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Rolf Hazlehurst, a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) staff attorney and father of a son with autism, today filed a motion in federal court alleging lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fraudulently concealed evidence that vaccines can cause autism.

In a motion filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Hazlehurst alleged that U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who represented HHS in vaccine injury cases repeatedly defrauded the judicial system — from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) to the U.S. Supreme Court.

That fraud led to thousands of families of vaccine-injured children being denied the right to compensation and the right to have their cases heard, according to the motion.

“This motion makes very serious and well-substantiated allegations of a massive scheme of fraud on the courts,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel who also is of counsel to Hazlehurst in the federal case.

“The evidence submitted in support of the motion clearly shows that attorneys from the Department of Justice concealed and misrepresented highly relevant information from the special masters in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the judges in the courts,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

Hazlehurst’s son Yates regressed into autism after being vaccinated as an infant. In the early 2000s, his family and thousands of others filed cases seeking compensation for vaccine-induced autism through the NVICP.

The program consolidated all of the petitions into the Omnibus Autism Proceeding (OAP) and selected six representative “test cases” — of which Yates’ was the second — as the basis for determining the outcome of the remaining 5,400 cases.

Unbeknownst at the time to the petitioners and the NVICP special masters, the DOJ’s star expert medical witness, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman informed DOJ attorneys during the ongoing omnibus proceedings that he had reversed his original opinion and determined that vaccines can and do cause autism in some cases.

In what Hazlehurst alleges was “a shocking cover-up,” instead of allowing Zimmerman to share his revised opinion, the DOJ attorneys relieved Zimmerman of his duties as a witness.

However, they continued to use excerpts from his unamended written opinion to make their case that vaccines did not cause autism — misrepresenting his position and committing “fraud on the court.”

According to the motion, the DOJ’s first act of fraud snowballed into a scheme of deception with far-reaching implications in which DOJ attorneys repeatedly misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion and concealed other evidence that emerged during the test case hearings in the OAP in subsequent cases before multiple courts.

“As a result, thousands of cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding were denied compensation and the impact beyond the OAP is enormous,” Mack Rosenberg said. “This fraud affected the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program — especially the Omnibus Autism Proceeding — the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and even the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Hazlehurst said he is “asking the court to give this motion the serious attention it deserves.” He added, “At a minimum, the court should allow discovery and hold a hearing on this motion.”

Overturning a ruling due to fraud on the court is an extraordinary remedy reserved for extraordinary cases but according to Hazlehurst, “This motion we filed shows that this indeed is an extraordinary case.”

The DOJ has until April 30 to respond to the motion.

CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender, “Vaccines most definitely do cause autism, and the government has been lying about this reality for decades.”

Holland added:

“With others, I published a law review article in 2011 showing that the government absolutely knew that vaccines cause autism — and yet they have covered it up and lied about it since the inception of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

“How many hundreds of thousands of children and families would have been spared the heartaches and crushing financial burdens of autism had the government come clean?”

‘Exceptionally Difficult’ to Obtain Compensation Through NVICP

In the late 1980s, a substantial number of lawsuits for vaccine injuries related to Wyeth’s (now Pfizer) DPT vaccine, combined with “grossly insufficient compensation” for victims of vaccine injury, threatened the vaccine program’s viability.

In response, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which established the “vaccine court.” The law gave the pharmaceutical industry broad protection from liability and proposed to compensate vaccine-injured children through the new NVICP.

The NVICP originally was designed to be a “swift, flexible, and less adversarial alternative to the often costly and lengthy civil arena of traditional tort litigation.”

To receive compensation, parents file a claim with the program.

The Court of Federal Claims (which oversees the program) appoints “special masters” — typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government — to manage and decide the individual claims. Attorneys may represent the petitioners, and the DOJ represents HHS.

NVICP proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. Unlike regular court proceedings, petitioners in the “vaccine court” have no right to discovery.

If a petitioner files a claim for a vaccine covered under the program and listed on the Vaccine Injury Table — the list of known vaccine side effects associated with certain vaccines within set time frames — it is presumed that a vaccine caused the petitioner’s injury and the petitioner is eligible for compensation without proof of causation.

However, if a petitioner experiences an “off-table injury” — an injury not listed on the table or that didn’t happen in the recognized injury time frame — the petitioner must prove by “a preponderance of evidence” that the vaccine caused the injury. Evidence includes medical records and expert witness testimony.

Claims must be filed within three years of the first symptom or two years of death.

Petitioners must provide a medical theory of the cause, a sequence of cause and effect, and show a temporal relationship between vaccine and injury.

However, the NVICP does not specify the required volume and type of evidence, so meeting the “preponderance of evidence” standard is largely at the discretion of the special master.

Petitioners can appeal NVICP cases to the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is “exceptionally difficult” to obtain compensation within the NVICP, Hazlehurst told The Defender. The proceedings are often turned into drawn-out, contentious expert battles and the backlog of cases is substantial.

The Vaccine Act of 1986 is unjust for petitioners, Hazlehurst alleges. And that injustice reached its zenith with the OAP, when the DOJ perpetrated fraud right under the noses of the special masters, signaling the beginning of the fraud on the courts that continues to this day.

Hazlehurst told The Defender he hopes his motion will shed light on the damage inflicted by this law and that it will ultimately help end the autism epidemic.

“The Vaccine Act of 1986 is one of the fundamental causes of the autism epidemic,” Hazlehurst said. “Understanding why this is true, and how the United States Department of Justice perpetrated fraud upon the courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the key to ending the autism epidemic.”

A Short History of the Autism Omnibus Proceedings

By 2002, to address a “massive influx” of petitions alleging vaccine-induced autism, the Office of Special Masters combined over 5,000 claims into the OAP to determine whether vaccines cause autism and if so, under what conditions.

Initially, the NVICP planned to investigate causation issues and apply those general findings to individual cases. However, the program changed its strategy and instead selected six “test cases” by which it would examine the evidence for injuries caused by the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCV), or a combination of both.

Then it would apply the findings of the test cases to other similar cases.

In doing so, Hazlehurst alleges, the court conflated general causation evidence with specific causation evidence from a few cases, without allowing for rules of discovery or evidence that would apply in an actual court.

This, Hazlehurst said, “was a recipe for disaster” as each test case was then used to determine the outcome for the remaining 5,000 cases.

Three cases — Cedillo v. HHS, Hazlehurst v. HHS and Poling v. HHS — are at the center of the alleged fraud by the DOJ.

Fraud #1: The Zimmerman Testimony

Hearings for the first OAP test case, Cedillo v. HHS, began in 2007. Zimmerman had worked with the DOJ to prepare an expert report on behalf of HHS finding that Michelle Cedillo’s autism had likely not been caused by the MMR vaccine.

Zimmerman later wrote in a 2018 affidavit that he attended the Cedillo hearing and listened to the testimony of Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne, another world-renowned expert in pediatric neurology.

On that basis, Zimmerman stated, he decided to clarify his written expert opinion about Michelle Cedillo, concerned it would be taken out of context.

Zimmerman spoke with DOJ attorneys to clarify that his expert opinion in the Cedillo case “was not intended to be a blanket statement as to all children and all medical science,” according to the 2018 affidavit.

He specified that advances in science, medicine and his own clinical research had led him to believe there were exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.

He also referred the attorneys to a paper he published with colleagues in 2006, the Poling paper, describing the case of an unidentified child who suffered regressive autism following vaccine adverse reactions. The paper suggested a possible association between mitochondrial dysfunction, vaccinations and regressive autism.

After communicating this evidence to DOJ attorneys, the DOJ dismissed Zimmerman as a witness but continued to use his written opinion as general causation evidence.

The DOJ was also allowed to use that report, submitted in one test case, as general causation evidence in other test cases.

None of the petitioners in the test cases could cross-examine Zimmerman, because he was no longer a witness. This was only possible because the federal rules of evidence do not apply in NVICP proceedings.

Yates’ case, Hazlehurst v. HHS, was the second test case in the OAP. His treating neurologist, Dr. Jean-Ronel Corbier testified Yates’ autism was likely caused by a genetic predisposition combined with an environmental insult in the form of vaccinations administered when Yates was ill. (Yates was a patient of Zimmerman in 2002.)

Corbier’s theory of causation in Yates was similar to the theory developed by Zimmerman in the Poling paper and shared with DOJ attorneys.

Yet, despite knowing Zimmerman had concluded that in a subset of children like Yates, vaccines can cause autism, the DOJ “intentionally and fraudulently” misrepresented Zimmerman’s expert testimony in its closing statements in Yates’ case, Hazlehurst alleges.

DOJ attorneys selectively quoted Zimmerman’s expert report from the Cedillo case, telling the court that Zimmerman found there was “no sound evidence to support a causative relationship with exposure to both or either MMR and/or mercury,” when Zimmerman had explicitly told the DOJ that his opinion was the opposite, according to the affidavit.

Fraud #2: The Hannah Poling Case

Three weeks after closing arguments in Yates’ case, the DOJ quietly conceded Hannah Poling’s case, which was on the verge of becoming the fourth test case.

Hannah regressed into autism over several months after being vaccinated against nine diseases at one doctor’s visit.

In 2003, Poling’s father, Jon, a physician and trained neurologist, and mother, Terry, an attorney and nurse, filed an autism petition against HHS under the NVICP for their daughter’s injuries.

Jon Poling was a co-author of the 2006 paper with Zimmerman that analyzed an unnamed child, later revealed as Hannah Poling, who had a mitochondrial disorder — a condition with which Yates was later diagnosed.

In 2007, just three weeks after the lead DOJ attorney misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion during the hearing in Hazlehurst, the same DOJ attorney submitted a report to the special masters conceding that in the case of Poling v. HHS, Hannah’s “regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder” (i.e., regressive autism) was caused by a vaccine injury, based upon a preponderance of the evidence standard.

This was the same neurological diagnosis Zimmerman had made for Yates in 2002.

According to court documents, if HHS had not conceded Poling, Poling v. HHS would have been designated as a test case. However, because the DOJ conceded the case, it was taken out of the omnibus and the DOJ had the case records sealed —- although they were later leaked to the press and published in the Huffington Post in 2008.

In March 2008, Hannah’s parents moved to make the proceedings transparent and available to the public, but the DOJ opposed the motion and the NVICP deferred a ruling on the motion for 60 days.

During those 60 days, the DOJ filed amendments to its report conceding the Poling case. It retroactively changed the basis for compensation to say that Hannah had a “table injury.”

This meant that instead of conceding that the petitioners had proven with a preponderance of evidence that the vaccines caused her autism, they said she had a presumptive injury on the vaccine table, in which causation is presumed.

By conceding the Poling case, opposing the parents’ motion for complete transparency and changing the basis for compensation, the DOJ was able to conceal fraud and critical material evidence of how vaccines cause autism, according to Hazlehurst.

Fraud #3: Appellate Courts and the U.S. Supreme Court

On Feb. 12, 2009, the special masters denied compensation in the first three cases. They found the petitioners failed to establish causation between MMR or TCV vaccines and autism.

In Hazlehurst’s case, the NVICP explicitly relied on the portion of Zimmerman’s expert report that DOJ attorneys misrepresented.

The Hazlehursts appealed to the Court of Federal Claims and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, both of which upheld the special master’s decision — by relying on Zimmerman’s misrepresented opinion and knowingly fraudulent statements made by a DOJ attorney, according to Hazlehurst.

Those prior decisions directly influenced the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth.

In that case, Wyeth, now Pfizer, argued that a decision favoring the Bruesewitz family — who was attempting to sue the company for their daughter’s vaccine injury — would lead to a “flood of frivolous lawsuits,” including by the families from the omnibus.

Amicus briefs from the American Academy of Pediatrics, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Sanofi Pasteur on behalf of Wyeth relied on Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP decisions that were based on the misrepresentation of Zimmerman’s testimony that there was “no scientific basis” that vaccines cause autism.

The Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and the NVICP it created, preempt all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers by individuals seeking compensation for injury or death.

In oral arguments and in their written opinions, the justices explicitly cited the portions of the amicus briefs citing Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP rulings that relied on the DOJ misrepresentations in their rulings.

Since that ruling, the special masters have continued to rely on the DOJ’s fraudulent claims to deny compensation to families filing complaints in the NVICP.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD chairman on leave, and Hazlehurst in September 2018 filed a complaint with the DOJ Office of Inspector General outlining what they then knew about the DOJ’s fraud during the OAP.

The DOJ Office of Professional Misconduct investigated and responded in a June 2019 letter that it found no wrongdoing.

In that letter, however, the Office of Professional Responsibility conceded the DOJ had in fact kept Zimmerman’s testimony while dismissing him as a witness in order to avoid creating the appearance that he had changed his opinion and to prevent the petitioners from cross-examining him, according to Hazlehurst.

The ‘Fraud on the Court’ Doctrine 

It has taken 17 years, Hazlehurst said, since the DOJ’s first alleged act of fraud upon the court, for him to gather all of the admissible evidence necessary to “connect the dots and reveal the DOJ’s web of deceit” to make this claim under the “fraud on the court” doctrine.

Under this doctrine, codified as Rule 60(d)(3) in the rules of the Court of Federal Claims, there is no time limit for the court to overturn a judgment made on the basis of fraud on the court.

The petitioner must demonstrate that there was fraud, intent to defraud and that the fraud affected more than one instance of litigation — putting the integrity of the judicial process at stake.

Hazlehurst alleges DOJ attorneys committed fraud by knowingly making false statements and offering evidence they knew to be false and that they did not take remedial action to disclose information they knew to be false and misleading to the court.

The special masters themselves have an obligation to consider all relevant evidence, but didn’t, in this case, Hazlehurst said. Instead, they ignored the contradictions in Zimmerman’s opinions and ignored the Poling evidence.

This is particularly problematic for NVICP cases, where petitioners can’t conduct meaningful discovery or cross-examination and the special masters’ oversight is the only meaningful safeguard to prevent the DOJ’s abuse of power, according to Hazlehurst.

“There is nothing fair about a government proceeding where the government controls the admissibility of evidence,” he said.

Hazlehurst said that by forcing people injured by vaccines into an administrative program, petitioners are deprived of the basic constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law. “It should be declared unconstitutional,” he said.

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Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

Featured image is from CHD

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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***

The government wants to play god.

It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.

Abortion may still be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual freedom, the rights of the unborn, and property interests in one’s body, but there’s so much more at play.

In the 50-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to believe that it not only has the power to determine who is deserving of constitutional rights in the eyes of the law but it also has the authority to deny those rights to an American citizen.

This is how the abortion debate has played into the police state’s hands: by laying the groundwork for discussions about who else may or may not be deserving of rights.

Despite the Supreme Court having overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry all along the spectrum of life.

Take a good, hard look at the many ways in which Americans are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American families who have their dogs shot, their homes trashed and their children terrorized or, worse, killed by errant SWAT team raids in the middle of the night are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Disabled individuals who are being strip searched, handcuffed, arrested and “diagnosed” by police as dangerous or mentally unstable merely because they stutter and walk unevenly are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

School-aged children as young as 4-years-old who are leg shackled, handcuffed and strip searched for violating school zero tolerance policies by chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun and playing an imaginary game of cops and robbers, or engaging in childish behavior such as crying or jumping are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Unarmed citizens who are tasered or shot by police for daring to hesitate, stutter, move a muscle, flee or disagree in any way with a police order are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Likewise, Americans—young and old alike—who are shot by police because they pointed a garden hose at a police officer, reached for their registration in their glove box, relied upon a cane to steady themselves, or were seen playing with air rifles or BB guns are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Female motorists who are unlucky enough to be pulled over for a questionable traffic infraction only to be subjected by police to cavity searches by the side of the road are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Male pedestrians and motorists alike who are being subjected to roadside strip searches and rectal probes by police based largely on the color of their skin are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American citizens subjected to government surveillance whereby their phone calls are being listened in on, their mail and text messages read, their movements tracked and their transactions monitored are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Homeowners who are being fined and arrested for raising chickens in their backyard, allowing the grass in their front yards to grow too long, and holding Bible studies in their homes are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Decorated military veterans who are being arrested for criticizing the government on social media such as Facebook are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Homeless individuals who are being harassed, arrested and run out of towns by laws that criminalize homelessness are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Individuals whose DNA has been forcibly collected and entered into federal and state law enforcement databases whether or not they have been convicted of any crime are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Drivers whose license plates are being scanned, uploaded to a police database and used to map their movements, whether or not they are suspected of any crime, are being denied their rights under the Constitution. The same goes for drivers who are being ticketed for running afoul of red light cameras without any real opportunity to defend themselves against such a charge are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Protesters and activists who are being labeled domestic terrorists and extremists and accused of hate crimes for speaking freely are being denied their rights under the Constitution. Likewise, American citizens who being targeted for assassination by drone strikes abroad without having been charged, tried and convicted of treason are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Hard-working Americans whose bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash are seized by police (operating according to asset forfeiture schemes that provide profit incentives for highway robbery) are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

So, what is the common denominator here?

These are all American citizens—endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, rights that no person or government can take away from them, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—and they are all being oppressed in one way or another by a government that has grown drunk on power, money and its own authority.

If the government—be it the President, Congress, the courts or any federal, state or local agent or agency—can decide that any person has no rights, then that person becomes less than a citizen, less than human, less than deserving of respect, dignity, civility and bodily integrity. He or she becomes an “it,” a faceless number that can be tallied and tracked, a quantifiable mass of cells that can be discarded without conscience, an expendable cost that can be written off without a second thought, or an animal that can be bought, sold, branded, chained, caged, bred, neutered and euthanized at will.

It’s a slippery slope that justifies all manner of violations in the name of national security, the interest of the state and the so-called greater good.

Yet those who founded this country believed that what we conceive of as our rights were given to us by God—we are created equal, according to the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence—and that government cannot create, nor can it extinguish our God-given rights. To do so would be to anoint the government with god-like powers and elevate it above the citizenry.

Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this particular devil for quite some time now.

If we continue to wait for the government to restore our freedoms, respect our rights, rein in its abuses and restrain its agents from riding roughshod over our lives, our liberty and our happiness, then we will be waiting forever.

The highly politicized tug-of-war over abortion will not resolve the problem of a culture that values life based on a sliding scale.  Nor will it help us navigate the moral, ethical and scientific minefields that await us as technology and humanity move ever closer to a point of singularity.

Humanity is being propelled at warp speed into a whole new frontier when it comes to privacy, bodily autonomy, and what it means to be a human being. As such, we haven’t even begun to wrap our heads around how present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty, and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive and unavoidable government technologies.

Yet here is what I know.

Life is an inalienable right.

By allowing the government to decide who or what is deserving of rights, it shifts the entire discussion from one in which we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” (that of life, liberty property and the pursuit of happiness) to one in which only those favored by the government get to enjoy such rights.

If all people are created equal, then all lives should be equally worthy of protection.

Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together.

We must never stop working to protect life, preserve our freedoms and maintain some semblance of our humanity.

Freedom cannot be a piece-meal venture.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from Boise State Public Radio

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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A deadly airstrike on the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Damascus, Syria has prompted outrage throughout the West Asia region.

This attack continues a long line of atrocities committed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the United States Pentagon.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) identified two of the deceased as Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, along with his deputy General Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi being among the seven people killed in the IDF attack.

Washington and Wall Street are the largest backers of the settler-colonial regime which has occupied Palestine for more than three-quarters of a century. Despite the façade of disagreements between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden, weapons are continuing to flow into Israel for the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout the entire Occupied Territories.

Iran demanded a hearing before the United Nations Security Council on April 2 where Deputy Ambassador Zahra Ershadi spoke for the government in Tehran. The leadership inside Iran have vowed to retaliate for the Israeli bombing of its embassy in Syria.

In a report published by Press TV on April 2 about the Security Council hearing explained that:

“Addressing the event on Tuesday in New York, the U.S., Iran’s mission to the UN called on the world body to categorically denounce Israel’s violation of international regulations. Zahra Ershadi, Iran’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said Israel is seeking to escalate tensions in the region while avoiding full responsibility for its actions. She said the regime defies Security Council resolutions and shows disregard for its international obligations.

She added that Monday’s crime also clearly breached the basic principle of diplomatic and consular immunity, as well as the 1961 Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes.” 

Obviously, the Zionist state has no regard for international law and norms governing relations between governments. A Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza has been disregarded by the Netanyahu administration. Although the U.S. Ambassador Greenfield abstained during the vote, the White House and State Department decided that it would not be opportune to veto yet another ceasefire resolution.

Political opinions related to the Biden administration’s pivotal role in the Gaza genocide has seriously damaged its bid for reelection. Mass demonstrations throughout the U.S. and within other imperialist states has illustrated the growing discontent over the unconditional support provided to the State of Israel.

The deaths in Damascus did not occur within a political vacuum. Inside Gaza tens of thousands of people have been massacred by the IDF including children, women, the elderly and infirm. Hospitals have been bombed into rubble along with places of worship, schools, universities, businesses, transportation infrastructure, residential areas and aid distribution centers.

Nonetheless, the Palestinian people have remained determined to resist the occupation and its most recent military onslaught. Ten different brigades are fighting the IDF in the Gaza Strip inflicting casualties and damage to military hardware.

The Hezbollah resistance movement based in southern Lebanon has been engaging the IDF in solidarity with Gaza. Yemen has imposed its own blockade on Israeli ports prompting numerous airstrikes by the Pentagon and the British Royal Air Force. Other resistance organizations in Syria and Iraq are launching missiles and drones at U.S. and Israeli targets.

This persistent resistance by the Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen has caused frustrations in Tel Aviv and Washington. In their efforts to maintain Israel as an outpost for imperialist interests in West Asia and North Africa, the ruling class in the U.S. has sought to suppress criticism related to its foreign policy on the Palestinian question.

A clear indication of the will to be free and independent of imperialist influence was a conversation held between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his Syrian counterpart President Bashar al-Assad. The two leaders agreed that the attacks in Damascus on the Iranian embassy are acts of desperation by the Zionist regime. Both the Iranian and Syrian presidents committed their governments to continue supporting the resistance in Palestine and throughout the entire region.

However, failed efforts by the Biden administration, Britain and the European Union (EU) to shift the narrative on the Palestinian situation, has been countered by the Republic of South Africa which filed a lawsuit during late 2023 charging Tel Aviv with violations of the Genocide Convention. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the charges of genocide by the African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa are plausible.

Each military and political setback on the part of Tel Aviv and their imperialist facilitators will breed further acts of state-sponsored terrorism aimed at dampening and degrading the capacity and willingness to struggle among the oppressed. Nonetheless, if developments over the last six months are an indication of the mood among the people in West Asia and internationally, the ability of imperialism to maintain its hegemony in the region will be seriously weakened.

Security Council Session Hears Condemnations of Israel

During the discussions before the UN Security Council on April 2, several governments spoke out against Tel Aviv. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian issued a statement calling upon the Security Council to denounce Israel for its actions in Damascus.

In the same Press TV article quoted above, it explains the session emphasizing:

“Moscow said Israel’s actions are set to fuel the ongoing regional conflict further and must immediately stop. Slamming the ‘flagrant violation’ of Syria’s sovereignty, UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia told a Security Council meeting that Russia was ‘of the view that such aggressive actions by Israel are designed to further fuel the conflict. They are absolutely unacceptable and must stop.’ China’s envoy also condemned Israel’s attack as a grave violation of the UN Charter and international law and a breach of the sovereignty of both Syria and Iran. The Security Council session was held at the request of Russia over the Israeli strike on Tuesday afternoon.”

Tel Aviv and Washington have remained quiet about the attack on the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital. This approach to foreign policy can only spark more widespread opposition inside and outside the U.S.

Palestine, Iran and Presidential Politics

In a recent Gallup Poll of adults and registered voters in the U.S., only 27% of those surveyed approved of Biden’s policies in Palestine and throughout the West Asia region. Even among Democratic Party voters, only 47% approved of his handling of the situation in Gaza and other territories in neighboring countries.

Many people today are questioning the historic approach to Palestine by the U.S. seeing that it is only resulting in more deaths, destruction and displacement. In regard to Iran, tensions have remained between Tehran and Washington since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Iran has weathered a consistent storm of sanctions, military strikes, diplomatic antagonism and psychological warfare by successive administrations in the White House and within Congress, irrespective of party affiliations. During this 45-year period of attempted destabilization and overthrow of the Iranian government, the country has grown in influence and infrastructure.

An Axis of Resistance spanning the West Asia territories from Palestine to Yemen and Iran now poses a serious threat to the imperialist domination of the region. Anti-imperialists, antiwar organizers and peace activists as a whole must view the crisis in Palestine as part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism.

Despite the negative U.S. media propaganda against Iran, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, these states have an inherent right to self-determination and sovereignty. It should not be the role of the ruling class interests in the U.S. to impose governments on the peoples of other geopolitical regions.

This hegemonic thrust by imperialism has already brought about tens of thousands of deaths and millions of civilians displaced since October 7. People around the globe have no alternative other than escalating their protests demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and the military disengagement from the entire region.

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

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

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Despite the deterioration of its defense industry, the West still appears willing to continue arming Ukraine. Without the ability to produce modern weapons in sufficient quantity and at an appropriate time to supply Kiev, the only alternative left to the regime’s sponsors is to resort to obsolete and disused arms – which, if they were not sent to Ukraine, would be discarded.

Recently, France, the country that currently leads anti-Russian efforts and is even considering direct intervention in Ukraine, announced that it will provide the neo-Nazi regime with a new military package.The equipment of the aid includes surface-to-air missiles and hundreds of armored vehicles. However, these are not new weapons in perfect working condition. These are very old equipment, taken from the Ministry of Defense’s warehouses – some of which are over 40 years old.

Despite the questionable quality of the weapons, Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu praised the importance of French aid and stated that Kiev “needs” this type of equipment to fight a protracted war. He also explained that he personally received a request from President Emmanuel Macron to come up with a “new aid package” as quickly as possible. Apparently, weapons manufactured four decades ago are all that Paris has left to send to Ukraine.

“To hold such a long frontline, the Ukrainian army needs, for example, our armored vehicles – this is absolutely key for troop mobility and is part of Ukraine’s requests,” the minister told journalists.

In addition to being old, some of the weapons supplied by the French are being “reused”. Several of the vehicles included in the package have been used by the French army previously, but are allegedly “still functional”. Not only that, the package is apparently also serving to accelerate the replacement of the French arsenal. The Ministry of Defense had previously shown interest in replacing thousands of VAB (Véhicule de l’Avant Blindé) armored personnel carriers with new and more efficient vehicles. Now, many of these armored vehicles, which began to be used by Paris 45 years ago, will be sent to Ukraine. It is expected to boost the declining local industry to produce new weapons to replenish the French arsenal.

As well known, France has been one of the main supporters of the war. Paris does not rule out the possibility of intervening directly in the conflict if Ukraine proves unable to continue fighting. Although Macron’s words on the topic are certainly a “PR stunt” to garner popular support amid the legitimacy crisis affecting France, the consequences of this type of attitude could be catastrophic, as other countries are also feeling encouraged by Paris to go to direct war with Russia. This is the case of Finland, for example, which recently announced that it is considering sending troops to Ukraine in the future.

However, rational analysis shows us that the French are absolutely incapable of taking any escalatory measures. Paris no longer even has the resources to finance the war indirectly, so it obviously does not have the means to intervene directly. The biggest proof of this incapacity is the fact that the new aid packages are made up of obsolete and reused weapons. The country has a very weakened defense industry, which is having difficulty in producing the appropriate quantity of weapons even in times of “peace”. It seems obvious that in a scenario of open war this industry would collapse in a short time, leading France to military failure.

It must also be emphasized that, for its part, Ukraine is not in a position to choose which weapons to receive. Kiev currently accepts any type of foreign “aid”, regardless of the quality of the equipment received. Recently, Ukrainian Vice Admiral Aleksey Neizhpapa showed interest in receiving two retired British ships, HMS Westminster and HMS Argyll. The frigates were recently selected for dismantlement in the UK. Such is the Ukrainian desperation that the country is eager to receive useless weapons in its arsenal – just to “have something” that allows it to continue fighting.

Obviously, old and outdated weapons will never be a “game changer” for the neo-Nazi regime. In practice, most of this equipment does not even last on the battlefield, being destroyed in a short time during high-precision attacks by Russian artillery. Kiev is aware of its military failure and the impossibility of reversing the conflict scenario, but, as it is not allowed by the West to surrender, it needs to continue begging for any type of weapon just to continue operating this proxy war.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

The rift between the US and the British special services is growing, over the recent series of “Ukrainian” attacks on oil infrastructure in Russia.

Over the past months, the US leadership has repeatedly sent signals to its Ukrainian “partners” that it would be unhappy to see strikes on oil refineries inside Russia. These signals were silently ignored or even publicly rejected by Kyiv.

Most recent media reports suggest that these attacks are likely to become more common in the near future.

There are reports that MI6 personnel have held a series of meetings with their little brothers from the SBU and the Main Directorate of Intelligence in Kyiv.

These meetings were allegedly dedicated to the development of long-standing strategy and tactical plans for a campaign of attacks on oil refineries in western and central Russia. It is expected that such attacks would include not only drone and missile strikes, but also sabotage acts involving the existing network of saboteurs inside Russia.

The supposed goal is to create a local crisis in Russia shortly before the sowing season. This crisis may be furthered by a coordinated campaign of attacks on the Russian border, media disinformation, and staged protests carried out by agents loyal to Kyiv and London within the Russian “opposition”.

 

 

The British side has reportedly contributed a great deal of effort to the initiation and organization of this campaign. Thus it may rightly be considered as a British operation wrapped in the Ukrainian flag. Reports say that some high-profile representatives of the British special services are directly involved in the planning and execution of this operation in Kyiv.

The interesting fact is that this initiative reportedly found little support within US intelligence circles. The United States is not interested in a long and successful campaign of attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. Even if partially successful, these attacks could contribute to a burgeoning of oil prices that will have a strong negative impact on the growing US industrial sector. This factor was the main motivation of the earlier opposition of Washington to such action, and it remains pertinent – especially with the imminence of the US Presidential election.

Furthermore, reports indicate that both the British and Ukrainian sides have blatantly brushed aside the objections expressed by representatives of the US special services. Taking into account that previous US signals to Kyiv and London over this topic were also ignored, it appears that Washington has lost direct control of this situation. US representatives in Kyiv seem to be between a rock and a hard place. US officials in Washington have declared that support for Ukraine somehow contributes to the ‘national interests’ of the United State. Meanwhile, the actions of Kyiv and its British friends are directly aimed at damaging those very ‘national interests’.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Although April 1 is a day of practical jokes, what it brought to Turkey is anything but.

The recent defeat of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in local elections, when the opposition effectively won, particularly the Republican People’s Party (CHP) that got the most support (37.7% of the overall vote, compared to AKP’s 35.5%), may soon bring about tectonic changes in Turkish domestic affairs. However, perhaps not all is lost for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s incumbent.

Namely, the AKP has been losing influence in big cities for quite some time, which is why it refocused most of its attention to the rural areas, trying to double down on drawing support where it exists or is strong enough to keep the current government in power at least a bit longer.

This is why Erdogan’s main cards boil down to a volatile mix of Neo-Ottomanism, political Islam and pan-Turkism, none of which he can really implement. However, all three are very useful for domestic consumption, particularly as the Turkish economy has been struggling for years.

The problem for Erdogan and the ruling AKP is that the ideological, nationalist and religious approach is beginning to lose momentum as the electorate is switching priorities to the less idealistic realm. Realizing that this could cost him power and understanding that Turkey’s economic (and, by extension, societal) problems stem from its dependence on the political West, Erdogan might soon start changing his previously (at least somewhat) balanced position to a more pro-NATO one.

This isn’t to say that Erdogan changed his opinion, but it simply boils down to realpolitik. In simpler terms, if he doesn’t change his (geo)political approach, the opposition definitely will, so if somebody has to do it, it might as well be him and the AKP. It seems we’re already seeing this and the United States plans to capitalize on it to the maximum.

Namely, Washington DC is set to significantly expand the import of military-grade explosives from Ankara, all in order to support the expansion of the fledgling American and NATO artillery shells production, a field in which Russia dominates with a production capacity that’s around three times larger. The US hopes this could help replenish its seriously depleted domestic stockpile.

If Ankara and Washington DC were to do this, it would bring about a significant expansion of artillery production in the US, enabling a more consistent supply of artillery munitions to various allies, vassals and satellite states. This is particularly important for the Neo-Nazi junta, as its forces have been suffering from a chronic lack of shells, diminishing their already low level of direct fire support against the increasingly powerful Russian military. The acquisition of large quantities of Turkish explosives will surely result in higher interdependence between the US and Turkey, which may bring about an improvement in relations after years of tensions. However, while this might be useful for Erdogan, it demonstrates once again that Ankara cannot be trusted.

In other words, Turkey would surely become NATO’s main Trojan horse, not just in Greater Eurasia, but the multipolar world as a whole.

We shouldn’t forget that Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman ambitions, mixed with an attempt to harness the power of the previously mentioned political Islam, helped kickstart the truly unprovoked and brutal NATO aggression in Libya and Syria, ever so euphemistically dubbed “civil wars” in the so-called “free press”. Ankara’s expansionism resulted in its deep involvement in both wars, making it instrumental in destabilizing virtually the entire Middle East for the sake of the political West. Worse yet, this continued even after the US-led belligerent power pole launched a coup to depose the Turkish president himself in July 2016.

For instance, Washington DC and Ankara have continued playing a leading role in supporting various ISIS-linked terrorist groups in Syria and elsewhere, particularly against Iranian-aligned Shia militias fighting on the side of Damascus. What’s more, while Erdogan is officially furious at Israel due to its actions in Gaza, the Turkish military and the IDF are still working very closely, particularly in Syria. Turkey’s close ties with the US will surely continue (behind the scenes, obviously), helping maintain strong relations between the two NATO members, but if this should extend to Ukraine, Washington DC might be willing to reconsider its stance on Ankara’s return to the troubled F-35 program. In fact, the infamous neocon warmonger Victoria Nuland said so back in January.

Namely, the now former Deputy Secretary of State and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs stated that the US would be “willing to provide F-35 fifth generation fighter jets to Turkey” if it meets “American conditions in regards to ensuring it does not operate Russian S-400 air defense systems alongside [the F-35]”. If Washington DC returns Ankara to “the fold” and the latter acquires the F-35, it would give NATO another certain carrier of the latest B61 thermonuclear bombs, helping the belligerent alliance in surrounding Russia with hostile nuclear-armed vassals stretching from Norway, Finland, the Baltic states and Poland to Turkey, possibly even Romania and Bulgaria in the future, as the relevant military infrastructure is being built there.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Video: FDA Approved a Digital Pill That Contains a Microchip That Transmits Information Once Swallowed. “Compliance” According to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla

By Global Research News, April 01, 2024

In a World Economic Forum, someone from the audience asked a question about patient engagement. “Even if you make the greatest drug, the greatest wearable, there is no guarantee that the patient is gonna take the drug or wear the device. How are you thinking about technology to engage the patient?”

“The Collective West”, Corruption, The Neocons and the 2024 Presidential Election. Richard C. Cook

By Richard C. Cook, April 03, 2024

My book, Our Country Then and Now, traces US history from Native American prehistory through early European arrivals, through the pioneer phase of settlement, to the disasters of the 20^th century until today, when our government is on the verge of taking us into World War III.

Israel and the Terrorists in Syria Are Coordinating Their Attacks

By Steven Sahiounie, April 03, 2024

When Israel struck and destroyed the Iranian Consulate in Damascus on April 1, their partners, the terrorists following Radical Islam, were coordinating attacks on the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). This is not the first time that Israel has coordinated and partnered with terrorists in Syria.

Video: Flashback: The Bankster Bailouts (2009). James Corbett and Michel Chossudovsky

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and James Corbett, April 03, 2024

In this flashback to the Economics 101 series, Michel Chossudovsky of globalresearch.ca explains the circular mechanism by which the banks become creditors of the very government that is bailing them out and thus leverage financial power over the political system itself.

Crocus Massacre Ukraine Escape, UK / USA Teach Hatred and Killing of Russians, Ukraine Leaders Boast of Assassinations

By Rodney Atkinson, April 02, 2024

It is suspicious that “Islamist terrorists” from Tajikistan would carry out a massacre at the Crocus City Hall for money rather than commitment to the Islamic State, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan against Russia which has shown great sympathy for the civilians of Gaza.

Rockefeller: Controlling the Game

By Jacob Nordangard, April 02, 2024

Why had the Rockefeller family funded and influenced climate research since the 1950s and helped shape climate policy since the 1980s? And why did Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2014 announce that they would divest from all of their fossil energy holdings? Why attack the very industry on which their immense wealth was founded? What was their motive in their own words – and how did it all begin?

Turbo Lung Cancer in Under 40 Year Olds

By Dr. William Makis, April 02, 2024

At this time, no other physician in the world is publishing detailed clinical accounts of mRNA Induced Turbo Cancers in the COVID-19 Vaccinated – and certainly no one is even talking about the bizarre and extremely aggressive Turbo Lung Cancers that are presenting at Stage 3 or Stage 4, especially in the age group under 40.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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The updated and expanded 10th anniversary edition of “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History,” by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, empowers readers with information, encourages critical examination of vaccine policies and advocates for informed consent in medical decisions

“Dissolving Illusions” is a seminal book that critically examines vaccine science and history

The new edition includes 200 additional pages, offering updated insights and deepening the historical context of vaccine development and its societal impacts

The book challenges widely accepted views on vaccines, highlighting discrepancies between public health promises and actual outcomes, including the history of polio and smallpox vaccinations

Through extensive research, Humphries and Bystrianyk present evidence suggesting that improvements in sanitation and hygiene, rather than vaccines, played a pivotal role in the decline of certain infectious diseases

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In this interview, Dr. Suzanne Humphries discusses the release of the 10th anniversary edition of “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History,” one of my favorite books on vaccines, originally published in 2013. I was honored to write the foreword for the update of this classic.

In that book, Humphries details how vaccine science has been misrepresented to portray them as safe and effective, when in reality they’re neither. The vaccine industry has intentionally deceived us about the risks and benefits to make a profit, with complete disregard for the suffering they cause.

Questioning Vaccines Has Never Been Allowed

Humphries first became aware that vaccines might be problematic when she was working as a nephrologist in northern Maine.

“I was not a pediatrician, so I didn’t come at this from an autism standpoint or from an allergy standpoint,” she says. “I didn’t get to that until later. Early on, it was more about watching my patients who already had kidney failure experience worsening kidney failure after they were vaccinated or watching them bleed out after a biopsy of the kidney after they were vaccinated, because vaccines change your coagulation profile.

That was shown as early as the 1960s by an Italian researcher named Del Campo. He did one of the few studies that really tracked biological indicators and children over days, weeks and months, and found antacid production, inflammatory markers, coagulopathies.

In the end, he said vaccination is a trauma of considerable measure, and it should be undertaken with great caution. And yet, what we’ve seen since then is the addition of more and more vaccines to all of us, not just children …

After a three-year-long struggle with the hospital administration, who refused to listen to any of her concerns, she finally quit in 2011.

“That’s pretty much the history of me, being in the medical system, waking up, thinking that people around me would be interested in the medical literature that I looked at, which they never had looked at,” she says.

“Instead, I was ostracized and pretty much became a pariah. I just didn’t want to be there anymore. So, so I left. But the best decision I ever made was getting free of those golden handcuffs, where you leave medical school with this huge debt, and then you feel like you don’t have a lot of options after that. Pretty much every penny I earned went towards paying off my loans so that I could be free again.”

This is actually very common as the average medical school debt is about a quarter of a million dollars. Such a debt is indeed a pair of golden handcuffs that turn the physician into a debt slave, forcing them to work in positions with little to no autonomy when it comes to practicing the type of medicine they hoped they would when they applied to medical school. This is something I hope to address in the near future. 

Dissolving Illusions

Shortly after quitting her job at the hospital, she wrote the first edition of “Dissolving Illusions” together with Roman Bystrianyk, who had been researching the history of disease and vaccines since 1998.

“What we decided to talk about was the history [of vaccines] because everywhere I went, talking about the flu shot that was damaging my kidney patients, I was met with, ‘Well, what about smallpox? And what about polio?’

And so, because I had to answer their questions, I learned a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned.

Roman, who had gone through the world’s databases — he’s a computer guy, and he’s real smart — put these graphs and charts together [showing that] the death rate for many diseases was at least 96% decreased, sometimes 99% decreased, when vaccines and antibiotics came onto the scene. And so that was kind of the beginning of ‘Dissolving Illusions.’ We wrote the history around that.”

History Is Repeating Itself

According to Humphries, who has been “knee deep” in the vaccination issue for 16 years now, there’s a bigger picture that is only discernible when you look at the history of vaccines.

“What happens over time is, we’re able to sit back and look at everything that we have learned, and then re-weave it, and we see a bigger picture out of that … COVID, which, by the way, was probably no surprise to you and was no surprise to me … because if you do know your history, you know what’s going to come.

After the whole COVID debacle, and then reading about all the other vaccines, watching what happened with Gardasil, with the new flu vaccines, the old flu vaccines, and the childhood vaccination schedule just ever-growing, I sat back and I thought, ‘You know, this is just a repeating story.’

Vaccines, most of the time, if not all of the time, are marketed to the public as one thing, and then, later, the public discovers that they’re a different thing.

For instance, with COVID, the public was told it was just nice little particles of this virus put into saline, and it would stay in your arm. And then we have scientists that are now coming out — real bench scientists, real genetic scientists — who have broken down the constituents of the vaccine and are saying that there’s so much more in there than we were told.

Well, the same was true the smallpox vaccine. It didn’t have smallpox in it. Sometimes it had cow pox in it, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it had rabbit pus, sometimes it had the pus from horses, sometimes it had pus from goats and donkeys. And, and it was passaged back and forth between humans and animals because back then they thought that would strengthen the effectiveness of this so-called pure lymph, which was anything but pure.

So here, the public was told one thing, then doctors start crying out saying, ‘Wait a minute. This disease was not bad enough to cause this problem with the vaccines’ … Every vaccine that has come out, the public was told one thing, the effect is completely different. Doctors come out saying this isn’t what it was supposed to be, the doctors are ostracized, the doctors become afraid and don’t want to give reports.

This has been going on for 225 years. There’s been about 200 years of outcry from really upset doctors who were done in by the system for standing up for their patients and seeing the negative effects of vaccination.

So, we’ve added another 200 pages to our original book, ‘Dissolving Illusions,’ based on what we’ve discovered since. So, people who’ve already bought the book won’t be disappointed because there’ll be some new things included, and people who have never read it will get a bigger, deeper picture of the history.”

Critics’ Most-Oft Used Arguments to Dismiss Clinical Experience

Humphries initial foray into vaccine science centered around flu shots, because she wanted to know if they could cause all the kidney problems she was seeing, things like hematuria proteinuria, kidney failure, glomerular sclerosis or high blood pressure.

“I was just looking at that and wrote a 16-page white paper with 45 medical references and gave it to the CEO of the hospital, the head of nursing, my colleagues. I was met with absolute silence. I was really hurt and shocked by that, because it was a lot of work on my part. I really thought that people would be interested in it,” Humphries says.

“What’s interesting is that people want to nail us clinicians down to do the bench research, to talk about the genetics of a virus, to prove the existence of a virus, when what we’re watching in front of our eyes is a consistent repetitive timeline of somebody either marginally healthy or fully healthy, who gets a jab and then within hours, days or weeks develops horrible new medical problems.

This is what we see with the boots on the ground, but that’s considered irrelevant to people who want to discredit us. Our clinical experience means nothing. This is a way to just split us all into a million bits and say only the bench researchers can prove something. You can’t. So, you have to go do your own study.

That’s what was told to me. The Chief of Medicine of the hospital told me that he would support me if I wanted to do a research project on vaccine injuries in the hospital. To prove that you would need hundreds of patients, and he wasn’t really going to support me. He just wanted to divert me. That’s really what they want to do.

In terms of ‘do viruses exist or not,’ it’s the same thing. What we’re seeing is a consistent pattern. Children get measles one time in their life and don’t get it again. Children get chickenpox one time in their life, and then they don’t get it again. But because I haven’t personally viewed a virus under an electron microscope, my clinical experience means nothing.

So, this is how we’re dismantled and discredited by our critics. What I found is that if people don’t want to hear what I have to say, I just move on. I’m not going to get trapped in arguments with people, because there are so many individuals out there that know nothing.

I couldn’t care less about the brainwashed ignoramuses who are willfully ignorant. If they’re just innocently ignorant, then they’ll change pretty quickly. They’ll have questions and they’ll want to talk. But the people who are just like, ‘Well, what about this?’ … and won’t relent when the facts are piled up in front of them by somebody who’s done the work … Sorry, I have no respect for that.”

Vaccines Didn’t Eradicate Polio

So, just what happened with polio? As it turns out, polio was nearly eradicated well before the first polio vaccine became available. The primary reasons for its disappearance were the relatively rapid change in sanitation and hygiene.

“When I left my job, I spent about a year and a half pretty much doing nothing but researching polio from morning till night,” Humphries says. “I was given a library from the daughter of a very prominent physician in Illinois … He was the health department chair, and he waited to give the oral polio vaccine because he wanted to see what would happen, and because he had his doubts.

His name is Herbert Ratner. He collected a lot of information. So, I had a lot of public health reports to go through. I went through pretty much every book that was ever written about polio, both pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine and everything in between.

If you want to talk about gain-of-function and criminality, go ahead, and let’s talk about polio. Because poliomyelitis is a neurological entity, and it can be caused by a lot of different things.

So, in some ways, it was really brilliant for them to grab on to that pathophysiology and give it a name [after] a virus — a virus that’s actually a commensal [symbiotic] in the human body that’s been shown to cause no harm in most people …

Your immune system is always dealing with it, keeping it under control. But if you add a toxin to that, a toxin that increases permeability of the gastric mucosa, then all bets are off. Then, these entities can gain access.

The natural polio virus was not a thing that was necessarily being pathologically passed around to people. It was only when humans started tinkering around with it, like the gain-of-function experiment that happened at the Rockefeller labs in 1916.

During that exact time, there’s the world’s worst outbreak of polio with a 25% to 50% paralytic ratio. That was unheard of in 1916. So that would have set the stage for terror among the masses. We’ve got to get rid of this horrible disease. It’s crippling children, crippling adults. That’s when the movement to start developing the vaccine really began, and there were some horrifying failures along the way.”

The Failure of Salk’s Polio Vaccine Was Covered Up

As explained by Humphries, Jonas Salk was recruited to produce the first polio vaccine, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued to instill the idea that the polio vaccine was the greatest medical achievement there ever was. In 1954, Salk began a massive field trial of the vaccine that lasted one year. Millions of dollars were spent on it. It was one of the largest medical experiments in history, at the time.

At the end of the trial, there were scientists who disagreed with the design of the vaccine, and there were statisticians who spoke about its flaws. There were biochemist and biologists who warned the vaccine would cause a big problem, because if you don’t kill the virus, it’ll come back stronger. Alas, all detractors were replaced and the vaccine was licensed anyway.

Two years later, access to the complete database finally became available, and scientists who went through it “ripped it up, down and sideways,” Humphries says.

“It was absolutely a terrible design. The interpretations were incorrect. But by then the horse was already out of the barn. And isn’t that how it always happens? … So, that’s one side of the vaccine for polio.

The other side is that it was a very low-incidence disease. If you look at it on the charts in ‘Dissolving Illusions,’ we have all the diseases and the deaths. The incidence of polio, you can barely see it at the bottom.”

Change in Diagnostic Criteria Made Polio Vaccine Appear Effective

In the years that followed, most of the polio cases occurred in those who were vaccinated. In other words, the vaccine itself became a cause of polio. Natural polio was associated with paralysis, but most paralytic cases resolved within 60 days.

To make the vaccine appear effective, the diagnostic criteria for polio was changed. Initially, all you needed for a polio diagnosis was two physical exams, 24 hours apart. After the vaccine was released, the patient had to be reassessed after 60 days.

Since most cases resolved on their own in two months without intervention, this change made it seem as though the vaccine had remarkable effectiveness. Today, most polio cases worldwide are caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV). So, VDPV has replaced natural polio infection.

Smallpox Vaccine Was a Major Killer

While the polio vaccine was rarely lethal, the smallpox vaccine turned out to be a major killer. According to Humphries, the death rate for smallpox infection was about 10 in 100,000. After the vaccine was brought out, the death rate for smallpox rose by 50%.

“That’s all documented from the UK. When they brought out the vaccine, the death rate from smallpox went up, cancer rates went up, tuberculosis rates went up. That’s what [smallpox vaccine creator Edward] Jenner’s subjects died from, they died from tuberculosis (consumption).

So, here we are today. We don’t have smallpox vaccines. The reason I think they got rid of it is because people were really analyzing and showing what was actually in it. And then we have scientists like Thomas Mac, who was still alive during the days of smallpox, saying that the vaccine didn’t get rid of smallpox. It was hygiene, it was cleanliness, and it’s not as easy to spread.”

Ever-Changing Goalposts

Another repeating story with vaccines is the changing of goalposts, such as the frequency at which you needed to get vaccinated, and how many doses you need to be fully protected. For polio, it went from one dose once in a lifetime, to four initial doses and a booster.

Why? Because the vaccine doesn’t offer lifetime protection. Few if any vaccines do, and that’s one of the primary differences between vaccine-induced immunity (which wanes) and natural immunity (which tends to be long-lasting, often for life).

“It’s the same story as the COVID vaccine,” Humphries says. “I’ve got patients now that have had five, six COVID jabs [and still got COVID]. When did it become okay to accept a vaccine and then still get the disease multiple times? …

Why on earth are we injecting ourselves with this putrid concoction with E. coli plasmids in it, when we could just use the technology that we have today, that good common sense that we have to support the divine blueprint instead of doing something diabolically against it, and injecting people numerous times with something that mis-programs their immune system so that when they are back in contact with it later, they’re going to have a worst time of it — original antigenic sin.

It’s been shown with flu, it’s been shown now with COVID. And it’s just a big mess. Seventy-five percent of my practice, for the first year, were vaccine injured people or people who had to go get the jab and didn’t feel they could get out of it and want it to be pretreated or post-treated.”

Humphries COVID Experience

In the interview, Humphries recounts her own experience with COVID. She had a severe case that lasted two weeks. My go-to recommendation for any respiratory infection is nebulized peroxide. She used this, but still had a hard time overcoming the infection. In her case, one of the remedies that made the biggest difference was low-dose aspirin.

“For me, the thing that made me feel like I was not going to make it was the pain. I had total body pain. I don’t get headaches. I didn’t even really understand what headaches were until COVID came along and I just had the most horrible headache. So, for me, I believe in retrospect that it was the vascular aspect of it.

My blood wasn’t flowing properly, and the spike protein is really rough on the endothelium. The day that I took a quarter of a tablet of dissolvable aspirin, my whole world changed. My pain went away, and I felt like I was going to be OK.

So, I think for some of us, we just needed to get our blood flowing again properly. That for me was key, and I’m a big advocate of using very controlled low dose, as needed, aspirin when people are having the effects of COVID.”

I’m a big fan of low-dose aspirin as well. I take it every day. I think it’s a wise strategy for many. The reason aspirin has been vilified is because it’s a massive competitor to their high-priced NSAIDs.

Speaking Your Truth Can Change the World

Like Ashley Armstrong, who took a huge risk by leaving her engineering career to get into regenerative farming, Humphries can attest to the power of following your own truth and inner guidance. Sure, quitting her job at the hospital put her in a tough spot initially, but in the end, she’s better off for it — and so is the world. Over the past decade, her book has educated untold numbers of people about the truth behind the vaccine propaganda, and this update will continue to do so.

“When I left conventional medicine, I didn’t know how I would survive,” she says. “I didn’t have any debt, but I didn’t have any savings. It was friends and family that that helped me out. But when ‘Dissolving Illusions’ was published, we earned a little bit of money. Over the 10 years, it’s been what enabled me to not sink, and to not go into huge amounts of debt. It kept me afloat.

I just feel like God looks after us when we do the right thing. I feel like God has been 100% faithful to me, and that’s really what kept me going. I never imagined that in 2024, we’d be publishing another version of the book. But Roman brought that up to me about a year and a half ago.

I was like, ‘Oh, Roman, I’m so done with vaccines, I just want to have a life. I want to learn about the real physiology, how to really help people in front of me now. I want to start curing some of these diseases.’ That’s what I wanted to focus on. But he really wanted to do this, and I can’t say no to him …

I don’t know what holds for the future. Every year or two I like to bring a new project into my medical practice to learn a new thing and to offer a new thing. Sometimes the new thing ends up being a nothing-burger and I drop it, but I still like to explore, because we’re not at the end of the line in terms of what we can offer people. There are always things we haven’t heard about before.

One of the funniest things is that — and I can say this with great confidence today — health is not made in the doctor’s office; it’s made in the kitchen. When people see me today, I say if you’re not willing to change what you’re eating, forget about it, I’m not going to be of any help to you. And if I’m working harder than you, then you’re not going to get better. The primary focus for me is what people are putting into their mouths.”

Diet and Sanitation Are Key Disease-Prevention Strategies

Indeed, diets have always played a key role in disease. Part of the additions made to the 10th anniversary edition of “Dissolving Illusions” is historical dietary and sanitary information.

“It’s always been a huge part of what changed so that human beings weren’t dying of diseases that were circulating,” she says. “Sewage [exposure] was a big part of it. In the mid-1800s, there was so much horse manure and horse urine in the streets in London and New York City. They had literally tons of this stuff sitting in the street, and where people were living.

People were living in apartments and dwellings that literally had cesspools underneath of them. It was part of the house, part of the basement. So, you’d be walking through horse manure, horse urine and dead horses. The average lifespan of a horse was three years back then. We now know horses live into their 30s. That’s a normal lifespan, sometimes longer.

Three years was the average lifespan because even the horses were sickened by what was going on around them. So, what’s going to happen to human beings as a result of that? You think there were fresh farmers markets on that street? No, there weren’t. In fact, some of the people were basically eating rotten meat mixed with saw dust as a sausage. I mean, that was the diet of the average people.

The average person was living in squalor on top of each other and the disease and death rates were extremely high as a result.

Henry Ford did a big favor to the world by bringing out motorcars so we could get these horses and horse dung and horse urine out of the street. That was one of the beginnings. Environmental cleanup was a huge deal … We also had a white slavery system in place then.

If you talk to someone like Catherine Austin Fitts, a financial expert who watches societal changes, she says slavery is the most profitable [business] that has ever existed, and that was true in the mid-1800s. Pregnant women and children with measles were working in coal mines and in bottle factories. They didn’t care that the kid had measles. It was about productivity.

That was all that these owners cared about. So, we had that form of white slavery in that sense that even though you got to go home to your own house, you got a pittance of pay and you couldn’t make ends meet, so you were stressed out. You were a slave to the system. We’re still not really 100% free, but we’re so much better off in terms of what our bodies can accomplish than those people back in the 1700s 1800s.”

More Information

To learn more, be sure to pick up the 10th anniversary update of “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History,” available on dissolvingillusions.com and Amazon. Buying her book is also the best way to support her work, which is so crucial for our future. The world needs to understand the history behind vaccines to really see the big picture.

“When people read it, even if you just use it as a reference book, it gives you some kind of standpoint to start with when you’re talking to other people,” she says.

“In fact, it’s changed a lot of people’s minds who are pretty much dead set against the idea of no vaccines or limited vaccines. It’s like they start to see it in a different way, because the data are the data. It’s the world’s vital statistics.”

Not only are vaccines harming many people, but by focusing public health efforts on vaccination, so many safer and more effective strategies are overlooked as well. We cannot afford to continue the way we have been, and mandatory mass vaccination of our children is one of the failed strategies that needs to be overhauled if we are to turn our disease statistics around.

For your convenience, I’ve also embedded our previous interview above, where we dive further into some of the dishonest tactics used by the vaccine industry, and why the tetanus vaccine is unnecessary.

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My book, Our Country Then and Now, traces US history from Native American prehistory through early European arrivals, through the pioneer phase of settlement, to the disasters of the 20^th century until today, when our government is on the verge of taking us into World War III.

We had two centuries of Indian, white, and African-American indigenous development, not without serious conflict, prior to American independence in 1776. A lot of hardship, but a great deal of nobility, beauty, and heroism.

Starting with the Revolutionary War, we had a gradual takeover by globalist finance, using fractional reserve banking and usury as their chief instruments of power. Around 1900, the British Empire and the US money power began to merge, with the Morgan/Rockefeller interests taking control of the US through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

This merger between British and American power started and carried out World Wars I and II for world control and is now trying to complete the project via WW III which is now starting. The action arm of lawless and futile US imperialism is the “Neocons.”

Put succinctly, the “Collective West” is run by money-grubbing lunatics, who also happen to be genocidal maniacs towards their own population. One of their projects is the Covid pandemic, with more to come with the 2024 WHO “treaty.”

My belief is that they cannot defeat the combined nations of Eurasia and the Global South. But a stalemate would allow the US to assume its proper role as one important nation among many others, not the world hegemon. The US does not have to pretend to be an “exceptional” or “indispensable” nation, nor does it have to climb to the top of the international heap by demonizing or hating others.

We should be friends and collaborators with Russia, China, and Iran, not enemies.

On the 2024 presidential election, if, of course, we have an election and the Biden administration doesn’t cancel it, from one standpoint we have a very old and fundamental rivalry between the “internationalist” Democratic Party run by Big Finance vs. the nationalistic Republicans who have found themselves a spokesman in Donald Trump. There is also a lot of support for Trump among the working level of the national security establishment. One figure often mentioned for a cabinet post is Col. Douglas MacGregor, who is a hero among conservative voters.

The most important issue Trump is riding on is the Biden administration’s open border policy that has allowed the entry into the US of millions of illegal immigrants. The state of Texas in particular has taken a strong stand against this.

The internationalists, heavily Zionist, and strongly behind the Ukraine war, control the Democratic Party and the top echelons of the US Deep State, which has been running a slow-motion assassination attempt against Trump and seems to be doing the same against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

RFK Jr. has little real platform except his family name and record as an environmental attorney but has progressive creds and could take enough votes from Biden to swing the election. Sinking Biden would constitute potent revenge against the Deep State and its endless machinations.

The only candidate that could make a difference in policy is Jill Stein, the Green, whose platform includes peace in the world and monetary reform, the two issues that really matter. Obviously she has no chance to become president.

Once Biden, or whoever they substitute for him, is elected, we would likely see the nuclear WW III that is in the works, since it’s the only way the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire could defeat Russia-China-Iran/BRICS+, etc. It was Democratic President Harry Truman that nuked Japan.

One way to put it is that the Democratic Party, along with similarly aligned parties in other Western nations and Israel, is controlled by a malign destructive force determined to kill or enslave most of humanity, reducing the planet to a totalitarian anthill. This destructive force is spearheaded by the strongly pro-Israel Neocon faction, the ones who brought us 9/11 and the ongoing regime of endless war.

In my opinion, the only answer to these dilemmas is spiritual, and that involves the revival of humanity’s traditional religions. This does not mean creating state religions. It means people acquiring a spiritual center that guides their personal, family, and public lives, that awakens their conscience. It means living by the law of love, not hate.

The key is reform of the monetary system—essentially nationalization of the Federal Reserve and the elimination of fractional reserve lending and usury.

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This article was originally published on VT Foreign Policy.

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Our Country, Then and Now

by Richard C. Cook

ISBN: 9781949762853

E-book ISBN: 978-1-949762-86-0

Year: 2023

Our Country Then and Now takes us on a 400-year journey through America’s history, providing unique snapshots from African enslavement, native dispossession, financial scandals, and wars of expansion and aggression, interspersed with tales from author Richard C. Cook’s ancestry—from Puritan forebears to fighters in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to Midwest Pioneer farmers and their relations with native nations.

Click here to order.

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When Israel struck and destroyed the Iranian Consulate in Damascus on April 1, their partners, the terrorists following Radical Islam, were coordinating attacks on the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). This is not the first time that Israel has coordinated and partnered with terrorists in Syria.

In the latest incident, Israel attacked Damascus with an airstrike which hit the Iranian Consulate, while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) attacked the SAA in the outskirts of Idlib in north west Syria, east of Latakia and west of Aleppo. The terrorists used suicide bombers as well as armed terrorists to carry out the attack which claimed the lives of SAA soldiers.

On March 31, Israel attacked the Jamraya Research Center in Damascus, and at the same time HTS was attacking near Jebel al Zawaya, and the SAA positions south of Idlib. The SAA pushed back against the terrorists by using massive gun power, supported by the Russian air force, and killing and injuring foreign terrorists, including Uyghurs from the East Turkmenistan Islamic Party (TIP).

On March 29, Israel targeted Aleppo with airstrikes, which killed civilians, while at the same time HTS coordinated attacks on the SAA positions near Aleppo utilizing foreign terrorists including those from Tajikistan, the same country of origin as the so-called IS terrorists who attacked the Crocus Center in Moscow recently. In this attack, the HTS utilized drones, and suicide bombers. Many, if not most, of the foreign terrorists were killed. After the attack, the HTS media claimed they had taken over SAA positions in west Aleppo, which the SAA quickly proved was a false claim, and showed video evidence refuting the claim which showed the dead terrorists.

On March 28, Israel targeted a residential building in Damascus killing civilians, and the HTS coordinated attack in suburbs of Idlib, used 1,900 armed terrorists as they targeted the SAA. The majority of the terrorists were foreigners, such as: Chechens, Tajiks, Uyghurs, Uzbeks and Turkmen. The SAA responded to the attack by using air force, missiles, tanks and Russian military support. The majority of the terrorists were killed or injured, and the HTS media reported the Idlib hospitals are full of their fighters, and several big leaders have died. The HTS did not gain any territory in these attacks, even though they used a massive amount of weapons and fighters.

Since the outset of the March 2011 US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change, Israel has been an active partner with the US, and has supplied weapons to the terrorists attempting to change Syria from a secular government into a Muslim Brotherhood led government, which would be US-friendly. Under President Obama, and his VP Biden, they elevated the Muslim Brotherhood to ally status.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a global terrorist organization, but despite Senator Ted Cruz bringing a bill to Congress several times, he could not find the votes to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, which finds support among Democrats and Republicans alike.

Obama saw the opportunity to overthrow the Syrian government without having to use American soldiers, by using the terrorists following Radical Islam as his foot soldiers, to fight the SAA, which is a national conscripted army made up of only Syrian males over 18 who are not enrolled in university.

The armed fighters began as the “Free Syrian Army” which was fully supported by the US, and the support which costed billions lasted until 2017 when President Trump shut down the CIA “Timber Sycamore” project.

Early on, the FSA failed to achieve military goals the US set, because the FSA did not have the support of the majority of the Syrian people, who could not justify chopping off your neighbor’s head just because they are born into a different religion. The SAA never fell apart, as the Pentagon envisioned.

In the first few years of the Syrian conflict, the FSA destroyed the SAA air defense system in the suburbs of Damascus and Deraa. The FSA assassinated SAA Generals who were attached to the air defense system. The FSA assassinated Syrian scientists involved in developing the SAA, especially in the Jumraya Research Center in Damascus, which has recently attacked again by Israel. These various FSA attacks on the air defenses occurred before the SAA entered into the war against terrorism.

It is paramount to understand, that the Syrian air defense system was in place to protect against Israeli airstrikes. By the FSA destroying the Syrian air defenses, this proves the US sponsored FSA were in collusion with Israel from the beginning of the conflict in 2011, and HTS continues that coordination with Israel today.

As the FSA faded away, the Jibhat al-Nusra group started making advances on the Syrian battlefield. The head was Mohamed al-Julani, a Syrian raised in Saudi Arabia. He had fought the US in Iraq as an Al Qaeda member, then became associated with Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, and finally came to Syria to form his own brand called Jibhat al-Nusra.

The US continued to support Julani and his fighters in Idlib, but once Jibhat al-Nusra was listed as an international terrorist group, the US insisted Julani change its name to HTS to re-brand itself.

Julani is the occupier of Idlib, holding 3 million civilians as human shields. Every bit of food and aid which rolls into Idlib from the UN and other aid agencies passes through his hands first. If you support him and his Radical Islamic fighters, then you get your share of food, but if you have voiced any complaints, you get nothing. Those who are denied free aid have to buy the surplus aid at Julani’s shopping center, the two-story Hamra Mall, which he built including escalators.

In the days of Jibhat al-Nusra, the Israeli military opened a security gate on the Golan Heights allowing injured Jibhat al-Nusra fighters to go to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally visited the injured Radical Islamic terrorists in the Israeli military hospital and had photos published of him consoling them.

Since October 7, Israel has bombed Syria more than 32 times. Airstrikes include on the SAA, Damascus International Airport, storage facilities in Aleppo, and places used by Hezbollah and Iran. The conflict between Syria and Israel began with the 1967 War, the occupation of the Golan Heights, the occupation of the Shebaa Farms in neighboring Lebanon, and the most important piece to the mosaic of conflict, is the occupation of Palestine, and the current genocide in Gaza.

Iran, Syria and Lebanon are parts of the axis of resistance, which are fighting for the freedom of Palestinians, as well as liberating all occupied territories.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from MD

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Case 01 – Autopsy proven myocarditis death in Australia

 

Barrack Heights NSW, AUSTRALIA – Roberto Garin was only 52 when he ‘died suddenly’ on 28 July 2021. The healthy father of two teenagers began feeling ill 48 hours after his first Pfizer shot and dropped dead in front of his terrified wife Kirsti six days later while she was on the phone to paramedics.

Garin’s family immediately suspected the vaccine caused his death. Kirsti was told her husband was the first person to die after a Pfizer shot. In fact, 176 deaths following Pfizer jabs had already been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), starting in the first week of the vaccine rollout.

But when Kirsti shared her concerns with filmmaker Alan Hashem, who released the video together with the accounts of other vaccine injuries and deaths, it unleashed a storm.

‘Misinformation researchers’ published by the ABC dismissed Kirsti’s ‘claims her 52-year-old husband died from “sudden onset myocarditis” after receiving the Pfizer vaccine’ because it didn’t ‘square with official data’.

Yet that was exactly what forensic pathologist Bernard l’Ons wrote in a brilliant report on his autopsy stating that the deceased’s heart showed a clear transition to severe giant cell myocarditis that could be ‘histologically dated to the time period of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination’ and it was ‘reasonable to state that the deceased’s previously undiagnosed cardiac sarcoidosis may have transitioned to a fulminating myocarditis as a result of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination’ noting that myocarditis had been reported in reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. L’Ons proposed a mechanism by which the vaccine could trigger fatal myocarditis and advised that a possible therapeutic implication was that sarcoid patients be given an echocardiogram to detect whether their heart was affected in which case alternative vaccination types could be considered.

All of this was ignored by the TGA which refuses to admit to this day that any death can be attributed to a Pfizer vaccine and was parroted by the ABC. The TGA did admit that as of 22 August it had received ‘235 reports of suspected myocarditis, (inflammation of the heart muscle) and/or pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart) following vaccination’ with Pfizer but said, ‘These reports reflect the observations of the people reporting them and have not been confirmed as having been caused by the vaccine,’ and that ‘some events may be coincidental and would have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination.’

This is a particularly misleading statement. Four out of five reports to the TGA are submitted not by random ‘people’, but by highly qualified health professionals and in Garin’s case by a forensic pathologist.

Why would the TGA dismiss these reports? That’s a question Associate Professor Michael Nissen could perhaps shed light on. He was appointed to the TGA in February 2021, just as the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, to lead its Signal Investigation Unit which investigates safety issues that arise with vaccines in adverse reports or are raised by international regulators or the medical literature.

Prior to his appointment, Nissen was the Director of Scientific Affairs and Public Health at GSK Vaccines from October 2014 to January 2021, a period during which GSK and Pfizer entered into a joint venture. Nissen worked concurrently in hospital-based medical care and academia. He has led over 40 clinical trials and authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications including vaccine studies. In all these areas pharmaceutical companies are a major source of funding.

The TGA is sensitive about managing conflicts of interest for advisory committee members but offers no guidance on its website with regard to staff members although presumably the same principles should, at least in theory, apply. It notes that shares, involvement in clinical trials, employment, contracts, consultancies, grants, sponsorships, board memberships and so on, may give rise to a conflict of interest.

Robert Clancy, an Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Newcastle Medical School and a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s Covid-19 Expert Database wrote in Quadrant online last week that ‘the power of the pharmaceutical industry and its pervasive influence at every level of political and medical decision-making’ has been underestimated in shaping the pandemic narrative which has been driven by commercial imperatives to such an extent that it has crushed scientific debate.

Clancy recounts that his approach to the College of Pathology (of which he was a Senior Fellow, a foundation Professor of Pathology, and past-Chairman of the College committee for undergraduate pathology education) calling for a national study to determine whether Covid vaccination was responsible for the increase in excess mortality in Australia and elsewhere by developing a protocol for post-mortems ‘to answer what is arguably the most important question facing medicine’ met with a rejection and a suggestion to take it instead to the TGA.

Nowadays, dying suddenly has become ominously familiar. According to a new film Died Suddenly available as of this week to stream via Twitter, in the last 18 months, the term ‘Died Suddenly’ has risen to the very top of ‘most searched’ Google terms. The film documents the surge in excess mortality in highly vaccinated countries. Dr. Peter McCullough, internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and one of the top five most-published, and most censored, medical researchers in the US, says that sudden death frequently occurs because the heart has been damaged by inflammation caused by Covid vaccines.

Papers that Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration tried to hide for 75 years show that Pfizer knew in 2020 that myocarditis and pericarditis could be caused by its vaccine.

And in the Pfizer trial in Argentina, a report on a healthy 36-year old  participant – Augusto German Roux – who developed pericarditis immediately after his second Pfizer jab, mysteriously disappeared from the published trial results.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSANZ) belatedly published a warning about myocarditis and pericarditis in September this year.

It was too late for Garin. Had his doctors known, his life might have been saved. His grieving family have still not received a cent in compensation. But Pfizer has apparently grossed nearly $100 billion from its sales of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.

Rebecca Weisser is an independent journalist.

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Case 02 – Autopsy proven myocarditis death in Canada

Ontario, Canada – 34 year old Brandon Watt Died Suddenly of Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis

Feb. 13, 2022 (Brandon Andrew Watt, March 30, 1987 – November 4, 2021)

Brandon Andrew Watt was a loving husband to his wife Chantelle, and father of two lovely young girls. Like so many people, Brandon got vaccinated against COVID-19 to protect his loved ones. But what they didn’t know, was that for months the vaccine slowly and silently attacked his heart. Until one day, he collapsed in front of his family, and ultimately died from what the coroner has determined to be Lymphohistiocytic myocarditis.

At the young age of 34 this death is shocking and unexpected. He had nothing in his case history to explain his death. No viral infection, no virus: only the COVID-19 vaccine.

His wife has courageously shared his story, putting the details of their experience into a beautiful and sorrowful stream of words.

Shared from his devoted wife, Chantelle Watt.

The father of my children died. Dropped dead. In front of them. At 2 and 6 years old they lost their daddy. Traumatically. They will live almost their entire lives without one of two people who loved them most. Without one of two people every kid deserves to grow up with.

Brandon’s death shook our community. Continues to shake it. It’s about to rumble it more.

I have been very open about every aspect of it. From posting 12 hours after his death, to continuing to share our story, and all aspects of my journey through grief. You, the community, have encouraged everything about this. This will be the biggest thing I share. Listen closely.

Brandon died of Lymphohistiocitic myocarditis.

This was determined by the Ontario Coroner’s Office at Kingston General Hospital. Because of the absolute shock of a healthy, active 34 year old man dropping dead, his body was sent to Kingston for a full and extensive autopsy. The results can take several months, and I have just recently received the full report (which had to be formally requested).

When they eventually gave the cause of death, it shocked both the local coroner and our family doctor. It was assumed he died of a cardiomyopathy — a genetic condition that he would have been born with and gone undiagnosed. This was not the case.

Lymphohistiocitic myocarditis is caused by a virus. His heart was extensively damaged. There was so much scar tissue, that it literally couldn’t pump another beat. I had no chance at reviving him. The official report states that his entire heart was damaged — not one ventricle or one area — top to bottom damaged. Fully attacked, for multiple months.

Brandon did not have covid. His work supplied rapid tests and we had done several throughout summer and fall. The virus that killed him was likely the mRNA vaccine.

Any medical professional I have spoken to and who has looked into this further has been quick to disregard the vaccine as the cause as “the research” shows myocarditis cases only happening within two weeks of an administered dose. First off, what fucking research? We ARE the fucking research. Secondly, this is only what they are allowing to be reported.

Until November 5th, I was a sheep. I fully admit that. Brandon and I both believed strongly in the vaccine and would roll our eyes at protestors, conspiracy theorists and all the “anti-vaxx” posts on social media. November 5th onward, my eyes have been opened.

I owe this to Brandon. To share what I believe killed him. What did kill him. What left his daughters without their daddy. To open all of your eyes. To allow yourselves to see things from another perspective. To think thoroughly before deciding to vaccinate your children, or get yourself boosted. I cannot in good conscience allow schools to bring in vaccine clinics and stay silent.

I believe in science. I absolutely love and respect medicine. I will never, ever vaccinate my children (or myself further) against Covid-19. We know nothing about the long term affects of this vaccine. Nothing. If you think you do, you don’t.

Please respect my energy on this. I have turned comments off. I will not reply to direct messages. If you see me in person I am happy to chat about it. Internet wars will never be my thing. But I feel deeply about sharing this — this isn’t something that should ever be kept quiet.

For all of you preaching to vaccinate children, please put yourselves in my shoes and then kindly allow yourself to shut your mouth.

Fight for your children and their rights. I’ll be fighting for mine. We never got a chance to fight for Brandon

Please feel free to share.

Shared from his wife, Chantelle.

Research 

1. Lymphohistocytic myocarditis after Ad26.COV2.S viral vector COVID-19 vaccination
2. Biopsy-proven lymphocytic myocarditis following first mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in a 40-year-old male: case report
3. Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021
4. SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17: A Stratified National Database Analysis

Here is a case report of 7 adolescents who presented with myocarditis after Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination and who recovered.

Case report of a 22-year-old man who died 5 days after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

“We present autopsy findings of a 22-year-old man who developed chest pain 5 days after the first dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine and died 7 hours later. Histological examination of the heart revealed isolated atrial myocarditis, with neutrophil and histiocyte predominance. Immunohistochemical C4d staining revealed scattered single-cell necrosis of myocytes which was not accompanied by inflammatory infiltrates. Extensive contraction band necrosis was observed in the atria and ventricles. There was no evidence of microthrombosis or infection in the heart and other organs. The primary cause of death was determined to be myocarditis, causally-associated with the BNT162b2 vaccine.”

Here is a case report of a 23-year-old male who developed myocarditis after getting the Moderna vaccine:

“A 23-year-old Caucasian male with a history of exercise-induced asthma presented to the emergency department complaining of left-sided chest pain which started two days after receiving the second dose of the mRNA-1273 Moderna vaccine. The patient described the pain as sharp, intermittent with radiation to the left upper back and left arm with 10/10 severity and worsening with deep inspiration. Fever and chills were also present. The patient did not report any recent history of tick bites, upper respiratory symptoms, paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea (PND), orthopnea, arthralgias or rashes.”

Here is a case report of myocarditis following administration of the Janssen vaccine in a healthy, young male:

“A previously healthy 33-year-old male presented to the emergency department with acute onset substernal chest pain. Two days prior, he had received the Janssen Ad26.COV2·S vaccine.” 

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Case 03 – Autopsy proven myocarditis death in Singapore

SINGAPORE – 43 year old Ontal Charlene Vargas died of myocarditis, coroner found it was likely related to the Pfizer Vaccine she received

• Ontal Charlene Vargas died of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart. A coroner found it was likely related to the vaccine she had received
• The 43-year-old became unwell the morning after getting Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine booster shot in 2021. Within days, she was unresponsive
• The Health Ministry confirmed that this was the second death related to Covid-19 vaccination in Singapore. The first was a 28-year-old Bangladeshi man who died of myocarditis in July 2021, about three weeks after receiving a vaccine shot.
• SINGAPORE: The family of a woman who died about four days after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine booster jab was given S$225,000 (US$169,122) under the Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Programme (VIFAP), the Ministry of Health (MOH) said on Sunday (Apr 16).
• Madam Ontal Charlene Vargas, a Filipina, died on Dec 13, 2021. The cause of her death was myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, a coroner’s court heard on Friday.
• State Coroner Adam Nakhoda found that on the balance of probabilities, it was likely to be related to COVID-19 vaccination.
• MOH confirmed that this was the second death related to COVID-19 vaccination in Singapore. The first was a 28-year-old Bangladeshi man who died of myocarditis on Jul 9, 2021, about three weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.The VIFAP provides a “one-time goodwill financial assistance” to people who received COVID-19 vaccines under the National Vaccination Programme, in accordance with the recommendations of the Expert Committee on COVID-19 Vaccination, and who experienced serious side effects that are assessed to be related to vaccines administered in Singapore.
• MOH said on Sunday that Mdm Ontal’s family had submitted an application under the VIFAP in January 2023, and it was reviewed by the independent clinical panel.
• “The panel assessed that her demise was probably related to COVID-19 vaccination and a one-time financial assistance of S$225,000 had been extended to her family in the Philippines,” said the ministry. The pay-out amount is the largest under the VIFAP.

• The Tier 1 pay-out of S$225,000 has been extended to five applicants so far, said MOH in response to CNA queries on Wednesday. As of Mar 31 this year, 418 applicants have received pay-outs under the programme, it added.

  “A total of S$2,359,000 has been paid out or offered to applicants,” said MOH.

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Case 04 – Autopsy proven myocarditis death in Israel

• 1m NIS compensation lawsuit on death of 35 y Israeli male from autopsy-confirmed vaccine-induced myocarditis 2 h post mRNA 5th shot!

• Israel said probing link between Pfizer shot and heart problem in men under 30

  • The report said that out of more than 5 million people vaccinated in Israel, there were 62 recorded cases of myocarditis in the days after the shot. It found that 56 of those cases came after the second shot and most of the affected were men under 30.
  • The concerns come from an intermediate report that was presented to ministry heads and to Pfizer in recent weeks

  • The report said that 60 of the patients were treated and released from hospital in good condition. Two of the patients, who were reportedly healthy until receiving the vaccination, including a 22-year-old woman and a 35-year-old man, died.

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Case 05 – Autopsy proven myocarditis death in New Zealand

New Zealand – 26 year old Rory Nairn died from myocarditis caused by Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine, coroner has ruled.

• On Nov. 17, 2021 Rory collapsed in the bathroom of his home & died suddenly He took 1st Pfizer dose 12 days earlier!

• Rory Nairn died of myocarditis after 1st dose of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
• Coroner Sue Johnson opened an inquiry into his death. After hearing evidence from pathologist Dr Noelyn Hung, Johnson said she is satisfied that the COVID-19 vaccine caused the myocarditis from which Nairn died.
• Hung carried out an intensive pathological examination of the heart.
• She stated that the cause of the myocarditis came down to a diagnosis by exclusion.
• There is no current test that will show the Covid-19 vaccine in the heart tissue, but Hung was able to exclude other causes of myocarditis. Hung also excluded all other known potential causes including certain medicines.

• There was no sign of any infection or any other reason for Nairn’s death except in the myocardium (the middle muscular layer of the heart). Johnson accepted Hung’s medical opinion that the direct cause of Nairn’s death was acute myocarditis – consistent with vaccine-related myocarditis.

 

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NEWS (April 1, 2024): Our preprint paper on the lethality of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced Myocarditis has won 1st place in the 2023 Most Popular Preprints Awards! 

Top paper in Medicine and Pharmacology of 2023! The paper is titled: “Autopsy Proven Fatal COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis” and despite relentless efforts by Big Pharma and compromised MDs to censor it, it has broken through!

COVID-19 Vaccine Induced myocarditis is neither mild nor rare. This lie has been uttered by most Public Health Officials in USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, etc.

In fact, mRNA Induced myocarditis is extremely dangerous and often lethal!

Authors: Nicolas Hulscher, Roger Hodkinson, William Makis, Peter McCullough

 

 

 

NEWS (April 2, 2024): I’ve caught Community Notes committing outright FRAUD on X! 

Within 24 hours of my previous post on our Autopsy proven myocarditis paper winning 1st prize at Top Medical Preprint of 2023, we were viciously attacked on Twitter with a fraudulent Community Note.

It claimed our paper was retracted.

Our paper wasn’t “retracted” as falsely claimed by “Enterprising Desert Raven” who wrote the fraudulent Community Note.

Our paper is peer-reviewed, published and available on NIH National Library of Medicine. There is NO retraction.

The Community Note actually references the wrong paper in ALL three sources! A completely different paper!

This is an open and shut case of FRAUD committed by a CommunityNotes leader on X, in an effort to censor and silence doctors and scientists who wrote an award-winning paper that shatters the Big Pharma narrative about safety of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines (fatal myocarditis confirmed on autopsy).

Our award winning paper is available here: (click here)

 

 

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from NaturalNews.com

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

***

The US-EU-UK are completely backward in nuclear technology.

France exemplifies it: Flamanville 3 Nuclear power plant (NPP) goes online here in 2024. Construction was started in 2007 and planned to be finished only 5 years of later by 2012 – it is now 12 years late. Total construction time 17 years. That’s a delay of 240%. The cost have run up to € 12 billion. It was planned to cost only € 3.3 billion. That is a cost overrun of around 250%. And Flamanville 3 is planned to deliver an underwhelming output of only 1.65 GW. Finland gets nuclear power plants built by the French, and Finland experiences similar delays and cost overruns. Germany is dropping out of nuclear technology altogether and Sweden is just lying low with what they have. 

UK is not better than France. Hinkley Point C with 3.2 GW was started construction in 2017 and was planned to go online 10 years later in 2027. Instead, construction is still not expected to be completed before 2030 – 13 years later. The construction cost are running up to £ 34 billion, and still counting.

The US has the world’s biggest nuclear power production, but the US has been extremely low on nuclear construction for decades.

After 30 years with no new nuclear power plants coming online, the US has just put two new reactors online, Vogtle 3 in 2023, and Vogtle 4 here in March 2024. Vogtle 3 and 4 are both 7 years late, and their construction costs doubled from $ 14 billion to $ 30 billion.

Grand US (and UK) ambitions to become leader in small Modular Reactors has so far shown no progress on the ground.

Japan is still in “nuclear” shock after the horrendous Fukushima disaster.

Photo taken on Dec. 6, 2020, in Iitate, a northeastern Japan village near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, shows a fence set up on a road to bar entry to an off-limit area ahead of the 10th anniversary of the earthquake-tsunami disaster and the subsequent nuclear crisis. (Kyodo)

The US-West is even completely absent in the latest nuclear technologies like molten salt, 4th generation, Thorium etc. which China is implementing on the practical scale these years. It is evident, that nuclear power is in deep crisis in Western countries (except for S.Korea). And with times for approval of 5 years or more, and times of construction of 15-20 years (!) there is no chance of the West catching up with Russia or China in the big nuclear technology race anytime soon.

Russia Taking Lead

Russia and China are the undisputed leaders in global nuclear technology. China has taken a lead in the construction of Thorium and molten salt reactors, which have unlimited amounts of fuel (Thorium much more abundant than Uranium) and can work anywhere without water for cooling – these are nuclear technologies the West doesn’t have any practical experience with whatsoever. But let’s focus on Russia for now.

Russia by building several nuclear reactors in Türkiye, Egypt, and elsewhere is a global leader in nuclear technology. Russia is also in the lead in Small Nuclear Reactors (SMR). SMR is a very important technology for Africa. Already here, nuclear technologies from the smallest to the biggest give Russia a big edge against the West in supplying energy for Africa. The US and UK have been talking about SMR for years, but they have gotten nowhere.

While US and UK talk, Russia is working it practically. SMR technology is green – no emissions. It can be located in remote areas. It can serve small communities but can also be scaled up big (build more). Construction is fast – 4 years. It mostly operates by itself – few experts needed to run it. It is very safe – everything is self-contained and designed to withstand any event. No waste in the area. Recycling is prepared – at the end of its life-cycle the SMR will be dismounted and trucked away as a unit. It will not be opened on location.

Breeding Nuclear Weapons Material

Going to the opposite end of the power-plant scale, from the small simple-constructed (but modern design) SMR to the big, fast Breeder reactors are probably the most advanced field in nuclear technology of strategic military and civilian importance.

Constructing an unprecedented 1.200 GW breeder reactor 42 km from Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, Russia is now building a new generation of bigger and more advanced fast Breeder reactors. The West has no fast Breeder reactors in the pipeline.

With current time in Western countries for approval and construction, the West is thus already 10-25 years behind in this field. Fast Breeder reactors burn nuclear waste from other reactors and convert it into new nuclear “fuel”. That’s in the name “breeder”; Breeder Reactors “breed”, they produce more nuclear “fuel” than they consume. Put the word nuclear “fuel” in quotation marks, because what comes out of Breeder reactors is usable as more than fuel for peaceful nuclear power production. Because the kind of nuclear “fuel” coming out of fast breeder reactors is Plutonium which is also used for nuclear weapons. In fact, fast Breeder reactors are the only ones capable of producing significant amounts of weapons grade Plutonium. Fast Breeder reactors are indispensable for making more advanced nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons based only on Uranium have a lot of problems material production which is cumbersome and slow, in handling of the bombs, in delivery of the bombs, in how powerful they can be, how much nuclear material you need for each bomb, and how many bombs you can build. Therefore, nearly all modern nuclear military powers base their arsenal on Plutonium, not Uranium. To illustrate this, remember that the JCPOA required Iran to pour concrete into their only fast breeder reactor to prevent Iran from building a larger strike force of Plutonium nuclear weapons. Iran did so, destroyed their only fast breeder reactor. Iran having destroyed their only Breeder reactor forever, was subsequently fooled by the US abrogating the JCPOA. Iran will no doubt want to buy a new fast breeder reactor from Russia, to restart their Plutonium production.

With new bigger Breeder reactors, Russia is vastly increasing its Plutonium production capacity. At one point in time, after the  nuclear disarmament treaties with the USA, Russia had excess stockpiles of Plutonium. But the US dropped the nuclear limitation treaties with Russia. Russia’s excess stockpiles of Plutonium may be gone too by now – or Moscow may today deem Russia’s stockpiles of Plutonium to be too small for Russia’s future needs of nuclear weapons.

In face of the Ukraine war and a new global security environment, Moscow may want to vastly expand its nuclear arsenal and have ordered a new much higher level of production of Plutonium for non-peaceful purposes. No matter what nuclear weapons plans Moscow may have, with the world’s biggest Breeder reactors coming online, Russia will relatively soon have a vast Plutonium production capacity to build a virtually unlimited number of nuclear weapons. Moscow will thus in a few years be guaranteed to win any future nuclear arms race with the USA, as Russia will likely outproduce the USA in Plutonium for nuclear weapons. With more Plutonium, Russia can build massive numbers of nuclear missiles to secure 100% second-strike capability, even if surprised by a US nuclear attack from the borders of NATO country like Finland. Russia will also be able to make a limitless number of nuclear missiles to overwhelm any US anti-missile defense with nuclear warheads. Welcome to a future of unlimited numbers of nuclear warheads.

On top of having more material for more nuclear missiles, Russia is also far ahead of the USA in producing hypersonic missiles and nuclear-powered missiles and torpedoes. The US does not have even one of these advance delivery technologies operational anytime soon. Russia’s hypersonic missiles travel up to 10 times the speed of sound and can even navigate up-down-to-the-side to overcome US-NATO missile defenses. Russia nuclear powered cruise-missiles can stay flying in the air forever – go several times around the globe if they want – before they strike the US from any angle. Nuclear powered Russian torpedoes can likewise travel forever, along any route no matter how long, stay secretly active in deep waters off the US coast, and strike anytime. Russia has nuclear superiority not only in numbers, but also in capability to deliver nuclear warheads to any corner of the US-NATO from anywhere, through any imaginable route be it across the Deep Sea or from the air over the Antarctic – to go off in minutes.

The US started the abrogation of nuclear arms reduction treaties, and the US has now gotten what it wished for, an unlimited new nuclear arms race.

This future nuclear arms race will be won by Russia.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Alvin Ward Vogtle Nuclear Power PLant (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

***

A massive protest erupted in France’s capital, Paris, over sending troops to the Ukraine.

Hundreds of protesters were seen opposing a recent proposal by Emmanuel Macron. “Macron, go to Ukraine alone,” slogans were raised by angry protesters. Demonstrators also tore up EU and NATO flags and waved French tricolours instead. The protesters carried banners saying, “We are not willing to die for Ukraine” and “Let’s stop pumping weapons into Kyiv.”

This comes after Emmanuel Macron hinted at a possible NATO troop deployment in Ukraine.

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

***

[This interview was conducted in 2009 at the height of the 2008-2009 economic crisis.]

In this flashback to the Economics 101 series, Michel Chossudovsky of globalresearch.ca explains the circular mechanism by which the banks become creditors of the very government that is bailing them out and thus leverage financial power over the political system itself.

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

***

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) condemns in the strongest terms Israel’s targeted attack on an aid convoy in Gaza which killed a Canadian-US dual national. The aid worker was killed alongside six international and Palestinian volunteers with World Central Kitchen in a series of Israeli airstrikes on their aid convoy. The identity of the Canadian has not yet been publicly identified. CJPME calls on the Canadian government to ensure swift consequences for this criminal act.

“This is far from the first time that Israel has targeted an aid convoy or killed humanitarian workers. Many family members of Canadians have also been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. But this atrocity is yet another reminder that no person in Gaza is safe, and anyone could be a target,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “We cannot wait for the results of an investigation before taking action. Canada must act now to sanction Israeli leaders and prevent further indiscriminate killing,” said Bueckert.

Israel has claimed responsibility for the attack but has called it an accident. However, CJPME believes that no rational person could believe this claim, given all of the available evidence. The convoy, consisting of multiple vehicles prominently featuring the World Central Kitchen logo, was hit after leaving an aid warehouse. Its route and timing were coordinated and authorized by the Israeli military. The convoy was hit by three successive drone strikes along the authorized route, as the vehicles were more than 500m apart. The vehicles were targeted one by one, picking off the survivors as they fled to the other vehicles for safety. All of the volunteers were killed.

As a result of the attack, the World Central Kitchen has suspended its operations, forcing aid ships to return to Cyprus with food aid left undelivered. This is particularly devastating as Israel’s blockade pushes Gaza further towards a forced famine and mass starvation event.

“The attacks on aid workers, alongside the starvation policies in Gaza, must be recognized as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent,” added Bueckert.

CJPME argues that the targeted assassination of humanitarian workers cannot go unpunished, and urges the Canadian government to take the minimum following actions:

1. Canada must make a strong and public condemnation of Israel for the attack;
2. Canada must expel the Israeli ambassador to Canada;
3. Canada must impose sanctions on Israeli officials responsible for this attack, and pressure Israel to end its blockade of Gaza;
4. Canada must send a letter to the International Criminal Court expressing its support for an investigation into the incident as a war crime.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

The human mind is often incapable of tolerating the limitless nature of a universe, the absence of a divine architect, or appreciate that intended designs may be absent when it comes to events awful, ghastly and catastrophic. A disaster with some human agency is bound to have arisen because of a constructed plan, a template to harm, a scheme to injure.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was another event to befuddle those searching for the plan.  The Singaporean-flagged MV Dali container ship lost power on March 26 and collided with the bridge in the early morning, causing the dramatic destruction of the bridge and the deaths of six construction workers who fell into the Patapsco River.

The authorities were quick scotch notions of foul play. FBI Baltimore stated that there was “no specific and credible information to suggest any ties to terrorism at this time. 

The investigation is ongoing.”  President Joe Biden, while betraying confusion about whether he ever travelled by train over the bridge or not – an impressive feat if so, given that the bridge never had train lines – described it as “a terrible accident.  At this time, we have no other indication – no other reason to believe there was any intentional act here.”

The Kraken of conspiracy had, however, been unleashed. 

Andrew Tate, the Count of Online Misogyny, was quick to the digital podium in suggesting a cyberattack. 

In a post of breathless excitement, he notes how the “Lights go off and it deliberately steers towards the bridge supports.” 

For the influencer facing charges of human trafficking, forming an organised crime group, and sexual assault in Romania, this was the work of “Foreign agents of the USA”.  With apocalyptic flavour, he declared that a “Black Swan event” was imminent.

With tearing speed, former security advisors and current political representatives made their offerings of conspiratorial theory.  Former US national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about meetings with Russia’s ambassador to the United States leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, added his own agreement with Tate. 

“Black swans normally come out of the world of finance (not military) … There are harbor masters for every single one of these transit ports in America that are in charge of assuring the safety of navigation … start there.” 

How exciting.

Former Florida state congressman Anthony Sabatini preferred a vaguer, more intangible culprit, identifying the enemy ideologically.  It all came down to a policy of diversity, equity and inclusion, with the insinuation that the swarthy types were responsible. 

“DEI,” he stated with certainty, “did this.” 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) worried whether this was “an intentional attack or an accident” and demanded an investigation, the very thing happening even as she bloviated on the subject.

Almost on cue, culturally charged theories began to froth and bubble.  Matt Wallace, yet another cerebrally overheated influencer with 1.6 million followers, drew a comparison (and connection) between the collapse of the bridge and the Obama produced Netflix film Leave the World Behind, which featured a cargo shipping losing power and running aground on the coast of Long Island.

In the film, the ship’s destination is Sri Lanka.  The country’s national flag sports a lion.  The MV Dali’s destination?  Sri Lanka.  The name of the cargo vessel in the film?  White Lion.  Celluloid could be effortlessly married to harmful plot and wicked design, or what another overly exercised social media user drunk on Christ and premonition liked to call “predictive programming”.

On CNN, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was trying to calm matters. 

“We’re in the business of dealing with roads and bridges and sometimes ships and trains.  So we are not in the habit as a Department of Transportation, of being in the business of dealing with conspiracies, or conspiracy theories or that kind of wild thinking.  But unfortunately, it is a fact of life in America today.” 

This, at best, is an airy reading of history.

The lifespan of the US Republic has been one of numbing conspiracy. 

In the land of Hope and Glory, with Freedom’s wash, conspiracy is mother’s milk.  The Salem witch trials in Massachusetts pointed to Satan’s industrious work; the fledgling republic feared the clandestine seizure of power from within by well organised European elites.  In the 1800 presidential race, rumours were sown by the Federalist Party that the wily Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, was a closeted atheist keen on handing over the new state to France on his election.  Jefferson won, and far from surrendering territory to France, doubled the size of the US with the purchase, from France, of 828,000 square miles.

At its creation during the Cold War, the John Birch Society, after ventilating about global communist conspiracy and home-grown threats, redirected its focus to the fanciful conspiracy that the United Nations was keen on world government and trimming US sovereignty.  This was much too flattering: the UN is rarely united and more akin to a collection of fractious tribes in permanent disagreement.

The problem with conspiratorial overheating is that the residual ash in the incineration can provide clues to something distantly plausible.  This is helped by the fact that governments and state institutions have not been shy in breaching the social contract with the citizenry. 

The deep state notion, for instance, is laughed off by the very people who represent such interests and regard it as a crank’s viewpoint.

Fundamentally, there is no need for conspiracy when there is a consensus, an understanding of agreed-upon facts and agreed-upon hierarchies of power.  But as for such calamities as befell the Francis Scott Key Bridge, never let human imbecility, incompetence and error off the hook.  To misjudge is to be human.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

The results of Türkiye’s 2024 local elections and its influences on Turkish politics will undoubtedly be seen more clearly in the medium term.

However, there are some significant points that the results indicate, and even if they are still in the heat of the moment, these points clearly show to the actors in the Turkish political scene that no election can be won in Türkiye if the economic and political realities are not taken into consideration. 

There is no doubt that the undisputed winner of this election is Republican People’s Party (CHP), which won the majority of the metropolitan and provincial municipalities and became the first party in the provincial assembly vote rate with 34.44%.

The loser of the election is the ruling party AKP, which fell below its vote share in 2002 for the first time in 22 years. If an evaluation is made as to why the ruling party experienced such a large loss of votes even though only 10 months have passed since the general elections, the key to winning elections and reaching to power in Türkiye can be understood:

First of all, during this 10-month period, the ruling party, with its new economy team in the government, followed an economic policy in line with the expectations of global capital, could not reduce inflation in the country, and prioritized the financial interests of global capital, not the people, and forgot about the retired and low-income segments of Turkish society.

This explains the approximately eight million votes lost from the ruling party compared to the previous election results.

As a matter of fact, we understand from the messages they give through their representatives that the global capital is the most disturbed one by the Turkish election results. The first messages coming from the pens of Western capital point out that the markets do not like the election result in Türkiye, they expect the return to orthodox economic policies to continue, foreign capital will be disturbed by these results and will expect extra guarantees for the continuation of the current economic policy.

However, the political practice and economic reality confirmed by the election results signalize the exact opposite: the election in Türkiye cannot be won with such economy team and economic policies that increasingly impoverish the Turkish people and serve the interests of global capital!

Secondly, the economic priorities and security sensitivities of the people in Türkiye are parallel to each other, and failure to conceive this will definitely have a negative impact on the election results. Again, during this 10-month period, the government’s shift to the West, which poses the biggest security threat to Türkiye in the last decades, has created serious question marks in the minds of larger parts of Turkish public. While on the one hand, they felt sorry for Gaza, on the other hand, the silent reaction they have shown in the meeting squares to Türkiye’s increasing trade with Israel was reflected in the ballots.

Thirdly, the refugee issue, which the public pays attention to in the economy-security balance of interests but is ignored by the ruling party, was a factor that affected the election results. The results in Kilis province, a province bordered to Syria, shows that the public does not accept the government’s refugee policies, its efforts to remove the refugee issue from Türkiye’s agenda, and, more importantly, its efforts to impose refugees on Turkish society as the new reality of Türkiye’s demography.

Fourthly, it has been seen that embracing outdated Western-origin liberal policies in a world that has become multipolar by following micro-nationalist and separatist political figures along with economic policies that prioritize the interests of global capital will not provide positive outcomes in the elections in Türkiye.

In addition, it seems that the era of political Islamism in politics, where political Islamism could gain support by showcasing the people’s so-called ‘conservative values’, is now coming to an end.

The conservatism of the people is something private and personal, and this requires an unquestionable respect.

But, the pure reality in the daily life of the Turkish people is wealth and security, which can only be provided equally to all citizens if the secular, modern Turkish nation state is strong. The election results are a sign that the secular Republic of Türkiye has never become obsolete, on the contrary, it is becoming more stronger in the 21st century; it has also been an indication that Atatürk’s legacy cannot be erased neither in Türkiye nor in the world with his strong nation-state and mixed economy models that give priority to the interests of people.

As the result of the election, those who are rising as new stars in Turkish politics are the CHP candidates, especially Mansur Yavaş, who won with a record vote in Ankara.

The fact that such large differences have emerged in favor of the opposition party for the first time in metropolitan cities is an indication that the Turkish people wishes a radical transformation in Turkish politics. The fact that Mansur Yavaş, Mayor of Ankara, won the election with a margin of 30%, doubling his closest rival, makes factitious inferences that the winner of İstanbul will be the natural presidential candidate meaningless.

Especially, when looking at the provincial assembly votes; and also, when the voting potential of the parties representing nationalist voters, which are currently components of the ruling alliance, and the approximately 8 million voters with high national sensitivity who have broken away from the ruling party, are taken into account, this wish for transformation is more apparently understood. More interestingly, it has become clear that the people demand the establishment of a new national central politics under the leadership of winner of this election, CHP, the founding party of the modern Republic of Türkiye.

The national center in the new political era, which has already started as of April 1, 2024, can only be possible with a new political perspective that can build economic policies that prioritize the people’s interests without giving credit to separatist politics and promise Türkiye’s independent stance in the world politics.

The results of this election are a signal that any political organization that can realize the need for this new perspective will sooner or later come to power in Türkiye.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Israel no longer controls the escalation ladder since its audacious attack pressures Iran to at least symmetrically respond with its own attack against an Israeli consulate somewhere.

Depending on whether this happens and how severe of an attack it is, Israel might then feel pressured to escalate in response, thus catalyzing an uncontrollable cycle that could spiral into the worst-case scenario.

Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus on Monday in an audacious attack that killed several high-profile IRGC targets. Iran vowed to avenge their deaths at a time and place of its choosing, which it’s pressured to do in some way or another after this flagrant violation of international law. Foreign diplomatic facilities are protected under the Vienna Convention, and Israel knows this very well after prior Iranian-linked attacks against its own such facilities, yet it still carried out this attack anyhow.

That was arguably a strategic mistake and perhaps one of the highest order since Israel is militarily defeating Hamas in Gaza, though at the expense of the civilian population there, which has been collectively punished through ethnic cleansing, famine, and genocide. These humanitarian and reputational costs were deemed worth it by Bibi for the sake of security, yet now he might have actually worsened his country’s security precisely at the time when he’s on the verge of declaring victory in Gaza.

The Houthis’ opening of a second front was insufficient for stopping Israel’s campaign while Hezbollah has thus far remained reluctant to open up a third one that would risk “mutually assured destruction”. Neighboring Jordan has recently experienced an upsurge of Hamas-inspired and Muslim Brotherhood-driven unrest, but it’ll likely remain manageable due to the security forces’ years of Western training, thus meaning that another front probably won’t open up on its own in that kingdom either.

Without Hezbollah waging total war against Israel and/or Jordan slipping into a Libyan-like conflict that spills over into the West Bank, Israel will complete its destruction of Hamas in Gaza.

Such was the state of affairs up until Monday’s audacious attack, however, because now Iran feels pressured to escalate in ways that could risk opening up another front. This could happen for example if it requests Hezbollah to respond in a way that inadvertently prompts an Israeli overreaction which then leads to all-out war.

Another possibility is that the IRGC, Hezbollah, and/or allied Iraqi militants set their Hybrid War sights on Jordan with a view of triggering its collapse in order to provoke an immediate national security crisis on Israel’s eastern borders that could draw the bulk of its forces away from Gaza in an instant.

Regardless of what many Alt-Media commentators have claimed over the past six months, Israel doesn’t want to risk “mutually assured destruction” by waging war against Hezbollah and/or Iran.

If there was any appetite for doing so, then it could have launched overwhelming first strikes against them to decapitate their leadership and destroy as many of their offensive weapons as possible before bracing for the retaliation that would follow. The time for doing so has long passed though since the most opportune moment would have been right after Hamas’ sneak attack on 7 October, not half a year later when its opponents have now prepared for that possibility even more than they already were.

Israel no longer controls the escalation ladder, however, since its audacious attack pressures Iran to at least symmetrically respond with its own attack against an Israeli consulate somewhere. Depending on whether this happens and how severe of an attack it is, Israel might then feel pressured to escalate in response, thus catalyzing an uncontrollable cycle that could spiral into the worst-case scenario. In that event, an overwhelming first strike by either side becomes much more likely than before.  

This comes at the worst possible time for Israel as it’s wrapping up its campaign against Hamas and preparing for Gaza’s post-conflict future that Axios reported might involve a multinational Arab military force taking responsibility for law enforcement and humanitarian activities. That would be unlikely to occur amidst a major escalation between Israel and its Resistance Axis foes, which could lead to its aforesaid campaign dragging on even longer with growing physical, financial, and reputational costs.

Had Israel not bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, then it wouldn’t have to worry about anything coming up to offset its impending military victory, which to remind the reader entailed enormous humanitarian and other costs that Bibi deemed worth it in the name of security.

Its plans are now much more uncertain than ever since nobody knows if, when, or how Iran might respond to this audacious attack, but should retribution come sooner than later, then it could truly be a game-changer.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Currently, the possibility of “direct intervention” by the West in Ukraine is being discussed in newspapers around the world.

What few know, however, is that, in practice, this is already a war between Western and Russian troops. 

Large numbers of mercenaries from NATO countries are fighting in Ukraine, mainly participating in terrorist raids against demilitarized regions on the Russian border.

With the Ukrainian failure in the special military operation zone, the neo-Nazi regime is focusing its attention against Russian border cities.

Since late 2023, Belgorod and Kursk have been bombed frequently.

Western missiles and drones kill Russian civilians in these regions where there is no military mobilization, which makes the attacks truly terrorist.

As experts have already said, these border attacks have no military relevance.

Kiev’s aim is to divert attention from its defeat on the battlefield and show its Western sponsors that the military aid provided is being used “appropriately” – reaching deep into Russia.

The problem is that this “PR stunt” is absolutely illusory. In practice, most of the Ukrainian missiles supplied by the West are shot down by the Russian defense, just as land incursions are quickly neutralized by Russian troops.

Publicly, the West quickly replaces Ukrainian material losses. What is little talked about, however, is that NATO is also already supplying Kiev with human resources. Thousands of foreign mercenaries are fighting against Russia. Border raids are largely being operated by these foreigners. I witnessed this personally in March when I was in Belgorod during a BRICS Journalists Association’s press expedition.

Our main objective was to cover the bombings carried out by the Kiev regime to harm the Russian electoral process.

In Belgorod, I spoke to civilians in the affected regions and received some important information about those responsible for the attacks. For example, on March 12, there was a land invasion in the village of Kozinka (Belgorod oblast). At the time, the enemies were quickly neutralized by the Russians. Fleeing from the fire, the invaders abandoned their dead and wounded soldiers as well as various equipment along the way.

The Russians thus captured the belongings of a Swedish mercenary neutralized on the border.

A notebook and diary were found with personal notes describing his work as a pro-Ukrainian soldier. In his notes, the Swedish citizen had important information about the use of special weaponry and military medicine techniques. There were also notes in his notebook on sabotage tactics and reconnaissance operations, as well as a collection of basic phrases in the Ukrainian language.

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Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military  expert. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

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Introduction

The national election time in India has started and in June India will have a new government in place based on these election results. These are widely regarded as very important elections for the country.

While ideally elections are about considering and debating the various paths of socio-economic development, politics and governance, continuity and change, in practice a comprehensive view on various important issues seldom emerges in various election debates. To make up for this, various groups prepare documents on the most desirable agenda needed for various sectors (for example health or education) or for various regions and more rarely, a comprehensive agenda for the development path covering the entire country. One such comprehensive documented prepared as a very humble contribution by this writer is presented below, with full recognition that such this can only be regarded as a small beginning to which many others will have to add and improve.

Clearly there is increasing need for a program based on justice, equality, peace, and environment protection which can reduce distress of people immediately and provide many-sided relief to them but which in addition can also provide the base for longer-term sustainable development. 

India has the most people in the world today in the world compared to any other country, over 1.4 billion. While India has about 17 per cent of the world’s population, it has less than 3% of the land and only slightly more of the freshwater resources. Its share of known reserves of oil and gas is also very small, making it dependent on importing a big share of its needs. India also suffered under almost 200 years of highly exploitative colonial rule when its development needs and priorities were subjugated to those of the colonial power, denying great opportunities at a time when availing these would have benefited the people a lot. It is these disadvantages that India must overcome to find a satisfactory life for its people while also protecting the environment. Hence the need for justice and equality, for social harmony and unity, for peace and stability are clearly very important needs for the country. It is within this broad framework that an alternative path for India should be planned. Today India stands at a very important juncture of history, faced with very serious problems and critical challenges, and at the same time India also has significant opportunities if only these can be grasped.

India and World

Any comprehensive understanding of India’s possible pathways in the near future should be linked to a wider understanding of the most essential features of present day world. India should of course plan its future in accordance with its needs, but this has to be seen in the wider context of the world’s most serious issues and problems so that the path India chooses is also in conformity with the world’s most urgently felt needs. This is true for all countries of course but this is all the more true for a country like India where one-sixth of the world’s people live.

The two most important features of the present day world are: (i) the deepening of a many sided ecological crisis in critical ways so that it has now become a survival crisis threatening the life of countless species and endangering humanity as well, and (ii) the reality as well as  possibility of many conflicts, invasions and wars (including the third world war) in a situation of more and more destructive arms race including huge arsenals of weapons of mass destruction which can destroy the entire world. 

These two problems may appear separate but are related in significant ways, not the least because the kind of international effort needed to resolve the first listed survival issues will simply not be possible in a situation of conflicts and wars.

In the context of this wider situation of the world, India must pioneer a path which, while solving India’s basic problems of poverty and deprivation, should at the same time show the way forward for resolving the most threatening problems of the world. If India can achieve this, it will be a truly historic achievement which will win admiration all over the world, increasing respect for India and leading to demands for a wider role of India in world affairs without India asking for this. Above all, if India achieves this, then this will be a huge contribution to reduce mass distress and disasters in the world, now and in the future, bringing relief to hundreds of millions of people. Can India achieve this?  

Need for Alternative Path

For such an achievement to be possible, India should try to establish broad consensus on three overwhelming priorities:

(i) very significant, durable reduction of poverty and inequalities, ensuring basic needs of all,

(ii) protection of environment with special emphasis on checking survival threatening problems such as climate change, water depletion and loss of bio-diversity and

(iii) peace and social harmony at all levels while ending all discrimination.

If the government supported by enthusiastic people’s participation and a broad consensus can really ensure that these inter-related tasks become topmost priorities, then India can truly pioneer a brave new path which can solve India’s most pressing problems at the same time as providing important contributions and lessons for resolving the most threatening world level problems.  

With a limited resource base India’s quest for meeting the basic needs of its people and providing them satisfactory livelihood on a sustainable basis is a huge challenge. If this can be met while also protecting environment and keeping down GHG emissions, this will truly be a very commendable achievement.

India is a nuclear weapons power which shares borders with two other nuclear weapons powers. India has been extremely prone to terrorist attacks from across its borders. It has already fought five and a half wars with neighboring countries, with aggression generally coming from the other side of the borders. It has coped with several secessionist movements and insurgencies. India has seven major religions (plus many more religious sects and religions with smaller number of believers), around 6400 castes and 1600 languages.

The much-discussed idea of India is that despite all these outward differences, all people can live without discrimination in India with security and equal opportunities. This is the basis for peace based on equality and justice (as distinguished from peace based on threats and submission). There needs to be an all encompassing commitment to peace based on justice, reflected as much in non-discrimination and equality at all levels in India as in attitudes and policies towards neighboring countries. Of course, national security and borders should be fully and firmly protected.  But we should also remember that unity of country based on equality of all can also be our most powerful defense.

Of course governance reforms including significant reduction of corruption and crimes (and related criminalization of politics) and improved transparency are essential preconditions for success of this agenda based on justice, equality, harmony and protection of environment.

But what has been happening in recent times is far removed from the real needs of the country. Today we have a system of crony capitalism tied closely to inequality and injustice based globalization, with a big role also for some of the most infamous multinational companies and institutions. Highly favored are those MNCs which are known to be very aggressive in trying to dominate food and seeds sector, using very hazardous technologies. To pave the way for such corporate led growth, the Planning Commission has been shut down arbitrarily. The environment is threatened more than ever before with aggressively marketed and ecologically destructive projects of big corporate interests. The richest and most corrupt forces can also be very aggressive and violent, in turn leading to terrible violations of human rights and civil liberties. Inequalities of wealth and income, after declining significantly in the post-independence years, have again increased sharply during the last three decades or so.  

In such adverse circumstances it is all the more important to hold high the banner that another path exists — a path that can make India a pioneer in reducing poverty, inequalities, environment ruin and GHG emissions, while promoting peace and harmony at all levels. While preparing such a program in greater detail, we should not allow ourselves to be misled by just a narrow-based approach. There have been times when GNP growth has been impressive but inequalities have increased and so have the problems of weaker sections, while environmental ruin too has been acute. Our concern should be for reducing distress of all, all life-forms, on a durable, sustainable basis.

It is with this spirit that major policy issues need to be clearly discussed with an emphasis on what has gone wrong, what are the risks ahead and what corrections need to be made. We need mutually consistent policy options for various sectors, leading to an overall policy framework which can work in real life conditions and is also is conformity with the creation of a better, safer world. 

While preparing a policy framework to some extent we need change but to some extent we also need to recognize what is of value at present and we need to protect it.

Economy and Trade

The highest priority should be accorded to meeting the basic needs of people on a sustainable basis. To ensure sustainability first of all environment should be well-protected and natural resources should be used very carefully. Also the economy should have a sound base. The basic needs of people include the following – adequate availability of balanced food satisfying nutrition norms, clean drinking water, satisfactory availability of clothes and housing to ensure protection from weather extremes as well as dignity and basic comforts, access to education which opens up opportunities of progress as well as strengthens basic human values, access to means of protection of health, medical care, safety and hygiene.

Livelihood of small and medium farmers, artisans, workers, other vulnerable employees and self-employed persons should be well protected and linked more closely to meeting the basic needs of all people. Special skills should be well-protected.

Economic inequalities should be reduced significantly as a matter of policy with emphasis on improving the prospects of people in the lowest layers of economy while also preventing excessive concentration of economic power in the hands of any person, group or corporate interest. 

In several critical areas of the economy the public sector should continue to play an important role. The private sector obviously should also have an important role but subject to the condition that no industrialist or company can dominate the economy, its one or more important sectors, to acquire excessive power and interfere unduly in the functioning of democratic system and its policy making mechanisms. 

Corporate sector should be regulated carefully for responsibilities relating to environment, workers, consumers (or other end-users of their products) and to the wider society. Multinational and foreign companies should be regulated very carefully. Cooperative sector should be reformed and strengthened to accept increasing responsibilities. Certain products and areas can be reserved for small-scale and cottage-scale entrepreneurs, cooperatives, small farmer groups and self-help groups, particularly of women, with emphasis on meeting basic needs of villages and small towns as well as generation of more diverse livelihoods there. Entrepreneurs and innovators at all levels, particularly those in small and medium enterprises, should be encouraged in various ways, including corruption-free business conditions which reward talent and innovation while discouraging, curbing cronyism and corruption.

Economic planning should retain an important role in ensuring the availability of goods and services which meet the basic needs of people, reducing inequalities, protecting livelihoods, keeping unemployment and inflation at low levels, providing essential infra-structure and avoiding foreign indebtedness. The Planning Commission (including state planning organizations) should be re-established with some important reforms to strengthen it and the process of five-year plans (including state plans) should be re-started.  

In foreign trade imports of all non-essentials including luxury goods and gold should be minimized. Steps which reduce excessive dependence on imports in meeting essential needs (in terms of consumption goods as well as capital goods and intermediates) should be emphasized, while the sovereign government’s powers to reduce or stop those imports which are harmful for health, livelihoods or other vital interests should be reaffirmed. Similarly patent laws should be in line with national interests. India should play an important role in reform of the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF with the aim to make them more transparent and responsive to the real and economic justice based needs of world. Steps should be taken in time to avoid any possibilities of heavy indebtedness, balance of payments problems and heavy dependence on uncertain ‘hot money’ inflows. The type of linkages due to which any international economic crisis affects us quickly and excessively unsettles our national economy should be avoided.

There should be a relentless campaign against the substantial ‘black’ part of the economy so that illegally held money can be recovered and used for constructive development tasks. This includes efforts to bring back black money deposited abroad using various secretive devices. This should be taken up in cooperation with other countries and organizations dedicated to this work. India should not merely rely on the lead provided by developed countries in this context but should instead seek to lead the developing countries in this context. 

Budgets should emphasize mobilization of adequate resources to meet the basic needs of all people. Luxury consumption and high profit areas should be taxed adequately, while the tendency to give heavy concessions and huge exemptions to corporate sector and richest people must be given up. There should be adequate budgeting for social sector and in addition the increasing privatization and high profit orientation of critical social sector components like health and education should be checked. 

Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, Forests, Fisheries and Rural Development

High priority should be given to rural areas. The distorted thinking which necessarily equates development with very rapid urbanization and migration of displaced villagers to mega-cities should be rejected. Villages should be the main base of India’s development. Even though land availability per family is declining with the passage of time, more diverse livelihoods can be provided in rural and semi-rural areas by encouraging village and cottage industries, including khadi, and protecting artisans’ livelihoods. These can include traditional improved industries as well modern industries, subject to the condition that these are not destructive for environment and public health. 

Land rights of all small and medium farmers should be well protected, while also providing encouragement for their mutual cooperation and the strengthening of rural communities. Their land should not be lost due to indebtedness or related distress conditions. Fertile agricultural land should as far as possible be saved for agriculture and chances of displacement of farmers should be minimized. Special care should be taken to protect the land rights of tribal communities and to ensure the proper protection of laws enacted for this purpose. If displacement cannot be avoided in some cases then as far as possible the efforts should be to provide land in place of land. High priority should be given to make available cultivation land to as many landless farm workers as possible, as well as strengthening their livelihoods base in other ways, including wider and more creative use of existing schemes like rural employment guarantee. Housing land with legal rights should be available to all rural households who are still deprived of it.

Ecologically protective, low-cost, location-specific technology which seeks to make best use of local resources and conditions should be emphasized, an approach which includes organic farming, protection of traditional seeds and biodiversity, soil and water conservation, increasing green cover and forests. Organic farming should avoid the pitfall of avoidable expenses like costly certification and should be based on self-reliance and low costs, including mutual certification by farmers of each other’s crops. Farmers’ seed rights should be well-protected and seed-banks of traditional diverse seeds should be set up with the close involvement of farmers including elderly farmers and women. Increasing control of big companies including multinational companies or their subsidiaries over seeds and other critical areas should be checked. G.M. crops (including gene-edited crops) and the related technology should be strictly banned keeping in view their many-sided, serious and irreversible adverse impacts and hazards. Protection of various forms of life should be emphasized. All subsidies meant for agriculture should be given directly to farmers.

Water conservation as well as protection/regeneration of greenery provide the base for survival in the form of meeting basic needs of life and supporting basic rural livelihoods. Some existing provisions like rural employment guarantee can be strengthened for this. In terms of resource use, concentrating attention on smaller watershed programs as well as proper maintenance of existing canals will yield much better results instead of various new big and medium projects of dams and canals. Of course this will also be ecologically much safer and will help to avoid a lot of displacement. Safety of existing dams should be a significant area of concern. Indigenous mixed tree plantation work which resembles natural forests should be emphasized and cutting of existing green trees should be minimized as much as possible. Indigenous trees which provide fodder and fruits should be emphasized in addition to trees with better soil and water conservation properties.

Protection and regeneration of natural mixed forests should get very high priority. The practice of raising monoculture plantations of commercial species of trees in place of natural forests should be given up forever. The role of forests in providing diverse forms of valuable foods and nutrition should be recognized and protected. Forest based livelihoods of tribal communities and other communities living in and around forests should be protected and promoted. Their co-operatives or groups should be the main beneficiaries of minor forest produce based sustainable livelihoods, which should emphasize also the protection of trees. These communities should never be displaced or evicted in the name of protection of wild life and forest; instead as far as possible they should get livelihoods in this protection.

Animal husbandry should be encouraged with special emphasis on regeneration of pastures and fodder trees as well as protection of indigenous species of farm animals. Protection of indigenous breeds of cows and bullocks should get special attention. Sex-selective technology used for having only female calves, also called sexed semen technology, should be banned. Fair price should be ensured to dairy farmers. Their co-operatives should be strengthened with special emphasis on the poor. Milk powder imports and oilcake exports should be discouraged. Pastoral groups particularly nomadic and semi-nomadic groups facing hard times should be given a helping hand.

Availability of essential food items in public distribution networks should be linked to strengthening of small and medium farmers in all rural areas. All raw food items needed for public distribution system as well as various nutrition programs should be procured from local farmers at a fair price. As far as possible self-reliance in essential diverse food items at the local level should be ensured with internal trade filling in unavoidable gaps. Food miles should be reduced in this and other ways. Special care should be taken to ensure that the public distribution system is used to strengthen local farmers. Rules of WTO or any other international rules which stand in the way of strengthening local food or farming systems should be resisted. In public distribution system millets, pulses and oilseeds should also get a proper place. 

Steps should be taken to free various kinds of produce from the grip of a few big traders and speculators so that farmers get justice and sudden escalations in price for consumers are also avoided. Direct contacts between farmers and city-based consumers for healthy, organic food can be encouraged by allocating space in specific city markets to clusters of villages, subject to certain conditions so that the weaker, smaller farmers can get more benefit.

Any obstruction by international agencies, WTO or others, in a well-organized system of food security and food self-reliance based on farmers’ secure livelihoods and sustainable fulfillment of basic food needs of people, should be resisted strongly.

Industrial Development 

The country should aim, to the extent possible and practical, for self-reliance to a significant extent in all essential consumer and capital goods.  

While private, public and cooperative sectors all have important roles, domination by any single industrialist or use of unfair means and corrupt practices to surge ahead of others in one or more sectors should not be allowed. Public sector should be strengthened and reformed to fulfill its wider social responsibility while maintaining high standards of efficiency and entrepreneurial ability.

All industrial units need to abide by properly framed regulations related to pollution, environment, displacement, health, safety, workers’ welfare, quality and consumers’ concerns.

Special protective steps including reservation of certain items in production and procurement need to be provided for cottage and small scale units with special emphasis on khadi and handlooms.

Activities of multinational and foreign companies should be regulated carefully.

Banking and Insurance

Image: LIC Zonal Office Night View from Connaught Place Park (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

The important role of nationalized or public sector banks and insurance companies (mainly Life Insurance Corporation of India) should be protected. These should be reformed and strengthened to improve their efficiency, basic financial soundness and social responsibility and to minimize the possibilities of corruption and irregularities.

Private and foreign banks and insurance companies can have only a limited role, and should not be allowed to damage the special position of national institutions like the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

The extremely serious problems of so-called ‘non-performing assets’ should be sorted out by ensuring due payment of enormous sums owed by influential borrowers. Without any fear or favor very strong actions should be taken against anyone found guilty of corrupt practices or colluding with them.

Infrastructure, Energy, Minerals

Public sector companies should continue to have an important role in creation of strong and adequate infra-structure for development of country. While infra-structure should be adequate, unnecessarily expensive and grand projects should be avoided. Care should be taken to minimize the problems relating to environment and displacement. There should be to steady progress of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels in overall energy mix. 

Special care should be taken to reconcile development and environment protection objectives in the area of energy, as both are important. For rural areas in particular decentralized mixed renewable energy systems can play an important role.

Mineral wealth should be used in the wider interests of people with special emphasis on the rights and welfare of communities living in mineral rich areas. Instead of trying to take out minerals as quickly as possible or maximizing corporate profits, various middle level options and technologies which protect communities and environment should be explored. Domination of decision making by corporate interests should be resisted strongly. Foreign and multinational companies should not have any leading role in development of minerals. Minor minerals should be extracted in consultation with gram sabhas, minimizing any harm to environment, while mining mafias should be kept away and resisted to prevent any criminalization of mining work.

Health

A strong foundation of good health can only be established by good nutrition and fulfillment of other basic needs.

In addition essential and safe health services, medicines, vaccines and investigations should be accessible to all as per their real needs. Adequate budgetary provisions should be provided for this. To utilize this properly, tendencies of extracting very high and unethical profits in the supply of medicines and medical care (including investigations) should be strictly curbed, or else the higher budget can be gobbled by profiteers. Important changes in medicines policy are needed to make available all essential medicines at a fair price, with special emphasis on supply of generic medicines, while those medicines and vaccines with high risks and side-effects should be discarded. The public sector should fulfill an important role in this. The government should accept the responsibility of health care, medicines and vaccines. As far as possible, all medicines should be provided free in primary health centers and all government hospitals, perhaps excluding the very rich patients.

Special medical courses designed to ensure adequate and satisfactory availability of doctors and all medical and health staff in rural areas should be taken up.

Several distortions in health budget spending need to be corrected so that integrated and balanced health planning can emerge which is linked to the real needs of the country and not to artificial priorities thrust upon by vested interests.

While indigenous medical practices should be encouraged, there is need to ensure rationality and standards so that undesirable trends (like mass marketing based on dubious rationality) can be checked.

Doctors and other medical personnel coming forward with the objective of serving poor people particularly in remote villages should get the necessary encouragement from the government. Irrational rules unfavorable to serving in real-life rural conditions should be changed.

Tendencies towards unjust patent laws, domination by multinational companies and excessive privatization should be resisted at a wider level. 

Holistic view of good health and health improvement, combining physical, mental and spiritual health, should be emphasized.

There should be continuing campaign to reduce the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and all substance abuse.

Education and Children

While emphasizing right to education for all, the education budget should be increased significantly. At the same time the tendencies of rapid privatization and extraction of high profits should be checked. Improvement of government schools should get the highest priority, while those schools which aim to sincerely pursue important educational objectives should also be encouraged. Children of weakest and vulnerable households (like migrant workers and nomadic groups) should also be included with a system of evening schools/bridge courses and later integration with the mainstream.

Tendencies towards introducing sectarian approach in education (or linking it to the dominance of one faith or religion) should be curbed. Instead a secular approach to moral/ethical education should be introduced with emphasis on universal values such as not causing distress to anyone, equality of all human beings, rejection of all kinds of discrimination, compassion for all forms of life, honesty, hard-work and a spirit of service. Cooperation and not competition should be emphasized, in studies, sports (team-spirit) and other activities. Health education including a firm message against all intoxicants and also emphasizing importance of physical work should get due importance.

Child labor and all forms of exploitation of children should be eliminated. Trafficking of children should be curbed strongly and missing children should be traced with a sense of urgency. Trafficked and exploited children when rescued should be rehabilitated properly. Creative programs for street children should be implemented and various homes for disadvantaged children should be improved.

Special care should be given to ending discrimination against girl child and improving her education opportunities.

Youth should have adequate opportunities for livelihoods linked to creating a better world and they should be adequately informed about such opportunities of employment as well as self-employment. Their creativity should get adequate avenues as much in villages and small towns as in big cities. 

High education and research should be linked to the country’s real needs. The trends towards making it very expensive and increasing student debts or limiting it to the rich should be curbed. A mix of social relevance, linkages with real needs, creativity, a sense of new initiatives and innovation should guide the pursuit of higher education.

Science and Technology

Progress in science and technology should be linked closely to the country’s real needs. Technical skills not only in institutions of higher learning but also in rural areas, in farms and workshops and factories should be recognized, encouraged and provided adequate avenues. Technology and engineering skills should not be linked to any narrow interests but instead should be directed towards serving the country’s high priority needs. Scientific research that can be linked to important initiatives and success particularly in environment protection, sanitation and waste-management should be emphasized. There should be emphasis on learning from past mistakes, looking more at local needs and conditions. A highly decentralized approach with close involvement of farmers, villagers and women, emphasizing traditional crop varieties and biodiversity protection, is needed in villages.  

Old Age, Disability and Pensions

Senior citizens should have a place of respect and dignity and to facilitate this better social security particularly pensions are very necessary. Extensive pension reforms should be taken up to create a system of universal and adequate pensions.

All disability-related discrimination should end. Adequate care should be given to meeting the special education, health and other needs of disabled persons, providing them access to all social places and facilities, apart from arranging adequate pensions. ‘Disability as well as ‘old age’ should be defined in a comprehensive way so that any deserving and needy persons are not left out of rights like social security. Prevention of and early treatment for accidents, injuries and diseases likely to result in disabilities should be emphasized.

Society and Religion

All forms of discrimination based on caste, religion, gender, color, ethnicity etc. should be curbed strictly in keeping with the constitutional precepts. Apart from implementing legal provisions this should also be taken up as public campaigns.

Continuing efforts should be made, and not just at the time of tensions, to maintain inter-faith harmony. Strict action should be taken against those responsible for spreading sectarian violence and tensions.

Everyone has a well-established constitutional right to follow his or her religion, but definitely not to insult other religions. All religions are equal in the eyes of the State, and governments should carefully follow secular precepts avoiding any discrimination.

However there should be adequate room for social reforms and narrow thinking should not stand in the way of changing or removing those customs or traditions which clearly harm society and cause distress. Social reform movements against child marriage, dowry system, discriminatory practices, liquor and intoxicants, pornography, superstitions, various exploitative practices under the influence of superstitions etc. should be encouraged.

Community and family ties at all levels should be strengthened and social cooperation for creative, philanthropic and reformist work should be encouraged.

Harmful practices in the celebration of festivals, such as excessive use of hazardous, polluting firecrackers, should be curbed by public campaigns mostly and by legislation where necessary.

The effort should be to protect good traditions while fighting clearly harmful ones.

A campaign against the increasing consumption of liquor and tobacco products in various forms as well as against drug addiction should be a very important component of the social reform effort. The increasing location of liquor shops in villages must be checked.

Social reforms should seek to involve all sections of community and, as far as possible, should avoid creating new conflicts.

Scheduled Castes, Tribal Communities, Denotified Tribes, Nomads and OBCs

The existing reservations should continue till real equality in all important respects is not achieved. A big effort should be made to provide some land to the large number of dalit (or other) landless farm workers and provide other assistance to help them to emerge as small farmers cultivating their own land. The ban on manual scavenging must be backed by adequate rehabilitation opportunities. Artisan work relating to bamboo, leather etc. should be improved so that new opportunities emerge and better, cleaner work-conditions are available.

Land rights of tribal communities should be carefully protected and land allocated earlier illegally should be restored under the due process of law. The implementation of recent Forest Rights Act needs to be substantially improved and any possibilities of large-scale displacement should be checked. Rights of minor forest produce should be strengthened and new opportunities opened up in processing work. Livelihoods based on protecting forests and wild life can be substantially expanded. PESA law for decentralization should be implemented in the right spirit.  

Nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes and groups deserve sympathetic understanding. Both options of improving their present life pattern and satisfactory rehabilitation are open. Denotified tribes need to be helped to come out of various kinds of stigmas and problems, and new opportunities must be opened for them.

In all categories the most oppressed and neglected groups deserve special attention and help. Particularly among OBCs there is a need to be careful that the genuinely oppressed, left-out and neglected castes get more help.

Labor 

Hard-won rights of workers and trade unions should be protected. Reforms or codification should not be used as a pretext to reduce or undermine these rights. Occupational health and safety need much more attention. The rights of unorganized sector workers deserve more attention and funds. Social security of these workers should be ensured in a big way. Women workers deserve special attention in terms of protection and care. Laws which protect rights of workers should be implemented in the right spirit. Within the organized sector also the rights of contractual workers deserve more attention, as also the need for regularization.   

Women and Gender Issues

There is a clear need to provide equal opportunities to women and end all gender-based discrimination. A system of (at least) 33 percent reservation for women in state and national legislatures and 50 percent reservation in the decentralized system should be in place in the near future. Reproductive health and rights should be well protected. The ban on female foeticide and infanticide should be implemented strictly. Apart from providing essential facilities, special incentives should be offered to encourage girl students. Security of girls and women should get high priority and urgent steps have to be taken at several levels to ensure secure living and working conditions for women. 

Various reasons due to which violence against women has continued to remain at high levels should be identified carefully and remedial action should be taken. The rise in sexual violence is a matter of deep concern and the causes should be carefully identified so that effective action can be initiated on the basis of proper identification. Rapid proliferation of liquor, other intoxicants and pornography needs to be checked. Deeply entrenched attitudes of society which when inter-acting with these recent trends can prove very dangerous also need to be identified and checked. Strong laws to protect women are needed, but at the same time any misuse of these laws should be checked.

Land and property rights should be jointly in the name of wife and husband, and the rights of single women should also be ensured, but inheritance laws should not be such as to transfer ownership of a village’s cultivation land outside the village.

Efforts for a better understanding of women’s perceptions of various development issues should be made. 

No one should face discrimination or injustice on the basis of gender or sexual orientations.

Other Forms of Life

It is important to avoid an excessively human-centric view of life as life forms other than human beings also need care and compassion. Many of these are today endangered and also face much cruelty due to the absence of this care. Most of the life forms who have been farmers’ friends – ranging from indigenous species of cattle and camels to earthworms and sparrows, are urgently in need of protection today. Indigenous species of cows and bullocks deserve special care due to their many sided utility, but other farm animals should not be neglected. Communities living near forests should get strong livelihood support in activities relating to protection of wild life and their habitats. Similarly communities like fishers, boatmen, can be involved in the protection of fish habitats and protection of all aquatic life, while snake charmers can be useful in protection of reptiles due to their special knowledge. Use of chemical pesticides and weedicides should be minimized while GM crops should be banned. Stray dogs and other stray animals also need better care but not in such distorted ways as to threaten public safety. Cruelty to animals in the name of laboratory experiments should be reduced as much as possible.

Protection of Environment, Checking Climate Change

Protection of environment is of the highest importance not only for preparing the base of sustainable development but increasingly for sheer survival of various life-forms including human beings. Protection of environment and reduction of pollution should get priority at all levels, including reduction of air and water pollution, soil and water conservation, protection of forests, reducing the spread of various toxic products and wastes etc. New forms of pollution , such as those associated with high hazrd technologies the irreversible risk of genetic pollution should be given adequate importance in the environment protection agenda.

Protection of rivers should learn from past failures and concepts of ecologically adequate river flows as well as free river flows should get more appreciation in policy, along with adverse impacts of dams and barrages. 

While a strong legal base is certainly needed for protecting environment, people’s movements and their close involvement in environment protection are equally important. It is important to evolve environment policies which involve people instead of alienating them. Environment protection work should provide new livelihoods to people, instead of displacing them or taking away their livelihoods.

A ban on destructive mining at any place, for example, should at the same time provide for protective and regenerative work at the site which will also provide employment. Special care should be taken for protection of eco-sensitive areas of special importance like those in the Himalayas or in coastal areas.

While the task of environment protection has always been important, its importance has greatly increased in times of extremely serious world-level threats like those of climate change. India like all countries needs to give adequate importance to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as to adaptive steps to cope with climate change related problems. These can become issues of very high priority in the near future. Also India should contribute adequately to world level justice based efforts to check climate change which should persuade developed countries to contribute substantially to efforts to check climate change, accepting historical responsibility for high greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in various sectors particularly agriculture and energy should be linked more closely to climate change related factors. Vast rural areas of India can become one of the most important frontiers of checking climate change with emphasis on small farmer organic and eco-friendly farming, protection of forests and a huge program of regeneration of degraded forests, linked to livelihoods of landless rural households and tribal communities. Mitigation and adaptation aspects of climate change should get equal importance and can often be combined in very creative ways. 

Protection from Disasters

Flooding in Odisha (Licensed under Creative Commons)

Increasing harm from several natural disasters is already a serious concern, while the threat from disasters can increase substantially in times of more aggressive climate change. Therefore according much higher priority to protection from natural disasters has to be a very important part of policy framework now and in the times to come. To be effective this effort has to learn from past experience and be willing to correct serious mistakes made earlier, as is evident from the increasing damage even after vast amounts had been invested in flood protection. So both increasing budgets and correction of distorted policies are important for protection from disasters. Planning for reduction of loss of life in an earthquake, cyclone or tsunami should get very high priority, as also various measures to provide protection from prolonged or acute droughts.

Protection from Accidents

Damage and threats from transport (particularly road), worksite, and domestic accidents as well as new threats from high hazard projects have been increasing. Preventive and immediate response action can reduce the damage including loss of human life to a substantial extent. So a nationwide network of protection and quick response for all kinds of accidents in an integrated way should be created.

Displacement

Efforts should be made to reduce displacement at all levels as much as possible. At the level of policy formation it is necessary to keep in view the need to minimize displacement. To the extent displacement cannot be avoided, all efforts should be made for satisfactory rehabilitation including land in place of land and protection of community ties. Cases of those victims of displacement who suffered injustice in much earlier times should also be considered sympathetically so that they can get justice even through belatedly.

Justice, Police and Crime

Long pending police reforms should not be delayed any longer. These reforms should be aimed at not only increasing the efficiency of the police but also their sensitivity and humanity. Dignity of policemen at lower levels should be protected.

Reducing crimes should have a multi-dimensional approach with special emphasis on reducing the social causes of crimes as well as breaking the nexus between crime and corruption and political power at higher levels.

Efforts to combat terrorism should be much better organized and all support-systems of terrorists whether in the country or abroad should be opposed and challenged on a continuing basis at various levels. Social conditions and grievances which fuel terrorism should be tackled effectively.

The justice system should give special attention to ensuring that innocent people are not implicated in crimes. Special efforts should be made to provide legal aid to the poor and needy, as also to help under-trials. Under-trials who have already served a jail sentence which is equal to the punishment of the offence for which they have been charged should be released.

The justice system is breaking down particularly in rural areas because of long pending cases and repeated visits to courts from long distances which only lead to further dates. Therefore rural decentralization should include some judicial provisions for settling disputes locally but with suitable safeguards.

Jails need extensive reforms to create more human conditions, with special provisions firmly in place for recognition and human treatment of political prisoners.

Housing and Homeless People

Ensuring legal rights to housing land to all households and improvements in housing programs for weaker sections should get high priority in rural areas, as also meeting the special housing needs in disaster prone areas.

The housing needs of urban areas cannot be solved by high profit oriented builders. The government should accept the responsibility for large-scale construction of houses to meet the needs of the poor as well as middle class. The needs of homeless people should get priority and construction of adequate shelters should be ensured. Slums should not be evicted arbitrarily  and instead improving various facilities in slums should be emphasized.

Strengthening Democracy, Improving Governance 

There should be very firm commitment to democracy and honest conduct of elections. The government should consult opposition political parties regarding their apprehensions on election malpractices and if there is widespread demand for elections based on ballot papers instead of EVMs, then this should be accepted. The impartiality and integrity of the Election Commission at all levels should be ensured. 

Centre-state relations should be guided by constitutional precepts of maintaining very good relations and there should be absolutely no bias against any state on the basis of political parties in power or other basis. There should be timely and adequate transfer of funds to states as per agreements which respect adequate financial rights of states to resources. Recent moves such as GST should not lead to increasing financial constraints for states.

Efforts to reduce significantly the role of big money, illegal ‘black’ money and criminals in elections and functioning of political parties should get high priority. Political parties should maintain complete records of income, expenditure and all donations which should be transparent and should be accessible under right to information law. Election expenses should be kept low, rules should be carefully followed but routine work should not be interrupted at election time. Election bonds which reduce transparency and promote organized, systemic corruption should be withdrawn.

Right to information should be protected and strengthened, with additional protection for those who expose corruption using RTI or in other ways and for ‘whistle-blowers’. Anti-corruption laws and organizations need to be strengthened and improved, while new laws should be introduced in areas where needed.

An effective grievance redressal system which provides for time-barred responses, issues receipts for complaints received and fixes responsibilities (as well as penalties for non-action) should be in place as soon as possible. Important reforms to increase accountability in governance should be introduced.

Exemplary strong action should be taken once corruption allegations have been confirmed. Excessive protection provided to some sections of officials from anti-corruption action should be withdrawn but at the same time tendencies towards witch-hunt without significant evidence as well as motivated targeting of innocent persons should be checked.

Strong action should be taken particularly in cases of illegal transfer of money earned by corrupt practices outside the country, in tax havens or secret accounts.

Decentralization and Panchayati Raj

Decentralization should be strengthened in rural as well as urban areas. Gram sabhas and ward sabhas in rural areas (assemblies of all adult villagers) as well as equivalent units in urban areas should be strengthened as a base where people’s real needs can be articulated, discussed and also documented. It is important to strengthen ward sabhas particularly in villages where gram sabhas can be too large to give everyone a proper hearing (or else panchayats can cover smaller areas.)

Some weaknesses of panchayats need to be corrected. The tendency of one or two persons to concentrate most powers of panchayat raj can be corrected by strengthening of gram sabhas, a more active role for panchayat samitis as well as for all elected ward members and possibly a rotation of the main head-person’s post among all ward members. Decentralization at the district level should be strengthened significantly so that the concept of a district level government can emerge which is much closer to the day to day problems and livelihood issues of people.

Decentralization needs to progress rapidly within the basic constitutional principles of equality and non-discrimination, integrity and unity of the country, secularism and socialism (interpreted in this context as reduction of inequalities and ensuring justice to weaker sections).

Urban Development

Urban life should emphasize environment-friendly and secure conditions for all sections of people, with special emphasis on reduction of pollution, access of satisfactory housing to weaker sections as well as middle class, and significant reduction of crime (particularly crime against women and children).

Instead of high concentration of population in big cities, balanced development of smaller towns including kasbas or semi urban settlements close to rural areas should be prioritized. Satisfactory essential facilities should be provided in all these settlements.

Scarce resources should be used carefully to provide essentials to all people instead of squandering scarce resources on grand and expensive projects. There is need for much better planning taking better care of needs of weaker sections, environment protection, decentralized sanitation and solid waste management. There is room as well as need for much creative reform and improvement here, taken up with involvement of people and particularly weaker sections, supporting many creative livelihoods which should be well rewarded for resolving most vexing urban problems.  

National Security and Unity

National security is based not just on armies and weapons but even more so on the unity and determination of people to defend national interests. Hence continuing efforts should be made to strengthen unity of people at all levels. Special attention should be given to justice-based unity in border areas, with a willingness to provide all democratic rights (except perhaps for very small periods of special security concerns) and an effective system for redressal of all grievances. Special care should also be taken to ensure such community participation that any victimisation of innocent persons at the time of security operations can be avoided.

Apart from overall improvement of anti-terrorism operations, efforts to break their higher-level linkages whether external or internal should be emphasized.

A high level of preparedness to defend national borders should be maintained, while at the same time improving negotiations with neighboring countries to resolve border issues and ease tensions. Corruption and commissions in arms purchase should be strictly curbed, while moving towards self-reliance and indigenous R and D should be strengthened.

Priority should be given to solving most expensive border disputes like Siachin glacier. The Kashmir issue can be resolved by strengthening democratic processes on both sides of the border, initiating dialogues and exchange, gradually opening up borders and recognition of these as the legitimate borders by all sides. But all this is possible only if disruptive forces of violence can be restrained.

Foreign Policy and International Affairs

There should be a deep commitment to friendly relations and peace with all neighboring countries without sacrificing national security interests and protection of our borders.

The world is passing through extremely difficult times with the growing threat of irreversible climate change and life-endangering conditions on the one hand, and the stockpiling and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction on the other hand. India should play a leading role of responsibility so that effective solutions for these life-threatening problems can get the highest priority and effective, justice-based solutions can emerge before it is too late.

Narrow viewpoints of developed countries on these issues should be challenged by a broader unity of developing and least developed countries. In addition the tendency of developed countries to go on trying to extend their special privileged position and dominate world economy and trade should be challenged and resisted. International trade and finance institutions should be reformed substantially, or what may be more practical ultimately, new international trade and finance institutions should be created which are more suitable for creating a new international economic order based on justice and equality.

India should participate actively, inside and outside the United Nations, for justice based peace and minimizing the possibilities of war and internal strife. Unity and cooperation of all countries should be established to curb strongly all forms of terrorism and its causes as well. 

India should support disarmament with renewed vigor so that substantial savings from arms expenditure can be diverted to development needs.

In the emerging world situation there are strong reasons for strengthening the non-aligned movement and India should strive to play a key leadership role in this. 

Minorities

Security and equal opportunities of all minorities should be protected and promoted. Communal harmony and national unity should be promoted actively on a continuing basis so that such conditions are created which minimize possibilities of any communal tensions and violence. Those guilty of obstructing this path of peace, goodwill and security should face strict action.

Although minorities are generally taken to be religious minorities, reasons for being identified on other basis (such as region) exist and any such effort of violence against any kind of minority should face strict action and all such tendencies should be curbed.

Sexual minorities should also be protected from injustice, discrimination and stigma.

Social Activists and Organizations

Social activists who seek to help weaker sections, oppressed people and reform society in other creative ways should get encouragement and protection from governments. Any moves to harass or repress such efforts of social activists and organizations should be checked and protection should be available to them. They should have encouraging conditions and a lot of freedom to advance their work in creative and constructive ways. 

Media

Image: Protests in New Delhi and New York City decrying the raid and detention of journalists in India. (Source)

Media should be close to the realities and needs of the country, and should be in tune with the basic precepts and values enshrined in our constitution – equality, secularism, special concern for the weaker sections, national integration and unity, peace and goodwill. Freedom of media is very important and this is also a basic constitutional precept, but it should not be misrepresented to justify increasing corporate control to an extent that media is alienated from genuine concerns of the people and instead promotes narrow interests and viewpoints. Cooperative efforts of journalists should be encouraged. Along with freedom, socially responsible behavior of new social media is important and new technologies should not be misused.

Transport and Tourism

Importance of railways and public transport keeping in view the needs of ordinary travelers should get high priority. Roads should be safe and in good condition, but overspending of scarce resources on non-essential expansion and widening should be discouraged. Safety in all forms of transport should get very high priority.

Safety, hygiene and essential facilities at all places of huge gatherings including pilgrimages, festivals and fairs etc. should be emphasized. Economy tourism, eco-friendly tourism and safety of tourists should get high priority. Tourism should be linked to the better livelihoods of ordinary people.

Culture, Art and Literature

Rich cultural assets and folk arts in various communities should be promoted and encouraged, as well as protected from the onslaught of corporate controlled media, ‘cultural imperialism’ and pornography. Highly deserving but neglected talent among ordinary folk should be encouraged and helped to realize their full potential. All languages should get encouragement, in the context of education, literature and folk arts. Special efforts should be made to protect endangered languages. Efforts to bring cinema, theatre and literature closer to the real concerns and aspirations of ordinary people as well as pressing needs of society should be encouraged. The rich heritage of previous achievements should be protected and promoted, while at the same time future achievements keeping in view the various needs of society should get support and encouragement. Freedom, with a sense of social responsibility, of all writers and artists should be well protected.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Man over Machine (Gandhian ideas for our times), Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food. Website bharatdogra.in, email [email protected], tel. +91-9717450249.  

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Dr. Paul Thomas hires outside firm to track vaccinated vs unvaccinated kids.

2,700 variably vaccinated and 560 not vaccinated. Then they were age matched and compared.

Here are the findings:

1. Asthma and allergies significantly increased in the vaccinated. Off the chart difference.

2. Eczema significantly was higher.

3. Sinusitis was significantly higher.

4. Gastroenteritis was significantly higher.

5. Respiratory infections significantly higher.

6. Otitis Media – Middle Ear Infection was significantly higher.

7. Conjunctivitis – Eye infections significantly higher.

8. Breathing issues significantly higher.

9. Behavioral issues significantly higher.

10. ADHD — NONE in the unvaccinated at all for 10 years in Dr. Thomas’s practice.

Click here to watch the video

As you see on the chart it is incredibly high which shows that there is something in these vaccines (Toxic Heavy Metals) that is causing ADHD.

The results were not even remotely close in comparison. It is a total knockout. If you listened to the TV Media you would think that results would be just the opposite of these findings.

There is a reason in 100 years of vaccinating children there has NEVER been retrospective studies.

Don’t you want to see 5, 10, 15 or even 20 year studies of the vaxxed vs unvaxxed? Wouldn’t that be VERY Helpful? Why has there never been any studies like this?

They would 100% PROVE without shadow of a doubt that not only do vaccines NOT prevent infections and transmission but they are severely harming children – especially for allergies, middle ear infections, autism, breathing issues, sinusitis, respiratory infections, eye infections, gastroenteritis, eczema and behavioral issues.

If vaccines PREVENT infections then why are infections significantly higher in all of Dr. Thomas’s vaccinated children? These are serious life changing chronic conditions.

Vaccines shift the immune system to allergy and autoimmunity, and you have more and more infections of other kinds. In short, what does this mean? It means that vaccines DESTROY a child’s immune system, every vax is different with different live viruses and toxins and they will really hit a child with a weaker immune systems first.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

It is suspicious that “Islamist terrorists” from Tajikistan would carry out a massacre at the Crocus City Hall for money rather than commitment to the Islamic State, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan against Russia which has shown great sympathy for the civilians of Gaza.

UK and USA exhortations to Ukraine to hate (see below) and attack Russians, their training of Ukraine troops for acts of sabotage inside Russia (including the murder of politicians and journalists) and the flight (see map) of the Crocus City terrorists to Ukraine, together with historical exploitation by the West of Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and the presence of those islamists inside the Ukrainian armed forces all suggest the Crocus City Hall massacre was connected to Ukraine. 

The West Teaches Hatred and Killing of Russians

US General Milley said not long ago that:

“there should be no Russian that goes to sleep without wondering if they are going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night” and called on Ukraine to “create a campaign behind the lines”

Vladimir Buchok, a Ukrainian serviceman of the 24th brigade of the AFU, was mobilised on his way home from university. He was sent for training in the UK.

“I was trained in the UK. They taught us how to use weapons and medicine. Psychologists worked on us so that we did not like Russian soldiers and all Russians in general, so that we killed them and treated them harshly when we captured them”

No wonder the American magazine The Spectator cited a statement from the head of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Kirill Budanov to Western journalists:

“We killed Russians and will kill them anywhere in the world until the complete victory of Ukraine. We have gotten to many people, including members of the public and the media.”

The Head of the Ukrainian Secret service Vasyl Malyuk admitted in a TV interview to high profile assassinations inside Russia including a Russian military blogger in St Petersburg and a Ukrainian MP Ilya Kyva.

The former CIA analyst Larry Johnson who was an expert in CIA operations behind enemy lines said in an interview with Judging Freedom:

“This means that the United States knew that Ukraine was up to something, and had an idea of what it was going to do. And there is a good chance that Ukraine not only did this but did it with the help of weapons and support provided by the United States.”

Having created the Ukraine monster we know that the USA has recently been worried about excessive attacks inside Russia so (while warning Russia of an imminent attack) they were unable to stop it.

As the Turkish official Omer Celik stated the terrorist attack could not have been carried out without the support of foreign intelligence.

Terrorists’ Ukraine Escape Route

The Russians now have evidence from the phones and other electronic equipment captured with the 4 Tajik terrorists that they were in communication with their organiser both before and after the attack who directed them towards Ukraine and Kiev where they were to pick up the remainder of their one million Rubles reward. 

The map of south west Russia and the border area with Ukraine shows that the 4 terrorists were unequivocally headed towards Ukraine. 

The map shows the area between the city of Bryansk and the Ukraine border. The main road from Moscow is the M3 which runs north south meeting the P120 just outside Bryansk where anyone traveling West to Belarus or east towards the “stans” (Kazakhstan or Tajikistan for instance) would have turned off.

But the terrorists were caught just outside Navlya some 360 kilometers south of Moscow and well south of the Bryansk turnoffs. 

So even without any evidence from electronic devices it is clear that the terrorists were driving towards the Ukraine border, an intense war zone which no one would head towards without specific instructions and a promise of reward! They would have headed south on the M3 and turned West towards Kiev on the E391.

The Russian Investigative Committee analysed financial transactions and claim to have traced connections to “Ukrainian nationalists”. This could mean nazi extremists like Azov or simply the Ukrainian State agencies engaged in planning sabotage and killings inside Russia.

Apparently the terrorists received significant amounts of money and cryptocurrency from Ukraine. (we know that cryptocurrency has been a favoured method of US donations to Ukraine, not least from the recently convicted FTX fraudster Bankman Fried)

Ukraine Embassy Recruited Tajiks in Tajikistan

Although the notice published has now been removed the Ukrainian Embassy in Tajikistan was recruiting Tajiks to fight in Ukraine:

The work on recruiting foreign citizens was headed by Ambassador Valery Evdokimov, the former foreign intel chief under Zelensky.

Natives of Tajikistan regularly become targets for recruitment by Ukrainian intel services: one of them was caught while photographing objects in a military unit near Moscow and the presence of ISIS fighters in the Ukraine Armed Forces is no secret. Here the Associated Press reports ISIS insignia on the uniform of a Ukrainian commander. https://thecradle.co/articles-id/1300 

US Denial of Ukrainian Terrorism

The speed of the American denial of any Ukrainian involvement in the attack, compared to the slow investigation of the Russian government, was suspicious. Simplicius the Thinker reminds us of American past denials of Ukrainian terrorism which turned out to be true:

BBC News 23/8/22 “Darya Dugina: Moscow murder accusation is fiction says Ukraine”

6/10/2022 New York Times: US Intelligence says Ukrainians behind Darya Dugina killing

The long standing presence of dangerous (often Tajik) Islamic terrorists in Ukraine cannot be denied and their recruitment for Ukrainian causes is clear: see this and this.

Whether the direct links between Kiev officials or nationalist extremists and the Crocus City terrorists can be made, time will tell.

But the atmosphere of extreme hatred of all Russians by UK, US and Ukrainian officials and the admission by Budanov and Malyuk of the targeting of civilians, the long track record of Ukraine’s political assassinations and the recent indiscriminate shelling of civilians, schools and residential blocks (NOT collateral damage) in Donetsk and Belgorod have created an atmosphere within which the Crocus City massacre could logically fit.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Apparently, Emmanuel Macron’s stance on the Ukrainian conflict is gaining supporters among European warmongers. In a recent statement, Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen supported the plan to send troops to Ukraine in the future, if Kiev proves unable to continue fighting. The case is further evidence of how anti-Russian paranoia is reaching worrying levels among European states, leading them to almost engage in open war with Moscow.

According to Valtonen, Macron is assuming a position of “strategic ambiguity” necessary for the current stage of the conflict. This “ambiguity” consists of not making it clear whether or not NATO troops will be sent to Ukraine. The precise time of the possible deployment also remains unknown. Valtonen sees this position as correct, since, according to her, Western countries must deliberate on such a strategic decision, choosing the moment to openly engage in the conflict.

Her view is that the West should avoid self-imposing red lines. She praises Macron for not ruling out direct intervention as this gives the West freedom to decide how and when to act. In an interview to the Financial Times, Valtonen stated that she does not see any need for Western intervention in the conflict for now, but supported the plan to send troops in the near future, if “necessary”. For her, the most important thing is that there are no strategic limits for the West, with NATO countries having maximum freedom to make any decision regarding the conflict.

“Now’s not the time to send boots on the ground, and we are not even willing to discuss it at this stage. But, for the long term, of course we shouldn’t be ruling anything out (…) Why would we, especially not knowing where this war will go and what happens in the future, disclose all our cards? I really wouldn’t know (…) What I liked about two recent announcements of President Macron is that he said that actually why should we impose ourselves red lines when Putin basically has no red lines?”, she told journalists.

As we can see, the Finnish official considers the direct deployment of troops as a Western “card”. She seems not to care – or simply not to understand – the catastrophic consequences of an open conflict between NATO and Russia. This shows, in addition to high bellicosity, a true diplomatic inability, which is particularly worrying since she is the head of Finnish diplomacy.

It is interesting to note how fallacious Valtonen’s speech is. She states that Europeans should not rule out direct intervention because “Putin basically has no red lines.”

However, since the beginning of the special military operation, it is Russia, not the West, that has self-imposed strict limits on how to act in Ukraine. Moscow deliberately moderates its military intensity to avoid side effects and civilian casualties. Instead of launching a high-intensity operation for a prolonged period, the Russians prefer a tactic focused on attrition and slow territorial gain, thus reducing damage to the Ukrainian civilian population.

Bombings against Ukrainian critical infrastructure happen rarely, almost always in retaliation for previous terrorist attacks carried out by Kiev on the border. If Russia really didn’t self-impose red lines, there would no longer be any infrastructure in Ukraine and Kiev would have collapsed a long time ago. Moscow clearly sees the conflict as a tragedy and strives to prevent its consequences from being even more serious for innocent people.

On the other hand, the West clearly has no limits when it comes to acting in Ukraine. In the first weeks of the special military operation, NATO countries promised to limit their support to sending money and humanitarian aid. Before long, weapons began to be sent, and then long-range missiles were arriving in Kiev some months later. NATO simply engaged in a proxy all-out war through the neo-Nazi regime – but was quickly defeated.

With the Ukrainians becoming unable to continue fighting and the Western military-industrial complex collapsing in the face of its inability to produce more weapons for Kiev, the West can only choose between retreating or moving towards direct war.

Macron, trying to improve his domestic and international image, launched a “PR stunt” talking about sending troops to Ukraine, but showing no real capacity or willingness to take this dangerous step.

The problem is that among Macron’s audience there are European leaders enraged by the anti-Russian paranoia spread by NATO.

These leaders have been deceived by the propaganda of their own “allies” and now truly believe that if they do not make “hard decisions” they will be “invaded by Russia” in the future. Finally, it seems that the lack of rationality and strategic sense is leading European countries to make a serious mistake.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Today my book Rockefeller: Controlling the Game is released internationally by Skyhorse Publishing.

It has been a long journey. Almost exactly 15 years ago, as a PhD Candidate in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, I started researching the politics behind climate change.

In the summer of 2008 I had decided to scrutinise the allegations against skeptical scientists, that they were paid by oil companies to discredit AGW (the theory of anthropological global warming). I found that these allegations were mostly unfounded, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. the Global Climate Coalition). I saw mainly a number of scientists who actually stood up for a genuinely scientific approach; who would not let themselves be bought by political trends and fat research grants. All skeptical scientists were not even critical of the AGW theory but only contended the degree of the human influence on climate, or the efficacy and wisdom of proposed mitigation policies.

Upon further digging, I instead, much to my surprise, found that oil companies were actually pumping money into projects which embraced Al Gore’s doomsday message! And had done so since early 1960s!

I asked myself where the threat of climate change really came from. When did it start? Alas, I found no answer. No one at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research (to which I was affiliated at the time) knew. There were many who did research on climate-related issues without having the faintest idea about the origin of their mission. But if the UN had declared that it is a crucial issue for humanity it must be true, seemed to be their reasoning; “everyone thinks so”. There were always references to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The debate was over.

I wanted answers. When no one else could provide me with those answers I realised I had to research the matter myself. I found documentation in a book published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where the development of the climate change issue was briefly described. A few key events were listed, which I used as a starting point: the International Geophysical Year 1957-58; a climate conference organised by the Conservation Foundation in 1963; the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972; and the Conferences in Villach, Austria in the first half of the 1980s.

I found out which actors were involved, what documents they used, who financed them, and what policy suggestions they came up with to solve the alleged problem of climate change.

I had initially planned on writing five pages but it landed on close to 50. The result was surprising and somewhat shocking. A clear pattern emerged. I knew it would be controversial to communicate these findings. They contradicted the views preached by the believers. Especially concerning the fact that a number of U.S. oil billionaires had gotten involved at an early stage. This was especially the case with most prominent oil family of them all. The founders of Standard Oil/Exxon. The Rockefellers.

I included the chapter in my doctoral thesis, which struck down like a bomb upon its publishing in December 2012.

In early 2016 I decided to do a more thorough investigation. It resulted in the first Swedish edition of Rockefeller, which was released on Easter Monday 22 April 2019. I asked a number of questions:

Why had the Rockefeller family funded and influenced climate research since the 1950s and helped shape climate policy since the 1980s?

And why did Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2014 announce that they would divest from all of their fossil energy holdings? Why attack the very industry on which their immense wealth was founded? What was their motive in their own words – and how did it all begin?

The answers can be found in the book. Published one day after Easter Monday 2024, and available as hardback, ebook (kindle) and audiobook.

Click here to order the book.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

38-year-old UK content creator Jules Fielder developed stage 4 Lung Cancer a few months after two COVID-19 Vaccine Doses

Nov. 1, 2022

 

At 38, Jules doesn’t look like someone who would be diagnosed with lung cancer and she believe this, coupled with her non-respiratory symptoms, meant she wasn’t diagnosed as quickly as she could have been. She is sharing her experience to help others avoid similar delays.

“I think people would look at me and never believe I have stage 4 lung cancer which has spread to three points in my spine and pelvis but this is my reality.

“I was diagnosed on 5th November after a series of what I now know to be lung cancer symptoms. I had been suffering from back ache, shoulder pain and then developed a lump in my neck. I was totally unaware that any of these were signs of lung cancer and my doctors didn’t piece it together either.

“My backache was put down to sciatica. My shoulder pain was diagnosed as tennis elbow – over the phone – whilst the lump in my neck was dismissed as a cyst or swollen gland that people get when they are run down. I wasn’t happy with this so pushed back and was referred to an ear, nose and throat specialist and this was how I finally started on the path to diagnosis.

“The ENT doctor sent me for an ultrasound and they told me they were taking biopsies. That was when alarm bells started to ring.

“My worst fears were soon confirmed and I was diagnosed with lung cancer. At that point, we didn’t really know what was going on. The person who delivered the news was not a lung cancer specialist and so couldn’t answer any of our questions. I was left fearing the worst.

As a mother, you just think of all the worst scenarios. I thought I was going to die and how was I going to tell my son. It just doesn’t feel real. You just keep asking yourself ‘Is this actually happening to me?’

JULES WAS DIAGNOSED WITH LUNG CANCER AGED 38

“Three days later, I had a phone call to tell me the scans showed it had spread to my spine and pelvis. We were completely devastated and so scared. We were still waiting on the results of the biopsies so I still didn’t have a treatment plan. All those worst case scenarios were feeling like they were coming true. All we knew for sure was that it was stage 4 and it felt like the end of the road.

“But then my treatment plan came in. I met my consultant and asked ‘Can anything be done?’ and he said yes! He told me about a targeted therapy that was showing great success, especially in the younger generation, by basically putting my cancer to sleep. And that is what is happening.

“Each day, I take this one little pill – I call it my magic medicine – and every scan since has shown my cancer is stable.

“It doesn’t come without side effects. I think that’s the price you pay for having a drug working so invasively in your system. I have mouthwashes constantly. My skin is cracked and dry because all the oil has been extracted from my body. I have diarrhea, sickness, loss of appetite and fatigue. The list goes on but that’s where your lung nurse comes in. She will make everything more manageable.

I’m now approaching a year since my diagnosis and I have come to peace with it. I do not live with cancer; my cancer lives with me. I am the one in control.

“However, I do still feel angry. I’m not a medical professional so I couldn’t have known that my body was sending out a message. I believe those little jigsaw pieces should have been picked up by a medical professional. I should have been scanned sooner and then my lung cancer could have been found out at a lower stage instead of stage four.

“I think lung cancer is very much associated to men. It has been largely thought of a manly illness, maybe someone who was a heavy smoker, or a man that worked in the asbestos industry.

“I want to break that stigma. And I will do everything in my power to do just that.”

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Turbo Lung Cancer in Under 40

Thailand – Dr. Krittai Thanasombatkul was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer in Oct. 2022 died on Dec. 5, 2023.

Nov. 30, 2023 – TURBO CANCER – NY – 40 year old Sophia Sheffer was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung cancer in Oct. 2023 & died on Nov. 30, 2023. Dx to death: 1 month.

Nov. 5, 2023 – 32 year old Bonginkosi Ntuli, South African professional soccer player was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung cancer shortly before his unexpected death on Nov. 5, 2023.

Oct. 15, 2023 – Norfolk, UK – 31 year old Jessica Robinson was told she just had wisdom tooth pain. She was then diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer”and the cancer spread, engulfing her whole left lung as well as her aorta and infusing into her spine”. She died 45 days after cancer diagnosis, on Oct. 15, 2023. “Family was told that doctors had not been looking for lung cancer because she was too young.”

Oct. 4, 2023 – 36 year old NY Army National Guard Captain Patrick John Cassidy, who was also a rugby player died after 9 month battle with Stage 4 Lung Cancer.

Oct. 1, 2023 – UK – 29 year old Hannah Williams died suddenly on Oct. 1, 2023 just 4 months after being diagnosed with Stage 3 Lung Cancer while she was pregnant. Diagnosis to death: 4 months.

Sep. 9, 2023 – Ft.Pierce, FL – 40 year old Lindsey Porter is a nurse. She is also a new mom and was just diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung cancer with brain metastases.

Sep. 5, 2023 – Glasgow, Scotland – 28 year old Cheryl Robertson was given a Stage 4 Lung Cancer (ALK-positive) Diagnosis in March 2023 and she died six months later. She had no smoking history. The lung cancer spread to both her lungs and lymph nodes.

Aug. 29, 2023 – Aug.29, 2023 – NY – 39 year old Stefanie Frances Lampf Kennedy, a successful real estate lawyer died on Aug. 29, 2023 from a rare, aggressive lung cancer.

Aug. 20, 2023 – Pretoria, South Africa – 24 year old Angie Oeh, Afrikaans rap sensation died suddenly on Aug. 20, 2023 only 6 days after being diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer.

Aug. 18, 2023 – Reno, NV – 29 year old Ezti Villanueva, who works at the veterinary clinic, was just diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer after presenting to ER with a collapsed lung and fluid in her chest.

July 21, 2023 – Oakville, ON – 40 year old Anoop Singh, whose wife is a Senior advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, died on July 21, 2023 after a 7 month battle with Stage 4 Lung Cancer.

My Take… 

At this time, no other physician in the world is publishing detailed clinical accounts of mRNA Induced Turbo Cancers in the COVID-19 Vaccinated – and certainly no one is even talking about the bizarre and extremely aggressive Turbo Lung Cancers that are presenting at Stage 3 or Stage 4, especially in the age group under 40.

Interestingly, I have found Lung cancer to be frequent enough in the COVID-19 Vaccinated, that it is either in the top 5 of most frequent Turbo Cancers or very close to it.

Preliminary data shows that these are all Non-small cell lung cancers with an unusually poor prognosis, refractory to all standard treatments.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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Western Countries in ‘Peace Talks’ Without Russia

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, April 01, 2024

Apparently, the “peace negotiations” about Ukraine continue to take place, even without any Russian involvement in the talks. According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, several diplomatic initiatives are taking place to end – or at least freeze – the conflict, but Moscow continues to be excluded from such processes, which obviously invalidates the negotiations.

Spring Traditions and Celebrations: The Past, the Present and the Future of Farming. Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, April 01, 2024

Eleanor Parker writes in her book, Winters in the World, that “in Anglo-Saxon poetry winter is often imagined as a season when the earth and human beings are imprisoned, kept captive by the ‘fetters of the frost’. Naturally enough, then, spring is associated with images of liberation and freedom once those fetters are released.”

Childhood Vaccines: HPV Vaccine (Gardasil) Injuries and Deaths of Young Boys

By Dr. William Makis, April 01, 2024

On June 29, 2018, Christopher Bunch received the Gardasil vaccine at a routine doctor’s visit. Within two and half weeks, he started complaining of a sore throat, and by July 31, he was complaining about a terrible sore throat and headache. (Sore throats and headaches are listed on the Gardasil 9 vaccine insert at common adverse effects.)

How CIA and MI6 Created ISIS

By Kit Klarenberg, April 01, 2024

Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch.

Electoral Redistricting Battles Rage Across the United States

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 01, 2024

A controversial redistricting map drawn up in 2021 by a supposed independent commission resulted in the domination of the Michigan State Legislative seats and Gubernatorial office by the Democratic Party after the 2022 elections.

Israel’s Attacks on Syria Take a New and Unexpected Direction

By Vanessa Beeley, April 01, 2024

Israeli warplanes infiltrated Syrian airspace via Jordan. They used the Syrian airspace over the illegal US base in Al Tanf (on the border with Jordan) to proceed towards the depths of the central Syrian Badia or desert area at low altitude to avoid detection.

Terrorism and Kosovo Independence: NATO’s Aggression in 1999. “The First Legalized European Mafia State”

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, April 01, 2024

Kosovo became the first and only European state today that is ruled by the terroristic warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). This article aims to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in 1999 which has as an outcome the creation of the first terroristic state in Europe – the Republic of Kosovo.  

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered across Tel Aviv and other occupied cities on the evening of 30 March for protests against their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Tens of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating in Tel Aviv tonight, calling on Netanyahu to do more to release the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. This is the biggest demonstration since October 7 pic.twitter.com/Qs9cWUYcts

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) March 30, 2024

For the first time, the families of the Israeli prisoners being held by the resistance in Gaza, who normally hold separate rallies, joined the massive crowds of anti-government protesters – whose movement initially started with the prime minister’s controversial overhaul initiative last year. 

“The rallies are over, the protests have just begun,” said the spokesman for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Haim Rubinstein. 

#ISRAEL PROTEST 🇮🇱

Large-Scale Protests are ongoing tonight in Tel Aviv. Israelis are marching along Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street urging the release of the hostages.pic.twitter.com/quCH2VyI5D

— WORLD AT WAR (@World_At_War_6) March 30, 2024

Israeli police detained over a dozen people and used water cannons against the protesters – who had blocked major roads in Tel Aviv. 

Around a thousand protested outside the Israeli defense ministry in Tel Aviv, demanding an immediate prisoner exchange deal.

Demonstrators also clashed with police in Jerusalem, where around 200 rampaged through police barricades in order to protest outside Netanyahu’s home in the occupied holy city. In occupied Caesaria, protesters were arrested while cutting off roads near the prime minister’s residence. 

Protests erupted in a number of other occupied cities, including Sderot, Or Akiva, and Beersheba. These were the largest demonstrations since the outbreak of the war on 7 October, The Times of Israel reported.  

Representatives of the anti-government protesters held a meeting last month with members of the Shin Bet security service – which aimed to “prevent the crossing of Red Lines,” as the Shin Bet warned at the time that protesters trying to break through the perimeter of Netanyahu’s private home could be shot, according to Haaretz. 

The demonstrations followed a statement released by prisoners’ families labeling the Israeli premier an “obstacle to a deal.” Members of the families of imprisoned soldiers in Gaza met with Netanyahu on 28 March, expressing deep annoyance and anger over the failure to reach an agreement. 

A senior intelligence source on the team of Israeli negotiator Nitzan Alon was cited by Haaretz as saying,

“There are increasing signs that [Netanyahu is] doing almost everything possible to postpone, delay and ruin the chance of a deal to release the hostages.”

The frustration comes as Netanyahu has just walked away from the latest rounds of negotiations in Qatar, aimed at reaching a truce and prisoner exchange agreement.

Hamas has continued to stand by its terms for a permanent end to hostilities, a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, allowing the distribution of aid across the Gaza Strip, and the return of the displaced, which Israel has repeatedly rejected throughout talks in recent months. 

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Introduction

Eleanor Parker writes in her book, Winters in the World, that “in Anglo-Saxon poetry winter is often imagined as a season when the earth and human beings are imprisoned, kept captive by the ‘fetters of the frost’. Naturally enough, then, spring is associated with images of liberation and freedom once those fetters are released.” (p. 93) Even the title of the book, Winters in the World, described one’s age, e.g. I have 30 winters in the world, a recognition of the harshness of the winters which one had survived.

Historically, the transition from winter to spring was symbolised by many traditions that reflected the end of difficult times and the coming of the new season of growth and rebirth. These traditions ranged from the celebration of vegetation deities through fertility rites, and the public rituals associated with Carnival/Fat Tuesday (February/March), Lent (February/March), Easter (fires/eggs/hares) (March/ April) and Rogation Days (April). Many rituals were taken over by the Christian church and given new meanings which themselves are now being secularised.

However, since the development of industrial farming in the early twentieth century, the connection between local farming and spring rituals associated with the land have declined and taken on a commercialised aspect separated from nature. We can see this with Carnival and Easter, while Lent fasting is not practised so much anymore.

This is not to say that the ending of the underlying reasons for carnival and the fasting of Lent, i.e. the finishing up of winter stocks and the privation until new crops grew, is such a bad thing, but our dependence on the current global system of industrial farming is worrying at a time when climate change is affecting food production around the world.

This change is also partly due to unsustainable agricultural methods that are negatively affecting our ability to farm in the future, for example, the spread of desertification, whereby fertile areas become arid due to the overexploitation of soil.

Furthermore, supermarkets packed to the gills with produce from all over the world deflects our attention from looming disasters. In Ireland we know the difference between famine (widespread scarcity of food) and hunger (in Irish Gaelic, An Gorta Mór, the great hunger) … ‘when a country is full of food and exporting it’.

Moreover, governmental measures to deal with land issues may be too little too late, or ineffective, as new laws are simply ignored by vested interests.

The Past

Vegetation Deities and Fertility Rites

From earliest times our relationship with nature had an element of awe and respect that resulted in the belief in vegetation deities “whose disappearance and reappearance, or life, death and rebirth, embodies the growth cycle of plants.” Many vegetation deities were also considered fertility deities, that is, “a god or goddess associated with fertility, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and crops.”

In Mesopotamian culture (dating back to the mid-4th millennium BCE) religion “involved the worship of forces of nature as providers of sustenance” and which later became personified as a range of gods with different functions. Natural phenomena in nature were seen to be directed by nature spirits, thus:

“A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in pantheism, panentheism, deism, polytheism, animism, Taoism, totemism, Hinduism, shamanism, some theism and paganism”.

In some cases the gods die and later return to life, particularly in religions of the ancient Near East. These dying-and-rising, death-rebirth, or resurrection deities are associated with the seasons as allegories of the death of nature and the rebirth of nature during spring, for example, Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion, and Persephone in Greece, the goddess of spring and nature whose return from the underworld each spring is a symbol of her immortality.

Image: Persephone, Queen of the underworld, Goddess of spring, the dead, the underworld, grain, and nature. Statue of syncretic Persephone-Isis with a sistrum. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete

Similarly, many later Roman gods and goddesses were the subjects of fertility rites and celebrations. The festival of Liberalia was held on the 17th March to celebrate the spring return of life. Liber was one of the original Roman gods. A favourite of the plebeians, he was the god of fertility and wine. His festival, the Liberalia, celebrated on the 17th March was an occasion to mark the return of life:

“The celebration was meant to honor Liber Pater, an ancient god of fertility and wine (like Bacchus, the Roman version of the Greek god Dionysus). Liber Pater was also a vegetation god, responsible for protecting seed. Again like Dionysus, he had female priestesses, but Liber’s were older women known as Sacerdos Liberi. Wearing wreaths of ivy, they made special cakes, or libia, of oil and honey which passing devotees would have them sacrifice on their behalf. Over time this feast evolved and included the goddess Libera, and the feast divided so that Liber governed the male seed and Libera the female.”

The Present

Carnival/Fat Tuesday (February / March)

Of all the ancient festivals that survived into current times Carnival is probably the most prominent.  Winter spirits have been forced out to make way for the new season since antiquity. Carnival symbolised this transition from winter to summer and darkness to light. The carnival was a feast whereby ordinary people feasted on the last of the winter stocks before they rotted. This in turn created the obligatory restraint and fasting until new produce was available. The Christian festival consists of Quinquagesima or Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. Therefore:

“Carnival typically involves public celebrations, including events such as parades, public street parties and other entertainments, combining some elements of a circus. Elaborate costumes and masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Participants often indulge in excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that will be forgone during upcoming Lent.”

The phrase ‘Shrove Tuesday’ comes from ‘shrive’ to be absolved of one’s sins and therefore shriven before the start of Lent.

It is also the last day of the Christian liturgical season which in French is known as Mardi Gras (‘Fat Tuesday’) the last night of eating well before the ritual fasting beginning on the next day, Ash Wednesday.

Carnival in Rome, c. 1650

Lent (February / March)

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts around six weeks. In this Christian religious observance, (according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke) Jesus Christ spent 40 days fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan.

The word Lent comes from the lengthening days of spring and is considered a period of grief which ends with the celebrations of Easter.

Lent observers, including a confraternity of penitents, carrying out a street procession during Holy Week, in Granada, Nicaragua. The violet color is often associated with penance and detachment. Similar Christian penitential practice is seen in other Christian countries, sometimes associated with fasting.

Easter (March / April)

Easter is derived from pagan customs that celebrated the victory of Spring over Winter. They lit fires that helped to accelerate the end of Winter and spread the ashes over the fields to help fertilise the soil in fertility rites. Easter bonfires “have been a tradition in Germany since the 11 century. The Christians adopted the pagan custom and reinterpreted it. The fire was now seen as the light of Jesus, reminding people of the life and resurrection of Christ.” The Christian festival commemorates the resurrection of Jesus from the dead after his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary c. 30 AD. Easter is also called Pascha (Aramaic, Greek, Latin) or Resurrection Sunday.

Other cultural traditions associated with Easter include Easter parades, communal dancing (Eastern Europe), the Easter Bunny and egg hunting. It is likely that the eggs and the prodigious reproduction of rabbits and hares led to their depiction as symbols of fertility.

Rogation Days (April)

Rogation Days follow some weeks after Easter when processions are formed to to pray or beseech (Latin ‘rogare’) God for protection from from natural disasters such as hailstorms, floods, and droughts and to ask to ask for blessings on the fields. Rogation processions started at a very early date in order to counteract the Roman Robigalia processions that the pagans made in honor of their gods:

“The Robigalia was a festival in ancient Roman religion held April 25, named for the god Robigus. Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect grain fields from disease. Games (ludi) in the form of “major and minor” races were held. The Robigalia was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season, but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and the dependence on divine favor to avert it.”

Blessing the Fields on Rogation Sunday at Hever, Kent in 1967

As can be seen in these regular prayers, blessings, and processions throughout the Spring season, the anxiety of the people regarding their crops shows a deep understanding of the vagaries of nature and an awareness of their lives dependence on the health of their cultivation work.

The Future

Industrial Farming

By the early twentieth century agriculture started to change due to new developments that brought in the era of industrial farming. Previously a wide variety of foods were produced by many small farms. However, that was all about to change as modern science was applied to various aspects of farming:

“In 1909, a scientific breakthrough by German chemist Fritz Haber—the “father of chemical warfare”—enabled the large-scale production of fertilizer (and explosives), igniting the industrialization of farming. Synthetic fertilizers, along with the development of chemical pesticides, allowed farmers to increase their crop yields (and their profits). Farmers began specializing in fewer crops, namely corn and soy, grown to feed farmed animals. Chickens became the first factory farmed animal when a farmer decided to try to raise ten times as many birds in a chicken house that was only built for 50. Other farmers followed suit.”

Thus followed the new era of industrial farming. The effect of mass production led to the use of antibiotics, selective breeding to increase the size of farm animals, and the mechanisation of slaughter houses.

These developments led to the collapse of the many small farmers who could not compete with farming on an industrial scale. For example, now in the USA “small independent and family-run farms use only 8% of all agricultural land. In just under a century, and especially since the 1960s, agriculture has become dominated by large-scale multinational corporations. Driven by profit, these food giants rely on practices that, by design, exploit and abuse animals, destroy natural habitats, and generate pollution”.

The harvest of seed corn in Iowa

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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“On June 29, 2018, Christopher Bunch received the Gardasil vaccine at a routine doctor’s visit.  

Within two and half weeks, he started complaining of a sore throat, and by July 31, he was complaining about a terrible sore throat and headache. (Sore throats and headaches are listed on the Gardasil 9 vaccine insert at common adverse effects.)

On August 1, his mother, Destiny, took him to express care where he tested negative for strep throat. He was sent home with instructions to treat the symptoms. 

Christopher was checked into the emergency room, and blood work was ordered quickly. From there, his health rapidly deteriorated. He was piercing his lips together and fidgeting with his fingers trying to take off his oxygen monitor.

He wasn’t really speaking but would nod and give a thumbs up. His blood work came back and it showed that he had an elevated white blood cell count. Since there were no other signs of bacterial or viral infection or illness, Christopher was sent to Iowa City Children’s Hospital for further testing. When Christopher arrived at Iowa City Children’s Hospital, they immediately ordered more blood work, a CT Scan, an MRI, and a spinal tap.

The tests revealed that Christopher’s brain was swelling and that he had lesions on his brain. Destiny and the doctors went over his last couple of months in detail to try and pinpoint the reason for swelling and lesions. The only thing that was different was that he had received the Gardasil vaccine. 

On Friday, August 10, Christopher was moved to the PICU as he needed more observation and medical attention. His neurologist explained that they were diagnosing him with Acute  Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM) and, given his medical history, he was “100% sure that the HPV vaccination caused the ADEM for Christopher… “The week of August 6, Christopher started football practice. After practice, he showered and slept until the following afternoon when it was time for practice again. Thinking that Christopher was dehydrated from practice and the heat, he was encouraged to eat and drink. After dinner, he went back to sleep. 

On August 8, after several attempts to wake Christopher, his mother decided he needed to see a doctor and headed to Trinity Medical Center. On the way to the hospital, Christopher was disoriented and said he felt very confused. 

By Saturday, August 11,  Christopher ‘s health became even more unstable and he stopped breathing on his own. His doctors told his family that they were unsure what the quality of his life would be if he recovered given the level of brain damage that had occurred from the massive amount of brain swelling.

On August 12, the doctors decided that in order to give Christopher the best chance of survival, they had to remove a portion of his skull to relieve the pressure caused by the swelling. His family was told that they would have to wait for two days to see if he had brain function. 

On Tuesday,  August 14, 2018 at 11 AM, doctors tested Christopher to see the level of activity in his brain. At 11:20 AM,  Destiny, and his father, Elijah, were given the news that their precious baby boy was brain dead.  Destiny and Elijah made a decision that no parent should ever have to make. They decided to unhook their son from life support. 

Christopher Eugene Bunch passed on August 14, 2018 at 1:02 PM.” 

Christopher Eugene Bunch (12/5/03-8/14/18)

On December 5, 2003, Christopher Bunch was born into this world. He weighed eight pounds and one ounce and was absolutely perfect. Christopher quickly captured the heart of his parents, older brother, and family. Everyone who met Christopher was instantly drawn in with his beautiful bright blue eyes, his outgoing personality, and his ability to light up the room. Christopher excelled in athletics, playing baseball and football, and was an exceptional student with a 3.9 GPA. He was an incredible son, the best brother you could ever ask for, and a supportive friend and boyfriend. Everyone loved Christopher. He was creative, kind, compassionate, and hilarious. He had a knack for making YouTube videos and described himself as “a kid from a small town trying to make it big.”

Sadly, Christopher passed on August 14, 2018, from a severe form of Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), a rare inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system which his doctors confirmed was caused by the HPV vaccination he had received earlier that summer. 

Source: Jessica Rojas

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My Take… 

Are HPV Vaccines dangerous for boys?

There are some interesting cases in VAERS.

VAERS 405821 – 15 year old boy (New Jersey) had Gardasil on Aug.30, 2010 and died suddenly while playing hockey on Sep. 27, 2010 (4 weeks later).

 

VAERS 421582 – 17 year old boy had Gardasil Nov. 1, 2010 and died from sudden cardiac death on the lacrosse field 5 months later on April 1, 2011.

 

VAERS 437999 – 18 year old boy (Ohio) got Gardasil 2nd dose on July 22, 2011 and committed suicide by hanging on July 27, 2011. “The patient had no medical history,” “physician also reported that there was no indication from the patient that he was troubled,” “Toxicology screen indicated that there were no medications involved in the patient’s death.”

 

 

VAERS 457904 – 14 year old boy (Wisconsin) had Gardasil on Apr. 2, 2012 and June 4, 2012. On June 7, 2012 he shot himself in the head. “Physician stated this young male was happy go lucky, healthy, and never had any psychiatric issues in the past.”

VAERS 510130 – 14 year old boy (California) had 2nd Gardasil vaccine on Aug.19, 2013. “Victim was found unresponsive/cardiac arrest in bed at home in the morning of Aug. 20, 2013 (next day). Autopsy showed cause of death was myocarditis.”

VAERS 515434 – 16 year old boy (Louisiana) had Gardasil on May 23, 2013. He died 6 weeks later on July 4, 2013. “Sudden death. He was perfectly healthy. This vaccination is the only thing I can think of that would have caused this. Everything else in his life was normal, the same.”

Do pediatricians or family doctors discuss these risks with their patients? I would bet none of them do.

*

 

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from COVID Intel

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Global cancer incidence is increasing, particularly among those under 50, with a notable rise in breast, uterine, prostate, lung, colorectal, pancreatic, and stomach cancers, with early-onset breast cancer incidence climbing by 3.8% annually between 2016 and 2019

The global death toll from early-onset cancers has surged by nearly 28% from 1990 to 2019, with predictions indicating a potential rise in mortality rates

Dietary changes, particularly the increase in obesity and consumption of processed foods rich in linoleic acid (LA), a polyunsaturated fat found in seed oils, are identified as major contributors to the rising cancer rates

LA intake is linked to several mechanisms promoting cancer, including disruption in energy production in cells, hormonal imbalances, increased oxidative stress, and damage to cellular and mitochondrial membranes

Limit your LA intake and avoid processed foods and certain animal products to mitigate your cancer risk

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According to the latest statistics, global cancer incidence is on the rise, especially among younger people. Between 1990 and 2019, incidence of 29 cancers rose worldwide in those younger than 50, with rates rising faster among women. Cancers on the rise include breast, uterine, prostate, lung, colorectal, pancreatic and stomach cancers.

Between 2016 and 2019, early-onset breast cancer incidence rose by 3.8% annually.¹ As reported by the journal Nature in mid-March 2024,² even teens are now being diagnosed with “improbable” cancers previously only seen in seniors, such as advanced gastrointestinal cancers. And it’s not just happening in the U.S. Oncologists in China and India have also noted this trend.³ According to Nature:⁴

“Statistics from around the world are now clear: the rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under the age of 50. This rise varies from country to country and cancer to cancer, but models based on global data predict that the number of early-onset cancer cases will increase by around 30% between 2019 and 2030.⁵

In the United States, colorectal cancer — which typically strikes men in their mid-60s or older — has become the leading cause of cancer death among men under 50.⁶ In young women, it has become the second leading cause of cancer death …

[The] number of deaths from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 worldwide. Models also suggest that mortality could climb …

Likely Culprits

The conventional medical model is beyond clueless when they believe the solution for this dilemma is better screening. This is unadulterated nonsense and fails to address the cause, which is a disruption in the microbiome that obliterates the healthy obligate anaerobes in the large intestine.

When your body fails to make enough cellular energy because the mitochondria are dysfunctional as a result of being regularly poisoned by LA and estrogen, they simply are unable to maintain an environment that allows the healthy beneficial bacteria to grow.

When the beneficial bacteria disappear, they are replaced by facultative anaerobes that tolerate oxygen, as a result of the lack of competitive inhibition by the beneficial bacteria. It is these bacteria that are increasing GI cancers, not a lack of screening.

Excessive LA Intake Promotes Cancer

The Nature article⁷ does, however, point to there being a dietary culprit, stating “The prominence of gastrointestinal cancers and the coincidence with dietary changes in many countries point to the rising rates of obesity and diets rich in processed foods as likely culprits in contributing to rising case rates.”

While the Nature article does not go into specifics about what it might be about our modern diets that contribute to cancer, my own research has singled out linoleic acid (LA) — an omega-6 fat found in seed oils (and hence most processed foods) — as a key contributor.

Like other experts in bioenergetic medicine, I’m convinced that chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer are bioenergetic diseases rooted in dysfunctional metabolism resulting in poor energy production, and polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) appear to be a primary contributing factor in this chain of events. As reported by bioenergetic researcher Georgi Dinkov in an October 2022 blog post:⁸

“The bad news for PUFA (in this case linoleic acid) just keep piling on. At this point, there is hardly a chronic condition out there that has not been linked to elevated PUFA and/or their peroxidation products.

[A December 2022 study in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling⁹] makes the argument that PUFA peroxidation byproducts (created by the increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) itself driven by PUFA) such as 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), are the cause of diabetes and cancer.

In fact, the study makes the argument that the two conditions are basically slightly different points on the same spectrum of systemic disease (i.e. cancer being the more severe one).”

The study¹⁰ published in Antioxidants & Redox Signaling highlights the increased risk diabetic patients face in developing several types of cancer, including hepatocellular carcinoma, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer.

This elevated risk is attributed to several factors that promote cancer growth in diabetic individuals. These factors include insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia, chronic inflammation, and elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). These conditions contribute to reductive stress that disrupt the body’s redox balance. As explained by the authors:¹¹

“The consequent oxidative stress associated with lipid peroxidation appears to be a possible pathogenic link between cancer and diabetes” and “the major bioactive product of oxidative degradation of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), the reactive aldehyde 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE) … may be the key pathogenic factor linking diabetes and cancer …

Controlling the production of 4-HNE to avoid its cytotoxicity to normal but not cancer cells while preventing its diabetogenic activities could be an important aspect of modern integrative biomedicine.”

4-HNE Linked to Obesity and Cancer

In her book, “Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food,”¹² Dr. Cate Shanahan details the hazards of 4-HNE, which forms during the processing of most vegetable oils. 4-HNE is highly toxic to gut bacteria, and consumption of 4-HNE has been correlated with having an obesogenic balance of gut flora.

4-HNE is also cytotoxic (toxic to cells), causes DNA damage, and instigates free radical cascades that damage the mitochondrial membrane. As noted by Shanahan in a 2017 interview:

“You can’t design a better delivery vehicle for a toxin that’s going to destroy your health slowly over the course of maybe 10, 20 years, depending on the genetics of your antioxidant system capacity.”

Importantly, 4-HNE occurs even if the oil is obtained from organic crops. It’s an intrinsic byproduct of the refining and processing of the oil, no matter how healthy the oil initially was.

Elevated LA Destroys Mitochondrial Function

Dinkov’s blog also draws attention to another noteworthy study,¹³ albeit its focus is on Alzheimer’s Disease instead of cancer. The study reveals that individuals with Alzheimer’s have cells that are inefficient at producing energy.

This inefficiency stems from a deficiency in glycocholic acid and an excess of LA. Essentially, LA triggers the production of damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS), which then hampers the cells’ ability to generate energy.

Moreover, PUFAs, like LA, disrupt your body’s hormonal equilibrium, imitating the effects of estrogen and cortisol while counteracting androgens and progesterone. Additionally, they alter cellular interactions with water, making cells more water-attracting. Dinkov suggests that these effects, beyond merely generating ROS, play a much more critical role in the harmful effects of PUFAs on a wide variety of chronic diseases, including cancer.

Seed Oils Undermine Your Health in Myriad Ways

In summary, seed oils in general and LA in particular have been shown to harm health by:¹⁴

Make your fat cells more insulin sensitive, thereby causing insulin resistance.¹⁵

Creating high amounts of oxidation products when used in cooking (as they are very susceptible to heat), including aldehydes, which are what cause oxidized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) associated with heart disease. Aldehydes also crosslink tau protein and create neurofibrillary tangles, thereby contributing to the development of neurodegenerative diseases.

Damaging the endothelium (the cells lining your blood vessels) and causing an increase in penetration of LDL and very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particles into the subendothelium.¹⁶

In other words, these oils get integrated in your cell and mitochondrial membranes, and once these membranes are damaged, it sets the stage for all sorts of health problems. With a half-life of 600 to 680 days,¹⁷ it can take years to clear them out of your body. They also get incorporated into tissues such as your heart and brain.

Damaging your mitochondria and DNA by making your cell membranes more permeable, allowing things to enter that shouldn’t.

Making the cell membrane less fluid, which impacts hormone transporters in the cell membrane and slows your metabolic rate.

Inhibiting cardiolipin,¹⁸ an important component of the inner membrane of your mitochondria that needs to be saturated in DHA to perform optimally and facilitate optimal function of the electron transport chain and production of ATP. Cardiolipin can be likened to a cellular alarm system that triggers apoptosis (cell death) by signaling caspase-3 when something goes wrong with the cell.

If the cardiolipin is not saturated with DHA, it cannot signal caspase-3, and hence apoptosis does not occur. As a result, dysfunctional cells are allowed to continue to grow, which can turn into a cancerous cell.

Inhibiting the removal of senescent cells, i.e., aged, damaged or crippled cells that have lost the ability to reproduce and produce inflammatory cytokines that rapidly accelerate disease and aging.

Stripping your liver of glutathione (which produces antioxidant enzymes), thereby lowering your antioxidant defenses.¹⁹

Inhibiting delta-6 desaturase (delta-6), an enzyme involved in the conversion of short-chained omega-3s to longer chained omega-3s in your liver.²⁰

Exposing you to toxic 4-HNE, which is highly toxic to gut bacteria, causes DNA damage, and instigates free radical cascades that damage your mitochondrial membranes.²¹

Exposing you to glyphosate residues, as most vegetable oils are made with genetically engineered crops. Glyphosate has been shown to disrupt the tight junctions in your gut and increase penetration of foreign invaders, especially heated proteins, which can cause allergies.

How to Avoid These Dangerous Fats

Considering the profoundly serious damage they cause, eliminating seed oils from your diet can go a long way toward improving your health. This includes soy, canola, sunflower, grapeseed, corn, safflower, peanut and rice bran oil.

Also, be mindful of olive oil and avocado oil, as both are commonly adulterated with cheaper seed oils. That said, even pure olive and avocado oil are loaded with LA. If, like me, you’re in the habit of eating olive oil, I would strongly encourage you to limit your intake to 1 tablespoon per day or less. In my view, olive oil is not a magic bullet and if you are already consuming 80 grams of LA per day, it will only worsen, not help, your health.

Additionally, as you can see in the video below from Brad Marshall, whose interview with me will post shortly, olive oil is no all it is cracked up to be.

To avoid these oils, don’t cook with them, of course, but also avoid processed foods, condiments, fast foods and restaurant foods. If you eat out, you’re undoubtedly eating unhealthy amounts of seed oils, as most restaurant foods are loaded with it.

Fried foods, dressing and sauces tend to be key culprits. Your best bet is to prepare most of your food at home, so you know what you are eating and, in the case of seed oils, what you’re not. Chicken and pork are also high in LA and are therefore best avoided. Since these animals, even healthy organically grown animals, are typically fed grains, they are loaded with omega-6 fats and may have 10 times the LA content that beef, lamb or buffalo do.

How Much Linoleic Acid Is Too Much?

Ideally, consider cutting LA down to below 5 grams per day, which is close to what our ancestors used to get before all of these chronic health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, became widespread. If olive oil puts you over the limit, consider cooking with tallow or lard instead.

If you’re not sure how much you’re eating, enter your food intake into Cronometer — a free online nutrition tracker — and it will provide you with your total LA intake. The key to accurate entry is to carefully weigh your food with a digital kitchen scale so you can enter the weight of your food to the nearest gram.

Cronometer will tell you how much omega-6 you’re getting from your food down to the 10th of a gram, and you can assume 90% of that is LA. Anything over 10 grams is likely to cause problems. To learn more about the biological impact of LA, be sure to watch the video at the top of this article, and/or read through my in-depth report, “Linoleic Acid — The Most Destructive Ingredient in Your Diet.”

mRNA Injections and Turbo Cancer

Another significant factor in the increase of cancer cases is likely the COVID vaccine. I’m convinced that excessive intake of LA was already a key issue contributing to rising cancer rates before the COVID era. Nonetheless, the introduction of mRNA vaccines has compounded the problem.

Specifically, these vaccines seem to be linked to the emergence of “turbo cancers,” which are rapidly growing cancers that often prove fatal. The sheer speed of their growth leaves little opportunity for effective treatment.

Canadian oncologist and cancer researcher Dr. William Makis in the HighWire interview above,²²replacing the uracil in the RNA used in the COVID shots with synthetic methylpseudouridine (to improve RNA stability) is known to be problematic.²³ When substituting parts of the code in this way, the resulting protein can easily get misfolded, and this has been linked to a variety of chronic diseases.²⁴

Importantly, the insertion of synthetic pseudouridine can suppress your innate immune surveillance by dampening the activity of toll-like receptors, and one downstream effect of that is reduced cancer surveillance.

“The more mRNA shots you take, the greater the immune system damage, the greater your risk of impaired cancer surveillance and hence, the greater your risk of turbo cancer,” Makis says.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) predicts more than 35 million new cancer cases in 2050 — a 77% increase from the estimated 20 million cancer cases that occurred in 2022.²⁵ Not surprisingly, the same drug companies that made the mRNA shots are now in a race to be the first to come up with new cancer drugs, including Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.²⁶

mRNA-Based Cancer Drugs Under Development

Disturbingly, many of the cancer drugs currently under development depend on the same mRNA-based technology responsible for the turbo cancer trend in the first place. Here are a handful of notable examples:

• Personalized cancer vaccines — Companies like BioNTech (which partnered with Pfizer for the COVID-19 vaccine) and Moderna have been working on personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer. These vaccines are designed to stimulate the patient’s immune system to target tumors based on the unique mutations in their cancer cells.²⁷
• mRNA technology for solid tumors — Moderna is also developing an mRNA vaccine targeting solid tumors.²⁸ This approach involves using mRNA to produce tumor-specific antigens inside the body to encourage the immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells.
• Combination therapies — Researchers are exploring the combination of mRNA vaccines with existing cancer treatments, such as checkpoint inhibitors, to enhance the immune system’s ability to fight cancer.
• Neoantigen targeting — Several biotech firms are focusing on neoantigens, which are new antigens that arise due to tumor mutations.²⁹
• mRNA-based CAR-T cell therapy — Efforts are also being made to combine mRNA technology with CAR-T cell therapy, a type of treatment that modifies a patient’s T-cells to attack cancer cells. mRNA is used to allow CAR-T therapy to be rapidly tailored to different types of cancer.³⁰

Considering the mRNA technology itself appears to produce carcinogenic results, I’d be extremely wary about cancer drugs based on it. Time will tell if they can somehow perfect it, but why wait? As mentioned, excess LA in the diet is a major driver of cancer, with or without the mRNA shots, and that is something you have complete control over.

As discussed in previous articles, you also want to avoid excess estrogen, which is a major driver of many cancers, especially breast cancer. For a refresher, see “What You Need to Know about Estrogen and Serotonin.”

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Notes

¹ JAMA Netw. Open 2024; 7: e2353331

^{2, 3, 4, 7} Nature March 13, 2024

⁵ BMJ Oncol. 2023; 2: e000049 (2023)

⁶ CA Cancer J. Clin. 2024; 74: 12–49

⁸ Haidut.me October 26, 2022 (Archived)

^9, 10, 11 Antioxidants & Redox Signaling December 2022;37(16-18):1222-1233

^{12, 19, 20, 21} Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Dr. Cate Shanahan

¹³ Front Aging Neurosci September 23, 2022; 14

¹⁴ Spotify Joe Rogan Podcast #1551 with Paul Saladino

¹⁵ YouTube June 23, 2020

¹⁶ Open Heart 2018;5:e000898

¹⁷ Journal of Lipid Research 1966 Jan;7(1):103-11

¹⁸ YouTube, Omega-6 Apocalypse 2, Chris Knobbe August 25, 2021

²² Rumble, The HighWire with Del Bigtree, Is the COVID Vaccine Causing Turbo Cancers? September 22, 2023

²³ International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research May 10, 2021; 2(1): 402-444

²⁴ Nature Medicine December 6, 2011; 17: 1536-1538

²⁵ World Health Organization February 1, 2024

²⁶ MakisMD Substack March 12, 2024

²⁷ Cancer.gov January 20, 2022

²⁸ Moderna Clinical Trial of Cancer Treatment for Adults with Solid Tumors

²⁹ Genome Medicine January 25, 2024;16(1):17

³⁰ Penn Medicine News Release January 6, 2022

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch.

For many, the attribution’s celerity raised suspicions Washington was seeking to decisively shift Western public and Russian government focus away from the actual culprits – be that Ukraine, and/or Britain, Kiev’s foremost proxy sponsor.

Full details of how the four shooters were recruited, directed, armed, and financed, and who by, are yet to emerge. The savage interrogation methods to which they have been, and no doubt continue to be subjected are concerned with prising this and other vital information from them. The killers may end up making false confessions as a result. In any event, they themselves likely have no clue who or what truly sponsored their monstrous actions.

Contrary to their mainstream portrayal, as inspired purely by religious fundamentalism, Daesh are primarily guns for hire. At any given time, they act at the behest of an array of international donors, bound by common interests. Funding, weapons, and orders reach its fighters circuitously, and opaquely. There is almost invariably layer upon layer of cutouts between the perpetrators of an attack claimed by the group, and its ultimate orchestrators and financiers.

Given ISIS-K is currently arrayed against China, Iran, and Russia – in other words, the US Empire’s primary adversaries – it is incumbent to revisit Daesh’s origins. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere just over a decade ago, before dominating mainstream media headlines and Western public consciousness for several years before vanishing, at one stage the group occupied vast swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory, declaring an “Islamic State”, which issued its own currency, passports, and vehicle registration plates.

Devastating military interventions independently launched by the US and Russia wiped out that demonic construct in 2017. The CIA and MI6 were no doubt immensely relieved. After all, extremely awkward questions about how Daesh were comprehensively extinguished. As we shall see, the terror group and its caliphate did not emerge in the manner of lightning on a dark night, but due to dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies.

‘Continuingly Hostile’

RAND is a highly influential, Washington DC-headquartered “think tank”. Bankrolled to the tune of almost $100 million annually by the Pentagon and other US government entities, it regularly disseminates recommendations on national security, foreign affairs, military strategy, and covert and overt actions overseas. These pronouncements are more often than not subsequently adopted as policy. 

For example, a July 2016 RAND paper on the prospect of “war with China” forecast a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour and ally in such a dispute. It was therefore necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. Six months later, scores of NATO troops duly arrived in the region, ostensibly to counter “Russian aggression”. 

Similarly, in April 2019 RAND published Extending Russia. It set out “a range of possible means” to “bait Russia into overextending itself,” so as to “undermine the regime’s stability.” These methods included; providing lethal aid to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. Most of that came to pass thereafter.

In this context, RAND’s November 2008 Unfolding The Long War makes for disquieting reading. It explored ways the US Global War on Terror could be prosecuted once coalition forces formally left Iraq, under the terms of a withdrawal agreement inked by Baghdad and Washington that same month. This development by definition threatened Anglo dominion over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, which would remain “a strategic priority” when the occupation was officially over. 

“This priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war,” RAND declared. The think tank went on to propose a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, despite the power vacuum created by withdrawal. Under its auspices, Washington would exploit “fault lines between [Iraq’s] various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts”, while “supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran”:

“This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces…The US and its local allies could use nationalist jihadists to launch proxy campaigns to discredit transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace…This would be an inexpensive way of buying time…until the US can return its full attention to the [region]. US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict…by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”

‘Great Danger’

So it was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting “nationalist jihadists” throughout West Asia. The next year, Bashar Assad rejected a Qatari proposal to route Doha’s vast gas reserves directly to Europe, via a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometre-long pipeline spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. As extensively documented by WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables, US, Israeli and Saudi intelligence immediately decided to overthrow Assad by fomenting a local rebellion, and started financing opposition groups for the purpose.

This effort became turbocharged in October 2011, with MI6 redirecting weapons and extremist fighters from Libya to Syria, in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s televised murder. The CIA oversaw that operation, using the British as an arm’s length cutout to avoid notifying Congress of its machinations. Only in June 2013, with then-President Barack Obama’s official authorisation, did the Agency’s cloak-and-dagger connivances in Damascus become formalised – and later admitted – under the title “Timber Sycamore”.

At this time, Western officials universally referred to their Syrian proxies as “moderate rebels”. Yet, Washington was well-aware its surrogates were dangerous extremists, seeking to carve a fundamentalist caliphate out of the territory they occupied. An August 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report released under Freedom of Information laws observes that events in Baghdad were “taking a clear sectarian direction,” with radical Salafist groups “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

These factions included Al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing (AQI), and its umbrella offshoot, Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The pair went on to form Daesh, a prospect the DIA report not only predicted, but seemingly endorsed:

“If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime…ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create great danger.”

Despite such grave concerns, the CIA inexorably dispatched unaccountably vast shipments of weapons and money to Syria’s “moderate rebels”, well-knowing this “aid” would almost inevitably end up in Daesh’s hands. Moreover, Britain concurrently ran secret programs costing millions to train opposition paramilitaries in the art of killing, while providing medical assistance to wounded jihadists. London also donated multiple ambulances, purchased from Qatar, to armed groups in the country.

Leaked documents indicate the risk of equipment and trained personnel from these efforts being lost to Al-Nusra, Daesh, and other extremist groups in West Asia was judged unavoidably “high” by British intelligence. Yet, there was no concomitant strategy for countering this hazard at all, and the illicit programs continued apace. Almost as if training and arming Daesh was precisely the desired outcome.

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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.

Featured image is from AME

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

A controversial redistricting map drawn up in 2021 by a supposed independent commission resulted in the domination of the Michigan State Legislative seats and Gubernatorial office by the Democratic Party after the 2022 elections.

This shift in the fortunes of the Democrats was the first time they have been in complete control of the state government in four decades.

The idea behind the independent commission was the result of a petition campaign and state-wide referendum in 2018 to change the way districts are drawn.

The idea was to place an impartial body over the process taking it away from the incumbent political officials in Lansing, the state capitol.

However, a number of African American voters filed suit against the redistricting commission saying that the new map diluted the overall electoral power of their communities. The claims of the African American voters were upheld by a federal court decision in December which ordered yet another redrawing of districts. These newly drawn districts are scheduled to be in place for the upcoming November state legislative elections in Michigan.

In a March 27 article published by the Associated Press it says:

“The original lawsuit contesting the Detroit-area seats was filed by a group of Black residents who argued that the map diluted their voting power.

The group had similarly opposed the newly submitted map, saying it favors incumbents elected under the previous map and doesn’t include enough majority-black districts. The three-judge panel disagreed in its approval of the map and pointed to the fact that the new ‘plan created three majority-black districts, whereas before there were none.

Federal law provides us no basis to reject the Commission’s remedial House plan,’ the panel wrote in an 11-page decision released Wednesday. Six state Senate districts will still need to be redrawn by a later deadline due to senators’ terms not expiring until 2026.” 

At present the State Legislature is deadlocked between Democrats and Republicans due to the abandonment of two seats by politicians who were elected to municipal offices. With 2024 being a presidential election year, Democrats are anticipating that they will be able to secure a slim majority in the State House.

Other Factors Which Could Reduce Voter Participation in Michigan and Other States

Nonetheless, discontent over the handling of several issues may place these assumptions in question. There is widespread dissatisfaction over the Democratic President Joe Biden’s handling of the genocidal onslaught in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. During the Democratic primary in Michigan 101,000 people cast their vote as “uncommitted” as a means of expressing their rejection of the White House position on the Palestinian question.

Also, despite the campaign talking points asserting that the economy is performing to the benefit of the majority of the population, many working people are suffering as a result of the rising prices for gasoline, heating, electricity, water, food, clothing, rents and mortgage rates. The federal minimum wage has not been increased by Congress since 2009, some fifteen years ago. At present the federal minimum wage stands at a grand total of $7.25.

Any increase in salaries for most working class people has been gained through protest actions, strikes and the demand for labor within certain sectors of the economy.

The increase in the federal minimum wage in 2009 took place amid the worst capitalist downturn since the Great Depression.

Millions of working families lost their homes after the collapse of the real estate markets stemming directly from the mad drive for megaprofits by the banks and other financial institutions during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Another major issue for African Americans is the failed promises by Biden when he was running for president in 2020 to pass legislation aimed at reforming the police services.

The George Floyd rebellions of that year was one of the motivating factors for the large turnout among African Americans and other oppressed communities aimed at removing former President Donald Trump from the White House.

The campaign pledge by Biden to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act never materialized. This act was designed to counter the monumental restriction placed on access to the ballot in the aftermath of the Shelby v. Holder Supreme Court of 2013 decision which struck down the enforcement provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules Against Lawsuit to Redraw Congressional Districts

A recent unanimous decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Democratic voters to throw out a Congressional map adopted by Republicans over a decade ago, has placed the outcome of the upcoming 2024 election in doubt. The Wisconsin high court is now composed of a Democratic majority and the decision to change the boundaries of federal districts will maintain a configuration which favors Republican politicians.

A report published by the Associated Press during early March noted:

“The decision leaves the state’s current congressional district boundaries in place for the November election. The decision not to hear the congressional challenge comes after the court in December ordered new legislative maps, saying the Republican-drawn ones were unconstitutional.

The GOP-controlled Legislature, out of fear that the court would order maps even more unfavorable to Republicans, passed ones drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. He signed those into law on Feb. 19 and urged the court to take up the congressional map challenge. The Elias Law Group, which filed the congressional challenge on behalf of Democratic voters, said the court’s decision on the legislative maps opened the door to them revisiting the other maps. But the court declined to take up the case. It did not give a reason in the unanimous unsigned order.” 

Wisconsin is a key battleground state where the results of the presidential elections in November could be pivotal in deciding who will occupy the White House and the Congress. The state was lost by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 along with others such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Later in 2020, all of these states went to Biden securing a firm lead for him in the national elections. However, the issues related to the Gaza genocide, police-community relations and the capacity of unions to organize remain unresolved.

CBS News in a report on the mood of African American voters in Milwaukee and other areas in the state emphasized that:

“President Biden’s winning coalition in 2020 was led by Black voters, particularly in major cities in battleground states. But this time around, there are signs that his support among this bloc of voters has softened. A CBS News poll in late February showed 76% of likely Black voters said they backed his reelection bid, down from 87% who voted for him in 2020. The more than a dozen Black voters and organizers interviewed by CBS News in battleground states have shared a sense of disappointment about the impending rematch of the 2020 presidential election, with worries it will translate to voters staying home in November.” 

In combination with restrictions on voting rights for African Americans and other people of color, the lack of enthusiasm for a Biden reelection are the greatest threat to the Democratic Party.

Despite the economic statistics related to unemployment, if the people are not feeling this purported progress, it will not translate into a massive turnout in November for the presidential, congressional and state legislative contests.

Hopefully, the results of the 2024 elections will prompt a broad-based discussion on the future role of voters from the national oppressed and working class electorate.

Whether Biden or Trump wins the elections in November, the social conditions of the majority within society will not change fundamentally until there is an independent political formation which can speak and act in its own names.

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

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

For 75 years, the United Nations, i.e. the global community, has paid for the care and subsistence of the 700,000 Palestinians (and their descendants) expelled from their homes by the start-up state of Israel in 1948. Instead of the occupiers then footing the bill, the world was forcibly saddled with the liability through a hastily formed, UN Agency, UNRWA. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees.

For about a century, the Israeli state has allowed the world to pay for its illegal occupation.

Now is the time for the occupier to take responsibility for its illegal acts and to pay the cost – not the American tax-payer! And now, there are over two million Palestinian refugees in Gaza alone, less those already massacred by Netanyahu’s IDF.  

And today, the US, Germany and UK, increase their shipments of bombs, missiles, drones and war planes in order to kill hundreds more defenceless Palestinians. It’s called democracy!

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

We’re seeing more and more of the cynical, obnoxious plan of the western liberal political-media class to try and pin the blame for the entire multinational genocidal campaign in Gaza solely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There is growing opposition to Netanyahu’s war machine,” reads a new tweet by Senator Bernie Sanders. “More Americans than ever are standing up against this horrific war in Gaza, which is causing tremendous suffering amongst the Palestinian people.”

This is on the same day we learned that the Biden administration has quietly signed off on the delivery of billions of dollars worth of 2,000-pound bombs and warplanes for Israel to use in its ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza. There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about “Netanyahu’s war” this far into a US-backed genocide. This is Biden’s war as much as it is Netanyahu’s — and Sanders supports Biden.

There is growing opposition to Netanyahu's war machine. More Americans than ever are standing up against this horrific war in Gaza, which is causing tremendous suffering amongst the Palestinian people.https://t.co/olNZgtJoUa

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 29, 2024

Sanders has been at this schtick for a while now, working to insert the idea into public consciousness that what we are seeing from Israel today is some kind of fluke aberration in the apartheid state’s history and not the obvious fulfillment of its inbuilt nature. The other day he publicly griped that “the Israel of today is not the Israel of Golda Meir,” falsely suggesting that there was once some kind of golden age in which Israel was not an abusive ethnostate built on ethnic cleansing, oppression, racism and injustice.

In an Al Jazeera article published earlier this month titled “This is not ‘Netanyahu’s war’, it is Israel’s genocide,” Ahmad Ibsais berates Sanders and his fellow “progressive” senator Elizabeth Warren for this pernicious narrative control campaign, saying that “Blaming Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open celebration of war crimes on Netanyahu alone is nothing but a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders and Warren.”

Ibsais writes the following:

“By blaming Netanyahu for the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, past and present, they keep alive the lie that Israel was built on progressive ideals, rather than ethnic cleansing.

“By blaming Netanyahu, they whitewash their seemingly unconditional support for a state blatantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“By blaming Netanyahu, and casting Israel as a progressive, well-meaning state that would respect international humanitarian law but is currently taken over by a bad leader, they are absolving themselves — and the US at large — of complicity in Israel’s many war crimes.”

This is not 'Netanyahu’s war', it is Israel’s genocide — #AJOpinion by Ahmad Ibsais.

🔗: https://t.co/TFHBTkavCC pic.twitter.com/gv4IbE1zY7

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 10, 2024

But that’s exactly what the Democratic Party has been trying to do in recent weeks. A couple of weeks ago Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drew the ire of the Israeli right wing with a speech on the Senate floor saying that Netanyahu has become a “major obstacle to peace” who has allowed “his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” calling for new elections to oust the prime minister.

In a recent article for Jewish Currents titled “Chuck Schumer and Democrats’ New Line on ‘Netanyahu’s War’,” Alex Kane picks apart the fallacious reasoning behind this trend:

“But despite Democrats’ repeated suggestion that Netanyahu is the impetus for Israel’s war, political analysts say that in reality the prime minister’s actions are in step with Israel’s political mainstream. ‘Schumer is operating in this fantasy that if you get rid of Netanyahu, you might be able to get somebody else who’s more moderate who could then save the relationship between the US and Israel under the pretense of support for progressive values and democracy,’ said Omar Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst. But this narrative ignores how Israeli politicians almost across the board agree with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as do the majority of Israelis. Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the Israeli opposition, supports the ongoing assault, as does war cabinet member Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and the man who, according to polling, would become prime minister if Israel held elections today…

“Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior.”

NEW from me on Schumer’s speech, which was a significant shift in how the top Senate Dem approaches Israel. But in focusing on the far right, he exemplified his party’s strategy of blaming Bibi to isolate the PM and pacify voters without changing policy. https://t.co/Q4Xad1zWmB

— Alex Kane (@alexbkane) March 27, 2024

Portuguese author and journalist Bruno Maçães recently tweeted that “One possible outcome of this is 200,000 Palestinians will be dead, Gaza will be destroyed, hundreds of thousand will be expelled and everyone will blame Netanyahu and move on.”

Would it surprise you if this happened? Would it not be entirely in keeping with what we have been seeing from the US empire in recent years? Would it be very different from what happened after the US destroyed Iraq, blamed George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and then moved on without anyone having been held responsible or any meaningful policy changes implemented?

That’s the entire goal here. The empire managers want nothing to change about Israel, nothing to change about Washington’s relationship with Israel, nothing to change about US foreign policy or the US war machine in general, and for the mainstream public to be thrown some cognitive bone to chew on while the amnesia of the daily news cycle sets in.

No it’s not—and what establishment ‘journalists’ like James O’Brien are doing is a transparent, cynical and desperate attempt to pin the blame for the genocide solely on Netanyahu in order to salvage the Zionist settler state’s standing and perceived legitimacy. It won’t work. pic.twitter.com/MXeHDLXaoZ

— Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) March 27, 2024

They want everyone to pin all the blame for the Gaza genocide on Netanyahu, but this is not all the fault of Netanyahu. It’s the fault of the entire Israeli state. It’s the fault of Joe Biden. It’s the fault of the Democrats. It’s the fault of all the Israel supporters on Capitol Hill. It’s the fault of the western press. It’s the fault of the Israel lobby. It’s the fault of the unelected empire managers in US government agencies. It’s the fault of the entire US empire and all its imperial member states like Australia, the UK, the EU, and Canada.

Gaza is proof that the US empire cannot be permitted to exist any longer, and they’re trying to get everyone to ignore this fact and blame the whole thing on one guy. Don’t let them do this. Don’t let them deceive you into losing sight of what they’ve done.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently warned about the consequences that NATO would face if it delivered US-made F-16s to the Kiev regime, particularly if those fighter jets were to deploy from third countries that are officially not involved in the ongoing NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. He dismissed the mainstream propaganda machine’s insistence that Russia would allegedly “attack Europe” as nonsense, but warned that direct interference won’t be tolerated and that any and all airbases housing these fighter jets would be legitimate targets. The statements come on the heels of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s announcement that the Neo-Nazi junta will have the right to attack targets “beyond Crimea” (i.e. Russia’s undisputed territory).

However, how good will the F-16 be for the Kiev regime forces?

InfoBRICS has been covering the topic extensively, with my respected colleagues and I writing about it for years at this point.

Despite neverending claims about the fighter jet’s supposed “superiority”, there’s simply no evidence to support such claims. On the contrary, even Ukrainian pilots training on the US-made jet actually prefer their Soviet-era aircraft. What’s more, a retired US military pilot Tom Richter recently confirmed this and called the F-16 a “prima done”, highlighting its much higher maintenance and logistics requirements that Soviet-made fighter jets such as the Su-27 and MiG-29 simply don’t need. This is because of differences in Soviet/Russian and American military doctrine.

Namely, the former is designed for high-intensity combat against an actual, near-peer adversary. In other words, while F-16s are built to fight largely helpless countries targeted by the political West, the Soviet Union/Russia built its military to fight any opponent while being able to survive the horrible conditions of warfare. However, this isn’t where the differences end, as the sheer robustness of Soviet-built aircraft is only the tip of the iceberg. Namely, unlike the Neo-Nazi junta, Russia actually improved and modernized the massive military it inherited from the USSR. It has also built several types of extremely high-end fighter jets such as the now legendary Su-35S and the next-generation Su-57. These jets alone make the US-made F-16 virtually obsolete.

And yet, some top Soviet gear that Russia inherited is so advanced and ahead of its time that it’s relevant even now, well over 40 years after being inducted into service. This is particularly true for the superfast, high-flying MiG-31. Apart from being adapted as the launch platform for the deadly 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” missile system (the MiG-31K/I), there’s also the heavily upgraded MiG-31BM, the undisputed epitome of what an interceptor is and should be. Moscow’s incremental upgrades to the jet over the last three decades have not only preserved the MiG-31’s contemporary relevance, but also ensured its dominance in the coming decades. This includes everything from its avionics and ease of maintenance to missiles and other types of armament.

This is particularly true when it comes to the terrifying R-37M hypersonic air-to-air (AA) missile, with its unrivaled 400 km range, effectively making the MiG-31BM a “flying S-400”. The jet has been one of the primary threats to the Kiev regime forces, shooting down multiple enemy fighters with impunity, often without having to ever leave Russian airspace. Even if NATO were to supply the latest F-16V (Block 70/72) variant to the Neo-Nazi junta, it would still be effectively helpless against the Russian interceptor. The best AA missile that F-16s can use is the AIM-120D AMRAAM, with a range of 160 km. The R-37M is not only around 50% faster (hypersonic Mach 6 vs. the latter’s Mach 4), but it also leaves the US-made missile in the dust when it comes to range (400 km vs. 160 km).

In addition to its state-of-the-art upgrades, the MiG-31BM is also a two-seat jet with a dedicated weapon systems officer (WSO), making it even deadlier in AA engagements. Its highly aerodynamic design allows it to fly supersonic even at low altitudes, which is precisely how the F-16s in the Kiev regime’s service will have to fly in order to survive Russia’s second-to-none air defenses and other fighter jets armed with long-range AA missiles. In addition, the MiG-31’s Soloviev D-30F6 (PS-30) low-bypass turbofan (bypass turbojet) engines ensure not only an unmatched speed of over 3000 km/h, but also a massive 3000 km range that the F-16 could never hope to match. Its avionics also give it an unprecedented look-down/shoot-down capability.

This will be particularly deadly for the much lower-end F-16, especially considering the fact that the latter would be forced to fly low, just like any other jet in the Neo-Nazi junta’s service. The MiG-31BM’s Zaslon-M PESA (passive electronically scanned array) radar, based on the legendary Zaslon, the world’s first ESA, detects hostile aircraft at a staggering 400 km range, meaning that it could detect and track the F-16 long before the latter is even aware of the MiG-31BM’s presence. In addition, it gives the Russian jet the ability to track at least 24 hostile targets and engage six simultaneously. The MiG-31BM also has excellent network-centric warfare capabilities, being able to share battlefield data within a group of other fighter jets.

For instance, just four MiG-31BM can cover a frontline of nearly 1000 km, sharing data with friendly jets and SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems. In addition, ground-based radars can relay information to MiG-31BMs in air and enable radar-silent engagements, making them even deadlier in AA combat, particularly against F-16s. Apart from the jamming-resistant Zaslon-M, the jet boasts an advanced IRST/FLIR (infrared search and track/forward-looking infrared) sensors with a range of approximately 60 km. This also gives the MiG-31BM the ability to target enemy aircraft in complete radar silence. Thus, as previously mentioned, the chances of even the latest iterations of the US-made F-16 against the Russian interceptor are very slim to none.

Worse yet, the Kiev regime will certainly not get any advanced versions of the F-16. On the contrary, the jets promised by several NATO countries are outdated AM/BM variants. These F-16 Block 20 MLU fighter jets are in no way better than the MiG-29s already in service, which is precisely why the Neo-Nazi junta has been “begmanding” for over 100 heavily upgraded jets instead of less than 50 of the basic ones it was promised. However, to make things even worse for the Kiev regime, Denmark, one of the major donors of F-16s, just announced the transfer of 24 of these jets to Argentina. Namely, Washington DC has been pressuring Buenos Aires to drop a potential deal with China and instead opt for these outdated F-16s that Copenhagen wants to get rid of and get the troubled F-35s.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Apparently, the “peace negotiations” about Ukraine continue to take place, even without any Russian involvement in the talks. According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, several diplomatic initiatives are taking place to end – or at least freeze – the conflict, but Moscow continues to be excluded from such processes, which obviously invalidates the negotiations.

In an interview with German media, Scholz confirmed the existence of diplomatic initiatives to end hostilities. He said that “a number of countries, including Ukraine, are currently discussing at the level of security advisers what something that could lead to a peace process might look like.”

In the same interview, Scholz also stated that dialogue is taking place to reach an agreement on the protection of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). Since 2022, the Russian Federation has been reporting Ukrainian bombings against nuclear facilities and warning about the risk of radiation leakage as a result of the attacks. International observation missions have already visited the region, proving the veracity of the Russian allegations. However, Western countries and international organizations remain silent about the case.

It is very curious to see that such “negotiations” are taking place without Russian participation, as Moscow is one of the parties in the conflict, which makes any agreement dependent on Russian acceptance. Furthermore, specifically with regard to ZNPP, it is even more illogical that talks are being held only with the Ukrainian side, since the Kiev regime is precisely the aggressor bombing the plant. As the ZNPP is located in a region under Russian control, there is no doubt about the responsibility of the attacks against the plant, but the West ignores this and continues “talking” with the regime that promotes nuclear terror.

Scholz also made some other nonsensical and hypocritical statements during the interview. According to him, “peace” can be achieved at any time if Moscow agrees to withdraw its troops from the special military operation zone. Scholz obviously ignores the legitimacy of the Russian interest in preventing the expansion of NATO and the rehabilitation of Nazism in its strategic environment. By calling for the mere “withdrawal of troops”, Scholz endorses an unfeasible position, nullifying any chance of a serious peace conversation.

In response to Scholz’s statement, Russian authorities confirmed that there was no invitation to Moscow to participate in new peace talks.

According to the Kremlin, the chancellor’s statement “does not change the essence of the ongoing events.” In other words, Russia will continue to act militarily until the objectives of the operation in Ukraine are fully achieved.

Western countries’ opinion on this does not seem to matter much now, as these countries have ignored all attempts at a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis before 2022. Now, the Russians are resolute in their decision to use military force to prevent Ukraine from continuing to be a base for Western aggression – and “European diplomacy” does not appear to have any capacity to change Russian plans.

Obviously, Moscow remains open to peace talks. Since the beginning of the operation, Russia has been active in seeking negotiations. However, being the winning side and having an irreversible military advantage, Moscow has a list of demands that need to be fulfilled by the Ukrainian side and its Western partners. Without these peace conditions, which include Ukraine’s neutral status and demilitarization, Russia does not have sufficient security guarantees to end hostilities.

The West, however, refuses to meet Russian demands, which makes peace unfeasible. It is impossible for peace talks to take place properly without direct Russian participation. The terms of talks are invalid as one of the belligerent parties was not invited to the process. There is no possibility of achieving peace unilaterally or through the terms of the defeated side, which makes the “initiatives” referred to by Scholz absolutely useless.

Furthermore, with the rise of terror on Russia’s borders – in addition to the high possibility of Ukrainian involvement in the Crocus massacre – the chances of a diplomatic resolution are running out even more quickly. The Kiev regime is proving to be a dictatorship that sponsors terrorism, forcing Moscow to use all necessary means of coercion to neutralize it, as negotiating with terrorists is not a reasonable option.

Although the end of hostilities is important and desirable, there will only be true peace when the legitimate interests of the Russian Federation are met. “Freezing” the conflict or creating temporary ceasefire measures is not in Moscow’s interest, which is why such directives will never be enough to end the war in Ukraine.

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Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: Olaf Scholz, federal chancellor of Germany, meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, in Kiev, Feb. 14, 2022. (President of Ukraine)

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Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Biden has been guilty of breaking a U.S. law against providing U.S. weapons to a nation using them against a civilian population as Israel has been doing openly for five months.  

“When the President of the United States becomes aware of the possibility of violations of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), the law mandates specific actions:

Prompt Notification to Congress: The President is required to promptly notify Congress about the potential violations.”

Not only could U.S. President Biden have stopped Israel from continuously bombing the homes of a civilian population, reducing whole cities to rubble and murdering 32,000 of Israel’s captive, entrapped and illegally militarily occupied Palestinians in Gaza, but Biden was and is legally obligated by U.S. law to have done so by ending his constant replenishing of the bombs, missiles and shells Israel keeps raining down on the Palestinian population of Gaza that is mostly women and children.

When a U.S. President is aware of violations of the defensive use restriction on U.S. supplied weapons, U.S. law requires him to report violations of the use of U.S. weapons to Congress.

When the President is aware of even the possibility of violations of the AECA, the law requires a report to Congress on the potential violations. [1] 

October 25, 2023

Biden said he’s sure innocent people have been killed, and he said that’s the price of waging a war.[2]

A war? No! Israel slaughtering entrapped and imprisoned Palestinians cannot be called a war.

No nation can declare war against its own militarily captive population, because a nation is illegally responsible for the well-being of its militarily occupied populations.

“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese tweeted on April 8.[3]

UN officials have clearly stated hostilities between an illegally military occupied nation and its illegal militarily occupiers cannot be called a war! [3]

January 25, 2024

Time Magazine, reported that a federal court case filed against President Joe Biden and two U.S. cabinet officials for allegedly being complicit in Israel’s genocide against Gazans moved forward with a hearing on Friday.

The case, which names Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as defendants, was filed by Palestinian human rights groups and individuals with help from the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights. Defense for Children International–Palestine v. Biden seeks to stop the U.S. from supporting Israel, which plaintiffs say has cost them the lives of family members, and will be heard in Oakland, Calif.       

After government attorneys argued the court has no standing to decide on what they say is a matter of foreign policy, the federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Biden but implored his administration to reconsider its “unflagging support” for Israel’s war on Gaza. 

U.S. Judge Found ‘U.S. Foreign Policy of Genocidal Bombing and Starvation Crime Unprosecuteable for the principle of Separation of Executive and Judicial Branches of Government. [Intercept, Feb. 1, 2024] 

So U.S. Genocide As Foreign Policy is ‘Above the Law?’ 

Starving a militarily occupied population is a crime against humanity as stipulated in the UN adopted Nuremberg Principles of International Law first used to prosecute high officials of Nazi Germany,

February 8, 2024

Biden issues a superfluous memorandum as a ploy to silence criticism of his non-compliance with existing Arms Export Control Act giving Israel space and time to argue falsely of its compliance.

February 22, 2024

The national security memorandum, published on Feb. 8, states that prior to supplying U.S. weapons, a country must give the U.S. “credible and reliable written assurances” that it will use any such weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law.

The Biden administration gave Israel until mid-March to sign a letter, provided by the U.S. on Tuesday, that gives assurances it will abide by international law while using U.S. weapons and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, three U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios, Feb. 22, 2024.[4] 

• For over 5 months hundreds of trucks of food and water, many financially contributed to by American agencies, blocked entry by Isreal military.
• Countries engaged in conflicts, like Israel, have 45 days from the day the memo was issued to provide the written assurances and have them certified by Secretary of State Tony Blinken. 45 days – Plenty of Time to Kill Thousands More The 
• memo requires the administration to provide an annual report to Congress on whether countries are adhering to international law.

(Annual! That’s Once a Year – Kids Are Dying Every Day)

March 19, 2024

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, said the United States is ‘complicit’ in the Gaza starvation.[5]

March 21, 2024

Oxfam and Human Rights Watch provide evidence of Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, undermining credibility of assurances for President Biden’s NSM-20 arms policy[6[

March 22, 2024

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited  the Rafah crossing on March 23. Receiving him, regional governor Mohamed Shousha said some 7,000 trucks were waiting in North Sinai to deliver aid to Gaza, Guterres spoke as follows.

“Here from this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all. A long line of blocked relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other,”

Many UN and U.S. laws against allowing starvation

The Foreign Assistance Act, which governs U.S. foreign aid, prohibits U.S. security assistance  “when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” 

March 23, 2024

Democratic lawmakers warned the U.S. president that the Netanyahu government’s restriction on the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza makes Israel ‘ineligible to receive continued U.S. weapons. [Haaretz | Israel News] 

March 26, 2024

As indicated in the title of this article and short chronology, President Biden will for sure not be prosecuted for the facilitating the deaths by bombing and starvation of many tens of thousands of Israel’s captive and illegally militarily occupied Palestinians of Gaza.

No U.S. President was ever legally held to account for the crimes against humanity which he ordered or participated in as part of the very frequently inhumane and massively deadly ‘foreign policy’ of America. However Biden is already today prosecuted in the minds and hearts of the survivors of the U.S. – Israel Gaza genocide and millions, and in time billions, of good people across the globe who have learned, or will have learned, of the great anguish and cruel suffering of the Palestinians for which Biden is ultimately responsible.

Peoples historians will have added Joe Biden to Noam Chomsky’s  continually updated list of all the U.S. Presidents after FDR, who would have been “hanged if the Nuremberg laws were applied.”[7]

Since the end of the Second World War, U.S.A., American presidents and America have able to get away with so much mass murder, so many invasions, bombings of so many smaller nations., for the powerful and wide reach of U.S. media having put Americans up on a pedestal of having saved the world by defeating Adolph Hitler and his Nazis and thus earning the gratitude of all humanity. 

With the present U.S. debacle in Gaza, American exceptionality and presidential prestige has evaporated and the U.S. media’s invented story of America’s World War Two grand accomplishment has already taken a hit, and with the rise of media prowess of giant China and now equally giant India, the truth will out.

The president of America’s designated revolutionary enemy Venezuela, Nicolas Madura, has lowered the boom on America’s WWII lie and its present evil support of Israel at the same time.

“Modern Israel enjoys “the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support” of the collective West like Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany before the World War II. The Western elites kept quiet because they were preparing Hitler for him to launch his military power against the Soviet Union, ultimately, Hitler was a construct, a monster created by the collective West. 

The criminal military apparatus of the State of Israel also has the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support of the West,” [Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who urged Jewish people who are still true to their roots to end the ongoing “massacre” of the Palestinians.][8]

Although Western media ignored Maduro’s disclosure of what has already been well documented in financial records of America’s major corporations, with the growing media power and rising influence of the enormously populated nations of China and India, the truth of the making of the Second World War will out, and will reduce the present stature of America and its chief executives.

There has arisen great hope, in some good part due to today’s Instant world-wide communication capability, that a new multi-polar world led by China and India will bring about humanity being released from five centuries of inhumane Western hegemony violently led during most of the present century by the United States of America.

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Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (Title II of Pub. L.

Tooltip Public Law (United States)

 94–329, 90 Stat. 729, enacted June 30, 1976, codified at 22 U.S.C. ch. 39) gives the President of the United States the authority to control the import and export of defense articles and defense services. The H.R. 13680 legislation was passed by the 94th Congressional session and enacted into law by the 38th President of the United States Gerald R. Ford on June 30, 1976.^[1]

2. Biden says he’s worried about civilian deaths in Gaza but questions death toll stats

OCTOBER 25, 20236:42 PM ET NPR WNYC

HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208577490/biden-says-hes-worried-about-civilian-deaths-in-gaza-but-questions-death-toll-st

3.“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, April 8. 

4. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/27/israel-sign-letter-international-law-weapons-us-aid U.S. wants Israeli written assurances on using U.S. weapons in Gaza by mid-March Axios Feb. 22, 2024                                                               

5. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/un-israel-food-starvation-palestinians-war-crime-genocide

6. Israeli Assurances to Use US Arms Legally Are Not Credible

7. https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/

8. Nexus Newsfeed https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopolitics/israel-has-the-same-western-support-as-hitler-maduro/

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Video of the Israeli aggression against eastern Aleppo. One target was an ammunition store which continued burning for 2-3 hours:

Click here to watch the video

Israeli Aggression Against Syria Takes a New Turn – Escalation or Desperation?

Official statement from the Syrian Ministry of Defence:

At 1:45 am, the Israeli enemy launched an air attack from the direction of Athriya, southeast of Aleppo, targeting several points in Aleppo countryside, in conjunction with a drone attack carried out by terrorist organizations from Idlib and Aleppo western countryside, in an attempt to target civilians in Aleppo city and its surrounding.

The aggression resulted in the martyrdom and injury of several civilians and soldiers, and material losses to public and private property.

Aleppo Under Attack 

Israeli warplanes infiltrated Syrian airspace via Jordan. They used the Syrian airspace over the illegal US base in Al Tanf (on the border with Jordan) to proceed towards the depths of the central Syrian Badia or desert area at low altitude to avoid detection. The missiles were fired from the Athriya area with U.S. cover towards several targets in the eastern Aleppo suburbs that until December 2016 were occupied by the Western-midwived terrorist gangs.

Simultaneously terrorist groups in Idlib (north-west) dominated by HTS (Al Qaeda) launched a massive attack with suicide drones on civilians in Aleppo City in an attempt to divert the Syrian Air Defence teams.

The Israeli aggression targeted the Jibreen area of eastern Aleppo, close to the Aleppo International Airport and the Ibn Al Khaldoun psychiatric hospital whose patients were terrified having already endured the five year occupation by the same terrorist gangs.

This combined attack was intended to stretch the capability of the Air Defence in defending Aleppo against the dual attacks.

Israel not only targeted Jibreen, it also targeted Kfarjoum to the West of Aleppo.

 

Sites hit included a gas station, weapon depots and various buildings and is considered as the most intensive attack on the Aleppo governorate by Israel – so far there are at least 30 martyrs (the number is still expected to rise) including women and children. Friends in Aleppo described it as “judgement day”, the explosions were so loud and the attack so intense.

These are people who lived through war since 2012.

There were also Syrian Arab Army martyrs and from Hezbollah units in the area. Some of the names of the martyred Hezbollah fighters:

 

• Ahmad Jawad Shhemeh, 1964
• Mustafa Ahmad Makkeh, 1984
• Ibrahim Anis Al-Zein, 1982
• Ali Mohammad Al-Haf, 1982
• Mustafa Ali-Nasif , 1991

A sixth fighter is reported to have died from his wounds.

Explosions continued for at least two hours due to the interception of the Syrian Air Defence combined with the fire and explosions from the weapons depots.

The day before at 5.50pm Israel had carried out a failed assassination attempt against a farm in Bahdaleyah town next to Sayyeda Zainab in the southern Damascus countryside. The farm was completely destroyed but the Hezbollah fighters had evacuated minutes before the strike and escaped. Two civilians were injured.

The two attacks within eight hours demonstrates Israel’s mounting desperation to inflict damage upon Hezbollah bases and fighters in Lebanon and Syria which is known to be the backbone of the resistance and a safe haven for the Hezbollah forces who were instrumental in the liberation of specific Syrian territory from US allied terrorist groups since the regime change war began in 2011.

Both aggressions targeted Hezbollah sites. The attack on Aleppo was unexpected – it is far away from the southern Lebanon front and logistically speaking it is not a natural target for Israel.

Therefore it can only be interpreted as an Israeli attempt to expand the war against Hezbollah specifically while triggering an escalation from the north-western Al Qaeda groups to further pressure the Syrian Arab Army forces and Air Defence teams and to distract the Syrian-based Resistance groups away from any attacks on Israel.

Lebanese journalist Qassem Qassem recently said:

I believe that the intensity of the clash and escalation with the Israeli enemy has increased and that the moment of heading to a battle that may develop into a war is approaching.

I believe that the Israeli enemy is preparing itself for a military campaign against Lebanon, and is now working to get rid of some of the obstacles it has, such as ammunition and the American green light.

I believe that the visit of Security Minister Gallant comes in the context of preparing for the attack on Lebanon and not for the Rafah operation.

Most Israeli military analysts speak with certainty about launching a campaign against Lebanon and that it is a matter of time.

All of this may be for exaggeration, but I believe that the time for exaggeration for Israel ended on October 7, especially after it faced the existential threat.

What this does show is that Israel is cornered. It is losing the ground war in Gaza against a relatively ill-equipped, starving and besieged Palestinian Resistance while the IOF forces on the ground in Gaza commit hourly atrocities against civilians, all caught on camera. Israel’s image as the ‘most moral army’-’only democracy in the middle east’ is irretrievably destroyed.

 

Article in the Telegraph. Reported by The Cradle:

Israeli intelligence officials told The Telegraph that the government’s stated goal to “eradicate Hamas” in the Gaza Strip has become unachievable after the US “turned its back” on Tel Aviv by abstaining during a UN Security Council (UNSC) vote earlier this week.

“If you’d asked me this a month ago, I would definitely say yes [we can eliminate Hamas] because, at that time, the Americans were backing Israel,” an Israeli intelligence official told the British daily, reportedly suggesting this assessment “had now changed.”

“The US doesn’t support going into Rafah, which they did before, so the cards right now are not good, meaning Israel has to do something dramatic and drastic to change the momentum and climate,” the source added, highlighting that “pressure is mounting on Israel to reach some sort of a deal, which means Hamas could survive. Both Hamas and the Iranians are playing on that.”

In the north on the border with Lebanon the 200,000 settlers and businesses that fled the conflict are destined to never return. Yemen has effectively blockaded an arterial sea route and even with the aid of the ‘normalised’ Abrahamic Accords regional countries like UAE, Jordan etc Israel’s economy is dying and military morale is on its knees.

The veils have been lifted. Israel is trying to expand the war to gain a victory which will ensure its survival. It has clearly demonstrated its allegiance to the Zionist-allied Al Qaeda factions in Idlib and is losing face globally. It has isolated itself even from the U.S. thanks to Netanyahu-hubris. It is trapped and flailing but perhaps at its most dangerous.

It is worth noting that ISIS attacks have also been increasing exponentially since October 7th, many coming from the US illegal military base at Al Tanf, used by Israel to launch attacks on Syria.

It is no longer possible to deny that the clear and present axis of terrorism in Syria is US-UK-Israel-Turkey-EU-Jordan-ISIS-Al Qaeda. The battle lines are no longer blurred, they are crystal clear. Those Palestinian supporters still promoting Idlibistan as a beacon of support for Palestine should take note.

Will Israel maintain escalation? What will the U.S. and U.K. do with elections looming? Whatever the outcome the Resistance is ready. Israel, the Zionist colonialist settler state, will not win this war.

*

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Many thanks to Syrian journalist and researcher Ibrahim Wahdi for his help in compiling this information. You can follow him on Twitter or Telegram or at Press TV.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. In 2017 Vanessa was a finalist for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism which was won by the much-acclaimed Robert Parry that year. In 2019, Vanessa was among recipients of the Serena Shim Award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. Vanessa contributes regularly to UK Column News, RT, Press TV and many independent media outlets. You can find her work at her Substack and Patreon.

Featured image: “Israel stood by our side…We wouldn’t have survived without Israel’s assistance” – including weapons the Netanyahu regime supplied. Spokesman for one extremist group in Syria 2017 (Source: Vanessa Beeley)

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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[This article was originally published in 2008.]

Twice this year, the leaders of Hamas indicated their readiness to accept a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas leader, informed former president Jimmy Carter of this decision in April 2008. In May 2008, it was revealed that Yves Aubin de La Messuziere, a retired senior French diplomat had held discussions with Ismael Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahar, two prominent Hamas leaders who confirmed Hamas’ readiness to accept a Palestinian State within the 1967 border, reflecting an unofficial acceptance of Israel. But this truce is contrary to the Zionism ideals:

“The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It’s that simple.” (Yitzhak Shamir (Maariv, 02/21/1997).

Thus, it became necessary to punish those who sought peace – and wage war.

Sadly, this was not the first time. History has repeated itself. Only our media has successfully managed to throw sands of ignorance in our eyes and blind us with bigotry, keeping our wits dull with misinformation. For the sake of the innocent victims everywhere, the truth must be exposed. We must revisit history.

Hamas, an Islamic Resistance Movement, was born with the first Palestinian uprising in December 1987.

With the end of the Intifada and the initiation of the Oslo peace process, the resistance component of the Palestinian struggle -so critical to Hamas’s political thinking and action- was undermined. In the two- to three-year period before the second Intifida in 2000, Hamas was no longer prominently or consistently calling for political or military action against the occupation, but was instead shifting its attention to social works and the propagation of Islamic values and religious practice.

The start of the second Palestinian Intifada on September 28, 2000, coupled with the impact of September 11, dramatically changed the environment in the West Bank and Gaza. Pre-existing political arrangements were disrupted, economic conditions deteriorated, and social structures weakened. Within a context of desperation and hopelessness Hamas reasserted itself. 

At the same time, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, land expansions through land expropriations and economic dispossession escalated. His agenda did not include a Palestinian state. The United States uneven handling of the conflict encouraged Sharon’s plans. With a weak Palestinian leadership in place, and the increasing significance of Hamas influence, the U.S. opened dialogue with a senior Hamas leader in early September of 2002.  Israeli reactions clearly indicated it did not want to have any Palestinian engaged in dialogue with the U.S. for fear that there may be a political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

United States-Hamas contacts of which Israel was fully aware, ended when the Israeli army arrested a politically moderate Hamas official in Ramallah on September 9, which Hamas interpreted as a deliberate attempt by the Sharon government to undermine its exchange with the Americans. A few days later, Israel launched an attack in Rafah that killed nine Palestinians, including civilians. Predictably, a suicide bomber staged an attack on a bus in Tel Aviv on September 19, killing six people. Other Hamas-Palestinian Authority (PA) cease-fires have been undermined by Israeli attacks. Alex Fishman, the security commentator for the right-of-center Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest mass-circulation newspaper, detailed in the November 25, 2001 issue of the newspaper how the assassination that November of Mahmud Abu Hanud, a key Hamas figure, shattered a Hamas promise not to carry out suicide bombings inside Israel:

“Whoever gave the green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he was thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the PA; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line – Israel’s pre-1967 borders – of the kind perpetrated at the Dolphinarium, a discotheque in Tel Aviv.( Perry, 2004,7)(1).

In effect, Israel’s actions led Hamas to play into their hands. Having already marginalized the PLO and Yasser Arafat, by instigating Hamas suicide bombings Sharon would ensure that negotiations for a Palestinian state would not take place, no matter what the cost.

Once again, the actions and motives of the Israeli government are ignored. The relentless Israeli siege on Gaza is cheered on by the “civilized world”, the American government topping the list. Reminiscent of Amphitheatres in Roman times, the “West” is looking on as the innocent Palestinians are being butchered by American weapons, funded by taxes; enabled through lack of Arab leadership and unity, and an absence of human indignation. The lust for blood goes on. UN Security Council has called for “restraint by urging an end to all violence in Gaza”. This is the same UN body that sanctions Iran for being a “threat to peace” while pursuing its inalienable right within the framework of the law, yet it urges restraint when it comes to genocide. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise given that Newt Gingrich at the American Enterprise Institute declared that the United Nations should be made a tool of the United States and Israel:

“The United States and Israel share a special bond rooted in our democratic traditions of government, our pluralistic societies, and our common respect for faith — not just one faith, but all faiths, and for all people of goodwill. These values are central to our national identities and unite us in a common vision for what we expect from the U.N. The U.N.’s past and current treatment of Israel has fallen dramatically short of these ideals. When the U.N. moves finally to end the second class treatment of Israel, it will provide an important indication that U.N. reform is truly moving in the right direction.

“The challenge before those of us who believe in the principles of the United Nations Charter, but who also believe that the UN as it operates today has betrayed these principles, is to effect change in the voting practices at the UNGA. I believe the United States can lead other countries in an effort to successfully reform the United Nations but it will take significant work over the long haul.

“In the first place a decision will have to be made that the UN is important enough to us to link our multilateral diplomacy with our bilateral diplomacy.

“A key first test for a concerted effort by the U.S. to win U.N. votes should be an upcoming vote in the (GA Assembly) concerning the abolishment of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and of the Division of Palestinian Rights.” (2)

The United Nations is at the mercy of man’s inhumanity. Israel can make its way by ruin of others and hear “Restraint”! Perhaps the weakness of the UN body is based on fear for Israel has been successful at intimidation.

Having successfully targeted high profile British personnel to chase them out of the British Mandate Palestine, the United Nations Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated on September 17, 1948 when he flew from Damascus to Jerusalem in order to negotiate the boundaries between Palestine and present day Israel. He was shot six times at point blank, along with his aide Colonel Andre Pierre Serot (3). The Bernadotte assassination sent a clear message to all nations and to future representatives of the United Nations: Israel would never compromise.  

“Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits.We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State.” – Moshe Dayan (Jerusalem Post, 08/10/1967)

Every person that does not speak up and make another aware is a spectator cheering for blood sport. Jonathan Swift aptly said:

“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.” 

We can each save a life, collectively; we can save the people under siege. 

*

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Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master of Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication. She is an independent researcher with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the influence of lobby groups. This article was first published by PalestineChronicle.com.

Notes

(1) Perry, M. “Israeli Offensive Disrupts US-Hamas Contacts,” Palestine Report, October 9, 2002 Downloaded April 23, 2004; www.jmcc.org/ media/report/02/Oct/2b

(2) www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23396,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

(3) J. Bowyer Bell, “Assassination in International Politics”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 59-82

Featured image: Statue of the founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl, unveiled in 2012 at the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Tel Aviv. It is called “Herzl meets Emperor Wilhelm II”

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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In a World Economic Forum, someone from the audience asked a question about patient engagement.

“Even if you make the greatest drug, the greatest wearable, there is no guarantee that the patient is gonna take the drug or wear the device. How are you thinking about technology to engage the patient?”

Watch the video to see what Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.

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Featured image is from OrientalReview.org

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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On December 9 2023, the European Parliament published a press release, where it stated that it reached a political deal with the Council of the European Union “on a bill to ensure AI in Europe is safe, respects fundamental rights and democracy“.

The future bill was supposed to ban “AI systems that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent their free will“. According to the press release the deputies “agreed“ as well on “clear obligations“ with respect to “AI systems used to influence the outcome of elections and voter behaviour“.

In November 2023, 11 world human rights organizations presented to the European Commission a legislation proposal, where they tried to make sure that the European legislation on Artificial Intelligence will not allow just attacks on close distance by brain-computer interfaces, but as well attacks on fundamental human rights and democracy from large distance (see this).

On February 2nd 2024, they received this reply:

“Thank you for the above letter, which has received our fullest attention.

The answer to your letter requires further work which is currently in progress.

You can normally expect a reply within one month of receiving this letter”.

On February 12, the European Commission wrote one more time:

“Your letter from 10th November has been passed to our services and well received.”

In June 2023, U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) developer Venture Global LNG said it had signed a 20-year deal to provide Germany’s Securing Energy for Europe GmbH (SEFE) with 2.25 million tonnes per year of LNG and in this way became Germany’s largest LNG supplier. Construction of the CP2 project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, was expected to begin in the same year (see this). On January 26th, 2024, the U.S. President Joe Biden released a statement, where he announced a temporary pause on pending decisions of Liquefied Natural Gas exports. Among others it pertained to CP2 project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

The European Union depends at present time in great part on the American liquefied gas and this American decision meant that the EU economy will not be able to grow in future years due to the lack of energy supplies.

Did the USA which has got to project how to control the population in large areas of the planet by controlling the activity of human brains of their inhabitants from ionosphere and project how to control the minds of their opponents around the world decide to stop the effort of the European Union to protect fundamental human rights from abuse by neurotechnologies and artificial intelligence? Was the European Union, which was freshly separated from the supplies of Russian natural gas and transferred its energy security from Russia to the United States, again exposed to political pressure which it did not have a chance to resist, if it wished to continue its prosperity?

On March 13 2024, the European Parliament adopted the legislative resolution laying down harmonised rules on Artificial Intelligence. On page 6 it states:

“AI may generate risks and cause harm to public interests and fundamental rights that are protected by Union law. Such harm might be material or immaterial, including physical, psychological, societal or economic harm”.

On page 29 it follows:

“AI-enabled manipulative techniques can be used to persuade persons to engage in unwanted behaviours, or to deceive them by nudging them into decisions in a way that subverts and impairs their autonomy, decision-making and free choices. The placing on the market, the putting into service or the use of certain AI systems with the objective to or the effect of materially distorting human behaviour, whereby significant harms, in particular having sufficiently important adverse impacts on physical, psychological health or financial interests are likely to occur, are particularly dangerous and should therefore be forbidden. Such AI systems deploy subliminal components such as audio, image, video stimuli that persons cannot perceive as those stimuli are beyond human perception or other manipulative or deceptive techniques that subvert or impair person’s autonomy, decision-making or free choice in ways that people are not consciously aware or, where they are aware, they are still deceived or are not able to control or resist. This could be facilitated, for example, by machine-brain interfaces or virtual reality as they allow for a higher degree of control of what stimuli are presented to persons, insofar as they may materially distort their behaviour in a significantly harmful manner.”

The EU document does not state that such actions can be performed not only by machine-brain interfaces, but as well at distance by electromagnetic fields and in this way may act on masses of people.

The document does not propose the establishment of agencies where people could complain in case that they would be exposed to such abuse of their fundamental human rights by anybody, including government agencies.

If the technology, which can be used to remotely control human minds is not published, people cannot understand what is actually happening to them, if they are exposed to such attacks, and will possibly consider themselves to be mentally ill. In this way governments are in a position where they can execute totalitarian powers over their citizens and the citizens are not able to find out about it or prove it. It is happening already at present time that people, who complain about being abused in this way, end up in mental hospitals, unable to prove that governments or anybody else have violated their privacy and personal freedom.

In the text quoted above, the EU tacitly admits that the AI could be used even to make people commit crimes whithout being truly responsible for them. The same possibility confirmed in 2021 the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO writing:

“External tools that may interfere with our decisions can call into question, or even challenge, an individual’s free will, and consequently an individual’s responsibilities. In this way, neurotechnology could affect freedom of thought, decision-making and action. Taken together, these could have a profound impact on justice systems and social organizations” (pg. 36).

It has been two months since the European Commission promised to 11 world human rights organizations in an e-mail to contact them within one month again on those issues, but it did not happen. Evidently the European Union gave in to the U.S. pressure and published only the fact that human minds can be manipulated at close distance by brain-computer interfaces and did not publish the feasibility of individual and mass manipulation of human thinking and behavior at distance by electromagnetic waves or other physical fields.

The battle to ban technologies for remote control of human minds cannot be stopped by the decision of the U.S. president to stop accepting new orders for liquefied gas to Europeans. The governments must not be able to play with their or foreign citizens as if they were just only their toys. You can still support the petition requesting the European Union to ban the remote control of human minds in an effective way and in this way help the European Union to set an example to the USA and rest of the world here.

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Mojmir Babacek was born in 1947 in Prague, Czech Republic. Graduated in 1972 at Charles University in Prague in philosophy and political economy. In 1978 signed the document defending human rights in  communist Czechoslovakia „Charter 77“. Since 1981 until 1988 lived in emigration in the USA. Since 1996 he has published articles on different subjects mostly in the Czech and international alternative media.

In 2010, he published a book on the 9/11 attacks in the Czech language. Since the 1990‘s he has been striving to help to achieve the international ban of remote control of the activity of the human nervous system and human minds with the use of neurotechnology.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S. 

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically? 

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected. 

It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media briefing. 

The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021. 

If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.

Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad. 

Image: Julian Assange was secretly recorded while living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. (Source: EPV)

Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.

The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege. 

The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes.

Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police. 

Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine. 

Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. 

Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence. 

Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global. 

The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files. 

Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively. 

The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”

Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence. 

The U.S. and the U.K. Secretary of State were urged by the judges to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16. 

If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed. 

If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.

The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates. 

This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

Featured image: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Mr. Fish

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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25 years commemoration of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March−June 1999 once again opened the question of the Western foundation for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and its unilateral proclamation of a quasi-independence in February 2008. Kosovo became the first and only European state today that is ruled by the terroristic warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). This article aims to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in 1999 which has as an outcome the creation of the first terroristic state in Europe – the Republic of Kosovo.  

Terrorism and Kosovo Independence

The KLA terrorists with support from the US and the EU’s administrations launched full-scale violence in December 1998 for the sole purpose of provoking NATO’s military intervention against the FRY as a precondition for Kosovo secession from Serbia hopefully followed by internationally recognized independence. To finally resolve the “Kosovo Question” in the favor of the Albanians, the US Clinton administration brought two confronting sides to formally negotiate in the French castle of Rambouillet in France in February 1999 but in fact to impose an ultimatum to Serbia to accept de facto secession of Kosovo. Even though the Rambouillet ultimatum de iure recognized Serbia’s territorial integrity, the disarmament of terroristic KLA and did not mention Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, as the conditions of the final agreement were in essence highly favorable to the KLA and its secessionist project towards independent Kosovo, Serbia simply rejected them. The US’s answer was a military action led by NATO as a “humanitarian intervention” in order to directly support the Kosovo Albanian separatism. Therefore, on March 24^th, 1999 NATO started its military operation against the FRY which lasted till June 10^th, 1999. Why the UN’s Security Council was not asked for the approval of the operation is clear from the following explanation:

“Knowing that Russia would veto any effort to get UN backing for military action, NATO launched air strikes against Serbian forces in 1999, effectually supporting the Kosovar Albanian rebels”.[1]  

The crucial feature of this operation was a barbarian, coercive, inhuman, illegal, and above all merciless bombing of Serbia for almost three months. Nevertheless, NATO’s military intervention against the FRY – Operation Allied Force, was propagated by its proponents as a purely humanitarian operation, it is recognized by many Western and other scholars that the US and its client states of NATO had mainly political and geostrategic aims that led them to this military action. 

The legitimacy of the intervention in the brutal coercive bombing of both military and civilian targets in Kosovo province and the rest of Serbia became immediately controversial as the UN’s Security Council did not authorize the action. Surely, the action was illegal according to international law but it was formally justified by the US administration and the NATO’s spokesman as legitimate for the reason that it was unavoidable as all diplomatic options were exhausted to stop the war. However, a continuation of the military conflict in Kosovo between the KLA and Serbia’s state security forces would threaten to produce a humanitarian catastrophe and generate political instability in the region of the Balkans. Therefore, “in the context of fears about the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Albanian population, a campaign of air strikes, conducted by US-led NATO forces”[2] was executed with a final result of the withdrawal of Serbia’s forces and administration from the province: that was exactly the main requirement of the Rambouillet ultimatum. 

It is of crucial importance to stress at least five facts to properly understand the nature and aims of NATO’s military intervention against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999:

1. It was bombed only Serbian side involved in the conflict in Kosovo while the KLA was allowed and even fully sponsored to continue its terroristic activities either against Serbia’s security forces or the Serbian civilians.
2. The ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by the Serbian security forces was only a potential action (in fact, only in the case of direct NATO’s military action against the FRY) but not a real fact as a reason for NATO to start coercive bombing of the FRY.                                      
3. NATO’s claim that the Serbian security forces killed up to 100.000 Albanian civilians during the Kosovo War of 1998−1999 was a pure propaganda lie as after the war it was found only 3.000 bodies of all nationalities in Kosovo.
4. The bombing of the FRY was promoted as a “humanitarian intervention”, which means a legitimate and defensible action, that scholarly should mean “…military intervention that is carried out in pursuit of humanitarian rather than strategic objectives”[3]. However, today it is quite clear that the intervention had political and geostrategic ultimate objectives but not the humanitarian one.  
5. The NATO’s military intervention in 1999 was a direct violation of the UN principles of international conduct as it is said in the UN Charter that: 

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”.[4]

What happened in Kosovo when NATO started its military campaign was quite expected and above all wishful by the US administration and the KLA’s leaders: Serbia made a much stronger military assault on the KLA and the ethnic Albanians who supported it. As a consequence, there was a significantly increased number of refugees – up to 800.000 according to the CIA’s and the UN’s sources. However, the US administration presented all of these refugees as the victims of the Serb-led policy of systematic and well-organized ethnic cleansing (alleged “Horse Shoe” operation) regardless of the facts that: 

1. The overwhelming majority of them were not real refugees but rather “TV refugees” for the Western mass media.
2. The minority of them were simply escaping from the consequences of NATO’s merciless bombing.
3. Just part of the refugees have been the real victims of the Serbian “bloody revenge” policy for NATO’s destruction of Serbia. 

Nevertheless, the final result of NATO’s sortie campaign against the FRY was that the UN’s Security Council formally authorized NATO’s (under the official name of KFOR)[5] ground troops to occupy Kosovo and give to the KLA free hands to continue and finish with the ethnic cleansing of the province from all non-Albanians. That was the beginning of the making of the Kosovo independence which was finally proclaimed by the Kosovo Parliament (without national referenda) in February 2008 and immediately recognized by the main Western countries.[6] In such a way, Kosovo became the first legalized European mafia state.[7]

Nevertheless, in addition, the EU’s and the US’s policies to rebuild peace on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia did not manage to deal successfully with probably the main and most serious challenge to their proclaimed task to re-establish regional stability and security: al-Qaeda-linked terrorism, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina but also in Kosovo-Metochia.[8]     

Members of the U.S. sponsored Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999 during NATO’s aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Dilemmas

According to the NATO’s sources, there were two objectives of the alliance’s military intervention against the FRY in March−June 1999: 

1. To force Slobodan Miloshevic, a President of Serbia, to accept a political plan for the autonomy status of Kosovo (designed by the US administration). 
2. To prevent (alleged) ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by Serbia’s authorities and their armed forces.

However, while the political objective was in principle achieved, the humanitarian one had quite the opposite results. By bombing the FRY in the three air strikes phases NATO succeeded in forcing Miloshevic to sign a political-military capitulation in Kumanovo on June 9^th, 1999, to handle Kosovo to NATO’s administration and practically to authorize the KLA’s-led Islamic terror against the Christian Serbs.[9] A direct outcome of the operation was surely negative as NATO’s sorties caused approximately 3000 killed Serbian military and civilians in addition to an unknown number of killed ethnic Albanians. An indirect impact of the operation cost many ethnic Albanian killed civilians followed by massive refugee flows of Kosovo Albanians[10] as it provoked the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army to attack. We can not forget that the greatest scale of war crimes against the Albanian civilians in Kosovo during NATO’s bombing of the FRY was most probably, according to some research investigations, committed by the Krayina refugee Serbs from Croatia who after August 1995 in the uniforms of the regular police forces of Serbia as a matter of revenge for the terrible Albanian atrocities committed in the Krayina region in Croatia only several years ago against the Serb civilians[11] when many of Kosovo Albanians fought the Serbs in the Croatian uniforms.     

The fundamental dilemma is why NATO directly supported the KLA – an organization that was previously clearly called a “terrorist” by many Western Governments including the US administration too? It was known that a KLA’s warfare of partisan strategy[12] was based only on direct provoking of Serbia’s security forces to respond by attacking the KLA’s posts with an unavoidable number of civilian casualties. However, these Albanian civilian victims were not understood by NATO’s authorities as “collateral damage” but rather as the victims of deliberate ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, all civilian victims of NATO’s bombing in 1999 were presented by NATO’s authorities exactly as “collateral damage” of NATO’s “just war”[13] against the oppressive regime in Belgrade. 

Here we will present the basic (academic) principles of a “just war”:

1. Last resort – All diplomatic options are exhausted before the force is used.
2. Just cause – The ultimate purpose of the use of force is to self-defend its own territory or people from military attack by the others.
3. Legitimate authority – To imply the legitimate constituted Government of a sovereign state, but not by some private (individual) or group (organization).
4. Right intention – The use of force, or war, had to be prosecuted on morally acceptable reasons, but not based on revenge or the intention to inflict damage.
5. Reasonable prospect of success – The use of force should not be activated in some hopeless cause, in which human lives are exposed for no real benefits.
6. Proportionality – The military intervention has to have more benefits than losses. 
7. Discrimination – The use of force must be directed only at purely military targets as the civilians are considered to be innocent.
8. Proportionality – The used force has to be no greater than it is needed to achieve morally acceptable aims and must not be greater than the provoking cause.
9. Humanity – The use of force cannot be directed ever against the enemy personnel if they are captured (the prisoners of war) or wounded.[14]

If we analyze NATO’s military campaign regarding just above presented basic (academic) principles of the “just war”, the fundamental conclusions will be as follows:

1. The US administration in 1999 did not use any real diplomatic effort to settle the Kosovo crisis as Washington simply gave the political-military ultimatum in Rambouillet only to one side (Serbia) to either accept or not in full required blackmails: 1) To withdraw all Serbian military and police forces from Kosovo; 2) To give Kosovo administration to the NATO’s troops; and 3) To allow the NATO’s troops to use a whole territory of Serbia for the transit purpose. In other words, the basic point of the US’s ultimatum to Belgrade was that Serbia would voluntarily become a US colony but without Kosovo province. Even the US President at that time – Bill Clinton, confirmed that Miloshevic’s rejection of the Rambouillet ultimatum was understandable and logical. It can be said that Serbia in 1999 did the same as the Kingdom of Serbia did in July 1914 by rejecting the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum which was also absurd and abusive.[15]  
2. This principle was misused by the NATO’s administration as no one NATO country was attacked or occupied by the FRY. In Kosovo at that time it was a classic anti-terroristic war launched by the state authorities against the illegal separatist movement but fully sponsored in this case by the neighboring Albania and the NATO.[16] In other words, this second principle of the “just war” can be only applied to the anti-terroristic operations by the state authorities of Serbia in Kosovo province against the KLA rather than to NATO’s military intervention against the FRY.
3. The Legitimate authority principle in the Kosovo conflict case of 1998−1999 can be applied only to Serbia and her legitimate state institutions and authorities which were recognized as legitimate by the international community and above all by the UN.
4. The morally acceptable reasons officially used by NATO’s authorities to justify its military action against the FRY in 1999 were quite unclear and above all unproved and misused for the very political and geostrategic purposes in the coming future. Today we know that NATO’s military campaign was not based on the morally proven claims to stop a mass expulsion of the ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo as a mass number of displaced persons appeared during NATO’s military intervention but not before. 
5. The consequences of the fifth principle were selectively applied as only Kosovo Albanians benefited from both short and long-term perspectives by NATO’s military engagement in the Balkans in 1999.
6. The sixth principle also became practically applied only to Kosovo Albanians which was, in fact, the ultimate task of the US and NATO administrations. In other words, the benefits of the action were overwhelmingly single-sided. However, from the long-term geostrategic and political aspects, the action was very profitable with a minimum loss for the Western military alliance during the campaign. 
7. The practical consequences of the seventh principle became mostly criticized as NATO obviously did not make any difference between the military and civilian targets. Moreover, the NATO alliance deliberately bombed many more civilian objects and non-combat citizens than military objects and personnel. However, all civilian victims of the bombing of all nationalities became simply presented by NATO’s authority as unavoidable “collateral damage”, but, in fact, it was a clear violation of international law and one of the basic principles of the concept of a “just war”.
8. The eighth principle of a “just was” surely was not respected by NATO as the used force was much higher as needed to achieve proclaimed tasks and above all was much stronger than the opposite side had. However, the morally acceptable aims of the Western policymakers were based on the wrong and deliberately misused “facts” concerning the ethnic Albanian victims of the Kosovo War in 1998−1999 as it was primarily with the “brutal massacre of forty-five civilians in the Kosovo village of Račak in January 1999”[17] which became a formal pretext for the NATO’s intervention. Nevertheless, it is known today that those Albanian “brutally massacred civilians” were, in fact, the members of the KLA killed during the regular fight but not executed by the Serbian security forces.[18]
9. Only the last principle of a “just war” was respected by NATO for the very reason that there were no captured soldiers from the opponent side. The Serbian authorities also respected this principle as all two NATO’s captured pilots were treated as prisoners of war according to international standards and even were free very soon after the imprisonment.[19]

Crucified Christian (Serb Orthodox) Kosovo after the war by the KLA’s members in power

Conclusions       

The crucial conclusions of the article after the investigation of the nature of NATO’s “humanitarian” military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 are:

1. NATO’s military intervention against the FRY during the Kosovo War in 1998−1999 was done primarily for political and geostrategic purposes. 
2. A declarative “humanitarian” nature of the operation just served as a formal moral framework for the realization of the genuine goals of the post-Cold War US policy in the Balkans whose foundations were laid down by the Dayton Accords in November 1995.
3. The US administration of Bill Clinton used the terrorist KLA to press and blackmail the Serbian Government to accept the ultimatum by Washington to transform Serbia into the US’s military, political, and economic colony with NATO membership in the future for the exchange for formal preservation of Serbia’s territorial integrity. 
4. The Western Governments originally labeled the KLA as a “terrorist organization” – that is combat strategy of directly provoking Serbia’s security forces was morally unacceptable and would not result in either diplomatic or military support.
5. During the Kosovo War in 1998−1999, the KLA, basically, served as NATO’s ground forces in Kosovo for direct destabilization of Serbia’s state security which were militarily defeated at the very beginning of 1999 by Serbia’s regular police forces.   
6. NATO’s sorties in 1999 had as the main goal to force Belgrade to give Kosovo province to the US and EU’s administration to transform it into the biggest US and NATO military base in Europe.
7. NATO’s “humanitarian” intervention in 1999 against the FRY violated almost all principles of the “just war” and international law – an intervention that became one of the best examples in the post-Cold War history of unjust use of coercive power for the political and geostrategic purposes and at the same time a classic case of coercive diplomacy that fully engaged the Western Governments.  
8. Some 50.000 NATO troops displaced in Kosovo after June 10^th, 1999 did not fulfill the basic tasks of their mission: 1) Demilitarization of the KLA as this paramilitary formation was never properly disarmed; 2) Protection of all Kosovo inhabitants as only up to January 2001 there were at least 700 Kosovo citizens murdered on the ethnic basis (mostly of them were the Serbs); 3) Stability and security of the province as most of the Serbs and other non-Albanians fled the province as a consequence of systematic ethnic cleansing policy committed by the KLA in power after June 1999.
9. The US’s reward for the KLA’s loyalty was to install the army’s members to the key governmental posts of today’s “independent” Republic of Kosovo which became the first European state administered by the leaders of an ex-terrorist organization that started immediately after the war to an execute a policy of ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanian population and to Islamize the province.
10. The ultimate national-political goal of the KLA in power in Kosovo was to include this province into the Greater Albania projected by the First Albanian Prizren League in 1878−1881 and for the first time realized during WWII.[20]
11. Probably, the main consequence of NATO’s occupation of Kosovo after June 1999 up to today is a systematic destruction of the Christian (Serb) cultural inheritance and feature of the province followed by its obvious and comprehensive Islamization and therefore transformation of Kosovo into a new Islamic State.     
12. What concerns the case of the Kosovo crisis in 1998−1999, the first and authentic “humanitarian” intervention was that of Serbia’s security forces against the terroristic KLA in order to preserve the human lives of the ethnic Serbs and anti-KLA Albanians in the province.  
13. The Balkan Stability Pact for both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo-Metochia attempted to under-emphasize the traditional concept of sovereignty giving a full practical possibility to the UN’s (in fact the West’s) administrative control over these two ex-Yugoslav territories.[21]
14. NATO’s “humanitarian” intervention in 1999 against the FRY clearly violated the recognized international standards of non-intervention, based on the principle of the “inviolability of borders” going beyond the idea of “just war” according to which self-defense is the crucial reason, or at least formal justification, for the use of force. 
15. While NATO declaratively fulfilled “the international responsibility to protect” (the ethnic Albanians) by heavily bombing Serbia and too much little extent Montenegro, bypassing the UN’s Security Council it is clear that this 78-day terror effort was counterproductive as “creating as much human suffer-refugees as it relieved”.[22]                  
16. The fundamental question regarding the Kosovo “humanitarian” interventions today is why the Western Governments are not taking another “humanitarian” coercive military intervention after June 1999 to prevent further ethnic cleansing and brutal violation of human rights against all non-Albanian population in Kosovo but above all against the Serbs? 
17. Finally, NATO’s military intervention was seen by many social constructivists as a phenomenon of “warlike democracies” as a demonstration of how the ideas of liberal democracy “undermine the logic of democratic peace theory”.[23]

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

Notes

[1]  S. L. Spiegel, J. M. Taw, F. L. Wehling, K. P. Williams, World Politics in a New Era, Thomson Wadsworth, 2004, 319.

[2] A. Heywood, Global Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 320.

[3] Ibid., 319.

[4] J. Haynes, P. Hough, Sh. Malik, L. Pettiford, World Politics, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011, 639.

[5] The 1244 UN Security Council Resolution on June 10^th, 1999. The KFOR’s basic responsibilities were: 

1. To protect aid operations.
2. To protect all Kosovo population.
3. To create a stable security in the province in order that the international administration can function normally.   

[6] This recognition of the self-proclaimed Kosovo independence from a democratic country of Serbia with a pro-Western regime, basically gave victory to the Albanian Kosovo radicals of the ethnic cleansing after June 1999. The Albanians from Kosovo started their atrocities against the Serbs immediately after the Kumanovo Agreement in June 1999 when the KLA returned back to Kosovo together with NATO’s occupation ground troops. Up to February 2008 there were around 200.000 expelled Serbs from Kosovo and 1.248 non-Albanians who have been killed in some cases even very brutally. The number of kidnapped non-Albanians is still not known but presumably majority of them were killed. There were 151 Serb Orthodox spiritual and cultural monuments in Kosovo destroyed by the Albanians in addition to 213 mosques built with financial support from Saudi Arabia. Before Kosovo independence was proclaimed, there were 80 percent of graveyards which were either completely destroyed or partially desecrated by the Albanians. On Kosovo right to independence, see [M. Sterio, The Right to Self-Determination under International Law: “Selfistans”, Secession, and the Rule of the Great Powers, New York−London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, 116−129]. On secession from the point of the international law, see [M. G. Kohen, Secession: International Law Perspectives, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006].

[7] T. Burghardt, “Kosovo: Europe’s Mafia State. Hub of the EU-NATO Drug Trail”, 22-12-2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/kosovo-europe-s-mafia-state-hub-of-the-eu-nato-drug-trail/22486.

[8] J. Haynes, P. Hough, Sh. Malik, L. Pettiford, World Politics, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011, 588.

[9] On the “just peace”, see [P. Allan, A. Keller (eds.), What is a Just Peace?, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2006].

[10] According to the official Western sources, even up to 90 percent of the Kosovo Albanian population became refugees during NATO’s military intervention. Therefore, it should be the largest displacement of the civilians in Europe after WWII. Nevertheless, all of these Albanian refugees are unquestionably considered to be “expelled” from their homes by Serbia’s security forces and the Yugoslav army.

[11] For example, in the “Medak Pocket” operation on September 9^th, 1993 there were killed around 80 Serbian civilians by the Croatian forces [В. Ђ. Мишина (уредник), Република Српска Крајина: Десет година послије, Београд: Добра воља Београд, 2005, 35] in which Kosovo Albanians served too.

[12] The “partisan” or “guerrilla” war is fought by irregular troops using mainly tactics that are fitting to the geographical features of the terrain. The crucial characteristic of the tactics of the partisan war is that it uses mobility and surprise but not direct frontal battles with the enemy. Usually, the civilians are paying the highest price in the course of the partisan war. In the other words, it is “war conducted by irregulars or guerrillas, usually against regular, uniformed forces, employing hit-and-run, ambush, and other tactics that allow smaller numbers of guerrillas to win battles against numerically superior, often heavily-armed regular forces” [P. R. Viotti, M. V. Kauppi, International Relations and World Politics: Secularity, Economy, Identity, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009, 544]. With regard to the Kosovo War in 1998−1999 the reconstruction of the Albanian guerrilla strategy is as following: 

“…a police patrol is passing a village, when a sudden fire is open and some policemen killed and wounded. The police return the fire and the further development depends on the strength of the rebellious unit engaged. If the village appears well protected and risky to attack by the ordinary units, the latter stops fighting and calls for additional support. It arrives usually as a paramilitary unit, which launches a fierce onslaught” [P. V. Grujić, Kosovo Knot, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: RoseDog Books, 2014, 193].  

[13] The “just war” is considered to be a war that has a purpose to satisfy certain ethical standards, and therefore is (allegedly) morally justified.  

[14] A. Heywood, Global Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 257.

[15] М. Радојевић, Љ. Димић, Србија у Великом рату 1914−1915, Београд: Српска књижевна задруга−Београдски форум за свет равноправних, 2014, 94−95.

[16] For instance, Albania supplied the Albanian Kosovo separatists by weapons in 1997 when around 700.000 guns were “stolen” by the Albanian mob from Albania’s army’s magazines but majority of these weapons found their way exactly to the neighboring Kosovo. The members of the KLA were trained in Albania with the help of the NATO’s military instructors and then sent to Kosovo.    

[17] R. J. Art, K. N. Waltz (eds.), The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics, Lanham−Boulder−New York−Toronto−Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004, 257.

[18] В. Б. Сотировић, Огледи из југославологије, Виљнус: приватно издање, 2013, 19−29. 

[19] On the NATO’s “humanitarian” intervention in the FRY in 1999, see more in [G. Szamuely, Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013].

[20] A Greater Albania as a project is “envisaged to be an area of some 90.000 square kilometres (36.000 square miles), including Kosovo, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro” [J. Haynes, P. Hough, Sh. Malik, L. Pettiford, World Politics, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011, 588].

[21] R. Johnson, “Reconstructing the Balkans: The effects of a global governance approach”, M. Lederer, P. Müller (eds.), Criticizing Global Governance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 177.

[22] A. F. Cooper, J. Heine, R. Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 766.

[23] J. Haynes, P. Hough, Sh. Malik, L. Pettiford, World Politics, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011, 225.

All images in this article are from the author

Doctors Report Mysterious Worldwide Cancer ‘Epidemic’

By Paul Anthony Taylor, March 31, 2024

The cause of the global increase, which is said to have sparked alarm among scientists, is hotly debated. But while improved diagnostic methods, genetic predispositions, lifestyles, and as yet unknown environmental factors have all been proposed as possible reasons, the roles of some other possible influences are essentially being ignored.

Assange’s ‘Reprieve’ Is Another Lie, Hiding the Real Goal of Keeping Him Endlessly Locked Up

By Jonathan Cook, April 01, 2024

The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.

Turkey Expected to Become US’ Largest Supplier of Artillery

By Ahmed Adel, April 01, 2024

Turkey is set to become the United States’ largest supplier of artillery shells as NATO allies have exhausted their stocks and now struggle to ship ammunition to Ukraine. Turkey’s indirect support for Ukraine is also supplemented by direct support, such as producing drones and warships, yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers himself as a viable partner in searching for peace between Ukraine and Russia.

Can Bibi Netanyahu be Stopped?

By Mike Whitney, March 31, 2024

Recent developments suggest that Israel’s full-scale ground offensive in Rafah could take place at any time. What we have been told by Israeli officials, is that the operation will require the evacuation of the city, presumably so the IDF can inflict the same level of destruction on Rafah as was inflicted on Khan Yunis and Gaza City.

COVID-19 Vaccine Myocarditis Not Healing > One Year After Diagnosis

By Dr. Peter McCullough, March 31, 2024

As a cardiologist, my two greatest fears concerning COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis are: 1) sudden cardiac death, 2) permanent damage to the heart resulting in scar.

Al Shifa Hospital Is the Site of Death, Torture and Rape by the IDF

By Steven Sahiounie, March 31, 2024

Soldiers in uniforms round up civilians at gunpoint. They separate the men from the women and children. The men are stripped naked and blindfolded, then taken into a room by the soldiers, gunshots are heard, and finally only the soldiers emerge from the room.

Does Wireless Tech Cause Cancer or Is It Just Another “Coincidence” Being Propagated by Tin-foil Hat Conspiracy Theorists?

By John C. A. Manley, March 31, 2024

Do cell phones, Bluetooth devices, WiFi and other wireless tech cause cancer or is it just another “coincidence” that tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists are sharing on their smartphones?

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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The interminable and abhorrent saga of Julian Assange’s incarceration for the crime of journalism continues. And once again, the headline news is a lie, one designed both to buy our passivity and to buy more time for the British and US establishments to keep the Wikileaks founder permanently disappeared from view.

The Guardian – which has a mammoth, undeclared conflict of interest in its coverage of the extradition proceedings against Assange (you can read about that here and here) – headlined the ruling by the UK High Court today as a “temporary reprieve” for Assange. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Five years on, Assange is still caged in Belmarsh high-security prison, convicted of absolutely nothing.

Five years on, he still faces a trial in the US on ludicrous charges under a century-old, draconian piece of legislation called the Espionage Act. Assange is not a US citizen and none of the charges relate to anything he did in the US.

Five years on, the English judiciary is still rubber-stamping his show trial – a warning to others not to expose state crimes, as Assange did in publishing details of British and US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Five years on, judges in London are still turning a blind eye to Assange’s sustained psychological torture, as the former United Nations legal expert Nils Melzer has documented.

The word “reprieve” is there – just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been “granted” – to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell.

In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights – as he has been for a decade or more.

In the ruling, the court strips him of any substantive grounds of appeal, precisely so there will be no hearing in which the public gets to learn more about the various British and US crimes he exposed, for which he is being kept in jail. He is thereby denied a public-interest defence against extradition. Or in the court’s terminology, his “application to adduce fresh evidence is refused”.

Even more significantly, Assange is specifically stripped of the right to appeal on the very legal grounds that should guarantee him an appeal, and should have ensured he was never subjected to a show trial in the first place. His extradition would clearly violate the prohibition in the Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US against extradition on political grounds.

Nonetheless, in their wisdom, the judges rule that Washington’s vendetta against Assange for exposing its crimes is not driven by political considerations. Nor apparently was there a political factor to the CIA’s efforts to kidnap and assassinate him after he was granted political asylum by Ecuador, precisely to protect him from the US administration’s wrath.

What the court “grants” instead are three technical grounds of appeal – although in the small print, that “granted” is actually subverted to “adjourned”. The “reprieve” celebrated by the media – supposedly a victory for British justice – actually pulls the legal rug from under Assange.

Each of those grounds of appeal can be reversed – that is, rejected – if Washington submits “assurances” to the court, however worthless they may end up being in practice. In which case, Assange is on a flight to the US and effectively disappeared into one of its domestic black sites.

Those three pending grounds of appeal on which the court seeks reassurance are that extradition will not:

• deny Assange his basic free speech rights;
• discriminate against him on the basis of his nationality, as a non-US citizen;
• or place him under threat of the death penalty in the US penal system.

The judiciary’s latest bending over backwards to accommodate Washington’s intention to keep Assange permanently locked out of view follows years of perverse legal proceedings in which the US has repeatedly been allowed to change the charges it is levelling against Assange at short notice to wrong-foot his legal team. It also follows years in which the US has had a chance to make clear its intention to provide Assange with a fair trial but has refused to do so.

Washington’s true intentions are already more than clear: the US spied on Assange’s every move while he was under the protection of the Ecuadorian embassy, violating his lawyer-client privilege; and the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him.

Both are grounds that alone should have seen the case thrown out.

But there is nothing normal – or legal – about the proceedings against Assange. The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the US can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.

And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.

Today’s ruling is most certainly not a “reprieve”. It is simply another stage in a protracted, faux-legal process designed to provide constant justifications for keeping Assange behind bars, and never-ending postponements of judgment day, when either Assange is set free or the British and US justice systems are exposed as hand servants of brutish, naked power.

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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

Featured image: STOP THIS – by Mr. Fish

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

***

The curved course of the ubiquitous banana has often been the peel of empire, its sweetness masking a sharp, bitter legacy.  Arab conquerors introduced it to the African continent as they cultivated a slave market. European imperialism did the same to the Americas via the Canary Islands, insinuating the luscious fruit into markets of solid exploitation and guaranteed returns.  In time, demand for bananas grew. Cheap capital cushioned it.

Corporation power and secondary colonisation, exercised through such ruthless entities as the United Fruit Company (now the jauntily labelled Chiquita), continued the legacy, collaborating with corrupt elites while exerting control over large swathes of the local economy. The Banana Republic was axiomatic to the exertion of US power in the agriculture of the South. Names like Lorenzo D. Baker, who first imported bananas to the US in 1870, preceding Philadelphia’s World Fair promotion in 1876, and Minor C. Keith and Andrew W. Preston, should be marked in bold in such efforts. It is they who led the way to the creation of the United Fruit Company.

Marcelo Bucheli offers an adequate description about United Fruit as a broad based alliance that led to the creation of an “impressive production and distribution network” made up of “plantations, hospitals, roads, railways, telegraph lines, housing facilities, and ports in the producing companies, a steamship fleet (the Great White Fleet, which eventually became the largest privately owned fleet in the world), and a distribution network in the United States.” Some fruit; some capital.

The company’s indelible staining of Latin America’s politics was ingloriously affirmed with its role in overthrowing the democratically elected Guatemalan leader Jacobo Árbenz, whose expropriating measures to award property to landless citizens proved too much.  The resulting Washington-backed coup, encouraged by such figures as United Fruit’s main shareholder Samuel Zemurray, resulted in a military dictatorship leading to 200,000 deaths.

In 1954, with the coup in full swing, Árbenz could only observe with tragic sadness that “the pretext of anti-communism” had been cited to overthrow his government.

“The truth is very different.  The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company and other US monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin American countries”.

There is good reason then to take a rather withering view of the banana trade. It has become the feature fruit of monstrous monopolies, a brutal currency of exchange, the means by which exploitation has been cultivated for huge corporate gain. In some cases, its pricing has been kept low as the costs in production, be they in terms of land and people.  They are the unwanted ghosts in the unaccounted equation.

Following the fruit to lands of its cultivation is to take a journey to inequality. The island of Mindanao in the Philippines produces 84% of the country’s bananas and hosts 25% of the country’s population. On that same island live over 35% of the country’s poorest residents. Historically, it was only the advent of the cooperative FARMCOOP and the passing of the Land Reform Law that enabled landless, indigent farmers to claim some degree of autonomy from the crushing conditions of the international banana market.

After the viciousness of imperialism, exploitation and profit, the banana now faces something of a different challenge. Climate, it has become trite to say, is playing up. The banana moguls, sellers and cultivators are getting anxious. Supply lines and prices are being affected. “Producers like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, will see a negative impact of rising temperatures over the next few decades,” predicts a confident Dan Bebber, a student of crop pathogens and sustainable agriculture.

Climate disruptions have also been something of an encouragement to threatening diseases to the crop, notably the TR4 fungus.  The World Banana Forum, which benignly sounds like the Sorghum Appreciation Society with polite tea breaks and conference papers, offered a stolid seriousness. The BBC was there to gather some material, coming with such prosaic spurts as those of Pascal Lu, a senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO): the impact of climate change was such as to pose an “enormous threat” to banana production.

CBS News was also at hand to be told by Sabine Altendorf, yet another economist at the UNFAO with an interest in supply chains of agricultural products, that any such infection would essentially doom the crop.  “Once a plantation has been infected, it cannot be eradicated.  There is no pesticide or fungicide that is effective.”

Lu offers a diplomatic splash on the whole matter.  He speaks of certification, keeping the bananas “greener” (no irony intended) and extols the value of such regulations as “they help producers seize the opportunity of making their production systems more sustainable.”   Inevitably, he offers the following: “But of course, they also come with costs for producers because they require more control and monitoring systems on the part of the producers and the traders.  And these costs have to trickle down to the final consumers.”

Ultimately, such certification remains overwhelmingly voluntary, by which the producers pay a fee for the process, thereby receiving price premiums and market access for upholding certain market standards.

The environmental ledger for humanity, and much of the globe, engenders worry.  Climate change is dooming us in various ways.  States and communities will be submerged.  Droughts will empty tracts of land of agrarian occupation.  Agricultural patterns will alter. It is making the cultivation of crops in certain areas of the world unfeasible and untenable.  And this potassium rich source, so revered for shape, size and flavour, its brutal legacy often ignored at the shopping counter, may have met its match.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Turkey is set to become the United States’ largest supplier of artillery shells as NATO allies have exhausted their stocks and now struggle to ship ammunition to Ukraine. Turkey’s indirect support for Ukraine is also supplemented by direct support, such as producing drones and warships, yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers himself as a viable partner in searching for peace between Ukraine and Russia.

“Turkish supplies of trinitrotoluene, known as TNT, and nitroguanidine, which is used as a propellant, would be crucial in the production of Nato-standard 155mm calibre ammunition — potentially tripling production, according to officials familiar with the discussions,” a Bloomberg report said, adding: “Turkey is already on track to becoming the biggest seller of the artillery shells to the US as early as this year.”

The surge in demand has delayed global orders and has put pressure on defence supply chains, especially for components such as TNT.  According to the outlet, to help alleviate this issue, Turkish defence company Repkon’s production lines are expected to produce about 30% of all US-made 155mm artillery shells by 2025.

The Pentagon said in a statement about investment in Texas’ defence industry with Turkish counterparts that working with allies “is key to building a global defence industrial base.”

Additionally, Washington purchased 116,000 rounds of battle-ready ammunition from Turkish company Arca Defense, with delivery expected later this year and further purchases believed to be concluding soon to be ready for delivery in 2025.

As Bloomberg admitted,

“The US and European efforts are part of a race to catch up with Moscow, whose war machine has put it in a position to produce or procure – according to some estimates – 4 million rounds this year, including shipments from North Korea. By contrast, the European Union expects to triple its production of artillery shells this year to around 1.4 million units.”

It is unsurprising that Turkey has been awarded a lucrative contract, given the recent announcement that Erdogan will visit the White House on May 9, the first time since US President Joe Biden took office.

The agreement with Ankara also reveals a delicate balance between the NATO allies, whose relations have been strained by the Russian military operation in Ukraine and Turkey’s months-long block on Sweden’s membership in the Atlantic Alliance. However, with Turkey greenlighting Sweden’s accession and plans to contribute to Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, the country is now being rewarded with export contracts and approval to upgrade its aging F-16 fighter jet fleet.

The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used by the Ukrainian military against Russian forces. The drone maker, Baykar, has initiated the construction of a factory in Ukraine, and the company’s CEO said in February that they aim to complete the project within approximately 12 months and produce around 120 units a year.

At the same time, it is recalled that in February, France, Greece, and Cyprus blocked financing for the supply of Bayraktar drones and artillery shells for Ukraine, which were to be purchased with European funds. Turkey was set to be financed from EU funds for some time, but once the order was confirmed, the three countries swiftly blocked the financing.

Although the initiative failed, the US recognised Turkey’s rapprochement with the West and is now rewarding the country with imports and exports in the defence sector. This is despite the fact that the issue of the acquisition of the Russian-made S-400 is not resolved, which is the reason Turkey was booted from the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet program to begin with.

Erdogan announced his offer to host a peace summit between Ukraine and Russia earlier this month following a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Since the beginning, we have contributed as much as we could toward ending the war through negotiations,” Erdogan said. “We are also ready to host a peace summit in which Russia will also be included.”

Although Erdogan claims to have contributed as much as possible to ending the war through negotiations, his country has also contributed to prolonging it. It is also recalled that during Zelensky’s visit to Turkey, he visited the shipyard where the two corvettes are being built for the Ukrainian Navy. At the same time, Turkey is providing drones to the Ukrainian military and is now replenishing the US’ artillery stocks. This is even though Ukraine has no chance of winning the war, meaning Turkey is not an honest broker for peace.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image source

O ataque terrorista à sala de concertos de Moscou, que resultou na morte de 140 civis indefesos (um número que pode aumentar devido ao alto número de feridos), foi realizado por quatro assassinos profissionais, membros do ISIS-K (Estado Islâmico Khorasan), que realizaram o massacre com uma frieza implacável. A dinâmica do ataque mostra que é impossível que eles tenham agido sozinhos.

Isso foi enfatizado pelo presidente Putin em seu discurso aos cidadãos da Rússia: “Eles tentaram fugir e estavam indo em direção à Ucrânia, onde, de acordo com informações iniciais, uma abertura foi preparada para eles no lado ucraniano para cruzar a fronteira do estado. Estamos no processo de identificar e desmascarar a base de cúmplices por trás desses terroristas: aqueles que lhes forneceram transporte, planejaram as rotas de fuga da cena do crime e prepararam os esconderijos com armas e munição. No entanto, já está claro que não estamos lidando simplesmente com um ataque terrorista cuidadosa e cinicamente planejado, mas com um assassinato em massa premeditado e organizado. Assim como os nazistas que realizaram massacres em territórios ocupados, eles planejaram uma execução demonstrativa, um ato sangrento de intimidação. Todos os autores, organizadores e mentores desse crime serão punidos de forma justa e inevitável, sejam eles quem forem e quem os dirigiu. Identificaremos e levaremos à justiça todos os indivíduos que estão por trás desses terroristas.”

O ISIS-K é uma facção do ISIS, o movimento islâmico promovido, financiado e armado pelos EUA, pelos membros europeus da OTAN e pelas monarquias do Golfo, para destruir o Estado sírio por dentro e fragmentar ainda mais o Iraque, a Líbia e outros países. Quando, depois de vinte anos de guerra, os EUA e a OTAN são forçados a se retirar do Afeganistão, onde o Talibã assume o controle, o ISIS-K inicia uma série de ataques terroristas sangrentos no Afeganistão, que depois se espalham para o Irã e o Paquistão à medida que a área e a influência do BRICS, baseada na estreita cooperação entre a Rússia e a China, se expande.

Estamos, portanto, diante de um renascimento do “terrorismo islâmico”, principalmente pelos serviços secretos dos EUA e da Grã-Bretanha, com a participação de ucranianos e outros. O objetivo é atacar a Rússia por dentro, em um momento em que ela está prevalecendo militarmente sobre a Ucrânia de Kiev, e justificar a guerra de Israel contra os palestinos e as operações de guerra dos EUA no Oriente Médio, fazendo-as parecer ações defensivas contra o “terrorismo islâmico”. Como parte dessa estratégia, existe a possibilidade de ataques terroristas até mesmo em países europeus membros da OTAN.

Manlio Dinucci

Texto original em italiano :

Dietro la Strage di Mosca

Tradução : Mondialisation.ca com DeepL

 

VIDEO (italiano):

Aparentemente, as “negociações de paz” sobre a Ucrânia continuam a decorrer, mesmo sem qualquer envolvimento russo nas conversações. Segundo o primeiro-ministro alemão, Olaf Scholz, estão a decorrer diversas iniciativas diplomáticas para pôr fim – ou pelo menos congelar – o conflito, mas Moscou continua excluído de tais processos, o que obviamente invalida as negociações.

Numa entrevista à imprensa alemã, Scholz confirmou a existência de iniciativas diplomáticas para pôr fim às hostilidades. Ele disse que “vários países, incluindo a Ucrânia, estão atualmente discutindo, ao nível dos conselheiros de segurança, como seria algo que poderia levar a um processo de paz”.

Na mesma entrevista, Scholz afirmou ainda que está em curso um diálogo para se chegar a um acordo sobre a proteção da Central Nuclear de Zaporozhye (ZNPP). Desde 2022, a Federação Russa têm relatado bombardeios ucranianos contra instalações nucleares e alertado sobre o risco de vazamento de radiação como resultado dos ataques. Missões internacionais de observação já visitaram a região, comprovando a veracidade das alegações russas. No entanto, os países ocidentais e as organizações internacionais permanecem em silêncio sobre o caso.

É muito curioso verificar que tais “negociações” decorrem sem a participação russa, já que Moscou é uma das partes no conflito, o que torna qualquer acordo dependente da aceitação russa. Além disso, especificamente no que diz respeito ao ZNPP, é ainda mais ilógico que as conversações estejam a ser mantidas apenas com o lado ucraniano, uma vez que o regime de Kiev é precisamente o agressor que bombardeia a central. Como a ZNPP está localizada numa região sob controle russo, não há dúvidas sobre a responsabilidade dos ataques contra a usina, mas o Ocidente ignora isso e continua “conversando” com o regime que promove o terror nuclear.

Scholz também fez algumas outras declarações absurdas e hipócritas durante a entrevista. Segundo ele, a “paz” pode ser alcançada a qualquer momento se Moscou concordar em retirar suas tropas da zona de operações militares especiais. Scholz ignora obviamente a legitimidade do interesse russo em impedir a expansão da OTAN e a reabilitação do nazismo no seu ambiente estratégico. Ao apelar à mera “retirada das tropas”, Scholz endossa uma posição inviável, anulando qualquer possibilidade de uma conversação de paz séria

Em resposta à declaração de Scholz, as autoridades russas informaram que não houve convite a Moscou para participar em novas conversações de paz. Segundo o Kremlin, a declaração do chanceler “não altera a essência dos acontecimentos em curso”. Em outras palavras, a Rússia continuará a agir militarmente até que os objetivos da operação na Ucrânia sejam plenamente alcançados. parecem importar muito agora, uma vez que estes países ignoraram todas as tentativas de uma resolução pacífica da crise ucraniana antes de 2022. Agora, os russos estão resolutos na sua decisão de usar a força militar para evitar que a Ucrânia continue a ser uma base para a agressão ocidental – e a “diplomacia europeia” não parece ter qualquer capacidade para alterar os planos russos.

Obviamente, Moscou continua aberta a conversações de paz. Desde o início da operação, a Rússia tem estado ativa na procura de negociações. No entanto, sendo o lado vencedor e tendo uma vantagem militar irreversível, Moscou tem uma lista de exigências que precisam de ser cumpridas pelo lado ucraniano e pelos seus parceiros ocidentais. Sem estas condições de paz, que incluem o estatuto neutro da Ucrânia e a desmilitarização, a Rússia não tem garantias de segurança suficientes para pôr fim às hostilidades.

O Ocidente, no entanto, recusa-se a satisfazer as exigências russas, o que torna a paz inviável. É impossível que as negociações de paz tenham lugar adequadamente sem a participação direta da Rússia. Os termos das conversações são inválidos porque uma das partes beligerantes não foi convidada para o processo. Não há possibilidade de alcançar a paz unilateralmente ou através dos termos da parte derrotada, o que torna absolutamente inúteis as “iniciativas” referidas por Scholz.

Além disso, com o aumento do terror nas fronteiras da Rússia – além da grande possibilidade de envolvimento ucraniano no massacre de Crocus – as possibilidades de uma resolução diplomática estão a esgotar-se ainda mais rapidamente. O regime de Kiev está a revelar-se uma tirania que patrocina o terrorismo, forçando Moscou a utilizar todos os meios de coerção necessários para neutralizá-lo, uma vez que negociar com terroristas não é uma opção razoável.

Embora o fim das hostilidades seja importante e desejável, só haverá verdadeira paz quando os interesses legítimos da Federação Russa forem satisfeitos. “Congelar” o conflito ou criar medidas de cessar-fogo temporárias não é do interesse de Moscou, razão pela qual tais diretivas nunca serão suficientes para acabar com a guerra na Ucrânia.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês : Western countries in ‘peace talks’ without Russia, InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

First published on February 11, 2021.

 

 

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See also Shane Quinn’s E-book entitled

History of World War II: Operation Barbarossa, the Allied Firebombing of German Cities and Japan’s Early Conquests

By Shane Quinn, May 08, 2022

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Among the Nazis’ first actions after taking power was to dismantle the German trade unions and labour power. By March 1933 the first concentration camp was erected at Dachau, soon to be followed by others, where numerous communists, socialists and other undesirables were interned. The German masses were thereafter transformed largely into devoted followers of Hitler, subjected regularly to Nazi propaganda; much of the techniques of which Gauleiter of Berlin Joseph Goebbels had learnt in the 1920s from Edward Bernays, the influential American propaganda merchant.

The Third Reich’s destruction of the left, along with Hitler’s stated intention to preserve big business, was welcomed by corporate managers. Before Hitler had even come to power, his views had drawn approval abroad from leading industrialists; like the American tycoon Irénée du Pont, a proponent of racial superiority and until 1925 the president of chemical multinational DuPont; and Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, a fervent anti-Semite who in the early 1920s wrote ‘The International Jew: The World’s Problem’.

A number of business moguls in America were overtly anti-Semitic, and Hitler’s rants against the supposed Jewish problem met with their approval. Ford’s writings in fact seem to have influenced Hitler and other Nazis like Baldur von Schirach, future head of the Hitler Youth. At the Nuremberg trials in May 1946, von Schirach said he had read Ford’s above work “and became anti-Semitic. In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself, because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success”.

Ford himself was providing funds to the Nazi Party since the 1920s, when it was a miniscule political organisation (1). Hitler kept a life-size portrait of Ford behind his desk in Munich, and in 1931 the Nazi leader told a Detroit news reporter, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration”. Each year Ford also sent money to Hitler personally on his birthday through Swiss or Swedish banks, between around 10,000 to 20,000 Reichsmarks annually. These payments to Hitler continued until 1944, more than two years after the German declaration of war on America. (2)

However, as Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party’s coffers were virtually empty and large bills remained unpaid. Just a few weeks before, Goebbels complained in his diary that “financial troubles make all organised work impossible” and “the danger now exists of the whole party going to pieces” (3). This indicates that, up until Hitler took control, the Nazis received rather limited funding from big business. Greater contributions would be forthcoming, almost as soon as Hitler gained the chancellorship.

Hitler, Bormann, Göring and Baldur von Schirach in Obersalzberg, 1936 (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

To help solve the Nazi Party’s financial plight and increase his grip on power, Hitler invited over 20 industrialists to attend a conference, on 20 February 1933, held at the official residence in Berlin of Hermann Göring. He was Hitler’s second-in-command, a morphine addict and President of the Reichstag. Among those who turned up at the meeting were well known individuals like Gustav Krupp (owner of the Krupp steel company); Fritz von Opel (Opel AG board member, grandson of founder Adam Opel); Georg von Schnitzler (IG Farben board member); Hjalmar Schacht (reinstated as Reichsbank president by Hitler in March 1933); and Albert Vögler (politician and businessman, centrally involved in arming the Wehrmacht).

Addressing the industrialists at length Hitler informed them, in a nutshell, that the choice now in Germany was between his rule – which respects the rights of private property and business – or that of communism, which he insisted would do the opposite and must be destroyed.

Highly impressed with Hitler’s speech, on behalf of the industrialists, Krupp expressed to the Nazi leader their “gratitude for having given us such a clear picture of his ideas”. Göring then informed Krupp and colleagues that the Nazi Party urgently required funds, to enable them to campaign sufficiently for the critical 5 March 1933 elections. The businessmen dispensed immediately with two million Reichsmarks (equivalent to about nine million Euro today). The notorious chemical corporation IG Farben, who we will come to later, provided the largest contribution to the Nazi Party at this meeting, giving 400,000 Reichsmarks. Further cash would be granted to the Nazis in coming days from German industry; while political opposition groups, such as the communists, were terrorised and intimidated by brown-shirted mobs.

The American historian Henry Ashby Turner, who has closely but skeptically analysed the links between German big business and the Nazis, acknowledged of the above funding, “These contributions unquestionably aided Hitler significantly” while Germany’s industrialists had always viewed the Weimar Republic “with misgiving”, primarily due to its accommodation of labour power. (4)

Goebbels wrote late in 1936 how Hitler confided to him that he had “wanted to shoot himself” in 1927, on account of having accumulated large debts. Coming to Hitler’s rescue was Emil Kirdorf, one of Germany’s foremost industrialists over the previous half century, who gave him 100,000 Reichsmarks (5). Kirdorf, who held far-right views, donated to the Nazi Party in the late 1920s; as too did another high level German businessman, the aforementioned Albert Vögler, founder of the United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG).

Image below: Prescott Bush

By 1933 the Nazis were receiving funds not merely through German business, but also from investments arriving across the Atlantic. The New York Herald Tribune reported on 31 July 1941 that the Wall Street firm, Union Banking Corporation, which the American banker Prescott Bush was managing, had in 1933 sent $3 million to the Nazi Party. This is indeed the same Prescott Bush who was the father of George H. W. Bush, and grandfather to George W. Bush, both of whom would later become presidents.

Prescott Bush was a founder of the Union Banking Corporation in 1924, along with others like W. Averell Harriman, a wealthy businessman and future US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Up until 1933, the Union Banking Corporation transferred an estimated total of $32 million to “Nazi bigwigs” in Germany, as noted by Moniz Bandeira, a prominent Brazilian historian. (6)

The Union Banking Corporation was closely connected to conglomerates owned by Fritz Thyssen, a German steel magnate and Nazi Party member since 1931, whose factories were an essential component of Hitler’s war industry. Thyssen supplied funds to the Nazis, both prior to and after their taking power. This money helped corrupt politicians like Göring to pursue luxurious lifestyles. Some of Thyssen’s cash funnelled to the Nazi Party went through “an account with a Dutch bank, which was interlocked with a Wall Street outfit called the Union Banking Corporation”. (7) (Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 198)

Prescott Bush, a director and shareholder in the Union Banking Corporation and other Nazi-linked businesses, such as the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), had “played a central role in Hitler’s financing and armament”, according to two American historians who co-wrote a biography on George H. W. Bush, Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin.

Image on the right: Fritz Thyssen (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

This is pertaining mostly to Prescott Bush’s connections to Thyssen, who had amassed great wealth through Hitler’s rearmament policies. Even after Hitler declared war on America in late 1941, and information began to leak out regarding Nazi crimes, Prescott Bush continued to work for firms like the Union Banking Corporation. A Guardian newspaper account outlined that he “profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power” (8). Union Banking Corporation’s assets were seized by the US government on 20 October 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917.

For his share in the Union Banking Corporation, Prescott Bush received $1.5 million, equivalent to over $20 million today (9). Likewise having shares in this bank was E. Ronald Harriman, a US financier and younger brother of W. Averell Harriman, along with a couple of Nazi Party members (10). Moniz Bandeira wrote that the money earned by Prescott Bush here “allowed his son, George H. W. Bush, to set up the firms Bush-Obervey Oil Development Co., and Zapata Petroleum, later called Harbinger Group Inc., bringing together several companies to explore oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Cuba”.

Prescott Bush was also a director at the previously mentioned CSSC, a company which exploited resource rich Silesia in the Third Reich for the benefit of Hitler’s war machine. The CSSC used slave labour in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Another firm that Prescott Bush worked for, the New York-based Brown Brothers Harriman, served as a US business platform for the ubiquitous Thyssen. The founding partners of Brown Brothers Harriman included the two Harriman brothers and Prescott Bush. Both firms, the Union Banking Corporation and Brown Brothers Harriman, had during the 1930s according to the Guardian “bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war”.

Some of America’s largest corporations had investments in Germany by the early 1930s, such as DuPont, General Electric, Gilette, Coca-Cola and Eastman Kodak. In the years ahead, many of these companies’ profits would grow substantially.

For example a Kodak branch in neutral Switzerland was, through 1942 and 1943, buying photographic equipment from Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied France and also Hungary, allied to the Third Reich. America’s embassy in London described these dealings by Kodak as “fairly substantial purchases from enemy territory”. A separate Kodak branch in fascist Spain was purchasing goods from the Reich, such as in early 1942. The latter deal was defended by William Beaulac, the US chargé d’affaires in Madrid. (11)

Wall Street, the financial heartbeat of America, had looked on with some concern at the rise of communism. Its bankers instead viewed fascism overall rather favourably as avant-garde (12). When it became clear that Hitler was favourable to the status quo, while he wiped out labour influence, some Catholic, evangelical and even Jewish bankers connected to Wall Street engaged in business with the Nazis. They granted the Hitler regime about $7 billion in credit during the 1930s, as revealed in 1943 by George Seldes, a US investigative journalist. (13)

The historian Gaetano Salvemini, compelled to leave Mussolini’s Italy because of death threats, later said “almost 100% of American big business” was sympathetic towards Mussolini and Hitler’s dictatorships; because of their lucrative armament programs and destruction of labour.

One of the hallmarks of state capitalism is generating money through the business of war, as seen through the decades, with Western governments providing billions worth of weaponry to autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and elsewhere.

The Nazis’ repressive policies enabled many companies linked to the Reich, such as Ford, to reduce their labour costs, from 15% of business volume in 1933 to just 11% in 1938. While Ford more than doubled their profits in Germany by 1939, they were also benefiting through a subsidiary in Nazi-occupied France, by posting earnings there of 58 million francs in 1941 alone. For this it received warm praise from Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company and son of founder Henry Ford.

By 1942 of the Wehrmacht’s 350,000 trucks in the field, around 120,000 of them were built by Ford factories in Germany (14). The General Motors-owned Opel plant in Rüsselsheim, western Germany, produced all-wheel-drive trucks for the Wehrmacht, which were most useful on the mud-soaked Eastern front and in the North African deserts.

On 13 December 1941, six days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, president Roosevelt issued a secret decree. He thereby granted special authorisation, so that certain US corporations could continue their business ventures with enemy nations, and with neutral countries on good terms with hostile states (15). This was a violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act; but Roosevelt, reliant on many of the same corporations in the prosecuting of war against Japan and Germany, was careful to appease big business. The American public had little idea of course that famous American companies, like Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, and others were doing deals with the enemy.

The US manufacturing firm ITT – already involved through a German subsidiary (C. Lorenz AG) in producing Luftwaffe military aircraft with Focke-Wulf – was furthermore supplying high quality communications equipment to the Nazis, in conjunction with IBM, a US technology corporation. This had assisted in the synchronised Blitzkrieg warfare decisive to the Germans quickly defeating Poland, France, the Low Countries, and capturing parts of the western USSR. (16)

In late June 1940, Germany’s easy victory over France was celebrated by some US business leaders at dinners and parties held in New York, such as at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Among those attending were the ITT founder and CEO, Sosthenes Behn, who had met Hitler in August 1933, James D. Mooney, a senior General Motors executive who saw Hitler on separate occasions, and Edsel Ford.

For their services to the Reich, Hitler lavished awards on Americans like Mooney and Henry Ford. At the beginning of Hitler’s rule US bankers flew to Nazi Germany, such as Winthrop Aldrich, chairman of Wall Street’s Chase National Bank. Aldrich met Hitler in the autumn of 1933, as too did Henry Mann of the National City Bank. Aldrich and Mann subsequently told William Dodd, the US Ambassador to Nazi Germany, that they were willing to “work with him [Hitler]”.

In August 1934 the US media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who owned dozens of newspapers and magazines, visited Berlin to see Hitler. On returning home, Hearst described the dictator as “certainly an extraordinary man” and he wrote about Nazi Germany’s “great policy” and “great achievement” of saving Germany from communism.

During the late 1930s, the Ford Motor Company was shipping mineral resources to Nazi Germany, sometimes through its subsidiaries in third countries. At the start of 1937 for instance, Ford sent almost two million pounds of rubber and 130,000 pounds of copper to the Nazi regime (17). Ford retained a more than 50% share in their subsidiary in Cologne, Ford-Werke, following the December 1941 German announcement of hostilities against America.

Douglas Miller, America’s acting commercial attaché in Berlin, had predicted in 1935 that by 1937 the Nazis would be producing enough oil and gas out of soft coal “for a long war”. Miller revealed that the Standard Oil Company of New York was collaborating in these ventures by “furnishing millions of dollars to help”. (18)

Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio, 1897 (Public Domain)

Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller family, had sent $2 million to the Nazis as early as December 1933 – of which Ambassador Dodd in Berlin informed president Roosevelt during October 1936. Dodd also wrote to Roosevelt that Standard Oil “has made $500,000 a year in helping the Germans make ersatz gas for war purposes”. Standard Oil, along with other major US firms like DuPont, was working with IG Farben, the German chemical corporation. IG Farben was firmly incriminated in slave labour and the Holocaust, having provided the Nazis with the infamous poison gas Zyklon B, used to kill more than one million people at Auschwitz.

No less than 53 American companies had connections to IG Farben alone (19). At the Nuremberg trials, US judge Paul M. Hebert called IG Farben “one of Hitler’s greatest assets”.

From the mid-1930s, the Nazis had been hoarding imported oil in preparation for war – and considerable amounts of this vital resource was supplied to Hitler by American corporations, such as Standard Oil of New Jersey and Texaco, the latter company headquartered in Beaumont, Texas. Under Texaco’s pro-Nazi chairman Torkild Rieber, a Norwegian-American who was friends with Göring, the company made significant profits in granting oil to the Nazis.

After the start of European hostilities in September 1939, both Standard Oil and Texaco were supplying Nazi Germany with diesel fuel, lubricating oil and other petroleum substances (20). The Standard Oil and Texaco shipments to Germany came via ports in General Franco’s Spain. Through 1940 and 1941, American oil deliveries to Germany increased further, large amounts of which were sent into the Reich through US subsidiaries in neutral European countries. The Texaco chairman Rieber had illegally dispatched shipments of oil to Spain’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, a factor in Franco’s eventual victory.

Image below: A Luftwaffe Ford V3000 truck, Italy, 1943 (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Ford and General Motors’ German subsidiaries, which together controlled 70% of the car market in Nazi Germany by 1939, were shifted increasingly towards producing military hardware. After all, even greater profits can be accrued from building the endless weapons of war. Ford and GM subsidiaries in the Reich built almost 90% of the Wehrmacht’s armoured “mule” three ton half-tracks, along with over 70% of Hitler’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. US intelligence reports highlighted this and stated that these vehicles served as “the backbone of the German Army transportation system”. (21)

The Belgian-born historian Jacques R. Pauwels wrote, “Many of Hitler’s wheels and wings were produced in the German subsidiaries of GM and Ford” and that “At one point, GM and Ford together reportedly accounted for no less than half of Germany’s entire production of tanks”.

The German Navy was supplied with some shipments of fuel by William Rhodes Davis, a Texan oil financier. In collaboration with US entrepreneur Fred Koch, father of future billionaires Charles and David Koch, Davis helped to build an oil refinery in Hamburg during the early stages of Hitler’s rule. This oil refinery became the third largest in the Reich, which refined high-octane oil for Luftwaffe warplanes. (22)

The American diplomat Dodd, who stepped down from his ambassadorship to Nazi Germany in December 1937, told the media the following month that US industrialists are “working closely with the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity, in my post in Berlin, to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime”. (23)

In 1942 Standard Oil, through an independent headquarters in Switzerland, asked for authorisation to continue selling oil to Germany; on this occasion, from fields that Standard was exploiting in Romania, a country closely allied to Hitler under its dictator Ion Antonescu. Again in 1942 a Standard Oil subsidiary, the West India Oil Company – which was established to exploit raw materials in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean – sent oil to the Reich through a firm located in Buenos Aires, called the Cia Argentina Comercial de Pesquería (24). A number of banking houses in Wall Street profited from doing business with the Nazis, such as the Bank of America (Forbes), Morgan Bank, Read & Co., and Chase Manhattan Bank.

Also pursuing business deals with the Reich were General Electric and the Dow Chemical Company. Dow Chemical, with its main headquarters in Michigan, conducted business with IG Farben, which was strongly supporting German rearmament. In 1934 and 1935, Dow Chemical delivered to IG Farben almost nine million pounds of magnesium, a substance used in airplane manufacturing, incendiary bombs and ammunition. IG Farben was granted this magnesium at a 30% lower cost, in comparison to Dow Chemical prices generally sold to American customers. (25)

During the war years, other US corporations were conducting covert business operations with the Nazis: such as Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks and Firestone Tires, which had subsidiaries in neutral nations like Sweden and Switzerland. Many of their products, once completed in those countries, was sent to the Reich (26). After the Nazis became an official enemy of America from December 1941, General Motors and Ford among others continued dealing with Hitler. This was mainly through their German subsidiaries in Rüsselsheim or Brandenburg. General Motors’ Opel subsidiary in Brandenburg produced Junkers Ju-88 fighter aircraft, land mines, trucks and torpedo detonators for the German armed forces. By 1944 General Motors was still importing goods into Nazi Germany from another subsidiary based in Sweden. (27)

The US companies Chase National Bank, and National City Bank, developed ties with the Nazi-linked Bank for International Settlements (Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich). The latter bank, located in Basel, Switzerland, was involved in the transfer of gold that the Nazis had stolen from Jewish populations in Europe. The gold was melted down and marked with a date preceding World War II, in order to obscure its origins and be used freely by senior Nazis.

Between 1940 and 1946, the Bank für Internationalen president was Thomas H. McKittrick, a Harvard-educated American banker. In this position McKittrick became a Nazi stooge, as the Bank für Internationalen mediated business with the Axis countries; while it was effectively controlled by Nazi officials like Emil Puhl, vice-president of Germany’s Reichsbank and Walther Funk, the German Minister for Economic Affairs. Funk was later sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg.

McKittrick was a friend of Allen Dulles, a US intelligence officer and future CIA director, whom he met in Switzerland where Dulles was stationed during the war. Dulles, also a corporate lawyer, previously met Hitler and Mussolini when acting as a legal adviser at the League of Nations.

After a business trip to Germany in 1935, Dulles was reportedly disturbed at the treatment of Jews (28). Allen, with his brother John Foster Dulles, were partners of Sullivan & Cromwell, a New York law firm which established a separate office in Berlin by 1928, but which closed in 1935. The Dulles brothers established contacts with various elites in Germany, including some Nazis (29). From 1933 onwards, Standard Oil and IG Farben were producing significant quantities of oil, gasoline and synthetic rubber for the Nazis from bituminous coal, through a hydrogenation process.

The furnishing of these important natural resources to the Nazi war machine, performed a role in enabling Hitler to swiftly defeat Poland; by his sending 5,000 gas and oil-guzzling panzers and Luftwaffe bombers across Polish territory. At the Nuremberg trials, Judge Hebert said that the German ability to continually produce synthetic rubber, of which Standard Oil and IG Farben were involved in, “made it possible for the Reich to carry on the war independently of foreign supplies”. (30)

Another crucial synthetic material, tetraethyl lead, assisted greatly in the high speed performance of Luftwaffe fighter aircraft. Tetraethyl lead was provided to the Germans in 1935 by a US fuel additive company, Ethyl Gmbh, a daughter firm of Standard Oil and General Motors and connected also to IG Farben. Tetraethyl lead was a key component concerning the whole concept of Blitzkrieg warfare. More than 30 years after the war Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister from February 1942, said that without different types of synthetic fuel supplied by American companies Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland”. (31)

In early 1938, Standard Oil presented IG Farben with the complete technical details for the creation of butyl rubber – a superior type of synthetic rubber, made from petroleum, and that was used in tyre construction for Wehrmacht vehicles like trucks. Germany is a resource poor country, so the collaboration with US business was clearly important to the Nazi regime. By 1940 the Germans possessed 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber, increasing to 70,000 tons by 1941 as they attacked the Soviet Union.

General Motors’ fully-owned German subsidiary, Opel AG, controlled 50% of the automobile market in the Reich by 1935, making it the largest car manufacturer there. Along with Ford, Opel became one of Nazi Germany’s largest panzer producers (32). General Motors chairman Alfred P. Sloan, an American industralist, acknowledged by 1942 – with the US and Nazi Germany now at war – that GM’s entire investment with Opel “amounted to about $35 million” (today equivalent to over $550 million). In December 1941, at the time of the Pearl Harbour attack, Standard Oil had invested $120 million in the Reich (over $2 billion today).

American companies like Pratt & Whitney and Bendix Aviation, the latter of which General Motors had a controlling stock interest in, were selling military patents to German corporations embedded in war production, such as BMW and Siemens. This came to light through a 1940 US Senate investigation. That same year, in return for royalties, Bendix Aviation provided full data regarding aircraft and diesel engine starters to Bosch, a German technology company centrally involved in Nazi armaments production. Bendix had to bypass the British blockade of Germany to push through with the deal. (33)

Japanese professor of business history, Yuji Nishimuta, who has analysed US industrial ties to the Nazis, wrote that, “The German subsidiaries of American corporations formed an important, even essential element, in the so-called ‘miracle of the German economy’” from the period 1933 to 1939. During the months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, US dealings in Nazi Germany “did not change”, according to Nishimuta, as “big American business conducted, as it were, ‘joint business operations’ with the Nazi government through their German subsidiaries” (34). Problems in the relationship only surfaced following Hitler’s declaration of war on 11 December 1941, but even then, as discussed, various US business operations continued.

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Notes

1 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed. 2019 edition, 4 Feb. 2019) p. 19

2 Ibid.

3 Trials of War Criminals Before The Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Under Control Council Law No. 10, Volume VII, October 1946-April 1949, p. 16

4 Henry Ashby Turner Jr., Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Jstor, Oct. 1969, page 13 & 14 of 15

5 Peter Ross Range, The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power (Little, Brown and Company, 11 Aug. 2020) Chapter 16, Impending Catastrophe

6 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 15

7 Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Pluto Press; Illustrated edition, 20 May 2005) p. 198

8 Ben Aris, Duncan Campbell, “How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power”, The Guardian, 25 September 2004

9 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 16

10 John Simkin, “Prescott Bush”, Spartacus International, September 1997 (Updated January 2020)

11 John S. Friedman, “Kodak’s Nazi Connections”, The Nation, 8 March 2001

12 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 16

13 Ibid.

14 Yuji Nishimuta, Nazi Economy and U.S. Big Businesses – The Case of Ford Motor Co., Jstor, October 1995, p. 8 of 14

15 Jacques R. Pauwels, “Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler”, Global Research, 7 June 2019

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 18

19 Gabriel Kolko, American Business and Germany, 1930-1941, Jstor, Dec. 1962, page 7 of 16

20 Pauwels, Global Research, 7 June 2019

21 The Industrialization Reorganization Act: Hearings Before The Subcommittee On Antitrust And Monopoly, Of The Committee On The Judiciary United States Senate, 93rd Congress, Second Session, p. 22

22 National Public Radio, “Hidden History of Koch Brothers Traces Their Childhood And Political Rise”, 19 January 2016

23 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 19

24 Ibid, p. 18

25 Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Diary of Democracy: The Senate War Investigating Committee (Richard R. Smith; 1st edition, 1 Jan. 1947) p. 94

26 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 20

27 Ibid.

28 John Simkin, “Allen Dulles”, Spartacus International, September 1997 (Updated January 2020)

29 Pauwels, Global Research, 7 June 2019

30 Kolko, American Business and Germany, 1930-1941, p. 10

31 Pauwels, Global Research, 7 June 2019

32 Kolko, American Business and Germany, 1930-1941, p. 13

33 Ibid., p. 14

34 Yuji Nishimuta, Nazi Economy and U.S. Big Businesses, The Case of General Motors Corporation, Jstor, April/October 1996, p. 17 of 17

Initially published on Valentine’s Day 2010.

Veteran War Correspondent and Associate Editor of Global Research Felicity Arbuthnot reminds us of the crimes against humanity committed against the Iraqi people at the height of Iraq War I, euphemistically described as The Gulf War. It happened on Valentine’s Day. Forty-three years of killings and destruction.

Iraq War I was followed by Iraq War II (March 2003) and Iraq War III (2014), which was casually presented to public opinion as a bona fide “counter-terrorism campaign” launched by president Obama in 2014 against ISIL-ISIS-Daesh, an Al Qaeda affiliate which happens to be supported by the CIA.

The extensive bombing campaign ordered by Nobel Peace Laureate Obama was portrayed by the media as a humanitarian endeavour on behalf of the people of Iraq and Syria. 

“I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven”

What next? Joe Biden

Michel Chossudovsky, February 13, 2021

***

Thirty-three years ago, on the night of 13th/14th February 1991, the Ameriya Shelter, on Baghdad’s outskirts, was deliberately targeted by US missiles, in a war crime which near excelled the litany of criminal acts in the onslaught which then Secretary of State, James Baker, promised would: “reduce Baghdad to a pre-industrial age.”

My memories of Ameriya have been left in their immediacy, rather than again updated. (See below.)

On 13th/14th February this year [2010], the US is still extinguishing Iraqis, detaining without trial (and almost certainly worse) in the name of “nation building” (read: nation erasing) after near seven years of murderous occupation. In the other country the US and UK are systematically destroying, Afghanistan, on precisely the anniversary of the Shelter bombing, they have launched another St Valentine’s Eve and Day massacre. It is also another equally infamous anniversary: that of the fire bombing of Dresden.

“Operation Moshtarak”, in Helmand Province, the biggest “surge” since the numerous other biggest surges since 2001, in this graveyard of Empires and Afghans, is set to create Ameriya’s incendiary tragedy throughout the towns and villages of the region.

The US military is to “clear” (read kill) “suspected Taliban” (their trained and paid allies when the USSR invaded) from the region. Rule of law shredded, “suspects” are no longer tried, simply summarily executed. Over the years, a surprising number of “suspects” have still been in diapers. Quite a few have also been in wedding dresses.

The US military, of course, reverted to their old habit to “avoid civilian casualties.” They dropped leaflets telling the locals to leave to avoid casualties. According to UNICEF, just 28% of the population is literate,  far less in rural areas. In the frozen wastes of a February Afghan winter, where are they to go?  (In 1991, the US dropped several tonnes of leaflets with the same warning to the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Illiterate but not stupid, they sold this bounty to the government, unable to import paper under the embargo.)

In 1750, Ahmad Shah’s army, is said to have lost eighteen thousand men in Afghanistan from cold, in a single night in February, the most Siberian month, where the temperature falls to an average low of -8 C., and the eastern reaches of the Hari river can freeze so hard that people travel it as a road.

“This is not going to be a Falluja” said Major General Nick Carter, “that’s not the model.” Oh good. “Moshtarak” means “together”, in the Dari language. At least it’s not the Wild West “Panther’s Claw” mark two, title of the last absolutely “final surge.”

In more quaint army-speak, General Carter refers to “inserting” the fifteen thousand testosterone-driven troops, backed by bombs, bullets, possibly the odd bit of white phosphorous and other aids to “pacification” and “bringing the government in behind us.” One could almost think it was a raunchy Friday night on the town, rather than a killing spree.

The troops refer to this “insertion” as: “lawn mowing.” What is it about blood baths and gardening euphemisms? Remember those military human shredding machines,”daisy cutters”?

So as Ameriyah is commemorated in the hearts of Iraqis, a day which is as yesterday for all Baghdadis, keep the Afghan people also in your hearts, in their terror, this Dresden replicating Valentine’s Day.

In her new book, to be launched on Wednesday 17th February, Iraqi writer and activist Haifa Zangana comments of  Iraq:

“We wanted to put an end to this but we failed. The war and occupation in 2003, apart from shattering Iraq as a country and a people, has brought about many more imprisonments, many more deaths.

Abu Ghraib is only one of many symbols. In occupied Iraq, torture became an instrument of humiliation and of a way to force a nation into submission. As we resist occupation now, our message is clear: We did not struggle for decades to replace one torturer with another.”(1)

An eloquent encapsulation for those in both occupied, invaded, terrorised, defiled lands.

A last word on the Ameriya Shelter comes from Dahr Jamail:

“I learned that the Amiriyah Bomb Shelter has been closed by the Americans, due to the fact that an Islamic Fundamentalist group was keeping it open. I am glad I went when I did a couple of weeks ago, for when monuments/schools/buildings are closed and/or occupied by the Americans here, they have a tendency not to reopen.” (2)

This uniquely poignant shrine, marking an unimaginable end, is now designated: an “Islamic Fundamentalist” site, by Iraq’s liberators, the new Crusaders.

Notes

(1)Haifa Zangana: “Dreaming of Baghdad.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreaming-Baghdad-Women-Writing-Middle/dp/1558616055

(2) http://www.esterrepublic.com/Archives/djamail1.html

 http://www.uruknet.info?p=30603    Ameriya 14th Feb 2007.

Felicity Arbuthnot

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest.

What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.   

Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.  

Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’. 

According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.   

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.   

In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.  

Shift to Authoritarianism 

The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.  

In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.  

This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.  

Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes.

But they also serve another purpose: social control.  

Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.  

To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.   

The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.  

At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.  

The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet. 

Net-zero Agenda 

But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary? 

Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.   

Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade. 

But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.  

He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns: 

“The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.” 

All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.  

Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.  

Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible. 

It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.   

Here’s a quote from it:   

“Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.” 

Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.  

However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new. 

The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.  

Fake Green 

The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.  

It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity. 

Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.  

It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.  

Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.   

The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.  

In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.  

It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds. 

That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.  

For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access the author’s two free e-books on the food system here and here.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image: Original image by Birch Gold Group staff

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Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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Medical errors are a significant global issue, with the World Health Organization estimating they cause 2.6 million deaths annually worldwide. In the U.S., this number could be as high as 440,000, making it the third leading cause of death

10% of all deaths in the U.S. are attributable to some kind of medical error, and it continues to be a leading cause of death today, ranking somewhere between third and first place, depending on the scope of medical mistakes you include in the equation

The documentary “Medical Errors: Why Doctors Make Mistakes” underscored a crucial issue in the medical community: the reluctance to openly discuss mistakes, which can hinder learning and improvement, contributing to ongoing errors

A mix of inexperience, fatigue and diagnostic challenges contributes significantly to medical errors, complicating the efforts to reduce these mistakes

To minimize your risk of harm from medical errors, consider creating a “Caregivers and Consent” document that spells out what your doctor may or may not do to you while you’re hospitalized. Also be sure to always bring family member or friend who can act as your advocate and keep track of what’s being done to you

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The documentary above, “Medical Errors: Why Doctors Make Mistakes,” explores the causes behind medical errors, which according to the World Health Organization claim 2.6 million deaths each year, worldwide, with at least 250,000 of those in the U.S.¹

In July 2022, the National Institutes of Health updated their library on medical errors, saying that number could be as high as 440,000 — and possibly even higher due to poor reporting — making it the third leading cause of death in the U.S.²

A Historical Look at Statistical Data on Medical Errors

In July 2010, Dr. Barbara Starfield published an article in JAMA titled “Is U.S. Health Really the Best in the World?”³ Buried in the tables of that article were data showing that physicians were the third leading cause of death in the United States. I created that headline 24 years ago and it has been a meme ever since.

For over 15 years, when you typed in “doctors are the third leading cause of death,” my article from 2000 came up first. Of course, those days are now long gone, since Google began censoring me from its search engine eight years ago. Sadly, the claim that “doctors are the third leading cause of death” remains true to this day. 

One of the first indications that medical errors were a significant problem emerged in 1989, when professor Lucian Leape from the Harvard Medical School — a pioneer in patient safety who is featured in the documentary — published a study on medical errors. (He also published the book “Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement”⁴ in 2021, which you can read and download for free here.)

Leape analyzed 30,000 medical records from 50 New York hospitals, concluding that nearly 4% had suffered an injury caused by treatment, and of those, two-thirds “were caused by an error in care and therefore are potentially preventable,” Leape said.

Extrapolating from that data, Leape estimated that 1.3 million American patients are injured each year due to medical mistakes and 180,000 die — the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every two days. In the UK, according to statistics cited in the documentary, medical mistakes claim the lives of an estimated 40,000 Britons each year.

Properly Prescribed Drugs Are the Fourth Leading Cause of Death

In 1998, another eye-opening study was published. Researchers at the University of Toronto, led by professor Bruce Pomeranz, concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.^5,6

Pomeranz’s analysis was the largest and most complete of its kind at that time. In all, they calculated that somewhere between 76,000 and 137,000 American patients died each year from correctly administered drugs.

Might Doctors Be the No. 1 Cause of Death?

In a 2003 article aptly titled, “Death by Medicine,”⁷ Dr. Carolyn Dean, Gary Null, Ph.D., Dr. Martin Feldman, Dr. Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, Ph.D., described in excruciating detail how the modern conventional American medical system has bumbled its way into becoming the LEADING cause of death and injury in the United States, claiming the lives of nearly 784,000 people annually.

Using those figures, that would put the health care system as the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., bypassing cardiovascular disease. These iatrogenic deaths (meaning deaths resulting from the activity of physicians) include everything from adverse drug reactions and avoidable medical errors to hospital-acquired infections, surgeries gone bad and deaths from unnecessary medical procedures.

The authors took statistics straight from the most respected medical and scientific journals and investigative reports by the IOM, showing that overall, American medicine is causing more harm than good. For clarity, the reason Dean et. al. came up with a much higher number than anyone else, even in later years, is likely because they included a broader range of mistakes.

Medicine Is Still a Leading Cause of Death

In 2010, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine,⁸ and another in the Journal of General Internal Medicine,⁹ revealed just how little things had changed since 2003.

Out of 62 million death certificates dated between 1976 and 2006, nearly 250,000 deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors,¹⁰ and an estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occurred every year.

Three years later, in 2013, a Journal of Patient Safety study^11,12,13,14 concluded preventable medical errors kill anywhere from 210,000 to 440,000 patients a year. In 2016, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts, led by Dr. Martin Makary, calculated that more than 250,000 patients died each year from medical errors — the same death count found by Starfield in 2010.

Then, in 2022, the WHO announced that unsafe care by medical professionals and hospitals result in a “horrifying” 2.6 million deaths annually, worldwide, with at least 250,000 of those deaths occurring in the U.S.¹⁵ And, as mentioned, that summer the NIH stated the death toll might be closer to 440,000, or more.¹⁶

So, medical errors have been the third leading cause of death for years, with 10% of all deaths being attributable to some kind of medical error,^17,18 and it continues to be a leading cause of death today, ranking somewhere between third and first place, depending on the scope of medical mistakes you include in your equation.

Misdiagnosis Rates Are on the Rise

Death isn’t the only outcome of medical mistakes. Permanent disability is another. When permanent disability and death are lumped together, the toll from medical mistakes reaches as high as 795,000 annually in the U.S. alone, according to data published in 2023.¹⁹

Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have described diagnostic errors as “the most under-resourced public health crisis we face.”²⁰ When you visit a doctor, whether you’re at a doctor’s office or hospital, you depend on getting expert care, including a correct diagnosis. But about 11% of the time, medical conditions are misdiagnosed.^21,22

The likelihood of misdiagnosis varies widely, however, depending on the type of medical problem and the symptoms presented. For instance, only about 1.5% of heart attacks are misdiagnosed, compared to 62% of spinal abscesses, a rarer condition.

But even among strokes, a leading cause of disability in the U.S., misdiagnosis occurs more than 17.5% of the time.²³ When a stroke occurs, some patients may experience only dizziness or headaches, which can easily be confused with other conditions. In all, 15 diseases account for 50.7% of the serious harms due to misdiagnosis while just five — stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer — account for 38.7%.²⁴

A 2023 review²⁵ of nearly 300 studies by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality also found that a startling number of patients who visit U.S. emergency rooms get an incorrect diagnosis.

Overall, their research showed about 1 in 18 people who visit an emergency room will be misdiagnosed, 1 in 50 will suffer an adverse event as a result, and 1 in 350 will suffer from permanent disability or death. Out of the 130 million visits to emergency departments (EDs) that occur every year in the U.S., this amounts to 7.4 million misdiagnoses, 2.6 million related adverse events and 370,000 serious harms from diagnostic error. According to the authors:²⁶

“Put in terms of an average ED [emergency department] with 25,000 visits annually and average diagnostic performance, each year this would be over 1,400 diagnostic errors, 500 diagnostic adverse events, and 75 serious harms, including 50 deaths per ED …

The strongest, most consistent predictors of ED diagnostic error were individual case factors that increased the cognitive challenge of identifying the underlying disorder, with nonspecific, mild, transient, or ‘atypical’ symptoms being the most frequent.”

Effort to Reduce Medical Mistakes in the UK

As noted in the documentary, the UK has implemented something called “League tables” in an effort to cut down on medical mistakes. League tables are rankings that compare the performance of National Health Service (NHS) hospitals based on various quality and performance metrics such as patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, waiting times and efficiency measures, among others.

The purpose of these tables is to provide transparency, stimulate improvements in healthcare delivery, and reduce medical mistakes by:

While league tables can drive improvements in healthcare quality and patient outcomes, they are not without criticism. Concerns have been raised about the potential for these rankings to oversimplify complex issues, penalize hospitals serving disadvantaged populations, or encourage gaming of the system. Nevertheless, they remain a key tool in the NHS’s strategy to improve healthcare quality and reduce medical mistakes in England.

How Is the US Tackling Medical Mistakes?

In the U.S., several mechanisms and tools parallel the concept of league tables in England, aiming to improve medical care quality and reduce medical mistakes. These tools include hospital rankings, reporting systems and quality improvement programs, which serve to enhance transparency, promote best practices, and ensure accountability in healthcare.

For example, the U.S. News & World Report Hospital Rankings is a publication that ranks hospitals nationally in various specialties, conditions, and procedures. The rankings are based on several factors, including patient outcomes, patient experience, nurse staffing levels, and expert opinions.

The Leapfrog Group also assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their performance in preventing medical errors, injuries, accidents, and infections. Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grade is intended to help consumers choose the safest hospital for their care.

There are also a variety of quality improvement organization (QIOs) that work with healthcare providers, including hospitals and physicians, to help them improve the care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries, as well as reporting and surveillance systems that track data on things like hospital-acquired infections.

Patient safety organizations also exist, as do clinical practice guidelines intended to help healthcare providers make consistent, evidence-based decisions to reduce variability in care and prevent medical errors. The electronic health records system is also intended to help prevent medication errors, ensure timely follow-ups, and support adherence to clinical guidelines.

Why Do Doctors Make So Many Mistakes?

Yet despite all these tools, the rates of medical mistakes aren’t dropping. According to the film, there are many potential reasons for this, including the taboo among doctors to discuss their mistakes openly.

Junior doctors also make mistakes due to inexperience. As noted in the film, doctors fresh out of medical school are literally “practicing” medicine on their patients, performing procedures they’ve never done before without oversight. Other factors include fatigue, as hospital doctors typically work very long shifts, and the fact that many conditions share symptoms.

In short, diagnosis isn’t necessarily easy, even with advanced medical tests. The same goes for treatment. Even with a correct diagnosis, choosing the best treatment isn’t black-and-white.

Experience comes into play and, I would say, a certain level of intuition, which requires your doctor to have a strong connection to his or her consciousness or Spirit. Unfortunately, that’s rare these days, as solid intuition requires a certain level of biological optimization that few have, even if they’re doctors.

How to Reduce Your Risk of Misdiagnosis

As a patient, taking an active role in your health care may help you receive the best care possible and reduce your risk of getting an incorrect diagnosis. This starts with choosing healthcare providers who listen to your concerns and have a holistic view of health.

Seek a healthcare practitioner who will help you understand the foundational causes of your health challenges, and create a customized and comprehensive — i.e., holistic — treatment plan for you.

What’s more, you can have an impact on your doctor’s tendency to recommend natural alternatives, as when you inquire about them, some do in fact listen. If they don’t, then keep shopping. Further, if something doesn’t sound right about the diagnosis you’re given, ask questions and get a second, or third, opinion if needed.

Remember, your doctor works for you, not the other way around. Ideally, health care should be a partnership, where you work together with your providers to identify the best solutions. Either way, if you’re not satisfied with their know-how or the tools in their toolbox, find another doctor. If you’re hospitalized or in an emergency situation, this is more challenging since you can’t always choose who’s providing your care.

There are many cases when it’s in your best interest to avoid hospitals, particularly for elective procedures or chronic conditions, but if you’re hospitalized due to a life-threatening emergency, be sure to have an advocate with you who can manage your care and act as a power of attorney if necessary.

If you’re seriously ill, it can be very difficult to explain what’s wrong while keeping tabs on what they’re asking you to sign and the medications and treatments they’re giving you, so having someone there who can double-check everything and advocate for you is essential. And no matter where you’re receiving medical care, be sure to explain all symptoms you’re experiencing thoroughly. The more information you provide, theoretically the better the outcome should be.

Create a Caregivers and Consent Document

Last but not least, I strongly recommend creating a “Caregivers and Consent” document, as detailed in “How to Save Your Life and Those You Love When Hospitalized.” A template for this was created by Laura Bartlett and Greta Crawford in response to the abhorrent medical mistreatment experienced by patients during the COVID pandemic.

Bartlett and Crawford have founded an organization to address the lethal and, in many cases, forced treatments patients receive when they’re hospitalized for COVID-19, but the same strategy can be used to protect yourself against other medical hazards as well.

When you enter a hospital, you must sign a general consent authorization form. This is basically a contract between you and the hospital. Since you have bodily autonomy, they need your consent before they can do anything to you.

Typically, the general consent form authorizes hospital staff to test, treat and care for you in whatever way they see fit — and when a patient signs the general consent authorization, physicians feel justified that they can implement a hospital protocol without further explaining the risks, benefits or alternatives of that protocol to the patient.

Now, if you’re well enough to read the entire document, and see something in there that you don’t agree with, you can strike the sentence or paragraph and initial it, to indicate that you do not consent to that specific detail. However, that still doesn’t offer you much protection.

What you need is a much more specific document where you detail the types of treatments you consent to and the ones you don’t.

You need to carve out a niche from the general consent form that specifies exactly what you do (and do not) consent to. And you need to be clear. Fortunately, the Caregivers and Consent document carves out that niche to communicate clearly to all physicians your exact consent wishes. And, they are legally required to respect your written directives.

A template Caregivers and Consent document can be found on OurPatientRights.com. Also be sure to read through “How to Save Your Life and Those You Love When Hospitalized,” as there are specific procedures that must be followed to make the document binding.

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Notes

^1, 15 Ideal Med Health May 6, 2022

^2, 16 NIH. Medical Errors. July 4, 2022

³ Starfield, B. Is US Health Really the Best in the World? JAMA. 2000;284(4):483-485

⁴ Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement (PDF)

⁵ JAMA April 15, 1998; 279(15): 1200-1205

⁶ Washington Post April 15, 1998

⁷ Death by Medicine 2003 (PDF Archived)

⁸ New England Journal of Medicine, November 25, 2010: 363(22); 2124-34

^9, 10 Journal of General Internal Medicine August 2010: 25(8); 774-779

¹¹ Journal of Patient Safety 2013 Sep;9(3):122-8

¹² NPR September 20, 2013

¹³ Northwestern Now November 16, 2016

¹⁴ Ankin Law May 5, 2019

¹⁷ Hopkins Medicine May 3, 2016

¹⁸ Fierce Healthcare May 3, 2016

^19, 22, 24 BMJ Quality & Safety Published Online First: 17 July 2023. doi: 10.1136/bmjqs-2021-014130

^20, 21, 23 USA Today July 18, 2023

^25, 26 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Diagnostic Errors in the Emergency Department August 14, 2023