro is winning this battle on the internet. Even before Moro’s resignations, tens of thousands went to Bolsonaro’s Twitter and Facebook accounts to tell the president that they voted for him but will not support him anymore if Moro resigns.

Earlier this month, the popularity of Bolsonaro had dropped to 33% because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which he described as a “fantasy” and a “minor flu.” Earlier this month it was also revealed that the military, in which Bolsonaro is a former Captain of and strongly advocated for during his election campaign, has now shifted their support and backing for Vice President Hamilton Mourao, a former general.

Everything indicates that Bolsonaro may fall in a matter of months, and it appears this scenario can come to fruition sooner with the resignation of the highly popular Moro who was a key player in prosecuting Brazil’s Leftist former President, Lula. It certainly means that the 33% approval rating has dropped significantly after the fall out with Moro.

In an investigation by the Supreme Court, the Federal police identified councillor Carlos Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, as one of the articulators of a criminal fake news scheme. According to Folha, Bolsonaro wanted Valeixo removed because he knew of the criminal acts Carlos was involved in. It is not reduced to just Carlos though, and rather all three of Bolsonaro’s politically active sons, along with his wife Michelle, have been implicated in corruption scandals.

One of the main appeals of Bolsonaro was his strong rhetoric of being against corruption, which is why he brought Moro into his administration because of his popularity after putting some Brazilian politicians behind bars because of their corruption. However, this has been proven to be a scam as not only are their major questions whether those prosecuted had engaged in corruption, but there are endless scandals and accusations of corruption levelled against the Bolsonaro family.

Bolsonaro modelled himself on Trump and followed him in nearly every major foreign policy agenda regarding not only Latin America, but also China and Israel. Despite Bolsonaro being the greatest advocate for American and Israeli relations the continent has seen in decades, it is highly unlikely that either Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will come out in support of Bolsonaro as he faces a very real impeachment. It now appears that all this time of pandering to the U.S. and its interests is beginning to crash down on Bolsonaro. Rather than serve the interests of his country in this new multipolar world, he wanted to maintain the hegemonic status of the U.S. and get away with corruption – now where is Trump?

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a head-spinning series of contradictions lately, with no end in sight. From placing a bounty on the heads of President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen current and former Venezuelan officials, to upping sanctions and sending the largest fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to stop drug trafficking from Venezuela, the U.S. appears to be pursuing an inexorable path towards regime change.

But at the same time, U.S. officials have announced they don’t seek a “coup” against Maduro, that the U.S. Naval deployment doesn’t seek his ouster, and that the United States wants Maduro to agree to a power-sharing deal, despite the bounty they’ve placed on his head.

An examination of the timeline reveals the last month of U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been nothing if not chaotic.

At the end of March, the United States indicted Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen former and current officials on corruption, narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges. The State Department announced that the U.S. will pay $15 million for information leading to Maduro’s arrest and conviction.

A day later, Elliot Abrams, reportedly chosen as the U.S. Special Envoy for Venezuela by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his expertise on coups, announced the “Democratic Transition Framework for Venezuela.” The framework calls on Maduro’s government to embrace a power-sharing deal. The plan doesn’t explain how Venezuelan leaders with bounties on their heads could come to the table and negotiate with Juan Guaido, whom the U.S. recognizes as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration increased sanctions on Venezuela and announced with much fanfare that U.S. Naval warships were on their way to the Caribbean to prevent “corrupt actors” and drug cartels from smuggling narcotics into the U.S.

“The goal is to replace [President Nicolas] Maduro’s illegitimate dictatorship with a legitimate transitional government that can hold free and fair elections to represent all Venezuelans. It is time for Maduro to go,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

A few days after that, and eighteen years after the U.S. supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, Abrams warned that if Maduro resisted the organization of a “transitional government” his departure would be far more “dangerous and abrupt.” Yes, this is the same Abrams who only days earlier had recommended a power-sharing arrangement. To many, Abrams’ aggressive rhetoric looked a lot like the U.S. “effectively threatening him with another assassination attempt” like the one the U.S. “tacitly supported in 2018.”

But then, the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Craig Faller rhetorically reversed course four days ago.

Faller said the U.S. buildup in the Caribbean is not aimed at ousting Maduro. The decision to double anti-narcotics assets in Latin America was not directly tied to Maduro’s indictment, and “economic and diplomatic pressure — not the use of military force — remain the U.S.’s” preferred tools for removing Maduro from power, said Faller.

Despite the fact that he’s leading the largest ever U.S. Naval deployment in the Southern hemisphere, and the biggest deployment since the invasion to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, Faller contends that his operation is “not an indication of some sort of new militarization in the Caribbean” and that “this is not a shift in U.S. government policy.”

So, the Trump administration’s real aims in Venezuela remain elusive, if not confusing.

“Certainly the timing of the deployment, coming as it does on the heels of the DOJ’s indictment of Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and the placement of a bounty on his head, looks suspicious,” said Dr. Alejandro Velasco, associate professor of Modern Latin America at New York University, in an interview with TAC. “While there may not be a causal relationship between the deployment and the administration’s regime-change policy, there is a strong correlation between the two.”

“To the extent that DOJ has indicted Maduro et al on narco-terrorism charges, and the Navy operation is geared at disrupting drug cartels, then it follows that, at the very least, the aim of the deployment is to squeeze Maduro,” said Velasco. “The issue is that Maduro’s primary (or even secondary or tertiary) source of revenue isn’t narcotics, it’s minerals like oil and gold.”

“The fact is, there is a government in Venezuela that the U.S. government does not like, and the U.S. has been citing and bolstering [Maduro’s rival] the interim president Juan Guaido, funding him and spearheading an effort to get him to either—initially it was to take office, now it’s to negotiate,” said Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, a professor and expert on Latin American politics at Florida International University, in an interview with TAC.

“It’s curious, because on the one hand, our government has indicted Maduro and set a bounty on his head… we’ve labelled Maduro a drug trafficker whom we want to extradite, but then the following week, we said we want to negotiate with him.”

One thing is for certain—the Trump administration’s stated intention, of deploying the U.S. Navy to interdict narco-trafficking, is nonsensical, said Gamarra.

“Most of my research has been on drug trafficking trends, and if you look at those, and the U.S. has done these kinds of anti-trafficking exercises many times in the past, we’ve had very little impact on the flow of drugs northward,” said Gamarra. “There’s a balloon effect, where if we squeeze the Caribbean, then most drugs come through Mexico … Eighty three percent of cocaine that comes into the U.S. enters through Mexico, currently aided by Mexican cartels.”

Drug traffickers don’t need to transport drugs through the Caribbean when there’s a relatively unguarded land route via the U.S. southern border, he said. Of course, as coronavirus ravages the globe, the flow of all goods have declined, so “we will probably see a decline in drugs too.” But the fact is that the majority of drugs that enter the U.S. do so through the Pacific, not the Atlantic coast.

The Trump administration may have its eyes on domestic political prizes rather than long-term foreign policy goals, suggests Velasco. There are big pockets of Venezuelan and Cuban Americans in swing-state Florida that eagerly greeted the news of the U.S. deployment, only to be let down by the subsequent lack of action and contradictory administration statements, Gamarra points out.

“As time passes, they get the sense that they’ve again been duped,” said Gamarra. “How long has it been since this administration told Venezuelans ‘all options are on the table?’ Maduro is still there, not weaker but stronger. [On Thursday] in at least four states, there were massive lootings, the state has essentially collapsed, but still the government doesn’t fall, and the virus has actually helped strengthen its position … what is the U.S. waiting for?”

Roger Noriega, AEI fellow and former ambassador, said the mobilization of assets off the coast of Venezuela “is a very tangible sign that the U.S. is losing its patience” with Maduro, who agrees with the administration’s aggressive approach.

“The costs are getting rather high, right on our doorstep,” he said. “Maduro’s regime is destabilizing the rest of the region, including our key ally Colombia, and aiding and abetting narco-trafficking and presiding over a humanitarian disaster.”

“Sooner rather than later, I think Trump’s going to have to consider being much more forceful in dealing with this. That could mean carving out a no-fly zone, territory for humanitarian aid, or getting authority from Congress to conduct clandestine operations against bad guys at the head of the regime. So far, they have been far from creative in dealing with this threat, which has been worsening on their watch.”

Noriega doesn’t think “too many people would blame” Trump “if he went in with a small force to take care of this festering criminal regime in the way we did with Noriega” in the ’80s, but if it comes to that, it will be because “there’s been a real failure here of U.S. intelligence, and a complete and utter lack of creative thinking from the career diplomats. They’re the ones who wrote the ridiculous framework for a diplomatic transition.”

“The State Department’s approach is completely out of sync with what the president ostensibly wants to do,” he said. “When his DOJ indicts these guys, when the DoD deploys these additional forces to deal with the criminal threat, when the Treasury Department is heaping on sanctions, and then the State Department comes out with this rather surrealistic plan that essentially blesses a narco-trafficking framework to stay in power, it shows a profound lack of understanding about the dynamics within the region.”

Not everyone would agree with Noriega, who has been a hawk on the region since his days as Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs under George W. Bush. With a pandemic competing for the full attention (and resources) of the federal government it may be likely that Trump’s anti-interventionist instincts win over. One thing is clear: the administration’s muddy policy in the region, and the resulting confusion it kicks up, may be the worst of both worlds, setting both countries on a collision course towards regime change.

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Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill,  UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.  Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019.

Americans awaiting their COVID-19 stimulus and unemployment checks will be thrilled to know their taxes continue to be spent via Netanyahu bombing and murdering Syrians in their homes. Israel remains the US’ most voracious welfare state queen, subsidized at more than four billion USD, annually. Netanyahu’s criminal and cowardly pre-dawn bombings murdered three civilians and injured three others.

The Netanyahu regime’s murderous war crimes against Syrians, today, involved another breach of International Law, Israel’s aggressive and illegal entry into Lebanon’s airspace. In 2014, Obama’s one billion guaranteed loan bribe to Abdullah was grounded in Jordan giving legal access to its airspace to Israel. The Netanyahu regime prefers to flout its chutzpah when murdering Syrians, and the NATO klan running the UN ignore all legitimate complaints from Lebanon.

In al Hujaira, Damascus’s southeastern countryside, one home bombed by the Netanyahu regime forces resulted in the murders of a husband and wife, in addition to injuries of two other adults and one child. This family had been displaced from al Quneitra city, by NATO-backed and armed moderate terrorists.

Another woman was murdered by Israeli bombing, in al Adliya.

Unindicted war criminal Netanyahu air force targeted people’s homes, including ones under construction, identified by the steel rope lay in this photograph.

Given the timing of the war criminal bombings, and Syria’s curfews to prevent the spread of COVID-19, these murder victims were killed in their homes, and likely while sleeping.

Netanyahu regime media have pulled out all the stops in hasbara fake headlines. Beyond Kafka and beyond chutzpah, they continue to ridiculously cite British owned and funded SOHR, fake founded by a thrice convicted on felony charges criminal, who jumped bail more than one decade ago — to avoid his fourth trial, leaving his pals holding the bag — who sought refuge in England, courtesy of the British taxpayers.

More housing under construction, bombed by Netanyahu regime forces.

Syria News reminds our readers that mere hours before Israel criminally bombed Tadmor on 20 April, Madman Netanyahu had barked that COVID-19 would not diminish his war crimes.

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All images in this article are from SANA

Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed the role of U.S. activists in stopping the U.S. war machine during “An Inside View of Resistance to US Imperialism in Venezuela and How to Build International Solidarity,” a webinar co-hosted by the Black Alliance for Peace, Alliance For Global Justice, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, International Action Center, Sanctions Kill and United National Antiwar Coalition.

Featuring speakers from the Venezuelan government, U.S. Peace Council and Popular Resistance.

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Featured image is from Alliance for Global Justice

Giulietto Chiesa died a few hours after concluding the April 25^th International Conference “Let’s Get Rid of War Virus”  on the 75th Anniversary of Italian Liberation and the End of World War II. The streaming conference was organized by the No War No Nato Committee – Giulietto was one of its founders – and GlobalResearch (Canada), the Centre for Research on Globalization directed by Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Several speakers – from Italy to other European countries, from the United States to Russia, from Canada to Australia – examined the fundamental reasons why war has never ended since 1945: the Second World conflict was followed by the Cold War, then by an uninterrupted series of wars and the return to a situation similar to that of the Cold War, with increased risk of nuclear conflict.

Economists Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), Peter Koenig (Switzerland) and Guido Grossi  explained  how powerful economic and financial forces are exploiting the coronavirus crisis to take over national economies, and what to do to thwart this plan.

David Swanson (director of World Beyond War, USA), economist Tim Anderson (Australia), photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi and historian Franco Cardini talked about past and current wars, functional to the interests of the same powerful forces.

Political-military expert Vladimir Kozin (Russia), essayist Diana Johnstone (USA), Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson (UK) examined the mechanisms increasing the chance of a catastrophic nuclear conflict.

John Shipton (Australia), – father of Julian Assange, and Ann Wright (USA) – former US Army colonel, illustrated the dramatic situation of journalist Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder detained in London at risk of being extradited to the United States where a life or death sentence awaits him.

Giulietto Chiesa’s participation focused on this issue. In summary, these are some passages of what he said:

“Someone wants to destroy Julian Assange: this fact means that we too, all of us will be fooled, obscured, threatened, unable to understand what is going on at home and in the world. This is not our future; it is our present.

In Italy the government is organizing a team of censors officially charged with cleaning up all news differing from the official news. It is State censorship, how else can it be called?

Rai, public Television, is also setting up a task force against “fake news” to erase the traces of their everyday lies, flooding all their television screens.

And then there is even worse, mysterious courts far more powerful than these fake news hunters: they are Google, Facebook, who manipulate news and censure without appeal with their algorithms and secret tricks.

We are already surrounded by new Courts that cancel our rights. Do you remember Article 21 of the Italian Constitution? It says “everyone has the right to freely express its thought.” But 60 million Italians are forced to listen to a single megaphone that screams from all 7 Television channels of the Power. That’s why Julian Assange is a symbol, a flag, an invitation to rescue, to wake up before it’s too late.

It is essential to join all forces we have, which are not so small but have a fundamental flaw: that of being divided, unable to speak with a single voice. We need an instrument to speak to the millions of citizens who want to know.”

This was Giulietto Chiesa’s last appeal. His words were confirmed by the fact that, immediately after the streaming, the on line conference was obscured because “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

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This article appeared on the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Once again, the good old reliable US major media proved unreliable again — time and again delivering fake news to readers, viewers and listeners.

On April 20, the NYT reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “was receiving treatment after undergoing heart surgery.”

Days later, the Times asked: “Where in Kim-Jong-un? Rumors are swirling about Kim Jong-un’s location and health.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post asked is Kim “dead after heart surgery? Is he lying in a vegetative state in a hospital bed?”

After being out of public view in 2014, there were false rumors of his death or a military coup.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Wilson Center public policy fellow Jean Lee, saying rumors about Kim’s health “could impact his ability to lead the country.”

Market Watch.com reported that Kim was either dead or in a “vegetative state,” citing Hong Kong and Japanese media.

MSNBC’s Katy Tur reported that Kim was “brain dead,” citing unnamed US officials, adding:

“He recently had cardiac surgery and slipped into a coma.”

So-called media analyst Mark Dice claimed the above information is “confirmed.”

The Washington Examiner claimed that Kim is in “grave danger” after surgery, adding:

“A US official with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN” that the US was “monitoring intelligence of” his conditions.

South Korean-based Daily NK cited unnamed sources, claiming that Kim had a “cardiovascular surgical procedure.”

CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto claimed he was “told by a US official with direct knowledge that the US is monitoring intelligence that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is in grave danger following a surgery.”

RT mocked CNN with the following headline:

“No confirmation needed? CNN fans rumors about Kim Jong-un’s alleged health issues, reports he’s in ‘grave danger’ after ‘surgery.’ ”

Screenshot from RT News

Bloomberg News got it wrong with a similar report, claiming Kim was in “critical condition.”

Senator Lindsey Graham was quoted, saying “’I’ll Be Shocked If He’s Not Dead.”

An unnamed Trump regime official said it’s unclear if Kim is alive or dead.

Former CIA deputy division chief for North Korea Bruce Klinger noted numerous earlier “rumors about Kim’s health,” adding:

“(O)ver the years, there have been a number of false health rumors about Kim Jong-Un (and) his father.”

A spokesman for South Korea’s Blue House (its White House equivalent) said the following:

“We have no information to confirm regarding rumors about Chairman Kim Jong Un’s health issue that have been reported by some media outlets. Also, no unusual developments have been detected inside North Korea.”

Britain’s Express said Kim hadn’t been seen in public since April 11, adding:

“Reports suggest his sister, Kim Yo Jon…could be set to take over.”

On Sunday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s senior policy adviser Moon Chung-in said Kim was “alive and well,” claims otherwise false.

Western media rumors, speculation, and reports got it all wrong.

On Monday, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency quoted Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun, the DPRK’s main broadsheet, saying Kim thanked builders in the country’s port city of Wonsan, the report saying:

Kim “sent his appreciation to the workers who devoted themselves to building the Wonsan-Kalma tourist zone.”

Satellite imagery reportedly showed his train in the area last week.

Rumors about his death or serious illness circulated when he wasn’t at a birthday ceremony for his late grandfather, Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder.

On Monday, RT mocked Western media, headlining: “Not dead anymore?”

“(M)edia (now) downplay death rumors after Seoul adviser sa(id) (Kim) is ‘alive and well.’ ”

Reports of his death, grave danger, vegetative state, being brain dead in a coma were greatly exaggerated.

They were fake news all along, no credible information supporting them.

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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.

Among the “losers of globalization” in the US, in addition to African-Americans and Latinos, indebted university students and white adults over 45 years of age without university studies and with jobs with low added value appear for the first time, after being enrolled in the ranks of the unemployed. , they would have ended up plunged into an explosive circle of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide after seeing the blackbird of the “American dream” disappear, which would have had as a collateral effect the disaffection of these segments of the white population with respect to the traditional Democratic and Republican establishment.

Thus, according to an NBC survey, 54% of the white population would be “angry with the system,” compared to 43% of Latinos and 33% of African Americans who continue to trust the American dream, which would have led White voters to support politically incorrect positions and refractory to the dictates of Donald Trump’s traditional republican establishment, symbolized by the support of outraged whites over 45 years of age for Trump and of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist parties that continue to control the spheres of power of “deep America”.

Paranoia and hybris syndrome in Donald Trump

The Spanish psychiatrist Enrique González Duro in his book La paranoia (1991 *), affirms that

“the triggers of this disease are very active in individuals who present a pronounced narcissism and who have been exposed to serious frustrations, consequently being endowed with low self-esteem ”.

Donald Trump’s personality would fit fully into the medical description of the disorder known as paranoid psychosis because his thinking is rigid and incorrigible: he does not take into account the opposite reasons, he only collects data or signs that confirm the prejudice to turn him into conviction and even if he is afflicted with such delusional disorder it would be quite functional and does not tend to show strange behavior except as a direct result of the delusional idea (read the construction of the Wall with Mexico).

In the specific case of Trump, we would be facing a typical case of megalomaniac paranoia, delusion of greatness that causes the individual to create himself endowed with extraordinary talent and power because the deities have chosen him for a high mission (restoring the White Power in a society in which demographic evolution will cause the white population to be a minority in the 2,043 scenario).

Trump’s paranoia would have been aggravated by being affected by the so-called “hydris syndrome” cited by the English doctor and politician David Owen in his work “The Hybris Syndrome: Busch, Blair ant the Intoxication of Power”. This term comes from the Greek word “hybris” which means excess and in his work, Owen defines it as “the exaggerated self-confidence of politicians when they reach power brings with it the Subject’s excessive self-confidence, exacerbated pride and rebuff before others, and may lead to abuse of power (autocracy) and the temptation to harm the lives of others. ” Another trait would be histrionics that impels him to “attract public attention and be reckless in his statements without caring about the opinion of others due to his evident lack of morality”, which would be his advice to use disinfectant to cure the coronavirus.

Can COVID-19 end Trump’s dystopia?

The theory of the Black Swan was developed by Nicholas Taleb in his book “The Black Swan (2010) in which he tries to explain” the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the strange event in the historical issues ”, which would explain Trump’s frivolization of the coronavirus and his delay in adopting surgical measures in the main centers of transmission of the coronavirus in the USA. This would have exacerbated the effects of the pandemic in the United States in the form of a trickle of the dead, the collapse of medical services, the paralysis of productive activity and the recession of the United States economy.

Likewise, the collapse of the oil price would have caused nearly 200 bankruptcy declarations of companies dedicated to shale with an accumulated debt of nearly $ 120 billion that will subsequently affect the income statement of large banks such as JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo and that could lead to a new financial crisis in the future. On the other hand, the inaction of the companies would have triggered a stratospheric increase in unemployment (26 million unemployed), which together with the Wall Street stock market crash could dilute the beneficial effects of Donald Trump’s economic policy and cause the disaffection of the population segment of its voters (40% of the electorate) in the next Presidential elections in November.

Thus, the traumatic shock that the coronavirus pandemic will generate in American society and the subsequent recession of its economy will force a profound catharsis and metanoia of society as a whole, which will cause the fundamentals that underpin it to be revised. The metanoia would be to transform the mind to adopt a new way of thinking, with new ideas, new knowledge and an entirely new attitude in the face of the emergence of the new pandemic scenario, which will imply the double connotation of physical movement (retracing the path followed) and psychological ( change of mentality after discarding the old prevailing stereotypes). This will have as beneficial effects the rediscovery of values such as respect for the environment, solidarity and equal rights in a new stage that will lead to the implementation of new renewable energy, basic income, unemployment benefits as well as healthcare Universal Public, a stage that will symbolize the end of the Trump dystopia and the reissue of the Rooseveltian “New Deal”.

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Germán Gorraiz López is an analyst.

In my first week in the House of Representatives in 1976, I cast one of the two votes against legislation appropriating funds for a swine flu vaccination program. A swine flu outbreak was then dominating headlines, so most in DC were frantic to “do something” about the virus.

Unfortunately, the hastily developed and rushed-into-production swine flu vaccine was not only ineffective, it was dangerous. Approximately 50 people who received the vaccine subsequently contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, a potentially fatal form of paralysis. According to an expert with the Centers for Disease Control, the incidence of Guillain-Barré was four times higher among those who received the swine flu vaccine than in the general population.

That sad history may soon repeat itself. Right now, governments and private industries are working to rapidly develop and deploy a coronavirus vaccine. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is a major funder of these efforts, has suggested everyone who receives a vaccine be issued a “digital certificate” proving he has been vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose record of wrong predictions makes him the Bill Kristol of epidemiology, also wants individuals to carry some proof they have been vaccinated.

Another authoritarian proposal floated to deal with coronavirus is to force everyone to download a phone app that will track their movements. This would allow government officials to identify those who may have been near anyone who may have had coronavirus. Such mandatory “contact tracing” is an assault on our privacy and liberty.

Vaccines can improve health. For example, vaccines helped reduce the incidence of diseases like polio. But not all vaccines are safe and effective for all people. Furthermore, certain modern practices, such as giving infants multiple vaccines at one time, may cause health problems. The fact that vaccines may benefit some people, or even most people, does not justify government forcing individuals to be vaccinated. It also does not justify vaccinating children against their parents’ wishes. And it certainly does not justify keeping individuals and families in involuntary quarantine because they do not have “digital certificates” proving they have had their shots.

If government can force individuals to receive medical treatment against their will, then there is no reason why government cannot force individuals to buy medical insurance, prohibit them from owning firearms, dictate their terms of employment, and prevent them from taking arguably harmful actions like smoking marijuana or drinking raw milk. Similarly, if government can override parents’ wishes regarding medical treatment for their children, then there is no reason why government cannot usurp parental authority in other areas, such as education.

Proponents of mandatory vaccines and enhanced surveillance are trying to blackmail the American people by arguing that the lockdown cannot end unless we create a healthcare surveillance state and make vaccination mandatory. The growing number of Americans who are tired of not being able to go to work, school, or church, or even to take their children to a park because of government mandates should reject this “deal.” Instead, they should demand an immediate end to the lockdowns and the restoration of individual responsibility for deciding how best to protect their health.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Giulietto Chiesa morreu algumas horas depois de concluir, no 75º Aniversário da Libertação e do fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Conferência Internacional de 25 de Abril, “Libertemo-nos do Vírus da Guerra”. Uma conferência de transmissão ao vivo, organizada pelo Comitato No War No NATO, do qual era um dos fundadores, e pela Global Research (Canadá), o centro de pesquisa sobre a globalização, dirigido pelo Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Vários oradores – da Itália e de outros países europeus, dos Estados Unidos à Rússia, do Canadá à Austrália – examinaram as razões subentendidas devido às quais a guerra nunca terminou desde 1945: a Segunda Guerra Mundial foi seguida pela Guerra Fria, depois houve uma série ininterrupta de guerras e o regresso a uma situação análoga à da Guerra Fria, que aumenta o risco de um conflito nuclear.

Os economistas, Michel Chossudovsky (Canadá), Peter Koenig (Suíça) e Guido Grossi (Itália), explicaram como é que as forças económicas e financeiras poderosas exploram a crise do coronavírus para dominar as economias nacionais e o que devemos fazer para impedir esse plano.

David Swanson (Director do World Beyond War, USA), o economista Tim Anderson (Australia), o fotojornalista Giorgio Bianchi e o historiador Franco Cardini, falaram sobre as guerras passadas e presentes, ligadas aos interesses dessas mesmas forças poderosas.

O perito em questões politico-militares, Vladimir Kozin (Russia), a ensaísta Diana Johnstone (Usa),  a secretária da Campanha para o Desarmamento Nuclear, Kate Hudson (Reino Unido), analisaram os mecanismos que aumentam a probabilidade de um conflito nuclear catastrófico.

John Shipton (Austrália), pai de Julian Assange e Ann Wright (USA), antiga Coronel do US Army, retrataram a situação dramática de Julian Assange, o jornalista fundador do WikiLeaks, detido em Londres, com o risco de ser extraditado para os Estados Unidos, onde o aguarda a sentença de prisão perpétua ou a pena de morte.

Giulietto Chiesa direccionou a sua intervenção sobre esse tema. Em resumo, estas são algumas passagens:

“O facto de que se queira destruir Julian Assange significa que, também nós, todos nós, seremos amordaçados, obscurecidos, ameaçados, incapazes de compreender o que está a acontecer no nosso país e no mundo. Isto não é o futuro, é o presente. Em Itália, o Governo organiza uma comissão de censuradores encarregados, oficialmente,  de ‘limpar’ todas as notícias que se afastem das notícias oficiais. É a censura do Estado, como é que pode ser chamado de outra maneira? Também a RAI, a televisão pública, institui uma ‘task-force’ contra as “fake news” para apagar o rasto das suas mentiras diárias, que inundam todos os seus écrans de televisão.

E há, ainda pior, os misteriosos tribunais muito mais poderosos do que esses caçadores de ‘fake news’: são o Google e o Facebook, que manipulam as notícias e, com seus algoritmos e truques secretos, censuram sem apelação. Já estamos cercados de novos tribunais, que apagam os nossos direitos.

Recordam-se do artigo 21 da Constituição Italiana?

Está escrito: “Todos têm o direito de manifestar livremente o seu pensamento”.

Mas 60 milhões de italianos são forçados a ouvir um único altifalante, que grita através dos sete canais televisivos do poder.

Por esse motivo é que Julian Assange é um símbolo, uma bandeira, um convite para a reconquista dos direitos civis, políticos e económicos, para nos acordar antes que seja tarde demais.

É indispensável unir as forças que temos, que não são assim tão pequenas, mas têm um defeito crucial: o de estar divididas, incapazes de falar a uma só voz. Precisamos de um instrumento que fale aos milhões de cidadãos que querem saber”.

Estas são as últimas palavras de Giulietto Chiesa. Confirmadas pelo facto de que, imediatamente após a transmissão, o vídeo da Conferência ficou obscurecido, porque “o seu conteúdo foi identificado pela comunidade do YouTube, como sendo inapropriado ou ofensivo para certos tipos de público”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Giulietto Chiesa in prima linea fino all’ultimo

ilmanifesto.it

US policymakers from both right wings of the one-party state want China’s rise on the world stage as an economic, industrial, and technological power undermined.

A undeclared Cold War between both countries rages. There’s always risk of things turning hot by accident or design when US imperialists choose this option.

Much like US propaganda war and unacceptable policies against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other sovereign states free from US control, hostile anti-China venom rages in Washington.

It’s notably at a fever pitch, a tactic by Trump regime hardliners to falsely blame Beijing for DJT’s failed and wrongheaded policies to contain COVID-19 outbreaks.

No credible evidence suggests that the virus was produced in a Chinese biolab.

One or more outbreaks first occurred in Hawaii late last summer, not China. Nothing suggests the virus is bat or other wildlife-related.

Is COVID-19 a US-created bioweapon — unleashed on humanity with diabolical aims in mind?

It wouldn’t be the first time US policymakers used chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons against adversaries and its own people.

It happened time and again throughout US history. Are COVID-19 outbreaks the latest example of US Machiavellian tactics against humanity for greater wealth and power at the expense of public health and welfare?

The fullness of time will tell whether diabolical US objectives are behind what’s going on. If past is prologue, it’s clearly possible.

Blaming others for its high crimes and malfeasance is longstanding US policy.

China is falsely blamed for the Trump regime’s failure to prepare for and properly address COVID-19 outbreaks when occurred — even though the threat of what’s ongoing was known about years ago.

Establishment media operate as mouthpieces for the imperial state, publishing and reporting material hostile to other countries that reads and sounds like intelligence community, state and war department press releases.

The NYT slammed China’s Red Cross this week. Because it receives state funding, the Times accused it of being “an arm of the state” instead of praising its human health mission.

Citing no evidence, the Times claimed “the group’s goal of helping people (is pitted) against the party’s interests in maintaining control over society.”

Far and away, China leads the world in addressing and containing COVID-19 outbreaks — in contrast to Trump regime blunders and indifference to public health and welfare.

The Times falsely accused China of letting “protective gear s(it) in a sprawling warehouse as desperate health workers battled the virus without it.”

China widely distributes personal protective equipment (PPE) internally, along with exporting it to scores of countries worldwide.

Months after US COVID-19 outbreaks occurred, National Nurses United continue to complain about lack of enough PPE — despite the Trump regime’s Department of Health and Human Services having declared virus outbreaks to be a national emergency on January 30.

Through mid-April, over 9,000 US healthcare professionals contracted COVID-19. Lack of enough proper PPE leaves them vulnerable, the Trump regime doing little to help states address an issue that should be prioritized.

The Times is a lying machine. The same goes for other US establishment media.

The neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post falsely blamed China for “spread(ing) the coronavirus by covering up initial reports about it (and) tr(ing) to use the pandemic to advance its authoritarian political model globally at the expense of democracy (sic).”

Separately, WaPo accused China of waging a “disinformation” campaign about the virus through “fake social media accounts (sic).”

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump regime “is tightening…export-control restrictions to prevent US companies from sending (high-tech) products abroad that could strengthen China’s military.”

The same policy applies to Russia, Venezuela and other invented US adversaries.

China’s Global Times (GT) said the Trump regime “is driving the US to failed state status,” the country already thirdworldized by its hostility to social justice.

Days earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said through April 20, Beijing “provided the US with over 2.46 billion masks, meaning seven masks for each (person) in the US, plus nearly 5,000 ventilators and many other types of medical equipment.”

Yet PPE and other supplies needed to combat COVID-19 haven’t been sent to states, Dem governors notably complaining about lack of federal help in dealing with a public health emergency.

GT: “China does need to take a lesson from the US and examine why (its ruling authorities) failed to protect (their) people, (let the country fall) into political division (at a critical time, and is) stunned by corruption and unparalleled social divide?”

China won’t play “scapegoat” to US indifference toward its own people, to its botched handling of COVID-19 outbreaks.

An internal GOP document obtained by Politico shows “Republicans have indicated they plan to make China a centerpiece of the 2020 campaign,” according to the broadsheet.

The Trump regime succeeded in alienating countless millions of people worldwide.

A Morning Consult poll conducted from April 24 – 26 showed Trump with a 41% approval rating, 54% disapproving of his performance as president.

Other polls earlier in April showed similar results, Trump’s disapproval exceeding 50% in nearly all conducted, 56% in a Global Strategy Group/GBAO survey.

The latest Gallup poll conducted in mid-April showed Trump’s approval at 43%, disapproval at 54%.

He’s an embarrassment to the office he holds. The option for US voters in November is no better.

Both right wings of the US war party operate the same way at the expense of ordinary people at home and abroad.

Whatever the outcome of dealing with COVID-19, the worst of times likely lies ahead in the US.

Voting achieves nothing, a popular revolution the only solution for possible responsible change.

Power yields nothing without strong resistance, the only sensible option looking ahead.

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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.

Giulietto Chiesa è morto poche ore dopo aver concluso, nel 75° Anniversario della Liberazione e della fine della Seconda guerra mondiale, il Convegno internazionale del 25 Aprile «Liberiamoci dal virus della guerra». Un convegno in diretta streaming, organizzato dal Comitato No Guerra No Nato, di cui era uno dei fondatori, e da Global Research (Canada), il Centro di ricerca sulla globalizzazione diretto dal professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Diversi relatori – dall’Italia ad altri paesi europei, dagli Stati uniti alla Russia, dal Canada all’Australia – hanno esaminato le ragioni di fondo per cui dal 1945 ad oggi la guerra non è mai terminata: al Secondo conflitto mondiale ha fatto seguito la Guerra fredda, quindi una serie ininterrotta di guerre e il ritorno a una situazione analoga a quella della Guerra fredda che accresce il rischio di un conflitto nucleare.

Gli economisti Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), Peter Koenig (Svizzera) e Guido Grossi hanno spiegato come potenti forze economiche e finanziarie sfruttano la crisi del coronavirus per impadronirsi delle economie nazionali e cosa dovremmo fare per sventare tale piano.

David Swanson (direttore di World Beyond War, Usa), l’economista Tim Anderson (Australia), il fotogiornalista Giorgio Bianchi e lo storico Franco Cardini hanno parlato delle guerre passate e attuali, funzionali agli interessi delle stesse potenti forze.

L’esperto di questioni politico-militari Vladimir Kozin (Russia), la saggista Diana Johnstone (Usa),  la segretaria della Campagna per il disarmo nucleare Kate Hudson (Regno Unito) hanno esaminato i meccanismi che accrescono la probabilità di un catastrofico conflitto nucleare.

John Shipton (Australia), padre di Julian Assange, e Ann Wright (Usa), già colonnello dello US Army, hanno illustrato la drammatica situazione di Julian Assange, il giornalista fondatore di WikiLeaks detenuto a Londra, col rischio di essere estradato negli Stati Uniti dove lo attende la pena dell’ergastolo o quella di morte.

Su tale tema ha incentrato il suo intervento Giulietto Chiesa. Questi, in sintesi, alcuni brani:

«Il fatto che si voglia distruggere Julian Assange  vuol dire che anche noi, noi tutti, saremo imbavagliati, oscurati, minacciati, impossibilitati a capire cosa succede a casa nostra e nel mondo. Questo non è il futuro, è il presente. In Italia il governo organizza una squadra di censori ufficialmente incaricata di fare pulizia di tutte le notizie che divergono da quelle ufficiali. E’ la censura di stato, come altrimenti si può chiamare? Anche la Rai, la televisione pubblica, istituisce una task force contro le “fake news” per cancellare le tracce delle loro bugie quotidiane che inondano tutti i loro teleschermi.

E poi ci sono, ancor peggio, i tribunali misteriosi di gran lunga più potenti di quanto non siano questi cacciatori di fake news: sono Google, Facebook, che manipolano le notizie e, con i loro algoritmi e i loro trucchi segreti, censurano senza appello. Siamo già circondati da nuovi tribunali che cancellano i nostri diritti.

Vi ricordate l’articolo 21 della Costituzione italiana?

C’è scritto “tutti hanno diritto di manifestare liberamente il proprio pensiero”.

Ma 60 milioni di italiani sono costretti ad ascoltare un solo megafono che urla da tutti i 7 canali televisivi del potere.

Ecco perché Julian Assange è un simbolo, una bandiera, un invito alla riscossa, al risveglio prima che sia troppo tardi.

È indispensabile unire le forze che abbiamo, che non sono tanto piccole ma hanno un difetto fondamentale: quello di essere divise, incapaci di parlare con una voce unica.

Occorre uno strumento che parli ai milioni di cittadini che vogliono sapere».

Queste le ultime parole di Giulietto Chiesa. Confermate dal fatto che, subito dopo lo streaming, il video del Convegno è stato oscurato perché «il suo contenuto è stato identificato dalla Comunità YouTube inappropriato o offensivo per alcuni tipi di pubblico».

Manlio Dinucci

A rabid anti-China propaganda campaign has spread through the media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hysteria seems to be just as contagious as the virus, as Americans are bombarded with anti-China stories from the pages of The New York Times to segments on Fox News. Both Republicans and Democrats are arguing the other side is not tough enough on China as they gear up for the 2020 election.

Since Donald Trump was elected president, the unfounded claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election was spread far and wide by intelligence officials and liberal media outlets.

A common tactic used to promote the Russiagate narrative was unnamed officials making statements to the press without providing evidence or any factual basis to their claims. Another common tactic was frequent media appearances by former intelligence officials, like James Clapper and John Brennan, usually making wild accusations about Trump and Russia. These tactics are being repeated to promote an anti-China narrative.

The New York Times ran a story on April 22^nd titled, “Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in US, Officials Say.” The article says rumors that were spread through text messages and social media posts in mid-March that claimed the Trump administration was going to lock down the entire country to combat coronavirus were boosted by “Chinese operatives.” The authors’ sources are “six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters.”

The story is lacking in detail and provides no evidence for the officials’ claims. “The origin of the messages remains murky. American officials declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese agents to the dissemination of the disinformation, citing the need to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing’s activities,” the story reads. Two of the officials told the Times that “they did not believe Chinese operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified existing ones.”

Sensationalized reporting in the Times would not be complete without mentioning the Russians. “American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake social media accounts to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who in turn unwittingly help spread them.”

Ironically, the story recognizes the danger of US officials making selective leaks to the media. “Foreign policy analysts are worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative … American officials in the past have selectively passed intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape.” The Times uses the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example of the dangers of selective leaks, ignoring the past four years of Russiagate stories that plagued its pages.

On April 17^th, Fox News Host Tucker Carlson had former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright on his show to deliver some wild accusations about US politicians and the Chinese government. Wright insinuated that some members of Congress might be agents of China’s intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Carlson explained to Wright that the show reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and other elected officials to ask if they’ve had contact with any Chinese officials since the coronavirus outbreak began. Carlson said they did not respond and asked Wright, “What do you think we should infer from that?”

Wright responded, “I think that they’re nervous. I think there are a bunch of people who, because they’re either useful idiots or they have some degree of knowledge and relationships behind the scenes with the Chinese government. Some of them in fact could be Chinese agents of the MSS.” Wright’s language comes straight from the Russiagate playbook. Intelligence officials and media pundits often referred to Trump as a “useful idiot” for Moscow, and some even speculated that the president is a “Russian agent.”

Trump’s anti-Russia policies show that he is not working in the White House on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Similarly, anti-China legislation that has recently passed through the House and Senate makes it unlikely any MSS agents are working in the halls of Congress.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act passed unanimously through the Senate last year and had one lone nay vote in the House from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). The act, which was signed into law by President Trump, requires the State Department to prepare an annual report on the autonomy of Hong Kong from mainland China. The act also requires the Commerce Department to report on “China’s efforts to use Hong Kong to evade US export controls.” The bill says the president shall present Congress with a list of any individuals that violate human rights in Hong Kong. Any findings that are unsatisfactory to the US could result in sanctions.

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act was also passed unanimously through the Senate, and again, Rep. Massie was the only one to vote against the bill in the House. This bill, which has not made it to President Trump’s desk, would require the US to impose sanctions and export restrictions over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the western autonomous region of Xinjiang.

Rep. Massie, the sole dissenting voice in Congress, did not vote against these bills because of any loyalty to Beijing or Xi Jinping. “When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,” Massie wrote on Twitter, explaining his votes.

The Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act, which was signed into law by President Trump in March, passed unanimously through both the House and Senate, with Rep. Massie finally falling in line with his colleague’s anti-China policy. The TAIPEI Act says the US should “help strengthen Taiwan’s diplomatic relationships and partnerships around the world.”

Taiwan remains the most sensitive issue between the US and China, since Beijing considers the island to be a part of China. Although the US does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, Washington supplies the island with arms and frequently sails warships through the Taiwan strait, drawing the ire of Beijing. No members of Congress speak out against these provocations. Like the accusations about Trump and Russia, the idea that Congress is crawling with agents of Beijing is easily disproven by actual policy.

Tucker Carlson did not challenge any of Wright’s outrageous claims but instead nodded along. Since the start of the outbreak, Carlson’s show has focused on putting all the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on Beijing. Carlson’s recent content reflects the strategy of the White House. The Daily Beast obtained internal White House documents in March that showed the administration was pushing US officials to blame China for a “cover-up” in the early days of the outbreak. The strategy has proven useful as many pro-Trump media outlets put Beijing’s response to the pandemic under a microscope, and largely ignore the US government’s early missteps.

Politico obtained a memo sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to GOP campaigns. The memo outlines an anti-China strategy for Republicans running for office in 2020. The document advises candidates to blame the pandemic on China, say Democratic opponents are too soft on China, and advocate for sanctions against Beijing. The memo is full of strong rhetoric like, “China is not an ally, and they’re not just a rival — they are an adversary and the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy.”

The GOP guidelines are similar to the rhetoric coming from China hardlinerslike former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. In March 2019, Bannon and neoconservative Frank Gaffney founded the Committee on Present Danger: China, a think-tank that identifies China as the greatest “existential threat” to the United States. In his almost-daily podcast, Bannon rails against Beijing and pins all the blame for the pandemic on China. “The Chinese Communist Party is at war with their people, they’re at war with the world, and they’re at war with you … You may not have an interest in the Chinese Communist Party but its destroyed your life. OK? Your economic life, your spiritual life, your social life. The destruction is from Beijing,” Bannon said in a recent episode.

Republicans and right-wingers are not the only ones looking to attack China this election season. The Biden campaign released an ad on April 18^th that attacked Trump for his response to the virus. The ad said, “Trump rolled over for the Chinese” and criticized how much the president praised China’s handling of the pandemic early on. “Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world,” the ad said.

The anti-China propaganda seems to be turning public opinion against Beijing. A new poll from the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,000 adults throughout March found that 66 percent have an unfavorable view of China, an increase of 14 percent since Pew last asked the question in 2018. Nine out of 10 adults surveyed view China as a threat, including 62 percent who see China as a major threat.

China may have made some mistakes in its early response to the virus, but that does not excuse the US government’s lack of preparedness, and treating the pandemic as an attack sets a dangerous precedent for future outbreaks. The strategy could backfire on Washington if any future pandemics originate in the US.

Like Russiagate, the anti-China propaganda will serve as a useful tool for a national security state that is looking to focus more on great power competition. The Pentagon identifies China as its number one priority and is looking to increase its footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. The constant propaganda will make that increased presence more palatable to the American people. But that increased presence will bring more confrontation between the US and China, and bring the region and the world closer to nuclear war.

*

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Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave.

What passes for US-style “democracy” would make some despots blush. 

It’s more fanciful than real, an illusion of what doesn’t exist.

The nation was created to be run by its rich, well-born, and able, John Adams explained.

John Jay, the first US Supreme Court chief justice, said owners of the country should run it.

When US elections are held, outcomes are predictable, continuity assured every time,

Names and faces change, results always the same.

Privileged interests are served at the expense of most others under one-party rule with two extremist right wings.

The nation’s bipartisan criminal class runs things for monied interests and themselves alone — at the expense of world peace, equity, social justice, and the rule of law they disdain.

When so-called elections are held, US voters get to choose between GOP and Dem presidential and congressional candidates for key posts who resemble an FBI most wanted list, not legitimate seekers of high office.

The race for the White House gets most attention for obvious reasons.

In November, US voters will choose between mentally unstable, narcissistic, congenital liar, disturbingly unhinged Trump, a person whose brain doesn’t work like normal people.

According to criminal psychology expert Robert Hare, he and hardliners surrounding him like Pompeo currently and Bolton earlier fit the definition of psychopathological derangement.

They exhibit the following disturbing traits: “coldheartedness,” a “callous unconcern for the feelings of others,” a lack of remorse, shame or guilt, irresponsibility, an extremely high threshold for disgust, impulsiveness, emotional shallowness, “pathological lying,” a “grandiose sense of self-worth,” an incapacity for love, a “parasitic lifestyle,” among other “dissocial personality” abnormalities.

They “con others for personal profit…pleasure,” and power over other people they seek to dominate.

They operate like recklessly dangerous sociopaths and psychopaths, blaming others for their own failures and wrongdoing.

They turn truth on its head for self-aggrandizement and malevolent aims, indifferent to the human toll.

Trump’s consistent dissembling suggests an inability to distinguish between facts and fiction.

His misleading, deceptive, and falsified remarks on key issues show profound ignorance and an aversion to truth-telling.

His callous indifference toward public health and welfare is polar opposite what responsible leadership is supposed to be all about.

In September 2017, thousands of mental health professionals said they believe that he “manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of president of the” US, adding:

“(W)e respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ ”

As president and commander-in-chief with his finger on the nuclear trigger he’s able to squeeze against one of more nations on the US target for regime change, he represents a clear and present danger to everyone everywhere.

What about Joe Biden, the presumptive Dem presidential nominee? Does he represent a safe alternative to Trump?

He and DJT are two-sides of the same coin, differing only in style and party label.

They’re both unapologetically pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-the military/industrial/security/media complex, pro-corporatism over the general welfare, pro-police state control, and anti-what just societies cherish.

Biden is Hillary with a gender difference, assuring continuation of Obama’s disturbing record if elected — notably endless wars against invented enemies, force-fed neoliberal harshness on ordinary Americans, and police state crackdowns on nonbelievers.

Ahead of formally announcing his candidacy for president, he said:

“I’m Joe Biden and I work for you (sic)…Are you with us (sic)?”

Throughout his near half-century political career as US senator, vice president, and presidential aspirant, Biden’s agenda has been all about serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of public rights, needs and welfare.

He never met a sovereign independent nation he didn’t want forcefully transformed into a US client state by wars or other hostile actions.

His Senate record alone revealed the measure of the man, supporting wars of aggression, police state laws, the racist war on drugs, mass incarceration, and other harmful policies to ordinary people, notably affecting people of color.

He opposes Net Neutrality, the last frontier of free and open expression, a fundamental right too vital to lose.

He and Trump have been accused of sexual misconduct numerous times.

Since the 1970s, many women accused Trump of assaulting them sexually.

As a private citizen, he earlier boasted about groping women. As a presidential candidate, he claimed many “women…got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me,” no evidence presented backing his claim.

One accuser said “(h)e was like an octopus. His hands were everywhere.”

Biden’s accusers are coming forth with lurid tales about him — from inappropriate touching to sexual assaults.

Psychology Today calls sexual assault “any sexual activity that occurs without consent,” adding:

It’s “a pervasive problem. In America, one in three women and one in four men experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, according to the National Institutes of Health.”

“And those numbers are likely an underestimate due to the shame and fear that prevent many survivors from reporting abuse.”

“Sex and violence are closely linked,” notably by “dominant men forcing themselves on women.”

“(S)exual assault is more about power than…sex…motivation stem(ming) from the perpetrator’s need for dominance and control.”

Sex is used by one person to exert power over another. Children and adolescents are affected like adults.

Men most often are perpetrators in male-dominant societies like the US. Trump long ago bragged that he could do what he pleased with women, saying:

“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Women in all walks of life tell horror stories of rape, assault, harassment, and abuse by powerful men, including politicians, celebrities, and the clergy.

Based on what’s know about Trump and Biden, neither figure is fit to hold any public office, notably not the highest in the land.

The choice for US voters in November is none at all.

It’s nearly always this way, notably since the neoliberal 90s — especially in Trump v. Hillary and incumbent DJT v. Biden.

Whoever is inaugurated US president in January 2021 will represent continuity like earlier, most likely in harsher form based on what’s ongoing.

It’s the American way. Democracy in the country is pure fantasy, never the real thing, notably not now and what’s coming ahead.

*

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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We are in a world that is globally flabbergasted today.

In other words, stunned, panicked.

Our brains are in a state of excessive, inordinate paranoia.

Our paranoia switches have been activated!

Martha Stout, an American psychologist, describes this in her book, “The Paranoia Switch“, published in 2007.

Our paranoia switch had already been activated on September 11, 2001.

Remember June 18, 2001? What you did, what you ate, the people you met, the TV program?

Not unless you were married that day. And again.

On the other hand, everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001, and especially what happened that day.

Not because everyone has a great memory or got married that day.

Because their paranoia switch has been turned to maximum.

I’m not going to lecture you on neuroscience or brain anatomy or brain amygdala or limbic system.

Those who want to, listen to the author [1] or read Martha Stout‘s book (photo on the right) [2], edifying, instructive, or this review article translated into French on the website fr.sott.net :

Limbic Warfare and Martha Stout’s “Paranoia Switch”

In summary, the stronger a traumatic event is, especially visual, the more the cerebral amygdala, the centre of fear and aggressiveness, is stimulated and, above all, the less the hippocampus (centre of factual memory) and its relays with the higher centres of the brain (reflection) are operational and intact.

This means ?

After the traumatic event, even years later, any image, sound, word closely or remotely related to this event plunges us back into the same state of fear by activating the amygdala and depressing the hippocampus and our upper brain centres.

Basically, the “panicker”, freed from the control of the “analyst”, takes over the reins of our brain, and that’s not nice, that’s not good.

For example, the sound of a car horn in the street can immediately awaken intense paranoia in a war veteran that is completely disproportionate or even irrelevant, escaping reason.

Martha Stout points out that among all traumatic experiences, the ones that will cause the most astonishment and terror are those intentionally caused by our fellow human beings, such as rape, kidnapping, aggression or a terrorist attack, far ahead of those caused by accidents (explosion, car accident…) or natural disasters (earthquake…).

The important thing to remember is that once stunned in this way, the human brain no longer thinks, or thinks badly [with difficulty]. A bit like a short circuit in an electrical installation.

As a result, despite all its intelligence, its possible knowledge or its reflexes of critical analysis of a situation, the human brain becomes as if frozen.

It is mature, ready to submit.

Primary emotions such as fear, anger and aggression take control.

Such humans become very malleable, very suggestible and feel a strong urge to calm this fear by preferring simplistic speeches, ready-made solutions, even if they are irrational, impossible, illogical, by thinking it over.

But precisely!

Once the paranoia switch is turned on, people’s brains stop thinking.

The citizens are told all the official authorities’ lies that seem to them to be the providential solution, in this climate of extreme fear.

Could the powers that be, well aware of these psychological weaknesses of human beings, use our paranoia switches to keep their power and commit their misdeeds?

Martha Stout, in her excellent book, says:

“Agents of fear maintain their power by exploiting human weaknesses. »

History shows how those in power have always used fear to commit their misdeeds, often using a scapegoat of that fear to exonerate themselves and give the brain a bone to gnaw in the brain amygdala of the deceived populations.

• Hitler used the anarchists, the Jews, the communists, accusing the latter of the burning of the Reichstag [3], to pass his freedom-destroying laws and establish Nazi rule.
• Successive American administrations have always used the fear of the other, from Native Americans to the Russians, and now the Chinese.
• Bush Junior used the fear of terrorists and Muslims by using the Osama Bin Laden lie, then the Fake news of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq, a new demonized enemy, used to activate the switch of paranoia of Western civilian populations.
• The New World Order (a transnational entity that now wants to establish a world government), uses a virus, COVID-19, to scare people, to stifle their paranoia switch, and this time, the enemy is represented by anyone who opposes their freedom-destroying laws presented as laws for the common good. Theirs above all!Always the same means for the same goal:

  Create a powerful paranoia switch and use it to dumbfound people’s thinking abilities, demonize opponents of the authorities and make them accept anything, as long as the fear is calmed.

  For September 11, 2001, the image of the collapsing twin towers and the cloud of dust, of people jumping into the void or scurrying like mad rabbits through the soot-blackened streets, served as a hook, a detonator for our cerebral amygdala.

  For the COVID-19 pandemic, all that was needed were these convoys of deaths in Italy, a few news stories about young people who died [6] and these daily macabre counts, these truncated statistics that our media inflict on us every day.

  The WHO of 2009, whose corruption has been officially brought to light [5-6-7], has remained and remains the patented organizer of this organized panic.

  The same gang of criminals has simply done it again, exploiting the psychological weaknesses well known to humanity.

  This time, it was done at a level never seen before, on a world level.

  And for many so-called civilized, “free” countries, it works.

  For me, this is what is most frightening, much more frightening than COVID-19, that all these countries, including mine, Belgium, have submitted so quickly to this evil New World Order.

  Martha Stout’s book not only describes how terror rewires our brains and reshapes our behaviour, it also describes how we can restore our dignity and freedom of thought.

  Dr. Pascal Sacré

  Photo: pixabay.com

  Author’s note : A Healthy Human Society:

•  Would have in all areas of life, first and foremost that of health, boards and committees made up of experts independent of merchants, vendors, industry which is not scientific, which is mercantile especially in a capitalist society.
• Would have “official” media at least neutral, at best critical of the executive power.
• Would have courses in its national education program on the functioning of the human brain and its weaknesses through the limbic system, the cerebral amygdala and the construction of memories, and popularized courses on how psychological trauma affects all these functions.
• Would have in the wake of these explanatory courses, courses of intellectual and emotional self-defense, with courses to be taken from among the many disciplines that have proven their effectiveness in managing stress and its emotional balance (meditation, self-hypnosis in particular).
• Would have control bodies made up of individuals with no ties of any kind to vendors, merchants, the industry mentioned above. Wise men” who proved this by their deeds and not only by their words, such as Professor Henri Joyeux, Professor Philippe Even, Doctor Michel de Lorgeril or the late Sylvie Simon in France.
• Would have in its medical and public health system a lobby that would put as much energy, if not more, into prevention and into the promotion of natural medicines, in particular the promotion of a healthy diet, if not more, than into the promotion of vaccination.
• Would have in its national education programme courses which would value pacifism and all the individuals who embodied it by their actions, rather than this endless series of admiring courses on the greatest mass murderers of History (Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Churchill*, Julius Caesar…).
• Would value bloodthirsty oppression resisters such as Powhatan, Opechancanough, Sir William Wallace and Arnold Winkler, rather than their oppressors.* “Winston Churchill was a patent-pending imperialist, a man who had no intention of ending domination over India, the African colonies and other British possessions.” [8]

Ingrained racism, brutality, warlike exaltation, and Churchill’s responsibility – whether in the military or while in power – for the brutal suppression of numerous revolts (in India, Sudan, South Africa as an army officer, in Ireland, Malaysia, Kenya as Secretary of State or as British Prime Minister), and for the abandonment to death of millions during the Bengal famine of 1943.

See:

Churchill’s Empire. The World That Made Him and The World He Made. Richard Toyle. London. Macmillan, 2010

Churchill’s Secret War. The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York, Madhusree Mukerjee, Basic Books, 2010 (English

The Crime of Bengal.

La Part d’Ombre de Winston Churchill, Paris, Les Nuits Rouges, 2015.

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Notes
1] The Paranoia Switch, YouTube video, interview with the author, in English

2] The book, The Paranoia Switch, by Martha Stout, PhD.

[3] Reichstagsbrandverordnung, Reichstag Fire Decree
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstagsbrandverordnung

4] COVID-19 – The choice of media: fear!

[5] Politics and corruption at WHO

6] Vaccination and the 2009 viral pandemic: do you trust SAGE?

[7] COVID-19 – Check your sources. War against… corruption?

8] Christopher Columbus and other cannibals, Jack D. Forbes, Le Passager Clandestin, 2018, pp 23-24.

It has yet to become clear just how harmful the coronavirus (Covid-19) will prove to be, with case figures and deaths continuing to evolve. As was anticipated, this highly contagious disease is causing havoc once it enters hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities – where the virus is spreading forth at ease and infecting thousands of vulnerable people.

To make matters worse, in the neoliberal era, hospitals and care centres have been under-funded and stripped of staff due to cuts or privatisation. For elderly people with underlying conditions like cancer or diabetes, the coronavirus has provided a death knell to an already depleted constitution. On these occasions the impression is often given, by mainstream media and politicians, that Covid-19 resulted solely in the patient’s death. It is more likely that, in many cases, the virus was a contributory factor in the loss of life, rather than the single cause.

Yet this virus should certainly not be written off as a mild disease, as analysis later on here may demonstrate. In some instances Covid-19 has been unwisely and recklessly dismissed, downplayed or even blamed on other countries.

Unlike heart disease or cancer, the coronavirus is of course infectious; it can spread quickly, unseen and, crucially, there is no vaccine or immunity to it. Therein lie some of the legitimate core concerns relating to this illness.

Covid-19’s emergence was most likely as a combination of the following factors, bolstered by scientific opinion and research: Industrial meat production which is massively reliant on the administering of antibiotics (1). Dangerous, mutant bacteria resistant to drugs have been developing as a result of overuse of antibiotics fed to livestock. America and China, the world’s strongest economies, are among the largest utilisers of antibiotics in meat processing and agriculture.

Tellingly, antibiotic resistance in domestic animals has almost tripled since the year 2000, as antibiotic usage has exploded this century (2). The abuse of antibiotics, in which both livestock and humans are becoming resistant to treatment, has many worrying repercussions, among them the likely spawning of various illnesses, including viruses. Another major factor in disease development is ongoing human encroachment into the natural world, like rainforests and grasslands. Habitat destruction across the globe has increased greatly over the past 70 years. This has resulted in regular interaction between billions of people, their livestock and wild creatures, all possible carriers of diseases, new or old.

It is irrelevant as to which country Covid-19 sprang forth from, whether it was China or some other state. For political or ideological reasons, a great deal of energy has been wasted in directing fingers of blame towards a particular nation, pertaining to the virus’s emergence. A viral outbreak is a world issue in which global corporate power, greed and the pursuit of profits are largely accountable – not a specific country or race.

About four months after the coronavirus was first reportedly identified, it has at least partly contributed so far to an official death toll of about 200,000 people, with global cases at present approaching three million. (3)

The above figures consist of a very small fraction of 1% of the planet’s human population. However, Covid-19 is in its early stages, and worldwide infections are increasing daily by the tens of thousands through statistics relayed to the public. There could be a considerable rise in cases to come, particularly if there are outbreaks of the virus among broader communities. It continues to spread relentlessly in hospitals, care facilities, etc., contributing to hundreds of deaths each day. In addition, the official coronavirus numbers are only the cases reported. The real Covid-19 figures are quite probably higher, due to inadequate testing and misdiagnoses, problems which have already come to the fore.

Early symptoms in patients with Covid-19 and influenza (flu) can be similar. The resemblance soon ends there. Every year, flu epidemics affect from 5% to 10% of the world’s human populace, up to 780 million people. Out of this, the flu is responsible for killing between 290,000 to 650,000 people globally per annum (4). Therefore the death rate worldwide from the flu each year, though slightly increasing in recent times, amounts to well below 1%.

Regarding Covid-19, official figures currently portray a death rate of around 7%: that is, 200,000 deaths out of 2.9 million cases. These statistics will, as stated, change over time but it indicates that Covid-19 is far more harmful than influenza – and likewise relating to the swine flu pandemic of a decade ago. These observations are supported by medical experts on the ground. Dr. Randell Wexler, a family physician working in various hospitals in the Ohio area, wrote earlier this month that, “What makes Covid-19 so much more dangerous than the flu, is that there’s no vaccine and no natural immunity in the world, meaning everybody is susceptible”. (5)

Indeed, and as of yet there is no evidence that recovered Covid-19 patients will thereafter develop immunity to the virus. They could catch it again and spread the disease about. Official figures from countries with some of the world’s highest coronavirus infection levels – such as Italy, France, Spain, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden – show that in each of these nations the death rate, from those infected with Covid-19, is presently at 10% or over (6). Bearing in mind that these are wealthy countries just mentioned, with more resources at their disposal than the vast majority of nations. The UN Human Development Index (HDI) places the above seven European states listed near the top of the “Very High Human Development” bracket. (7)

To provide one example, Italy, over 25,000 people there have died at least partially due to Covid-19, out of fewer than 200,000 cases recorded at present. This comprises a current death rate of 13.5% in Italy. There are indications that the disease is being contained in the country, mostly due to the necessary clampdown on Italian society announced in early March, it can be noted. The daily Covid-19 figures in Italy are gradually declining, but the Italians are not out of the woods by any means. Further outbreaks or clusters could occur, as in any affected country, and caution will need to be applied in the time ahead.

The coronavirus was first identified on Italian soil during 31 January 2020. In the 12 weeks or so directly prior to this, there were at least three million confirmed flu infections recorded in Italy by medical experts, up to 23 January 2020. Out of these approximately three million flu cases, just 240 people are thought to have died. (8)

Research conducted by scientists at separate universities in Britain, has outlined that those most vulnerable to the coronavirus are not only the elderly, but rivalling them are the obese (9). Medics have been struck by the influx of obese patients admitted to British hospitals with Covid-19. Obesity is a worsening problem in Britain, with almost 30% of the adult population considered obese, and many of them are not elderly. The insidious connection between obesity and Covid-19 has been under-reported by the media, and is presumably little know among the public.

America has easily the world’s highest level of reported coronavirus infections. By now, over 50,000 Americans are said to have succumbed to the virus, out of more than 900,000 official detections and counting. During the winter of 2018-2019, an estimated 35.5 million people contracted the flu in America, with 34,200 people dying, a death rate of a fraction of 1% (10). Studies have shown that obesity is a leading factor in coronavirus hospitalisations in New York City for example, the worst affected area of the US. Just over 40% of the American adult population is obese (11). Another one third of American adults are classed as overweight, below the level of obesity, but we will stick with the latter phenomenon which has more severe health ramifications.

Most of those enduring obesity are again far from advanced in years – 17% of American children are obese. Dr. Nivedita Lakhera, working in an intensive care unit in San Jose, California, noticed the large numbers of young and obese with coronavirus entering O’Connor Hospital, where she is mainly based. Dr. Lakhera revealed last week that, “They are young and coming to ER [Emergency Room] and just dropping dead” (12). Some of the patients who died of Covid-19 had no other known health problems, other than being that of morbidly obese.

America’s national public health institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has listed those afflicted with obesity among the high risk patients (13). This term, obesity, is defined by medical professionals as people who have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above. Dr. Jennifer Lighter, an epidemiologist at New York University Langone, noted recently that, “BMI is the achilles’ heel for American patients. In China it was smoking and pollution, and Italy had a larger older population, and many grandparents lived with extended families. Here, it’s BMI that’s the issue”.

Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, warned last week, “Obesity and poor diet is emerging as one of the biggest risk factors for a severe response to Covid-19 infection that can no longer be ignored”. (14)

The food industry is amassing huge profits in churning out cheap, low quality processed foods that fill supermarket shelves, and which is a cause behind disturbing obesity levels. Furthermore, those who are severely overweight are more likely to have embedded health issues, such as diabetes or cancer. Considering the high rate of obesity in America, it would not at all be accurate to suggest that a minority of the US population are potentially vulnerable, should they contract the virus. On obesity figures alone, more than a third of the American adult population could face health complications should they become infected with Covid-19.

Such a prospect is a low possibility, and it is not to suggest that millions will die due to the virus in America, or badly affected countries elsewhere – but every precaution must be taken to prevent it from spreading at will among the public. A World Health Organisation (WHO) account expounded that 80% of patients “experienced mild illness” when infected with Covid-19, before recovering quickly. The WHO was referring here primarily to cases in China (15). This WHO report was published almost two months ago, when China then had the world’s highest infection numbers. The virus was swiftly contained in China following strict lockdown measures enacted by the authorities.

Not mentioned once in the WHO report in question is the threat of obesity. Only between 5% to 6% of China’s population is obese. In Hubei province, where the city of Wuhan is located, 7.8% of its inhabitants are obese (16). By comparison, more than three times that percentage suffer from obesity in New York state, encompassing New York City. In the UK to date, three-quarters of critically ill coronavirus patients have either been overweight or obese. The official death rate from Covid-19 infections in Britain is 13.5%, with around 20,000 reported to have died, but this does not include those who passed away in care homes. The actual British death toll from the disease is likely to be 40% higher than the figures released by the government, which relate just to hospital deaths.

Elsewhere it may be no coincidence that, in South Korea, with one of the lowest obesity rates worldwide, that nation has experienced a very mild coronavirus death rate. Although there may be other factors involved in South Korea’s low fatality count, the country with the planet’s lowest obesity level, Vietnam, has so far recorded no deaths from Covid-19 – despite the fact that the first virus patient was noted in Vietnam just three days after the first American case.

Recent scientific studies highlight that more than 10% of the global human population is obese, around 800 million people (17). Dr. Samuel Kline, a gastroenterologist at Washington University School of Medicine, said that obesity sufferers “already have lower oxygen levels, they are predisposed to pulmonary dysfunction, and they have decreased chest function because of the weight on their chest. And many have sleep apnea. So they’re at pulmonary risk already”.

As the coronavirus is a respiratory disease that attacks the lungs, obese patients become yet more vulnerable. It could explain Dr. Lakhera’s poignant remarks about how some obese patients in California are “just dropping dead” after contracting Covid-19. In the age of neoliberal globalisation especially, one is well advised to treat government actions with suspicion. Nevertheless regarding the coronavirus epidemic, governments are undoubtedly correct in ordering lockdowns of the public so as to suppress this disease; providing it is done professionally, with proper notice and explanation given to the public, the opposite to which took place in India last month.

It must be stressed that governments have no other alternative but to call for lockdowns of societies for a certain period of time, and to promote social distancing initiatives. To suggest by now that governments should not implement these policies is irresponsible, to put it mildly. Were the public free to pursue their lives as before, this dangerous virus would clearly spread at a much quicker rate. As general populations of all ages are in overall poor physical shape, and with many having underlying illnesses, a lack of restrictions could have serious consequences.

Bucking the trend in Europe, the Swedish government has so far withheld implementing a complete lockdown, and precautions in the country have been light. The authorities may well be advised to alter their policies, as the official Covid-19 death rate in Sweden now stands at around 12%. On per capita terms Sweden, with a modest 10 million population, is among the world’s worst affected nations. Other Scandinavian countries also have much lower Covid-19 figures than Sweden.

It remains to be seen if the planet’s ultra-rich sectors will emerge in an even stronger position, when the virus is finally quelled. The signs may not be encouraging, even for the absolute elite. From late January to late March 2020, the richest 100 billionaires lost over $400 billion of their wealth, a painful dose of medicine by any measure (18). Almost all of the wealthiest people have seen their grotesquely bloated incomes fall appreciably during this period, coinciding with the virus outbreak. US president Donald Trump himself lost a billion dollars over the course of a month.

The reality is that the top 1% around the world, and more specifically the top 0.1%, were managing very nicely prior to the virus spread. Covid-19’s emergence was not desired by much of those in de facto control of the world. Corporations that will benefit are primarily the large pharmaceutical and drug companies, but this is just one segment of the big business sphere. The masses are unsurprisingly bearing the brunt of suffering once more, from highly unequal and impoverished countries like India, to the world’s richest nation, America.

Global spread of coronavirus could in fact have been prevented from the start (19). A growing likelihood of a virus epidemic was well known to scientists and other experts, and also by governments. Nothing was done, however. The crisis was compounded by the perfidy of our political systems. The reaction to Covid-19 was particularly sluggish and shambolic in America and Britain, where the warning signs had previously become so obvious. Thousands have since needlessly died.

While Covid-19 is having disastrous economic and social consequences, two greater challenges loom on the horizon which are scarcely mentioned: rising threat of nuclear war and climate change, both of which are being largely driven by a combination of Trump administration policies and neoliberalism. A major nuclear war or rampant climate change will make Covid-19 seem like child’s play in comparison. Mass media coverage of these bigger threats is either inadequate (climate change) or almost non-existent (nuclear war). Yet the media have directed enormous attention towards the coronavirus.

*

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Al Jazeera News, “Noam Chomsky: ‘Coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented’”, Al Jazeera, 3 April 2020

2 ScienceDaily, “Antibiotic resistance in food animals nearly tripled since 2000”, Princeton University, 9 October 2019

3 Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Joe Hasell, “Statistics and Research Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19)”, Our World in Data, 26 April 2020

4 World Health Organisation, “Up to 650,000 people die of respiratory diseases linked to seasonal flu each year”, 13 December 2017

5 Randell Wexler, MD, “How Covid-19 is different and worse than the flu”, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, 15 April 2020

6 Statista, “Coronavirus (Covid-19) death rates in countries with confirmed deaths and over 1,000 cases as of 26 April 2020, by country”

7 Human Development Reports, “Table 1: Human Development Index andits components”, United Nations Development Programme

8 The Local, “Flu outbreak in Italy peaking as half a million people struck down in a week”, 23 January 2020

9 Oli Smith, “Scientists discover ‘single biggest coronavirus risk factor’ – and 3 out of 5 Brits have it”, Daily Express, 20 April 2020

10 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical Visits, Hospitalisations, and Deaths in the United States – 2018 – 2019 season”

11 Gaby Galvin, “The U.S. obesity rate now tops 40%”, U.S. News, 27 February 2020

12 Dawn Fallik, “Covid-19 is hitting some patients with obesity particularly hard”, ScienceNews, 22 April 2020

13 Hannah Osborne, “Obesity one of the biggest risk factors in Covid-19 hospitalisations, study finds”, 14 April 2020

14 Oliver Morrison, “Coronavirus and obesity: Doctors take aim at food industry over poor diets”, Food Navigator, 22 April 2020

15 World Health Organisation, “Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) Situation Report – 41”, 1 March 2020

16 Lina Su, Long Sun, Lingzhong Xu, “Review on the prevalence, risk factors and disease Management of Hypertension among floating population in China during 1990–2016”, SpringerLink, 23 July 2018

17 AFP News Agency, “Obesity ‘epidemic’ affects one in 10 peopleworldwide – study”, TheJournal.ie, 12 June 2017

18 Tanner Brown, “Only 9 of the world’s top 100 billionaires have gotten richer during the coronavirus pandemic”, MarketWatch, 11 April 2020

19 The Real News Network, Marc Steiner, “Noam Chomsky On Covid-19 And His New Book: Internationalism Or Extinction”, 13 April 2020

Featured image is from CODEPink

It is with great sorrow that we learned yesterday, April 26^th, that Giulietto Chiesa has passed away. One of the most remarkable European intellectuals – activists of our times, deeply enshrined in the “Leninist” tradition of action before anything else, even if he would not claim it, Giulietto participated in the Delphi initiative which was born out of the Delphi Conference in 2015. It was from this center of the ancient World that he delivered a passionate warning on the danger of a new world war and an equally passionate appeal to stop both the coming war and NATO.

South Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council declared self-rule over the vast regions of the country that they claim as their own in response to the Saudi-backed Hadi government’s repeated violations of last year’s Riyadh Agreement that was aimed at de-escalating tensions between the nominally allied sides, thus representing the next step towards independence and one which couldn’t have been made at a more strategically opportune moment.

The 25th of April is an important date in Italy’s history. It commemorates the 75th anniversary of  Liberation, which is also the Anniversary of the Resistance.

On April 25, 2020, Commemorating the Liberation of Italy. We express our solidarity with the people of Italy. At the same time we express our concern regarding the US military bases established in Italy immediately established after World WarII.  

Italy like many other countries is currently experiencing the COVID-19 crisis. This year on the 25th of April which commemorates Italy’s Liberation, we were  not able to meet in Firenze to debate and discuss the “coronavirus crisis” which is affecting millions of people Worldwide.

Below is the transcript of the interview with Peter Koenig

***

Question: After the Corona virus lockdown that stopped the economy in a large part of the world, what do you think will happen with the economically weaker countries and how can they be defended?

Peter Koenig: First, I must tell you, it is virtually impossible to predict what might happen and in what time. We are quite possibly experiencing a huge paradigm shift. That means that nothing will – or almost nothing – will remain the way it was before.  This is a well-concocted plan -emanating from the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report. We are right now living the beginning of the first phase, called the “Lock Step” scenario.

What we can see already after barely 3 months of this “pandemic” lockdown – there is massive unemployment. In the US already more than 23 million people are claiming for unemployment benefits. That does not take into account, all those that have given up….

FED and GS (Goldman Sachs) predict unemployment to reach between 32% and 40% in the next quarter.

And there will be massive bankruptcies- over the next few months, spinning out of control- triggering more unemployment. Hardest hit are the small and medium size enterprises

The situation in Europe will be similar- if not worse.

So far, we have barely seen the tiny tip of the iceberg.

The countries most affected will be the debt dependant – i.e. highly indebted countries. And I’m talking about enslaving foreign debt.

This evil plan COVID-19 /2010 Rockefeller Report – contains many very people-unfriendly elements. It would be too long, to explain them here. But let’s list the most important ones – and how they may impact us and the economy:

• A massive vaccination program
• population reduction through vaccination – and other means, like induced famine, man-induced climate change, GMOs, 5G (strong electromagnetic fields – EMF) – and so on….
• digitized ID
• digitized money – no more cash
• rolling out 5G – to control all and every move we take – plus our digitized bank accounts – what is commonly called and misleadingly called “the internet of things”
• 5G is a weapon when used at its full strength – which is not yet the case. 5G is weaponized and can kill.

The Plan foresees massive repression through – what has already been called before the end of the last Century – the NEW WORLD ORDER, often also referred to as the ONE WORLD ORDER. A small elite of super powerful and super rich people would control us all.

The principal of the “Lock Step” arrangement. All we have left is marching in Lock Step to the orders from above.

But we do not have to allow this to happen. If we are aware of the Plan, we can take control – I suggest that you all read the 2010 Rockefeller Report – it’s probably still to be found on Internet. So, you realize that I’m not talking “conspiracy theory” – but that this Conspiracy is REAL.

For example, tell your governments with urgency to Stop Rolling Out 5G -the health impact has not been studied, except for individual scientist- 180 of whom have written to the EU Commission in Brussels, asking for a moratorium and independent study.

WHO has suspiciously remained silent about 5G.

Mr. Putin, for example, so far has refrained from rolling out 5G in Russia.

This may not answer the original question. But it is important to know the Plan to find the answers on how to save our local – not globalized – economies:

So – Deglobalize –

• Do not belong to a monetary or a political union that has no common constitution, no common interests, and no common goals- and especially no solidarity.
• Italy knows best about abject lack of solidarity within the EU – recent events with COVID-19 are a living testimony to the sham of the European Union.
• Greece also knows what it means to be in a union without solidarity
• So – get out of the EU and the Euro-prison. Yes, a Euro-prison, because the Euro, the way it has been injected into Europe, does not allow your countries economic and monetary sovereignty.
• What happened for example to Greece could never have happened if Greece would have had her economic and monetary sovereignty -i.e. her own currency
• Countries do need to regain their economic and monetary sovereignty – and
• be able to restart their local economy for local consumption with local money, with local public banks and with a publicly-owned central bank, that works for the local economy.

At the beginning, until a country achieves a high degree of auto-sufficiency, international trade is of lesser importance.

Then – trade with friendly nations, with countries and people that share the same or similar values. Make your own trading agreements – you do not need WTO.

And once you take back your country’s economic and monetary autonomy, you do not need international loans – from – I call them indebting organizations, like the World Bank and the IMF and regional development banks.

You can create your own internal debt and resolve that internal debt according to your own economic pace and strength. No need to pay a foreign institution interest for a foreign currency.

As to a recovery, poorer – or less industrialized – countries may be better suited to recover quickly, because they have a much bigger informal sector. Informality is creative and can adapt and adjust usually much faster than strictly and often rigidly structured economies.

A Prominent example is China – China grew out of the ashes in 1948 – internally independent, no foreign debt to speak of, with the principal goal of becoming auto-sufficient in food, education and health. When these goals were nearly reached, China started opening up for international trade and relations – in the 1980s.

Granted, China is not Italy – China is a huge country with 1.4 billion people. But the principal applies to every nation that wants to become her sovereign self again.

Question: After this long Covid-19 economic stagnation, can Europe recover? and by what means?

PK: Yes, Europe can recover. It depends how.

Remember, there is going to be a great paradigm shift in socioeconomic terms, as I mentioned before – of values, of customs, of our behaviour vis-à-vis each other – and likely in relations between countries. It is difficult – or rather impossible to predict – which way the wheels will be turning.

But what we can say now, is that our world will not be the same again – at least for a long-long time.

What happened during this almost total lock-down – not only of people, but of the world economy, lives have been destroyed, not by COVID-19, but by the shrieking unprepared halt of the economy around the world, and the multiple consequences that nobody with a sane mind could have foreseen.

People who have caused that were and are of an insane mind. It looks like a wanton destruction of the world’s assets, savings, incomes – the entire societal livelihood has been annihilated. At will. None of this would have been necessary to come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic.

But that is another subject.

What to do now?

This is the moment for US, the people to take over and create a new economic system, one of peace, equality and solidarity.

What first must go – in order to foster peace and to use available resources for the benefit of the people – we Europeans have to get out of NATO.

Imagine the trillions of dollars or Euros saved by abandoning this war-mongering apparatus that has only hostile and negative effectives on our closest neighbour, Russia – and a bit farther away – China?

These are our normal partners, they have been for centuries, if not millennia before the onset of the Anglo-American Empire – as they are on the same huge landmass, called EURASIA – no need to look and listen and being sanctioned left and right by the Masters across the Atlantic. No need at all. Europe and her Eastern Partners don’t need NATO.

There is no aggression whatso ever coming from either Russia or China. These people are friendly and want to enter into social and economic relationships.

None of these countries have a history of invading and interfering in other countries, not like the west – with at the forefront the US of A.

We are being indoctrinated on a daily basis that these are our enemies. That is a huge LIE. – A lie, the west, or the United States needs to maintain its power base, its military industrial complex that produces about half of the US GDP.

So, the silver lining of this crisis is that it gives us the opportunities to rethink Europe’s priorities, who are our true alliances – peaceful alliances. – And we do not need NATO.

Again – imagine what we, Europe, could be doing with the trillions saved from not belonging to the most destructive war-machine of this planet.

*

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This was livestreamed by BYOBLU and Pandora TV.

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

Global CO₂ rise and warming rates have reached a large factor to an order of magnitude higher than those of the past geological and mass extinction events, with major implications for the shift in climate zones and the nature and speed of current extreme weather events. Given the abrupt change in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere-land system, accelerating since the mid-20ᵗʰ century, the terms climate change and global warming no longer reflect the nature of the climate extremes consequent on this shift. Further to NASA’s reported mean land-ocean temperature rise to +1.18°C for March 2020, relative to the 1951-1980 baseline, large parts of the continents, including Siberia, central Asia, Canada, parts of west Africa, eastern South America and Australia are warming toward mean temperatures of +2°C and higher.

The rate exceeds that of the Last Glacial Termination (LGT) (21–8 kyr), the Paleocene-Eocene hyperthermal event (PETM) (55.9 Ma) and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K-T) (64.98 Ma) impact event. A principal question arises regarding the relationships between the warming rate and the nature and progression of the current migration climate zones toward the poles, including changes in the atmosphere and ocean current systems. Significant transient cooling pauses, or stadials, are projected as a consequence of the flow of cold ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica into the oceans.

Figure 1. Global temperature distribution in March 2020, relative to a 1951-1980 baseline. NASA GISS.

The K-T impact and subsequent warming

According to Beerling et al. (2002) the CO₂ change triggered by the K-T impact event 65 Ma years ago involved a rise from about 400-500 ppm to 2300 ppm over 10.000 years from the impact (Fig. 2) at a rate of 0.18 ppm/year. This is less than the mean Anthropocene CO₂ rise rate of 0.415 ppm/year and an order of magnitude less than the 2 to 3 ppm/year rise rate in the 21ˢᵗ century. Likewise the Anthropocene temperature rise rate of ~ 0.0074°C/year is high by an order of magnitude as compared to the K-T impact event rate of~ 0.00075°C/year (Table 1) reported by Beerling et al. (2002).

Beerling et al.’s (2002) estimate, based on fossil fern proxies, implies an initial injection of at least 6,400 GtCO₂  and possibly as high as 13,000 GtCO₂ into the atmosphere, significantly higher than values derived by Pope et al. (1997). This would increase climate forcing by +12 Wm⁻² and mean warming of ~7.5°C, which would have strongly stressed ecosystems already affected by cold temperatures and the blockage of sunlight during the impact winter and associated mass extinction at the KT boundary (O’Keefe et al. 1989).

Figure 2. Reconstructed atmospheric CO₂ variations during the Late Cretaceous–Early Tertiary derived from the SI (Stomata index) of fossil leaf cuticles calibrated by using inverse regression and stomatal ratios. Beerling et al. (2002).

The PETM hyperthermal event

The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55.9 Ma, triggered the release of a large mass of light ¹³C-depleted carbon suggestive of an organic source, likely methane, has led to a global surface temperature rise of 5 – 9°C within a few thousand years (Table 1; Fig. 3). Deep-sea carbonate dissolution indices and stable carbon isotope composition were used to estimate the initial carbon pulse to a magnitude of 3,000 PgC or less. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased during the main event by up to 70% compared with pre-event levels, leading to a global surface temperatures rose by 5–9°C within a few thousand years.

Figure 3. Simulated atmospheric CO2 at and after the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary (after Zeebe et al. (2009).

The last glacial termination

Paleoclimate indices based on ice cores and isotopic evidence suggest temperature rise generally correlates with CO₂ during the Last Glacial Termination between 17.5 kyr to 10 kyr. Whereas the rise rates of CO₂ and temperature are broadly parallel the temperature somewhat lags behind CO₂ (Figure 2), including changes of CO₂ (186 – 265 ppm) and of temperature (T°C -3.3°C – +0.2°C) (Fig. 4). A rise rate of ~0.010 ppm CO₂/year and of temperature ~0.00046°C/year are indicated (Table 1) (Shakun et al., 2012). Differences between temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere correspond to variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

Figure 4. Global CO₂ and temperature during the last glacial termination (After Shakun et al. 2012).(LGM – Last Glacial Maximum; OD – Older Dryas; B-A – Bølling–Allerød; YD Younger Dryas).

Trajectories and rates of global CO₂ rise and warming

The rates at which atmospheric composition and climate changes occur constitute major control over the survival versus extinction of species. Based on paleo-proxy estimates of greenhouse gas levels and of mean temperatures, using oxygen and carbon isotopes, fossil plants, fossil organic matter, trace elements, the rate of CO₂ rise since ~1750 (Anthropocene) (CO₂ ᴀɴᴛʜ) exceeds that of the last glacial termination (CO₂ ʟɢᴛ) by an order of magnitude (CO₂ ᴀɴᴛʜ/CO₂ ʟɢᴛ = 41) and that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (CO₂ ᴘᴇᴛᴍ) by a high factor (CO₂ ᴀɴᴛʜ/CO₂ ᴘᴇᴛᴍ ~ 3.8–6.9)(Table 1). The rise rate of mean global temperature exceeds that of the LGT and the PETM by a large factor to an order of magnitude (Table 1; Figs 5 and 6). It can be expected that such extreme rates of change will be manifest in real time by observed shifts in state of global and regional climates and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, including the following observations:

• A shift in climate zones (Fig. 7) including expansion of the tropics and migration of moderate Mediterranean-type climate zones toward the poles, estimated at a rate of 56-111 km per decade (Thurton 2017), signifying a fundamental shift in state of the Earth’s climate regime.
• A high rate of ice melt and development of cool ocean pools south of Greenland and around Antarctica (Fig. 8a) developing into cool ocean regions and stadial climate conditions (Fig. 8b).
• Reduced temperature differences between the polar zones and mid-latitudes and thereby weakening of the polar boundaries and the polar jet stream boundary.
• Weakening of the North Atlantic Thermal Circulation.
• Changes in the southern ocean Antarctic oscillation and the Antarctic vortex.
• The rapid increase in extreme weather events, including droughts, heat waves, fires, cyclones and storms.

Figure 5. Cenozoic and Anthropocene CO₂ and temperature rise rates.

Figure 6. A comparison between rates of mean global temperature rise during:

(1) the last Glacial Termination (after Shakun et al. 2012);

(2) the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, after Kump 2011);

(3) the late Anthropocene (1750–2019), and

(4) an asteroid impact. In the latter instance, temperature associated with CO₂ rise would lag by some weeks or months behind aerosol-induced cooling.

Figure 7. Migration of the subtropical Sahara climate zone (red spots) northward into the Mediterranean climate zone leads to warming, drying and fires over extensive parts of Spain, Portugal, southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and to melting of glaciers in the Alps. Migration, Environment and Climate Change, International Organization for Migration, Geneva, Switzerland. With permission of the IOM UN Migration. The regional impacts of climate change map extracted from The Atlas of Environmental Migration (Ionesco D., Mokhnacheva D. and Gemenne F., Routledge, Abingdon, 2017), p. 63 © IOM (Mokhnacheva, Ionesco), Gemenne, Zoï Environment Network, 2015. Sources: IPCC (2013, 2014)

By contrast to linear IPCC climate projections for 2100-2300, climate modelling for the 21st century by Hansen et al. 2016 suggests major effects of ice melt water flow into the oceans from the ice sheets, leading to stadial cooling of parts of the oceans, changing the global temperature pattern from that of the early 21ˢᵗ century (Figs 8, 9a) to the late 21ˢᵗ century (Fig. 9b).

Figure 8. Global temperature patterns during El Nino and La Nina events. NASA GISS

Figure 9. (a) An A1B model of surface-air temperature change for 2055-2060 relative to 1880-1920 (+1 meters sea level rise) for modified forcing (Hansen et al. 2016);
(b) A1B model surface-air temperatures in 2096 relative to 1880-1920 (+5 meters sea level rise) for 10 years ice melt doubling time in the southern hemisphere and partial global cooling of -0.33°C (Hansen et al. 2016).

Summary and conclusions

1. Late 20th century to early 21asrt century global greenhouse gas levels and regional warming rates have reached a high factor to an order of magnitude faster than those of past geological and mass extinction events, with major implications for the nature and speed of extreme weather events.
2. The Anthropocene CO₂ rise and warming rates exceed that of the Last Glacial Termination (LGT) (21–8kyr), the Paleocene-Eocene hyperthermal event (PETM) (55.9 Ma) and the post-impact Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K-T) (64.98 Ma).
3. Further to NASA’s reported mean land-ocean temperature rise of +1.18°C in March 2020, relative to the 1951-1980 baseline, large parts of the continents, including central Asia, west Africa eastern South America and Australia are warming toward mean temperatures of +2°C and higher.
4. Major consequences of the current shift in state of the climate system pertain to the weakening of the polar boundaries and the migration of climate zones toward the poles. Transient cooling pauses are projected as a result of the flow of cold ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica into the oceans, leading to stadial cooling intervals.
5. Given the abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere-land system, the current trend signifies an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere, accelerating since the mid-20th century. Terms such as climate change and global warming no longer reflect the extreme nature of the climate events consequent on this shift, amounting to a climate catastrophe on a geological scale.

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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and climate scientist, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

For many years, we in the alternative media have been warning that when a new crises emerges, a future of social engineering and control would bring us closer to George Orwell’s predictions right to our doorstep.  Since the start of the Corona Virus Pandemic (Covid-19) the destruction of the world’s economy with the US in an already fragile state of affairs taking the biggest hit with its lock downs and an estimated 26 million people so far who are now unemployed.  It has crippled the social fabric of society, basically forever and as a result, more invasive technologies are being introduced to the world now more than ever before. Recently, the US mainstream media has been reporting on the new technologies that can be implemented by governments to track the potential carriers of Covid-19 from drones that will be able to check your temperature and determine that you may or may not carry the virus to a program that can track individuals Smart phones through a mapping tool which was created by an Israeli company looking to have a footprint in the US market.

When it comes to the surveillance of the public’s health from the sky, drone manufacturer Draganfly comes to mind as it made recent headlines with claims that their drone technology can monitor the public’s health in real time which brings us to the town of Westport, Connecticut. The Westport local police department had originally agreed to monitor and track its citizens for fevers or coughs but had decided to reverse its course and not to roll out the drone program due to its citizens privacy concerns according to NBC news:

A Connecticut police force is grounding its plans to test a “pandemic drone” that would detect a person with a fever or cough, after privacy concerns were raised. The town of Westport has chosen to opt out of the ‘“Flatten the Curve Pilot Program” from drone manufacturer Draganfly, according to NBC Connecticut. Westport Police Chief Foti Koskinas said Thursday that while he was thankful for the opportunity to participate, he also wanted to be responsive to citizens’ concerns.

“We thank Draganfly for offering the pilot program to Westport and sincerely hope to be included in future innovations once we are convinced the program is appropriate for Westport,” Koskinas said, according to NBC Connecticut

Why Westport residents were concerned with Draganfly’s drone capabilities? Watch their introductory video:

This is just one of the technologies that happens to be floating around, giving those in power new ideas that can be used in any future outbreak or any other crisis. What if there is another outbreak in the late fall or winter season? . 

Another not so great idea that is not drone related is currently being used around the world is a program called Fleming created by an Israeli technology firm called the NSO Group based in Herzliva, Israel, a firm that was founded by Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio who happens to employ former IDF soldiers.  An article from Australia’s online news site www.news.com.au from 2016 ‘Everything we know about NSO Group: The cyberarms dealer responsible for the iPhone hack’ describes who the founders are linked to which should not be a surprise to anyone at this point:

According the LinkedIn pages of Mr Lavie and Mr Hulio, both men are self-proclaimed serial entrepreneurs, with a string of Israeli start-ups attributed on their profiles.  Despite the plethora of tech companies the pair has founded, both men also have ties to the Israeli government. 

Mr Lavia’s profile shows he was an “employee” of the Israeli Government from July 2005-October 2007, while Mr Hulio’s claims he was a Company Commander (Search and Rescue) for the Israeli Defence Force from August 1999-November 2004.  The company also boasts to have employees from Unit 8200 — the signal intelligence and code deciphering arm of the Israel Defence Force

The NSO group is known worldwide for a highly-controversial spyware program called Pegasus which enabled remote surveillance of individuals smartphones. The NSO Group’s history has been controversial since its introduction of the Pegasus program to the world, for example, in a 2019 article from fastcompany.com, ‘Israeli cyberattack firm woos investors amid a human rights firestorm’ explains one particular controversy that targeted numerous activists and journalists worldwide:

NSO makes Pegasus, a sophisticated tool that can hack into smartphones and is intended, the company says, to help governments stop criminals and terrorists.  But Pegasus has also been implicated in attacks on members of civil society. Targets of the software have included at least two dozen activists, journalists, and lawyers in the Middle East, Mexico, Asia, and Europe, according to extensive analysis by Citizen Lab, a digital watchdog at the University of Toronto

NSO Group has many other scandals, one of them is with Saudi dissident, Omar Abdelaziz who filed a lawsuit claiming that his conversations with Jamal Khashoogi, the Washington Post journalist from Saudi Arabia who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018 were intercepted by Pegasus. Now, the NSO Group is rolling out a new program called Fleming. According to the NSO group,

“Fleming features an advanced mapping tool that identifies the spread of coronavirus in real-time, empowering health and other government officials to make informed decisions, backed by data, to quickly mitigate the pandemic.”

They say that they will empower healthcare workers and “other government officials” which is pretty vague. “By utilizing this technology, decision makers can more effectively deploy resources, including critical supplies and medical personnel, and implement public health protocols that help contain the spread”, resources can be taken out of proportion because the government will decide what “resources” they will use. What if they decided to use a drone strike as a resource?

In an opinion piece published by Ynetnews of Israel ‘ The truth about digital tracking to fight coronavirus’ by Shalev Hulio, the CEO of the NSO Group who of course takes a defensive approach for his firm’s new program “It is important to appreciate that the historical information for each mobile subscription is already and routinely available to the cellular companies” so, since it is already in use, Hulio is suggesting that we can go a little further.

“This information only includes cellular locations for that subscription and does not require any collection of information from the device itself”

which is something they cannot guarantee. He continues

“In other words, with the exception of retrieving the historical location of the device, there is no listening in on calls and no data, personal information or messages that exist on the device can be gathered.”

This is the same tech firm that has been implicated in violating the privacy concerns of journalists, activists and lawyers around the world. Hulio says that “through mapping the path of the patient, we can see the people around them and they can be directly alerted” and then he asks the question, “So how does all this not violate privacy?”

He claims that the data is analyzed with no verifiable information that can identify you, “In fact, not even a phone number is collected: The analysis is based on the SIM card number that exists on the device.” Then once all the information is collected then they can send a message to the person infected and request they go into self-isolation “This will allow the authorities to build a “tree of infection.”

These are just two of many Orwellian ideas being floated around as potential tools to monitor and control the corona virus outbreak. If we allow these technologies to be implemented into our daily lives, whatever remaining freedoms you may still have, will slowly be taken away.

It does not have to be this way, we can resist this type of invasive technology as the people of Westport, Connecticut proved. They had privacy concerns and voiced their concerns to the local authorities about using ‘Draganfly’s drones that would have initiated the ‘Flatten the Curve Pilot Program’ which is a victory in itself, but this fight has only begun, and will continue well into the future as George Orwell’s warning becomes a reality day by day as the lock downs continue.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

Beijing is not back to normal but there is an air of normality. The Beijing Subway has 23 lines but only one runs on a north-south axis. This is Line 5, the busiest. In February and March its carriages were almost empty. Now it is running at about 75 per cent of its pre-outbreak capacity.

The capital’s parks are filling up again as families take advantage of the warmer weather. The May day holiday is approaching and picnic spaces are being prepared.   Restaurants are opening tentatively with social distancing enforced for diners. Primary schools are also reopening but most secondary schools and universities remain closed until September. The capital was never under lockdown but all residents must have a pass to enter their compound. If you lose it, a new one must be issued before admittance is granted.

And everyone, without exception, is wearing face masks. You cannot use public transport, go into a shop or go to work without one. Temperature checks are ubiquitous. They are carried out swiftly at the entrances to subways, work places, shops or any public gathering.  The masks serve another purpose. This is the time of year when millions of catkins take to the air, and pedestrians have to protect their eyes, noses and throats from them. There are pockets of Beijing where COVID-19 has appeared but generally the capital seems to be controlling the outbreak.

Anyone re-entering the city limits must undergo a 14-day quarantine. If this is permitted to be carried out at home, a sticker is put on the apartment door asking neighbors to inform the authorities if quarantine has been broken.

Supermarkets in the capital have remained well-stocked. More than 300,000 tons of pork from the strategic pork reserves were released for the capital’s residents and trucks have been requisitioned to deliver vegetables. As the capital, food shortages for its residents were unthinkable.

The blame game? From China’s point of view, the narrative is clear cut. It made catastrophic mistakes initially. It was slow to recognize the danger posed by COVID-19. It hassled and arrested doctors for warning about it in early January. That same month it allowed a massive Lunar new year’s public banquet for 40,000 families to take place. And as it became clear that an epidemic was raging, politics took precedence as the local party congresses in Wuhan and in Hubei province were being held in January prior to the (postponed) national congress in March.

Even when it announced the Wuhan lockdown, it did not implement it until five hours later allowing people, many presumably infected, to leave the city. But then it acted with resolve. Locking down Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, telling most of the country’s workers to stay at home, shutting schools and universities, cutting air links, introducing national temperature checks, and home passes. These and other measures allowed it to find a route to recovery and gave the rest of the world a precious window of opportunity. This, again, in China’s view, was squandered. Despite the evidence from China, the rest of the world seemed reluctant to face reality.  Italy, Span and Germany seemed to understand the peril but Japan, Britain and the United States adopted an almost laissez-faire mentality. And US President Donald Trump’s remark that COVID-19 could be treated by people injecting disinfectant seemed to confirm China’s worst fears: The lessons it painfully learned were being willfully ignored.

Even if a vaccine is developed relative quickly, say by September, COVID-19 will change the world.

There will be political consequences. Mutual mistrust between China and the West is the new norm. And in China, the unwritten law that has shaped that country’s and the world’s fortune over the last 30 years seems to have been broken. That law states that China will deliver its citizens economic growth at the cost of political rights. Before COVID-19 the Chinese economy, according to Beijing, was growing at about 6 per cent per annum. This year it is estimated to grow at about 2.5 per cent. Pre-COVID, any growth less that 5 percent was considered a recipe for massive social upheaval. The consequences of this outbreak will be felt long after the face masks in Beijing are discarded and the temperature checks stopped.

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Reporting from Beijing Tom Clifford is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

April 24, 2020, marks the 105^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, which was the first genocide of the 20^th century.  The starting date is held to be April 24, 1915, in a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in at least 1.5 million deaths by 1923.  The Ottoman Empire is the direct predecessor of modern Turkey. 

The Armenians were the first nation in the world to make Christianity their official state religion. The Turks were Muslims, and this holds today. Not only Armenians were targeted for extermination, as the Assyrian and Greek Christian communities were among those massacred.

Armenian Genocide facts

While the world was focused on their collective suffering in World War 1, the Turks were carrying out the genocide in two phases.  The second phase involved the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the sick on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert city of Deir Ez Zor, then also under Ottoman Empire occupation. Those marching across the vast desert were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.

The Turks viewed Armenians as “heathens”, and deserved to be treated differently than the Muslims.

Turkish denial of history

Turkey denies the Armenian Genocide ever happened, despite the documented history.  Turkey and Turkish leaders have vociferously refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, and have attacked, punished, and harassed all Turkish citizens who do publicly acknowledge the crime against humanity.

The brutal Turkish dictator, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, was infuriated by the Armenian campaign to win their basic civil rights, and he declared that he would crush them.  “I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. The first Armenian massacre occurred between 1894 and 1896 and was the precursor to the later genocide.

The Turks not only succeeded in exterminating 1.5 million Christians, but they changed the entire culture, as they tried to re-write history.  The results were over 450 monasteries, 1,900 schools and 2,400 churches were seized and turned into Muslim places of worship, or state use.  Many of the Museums in Turkey today were once a busy and thriving church.  Libraries, artwork, and Christian antiquities were destroyed or removed to obscurity.

The names of over 3,600 towns and villages that had once been Armenian communities were morphed into new Turkish names, to erase the Armenian, and Christian history of modern Turkey once called Anatolia.

The Turks ancestors were a Central Asian race, who were warriors on horse-back, and converted to Islam.  Othman conquered Constantinople, which was a Christian center. He established the Ottoman Empire on the doors of Europe, but his culture and mentality were Eastern.  Germany has repeatedly refused to accept Turkey into the European Union, and much of that refusal is rooted in the culture of the Turks.

Turkey attacked an Armenian village in Syria in 2014

History repeats itself, and the world allows it because Turkey is unrepentant, and acts with impunity. Turkey is a member of NATO and a close US ally.  President Obama’s war on Syria for ‘regime change’ included Turkey as the transit hub for the terrorists following Radical Islam, which is a political ideology followed by Turkey and most of the Arab Gulf monarchies.

The attack on Kessab, Syria began on March 21, 2014. Resident Samuel Poladian told Dr. Declan Hayes of Ireland he heard Turkish military helicopters overhead on the morning of the invasion.  Kessab is a small Armenian village on the border with Turkey, just north of Latakia. Turkey orchestrated the invasion which sent 2,000 residents fleeing for their lives, as 20,000 foreign terrorists poured over the border from Turkey.

Hovian Khatcherian had been sheltering in Kessab, having been forced to flee Reqaa, and then Aleppo.  For the third time, she was running for her life from terrorists who were supported by the US-EU-NATO project for a new Syria.

The terrorists systematically desecrated all three of Kessab’s churches, and they looted the village’s graves seemingly looking for gold. They stripped every house of anything of value, and their Turkmen partners ferried off household goods to be sold in the markets of Antakya and Iskenderun.

Kessab’s very elderly residents were kidnapped and taken to Turkey where they languished for months of captivity. The US Ambassador to Turkey visited them on “April Fools Day”, but when he left without releasing them, it was no joke.

Pepken Djourian and his wife watched in horror as the US-backed terrorists executed their only son Kevork in front of them and they refused to allow them to bury him. The parents were also among the kidnapped victims enduring captivity in Turkey.

The Kessab attack, destruction, and occupation were directed solely against Armenian Christians. It was Turkey’s brutal way of showing the Armenians and the Syrian Arab Army which protect them that, just as in 1915, they can occupy Kessab and slaughter its inhabitants at any time.

Kessab’s nightmare has not ended. Few of the residents have returned to their homes, and most homes, shops, and farms have not been repaired. Most residents can’t afford repairs, and those who can are reluctant to invest in repairs which can be wiped out again by Turkey, and its terrorist allies. Al Qaeda is in control of Idlib, which is close to Kessab. The terrorists have continued to periodically strike Kessab with missiles fired from Idlib. The terrorists are supported by President Erdogan and President Trump has repeatedly demanded that Idlib and its terrorist leaders be protected against attack by the Syrian Arab Army. Until Idlib is free of terrorists, Kessab cannot be safe.

Israel refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide

‘Israel’ insists that six million Jews were barbarically and cruelly murdered in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis.  The Jews were the victims of the second genocide. Jews and Armenians have shared common experiences; however, ‘Israel’ has refused to ever recognize the Armenian genocide. Raphael Lemkin in 1943 was the first to coin the word genocide as he was reflecting on the Armenians.  Adolf Hitler is reported to have said in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Turkey was never punished for the Armenian genocide, which gave Hitler the confidence for his plan to exterminate the Jews.

‘Israel’ has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide out of fear of Turkey’s reaction, a nation which is a close ally with ‘Israel’ and has established a thriving oil business, trafficking stolen oil from the east of Syria through Turkey, and then shipped to ‘Israel’. The schools in ‘Israel’ refuse to teach the Armenian genocide as part of history, even though it has a connection to their own Holocaust. The Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem is just a place on a map for ‘Israeli’ students.

Armenian Genocide Recognized Internationally

32 countries currently recognize the Armenian Genocide, including the US, Russia, Syria, and Germany. In 2015, the martyrs of the genocide were canonized by the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church, and special icons were placed in Armenian churches around the world.

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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: Armenian Americans march in Los Angeles on April 24 during an annual commemoration of the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. (Source: AP)

The statistics surrounding the Covid-19 crisis have always been unreliable, yet msm and other sources use these numbers without qualifications. To qualify the numbers would be to dismantle the Lie. The Lie must be maintained because it is fundamental to hidden agendas which include economic warfare, and a vast transfer of wealth upwards,(1) war propaganda against China (2), the anti-democratic ushering in of police-state surveillance mechanisms, and the imposition of what some refer to as a Fourth Industrial Revolution.(3)

In the following video, Senator Jensen dismantles the statistical corruption. He explains that administrators pressure Doctors to use the Covid-19 descriptor. Why? Hospitals in his area receive $5,000.00 for a pneumonia diagnosis, $13,000.00 for a Covid-19 diagnosis, and $39,000.00 if the patient receives treatment with a ventilator.

Since the distinction between dying FROM Covid and WITH Covid-19 is not being made, most Mainstream Media and government statistics are not valid. They are being used to satisfy other agendas.

Accurate statistics, largely suppressed, do exist, and they involve results from antibody tests.

These numbers are not inflated, and they reveal Covid-19 infection fatality rates as being in line with flu mortality rates. (4)

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

Notes

(1)
The Last American Vagabond, “Your Government Is Using Coronavirus To Create The Largest Transfer Of Wealth In American History” (video) 5 April, 2020.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hwCEXZphQ&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0ARHj6HbP6KsEJpiJUcz-uMkFEwxTZySX_NpQsslJpnDUkeHXb5iov2Hk)

(2) Mark Taliano, “Coronavirus False Flag.” Global Research, 22 April, 2020.
(https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-false-flag/5710403) Accessed 26 April, 2020.

(3) The Jimmy Dore Show, “Security State Using Coronavirus To Implement Orwellian Nightmare.”. 23 April, 2020.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGMkSNj_-7Q&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2fUd81wk1aCLw3C0Sw6Hynd9f7qp8GQhOrusfivlcQ_9ZxY-F3-yS1mM4) Accessed 26 April, 2020.

(4) “THIS IS HUGE: Stanford’s Antibodies Study Wraps Up, Shows Covid-19 Is 50x More Prevalent and 50x Less Deadly Than Believed/ Will this be the stake through Covid Rouge’s dark, rotten heart? It should be /By Dr. John Ioannidis/ANTI-EMPIRE”
(https://www.marktaliano.net/this-is-huge-stanfords-antibodies-study-wraps-up-shows-covid-19-is-50x-more-prevalent-and-50x-less-deadly-than-believed-will-this-be-the-stake-through-covid-rouges-dark-rotten-heart-it/) Accessed 26 April, 2020.

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

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

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

Last year we met in Florence on the 7th of April, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO. The theme of our conference last year was NATO EXIT.  

On April 25, 2020, Commemorating the Liberation of Italy. We express our solidarity with the people of Italy.

Italy like many other countries is currently experiencing a major crisis. This year on the 25th of April which commemorates Italy’s Liberation, we are not able to meet in Firenze to debate and discuss the “coronavirus crisis” which is affecting millions of people Worldwide.

VIDEO: Presentation of Colonel Ann Wright

On Friday, May 1, an ongoing General Strike campaign begins. This campaign could become the most powerful movement in the United States and reset the national agenda. It comes when the failures of the US political system have been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered an economic collapse in a presidential election year.  The General Strike campaign will be ongoing with actions on the first of every month. Strategic strikes of workers, students, consumers, prisoners, and renters will also continue.

This new era of mass strikes builds on successful strikes by teachers, healthcare workers, hotel workers, and others.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the last two years, there has been the largest number of major work stoppages in 35 years with more than 400,000 workers involved in strikes in both 2018 and 2019. This continues in 2020 with a wave of wildcat strikes.

People must commit to an ongoing campaign of strikes starting now and continuing after the election. FDR faced more than 1.4 million people striking after he was elected, which forced him to put the New Deal and workers’ rights legislation in place. The next president should be subjected to continuous strikes with specific demands. Striking is the most powerful tool of the people. We need to learn to use it effectively.

United action magnifies popular power and shows those in power that they cannot ignore us any longer. You can participate by sharing this article with other people and urging them to participate. Follow and share the hashtags #CoronaStrike, #GeneralStrike, #MayDay2020,#GeneralStrike2020, and #PeoplesStrike.

Participate in Popular Resistance’s Zoom call on April 29, 2020, at 7:00 pm Eastern/4:00 pm Pacific to learn about what will be happening on May Day and how you can be part of it. Register at bit.ly/MayDayMeeting.

General Strike

COVID-19 exposes the fact that essential workers who provide food, healthcare, and deliveries to our homes are mistreated and underappreciated. Workers are underpaid and are not being provided with protective equipment or allowed sick leave. The COVID-19 rescue laws have given trillions in funding to investors and big businesses while leaving people and small businesses with crumbs. Twenty-six million people have filed for unemployment but states are not processing claims quickly and the COVID-19 rescue only provided an inadequate one-time $1,200 payment. Millions of the newly unemployed are losing their health insurance.

The #GeneralStrike has five demands:

(1) Protection from Covid-19

(2) Safe Housing.

(3) Living Wages.

(4) Medicare for All.

(5) Equal Education.

We would add a sixth urgent demand – saving the postal service.

The tactics of the General Strike will vary over time. During this initial phase of the COVID-19 virus, there will be car caravans, sickouts, and signs on windows supporting the strikes. People will use social media to show support for the demands. On May 1 and beyond there will be webinars on the strike and the issues raised by it.

With a campaign of strategic and general strikes very likely going on until 2022, people can take control of the country and put the necessities of the people at the top of the agenda. Jane McAlevey points to three areas where workers have decisive power. These include logistics, healthcare, and education.

• Logistics includes providing food, delivery, transit, and other services that keep the economy functioning. Workers disrupting these areas makes the country ungovernable by creating economic dysfunction. 
• Despite being essential, healthcare workers lack protective equipment and basics such as tests. Healthcare workers have stood against the dangerous so-called “Liberate” protests Donald Trump is encouraging to prematurely re-open the economy. Nurses have protested the lack of protective equipment and been fired for doing so. These acts of defiance must be supported as we also demand national improved Medicare for All so everyone has access to high-quality healthcare. We must build our public health system so never again will the country be unprepared for a pandemic.
• Teacher’s unions have developed the model for all unions to follow, strikes for the common good. Teacher strikes have been successful because they have represented theinterests of students and the communities where they live. Poverty, inadequate housing, brutal policing, and ICE raids undermine the ability of teachers to do their jobs. Making demands for the common good unites us to work for what we need.

Recently, there have been wildcat strikes. These can include a variety of work stoppages, e.g. people taking sick days, work slowdowns, work disruptions due to flat tires on delivery trucks, and other ways that prevent work from being accomplished. To follow strike actions, visit On The Picket Line or check out this interactive map of strike actions, or the “Dual Power” map by Black Socialists in America. Get in the loop and get connected at General Strike 2020.

Rent Strike

As unemployment reaches Depression-era levels, with one in six US workers being unemployed, and the government is unable to process unemployment benefits and is refusing to provide a basic income, people are unable to pay their rents. According to data from the Rentec Direct property management software platform, “The rent received by property managers in the U.S. by April 8 was 17% less than it was through the first eight days of March. Other data point to a similar trend. For example, data from the National Multifamily Housing Council found that 69 percent of renters paid their rent between April 1 and April 5, down from 82% in the same period in April 2019.” According to the New York Times, 40 percent of New York City tenants may have skipped their April payments.

In January before the pandemic, a Harvard University report found that nearly half of US renters are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, a quarter of renters—eleven million people—are “severely cost-burdened,” spending more than half of their income to make rent. There was already a housing crisis in the US, the economic collapse has magnified it

This economic reality is turning into an organized and growing rent strike against corporate landlords. Calls for an expanded rent strike on May 1 are growing. In Kansas City, Missouri, tenant advocates tweeted: “Highway takeover in an hour. We will have tenants spanning the state, every five miles, from Kansas City to St. Louis.” Tenant groups from South Carolina to Los Angelescalled for a rent strike in May as have groups in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Denver, Bloomington, St. Louis, and New York. Yesterday, Cancel the Rent car caravans were held in many cities. Rent strikes are building into a nationwide revolt with calls for rent strikes going viral in unlikely places like Georgia. How this will evolve? If tenants are made homeless, people will take over buildings to be housed, assets of landlords could be nationalized, and social housing could escalate.

Rent strike organizers say, “We are banding together: folks who cannot pay and those who will join them in solidarity. We refuse to pay for the right to live. Many will have to choose between rent and food, and many won’t have enough for either. We will not sacrifice our lives to keep the market afloat, or to fill the pockets of real estate lenders and landlords…Together, we can transform this moment of isolation into a moment of shared strength, support and compassion.” Rent strikes are demanding:

• Forgive unpaid rents and waive mortgage interest and defer mortgage payments for the months of April, May, and June;
• Cease evictions of any renters and foreclosures on any homeowners during the full duration of the crisis — for at least six months;
• Use their political power to call on public officials to support housing relief for the tens of millions of American workers who have lost their jobs.

The COVID crisis has magnified a reality in US housing — housing has been turned in a profit engine for the super-rich. Rentals have been corporatized and controlled by some of the wealthiest individuals in the world. The Action Network reports: “Companies like Greystar, Equity Residential, and Lincoln Property Company control the rents for apartments in every state in the United States, while billionaires like Sam Zell founder and chairman of Equity Residential and Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital effectively serve as landlords for millions of us. These enormous companies dictate the rent and home prices in communities across the country. “

As a result, polling shows that a majority of people across the political spectrum support canceling rent payments and suspending home mortgage payments during the coronavirus pandemic. By a margin of 22 percent, voters strongly favor suspending or forgiving rents, for those under 45 years of age, the margin is 50 percent.

Building Power For An Effective General Strike

We do not yet have the organization to conduct a massive General Strike and only a few unions are aggressive enough to conduct strategic work stoppages. We must use the General Strike campaign to build our power and learn how to strike.

The foundation of all movements is education. We must constantly work to educate people about what is going on around them. This means overcoming the corporate media, which reports from the perspective of major corporate interests and the two Wall Street-funded parties. Independent media and social media are areas of activism that must always be a priority.

Subscribe to our daily digest for ongoing movement news and choose articles to promote in your social media networks. Each of us should act with the intention to build our social media networks so we become an effective media outlet. If the tens of thousands of people who receive this newsletter behave as media outlets, we will change the national dialogue.

We must organize to bring people into the movement. Mass movements win, fringe movements fail. How do you organize?  Organizing is as simple as talking to people who are not yet part of the movement, listening to their concerns, and showing them how joining together we can solve problems. This requires the patient and steady systematic building of relationships in the community. Talk to your neighbors, participate in apolitical neighborhood email groups, and speak with those who deliver to your home.

In the workplace, talk to co-workers, form clandestine strike committees, and speak and listen to each other. Work stoppages can vary in form. Workers can use the tactic of “Work to Rule,” following often ignored workplace safety and other rules, resulting in a slowdown. The bosses will fight back, so this will not be easy. Workers need to build community support so bosses are isolated and the conflict is broadened.

There are also tactics for at-home workers where sickouts and slowdowns are easy to adapt. Workers can call in sick during the first week in May. Even mild symptoms can result in a day or two off work. With the stress of COVID-19 and the economic collapse, a ‘mental health day’ is needed for many.

Then, we must mobilize people. When people are in the movement, a union, or an organization, they are ready to be mobilized in mass action. This requires showing this is a strategic campaign, not one protest, but a series of escalating events that build and are focused on achieving change. We discuss how you can create a strategic campaign in the free Popular Resistance School, How Social Transformation Occurs, eight web-based classes and readings we urge you to use.

If you are not part of a union or organization, become an active supporter of their actions. Show up, join them, call the media, religious leaders or neighbors, and urge them to show up.  If you see a picket line, join the workers or bring food and beverages. See yourself as the media and report on strikes, share their stories, and use your social media networks. If a union organizer is fired, come to the aid of that person including highlighting the injustice, insisting the person gets their job back, and raising funds to support them. We can support local strikers through “GoFundMe” pages or join a local Mutual Aid team.

In the coming era of strikes, we must remember that an injury to one is an injury to all. Show solidarity with the general strike. Wear red on Friday. Display a strike poster in your window. Wear a red or black or lavender bandana. Change your Facebook cover image.

As the era of strikes builds and people develop the skills, confidence, and courage to exercise their rights, the potential for transformational change will grow in ways that we cannot yet foresee.

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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 PR

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The Unbearable Lightness of China

By Pepe Escobar, April 27, 2020

As Mahbubani carefully explains, “while Chinese leaders want to rejuvenate Chinese civilization, they have no missionary impulse to take over the world and make everyone Chinese.” And still, “America convinced itself that China has become an existential threat.”

The best and the brightest across Asia, Mahbubani included, never cease to be amazed at the American system’s total inability to “make strategic adjustments to this new phase in history.” Mahbubani dedicates a whole chapter – “Can America make U-turns?” – to the quandary.

The Dengvaxia Disaster Was Twenty Years in the Making—What Will Happen with a Rushed COVID-19 Vaccine?

By Children’s Health Defense, April 27, 2020

For several weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have been beating the drum about a COVID-19 vaccine, seeking to keep the world’s coronavirus optics focused on a medical intervention that Gates acknowledges to be risky enough to require indemnification against lawsuits. The two are casting a COVID-19 vaccine—which they speculate could be ready in as little as 18 months—as the passport for a return to “normalcy.” The two opinion leaders’ gambit seems to be backfiring among people savvy enough to understand that Fauci’s and Gates’ organizations, pocketbooks and agendas are driving the rush for an indemnified vaccine. Other Americans may be too distracted by the historically unprecedented lockdown, however, to think through the safety issues raised by a potential COVID-19 vaccine.

Saudi Arabia: What Happens When the Oil Stops

By David Hearst, April 27, 2020

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) can no longer plead youth or inexperience. That time has passed. What you see is what you get. The misrule, blunders and war associated with him as crown prince will only continue with him as king. The full repertoire of the crown prince’s statecraft was on display in a stormy telephone call he made to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of an Opec meeting last month which ended in a calamitous price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

As Food Banks Struggle to Cope with Demand, Desperate Farmers Dump Unsellable Produce

By Alan MacLeod, April 27, 2020

In San Antonio, over 10,000 people lined up overnight in their vehicles in the hope of receiving a box of basic foods. “Needs have skyrocketed not just here but around the country,” one Washington, D.C. organizer told MintPress last week. Meanwhile, a veteran Louisiana food bank employee said the current situation is graver than it was after Hurricane Katrina. Food banks are going millions of dollars over budget trying to keep up with surging demand; one estimate suggests that one in three people seeking groceries at pantries last month had never done so before. Those who manage the facilities are worried that they will soon be completely drained of food.

The Digital Revolution: Unlimited Ability to Spy and Control Populations. The Creation of a Police State Dystopia

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, April 26, 2020

The digital revolution provides government and corporations with unlimited and unaccountable ability to spy and control populations.  Every word, deed, and movement of people can be tracked and a “social credit” dossier built for them.  China already has such a control system in place.  Those whose profiles are outside acceptable parameters are unable to function in normal society, being blocked from passports, driving licenses, employment, and activities reserved to those with acceptable social credit scores.

The Gates Foundation and the “War on Cash”: ‘Financial Inclusion’ in an Age of Neoliberalism

By Colin Todhunter, April 26, 2020

When we look beyond the mainstream narrative to gain an understanding of the current crisis, it doesn’t take long before the name of Bill Gates and his foundation appears. And this is no coincidence seeing that he has placed himself firmly in the limelight on prime time TV shows offering his opinion on COVID-19 and what he thinks should be done. He has mentioned the need for maintaining some form of lockdown until a vaccine is discovered.

Predictions: What Will Happen Next in the Corona Crisis?

By James Corbett, April 26, 2020

There is a second wave of Covid-19 coming in the next few months. We don’t have to speculate about this. Not only have we heard this from all manner of politicians and health “authorities” over the past few months, but it was an integral part of MIT Technology Review’s now-infamous “We’re not going back to normal” article, which revealed how the waves of lockdown and release were going to restructure our lives and condition us into the Corona World Order. And, lest there be any doubt that this is an important part of the plandemic narrative, Bill Gates just reaffirmed it in his latest “GatesNotes” on “The first modern pandemic.”

As a living embodiment of how East and West shall meet, Mahbubani is immeasurably more capable to talk about Chinese-linked intricacies than shallow, self-described Western “experts” on Asia and China.

Especially now when demonization-heavy hybrid war 2.0 against China is practiced by most factions of the US government, the Deep State and the East Coast establishment.

Distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, former president of the UN Security Council (from 2001 to 2002) and the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (2004-2017), Mahbubani is the quintessential Asian diplomat.

Ruffling feathers is not his business. On the contrary, he always deploys infinite patience – and insider knowledge – when trying to explain especially to Americans what makes the Chinese civilization-state tick.

All through a book elegantly argued and crammed with persuasive facts, it feels like Mahbubani is applying the Tao. Be like water. Let it flow. He floats like a butterfly reaching beyond his own “paradoxical conclusion”: “A major geopolitical contest between America and China is both inevitable and avoidable.” He centers on the paths towards the “avoidable.”

The contrast with the confrontational, stale and irrelevant Thucydides Trap mindset prevalent in the US could not be starker. It’s quite enlightening to observe the contrast between Mahbubani and Harvard University’s Graham Allison – who seem to admire each other – at a China Institute debate.

An important clue to his approach is when Mahbubani tells us how his Hindu mother used to take him to Hindu and Buddhist temples in Singapore – even as in the island-state most Buddhist monks were actually Chinese. Here we find encapsulated the key cultural/philosophical India-China crossover that defines “deep” East Asia, linking Confucianism, Buddhism and the Tao.

All about the US dollar 

For Asia hands, and for those, as in my case, who have actually lived in Singapore, it’s always fascinating to see how Mahbubani is the quintessential Lee Kuan Yew disciple, though without the haughtiness. As much as his effort to understand China from the inside, across the spectrum, for decades, is more than visible, he’s far from being a disciple of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

And he stresses the point in myriad ways, showing how, in the party slogan, “Chinese” is way more important than “Communist”: “Unlike the Soviet Communist Party, [the CCP] is not riding on an ideological wave; it is riding the wave of a resurgent civilization … the strongest and most resilient civilization in history.”

Inescapably, Mahbubani outlines both Chinese and American geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges and shortcomings. And that leads us to arguably the key argument in the book: how he explains to Americans the recent erosion of global trust in the former “indispensable nation,” and how the US dollar is its Achilles’ heel.

So once again we have to wallow in the interminable mire of reserve currency status; its “exorbitant privilege,” the recent all-out weaponization of the US dollar and – inevitably – the counterpunch: those “influential voices” now working to stop using the US dollar as reserve currency.

Enter blockchain technology and the Chinese drive to set up an alternative currency based on blockchain. Mahbubani takes us to a China Finance 40 Forum in August last year, when the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China, Mu Changchun, said the PBOC was “close” to issuing its own cryptocurrency.

Two months later, President Xi announced that blockchain would become a “high priority” and a matter of long-term national strategy.  It’s happening now. The digital yuan – as in a “sovereign blockchain” – is imminent.

And that leads us to the role of the US dollar in financing global trade. Mahbubani correctly analyzes that once this is over, “the complex international system based on the US dollar could come tumbling down, rapidly or slowly.” China’s master plan is to accelerate the process by connecting its digital platforms – Alipay, WeChat Pay – into one global system.

Asian Century 

As Mahbubani carefully explains, “while Chinese leaders want to rejuvenate Chinese civilization, they have no missionary impulse to take over the world and make everyone Chinese.” And still, “America convinced itself that China has become an existential threat.”

The best and the brightest across Asia, Mahbubani included, never cease to be amazed at the American system’s total inability to “make strategic adjustments to this new phase in history.” Mahbubani dedicates a whole chapter – “Can America make U-turns?” – to the quandary.

In the appendix he even adds a text by Stephen Walt debunking “the myth of American exceptionalism.” There’s no evidence the Exceptionalistan ethos is being seriously contested.

A recent McKinsey report  analyzes whether the “next normal” will emerge from Asia, and some of its conclusions are inevitable: “The future global story starts in Asia.” It goes way beyond prosaic numbers stating that in 20 years, by 2040, “Asia is expected to represent 40% of global consumption and 52% of GDP.”

The report argues that, “we may look back on this pandemic as the tipping point when the Asian Century truly began.”

In 1997, during the same week when I was covering the Hong Kong handover, I published a book in Brazil whose translated title was 21^st: The Asian Century (excerpts from a few chapters may be found  here). By that time I had already lived in Asia for three years, and learned quite a few important lessons from Mahbubani’s Singapore.

China then was still a distant player on the new horizon. Now it’s a completely different ball game. The Asian Century – actually Eurasian Century – is already on, as Eurasia integration develops driven by hard-working acronyms (BRI, AIIB, SCO, EAEU) and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Mahbubani’s book, capturing the elusive, unbearable lightness of China, is the latest illustration of this inexorable flow of history.

Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (Kishore Mahbubani), published by Public Affairs (US$19.89).

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

In pursuit of its imperial aims, the US needs enemies. None exist so they’re invented.

Iran is US public enemy No. 1 in the Middle East, China considered Washington’s leading adversary globally — despite no threat posed by either country.

Demeaning China is all about its growing economic, industrial, and technological development, its political influence, and military strength able to defend against US aggression if occurs.

The world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism USA consistently blames other nations for its own high crimes.

Operating as press agents for wealth and power, establishment media repeat false accusations against targeted nations with disturbing regularity.

For weeks after COVID-19 outbreaks emerged, Trump falsely claimed they’d “disappear” on their own.

As they increased to the present day, he, hardliners surrounding him, and Congress have been indifferent toward the health, rights and welfare of ordinary Americans.

They failed to provide states with personal protective equipment, funding to combat outbreaks, or treatment for infected individuals.

Despite advance warning of what could happen, they let a public health crisis fester, focusing almost entirely on handing favored business interests trillions of dollars of free money.

They delayed in authorizing nationwide testing that remains woefully inadequate.

All along, Trump praised his response that remains dismal for ordinary Americans he’s indifferent toward.

Instead of correcting flawed policies, he blames China for his failures, a nation on top of the problem swiftly, able to bring it under control in about two months while the US continues to struggle.

China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet responded to unacceptable Trump regime accusations.

It slammed Pompeo, calling him one of China’s “most radical critics,” ignoring the country’s achievements while “the coronavirus ravages the country he serves,” adding:

“A leaked Republican strategy memo tells the GOP to ‘attack China’ over coronavirus.”

“(A) top Republican strategist advis(ed) party candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China.”

Beijing stressed that the GOP strategy is doomed to fail, including claims that China caused COVID-19 and its spread to other nations.

China’s Global Times (GT) slammed the US notion that Beijing is responsible for spreading COVID-19 outbreaks.

At a time when world community cooperative relations are needed to address and contain a common problem, US hardliners focus on shifting blame for its failures onto others, notably China.

On Sunday, a GT editorial slammed the Trump regime for unacceptably “scapegoating China” to distract attention from its own failures in dealing with coronavirus outbreaks.

Its epicenter is in the US, not China or other countries. While outbreaks are largely contained in China, they remain a major problem in the US and West.

As for Pompeo, GT called him “sinister…a political hooligan, (an) an enemy (of) world peace…playing with fire…steering the US State Department into becoming the” CIA, operating as an anti-diplomat, not the other way around.

He’s not alone. The Trump regime and Congress are infested with like-minded extremists.

Trump and others like him are unfit for any public office, Biden no better.

US-led Western-style predatory capitalism “can’t be repaired, economist Richard D. Wolff stressed, calling how it operates structurally flawed, asking:

“Are we experiencing capitalism’s historic decline?”

“For the 21st century, the most popular slogan on socialists’ banners will likely be “Democratize the Enterprise.”

US economic collapse at a time of an inadequately addressed public health crisis brought to light the inequities of how the US-led West operates — serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense peace, equity, the rule of law and justice.

Ordinary Americans are protesting against failed public policies at the federal and state levels, including against unacceptable conditions for workers on the job.

Hundreds of Amazon workers staged sick-outs for lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and overall unsafe working conditions.

Whole Foods workers walked off the job over similar complaints, the company owned by Amazon.

Instacart workers called for strike action for lack of PPE and hazard pay. So did Detroit and Birmingham Alabama bus drivers, Pittsburgh sanitation workers, Kroger warehouse employees, and others in the US for similar reasons.

Growing numbers are not showing up for work, calling in sick, and staging wildcat strikes.

On May 1, a first of the month US general strike action is set to begin, involving workers, students, and other segments of society.

Achieving vitally needed social justice that eroded to a shadow of its New Deal/Great Society status depends on how widespread and sustained actions become.

Current US conditions reflect a failed system. Resistance against inequity and injustice is the only chance for responsible change.

With growing mass unemployment and indifference toward public health and welfare by US ruling authorities, now is the time for large-scale public actions for restoration and enhancement of vital social programs.

Ordinary people have power when mobilized to use it. Positive change requires sustained struggle.

Former Supreme Court Justice William Douglas said “(p)ower concedes nothing without a demand.”

Social movements can be pivotal forces. Disruptive activism works when ordinary people challenge what’s unacceptable.

Electoral politics doesn’t work. Changing names and faces assures continuity.

America’s political system reflects how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Scattered reforms are woefully inadequate and won’t work, major change needed.

The late Doug Dowd called the US “a sick and dangerous nation run by a handful of the politically powerful” — serving the country’s privileged class by exploiting most others at home and abroad.

Equitable transformational change is the only acceptable option.

At a time of overwhelming public duress, the moment is now to challenge authority for responsible change — collective defiance and disruption the way to go.

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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.

Since Iranians ended a generation of CIA-installed fascist dictatorship in 1979, the US has been at war on the Islamic Republic by other means.

The Trump regime escalated it way beyond where its predecessors went, risking confrontation by accident or design.

While US war on Iran is unlikely because of the IRGC’s military capabilities that could hit back hard against regional Pentagon bases and Israel if attacked, what’s unthinkable is possible because of US rage to transform all sovereign independent nations into vassal states it controls.

Cracks in Trump regime sanctions on Iran exist because Russia, China, and other countries maintain friendly diplomatic relations.

They show up in Iranian exports. Last week, Press TV reported that Tehran exported “around $60 billion (worth) of products, services, and energy since the” Trump regime began stiffening illegal sanctions in spring 2018.

According to Iran’s trade ministry,  Iran shipped 135 million metric tons of non-crude goods to other countries since Trump abandoned the JCPOA.

Year-over-year to today, Iranian sponge iron exports increased by 86%.

Shifting from heavy dependence on petroleum exports at a time of Trump regime sanctions, and now rock-bottom oil prices, enabled Tehran to develop export markets for other goods, including petrochemicals, metals, raw materials, food and other products.

In January, Iran estimated its year-over-year steel exports through March would be around 10 million tons, yielding up to $5 billion in revenue.

On Sunday, data from Iran showed steel exports increased by over 25% in the past year through March 19.

Through late March 2020, Iran exported about $32 billion worth of non-oil goods.

Tehran’s deputy industry minister Hossein Modares Khiabani called its achievement “a miracle in the current economic situation of the country.”

In early April, head of the Iran/Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce Yahya Al Eshaq said the Islamic Republic aims to export a record $20 billion of goods to neighboring Iraq in a few years, its second largest foreign market after China.

Iraq relies on Iran for food,

natural gas, electricity and construction materials. China is the largest importer of Iranian oil.

Iran’s ability to persevere in the face of Trump regime “maximum pressure” is  a tribute to its ingenuity, peace agenda, and cooperative relations with other countries.

For over 40 years, its ruling authorities withstood efforts by the US to return the country to subservient client state status — including everything thrown at it by the Trump regime.

Over the weekend, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed that the Islamic Republic will “never” initiate conflict against another nation.

It’ll retaliate strongly against an aggressor if attacked, its legal right under international law.

The US remains its main threat, followed by Israel.

According to a Sunday Tribune News Service report, the Pentagon is boosting the presence of its AC-130 gunships and Apache attack helicopters in the Persian Gulf — a provocative action, along with the perpetual presence of US warships in Persian Gulf waters.

Days earlier, Trump belligerently “instructed the (US) navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.”

Iranian vessels harass no one. They patrol offshore waters, defending the nation’s territory from possible hostile actions from an aggressor like the US and Israel.

Trump’s war secretary Esper threatened Iran, saying “they need to be well-warned” — a hostile remark against the region’s leading proponent of peace and stability.

Moscow expressed concern about hostile US anti-Iran threats,  Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov saying the following:

“This is one of the methods that create uncertainty in the international community.”

“This is a deliberate desire to sow discord among members of the international community, given that different countries interpret the relevant provisions of international law differently.”

“This is one of the elements of US policy that is aimed at continuing to play on the nerves.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zaif slammed the hostile presence of US forces “7,000 miles away from home” where they don’t belong, an unacceptable provocation.

Reportedly, Pompeo is set to defy reality by claiming the Trump regime never abandoned the JCPOA.

Maintaining the fiction that it remains a “participant state” aims to use the status it does not have to try maintaining a UN arms embargo on Iran via a Security Council resolution or threats of sanctions on nations selling conventional arms to the Islamic Republic.

The UN arms embargo expires in October. The Trump regime wants it remaining in place, Pompeo saying:

“We cannot allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to purchase conventional weapons in six months.”

“We are prepared to exercise all of our diplomatic options to ensure the arms embargo stays in place at the UN Security Council.”

The Trump regime drafted a Security Council resolution on this issue, Russia and China able to veto what they consider unacceptable.

By falsely claiming the US remains a JCPOA signatory, the Trump regime aims to enforce continuation of the anti-Iran arms embargo even if its Security Council resolution isn’t adopted.

Over the weekend, Pompeo falsely claimed “Iran’s space program is neither peaceful nor entirely civilian (sic),” adding:

Its “satellite launch vehicle and others launched before it incorporate technologies identical to, and interchangeable with, ICBM ballistic missiles.”

“No country has ever pursued an ICBM capability except for the purpose of delivering nuclear weapons (sic).”

Pompeo failed to explain that repeated IAEA inspections showed and continue to show that Iran’s legitimate nuclear program has no military component.

According to the Arms Control Association, ICBMs are weapons able to travel over 5,500 km.

Iran has none in its arsenal, its longest-range BM-25/Musudan  ballistic missile able to travel a distance of about 2,500 km.

All Iranian missiles are designed to carry conventional warheads alone.

They’re for defense, not offense. Iran is at peace with its neighbors, polar opposite how the US, NATO and Israel operate.

Time and again, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism USA accuses other nations for its high crimes against them, notably Iran.

Its ruling authorities are committed to regional peace and stability in contrast to US war on humanity worldwide.

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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.

For several weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have been beating the drum about a COVID-19 vaccine, seeking to keep the world’s coronavirus optics focused on a medical intervention that Gates acknowledges to be risky enough to require indemnification against lawsuits. The two are casting a COVID-19 vaccine—which they speculate could be ready in as little as 18 months—as the passport for a return to “normalcy.” The two opinion leaders’ gambit seems to be backfiring among people savvy enough to understand that Fauci’s and Gates’ organizations, pocketbooks and agendas are driving the rush for an indemnified vaccine. Other Americans may be too distracted by the historically unprecedented lockdown, however, to think through the safety issues raised by a potential COVID-19 vaccine.

Americans would be well advised to revisit a virus-and-vaccine cautionary tale that briefly captured front-page attention a year ago. In April 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Sanofi Pasteur’s Dengvaxia vaccine, joining 19 other countries in granting regulatory approval to the world’s first dengue vaccine. The FDA gave its green light not long after the Philippines—the first country to roll out the vaccine widely—witnessed hundreds of distressing hospitalizations and deaths in 9-16 year-olds, representing a clear safety signal.

Dengvaxia’s fallout was so dramatic that it even overrode the U.S. media’s customary whiteout of vaccine safety problems. As summarized by National Public Radio (NPR), the Philippines’ mass dengue vaccination program—implemented with “undue haste”—not only killed children but provoked protests, criminal investigations, indictments, revocation of the vaccine’s license in that country and a plummeting of parental confidence in vaccine safety from 82% to 21%.

Viral vaccines and “disease enhancement”

Given that an estimated 40% of the world’s population is at risk of mosquito-borne dengue infection, it is not surprising that the vaccine industry has had a dengue vaccine on its list for decades. There are four types of dengue virus that can trigger infection, albeit with a highly variable trajectory that  ranges from asymptomatic infection or “mild and non-specific febrile illness” (together representing about 75% of cases) to “classic dengue fever” and, in an “occasional” subset, more severe outcomes such as plasma leakage, bleeding, shock or death. In children, experts believe the majority of dengue infections are subclinical. Researchers note that environmental and host immune factors play a significant role in shaping both susceptibility and outcomes.

Natural infection with one type of dengue virus provides long-lasting protection against the same type but only short-term protection against the other three varieties. The vexing result is that, in some individuals, subsequent infection with a different dengue virus can increase the risk of severe outcomes—a phenomenon known as “disease enhancement.” In a 2018 review, researchers listed reports of “enhanced illness” resulting from influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Zika, West Nile virus, dengue and coronavirus—and emphasized that either infection or vaccination could produce this response.

In 2018, the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety reviewed some of the deaths associated with Dengvaxia but stated that it could not determine whether the vaccine was causally related to the “vaccine-related immune enhancement.” This disingenuous conclusion flies in the face of decades of evidence showing some viral vaccines to be capable of “subverting” the immune system and provoking “exacerbated illness.” It is doubtful that WHO or Sanofi are unaware of this phenomenon, which numerous publications acknowledge as a “major obstacle” for the development of safe dengue and other viral vaccines. After the problems in the Philippines, however, Sanofi’s global medical director asserted that “In hindsight . . . Sanofi wouldn’t do anything differently.”

A dengue expert who develops vaccines for the U.S. military issued warnings about Dengvaxia’s risks ahead of time—vainly cautioning that vaccinating 9-16 year-olds who were “seronegative” or “dengue-naive” at baseline (that is, had never before been exposed to dengue) was likely to significantly augment their lifetime risk of severe disease when later exposed to dengue. (About 21% of vaccinees were seronegative.) Why did this industry insider—who has been a paid dengue vaccine consultant to Takeda, Merck, Sanofi Pasteur and SmithKlineBeecham—voice these concerns and condemn international health institutions for unethical, unscientific and “contorted explanations” that “fail[ed] to identify breakthrough dengue disease in vaccinated subjects as serious adverse events”? As he pointed out in numerous letters and articles, the potential for vaccine-enhanced dengue disease was readily apparent in Dengvaxia’s clinical trials, but both Sanofi and WHO chose to ignore the evidence.

Belatedly—a year and a half after the launch of the Philippines’ disastrous vaccination campaign—Sanofi announced that “new information” was prompting the company to declare that “vaccination should not be recommended” for seronegative individuals of any age. Repackaging Dengvaxia as a vaccine solely for individuals who have had at least one laboratory-confirmed bout of dengue is easier said than done, however, because many mild dengue infections go undiagnosed and undocumented.

The dengue vaccine pipeline

Sanofi reluctantly revised its recommendation to provide Dengvaxia only to individuals with evidence of past infection, which “leaves a substantial unmet need” that other dengue vaccine developers appear only too eager to exploit. Although Sanofi’s formulation—which took two decades and two billion dollars to develop—is the first dengue vaccine ever to make it out of the pipeline and into the marketplace, two other vaccines (TAK-003 and Butantan-DV) are currently undergoing late-stage clinical trials in Asia/Latin America and Brazil, respectively.

Dengue vaccine development has been marked by strong for-profit industry involvement. In addition, there has been “wide participation and co-ownership” by U.S. government institutions in dengue vaccine research and development, even though dengue disease poses little threat on the U.S. mainland. With dengue-endemic areas limited to Puerto Rico and a few offshore territories and protectorates, HHS—the umbrella agency for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the CDC and the FDA—owns 65 dengue-vaccine-related patents, dwarfing the 19 owned by Sanofi and the 12 and 4 owned by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, respectively. All of the private companies involved in dengue vaccine development share patents with U.S. government agencies; meanwhile, very few patent applications have been filed in developing countries.

CDC scientists designed and constructed the TAK-003 vaccine and then licensed it to Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Asia’s largest pharmaceutical conglomerate. However, preliminary analyses of the clinical trial results suggest that TAK-003 may suffer from similar problems as Dengvaxia, providing “unbalanced protection among the four types of dengue” that could “increase the risk of severe disease after exposure to a second type of the virus.” Takeda plans to apply for approval in dengue-endemic countries anyway.

Some experts are placing their bets on the third finalist, Butantan-DV, developed by none other than NIAID. NIAID has sponsored Butantan-DV clinical trials in Brazil since 2013, licensing its vaccine technology to Brazil’s Butantan Institute and launching the most recent trials in 2016. Not content to lurk in the background, NIH and NIAID have taken pains to call attention to their role in the vaccine’s development; publications presenting clinical trial results have titles referring to the “National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases tetravalent dengue vaccine” and the “National Institutes of Health dengue vaccine.” In studies published to date, investigators only monitored adverse reactions for 21 days.

Mosquito versus needle

The Dengvaxia experience—involving a skewed immune response and enhanced risks—raises questions “applicable to all dengue vaccine candidates” and a number of other viral vaccines. One not-often-discussed consideration pertains to the “considerable differences between a wild-type [dengue virus] delivered by a mosquito versus needle administration of a vaccine,” which have the potential to elicit different immune responses. Instead of acknowledging these vaccines’ potentially unconquerable risks, why not focus on training health care workers in the provision of the supportive care known to be “very effective when delivered by experienced practitioners”? Even in severe cases of dengue characterized by vascular permeability and fluid loss, practitioners who “accurately and rapidly” replace fluids can stabilize patients’ condition—“and rather quickly”—with the result that “the vascular permeability phenomenon abruptly disappears.” In addition, fruitful avenues of research could include studying the environmental and immune system factors associated with the minority of cases that involve more severe dengue outcomes.

With vaccine damage occurring in association with many different vaccines, it is unclear why so many individuals and organizations jumped on the anti-Dengvaxia bandwagon last year, but—with a rushed COVID-19 vaccine in the works—their words of warning are worth heeding. As NPR noted, “the debacle in the Philippines offers a key lesson for governments and manufacturers when it comes to approving and selling new vaccines: Slow down.” The dengue expert who presciently warned about Dengvaxia’s dangers put it this way:

Dengvaxia-enhanced disease has created a major ethical dilemma for the vaccine community, an enduring public health management crisis, and legal nightmare. Vaccines should not harm recipients, directly or indirectly. WHO and the manufacturer owe the customer a safe product.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) will receive a $30 million grant from the government of China to use these resources for the containment of COVID-19.

The announcement of the donation was made Thursday by the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson Hua Chunying.

On her Twitter account, Hua Chunying recalled that the government donated $20 million in cash to the WHO on 11 March.

China’s donation comes one week after President Donald Trump’s administration announced the end of funding to the WHO.

China has decided to donate additional $30 million in cash to WHO to support its global fight against #COVID19, in particular strengthening developing countries' health systems. China already donated $20 million in cash to WHO on March 11.

— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) April 23, 2020

Washington argued its decision by accusing the World Organization of trying to protect China at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak and of not giving true information.

For Trump, the WHO mishandled the pandemic, even though at the time of the outbreak in late 2019, a team of U.S. scientists was working at the organization’s headquarters.

These scientists kept Donald Trump’s administration informed of the progress of the new coronavirus in China, step by step.

Today, China seeks “to support the WHO’s fight against Covid-19. We support multilateralism and global solidarity,” Hua Chunying said.

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Featured image: Healthcare workers were registered Wednesday when they performed rapid coronavirus tests on citizens in their cars, enabled by the government of Brasilia, Brazil. April 22, 2020. | Photo: EFE

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) can no longer plead youth or inexperience.

That time has passed.

What you see is what you get. The misrule, blunders and war associated with him as crown prince will only continue with him as king.

The full repertoire of the crown prince’s statecraft was on display in a stormy telephone call he made to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of an Opec meeting last month which ended in a calamitous price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

A big mistake

Mohammed bin Salman can see for himself just how big a mistake that call was. The price of oil has collapsed, storage will rapidly run out, and oil companies face the real prospect of having to cap wells. The oil and gas sector accounts for up to 50 percent of the kingdom’s gross domestic product and 70 percent of its export earnings. This has just disappeared.

As anyone who has met Putin will tell you, you can bargain as hard as you like with the Russian president. You can even be on opposing sides of two regional wars, in Syria and Libya, and still maintain a working relationship, as the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to do.

But what you must not do is back Putin into a corner. This is what the Saudi crown prince did by giving Putin ultimatums and shouting at him. Putin just shouts back, knowing that the Russian balance of payments is in better shape to play that game of poker than the Saudi one is.

MBS is finding out now how weak his cards are. To be fair, before he made that call, he took advice from someone as arrogant and unthinking as he is. US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East advisor Jared Kushner listened to what the Saudi crown prince was about to do and did not object.

This explains why Trump’s first reaction was to welcome the oil crash. Trump thought for every cent cut from the price of oil, a billion dollars of consumer spending power would be released at home. That was until his attention turned to what the oil price collapse was doing to his own oil industry.

Saudi Arabia without oil 

With the price of Brent Crude less than $20, Mohammed bin Salman is about to find out what happens when the world does not need his oil. In the past, the standard response to that hypothesis was condescending looks. Not any more. The prospect of Saudi becoming a debtor nation is real.

Saudi Arabia’s financial decline has been in the works for some time. When his father Salman took over as king on 23 January 2015, foreign reserves totalled $732bn. In December last year they had depleted to $499bn, a loss of $233bn in four years, according to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA).

The kingdom’s GDP per capita has also declined, from $25,243 in 2012 to $23,338 in 2018, according to the World Bank. The nest egg has been diminished with speed. The IMF has calculated that net debt will hit 19 percent of GDP this year, 27 percent next year, while coronavirus and the oil crisis could push borrowing to 50 percent by 2022.

The war in Yemen, a coup in Egypt and interventions across the Arab world, outsized arms purchases from America, vanity projects like the building of a futuristic city Neom, not to mention his own three yachts, paintings and palaces, each play a part in draining Saudi coffers.

Saudi’s economy was already struggling before coronavirus took hold with a growth rate of just 0.3 percent and a drop of 25 percent in construction since 2017. Add to that the lockdown imposed by coronavirus and the cancellation of the Umrah and Hajj, which attract up to 10 million pilgrims a year, and a further $8bn is wiped off the balance sheet.

But it isn’t just what the Saudi crown prince spent his money on that caused the problem. It was also what he put his money in that went bad.

Bad investments

One indication of bad investments is the decline in the relative value of sovereign wealth funds. Big brother Saudi Arabia now finds itself dwarfed by its much smaller Gulf neighbours on that score.

The chief sovereign wealth fund, Public Investment Fund (PIF), ranks at 11th in the world, behind Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Kuwait Investment Authority and Qatar Investment Authority. When sovereign funds are pooled by nation, UAE comes first with funds worth $1.213 trillion then Kuwait with $522bn, Qatar with the $328bn and Saudi with $320bn.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, the IMF thought that plans to increase PIF to a trillion dollars would not be enough to generate the income needed if Saudi diversified from oil. If “Saudi Arabia were to grow its PIF from its current $300bn to this scale, financial returns alone would not constitute adequate income replacement in a post-oil world. Oil production of 10 million barrels per day, valued at $65 per barrel, translates to annual oil revenues of about $11,000 per Saudi at present,” the IMF wrote.

Another measure of decline is what has happened to the investments themselves. Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japan’s Softbank, recalled how he got $45bn after spending just 45 minutes with MBS for his $100bn Vision Fund. “One billion dollars per minute,” Son said. Softbank announced last week it expects its Vision Fund to book a loss of $16.5bn.

PIF paid almost $49 a share for a stake in Uber Technologies Inc. in 2017. Uber shares have dived since. It sold almost of all its $2bn stake in Tesla toward the end of 2019, just before Tesla stock went through the roof, with an 80 percent rally this year. At this rate the PIF stake in Newcastle United is looking like a solid bet in comparison.

The oil crash comes less than two weeks after PIF splashed another $1bn on stakes in four European oil companies and the Carnival cruise liner – all of which casts in doubt the strategy of PIF diversifying away from oil. “I don’t understand why the PIF is doing what they are doing now when their country is going to need every penny,” one Middle Eastern banker told the Financial Times.

“It very much reminds me of the QIA [Qatar Investment Authority] in its early years. There’s a strategy, but they are not adhering to a strategy. They want high visibility but they also want to make money. They want to diversify the economy, but want to be opportunistic.”

No financial stimulus

Saudi Arabia today can not afford the financial stimulus to cushion the impact of the pandemic that its Gulf neighbours are making. The kingom is spending one percent of GDP on supporting its economy during the lockdown, while Qatar is spending 5.5 percent, Bahrain 3.9, UAE 1.8.

There are many examples  of money running out. The king decreed that the state would pay 60 percent of salaries during the coronavirus shutdown.

But employees of the Saudi’s biggest telecoms company STC are only getting 10 percent of their salaries, I am told, because the government is not paying STC the money for the furloughed staff.

The Saudi Ministry of Health has been requisitioning hotels to run as hospitals. Instead of compensating hotel owners for the temporary loss of their property or paying them a cost price, they are forcing them to pay the running costs in addition to the costs of disinfecting the rooms.

Or take the paycut Egyptian doctors working in the Saudi private health sector are being forced to take. Those who are on annual leave, are not being paid. Those who are instructed to work from home  on shifts by their hospitals to lessen the risk of infection, either have to take that time from their annual leave or work for free.

So, as Bloomberg reported, the prospect of Saudi becoming a net debtor nation is real. The question is how soon that happens.

The IMF calculated that with oil prices of $50 to $55 a barrel, Saudi Arabia’s international reserves would fall to about five months import coverage in 2024. With oil at zero, a once unthinkable balance of payments crisis and abandonment of the dollar peg is now all too likely.

Regional effect

Both pillars of Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to modernise and reform his country are crumbling. His plan to generate foreign investment by selling off five percent of Aramco on foreign stock exchanges has gone and now PIF, the main vehicle for diversifying his economy away from oil, is in chaos too.

Many in the region would cheer MBS’s demise. He has simply done so much harm to so many people, particularly in Egypt. In a post-oil era, MBS would lose his power of patronage, the power of an oligarch who can spend a billion pounds a minute and not blink.

But the collapse of Saudi Arabia’s economy, which for decades has been the engine room of the economy of the whole region, would quickly be felt in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia – all of which send millions of their workers and professionals to the kingdom and whose economies have grown to depend on their remittances.

This is not a prospect anyone should welcome.

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David Hearst is the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. He left The Guardian as its chief foreign leader writer. In a career spanning 29 years, he covered the Brighton bomb, the miner’s strike, the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflicts in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the end of the Soviet Union, Chechnya, and the bushfire wars that accompanied it. He charted Boris Yeltsin’s moral and physical decline and the conditions which created the rise of Putin. After Ireland, he was appointed Europe correspondent for Guardian Europe, then joined the Moscow bureau in 1992, before becoming bureau chief in 1994. He left Russia in 1997 to join the foreign desk, became European editor and then associate foreign editor. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he worked as education correspondent.

It’s April 2020, and since March, the UK has swiftly commissioned and built vast, temporary, intensive care hospitals, in readiness for a predicted epidemic number of severe COVID-19 cases.

They are called NHS Nightingale Hospitals, and to date there are seven of them, either open or planned. The first one was announced on 24 March by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, and was opened almost immediately on 3 April at the London Excel Centre. It has a capacity of some 4,000 beds. The other temporary field hospital sites are in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate, and Washington.

Additionally, over the last month, some 8,000 beds in private hospitals have been re-assigned for Covid-19 use, along with other NHS beds in hospitals all over the UK. By the beginning of April, one third of all non-ICU NHS beds had been converted into potential ICU beds for possible Covid-19 patients. Yet, by 12 April, the London Nightingale had treated just 19 patients, and to date, only 41 patients have been treated.

This sudden blitz is both unusual and unprecedented. We regularly have seasonal infectious illnesses spread throughout the population; in fact in recent years, some of these epidemic diseases were also predicted well in advance. Yet no new mega-hospitals, temporary or otherwise, were ever built to cope with them, nor were they seen to be needed. Why now?

According to the King’s Fund, over the last thirty years, the number of ICU beds has declined, at a time when the population has risen. Over that period, around 34% of general and critical care beds in England have been lost.

Peter Donaghy, an independent data analyst, reports that the UK now comes near the bottom of the world league in the number of hospital beds per head of population: in 2019, and across the four UK nations, he found that there are about 5.7 ICU beds per 100,000 of the population [interpolation of his figures mine]. Cyprus has double that number, Germany has 29, the USA 34, and even Kazakhstan and Mongolia do better than the UK.

Bed shortages are not news, however. In 2008, it was revealed that 32,000 beds of all types had been cut in the decade since 1997, when, ironically, the Blair government came into power on a ticket of increasing the number of hospital beds.

Between 2010 and 2017 there were 70,000 fewer intensive care beds in the UK:

In 2016, the Royal College of Surgeons had complained of chronic bed shortages, so much so that the occupancy rates had gone beyond 89%, when 85% is considered the maximum safe level. This complaint was made just before the British Medical Association chimed in, reporting on the shortage of beds being more severe than in other Western countries, and that such overcrowding can lead to the spread of infections.

And in 2018, the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine (FICM) astonishingly reported that across the UK, 80% of intensive care units were sending patients to other hospitals, either because of a lack of beds or a shortage of staff, particularly nurses.

To cap things off, by 2019, it was being reported by the British Medical Association that ICU beds had begun to be used for patients recovering from routine operations, and that when more emergency beds were needed, a policy of “escalation beds” came into force. The BMA drily reported that there was “little sign of this practice ending”.

When one thinks of the NHS, intensive care is at the heart of most people’s perceptions of it. Yet the decline in the number of ICU beds over the last 30 years is so counterintuitive that it’s as if some monster deus ex machina has intervened and decided not only that the general numbers of hospital beds are of little import, but that intensive care beds are even more expendable. But whatever the case, in the event of a mass epidemic, the consequences of ICU bed shortages were indeed grim prior to 2020.

What official policies have the post-Blair governments been maintaining throughout this decline in the number of ICU beds?

To get a general feel, looking back to 2011, the government published the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy Paper, outlining what the official response to a hypothetical pandemic should be.

This paper appears to have been written largely in response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak. Its precautionary approach stresses that actions following the emergence of a pandemic, which could occur suddenly at any time:

• must be evidence based
• be proportional to the level of threat
• be flexible
• be based on ethical principles.
• emergency powers must last no longer than 30 days

Significantly, it states that during any pandemic, it should be “business as usual” and notes that its recommendations are in line with an earlier, 2007, National Framework paper’s “defence in depth” approach to a pandemic.

The Pandemic Preparedness Strategy Paper also makes clear that military personnel are not to be redeployed during a pandemic, but must remain on their normal defence duties. So of course, this means that they were not to be used to help build vast temporary hospitals, transport patients, or manage the public.

Military convoy off the coast at Devonport on the morning of 23 March, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown

In fact, the paper is silent on any hospital bed policies; it takes it as read that there would be enough UK ICU beds for the treatment of pandemic disease patients – for in 2009’s H1N1 swine flu outbreak, generally, hospitals may have just coped with finding enough beds for acute H1N1 patients. There were 540,000 cases of swine flu in England, and 138 fatalities at the time, or 0.026% of those infected.

Exercise Cygnus

Following the publication of the 2011 preparedness paper, however, the number of ICU beds continued to fall. Then, five years later, government held an unusual and secretive event called Exercise Cygnus.

It involved all government departments, all local authorities, and the NHS, right across the UK. Its report has not been published for “national security reasons” and so as not to “frighten the public”. However, according to those with first-hand knowledge of the operation, Cygnus’ script contained a scenario of a patent lack of capacity in ICU beds and personal protective equipment.

Based on its given hypotheses, it predicted that thousands more critical care beds would be required, large parts of the NHS would need to be switched off to redeploy staff, frail patients would be denied care, and mortuaries would be overwhelmed.

Was this just an experiment to see how the public sector actors involved would react to each other, like some kind of Grand Guignol? Did the exercise take its inspiration from the memorably twisted 2012 London Olympics ceremony, in which rows of thousands of NHS patients in hospital beds, in a dark auditorium looking like a Nightingale Hospital, were danced around by strange beasts and actors wearing scrubs?

The modelling of Cygnus was done by Imperial College, London, under the aegis of Neil Ferguson, who is also now doing the modelling of Covid-19.

Tellingly, it is said that last month’s Coronavirus Act, the emergency legislation which underpins the lockdown, is based on his modelling in Exercise Cygnus. Ferguson’s involvement in the Coronavirus crisis does raise other questions – for further coverage see Vanessa Beeley’s article: Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?

Outside of the strange artificial world of Exercise Cygnus, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Surgeons continued to complain about bed shortages. So why was there no turnaround policy introduced at least by 2016 after these professional outcries?

The Health Secretary at the time was Jeremy Hunt. Simon Stevens was Chief of NHS England. Both had been involved in cutting bed numbers. Yet, since 2016, and prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, with Sir Simon Stevens still at the helm, there appears to have been no general improvement in ICU bed capacity.

Following Exercise Cygnus, in 2017, the NHS Board published a short internal paper called Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR). Its approach is centred on three Acts of Parliament: the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the NHS Act (2006), and the Health and Social Care Act (2012).

Drawn up by Director of Operations and Information for the NHS Board, Matthew Swindells (sic), it asks the Board to agree that progress had been made in EPRR over the last year, and that the NHS was in a state of pandemic readiness. EPRR was rubber stamped, but as we have seen above, the somewhat rosy, self-congratulatory picture that was approved by the NHS Board was shown to be completely incorrect by Statista in 2017, and later, by the Faculty of Intensive Care in 2018, the BMA in 2019, and Peter Donaghy in 2020.

Back to Exercise Cygnus. This was supposed to be merely a computer simulation. So why would it be an issue of “national security”? Why would it “frighten the public”? Perhaps because it was intended to change the real world into its simulated image?

It’s an uncanny coincidence that, after the Coronavirus pandemic was declared, it was announced that there were not enough ICU beds or personal protective equipment, that NHS staff have been redeployed to other areas, that hospitalised elderly patients have been denied care through the use of “Do Not Resuscitate” orders, and large, temporary, mortuaries have also been built up and down the country, just as in the simulation.

Temporary mortuary set up in Ernesettle Fort, Plymouth

Since the first reported UK Covid-19 case, there has been non-stop media coverage propagandising the numbers of cases and deaths, and its threat. All the while, there have been regular reports that many ICU beds are empty, that beds of other sorts are empty, and that although accident and emergency visits are down, people with serious conditions telephoning the NHS advice and triage number, are being told to “Stay at home – Save the NHS – Save Lives”. Many of these callers have then died for lack of care.

It has also emerged that standards in death registration have been lowered by the government, and that there has been encouragement to register anyone who dies, of any underlying condition, as a Covid-19 death. There need be no objective verification of the existence of Covid-19 to register a death as being caused by it.

Despite these efforts to inflate the death rate, actual mortality rates since the beginning of this crisis do not show that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and actual critical case numbers are not overwhelming the NHS’s depleted intensive care units. In that regard, Covid-19 is not mirroring Exercise Cygnus’ computer-generated scenario.

The government response, however, seems to match it exactly.

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All images in this article are from UK Column unless otherwise stated

Even as food banks nationwide are inundated with hungry Americans, many of the country’s farmers are dumping or destroying their harvests. Amidst a pandemic that has seen tens of millions of workers laid off, the nation’s food banks have struggled to cope with the surge in demand for their vital services.

In San Antonio, over 10,000 people lined up overnight in their vehicles in the hope of receiving a box of basic foods. “Needs have skyrocketed not just here but around the country,” one Washington, D.C. organizer told MintPress last week. Meanwhile, a veteran Louisiana food bank employee said the current situation is graver than it was after Hurricane Katrina. Food banks are going millions of dollars over budget trying to keep up with surging demand; one estimate suggests that one in three people seeking groceries at pantries last month had never done so before. Those who manage the facilities are worried that they will soon be completely drained of food.

Yet even as hunger rises, economics dictates that farmers across the country are dumping, discarding, or failing to harvest vital foods. Dairy farmers are pouring rivers of fresh milk down the drain every day. Pig farmers are slaughtering piglets en masse. Meanwhile, ripening fruits and vegetables are being left to wither and die on the vine or in the ground. The reason? “Demand” is falling greatly.

Of course, during a pandemic, the caloric needs of America are basically the same as before: we have all got to eat. The problem is that so much of the produce was predestined to be bought by businesses that have now closed due to the lockdown. Restaurants, universities, hotels, stadiums and many more popular eating locations are now shuttered, leading to a collapse in orders for many farmers. At the same time, there is an increased demand for supermarkets and food banks, leading to a situation where farms are full, but store shelves and bellies are increasingly empty. Re-routing interrupted supply chains is not easy, and many farms have not found new buyers willing to collect, transport and distribute their food.

A perfect encapsulation of this is an Idaho woman who went to her local farm yesterday and saw mountains of discarded potatoes, given away free to anyone who passed. Yet three days earlier she noted that her local food bank had fed more people in the last four weeks than it did in the whole of last year. Unfortunately, the current system is currently unable to make those ends meet.

Farmers in Idaho are dumping their potatoes. 😢 I went to Picabo today to see the discarded pile (and pick up a bagful). Commercial demand has fallen, and there is no market for the extra potatoes. 🥔 pic.twitter.com/7MLLeIigmC

— Molly Page (@idahomolly) April 23, 2020

Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and author of the influential book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, explained the situation to MintPress News:

Of all of the contradictions and deep flaws in our food system, none is a more poignant example of its lack of resiliency than food dumping in the face of long lines of cars waiting hours for food handouts. The last time we saw this was in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, the government stepped in with assistance programs for farmers and hungry people — that’s how the Food Stamp program (now SNAP) got started. But today’s government has done all it can to weaken SNAP and bailout funds largely go to Big Agriculture, not small farmers. The only hope is that public pressure will force the government to step in and intervene in some positive way. I see signs of useful actions — increased SNAP benefits, for example — but will they last? One can only hope.”

Some of the hotspots of the COVID-19 outbreak are also in areas of most pressing food insecurity. This is rarely a coincidence. The South Bronx, for example, is the most food insecure community of the United States: some 37 percent of residents regularly going hungry. Bronx residents are over twice as likely to contract coronavirus as their much wealthier Manhattan neighbors. Those who live in poverty often have neither the accommodation nor the economic means to shelter in place like others can. Furthermore, 32 percent of the Bronx works in education, healthcare or social assistance, meaning their jobs cannot be done from home.

The coronavirus pandemic is currently shaking America’s food supply and production system. And after only a few weeks, it appears much of it is failing the stress test.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image: Discarded potatoes lay near an Idaho roadside, dumped by a farmer unable to sell them amid the coronavirus lockdown. Photo | Molly Page @idahomolly

It’s been over 25 years since that glorious warm, blue sky summer day at Belmont Park Racetrack. I not only remember it so well, but I can almost inhale that special racetrack smell, the combination of disinfectant merged with horse manure. The moment you walked into the place, open air as it was , you might have been on some livestock farm for that matter. But this was Elmont, Long Island, and this writer lived within one mile of the track. I had just finished up my sales rep phone calls by noon, and my wife allowed me to do what I always did on beautiful race days like this one: Go to the track. Well, not so fast. First I drove to Guido’s deli nearby our place and got my usual Salami and American cheese hero. At the track, wearing my usual racetrack wardrobe of baggy shorts, loose cotton shirt with giant pocket to hold my two Pilot pens and Te Amo cigars, I ventured up to the 3rd floor grandstand. This was my spot right on the finish line. The sandwich was devoured along with a cold draft beer (couldn’t beat the racetrack beer) and  I puffed on my cigar as I attacked the Daily Racing Form.

By a quarter to one I was joined by my two compatriots, jock’s room masseur Stevie Lee and loveable retiree Ira from Great Neck. We were all doping out the first race when greatness was being born right before our eyes. “You see that number 3 horse, Great All Over?” Stevie volunteered to us. “Well, I worked on him about an hour ago at the barn.” Ira and I both were startled to learn that our buddy did more than just massage humans.

Still, looking over the horse’s past performances I cracked “Yeah, I think God would have to work on this horse to  move him up!” Stevie countered “I know, I’m just saying that the trainer had me work on the horse for about 45 minutes before he brought him over. The horse was tight too.” I again looked at the horse’s past form and he wasn’t just bad… he was terrible! This was a cheap maiden claiming race, the bottom of the barrel in NY, and this horse sure was consistent: he finished up the track from gate to finish in every start.” This horse doesn’t need a massage… it needs a miracle!” Ira laughed, but very subtlety so as not to insult Stevie. “I like the number 4 horse, the second choice in the betting. I cannot see myself putting even a dime on that 3 horse. Sorry Stevie.” We all laughed. As the horses were approaching the gate, we all scurried up to get our bets in. I went with the 11 horse and threw out the favorite, who looked so good on paper that he was a candidate for a stiff job. Ira bet his 4 horse and Stevie passed on the race. Great All Over now had odds of 60-1 and rising.” Should be 160-1″ , Ira offered. “The horse has absolutely no form.”

The next two minutes proved fateful for me, and for Stevie Lee, massage therapist extraordinaire. No, Great All Over did not win the race at 75-1… that’s the stuff of a Walter Matthau film. I’ll tell you what he did do, however. He ran the race of his life! After being trapped on the rail in this 13 horse field, he weaved through horses down the stretch and lost the whole race by no more than a head! He finished third, beating 10 horses  and causing gasps from track announcer Tom Durkin. Stevie just sat there, perhaps even a bit shocked at what his work must have accomplished. Ira and I looked at each other, shaking our heads. “What did you actually do to that horse Stevie?” Ira asked. “Could you do the same thing for me… my wife would be grateful?”

Stevie was never asked back to massage Great All Over again. Why. “You see”, Stevie explained, “If the owner finds out that I improved his horse that much by massage, then it takes away from the trainer, and trainers usually have big egos in this business.”

A few months later, when a writer for a popular magazine found out about Stevie’s prowess, he arranged to do a story on massaging horses. Stevie asked a trainer friend of his if he had a horse Stevie could work on. Sure, said the trainer, come to my barn with the writer and work on my colt; The horse is scheduled to race in a few days and could use some loosening up. Stevie set it up and did his thing… not once but actually on two early AM occasions. The horse ran a few days later and won at 40-1 odds. The trainer never invited him back again. Such is the reason why Damon Runyon loved the racetrack experience. You never know what to expect!

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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, Cross Currents 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].

What do we want to call the geopolitical operation of the “global elite” with its real “depopulation agenda” currently taking place before our very eyes?

The consequences of this gigantic, frightening swindle are being experienced by everyone personally at the moment.

Both the young and the old are deprived of their freedom and driven into despair, hopelessness and ultimately death. Is this geopolitical operation a “crime against humanity” as outlined under Nuremberg (1945/46 Trials) (1)

I hereby publicly denounce the “main actors” and institutions who know what they are doing (“J’accuse…!”)

It is also allowed to speak on behalf of all those who either do not have a public voice or who do not dare or are not (any longer) able to speak: For example, the countless old and elderly people who are cared for in their families or who are waiting to die as residents of old people’s homes; the inmates of prisons or psychiatric institutions who are not allowed to speak at all; the infants and students who are no longer allowed to move freely, who are sometimes deprived of their educational opportunities and are not yet able to articulate themselves; the many day laborers, workers and parents who do not know how life should go on and who do not even take the right to freedom of expression for granted.

The restrictions imposed by the governments on the officially guaranteed civil liberties in connection with the so-called  “Corona crisis” must be lifted in their entirety, because in the opinion of countless independent scientists who do not bow down to criminal policies, there are no convincing arguments for the current arbitrary restrictions!

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.

Note

(1) Arendt. H. (2013, 8th edition) Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Munich, p. 399

Many have expressed concerns that coronavirus will be used, as 9/11 and the hoax “war on terror” were, to further expand the American police state dystopia.  But we were doomed by the digital revolution to a controlled existence regardless of 9/11 and Covid-19.  

The digital revolution provides government and corporations with unlimited and unaccountable ability to spy and control populations.  Every word, deed, and movement of people can be tracked and a “social credit” dossier built for them.  China already has such a control system in place.  Those whose profiles are outside acceptable parameters are unable to function in normal society, being blocked from passports, driving licenses, employment, and activities reserved to those with acceptable social credit scores.

Technology is now available that permits videos to be created of people speaking words that they never spoke.  These can be used to ruin people on social media and to convict them falsely in trials.  Privacy no longer exists despite endless “privacy notices,” and people have no control over their persona. 

Even a person’s unspoken thoughts are under assault by mind-reading technologies. Once money has been reduced to digital money, a person’s access to his funds can be cut off at any time.  Financial independence ceases to exist for those who don’t comply. 

The outcome of the digital revolution is completely different from the naive belief that the Internet opened up communicative freedom that would ensure liberty.  What a joke this belief turned out to be.  The tech and social media firms themselves engage in censorship of explanations, called “conspiracy theories,” that differ from official or permissible explanations or use words found “offensive” by privileged groups.  Truth itself has become a “conspiracy theory.” Factual history is unacceptable to Identity Politics and is being replaced by fake history, such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

It is certainly true that indoctrination is part of enculturation, and every age has had to struggle for truth.  There have always been interests whose agendas are served by falsehood.  But for those determined, it was possible to challenge and to expose the falsehoods.  That possibility is what is extirpated by the digital revolution. 

The technology is already in advance of that portrayed in George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984. We await the coalescing of elite interests in a leadership agenda. All the tools Big Brother needs await his arrival.

The young born into the digital revoluton know no different. They are so taken with their electronic gadgets and indispensable apps and so content in their self-isolation in virtual reality that liberty means the ability to push buttons to call up images and entertainment. Liberty will not have to be taken from them.  It has already left them.  Indeed, they never knew it or its requirements.

The well-rewarded techies who created the instruments of oppression are proud of their contribution to the creation of a police state dystopia. These preening fools are the handmaidens of the police state. 

Years ago I read a science fiction short story about a father and mother who were concerned about their son as the age of testing approached.  They were members of a people that had somehow recovered from an enslaving technology. To prevent a reoccurence, testing of the young was instituted to weed out for extermination those whose intelligence and aptitude could bring back technological tyranny.  In their society, not all forms of human creativity were permissible.  A society so full of hubris that it played God was unacceptable.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from blogtrepreneur/Flickr

While the world is pre-occupied with coronavirus and its impact on lives and the international economy, one must not forget that suffering due to oppression knows no season and has no vaccine, but is not without a cure. Sadly, for years, and especially since August, the world has watched India increasingly pressure and repress the Kashmiri people, as India now embarks on a colonizing project on the model of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.

Let’s review the situation.

On August 5, 2019, the government of India revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, thus nullifying whatever autonomy Kashmir, long considered ‘disputed’ had. This was accompanied by a complete lockdown of Kashmir, in which no one, included journalists and diplomats, was allowed to enter or leave. Social media was also shut down, depriving the people of Kashmir from any contact with family and friends outside of the country. Additionally, the presence of Indian troops, already there in large numbers, was increased, with the ratio now of at least one security officer (police, member of the military) for every 30 residents, including men, women and children. This constitutes an extremely repressive police state.

One month after the revoking of Article 370, India’s consul-general to New York made the following comment: “I believe the security situation will improve, it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and you will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world. I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”

This has already begun, with the beginning of the construction of ‘outposts’ in Kashmir, which, like in Palestine, will soon become full-blown settlements.

Why is the world simply sitting back and allowing this to happen? There are several reasons:

• The United Nations, in 1948, passed a resolution to resolve the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir. The resolution did not bind those nations to any legal action, but implied that it bound them ‘morally’.Activist Assata Shakur, formerly of the United States but a long-time resident of Cuba, once stated the following: ​ “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” Expecting India and Pakistan to be ‘morally’ bound to do the ‘right thing’ is the ultimate pipe dream, perhaps only matched by anyone’s expectation for Israel to feel a moral obligation to do what is right. The United Nations is also responsible for the 70+ year atrocity known as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But such wording gives the international community, hardly led by people of strong moral values, the ability to say there is nothing they can do.
• A second, and perhaps even more significant reason for the world to ignore Kashmir, as it ignores Palestine, is because Kashmir, like Palestine, is a mostly Muslim nation. Throughout the west, Muslims have been vilified. In the United States, it is cliché to say that any crime committed by a white man indicates that he has emotional problems and needs assistance to be re-integrated into society; a crime by a Black man indicates that he is a criminal and should be shot on sight and, if not, should be incarcerated for life. And a crime committed by a Muslim is always an act of terrorism, deserving of the most stringent penalties, and requiring all Muslims everywhere to disavow the act, pledge their allegiance to the United States above anything else, and from then on keep out of sight as much as possible.

Over the course of nearly seventy-three years, Palestinians have watched the size of their nation shrink, due first to United Nations decree, and then to Israeli terrorism. The Kashmiri people, for basically the same length of time, have suffered cruel repression, and now Indian Prime Minister Modi has decided to emulate Israeli brutality against the Kashmiris.

What can the international community do for either Kashmir or Palestine? This is not a puzzling question, but one with obvious answers.

1. Condemn in the strongest terms the repression of Kashmir by India, and Palestine by Israel. Do this constantly.
2. Sanction India and Israel. The BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement has cost Israel dearly in terms of economic consequences, due to people around the world who will not buy its products, and reputationally, as academics and people from the entertainment world refuse to appear there. It is time for nations around the world to take their cue from their citizens, and cease all trade with India and Israel.
3. Support the International Criminal Court first in its determination that it does, indeed, have jurisdiction over Palestine, and then on insisting that investigators be allowed into Gaza to perform their duties.
4. Demand an end to the occupation of both nations, and of the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The similarities of the repression of Kashmir and Palestine are striking. And now, with the coronavirus on everyone’s mind, that repression is being even further ignored.

Governments have demonstrated that they will do nothing to further the human-rights of struggles of the Kashmiri and Palestinian people. Therefore, it is up to the people around the world to demand action. The barbaric cruelty of the Indian and Israeli governments cannot be allowed to continue. Today is it Palestine and Kashmir; tomorrow, it could be any country that a more powerful one decides it wants to colonize, and precedent for doing so is being established.

International crimes must be identified, prosecuted and punished as are individual crimes. And crimes against humanity, as perpetrated by India and Israel, should both shock and motivate the world. We who recognize these crimes must do all that is in our power to make our governments react appropriately.

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Featured image: A sign stating ‘Danger, demolition. Entry is prohibited’ was placed by Israeli authorities on top of the rubble of the Khalialehs’ houses (MEE\Sondus Ewies)

Neocon hardliner Haley is a “hawk” on the far-right fringe of US politics. She’s militantly hostile toward sovereign states on the US target list for regime change.

As former Trump regime UN envoy, she was an embarrassment to the position she held, using her platform to “tak(e) names” and urge retaliation against nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests.

Straightaway after assuming her post in 2017, she said “(y)ou’re going to see a change in the way we do business.”

Along with other hardliners in Washington from both right wings of the one-party state, her goal was and remains achieving US dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations — endless wars and other hostile actions their favored strategies.

Haley is back with a website called “Stop Communist China.” She’s part of a US hard right-wing cabal that’s aiming to “prevent China’s growing influence.”

Big Lies and deception about Beijing’s successful model and its ruling authorities are her featured tactics with remarks like the following:

“China’s Communist government needs to be held accountable for their role in lying about the coronavirus pandemic (sic), and the US Congress needs to respond – now.”

“Join us in our fight to stop China from gaining influence in America and around the world.”

Last July, capitalist to the bone Forbes magazine praised China’s development since the 1970s, saying the following:

“…China is the world’s leading export nation, ahead of the” US.

Its economic achievements are remarkable by any standard.

“(N)ever before in history have so many people escaped poverty in such a short time as in the past decades in China.”

“According to official World Bank figures, the percentage of extremely poor people in China in 1981 stood at 88.3%.”

“By 2015 only 0.7% of the Chinese population was living in extreme poverty.”

“In this period, the number of (extremely) poor people in China fell from 878 million to less than ten million.”

Whether these numbers are  accurate or not takes nothing away from China’s rapid rise on the world stage as a dominant economic power in a remarkably short period of time.

Forbes claims China’s success “provides clear evidence of the power of capitalism.”

China’s development is attributed to developing a successful economic model that’s different from and free from US control, not victimized by its exploitive practices.

Last August, Ellen Brown explained that US/Western-style neoliberalism “met its match in China.”

Over 80% of its banks are state owned and controlled, loans made to public and private businesses on favorable terms to stimulate longterm growth.

Brown:

If “businesses cannot repay the loans, neither the banks nor the businesses are put into bankruptcy, since that would mean losing jobs and factories.”

“(N)on-performing loans are just carried on the books or written off. No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government…”

China considers its system superior to the West that’s focused on short-term profits by private enterprises.

China’s successful model is superior to the West’s “unfair trade practices.”

US policymakers want China’s system replicating America’s. They want control over the country as a US vassal state.

Michael Hudson said the Trump regime “wants the Chinese to be as threatened and insecure as American workers.”

“They should get rid of their public transportation. They should get rid of their subsidies.”

“They should let a lot of their companies go bankrupt so that Americans can buy them” on the cheap.

“They should have the same kind of free market that has wrecked the US economy.”

Brown noted China’s impressive “long-term growth and development,” its success revealing superiority over the flawed US model.

Instead of pushing China to operate like America, its policymakers should adopt Beijing’s model.

Its success reflects the superiority of its system, not “the power of capitalism,” as Forbes claimed.

The magazine that calls itself a “capitalist tool” praised China’s impressive development that far exceeds anything in the West.

“Hundreds of millions of people in China are far better off today,” Forbes stressed.

The nation is an economic success story unmatched in the West, China heading one day for becoming the world’s leading economy.

It’s why US policymakers want its economic, industrial, and technological development undermined.

In cahoots with other US dark forces, that’s what Haley’s “Stop Communist China” campaign is all about — an agenda doomed to fail.

China and other nations are rising, the US and West declining.

Already thirdworldized for its ordinary people, the disparity between the rich and most others is widening, things heading toward getting worse, not better — notably in the US.

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, human deprivation, and police state control are growth industries in the world’s richest country.

Its fantasy democracy provides cover for steadily eroding human and civil rights, notably under current conditions.

COVID-19 and economic duress provide a pretext for convincing people to sacrifice personal freedoms for greater security, not realizing that both are being lost.

Endless wars on invented enemies and police state control in the US followed 9/11.

What’s ongoing now has the earmarks of 9/11 2.0 in new form.

What Pompeo called a “live exercise” in March (state-sponsored, not natural?) may make the US more unequal, unsafe and unfit to live in than before what’s happening emerged.

What most Americans haven’t grasped is what should concern them most — not coronavirus outbreaks that will pass.

A Final Comment

Haley has high-level political ambitions. She may seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Last year she was a Boeing board member, earning substantial six-figure compensation, perhaps more given her political connections.

In March, she resigned her board position, citing disagreement with bailing out the company.

Her memoir titled “With All Due Respect” was published to pursue her political ambitions, along with cashing in on her public persona.

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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.