Global Research

Despite strong rebukes from the WHO, President Trump and his Administration officials have made an emphatic point of calling the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese Virus” or “China Virus” over the last few weeks.  When pushed on the racist overtone of his rhetoric, Trump retorted, “Cause [the virus] comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.”

Sadly, most Americans, even if uncomfortable, appear to agree on the facts, if not the tenor, of Trump’s choice of words.[1]

Here are some facts about the COVID-19 virus that will helpfully set the American public straight.

The True Origin of COVID-19

First, according to the most recent science research, the origin of the COVID-19 is actually unknown. While officials in China initially believed the virus to have originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, subsequent studies by researchers from Japan, Taiwan, and Mainland China itself have cast strong doubts on that theory.[2]  China’s official position now is that the origin of the virus should be determined through sound scientific deliberation, without political interference.[3]

Those Bat-Eating Chinese People!

Second, many in the U.S. appear to believe bat-eating Chinese people caused the current COVID-19 pandemic.  Since the epidemic first started in Wuhan, Western social media have been lit up by links to several videos of Chinese citizens eating bat soup, with not so subtle racial insinuations that it is the Chinese people and their culture that have caused the COVID-19 epidemic.

But Chinese people do not have a tradition of eating bats. Journalists from France 24 TV recently tracked down the makers of five of the six most-shared videos.  They found that none of these videos were filmed near Wuhan, or in China, as many had claimed.  Instead, all videos were filmed in Palau or Indonesia, in locales where bats have traditionally been consumed as food,[4] and where adventurous visitors from around the world would be welcomed to sample local, traditional cuisine.

The WHO has warned against naming viruses based on region or ethnicity precisely because of the stigma and racism that these names inevitably provoke.[5]

According to current research, it is not likely that bat consumption alone caused COVID-19.  Most scientists believe that the COVID-19 virus did not enter the human population directly,[6] but through an intermediate host such as pangolins, civets, ferrets, or even turtles, pigs, or cats.[7] The much studied 2003 SARS virus – a cousin of the COVID-19 virus – for example, is thought to have leaped from bats to civet cats, mutating there before making a final jump to humans.

Demonizing Chinese or bat-eating people in general is ultimately just a sign of racism.  If zoonotic virus transfer is a true overriding overarching concern, then the consumption of beef, pork and chicken should all be categorically condemned as well since viruses can and do periodically jump from cattle, pigs and chicken to humans.  Similarly, the keeping of dogs and cats as pets should also be categorically condemned since viruses can and do periodically jump from those animals to humans.

The Wuhan Virus?

Third, the fact that the COVID-19 epidemic first arose in Wuhan does not necessarily mean that the virus must have arisen there.  Take the AIDS epidemic as an example.  While the AIDS epidemic arose in Los Angeles in the 1970’s, the HIV virus actually arose in the human population much earlier – around 1908, in the southeastern corner of what is present day Cameroon.[8] Having made the jump to a human population from a monkey or chimpanzee, the virus then mutated and spread within the human population for more than half a century – below everyone’s radar – before exploding onto the global scene in the 1970’s.

In a 2012 interview, science writer David Quammen astutely observed how a virus would have hit “jackpot” if it successfully entered the human population because no species had achieved the numbers and mass that we humans have.[9] To viruses and bacteria, we are all one.  We form one large globally-spanning host system.

A recent study has shown that some 30% of human protein adaptions since our divergence from chimpanzees have been driven by our viruses!  Thus, when a viral epidemic strikes, we need to band together to collectively fight against it lest it spreads to engulf us all.

A Chinese Cover-up?

Fourth, there is no evidence that the Chinese government attempted to cover up the COVID-19 as many in the U.S. claim. Here is a short timeline what China did do in the initial days of the epidemic.

On December 31, 2019, the Chinese informed WHO of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan city.  Soon afterwards, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission ruled out influenza, avian influenza, adenovirus infection, SARS, MERS and other commonly known respiratory diseases as the cause.[10] On January 7, the Chinese had identified a new coronavirus as the cause.  Five days later, China completed and published the genetic sequence of the new virus.  On January 21, WHO confirmed the first case of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.  On January 23, China shut down most of the nation and enacted a city-wide quarantine of Wuhan when nation reported some 500 confirmed cases and 17 deaths.

Compare this with the response that would subsequently take place in Europe or America. Italy – despite having a population around 4% of that of China – did not instate a national lockdown until after it reached some 12,462 confirmed cases and 827 deaths. The U.K. talked openly about ignoring the virus to build a “herd mentality” until it abruptly change policy a week after Italy’s decision to lock down.  The U.S. did nothing domestically to prepare for the virus until mid-March when hospitals began to be saturated with patients, doctors ran out of basic medical supplies, and cities and states across the nation began shutting down.

Yet many Americans continue to point a finger at China.  Last week, Secretary Pompeo tweeted that “Beijing must acknowledge its role [in the current global pandemic] and be part of the solution.” Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, tweeted that “[i]t’s fact there was a massive coverup. China is responsible. The world must act to hold them accountable.” Urged on by supporters, Trump is said to be considering how to “punish China” for starting and spreading the COVID-19 virus.

Dr. Li Wenliang is a Chinese “national hero,” not “whistleblower.”

Fifth, Dr. Li Wenliang is a Chinese “national hero,” not “whistleblower.”

In the West, Dr. Li Wenliang – an ophthalmologist – is often portrayed as a “whistleblower” that forced the Chinese government to relent on an alleged cover up.  Reviewing records retrospectively, some critics have alleged that the first case of COVID-19 in China may have arisen as early as November 17,[11] but even they acknowledge that frontline doctors in China did not suspect of a new disease until late December.

The story of Dr. Li is a story of both heroism and tragedy – a story replicated many times over in China during this pandemic.  On December 30, Dr. Li posted information the string of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan in a private WeChat group and speculated to his friends about a return of the 2003 SARS virus.  He cited details from a then unpublished “government report” and asked his friends to keep silence.  But details of what he disclosed nevertheless got out.  On January 3, local officials cited him for spreading rumors and suspended his license to practice.  On January 7, after the content of the report – i.e. the existence of a new virus – was verified and the report published, Dr. Li was told to go back to work.  Dr. Li unfortunately soon contracted the COVID-19 virus and would die one month later.

Dr. Li’s ordeal – while tragic – was however not part of a systemic cover up.  Dr. Li was an ophthalmologist whose work does not usually touch on infectious diseases.  Dr. Li’s hunch about a new disease happened to be right, but he also got important details wrong. In China, Dr. Li is considered a hero.  While people acknowledge the government’s right to hold up the report until its contents can be verified, many people also believe the government should have published the report sooner.

America should take responsibility for America’s actions.

Sixth, the U.S. should take responsibility for its COVID-19 epidemic and not blindly scapegoat others for its problems.

The U.S. had a first confirmed case of COVID-19 on January 20,[12] some two weeks after China had alerted the world of a new virus.  On February 5, Trump tweeted “Only 5 people in U.S., all in good recovery.”  On February 10, Trump said in a rally, “I think it’s going to work out good. We only have 11 cases and they’re all getting better.”  On February 24, Trump tweeted “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”  On February 26, Trump said, “We’re very, very ready for this. … we’re at that very low level.” His main gripe then was how media like MSNBC and CNN was “doing everything possible to make the Coronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets….”  On February 28, in a political rally attended by over ten thousand supporters,[13] he called concerns about the coronavirus a “hoax.”

On March 2 when US confirmed cases of COVID-19 reached 90, Trump pronounced that a vaccine could be available for the public in as little as a few months.  On March 9, Trump compared the coronavirus to the “common flu” and said that life and economy will “go on” as usual.

On March 11, however, in a major policy reversal after U.S. confirmed cases reached 1,000, Trump blamed Europe and China on his first major nationally televised speech about the pandemic.  “The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots. As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.”

But the U.S. was on full alert about the new disease since early January.  In the three months since, Trump chose to rely on his border-control ideology[14] instead of science as the nation’s primary means of defense.

While the U.S. put up a travel ban targeting Chinese nationals travelling from China, the U.S. put up no restrictions at all on other nationalities traveling to and from China, put up no restrictions on travelers travelling to and from any other region of world, and failed to screen many non-Chinese travelers coming into the nation even when they showed overt signs of being sick.[15]

Even more critically, the U.S. failed to conduct any systematic test on the American population, a necessary first step to conducting any public health campaign.  It failed to produce the test kits for doctor’s offices.  It refused available tests from the WHO and got mired in a disastrous rollout of its own test kits. It failed to ensure the availability of critical of personal protective equipment should an epidemic hit.

Questioning an unchallenged assumption?

Finally, American citizens should question the unchallenged assumption in the U.S. that the coronavirus arose and spread from China.  Over this past weekend, the New York Times put up a beautiful “infographics” showing “how the virus got out” from Wuhan and China despite the “most extensive travel restrictions to stop an outbreak in human history.”[16] The Times overlaid graphics of general movement of people moving by cars, public transportation, and flights to give readers a visual sense of how the virus might have spread out from China.  But is this visual based on scientific fact?  The graphics proves nothing.  The truth is that anyone can choose any city in the world and overlay general traffic and flight patterns to show how a putative virus got out and infect the rest of the world.

A simple ‘back-of-the-envelop’ calculation shows how big a problem the current presumption about a “China virus” is.  Based on current research, the coronavirus virus has a mean infection rate (R₀) of 2.2,[17] and a mean incubation rate of 6.4 days.[18] One can calculate the fastest growth rate of this virus by assuming that the mean infection period is equal to the mean incubation period (realistically, the mean infection period will probably be much larger, because virally comprised patients such as flu patients typically infect others not just during the incubation period, but after the onset of symptoms and perhaps even during recovery). If the coronavirus had really arrived in the U.S. only around mid-January, then it could have grown at most to around 3,844 cases by March 22.  According the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Website however, the U.S. already had 33,276 confirmed cases by March 22.  That is a 10x discrepancy!

According to Trevor Bedford of the COVID Tracking Project, the actual number of people infected in the U.S. is much larger than confirmed cases, at probably around 120,000 by March 22.[19] 120,000 against 3,844 is now a 32x discrepancy!

Due to a lack of systematic testing in the U.S.,no one knows how many are really infected in the U.S. today. But whatever the number, using basic calculations taking into account basic facts about the virus like the one above, one can easily show how unlikely it is that the virus spread from China to the U.S. in late January or February.  More likely, the virus was already established in the U.S. by early January and perhaps December or even November.

These statistics become all the more sobering when viewed in light of other contemporaneous public health developments in the U.S.  Last year, mysterious pneumonia cases relating to e-cigarette vaping occurred started popping up around summer in the U.S.  X-ray images of lung damage show “ground glass” opacity that now look surprisingly similar to those caused by the coronavirus.[20] According to the CDC,[21] the vaping cases peaked around September, right before the CDC started reporting abnormally early cases of flu in October.  Could the mysterious vaping pneumonia cases have been coronavirus cases that are later inadvertently lumped into the flu cases?

On March 11, CDC director Robert Redfield admitted during a House Oversight Committee hearing that the CDC had mis-categorized an unknown number of coronavirus cases under flu cases during this past season.[22] Could the coronavirus have been established in the U.S. much earlier than the government is currently admitting?

The New York Times recently featured an amazing story about how Dr. Helen Chu – an infectious disease expert – tried but was blocked from getting answers to such questions.[23] The earliest cases of coronavirus in the U.S. struck in the Seattle area.  Throughout February and until mid-March, Washington would lead the nation in coronavirus count.  As luck would have it, for several months as part of a research project into the flu, Dr. Chu happened to have been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms in the area.  When the coronavirus outbreak arose, Dr. Chu wanted repurpose her tests to monitor for the coronavirus instead of the flu.  Various authorities blocked her.  When Dr. Chu went to the C.D.C. and F.D.A., officials there told her to “cease and desist.”

The Trump Virus?

Throughout this pandemic, the WHO and many health professionals have lauded China for its response to the outbreak.[24]  China has been able to control its epidemic through actions that many thought were too draconian, but that many now think is necessary to controlling the outbreak.

Will the U.S. join China in a common global fight, or will it continue to politicize and smear, bumbling along the way and putting millions of additional lives in danger?

If Trump decides to fight China instead of the virus, would the term “the Trump Virus” be a better moniker than “the Chinese Virus”?

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Notes

[1] See, e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/donald-trump-china-virus-coronavirus/index.html

[2] See, e.g., https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally;https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3051981/coronavirus-did-not-originate-wuhan-seafood-market-chinese;https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-coronavirus-shocking-update/5705196

[3] https://m.guancha.cn/internation/2020_03_12_541339.shtml

[4] See, e.g., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-indonesia-bats/bat-meat-still-popular-in-parts-of-indonesia-despite-coronavirus-fears-idUSKBN20511R,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJEp-LNcWHs,https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4724787/,https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/eating-bat-in-the-seychelles

[5] http://english.cctv.com/2020/03/19/ARTIFtUTmzPdrichXQlfiuBK200319.shtml;https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/488479-who-official-warns-against-calling-it-chinese-virus-says-there-is-no;http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/20/WS5e739d6ea3101282172808f1.html

[6] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.htm;https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9;https://mmrjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40779-020-00240-0,https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/03/18/coronavirus-fact-check-covid-19-caused-eating-animals/5073094002/,

[7] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.25726,https://jvi.asm.org/content/94/7/e00127-20

[8] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2008/06/revising-hivs-history;https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5450391

[9] See Science Talk, March 18, 2020.

[10] See, e.g., https://www.livescience.com/mysterious-virus-in-china-sars.html

[11] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back

[12] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191

[13] https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/TheBattery/archives/2020/02/28/what-you-need-to-know-about-trumps-campaign-rally-in-north-charleston

[14] On March 12, the day after the President’s first nationally televised speech on the pandemic, the White House sent out an email with the following quote: “Some 150,000 illegal immigrants from 72 nations with cases of the coronavirus have been apprehended or deemed inadmissible from entering the United States since November,” according to officials. These apprehensions underscore the need for border security and proper vetting.

[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/politics/coronavirus-travelers-screening.html

[16] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html

[17] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-myths.html; see also https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/how-scientists-quantify-intensity-of-an-outbreak-like-covid-19

[18] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported

[19] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-are-sick-lost-february/608521/

[20] See, e.g.,. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020200463and https://radiopaedia.org/articles/vaping-associated-lung-disease?lang=us.

[21] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html#overview

[22] https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-03-11-20-intl-hnk/h_1319f66f92245a2fe4ec63fe91ab66c9

[23] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html

[24] See, e.g., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-lauds-chinese-response-to-virus-says-world-at-important-juncture-idUSKBN1ZS2EE;https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/who-lauds-china-s-efforts-to-tackle-covid-19-says-global-community-unprepared-to-face-coronavirus-threat/story-zzOQaBAEKo9MI0Na2p5HbM.html;https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-has-vindicated-china-exposed-the-west/?fbclid=IwAR28VFE2s4TE1Rc9jsOK3576MdCDOXvrvhJ6uHMVWYHo4J15iOroFRpc8uo.

Featured image is from Asia Times

While humans stand on the brink of precipitating our own extinction, with the prospects of now averting this remote – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’– virtually everyone remains unaware of the critical nature of our plight. Moreover, the ongoing human death toll from the activities that are generating this crisis numbers in the many millions each year while the number of species driven to extinction is estimated at 200 per day.

In contrast, a virus that is killing a very small proportion of the minuscule number it has infected is causing panic in many countries around the world, devastating the travel and tourism industries while emptying supermarket shelves of food and that apparently most vital of commodities: toilet paper.

According to the Johns Hopkins University Coronvirus Resource Center (which is presumably separate from the JHU bioweapons research facility), the last time I checked it before this article was sent for publication, official reports indicate that the COVID-19 virus has so far infected 372,563 people in a world population of 7,800,000,000 (that is, about .0048% of the human population), killing 16,380 (4.3% of those infected) with 100,885 (27%) recovered already (and many more highly likely to do so). Of course, there is an unknown number of people who have contracted the virus but not reported it (through ignorance or intention) thus indicating that the death rate from the disease is (probably significantly) lower than the official rate.

Moreover, as one doctor has reported after researching the data on Italy, where the greatest rate of COVID-19 infection has occurred: ‘80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases’ and ‘90% of the deceased are over 70 years old’. In addition, ‘Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons’ defined, very simply, as ‘persons without pre-existing chronic diseases’. Given that northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe, which has already led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past, these are undoubtedly factors that help to account for the current local health crisis. See ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’.

Obviously the utterly inadequate response to the genuine crisis in which humans now find themselves and the panic-stricken response to a simple virus tells us a great deal about how human fear is working in these two contexts and the way in which elite agents, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), governments, medical personnel and the corporate media, have no trouble manipulating this fear to serve elite interests.

A few minutes listening to or reading government and medical personnel commenting on COVID-19, as reported in the corporate media, is enough to reveal the extent of the fear they are peddling, although to those who are terrified, this is not obvious at all. It is just frightening.

While the multifaceted existential crisis clearly requires a concerted response ranging from nonviolent strategies to compel key corporations in various industries to desist from their biosphere-destroying behaviours to convincing ‘ordinary’ people to systematically reduce their consumption to relieve pressure on the biosphere as well, the virus problem requires either zero precautions for those individuals who make a point of maintaining their health (preferably by eating healthily-prepared biodynamic/organically grown vegetarian whole food etc which sustains their immune system), or the simplest of precautions (perhaps including taking some nutritional supplements such as vitamins A and C, for example), commensurate with precautions one might take to avoid catching the flu.

Of course, it should be noted, like many other threats to human health – including ‘doctor error’ (see, for example, ‘Table Of Iatrogenic Deaths In The United States’ and ‘Johns Hopkins study suggests medical errors are third-leading cause of death in U.S.’), heart disease, cancer and tuberculosis – the flu kills vastly more people, every day, than COVID-19 is doing. For example, according to the WHO, which ignores deaths from other diseases such as cardiovascular disease that can be influenza-related, seasonal influenza may result in as many as 650,000 deaths each year (an average of 1,781 each day) due to respiratory illnesses alone. See ‘Influenza: Burden of disease’. That is, the global death toll from COVID-19 in the months since it originated is equal to the global death toll from flu every 6.5 days.

Moreover, if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course. And no action either.

So, leaving aside this last point, the key question is this: Why aren’t people scared of the prospect of human extinction and behaving powerfully in response, while vast numbers of people are terrified of catching one particular virus (but, apparently, not scared of being killed by their doctor or catching other viruses, contracting heart disease, cancer or TB) and acting insanely as a result?

And the short answer to this question is this: The elite is using its international organizations (particularly the United Nations and its agencies), governments, education systems, corporate media and other agents to suppress people’s awareness (and hence fear) of the threat of extinction so that business-as-usual (that is, profit-maximization) can continue for as long as possible unhindered by efforts to contain this existential crisis while deliberately triggering people’s fear in relation to COVID-19 so that a greater degree of elite control can be achieved and greater profits can be secured by exploiting certain opportunities (such as ‘short-selling’ on the stock market and profit-making by pharmaceutical corporations) that the panic arising from the virus generates.

Let me elaborate.

If one investigates the state of Earth’s biosphere, it quickly becomes evident that the biosphere is under siege on many fronts: There is the ongoing threat of nuclear war (perhaps started regionally) as the Cold War infrastructure containing this threat has been progressively dismantled. There is the ongoing threat posed by the progressive collapse of biodiversity as habitat is destroyed at an accelerating rate while animals, birds, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles and plants are killed in vast numbers by a multitude of concurrent assaults. There is the ongoing threat posed by the climate catastrophe. There is the ongoing threat posed by the deployment of 5G (and electromagnetic radiation generally). And these threats are complemented by the imminent collapse of the Amazon, the widespread radioactive contamination of the Earth, the use of geoengineering and the ongoing ecological destruction caused by the many ongoing wars and other military activity. Among a wide variety of other threats.

The nature and details of these threats are readily available – again, for example, see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’– and can be accessed by virtually anyone on Earth interested. Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence to support the argument that human extinction is now imminent given the synergistic impact of these (and so many other) threats. In essence, if one chooses, one can consider the evidence oneself and use this knowledge to behave sensibly and powerfully in response.

However, only a rare individual is seeking out and considering this wide range of evidence so that they can consider modifying their behaviour in light of this multifaceted crisis. Why?

Because our fear allows our life circumstances (‘I am busy with work/my family’ etc.) and elite agents, such as the corporate media, education systems and the entertainment industry, to distract us from paying close attentionto these interrelated crises. This means that, if we do pay attention, it is usually to the corporate media’s version of the ‘evidence’, as presented by corporate scientists, and we are directed how to interpret this information; only the rarest individual seeks out the science for themselves or reads the scientists who courageously tell the truth. See, for example, ‘Arctic News’. In this way, strategically-focused action based on an analysis of the driving forces, even by those who self-label as ‘activists’, can be prevented and business-as-usual continues.

In contrast, because events such as the COVID-19 virus – like the long list of such threats (including AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS], Mad Cow disease and Ebola) that preceeded it – are created to expand elite political, economic, social and geopolitical control as well as to generate greater profits in some sectors of the economy (including through stock market windfalls by ‘short-selling’), our fear is deliberately played upon by the propaganda distributed through various elite agents. The resulting panic ensures that the bulk of the human population – willing to surrender control on the promise of greater material security – serves elite interests precisely.

For a sample of the literature and videos that thoughtfully discuss points such as these, as well as others consistent with them (such as the push for compulsory vaccination and marginalization of the elderly), see:

‘COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Fake Pandemic? Who’s Behind It? Global Economic, Social and Geopolitical Destabilization’,

‘This Is a Test: How Will the Constitution Fare During a Nationwide Lockdown?’,

‘China – Western China Bashing – vs. Western Biowarfare?’,

‘CoVid-19 – What the government is really covering up’,‘Plunging stocks, pandemic fears, quarantines – what’s the real operation?’,

‘How Many People Have Coronavirus?’,

‘The Coronavirus Phenomenon is a Political Pandemic, not a Medical Emergency’,

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

‘The Coronavirus Hoax’,

‘Pandemic: The Invention of a Disease Called Fear. People are being “Herded”.

Disrupting the World Economy’, ‘Coronavirus scare – the hoax of the century?’,

‘Corona Panic – erstaunliche Einblicke / stunning insights’,‘

The Coronavirus: Crown Jewel of the New World Order or Crippling Blow to Globalization?’,

‘Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation’and

‘In a Europe Closed Down by the Coronavirus the EU Opens its Doors to the US Army. Could the Defender become the Invader of Europe?’

In essence then, knowledge – whether of those actually possessing it but even of one’s own – is marginalized because once people are scared, their fear overwhelms their capacity to think, assess, evaluate and critique, as well as to feel the other emotional responses that tell them what is actually taking place. Only the occasional individual pauses to consider – and research – what is happening in order to respond powerfully.

Of course, knowledge might not be easy to acquire given that, in this instance, there are various theories, apart from those mentioned above, about what is happening. These include the hypotheses that the virus is a (deliberately or even accidentally) released bioweapon – see

‘Author of US Biowarfare Law: Studies Confirm Coronavirus Weaponized’,

‘Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China Itself?’,

‘China is Confronting the COVID-19 Epidemic. Was It Man-Made? An Act of of Bio-warfare?’and

‘Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus’– and that the virus is being used to obscure the death toll from the deployment of 5G (already done extensively in Wuhan, for example).

See ‘Wuhan China, One Big 5G FEMA style Camp & Not because of Coronavirus’ and ‘China, 5G, And The Wuhan Coronavirus: The Emperor’s New Virus’.

However, just because knowledge requires effort, it does not mean that it is not available if we conscientiously apply our intelligence to identify and investigate credible sources, such as those mentioned above. Moreover, if knowledge is genuinely sought, we might also need to spend time endeavouring to comprehend the complexity of some issues, starting by asking key questions. In this case, for example, there are many people benefiting from this crisis but doing so even though they work at different points in relation to it. How does this help us to understand what is going on?

The fundamental problem, of course, is that applying intelligence to a challenge is effectively impossible if, as is the case with the bulk of the human population, the individual is (unconsciously) terrified and hence easily stampeded into panic, especially if the stampede is precipitated deliberately to serve specific elite ends.

So why is virtually everyone so (unconsciously) terrified? Unfortunately, it is the standard state of virtually all human beings after being terrorized into submission by parents, teachers, religious figures and other adults during childhood. But also denied the opportunity to feel and release this fear, the individual suppresses their awareness of the fear which simply remains in the unconscious endlessly shaping behaviour without the individual even realising. For a full explanation of this, including the roles that ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence play in generating this outcome, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

One way in which this works is as follows. Children start learning at a very young age to identify, often unconsciously, when a parent or other adult is delusional about something. This is particularly the case when this involves the parent projecting their fear onto the child (or something the child is doing), when there is actually no danger. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’. The child can perceive the parental projection because the child’s perceptions are not yet as damaged as those of the adults around them. However, because the adult is always fearfully attached to their delusions and projections as a key outcome of their own childhood terrorization experience, the child also quickly learns that if they seriously contradict a delusion or projection held by the parent/adult, they are highly likely to be punished. And so the child acts to avoid punishment by not challenging the delusion/projection.

As Anita McKone further explained her understanding of this process during a recent discussion, she noted the way it feels for the parent in this context: ‘If you don’t help me to keep safe from my projected fear/delusion (which, of course, for me is absolutely real), then I consider you to be dangerous to me and I will attack you!’ The problem for the child in this circumstance is that the parental fear and the threat it poses are overwhelming and so, after a time, the child copies the fear and ceases to remember how things actually were. But without a subsequent opportunity to feel the fear holding this delusion/projection in place, the child will retain this delusion/projection for life, just as the parent has done.

However, the problem is that once a childhood fear is suppressed, it spends the remainder of the individual’s life seeking ways of being felt and expressed. This can occur in ways that are easily not noticed, such as feeling scared while watching a horror movie. However, the most usual ways in which this suppressed fear manifests in later life is by projecting it at activities undertaken by one’s children that trigger this fear. And because it is not actually frightening to control the child’s behaviour, the parent will seek this control so that they can feel the relief of (temporarily) getting their own fear back under control.

But another way in which this fear can be given a safe outlet on something that is not actually frightening, is by participating in ‘socially-approved’ activities that allow the fear to be expressed. For example, the people who are participating in the panic-stricken purchase of foods and goods from supermarkets are simply responding to their unconscious fear which has been deliberately triggered to enable elite-desired outcomes for greater social control to be achieved by making political use of this panic. Again see articles cited above such as ‘This Is a Test: How Will the Constitution Fare During a Nationwide Lockdown?’

In essence then, the COVID-19 pandemic was created as just another step in the endless effort to fully establish elite political, economic and social control. With the WHO, governments, medical personnel and the corporate media warning the population (with their superficially suppressed terror readily accessible) of the dangers of the virus and directing them to respond in particular ways under threat of punishment, governments implementing measures to restrict freedom and movement (including ‘lockdowns’, border closings, bans on gatherings in a variety of public contexts and a range of other drastic measures), the corporate media endlessly referring to and discussing possible ‘horror’ scenarios, people’s fear is readily triggered to ensure there is little resistance to the ongoing curtailment of their rights (and many even end up asking for these curtailments if it will make them feel safer).

The fundamental problem is this: once we fearfully surrender a right, it is rarely won back. And we are one step closer to living in a dystopian (technologically-monitored and controlled) police state. If you think this won’t/can’t happen, I gently encourage you to read the relevant references cited above, each of which was carefully chosen because it illustrates this point in one way or another.

Whether COVID-19 is intended to be the final step or just another in what remains of the series, we will soon know. In any case, if we are not resisting strategically, the elite will ultimately succeed.

So here is the summary:

Our existing parenting and education models are designed to produce submissively obedient children, students, workers, soldiers and citizens. After all, we want children, students, employees, military personnel and even citizens who obey orders, not think for themselves. But this outcome can only be achieved by terrorizing children throughout childhood until they suppress their awareness of their own self-will so completely that they submit to the will of adults virtually without protest. Now devoid of their own unique and powerful self-will, they become sheep herded from one supermarket to the next by their own fear. No need for a shepherd.

Then, when the global elite plans and implements its next move, using COVID-19 as ‘cover’ on this occasion, to consolidate its ever-tightening grip on the human population (more militarized policing, new and improved police/military weapons systems, privacy-abusing law, surveillance technology, facial recognition system, vaccination regime, genetically-mutilated organism, monetary or banking convenience….), it simply instructs its agents in the UN, government, education systems, the corporate and social media, and elsewhere to carefully explain why this particular response is so beneficial to everyone with genuine critiques confined to those few outlets with modest audiences, such as this one, that tell the truth.

Terrorized into accepting adult dogma as a child, the typical adult now participates in many delusions, such as the one that the choice offered at elections constitutes having a say in how a country is governed. Devoid of the capacity to critique society beyond the most superficial level, elite propaganda is devoured as ‘knowledge’. And once their deeply-suppressed terror is triggered, these ‘adults’ will be readily panicked into doing as the elite directs. People in a terrified state are in no condition to defend themselves and their rights and so they readily give these up on the promise of not having to feel afraid.

What can we do?

Well, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

If you need help to parent in this manner, try ‘Putting Feelings First’ and learning how to nistel to your child(ren). See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you know someone who is frightened, or even panicking, about COVID-19, and you feel capable of doing so, it will help them enormously if you are able to listen to them talk about, and feel, their fear. Again, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you want to better understand the origin, identity and behaviour of the global elite and why it is insane, see the section headed ‘How the World Works’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’ and the articles ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

If you want to better understand the link between suppressed fear and panic-buying in supermarkets, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

If you wish to campaign to defend our rights and the integrity of our biosphere, then consider doing it strategically. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. The global elite is not about to give way unless we compel it to do so. We have plenty of power if we deploy it strategically.

If you wish to remove a corrupt or electorally unresponsive government, see Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

If you wish to fight powerfully to save Earth’s biosphere against those governments and corporations so intent on destroying it, but you prefer local engagement, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a simple program to systematically reduce your consumption and increase your self-reliance over a period of years.

You might also consider joining the global network of people resisting violence in all contexts, particularly that inflicted by the global elite, by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Each of the measures nominated in the section above identifies ways in which we can restore our power to resist elite insanity and/or take strategic action to resist elite violence once we have the power to do so.

If we do not take measures such as these, the insane global elite will continue to manipulate us into doing its bidding, usually using more insidious techniques than COVID-19, until human beings cease to exist. As touched on above, the evidence strongly suggests we do not have much time.

What you decide is therefore critical.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

The Washington Post – an inveterate keystone of US foreign policy propaganda – made a surprising admission recently. The people of Crimea – allegedly “annexed” by the Russian Federation – are vastly satisfied under Moscow’s governance.

The Washington Post article titled, “Six years and $20 billion in Russian investment later, Crimeans are happy with Russian annexation,” attempts in every way to misrepresent, and deny the cause and obvious implications of the polling data presented – but still admits:

…the annexation was popular, especially among Crimea’s large population of older ethnic Russians. More than five years later, and billions of rubles of investment later, it remains popular.

The polling data was collected by the Levada Center – which the Washington Post calls, “Russia’s most reliable polling company.” The Washington Post conveniently omits that the Levada Center has been funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and regularly works with the Western media to generate data to support Washington and London’s various anti-Russian narratives – which is likely why the Washington Post determines it is so “reliable.”

Yet even this US-funded front had to admit that from 2014 when Crimea rejoined Russia, up to and including today, the peninsula’s Russian administration was and remains highly popular.

The Washington Post even had to admit that among Crimea’s Tatar minority support for Crimea’s rejoining of Russia actually rose since 2014.

The Washington Post would have to admit (emphasis added):

Support for joining Russia remains very high (86 percent in 2014 and 82 percent in 2019) — and is especially high among ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. A key change since 2014 has been a significant increase in support by Tatars, a Turkic Muslim population that makes up about 12 percent of the Crimean population. In 2014, only 39 percent of this group viewed joining Russia as a positive move, but this figure rose to 58 percent in 2019.

Crimea’s Tatars have been the focus of immense efforts both by Washington and its partners in Kiev to create a viable opposition to destabilize the peninsula and undermine Russia’s presence there.

Apparently this ploy has mostly failed.

Russophobic Foreign Policy Out of Sync With Reality

The Washington Post finally admits that despite overwhelming support both in 2014 and up to and including today for Crimea’s return to Russia – the West is still outraged over the development.

The Post notes:

Crimea’s annexation remains an outrage to most Euro-Atlantic states, though sentiments are clearly different on the political far right. But even Russia’s fiercest critics recognize, though they rarely express it publicly, that Crimea is not going to return to Ukraine any time soon.

But if the people of Crimea wanted to return the peninsula to Russian administration and were overwhelmingly happy then and now having done so – what is the source of outrage among most “Euro-Atlantic states” – states that allege their foreign policy is underpinned by concern for democracy and human rights?

Here one sees another shingle come loose and blow away from the roof of propaganda that shelters and hides the West’s true agenda and motivations. These “Euro-Atlantic states” never cared what the people of Crimea thought, or cared about the fate and future of Ukraine or Russia in terms of what was best for the people actually living there – and instead cared only about how developments in both states would benefit themselves.

This includes their highly determined attempts to maintain their unipolar “international order” – an order they created and one that benefits they and they alone – and an order maintained at the cost of the rest of the world subjected to it.

The fact that the West still protests Crimea’s rejoining Russia despite the actual people of Crimea choosing to do so and – 6 years on – still being vastly satisfied with their decision – says much about the West’s actual commitment to the principles of democracy and self-determination versus its use of such principles to hide its self-serving agenda.

The people of Crimea have escaped the destabilized, chaotic nightmare the US and its NATO allies turned neighboring Ukraine into – a nightmare predicated on bringing Ukraine “democracy” and “human rights” and putting it on course to join the disintegrating European Union and drawing it in closer to the increasingly antiquated and impotent NATO military alliance.

The tale of post-Euromaidan Ukraine and Crimea which escaped it – is a cautionary one – warning nations of what actually becomes of those who fall into the orbit of Washington, London, and Brussels, and the true benefits of genuine self-determination beyond that orbit.

Ukraine will continue to be a warning of bending to the West and investing in its tired “international order” – while neighboring Crimea will continue to be showcase for the merits of emerging multipolarism – and increasingly so to the point where even prominent sources of Western propaganda like the Washington Post must admit as much – however obliquely.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

The US will lose 2 million jobs just in March (Bloomberg News). US GDP will fall by -24% to -30% in second quarter (Goldman-Sachs & Morgan-Stanley Banks). Jobless rate could rise to 30% (Fed St. Louis Governor, Bullard). Federal Reserve promises $4T more to pre-bailout banks (Marketwatch). Financial markets imploding and credit system on verge of freeze up. Trump and US politicians considering sending people back to work despite higher cost in infections and deaths from the virus!

A month ago, in late February 2019, I was convinced the recession I have been predicting since January 2019 had arrived. Two weeks ago I began writing this would be another ‘Great Recession 2.0’, as in 2008-09. Now I’m not so convinced of even that. It may be worse, much worse. A bona fide Depression on the scale of the 1930s may be approaching.

US Real Economy Falling Faster Than 2008 or 1932

Just last week Goldman Sachs investment bank was predicting a -14% contraction of the US real economy in the second quarter, April-June 2020. Morgan Stanley followed with its prediction of a -30% drop in US GDP. Goldman has since modified its initial forecast to -24%.

This compares with the worst quarterly decline in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s, of -13%. The current contraction, in other words, is coming faster and deeper than any on record previously—whether compared to the 2008-09 Great Recession or the 1930s Depression.

As of the close of March 2020, about a third of the US economy is now shutdown. More is about to follow. The US regions most directly and heavily impacted by the coronavirus—Washington State, California and New York—are where business activity has virtually shut down except for emergency services. Other areas, like Illinois, Texas, and Florida are catching up fast.

Given the spreading shutdowns, focused in states of high concentration of economic production, According to current Federal Reserve central bank governors, the unemployment rate will rise as high as 30%, and quickly, according to St. Louis district Federal Reserve governor, Bullard. Predictions are at least 2 million will be unemployed in March alone, just the first month of the crisis. That monthly unemployment rise also exceeds the worst months of the 2008-09 prior Great Recession.

In short, the real economy in the US has fallen into an economic ‘coma’, as some have accurately called it.

But that economy was already weak and fragile when the virus effect pushed it off a cliff. Already in late 2019, business investment had been contracting for nine months, the manufacturing sector was in a recession, trade was negatively affected by Trump’s 2018-19 trade wars, and household consumption was showing serious signs of weakening. For example, with regard to household consumption, the default rate on credit cards for median families had risen to nearly 9% by late 2019, more than 7 million auto loans had defaulted, and student loan defaults were rising as well (although covered up by clever government re-categorizing of loan defaults). The consumer was not in good shape, in other words, keeping spending afloat largely by credit based spending by the middle classes and by the high end income households’ spending based on inflating stock and financial gains (the wealth effect) and Trump’s massive tax cuts of 2018-19 flowing to their bottom lines.

Then the virus hit the economy like a baseball bat to the back of the head!

Financial Markets Price Implosion

Financial asset markets began to plummet. Artificially boosted for three years under Trump, US financial markets were fueled by Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax cuts and low interest rates in prior years. That tax and cheap money windfall to business, senior managers and shareholders in turn was redistributed to managers and shareholders in the form of a flood of stock buybacks and dividend payouts. More than $3.4 trillion, in fact, in just the last three years!

The buybacks & dividends were then diverted once again in large part back into stocks and other financial markets once more. The artificial financial asset bubbles grew. But it was all artificial, driven by cheap money and massive tax cut income redistribution to investors, corporations, and the wealthiest 1%.

Under Trump, from 2017 through 2019, stock buybacks totaled more than $2 trillion. It went mostly to professional investors and CEOs and senior managers of companies (In tech companies, the amount of the buybacks going to CEOs and senior managers was as high as 70%, as for example occurred in Apple).

Another $1.4 trillion was distributed to shareholders in the form of dividend payouts. That’s a total of more than $3.5 trillion in tax cut and low interest driven income redistributed to the wealthiest households. Most of this massive income windfall was reinvested in financial markets. US stock markets alone under Trump rose by 25%-35% in just three years. And that’s just about the amount the same markets have now crashed in just one month under the virus’s economic impact!

Crashing stock prices are one key indicator of the onset of a Great Recession, nor a normal one. The same applies to the spread of financial asset collapse to other financial markets.

Already US stocks have contracted by 35%-40%. Oil and commodity futures prices by 40% or more, as the price per barrel of crude has fallen from $70 to the mid-$20s per barrel range. Other industrial commodity prices by 20%-30%. Currencies (aka foreign exchange) worldwide devaluing everywhere, with greatest pressure in India, Asia, and Latin America. Bond markets—corporate and government—have now begun to feel the pressure as well and are beginning to fracture. And bond markets are far more important to the stability of the capitalist economy than are even the stock markets.

As financial asset prices deflate rapidly holders of those assets try to dump them to contain losses. Everyone wants to sell; no one wants to buy. Prices deflate further. Often purchased on margin, by borrowing money to buy more assets during the boom period, ‘margin calls’ require even more selling—and even more financial asset price collapse. Investors become desperate to raise cash to cover their losses. A ‘dash for cash’ overwhelms investor, business, and consumer psychology. As losses exceed the ability to raise cash, financial markets begin to implode. And they are now falling line ‘ten pins’, one after the other.

Pre-Emptive Bank & Investor Bailouts

First stock markets, but in the past month, repo markets where banks loan to each other; then commercial paper markets and money market funds; then municipal bond markets; and residential mortgages; and leverage loans (junk loans); and, behind the scenes and intensifying, high yield (junk) corporate bonds and so-called BBB investment grade corporate bonds.

The latter junk corporate bond + BBB market in the US alone is valued at $6 trillion. Leveraged loans another $1.2 trillion. Muni bonds $4 trillion. Residential mortgages $11 trillion. All in trouble now. Plus Repos, Commercial Paper-money funds, and so on as well.

And let’s not forget oil-commodity futures global price deflation, collapsing emerging market economy currencies, and even growing troubles in national government bonds like US Treasuries, Gilts (UK), Bunds (Germany) and others, many of which were already trading in negative rate territory.

In short, the generalized financial markets collapse was a defining characteristic of the 2008-09 financial crisis. And it’s returned now with vengeance.

Also returning is the desperate effort by the Federal Reserve (and other central banks worldwide) to stuff the growing black holes in banks, shadow banks, and corporate balance sheets with new liquidity (money injections) in order to try to prevent defaults and bankruptcies. A bank-corporate bailout has already begun—even before the banks fail. It is pre-emptive in 2020, unlike ‘after the fact’ as in 2008. Banks have not yet crashed and are being bailed out!

The Federal Reserve in one week in mid-March injected $2.2 trillion in the form of $1.5T for the repo market and another $700 billion in Fed direct purchases of mortgage bonds and investor held Treasuries. It followed with unlimited further money to stave off collapse of the commercial paper-money market funds, the muni bonds, mortgage bonds, and reportedly to back up credit card and auto finance companies from their anticipated losses. The Fed also announced it would ‘swap’ US dollars for foreign currencies of other central banks in order to help their economies. The Fed has committed to $4T more in money injections to banks. And that’s in addition to the $2.2T already committed.

In other words, bankers will be bailed out $6.2T, and that’s probably just a start. That amount compares, by the way, to approximately $4.5T used to bailout the banks in 2008-09.

What about non-bank companies? They received a ten year Trump tax cut in January 2018 of no less than $4.5 trillion! They were then awarded with more tax loopholes in 2019 equal to $427 billion more. Now the Republican Senate in the US Congress is proposing another $500 billion with virtually no strings attached.

Yet Another Windfall for Non-Bank Corporate America

In contrast, the fiscal spending stimulus for Main St. and middle-working class families totals about $500B in the pending 2020 crisis recovery bill. It includes a one time cash rebate to households of $3,000 but no increase in unemployment benefits thereafter. It’s clearly a 30 day emergency package, even though the impact on the US economy from the virus will be for months to come.

The US economy generates $1.7 trillion in spending every month. The $1 trillion fiscal stimulus package coming from Congress will thus replace barely half of the lost spending by the US economy.

Big corporate interests and politicians in Washington DC know the depth of the current economic crisis—financial and real. They’re providing for the bankers and investors to the tune of $6.2 trillion, with an open ended checkbook for more if necessary. But they’re only providing for a one month bailout of Main St.

Already Trump is tweeting this package will be reviewed in 15 days. He’s thinking short term. So too are other politicians. Their media is pushing the theme that ‘maybe the economic costs are too high for the cost of the death rate from the virus’ that will occur. Politicians like New York governor, Cuomo, are raising the question, signaling the debate now rising within the economic and political elite; they are preparing the public. They are getting ready to trade off human lives for their economy. They are preparing to send people back to work after a month, regardless the health consequences. They fear economic collapse and their loss of incomes more than the virus and its destruction of American lives.

Trump may soon decide to announce “let them go back to work”. An echo perhaps of Marie Antoinette’s infamous line as her citizens were dying too: “let them eat cake”.

In short, we are now about to see that people’s lives are expendable, for their profits, income and wealth that are not.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Jack Rasmus.

Check out Dr. Rasmus’s predictions since Sept. 2018 on recession and current events on this blog. And concluding chapters from his books, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’ 2016; ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’ 2017; ‘Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression’ 2010; and the most recent ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism’ 2020.. For day by day and hourly commentary, join Dr. Rasmus on twitter at @drjackrasmus, and listen to his weekly radio show commentaries in depth as the crisis unfolds, at http://alternativevisions.podbean.com. Dr. Jack Rasmus is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

The conflict in Yemen has escalated amid the crisis on the oil market caused by aggressive actions of Saudi Arabia.

On March 8, Riyadh launched its oil gamble flooding the market and offering unprecedented discounts in an attempt to defeat other oil producers, mainly Russia and Iran, and capture their share. In the next several weeks, Saudi Arabia was increasing its pressure on Russia on Iran slashing oil prices, but the Kingdom forgot about its own soft underbelly.

By March 17, forces of Ansar Allah (the Houthis) have captured most of the province of al-Jawf, including the provincial capital – al-Hazm, from the Saudi-led coalition and its Yemeni proxies. In this battle only, Saudi-led forces lost hundreds pieces of military equipment, including dozens of battle tanks and artillery guns. The Saudi Air Force carried out airstrikes on positions, HQs and weapon depots of its allies. However, the number of abandoned equipment and the speed of fleeing of Saudi-backed troops were so high that 10-20 airstrikes were just not enough to compensate them.

Following the swift advance in al-Jawf, Asnar Allah turned its attention to the neighboring province of Marib. They captured a number of Saudi positions east of Sirwah, including the Kufil military base, a key stronghold of Saudi-backed forces on the route to Marib city. After this, the defense of Saudi proxies started collapsing in the entire eastern part of the province. If the situation develops in the same direction and further, Yemeni forces will likely be able to reach and besiege Marib city in early April and capture it by the middle of the month.

Meanwhile, Ansar Allah units forces pro-Saudi forces from the key district of Nihm near the country’s capital Sanaa. The district had been contested since early 2020. Nonetheless, now, it’s

Pro-Saudi sources regularly claim that Ansar Allah suffers large-scale casualties, but often fail to provide any visual evidence to confirm these claims. In own turn, most of the recent successes of Ansar Allah were carefully documented by their media branch.

The Saudi-led coalition also faced a never-before-seen resistance to its air power. In January and February, Ansar Allah shot down several unmanned aerial vehicles of the coalition. In March, its forces moved to direct attacks on coalition warplanes. On March 14, Yemeni air defense forces launched missiles at a group of F-15 and F-16 jets over the province of al-Jawf. On March 19, several missiles were launched at coalition warplanes over the district of Sirwah in the province. In both cases, Ansar Allah employed the so-called Fatir-1 air defense system. This is a locally-modernized variant of the Soviet-era 2K12 Kub system. The Fatir-1 was revealed in August of 2019. The claimed effective range of the system is 22 km.

Fatir-1 launched did not result in downing of any coalition jets, but the existence of the new threat itself limited operations of the Saudi air power.

In March, the main area of clashes between Ansar Allah and Saudi forces was northeastern and central Yemen. However, if the oil price will remain under the level of 35 USD per a barrel, a new round of Ansar Allah offensive will take place inside Saudi Arabia.

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The US has no shortage of missiles, bombs, bullets, or chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons to use against targeted adversaries at home and abroad.

That’s not the case when it comes to providing vital healthcare for its citizens, including ventilators and protective gear for healthcare providers on the front lines of treating growing numbers of COVID-19 patients.

The disease attacks the lungs, ventilators needed to save lives by helping people unable to breathe do it for them by delivering air into their windpipes to the lungs.

A growing shortage isn’t likely to ease any time soon. If COVID-19 outbreaks continue increasing, a ventilator shortage will force doctors to decide who lives or dies.

Reportedly, there are about 170,000 ventilators in the US. It’s unknown how many may be needed. The American Hospital Association estimates nearly a million. At this stage, its pure guesswork.

By invoking the 1950 Defense Production Act, the president can require businesses to produce what’s needed for national defense.

Hoarding or price-gouging of designed goods and materials can be prohibited.

Ventilators can only be produced by companies technically competent to do it.

Current producers may have limited capacity to increase output. GE Healthcare makes them, a company statement saying:

It’s exploring “all options to support this increased need.”

“GE has robust business continuity plans, and we are increasing our manufacturing capacity and output of equipment that is important in the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients, all while ensuring safe operations.”

Government funding could expedite the process, what governance serving the public welfare is all about.

Because ventilators are used to save lives, technological expertise to produce them and quality control are essential.

According to MIT Technology Review, “(m)edical device manufacturing is highly regulated, depends on proprietary global supply chains, and requires significant expertise to ramp up and run.”

“It’s absolutely critical, of course, that the machines function safely. (It’s) over-optimistic” to believe auto or other non-medical equipment manufacturers can produce them quickly.

Even current ventilator producers face constraints on ramping up production — including “size of (their) manufacturing plants and the availability of critical components, many of which (are produced) in China.”

Increasing production capacity requires significant capital expenditures with no idea how many ventilators may be needed over what time period.

According to Boston University’s College of Engineering dean Kenneth Lutchen:

“Who will pay for all the extra ventilators even if (producers)  ramp up?”

“Presumably at some point this crisis will play itself out, and the hospitals will have far more ventilators than they need until the next crisis.”

“There needs to be an incentivized business model to hit the go button for ramping up manufacturing, and government likely needs to figure out how to successfully engage.”

Ventilator producer Ventec Life Systems’ CEO Chris Kiple said his firm can increase production up to five-fold if have contracts for numbers to produce.

When leadership in Washington is sorely needed, it’s absent in the White House and Congress.

Critical shortages of ventilators protective gear, sanitizers, and other supplies needed to deal with potentially large numbers of COVID-19 patients in parts of the US or nationwide haven’t been addressed by America’s ruling class.

As of Monday, there are 381,000 COVID-19 cases worldwide, around 46,000 in the US, manageable numbers to handle in developed countries.

That’s not the case if numbers spike exponentially higher. Doctors, nurses, and other medical staff are healthcare providers, not magicians.

They’re also not involved in making political decisions, and they’re aren’t enough ventilators in the US and other countries if numbers of infected people increase dramatically higher.

Washington is responsible for dealing with public heath. So are states and local governments to a lesser extent.

When ruling authorities serve privileged interests over the public welfare, ordinary people suffer.

That’s the disturbing state of today’s America. Simmering below the surface in normal times, it can become a national crisis like now.

A Final Comment

According to the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health instructed medical professionals only to test patients for COVID-19 “if a positive result could change how they would be treated,” adding:

“(G)uidance sent…to doctors (last week) was prompted by a crush of patients and shortage of tests, and could make it difficult to ever know precisely how many people in LA County contracted the virus.”

Besides a shortage of tests, there aren’t enough public health staff in the US to track sources of new infections nor enough hospital capacity and ventilators to deal with epidemic levels of patients if things get this bad.

Will other cities and counties in America operate like Los Angeles?

In the weeks and months ahead, with the true number of COVID-19 cases in the US be much higher but unknown?

Some people are asymptomatic so as carriers can unwittingly affect others.

Healthcare, a fundamental human right, is a national issue.

Not in America where warmaking and corporate handouts take precedence, ordinary people increasingly left on their own — even when national leadership is needed at times like now.

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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.

With the days moving on, global coronavirus cases are significantly increasing in rate, as the neoliberal world grinds to a halt with dire implications for the international economy. Altogether, the number of official coronavirus detections is now fast approaching 400,000, with over 16,000 people succumbing to the disease so far. Around 100,000 patients have recovered, most of them Chinese citizens, with active cases globally topping a quarter of a million.

Over the past few days, worldwide reports of the illness have been accelerating. On 22 March 2020, the United States reported one of the world’s largest daily increases of coronavirus cases – when almost 10,000 Americans contracted it on that day, the vast majority of them New York residents (1). Statistics for the 23rd of March are revealing a similar number of cases again in the US, a country which now has one of the planet’s highest rate of coronavirus infections.

In total, more than 40,000 Americans have to date been diagnosed with the disease, and over 500 have died. The real figures in America could be considerably higher, due to the exclusionary nature of its health service and inadequate testing. These problems are not restricted to the US. Meanwhile, less than a month ago president Donald Trump had unwisely called the coronavirus “a hoax”.

It is important to note that, at present, case numbers in the US are still very low, as they remain globally. Media headlines have been flashing in recent days warning that the coronavirus “could kill millions of Americans”, with the flames being fanned by World Health Organisation officials who should know better (2). This speculation is based on no evidence and ranks as flagrant scaremongering. The probability is that the US death toll will be in the thousands, before the illness is eventually suppressed.

Advice put forth by the WHO should be treated with caution for other reasons, as this world body has received extensive funding from pharmaceutical corporations since 2005, along with other private sources. During the 2009-2010 swine flu pandemic, the WHO negotiated the price of drugs with governments on behalf of big pharma (3). Pharmaceutical companies, most of them headquartered in the US, will also hugely benefit from the coronavirus crisis, while swathes of the public are losing their jobs and face uncertain futures.

Over the past generation, there has been a large increase of contagious diseases – from SARS and avian flu to ebola, MERS and coronavirus. The multiplication of infectious illnesses is surely an indication that something has gone terribly awry with the condition of our planet. The reality is of course stark. We are presently living in the sixth mass extinction, driven by human actions, as species and ecosystems disappear at a level not seen since the “dinosaur asteroid” struck earth 66 million years ago.

Another cause behind the rise in infectious diseases, is likely due to the workings of industrial-scale meat production (4). Meat processing, including poultry and dairy manufacturing, is heavily reliant on antibiotic usage, and many corporations are dependent upon this sector as a means of profit-making. In the neoliberal era, this ensures that it is embedded in the world economy.

The meat industry is eroding the effectiveness of antibiotics, which over time are creating mutant bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics. It is a disturbing phenomenon. According to the experienced American microbiologist, Dr. Glenn Morris, if a person consumes antibiotic-resistant bacteria from under-cooked meat and then becomes ill, he or she may not respond to antibiotic treatment to cure the ailment. (5)

In America, one of the world’s biggest meat consuming countries, it is unknown how much antibiotics are actually administered. The drug companies have been covering up, and are refusing to publish data pertaining to antibiotic levels in meat production.

Dr. Morris warned that,

“There’s no federal regulation that really allows us to know how much antibiotic is being used in agriculture. And the drug companies are not going out of their way to make that data readily available. So we really don’t know how much antibiotic is being used in agriculture in this country [America]. And that’s kind of scary”. (6)

Meat processing is also inhumane and a heavy contributor to global warming. It accounts for 16.5% of global carbon emissions (7). With the human population exploding, meat consumption has doubled over the past half a century.

Moreover, livestock is being flown back and forth across the world in growing quantities, further increasing the risk of disease spread. It is impossible to assess each animal to see if it is carrying an illness. Any ailment could be transferable to people, especially between pigs and humans whose biological composition is quite similar.

Because of antibiotic usage over many years, mutant bacteria could be spreading forth and having a decisive role in the spawning of potentially deadly illnesses, such as the coronavirus. Philip Salvatore, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said that some drug-resistant bacteria “may cause more severe disease, may be more contagious, and are certainly more difficult to kill” (8). The coronavirus is highly infectious and proving tough to eradicate.

Multinational fast food retailers like McDonald’s, Burger King, and others, have vested interests in the meat industry persisting with business-as-usual strategies, which helps to maintain their high profit levels. McDonald’s directors have even informed farmers they should be “incentivised to produce beef, otherwise we don’t have a future for some of our key products” (9). Such policies are unsustainable, not to mention incompatible within government commitments to tackle climate change.

To blame the recent arrival of contagious illnesses on biological warfare is lacking in hard evidence. This form of waging conflict has been in existence for generations. The British Army attempted to spread smallpox among Native Americans in the summer of 1763, during the Siege of Fort Pitt in what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Scores of indigenous people succumbed to smallpox in the region, but it was never discovered how much of this was due to London’s dissemination of smallpox.

Imperial Japan, as widely reported in the West, implemented chemical and biological warfare against the Chinese during the 1930s and 1940s, killing untold thousands.

More recently, at separate times since the 1960s bio and chemical warfare was widely used by the Pentagon against revolutionary Cuba (10). These acts are not well known today, and are routinely avoided in the Western mass media whenever US-Cuban relations are discussed. Also glossed over are the large-scale terrorist attacks perpetrated on Cuba, which stretch to the early 1960s (“Operation Mongoose”), and were authorised in November 1961 by president John F. Kennedy, thereafter organised on the ground by his brother Robert Kennedy. (11)

Washington’s bio and chemical warfare campaigns against Cuba included the implanting of sinister maladies into the Caribbean island, like type II dengue virus and African swine fever, along with the introduction of other diseases, some of them fungal or parasitic.

Since 1962, Pentagon specialists were developing biological agents in sealed laboratories, with the specific aim to be used against Cuba. The Cuban leadership itself was aware from the beginning that their country was being plagued by harmful bacterium and chemicals. They also knew where it could most likely be traced to.

The country’s president, Fidel Castro, was usually situated at his headquarters in the capital Havana, whereby he was informed immediately that Cuba’s agricultural centres were under attack by suspicious infections. With Cuba already under the weight of an embargo enacted by the world’s strongest country, Castro’s reaction on hearing this news did not betray anger or dismay; but rather he received it in an austere, controlled manner.

Castro thereupon drove out to the affected area, be it a coffee plantation or sugar cane field, so that he could witness at first-hand the destruction and judge how to respond. On such occasions, which were increasing in frequency after the 1960s, Castro was often among the first to be present at the scene of the crime. It sometimes took the farm labourers, working a little distance off in the field, a few minutes before realising that it was in fact he, Castro, who had arrived in the vehicle in standing position – before he disembarked, looking about at his surroundings.

Some of the farm workers, approaching nearer to get a better view, then identified and pointed in amazement towards the tall, bearded man in full military attire, who was walking along the edge of the field. They then advanced, surrounding the Cuban leader, and their worries soon drifted away. Such was the effect on the masses that these major figures in world history produced, whenever they appeared on the scene unexpectedly, particularly in times of crisis.

Castro later said of Washington’s biological and chemical assaults on Cuba,

“Well I’ve talked about the thousands of terrorist actions, the assassination attempts… I mentioned the attacks with viruses – swine fever, hemorrhagic dengue – that made thousands of people sick and killed over 100 children. In the 1980s there were also biological attacks on our agriculture. For example, a parasite called blue mould attacked our tobacco crops; later, an unknown mould destroyed our best strain of sugar cane, the Barbados 4362, and 90 per cent of the crop was lost. Such a thing had never happened before”.

The Cuban president remarked further that,

“The same thing happened with coffee; other crops were infested with a parasite… which then attacked our potato crops. And there were other very destructive infestations like that, which caused many problems for our agriculture. It’s very hard to prove, but everything indicates that these disasters were not just coincidental; there was really malicious intent”. (12)

Indeed, it is virtually certain that these systematic attacks were directed from Washington. There were simply too many examples of it to be mere coincidence, with some diseases springing up in Cuba, like African swine fever in 1971, which had never before been recorded in the Western hemisphere.

Of the coronavirus, it is very hard to definitively prove the crucial circumstances behind its emergence. It can almost certainly be linked to human activity on some level. As the coronavirus spreads, on per capita terms Italy is to date comfortably the world’s worst affected country. With a population of 60 million, more than 60,000 Italians have so far contracted the coronavirus; with over 6,000 people in Italy having died. Even in this instance, though it is an unfolding tragedy, we are talking about a small percentage of 1% of the Italian people.

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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 Worldometers, World/Countries/United States, 23 March 2020, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

2 William Feuer, “The coronavirus could kill millions of Americans: ‘Do the math,’ immunization specialist says”, CNBC, 19 March 2020, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qhtoXJyfJEQJ:https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/the-coronavirus-could-kill-millions-of-americans-cdc-advisor-says.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie

3 Soren Ventegodt, Reviewed & Approved by Dr. Harold H. Fain, January 2015, https://www.avensonline.org/wp-content/uploads/JIMT-2378-1343-02-0004.pdf

4 Mattha Busby, “‘Live animals are the largest source of infection’: dangers of the export trade”, The Guardian, 21 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/21/live-animals-are-the-largest-source-of-infection-dangers-of-the-export-trade

5 Frontline, “Antibiotic Debate Overview”, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/safe/overview.html

6 Frontline, “Interview with Dr. Glenn Morris”, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/morris.html

7 Kevin O’Sullivan, “The trouble with meat: Why climate scientists are targeting beef”, Irish Times, 15 January 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/the-trouble-with-meat-why-climate-scientists-are-targeting-beef-1.3759264

8 Arielle Dulhaime-Ross, “Mutations that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics might also make them deadlier”, The Verge, 22 July 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/22/9015505/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-study-infection-deadliness

9 Ellie Donnelly, “Fast food giant McDonald’s warns of long-term threat to beef sector”, Irish Independent, 26 November 2019, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-q889sAk6ZgJ:https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/fast-food-giant-mcdonalds-warns-of-long-term-threat-to-beef-sector-38726611.html+&cd=20&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie

10 William Blum, “CIA Motto: ‘Proudly Overthrowing the Cuban Government Since 1959′”, CounterPunch, 15 March 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/15/cia-motto-proudly-overthrowing-the-cuban-government-since-1959/

11 Stuart McMillan, “Biowarfare over Cuban skies – Biological weapons are strictly off-limits… unless you’re the American government”, The Manitoban, 25 February 1998, http://www.uky.edu/~rmfarl2/cubabio2.htm

12 Fidel Castro, My Life: A Spoken Autobiography (Simon & Schuster Ome; Reprint edition, 9 June 2009), p. 267

Just as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic starts to slow down in China, where no new domestic cases have been reported in the past three days, other parts of the world are seeing their numbers spike. With over 328,000 COVID-19 cases worldwide and at least 14,380 coronavirus-related deaths, Italy and Spain are announcing significant increases in their daily death totals. Italy has surpassed China in the number of fatalities. The United States which currently has the third largest number of COVID-19 cases 33,276 is seeing a sharp increase in its cases as well, mostly due to community spread and increased testing. As tests become more accessible across the nation, numbers will continue to increase over the next few months. The only way to accurately determine how many American’s have COVID-19 would be to test everyone, but that isn’t even a consideration at this point.

During Sunday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force news conference, the Trump administration stated that out of those who were tested only 10% were positive for COVID-19.  He urged that people only test if they are exhibiting symptoms and that patients currently in the hospital should have priority for testing. President Donald Trump referred to COVID-19 as the “hidden enemy” and said that we are currently at war with it. He also said that he’s considering letting non-violent and elderly federal prisoners out to stem the spread of the virus.

In a race against time to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, Medical professionals have been speaking out about the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), respirators and other medical equipment as well as lack of accessibility to testing for those who have symptoms but still do not meet the qualifications for whatever reason.

The National Guard will be activated in New York, California, and Washington State, as this affords these states with maximum flexibility to use the guard without worrying about cost or liability. President Trump also spoke about the Federal Government deploying medical supplies to the hardest hit areas, including face shields, surgical gowns, face masks, gloves, overalls and medical equipment including much-needed respirators, as well as medical stations and naval ships within the next 48 hours.

Many are questioning how is it possible that the most powerful nation on earth has been so incredibly reactive during the past three months rather than being proactive and how can we be so unprepared for a pandemic, knowing that simulations such as Crimson Contagion and talks of this exact scenario playing out have been discussed by scientists and health professionals for years.

The most frustrating part is that there are more questions than answers, and many predict that things will be getting much worse (at least in the United States) in the upcoming months before they start to get better. With everything canceled/shut down people are starting to get impatient.

COVID-19 has spread to at least 167 countries and territories and although each one is battling their own war within their borders to contain it some nations such as Russia, China, and Cuba have been helping nations including Italy and Iran. Chinese President Xi Jinping made a diplomatic gesture towards European countries by calling the leaders of France, Germany, Spain, and Serbia to offer China’s support in their fight against COVID-19.

Beyond the medical challenges associated with COVID-19 are the economic hardships that a massive country-wide shutdown has produced, leading some including The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity to question whether the consequences of this government-imposed shutdown are actually worse than the virus itself.  Unemployment claims are expected to spike to 2 million this week, and a trillion-dollar Coronavirus stimulus bill has failed to move forward as of Sunday night and negotiations are expected to continue.

If we have learned anything it’s that this fear-driven pandemic is a world-wide issue and every effort should be made to mitigate its spread for purely humanitarian reasons, putting politics aside, while not creating an overwhelming sense of panic, as I stated in my previous article, we have reason for concern but not for panic.

This is the perfect time for the United States to end its wars and lift sanctions on nations including Iran and Syria, but seeing as these nations are seen as geopolitical rivals and threaten Washington’s capitalist hegemony, this is entirely unrealistic.

On Sunday the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan tweeted,

“I want to appeal to President Trump on humanitarian grounds to lift the sanctions against Iran till the COVID-19 pandemic is over. The people of Iran are facing untold suffering as sanctions are crippling Iran’s efforts to fight COVID-19. Humanity must unite to fight this pandemic.”

This is most likely in response to the Trump Administration’s announcement on Friday during the Coronavirus Task Force news conference that they will not be offering Iran sanctions relief as the coronavirus ravages the country. Iran’s health minister said that every hour fifty people are infected and every ten minutes another person dies from COVID-19. Iran wants sanction relief from the US not humanitarian assistance.

Tehran has been urging countries to back its call for lifting US sanctions, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted on Tuesday that unlawful US sanctions drained Iran’s economic resources, impairing its ability to fight COVID-19. He asked other countries to join the growing global campaign to disregard US sanctions on Iran. NIAC Action and 25 Organizations have urged Trump to ease Iran sanctions to combat coronavirus.

Just like US State Department officials promised in December 2019, the maximum pressure campaign on Iran has intensified in 2020 with fresh sanctions imposed just a few days ago.

Putting the very real humanitarian concerns aside for a moment, the widespread apocalyptic fear of an invisible enemy by the media is causing mass hysteria and doesn’t help anyone.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Perante o Coronavírus – declara o US European Command (Comando Europeu dos Estados Unidos) – “a nossa primeira preocupação é proteger a saúde das nossas forças e a das  forças dos nossos Aliados. Portanto, anuncia que reduziu o número de soldados do exercícioDefender Europe 20 (Defensor da Europa 20). Mas esse mesmo exercício continua.

Em 16 de Março, o Comando afirma que “desde Janeiro o US Army enviou 6.000 soldados dos Estados Unidos para a Europa”, com 12.000 peças de equipamento (desde armamentos pessoais a tanques) e que foi “completado o movimento de soldados e equipamentos, de vários portos para áreas de treino na Alemanha e na Polónia.” Além de que, “9.000 soldados dos EUA estacionados na Europa”, também participam no exercício.

O objectivo declarado pelos USA é “instalar uma força de combate credível na Europa, de apoio à NATO”, evidentemente, contra a “agressão russa”.

O objectivo verdadeiro – escrevemos há dois meses e meio, no il manifesto (o único jornal que então dava notícias do Defender Europe 20 ) – é semear tensão e alimentar a ideia do inimigo.

O cenário declarado do exercício nunca poderia verificar-se, também porque um confronto armado entre a NATO e a Rússia seria, inevitavelmente, nuclear. Esse é o cenário real para o qual se treinam as forças americanas, na Europa. Confirma-o o General Tod D. Wolters, Chefe do Comando Europeu dos Estados Unidos e, como tal, Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa.

Numa audiência no Senado dos Estados Unidos, em 25 de Fevereiro de 2020, declara que “as forças nucleares, garantia suprema da segurança dos Aliados, apoiam todas as operações militares dos EUA na Europa”.(1) O que significa que o Defender Europe 20 é um exercício não só de forças convencionais (não nucleares), mas também de forças nucleares.

Em 18 de Março, foi comunicado que dois bombardeiros nucleares B-2 Spirit, que fazem parte da task-force que chegou dos USA em 9 de Março, decolaram de Fairford, em Inglaterra, para treinar na Islândia e no Atlântico Norte, juntamente com três caças noruegueses F-35. Esses dois tipos de aviões foram projectados para o uso das novas bombas nucleares B61-12, que os EUA instalarão, em breve, em Itália e noutros países europeus, substituindo as actuais B-61.

Wolters eslarece na audiência do Senado, qual é a função das forças nucleares USA na Europa. Quando a Senadora Fischer lhe pergunta o que pensa do não primeiro uso das armas nucleares, o General responde: “Senadora, sou defensor de uma política flexível de primeiro uso”.  Aquele que, na Europa, detém nas suas mãos as armas nucleares USA/NATO, declara oficialmente, baseado num critério “flexível”, ser partidário do primeiro uso para o first strike – para o ataque nuclear de surpresa.

Perante uma declaração desta gravidade, que obriga os generais russos a colocar o dedo no gatilho nuclear, silêncio absoluto dos governos, dos parlamentos e dos grandes meios de comunicação mediática da Europa.

Na mesma audiência, o General Wolters afirma que “Desde 2015, a Aliança deu mais importância à aplicação das capacidades nucleares” e que “O Comando Europeu dos Estados Unidos apoia plenamente as recomendações, contidas na Nuclear Posture Review 2018, para instalar o míssil balístico de baixa potência W76-2”. 

A ogiva nuclear de baixa potência W76-2, já instalada em mísseis lançados de submarinos (anunciou o Pentágono, em 4 de Fevereiro), pode também ser instalada em mísseis balísticos com base no solo, perto do território inimigo. É particularmente perigosa. As armas nucleares de menor potência – alertam, também, especialistas americanos competentes – aumentam a tentação de usá-las primeiro, podem levar os comandantes a pressionar porque, num ataque, usa-se a bomba nuclear, sabendo que a “chuva de partículas radioactivas/fall out” seria limitada”. Seria como lançar um fósforo aceso num barril de pólvora.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Alla nostra salute ci pensa il dottor Stranamore

Foto : The War Room with the Big Board do filme de Stanley Kubrick de 1964, Dr. Strangelove.

Di fronte al Coronavirus – dichiara lo US European Command (Comando Europeo degli Stati Uniti) – «nostra prima preoccupazione è proteggere la salute delle nostre forze e dei nostri Alleati». Annuncia quindi di aver ridimensionato come numero di soldati l’esercitazioneDefender Europe 20 (Difensore dell’Europa 20). Essa però continua.

Il 16 marzo, il Comando precisa che «da gennaio lo US Army ha dispiegato dagli Stati uniti in Europa 6.000 soldati», con 12.000 pezzi di equipaggiamento (dagli armamenti personali ai carrarmati), e che è stato «completato il movimento di soldati ed equipaggiamenti da diversi porti alle aree di addestramento in Germania e Polonia». Oltre a questi, anche «9.000 soldati Usa con base in Europa» partecipano all’esercitazione.

• Scopo dichiarato dagli Usa è «dispiegare una forza credibile di combattimento in Europa in appoggio alla Nato, evidentemente contro la «aggressione russa».
• Scopo reale – scrivevamo due mesi e mezzo fa sul il manifesto (l’unico giornale che allora dava notizia della Defender Europe 20)  –  è seminare tensione e alimentare l’idea del nemico.

Lo scenario dichiarato dell’esercitazione mai potrebbe verificarsi, anche perché uno scontro armato tra Nato e Russia sarebbe inevitabilmente nucleare. Questo è il vero scenario a cui si addestrano le forze Usa in Europa. Lo conferma il generale Tod D. Wolters,  capo del Comando Europeo degli Stati uniti e, in quanto tale, Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa.

In una audizione al Senato degli Stati uniti,  il 25 febbraio 2020, dichiara che «le forze nucleari, suprema garanzia della sicurezza degli Alleati, sostengono ogni operazione militare Usa in Europa». (1) Ciò significa che la Defender Europe 20 è una esercitazione non solo di forze convenzionali (non-nucleari), ma di forze nucleari.

Il 18 marzo è stato comunicato che due bombardieri B-2 Spirit da attacco nucleare, facenti parte della task force arrivata dagli Usa il 9 marzo, sono decollati da Fairford in Inghilterra per addestrarsi sull’Islanda e il Nord Atlantico insieme a tre caccia F-35 norvegesi. Questi due tipi di aereo sono predisposti per l’uso delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12, che gli Usa schiereranno tra non molto in Italia e altri paesi europei al posto delle attuali B-61.

Che ruolo abbiano le forze nucleari Usa in Europa lo chiarisce Wolters nell’audizione al Senato. Quando la senatrice Fischer gli chiede che cosa pensi del non-primo-uso delle armi nucleari, il  generale risponde: «Senatrice, io sono sostenitore di una flessibile politica del primo uso».  Colui che ha in mano le armi nucleari Usa/Nato in Europa  dichiara in tal modo ufficialmente di essere sostenitore, in base a un criterio «flessibile», del loro primo uso per il first strike, l’attacco nucleare di sorpresa.

Di fronte a una dichiarazione di tale gravità, che spinge i generali russi a mettere il dito sul grilletto nucleare, completo silenzio da parte dei governi, dei parlamenti e dei grandi media europei.

Nella stessa audizione il generale Wolters afferma che «dal 2015 l’Alleanza ha posto maggiormente l’accento sul ruolo delle capacità nucleari» e che «il Comando Europeo degli Stati Uniti  sostiene pienamente le raccomandazioni, contenute nella Nuclear Posture Review 2018, di schierare il missile balistico a bassa potenza W76-2».

La testata nucleare a bassa potenza W76-2, già installata su missili lanciati da sottomarino (lo annuncia il Pentagono il 4 febbraio), può essere installata anche su missili balistici con base a terra a ridosso del territorio nemico. Essa è particolarmente pericolosa. «Armi nucleari di minore potenza – avvertono anche autorevoli esperti Usa  –  aumentano la tentazione di usarle per primi, possono portare i comandanti a premere perché, in un attacco, si usi la bomba nucleare, sapendo che la ricaduta radioattiva sarebbe limitata». Sarebbe invece come gettare un cerino acceso in unapolveriera.

Manlio Dinucci

Foto : The War Room with the Big Board dal film di Stanley Kubrick del 1964, Dr. Stranamore.

The question is how long can working stiffs, who make up perhaps most of the 99+% of us, tolerate the other, almost as potent virus called ‘The Super Rich’? Does anyone realize that these ‘less than 1/4 of one percent of us are mega millionaires?

It used to be, like when JFK took office, that the super rich were being taxed at 90%. Then, with their accountants sharpening pencils, the super rich probably forked over maybe 40% to 50 % of their income each year to Uncle. Well, little by little, from a top rate of 81% and then 71% under Reagan, it now settles in at 37%…as a TOP rate. As Senator Mitt Romney acknowledged a few years back, he, a super mega millionaire (billionaire?) paid out 15% in federal taxes. So, all those super rich among us (or rather secluded away from us) have got some sweet deal. Yes?

On one hand, to hear that some sports figures and sports owners are actually giving back to help pay the folks who work for their teams, arenas and stadiums, is always well received. Yet, when a guy or gal who is earning or worth $ 20 million or $ 50 million each year, and then gives $ 100k to help out folks…. well… the homeless guy who with two bucks to his name gives his totally broke fellow homeless pal one of those dollars is doing a hell of a lot more. Do the math: The super rich sports figure or sports owner who earns let us say $ 50 million, and, hypothetically speaking, pays out the Full Monty of 37% in taxes, still keeps $ 31.5 million TAX FREE! Can you imagine how long a family of four could live on that? How about two families of four… or even a hundred?

A long time folks, with NO worries about anything… but of course this virus. Yes, with businesses about to shut down with tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions soon out of work with no income at all…. we will have CHAOS!  Who knows how far a person will go when there are mouths to feed and no end in sight to this darkness of what I call Economic Pandemic.

The voice of the people needs to be heard. Not through violence but consistent demand en mass.  Both the federal government and the uber rich need to pay out to save us all! As pubic banking advocate Ellen Brown elaborates, and even recent presidential candidate Andrew Wang agreed, Uncle Sam must initiate a monthly stipend of no less than $ 1000 for every American (at least until this pandemic runs its course). Since we don’t have a maximum income, which we need drastically (like say a ceiling of $ 5 million per year in earnings) then a 50% Flat Surtax on all income over $ one million dollars per year per person will begin to do the trick.

In the meantime these mega  millionaires need to follow the precepts of all the major religions and fork out a bulk of their riches to save their fellow citizens. If those two major sources of our national wealth do not act NOW… sooner or later the Dam may be tested and all hell will break loose. Of course, the main concern for we who study history is that, when and IF national financial disaster and mass unrest does occur here in Amerika, what transpired in Germany after WW1 will happen here. And that is not a nice scenario. To see good and usually decent working stiffs marching with those armbands, as Sinclair Lewis aptly portrayed it, ‘Wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross’, is scaring the ****out of this writer. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders only initiated this focus on, as I refer to it, A New Awareness for more socialistic ideas. More working stiffs need to carry the ball.. and soon!

In Mathew, a rich young man asks Jesus what actions bring eternal life. First, Jesus advises the young man to obey the Commandments. When the man responds that he already observes them, and asks what else he can do, Jesus adds:

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When he heard this the man became very sad, as he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said:

“How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

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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, World News Trust 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 300 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].

21 years ago, acting on its own and without the UN Security Council approval, NATO carried out an armed aggression against Serbia, in gross violation of the UN Charter, the OSCE Helsinki Final Act, a series of other international conventions as well as of its own Founding Act of 1949.

The death toll of this aggression committed in collaboration with the terrorist KLA was between 3500 – 4000 people (the final list has not been concluded) including 89 children, with more than 12,500 additional people wounded. It inflicted an enormous economic damage, whereas the use of missiles filled with depleted uranium and other forbidden weaponry has permanently affected human health and caused environmental devastation. From a defensive alliance, NATO transformed into an offensive and interventionist one, in pursuing a clear expansionist policy especially targeting the East.

This was, and remains, a crime against peace and humanity.

The aggression and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo and Metohija, illegal establishment of Camp Bondsteel as one of largest US military bases in the world, unilateral declaration of independence of a territory under United Nations mandate, grave violation of UN SC Resolution 1244, individually and collectively, make dangerous precedents and severe blows to the European and the global security systems, and encourage the spreading od separatism and terrorism, thus triggering unforeseeable consequences.

In a response to information that a number of Members of the Norwegian Parliament and some other persons from the West raised initiative to award the Nobel Peace Prize to NATO, the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, and the Foundation United for the Youth sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee ( www.beoforum.rs).

The letter of these Serbian organizations, offering facts and principled evaluation of illegal aggression and NATO’s offensive nature has garnered wide support and publicity in Serbia, the Serbian Diaspora, and abroad. Its integral version was published in Serbia by respectable dailies, several news agencies and many electronic media and social networks. It was translated into Russian, German, Italian and published by numerous media in Italy, Switzerland, Russia, Greece, the USA, and some other countries. The letter was endorsed by many organizations and prominent persons throughout the world including, most notably, the World Peace Council as an Associate Member of ECOSOC (a key UN organ), which is based in Athens and acts as umbrella that brings together thousands of peace organisations and peace movements from all continents.

Among the most esteemed international personalities and intellectuals, the positions stated in this letter were endorsed by former French politician Yves Bonnet, Russian politician and scientist Sergey Baburin, Finnish politician and writer Pirkko Turpeinen-Saari, Italian writer Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti, American author and peace fighter Sharon Tennison, renowned Canadian diplomat Ambassador James Bissett, and many more.

The Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, and the Foundation United for the Youth re-launch their initiatives asking the state authorities to request compensation for war damage from NATO countries; to complete the list of all victims of NATO aggression in order to prevent their fading into oblivion and put an end to public bickering concerning their number; to launch the functioning of an inter-sectoral and expert Governmental body tasked with determining the consequences of missiles with depleted uranium which had been established a year ago; to activate the flames of the memorial to victims of aggression in the Friendship Park in Novi Beograd; to establish and build the Serbian Memorial for Victims of Genocide in 20 th century, resembling the ‘Yad Vashem’ Memorial in Israel and the ‘Ararat’ Memorial in Armenia.

The signatories hold the time has come for the governments of NATO and EU member states to review their role in the aggression of 1999 and their policy towards Serbia and the Serbian people, to apologise publicly for the victims and the illegal devastation of Serbia (the FRY) and to revert to the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1244 as the only acceptable and principled basis for a just and sustainable peaceful solution for the future status of Kosovo and Metohija as a Province exercising broad autonomy within Serbia. The new trends in global relations, a new paradigm of reaffirming equality, partnership, and the rule of the fundamental principles enshrined in the UN Charter disapprove continuation of outdated policy of hegemonism pursued by the Clintons, Albright, Blair and Schroeder.

*

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Much remains to be learned about the coronavirus, though it is quite possible that it will not be possible to determine how it developed if the various governments that might be involved prove to be uncooperative. The Chinese carefully controlled the information on the virus in its early stages, though they eventually adopted a complete lockdown to prevent its spread that seems to have been successful and might serve as a model for other nations to follow if they can overcome concerns about threats to civil liberties that evolve from placing too much power in the hands of corrupt and ignorant government officials.

Over two weeks ago, I suggested that the current form of corona might have possibly escaped from someone’s lab where a weaponized virus was being developed, most likely in China itself, though nations like the United States and Israel which are believed to have significant capabilities in biowarfare as well as a geopolitical motive to unleash the disease on certain countries should not be excluded. I still believe that assessment should be considered as viable particularly as the politicization process involving the virus is now fully in play.

China is now claiming that U.S. soldiers involved in the World Military Games held in Wuhan back in October might have deliberately planted the virus, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans in the U.S. are calling the disease the Wuhan or China virus, implying willful or careless behavior by the Chinese and a clear effort to demonize the Beijing government by exploiting the appearance of the virus as a wedge issue. And one might take note of the fact that the virus has particularly hit both China and Iran, countries that are on Washington’s enemy list, which generates additional conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump is not exactly a person overflowing with compassion. When corona virus began to emerge in the U.S. he called it a “hoax” and urged everyone to keep going to work even if ill, precisely the opposite of what was being recommended by most responsible medical authorities. He is now planning to throw $1200 dollars at each American resident whether they need it or not to undo the political damage, a proposal that will cost as much as $500 billion of money that the United States does not have and which it will have to either print or borrow. The money should be going to those who are now unemployed as a result of the virus, a point that surprisingly enough is being made by several Republican Senators.

Hundreds of billions more will go to the usual “victims,” banks and large corporations that will use the cash to pay off long terms loans and also to buyback their own stock and raise the value of their shares for investors. That is precisely what happened in 2008, with little to show for the average American.

One of the most truly despicable aspects of the coronavirus is how it is being exploited by Washington to punish countries like Iran and Venezuela, currently the enemy-designates of the inside the Beltway crowd. It would be possible to describe the Trump Administration policy towards both nations as sadistic apart from the fact that the behavior of the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo might actually shock the Marquis de Sade.

Venezuela has been denied a $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan to combat the virus based on the seemingly irrelevant and politically motivated argument that it is not clear who represents the legitimate government in the country, whether it is Nicola Maduro, the president, or Juan Guaido, the aspirant to the position of head of state being promoted by Washington. The White House has also declared a “maximum pressure March” directed against the Venezuelan economy, with the health care sector particularly targeted. So, Venezuelans will die and Maduro will undoubtedly continue to run the government, making the position of the Trump Administration demanding regime change both toxic and pointless.

Iran is also seeking a $5 billion IMF emergency loan to cope with the crisis, a request that will almost certainly also be torpedoed by the Trump Administration. Last Thursday Pompeo doubled down on Iran, initiating new sanctions based on the evidence-free allegation that Tehran is behind the recent attacks on U.S. military bases in Iraq. He also confirmed that, as part of the “maximum pressure” policy, all existing sanctions will remain in place, saying “Our sanctions will deprive the regime of critical income from its petrochemical industry and further Iran’s economic and diplomatic isolation. The United States will continue to fully enforce our sanctions.”

The fact that the Iraqi government and parliament have asked the Americans to close their bases in the country while the U.S. is highly unpopular due to its killing of Iraqi militiamen and soldiers seems to have escaped Pompeo as possible causes of the series of missile strikes. Pompeo also seems oblivious to the fact that remnants of ISIS are active in the areas where the bases are located and have proven quite capable of firing missiles from improvised pick-up truck launchers.

Last week Iran confirmed that it had experienced 988 deaths from the coronavirus and the infected number in the tens of thousands, but many believe that testing has been inadequate and the government may be understating the number of cases for political reasons. Pompeo has repeatedly insisted that Iran will be allowed to buy necessary medicines from abroad, but the U.S-imposed currency exchange restrictions on the activity of the national bank as well as of the country’s remaining commercial banks means that there is no mechanism to pay for the drugs and medical supplies so the country is combating the epidemic without many badly needed pharmaceuticals.

Even some congressmen have noticed that there is something fundamentally evil about the U.S. policy. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Pompeo and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin that included

“I am concerned about the vulnerability of the Iranian people to the coronavirus and the potential for Iran’s coronavirus cases to worsen the spread of the disease to neighboring countries, including regional allies, and to the rest of the world. Therefore, I seek an assurance that every reasonable effort is being made by the United States to ensure the availability of medicine and other non-sanctionable humanitarian items to the Iranian people to help prevent the further spread of the coronavirus.”

Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted

“Iran is facing a catastrophic toll from the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. sanctions should not be contributing to this humanitarian disaster. As a caring nation, we must lift any sanctions hurting Iran’s ability to address this crisis, including financial sanctions.”

Iran’s government is admittedly unpopular due to the mishandling of the shoot-down of the Ukrainian airliner and the inability to cope with a deepening economic crisis caused largely by the U.S. imposed sanctions. Given the current signs of weakness and instability in Tehran, there was recently a meeting in the White House discussing whether the U.S. should take the opportunity to attack Iran. It was, fortunately, rejected by a narrow margin when the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff strongly opposed the proposal.

Meanwhile the usual Iranophobes in Washington at the Israeli-linked Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) have seen an opportunity to tighten the screws a bit more and hopefully bring down the Iranian leadership through economic warfare. Their support for increasing sanctions on Iran is a policy designed to inflict the maximum pain on the Iranian people so they will rise up seeking to destroy their government. If that were to occur it would mean a civil war, but the folks at FDD would be hard pressed to even acknowledge the blood on their hands.

Ironically, if the United States were to make a serious effort to actually help the Iranian people by suspending sanctions and helping to expedite medical assistance it might actually produce a genuine thaw in a relationship that has been unnecessarily locked into 1979 and the embassy hostage crisis. Waging war on innocent people should not in any event be what the United States of America is all about. A shift in policies that actually demonstrates that Washington might be interested in saving lives rather than destroying them would be welcomed by most of the world and also by many Americans.

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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].

Imagine that you are in Hong Kong, in a city where “you are actually not supposed to be”, in the first place. You are ready to go home, to South America. But just two days before your departure, via Seoul and Amsterdam, your first Sky Teamcarrier, Korean Air, unceremoniously decides to cancel all flights from the territory.

Several Korean religious freaks, apparently, are to blame.

On 22 February, 2020, Mail Online, reported.

“More than half of all South Korea’s coronavirus cases are linked to a secretive ultra-religious cult whose leader believes he is immortal.”

Just reading that, I knew I may get royally screwed. Nothing good comes from ultra-religious fanatics, and South Koreans are notorious for their political and religious extremism.

But that was not all. The report continued:

“There are further reports of outbreaks in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Cheongdo county, infections in Busan, and on the island of Jeju.”

Korean Air, which was supposed to fly its glorious new Boeing 747-8 from Hong Kong to Incheon (Seoul international airport), has been carving its service, first reducing it to Boeing 777s, then to Airbus 330s, and in the end, cancelling all of its flights 3 days before my departure.

To secure my monstrously long commute, I spent most of my Sky Team miles, to secure a business class set of tickets.

There was a reason for it: I could not see. Well, I could hardly see, at all.

Before Hong Kong, I had worked in Kalimantan, in the Indonesian part of Borneo, on an island which has been totally plundered by greed, corruption and the ineptness of the Javanese neo-colonialists. An island where the present administration of president Joko Widodo (known as “Jokowi”), is planning to build and move the new capital city, abandoning the enormous, more than 20 million population sized urban area of Jakarta which is “sinking”, ridden with countless urban slums, lack of sanitation and safe drinking water.

Writing a book about this monumental insanity, I continued investigating. And In a process I got attacked, as almost anyone who visits Borneo does, by various and vicious parasites. My guts got infected by something terrible, and then my eyes. I flew between Balikpapan and Pontianak on Lion Air’s Boeing 737 (yes, that Lion Air, which keeps cramming and periodically crashing planes, ever since the beginning of its operation). I have no idea whether my eyes got attacked there, on board, or in some filthy ditch near the palm oil plantations, where they are cutting down what is left of the tropical forest.

Wherever it was, it did get infected. First the left eye. It was like a white foam. I could only see extremely abstract contours, as if between me and the world, there was a thick, white blanket. It was scary, very scary. I am not only a writer and a philosopher, but I am also a filmmaker and photographer. Doing what I do and not seeing almost anything is, you know, quite terrifying.

Before flying to Hong Kong, where I have been covering the riots ignited and financed by the West, I stopped over in Bangkok and went to an eye clinic, but the doctors there only cared about the payment. They had no clue what was happening to my eye.

Then, in Hong Kong, as Korean Air cancelled my flight, my right eye also got attacked.

At night, as I lay awake in my hotel room, I suddenly recalled how on board the Garuda Indonesia, between Pontianak and Jakarta, at least four people were coughing, loudly and desperately. Nobody was checking them. The Indonesian government had suggested that people pray, to avoid the outbreak of the coronavirus.

“What else,” I thought. “Am I also going to get the coronavirus?”

*

I refused to succumb to this horrible situation.

By then I knew that Korean Air was determined to ruin me. While Air France (my Sky Team carrier) and KLM were offering re-routing and compensation to their passengers stranded in Asia, Korean Air showed a clear and vulgar indifference. It did nothing to help. It never even replied to my queries.

I was also aware of the fact that I may have to travel, at least for 7 days, through various detours, and without seeing almost anything. Also, with twisted guts and a diabetic attack which had kicked my backside because of the tremendous stress.

Was it worse than being in Syrian Idlib, in Afghanistan, or near Mosul after it had been taken over by ISIS?

In a way, it was. Being blind, chased by the new coronavirus type, with airports closing one after another, and with the prices of airline tickets going sky-high, everything seemed to be demeaning, depressing and unsettling.

Strangely enough, I felt no fear of the COVID-19. I kept discussing the new type of coronavirus with my medical colleagues, through WhatsApp, until my eyes totally let go and collapsed.

I had to make it through, to Santiago de Chile, which happened to be on the total opposite side of the world.

Western doctors that I knew, were sending long and useless advice which mainly repeated “go see a doctor” idiocy. I told them I was in Hong Kong, which had been experiencing a near total lockdown. I told them that I had already been to a Thai eye doctor who had absolutely no clue about my condition.

Then, I realized that I could not rely on those that I am fighting against! I needed comrades to help me.

My family contacted a Syrian lady doctor, an expert in infectious diseases, and a sister of my friend in Damascus. I sent photo-images of my eyes. She saw, asked for symptoms and prescribed some powerful oral antibiotics and drops. I managed to convince a Hong Kong pharmacist to sell the medicine over the counter: I said it was a matter of life and death. She understood.

Syria and China saved me. People were guided by intuition, not by rigid rules.

I was going home.

*

My nearest and dearest began helping me to re-route. It took days. It was horrible.

Airlines, from Korean Air to Cathay Pacific, began to cover their backs; trying to squeeze every penny from those who were still able and willing to fly. Some one-way economy tickets for 2 hours flights shot up to 1,600 US dollars. Business class on certain routes became miraculously cheaper. As long as one could search, and as long as one could look at a screen.

To avoid quarantining, and to get out of Hong Kong, the easiest way was to fly in the totally opposite direction than where I was heading: to Bangkok, on Emirates. A few business class tickets were still available, but at $600, on a route where they used to cost under $400. It was one of the last available ways out of the almost locked out city.

I grabbed a seat on the Airbus 380-800. I somehow pulled through the totally empty Hong Kong Airport. I could hardly see anything. There were hardly any seats to rest on in the departure hall. My backpack was almost 20kg heavy, with a professional camera, computer and mobile phones.

I have no idea how I managed to get to my plane. With my damaged eyes, I could still see those huge numbers indicating gates. I collapsed into my seat. The super-jumbo took off, Southeast; away from where I was trying to fly. I was some 20 thousand kilometers away from Santiago de Chile.

Santiago was bleeding, too! Its eyes were damaged. People were fighting against the fascist regime imposed on them by Washington, and by the multinational corporations, in 1973. Like my own, their eyes were inflamed; some, over 300 individuals, even lost their eyes, as they were shot at by the police.

On board my flight to Bangkok, I was not sure whether I was going to be able to return home, alive.

But I was going, through the night, towards Bangkok. Would they even let me in? The first step.

*

They did. Miraculously. I must have looked like shit, but an unfriendly, insulting border police officer slammed a stamp into my passport, fingerprinted me, photographed me, and in the end, let me go.

That was it. Hong Kong does not stamp passports. Officially, my journey would begin in Thailand.

I had only 9 hours on the ground. The airport was eerily empty. People looked like streetwalkers, wearing masks, some even things resembling ski-glasses. I went home to my place by the river, without even opening my luggage, I collapsed into my bed, but could not sleep the entire night. Tugboats were pulling ghost-like barges, 31 floors below. I could not see the barges, only contours. This was my first day into the journey.

In the morning, very early, I somehow managed to return to the airport, and rechecked my luggage all the way to Suriname, as that was the only airport in South America, which I was able to get to free (using my air miles) business class tickets, at least from Seoul. Instead of re-routing or compensating me, Korean Air which had brutally cancelled my tickets from Hong Kong, was now charging me something absolutely ridiculous, to get from Bangkok to Seoul, where I was to catch a KLM flight to Amsterdam and many hours later, to Paramaribo.

Thai fingerprinting and photographing again. The taking the shoes off, precisely as the U.S. masters have ordered. The saturated spite of the Thai officials suffering from superiority complexes, followed by an old, dirty, 777-300 Korean Air aircraft. I crashed into its unmaintained seat. Just glanced at the food (inedible-looking, cheap version of bibimba), and slept all the way to Seoul.

*

Coronavirus, greed, extreme capitalism, rudeness: everything accumulated into this monstrous journey.

Taking off from Hong Kong and later Bangkok, I experienced almost absolute blindness. Then, the Damascus-prescribed antibiotics began to kick in. They were terrible, but I was warned. Either or. Either blindness and white fog, or total exhaustion, a collapsed body, but clearer sight. I opted for sight.

I landed in Seoul, like a zombie, heavy rucksack on my back, wobbly, almost desperate.

My luggage was automatically transferred all the way to Paramaribo, using the Sky Team system.

But this was South Korea. At the transfer desk I was refused boarding passes: “Go through security, then go to Sky Team Lounge and wait 8 hours for your flight. They will give you boarding passes at the gate,” I was told.

At the security check, they could not read English, or understand what was written on my E-tickets. 3 times I was humiliated, going back and forth between the transfer desk and security checkpoint. The staff were clearly enjoying the game, perhaps waiting for when I would finally collapse. The transfer desk person refused to walk with me to the security check. Security people were stubbornly refusing to read English.

This was precisely one of those moments when one loses all hope in humanity. You think: “Your body will let go! You will collapse, at any moment. Collapse and die.” All this, just because you have been putting your life on the line, for some poor, devastated, enormous tropical island. Just because some South Korean religious freaks went bananas. Just because of human indifference and racism. Just because, just because… The brave new world. The creepiness of a capitalist, right-wing trash universe.

I made it to the lounge, eventually, moving through the empty airport. Everything was shut down. The lounge was empty; almost nothing to eat there. The coronavirus scare.

At this point, all I wanted to do was to sleep. I found a transit hotel and paid an exorbitant price for only a few hours of rest. I collapsed. I cursed capitalism, greed, and humanity’s collapse.

I knew that as I was entering the disturbing world of dreams, or should I say nightmares, the People’s Republic of China, as well as Cuba, were fighting for our human race, against all the odds, against the monstrous propaganda originating from the West.

I had no right to kick the bucket in some bloody transit hotel room at the Incheon Airport. China, Cuba, Russia, Venezuela needed me. I saluted my comrades, the old fashioned way, and fell asleep.

Incheon, South Korea. Usually one of the busiest airports

*

The Korean Air clerk at the gate had no idea where Paramaribo was, or where Suriname is located. He was moonlighting for KLM, but was wearing a Korean Air uniform.

I told him what I thought about Korean Air. Before that, he had not liked me for flying to “some Paramaribo”, but after that he started to hate me, openly. The fact that I am a platinum member of his alliance meant nothing.

He began treating me as if I was the coronavirus incarnated.

By then, I could hardly see him. My legs were about to collapse, at any moment. But I was not going to show weakness.

He began: “Where is your visa to Suriname”?

“Here,” I replied.

“What is that?”

“My visa.”

“So, where is your visa?”

“My visa is here.”

“You have to show it to me.”

“It is in front of you.”

Korean Air had stolen my money by cancelling flights and by refusing to re-route me. Now, it was ruining my health. But, there was zero remorse coming from the staff.

Eventually, a supervisor came, and began abusing me, too.

I told directly to her face: “You should learn from North Korean people how to treat visitors!”

Her apparatchik essence kicked in. She began threatening me.

I pulled out five press cards: “Do you want to arrest me for expressing my opinion?”

She started to look hesitant. I demanded her name card. She said she does not have one. Bullshit: in north Asia everybody has one.

“Are you a security agent or an airline staff?” I asked her, point-blank. I knew that in South Korea, it was the same thing.

Finally, she gave me my boarding passes, together with a look, which was full of hate.

This legendary racist horror, South Korean-style then disappeared. I saw, the way she humiliated herself, bowing and kissing the asses of her fellow, South Korean, citizens.

I was welcomed on board by an outraged flight hostess who was originally from Suriname: “She did not even know that my country exists, did she?” She patted me on the shoulder.

*

While Seoul was terrified of the coronavirus, the Europeans looked totally indifferent to the possible danger.

That was on March 3^rd, 2020.

After the more than 11 hours flight from Seoul to Amsterdam, Schiphol airport appeared to be totally relaxed.

Amsterdam Airport

Even passengers from Seoul to Amsterdam looked undisturbed. No masks, no panic. Snoring contently, into the air.

777-200ER landed very early, at around 5 am.

I went through security, and located the Sky Team Lounge. It was stuffed with excellent food, but it happened to be totally empty. I found a comfortable chair and fell asleep, almost immediately. When I woke up, the lounge was full; literally packed.

After being used to masks being worn all over North and Southeast Asia, what hit me was the absolute lack of any face protectors at the major Dutch airport.

People were drinking, eating tons, talking. There was no sense of any emergency.

European and North American daily newspapers, in all languages, were full of the coronavirus headlines. Those freely distributed in the lounge, were only attacking China, totally and bizarrely avoiding the absolute lack of preparedness in the West.

Even the Italian daily papers, at that time at least, showed no signs of concern.

Not far from me, a group of Italian travelers, was chatting, embracing, kissing, drinking prosecco and coffee for breakfast, and calling home on their mobile phones.

There was only one lax coronavirus checkpoint, upon arrival from South Korea, at the time one of the hardest hit countries in the world.

In retrospect, this was all totally bizarre and irresponsible.

Was the Western medical system so unprepared? Or was it told, even ordered, to behave in such a manner?

Waiting for my flight to Paramaribo, I called my 84-year old mom, who has been living in Germany, where she is married.

“They feed us with such crap,” she told me, in Russian. “I mean, that stuff that they tell us through the mass media. I don’t believe anything they say or write,” she concluded. “All this is not going to end well.”

And she was absolutely right.

*

The Queen of the Sky, a majestic old Boeing 747-400 took off on time, towards Suriname. Both KLM and British Airways were still flying these beautiful planes, although there were rumors that KLM will retire most of them in 2021.

This was the last flight of the captain. He was leaving KLM. The flight hostesses were urging all the passengers to write something short, something personal. There was supposed to be a great celebration, a great party, in Paramaribo.

By then, I was almost losing my consciousness. My eyes cleared, almost totally. But the monstrous antibiotics and chronic exhaustion, doubled my body down. Chile appeared to be far, far away.

Again, no masks, no precautions. The 747 was going southwest, full of passengers, with zero medical safeguards.

The plane landed, and it was sprayed with water by a fire engine, to celebrate the last flight of the captain.

No jetways: passengers had to climb down off the enormous aircraft. Those who couldn’t were met by special vehicle, functioning as a lift, and by a bus.

But the lift and other vehicles were quickly engaged by the celebrations of the captain’s retirement. Countless Surinamese passengers who were returning from Holland, after being treated in European hospitals, were waiting in the lift and the bus, abandoned by the ground staff. No one to measure their temperature. Nobody to even ask what kind of medical conditions they were suffering from.

By then, I had turned into a zombie. I somehow managed to sail through the immigration of a shack defined as an airport.

I almost collapsed. I asked for help, but was told by a local staff member: “If you feel sick, go get medical help”. Later, the hotel manager told me that this is the “usual treatment people get here”.

I somehow got stabilized, by getting my hands on a luggage trolley. The universe was spinning around me.

My pre-paid taxi did not wait for me. The hotel was some 50 kilometers from the airport.

In the end, I went to the airport police. Instead of helping me, they began a rude scrutiny, clearly trying to extract some bribe.

“I feel very sick,” I said. They couldn’t care less.

No questions asked about what had made me sick. Was it the coronavirus? By then it was already called COVID-19, and it was on my tail, chasing me as I was circling the globe.

*

I filmed the Suriname River and the rainforest of Suriname, to show the contrast with Borneo.

Empty crossing of Suriname River

Suriname has been terribly damaged, but Borneo has been ruined, endlessly and some say, irreversibly.

I only had one full day. I had to work fast. My Indian driver had to hold me up while I was working, otherwise I’d collapse.

On the 5^th March, I returned to the airport, ready to fly to Belem, Brazil.

Further humiliation, overcharging, insults. I wanted to get out. And never return. One day I will write about those repulsive 48 hours in Suriname, but not now.

A 90 minutes flight, and everything fully changed. Even under the fascist government of Bolsonaro, Brazilians were kind and caring.

Shortly after the plane door opened in Belem, I was put into a wheelchair and zipped through immigration and other formalities. There was no overcharging, no humiliation and no dramas.

Brazil was what it always has been: a great country with dire problems. But a great country, nevertheless.

The next day I flew from Belem to Rio de Janeiro, via Brasilia.

Still, almost no masks. Once or twice my temperature was checked. That is all.

In Belem, all the Amazon riverfront cafes were kept open.

In Rio, while waiting for my flight to Chile, I went to the legendary and packed Vinicius bosanova club, and to the totally packed Caso de Chuva cultural center, where Tom Veloso was singing the songs of Gilberto Gil. Absolutely no precautions, no masks, people squeezed like sardines. The evening of March 8^th.

Rio

A day later, on March 9^th, the airlines in South America began catching up with turbo-capitalist games. Chilean LATAM, when I asked for an extra legroom seat, suggested that I pay $1,500, for 4 hours on board a small Airbus 320 plane. Naturally, I refused.

Santiago airport took the coronavirus seriously. There were several checkups. End of the games.

Coronavirus check at Santiago Airport, Chile

This is when strange things began to happen.

Two days after I landed in Santiago de Chile, South America moved from inactivity to hyperactivity.

One country after another began lock-ups; from Argentina to Peru, to Chile.

Santiago began resembling a ghost town. Entire regions of Chile began to close down.

I needed to recover, quickly, and to travel to Venezuela and Cuba, but it was becoming thoroughly impossible.

I arrived, I survived, but right away, I was grounded.

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From one extreme, to another. In South America and the West.

When confronted with the terrible medical emergency, China reacted like a Communist country, which it is. It mobilized in the name of the people, and began fighting the battle. It acted rationally and responsibly. It never performed a total lockdown.

It demonstrated tremendous enthusiasm and discipline.

Without thinking twice, it sacrificed its economic interests, putting the people first.

It has won the battle; beating the virus back. Almost no new cases now. The hospitals constructed to treat the coronavirus are closing down. Doctors and other medical staff are celebrating.

Cuba is near to developing a vaccine for the new coronavirus.

China and Cuba are cooperating. China is sending airplanes with help to Italy, Spain and Serbia.

In the meantime, people in certain Western countries are being told that over 80% of their citizens will get infected, and that hundreds of thousands, even millions, will die!

Why?

Why the hell, really?

Some nations, from Italy to Chile (where I am right now), are locking up everything: entire countries, entire regions, everything.

At the height of the crises, Beijing was open, and so was Shanghai and almost all other major cities. Flights were arriving and departing. What confidence! What a success!

A clear victory of socialism over capitalism.

Just look at the Western nations, at Southeast Asia, or at South America; people are petrified. Control of the population is much more brutal than anything that has ever been implemented in China.

And what do they tell the Italians, French, Brits and North Americans? That they will be dying like flies! Even now, when this essay is being written, more Italian people have died, than the Chinese. That is, on a per capita basis, about 22 times more. And in the West, things are getting worse and worse.

And, until now, it is not yet clear, who brought the epidemy to Wuhan, to begin with. Many believe that it was the U.S. military. Still, China never stopped behaving like an internationalist country!

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During my more than 20,000 kilometers long journey, I have seen a frightened, divided planet.

And then, I saw a great Chinese victory, and a Cuban victory.

I read how Cuba has rescued 600 people stuck on a cruise ship, the MS Braemar, belonging to one of its tormentors.

I witnessed panic in extreme right-wing countries like Chile. I was ready to drive south, to Araucaria, to speak to the discriminated against Mapuche indigenous people (according to Word they do not exist, as I am given red error sign), but precisely that area got hermetically sealed, closed down, one day before my planned 900-kilometer journey, and a month before the planned constitutional referendum.

In the West, and allied countries, the coronavirus has been used for political ends.

I am almost certain the Bolivian elections will be ‘postponed’, “because of the coronavirus”, to prevent socialist MAS from regaining power.

I am back home, but home is not a real home, anymore.

Home is now China, Cuba, Russia. Countries which are fighting against the Western tyranny that is sacrificing millions of human lives.

The coronavirus is a barometer of the state of the world.

It shows which countries bring shame to the word “humanity”, and which bring pride.

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This article was originally published on 21st Century Wire.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative”,“China and Ecological Civilization”with John B. Cobb, Jr., “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”, the revolutionary novel “Aurora” and bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his ground-breaking documentary about Rwanda and DR Congo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and Latin America, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website, his Twitter and his Patreon. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg is the first specialist we met to understand the current crisis about the coronavirus. Please support us so that we can investigate further in making a 90min cinema documentary.

We will meet multiple personalities with different points of view and we will do extensive fact-based research. During our path to the truth, we think it’s important to open the discussion an analyze all sides. We intend to gather a maximum of information and then help to understand what is happening, and why it is happening.

GR Editor’s Note 

In 2009-2010, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg was chairman of The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Committee (PACE), which investigated the WHO’s motives in declaring the H1N1 2009 a Worldwide pandemic. 

Wolfgang Wodarg, declared that the “false” H1N1 swine flu pandemic  was “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” (Forbes, February 10, 2010) Scroll down below video for January 2010 statement by the European Parliament. 

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Watch the video below for Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg’s opinion on the coronavirus.

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While we are in the middle of a serious health crisis with Covid-19, the way is being paved for another one.

While we are home from work and school, out of work, self-isolating, cocooning, worrying about our health and the health of our family, our livelihoods and futures, telecom engineers are busy on the streets upgrading and installing thousands of 4G, 5G and wireless antennae outside our homes, schools, hospitals etc.  Once turned on, these transmitters will exponentially increase our exposure to microwave radiation that has been proven harmful to health.

This will make people sick.

The Irish Government Are Allowing this to Happen

Our government have ignored decades of warnings from scientists, doctors and experts, from thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies showing harmful to humans, animals, wildlife and our environment from wireless microwave radiation.

Our government have ignored the plight of people suffering with microwave sickness/EHS for decades, refusing to acknowledge their basic human rights.

They have ignored the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s 2011 classification of Wireless Radiation as a Group 2B Carcinogen.

They are ignoring recent studies from USA and Italy showing clear evidence of cancer from 2G and 3G radiation and that courts in Italy have ruled that mobile phones cause brain tumours.

They are ignoring the fact that children absorb more radiation and are most at risk of long-term health problems from exposure to wireless radiation, and that older and sick people are also more vulnerable to health effects.

They are ignoring recent calls from scientists and doctors to halt the roll-out of 5G who have warned that there will be a serious health crisis.

They are ignoring pleas and protests from concerned groups, parents, medical and technology professionals and individuals from all over Ireland to halt the roll-out of more 4G and 5G networks, smart meters and wifi in schools.

The Government are not protecting our health.

While we are at home, streaming conference calls and movies using wifi, whatsapping, instagramming, using smart speakers, and making calls from smart devices and smart phones to keep in contact with our friends and family, we are exposing ourselves and our children to extremely high levels of harmful microwave radiation.

This will make people sick.

In the last week, mobile networks have become congested and slow and the telecom companies are solving this issue by boosting their network capacities – this means that the power has been turned up at base stations and the radiation emitted from masts, antennae and transmitters is considerably stronger in our environment.

This will make people sick.

People suffering with microwave sickness/EHS are already feeling the effects of this.

Much of the mobile service congestion can be reduced by using a landline instead of a mobile.

Slow internet speeds can be helped by hardwiring computers and smart devices.  Using wifi can actually slow down data transmission. 

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Federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, has started a serious diplomatic crisis between Brazil and China. On March 18, the congressman published on a social network:

“Whoever watched Chernobyl will understand what happened. Replace the nuclear plant with the coronavirus and the Soviet dictatorship with the Chinese. Once again a dictatorship preferred to hide something serious rather than exposing it with wear and tear, but that would save countless lives. China is to blame and freedom would be the solution”.

Then Eduardo published several accusations to the Chinese government of being responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chinese response was immediate. China’s ambassador to Brazil, Yang Wanming, said that

“the Chinese side vehemently repudiates the deputy’s words, and demands that he withdraw them immediately and apologize to the Chinese people.”

He also said that he would express his repudiation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chamber of Deputies. The reaction of the Chinese Embassy website itself was even more incisive:

“His words are extremely irresponsible and sound familiar. They are still an imitation of your dear friends. Upon returning from Miami, he unfortunately contracted a mental virus, which is infecting friendships among our peoples”.

The mention to Miami made in the publication refers to the last official trip by President Jair Bolsonaro and his entourage, to the USA, two weeks ago, in which 22 Brazilian state officials contracted the new coronavirus. The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, responded quickly to the Chinese’s demand, posting on his social network profile:

“On behalf of the Chamber of Deputies, I apologize to China and Ambassador @wanmingyang for the thoughtless words of the deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro”.

However, the attitude of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo, was not the same as that of Rodrigo Maia. The head of Brazilian diplomacy spoke out in defense of the Bolsonaro family and sharply criticized the Chinese response:

“It is unacceptable for the Chinese ambassador to endorse or share an offensive post to the head of state of Brazil and its voters. (…) We expect a retraction for his offense to the head of state. Brazil wants to maintain the best relations with the government and the Chinese people, promoting business and cooperation for mutual benefit, without ever leaving aside mutual respect”.

Clearly, Ernesto Araújo tries in his speech to reverse the logic of the discussion between Eduardo and the Chinese ambassador. Instead of appeasing the situation by acknowledging the parliamentarian’s mistake and advising him to retract, the Minister demands an apology from the ambassador of the country which Eduardo Bolsonaro publicly offended. Due to the nature of his position, as head of Brazilian diplomacy, Ernesto Araújo should seek to reestablish good relations between countries, without prejudice to either side. However, in the opposite direction, the minister intensified the discussions and deepened a crisis between Brazil and its biggest trading partner, proving its complete inability for the diplomatic exercise.

The Brazilian vice-president himself, General Hamilton Mourão, expressed himself more appropriately, claiming that the views of Eduardo Bolsonaro do not represent the official views of the government. Subsequently, Eduardo spoke again:

“I’ve never intended to speak for the Brazilian government, but, due to all this repercussion, I leave here crystal clear that my intention, once again, was never to offend the Chinese people or to hurt the good relationship between our countries (…) I have never offended the Chinese people, such an interpretation is totally unreasonable. I clarify that I shared a post that criticizes the Chinese government’s action in preventing the pandemic mainly in sharing information that would have been useful on a global scale”.

We can see here a good example of the political praxis of the current Brazilian government. A parliamentarian offends China; China responds to offenses; the head of Brazilian diplomacy starts to demand excuses from China and; the parliamentarian returns to say that he did not offend China, distorting his own speech instead of acknowledging his mistake and asking for forgiveness. The case reveals the total unpreparedness and the most complete malpractice with which the Brazilian government deals with its main relations. The result is simple: now, not only the strategic relations between Brazil and China are shaken, but also their own diplomatic ties.

Making the situation even worse, the crisis comes amid a global pandemic scenario. Unlike Brazil, where the number of cases grows every day and the State remains silent in the face of social chaos, China knew how to deal with the situation very well and already has COVID-19 under control. Stable, Beijing seeks to help other countries affected by the virus, stimulating international cooperation. One of those countries that China had committed to helping was Brazil. In response to a desperate request from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, China was sending medical equipment to Brazil to help fighting the coronavirus. This relationship now does not give any certainty about the future, which, in the event of a cancellation, will represent a great loss for Brazil.

Finally, the Brazilian president himself, Jair Bolsonaro, tried to contact personally with Chinese President Xi Jinping in order to resolve the situation and justify his son’s irresponsible attitude. Xi, however, ignored him and refused to answer, making it clear that China is not willing to “forget” Eduardo’s offense. A new note from the Chinese Embassy was published, this time criticizing and rejecting the administration carried out by Ernesto Araújo.

The attitude of Brazilian politicians is only a reflection of the neoliberal and pro-US ideology behind Jair Bolsonaro. Other similar testimonies have already been made by Brazilian public figures, even stating that COVID-19 may be a biological weapon produced by China itself – the biggest country affected by the pandemic. In addition, sinophobia is growing in the country, with an insurgent hatred against Asians, who are being seen as “propagators of COVID-19”. The collective madness implanted by the Bolsonaro phenomenon is already causing Brazilians to refer to the coronavirus as “Chinese flu” or “Asian virus”. The fact is that the biggest loser in all this is Brazil itself, which is in serious danger of breaking ties with its biggest economic partner.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

At the moment large parts of the population are confused and paralyzed by the declared coronavirus pandemic and its serious social and economic consequences. Are they quickly prepared to accept the very drastic, sometimes questionable restrictions of basic rights guaranteed by the state without contradiction as necessary and without alternative? These include the fundamental right of personal freedom and the right to physical integrity.

What is the cause of this unrestrained reflex of obedience?

And how are citizens supposed to arrange their lives after this break – this current haunting?

Where are the “free thinkers”, the philosophers and other intellectuals who are in nobody’s service, who strive on their own to know the truth and who are ready and able to think for all of us alone?

Their task would be to teach “us others” what the task of our time is – and what should be in the future. On the facade of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade hangs a large banner with the inscription “NIJE FILOZOFSKI CUTATI” – “To be silent is not philosophical”.

Naomi Klein’s “shock strategy”

If you look at the current horror scenario worldwide, the daily bad news of the mass media, the identical announcements and restrictive activities of governments and the immense damage to the global economy while enriching “global players” as well as the panic and shock-induced paralysis of the affected citizens, you are involuntarily reminded of the socially critical bestseller “The Shock Strategy” by the Canadian scientist Naomi Klein.

In it she tries to prove that neoliberal governments have single-mindedly exploited the confusion and paralysis of people after political or economic crises or natural disasters. In these phases of crisis, the capitalist economic system is quickly crammed through in its purest form. It is a “shock treatment” before the population has the strength again to resist.

To what extent the current global crisis is a natural disaster or a man-made catastrophe, that remains to be seen.

Education to Obedience

A psychologically interesting question is why most people subordinate themselves reflexively and without contradiction to the will of authority – in this case the governments – and accept serious sometimes highly controversial and questionable restrictions of their fundamental rights. Freedom of movement is massively restricted, even to the point of isolation despite unforeseeable health risks and negative social concomitants. Supposedly threatened sections of the population, such as older citizens, may even be forced to take part in protective vaccinations or other specific prophylactic measures, which constitutes a restriction of the right to physical integrity.

Now it is a finding of scientific psychology that we adults, by and large, have at our disposal only what we have been taught by the educators during our childhood. This deep psychological insight has made it clear to us what a tremendous impact education has.

So if the highest principle of education at home and at school is still the education to obedience, it is not surprising that we as adults obey politicians and self-proclaimed experts – so-called authorities – reflexively and nip in the bud any doubts that may arise about the measures ordered, or even prevent them from arising in the first place.

The autobiographical notes of Rudolf Höß “Commander in Auschwitz” – written down during his remand in Krakow in 1946 – are a psychological document of exemplary historical significance. They show us the connection between Höß’ authoritarian upbringing according to strictly military principles and his later absolute obedience to the murderous orders of his “Führer”. The seemingly incomprehensible is thus made comprehensible. (See “NRhZ” No. 507 of 22.04.2015 “Psyche of Commander Rudolf Höß”)

If we do not want people to show this reflex of obedience in the future, then pedagogy in the home and school must renounce the authoritarian principle – which for centuries was considered the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour – and the use of violence. Educators must adapt themselves to the child’s spiritual life with true understanding, respect the child’s personality and turn to him or her in a friendly manner. Such an education will produce a type of person who has no “subject mentality” and will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in our world.

The task of the philosopher and other intellectuals

We are all called upon to make our contribution to solving the great task of the future. Philosophers and other intellectuals have a special responsibility in this respect. They should be those people who (thinking) take responsibility for themselves and all other people, “if need be, stands alone within all, think alone for all” (Romain Rolland). This requires a fighting spirit that does not get lost, even if it contradicts the prevailing opinion. Intellectuals should also be honest, because a lack of honesty has already led to many errors, of which the theories are full of. Such independent, courageous and honourable thinkers would be an example for our youth, just as countless thinkers and humanists have been in the past centuries.

Philosophers and other intellectuals as representatives of various disciplines have the noble task of passing on to their fellow citizens what they have acquired in their studies, what their science has worked out to solve the problems of humanity. When they use their intellectual abilities, their research and their struggle for truth for the benefit of those through whom they became what they are, they make a valuable contribution to the common good. The future of our culture will depend largely on whether there are enough “enlighteners”. More than ever, we need “free spirits” to teach us what is truth and what is a lie. The purpose of the Enlightenment effort is above all to purify human consciousness of individual and collective prejudices. The enlightened mind is capable of considering healthy goals in life. (See “NRhZ” No. 424 of 18.09.2013 “Tasks of intellectuals in uncertain times”)

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.

‘Unprecedented’ was the word repeated over and over by UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak on Friday as he delivered a package of economic measures to save the British economy from the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Boris Johnson has effectively shut down the United Kingdom, as he announced last week the immediate closure of pubs, bars, restaurants gyms, leisure centres, cinemas and other public places in a bid to prevent the spread of the disease.  He said stronger measures were now required as ‘There is no guarantee that you will get mild symptoms and you can still be a carrier, have no symptoms and pass it on to others’.  It had been clear that not everyone had been following the government’s advice earlier in the week to maintain social distancing, and Johnson had hinted at his press conference on Thursday that if necessary, stronger measures would be required. He urged people not to go out as nobody was ‘invincible’.

The UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled plans to assist UK businesses which would effectively mean nationalising huge sectors of the economy – an extraordinary move for a Conservative government. He said that government grants will cover 80% of the salary of retained workers up to a total of £2,500 a month and employers could top up salaries if they wish.  Announcing the ‘Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme’ he said that the cost of wages would be backdated to 1st March, and that the program would be extended if necessary. There is the possibility, according to experts, that the current crisis could last for a year or more.

Friday’s spending plan marks an upscale from the Chancellor’s original Coronavirus business strategy revealed earlier in the week. The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme which he said originally would be for six months, has now been extended by another six months.  In addition he has now promised to defer the next quarter of VAT payments, the equivalent of £30bn or 1.5% in GDP. He also said that small businesses would benefit from £25,000 in cash grants. The government had faced criticism earlier for not having done enough to help individuals, particularly the self-employed, but now it was announced that even the self-employed would be able to access full Universal Credit at a rate equivalent to Statutory Sick Pay. Rishi Sunak said that the rates of Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit would also be increased. In total the welfare package offered amounts to around £7bn.

So why has the government upped the stakes so dramatically? Well the warnings from both Italian and British medics are coming thick and fast. The death rate to Covid-19 in Italy is now 8.6% – astonishingly high. Medics invited the media into hospitals in Bergamo to stress the extent to which doctors are being stretched. Staff is working 18 hours shifts and the average age of doctors and nurses is dropping as they also succumb to the virus. Speaking to the Sky news, doctors stressed that Covid-19 should not be compared to the flu: it is a serious respiratory illness with a 50/50 chance of recovery. The statistics coming from Italy are frightening: to date there have been 5476 deaths and only 7024 recoveries. Doctors in the UK are warning that Britain could face an even worse epidemic – one consultant has said that in many ways the Italian healthcare system is better resourced and has many more intensive care beds. On Thursday one hospital in London declared a ‘critical incident’ as it ran out of beds to treat coronavirus patients. Elsewhere in the capital a mortuary was being built to cope with expected future casualties.

Comparisons with ‘war-time’ are being made more and more often. But the situation surpasses any war to date: this enemy is invisible and it’s everywhere – in 191 countries.  Never has the Bank of England lowered its interest rates as low as 0.1% – not since its foundation in 1694. Never before has the government offered to effectively pay people’s salaries. Never before have we seen school exams cancelled. And this is just the beginning…

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Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from Shropshire Star

The planned NATO military exercise in Europe, “Defender 2020,” will be held on a reduced scale because of the coronavirus pandemic. Defender 2020 will have the participation of 18 NATO countries, cover 4,000 kilometers of convoy routes and rely on 10 European countries to host exercise activities, with the U.S. originally sending a total of 37,000 soldiers and officers to the exercises. The NATO exercises are a demonstration of power against Russia, and the fact that the coronavirus pandemic will not cancel the military drills is also indicating its power against Russia at a time when the world is going into lockdown.

The Alliance’s official website states that the scope of the exercise is shrinking due to a pandemic and that the movement of personnel and equipment from the U.S. to Europe is being halted. But many have already arrived in Europe. Media reports quoted Manilo Dinuchi, an Italian journalist for Manifest, claimed soldiers were exempted from the coronavirus protocol in an exercise, something recorded in a video showing the first 200 U.S. Army soldiers arriving in Bavaria on March 6, without masks on their faces, and shaking hands and kissing with German authorities and soldiers.

So why then did this exercise have to take place at all when everything else was put off?

The goal is without a doubt to have a show of force against Russia, the main target of these massive exercises by NATO. Although this may seem like a simple reason, NATO needs to show Russia that they can organize such exercise in a demonstration of aggression even in times of uncertainty and crisis. The exercises could easily have been cancelled, because there is no reason for them to be held right now and in such conditions, but conducting them during a pandemic shows greater strength by NATO – or so they think.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg presented his Annual Report for 2019 on Thursday and announced “Our forces remain ready and our work goes on, including in our multinational battlegroups in the east of the Alliance, NATO Air Policing, our maritime deployments, and our missions from Afghanistan to Kosovo.” Although the coronavirus pandemic is plaguing NATO alliance countries, especially Italy with over 60,000 cases, the United States with over 33,000 cases, Spain with over 30,000, Germany with over 25,000 and the United Kingdom with over 6,000 cases, with thousands of deaths between these countries, Russia has only 438 confirmed cases and has been sending doctors and medical aid to Italy. As Russia weathers the pandemic comfortably compared to the major NATO countries, the Alliance feels that the cancellation of the Defender 2020 exercises will show major weakness and has therefore decided to continue with the military drills despite the non-necessity of it.

Although NATO is buckling down to continue the exercises, the grander scheme of the liberal world order is beginning to collapse under pressure from the coronavirus. The European Union has shown incompetence in dealing with the pandemic and has left each country to fend for itself, and rather it has been ‘enemies’ of the liberal world order, China, Russia and Cuba, who have mobilized to help countries severely affected. It is unlikely that Italy and Spain, both NATO and European Union members, will quickly forget the significant help they have received from Russia. This soft power play by Russia is likely to change public opinion in Italy and Spain and create deeper divisions in NATO in regards to hostile policies against Russia. As the Atlanticist states of the United Kingdom and the United States want to maintain hostility towards Russia, it is likely that southern European NATO members will not want to continue hostilities, remembering who was there to help them in their greatest crisis since World War Two.

It is for this very reason that some NATO members may begin turning against Alliance orders with Atlanticist interests and open friendlier relations with Russia. Meanwhile coronavirus is far from peaking in Europe and is only beginning to strangle the United States. It cannot be overlooked that the virus is changing the world order at a faster pace than anyone could have anticipated. When the world has moved on and overcome the coronavirus pandemic, we will have entered a new world order and shifting European loyalties from the United States to greater cooperation with Russia and China. Therefore, the continuation of Defender 2020 shows desperation to maintain the global status quo.

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Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

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A few years ago I wrote a piece for Labor Day suggesting that it become a “do-nothing day.” It was a bit satirical but of course had a serious point as satire does.  I had little hope that my recommendation would be adopted.  Now that we are suffering from coronavirus panic and people are being told to shelter in their homes, many are no doubt suffering withdrawal symptoms from having to slow down. After all, how many cookies can you bake, television and movies watch, liquor drink, emails and texts send and receive, toilet paper rolls count, etc.?

I am well aware that this enforced idleness has inflicted enormous economic damage on regular working people world-wide, as I believe it is meant to do. The psychological damage is incalculable. The super-rich will no doubt profit mightily from the coronavirus crisis while the poor and middle-classes, small business owners, and the elderly will suffer greatly. The government will use people’s taxes to bail out big banks and corporations for whom they front. Inflicted suffering has a way of culling the herd and controlling the survivors.  It’s an old story continually updated.

Such suffering notwithstanding, I think the points I made in that do-nothing article are worth repeating and so I will repeat them in an edited way in what follows.  A do-nothing day has now become weeks. I think it important that we create a chrysalis of light and hope in these dark times.  Embracing contemplation might even breed resistance to the evil forces that run the show.

In a country with a Mount Rushmore that celebrates the ruthless and frenetic westward expansion, it might be a bit naïve to suggest do-nothing days are a good thing.  I have nothing against laboring men and women working hard and constantly. I am a laborer myself, and national holidays like Labor Day are great – so many sales for stuff no one needs, and far too many people working on an ostensible holiday.  But I have this ridiculous dream of a time when everyone just does nothing for a while.

To rush less, to idle, and to do nothing sounds so un-American, yet it might be a solution to many of our country’s problems.  Quixotic as it may sound, if every person in the country could be convinced to lay aside his compulsive busyness for a while, this not-doing would paradoxically accomplish so much.

Nothing is a funny word, as Shakespeare well knew.  There is so much to it; “much ado” as he put it.  It is the great motivator.  While it frightens people, it is also the spur to creativity and spiritual renewal.

Samuel Beckett once astutely said, “Nothing is more real than nothing.”

It is the void, the womb, the empty space out of which we come and live out our days.  It is the background silence for all our noise. Like the rain, it is purely gratuitous. Such a gift should not be shunned.

By doing nothing I mean the following: no work, just free play; no travel, except by foot or bicycle or by car, if necessary, to get groceries; no use of technology of any sort except stoves for cooking meals to share; no household repairs or projects; no buying or selling of any kind, except for food, including thinking of buying and selling.  You get the point.

This not-doing doing could be called dreaming or simply being.  It’s a tough task indeed, but fitting for the paradoxical creatures that we are. I realize that cemeteries are the only place where the inmates literally do nothing, but we are not there yet.  And anyway, as the word’s origin attests, the inmates are only sleeping.

Nationally, all businesses would be closed except for food stores; factories would be idled, planes and trains grounded.  Only emergency services – hospitals, police, etc. would be allowed to operate. Quixotic, yes, but our national leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, are surely apt to agree since it would add more days to their schedules of doing “nothing.”

Making my point in a slightly different way, Mark Twain said:

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress.  But I repeat myself.

Think of how much we would accomplish by doing nothing!  People might dream and think; they might hear birds singing or even sing themselves; they might have real conversations; they might relearn that old trick of putting one foot in front of the other called walking; they might feel the peace of a wild idleness; our ecological matrix would have a brief chance to catch its breath; a massive amount of energy would be saved and little carbon would be spewed into the atmosphere (a rather startling statistic could be inserted here).  The benefits are endless – and all from doing nothing.

The immediate downside would be millions of mental breakdowns of the do-something addicts. Their agony from trying to do nothing would be excruciating.  A friend from another country where they still take siestas and celebrate doing nothing was kind enough to suggest a rapid resolution to this mass madness. Kill these do-somethings.  Since they are not good for nothing while alive, she said, and they can’t help contaminating the earth with their compulsive busyness, why keep them around.

She advocated enlisting the help of the Pentagon for this work since killing is their business and they are good at it.  While acknowledging the aptness of her suggestion, I told her I thought the Pentagon was much too busy killing foreigners to get involved in a domestic caper at this time.  It also raises a number of other practical problems, the biggest being how and where to bury so many busybodies all at once.

Furthermore, people who have so utterly forgotten their childhood’s lovely ability to do nothing are far too tough and set in their skins to be used as food, as another wag of my acquaintance suggested.  Even trying a little tenderizer on their frazzled flesh wouldn’t work.

After all, when Jonathan Swift had that profound idea of how to solve the Irish famine problem, he was suggesting soft and tender one-year-olds be slaughtered and sold to the wealthy since they would make “delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”

But older, compulsive, do-something people, set in their ways, while seemingly organic – a good thing these days, I’m told – are tough and sinewy, which is not a very appetizing thought.  I doubt there would be much demand for their meat.

Therefore, in all due respect, let me suggest another way to proceed.  I think it best to let the eternal doers go mad on do-nothing days. They will bounce back when the go-go days are reinstated but should eventually get so discouraged if the mandatory days of isolation are reinstated that they will do us the favor of then committing suicide.  That way they’ll get what they didn’t want – a quite long stretch of days doing nothing, if eternity has days.  And the survivors can live guilt-free, since all they did was nothing to stop them.

As you can see, the downsides to do-nothing days are small compared to the benefits.  But convincing people to adopt my plan won’t be easy.  Long ago I stopped giving advice to friends and family since whatever I suggested seemed to encourage them to do the opposite.  Yet here I go again, suggesting the benefits of doing nothing. So I will desist in the name of the law of reversed effort.

I really don’t want to organize a movement to impose this not-doing on people.  I don’t want to establish a cult and be a cult leader. We already have one running things.  I’m really too busy for that.  My schedule is too packed for such a job.  Maybe you have time.  I have too much to do.

I say, “Nothing doing.”

I was once rushing to take groceries to my elderly mother when I ran into the sharp metal edge of a stop sign. Stunned and coming to on my back on the pavement with blood dripping down my face, it bemused me to think how fast I was stopped.  Ever since, I’ve been on the go, laboring away. Keeping very busy.

Nothing showed me his face.  Fear seized me.

Yet here and there I have this dream of do-nothing days.  It’s the dream of a ridiculous man, isn’t it?

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author’s website here.

Featured image is a Getty Image

A few days ago, Dr. Tedros, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) repeated what he said already a few weeks ago, that there are about 20 pharmaceutical laboratories throughout the world that are developing a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, named COVID-19, also called 2019-nCOV, or SARS-CoV-2. For the layman, it is just a stronger mutation of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, that broke out in 2002 / 2003, also in China. To be sure, a mutation made in a laboratory. In a US high-security biological warfare laboratory. In other words, both SARS and COVID-19 – among many other bio-war agents – were made in the US.

And now, the chaotic western-style race of private corporations for a vaccine wanting to outdo one another, has begun.

Who is first to develop a vaccine? – It’s a fierce competition to establish a patent, a monopoly – for a possibly multi trillion-dollar business. Its western neoliberal capitalism at its very worst – or best, depending on the angle from where one looks.

There are no words to describe this chaotic fever for profit over human wellbeing. It has nothing to do with health, with healing sick and suffering, possibly dying people. It’s all about money. Hundreds of billions, if not trillion of profit for the pharmaceutical oligarch and their associated research laboratories and enterprises. And even more so, if the WHO-declared “pandemic” (sic) will prompt a forced vaccination campaign, enhanced by military and police surveillance.

Let’s put COVID-19 in context. As of 23 March 2020 (18:33 GMT), and according to WHO statistics, reported worldwide cases are 372,572; deaths 16,313; recovered 101,373 – a death rate of 4.37%. However, these figures must be considered with caution. In many countries, especially developing economies, accurate testing may be a problem. Test kits are often not available, or not reliable. So, may people who go to the doctor with some flu symptoms are possibly falsely diagnosed as COVID-19 victims, as it serves the publicity hype.

Miscalculations and false reporting may even occur in the United States. Mr. Robert Redfield, CEO of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), testified before Congress that CDC does no longer carry out regular tests, that these were carried out at State-level and only in extreme cases. See also this reference form the LA Times of California measures and directives.

By comparison, the US CDC estimates that in the 2019 / 2020 flu season in the US alone, some 38 to 54 million people may catch the common flu, and 23,000 to 59,000 may die from it. The vast majority of these deaths will be elderly people above 70-years of age and many of them with pre-health conditions and /or pre-existing respiratory problems. This is pretty much the same disease and death pattern as with COVID-19. Expanding these common flu figures linearly on a worldwide scale would result in hundreds of thousands of flu deaths. In the particularly strong 2017-2018 US flu season, an estimated 60,000 people died from the flu in the US alone. The reader may himself judge whether WHO was justified declaring COVID-19 a “pandemic” — or whether there may have been – just perhaps – another agenda behind it?

The vaccine that might eventually be applied to COVID-19, may most likely no longer be valid for the next coronavirus outbreak – which, also according to Mr. Redfield, CDC, will most probably occur. A later virus may most certainly have mutated. It’s quite similar to the common flu virus. In fact, the annually reoccurring common flu virus contains a proportion of 10% to 15% (some times more) of coronaviruses.

The effectiveness of the annual flu vaccines is on average less than 50%, not to mention all the potential harmful side effects, they carry along. COVID-19 is very similar to influenza. Will a corona virus vaccine be equally weak in protecting a potential patient from a future infection?

Cooperation instead of competition, doesn’t occur in the west. It’s all profit-driven. With a number of different vaccines from different pharma giants coming on the market, who will tell the patient which one is the best, most suitable for the patient’s condition? It smells like an utter chaotic scam.

The real question is – are vaccines – or a vaccine – even necessary?  Maybe – maybe not. The production of vaccines is pushed for profit motives and for an important political agenda for a New World Order – that has been planned to change human life as we know it, or thought we knew it. See further explanations below.

Vaccines don’t heal, they may prevent the virus from hitting as hard as it might otherwise do, or not at all, depending on the age, physical and health condition of a person. Worldwide statistics show that usually a person up to the age of 40 or 50, who is infected by the COVID-19, has none or only slight symptoms, nothing to worry about.

Should symptoms show up, staying home, resting and using traditional, age-old medicine, the same that might be used for the common flu, might be enough to get rid of the virus. This might resolve the disease within one or two weeks. Then, the person will be naturally “vaccinated” against this strand of coronavirus. Elderly people above 65 or 70 may be more at risk and special attention may be in order – separated from crowds, isolation during a two-week quarantine (the incubation period), while the rest of society goes on with life as normal as possible, thereby reducing the huge cost to society.

China has brought the COVID-19 pandemic under control without a vaccine, but using common sense and traditional, rather inexpensive medication. What are these regular medicines that are effective and have helped to bring COVID-19 under control in China, without a vaccine?

The “Children’s Health Defense” (the Children’s Defense Fund – CDF), an American NGO, founded 1973 by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., depicts the current power struggle in France between health official and the country’s leading experts in virology, as representative for the worldwide fight between corporate pharma supported by (bought) governments and international organizations, such as WHO – and renowned scientists. If laid open, it is an eye-opener. See full CDF study.

French Professor Didier Raoult, who is one of the world’s top 5 scientists on communicable diseases, argued that the approach of mass quarantine is both inefficient and outdated and that large-scale testing and treatment of suspected cases achieves far better results.

Early on, Dr. Raoult suggested the use of hydroxychloroquine (Chloroquine or Plaquenil), a well-known, simple, and inexpensive drug, also used to fight Malaria, and that has shown efficacy with previous coronaviruses such as SARS.  By mid-February 2020, clinical trials at his institute and in China already confirmed that the drug could reduce the viral load and bring spectacular improvement. The Chinese scientists published their first trials on more than 100 patients and announced that the Chinese National Health Commission would recommend Chloroquine in their new guidelines to treat Covid-19.

In addition, China and Cuba are working together with the use of Interferon Alpha 2B, a highly efficient anti-viral drug developed in Cuba some 39 years, but little known to the world, because of the US imposed embargo on anything from Cuba. Interferon has also proven to be very effective in fighting COVID-19 and is now produced in a joint-venture in China.

Chinese researchers in cooperation with Cuban scientists are also developing a vaccine which may soon be ready for testing. In contrast to the west, working exclusively on profit-motives, the Chinese-Cuban vaccine would be made available at low cost to the entire world.

Other simple, but effective remedies include the use of heavy doses of Vitamin C, as well as Vitamin D3, or more generally the use of Micronutrients essential to fight infections, include vitamins A, B, C, D, and E.

Another remedy that has been used for thousands of years by ancient Chinese, Romans and Egyptians, are Colloidal silver products. They come in forms to be administered as a liquid by mouth, or injected, or applied to the skin. Colloidal silver products are boosting the immune system, fighting bacteria and viruses, and have been used for treating cancer, HIV/AIDS, shingles, herpes, eye ailments, prostatitis – and COVID-19.

Yet another simple and inexpensive remedy, to be used in combination with others, is menthol-based “Mentholatum”. It’s used for common flu and cold symptoms. Rubbed on and around the nose, it acts as a disinfectant and prevents germs to enter the respiratory track.

Northern Italy and New Orleans report that an unusual number of patients had to be hospitalized in Intensive Care Units (ICU) and be put 24×7 on a 90% strength respirator, with some of them remaining unresponsive, going into respiratory failure. The reported death rate is about 40%. The condition is called acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS. That means the lungs are filled with fluid. When this description of ARDS episodes applies, Dr. Raoult and other medical colleagues recommend COVID-19 patients to “sleep sitting up” until they are cured. This helps drain the liquid out of the lungs. The method has been known to work successfully since it was first documented during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.

As you may expect, if you look up any of these alternative cures on internet – internet controlled by Google and the Big Corporatocracy, including the pharmaceuticals, will logically advise you against using them. At best they will tell you that these products or methods have not proven effective, and at worst, that they may be harmful. Don’t believe it. None of these products or methods are harmful. Remember, some of them have been used as natural remedies for thousands of years. And remember, China has successfully come to grips with COVID-19, using some of these relatively simple and inexpensive medications.

Unfortunately, few doctors are aware of these practical, simple and inexpensive remedies. They are safe and more often than not successful. The media, under pressure from the pharma giants and the compliant government agencies, have been requested to censoring such valuable information. The negligence or failure, to make such easily accessible remedies public knowledge is killing people.

Now, let’s cut to the chase, to what’s behind it all – behind the extraordinary monstrous media propaganda hype that is bringing down the entire (western) world’s socioeconomic system, creating untold misery, famine, and death. A misery with suffering potentially by orders of magnitude worse than the Big Depression of 1928 / 1929 and the subsequent years.

If anybody had any doubts up to now, where the virus originated, the truth was dropped surreptitiously, a slip of the tongue or on purpose, by Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, when he addressed the Nation on 21 March on COVID-19, he said, “This is not about retribution, we are in a live exercise here…”, meaning military exercise, or a war game.

President Trump by Pompeo’s side was whispering, “you should have let us know”. Whatever that means. It’s hard to believe that Mr. Trump didn’t know. But these are the vagaries of American politics, even on a death-serious subject like the new coronavirus breakout. See here with a brief video. See this also.

This live (military) exercise has unimaginable worldwide implications which may completely transform our lives. It’s economic warfare. Almost every country on this planet is on some kind of a lock-down, a quarantine of sorts for an as of yet undetermined period, with businesses closed, shops and restaurants shot, construction sites halted, people working from home if they can, being in the streets is forbidden, in many countries under police and military surveillance, with cases of people being beaten up and hand-cuffed, if they have no good explanation.

The President Macron-inspired French police is especially known for its uncontrolled brutality fighting the Yellow Vests. They have already demonstrated their same despise for their fellow citizens, when they are in the streets, even food shopping, without a special permit.

Borders are shot, airlines are grounded, tourism comes to a screeching halt, basically from one day to the other, stranded throughout the world. With a few exceptions, Germany and France are rare ones, they organize return flights for their citizens abroad. Otherwise, with uncertain flight departures, over-booked and over-crowded flights, the stranded tourists have hardly a chance to return home soon.

The socioeconomic cost is astronomical. In the multi-quadrillion, or quintillion; numbers with so many zeros they make you dizzy. This calamity can only partly be valued with numbers, and not now, as the world’s lock-down continues – with a social cost that cannot be valued. The dive of the stock market by about 30% – a typical bonanza for forward speculators and Big Finance, Big Banking, with multi-trillion-dollar losses for the small investors.

Millions, if not hundreds of millions of small and medium size businesses going broke, unemployment going rampant, in the hundreds of millions, throughout the world, and the poorest of the poor, especially in developing countries, who are either unemployed or survive on small hourly or day-to-day jobs – they have no income, cannot buy the basics for survival – some of them may die from famine, others may commit suicide, others convert to crime. This is Greece by a factor of thousand, or worse.

Then, there is a moral and societal breakdown from a forced quarantine, for which there is no clear end in sight. This creates fear and anxieties, frustration and anger.  For many it’s like solitary confinement – all of which is bad for health, and lowers the immune defense system. Just what those who pull the strings want.

So, whom does this live (military) exercise serve? – First one would assume its destined to break China’s back, as China is the up-and-coming economic power. It is true, China’s economy has suffered enormously, with about 60% to 70% of all production stopped for the first two months this year, the time of the COVID-19 outbreak and peak, meaning a significant plunge of China’s GDP, maybe as much as 40% for January and February 2020.

However, China has the corona virus now firmly under control. And China being China, her economy is recovering fast and may soon be back to what it was in December 2019. In fact, despite the significant impact of COVID-19, China’s economy may soon overtake that of the self-styled empire, the United States of America. China’s currency the yuan, is solidly backed by a strong economy and by gold, and is slated to become the world’s chief reserve currency, replacing the US-dollar, which had that role for the last 100 years. When that happens, the US hegemony is doomed.

It’s more. This attack on China is actually backfiring big time. China is the supply chain for almost everything for the west. To increase corporate profits, the US and other western countries have outsourced almost everything to low-cost labor China. This concerns not only high technology electronics, but also medication and medical equipment. About 80% and ingredients to produce medication come from China. For antibiotics the proportion is about 90%.
With much of Chinese production halted for almost 2 months, the delivery lag is enormous.

A plan has been on the drawing board for the last few years, dictated by the obscure clan, or “Deep Dark State”, and designed by its minions, who expect to be generously rewarded in one way or another. Or, you may put it this way, the absence of punishment and torture is also a form of reward.

Universal Vaccination

First, there is an enormous drive towards universal vaccination, because vaccination will be the cornerstone of all that follows, namely a universally imposed electronic identification of every person on the planet. And what is best suited to force down a vaccination program? – A pandemic, of course, with people being made more scared every day. The fear factor is key. It is being increased by a time-undetermined quarantine and by a constant drip-by-drip indoctrination of bad news on the COVID-19 front. Every day the pace of increasing numbers of infected people and those who died, accelerates, increasing fear and anxiety.

The time will come, when people will literally scream for help. They want a police and military state to protect them – from the virus, I guess – and they want to be vaccinated. They don’t care nor ask what is the cocktail that is being injected in their body and what its long-term implications may be. For example, the vaccination cocktail could serve to reduce women and men’s fertility, or cause long-term neurological defects that can even be passed on to next generations.  People with fear just want to sleep at ease, being vaccinated. They don’t care – nor do they want to know – that along with the vaccine could be a nano-chip injected that will contain all their personal data, from health records to bank accounts – and can be electronically remote-controlled.

It goes without saying, our monetary system is planned to be fully electronic, no more cash – cash is poison – or as WHO’s Director General recently warned, not verbatim, but with that meaning, cash is dangerous for infections, paper money and coins may carry deadly viruses – thereby paving the way for full digitization of our monetary system. This has, indeed, already been tested over the past few years, mainly in Scandinavian countries, where entire department stores refuse to accept cash. In response to the WHO DG’s recommendation, some shops and restaurants in Germany refuse to accept cash.

The universal vaccination and electronic ID go together and will first be tested in a few developing countries. Bangladesh is one of them. The vaccination program is the platform for the mega-changes the New World Order (NOW), or the One World Order (OWO) wants to bring about. This, in addition to the enormous money-making bonanza.

An almost unknown agency called Agenda ID2020 is behind all this, monitoring, directing and adjusting the implementation of the various programs – that are supposed to eventually lead to Full Spectrum Dominance. For more details, see also the recent article on the dangers of Agenda ID2020.

Behind this elaborate and complex network of things, appears time and again, one prominent name: Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gate’s Foundation. Bill Gates has been funding vaccination programs in Africa for decades. And Bill Gates and the Rockefellers make no secret that one of their ultimate goal for planet earth is a drastic population reduction.

Abstract of Agenda ID2020

Agenda ID2020 – is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.

GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, identifies itself on its website as a global health partnership of public and private sector organizations dedicated to “immunization for all”. GAVI is supported by WHO, and needless to say, its main partners and sponsors are the pharma-industry.

The ID2020 Alliance at their 2019 Summit, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, in September 2019 in New York, decided to roll out their program in 2020, a decision confirmed by the WEF in January 2020 in Davos. Their digital identity program will be tested with the government of Bangladesh. GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and “partners from academia and humanitarian relief” (as they call it), are part of the pioneer party.

Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020?

How the Vaccination Research and Production is supposed to work.

How will this elaborate and complex business of creating vaccines and implementing vaccine campaign work? As most official activities that basically are government responsibilities are privatized and outsourced, they become complex, chaotic at times and inefficient. In the case of the west, the US pretends to take the lead, but will also assign responsibilities to European pharma-labs.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has overall responsibility for national health research and program implementation. NIH’s Director is Anthony Fauci. The Institute was created in 1955. Under NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of 27 institutes, reporting to NIH, is responsible for vaccination programs. NIAD’s mission is to conduct basic and applied research to better understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. NIAD has outsourced the vaccination program to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

CEPI was formed by the WEF (World Economic Forum) in Davos in January 2017. It was founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the London-based Welcome Trust, created in 1936, but including now as members several European countries and the European Union (EU). The BMGF made a first infusion to CEPI of US$ 460 million. CEPI also receives funding from Norway and India and is also heavily supported by the pharma-industry.

According to CEPI’s website, CEPI has appealed for US$ 2 billion to support the development of a vaccine for COVID-19 and to expand the number of vaccine candidates to increase the chances of success and to fund the clinical trials for these candidate vaccines. CEPI’s ambition is to have at least three vaccine candidates, which could be submitted to regulatory authorities for licensing for general use/use in outbreaks.

“Governments around the world will need to invest billions of euros more in coronavirus vaccine development, to take forward some promising candidates that are emerging.  – It’s a very risky business – everything is being done in parallel, you’re not building on the expertise of others – but good progress is being made,” said Melanie Saville, director of vaccine research and development at CEPI.

CEPI has already some preselected international pharma corporations to research and work on a COVID-19 vaccine. They include the biotech “Moderna” in Seattle, not far from the Microsoft Headquarters – also a Bill Gates creation; the biotech lab Inovio, the University of Queensland, Australia, and the Germans, BioNTech and CureVac.

From the outset it looks that Moderna, CureVac and BioNTech are best suited to produce fast a vaccine, because according to a Health and Science report, published on March 17, 2020, “all three of these firms specialize in messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics. These mRNA molecules are used to instruct the body to produce its own immune response to fight a range of different diseases. This type of vaccine can potentially be developed and produced more quickly than traditional vaccines.”

Enters GAVI – the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has also been created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is a global health partnership of public and private sector organizations, dedicated to “immunization for all”. GAVI is supported by WHO, and needless to say, its main partners and sponsors are the pharma-industry. GAVI has already announced it needs billions of dollars to support its COVID-19 vaccination program. In June 2020, the UK Government will sponsor a donor conference in support of GAVI’s COVID-19 vaccination program, expecting to raise US$ 7.3 billion.

From this maze of overlapping organizations, activities and unclear responsibilities, the money-flow is likely going to be a crisscross that nobody can follow. Accountability on a large scale will be lost.

As to the output – hopefully a vaccine – or several vaccines. For the layman and potential patient, it will be a matter of luck (or bad luck) what cocktail of biological substances will be injected into his or her body. In any case, the long-term outcome, is unpredictable. Remember, Bill Gates has been pursuing during the last fifteen or twenty years his own very special agenda. It is unlikely he will abandon it now. Rather COVID-19 and the ensuing vaccination program will allow him to enhance it.

Concluding – it is amply clear that this is a huge money-making and public-rip-off proposition by the pharma industry. What makes this multi-billion-dollar scam even worse, is that it has an official rubber-stamp, by being supported by western governments and international organizations, foremost WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank.

This may be the last opportunity for the elite, the 0.1%, to shuffle social capital and worker funded assets from the bottom to the top, before we enter an era of total control through electromagnetic fields (EMF), managed by the minions of the 0.1% and with 5G / 6G technology, where we, the remaining humans may have become mere tele-guided robots.

It is by now a pipe dream to believe that the world may continue as it did until the end of the last decade. It would be too much of a coincidence that Agenda ID2020 started activating its evil programs exactly at the beginning of the decade 2020. Unfortunately, it is also a far-away dream that China and Cuba could lead the way for finding a cure for the most likely recurring coronavirus in one mutation or another – including but not exclusively, using traditional methods and remedies that have proven successful in the current battle to control COVID-19.

There are draconian measures on the way, and we may just pray that they fail, or that we, the people, awake in time and in sufficient numbers – a critical mass – and find back to our innermost voice and soul – solidarity for each other that gives us strength to fight this Luciferian monster.

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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, including in Palestine, 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.

The original source of this article is Global Research

GR Editor’s Note

This is a “potential” slap in the face to the CDC, the US media and Big Pharma which is developing a multibillion dollar vaccination program.

Big Pharma’s intent -with the support of the Western media- is to suppress relevant information on the features of the virus and how it can be cured. Treatment is currently the object (in several countries including the US) of debate by virologists and physicians. Dr. Zelenko’s  treatment on the use of hydroxychloroquine is in this regard of utmost importance. 

Michel  Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 24, 2020

Note to our readers. Do not take medicine without a formal prescription from your physician or family doctor.

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Over the weekend Dr. Vladimir Zelenko from New York state announced he has found a treatment against the coronavirus with a 100% success rate on 350 patients.

Dr. Zelenko joined Sean Hannity earlier today on his radio program to discuss the results from his test.

The New York doctor also posted a video explaining his success with hydroxychloroquine and Zinc.  His treatment resulted in the shortness of breath issue being resolved in 4 to 6 hours.  Dr. Zelenko in his study had zero deaths, zero hospitalizations and zero intubations!

Later on Monday evening Sean Hannity invited two more medical experts on to discuss Dr. Zelenko’s coronavirus results.

The two doctors were cautiously optimistic.

Via Hannity:

We updated this post to note Dr. Zelenko used Zinc supplement and not Z-Paks in his treatment.

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Everything Accomplished During the Great Depression to Make Capitalism Workable Has Been Taken Away Resulting in Economic Crisis that Only Debt Forgiveness Can Mitigate

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 23, 2020

Debts have to be cancelled as they are smothering individuals, businesses, and the economy. Our economic culture is accustomed to thinking that debt must be paid. The belief is that to reward those who did not live frugally and avoid debt subsidizes and encourages bad behavior. But in this case, unless debts are forgiven the frugal and responsible go down with everyone else.  As I have emphasized for 20 or more years, globalism stopped real family income growth by offshoring high-value added jobs.  Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve used debt expansion to take the place of income growth in order to continue to fuel aggregate consumer demand.

We’ve been writing for a while that the 2020’s would be a decade when multiple crises would come to a head and we would have an opportunity for major transformations if we were organized to mobilize and demand them. The current coronavirus pandemic, economic collapse, and falling oil prices are three events that are creating such opportunities. Each crisis shows the glaring shortcomings of healthcare, economic and environmental policies that are failing the people and planet. Nobody could have predicted that the crises would happen so quickly, but here we are.

Now, we must act on two levels. First, an immediate response to the pandemic that is rapidly infecting and hospitalizing people and could lead to more than one million deaths in the United States and to the global economic collapse triggered by the COVID-19 virus that is bringing the economy to a standstill with rapidly rising unemployment and resulting in a deep recession or even a depression. Second, we must make structural longterm changes to redesign our systems so that everyone’s basic needs are met, the planet is protected and we end gross inequality.

Response to the pandemic and economic collapse are already showing change is possible. As part of what may be nearly a $2 trillion stimulus, even Republicans are urging cash payments to most people in the form of a short-term universal income, providing businesses with financing so they do not go bankrupt, and the government taking an equity share of large industries that seek financial support. Prisons are releasing inmates, police are arresting fewer people, and evictions and water and power shutoffs are being stopped. It is our responsibility to push for what we need and to ensure these crises are not used to put harmful policies in place.

Single-payer healthcare systems are better equipped to respond to epidemics

Advocates for a universal single-payer healthcare system in the United States have warned for years that we are ill-equipped to handle a pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis is making it very clear that our healthcare system is failing us. We’ve also raised awareness that the United States has the highest number of preventable deaths compared to other wealthy nations, even though we spend the most on health care. Now that the epidemic can impact everyone, leaders are taking notice.

President Trump announced that testing for COVID-19 would be free. He also stated that there would be no co-pays for treatment but the insurance industry was quick to say they had not promised that. Politicians are pushing for our public health insurances, Medicaid and Medicare, to pick up out-of-pocket costs for care that would otherwise prevent people from seeking treatment.

Countries that have universal single-payer healthcare systems are handling the COVID-19 pandemic much better than the United States. They already have a system that offers free care and they have the authority and communications networks in place to rapidly deploy health professionals and resources to areas of need and to build healthcare infrastructure to meet the demand. We have a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute write that:

“Because the VHA is a highly coordinated system, agency staff have begun rejiggering its supply chain to get necessary equipment to hospitals in hardest hit areas, and have started setting up command centers to assist with this national emergency…. Already, VHA staff have embedded with the Centers for Disease Control and are largely running the country’s 65 emergency coordinating centers. The department has also deployed nurses to screen American soldiers coming home; built a website landing page to inform veterans of updates through the crisis; restricted non-essential hospital visits across the country; and instituted strong protective measures at their nursing homes, which are much better staffed and safer than their private sector counterparts.”

This is possible because the VHA is a national system that is government-funded and not for profit. They already have a telemedicine infrastructure in place so people can receive ongoing care from their homes. Staff are salaried so they can easily shift to provide care where needed, unlike many private doctors who are only paid if they can bill insurance companies. Dr. Mike Pappas, who practices in New York City, reports that health professionals in the non-VHA healthcare system are facing critical shortages of tests, protective gear, medical equipment, and hospital beds.

The United States has been very slow to react to the crisis. HHS Secretary Alex Azar was informed about the COVID-19 virus on January 3. China only became aware of it in late December, and it was not until January 7 that Wuhan researchers determined a new virus was causing disease, so the US became aware almost immediately (One of the often-repeated lies of the Trump administration and US media is that China was secretive about the virus when in reality, the US was informed as China was still figuring out what was occurring). Not only did health officials know, but US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic. Yet, here we are in late March and we are still unsure how widely the virus has spread.

Fixing our healthcare system

Our fragmented, unequal and for-profit system is the problem. The pandemic is illustrating that health is a national security issue. Healthcare doesn’t belong in the private sector where profit is the priority instead of health. Our for-profit system is resulting in the closing of 30 hospitals a year and the reconfiguring of community hospitals to be profit centers that specialize in care that brings in money rather than the general care communities need. This is why we lack sufficient beds to handle the pandemic and have to rely on people to self-isolate to slow the rise of infection in order to avoid overwhelming our system.

Our for-profit mentality when it comes to pharmaceuticals is also hurting our health. The US is spending a billion dollars to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. This should be made available for free to everyone in the United States; it should not be a profit center for a private corporation. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that spending on prescription medications is higher in the US, per capita, than in any other country in the world. Drug companies are among the most profitable US corporations and spend more on marketing than research. Five out of the six highest profiting US companies were pharmaceuticals.

Lee Fang reports in The Intercept that price gouging is being encouraged by investors, writing, “Over the past few weeks, investment bankers have been candid on investor calls and during health care conferences about the opportunity to raise drug prices.” The Hill reports, “A CEO of a Georgia-based hospital on Wednesday said the supplier of a protective mask critical for health care workers treating COVID-19 patients is charging $7 for the masks that typically cost 58 cents.”  The US Public Interest Research Group  Education Fund said it is tracking prices of medical supplies and found a package of 320 Lysol disinfecting wipes that usually cost $13.57 were priced at $220. Another listing offered Purell sanitizer that normally sells for $7.99 priced as high as $49.95. Nearly one in six masks and hand sanitizers sold by the retailer saw their prices jump at least 50% in February.

This all shows a need for a publicly-financed, universal healthcare system in the United States such as national improved Medicare for all or a national health service modeled on the VHA. It also demonstrates the need to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry and control the prices of goods required for personal protection.  In Spain, the government seized control of private health care providers, including privately run hospitals, to manage the demand for treatment for patients with COVID-19.

In the immediate term, we need to do what other countries have done:

• Make widespread screening and testing free to everyone.
• Isolate people who are infected with COVID-19 and test their contacts.
• Provide treatment free of charge. The government should pick up the cost of any care that is not covered.
• Increase domestic production of necessary items such as protective gear, medical equipment, medications, and supplies.
• Do bulk purchasing of necessities such as protective gear, medical equipment and medications by the government that are provided at low or no cost to health facilities and coordinate the transportation of supplies to where they are needed.
• Create places for isolating and treating patients such as reconfiguring hospitals and unused buildings.
• Mobilize health professionals who are not providing direct care, such as those who are in administrative positions or are retired, to provide care.
• Hire and train people to conduct screening, testing, and data collection to identify and communicate with people who have come in contact with infected persons or who are in areas with high numbers of cases and to run hotlines where people can get information.
• Coordinate food programs in communities so that all people are able to eat. This could be done in coordination with local farmers, restaurants, schools, and meals on wheels programs.
• Provide immediate housing to all people who are unhoused so they can self-isolate.
• Release all prisoners who are vulnerable because of age or underlying health conditions or who have committed nonviolent crimes.

In the longterm, we need to demand that we do not go backward. This includes creating a universal, publicly-funded healthcare system that is free at the point of service, nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry, building more healthcare infrastructure so all people have access to care within a reasonable distance, expanding and paying for medical education – especially for people in low-income communities, treating housing as a human right by converting existing empty homes and apartments into social housing and changing our legal system to minimize the use of prison as a punishment.

We can make the 2020’s a decade that completely transforms our healthcare, economic, and environmental systems and more. Now is the time to be bold in demanding what we need to uphold human rights and protect the planet. Many groups are putting forward demands for changes they need. We’re posting them on Popular Resistance. And we will continue writing about transformative changes to our economic and environmental policies in the next newsletter.

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Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. 

On March 10^th this year, the UNHCR made the entirely false claim that 77,000 Nicaraguans are currently seeking refugee status in Costa Rica. That claim is a downright lie. Despite the mercenary opportunism of the Costa Rican government, which has received over US$600m to assist alleged political refugees from Nicaragua, Costa Rica’s own migration statistics give a very different account.

At the end of 2017, Costa Rican migration statistics put the number of Nicaraguans already resident in Costa Rica at 339,495. Net migration to Costa Rica from Nicaragua for 2018  and 2019 added another 33254. Nicaraguans entering Costa Rica undocumented do not enter the country’s migratory statistics. Nicaraguans requesting asylum do. The UNHCR cannot weasel out of its false claim by dodging behind undocumented Nicaraguan migrants.

A recent Costa Rican government report stated that at the end of 2019 around 31500 Nicaraguans were seeking asylum. While some data is available for the number of asylum requests granted to Nicaraguans, just 6 out of 23,063 in 2018, data is incomplete for 2019, although Nicaragua’s anti-government news outlet La Prensa reported 18 asylum requests had been approved as of May 2019. The number of requests denied also seems to be unavailable. So putting together a complete picture to date is difficult.

Even so, on official, publicly available data  the UNHCR has no basis, except perhaps false propaganda from the country’s coup promoting opposition, to portray Nicaragua as a country from which tens of thousands of people have fled to Costa Rica to escape violent persecution. Costa Rica’s own migration statistics confirm the reality misrepresented by the UNHCR and bear out the long-standing historical context of economic migration between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Likewise, the Costa Rican government has itself acknowledged that most Nicaraguans claiming asylum do so for economic reasons.

The statistics show that migration from Nicaragua to Costa Rica actually fell during and after the period of the violent failed coup attempt in Nicaragua. Whereas, if opposition claims of mass repression were true, it should have increased. Costa Rica’s data for asylum requests granted also show up the false claims of persecution by opposition activists. During 2018, the Costa Rican authorities approved just 6 applications from the 23,062 Nicaraguans who applied to the Costa Rican authorities for refugee status. By contrast, that same year Costa Rica approved 107 of the 1066 applications it received for refugee status from Salvadorans.

The reason Costa Rica’s immigration authorities granted less than 1% of all those 23,062 asylum requests from Nicaraguans in 2018 is because the overwhelming majority of those applications were phony. Costa Rica granted significantly more asylum requests to Salvadorans because, in the aftermath of the coup attempt in Nicaragua between April and July 2018,  the situation in El Salvador was incomparably more dangerous. The great majority of opposition activists in fact fled Nicaragua quite rightly fearing arrest for the very serious crimes they committed during the violent failed coup attempt of 2018.

Apart from the UNHCR’s false report on the situation of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, some genuine reporting by veteran Swedish journalist Dick Emanuelsson has also exposed the UNHCR’s duplicity with regard to Nicaraguan opposition activists in Honduras. There, Emanuelsson interviewed the UNHCR representative who rejected claims that the UNHCR was involved in establishing infrastructure for the often violent members of Nicaragua’s political opposition along the Honduran border with Nicaragua. Subsequently, Emanuelsson report cites the representative of a local UNHCR partner organization working along the Honduran border with Nicaragua who admitted organizing exactly that kind of shelter and support.

This level of duplicity has come to be routine for organizations and institutions coopted one way or another by Western corporate funding or governmental intervention. The examples involving the UNHCR in Costa Rica and Honduras seeking to damage Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, while nothing new, are not for that reason less scandalous and disturbing. The fundamental point is that no genuine reporter doing due diligence and checking their facts in good faith can trust the blatant disinformation spread by institutions like the UNHCR or similar bodies like missions of the Organization of American States.

Most people in North America and Europe continue to trust international human rights and humanitarian institutions despite their now proven chronic inability to report fairly and accurately. That has long been true of human rights NGOs like Amnesty International, The International Federation for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. But extremely egregious misrepresentations and omissions have also come to characterize reporting by many multilateral institutions. They have been coopted by Western governments so as to manipulate crises around the world from Syria to Ukraine to Mali to Venezuela. Cynical manipulation of data and events has become the norm rather than the exception.

In Latin America, events over the last decade have categorically demonstrated the collapse in  institutional integrity and independence of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and the UN High Commission for Refugees. This has been especially true with regard to the double standards applied , for example, between reporting on Bolivia before, during and after the military coup, on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and the quite different reporting standards applied to countries like Haiti, Honduras Colombia, Ecuador and Chile.

In countries with progressive governments right-wing opposition falsehoods are generally glibly taken as unquestionably true. But in right-wing dominated countries legitimate progressive opposition claims are subjected to meticulous, usually disingenuous and often dismissive  scrutiny.  Even so, practically all Western news outlets invariably publish such information without question. They do so because they long ago gave up genuine news reporting in favour of imperialist psychological warfare.

Reporting of the UNHCR’s misrepresentation of the situation of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica confirms this. Basic fact checking shows the UNHCR claim of a very serious humanitarian crisis of Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica is a lie. The only serious crisis in Costa Rica involving migrants from Nicaragua is the crisis of integrity in the UNHCR.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Even before the novel coronavirus appeared, many American families were falling behind on student loans, auto loans, credit cards and other payments. America’s debt overhead was pricing its labor and industry out of world markets. A debt crisis was inevitable eventually, but covid-19 has made it immediate.

Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives and huge bailouts to corporations, raises the threat of a depression. But it doesn’t have to be this way. History offers us another alternative in such situations: a debt jubilee. This slate-cleaning, balance-restoring step recognizes the fundamental truth that when debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Just for fun. To pass the time while we’re indefinitely locked down inside our homes, compulsively checking the Covid-19 “active cases” and “total death” count, washing our hands every twenty minutes, and attempting not to touch our faces.

Before we do, though, I want to make it clear that I believe this Covid-19 thing is real, and is probably the deadliest threat to humanity in the history of deadly threats to humanity.

According to the data I’ve been seeing, it’s only a matter of days, or hours, until nearly everyone on earth is infected and is either dying in agony and alone or suffering mild, common cold-like symptoms, or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever.

I feel that I need to state this clearly, before we do our thought experiment, because I don’t want anyone mistakenly thinking that I’m one of those probably Russian-backed Nazis who are going around saying, “it’s just the flu,” or who are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about bio-weapons and martial law, or who are otherwise doubting or questioning the wisdom of locking down the entire world (and likely triggering a new Great Depression) on account of the discovery of some glorified bug.

Obviously, this is not just the flu. Thousands of people are dying from it. OK, sure, the flu kills many more than that, hundreds of thousands of people annually, but this Covid-19 virus is totally new, and not like any of the other millions of viruses that are going around all the time, and the experts are saying it will probably kill, or seriously sicken, or briefly inconvenience, millions or even billions of people if we don’t lock down entire countries and terrorize everyone into submission.

Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for that … this is not the time to be questioning anything the corporate media and the authorities tell us. This is a time to pull together, turn our minds off, and follow orders. OK, sure, normally, it’s good to be skeptical, but we’re in a goddamn global state of emergency! Idris Elba is infected for Chrissakes!

Sorry … I’m getting a little emotional. I’m a big-time Idris Elba fan. The point is, I’m not a Covid-denialist, or a conspiracy theorist, or one of those devious Chinese or Russian dissension-sowers. I know for a fact that this pandemic is real, and warrants whatever “emergency measures” our governments, global corporations, and intelligence agencies want to impose on us.

No, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I have a close friend who knows a guy who dated a woman who dated a doctor who personally knows another doctor who works in a hospital in Italy somewhere, and she (i.e., my friend, not the doctor in Italy) posted something on Facebook yesterday that was way too long to read completely but was a gut-wrenching account of how Covid-19 is killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators!

Or maybe it was Italian babies. Like I said, it was too long to read.

Also, did you see the story about the baby that was born infected?! Or the stories about the people in their 30s and 40s who were more or less in perfect health (except for, you know, cancer or whatever) who died from (or with) the Covid plague?! And what about all those charts and graphs?! And those pictures of people in hazmat suits?! And those Italians singing Turandot on their balconies?! Doesn’t that just make you want to break down and cry over the sheer humanity of it all?!

No, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Covid-19 is the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced, and that we have no choice but to cancel everything, confine everyone inside their home, wreck the entire global economy, force working class people even further into debt, pour trillions into the investment banks, cancel elections, censor the Internet, and otherwise implement a global police state.

But what if it wasn’t? Just hypothetically. What if this wasn’t the deadliest global pandemic humankind has ever faced? (I’m just posing the question as a thought experiment, so please don’t report me to the WHO, or the CDC, or FEMA, or whoever.) What if this new coronavirus was just another coronavirus like all the other coronaviruses that people die from (or with) all the time? What if the fact that this one is “new” didn’t really mean all that much, or possibly anything at all, because coronaviruses are always mutating, and every year there are a lot of new variants?

Relax, OK? I know this one is different, and totally unlike anything ever encountered by virologists in the history of virology. Remember, this is just a thought experiment. These are just hypothetical questions.

Here’s another hypothetical question. What if all the scary statistics we’ve been seeing (e.g., the death rates, the explosion of “cases,” etc.) weren’t unquestionable scientific facts, but rather, were, like other statistics, based on things like sample groups, and dependent on a host of factors and variables, which you kind of need to know to make sense of anything?

Say, for example, you tested everyone that died of acute respiratory failure on a given day in your Italian hospital, and you discovered that, let’s say, five of those patients had been infected with Covid-19. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “total deaths” count, regardless of whether the folks who died had terminal cancer, or heart disease, or had also been infected with the common flu, or some other type of coronavirus. That would probably skew your “death” count, wouldn’t it?

Or, say you wanted to test for the virus to keep track of all the “active cases” and generate an infection rate, but you can’t test hundreds of millions of people, because no one has that many tests. So, you test everyone who turns up sick, or thinks they’re sick and demands to be tested, or who touched someone sick who you already tested (though you’re not even sure that your test is accurate) and you come up with, let’s say, ten positive results. So you feed that number to the WHO, and they add it to the “active cases” count, regardless of the fact that everyone knows the real number is likely twenty times higher.

OK, so now you take your “active cases” number and your “total deaths” number and you do the math (keeping in mind that your “total deaths” include those cancer and heart failure people), and you end up grossly underestimating your “infection rate” and “active cases,” and grossly overestimating your “death rate” and the number of “total deaths.”

Just hypothetically, you understand. I am not suggesting this is actually happening. I certainly don’t want to get censored by Facebook (or accidentally censored by some totally innocuous technical glitch) for posting “Covid misinformation,” or tempt the Wikipedia “editors” to rush back to my Wikipedia page and label me a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” … or, you know, get myself preventatively quarantined.

It probably won’t come to that anyway, i.e., rounding up “infected persons,” “possibly infected persons,” and “disruptive” and “uncooperative persons,” and quarantining us in, like, “camps,” or wherever. All this state of emergency stuff, the suspension of our civil rights, the manipulation of facts and figures, the muzzling of dissent, the illegal surveillance, governments legislating by decree, the soldiers, the quarantines, and all the rest of it … all these measures are temporary, and are being taken for our own good, and purely out of an “abundance of caution.”

I mean, it’s not like the global capitalist empire was right in the middle of a War on Populism (a war that it has been losing up to now) and wanted to take this opportunity to crank up some disaster capitalism, terrorize the global public into a frenzy of selfish and irrational panic, and just flex its muscles to remind everybody what could happen if we all keep screwing around by voting for “populists,” tearing up Paris, leaving the European Union, and otherwise interfering with the forward march of global capitalism.

No, it certainly isn’t like that. It is an actual plague that is probably going to kill you and your entire family if you don’t do exactly what you’re told. So, forget this little thought experiment, and prepare yourself for global lockdown. It probably won’t be so bad … unless they decide they need to run the part of exercise where it goes on too long, and people get squirrelly, and start rebelling, and looting, and otherwise not cooperating, and the military is eventually forced to deploy those Urban Unrest Suppression Vehicles, and those Anti-Domestic-Terror Forces, and …

OK, I’m getting all worked up again. I’d better take my pills and get back to Facebook. Oh, and … I should probably check up on Idris! And see if Berlin has gone to “Level 3,” in which case I’ll need to find whatever online application I need to fill out in order to leave my house.

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Featured image is from OffGuardian

The Environmental Protection Agency moved today to restrict the types of research that can be used in public health protection decisions and scientific assessments. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the agency is recklessly giving the public just 30 days to comment on this sweeping proposal. UCS developed a guide to assist you in making a public comment, and if you are able to do so, you should.

The “supplemental” proposal, which builds on a previous effort, would remove from consideration or downweight thousands of scientific papers by public health scientists when the raw data behind these studies cannot be made public. So while these experts are the front lines of the fight against COVID-19, treating patients, researching vaccines, and educating the public about staying safe, the EPA is trying to push this proposal through with as little criticism as they can get away with.

The American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, and scores of other scientific organizations all strongly opposed the original proposal and urged EPA to withdraw it. Now, they will have to pull staff away from protecting our country to write extensive comments to stop the EPA from sabotaging itself. It’s a terrible diversion, but it’s one they must take.

In a letter sent this morning, we asked EPA to extend the comment deadline and hold virtual public hearings. The “supplemental” proposal is significantly broader than the original. According to EPA, it would apply not only to studies behind EPA decisions about vehicle emissions, clean air standards, and clean water protections, but also EPA’s own “state-of-science reports, technology assessments, weight-of-evidence analyses, meta-analyses, risk assessments, toxicological profiles of substances, integrated assessment models, hazard determinations, exposure assessments, or health, ecological, or safety assessments.”

The EPA has not articulated a problem it wants to solve. It faces no deadlines. But agency leaders see an opening. They feel compelled to carry out an idea hatched by tobacco industry lobbyists decades ago. The proposal was developed wholly by political staff. The EPA’s Science Advisory Board initially called it a “license to politicize” science and said that it would compromise the agency’s decision-making process.

Because this is written as a supplemental to the original rule, EPA will only take comments that address the changes made in the supplemental. Therefore, you should articulate how your comments respond to the document that was released today.

At a time when seeking out and utilizing cutting-edge research is a life or death situation, the EPA is moving in the opposite direction. What EPA is saying here is that it wants political control over what research is used in any of the agency’s work. Don’t let them get away with this without a fight. Commit to writing a public comment and we will provide you with the resources you need to be most effective.

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Michael Halpern is an expert on political interference in science and solutions to reduce suppression, manipulation, and distortion of government science.

For the past 40 years, China achieved sustained high-level economic growth, experiencing short-term bumps alone along the way.

On a purchase price basis, what a basket of goods costs compared to the US, China already is the world’s largest economy, though not so far on a GDP basis.

Economic analysts call China’s growth from 1979 to 2019 one of the greatest economic success achievements in modern times.

Initiated by Deng Xiaoping, he called the process “crossing the river by touching the stones” — aided by large-scale domestic and foreign investment, productivity gains, significant economic stimulus and expansive monetary policy.

Last August, Ellen Brown explained that “neoliberalism met its match in China (by) subsidiz(ing) worker costs (and) the costs of its businesses,” adding:

Around 80% of banks are nationalized. “The government owns 80% of the banks, which make loans on favorable terms to domestic businesses, especially state-owned businesses.”

“Typically, if the 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…written off.  No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government.”

Corporations “are largely state-owned.” China’s economic/financial model focuses on longterm considerations, not “short-term profits for private shareholders.”

Instead of pressuring China to adopt a flawed US neoliberal system, Washington should move toward reworking the US economy to operate like China’s.

Brown put it this way:

“The Chinese have proven the effectiveness of their public banking system in supporting their industries and their workers.”

“Rather than seeing it as an existential threat, we could thank them for test-driving the model and take a spin in it ourselves.”

Noted market analyst Jeremy Grantham earlier compared (Wall Street run) Fed policy to beating a donkey, saying:

“We’ve been conned.” We’re manipulated to believe that “debt is everything.” Mounting exponentially, it’s unsustainable.

The Fed “keeps beating (the economy) until it either turns into a horse or drops dead from too much beating.”

Fed policy has nothing to do with longterm growth, everything to do with helping bankers, other corporate favorites, and large investors — at the expense of sustainable growth since the 1990s.

Grantham stressed that the “real world is the quantity and quality of your people, and the quality and quantity of capital spending.”

“Are you building new machines? Are you being inventive?” Are you educating a new generation properly?

“We’re in this death grip that only paper things matter.”

David Stockman called money printing madness and bailouts the “most shameful chapter in American financial history” — grand theft by any standard by wrecking economies to benefit Wall Street and other corporate favorites while waging war on social justice.

Michael Hudson explained that debts too high to be repaid won’t be.

Money power in private hands created unsustainable consumer and corporate debt, record budget and trade deficits, out-of-control national debt, an unprecedented wealth gap, along with Depression-level unemployment, poverty, homelessness, food insecurity and hunger — at a time when things are heading toward getting much worse.

The US is waging war on China by other means, wanting its economic, financial, industrial, technological, and military development undermined.

Was COVID-19 introduced in China by the US as part of its strategy to try achieving the above aims?

Throughout the post-WW II period, the US waged war by hot and other means on numerous countries to smash their infrastructure, massacre their people, crush their economies, and immiserate their population — aiming to transform them into vassal states.

Bottom line: The policy hugely benefitted military, industrial, security, media, and other corporate interests.

It failed to achieve imperial objectives. The US hasn’t won a hot war since WW II ended.

Its wars by other means on Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries fared no better.

China’s resilient economy will likely rebound ahead from its February 2020 slump.

Its manufacturing index plunged from 50.0 in January to below the November 2008 38.8 low in February.

Its service and construction sectors fell from 54.1 in January to 29.6.

On Monday, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the nation is “braced for a second economic shock wave as COVID-19 controls kill demand.”

Closure of overseas markets will greatly curtail exports that will dramatically affect China’s economy adversely.

SCMP quoted a Chinese manufacturer, saying it “returned to 100% capacity for overseas demand, but sadly the market is either shutting, or about to shut.”

Orders are either delayed or cancelled because of conditions in the US and other countries.

Things are similar to 2008-09, possibly much worse if what’s going on continues through 2020 or longer.

In January and February, Chinese exports fell over 17%, economists projecting greater declines ahead at least short-term.

Global COVID-19 outbreaks aren’t remotely near epidemic and pandemic levels, but there’s risk that things could could reach them in countries hit hardest or globally.

As of Monday, 340,000 cases were reported worldwide, less than 15,000 deaths.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated  at least 38 million US flu illnesses, 390,000 hospitalizations, and 23,000 deaths this flu season (beginning last October) through mid-March — the season lasting until end of May.

Worldwide the number of seasonal flu/influenza cases is many times the above numbers with no fear-mongering headlines scaring people to death.

The difference between seasonal flu and COVID-19 is the latter is highly contagious and only experimental cures exist.

Clearly the disease is cause for concern, but proper actions by ruling authorities can control it.

In China, the rate of transmission keeps falling, though it’s unknown whether a new wave could erupt.

Beijing took draconian measures to achieve dramatic results.

No nations are out of the woods, things highly likely to worsen ahead before improving.

Responsible government actions and personal efforts to stay safe are needed to defeat COVID-19.

Like other times of public angst, this too shall pass.

Of much greater concern is whether the public welfare will be gravely harmed in the US and elsewhere on the phony pretext of providing greater security.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The world is in the grip of a COVID-19 pandemic that is now impacting relatively poor countries in Africa and South Asia. Rich island continent Australia (population 25 million) has only about 1,000 cases so far and has achieved this through tough travel bans, selective testing, contact tracing, case isolation, quarantine and public education. However there is a big debate in Australia over whether to follow the UK with an aggressive coronavirus suppression program that includes closure of schools and universities.

First some key advice and  disclaimers:

(1) take your medical advice from medical authorities such as your own doctors and from medical organizations such as the World Health Organization [1] and your local medical authorities (e.g. see [2] for Australia) ,

(2)  I am a biological chemist  and not a medical doctor, and

(3) as a 75-year old I am in  a much higher risk group of Australians and therefore have a quite personal interest  in the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.   Consequently in the following analysis I have taken great pains to mostly quote the opinions of medical experts as well as the expert opinions of people directly involved in the issue of whether schools should close (notably teachers).

Least deaths “suppression” option involving hygiene and social distancing, case detection and isolation, household quarantine, and the closing of schools and universities.  

On 16 March 2020 eminent epidemiologist  Professor Neil Ferguson and his colleagues at Imperial College, London,  released an important  research document  entitled “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and health care demand”[3]. This research paper  has compelled the UK Government to take drastic action to suppress the COVID-19 epidemic via a “suppression” scenario involving hygiene and social distancing, case detection and isolation, household quarantine, and the closing of schools and universities.  This “suppression” strategy is modelled to result in much fewer  UK deaths (circa 40,000) as compared to a less stringent “mitigation” strategy not involving  school and university closure  (210,000 deaths) or inaction (510,000 deaths).

Chelsea Bruce-Lockhart, John Burn-Murdoch and Alex Barker of the UK Financial Times have summarized the key findings of this important report (19 March 2020):

“The starting point for analysis is an unchecked epidemic. This would infect eight out of 10 people, according to the researchers, with 510,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2m in the US.… While a vaccine is developed — a process that can take up to 18 months — or antiviral drugs identified, US and UK governments are left with two extraordinary choices. The first is a “mitigation strategy” to reduce the peak of infection while the population builds immunity; the second a more drastic “suppression” approach to quell the epidemic, whatever the cost to the economy, or trauma for social life… Governments are racing to expand critical care. Yet even assuming all patients could be treated, the Imperial researchers conclude mitigation strategies alone would leave about 250,000 dead in the UK and around 1.2m in America… More drastic curbs on society can make a big difference. Short of a complete lockdown on movement, the most effective [“suppression”] scenario modelled involves isolating people with symptoms, reducing everyone’s social contact by 75 per cent, quarantining households and closing schools and universities for five months. If sustained, the measures can choke the epidemic to bring patient numbers to something hospitals could potentially cope [circa 40,000 UK dead]” [4].

Professor Neil Ferguson and his numerous co-author colleagues (16 March 2020):

“We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option. We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism… The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package –or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission –will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) –given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed… The strategies differ in whether they aim to reduce the reproduction number, R, to below 1 (suppression) –and thus cause case numbers to decline–or to merely slow spread by reducing R, but not to below 1… In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months… in such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic… In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality… Combining all four interventions (social distancing of the entire population, case isolation, household quarantine and school and university closure) is predicted to have the largest impact [only circa 40,000 deaths], short of a complete lockdown which additionally prevents people going to work… Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US health care systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US… We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time” [3].

Australian Government actions to mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic in Australia.

Australia has acted to minimize the COVID-19 epidemic in Australia.The Australian Government headed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison takes its advice from the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy, who with  the State Chief Health Officers  constitute the  Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) [5].

In an evolving response,  travel into Australia for people who are not Australian citizens or residents is now banned. Australian citizens or residents are banned from departing Australia , and those entering Australia must go into quarantine for 14 days. The Australian Government Department of Health provides very detailed  advice  about personal hygiene [hand washing, coughing into elbow or tissue to be discarded], social distancing [no more than 500 people at an outside event, no more than 100 people at an inside event, 1.5 metre spacing between people, 1 person per 4 square metres inside], self-isolation, self-quarantine, and case isolation [2]. Thus it states:

“You must self-isolate if any of the following applies to you: you have COVID-19; you have been in close contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19; you arrived in Australia after midnight on 15 March 2020. If you do not need to self-isolate, you should still protect yourself and others… There is a global shortage of the test kits that pathologists use to diagnose COVID-19. This is why we are doing targeted testing instead of widespread testing”

[2]. The State Government of the island state of Tasmania has declared that, with some exceptions,  anyone (Tasmanians or Mainland Australians) entering Tasmania must self-isolate for 14 days.

The result of such measures is regularly updated by the Australian Department of Health:

“As at 6.30am on 22 March 2020, there have been 1,098 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. There have been 224 new cases since 6.30am yesterday… Of the 1,098 confirmed cases in Australia, 7 have died from COVID-19. More than 127,000 tests have been conducted across Australia” [6].

Mathematician Dr Joel Miller  (Senior lecturer, Applied Mathematics, La Trobe University, Melbourne) provides a key insight (19 March 2020): “Without any intervention, the epidemic would grow until depletion of susceptible people slows the growth. The prevalence would start to fall when the susceptible population reaches what’s called a critical fraction, 1/R0. Once we pass this threshold a person with COVID-19 will only transmit the virus to less than one other person (because fewer people remain susceptible to infection). For a population of 25 million like Australia, this would require 15 about million infections. COVID-19’s observed doubling time has been about four days. That means every four days the number of cases has been roughly double what it was four days prior. We would calculate it takes about three months for one infection doubling every four days to cause 15 million infections. After the peak, we expect the total time to drop to be about the same as it took to rise. This gives a crude prediction of six months” [7].

Academics  Caleb Ferguson, Richelle Wynne and Scott Newton (20 March 2020):

“According to data from China, around 5% of people who test positive to COVID-19 will experience severe symptoms and require admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) for around four weeks. So, three months into the pandemic, without public health measures to control the spread, we could have expected to see 750,000 severe cases requiring admission to ICU in the first three months. What can our ICUs cope with? We [Australians] currently have just over 2,200 ICU beds” [8].

5,000 doctors signed an open letter to PM Morrison by Sydney  intensive care specialist Dr Greg Kelly calling for an immediate lockdown of Australia (17 March 2020):

“Dear Prime Minister, We, the undersigned Australian medical doctors, are writing to you today because of our grave concern regarding the threat that novel Coronavirus 19 (COVID19) represents to the lives of Australians. We believe that Australian federal and state governments can avert disaster by heeding the lessons of other countries. This means: 1. Immediately implementing the strict measures of lockdown and social distancing that have been shown to be effective at slowing the spread of COVID19 and, 2. Preparing our health systems for a surge of COVID19 and critically ill patients. Taken together, these measures would reduce the numbers and presentation rate of COVID19 patients and allow our health system to cope. Many of us are in contact with colleagues in Italy, Spain and France and they are begging us to learn from their mistakes. With access to intensive care the death rate from COVID19 is likely less than 1%, but in an overwhelmed system without access to intensive care the death rate approaches 4%… On current growth rates the 370 cases in Australia today will be 750 on Friday [20 March] , 1500 on Tuesday next week [24 March], 3000 next Saturday [29 March], 6000 on the 1st of April and 12 000 by the 4th of April… The Italian region of Lombardy which is currently hardest hit by COVID19, is one of the richest areas in Europe with a health system equal to that of Australia’s. Our colleagues there have made herculean efforts to increase their capacity to care for critically ill COVID19 patients. Despite their efforts their systems are completely overwhelmed with corresponding very high death rates and inability to provide intensive care to previously healthy seventy year olds. They describe their situation as like being “in a war zone.” With access to intensive care the death rate from COVID19 is likely less than 1%, but in an overwhelmed system without access to intensive care the death rate approaches 4%” [9, 10].

Australian medical and teaching experts supporting closure of schools to help suppress the COVID-19 epidemic, flatten the infection curve,  and hence better enable medical services to cope.

Dr Hemant Garg (a GP) and almost 2,500 other doctors in a letter to Federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt (March 2020):

“[Doctors are] dismayed at the disconnect between the actions being taken within the medical community and the recommendation for actions being passed on to the general population. We should immediately recommend a three to four week closure of schools, cultural and religious places including places of worship, gyms and leisure centres, pubs, bars, theatres, cinemas and concert hall.  This would allow a steady declaration of cases of coronavirus to present to hospitals and fever clinics as their symptomatic phase develops” [9].

Dr Norman Swan (host of the ABC Radio’s  “Coronacast” and “Health Report” programs) (20 March 2020):

“This week, the numbers in Australia are starting to rise steeply, albeit from a low level.  We have a few days to play with but very soon, if the curve isn’t bending then schools and universities are going to have to shut since the international evidence is that around 30 per cent of infections come from young people. And by the way there — sadly — are plenty of young people being ventilated in intensive-care units in Italy and elsewhere… I’d find it challenging to keep the school open with the increasing level of staff absence” [11].

Dr Norman Swan (15 March 2020):

“There are social impacts from closing schools… But probably the right thing to do is close schools now… It is tough but I think we control this epidemic early rather than waiting until the numbers get out of control” [12].

David Smillie (principal, The Grange, a primary and secondary college State school located in Hoppers Crossing in the  outer west of Melbourne, with 50% of its 1,830 students now absent) (20 March 2020):

“Since the Prime Minister’s statement that schools definitely won’t close, I have been inundated with really worried parents. They’re very confused, they’re very scared. No matter how much we talk about theories of containment of the virus, people still think because we’ve got lots of kids on site, they still think the school’s a possible area of infection and they worry about their own children. They know that the public galleries are closed, they know that politicians are sitting 1.5 metres away from each other, Qantas is closing down, people are working from home, but what do they see here? So, we’re hoping that the chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, is correct, and that he’s smarter than the rest of the world and we’re hoping that Dr Norman Swan on ABC is wrong… “We hear that schools aren’t closing but we also hear there’s a great possibility that down the track that they will. So we’re caught, we’re asking teachers to manage two things, preparation for the future and the current curriculum program. They see it in pretty basic terms that rich schools yet again are safe, when state schools have to bear the brunt of it” [11].

Agata Kula-Lugg (secondary school teacher and mother of 2  young children) (20 March 2020):

“Aside from concerns about my own safety and my family’s safety, I’ve been following the news very closely for the last three days and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of teachers when they’re talking about schools. Because if they did mention teachers, they’d have to admit that this is completely unsafe. Schools are not set up for social distancing” [11].

Dr Kerryn Phelps (general practitioner,  former AMA president and former independent Federal MP)(ca 16 March 2020):

“Within a very short timeframe we’re going to have to look at the closure of schools and closure of universities for a couple of weeks in order to help with limitation of transmission” [13].

Anthony Albanese (Leader of the Opposition Labor Party) (ca 16 March 2020):

“What I don’t want is the government to be too far behind here. I can’t see how [school closures] won’t happen at some stage. What we need, though, is for those decisions to be essentially recommended by the medical officers – if they say that is where it’s going to go, we need transparency” [13].

Dr Andrew Miller (president of the WA branch of the Australian Medical Association) (ca 16 March 2020:

“The schools, we need a bit of preparation time, but it will be coming. Sometime in the next few weeks we would expect the government would be looking closely at that. I suspect what will happen is that schools won’t go back after the holidays” [13].

Angelo Gavrielatos ( president of the NSW Teachers Federation):

“We’ve certainly made representations [re sending home pregnant, older and vulnerable teachers]. We expect the Government to make a quick announcement with respect to those more vulnerable members. These are unprecedented times, and now is the time for the Government to demonstrate its obligations to the health and wellbeing of all its employees” [14].

Professor Ian MacKay (virologist, University of Queensland) (ca 16 March 2020):

“If we were really serious about flattening the curve [of spread of the virus] we would have to think about closing schools. But we have to balance that against all the social disruption that would cause, including taking people out of various jobs so parents could look after small children at home… We know children get the virus, but are they creating a major part of the transmission chain, or are they having low viral loads and not passing the virus on? We need to find that out so we can have a better understanding of the role that schools play in transmitting the virus” [15].

Professor Nigel McMillan (director,  Menzies Health Institute, Griffith University) (16 March 2020):

“Schools will close eventually, it’s really a matter of when, not if… With all due respect to the prime minister, I wonder what he thinks those students do when they’re out of school (now), if they’re not hanging around malls or anything. We may close schools but we’re not closing education. And I think schools are well prepared for this” [16].

Australian medical experts and politicians opposing school closures.

Associate Professor  Kamalini Lokuge ( Australian National University Research School of Public Health) (18 March 2020): “Our essential workers, our doctors, our nurses, those who supply our food, our electricity – they need to be able to send their kids to school” [13].

Dr Brett Sutton (Victorian chief health officer) (ca 17 March 2020):

“There is currently limited information on the contribution of children to transmission of Covid-19. The WHO-China joint mission noted the primary role of household transmission and observed that children tended to be infected from adults. Previous work suggests that the potential reduction in community transmission from pre-emptive school closures may be offset by the care arrangements that are in place for children who are not at school. There is a particular risk associated with the fact that children may require care from vulnerable grandparents or may continue to associate (and transmit infection) outside of school settings. Broadly the health advice on school closures from previous respiratory epidemics shows the health costs are often underestimated and the benefits overestimated. This may be even more so in relation to Covid-19 as unlike influenza the impact on otherwise healthy children has been minimal to date” [13].

Daniel Andrews (Victorian premier) (ca 16 March 2020):

“As much as I know parents are concerned, if you were to do that, you would do more harm than good. It is never good not to follow unanimous and clear advice from the health experts. There will be a time when schools will be significantly disrupted, some already have been where there has been individual cases. In many respects, the best place for the kids at the moment is at school. I am not criticising people for being scared or anxious, it is a natural thing” [13].

Steven Marshall (South Australian premier) on extending school holidays (ca 16 March 2020):

“This is not a political decision, it is not an ideological decision, it is an evidence-based decision, which has been informed by the brightest minds in Australia, and they’re making it very clear. Children should go to school and to preschool and to kindy, here in South Australia, and around the country, and not to do so doesn’t diminish the risk – in fact, it increases the risk and it reduces our response as a nation so the coronavirus. It will harm our ability to tackle the coronavirus. So this couldn’t be any clearer. The advice was unequivocal” [13].

Professor Brendan Murphy (Chief Health Officer of Australia) (18 March 2020):

“So it will be hard for schools, but it would be much, much, much harder for society if the schools were closed. We want our children to be looked after in schools. If they were at home, we know that they probably wouldn’t stay at home, they would probably congregate anyway and if transmission were occurring, it would happen” [17].

Scott Morrison (Coalition Prime Minister of Australia) (18 March 2020): “That [school closure] will put peoples’ lives at risk. Let’s keep our heads as parents when it comes to this. Let’s do the right thing by the country and by each other and follow the proper advice. There is a national public interest here in keeping schools open. If that were different and if that became different, then premiers and chief ministers and I would certainly come to a different view” [17].

Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) (17 March 2020):

“The AHPPC met on Tuesday 17 March to consider the issue of school closures in relation to the community transmission of COVID‑19. The Committee’s advice is that pre-emptive closures are not proportionate or effective as a public health intervention to prevent community transmission of COVID-19 at this time… Previous studies suggest that the potential reduction in community transmission from pre‑emptive school closures may be offset by the care arrangements that are in place for children who are not at school. Children may require care from older carers who are more vulnerable to severe disease, or may continue to associate (and transmit infection) outside of school settings. Broadly, the health evidence on school closures from previous respiratory epidemics shows the costs are often underestimated and the benefits are overestimated. This may be even more so in relation to COVID-19 as, unlike influenza, the impact on otherwise healthy children has been minimal to date. School closure is associated with considerable costs. Studies have estimated that around 15% of the total workforce and 30% of the healthcare workforce may need to take time off work to care for children. This burden will be significant and will fall disproportionately on those in casual or tenuous work circumstances. At this stage, the spread of COVID-19 in the community is at quite low levels. It may be many months before the level of Australian community infection is again as low as it is at the moment… More than 70 countries around the world have implemented either nationwide or localised school closures, at different times in the evolution of the local COVID-19 epidemic, however it should be noted the majority of these have not been successful in controlling the outbreak. Some of these countries are now considering their position in relation to re-opening schools. Singapore has had success in limiting the transmission of COVID-19 in the community without closing schools” [18] [however the successful period in Singapore coincided with school holidays and when students returned they were temperature-tested [12]].

Final comments

We Australian laypersons are left in a quandary – which medical experts should we believe? I am biased because as a 75-year old I am in a relatively high risk group.  However as a scientist and humanitarian I am sold on the objective  argument from the epidemiologists and mathematicians that it is crucial that actions should be maximal and fast to prevent exponentially increasing huge numbers of serious infection cases that will overwhelm medical personnel and facilities. Thus Australia presently only has  2,200 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds [8].

Some 70 countries – surely on the basis of advice from their own medical  experts – have closed schools as a key “social distancing” measure [14]. No doubt school closures will be economically very disruptive but what value does a society place on the health of teachers and school children? Sensible arrangements can be made, for example, to keep schools open for the children of  health and other emergency workers, and indeed   for the children of other parents with special circumstances. Many Australian parents have already removed their children from school, whether from the poorly funded  state schools or from the much better funded private schools.

To control the spread of COVID-19 Australia has introduced bans on non-essential mass outdoor gatherings of 500 people or more, on indoor gatherings of 100 or more, and on an indoor personal space of less than 4 square metres for an individual.  However  so far the Australian Government  has not opted for the mass closure of schools where each student is typically confined in class to the 1 square metre occupied by a desk and chair. Teachers young and old and their charges are exposed to very small “social distances” with hundreds of people each day at school, whereas everyone else in Australia  is sensibly exhorted to maximize “social distance” to help curb the epidemic.

Admittedly as a layperson,  I suspect that the refusal of the Australian Coalition Government  to close schools will eventually be overtaken by events and reversed, but in the process valuable time would have been lost in which to minimize infection in a scenario  of exponentially increasing infection. As eminent UK epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson and his 30 research colleagues stated (16 March 2020):

“We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time” [3].

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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). 

Notes

[1]. World Health Organization (WHO), “ Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public”: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

[2]. Australian Government, Department of Health, “Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) health alert”: https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert

[3]. Neil M. Ferguson and 30 colleagues. “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and health care demand”, Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, 16 March 2020: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf.

[4]. Chelsea Bruce-Lockhart, John Burn-Murdoch and Alex Barker, “The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US”, Financial Times, 19 March 2020:  https://www.ft.com/content/16764a22-69ca-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75

[5]. Australian Government, Department of Health, “Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC)” : https://www.health.gov.au/committees-and-groups/australian-health-protection-principal-committee-ahppc#members

[6]. Australian Government, Department of Health,” Coronavirus (COVID-19) current situation and case numbers”: https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers

[7]. Joel Miller, “Scott Morrison has said we’ll face at least 6 months of disruption. Where does that number come from?”, The Conversation, 19 March 2020: https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-has-said-well-face-at-least-6-months-of-disruption-where-does-that-number-come-from-134025

[8]. Caleb Ferguson, Richelle Wynne and Scott Newton: “How we’ll avoid Australia’s hospitals being crippled by coronavirus”, The Conversation, 20 March 2002:  https://theconversation.com/how-well-avoid-australias-hospitals-being-crippled-by-coronavirus-133920 .

[9]. Melissa Davey, “Thousands of Australian doctors call on government to ramp up coronavirus response”, Guardian, 17 March 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/thousands-of-australian-doctors-call-on-government-to-ramp-up-coronavirus-response

[10]. Dr Greg Kelly and 5,000 other doctors, “Open letter from Australian doctors to Australian federal and state governments re. coronavirus COVID19 response” : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScYb_XOzPsGaRsUPOK_XacES857iti_qIrSKm6YKaC8sLpxmg/viewform

[11]. Margaret Burin, “As coronavirus spreads keeping a school open becomes a fraught challenge”, ABC News, 20 March 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-21/coronavirus-covid-19-schools-open-close-principal/12072018

[12]. Norman Swan, “Coronavirus Q&A”, ABC News, 15 March 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-15/dr-norman-swan-recommends-proactive-national-lockdown/12057956

[13]. Paul Karp and Melissa Davey, “Why Australia is not shutting schools to help control spread of corona virus”, Guardian, 16 March 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/why-australia-is-not-shutting-schools-to-help-control-the-spread-of-coronavirus

[14]. Conor Duffy and Brad Ryan, “Why are schools open in Australia when coronavirus is prompting closures overseas?”, ABC News, 19 March 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-19/coronavirus-why-is-australia-keeping-schools-open/12070702

[15]. Conor Duffy and Sophie Scott, “Should I keep my children home from school due to coronavirus?”, ABC News, 16 March 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-16/should-i-keep-my-children-home-from-school-due-to-coronavirus/12058200

[16]. Kelly Burke, “Coronavirus Australia: school closures inevitable, says health expert”, 7 News, 16 March 2020: https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-australia-school-closures-inevitable-says-health-expert-c-747069

[17]. Dan Jervis-Bardy, “Student numbers down at Canberra schools due to coronavirus concerns”, Canberra Times, 18 March 2020: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6685297/student-numbers-down-at-canberra-schools-amid-covid-19-concerns/

[18]. Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) coronavirus (COVID-19) statement on 17 March 2020:  https://www.health.gov.au/news/australian-health-protection-principal-committee-ahppc-coronavirus-covid-19-statement-on-17-march-2020

In Times of Crisis, How to Prevent an Economic Meltdown and Avoid Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay, March 23, 2020

The crisis and public measures to fight it (drastic travel restrictions, social distancing, worker quarantines, etc.) have provoked a major global economic meltdown and perturbed supply chains domestically and around the world. Moreover, they have profoundly shaken financial markets already vulnerable, after years of easy money policies and round after round of so-called ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE) by central banks, which have encouraged unsustainable debt levels by pushing interest rates down at historically low levels, irresponsible large fiscal deficits by governments during prosperous times, which have enriched the very rich, and runaway unregulated financial speculation that have had the same result.

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Spinning Fear and Panic Across America. Analysis of COVID-19 Data

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 20, 2020

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, thousands of small enterprises across the land have been spearheaded into bankruptcy. Millions of families have lost their lifelong savings as a result of the collapse of stock markets. Precipitated into a debt trap, they may lose their homes.

And that scenario will not “recover” in two weeks. It’s a long term depression. What we are dealing with is the destabilization of the US economy and an engineered transfer of billions of dollars of money wealth. 

Iran’s IMF Request Shows Just How Desperate Tehran has Become

By Andrew Korybko, March 20, 2020

Requesting an IMF loan usually doesn’t mean that a country is on the brink of collapse, but the situation is altogether different in Iran’s case after the Islamic Republic asked for $5 billion worth of emergency assistance to help it deal with a series of interconnected and increasingly cascading crises that threaten to totally upend everything that it’s achieved since 1979. The combination of crippling American sanctions, the compliance with the aforesaid by the US’ “comprehensive global strategic partner” India (formerly one of Tehran’s top energy partners) out of fear of so-called “secondary sanctions”, the uncontrollable outbreak of COVID-19 in the Islamic Republic, and the authorities’ mismanaged response to all of this has putting the country on the path to regime change, as the author warned in his earlier analysis titled “Iran: Regime Change By Coronavirus?“, with the global pandemic serving as the catalyst for possibly bringing this dark scenario into fruition.

The Coronavirus, Fear, and Elitist Driven Market Insanity

By William J Murray, March 20, 2020

The headlines about seven dead in Seattle the first week of March emptied out stores and brought commerce to a standstill in that city. Shops and restaurants emptied out. With no guidance from federal, state of local officials the panic buying spread throughout the United States endangering the lives of millions of people as they coughed, sneezed and fought each other over toilet paper in Costco stores nationwide.

Coronavirus, Vaccines and the Gates Foundation

By F. William Engdahl, March 20, 2020

By 2019 Bill Gates and the foundation were going full-tilt boogie with their pandemic scenarios. He made a Netflix video which made an eerie imaginary scenario. The video, part of the “Explained” series, imagined a wet market in China where live and dead animals are stacked and a highly deadly virus erupts that spreads globally. Gates appears as an expert in the video to warn, “If you think of anything that could come along that would kill millions of people, a pandemic is our greatest risk.” He said if nothing was done to better prepare for pandemics, the time would come when the world would look back and wish it had invested more into potential vaccines. That was weeks before the world heard about bats and a live wet market in Wuhan China.

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You were told, by Western mass media outlets, to pity Uyghurs, an ethnic Chinese minority group from Xinjiang Province. You were instructed to ‘stand by them’, and to “defend their rights”.

They told you that Uyghurs are being discriminated against, and that China is, unfairly, trying to destroy their culture.

What you are not supposed to know is that many seemingly unrelated occurrences that you are following on your television screens or from the pages of your newspapers, are actually directly connected to the Uyghurs and their militant, pro-Western “World Uyghur Congress (WUC).”

You read about the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suddenly exploding, antagonizing Russia, even provoking the European Union, and sending more and more occupation troops into neighboring Syria. You could be forgiven for thinking that he has gone insane.

But no, there is actually a steely logic to his actions. For decades, Erdogan has believed that the Turkic minority ethnic group, mainly found in China’s Xinjiang Province, is the proverbial birthplace of the Turkish nation. When he was the mayor of the city of Istanbul, he even erected a small statue of a Uyghur, in the historical Sultan Ahmed neighborhood.

After the war in Syria erupted, or more precisely, after the West began an attempt to overthrow President Assad, Turkey brought militant Uyghurs from China, and began using them inside the Syrian territory. I described this in my lengthy essay “March of the Uyghurs”, published by this magazine (New Eastern Outlook). The longer version of the essay will soon be published as a book.

Turkey dragged Uyghur jihadi cadres and their families through Indonesia and other countries, supplying them with Turkish passports, for the length of the journey. It trained them in so-called refugee camps, mainly in the Hatay area (historically Syrian territory, arguably grabbed by Turkey after WWI)), eventually injecting them into Idlib (a Syrian province). There, often under the influence of combat drugs, Uyghur combatants committed crimes against humanity, murdering hundreds of men, women and children, while de-populating entire villages and towns. They have been cooperating with various terrorist groups, mainly from the Arab countries, which are still holding the area.

I interviewed several Syrian families who had fled in horror from the slaughter. I also interviewed Syrian commanders on the borders of the areas held by the terrorists, in 2019. Both the civilians and armed forces testified that they had never encountered such brutality in their entire lives.

Turkey, a NATO member, was basically doing a favor for its Western allies. The Uyghurs were injected into the Syrian jihadi battlefields, in order to get hardened even further, and eventually to return to China, disrupting peace as well as the vital “Belt and Road Initiative” – the great internationalist project of President Xi Jinping.

The restive Indonesian island of Sulawesi has also been used, although to a lesser extent, for the training of the Uyghur combatants.

Now, Turkish forces are holed up in the Idlib Governorate, directly engaging the Syrian army, while threatening the Russian military with yet another war.

Russia complains that Turkey has failed to separate terrorists from the legitimate opposition. This is actually defining the situation in extremely mild terms. Turkey is directly supporting terrorists in the Idlib area, and that includes several offshoots of what used to be known as ISIS, and by all means the Uyghurs and their contingents.

Ankara wants to rule over the region, once again, as it used to, in the past. But now it is playing an extremely complex game; it wants to re-build its empire by pitching NATO, the U.S., Europe, the terrorists, Islamists and Russia against each other.

For Turkey, the Uyghurs have just been another pawn in its brutal imperialist game.

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Even in Afghanistan – the new momentum is directly and indirectly related to the Uyghurs.

Syria is being liberated by its armed forces, and the terrorists are being gradually and silently evacuated by the Western allies, mainly Turkey. Where do they go? One of the countries is, of course, Afghanistan. Already two years ago, I was told in both Kabul and Jalalabad that ISIS were moving in huge numbers, to Afghanistan, where they operate predominantly in the rural areas.

There is no doubt that Uyghur jihadis are in Afghanistan, too. Now that thy are well-trained and hardened, they are ready to re-enter China, but also the former Soviet republics, even Russia.

All this goes in accordance with the U.S. and NATO plan.

Plus, the West recently, has been adding various distorted ‘sentimental elements’ to the conflict, portraying the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang as “victims”, twisting reality and suddenly playing what could be described as the “Muslim card”.

China has, historically, no issues with the Muslim people (it is the West that does, through colonialist and neo-colonialist adventurism). A visit to the old Chinese capital of Xi An would clearly illustrate how the Han and Muslim cultures have been inter-connected. Xi An is where the ancient “Silk Road” used to originate from, connecting China with Central Asia, and what is now defined as the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world.

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In December 2012, Global Times reported:

“The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an organization that is reportedly found to be linked to terrorist groups and receives money from Western political organizations, has long played an important role in smearing China’s policies in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and cementing Western media stereotypes of China.

Some Western media and politicians, together with the WUC, have hyped and smeared China’s policies in Xinjiang but remain silent about information released by the Chinese government or its media.

The WUC is headquartered in a low-rise building in Adolf-Kolping-Strasse near the railway station and commercial district of Munich in Germany.

The building, with an unnoticeable exterior, has become the heart of separatists from China’s Xinjiang and the mastermind behind many separatist activists in Xinjiang.

WUC’s core aim to split Xinjiang from China has never changed, Weinsheimer, a German scholar on China’s ethnic groups, told the Global Times.”

Reports like this are usually dismissed by Western propaganda and mass media as an attempt of the Chinese pro-government newspapers to cover up human rights violations against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

However, from my first-hand investigation in Turkey, Europe, Syria, Indonesia and several other parts of the world, it has become clear that China is using an even-handed approach, while facing an extremely dangerous terrorist threat on its own territory.

Even in Hong Kong, the “Uyghur issue” has been used by the West and Taiwan, as recently as in December 2019. I covered it, and as always, I have clear photographic proof.

What Global Times reported was actually only a soft reaction to the brutal policy of the West, which is aimed at breaking the most populous country on earth – PRC – into pieces.

That is why I periodically address this topic, which is so unpopular, even hidden, in the West.

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The Uyghurs are at the frontline of the West’s combat against China.

Washington, London, Berlin have several fronts open against Beijing. Various different types of fronts, too: economic, political, ideological, and even military.

To harm China (and Russia, Iran, Venezuala and others) is the main goal of Western foreign policy.

The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) is ready to assist the United States, Europe and NATO (particularly Turkey) in their efforts to hurt China, and to disrupt BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).

Why? It is because BRI is the worst nightmare for Western neo-colonialism. I explain it in my recent book: “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives”. China is deeply involved in this tremendous project which I often describe as the final stage of global de-colonialization. Russia is increasingly participating, too; in various cases even taking the lead.

The West cannot offer anything positive, optimistic. It is smearing China and Russia, and overthrowing or intimidating governments which do not want to sacrifice millions of their people on the altar of brutal extreme capitalism and Western imperialism. The Western mass media is warning writers not to use such “outdated terms”. Rubbish: they are not outdated; they are real! Imperialism never ended. Colonialism is still plundering and ruining dozens of countries on all continents.

China and Russia, as well as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Cuba and others, are fighting for the wretched of the world. As simple as that.

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The WUC and its ‘president’, Dolkun Isa, have clearly decided to take the money and accept the diktat of the West.

Simultaneously, by hosting the headquarters of the WUC on its territory, Germany, once again, has decided to play an extremely negative role in global politics. No wonder, German flags are now flying all over Hong Kong, alongside the U.S. and U.K. ones, whenever the rioters decide to hit the streets. Germany foolheartedly backs the Hong Kong rioters, as well as the WUC.

By now, both Germany and Turkey have made up their minds, by joining forces with Washington and London, against the People’s Republic of China and its right to live a safe existence. It is a very dangerous situation, but it is real, and there is no reason to hide the reality.

The Uyghur extremists were designated to detonate both China and the progressive part of the world.

China is trying to calm the situation down, to negotiate in good faith. It is not easy.

The West, Turkey and the extremist Muslim forces operating all over the world, are pressing the radical Uyghurs and their WUC into a horrendous and bloody confrontation with Beijing.

It is time to make the situation known. The West’s game, deadly and enormously dangerous, must be exposed.

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

Below are an interview I gave to the Herland Report prior to the coronavirus explaining our precarious economic situation and Michael Hudson’s article today explaining that the way out of the economic crisis is a debt jubilee.  As the debts cannot be paid, it makes far more sense to forgive them than for all of us to sink with them. Debt cancellation is not an expression of idealistic egalitarianism. It is a practical alternative to prolonged depression and worse economic polarization with all of its social and political implications.

The central point of my interview is that deregulation and concentration of the economy and its financialization has made another severe depression unavoidable—unless possibly there is a debt jubilee as Michael Hudson recommends.  See this. 

The question we face is whether our leadership can understand that more debt is not the answer.  So far “solutions” seem to be to make more loans, thereby continuing to build up debt. As existing debts—mortgage, student, car, credit card—are so overwhelming that they cannot be paid, adding more loans is like throwing fuel on a fire.

Debts have to be cancelled as they are smothering individuals, businesses, and the economy. Our economic culture is accustomed to thinking that debt must be paid. The belief is that to reward those who did not live frugally and avoid debt subsidizes and encourages bad behavior. But in this case, unless debts are forgiven the frugal and responsible go down with everyone else.  As I have emphasized for 20 or more years, globalism stopped real family income growth by offshoring high-value added jobs.  Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve used debt expansion to take the place of income growth in order to continue to fuel aggregate consumer demand.

Debt forgiveness has a long history of success.  The ancients used it repeatedly, and in 1948 in Germany, the replacement of the Reichsmark with the Deutsche mark wiped out 90 percent of government and private debt, resulting in “the German miracle.”

Government debt is not the problem that private debt is.  Government can pay off its debt by printing money, but individuals and businesses cannot.  As Hudson says,

“if the U.S. government can finance $4.5 trillion in quantitative easing for the banks, it can absorb the cost of forgoing student and other debt. And for private lenders, only bad loans need be wiped out. Much of what would be written off are accruals, late charges and penalties on loans gone bad.”

Debt forgiveness for banks and large corporations implies some nationalization so that the public sees some fairness in the bailouts of debt.  Essentially, quantitative easing was debt forgiveness for too-big-to-fail financial institutions.  The Federal Reserve purchased the banks’ bad loans and put them on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.  Unlike a bank, the Federal Reserve cannot go broke.  Our economic culture also sees nationalization as socialism and an awful terrible thing.  I addressed that issue on March 14, see this. 

Our ingrained ways of thinking can easily prevent a solution to the current crisis, which is building as I write.

Here is a link to Hudson’s article.

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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.

The COVID-19 virus outbreak is taking lives around the world while at the same time exposing the weaknesses and absurdity of the capitalist system. The most advanced capitalist countries have already shown that they are unprepared and helpless in swiftly managing to control the inevitable public health emergencies; just as they are incompetent to take preventive measures and respond to the natural disasters such as Fires, Floods, Hurricanes and Earthquakes. Capitalism as an economic system is obsolete, destructive and pernicious.

With the news of COVID-19 virus outbreak, at first, the “leaders” downplayed the seriousness of the situation, then in a chaotic manner, they made people fearful of an unknown future while preaching for them to be calm!

So far, to different degrees, this scenario has been repeated in every capitalist country. In the United States, at daily White House briefings, authorities in charge toss around one solution after another just to contradict themselves the next day. For days they kept promising that soon everybody would be able to be tested for COVID-19 virus, while in fact only a few wealthy people had access to these tests and the lab results. The only constant advice has been to wash your hands and “Social Distancing”.

But “Social Distancing” which does prevent the spread of the virus to a certain degree, also exasperates other underlying and excruciating problems for the majority of people. It is unclear how long this could last. This temporary solution actually raises more questions for the average American with extended family that live in one household.

How is a single mother with two school-age children, who lives paycheck to paycheck suppose to deal with “Social Distancing”? Is a voluntary quarantine, “Social Distancing” and not going to work really practical for the low income working families? Abigail Hess, CNBC Reporter in her article titled “Widespread school closures mean 30 million kids might go without meals” reminds us the sad reality that “Amidst school closures, many fear that millions of students will go hungry.” Undoubtedly any temporary solution even in the best circumstances, such as financial aid and relief programs (stimulus package), would not change the unprecedented inequality, the underlying 21st-century problem.

The ruling elites in the U.S. have already concluded that the current system of governing is a dead-end path that demands a new system of governance. On March 18th, President Trump declared himself as the “Wartime President” to contain the spread of Coronavirus.

That is a day after Defense Secretary Mark Esper assured everyone that “the U.S. military, including the National Guard, is actively seeking ways to help dampen the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. …In that context, our second focus has been on supporting the president and the whole-of-government approach to the Coronavirus [emphasis added].” 

This will be the first time that the U.S. military is helping the government by putting its “medical foot” on U.S. soil to “protect” the lives of the American people. But by admission of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Jonathan Rath Hoffman “the U.S. military’s skills are not best suited for treating respiratory diseases [emphasis added]”! It is needless to remind readers that historically when the U.S. military is assigned to “help” and “protect” people from their enemy, the first casualty will be the freedom and the democratic rights of the very people who are being helped!

In this regard, the fascistic-minded “Wartime President” did not waste a moment to invoke the cold war “Defense Production Act” which gives him power over production decisions and economic direction under the guise of fighting the Coronavirus “pandemic”.

Now that the fear factor has shaped the American public opinion to accept that they are in a dire situation of an uncontrollable global “PANDEMIC” (which in fact is only an outbreak based on the minute number of people who have lost their lives to COVID-19 virus).

Now that corrupt media instead of reporting the facts and focusing on the real issues are distracting Americans with their sensational “journalism”, The prospect of a total military lockdown is conceivable. 

Today’s crisis, in many ways, resonates with the experience of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. At that time, the American people were shocked by a series of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. In 2001, the majority of people accepted the official narrative about these attacks, the origin and those who committed these heinous crimes. But soon many contradictions became apparent and did not support the official narrative. Honest people did not accept the official story as to why “building seven” in the World Trade Center complex (which was not hit directly), collapsed in a controlled demolition style! They were puzzled about the attack against the Pentagon at that time and still are perplexed regarding what happened to the airplane that supposedly hit and made a small hole on the side of the building, without a trace of any plane wreckage or remains of its passengers?

In this light, it is not farfetched nor unreasonable to speculate about the origin of this virus. Mr. Trump insists that this virus is “Chinese”. Mr. Pompeo repeatedly referring to the new Coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus”. The Trump Administration and commercial media, in full force, are spreading the xenophobia against Chinese people in general and Chinese-American citizens in particular. Just like September 11, once again a group of people have been singled out and terrorized through unsubstantiated and fake news, in this case, Chinese-American communities.

Honest and democratic-minded people are not convinced of the government narrative about the outbreak of COVID-19 virus. There are many credible documents and studies available that suggest this virus did not originate from the market in the city of Wuhan in China.

Among those scientists who are working diligently to find a cure for COVID-19 virus, many are not surprised by the emergence of this virus. Coronaviruses generally have been a major focus of scientific research for the past four decades. Scientists already had experience with the famous human disease known as SARS- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. But SARS was only a warning shot. Susan Weiss, PhD, a professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine who has been researching in this field since 1980 says: “It is gratifying to see how those years of research and mentoring can aid during health crises. One lesson to be learned is that it is crucial to support basic research that may not seem to have an immediate impact on human health.”(1)

Many scientists, investigative journalists are writing and talking reasonably about the factual issues surrounding this outbreak. Professor Michel Chossudovsky in his article “Coronavirus COVID-19: ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made in America’?” explains the economic objective of the U.S. propaganda: “While the ‘Made in China’ Coronavirus label served as a pretext, the unspoken objective was to bring the Chinese economy to its knees. … It was an act of ‘economic warfare’, which has contributed to undermining both China’s economy as well as that of most Western countries (allies of the US), leading to a wave of bankruptcies, not to mention unemployment, collapse of the tourist industry, etc.”(2)

Larry Romanoff in his latest article “Why Is the US Apparently Not Testing for the COVID-19 Coronavirus?” writes:

The “US has done only around 450 tests while … a Chinese firm has put into mass production a highly-accurate test for COVID-19 that has received the highest level of European certification and that is now being marketed worldwide.”(3)

The politicians and “pundits” are busy these days comparing today’s crisis with World War II and how the capitalists in the U.S. at that time succeeded to transfer the entire industry to a wartime industry – an industry for destruction!

However, since the end of the last world war, not one capitalist has invested in building specialized non-profit hospitals equipped with the latest modern medical technology and training a large number of medical specialists free of charge to be ready for operation at the time of outbreak public health crisis like today! It is obvious now that the health system in the U.S. is starving and ill. It is impossible to contain this virus by a nationalistic ideology and closed border policy. This is a global crisis and it needs a global solution. The unproductive trade war measures and insane sanctions against Iran, Venezuela and other countries must end now.

More than ever, working people need to rely on their own organizations to change the current miserable situation that is created by a few wealthy people. With the upcoming election, working people should not put their trust and energy in the 1% candidates of either Democratic or Republican parties. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden with their far-right agenda represent Wall Street and are in conflict with the interest of hard working people. Mr. Sanders the “Socialist” once again like his Social Democrat ancestors, has shown his loyalty to the 1% capitalists and has successfully delivered the enthusiastic avant-garde youth to the political slaughterhouse of the Democratic Party as he did in 2016 Presidential Election.

Today, besides the COVID-19 crisis, the entire world economy is facing a major meltdown. Capitalists for centuries have exploited humans and nature to the point of extinction. Only the real producers are able to create prosperous democratic societies and flourishing environment that humans and all other species would enjoy the infinite natural sources in harmony. An economic system that puts profit over people actually functions like a deadly virus that gradually would destroy human societies and makes much of the world uninhabitable. It is time to organize for a radical change.

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1- “The Biology of Coronaviruses: From the Lab to the Spotlight” – by Rachel Ewing

2- www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-covid-19-made-in-china-or-made-in-america/5706272

3- www.globalresearch.ca/why-us-apparently-not-testing-covid-19-coronavirus/5705721

Featured image is from the author

Earlier global crises were manufactured to enhance the power of US ruling authorities, serve corporate favorites, and transfer wealth from ordinary people to privileged ones.

Since the neoliberal 1990s alone, that’s what the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, 2000 dot.com bust, and 2008-09 financial crisis were all about.

Is that what’s behind COVID-19 fear-mongering, lockdowns, and market turmoil? Are things not what they seem?

If past is prologue, what was manufactured before appears to be happening again — establishment media playing a key roll as before by scaring the public to death.

While great care needs to be taken to prevent a highly infectious disease like COVID-19 from spreading, public angst generated by fear-mongering suggests motives other than protecting public health are in play.

Notably since the neoliberal 90s, US-led Western governments, in cahoots with corporate favorites, consolidated greater power and transferred enormous wealth from ordinary people to privileged interests.

For decades, monied interests never had things better, profiting hugely from market manipulated casino capitalism — at the expense of the public welfare.

Since the 2008-09 Wall Street orchestrated financial crisis, protracted Depression conditions adversely affected ordinary people in the US and elsewhere.

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, food insecurity, hunger, overall deprivation and human suffering are growth industries in the US and West.

While Washington spends unlimited trillions of dollars for militarism, forever wars, and homeland security to protect privileged interests from nonbelievers, vital popular needs to health and welfare increasingly go begging.

The world’s richest country doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority of its people, just its privileged class.

Class warfare pits private wealth against public health and welfare. For decades in the US, wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. Benefits steadily eroded.

High-paying jobs with good benefits disappeared by offshoring to low-wage countries.

Improved technology forced wage earners to work harder for less. So-called free markets work only for elements that control them. See below.

Powerful interests benefit from class struggle by exploiting ordinary people with bipartisan support from Washington.

Instead of governance of, by, and for everyone equitably, only the privileged few are served.

Until the late 1970s in America, new generations were better off financially than previous ones — no longer by institutionalized inequality.

The notion that markets move randomly is pure fiction. They’re manipulated up and down to serve monied interests.

Schemes include pumping and dumping, naked short-selling, precious metals price suppression, illegally profiting from inside information unavailable to the public, and government/Fed intervention to serve privileged interests at the expense of the public welfare.

Banks and other corporate favorites get bailouts, ordinary people sold out by their ruling authorities.

In cahoots with government, powerful private interests create financial shocks to eliminate competition and consolidate to greater size and power by buying damaged assets cheap.

Financial history in the US and elsewhere has numerous examples of preying on the weak, crushing competition, socializing risks, privatizing profits, and redistributing wealth upward to a financial oligarchy, creating tollbooth economies in debt bondage, getting what Michael Hudson calls a “free lunch” for privileged interests at the public’s expense.

When foxes guard the henhouse, new ways are invented to get a “free lunch” by creating crises for greater consolidation of wealth and power.

Orwell might have put it this way. At times like now, instability is stability, creating systemic risk is containing it, sloping playing fields are level ones, extracting maximum profit is sharing it, and what benefits the few helps everyone.

Market collapses can be hugely profitable for powerful insiders.

Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators created an environment that serves speculation through futures, options, index funds, derivative securities, and short-selling, etc.

At times like now, greater concentration of wealth and power can be achieved at the expense of savers, seniors,  other ordinary people, and personal freedoms.

The road to tyranny is paved with ill-intentions. It’s happening in the US, West, and elsewhere in plain sight.

A Final Comment

Michael Hudson explained that lockdowns, social distancing, mass layoffs, crashing markets, and corporate bailouts “threat(en) a (global) depression,” adding:

History shows “it doesn’t have to be this way.” Hudson’s solution is “a debt jubilee…(R)estore…balance (by) slate-cleaning…”

“(W)hen debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.”

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions. Ones taken by America’s oligarchy benefit privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others.

This time is highly likely to be no different than earlier in the US.

Hard times are likely to get much harder for ordinary Americans while favored interests benefit greatly from what’s going on.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Asia Times

What will change in our lives after Covid? It’s a big question. One answer is – a lot. Another is – whatever happens, it won’t be the same again. Both are true. Another truth is that the government have now backed themselves into a no-win position.

Carelessly, the Boris Johnson administration, led by Dominic Cummings, decided that infecting everyone nice-n-easy would be best. Then it decided to take the crisis nice-n-easy itself and not do much even though the evidence by scientists (in their hundreds), experts in other countries, warnings from the World Health Organisation and from medics in the NHS was that it should take it seriously. When the government did react, it typically tried to instil a wartime spirit with a populist masquerading as a Churchillian leader.

For now, all the evidence suggests that Britain is going to go the same way as Italy. If it does, it will be a disaster on every level and the government will not survive it. But what if those expectations are not met? Another outcome will be an economy on its knees. National debt will hit 100 per cent of GDP within a year, household debt will hit 150 per cent of income within months. Unemployment will soar, businesses will collapse and the dreams of many will vapourise.

If the government was so worried about people when its sacrificed the economy to protect them, why then did it not go further to protect them against the tobacco industry or the manufacturers who have so heavily contributed to diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory diseases and heart disease. These are the very groups statistically most at risk from this coronavirus. Why did they not encourage everyone to change their behaviour or force manufacturers to reduce all the other poisons in our modern diets or do something about air quality?

Now that the government is about to spend more than the infrastructure budget it proposed just a few weeks ago – is HS2 more important that the desperately needed £106billion it will cost, than say pumping that directly into businesses to get people back to work? The cost of Brexit to the economy, according to the governments own calculations will be a huge 5 per cent decline in GDP if a deal is done with the EU. If not – that hit will be an eye-watering 7 to 9 per cent – more even that the toll taken by 2008 crisis. Could the country even afford it? Is it now worth the risk?

Brexit has exposed something else. Since the referendum, 14,000 medics from the EU have left the service and there has been an 87 per cent fall in applications from the EU. It’s a staffing crisis that has led the government to appeal to those retired or that have left the service to come back and help fight the virus. Many left in the first place because of the way they were treated by the government. When Britain is still burying the victims of this virus will the question be asked if it was worth the increased risk of Brexit to the very people who largely voted for it? Or will there be a sea-change in the way we fund the NHS?

The entire mainstream media, who spent two years claiming Jeremy Corbyn would bankrupt the economy and turn it into Venezuela – are not actually asking where Rishi Sunak is going to get all this money from – and more importantly, ultimately who is going to pay for it. It turned out at the last budget that the Tories were going to spend even more than Corbyn would have, then the CoVid crisis came along. So it turns out there was a money tree after all.

Will the question be asked – why was its low hanging fruit not plucked after the bank-led financial crisis in 2008 – itself classed as an existential crisis by the leadership of the day? The suits in The City of London got a half a trillion in cash and a lot more in loan guarantees to prop up criminal operations that gambled our money at a boys club casino and lost. Everyone else was punished for it and 120,000 people are known to have lost their lives over the policy to recover that money that in the end, never turned up.

Then there’s government assistance being dished out to fight this crisis. But it comes with strings attached. Small company owners are being asked to put the title deeds of their homes up to qualify for loans. Businesses have to lay-off employees to claim wage support. It won’t help them keep going if they had to fire staff to qualify. And there’s nearly 5 million self-employed – about 15 per cent of the entire workforce who qualify for nothing. And those who rent their homes, and there are nearly 5 million households (not individuals) of them who represent 63 per cent of all households today. How are they going to pay?

The CoVid Cads

Some people, once considered the titan’s and captain’s of industry are proving themselves to be who they really are in a crisis. Take Sir Stelios at EasyJet. He has sparked outrage after paying shareholders £174 million in dividends whilst at the same time appealing for taxpayer support because of the coronavirus pandemic. Of that £174million, £60 million goes straight into the pocket of Stelios. Richard Branson is another. The multi-billionaire offshore tax haven tycoon, whose company is mostly owned by foreign investors sticks his ugly rapacious head up asking British taxpayers for a bailout the same week as he dumps thousands of staff without pay. It makes you want to spit! There would be public outrage, probably worse if bailouts to billionaires happened.

Donald Trump is another who is demonstrating what a lunatic he is in times of crisis. Who in this world is looking towards America for leadership in this global crisis? No-one at all is the answer. The foremost super-power is about to get a dose of its own reality. Its healthcare system is demanding an astonishing $35,000 to help if anyone gets a nasty dose of CoVid-19 – a pandemic that Trump has blamed on political opponents, called a hoax, is just a cold, then flu – and in desperation is now blaming the Chinese and even demanding financial reparations from them. There are 27 million Americans with no health care insurance.

China had the advantage of being an authoritarian regime – so it brutally crushed CoVid by ruthlessly stifling the movement of its people, enforced mass testing and isolation. It is back in action after three months and its economy is gearing up again. In the meantime, America has been warned by its own economists that the hit to its economy could be a staggering 24 per cent of GDP. One wonders what that might look like in six months time with is gun-toting, opiate-fuelled populace and armed-to-the-teeth police state.

China is already significantly assisting European and African nations combat this deadly threat with tangible help. America, in contrast, is threatening others by attempting to take potential vaccines for itself and profit from it and is shipping nothing. It continues with its trade wars, financial and trade sanctions to its perceived enemies and savagely stifling desperate efforts to buy in medical supplies and equipment to save people. And when America comes out of the other side of this crisis and sees it has been pushed into the No2 slot of world super-power by GDP by China, what will it do to regain its title? Attack it?

Britain might ask itself, why would anyone in their right minds do a trade deal or any deal with a country like that? Britain is a geographical halfway staging post between America and China – we could be dragged into a battle we’d have no chance of surviving, especially without our European neighbours. We might demand that our politicians not take that risk.

What will these questions be when this crisis is under control? One thing is for sure – Britain has already proved to itself it is no longer the stoic stiff upper lipped nation who will just keep calm and carry on. Just look at the stunned key workers who turned up after gruelling shifts at the supermarkets stripped of essential goods for that. Just look at its response to the Prime Minister’s appeal to stay at home – they didn’t believe him, went out and got drunk instead.

Public opinion rapidly changing.

Brexit was the number one issue facing the country according to voters in October last year. Indeed, 70 per cent thought so. Then the global pandemic hit the news and by the end of January, Brexit had fallen to 52 per cent as the number one issue facing the country and one month later to 43 per cent. By the end of March, you can imagine Brexit will be the very last thing on people’s minds. Health and the environment were the next two most important issues on voters minds at the time. Fighting crime was next and only then did the economy appear on the list – languishing in fifth place.

Today, health will be by far the number one issue on people’s mind. But when this is over, will attention turn to the economy? Will educating our next generation be more important to help our battered economy recover and fixing the environment – a crisis on its own be up there as more important? And Will Brexit be seen as something we should never have contemplated after all this? Will the government itself be challenged for withholding funds to fight this crisis when it was given two years forewarning this was coming?

Right now, as we are finding out, it is the power of people that is moving the government, not the other way around and whatever happens politically and economically, our culture and politics will surely be changed forever. Will we be better for it? Or worse?

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Today, Center for Food Safety (CFS) on behalf of a broad coalition of farmworkers, farmers, and conservationists, filed a federal lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its January 2020 re-approval of the pesticide glyphosate, best known as the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup pesticides. The suing organizations are CFS, Beyond Pesticides, the Rural Coalition, Organización en California de Lideres Campesinas, and the Farmworker Association of Florida.

While EPA defends glyphosate, juries in several cases have found it to cause cancer, ruling in favor of those impacted by exposure. Glyphosate formulations like Roundup are also well-established as having numerous damaging environmental impacts. After a registration review process spanning over a decade, EPA allowed the continued marketing of the pesticide despite the agency’s failure to fully assess glyphosate’s hormone-disrupting potential or its effects on threatened and endangered species. The review began in 2009, has already taken 11 years, without a full assessment of the widespread harmful impacts on people and the environment in that time period.

“EPA’s half-completed, biased, and unlawful approval sacrifices the health of farmworkers and endangered species at the altar of Monsanto profits,” said George Kimbrell, legal director for CFS and counsel for the coalition. “The reckoning for Roundup is coming.”

While EPA has declared that glyphosate does not cause cancer, the world’s foremost cancer authorities with the World Health Organization declared glyphosate to be ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ in 2015. Over 40,000 lawsuits have been filed against the Monsanto (recently acquired by Bayer) by cancer victims asserting that exposure to Roundup caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, including many farmworkers. Plaintiffs have prevailed in the three cases decided thus far, with victims awarded roughly $80 million in each case.

“Contrary to the Trump EPA’s claims, both regulatory and independent scientific studies demonstrate that glyphosate herbicides are carcinogenic and have adverse effects on internal organs,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at CFS. “Far from consulting the ‘best available science,’ as EPA claims, the agency has relied almost entirely on Monsanto studies, cherry-picking the data that suits its purpose and dismissing the rest,” added Freese. “EPA’s glyphosate decision shows the same hostility to science that we’ve come to expect from this administration, whether the issue is climate change or environmental health.”

EPA judged glyphosate far more critically in the 1980s, when the agency designated it a possible carcinogen and identified harmful effects on the liver, kidney, and reproductive systems. Thanks to pressure from Monsanto/Bayer, EPA has since dismissed these harms and illegitimately raised the safety threshold – the daily amount of glyphosate regarded as safe over a lifetime – by 20 times.

“The farmworkers and farmers we serve are the backbone of our food system. Their families are the first – but are not the last – to bear the huge costs of EPA’s irresponsible decision, while corporate shareholders of Monsanto-Bayer benefit,” said Lorette Picciano, executive director of the Rural Coalition.

EPA has also failed to collect basic data on how much glyphosate is taken into human bodies via skin contact or inhalation of spray droplets. These exposure routes are particularly significant for farmworkers and others who work around and/or use Roundup, the very people who are at greatest risk of cancer and other health harms.

“How many more farmworkers have to suffer health impacts to themselves and their families before EPA “sees” them – the “invisible people” – and takes action?” said Jeannie Economos of the Farmworker Association of Florida. “EPA must protect human health before one more person suffers acute or chronic illness from exposure.”

“Farmworkers are on the front lines of the pesticide exposure crisis providing vital food for American families,” said Suguet Lopez of the Organización en California de Lideres Campesinas. “They deserve a duty of care from the government which it has failed to provide.”

Glyphosate herbicides also threaten numerous species, including fish, amphibians, and aquatic as well as terrestrial plants. EPA discounts these risks by low-balling exposure estimates and ignoring critical studies showing glyphosate’s potency, and by relying on ineffective and toothless changes to the language on glyphosate herbicide product labels to “mitigate” risks. Even worse, despite again registering the pesticide, EPA failed to complete any assessment of its impacts on thousands of potentially harmed endangered species, delaying it until a future decision.

“EPA failed to consider if Roundup disrupts the balance of nature and ecosystem health, critical to the survival of a vast number of organisms on which life depends – from beneficial insects, such as parasitoid wasps, lacewings, ladybugs, and endangered bumblebees, monarch butterflies, to fish, small mammals, and amphibians,” said Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides.

To give just one example, the massive use of glyphosate has nearly eradicated milkweed, the monarch butterfly’s host plant, from Midwest farmers’ fields, a major factor in the catastrophic decline in monarchs over the past two decades. Even though monarchs are under consideration for protection under the Endangered Species Act, EPA’s registration decision contains no effective measures to protect milkweed and monarchs from still more glyphosate damage.

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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

First published in October 2009. Relevant to the COVID-19 current crisis

When the Lie becomes the Truth, There is Moving Backwards.

When war becomes peace,

When concepts and realities are turned upside down,

When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction.

When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor, 

When the killing of civilians is upheld as “collateral damage”, 

When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as “insurgents” or “terrorists”.  

When preemptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense.

When advanced torture and “interrogation” techniques are routinely used to “protect peacekeeping operations”,

When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”

When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as “national defense” 

When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,

When the Lie becomes the Truth, There is No Moving Backwards…

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Obama’s “War Without Borders”

We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity.

At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon’s “Long War”:  “A War without Borders” in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might.

Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons.

Since the very outset of the Obama presidency, this global military project has become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the World  and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecdented scale.

Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama provides legitimacy to the illegal practices of war, to the military occupation of foreign lands, to the relentless killings of civilians in the name of “democracy”.

Both the Obama administration and NATO are directly threatening Russia, China and Iran. The US under Obama is developing “a First Strike Global Missile Shield System”:

“Along with space-based weapons, the Airborne Laser is the next defense frontier. … Never has Ronald Reagan’s dream of layered missile defenses – Star Wars, for short – been as….close, at least technologically, to becoming realized.”

Reacting to this consolidation, streamlining and upgrading of American global nuclear strike potential, on August 11 the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, the same Alexander Zelin cited earlier on the threat of U.S. strikes from space on all of his nation, said that the “Russian Air Force is preparing to meet the threats resulting from the creation of the Global Strike Command in the U.S. Air Force” and that Russia is developing “appropriate systems to meet the threats that may arise.” (Rick Rozoff, Showdown with Russia and China: U.S. Advances First Strike Global Missile Shield System, Global Research, August 19, 2009)

At no time since the Cuban missile crisis has the World been closer to the unthinkable: a World War III scenario, a global military conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons.

1. The so-called missile defense shield or Star Wars initiative involving the first strike use of nuclear weapons is now to be developed globally in different regions of the World. The missile shield is largely directed against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

2. New US military bases have been set up with a view to establishing US spheres of influence in every region of the World as well as surrounding and confronting Russia and China.

3. There has been an escalation in the Central Asian Middle East war. The “defense budget” under Obama has spiraled with increased allocations to both Afghanistan and Iraq.

4.  Under orders of president Obama, acting as Commander in Chief, Pakistan is now the object of routine US aerial bombardments in violation of its territorial sovereignty, using the “Global War on Terrorism” as a justification.

5. The construction of new military bases is envisaged in Latin America including Colombia on the immediate border of Venezuela.

6. Military aid to Israel has increased. The Obama presidency has expressed its unbending support for Israel and the Israeli military. Obama has remained mum on the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. There has not even been a semblance of renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

7. There has been a reinforcement of the new regional commands including AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM

8. A new round of threats has been directed against Iran.

9. The US is intent upon fostering further divisions between Pakistan and India, which could lead to a regional war, as well as using India’s nuclear arsenal as an indirect means to threaten China.

The diabolical nature of this military project was outlined in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC’s declared objectives are:

defend the American homeland;

fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;

perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;

transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs;” (Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses.pdf, September 2000)

The “Revolution in Military Affairs” refers to the development of new advanced weapons systems. The militarization of space, new advanced chemical and biological weapons, sophisticated laser guided missiles, bunker buster bombs, not to mention the US Air Force’s climatic warfare program (HAARP) based in Gokona, Alaska, are part of Obama’s  “humanitarian arsenal”.

War against the Truth

This is a war against the truth.  When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer possible.  An inquisitorial social system emerges.

An understanding of fundamental social and political events is replaced by a World of sheer fantasy, where “evil folks” are lurking. The objective of the “Global War on Terrorism” which has been fully endorsed by Obama administration, has been to galvanize public support for a Worldwide campaign against heresy.

In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a “just cause” for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds. The consensus is to wage war. People can longer think for themselves. They accept the authority and  wisdom of the established social order.

The Nobel Committee says that President Obama has given the world “hope for a better future.” The prize is awarded for Obama’s

“extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

…His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population. (Nobel Press Release, October 9, 2009)

The granting of the Nobel “peace prize” to president Barack Obama has become an integral part of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine. It provides a human face to the invaders, it upholds the demonization of those who oppose US military intervention.

The decision to grant Obama the Nobel  Peace Prize was no doubt carefully negotiated with the Norwegian Committee at the highest levels of the US government. It has far reaching implications.

It unequivocally upholds the US led war as a “Just Cause”. It erases the war crimes committed both by the Bush and Obama administrations.

War Propaganda:  Jus ad Bellum

The “Just war” theory serves to camouflage the nature of US foreign policy, while providing a human face to the invaders.

In both its classical and contemporary versions, the Just war theory upholds war as a “humanitarian operation”. It calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against “insurgents”, “terrorists”, “failed” or “rogue states”.

The Just War has been heralded by the Nobel Committee as an instrument of Peace. Obama personifies the “Just War”.

Taught in US military academies, a modern-day version of the “Just War” theory has been embodied into US military doctrine. The “war on terrorism” and the notion of “preemption” are predicated on the right to “self defense.” They define “when it is permissible to wage war”: jus ad bellum.

Jus ad bellum has served to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It has also served to convince the troops that they are fighting for a “just cause”. More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda. Under Obama as Nobel Peace Laureate, the Just War becomes universally accepted, upheld by the so-called international community.

The ultimate objective is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the US NATO led war.

War becomes peace, a worthwhile “humanitarian undertaking”,  Peaceful dissent becomes heresy.

Military Escalation with a Human Face. Nobel Committee grants the “Green Light” 

More significantly, the Nobel peace prize grants legitimacy to an unprecedented  “escalation”  of US-NATO led military operations under the banner of peacemaking.

It contributes to falsifying the nature of the US-NATO military agenda.

Between 40,000 to 60,000 more US and allied troops are to be sent to Afghanistan under a peacemaking banner. On the 8th of October, a day prior to the Nobel Committee’s decision, the US Congress granted Obama a 680-billion-dollar defense authorization bill, which is slated to finance the process of military escalation:

“Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year”.

The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.

Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of “perhaps as many as 45,000.”

The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America’s obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan’s history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced. (Rick Rozoff, U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’s History, Global Research, September 24, 2009)

Within hours of the decision of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Obama met with the War Council, or should we call it the “Peace Council”. This meeting had been carefully scheduled to coincide with that of the Norwegian Nobel committee.

This key meeting behind closed doors in the Situation Room of the White House included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and key political and military advisers. General  Stanley McChrystal participated in the meeting via video link from Kabul.

General Stanley McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief “several alternative options” “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”. The 60,000 figure was quoted following a leak of the Wall Street Journal (AFP: After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council, October 9, 2009)

“The president had a robust conversation about the security and political challenges in Afghanistan and the options for building a strategic approach going forward,” according to an administration official (quoted in AFP: After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council  October 9, 2009)

The Nobel committee had in a sense given Obama a green light.  The October 9 meeting in the Situation Room was to set the groundwork for a further escalation of the conflict under the banner of counterinsurgency and democracy building.

Meanwhile, in the course of the last few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of village communities in the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, under the banner of combating Al Qaeda.

AMERICA’S “WAR ON TERRORISM”

by Michel Chossudovsky

CLICK TO ORDER

America’s “War on Terrorism”

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Chossudovsky peels back layers of rhetoric to reveal a complex web of deceit aimed at luring the American people and the rest of the world into accepting a military solution which threatens the future of humanity.

The last chapter includes an analysis of the London  7/7 Bomb Attacks.

CLICK TO ORDER (mail order or online order)

America’s “War on Terrorism”

Author’s Note: Following is a somewhat fictionalized account based on factual circumstances.

I’m feeling numb. My throat is tight. My breath is short. I look outside. The street is empty. I look inside. Can’t see my lover; she’s on the other side of the door. Double-quarantined am I. Got my wires crossed with Coronavirus.

“In domus”, and out. Am I alone in this?

Local news says “whole city shut down by invisible foe”.

National news screams “whole country in lockdown”.

My heart is racing now.

World news moans “whole world in grips of terror”. Terror? What terror? Who’s terror? A weird terror I can’t see nor smell. My head drops.

This “thing” is too big. I can’t grasp its breadth; I gasp for breath. The whole world has shut down. Like some humongous, cavernous boarded-up Michigan car plant. Bugged by this what – virus – Co o o v v I – can’t even bring myself to say it. Nor conceive of it. My arms are heavy. Caught in the backdraft of the media onslaught of self-contradictory “BREAKING NEWS”. I can’t get my brain to turn over.

I shuffle my lead-laden legs to my man-cave. AH HA! A voice from the TV screen. A young, innocent voice that asks “How you like Lockdown?”

I’m taken aback. I answer “Why ask?” Six-year-old Ayesha asks on, “Has a bad man thrown bombs on your house?

Shot the knees out of your brother? Killed your baby sister?” “No”, I answer. “I am only isolated and disoriented. I’m scared I will get very sick.” Ayesha answers “I am already sick! My chest is burning. I am choking. The big, scowling man in the Knesset is blocking my medicine from coming into Gaza.” Her father Mustafa yells, “No masks, no test kits, no respirators. Full blockade. No food either. Only bombs and IDF snipers. NO HOPE. Why does Canada support Netanyahu?”, I see Mustafa’s eyes pleading, accusing. “I’m hungry” cries out Ayesha. “Why do they want me dead?”

Another voice arises from the TV screen.

A thin, weak voice. Pablito from Valencia, Venezuela. “I feel so hot. Ooooh, huuuh. I can’t see.” “We have to go to hospital! The insulin finished” cries his mother. “We can’t”, says his father. “The car’s transmission is broken”.

“Fix it”, says Mother. “I can’t. Trump is strangling us with sanctions. Can’t import parts.

Wouldn’t help anyway. The bridge was fire-bombed by Colombian paramilitaries. NO PARTS because of Trump and Canada sanctions.”

“Up to now, we were dying of hunger and diabetes because the US steals our insulin and our oil” says Uncle Alejandro.

“Now, this COVID could crush many more of us. Do you see the US ships blocking the medicine and food ships from China?” “We beat them back before.” says neighbor Alfredo. “We’ll do it again”. “Where is my sister?” whimpers Pablito. “She went to look for Abuela in Columbia. Bad men kidnapped her; are hurting her” says Mother, weeping uncontrollably now. Holding her son tightly as he coughs; his small body arching in pain, air hissing achingly from his lungs. He stops breathing. “NO PARTS.” “ONLY SANCTIONS”.

Bahadur, walking heavily, back bent forward, eyes transfixed on the wooden box. In front of him, below the rim of the hill, machines from Teheran at work, digging long, narrow trenches. Behind and in front of him, more boxes, more families, trudging, weeping in single file. In the box, his wife and two young daughters – his whole family. Each in turn suffocated by the new plague. Wracked with sorrow, is Bahadur. Seething with anger. At the orange-haired, woman-grabbing president halfway around the world whose sanctions have prevented his family from receiving life-saving COVID treatment and medicine. “Why? Why would a human being deliberately and knowingly do that to another human being? To my precious Jasmine, and my little Bahar and Farzeen?”

I’m stunned. I can’t take it. I can’t shake it. The whole world brought to its knees by Coronavirus.

Or is it by some faceless band of greedy men wielding their lung-freezing, microbial scythe, culling the herd of the world’s dispensable and riffraff, as they have joked about in their private clubs and yachts? I can’t think in my brain. I’m paralyzed, exhausted. I’m haunted by the ghosts of those killed in my name.

I go to bed. It’s 3 pm. Fall into a kind of deep trance. Not sleep really. Nightmares. Flashes of light. Room shaking from my convulsions. I wake up suddenly, in a dead sweat. Deer’s eyes in the headlights. It’s midnight.

Ayesha’s stare and dare hit me, right in the chest: “How you like Lockdown?”

Blood seeps from my face. I steady myself against the wall. What do I do? Go back to bed? Scream out into the empty night? Keep feeling sorry for myself in my little white-picket-fenced, alcohol-imbued, privileged lockdown? Storm the Bastille? Demand an immediate end to the sanctions? Call for reparations? More, much more! Storm the boardrooms and bedrooms of the dystopia-fantasizing uber-rich and powerful?

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Featured image is from EPA-EFE/SHAWN THEW

The People’s Republic is dedicated to win-win exchanges in order to ultimately build a Community of Common Destiny, and its selfless assistance to the rest of the world proves is sincerity to those noble ideals without any doubt.

Imagine if the congress approved a measure to form a public-private partnership between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Can you imagine that?

Now imagine if a panicky and ill-informed Congress gave the Fed a blank check to bail out all of its crooked crony corporate and Wall Street friends, allowing the Fed to provide more than $4.5 trillion to underwater corporations that ripped off Mom and Pop investors by selling them bonds that were used to goose their stock prices so fatcat CEOs could make off like bandits. Imagine if all that red ink from private actors was piled onto the national debt pushing long-term interest rates into the stratosphere while crushing small businesses, households and ordinary working people.

Now try to imagine the impact this would have on the nation’s future. Imagine if the Central Bank was given the green-light to devour the Treasury, control the country’s “purse strings”, and use nation’s taxing authority to shore up its trillions in ultra-risky leveraged bets, its opaque financially-engineered ponzi-instruments, and its massive speculative debts that have gone pear-shaped leaving a gaping black hole on its balance sheet?

Well, you won’t have to imagine this scenario for much longer, because the reality is nearly at hand. You see, the traitorous, dumbshit nincompoops in Congress are just a hairs-breadth away from abdicating congress’s crucial power of the purse, which is not only their greatest strength, but also allows the congress to reign in abuses of executive power by controlling the flow of funding. The power of the purse is the supreme power of government which is why the founders entrusted it to the people’s elected representatives in congress. Now these imbeciles are deciding whether to hand over that authority to a privately-owned banking cartel that has greatly expanded the chasm between rich and poor, incentivized destructive speculation on an industrial scale, and repeatedly inflated behemoth asset-price bubbles that have inevitably blown up sending stocks and the real economy into freefall. The idea of merging the Fed and the Treasury first appeared in its raw form in an article by former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in the Financial Times. Here’s a short excerpt from the piece:

“The Fed could ask Congress for the authority to buy limited amounts of investment-grade corporate debt… The Fed’s intervention could help restart that part of the corporate debt market, which is under significant stress. Such a programme would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed while still providing needed liquidity to an essential market.” (Financial Times)

The Fed is not allowed to buy corporate debt, because it is not within its mandate of “price stability and full employment”. It’s also not allowed to arbitrarily intervene in the markets to pick winners and losers, nor is it allowed to bailout poorly-managed crybaby corporations who were gaming the system to their own advantage when the whole deal blew up in their faces. That’s their problem, not the Fed’s and not the American taxpayer’s.

But notice how Bernanke emphasizes how “Such a programme would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed”. Why do you think he said that?

He said it because he anticipates an arrangement where the new Treasury-Fed combo could buy up to “$4.5 trillion of corporate debt” (according to Marketwatch and BofA). And the way this will work, is the Fed will select the bonds that will be purchased and the credit risk will be heaped onto the US Treasury. Apparently Bernanke and Yellen think this is a “fair” arrangement, but others might differ on that point.

Keep in mind, that in the last week alone, investors pulled a record $107 billion out of corporate bonds which is a market which has been in a deep-freeze for nearly a month. The only activity is the steady surge of redemptions by frantic investors who want to get their money back before the listing ship heads for Davey Jones locker. This is the market that Bernanke wants the American people to bail out mainly because he doesn’t want to submerge the Fed’s balance sheet in red ink. He wants to find a sucker who will take the loss instead. That’s where Uncle Sam comes in, he’s the target of this subterfuge. This same theme pops up in a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Check it out:

“At least Treasury has come around to realizing it needs a facility to provide liquidity for companies. But as we write this, Mr. Mnuchin was still insisting that Treasury have control of most of the money to be able to ladle out directly to companies it wants to help. This is a recipe for picking winners and losers, and thus for bitter political fights and months of ugly headlines charging favoritism. The far better answer is for Treasury to use money from Congress to replenish the Exchange Stabilization Fund to back the Fed in creating a facility or special-purpose vehicles under Section 13(3) to lend the money to all comers. “(“Leaderless on the Econom”, Wall Street Journal)

I can hardly believe the author is bold enough to say this right to our faces. Read it carefully: They are saying “We want your money, but not your advice. The Fed will choose who gets the cash and who doesn’t. Just put your trillions on the counter and get the hell out.”

Isn’t that what they’re saying? Of course it is. And the rest of the article is even more arrogant:

“The Fed can charge a non-concessionary rate, but the vehicles should be open to those who think they need the money, not merely to those Treasury decides are worthy.” (Huh? So the Treasury should have no say so in who gets taxpayer money??) The looming liquidity crisis is simply too great for that kind of bureaucratic, politicized decision-making. (Wall Street Journal)

Get it? In other words, the folks at Treasury are just too stupid or too prejudiced to understand the subtleties of a bigass bailout like this. Is that arrogance or what?

This is the contempt these people have for you and me and everyone else who isn’t a part of their elitist gaggle of reprobates. Here’s a clip from another article at the WSJ that helps to show how the financial media is pushing this gigantic handout to corporate America:.

“The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and banking regulators deserve congratulations for their bold, necessary actions to provide liquidity to the U.S. financial system amid the coronavirus crisis. But more remains to be done. We thus recommend: (1) immediate congressional action …. to authorize the Treasury to use the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee prime money-market funds, (2) regulatory action to effect temporary reductions in bank capital and liquidity requirements… (NOTE–So now the banks don’t need to hold capital against their loans?) .. additional Fed lending to banks and nonbanks….(Note -by “nonbanks”, does the author mean underwater hedge funds?)…

We recommend that the Fed take further actions as lender of last resort. First, it should re-establish the Term Auction Facility, used in the 2008 crisis, allowing depository institutions to borrow against a broad range of collateral at an auction price (Note–They want to drop the requirement for good Triple A collateral.) … Second, it should consider further exercising its Section 13(3) authority to provide additional liquidity to nonbanks, potentially including purchases of corporate debt through a special-purpose vehicle” (“Do More to Avert a Liquidity Crisis”, Wall Street Journal )

This isn’t a bailout, it’s a joke, and there’s no way Congress should approve these measures, particularly the merging of the US Treasury with the cutthroat Fed. That’s a prescription for disaster! The Fed needs to be abolished not embraced as a state institution. It’s madness!

And look how the author wants to set up an special-purpose vehicle (SPV) so the accounting chicanery can be kept off the books which means the public won’t know how much money is being flushed down the toilet trying to resuscitate these insolvent corporations whose executives are still living high on the hog on the money they stole from credulous investors. This whole scam stinks to high heaven!

Meanwhile America’s working people will get a whopping $1,000 bucks to tide them over until the debts pile up to the rafters and they’re forced to rob the neighborhood 7-11 to feed the kids. How fair is that?

And don’t kid yourself: This isn’t a bailout, it’s the elitist’s political agenda aimed at creating a permanent underclass who’ll work for peanuts just to eek out a living.

Welcome to Sweatshop Amerika!

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.

At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.

Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?

Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Image on the right: Cases from Diamond Princess (Source: WHO)

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.

These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.

Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.

Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other viruses, like common-cold coronaviruses.

In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.

In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.

This has been the perspective behind the different stance of the United Kingdom keeping schools open, at least until as I write this. In the absence of data on the real course of the epidemic, we don’t know whether this perspective was brilliant or catastrophic.

Flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming the health system is conceptually sound — in theory. A visual that has become viral in media and social media shows how flattening the curve reduces the volume of the epidemic that is above the threshold of what the health system can handle at any moment.

Yet if the health system does become overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to coronavirus but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. That’s another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.

In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That’s in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.

One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.

If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.

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John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University.

In recent days a couple videos have begun circulating on social media with evidence of apparent installations of 5G and/or biometric systems while children are home due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

We now have the opportunity to confirm (or debunk) reports of these covert installations at schools everywhere. We need your help with this – see the bottom of this post for what to do.

First, on March 16, the YouTube channel Logic Before Authority posted a video detailing a message he received from an apparent member of a local school board. This whistleblower detailed how school districts were intending to covertly install 5G equipment in schools during the lockdown, under the direction of the U.S. Department of Education. The companies being sent in were instructed to act as if they are there to disinfect the schools to stop the spread of the virus.

Watch that video here:

Following the Logic Before Authority video, On March 18 another video began circulating showing a fleet of white work vans behind an unknown school. Although we do not see the name or location of the school, the video clearly shows vans for two companies – Systems Plus Wisconsin and North American Mechanical, Inc. Both companies appear to be headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.

While American Mechanical, Inc focuses on plumbing and mechanical services, Systems Plus Wisconsin clearly states they install biometric systems. The person filming the video called the school to ask whether the vans were involved with anything related to 5G. The person on the other end of the line then immediately hung up the phone.

Watch the second video here:

These videos, and others, have since sparked a growing number of social media comments from folks claiming to have seen work vans and/or towers and antennas being installed on school grounds during the quarantines. In fact, TBYP writer Derrick Broze was able to confirm that systems were being installed at Houston area schools during shutdown.

What’s happening in your neighborhood?

Now we need your help gathering more evidence! Most of us have been asked to stay home from work and our children have been indefinitely sent home from school. This absence from the daily grind has provided us with the opportunity to question the narratives that are unfolding around us.

Take a walk or drive to your local school to see if you notice anything unusual, such as work vans or telecom companies on site. If so, call the school and politely ask for more details. Please be courteous, but firm. If it’s the case that the U.S. Department of Education (or other state, federal or local agencies) are indeed working with the telecoms to covertly install 5G and/or biometric systems in schools, parents deserve to know!

Scroll down, and post your details and links to pictures in the comments section below! Once we gather enough credible evidence we be able to accordingly move forward with an organized action.

Then, please write your school board superintendent, school principal, or elected reps! Here’s an example script which is courteous and firm.

Here are some of the initial comments from YouTube and Facebook:

“I went to check my local school after I saw the video you posted on this today — sure enough, 3 telecom vehicles were the only vehicles in sight. Sneaky and evil. “
-Deirde R, March 19 (Texas)

“My sister is a teacher in TN and they have been told to stay out while maintenance cleans.”
-Break the Chains, March 20

“The installation of 5G towers while everyone is being ‘quarantined’.”
-Phoenix M, March 20 (BC)

“At least 40+ vans. Not including the ones parked in corner of buildings or in front of schools.”
-Ivonne J, March 20 (North Texas)

“They are installing 5g around schools here in Richmond, Virginia today–the first day schools are closed due to this fake coronavirus. Trucks are out digging up roads for the fiber installation of 5g.”
-Commenter, March 17

“This is a Federal Company, a simple google search leads you to their licensing. They are sub licensed as “Business Radio Licensing”, pretty generic name huh? which is a front company for the feds and 5g.”
-WTF198, March 19

“Im actually watching these Persons in their altech trucks placing 5G boxes on poles right outside of my apartment building right.now. They started down the whole block actually.”
-Wanda F, March 17

“I live across the street from two schools… This morning I saw 2 white trucks and men wearing yellow vest. They seemed to be with the electric company but nothing on their truck or person said so.”
-Barbara L, March 18

” One of the shopping malls in downtown Seattle is closed till April 2nd “because of the Virus” – A worker there told my Mom they are installing Five Jee during the closure. All dining establishments and our library are also closed and one of the downtown Starbucks is doing “renovations” – I think they are using the Virus as a cover for the nationwide roll-out. “
-Rusty S, March 19

Apparently happening in Denmark too
-March 19

Where could this all be leading?

Our concern is that 5G could be installed without our knowledge while we are grappling with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the installation of biometric systems could be a part of a more sinister agenda.

Namely, we are concerned that after the COVID-19 pandemic passes we will still be dealing with the repercussions of newly installed 5G, biometric systems, thermal imaging cameras or even temperature guns to detect who MAY have COVID-19.

Even more worrisome is the idea of government-mandated vaccinations; and, for example, that only those who can prove they have received the COVID-19 vaccine (once it’s developed) will be allowed back to work, school, public parks, public transportation, etc.

This is even more worrisome when you consider that Bill Gates – a long time proponent of vaccinations and population control – recently stated:

“Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

What does Gates mean by a “digital certificate”? Could it be tied in to the Global ID2020 or the discussion of a “tattoo” that tells the medical authorities whether you have been vaccinated, for example?

It certainly seems so, by admissions on this Reddit thread:

At the moment we simply don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic will lead, but it is certainly being exploited to push several agendas which do not bode well for human health and freedom.

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Borrowing from the moniker of horseracing as the ‘Sport of Kings’ this writer is going further into the sewer of media hype. I love sports and acknowledge that I am a fan of many sports, with even some teams as my favorites. Methinks that in the past few years I have been more and more violated by what comes across as the ‘Sports Talk  Media’.

In a word they have ALL become the whores they probably always were at heart. You turn on any channel on ESPN or Fox Sports Network or CBS Sports, or any other I have missed mentioning, and you get this: “How much so and so is going to be paid in mega millions for how long a contract.” Or “How much so and so wants to be paid as a free agent etc.” They don’t even talk about strategy or things of that nature.

Instead it is how much these Fat Cat team owners are going to be paying out from the mega millions, even billions they are earning. Of course, the other culprits here are the media outlets who subsidize this insanity, by the billions they are making from all we suckers! After all, have you looked at your cable bills lately? From $ 30- $ 50 a month for a slew of channels, we now fork out well over $ 150 a month for the same coverage. Then you have the ancillary costs that the ‘fans’ pay out for tickets or licensed products. All those of us who wear the team hats, jerseys, sweatshirts etc pay through the nose for this shit! I for one, with all my faults as a ‘Fan’, made a decision years ago to only buy such things when they were outdated and reduced drastically in price… very drastically.

Here’s the skinny on this: Tens of millions of diehard fans, who are now suffering as this writer by this blackout on almost all sports, should be outraged as I am by this shill sports media.

You have most of those (so called) sports journalists earning mega millions while the overwhelming majority of their audience are now worried about staying financially afloat during this pandemic. Much more importantly, even if there was NO pandemic, it is outrageous that our economic system is such that too many of we ‘Sports fans’ still are lucky to even afford our cable bills, let alone paying the shyster prices for tickets to games or sports paraphernalia.

Many working stiff dads and moms do that as much for their kids as they do for themselves. Yet, there needs to be some Righteous Anger at the piggery and arrogance of the whole professional sports world.. and that of the college coaching profession. By the way, I am sick and tired of hearing coaches, many of whom are NOT even coaching anymore, being interviewed by those sports hype artist media whores and called ‘Coach’. Come on, are these men and women wearing a divinity label or Ph D. moniker? No, they are just coaches and nothing more. But, the whole agenda here is to make them into too much more essential and vital than anyone else.

I remember watching a scene from Chazz Palminteri’s great film ‘A Bronx Tale’ when Sonny, the gangster is speaking with the young boy he likes and counsels on life. The kid mentions how Mickey Mantle is his hero etc. Sonny, played by Palminteri, says to the kid “Does Mickey Mantle pay your rent?” As my old street corner compatriot Walt DeYoung always ended his writings “Nuff Said.”

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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, World News Trust 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 300 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].

Crises are opportunities for ruling authorities to institute policies not easily introduced during normal times.

Post-9/11 and at other extraordinary times, the public is willfully deceived to believe that by sacrificing personal freedoms, greater security is possible — not realizing that both will be lost.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The cost of its loss is tyranny — the US and West far advanced toward it’s becoming full-blown.

Protecting public health to prevent COVID-19 from spreading by stay-at-home orders, state and community lockdowns, and social distancing reflect common sense policymaking.

Overstepping occurs if martial law is declared and constitutional rights are suspended — what tyrannical police state rule is all about.

Post-9/11, US hardline rule became reality by presidential executive orders, national and homeland security presidential directives, and enactment of police state laws — along with actions against designated domestic and foreign adversaries, dissent, civil liberties, human rights, and other democratic freedoms.

State-sponsored indefinite detentions, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, military commission trials, torture, mass surveillance, and other extrajudicial actions were instituted and remain in place on the phony pretext of protecting national security at a time when America’s only enemies are invented.

For nearly two decades, the US has been waging war OF terrorism, not on it, at home and abroad — a bipartisan coup d’etat on world peace, equity, justice and the rule of law.

Police state measures were prepared in advance and on the shelf for rolling out in the aftermath of the 9/11 mother of all state-sponsored false flags.

The mother of all establishment media promoted Big Lies left most people unaware that what happened on that fateful day was all about advancing Washington’s imperium, along with cracking down on homeland freedoms.

Will spreading COVID-19 outbreaks in the US be used as a pretext for further hardening of hardline police state rule, including suspension of vital habeas rights?

According to Politico on Saturday,  the Trump regime’s Justice Department “quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies,” adding:

Documents seen by Politico “detail the (DOJ’s) requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted.”

The Trump regime already closed the nation’s borders (except for commerce), imposed restrictions on international and domestic air travel, barred foreign nationals from entering the US who’ve been in China, Iran, and European countries recently, and suspended visa services at US embassies and consulates worldwide.

About a fourth of the US population is locked down following orders by individual state governors, others highly likely to follow, perhaps the entire nation in the days and weeks ahead as COVID-19 outbreaks will likely continue to increase before abating.

Some measures are justified to enhance public safety, others not.

Clearly no justification exists to order indefinite detentions arbitrarily under any circumstances.

If permitted or not, will martial law and suspension of the constitution follow?

According to Politico, one of the documents it saw calls for Congress to empower the attorney general to circumvent judicial proceedings “whenever (a) district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”

The authority would apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.”

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers executive director Norman Reimer said if indefinite detentions without trial become the law of the land, habeas rights no longer will exist as long as the practice continues.

Anyone for any reason, real or invented, “could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.”

“I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”

“This is something that should never happen” anywhere!

The DOJ document also asked Congress to suspend “statute of limitations or criminal investigations and civil proceedings during national emergencies,” said Politico, adding:

The DOJ wants Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure “change(d) to expand the use of videoconference hearings, and to let some of those hearings happen without defendants’ consent, according to the draft legislative text.”

According to Reimer, forced video hearing (without consent of the accused) would violate their civil liberties — “a terrible road to go down.”

“We have a right to public trials. People have a right to be present in court” represented by counsel.

Tahirih Justice Center head Layli Miller-Munro said the DOJ request, if implemented, would block refugees and asylum seekers from entering the US — a way to keep unwanted people of the wrong race, creed, color, or nationality out of the country.

Make no mistake. The DOJ document was likely prepared before or straightaway after the onset of COVID-19 outbreaks.

The 300-plus page USA Patriot Act was written before 9/11, readied to be considered by Congress, passed, and signed into law six weeks after the state-sponsored false flag.

The Trump regime will likely take full advantage of spreading COVID-19 outbreaks for hardened police state rule — instead of prioritizing public health and economic justice actions for ordinary Americans.

The greatest risk to remaining personal freedoms for ordinary Americans will be if martial law and suspension of the Constitution become the law of the land by executive order.

Perhaps it’s coming if Congress and/or the courts don’t intervene to block it.

While extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions, it’s vital to institute them lawfully to protect public health and welfare as top priority.

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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.

“You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own,” President Barack Obama told hundreds of cheering U.S. troops in Baghdad on April 7, 2009, his first visit to the country after being elected. He added that now, “Iraqis need to take responsibility for their country.”

For brazen hypocrisy and condescension, these words—repeated in essence by virtually all the top civilian and military officials of the Bush and Obama administrations over the past eight years—are hard to beat.

The implication is that before the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003, Iraq was not able to “stand on its own,” and now the Iraqi people must be prodded to “take responsibility for their country.” This theme is really no different than the racist propaganda used by the colonial powers to justify their murderous exploitation in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East over hundreds of years.

The real history of modern Iraq is deliberately distorted or completely ignored by the corporate media and officials here for the simple reason that it utterly demolishes this colonialist narrative, while at the same time exposing  the actual driving forces behind U.S. intervention in a country half a world away..

July 14, 2011, marks the 53rd anniversary of the Iraqi Revolution. The 1958 revolution ended four decades of British domination and marked the beginning of Iraqi independence. The fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, reduced Iraq once more to colonial status, now under U.S. rather than British rule.

Iraq before the 1958 revolution

Iraq is one of the oldest continually inhabited centers of human civilization, long known as Mesopotamia or the “land between the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers.” Modern Iraq came into being in the aftermath of World War I (1914-18), a war of empires vs. empires. At the end of the war, the winners took over the colonies of the losers. Britain and France took over much of the Middle East from the defeated Turkey-based Ottoman Empire, and divided it up between them.

The former Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul became the new British “mandate” of Iraq. The British were also awarded Palestine by the just-established “League of Nations.” France was given “mandates” over present-day Lebanon and Syria. All were in reality colonies. The mandate system was justified on the supposed basis that the Arab people needed the tutelage of the British and French to prepare for “self-rule.”

The Arab people did not see it that way. In 1919 and 1920, revolts swept the region, from Egypt (also under British control) to Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place, leaving thousands dead including the British commanding general. In 1925, another uprising, centered in the predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq, was answered by the British dropping poison gas from planes on the population.

Because of the fierce resistance to colonial domination by Arabs and Kurds alike, Britain granted Iraq its nominal independence in 1932. But it was independence in name only. The country was ruled by a British-installed monarchy, and continued to be occupied by British military bases.

Intifadas (uprisings) against the rule of British and their Iraqi collaborators, like Nuri as-Said, continued and intensified after the end of World War II.

To fortify their domination, the British promoted the development of a class of big landowners in Iraq, who exported grain, dates and other products. The peasants, who constituted the majority of the population, were treated as serfs–bound to the land and living in utter poverty.

In the 1950s, life expectancy in Iraq was 28-30 years. Infant mortality was estimated at 300-350 per 1,000 live births. By comparison, infant mortality in England at the time was around 25 per 1,000 births.

Illiteracy was more than 80 percent for men and 90 percent for women. Diseases related to malnutrition and unsanitary water were rampant.

A statistical survey at the time showed income of less than 13 Fils—4 cents—per day for individual peasants in Diwaniya, one of the more prosperous agricultural regions.

According to a 1952 World Bank report, the average yearly income for all Iraqis was $82. For peasants it was $21. (“Revolution in Iraq,” Society of Graduates of American Universities in Iraq, 1959)

Neocolonial and landlord rule was maintained by a ruthless secret police/military regime that tortured, murdered and imprisoned countless thousands of Iraqis. Still, the resistance was strong, as evidenced by the fact that Iraq was placed under martial law 11 times between 1935 and 1954, for a total of nine years and four months.

Underlying Iraq’s extreme poverty was this simple fact: oil-rich Iraq owned none of its own oil.

The United States and Iraq

U.S. involvement in Iraq began after World War I. U.S. corporations were granted 23.75 percent of Iraq’s oil as a reward for having entered World War I on the side of the victorious British and French empires. British, French and Dutch oil companies also each received 23.75 percent shares of Iraq’s petroleum resources. The broker of the deal, an Armenian oil baron named Calouste Gulbenkian, got the remaining five percent.

In the latter stages of World War II (1939-1945), the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, dominated by big banking, oil and other corporate interests, were determined to restructure the post-war world to ensure the dominant position of the United States.

The key elements in their strategy were: 1) U.S. military superiority in nuclear and conventional weaponry; 2) U.S. domination of newly created international institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and establishment of the dollar as the world currency; 3) control of global resources, particularly oil.

In pursuit of the latter, the U.S. government was intent on taking control of certain strategic assets of the British Empire, the war-time alliance between the two countries notwithstanding. Among those assets was Iraq.

A February 1944 exchange between U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes clear that the British were well aware of U.S. intentions. Churchill wrote Roosevelt: “Thank you very much for your assurances about no sheep’s eyes [looking enviously] on our oilfields in Iran and Iraq. Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia.” (quoted in Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War, 1968)

What this note clearly shows is that the U.S. leaders were so intent on taking over Iran and Iraq, both important neo-colonies of Britain, that alarm bells had been set off in British ruling circles.

Despite Churchill’s bluster, there was nothing the British could do to restrain rising U.S. power. Within a few years, the British ruling class would adapt to the new reality and accept its new role as Washington’s junior partner, a position it continues to occupy today.

In 1953, after the CIA coup that overthrew a nationalist government and put the Shah (king) back in power in Iran, the United States took control of that country. And by the mid-1950s, Iraq was jointly controlled by the United States and Britain.

In 1955, Washington set up the Baghdad Pact, which included its client regimes at the time in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq, along with Britain.

The Baghdad Pact, also called CENTO—Central Treaty Organization, had two purposes. First, to oppose the rise of Arab and other liberation movements in the Middle East and south Asia. And second, to be another in a series of military alliances—NATO, SEATO and ANZUS were the others—encircling the socialist camp of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea and North Vietnam.

The Iraqi Revolution

But on July 14, 1958, a military rebellion led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Free Officers movement turned into a country-wide revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly gone, the recipients of people’s justice.

The 1958 revolution put an end to colonial domination and marked the beginning of Iraq’s real independence. Although the Iraqi Communist Party was the biggest organized force among the revolutionary forces, the revolution did not lead to a socialist transformation of the country. The ICP strategy was an alliance with the anti-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie.

Though not a socialist revolution, the Iraqi Revolution created panic in Washington and on Wall Street. President Dwight Eisenhower called it “the gravest crisis since the Korean War.

The day after the Iraqi Revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.

The U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save the neo-colonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not, the popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought down the Western-dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.

But Eisenhower and his generals had something else in mind as well: invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and re-installing a puppet government in Baghdad.

Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in 1958: 1) the sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution; 2) the announcement by the United Arab Republic—Syria and Egypt were then one state that bordered Iraq—that its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to invade; and 3) strong support for the revolution from the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. The USSR began to mobilize troops in the southern Soviet republics close to Iraq.

Over the next three decades, the United States applied many tactics designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent country. At various times—for instance after Iraq completed nationalizing the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and signed a defense treaty with the USSR—the United States gave massive military support to Kurdish elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its list of “terrorist states.”

Washington supported the more rightist elements within the post-revolution political structure against the communist and left-nationalist forces. For example, the United States backed the overthrow and assassination of President Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1963 by a right-wing military grouping. And Washington applauded the suppression of the left and unions by the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party governments in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to fund and arm Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, in its war against Iran. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S. attitude about the war: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”

Bourgeois governments in both Iran and Iraq pursued the war for expansionist aims. The war was a disaster for both Iran and Iraq, killing a million people and weakening both countries.

Social advances

Despite the numerous internal and external conflicts, Iraq made rapid strides forward in development after the 1958 revolution and particularly following the complete nationalization of oil operations in 1972.

Billions of dollars of oil revenue paid for development of water and sewage treatment facilities, modern roads, ports, railways and airports, and electrification even for many remote areas of the country.

Iraq created the best health care system in the region, and health care was free. So, too, was education through university. Food was subsidized and food imports greatly increased in order to meet the needs of the population.

By virtually all indices that measure social progress—literacy, infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy, etc.—Iraq’s progress was extraordinarily dramatic.

Many students from Africa and poorer Arab countries received scholarships that covered all expenses to attend Iraqi universities. Iraq educated and trained hundreds of thousands of doctors, engineers, nurses, scientists and other personnel needed to lead and operate a rapidly modernizing society. Women, particularly in the urban areas, made major gains.

At the same time, Iraq was still a developing country and highly dependent on one commodity: oil. When the sanctions blockade was imposed on Iraq in 1990, it was importing 65 percent of its medicine, 70 percent of its food and up to 100 percent of infrastructure and other goods, paying for them with oil revenues.

The collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War

Shortly after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, developments in the Soviet Union posed a new threat to Iraq. In pursuit of an illusory “permanent détente” with the United States, the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow was eliminating or sharply cutting back its support for allies in the developing world.

In 1989, Gorbachev withdrew support for the socialist governments in Eastern Europe, most of which then collapsed. This sharp shift in the world relationship of forces, culminating with the fall of the Soviet Union itself two years later, opened the door for the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991—and for more than a decade of sanctions/blockade and bombing that severely weakened Iraq and its people.

It would have been inconceivable even a few years earlier that Soviet leaders would have stood by while the United States sent more than half a million troops to attack a nearby country with which the USSR had a mutual defense agreement.

Rather than ushering in a new era of peace, the counter-revolutionary overturn of the governments of the USSR and the socialist camp was seen in Washington as the green light for a new round of wars and interventions.

In the 1991 war, more than 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq. While U.S. leaders justified the war on the basis of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait after a long and bitter dispute, U.S. military tactics showed that the main aim was to destroy Iraq. The civilian infrastructure throughout the country—water, power, phone and sewage systems, food and medicine production, storage facilities, schools and hospitals, roads and bridges, and more—were targeted, often many times over. Military targets and troops were also hit, with an estimated 125,000 Iraqi soldiers killed.

Blockaded and bombed for 13 years

The sanctions passed by the UN Security Council at the behest of the United States on August 6, 1990, were killing people even before the bombing began five months later. The sanctions on Iraq were the most comprehensive in history; in reality, it was a blockade of the country, enforced by military means that was to last for 13 years, killing more than 1 million people, half of them children under the age of five.

Through the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush up to the 2003 invasion, Iraq was bombed several times per week, with several periods of intense assault. There were numerous coup attempts organized by the CIA. And the death toll from the blockade was relentless, as U.S. officials were well aware.

On May 12, 1996, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, appeared on the TV program “60 Minutes.” Albright was asked by reporter Leslie Stahl, who had just returned from Iraq, about the impact of the sanctions: “We have heard that a half million children have died, I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright’s response was a rare exposure of the real and monstrous thinking of the imperialist policymakers: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Still, the desired goal of regime change, which became official U.S. policy when Clinton signed the “Iraq Liberation Act” in 1998, was not achieved. It became clear that regime change could only be achieved by a military invasion.

After a protracted public relations campaign—demonizing Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders, attempting to link Iraq to the Sept. 11 attack, fabricating claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” including nuclear weapons—U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.

In April 2003, the U.S. and British rulers finally achieved what they had wanted to do since July 1958: counter-revolution in Iraq. While U.S. leaders and their corporate media had relentlessly promoted the idea that their goal of “regime change” simply involved removing the ultra-demonized Hussein and his immediate circle, in reality, Washington’s aim was to destroy everything that made Iraq an independent state.

The entire government and state apparatus was disbanded, from the military to the government ministries to the state-run food-distribution and health-care systems.

Early in the war, U.S. military forces seized the great prize in Iraq, the rich oil fields in the north and south. Iraq holds an estimated 12 percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves.

In the eight-plus years since, it is estimated that more than 1 million Iraqi “excess deaths”—deaths due to the occupation—have occurred. There have been 4.5 million Iraqis displaced internally or out of the country. The number of wounded remains uncounted, but must also be in the millions. All of this in a country of about 27 million people.

The social fabric of the country has been ripped apart due to the occupation. The occupiers have favored some ethnic and religious groups against others.

In a country where the long summers frequently see temperatures over 120 degrees, electricity is less available than even in the time of the sanctions.

Millions of tons of toxic waste, including depleted uranium used in bullets and shells, have been dumped in Iraq by the occupation forces.

Iraq has suffered extreme looting by the occupiers. Just one example is that, on July 27, 2010, the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction released a report stating that the Pentagon cannot account for 95 percent of the Development Fund for Iraq.

The DFI was set up by L. Paul Bremer, who ruled Iraq as virtual dictator for the first 15 months of the occupation. The $9.1 billion in the account came from Iraq’s frozen assets in the United States and other countries, and the sale of Iraqi oil. Of that amount, $8.7 billion is “missing.” No one has been charged with any crime nor is any crime even alleged by the U.S. authorities.

Countering the ludicrous claim that the U.S. occupation has “given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own,” a Mercer Quality of Living survey released on May 26, 2010, ranked Baghdad—one of the truly great and historic cities of the world—dead last in a list of “most livable cities.”

What Iraq needs and deserves from the United States is not more dishonest and insulting speeches, but instead a complete end to the occupation and reparations for the terrible damage done.

Despite all the indescribable horrors they have suffered, the Iraqi people have not given up and will continue their struggle until they regain what they first won 53 years ago—real independence and sovereignty.

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For those who follow the global immunization agenda and its implementation on different continents, the announcement of a new pandemic didn’t come as a surprise.  “Pandemic preparedness” has been well-funded and a buzz word for a long time before becoming a priority at the last G7 summits, the Davos World Economic Forum and other meetings of global governance. The latest simulation for preparedness was Event 201,^[1] a rehearsal of a coronavirus pandemic organized on October 18, 2019 in New York by Johns Hopkins University, the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.

The Presidential election campaign in the United States and the controversial mandatory measles vaccination law in Germany provided perfect timing. What better than viral terror to influence public opinion and health policies on vaccine battles raging on both sides of the Atlantic?

Soon after that meeting, the big “measles scare” campaign started in Disneyland in December 2014, leading to the removal of vaccine exemption rights in California. Meanwhile, Italy, which had been designated to be the forerunner of this agenda in Europe, set things in motion to mandate eight additional childhood vaccines.

The movie Vaxxed then came out in April 2016, during the Presidential campaign.  Many American families voted for Donald Trump, hoping that he would create a commission to investigate vaccine safety, as he seemed to have a particular interest. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, repeated that “the science is clear, the earth is round, the sky is blue and vaccines work” throughout her campaign. A few days before the November 2016 vote,^[3] President Obama signed major US funding for the GHSA, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Unfortunately, after the election, the vaccine safety commission that was supposed to be led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. never came to pass. On the contrary, draconian vaccine legislation made its way to several states. California, for example, which had already abolished personal belief exemptions, stripped away almost all medical exemptions in 2019, commencing a medical inquisition against doctors who put their patients first.^[4]  Many Californians, realizing that their Eldorado had become a gilded cage, moved to freer states for vaccine choice, like Texas or Idaho.^[5]

A vaccine war

In 2020, vaccines could weigh even more heavily in US elections. In fact, one could almost say that a vaccine war is going on across the US.  After California, states like New Jersey, Maine, Connecticut, Virginia, Hawaii, Colorado and many others are trying to adopt harsher vaccine laws.  But vaccine freedom advocates are getting more organized, too, putting pressure on elected officials and candidates and even introducing their own legislation. For example, after the New Jersey legislature twice failed to pass a repeal of the religious exemption, even though Speaker Steven Sweeney vowed to “go to war” to get it passed, legislators proposed several vaccine safety bills.^[6] The Maryland legislature refused to allow pharmacists to administer vaccines, and in South Dakota, the legislature considered, although rejected, a bill that would have completely prohibited all medical mandates of any kind.^[7]

Europe too is undergoing a similar wave of coercive legislation and pushback.  In Germany, compulsory measles vaccination has just come into force in early March, even though the country has one of the highest coverage rates — 97% one dose, 93% two doses — and very few cases of illness or death.  This vote comes two years after Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that there would be no mandatory vaccinations in Germany,^[8] as informed consent had “solid historical reasons.”

Sadly, informed consent and the Nuremberg Code may now exist only in the museum of democratic values.  The new German law is particularly restrictive.  There is no option for home schooling, and the measles vaccine obligation applies to adults working in the health and education sectors as well. But German citizens may be ready to fight back.  Families and doctors are fighting the mandates in courts,^[9] and protests were planned all over the country for March 21, including a major event in Munich with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and activists from all over Europe – until the coronavirus pandemic intervened.^[10] Everywhere in Europe — in Great Britain, Austria, Belgium, Romania, Slovenia, from Ukraine to Spain — mandatory vaccination bills are being introduced. Faced with the violation of human rights that their Constitutions guarantee, people have filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights.  The Court, whose jurisdiction covers 49 countries throughout Europe and Eurasia, will hear cases on mandatory vaccination on April 30, 2020 arising from the Czech Republic.

It is undeniable that the coronavirus epidemic has come on the scene at a crucial moment, when people everywhere are in revolt against the power of international financial institutions and multinational pharmaceutical corporations, whose stranglehold on governments is no longer hidden. Many scandals have shaken confidence. The bankruptcy of an aberrant economic system is accelerating, and attempts to start a third world war are multiplying. While it is impossible to know how the “coronavirus pandemic” will influence the redistribution of power, it is certain that many are seeking to have Covid-19 serve the political interests of a global governance project.

Iran

Interestingly, the second largest outbreak started in Iran, a country which, like China, does not bend to the West’s dictates. It is also currently involved with Syria and Russia in a tug-of-war with Turkey, NATO, and its traditional allies.  After having refused all outside help in the management of the pandemic, Iran made a complete about-face by inviting the WHO to its rescue. It seems that the virus had contaminated a number of high-ranking government officials, including those close to Ayatollah Khamenei, and the former Iranian ambassador to Syria, who died in the early days of the epidemic.  Taking an unusual sanitary measure, the Iranian government released  85,000 “uncontaminated” prisoners to avoid contagion in prisons.  At the same time, officials blamed US sanctions, which were reimposed on Tehran after Washington abandoned the Iran 2015 nuclear deal, for “hampering their efforts to fight the coronavirus.”  Iran called again for lifting the ban and asked the International Monetary Fund for a $5 billion loan to fight the outbreak.^[11]

In Europe, as luck would have it, the pandemic first affected northern Italy, namely Lombardy and Veneto, which have by far the largest number of vaccine hesitant people in Europe and probably the world.  Veneto strongly opposed the expansion of vaccine mandates.  Activists demonstrated for months, with rallies of more than 50,000 people. As a result, the regional government appealed to the Council of State, arguing that the law violated constitutional freedoms and demanded autonomy in health matters. Of note, the WHO then decided to move its European headquarters to Venice, the capital of Veneto.

At the beginning of the disease outbreak, the Italian authorities considered it unnecessary to impose a two-week school quarantine on children returning from a trip to China, in order not to “stigmatize” them. (By contrast, unvaccinated children are stigmatized and prohibited from attending school year round.) Officials disagreed on Covid-19 diagnosis and “crisis measures,” reflecting conflicts between regional parties and medical experts. But the WHO soon managed to take control of the situation^[12] and appointed a special advisor, Dr. Gualtiero Ricciardi, who had been forced to resign earlier from the Italian HHS due to a long list of undeclared conflicts of interest, to steer the coronavirus crisis.

Since then, panic and alarm have escalated continuously, as have the Veneto region’s accusations of “anti-scientific”^[13] management. Although the country has been in a complete lockdown for weeks, cases keep increasing and the estimated number of deaths is now nearing 3,000. This sends a frightening signal, but these numbers need to be seen with caution. First, one of the major reasons why Italy is “overwhelmed,”  is because of the crisis its public hospitals were already facing before the epidemic. The number of intensive care units has dropped by half over the last 20 years, dropping from the highest to the lowest number of beds per capita in Europe to around 230 per 100,000 inhabitants. In other words, the situation was already disastrous.

Second, there is a lot of controversy about the number of deaths that can really be ascribed to the epidemic. Testing is not very reliable and suffers many biases. According to Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, who had chaired the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Health Committee that called an emergency debate on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the declaration of the H1N1 flu pandemic by WHO in 2009,  “the tests are currently not measuring the incidence of coronavirus diseases, but the activity of the specialists searching for them.”^[14] Many experts also disagree on the mortality rate of Covid-19. While the WHO gives estimates as high as 3.4%, renowned epidemiologists such as John Ioannidis^[15] consider the risk is probably much lower, perhaps 0.125%, for which there are no reasons to take such draconian measures.

France

In France, too, declarations of the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to have a flair for strategic time and place. When Minister of Health Agnes Buzyn suddenly left office to replace a candidate who was running for mayor of Paris (he had to step down after a sex scandal), the coronavirus crisis seemed to be reasonably manageable. But the Covid-19 threat arose again at an opportune time — to ban large protests against a highly unpopular law that slashed pensions and on the eve of local March elections. After the first round of voting, a complete lockdown was announced. The former health minister, who wasn’t elected mayor, expressed her regret for leaving office during the coronavirus crisis, saying that she knew from the start that the epidemic would escalate and soon turn into a major catastrophe…

But a disaster in France is easy to predict, as the situation is very similar to Italy. 1,300 public hospital doctors have been on administrative strike for almost a year. They refused to share the responsibility and decisions of a state that no longer provides minimal funds to run public health services. In the last two decades, the available number of beds has been reduced by 100,000 and the remaining facilities are largely understaffed. Patients who died after waiting endless hours in the emergency room were already frequently reported by the media long before the coronavirus epidemic.

So the former health minister, who had received fierce criticism for her inability to solve this lingering hospital crisis, knew perfectly well that the coronavirus situation would further exacerbate the problem. Recently, when President Macron visited doctors fighting the epidemic to show his support, medical staff took the opportunity to express their anger towards his disastrous health policies in front of the camera.

The silent war in the treatment against Covid-19 

Finally, the Coronavirus epidemic reveals the huge discrepancy between the WHO health strategies and the reality for scientists and doctors who put patients’ lives first.

The current power struggle in France about coronavirus strategies between health officials and the country’s leading expert is truly eye opening.  Professor Didier Raoult, who is one of the world’s top 5 scientists on communicable diseases and leads the high tech research center on infectious diseases,  IHU – mediterranée Marseilles, argued that the approach of mass quarantine is both inefficient and outdated and that large scale testing and treatment of suspected cases achieves far better results.

Early on, Dr. Raoult suggested the use of hydroxychloroquine (Chloroquine or Plaquenil), a well-known, simple, and inexpensive drug that has shown efficacy with previous coronaviruses such as SARS.  By mid-February, clinical trials at his institute and in China already confirmed that the drug could reduce the viral load and bring spectacular improvement. The Chinese scientists published their first trials on more than 100 patients and announced that the Chinese National Health Commission would recommend Chloroquine in their new guidelines to treat Covid-19.^[16]

As a member of a similar French committee, Dr. Raoult immediately shared the great news with health authorities.  But they replied that there was not enough scientific evidence to prove efficacy and warned against potential side effects of the drug, preferring to focus their efforts to find new molecules and develop a new vaccine, with France’s Sanofi Pasteur included in the coronavirus vaccine competition.

But Dr. Raoult and 600 members of his institute continued their work and confirmed similar results in a trial of 24 patients that was published March 3, 2020.^[17] Dr. Raoult has recorded daily videos^[18] to share his research and knowledge, sometimes reaching half a million views in a couple of days. Hospitals and general practitioners started to treat their patients with the drug until it quickly went out of stock.

In fact, for an unknown reason, last October, the French minister of health suddenly decided to put this long used over-the-counter drug on the list of  “controlled substances” and make it a prescription drug.

Now, a month later, under the growing pressure of doctors and the media, the government has finally decided to “consider more trials” of this protocol, and Sanofi Pasteur has announced that it will offer enough doses to potentially treat 300,000 patients.^[19]

Although Chloroquine was cited second on the WHO’s original list of drugs to be evaluated for coronavirus treatment as a drug on its list of “essential medicines,” the WHO has not yet released any information about it and has not even mentioned the four clinical trials that received official European Union approval.  While the WHO has repeatedly praised China and South Korea, for their “efficient response” using draconian quarantine measures, there has been no mention of the fact that those countries are using Chloroquine as an efficient Covid-19 treatment. But having used Chloroquine together with quarantine, China is nearing the end of its epidemic.

Interestingly, on February 26, the United Kingdom put Chloroquine on its list^[120] of drugs that can no longer be exported outside the country. In the United States, a white paper,^[21] published on March 13 by researchers from the National Academy of Science and Stanford Medical School, proposes that “the United States of America and other countries should immediately authorize and indemnify medical doctors for prescribing chloroquine to treat COVID-19.”

But so far, the only words we hear from the WHO and Western health officials are “quarantine,” “fast tracking vaccines,” and “the search for new drugs.”  Obviously, there is no real interest in using a generic drug that can provide immediate treatment and prevention for a price around $5. As a financial consultant recently asked in an article, “If a Covid-19 Therapy Doesn’t Benefit A Stock, Does It Event Exist?”^[22] The answer, sadly, is obviously not.

It looks as if the WHO and our Western governments have decided to keep fueling the panic and raising the alert level, pushing the “Global Health Security Threat” narrative to the hilt.  How much longer will we have to wait for effective treatment? How much longer with this global lockdown last? Officials say “until a new vaccine has been developed,” which will probably be in fast track mode by a well-known philanthropist after most courts in the world have ruled that mandatory vaccination does not violate human rights.

Or perhaps until the economy has completely crashed and can be rebuilt on a “healthy basis”? Here is a clue: the European Central Bank has launched a “Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program”^[23] that will last until “the coronavirus Covid-19 crisis phase is over, but in any case not before the end of the year”!

Anything can happen now. No one can know for sure if we will emerge out of the coronavirus crisis as subjects of a techno-communist global government or if a new freedom virus will derail such a program. Certainly the world will not be the same.

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Senta Depuydt is a Belgian freelance journalist with a degree in communications. In 2016, she organized the first European Congress on biomedical treatments in Paris and has hosted debates on the biology of autism and vaccine safety in many French-speaking countries. She arranged for premieres of “Vaxxed” in Brussels, Paris and Cannes and an event at UNESCO. She is a board member of the French League for Free Choice in Vaccination and in the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance. She works with health freedom organizations across Europe.

Notes

1. Event 201.
2. Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) meeting.
3. Executive Order — Advancing the Global Health Security Agenda to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats.
4. California vaccine bill exemption rules agreed to by Newsom and lawmakers.
5. ‘California refugees’ move to Idaho for lax vaccine laws. They want lawmakers to know why.
6. ‘We’re ready to go to war on this’: N.J. lawmakers pledge to reintroduce failed vaccine bill.
7. South Dakota Considers First State Bill To Outlaw All Vaccine AND Medical Mandates.
8. Genèse de l’obligation vaccinale contre la
   rougeole en Allemagne.
9. Erste Verfassungsbeschwerden in Karlsruhe übergeben.
10. Invitation to european protest for medical freedom.
11. Coronavirus: Iran frees 85,000 prisoners to combat spread of infection.
12. Joint WHO and ECDC mission in Italy to support COVID-19 control and prevention efforts.
13. Coronavirus, Ricciardi (OMS): “Il Veneto si è comportato in maniera antiscientifica”.
14. W.Wodarg “Without PCR-Tests There Would Be No Reasons For Special Alarms”, 1.3.20, wodarg.com.
15. A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.
16. Expert consensus on comprehensive treatment of coronavirus disease in Shanghai 2019.
17. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as available weapons to fight COVID-19.
18. mediterranee-infection.com.
19. https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/French-lab-Sanofi-hypothetically-offers-millions-of-doses-of-potential-Covid-19-Plaquenil-anti-malaria-drug.
20. Medicines that cannot be parallel exported from the UK.
21. March 13 White Paper
22. If a COVID-19 Therapy Doesn’t Benefit a Stock, Does it Even Exist?.
23. The Governing Council will terminate net asset purchases under PEPP once it judges that the coronavirus Covid-19 crisis phase is over, but in any case not before the end of the year.

“The test of our [moral] progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd American President (1933-1945); (in his ‘Second Inaugural Address’, Wed., Jan. 20, 1937).

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. … By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.” —John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), British economist, 1936.

“Our economic leadership does not seem to be aware that the normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment and poverty in the middle of what could be virtually universal affluence —in short that financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed.” —Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), American economist, 1986.

Here we go again: Another financial bubble burst and another financial crisis threatening to disrupt the real economy! This time the trigger is the health pandemic of the coronavirus crisis, the most serious in a generation, which is paralyzing the real economy and triggering crashes in the financial sector.

The crisis and public measures to fight it (drastic travel restrictions, social distancing, worker quarantines, etc.) have provoked a major global economic meltdown and perturbed supply chains domestically and around the world. Moreover, they have profoundly shaken financial markets already vulnerable, after years of easy money policies and round after round of so-called ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE) by central banks, which have encouraged unsustainable debt levels by pushing interest rates down at historically low levels, irresponsible large fiscal deficits by governments during prosperous times, which have enriched the very rich, and runaway unregulated financial speculation that have had the same result.

An oil supply glut worldwide has now produced an additional deflationary bias in the world economy, which will be difficult to reverse. To top it all, there are countries that are presently run by inexperienced and/or incompetent leaders.

As a result, the world is presently going through a convergence of health and economic crises that creates a perfect economic storm, for which many countries are not prepared at all to handle.

In the United States, for example, only two years ago, in 2018, President Donald Trump fired his top health official (Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer) who was responsible for the response to pandemics, and he was not replaced. He then shut down the White House National Security Council’s entire global health security unit in charge of preparing for a global pandemic. In so doing, Mr. Trump forgot the precautionary principle in government, which requires preparations to face unforeseen events.

During such a severe health and economic crisis, which touches some people more than others, governments that sometimes create problems are the only collective instruments to fight it in the most ethical way possible.

Of course, besides taking the required measures to prevent the virus crisis from spreading and preventing panics, governments must take, on the economic and financial fronts, some fiscal, regulatory and monetary steps to prevent a deflationary downward spiral of economic activity and to stabilize the financial system. They must, above all, prevent human suffering and help workers, families and communities under financial strain.

What should governments do and not do to minimize the impact of the supply shock and of the demand shock presently hurting their economies?

1- First of all, government priority has to be to get out of the virus health crisis as soon as possible, and to provide medical care and assistance, while preventing shortages. Measures have to be taken to fight the infectious disease and alleviate human suffering, but also to prevent price gouging and other instances of corruption.

Lessons from previous virus outbreaks (Ebola, SARS, H1N1, etc.) can be a guide to action.

The coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis is presently the main cause of economic disruptions and hardships, and traditional monetary and fiscal macroeconomic policies are not geared to solving that type of problem.

2- The second priority is to save the economy from collapsing, and from entering into a deep recession or even into an economic depression. The first step, which is already taken to some extent, is for central banks to make sure that there is enough liquidity in the financial system to keep the latter functioning. This means that they must inject as much liquidity, i.e. cash, as needed to prevent bankruptcies in cascades of otherwise creditworthy and solvent companies, and to allow credit to flow freely.

But it is not acceptable for the government to tap public money to alleviate private banks and private companies’ cash-flow problems. This must not be done at the public expense and to enrich owners of capital, but according to sound business practice. Advances must be guaranteed loans, secured by a bank’s or a company’s assets, physical assets or shares, —and to be repaid at a future date. That is the only way to avoid taxpayers being fleeced by private improvident and risk-taking operators whose motto is “let’s privatize profits, but socialize losses.”

3- However, it must be recognized that monetary policy as such is largely ineffective in correcting a supply shock. It cannot restore perturbed supply chains or prevent companies from stopping production and employment when there is no demand for their products or services. And, it cannot solve a demand shock by simply cutting interest rates, which are already low, when people’s incomes are falling and consumer confidence is absent, or when consumers are unable to get out and spend because they are quarantined.

Moreover, negative real interest rates, the result of attempting to boost economic growth through financial means, as has been tried in Japan and in Europe, are bound to create important economic problems down the road. They are fundamentally deflationary.

They hurt savers and retirees and they contract effective demand from this important group of consumers, and they exert a negative pressure on prices. They also pose a threat to the financial viability of pension funds and insurance companies by forcing them to invest in riskier financial assets. They also encourage companies to invest in projects that would not been profitable otherwise.

4- As a preliminary conclusion, therefore, let us say that from an economic, political and social perspective, injecting liquidity in the economy is not ‘a whether or not question’ during a crisis, but it is how it should be done.

More than a century and a half ago, British economist and banker Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) spelled that out clearly when he wrote that in a time of economic and financial crisis, a central bank must discount heavily, i.e. lend as much money to institutions in need as necessary against collateral, toavoid cascading defaults and bankruptcies.

But this must be done at “punitive rates of lending” in order to avoid enriching distressed banks and their owners with public money, and to create a moral hazard by encouraging foolish risk-taking, with the knowledge of being bailed out in case of trouble.

What does it mean in practice? It means that in a time of crisis, the central bank or the Treasury must lend as much money as necessary, but the weaker and the more risky the collateral is, the higher the lending rates must be.

That is a lesson that was not totally followed in the U.S. during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis when the Fed increased its balance sheet from $870 billion in 2007 to $4.5 trillion by 2015, (a more than a five-fold increase), in order to save some mega banks from bankruptcy by relieving them of their bad debts. The purpose, of course, was to prevent the financial system from collapsing under the weight of a mountain of mortgage-backed securities that had turned sour. But it ended up enriching the already very rich at the expense of the rest of the population.

There is unanimity among economists about the need for fiscal policy responses to the crisis

The need of strong fiscal responses, to help people and companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, is obvious. But, by what means, at a time when fiscal deficits are already high?

Hundreds of thousands of workers are being temporarily laid off, many with no severance. They find themselves suddenly without paycheques, because their employers cannot produce and sell their goods or services. The criteria and requirements to qualify for unemployment insurance benefits could be relaxed in order to make more unemployed workers temporarily eligible.

But all individuals and families, to different degrees, may see their financial situations deteriorate during the crisis. This is both an economic and social problem. Helping those individuals and families who are the most in need of urgent assistance poses a logistic problem for governments.

For one, some laws or directives by the relevant level of government could be adopted to protect the most vulnerable people from being evicted from their lodgings during the crisis. Small landlords are also facing mortgage payments and would have to be compensated for lost rents.

The simplest fiscal way to quickly deliver cash payments to people in need would be to mail monthly checks of a few thousands dollars to taxpayers whose income in 2018 was below a certain amount, say $50,000, in order to provide them temporarily with a basic guaranteed income to bail them out during the coming months.

The proposal made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to provide emergency government funding (two-thirds of wages while away from work) to reimburse lost paychecks for those workers who are self-quarantining and are missing work or losing jobs amid the outbreak, goes in the same direction. This could be done through the channel of employers or through the Social Security Administration.

There are, however, logistical problems with any simple solution. Indeed, it is not everybody who has a full-time job, a tax record and a mailing address. Some people are self-employed, some are retired, some are seasonal or part-time workers, and some have income too low to file an income tax return. Some are homeless. They could be left out of direct financial assistance if direct assistance is used, even though they are probably among those who need help the most.

For example, there were more than half a million homeless Americans in 2019. These people would have to be reached and helped through different approaches. The number of children in needy households must also be taken into consideration. Possibly, municipalities or other community organizations could serve as aid distributors.

Proposals to resort to payroll tax cuts would not address the problem properly since such taxes are only paid when employees are still working! Similarly, providing direct financial assistance to people with incomes as high as $198,000 a year, as Republican Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate Mitch McConnell has proposed, would be both very costly and unethical.

Whatever the channels used, some direct fiscal assistance from the government has become a necessity, considering the declining incomes of many workers laid off during this crisis.

For example, if federal and state governments in the U.S. were to inject in the economy, this year, an amount equal to about 30% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this would mean a combined effort of $US 6 trillion.

In Canada, if federal and provincial governments were to do the same, their combined efforts to sustain the economy would amount to some $CAD 550 billion. This is much more than what is under consideration in either country.

We must add that the Covid-19 pandemic is worldwide and that countries should cooperate to stabilize international trade, in order to facilitate an orderly return to prosperity once the health issue has been resolved.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that all efforts should be devoted to stopping the coronavirus pandemic in its tracks. This is an absolute public health priority.

However, in so doing, all must also be done to repair the heavy damage inflicting on the economy by distortions in the supply chains, by workers being laid off in droves, and by deflationary financial crashes, so that the economy can rebound quickly when things get back to normal. And since this is a worldwide crisis, the more international coordination to lay the ground for a quick return to prosperity, the better it will be.

For one, governments should not refrain from relying on monetary, regulatory and especially fiscal policies to inject liquidity and financial assistance where it is needed. However, this should not be done in a way that ends up “privatizing profits, while socializing losses.”

Secondly, it must be said that over the last forty years or so, there has been a curious politico-economic system, which has been imposed upon the people in some countries.

It has translated into being a harsh capitalist system for most of the people and an accommodating socialist system for the owners of capital and the super rich. After the current catastrophe, I do not think that people are going to tolerate such a system much longer.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, of the book “The New American Empire”, and the recent book, in French « La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018 ».  Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

In 1948 the poet, W.H. Auden, published a long poem he titled, The Age of Anxiety, in which four characters express their anxiety about their place in a world that has been destroyed by two world wars and was threatened by a third, and nuclear, world war.

He described the faces in the bars, the people trying to cling to average days that no longer existed, all hoping that the lights wouldn’t go out, that the music would always play, that they could avoid looking at where they were, lost in the dark, “children afraid of the night, who have never been happy or good.”

The entire period, from 1914 until today, has been an age of anxiety created by our common experience of life in the dominant economic, social, and political system that atomises the individual, reduces them to fragment of themselves and constantly threatens them with annihilation.

A tortured humanity cried out for something better and, for a time, during the rise of socialism, during and after the First World War and through to the counter-revolution in what was the Soviet Union, a new human spirit appeared and created conditions that made people aware of their own possibilities and taught them that the other was not an enemy or a competitor, but a friend, a brother, a sister, who, together, could do anything, for when you can do things and know it, anxiety transforms into confidence and calm, into resoluteness and courage. Liberation movements arose against all the imperialist countries, supported by the socialist nations. The possibility of a better world arose, and as Che Guevara wrote, the possibility of a new human being governed by the spirit of cooperation and regard for fellow beings, by love instead of war.

But, though the struggle goes on, the present reality is a return to universal anxiety. Nuclear war is a possibility at any time. The Americans threaten it, the Russians, Iranians, Koreans, Chinese prepare for it, and the rest of us can only bite our nails and hope they will not see that bright flash on the horizon just before they are swept into oblivion.

Human caused climate change alone threatens us with an immediate existential threat. Temperatures are rising faster than expected by the official journals, though as expected by the more astute scientists, climate systems are disrupted, crops are threatened, the oceans acidified, the ice melting, the seas rising. Our industrial civilisation has destroyed the world ecological systems so that the scientific consensus is that we are in the midst of the 6th Mass Extinction event and its ultimate conclusion is not far off; decades at most, much shorter by some estimations, certainly within my life time.

And the daily grind in the capitalist system generates the daily anxiety we all face, worrying about getting the money you need to live in this system, about paying the bills, about losing the job that you probably hate in any event and only do out of necessity, for most of us do work that creates no satisfaction and from which we can see no escape. The alternative is the street, the hunger, the cold, the heat, the loneliness of being poor. Charlie Chaplin expressed it in Modern Times, the human being as human machine, used up and then discarded by the machine system, worse than slaves, now reduced to subhuman slaves.

On top of all this background anxiety we now have the warnings of imminent death from the corona virus and the unprecedented disruption of every aspect of our lives its appearance has created. Now many face the cruel reality of losing their place in the capitalist lottery as the capitalist economic system breaks down, the system ceases to function, and uncertainty and fear are ever-present.

And, as with all states of anxiety, we see the rise of irrationality and superstition, as people try to convince themselves, “like children afraid of the night” that it is not really happening, or that man created it instead of nature, feeling more secure that it was designed than is a random product of nature, which seems to frighten them the more, and that however it came to be, it is much ado about nothing, just another flu.

We have seen several articles lately making these claims. It has been claimed it was a result of a Chinese bio-warfare lab making a mistake and leaking a virus. It has been claimed it was an American Army laboratory that leaked it; that China was attacked by the US Army sports team that went to a competition in China. For none of these claims is any evidence presented, Instead, they use speculation and conjecture based on false facts or coincidence. Some of them contradict themselves in different articles, One wrote an alarming essay the US Army was behind it. Later he wrote another suggesting it was all a plot by Bill Gates and friends. Well, which it it? They don’t know because they don’t know and don’t care about being consistent so long as it is alarming.

But these articles are passed around and soon Trump begins blaming China and China blaming the US exacerbating the already tense situation between the two countries that could lead to nuclear war. These articles fan those flames. While those that claim it is a plot for “world domination” and that it is either not really happening, or, if happening, is nothing to be concerned about, cause people to put themselves and others at risk by ignoring any measures put in place to protect them and the rest of us.

That superstition involved is plain to see. Those making these claims state that world governments are lying to us. Yet they cannot then explain why the Chinese, Russian, Iranians, Cuban, North Koreans and other anti-imperialist nations take it very seriously and have acted to contain it. But they don’t think about that. They are whistling in the dark because their own anxiety levels are so high, so, to comfort themselves, they invent comforting stories so that they can feel in control. But we are not in control. Nature is. For it is probable, as the Chinese have shown with their genetic studies of the virus that it likely came out of nature not out of a lab.

Of course there is no denying the evil intentions and potential of the western war machine, and of course anything is possible, but until someone comes up with some concrete and reliable evidence that, for example, the virus was an attack on China by the USA, a claim which could add the spark to the powder keg of war, I will assume it is something Nature has thrown at us, at the world, and that instead of creating more division between the nations and peoples of the world we must all act together to help each other as humanity unites to overcome this new threat.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Though it narrowly averted war with Iran this January, the Trump administration is still pushing for all-out military conflict. The architects of the drive to war, Mike Pompeo and Benjamin Netanyahu, have relied on a series of cynical provocations to force Trump’s hand.

***

The administration of President Donald Trump may escape the most recent conflict with Iran without war, however, a dangerous escalation is just over the horizon.  And as before, the key factors driving the belligerence are not outraged Iraqi militia leaders or their allies in Iran, but Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to draw the US into a military confrontation with Iran.

Throughout the fall of 2019, Netanyahu ordered a series of Israeli strikes against Iranian allies in Iraq and against Lebanese Hezbollah units. He and Pompeo hoped the attacks would provoke a reaction from their targets that could provide a tripwire outright war with Iran. As could have been expected, corporate US media missed the story, perhaps because it failed to reinforce the universally accepted narrative of a hyper-aggressive Iran emboldened by Trump’s failure to “deter” it following Iran’s shoot-down of a U.S. drone in June, and an alleged Iranian attack on Saudi oil facility in September.

Pompeo and John Bolton set the stage for the tripwire strategy in May 2019 with a statement by national security adviser John Bolton citing “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” implying an Iranian threat without providing concrete details. That vague language echoed a previous vow by Bolton that “any attack” by Iran or “proxy” forces “on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.”

Then came a campaign of leaks to major news outlet suggesting that Iran was planning attacks on U.S. military personnel. The day after Bolton’s statement, the Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed U.S. officials cited “U.S. intelligence” showing that Iran “drew up plans to target U.S. forces in Iraq and possibly Syria, to orchestrate attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb strait near Yemen through proxies and in the Persian Gulf with its own armed drones….”

The immediate aim of this campaign was to gain Trump’s approval for contingency plans for a possible war with Iran that included the option of sending as many 120,000 U.S. troops in the region.  Trump balked at such war-planning, however, complaining privately that Bolton and Pompeo were pushing him into a war with Iran. Following Iran’s shoot-down of the U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz on June 20, Pompeo and Bolton suggested the option of killing Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in retaliation. But Trump refused to sign off on the assassination of Iran’s top general unless Iran killed an American first, according to current and former officials.

Screenshot from The NYT

From that point on, the provocation strategy was focused on trying to trigger an Iranian reaction that would involve a U.S. casualty.  That’s when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu interjected himself and his military as a central player in the drama. From July 19 through August 20, the Israeli army carried out five strikes against Iraqi militias allied with Iran, blowing up four weapons depots and killing as many Shiite militiamen and Iranian offcers, according to press accounts.

The Israeli bombing escalated on August 25, when two strikes on the brigade headquarters of a pro-Iranian militia and on a militia convoy killed the brigade commander and six other militiamen, and a drone strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in south Beirut blew the windows out of one of Hezbollah’s media offices.

Netanyahu and Pompeo sabotage Trump and Macron’s attempt at diplomacy

Behind those strikes was Netanyahu’s sense of alarm over Trump toying with the idea of seeking negotiations with Iran. Netanyahu had likely learned about Trump’s moves toward detente from Pompeo, who had long been his primary contact in the administration. On August 26, French President Emanuel Macron revealed that he was working to broker a Trump-Rouhani meeting.  Netanyahu grumbled about the prospect of U.S.-Iranian talks “several times” with his security cabinet the day before launching the strikes.

Two retired senior Israeli generals, Gen. Amos Yadlin and Gen. Assaf Oron, criticized those strikes for increasing the likelihood of harsh retaliation by Iran or one of its regional partners.The generals complained that Netanyahu’s attacks were “designed to prod [Iran] into a hasty response” and thus end Trump’s flirtation with talking to Iran. That much was obviously true, but Pompeo and Netanyahu also knew that provoking an attack by Iran or one of its allies might cause one or more of the American casualties they sought. And once American blood was spilled, Trump would have no means to resist authorizing a major escalation.

Kataib Hezbollah and other pro-Iran Iraqi militias blamed the United States for the wave of lethal Israeli attacks on their fighters. These militias responded in September by launching a series of rocket attacks on Iraqi government bases where U.S. troops were present. They also struck targets in the vicinity of the U.S. Embassy.

The problem for Netanyahu and Pompeo, however, was that none of those strikes killed an American. What’s more, U.S. intelligence officials knew from NSA monitoring of communications between the IRGC and the militias that Iran had explicitly forbidden direct attacks on US personnel.

Netanyahu was growing impatient.  For several days in late October and early November, he met with his national security cabinet to discuss a new Israeli attack to precipitate a possible war with Iran, according to reports by former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. Oren hinted at how a war with Iran might start.  ‘[P]erhaps Israel miscalculates,” he suggested, “hitting a particularly sensitive target,” which, in his view, could spark “a big war between Israel and Iran.”

But on December 27, before Netanyahu could put such a strategy into action, the situation changed dramatically. A barrage of rockets slammed into an Iraqi base near Kirkuk where U.S. military personnel were stationed, killing a U.S military contractor. Suddenly, Pompeo had the opening he needed.  At a meeting the following day, Pompeo led Trump to believe that Iranian “proxies” had attacked the base, and pressed him to “reestablish deterrence” with Iran by carrying out a military response.

In fact, U.S. and Iraqi officials on the spot had reached no such conclusion, and the investigation led by the head of intelligence for the Iraqi federal police at the base was just beginning that same day. But Pompeo and his allies, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A Milley, were not interested in waiting for its conclusion.

A deception brings the US and Iran to the brink of war

The results of a subsequent Iraqi investigation revealed that the rocket barrage had been launched from a Sunni area of Kirkuk with a strong Islamic State presence, and that IS fighters had carried out three attacks not far from the base on Iraqi forces stationed there in the previous ten days. US signals intercepts found no evidence that Iraqi militias had shifted from their policy of avoiding American casualties at all cost.

Kept in the dark by Pompeo about these crucial facts, Trump agreed to launch five airstrikes against Kataib Hezbollah and another pro-Iran militia at five locations in Iraq and Syria that killed 25 militiamen and wounded 51.  He may have also agreed in principle to the killing of Soleimani when the opportunity presented itself.

Iran responded to the attacks on its Iraqi militia allies by approving a violent protest at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad January 31.  The demonstrators did not penetrate the embassy building itself and were abruptly halted the same day. But Pompeo managed to persuade Trump to authorize the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s second most powerful figure, presumably by hammering on the theme of “reestablishing deterrence” with Iran.

Soleimani was not only the second most powerful man in Iran and the main figure in its foreign policy; he was idolized by millions of the most strongly nationalist citizens of the country.  Killing him in a drone strike was an open invitation to the military confrontation Netanyahu and Pompeo so desperately sought.

During the crucial week from December 28 through January 4, while Pompeo was pressing Trump to retaliate against Iran not just once but twice, it was clear that he was coordinating closely with Netanyahu.  During that single week, he spoke by phone with Netanyahu on three separate occasions.

What Pompeo and Netanyahu could not have anticipated was that Iran’s missile attack on the U.S. sector of Iraq’s sprawling al-Asad airbase in retaliation would be so precise that it scored direct hits on six U.S. targets without killing a single American. (The US service members were saved in part because the rockets were fired after the Iraqi government had passed on a warning from Iran to prepare for it). Because no American was killed in the strike, Trump again decided against further retaliation.

Towards another provocation

Although Pompeo and Netanyahu failed to ignite a military conflict with Iran, there is good reason to believe that they will try again before both are forced to leave their positions or power.

In an article for the Atlantic last November, former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, channeled Netanyahu when he declared it would be “better for conflict [with Iran] to occur during the current [Trump] administration, which can be counted on to provide Israel with the three sources of American assistance it traditionally receives in wartime,” than to “wait until later.”

Oren was not the only Israeli official to suggest that Israeli is likely to go even further in strikes against Iranian and Iranian allies targets in 2020.  After listening to Israeli army Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi speak in late December, Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel reported that the Israeli army chief conveyed the clear impression that a “more serious confrontation with Iran in the coming year as an almost unquestionable necessity.” His interviews with Israeli military and political figures further indicated that Israel would “intensity its efforts to hit Iran in the northern area.”

Shockingly, Pompeo has exploited the Coronavirus pandemic to impose even harsher sanctions on Iran while intimidating foreign businesses to prevent urgently needed medical supplies from entering the country. The approaching presidential election gives both Pompeo and Netanyahu a powerful reason to plot another strike, or a series of strikes aimed at drawing the US into a potential Israeli confrontation with Iran.

Activists and members of Congress concerned about keeping the US out of war with Iran must be acutely aware of the danger and ready to respond decisively when the provocation occurs.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

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The recent re-labeling of the novel coronavirus with xenophobic undertones by some U.S. politicians to stigmatize China has drawn widespread criticism.

As the international community works together to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, a few American politicians are shifting blame to China for the virus’ spread by recasting it as a “Chinese virus” or “foreign virus.”

Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, warned on Wednesday against using the phrase “Chinese virus,” saying that

“Viruses know no borders, and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank.”

“So it’s really important we be careful in the language we use,” Ryan said at a news conference in Geneva, giving an example of the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009.

The pandemic “originated in North America and we didn’t call it the North American flu,” he said, calling for solidarity and joint efforts of all countries.

Dr. Michael Ryan (L), executive director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program, addresses a press conference, in Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 18, 2020. (Photo by Chen Junxia/Xinhua)

Ryan was echoed by co-founder of Microsoft Corporation Bill Gates, who wrote on Wednesday in an Ask Me Anything session on the American social news platform Reddit that “we should not call this the Chinese virus.”

The tally of confirmed cases of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached over 220,000 and spans at least 160 countries and regions, according to the latest statistics from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

With the world facing an escalating challenge from the disease, “it’s also an unprecedented opportunity to come together as one against a common enemy,” the WHO wrote on its Twitter feed on Wednesday.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday refuted the White House’s racist remarks on Twitter, saying that “coronavirus does not discriminate.”

“Bigotry against people of Asian descent is unacceptable, un-American, & harmful to our COVID-19 response efforts,” the Massachusetts lawmaker wrote.

U.S. Representative Lois Frankel said on Twitter Wednesday that she was “disappointed, but unsurprised” at the White House’s decision to use xenophobic language during this global pandemic.

She urged the government to promote international cooperation instead of racism to combat the disease.

Public Policy Committee Chairman of the Committee of 100 Charlie Woo said in a statement that any attempt to ascribe the virus to one culture, ethnicity or country can only hinder the global effort to combat the epidemic.

“This crisis requires science, facts and clear language, not fear-mongering, finger-pointing and xenophobia by our public servants,” the statement said, quoted by the New York Times.

John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a non-profit legal aid organization, told NBC Asian America that the U.S. administration’s words could have negative repercussions.

The usage of such racist terms has “led to a noticeable incline in hate incidents that we are seeing,” Yang was quoted by the NBC report. “I do think that there is a correlation,” he added.

The monitor shows the scene of the video conference attended by Chinese and Italian experts in Shanghai, east China, on March 16, 2020. Shanghai medical experts on Monday held a video conference with their Italian peers, sharing their experience on prevention and control measures, medical treatment and scientific research related to the coronavirus epidemic. (Photo by Wang Xiang/Xinhua)

“Rather than making mockery of the Chinese nation or calling the virus ‘made in China’, the world must learn from the miraculous measures China has adopted to defeat this invisible enemy,” said Yasir Masood, former director of media and publications at the Center of Excellence of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

The Pakistani political and international relations analyst believed that such smearing tactics against China or any other country in these depressing times are not conducive to global harmony.

Epidemics have taken millions of lives throughout history and can wreak havoc at a moment’s notice, Masoon said, adding “epidemics and natural disasters have no boundaries and they do not announce their arrival.”

China has achieved great success in its fight against COVID-19, and now it is extending help to other countries to defeat this pandemic, he said.

“In this difficult time of confusion and dismay, the world must work collaboratively to end this pandemic rather than tossing political rhetoric,” he added.

Experts adjust the lab equipment for the COVID-19 nucleic acid test in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 15, 2020. A Chinese team of seven health experts is providing guidance and medical assistance to contain the COVID-19 outbreak in Iraq. (Xinhua)

Regarding the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Pakistan, the analyst said the country has a lot to learn from the exemplary steps taken by China to defeat the virus.

Masood, who was in China when the disease broke out in Wuhan, said the government’s efforts to raise awareness by calling on the public to be socially responsible to stem the virus’ spread is commendable.

“The sterilization of public places and collective quarantine were strictly adopted in the country and the suspected cases were taken care of,” he said.

Praising the Chinese government and its people for their resilience, discipline, and unity during the outbreak, he said China’s measures could be followed.

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Featured image: Photo taken on March 1, 2020 shows medical supplies, including masks, gloves and protective suits, donated to Italy by Lishui City, east China’s Zhejiang Province. (Xinhua)

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy already seems to be affecting the companies and businesses of U.S. President Donald Trump and, along with with it, the employment of hundreds of people.

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President Trump’s company — significantly reliant on tourism, conventions, and restaurant income — has been sharply impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with at least two properties closing and three hotels laying off staff, according to the Washington Post.

In the wake of the crisis caused by the new coronavirus pandemic in the world, many countries have adopted some strict policies to prevent mass contagion. In the United States, some states ordered the closure of bars and restaurants and imposed special restrictions in some places, which has affected Trump’s businesses and companies in Florida, Las Vegas, New York, Washington, among others.

Places like the famous Mar-a-Lago Club and hotels announced its closure due to the policies that the states imposed to combat the COVID-19. However, the strong impact of all this lies in the dismissal of hundreds of employees, more than 200, according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas was shuttered in response to a statewide order from Nevada’s governor. It will not reopen until April 17; the hotel told customers. However, some employees at the hotel have already been laid off, the news outlet reported.

One nonsalaried employee in the hotel’s food and beverage department said his manager told him he would receive nothing. “Zero, nothing,” said the employee, who said he had been at the hotel for more than a decade. “We live paycheck to paycheck,”  “We are screwed,” he said to the Washington Post.

In New York, Trump’s hotel on Central Park remained open Friday. However, 51 of the more than 300 employees were fired on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the Trump hotel’s operations.

“Various facilities are temporarily closed given local, state and federal mandates,” Trump Organization spokeswoman Kimberly Benza said in a statement. “We anxiously await the day when this pandemic is over, and our world-class facilities can reopen.”

At the Trump Hotel in Washington, the layoffs were even more drastic. In essence, 160 workers were let go, as the hotel’s occupancy rate plunged to about 5 percent, according to the union that represents the hotel’s employees.

Trump’s D.C. hotel remains open, despite the bar and restaurant being closed by a directive from the D.C. government and almost no guests staying there.

John Boardman, executive secretary-treasurer of the D.C. affiliate of Unite Here, said occupancy is about 5 percent and about 160 of his 174 workers he represents — including housekeepers, dishwashers and bellmen — have been laid off. He said the Trump Organization is “no different than anybody else except that they are staying open, which amazes me.”

And at all of the company’s other large U.S. hotels — in Miami, Honolulu, and Chicago — restaurants were either partially or entirely shut, cutting off a vital stream of revenue, the Washington Post said.

The company does not release profit and loss information, so it is unclear what the downturn has meant to its bottom line.

Also, the company has other lucrative investments in commercial buildings that will not be hurt immediately by the new coronavirus. But many of the company’s largest — and most heavily indebted — businesses are dependent on a travel industry that is now primarily shuttered, with no end in sight. Trump still owns his business empire, so its struggles could affect his wealth.

Trump owns seven U.S. hotels, including three — in Washington, Miami, and Chicago — with outstanding loans from Deutsche Bank. The original value of these loans was more than $300 million. Deutsche Bank declined to comment about the loans, according to the Washington Post.

Many analysts have criticized the lack of preventive policies by the Trump government, who had initially downplayed the COVID-19 threats in March early. Now the impact of this new virus seems to become more real for the world economy as well as the International Labour Organization (ILO) said that the effects of the new pandemic could destroy up to 25 million jobs around the world.

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Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, joined the country’s battle against the global coronavirus pandemic and has acquired 100,000 test kits for the disease from two countries with which it does not share diplomatic ties, Israeli media reported, adding that the kits were “unusable”.  

The Mossad is expected to get millions of coronavirus test kits, the reports said.

Israel’s health ministry said the kits that the Mossad obtained overnight on Wednesday were “unusable”, and they were missing the swabs needed to conduct the tests.

“Unfortunately, what Mossad has delivered is not what we are in need of,” Itamar Grotto, the deputy director-general of the health ministry, told Ynet.

The sources of the test kits remain unidentified.

Yossi Melman, a security analyst and Middle East Eye contributor, estimates that the Mossad obtained the test kits “probably from the United Arab Emirates”.

“Since Israel refuses to reveal the name of the country that supplied the equipment that is in demand worldwide, it is likely the UAE. Certainly, not another friend of Israel, such as Egypt or Jordan, both of which need it for their own populations,” Melman said.

The equipment includes test tubes for throat checks and must be approved by the Israeli Ministry of Health to ensure they meet the required standards.

Melman added that both the Mossad and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are trying to take visible action against the pandemic.

He added that hundreds of Israeli businessmen and firms are also trying to purchase the needed test kits to meet the shortage in the country.

The Mossad often coordinates with countries with which Israel has no official diplomatic ties, such as Oman, the UAE, Sudan, Bahrain and Qatar.

Israel has recorded 529 coronavirus cases as of Thursday, with six people in serious condition, and no fatalities.

Last week, Netanyahu issued an order requiring that all citizens returning from abroad go into self-quarantine.

Last week, Israel mobilised a cyber spy unit in the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet to monitor and identify people infected with the coronavirus.

There are currently 20 labs in Israel dedicated to testing for the coronavirus infection.

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The actions of prominent US lawmakers, Democrats as well as Republicans, in seeking to secure their personal wealth while concealing from the public the catastrophic implications of the coronavirus pandemic and the measures needed to combat it, sum up the response of the American ruling elite to the unfolding crisis.

According to reports published by the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR) and ProPublica, and confirmed on the US Senate database for financial disclosures, at least four sitting senators, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Richard Burr, and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, in a textbook example of “insider trading” dumped millions of dollars worth of stock after a receiving a classified briefing on January 24. During the briefing, all members of the US Senate were informed of the “emerging public threat” regarding the novel coronavirus.

In addition to Feinstein and Burr, Republican senators James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia sold off large amounts of stock while at the same time misleading the public about the danger of the virus and the lack of preparation on the part of the government. In all cases, the senators completed the sale of their stock well before the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 10,000 points beginning February 21.

The most blatant and criminal example of insider trading comes from the Senate’s newest and wealthiest member Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacancy this year. Loeffler is worth an estimated $500 million, in large part due to her role as former executive and stockholder at the Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, “ICE operates 12 exchanges and other subsidiaries,” including the New York Stock Exchange. ICE’s primary government regulator is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which reports to the Senate Agriculture committee.

ICE was founded in 2000 by Jeffrey Sprecher, whom Loeffler married two years after arriving at the company in 2002. Sprecher is still the company’s chief executive and the largest individual shareholder. After being appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to replace retiring Senator Jonny Isakson without a single vote cast, Loeffler became a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee on January 6, 2020 and was now in charge of regulating her and her husband’s businesses.

After the classified briefings on January 24, which included reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Loeffler tweeted her appreciation for “today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak.” Loeffler and her husband expressed their appreciation by acting on the classified intelligence they received and hurriedly completing 27 separate sales of stock within 22 days. Between January 24 and February 15, Loeffler reported selling stock jointly owned between her and her husband worth between $1.275 and $3.1 million. Loeffler proceeded to purchase stock in only two companies: Oracle, a major technology company, and Citrix, which specializes in teleconferencing software, both on February 14 in the amount of $100,000 to $250,000, respectively.

When Loeffler wasn’t busy dumping soon to be worthless stock she took to Twitter to defend President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 11,300 worldwide, including nearly 300 in the US as of this writing. In a February 28 tweet, Loeffler lied to her followers and the world, stating, “The truth: @realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.”

In a video appearance on Fox News Friday morning, Loeffler failed to convince viewers that she was unaware of the transactions and that she played no part in the sale of potentially $3 million worth of stock, stating that “there’s a range of decisions made that I’m not involved in.”

Joining Loeffler in seeking to profit off of the preventable pandemic were high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr and James Inhofe, and the former chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Members of the committee receive regular classified briefings to which other members of Congress are not privy, including CIA and military reports. The Washington Post reported Friday that the CIA was warning in such briefings as early as January of the outbreak in China mushrooming into a global pandemic. There is no doubt that these senators were well aware of the immense peril COVID-19 posed to the public.

Burr’s disclosures reveal that he and his wife sold 33 different stocks on February 13, worth between $628,000 and $1.72 million, the most stock he’s sold in a single day in the last 14 months. Burr’s largest sales were among companies most affected by recent lockdowns and travel restrictions, including $150,000 worth of shares in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, which has lost two-thirds of its value so far this year, and $100,000 worth of shares in Extended Stay America, whose share value has decreased by 50 percent since Burr sold his stock.

Burr also sold up to $65,000 worth of stock in Park Hotels and resorts, whose stock is now a fifth of what it was before the sale. A week after the sale, the Dow Jones began its rapid descent.

Burr, like Loeffler, did not warn the public after having received the intelligence briefing. Instead, he downplayed the virus and sought to bolster the government’s credibility. In a February 7 opinion piece for Fox News, coauthored with Senator Lamar Alexander, the pair stated that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress and the Trump administration.”

It was reported this past week that the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile has approximately 12 million of the vitally important medical-grade N95 masks. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the US will go through approximately 3.5 billion masks if the outbreak lasts the duration of the year. That is, the US government has less than one percent of the masks on hand needed to meet the urgent demand and ensure the safety of health care workers risking their lives to fight the disease. Health care workers in the US have already resorted to reusing equipment and even relying on bandanas to protect themselves.

Burr, however, changed his tune when talking to prominent campaign contributors in his home state of North Carolina. Members of the Tar Heel Circle pay between $500 and $10,000 in dues to “Enjoy interaction with top leaders and staff from Congress, the administration and the private sector,” according to the group’s website.

In recordings obtained by NPR, two weeks before the Trump administration banned travel to Europe, Barr warned the Tar Heel Circle, “…you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they’re making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done on the video conference. Why risk it?”

In contrast to his op-ed piece, Burr was more forthcoming to his elite audience in regards to the severity of the virus. “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to the recording of his remarks cited by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” he warned.

Upon news of Burr’s corruption, the senator claimed that his decision to sell a majority of assets was made after watching “CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time.” In an attempt to save his seat and blunt social anger, Burr has requested a Senate Ethics Committee review of his transactions.

Demonstrating that capitalist corruption is a bipartisan affair, multimillionaire Dianne Feinstein and her husband, billionaire investment banker Richard Blum, reported in Feinstein’s senate disclosures the sale of between $1.5 and $6 million worth of California biotech company Allogen Therapeutics stock between January 31 and February 18. A share of Allogen stock sold for $24.25 the day Feinstein dumped the stock. As of today, shares of the stock were trading at $19.25.

Feinstein, like Loeffler, pleaded ignorance of the seven-figure sales, stating on Twitter that she “held all assets in a blind trust of which I have no control.” Echoing Loeffler, she further declared that she “had no input” into any decisions her husband made.

Finally, Senator Inhofe sold as much as $400,000 worth of stock, including in companies such as PayPal, Apple and Intuit on January 31. Inhofe had previously been criticized for buying stock in defense contractor Raytheon while advocating for more defense spending. He is the current chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Inhofe joined his fellow grifters in pleading ignorance, telling the Tulsa World that he did not know about the stock sales and had “no control” of his investments.

There is little doubt that there are more members of Congress who have done the same, exemplifying once again that in capitalist society the first and foremost concern is the wealth of the aristocracy, not the health and safety of the population, even in the face of a global pandemic.

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The International Monetary Fund has rejected a Venezuelan appeal for an emergency US $5 billion loan to face the coronavirus health crisis.

Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza revealed on Tuesday afternoon that President Nicolas Maduro had sent a letter to IMF President Kristalina Georgieva requesting funds from the body’s Rapid Financing Instrument to “strengthen [Venezuelan] detection and response systems.”

The Associated Press reported on Monday evening that the Fund was not “in a position to consider” Venezuela’s request. According to a statement, the IMF does not have “clarity on recognition” of the Maduro government.

Opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself “interim president” in January 2019 and was immediately recognized by the US and its allies. With its member states split on recognizing Guaido as the country’s legitimate president, the IMF has not taken a position on the matter.

Venezuela’s healthcare system has been hard hit by years of economic crisis and US sanctions. Officials have repeatedly denounced obstacles in importing medicines and other equipment. Cooperation with the Red Cross and United Nations agencies has increased in recent months in attempts to tend to the most vulnerable sectors.

The Washington-based lending body has allocated $50 billion in loans to countries struggling to deal with the pandemic. Iran reportedly applied for a $5 billion loan as well.

The Maduro government’s request generated intense debate on social media, with critics pointing towards former President Hugo Chavez’s fierce opposition to the IMF over the body’s promotion of neoliberal structural adjustment policies across the continent.

The Venezuelan government has acted swiftly following the confirmation of the first COVID-19 cases in the country last week, declaring a state of emergency followed by national quarantine measures. Authorities have imposed restrictions on movement and commercial activity, with public transport reserved for workers in the health, food retail, and other priority sectors has been halted while public transport is only available for public workers, health officials and other prioritized sectors.

While health officials have warned that the number of confirmed cases is due to grow in the coming days, no new confirmed cases have been registered in the past 24 hours.

Vice President Delcy Rodriguez announced on Wednesday evening that the number of confirmed cases remains at 36. She stated that the quarantine is being 90 percent enforced, and lauded the “collective discipline” of the Venezuelan people.

Rodriguez likewise revealed that President Maduro had held a telephone conversation with World Health Organization (WHO) President Tedros Adhanom, who reportedly pledged to support the country with coronavirus test kits, supplies and technical assistance.

On Wednesday evening, Venezuelan authorities announced that a massive testing campaign would be deployed during the weekend, asking Venezuelans to fill out an online survey should they have coronavirus symptoms.

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Cuban health authorities announced on Thursday that the country will send 53 health professionals to Lombardy, Italy, to help contain the new coronavirus pandemic.

The 53 doctors and nurses have experience in caring for these types of diseases. In 2014, they traveled to Sierra Leone in West Africa to fight the Ebola virus.

According to Cuban authorities, the arrival in Lombardy will take place next Saturday, March 21.

The regional health counselor Giulio Gallera announced that the European country “requested medical support from Cuba given the shortage of health personnel in Italian hospitals.”

Giulio Gallera, Consejero de Bienestar de la Región de Lombardía (foco de coronavirus en Italia): "Tendremos personal de Venezuela, China, Cuba, son médicos a los que obviamente les daremos un lugar para vivir, pero necesitamos las habilidades de todos". pic.twitter.com/PGcQ5oLSCD

— Misión Verdad (@Mision_Verdad) March 14, 2020

“Welfare Councillor for the Lombardy Region Giulio Gallera said, ‘We will have staff from Venezuela, China, Cuba, they are doctors who will be given a place to live, but we need everyone’s skills.'”

Gallera’s request reached the competent authorities of the Caribbean island through the Cuban ambassador in Italy, Jose Carlos Rodriguez.

The Cuban doctors and nurses will join the ten professionals from China who arrived this Thursday in Milan, Italy.

“Cuban and Chinese medical personnel will be sent to a field hospital in Bergamo, the region of Lombardy most affected by the pandemic.

Italy has recorded more than 3,000 deaths from the spread of the disease, surpassing China as the country with the most deaths.

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Featured image: At the entrance to the hospital, a sign reads: “You are the real heroes”, Bergamo, Italy, March, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @orlandoQva