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The USA in the only country in the world where there are more firearms than people.

46% of all households have a firearm. This is the average. In some places this can be over 60%.

About 48,000 people die in gun-violence in a year, the majority of this being suicide cases.

When seen in the context of comparable rich countries, the US gun homicide rate is about 25 times higher while gun suicide rate is about 10 times higher.

For every victim of shooting who dies, there are more than double the number who go to emergency rooms in hospitals for the treatment of their injuries.

Over the years, the number of those killed or seriously injured in gun violence continues to accumulate. In surveys, one out of five Americans have stated that a family member or someone very close has been fatally shot.

However the harm done by excessive number of firearms goes much beyond the actual shootings. Many people in certain communities say that due to the excessive number of people having or carrying firearms, they live in perpetual fear and their life has become much more stressful than it would otherwise be without so many guns. Even within families the life of several family members is very adversely affected, particularly of women in families with a history of domestic violence. Schools have also come under the shadow of the stress caused by the wide spread of gun violence and gun culture, including most students as well as teachers.

While there is wide concern over the easy availability of guns and bullets, those people and social movements who have been campaigning against such easy and widespread availability of guns have not been successful so far in reducing the presence of guns and the supporters of easy and unhindered gun availability are known to be politically influential and powerful. They are known to often take very aggressive positions.

While there is obvious need to curb gun violence and the wide presence of guns and gun culture, supported by gun movies and other popular media, some other important questions also need to be raised. These relate to why such popular gun culture flourishes, who fuels it and why such a large number of people feel the need to have so many firearms. Unless such broader questions are also examined sincerely, it may not be possible to reduce the demand for guns and the supply of guns.

Of course the industry which feeds on the sales of such huge numbers of guns and bullets on a continuing basis is also likely to acquire a strong interest in such continuing sales and these powerful economic interests may also be fueling popular gun culture and keeping the demand and supply of civilian firearms at a very high level.

However there are also factors beyond this which also need to be considered. The aggression of the US establishment abroad has to be matched by a popular culture of aggression at home as these two trends feed off each other. It appears that maintaining and popularizing aggressive cultures, using Hollywood movies and other devices, is considered desirable by the establishment to create domestic perceptions and thinking that are supportive towards external aggression. 

The military industrial establishment, which has emerged as a powerful force, is also fine with the continuation of external as well as internal aggression, both being supportive of each other.

Hence while gun control efforts and campaigns are obviously justified and deserve the support of people, these may not be able to progress much on their own, unless they become part of wider peace campaigns which seek to check internal as well as external aggressive trends of the USA. Such a broader peace movement can also be helpful in checking some other important social problems of the USA as well, while also contributing to world peace.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Man over Machine. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Iranian people voted for him because they wanted a “reformist” who’d gradually change their country’s domestic and foreign policies, knowing that nothing radical can be expected due to the strict system of checks and balances that’s in place to prevent this.

Iranian President-Elect Masoud Pezeshkian, who won the snap elections that were called after former President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a tragic helicopter crash in mid-May, published a refreshing foreign policy vision at the Tehran Times on Friday titled “My message to the new world”. The reason why it’s described as refreshing is because it moves beyond the zero-sum thinking that the Mainstream Media (MSM) and many folks from the Alt-Media Community (AMC) nowadays espouse.

Both media camps largely believe that the world is divided into the West and the non-West, with the US leading the first and China the second, and they’re both supposedly predestined to clash. Each recoils whenever one of their own cooperates with their side’s perceived rival. The MSM was apoplectic that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Moscow as part of his peace mission earlier this month while the AMC reacted similarly when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited DC last summer.

Iran has hitherto been considered by many in the MSM and the AMC alike to be one of those zero-sum countries considering its regional role in the global systemic transition to multipolarity and the opprobrium that this has provoked from the West in response. Such a perception was just shattered by Pezeshkian, however, who declared in his article that he’s prepared to improve ties with his country’s adversaries so long as they treat it with respect and allow it to preserve its dignity in all ways.

In his words, “we will welcome sincere efforts to alleviate tensions and will reciprocate good-faith with good-faith”, beginning with Iran’s home region and then spreading outwards. In connection with that, he called for expanding relations with Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates; doing the same with respect to Russia and China; and then trying to find a way forward with the West. His goal is to create stable international conditions for peace and development.

Pezeshkian is associated with the “reformist” school of policymakers who advocate gradual changes in Iranian policy at home and abroad, while their “friendly rivals” are the “principalists” who believe that that reforms might corrupt the country and could ultimately lead to a pro-US regime change. Regardless of whatever one’s views are about these two, the fact of the matter is that they’re each patriots in their own way, and there’s no way that the Iranian system would ever allow a “traitor” to rise to power.

This clarification is required to dispel the false perceptions among some in the AMC who assumed that Pezeshkian’s critiques of various policies were proof of him being a “Trojan Horse”. Iran’s post-1979 system is chock-full of checks and balances which prevent any such figure from ruining the country. Nothing of significance can be done without the approval of the Supreme Leader, who acts as the leading bulwark against radical policies, though they’re also backed up by the IRGC and other groups.

The point is that Pezeshkian’s interest in exploring a rapprochement with the West doesn’t make him a “sell-out” to the multipolar cause. China is in a relationship of complex economic interdependence with those countries despite being one of the world’s most powerful multipolar engines, while India proudly multi–aligns between the West and the non-West, the pragmatic approach of which Pezeshkian apparently wants to emulate. There’s nothing wrong with either and they both deserve praise.

In fact, it’s far more common for non-Western countries to balance between their side and the West than it is for them to not have any significant ties with the West, so Iran, Russia, North Korea, and a few others are the exception, not the rule. The only reason why they don’t have a similar level of ties with the West as their peers do is because the West sanctioned them for their foreign policy, thus being the ones who decided that they didn’t want cordial relations, not Iran and company.  

To be sure, the West oftentimes exploits these selfsame relations by gradually making them lopsided in its support and thus creating disproportionate dependence on its markets, investments, arms, etc., but it’s possible to avoid such a trap if non-Western leaders are careful. Pezeshkian is confident that Iran can thwart the hybrid threats connected with resuming trade with the West in the scenario that some of those countries are interested, but to be honest, it’s unlikely that his outreaches will be reciprocated.

While the MSM and AMC are almost equally influenced by zero-sum thinking, it’s only the West as a whole that actually formulates policy according to this paradigm, not non-Western countries. This is evidenced by the former’s comprehensive pressure campaigns against Russia, Iran, and North Korea, while the latter proved its strategic autonomy by not cutting off ties with those three in solidarity with the West nor cutting off ties with the West out of solidarity with those three.

It’s therefore natural that the MSM is caught in zero-sum thinking, but those in the AMC who have such views are mostly ideologically driven activists who are so committed to the cause that they subconsciously behave as though they’re “more multipolar than the top multipolar countries”. No value judgement is being implied here, it’s just a reflection of reality to help readers understand why many in the AMC promote views that are at variance with most of the non-West’s who they claim to represent.

This is crucial to keep in mind when reflecting on some of the dire predictions that were made about Pezeshkian before his election and in assessing the intentions behind his newly articulated foreign policy. The Iranian people voted for him because they wanted a “reformist” who’d gradually change their country’s domestic and foreign policies, knowing that nothing radical can be expected due to the strict system of checks and balances that’s in place to prevent this.

In the event that the West rejects his outreaches as is expected, then Iran will simply continue along the foreign policy course that Raisi charted for it, in which case nothing will change. On the off chance that at least some of them positively respond to his appeal, then the most that might happen is a boost in bilateral trade and a reduction in tensions. Nothing dramatic will likely happen either way, but at least Pezeshkian is trying to promote peace despite the odds, which speaks to his personal integrity.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, 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.

Featured image is from the author

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I’ve seen a few Substack posts from authors who claim that the assassination attempt was staged in order to garner sympathy for Trump. One author asserted that there is a lack of visible blood on Trump’s right hand immediately after he touches his right ear immediately after the shots ring out, and that this lack of blood visible (in a millisecond of video) on his right hand at this instant is proof that his ear was not actually wounded.

Another Substack author boldly proclaimed that the direction of blood flow down Trump’s face indicates that the apparent blood flow was staged.

As one who has a written a book about staged suicides for which I consulted top bloodstain pattern analysts, I can confidently state that both of these authors are making the wildest of assumptions.

A high-velocity bullet that superficially grazes the outer ear will NOT necessarily produce a wound that bleeds instantly. In Trump’s case, it appears that the wound only started to bleed with sufficient volume to run down his face AFTER he was placed in a kneeling position by Secret Service. It is perfectly plausible that the wound only started to bleed in this manner after he was placed in this position. I have personally suffered multiple wounds that only began to bleed with notable volume after a few seconds.

Note that the direction of flow in this photograph is consistent with his head being held approximately in this position for several seconds.

Copyright Getty Images

In order to make a persuasive case that the assassination attempt was staged, the Substack commentators would have to explain away the following:

1) Multiple, credible witnesses stated independently that they saw the shooter on the roof, firing a rifle towards Donald Trump.

2) Video recordings of a young man on the roof in the prone position, aiming a rifle at Trump at same time that multiple shots can be heard coming from the direction of the roof.

3) The death of Cory Comperatore, whose fatal gunshot wound to the head was observed by multiple witnesses, including an ER doctor in the audience who tried to resuscitate him.

If the young man on the roof was—as some commentators have suggested—merely firing blanks—and Donald Trump crushed a theatrical blood capsule onto his ear while he was in a kneeling position—these commentators must present a persuasive explanation of what killed Cory Comperatore and—according to reports—wounded David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania. Both are purportedly being treated at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

I wonder if those who propose the staging theory could present evidence that Cory Comperatore was not fatally shot in the head—and that David Dutch and James Copenhaver were not severely wounded—in the same fusillade.

If—as some commentators have suggested, Comperatore, Dutch, and Copenhaver were sacrificial victims to make the staging seem real, I wonder if these commentators can present evidence to support their theory?

In our strange era in which we are contending with the Matrix, it is important to remember that there are good conspiracy theories and bad conspiracy theories. Good conspiracy theories are supported by evidence that stands up to critical scrutiny.

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Featured image is by Evan Vucci / Licensed under Fair Use

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In a highly controversial decision, the Supreme Court on June 28 reversed a 40-year old ruling, reclaiming the Court’s role as interpreter of statutory law as it applies to a massive body of regulations imposed by federal agencies in such areas as the environment, workplace safety, public health and more. 

The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority overturned a 1984 ruling, also issued by that Court’s conservative majority, that granted authority to a federal agency if a Congressional statute involving that agency was ambiguous or incomplete. It left the interpretation of the law to the agency rather than the courts. 

This principle blocked individuals and businesses from suing agencies in court for damages incurred when the agencies exceeded their Congressional mandates. 

“Chevron deference,” the name given the 1984 decision due to the litigation involving that company, has been grounds for upholding thousands of regulations by a host of federal agencies over the last four decades. Opinions by commentators on its reversal range from “an epic disaster, … one of the worst Supreme Court rulings … another huge gift to special interests and corporations,” to “a victory for the common man” and “an important win for accountability and predictability at a time when agencies are unleashing a tsunami of regulation — in many cases clearly exceeding their statutory authority ….” 

On July 10, Reuters reported that House Republicans had asked all federal agencies to begin reviews of regulations that could be affected by the recent ruling, noting:

Three House committees — Agriculture, Oversight, and Education and Workforce — targeted agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor in what the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, called a “fight to free the American people from the power-​hungry administrative state.”

The “administrative state” had modest beginnings during George Washington’s presidency, with the formation of the Defense, State, Treasury and Justice Departments. Today it has mushroomed into more than 400 agencies.  For the 178 laws passed by Congress in 2020 alone, federal agencies issued an average of 19 rules and regulations for each law passed, for a total of 3,382 such rules. The Federal Register, a common measure of regulatory action, hit an all-time high 95,894 pages in 2016. That’s 75 times The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which contains 1280 pages.

The issues raised by the Chevron doctrine go back to the founding of the country and make for an interesting lesson in civics. But first a look at the fishing case that reversed it. 

The Fishermen Who Challenged a Bureaucracy

On Jan. 17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two combined cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless, Inc v Department of Commerce, which would determine the fate of Chevron. On June 28, the Court ruled in favor of the fishermen plaintiffs in the Loper Bright case, rejecting the deference that courts have given federal agencies in cases where the law is unclear. The Court did not rule on the merits — the question whether the agency had exceeded its statutory authority. It just ruled on the judicial question whether Chevron blocked the case from proceeding. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Opinion of the Court, stated:

Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. …

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.

The case was therefore allowed to go forward in the lower D.C. District Court where it originated. Those proceedings are expected to begin this fall.

The plaintiffs are three New Jersey herring fishermen who challenge what they say is an unlawful requirement that forces them to surrender 20% of their earnings to pay at-sea monitors – individuals who gather information used to regulate their industry. The cost works out to as much as $700 a day, which can be more pay than the crews themselves take home. 

The requirement was imposed on them by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates the nation’s fisheries. The fishermen don’t contest that federal law allows the government to require at-sea monitors on their boats, but they argue that Congress never gave the executive branch authority to pass monitoring costs onto the fishermen. They contend that the NOAA abused its power, but they were handicapped by Chevron in fighting the rule. 

“We are grateful the Court has overruled Chevron,” said Bill Bright, one of the fishermen plaintiffs. “Restoration of the separation of powers is a victory for small, family-run businesses like ours, whether they’re involved in fishing, farming or retail.”

Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General and attorney for the fishermen, echoed that sentiment, stating, “We are gratified that the Court restored the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” And that Constitutional mandate is what makes for an interesting civics lesson on the issues.

Designing a Republic with a Balanced Separation of Powers

The Founding Fathers were famously afraid of centralized power, and they designed the Constitution and Bill of Rights to avoid it. Power was balanced among separate branches of the government — watchers watching the watchdogs, with no one imperial controller. 

In colonial America, judges were appointed and paid by the monarchy, receiving salaries that were raised from duties paid by the colonists. King George exercised sole authority to appoint colonial governors to represent the Crown’s interests. For legislative control, the monarchy possessed the powers of the purse and the sword, stationing soldiers in the colonies while requiring that colonists house, feed, and pay taxes for the soldiers’ imported supplies.

Today, many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, which similarly serve as judge and jury. As Stone Washington with the Competitive Economic Institute, a nonprofit libertarian think tank, wrote:

The judicial branch is presumably an independent branch of government, alongside the legislative and executive branches. But many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, called administrative law courts (ALCs). In ALCs, agencies choose their own judges, pay their salaries, and set the rules of procedure. Agencies rarely lose in their own courts. And their abuses to established constitutional norms have garnered the attention of federal courts in recent years especially in antitrust and securities law matters.

In administrative law courts, private litigants are deprived of basic constitutional privileges, including the right to trial by jury, freedom to petition a case before a Constitutional (Art. III) court, and equal application of justice under the law. Litigants who lose may or may not be granted the right to appeal to a federal court; but even if they succeed in getting on the appellate court docket, the process is lengthy and expensive, undemocratically excluding those who cannot afford the cost or the time to wait for a decision. 

The New Jersey fishermen in the two herring boat cases were not required to go through the administrative law court system, but the result was the same: the agency made the rules and enforced them; and under “Chevron deference,” the plaintiffs were powerless to contest the outcome. 

Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist that any irreconcilable differences between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress were to be decided in favor of protecting the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The power of judicial review was first asserted in the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, recognizing the Constitution as the highest law in the land. Through judicial review, the Court reinforced that constitutional system by checking the power of other branches. Not just the administrative arm of the executive branch but the legislature itself could be restrained from passing legislation that violated the Constitution. 

In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to codify the procedure for executing administrative law. The APA provides that the “reviewing court shall decide all  relevant questions of law, [and] interpret… statutory provisions.”

It is that deviation from the constitutional system as codified in the APA that the Supreme Court intended to rectify. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion, stated that “the majority’s decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system, ‘cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions’ of statutes and threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them for years.”  But Justice Roberts made clear that prior decisions relying on Chevron were not automatically nullified but stood under stare decisis (to “stand by things decided”). The issues could be challenged in new cases, but the challenged rules had to be shown to exceed the mandate of Congress. 

The Question of Corporate Capture

No doubt the floodgates to new cases will be opened, as other critics have stated; and it will be a major burden for the court system, which is already backlogged. But it is actually a democratic development. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains on X:

The Chevron decision cuts both ways.
The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision.

If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 2, 2024

The Chevron decision cuts both ways. The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision. If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad interpretive leeway. For instance, almost every important environmental decision in federal court over the past 40 years is based upon Chevron. Without it, the EPA (not an entirely captured agency) is virtually powerless. But when corporate interests have captured a federal agency, then the same interpretive leeway gives the agency even more power to serve their corporate masters at the expense of the public interest. Thus we have the FDA sending armed police to shut down Amish farmers and grocery stores for selling raw milk, while they allow into our food supply hundreds of harmful but profitable chemical additives that are banned in other countries. The Chevron controversy is therefore a false dilemma with no solution. The real issue is corporate capture. If federal agencies served the public interest, then no one would want to hamstring them.

Although critics say the ruling is a boon to corporations, it is the agencies themselves that are notoriously susceptible to “corporate capture.” As explained in Investopedia:

Regulatory capture is a process by which regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be scrutinizing. 

It is that sort of corporate capture that Chevron deference protected from the reach of the courts, and that the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has opened to private challenge. The APA tells agencies they cannot act illegally, arbitrarily, or without letting the public meaningfully participate in the creation of new rules. Many agency rules are now vulnerable to judicial review for violating those standards.  

Agency Overreach: Some Areas of Vulnerability

Technically, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Treasury, the State Department, the IRS and even the Defense Department are agencies falling under the Administrative Procedure Act and its rules. Even those secretive, non-transparent, unaccountable intelligence agencies sometimes called the “deep state” could be subject to APA review. But as detailed in a Vanderbilt Law School article titled “The Politics of Deference,” “national security” has its own special deference under separate case law, so it probably cannot be reached. 

The more likely initial targets will be agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

MSNBC experts expect electric vehicles to be most at risk. A Reuters article titled “Biden Tailpipe Emission Rules on Shakier Ground after Supreme Court Ruling” explains, “That’s because the rules target mobile sources of greenhouse gas rather than stationary ones like power plants, even though environmental laws are ambiguous on whether regulators have the mandate to do that.” Another expert says the controversial tailpipe regulations “will eliminate most new gas cars and traditional hybrids from the U.S. market in less than a decade.”  

 Steve Forbes argues that Congress would not have passed such a prohibition because of intense public opposition, so it got kicked over to the EPA, which was thought to be untouchable under Chevron. But Chevron deference is no more. On July 3, 26 states filed suit against the Administration over EV mandates. The Petition for Review states, “the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law.” 

Other agency regulations expected to be the subject of lawsuits include the SEC’s imposition of civil penalties without the benefit of a jury trial, and FDA and CDC regulations involving vaccines, pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements.

The administrative law system does not follow constitutional principles, which it must if it is ruling on regulations having the force of law. Removing some of the arbitrary red tape hampering small business, local politicians, schools and families by holding administrative regulations up to Constitutional standards can not only stimulate economic productivity and lower inflation and taxes but can help restore the system of checks and balances so important to our country’s founders. 

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This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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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His entire set of teeth, and gums, must be gold plated by now.  Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has decided to let the world, and more specifically Sir Keir Starmer’s freshly elected government, in on a secret: that artificial intelligence is inexorably majestic, glorious and sovereign.  Embrace it and fob off the doomsdayers.  Importantly for Blair, embracing it will ensure that the rivers of gold continue to flow into his private purse.

In May, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) released a report that unabashedly embraced the role of AI in influencing the way states govern.  It is the accompanying document to Blair’s own address given at the Future of Britain Conference on July 9, which called for reimagining the state through the prism of AI.  As he spoke, the sound of money going out the door was palpable.

The former PM would have the new Labour government believe, plucking various numbers out of the air, that technological reforms made to the public sector could see £12 billion of “annual fiscal space” at the conclusion of the first term, followed by £40 billion at the end of the second, with cumulative savings of £15 billion in the first term and £150 billion in the second.

As one has come to expect from Blair’s ruminations, complexity and troubling consequence is obscured by anaemic waffle.  He found it hard to avoid the prospect that this enthusiastic embrace of AI by governments would see a contraction of the public sector, offering no details about chronology or severity.  Little, as well, on how the revolution could offer “the best route to a society that is not only more productive but one that is more equitable… a contemporary version of the combination of economic efficiency and social justice.”

In Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State, the institute takes a hammer to the traditional caution expressed by the state.  “Like all well-established organisations, the state has a bias towards caution.  But this is an illusion – a failure to modernise, reform and deliver is a perilous course for a nation and those who govern it.”  With a breezy confidence, the report estimates that £40 billion in annual savings will be made as things stand with current technology.  “But of course, over time, this technology will accelerate dramatically in its capability, and so will the savings.”

Screenshot from TBI

The report is shameless in charting out the institute’s own marketing strategy.  Here is the scenario, and we are happy to offer our services in facilitating it, swooping in for the corporate kill.  “To access this opportunity [presented by AI], government will need a coordinated strategy to put in place the necessary infrastructure, sovereign capability and skills.”  Appropriate data, “interoperable” across departments, will require investment.  Models will need to be trained, with necessary computing power to “for AI to run at scale”.  Enter the linking of hands between government and the private sector, something the institute is more than willing to facilitate.

Blair’s donor base is impossible to discount when considering his speeches on the subject of AI and the reports of his institute.  Over the years, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, has forked out vast sums to the organisation.  In 2021, Ellison, through his philanthropic offices, furnished the institute with US$33.8 million, with a promise of US$49.4 million in 2022.  These contributions should suggest more than a bit of string pulling by the likes of Ellison over the TBI research agenda, a case of purchasing corrupted advice that can be duly advertised to government and corporate clients the world over.

Benedict Macon-Cooney, the body’s chief policy strategy, is dismissive of the suggestion.  “There is no conflict of interest, and donations are ringfenced.”  He did, however, concede that the institute did partner public officials with companies to attain their respective goals.  “Sometimes the state is the best way to do things, but if we are [to] look around and see private providers which would be better helping with reforms, then we will say so.”

In what seems like a mud wrestle between the mendacious and truth in slant, Goldman Sachs has begged to differ from the TBI’s dreams of technological nirvana in a dampening analysis.  On this occasion, the devil is singing in different registers.  In its June 2024 report, the investment banking colossus notes that the vast sums being expended – an estimate of US$1 trillion over the next few years is offered – on data centres, chips, AI infrastructure and the power grid has, and will have “little to show for it in so far beyond reports of efficiency gains among developers.”

The report features an interview with MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, who estimates that a mere quarter of tasks subject to AI “will be cost effective to automate within the next 10 years, implying that AI will impact less than 5% of all tasks.”  In his interview, Acemoglu observes that numerous tasks currently being performed by humans “for example in the area of transportation, manufacturing, mining, etc., are multifaceted and require real-world interaction, which AI won’t be able to materially improve any time too soon.”

The GS Head of Global Equity Research, Jim Cavello, is even less impressed, noting that AI technology, to be viable, must be able to solve complex problems.  AI technology is not the holy grail of company valuations, being simply too costly in terms of building critical products such as GPU chips and unable, so far, to “replicate humans’ most valuable capabilities.”

There you have it.  On the one hand, the flowery promises of AI benefits and savings arising from a fierce embrace of technology by governments, as put forth by Blair and his institute.  Then we have Goldman Sachs, similarly famed for its ruthless tailoring of advice to swell monetary returns.  Neither is encouraging, but Blair’s offerings always come with a barely concealed odour of self-interest masquerading as human salvation.

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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]

Introduction

Normalization of diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation had first been proposed by Donald Trump in 2017.

Under RussiaGate (2016), President-elect Donald Trump had been accused of treason “after President Obama announced new sanctions [in late December 2016] against Russia and Trump praised Vladimir Putin’s response to the sanctions.” (Daily Caller, December 30, 2016, emphasis added)

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leo Panetta had already intimated prior to the elections that Trump was a threat to national security. 

Even prior to the inauguration of president Trump, the US media in liaison with US intelligence had launched successive waves of smears directed against President-elect Donald Trump.

The objective from the very outset was to discredit president Trump, presenting him as a Manchurian candidate serving the interests of the Kremlin.

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Vanity Fair November 1 2016

The Atlantic October 8 2016

RussiaGate 2.0

The RussiaGate objective as formulated in 2016 was: 

“to get rid of a President who intended to normalize relations with Russia, thus curtailing the budget and power of the military/security complex.” (Paul Craig Roberts, emphasis added)

In January 2019, the FBI Russia investigation was quoted by the media as “evidence” that Trump was “wittingly or unwittingly” an agent of the Kremlin.

What is the stance of the FBI today in regard to the candidacy of Donald Trump? The FBI played a key role in sustaining RussiaGate. (P. C Roberts). I should mention that the FBI is also responsible (coincidentally) for the investigation of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Let us wake up to REALITY.  

The levels of political manipulation, fraud and criminality have reached their pinnacle.

The ultimate intent of the campaign against Trump in 2016-19, led by the Neocons and the Dems Clinton faction was to destabilize the Trump presidency.

From RussiaGate 1.0 to RussiaGate 2.0

There is continuity: Under RussiaGate 2.0 (2024) which we are currently experiencing, various accusations of treason against Trump will once more go into high gear, ultimately with a view to sabotage the peace process as well as destabilize Trump’s candidacy to the presidency of the U.S. 

Trump has confirmed: …

“that if reelected, he would swiftly bring an end to the war in Ukraine by speaking with Putin.

“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on January 20.

I’ll have that war settled,” Trump said on June 27 during a debate with Biden, adding,

“I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.” (Quoted by Newsweek)

Speaking with Putin is regarded as an act of treason. This courageous statement, reminiscent of Donald Trump –the alleged Manchurian Candidate— is unlikely to be accepted by the “Deep State”, the Military Industrial Complex and the powerful financial groups which support the Democratic Party leadership.

What will be the ultimate outcome? 

Real peace negotiations are an integral part of Trump’s election campaign.

Trump’s national security advisory team has prepared a balanced plan: if the Kiev regime does not enter into peace talks with Moscow, the U.S. would (under a Trump presidency) immediately suspend the flow of US weapons to Ukraine:

“Under the plan drawn up by [General Keith] Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council during his 2017-2021 presidency, there would be a ceasefire based on prevailing battle lines during peace talks, Fleitz said.

They have presented their strategy to Trump, and the Republican presidential candidate responded favorably”. (Reuters, June 23, 2024)

It is worth noting that this peace proposal — which is part of his election campaign — was formulated barely a few weeks prior to the failed attempt to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

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Canadian citizen and journalist Laith Marouf along with Hadi Hotait were reporting for Free Palestine TV (FPTV) in the south of Lebanon, when the Israeli military attempted to assassinate them.

Laith Marouf described the attack to Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse.

“The Israeli military have been targeting media workers in Gaza and Lebanon, and even in the West Bank.  We can remember before October 7 they assassinated Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank.”

“And, now over 160 journalists have been martyred in Gaza, and of course here in Lebanon the Israelis have assassinated four journalists in the south.  The enemy is vicious and they do not like people that do journalism work, because that brings the truth to the world. This is especially true for those who write in English.”

“We were alone, and nobody was around us when we were targeted.  Thank God the shells fell 200 meters away from us. There was a short cement fence which partially protected us, and the wind was blowing away from us, so the white phosphorus that fell in the first shell did not injure us, thank God.”

According to Hotait, he and Marouf were near an open field taking photos when the shell landed on the edge of a house near them. Hotait told The Canada Files that this was obviously a targeted assassination attempt because there were no weapons or military assets in the area. Israel has a long history of killing journalists.

White phosphorous was dropped by Israel, and soon afterwards an Israeli guided missile landed in the same area. The white phosphorous remains active, very toxic and flammable for much longer than previously known.

Lebanese researchers and experts are warning that Israel’s tactics are causing long-term and potentially irreversible damage to south Lebanon’s environment, agriculture and economy, potentially making it uninhabitable.

By March 6, 117 phosphoric bombs had been dropped on southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Israel is using it as part of a larger strategy to push out civilians and make south Lebanon uninhabitable, now and in the future.

The Israeli military knows that white phosphorus is detrimental, that it reignites even up to a month after being dropped, and is toxic to the environment.

The Lebanese side is completely barren land, but the Israelis are cultivating down to the last inch before the border. The white phosphorus used by Israel is effectively making the south of Lebanon uninhabitable.

The continuous Israeli bombing has caused huge evacuations, but those who have to remain in their homes recognize the smell of the white phosphorus, which is similar to garlic.

White phosphorous ignites when exposed to the oxygen in the air at temperatures above 30C (86F) and rains down streaks of dense white smoke mixed with phosphorus oxides.  The fragments burn plants, houses and human flesh.

On March 19, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch reported that cited Israel’s use of white phosphorus on Gaza and south Lebanon as one in “a wide range of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law” and called on the Biden administration to “immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel”.

This isn’t new in Lebanon, as the Israeli army targeted civilians with white phosphorus in the 1982 invasion and since October 7 there has been a lot of white phosphorus used on forests, plantations, olive and fruit trees.

Experts in the field have said that the use of white phosphorus is ‘environmental terrorism’ and ‘psychological warfare’.

Over the last 46 years or more, experts and officials say a pattern has become clear; Israel is creating a barren ‘no-man’s-land’ in the south of Lebanon as their buffer zone.

Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, its occupation from 1985 to 2000, and the wars between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and 2023-2024 have eroded the land on the Lebanese side of the border.

An investigation by Forbidden Stories and 13 media outlets, including Le Monde, suggests that some of these Israeli strikes were deliberate attacks on journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has conducted investigations as of July 12, 2024 which showed at least 108 journalists and media workers were among the more than 39,000 killed since the Gaza war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992. CPJ is investigating almost 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries.

The Canada Files’ Editor-in-Chief, Aidan Jonah, and Marouf, co-host a weekly show called Canada and Palestine: The War on Zionism. Marouf appears on other shows regularly every week, and regularly is interviewed by prominent Canadian lawyer and journalist Dimitri Lascaris.

FPTV now does reports from the field on the border between South Lebanon and Israel/occupied Palestine and a weekly show called Wartime Café where Lebanese pro-resistance activists, artists and thinkers are interviewed, and translation of all the resistance videos coming out from Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, around the whole of the Axis of Resistance.

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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.

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Tara Rodas is an HHS whistleblower who exposed how the US government is using taxpayer dollars to traffic illegal migrant children all throughout the United States.

Yesterday Tara testified before Senator Grassley’s committee.

Click Here to Download the Oral Testimony presented at U.S. Senate Roundtable

TRANSCRIPT BELOW

 

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Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the human species is that inherently it is neither particularly constructive not particularly destructive. How human beings actually behave and live depends to a large extent on the ideas, information, and understandings to which they are exposed, particularly in the formative years of their life but also later.

 So for all those who are committed to the creation of a better world, a key concern should be the extent to which people and particular children and teenagers are being exposed in interesting and creative ways to ideas and understanding of justice, equality, peace, social harmony and protection of environment and biodiversity. Unfortunately, the situation just now in this context is not at all encouraging. Although people are exposed to mountains of information and news, mostly this is of a frivolous kind. Reading habit is fast diminishing, particularly in terms of serious study.

Secondly, even when ideas of justice, environment protection and peace are taken up, often there are serious distortions in these. To give an example, some action of a big power which is promoted as an action of peace may actually turn out to be provocation of violence. Or something promoted by a big multinational company as being taken up for environment protection may ultimately be revealed to be a cover-up for wider destruction of environment. 

Hence at a time when there is great urgency of promoting sincere ideas of justice, peace and environment protection rooted in truth, this task is actually suffering from shocking neglect, apathy and inadequacy.

As remedial action, perhaps the first step in this direction is to select certain key messages based on secular ethics around which the social change role of education should be carried forward. These messages need to reach all groups so certainly such an educational effort should not remain confined to just schools and colleges. Of course when different age-groups are covered, the same messages are discussed and debated in very different ways that are appropriate for different age groups. 

Some of the key messages relate to important aspects of social relationships and behavior. One key message can be that as far as possible one should avoid trying to cause any distress to anyone in daily life. One has to discipline oneself accordingly and train oneself for this, for this does not come naturally. This may appear to be a very simple message, but look at the implications of this, how the world will change or how a single village will change in very important ways if all the people are consciously trying not to cause any distress to anyone.

Another key message is that we should not discriminate between any fellow human beings, whether on the basis of religion, ethnicity, caste, color or in any other way. This opens up our hearts and minds and we can be receptive to the friendship of all people and wish for the welfare of all people.

Thirdly, whenever we are interacting with anyone poorer to us, or less advantaged than us, our effort should be to be kind and generous, while entirely avoiding being exploitative or taking undue advantage of the weaker state of the other person or persons.

Another important message is to have a firm commitment to one’s family and its welfare, and be very respectful towards women. This includes avoiding all forms of domestic violence—physical and emotional—which is one of the biggest causes of human distress.

All these key messages involving social distress are of course related to each other, but nevertheless it is useful to state these separately.

Then there can be some key messages relating to personal behavior. Here perhaps the most important message can be to entirely avoid all intoxicants including alcohol, tobacco, smokeless tobacco and gutka, opium as well various other kinds of intoxicating drugs. These are the cause of not just too many health problems but in addition increase human distress in many other ways as well. A wider message along the same lines can be to avoid all harmful and wasteful consumption.

In terms of community actions certain key messages should emphasize that we all should all contribute to maintaining public hygiene and sanitation. We should contribute to protection of environment as a part of community efforts and also try as far as possible to keep our life pattern and life style in keeping with the needs of environment protection. We should contribute whenever we can to the early resolution of any disputes around us and contribute to maintaining social harmony in our surroundings.

If most people behave in accordance with these messages, then we would have a world much better than it is and our community and surroundings would also be much better than these are. We ourselves would be much more creative and happier persons if we tried to live according to these messages and tried to spread them in our social relationships.

However there is a much bigger reason why these messages are important. Our world is faced with very serious environmental problems, highly destructive wars and arms race. There is much injustice and the resulting distress. To create a different world, we need support for an agenda of peace, justice and environment protection from a very large number of people. Education for social change based on important key messages can help to create a very wide and strong base of people, including the upcoming generation, who believe more firmly in peace, justice and environment protection and therefore will be more active for these causes.

Education for social change is a very creative process in which poems, songs, stories, essays are created around certain key messages all the time and ordinary people including children also contribute with their real life experiences. It is an effort which starts contributing some good results from the very initial stages and keeps contributing more and more for a better world the longer it continues and the more creative it becomes over a period of time with all its valuable experiences.

Hence this concept of education for social change which continues beyond school and college for all age-groups should get wider attention.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Earth without Borders, Man over Machine, Planet in Peril, When the Two Streams Met and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

On June 23, Russia was hit by a series of very well-coordinated terrorist attacks by NATO, the Neo-Nazi junta and Islamic radicals. The combined death toll was nearly 30 people. And while NATO-controlled extremist ideologies such as Islamic radicalism and ultra-liberalism/wokeism can be extremely damaging to societies at large, the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel often directly engages in terrorist activities.

Whether it’s NATO’s direct and indirect aggression against the world or “occasional strikes” within the framework of the vaunted (neo)colonialist “rules-based world order“, the belligerent alliance is always on the lookout for new victims and plunder. However, in the last two and a half years, it has become far more aggressive than ever before, poking the Bear and trying to push Russia into a direct confrontation. All this has brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear annihilation.

Attempting to avoid this scenario, Moscow kept its cool even in moments of almost universal public anger and cries for retaliation. However, things changed dramatically after June 23. Whether the date was chosen by NATO to nearly coincide with the beginning of “Barbarossa” (June 22) is unclear, but its symbolism cannot be ignored.

The political West has demonstrated time and again that it’s the virtual heir to Nazi Germany and much of the same actions and policies that Berlin used 80 years ago are now being recycled by NATO.

This was a step too far for the Kremlin and it reacted. Since the terrorist attack on Sevastopol, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) were instructed to start suppressing or even downing US/NATO ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets over the Black Sea to ensure these cannot help the Neo-Nazi junta target Russian civilians.

Ever since, the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel hasn’t dared fly close to Crimea, mostly limiting its activities to airspace over NATO-occupied Romania. However, the Russian military realized it needs to do even more to ensure the safety of its people. While detecting and targeting NATO-sourced weapons was always a priority for Moscow, as evidenced by regular updates on the destruction of various assets, particularly the overhyped HIMARS, June 23 was a turning point.

Thus, a more intense hunt for HIMARS, M270/MARS and ATACMS started. By June 27, at least two launchers were destroyed by an “Iskander-M” SRBM (short-range ballistic missile). The HIMARS and M270 were stored in a warehouse near the settlement of Yasenovoe in the Donetsk oblast (region). On June 27, video footage of the precision strike was posted on various social networks, particularly Telegram.

According to various military sources, at least 20 enemy soldiers were neutralized, composed most likely of mixed NATO crews and the Neo-Nazi junta forces. Apart from the destruction of the system itself, the elimination of personnel capable of operating and maintaining the launchers is a high priority for the Russian military. Another system was detected by a drone while withdrawing to a warehouse near the settlement of Shevchenkove in the Nikolayev oblast. The warehouse was then promptly obliterated by an “Iskander-M”. The video of the precision strike appeared online on June 28, while the after-action reports suggested that the strike neutralized 25 enemy troops. However, the Kiev regime and NATO were given no time to consolidate, as the Russian military continued hunting down their overhyped HIMARS and M270 already the next day. What’s more, the damage was even worse this time.

Namely, according to military sources, another precision strike on the village of Matveyevka in the Zaporozhye oblast resulted in the destruction of a warehouse with various munitions for the HIMARS/M270. The building reportedly housed both rockets and ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles. Another stockpile was hit shortly afterward in the nearby Kamennoye settlement. This forced the Neo-Nazi junta troops to disperse to reduce losses. However, the situation was hardly better. Quite the contrary, it turned out to be even worse. In the last two days alone, reports surfaced about the destruction of seven more HIMARS/M270 systems, including those armed with ATACMS missiles. The destruction of the first three was reported on July 8. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted video footage from one of its tactical ISR drones, showing the elimination of the systems in the Kherson oblast.

The precision strike was conducted at night, after the launchers were detected near the village of Klapaya. Minutes later, an “Iskander-M” obliterated the position. The Russian MoD reported that dozens of NATO personnel were eliminated, while it was also suggested that these launchers were among those used in the previously mentioned terrorist attack on a packed beach in Sevastopol. Some unofficial reports also suggest that this Russian night strike thwarted a NATO plan to launch another attack on the Crimean peninsula, as the launchers were loaded precisely with the ATACMS missiles when the “Iskander-M” hit their position. However, this wasn’t the end of it, as on July 9, more footage was posted by the Kremlin’s MoD, with reports showing the destruction of another four HIMARS systems, and once again, the “culprit” was the “Iskander-M”. Two were destroyed in the Zaporozhye and another two in the Kherson oblast.

The latter were detected in Novopetrovka in the Kherson oblast, with the precision strike destroying two launchers, five escort vehicles and neutralizing at least 20 enemy personnel. The enhancement of the Russian military’s tactical and strategic ISR capabilities resulted in the easier detection and destruction of assets such as the HIMARS.

The Kiev regime has had a lot of trouble in this regard, particularly in recent months, as its overhyped NATO-sourced weapons are having trouble going past the world-class Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems, meaning that their lethality has been greatly reduced. At the same time, the aforementioned Russian ISR is making it far riskier to engage in combat with the HIMARS, with or without the ATACMS. The usage of regular guided rockets has become ineffective due to EW, while the usage of larger ATACMS makes it easier to detect and neutralize the launchers.

This sort of catch-22 situation is turning the HIMARS/M270 into yet another overhyped NATO-sourced weapon that can’t really do what its manufacturers are marketing it for, denting its reputation, most of which was the result of NATO propaganda either way. And it should be noted that this certainly isn’t the only Western weapon whose reputation has been tarnished by the Russian military. This was particularly apparent during last year’s much-touted counteroffensive, when NATO-sourced armor was obliterated by Russian drones, attack helicopters and specialized ATGM teams.

More recently, Su-57 next-generation fighter jets, “Tornado-S” MLRS and Russia’s unrivaled hypersonic weapons all proved their combat capabilities against the latest NATO gear. And all this was before the Russian government decided to massively increase investment into the military and also reshuffle the MoD for maximum efficiency.

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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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Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”

But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.

Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. We don’t exactly know why yet. We barely know the “who,” as stories about slain 20-year-old suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks are citing investigations into “whether the shooter had accomplices,” as NBC put it. New York Times analysts say the gunman fired eight shots. That’s a lot of rage, and even if we don’t know its direct source, it can’t have been much lower than what was already in the air around Trump. He and his supporters have been dehumanized as part of an induced collective madness that’s a bigger crime than the coverup of Biden’s incapacity.

Click here to read the full article.

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I recently was asked about COVID-19 vaccination and colon cancer. Are they related? What is new in the literature?

Akkus et al studied the impact of COVID-19 vaccination more than 3 months before newly diagnosed with a special kind of colon cancer. Microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) colon cancer is a type of colon cancer where tumor cells are highly unstable due to a high number of genetic mutations. Instability occurs when mismatch repair (MMR) genes, which correct errors during cell division, stop functioning properly. As a result, errors accumulate and tumors become unstable. MSI-H colon cancer cells look and behave abnormally, making it easier for the immune system to recognize them as invaders and with proper immune surveillance, the tumor cells are effectively killed.

 

 

Akkus E, Karaoglan B, Akyol C, Ünal AE, Kuzu MA, Savaş B, Utkan G. Types and Rates of COVID-19 Vaccination in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Microsatellite Stable and Instable Non-Metastatic Colon Cancer. Cureus. 2024 Jun 6;16(6):e61780. doi: 10.7759/cureus.61780. PMID: 38975417; PMCID: PMC11227084.

Exposure to the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a > 6-fold increased risk for this form of cancer. Because the Spike protein is believed to impair tumor surveillance systems, among several cancer-promoting mechanisms, it is plausible that these cancerous cells are allowed to proliferate among the vaccinated where the cancer was not yet detectable at the time of injection.

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Driving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris by an undetected bomb. Refusing extra resources for a presidential candidate. Admitting an agent on a White House detail assaulted her supervisor. 

Long before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday night such focused a harsh light on the Secret Service, the presidential security agency was already facing difficult questions about its capability, training, recruitment and emphasis on diversity.

Secret Service agents reportedly were even circulating a petition raising questions about their management a few weeks ago.

Those questions are now certain to receive intense new attention after video footage showed a gunman on was able to scale a building less than 200 yards from Trump, get to a shooting perch with a rifle and fire several rounds before being neutralized by a Secret Service sniper team at the event Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Several witnesses said they started to yell the man had a gun before he started shooting. And several lawmakers say they are now investigating reports that the Trump campaign had requested additional security resources recently, and was turned down. 

“How could you have somebody on the rooftop?” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, himself a victim of political violence when he was seriously wounded at a congressional baseball practice. “There are reports that people watched him climb up the roof and even alerted authorities, and we’re going to be looking into that.”

How could that happen with all the authorities around that they miss something so clear that the shooter was able to get that kind of line of sight just 150 yards away from the stage?”

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Saturday night demanded the Secret Service provide Congress immediate answers as to how it failed to stop the assassination attempt.

Comer announced just hours after Trump survived the attack that he would be demanding testimony from the head of the Secret Service as well as documents and other evidence.

”I have already contacted the Secret Service for a briefing and am also calling on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to appear for a hearing,” he said on X. “The Oversight Committee will send a formal invitation soon. There are many questions and Americans demand answers.”

Criticism of the Secret Service spread quickly on social media – from X owner Elon Musk to members of Congress. Several urged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mallorca to reconsider his denial of Secret Service resources for third-party presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate. Either way, the SS leadership must resign,” Musk wrote.

Democrats also are likely to face new questions after Rep. Benny Thompson sought to end Trump‘s Secret Service protection recently and President Joe Biden reportedly told donors in recent days it was time to put a “bullseye” over his Republican rival.

Back in May, Congress requested a briefing with the Secret Service, after several incidents allegedly raised internal concerns over the quality of its trainings.

A petition within the Secret Service has reportedly been circulating because of the incidents and called for a congressional investigation into the agency, according to Comer.

One incident saw a Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris allegedly attack her superior and other agents. The unnamed agent also exhibited other “concerning” behavior, according to her colleagues.

Comer mentioned the incident in a letter to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and asked for a briefing on how the Secret Service is responding to the allegations of “inadequate training.”

“This incident raised concerns within the agency about the hiring and screening process for this agent,” Comer wrote in his letter. “Specifically [concerns] whether previous incidents in her work history were overlooked during the hiring process as years of staff shortages had led the agency to lower once stricter standards as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion effort.”

Comer also flagged concerns from the petition related to a “double standard in disciplinary actions, and a vulnerability ‘to potential insider threats’ that could pose a risk to U.S. national security.”

The letter requests the briefing by June 13, and cites “potential vulnerabilities” that could keep the Secret Service from “fulfilling its mission to ensure the safety and security of its protectees,” including the president, vice president, and their families.

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Days before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, President Joe Biden publicly declared that “it’s time to put a bullseye on Trump.” While Biden clearly wasn’t openly calling for the assassination of Trump, words have meaning. And at a time when heated rhetoric can fuel political violence, everyone—including the President and former President—need to weigh their words carefully.

In David Cronenberg’s 1983 film, The Dead Zone (based upon a novel written by Stephen King), Christopher Walken plays a schoolteacher named Johnny Smith who, after nearly dying in an accident, awakens from a coma possessed with psychic powers—an ability to see into the future. This new power turns into a curse after Smith shakes the hand of Greg Stillson, a populist third-party candidate for the US Senate, played by Martin Sheen. Smith has a vision of Stillson becoming president and ordering a nuclear strike against the USSR. Smith confers with his neurologist/therapist, Dr. Sam Weizak (played by Herbert Lom), who is cognizant of Smith’s psychic power. Weizak postulates the question, “What would you do if you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler?” before he committed his many atrocities. After pondering this question, Smith decides that the only course of action left to him is to assassinate Stillson before he becomes president.

I don’t know what motivated Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old Pennsylvania resident whom authorities have named as the person who fired the shots that wounded former President Donald Trump and two bystanders, and killed another innocent bystander, before himself being killed by the Secret Service. There will presumably be a very thorough investigation into this criminal act of political violence.

What I do know is that the rhetoric which had superheated the American political scene in the months, weeks and days leading up to the attempted assassination at a pro-Trump political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, mirrored in tone, content, and purpose the advice Dr. Weizack gave to Johnny Smith about how best to deal with the threat posed by the potential election of Greg Stillson.

The perpetrators of this rhetorical lambasting populate the entire spectrum of societal influence and control, from the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to numerous Senators and Representatives in the US Congress, to various pundits, experts, and analysts who provide commentary on political events for the mainstream media, and to their respective echo chambers and independent content creators on social media.

All are complicit in the attempted assassination, just as Dr. Weizack was complicit in the crime planned by Johnny Smith. The difference between Weizack and these modern conspirators, however, is that one event takes place as part of a fictional narrative, and the other as part of a national reality.

Image: A defiant Donald Trump following the failed attempt on his life 

President Biden has emerged as the principal voice among the crowd of politicians, pundits, and politicized activists who have been defining former President Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy, and America itself.

Just to be clear (because words do matter), an existential threat is a threat to something’s very existence—when the continued being of something is at stake or in danger.

It is, literally, about life and death.

This apocalyptic description has now been attached to any supporter of Donald Trump (reviled by Biden as “MAGA”, the acronym for “Make American Great Again”, the rallying cry of the pro-Trump movement).

Perhaps Biden and his supporters forgot that Trump pulled in some 74 million votes in 2020—about 47% of the participating electorate. There is no more certain way to incite a literal Civil War than to label one half of the country as an existential threat that must be neutralized come hell or high water.

“I believe in free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power,” Biden proclaimed at an Arizona election event in September 2023. “I believe there’s no place in America—none, none, none—for political violence,” Biden said.

If only he had remained on script.

“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” Biden at the same event. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: The MAGA movement.”

Later, in December 2023, Biden went further.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” Biden declared. “We cannot let him win.”

Speaking on the occasion of the 80^th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Biden invoked the imagery of war when speaking about defending American democracy.

“American democracy asks the hardest things: to believe that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves,” Biden said. “So, democracy begins with each of us.”

As Biden spoke, his campaign released a video which declared,

“There is nothing more sacred than our democracy. But Donald Trump’s ready to burn it all down.”

Biden literally invoked the struggle against Hitler as being synonymous with his struggle against Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

Biden speaking in Arizona in September 2023

A day before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Biden, speaking in Michigan, announced that the gloves were coming off.

“We’re going to say who he is, what he intends to do. Folks, Donald Trump is a convicted criminal.” Biden later declared that “Most importantly, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation.”

Donald Trump is no more a threat to the United States than Joe Biden.

Each articulates policies the other finds reprehensible.

But these policies must pass through the gauntlet of constitutional processes before becoming policy.

And, when speaking of the United States, it is these very processes that give us the right to call ourselves a Constitutional Republic.

There is nothing undemocratic about having differences of opinion.

That is what elections are all about.

But there is something inherently unconstitutional in promoting political violence by converting these political differences into articulations of existential gravitas, where literal life and death outcomes hinge on who prevails in an election.

By labeling Donald Trump as a threat to America, Joe Biden was—literally—saying that to preserve America, this threat must be eliminated.

This is not an extreme interpretation of how Biden’s words can be construed by those inclined to believe Donald Trump is a danger to the Republic. The actress Lea DeLaria, who appears in the popular television drama, Orange Is the New Black, recently uploaded a video to her Instagram channel.

“Joe,” DeLaria declared (referring to the current President of the United States), “you’re a reasonable man. You don’t want to do this. But here’s the reality: This is a fucking war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our fucking country. And these assholes are going to take it away. They’re going to take it away. Thank you, [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence ‘Uncle’ Thomas. Joe, you now have the right to take that bitch Trump out. Take him out, Joe. If he was Hitler, and this was 1940, would you take him out? Well, he is Hitler. And this is 1940. Take him the fuck out!”

As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted in a landmark 1919 decision regarding the First Amendment of the US Constitution, free speech does not give one the right to shout “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

Nor should it empower anyone, from the President on down to radical personalities such as Lea DeLaria, the right to incite political violence—especially against a former US President who aspires—not without reasonable justification—to be the next President of the United States.

Threatening the president of the United States is a federal felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. The law prohibits anyone from making “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict great bodily harm upon the president of the United States.” The law also includes presidential candidates, vice presidents, and former presidents. The Secret Service is responsible for investigating suspected violations of this law.

The Secret Service needs to pay Lea DeLaria a visit. So does the FBI. She should be detained, questioned and charged appropriately.

Lea DeLaria (left), Jacquline Marsaw (right)

So, too, should anyone who articulates in favor of political violence against Donald Trump or Joe Biden. This includes US Congressman Bennie Thompson, who has openly called for Donald Trump to be stripped of his Secret Service protection if sentenced to prison, holding that prison authorities would be responsible for the protection of Trump.

Ask Jeffrey Epstein how that worked out.

And, just to prove the point that Bennie Thompson’s intention behind his proposed legislation wasn’t driven by pure legislative motive, enter, stage right, Thompson’s Field Director, Jacqueline Marsaw, who posted on her Facebook page the following comment: “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time oops that wasn’t me saying that.”

But it was Jacqueline Marsaw that said it. Her subsequent removal of the post doesn’t erase the deed.

And she should be held accountable.

So, too, should everyone who articulates actual violence as a solution to the issues that divide the nation when it comes to presidential politics.

I don’t take these matters lightly. On March 21, 1981, I was in the Student Union of Franklin and Marshall College checking my mail when the news broke about the attempted assassination of President Reagan. “I hope he dies,” one of my fellow students announced, after watching the shooting on a television located in the common area.

The attempted assassination of President Reagan, March 1981

I immediately put him up against the wall and told him I took violent exception to his support for the attempted assassination of my commander in chief (I was fresh out of the Army at that time).

My antics earned me a trip to the Dean of Student Affairs, who informed me (I was a newly arrived Freshman) that I would probably be expelled from college.

“We don’t tolerate acts of violence among students,” the Dean said.

“But you do tolerate the promotion of the political assassination of the President of the United States,” I retorted. “I’m curious what the Secret Service would think about that.”

The Dean thought on my words, and the incident was resolved by having me apologize to the student in question for roughing him up, and the student apologizing for his “insensitive” comments about President Reagan.

Today I made the decision to suspend the chatroom associated with my Telegram channel. This suspension will last 24 hours.

I made the decision after participants commented in response to a post I made about the attempted assassination.

The post was as follows:

The attempted assassination of former President Trump underscores the extraordinarily precarious situation America finds itself in at this point in time in history.

Political violence is tragically not unknown in America—the assassination and attempted assassination of American Presidents is a sad reality of the American experience.

That an estranged citizen would convert his personal demons into an action designed to end the life of the person he blamed for what haunts him is sadly a byproduct of a society conditioned to accept violence as a means of resolving disputes, regardless of the underlying legality of the action. The Second Amendment, and the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of its articulation and implementation, is the living manifestation of this reality.

But America has never before experienced a situation where the political environment itself has contributed so heavily to an atmosphere where political violence is openly advocated by a sitting President and his political party.

The depiction of Donald Trump by President Joe Biden as a criminal who represents a direct threat not only to democracy but also the existential survival of the American Republic creates a causal linkage that leads inevitably to the attempted assassination. Biden’s words have been echoed by the Democratic Party and anti-Trump activists on mainstream and social media in such a fashion that it constitutes a veritable green lighting of political violence against the former President.

At a time when the American people and nation are fundamentally divided on political issues for which it seems there is no middle ground, when these divisions are articulated in stark existential terms, and when the Democratic Party is already being accused—with good reason—of politicizing and weaponizing the apparatus of judicial power to prevent Donald Trump from successfully challenging Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election, the articulation by Biden and his supporters of Trump as a threat to the survival of the Republic that must be stopped at all costs is little more that an open directive for political violence.

America has never been closer to Civil War at any time since 1861. The assassination of the former President on the orders—perceived or otherwise—of a sitting president and the establishment he directs would likely result in the permanent irreconcilable division of the nation along ideological grounds and lead to massive outbreaks of violence and the potential fracturing of the physical unity of the nation.

We live in a very precarious moment. The fever pitch of political rhetoric must be cooled down immediately. If both sides cannot walk back their respective political passions, then what happened in Bulter Pennsylvania yesterday will become the inevitable norm, and violence, not reason, will become the chosen means of ideological differences.

And if that is the direction America is heading, God help us all.

In response to this post, several chat participants posted content which endorsed political violence in American, to include the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater.

And you can’t advocate for the assassination of a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Not in my chat.

And not in my America.

Postscript (movie spoiler alert):

Johnny Smith doesn’t shoot Gregg Stillson. Stillson’s loathsome character is exposed to the public, which rejects him, ending his political career. Therein lies the lesson: let politicians be themselves. And trust the American people to make the right choice. And if your choice doesn’t win, do better next time. Because in America, if we actively participate in the democratic processes that underpin our Constitutional Republic, there will always be a next time.

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Featured image: Christopher Walken, as Johnny Smith, draws a bead on Martin Sheen’s Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone / All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

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***

Although perfectly healthy, Saba had a severe and life changing reaction to a 2010 flu vaccine at age 11 months.

She suffered severe brain damage and multi-organ failure. Saba has been diagnosed as having cerebral palsy from an acquired brain injury. Saba required and will continue to require intensive rehabilitation for the rest of her life.

“We had a perfect pregnancy with Saba and an easy natural birth. Saba was a very healthy little girl who had a loving, cheeky & strong-willed personality.

Saba has been diagnosed now as having cerebral palsy from an Acquired Brain Injury caused by the flu vaccination (‘Flu-vax’ by CSL). She is a spastic quadriplegia (GMSCF level 5 – the worst) has epilepsy and respiratory weakness.

We are reminding you to be INFORMED and do your research before you make the decision to vaccinate your children with ‘any’ form of vaccine ~ Saba’s Parents

This could have been prevented.

The West Australian Health Department knew that there had been some terrible adverse reactions to the flu vaccine cc, particularly in children, but didn’t issue a warning.

The flu program continued for two more days. Parents continued to vaccinate their children, unaware of the permanent damage it had caused to Saba and dozens of other children. Fluvax is now banned for children under the age of five in Australia after hundreds of children suffered from adverse reactions in 2010. See this.

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Settlement for Saba Button, Severely Disabled After Flu Vaccine 

5 Jun 2014, ABC News

Below is an excerpt from the article.

 

Saba Button with her parents Kirsten and Mick in 2011.(ABC News)

The family of a West Australian child left severely disabled after receiving a flu jab has reached a settlement with the vaccine’s manufacturer and the State Government.

Saba Button suffered brain and organ damage after getting the Fluvax shot when she was 11 months old in 2010.

Her parents launched legal action in the Federal Court against the vaccine’s manufacturer, CSL Limited.

CSL cross-claimed against the State of WA and the Health Minister.

All parties have reached a confidential settlement which has today been accepted by Federal Court Justice Michael Barker.

…

Her mother Kirsten Button said she was relieved the legal action had been finalised.

“It doesn’t matter how much you have because you can’t buy your health but it is a good outcome, and the fact that it’s settled, we’re quite a strong family and we have moved forward but I think having that hanging over your head as such can be stressful so now we can move forward knowing that it’s all over.”

Mr Button said the funds would help Saba continue ongoing therapy and explore new options both in Australia and overseas.

“This doesn’t just stop now, once all the cameras are gone, it’s back to business and we’ve got a lot to do with Saba,” he said.

Problems with flu vaccine sparked national ban

In his judgement, Justice Barker said Saba had suffered hypoxic brain injury and consequential, severe disabilities.

…

Her disabilities are profound and permanent. She will require constant care for the remainder of her life.

…

Hundreds of children suffered adverse reactions after they were given the flu shot in 2010 with many of them taken to hospital.

It led to an Australia-wide suspension of the vaccination for children under five.

Authorities were criticised for not acting quickly enough to advise GPs of the problems or identifying that there was an issue.

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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

Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump. Secret Service Has Some ‘Splainin to Do

By John Leake, July 15, 2024

As I have observed in previous columns, our era in the United States is frequently beset with incidents characterized by a catastrophic loss of competence. Decades of procedural knowledge seem to vanish from one day to the next, leaving sensible people wondering how it could possibly happen.

Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Barely Escapes an Assassination Attempt

By Peter Koenig, July 15, 2024

Trump’s security guards immediately killed the shooter, no attempt whatsoever to arrest him, so he could NOT be put on trial. There is no trace and Thomas can no longer talk about his possible motives, what may have prompted his shooting, whether he acted alone or in a team or whether he was in one way or another prepared for the assault – if so, by whom. He was silenced.

NATO Reinforces Its War Plans During Washington Summit

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, July 15, 2024

NATO held a summit in Washington from July 9 to 11 to celebrate its 75th anniversary and discuss strategies for dealing with the current global issues. Instead of reaching any consensus on making meaningful changes to improve global security and advance diplomacy, Western states focused only on thinking of ways to continue the war, despite the disadvantageous conditions for the alliance.

Supporting Israel Is Big Business in the United States. Dr. Philip Giraldi

By Philip Giraldi, July 15, 2024

One thing that should be completely clear is that the United States gets absolutely nothing out of the relationship with Israel, which all flows in only one direction to the tune of what probably amounts to more than a billion dollars a month if all the extras and the inevitable fraud are taken into account.

Lessons for the US Secret Service: When the CIA Tried to Assassinate Fidel Castro More Than 638 Times

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, July 15, 2024

There is a period of history that the US Secret Service can learn from and that is from the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) or Cuban Intelligence that protected Cuba’s Fidel Castro for many years from the US government, namely, the CIA.  You may ask, what can the US Secret Service learn from Cuban Intelligence?   

Video: At NATO Summit, Biden Introduces Zelensky as Putin. Gets “His Countries Mixed Up”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 13, 2024

Concluding his opening remarks, Biden handed over to Zelenskiy with the words: “Now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination.” “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!”

The Convulsed Republic: The Shooting of Donald Trump

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 14, 2024

As a nation, the United States, as if we did not already know, is convulsed.  Paranoid and divided, giddy with conspiracy and deranged by a fear of totalitarian seizure, hyper partisan and hostile to debate and any loose definition of facts (this condition afflicts the entire political spectrum), the only thing missing so far was this: an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.

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***

NATO held a summit in Washington from July 9 to 11 to celebrate its 75th anniversary and discuss strategies for dealing with the current global issues. Instead of reaching any consensus on making meaningful changes to improve global security and advance diplomacy, Western states focused only on thinking of ways to continue the war, despite the disadvantageous conditions for the alliance.

Under the current circumstances, there is little that NATO can do to escalate the war against Russia. The alliance is already sending to the Kiev regime all possible types of weapons, except nuclear ones, as well as a large number of mercenaries. In practice, a further escalation of hostilities would be an extremely dangerous scenario, and could even reach the level of open global war. However, the bloc does not seem interested in de-escalating and starting diplomatic talks. Instead, NATO’s internal negotiations are being advanced to further worsen the crisis.

For example, during the summit in Washington, US officials promised to deploy new long-range missiles to Germany as part of a “preparation” for the event of open war in Europe. The US plans to use German territory as an important operational hub in case of hostilities against Russia, which is why from 2026 on many advanced missile systems will start to be placed in German strategic areas.

The alliance has not only promised to strengthen its positions in member countries, but has also made it clear that expansion of the bloc remains a possibility. Despite constant Russian calls for NATO to stop expanding, the group appears to have little interest in any kind of diplomatic dialogue. In a joint statement, the countries announced their intention to grant membership to countries in the Western Balkans region. In addition, it was stated that the Black Sea – a key region of Russia’s strategic environment – is one of NATO’s points of greatest interest, suggesting that an expansion of maritime activities in that area may be about to happen.

“The Western Balkans and the Black Sea regions are of strategic importance for the alliance. [We promise to help] counter malign influence, including disinformation, hybrid, and cyber threats, posed by both state and non-state actors (…) NATO supports the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of interested countries in this region,” the statement reads.

It is important to emphasize that any expansion into the Black Sea could cause a serious crisis in the current context. The conflict in Ukraine already forces Russia to maintain constant military activities in the Black Sea. In addition, NATO has been illegally providing intelligence and geolocation data to Kiev’s forces through Western drones that are circulating in the Black Sea region. This data has been vital for Ukraine to plan terrorist attacks against fully demilitarized Russian cities, which is leading Moscow’s patience to gradually run out. If NATO decides to promote further expansion into the Black Sea, it is possible that the escalation of the conflict will reach a point of no return.

A map showing the location of the Black Sea and some of the large or prominent ports around it. The Sea of Azov and Sea of Marmara are also labelled. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Russia was not the only target of NATO’s war plans. China was also heavily targeted by NATO strategists during the event in Washington. Delegations from member countries accused China of being an important “enabler” of Russian military actions. According to Western logic, if a country maintains diplomatic and trade relations with Russia, it automatically becomes a co-participant in the hostilities in Ukraine and should therefore be punished, sanctioned and isolated.

Beijing has never supplied weapons to Russia – both because it is not part of Chinese foreign policy to participate in conflicts and because Moscow is strong enough to face its enemies alone, without needing external help. Instead of being interested in conflicts, China is focused on maintaining strategic and mutually beneficial trade ties that generate profits for both sides and gains for ordinary people. This is why Russians and Chinese are increasingly engaged in cooperation projects, with the alliance between the two countries not being a military pact.

The reason why the Russian-Chinese partnership is causing fear in NATO is simple: Moscow and Beijing are rivals of American hegemony and publicly advocate for the reconfiguration of the geopolitical order. For the Atlantic alliance, this is a reason to go to war – which is why Ukraine is already being used as a proxy and tensions in the Pacific are getting worse. The only thing that became clear after the Washington summit is that, even weakened, NATO will not give up its war plans.

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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. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

Featured image is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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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***

 

 

 

[First published by PCR in March 2020.]

Diana Johnstone’s just published book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, is the best book I have ever read, the most revealing, the most accurate, the most truthful, the most moral and humane, the most sincere and heartfelt, and the best written.  Her book is far more than a memoir.  It is a history that has not previously been written.  If you want the truth of the last 60 years in place of the contrived reality constructed for us by controlled explanations, it is in this book.

This book is so extraordinary in its truthfulness and conciseness that it is difficult for a less gifted writer to do it justice.  It is a book without a superfluous sentence.

Herein I will provide some of the books message.  In future columns I hope to present some of the  history in the book.  

In the Western World the legitimate national interest of people has become identified with racism and fascism.  Corporate globalism requires open borders, and the left has aligned with globalism and has become the most zealous enforcer of open borders, which has come to mean the right of refugees with victim status to other peoples’ countries.  The left has abandoned the working class and anti-war activity.  Today the left is pro-war in order to enforce “human rights” on alleged dictators by bombing their peoples into oblivion, thus producing refugees and tag along opportunistic immigrants that flock to the Western aggressor nations.  

Image is from Zero Hedge

Self-styled moral censors, such as Antifa, denounce hate while violently hating those they denounce. Everything is settled by controlled explanations that cannot be questioned or examined in debate.  Those who engage in critical free thinking are censored, shouted down, beaten up, fired, and cancelled.  The cancel culture permits no debate, only enthusiastic acquiesce to explanations that have been settled in advance. 

Antifa by shutting down open debate actually serves to protect the authoritarian center consisting of “the Clintonian Democratic Party, mainstream media, the military industrial complex and globalized neoliberal finance capital.”  Antifa turns the left into a support group for the authoritarian center.

In the European Union’s so-called constitution, private corporate interests take precedence over—indeed do not permit—the socialized elements of European mixed economies that made the societies livable communities. Today people are sacrificed to the greed of the global elite as social services are curtailed and privatized. 

In the “Western democracies,” democracy–that is, rule by the people and a rule of law– has been extinguished. European peoples were forced into the European Union at the expense of their national sovereignty despite having voted down EU membership.  The French people voted 54.7% against EU membership and 45.3% for.  The Dutch people voted 61% against the EU and 39% for.  Faced with an unacceptable democratic outcome, the ruling elites removed the question from the people by turning EU membership into a “treaty” that could be signed by governments without input from the peoples.  When the French Constitutional Court ruled that the “treaty” was contrary to the French Constitution, the French Constitution was changed to accommodate the “treaty.”  Only the Irish government gave the people a choice by putting the “treaty” to a referendum, and the people rejected it. Chastised for allowing the people to decide their own fate, the Irish government collapsed under elite pressure and after a period of intense propaganda in favor of the “treaty” forced it through on a second referendum.  The Western “democratic” media were principal agents of the elite in stripping European peoples of any control over how they are governed.

In the West lies and orchestrated deceit have replaced truth in government and media. Instead of spreading facts and mutual understanding, media have deceived the public in order to gain support for unjustifiable wars.  Deceit “reached an extravagant new peak of danger with the campaign of calumny against Russia” culminating in the preposterous charge investigated by a “special prosecutor” that Hillary Clinton’s defeat was caused by a Putin/Trump plot involving Russian interference in the US presidential election.  

Image: A US government propaganda poster from the 1940s (Source: Multipolarista)

“Western values” are constantly invoked, but what are these values?  They are not the values that made the West what it is, or rather was.  These values are rejected.  Free speech is out if it challenges official explanations whether the government’s or the left’s or uses any words that can be misrepresented as “hate speech.”  Democracy is out as demonstrated by the anti-democratic formation of the European Union. Truth is out as it is “offensive.”  Rational inquiry is regarded as denial of emotion-based proclamations.  It goes on and on.  Diana Johnstone notes that government repression is most significant not against violent acts of rebellion but against Julian Assange for exercising press freedom to convey information to the public.  

Where does this leave us?  We have the West against the world, the West against itself, and the people against themselves.  Washington is unable “to view the world other than as a field for exercising US ‘leadership,’ and all who balk are considered deadly enemies.”  The diplomacy of the US and its NATO vassals consists of dropping sanctions and bombs on those who refuse to submit to Washington’s will, while the West itself dissolves into “diversity” and the mutual hatred of Identity Politics, which has progressed to the point that the transgendered are busy at work hating feminists. Diana Johnstone puts it best:

“When individuals are bunched into groups assigned intrinsic qualities—from victimhood to racism—normal human ties of mutual concern, shared purpose, comprehension and compassion are severed. In a grotesque development, new gender identities are invented, whose ‘cause’ overshadows the real problems of genuinely disadvantaged people. Economic issues are forgotten as groups mobilize solely to police attitudes.  Billionaires prosper more than ever before, while down below people bicker over safe spaces and toilet use.”

Hubris has destroyed humanity:

“The countries of the Western world are in a state of schizophrenic overconfidence and self-doubt. Their leaders persist in proclaiming ‘our values’ as the model for the rest of humanity, while their own people are increasingly divided and disillusioned. 

“The 18th century was the century of the liberated mind. The 19th century was the century of Great Men. The 20th century was the century of the common man. And the 21st century’s looks like it may become a negation of all of them. The century of nobody at all.

“Irrationality and censorship restore chains to thought. Great Men are only statues to be demolished. The common man, once hailed as the hero of a radiant future, has been degraded to a superfluous nuisance, probably racist and homophobic. Ordinary folks have been reassigned from the glorious concept of ‘the people’ to their derogatory redefinition under the rubric of populism’ [and Trump deplorables].

People are reduced to ‘consumers,’ while being told that by consuming, they are destroying the planet. Identity Politics has not only turned people against each other by group, but its late manifestation, Vegan speciesism, even turns people against people altogether, for being an overprivileged life form.”

What will our future be? Currently we live in a dystopia of deceit.  But the failure of our leaders to deal adequately with a health crisis and their hostility to an economic system that serves people rather than the wealth of elites are marking the Western world as a massive failure. Will realization of this failure cause the people to revolt as the Yellow Vests have, or will it break the people and further diminish them?

As we are confined at home in an effort to avoid infection and to limit the spread of infection, now is a good time to read a clear explanation of what has happened to us in our time, assess the failures that have undermined our existence as a united and free people, and prepare for reconstructing a livable and humane society.  

Diana Johnstone’s book is available from Clarity Press.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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CIRCLE IN THE DARKNESS: Memoir of a World Watcher

Author: Diana Johnstone

ISBN: 978-1-949762-13-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-949762-14-3

Publication date: 2020

Page Count: 435

 

 

 

Reviews

“Diana Johnstone spent over half a century chronicling contemporary history from the Cold War to the rise of groups such as Antifa. Her memoir, Circle in the Darkness, is not only a fascinating window into a contemporary event, but also a blistering attack on the Left, which she argues, correctly, betrayed its historical role as a champion of social justice and peace, replacing it with the boutique activism of identity politics, political correctness, and what has become known as humanitarian intervention.” —CHRIS HEDGES

” … fiercely courageous and independent reporting, historical analysis, and activism … With her eyes on the prize, Diana Johnstone has stayed the course to oppose U.S. and Western aggression, using her critical skills to expose endless horror and insisting that a truthful understanding of historical events remains a necessary tool against murder and illegality. We are deeply indebted to her.”  —JOHN MARCIANO, Monthly Review.

“Diana Johnstone’s just published book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, is the best book I have ever read, the most revealing, the most accurate, the most truthful, the most moral and humane, the most sincere and heartfelt, and the best written.  Her book is far more than a memoir.  It is a history that has not previously been written.” —PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Click here to purchase.

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The following three sets of international treaties for arms control, disarmament, the control of emerging technologies, and international security are absolutely essential to reverse the covert drive for war, even world war, that is taking place at every level in human society, that has accelerated over the last twenty years, and has spun out of control over the last eight months. The current drive for war, and the destruction of all government institutions in the United States make world war inevitable if we cannot formulate a viable alternative now.

Although these treaties cannot be realized overnight, and cannot be enacted by a Congress in the United States that is led by shills for private equity, pawns for billionaires, operatives for Israeli private intelligence, and consultants for weapons contractors, the decision to promulgate a serious proposal for meaningful arms control and disarmament treaties has tremendous value in that it offers a roadmap forward to those who have been discouraged by the vain and self-serving blather of cardboard messiahs and the prattle of limited-hangout “truth tellers” who refuse to face the truth about world war.

Demanding the drafting and signing of such treaties, including mutual inspection regimes, as opposed to globalist conniving, or the destructive fiction of isolationism which suggests that we can simply withdraw into our shells, will be a transformative act for us and we will find allies where we least expected them to be when we embrace true internationalism, grounded in sovereign rights and opposed to globalism, either in its pure narcissistic form, or disguised as nationalism.

Before we present a solution, it is critical that we firmly, and unambiguously, condemn the efforts of certain public intellectuals to denounce all efforts of the United Nations, and before the United Nations, the League of Nations, to establish treaties, guidelines, and norms to regulate the military and to promote arms control and disarmament.

Although the United Nations, the League of Nations, and Hague Conventions before, did not realize their full potential, and they all included some corrupt elements, it is simply not true that they were the tools the globalists, or a plot by the banks to establish one world government. International institutions are essential and that fact that current international organizations are the pawns of the rich does not mean that true international institutions cannot be established again in the future.

The United Nations and the League of Nations served as a critical platform for the establishment of international policies for peace and cooperation, and they developed sophisticated practices to promote disarmament, prohibit war crimes, and encourage diplomacy that made a difference.

It was the “globalists” who worked hard to keep the League of Nations and the United Nations from reaching their full potential because both these institutions offered a vision for peace and international cooperation that undermined their financial plots.

The infection of the United Nations by global finance and the Gates Foundation (and other such catspaws of billionaires) is a consequence of the extreme power of money in the current political economy, and the decay of ideology. Today, the wealthy employ the very institutions that were developed for promoting world peace as weapons against the citizens so as to promote and justify militarization as a way of generating financially beneficial consumption.

We need international institutions that serve the people and that can only be achieved if the nations that participate in them are run in a participatory manner so that money does not determine policy. We must fight at the local level to guarantee transparency and the rule of law and that will allow us to establish meaningful treaties. If national governments are run by multinational corporations, there will be no meaningful international treaties. 

It is mistaken to assume that arms control treaties are not possible, or not enforceable. They have worked in the past and they are the only effective way to protect ourselves.

History shows that it is possible for nations to create a civil service that works for the people in a transparent and accountable manner, and limits the power of the rich, granted the innate limitations of human nature.

It is possible to sign binding treaties on weapons that include inspection regimes, to limit, and then eliminate most dangerous weapons.  It is possible for the United States to accept and embrace invasive inspection regimes that address directly its corrupt and decadent military industrial complex. It is not an issue of law, or of science, but rather of will.

International treaties for arms control and disarmament, including inspection regimes, are the only thing that can save our sick nation at this point, that can give us a new birth of freedom, and a government of the people, by the people and for the people that shall not perish from the earth.

The proposed treaties and international agreements are arranged in three sets:

Set One: The full implementation of existing treaties and proposals for treaties for arms control and disarmament

Set Two: Proposals for new treaties that address emerging weapons and their proliferation

Set Three: Treaties and agreements that bring the quest for international peace and security up to date

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Set One: The Full Implementation of Existing Treaties and Proposals for Treaties for Arms Control and Disarmament

1)  International treaties limiting conventional weapons

The United States will draft and sign robust and enforceable treaties on conventional arms between the major powers that will limit the numbers of tanks, bombers, fighter planes, missiles, warships, conventional artillery, and troop size and that will be enforced through mutual transparent inspection regimes to be honored by all nations of the Earth—starting with the United States. The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) will serve a starting point for the negotiations for these treaties that will extend also to missiles and other conventional weapons systems.

The treaties will be linked to concrete steps to take the profit out of weapons sales and to promote peace and international cooperation in a concrete manner around the world by demonstrating to citizens how funding for weapons manufacturers is used as a means to transfer wealth to the elites.

2) Set of international treaties limiting, and the eliminating, nuclear weapons

A comprehensive treaty for the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons will be drafted and signed by the United States in which it, and the other nuclear powers, fully embrace the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968. All nations with nuclear weapons, starting with the United States, will follow the imperative for “the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery pursuant to a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control” expressed explicitly in the original treaty. Because the realization of this part of the treaty has been criminally overlooked by the United States and other nuclear powers, all attention must be focused on this first step.

As part of that process, the United States and the other nuclear powers will join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and start to dismantle their arsenals immediately.

All nuclear weapons will be eliminated within ten years by the United States, and other nations, and the radioactive materials employed within those weapons will be designated as sensitive substances and kept out of the hands of any organization that might use them for a military purpose. The end of the nuclear power system, and the corporate lobby promoting nuclear power and nuclear weapons, must be a part of this process so as to ensure the end of nuclear weapons.

3) Treaty on lethal autonomous weapons systems

The United States will take the United Nations resolution on the Dangers of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (2023) as the basis for a comprehensive international treaty banning the development, sale, and deployment of autonomous weapons systems. The United States will draft and promulgate such a treaty in cooperation with the other nations of the Earth.  

4)  Ban on Weapons in Space

The United States will draft with the other nations of the Earth a comprehensive treaty banning weapons from space, and strictly regulating the deployment of satellites with military or dual-use functions. The treaty will build on the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 banning weapons of mass destruction in space, this time establishing a binding treaty, supported by mutual inspection regimes, that grows out of the 1981 United Nations resolution “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space.”

Among the measures that will be included in the treaty to end the militarization of space will be the banning of the deployment of satellites, and the launch of cargos into space, by private for-profit corporations, and a ban on the development of space-based weapons.

Armed satellites and spacecraft will be prohibited by the treaty. Other weapons systems that include the use of satellites will be eliminated over the next ten years.

All deployment of satellites in space, or other objects, must be carried out in a completely transparent manner by public monopolies that are accountable to the government and to the international community at every level so as to assure that they have no military functions.

Strict regulations on satellites with possible military/intelligence use will be enforced and the use of satellites to observe the Earth will be subject to careful control regimes that assure that the information cannot be abused using international inspection regimes.

5)  Ban on landmines and cluster bombs

The United States will enact a robust international ban on landmines that follows the conventions established by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and will join the Convention on Cluster Munitions and enact an international ban on all cluster munitions, including a prohibition on research and development of such inhuman weapons. The ban on landmines and cluster bombs can be covered by a single international treaty.

Set Two: Proposals for New Treaties that Address Emerging Weapons and Their Proliferation

1) Treaty limiting the use of radioactive substances

The full range of dangerous technologies related to radioactive substances and nuclear technologies must be regulated, and eventually eliminated, and the weaponization of radioactivity must be banned, through an international treaty. That treaty will recognize the danger of all radioactive materials, the threat posed by nuclear power for the environment and for health, and the innate linkage of nuclear power to the development of nuclear weapons. The treaty will set up a strict regulation and enforcement regime for nuclear technologies in general that makes them unprofitable so that they cease to serve as opportunities for exploitation and profit.

Weapons such as depleted uranium shells, hybrid nuclear/conventional weapons, and other weapons systems that employ radioactive materials will be prohibited by this treaty. A strict regime for the long-term control of radioactive substances will be established internationally that will permit the use of radioactive materials for medical treatments, and other scientific processes, but strictly regulate that process.

2)  Treaty banning nano-weapons

 

The secret development and deployment of nano-weapons around the world by nation states and multinational corporations is one of the greatest threats we face which must be addressed by an international treaty. Nano-weapons (whether nano-robots, hydrogel, or nano-particles) are being introduced covertly into medicines, foodstuffs, water and the air as weapons that target the health, and the mental well-being of citizens.

Such nano-weapons must be prohibited explicitly by an international treaty demanding that the true nature of current nano-weapons programs be made public (as they are currently developed and deployed in secret) and that nano-robots, nano-particles, and other nano-substances with dual use must be strictly regulated.

3)  Treaty regulating drones, robots, and satellites, and banning the most dangerous versions

The United States will lead the establishment of a series of international treaties that severely limit the use of armed drones, robots, and satellites, including the prohibition of the most dangerous of them. The regulations will extend to drones, robots and satellites that have potential dual use.  

There must be stringent limits on the use of armed drones, robots and satellites (both autonomous and remote controlled) and also control over the development of potentially dangerous new technologies.

In the future, in order to reduce opportunity for abuse of such technologies, they will be handled exclusively by regulated public monopolies and kept out of the hands of private corporations which stand to profit from their manufacture and deployment.  

4)  Treaty banning the use of energy weapons

The development of dangerous new energy weapons is highly destabilizing and, because these weapons are effectively unregulated, they are already being employed covertly. The United States will draft and sign with other nations a comprehensive international treaty that bans energy weapons and that will strictly regulate all devices with potential dual-use.

The international treaty will ban directed energy weapons, and prohibit their deployment in space, in the air via airplanes and drones, on tanks, trucks and boats, and elsewhere. The development of the relevant technologies for directed energy weapons will be subject to strict international control conventions, including mutual open inspections.

Other energy weapons currently being developed, including electromagnetic radiation weapons (often disguised using the term 5G), microwave radiation weapons, infrared radiation weapons, terahertz radiation weapons, and other energy weapons currently being developed and deployed must be declassified, made open knowledge, and then subject to strict bans, and or regulations, on development and deployment.

Bans, restrictions, and robust inspection regimes will not be limited to weapons systems, but will also cover dual use technologies (such as 5G or infrared cameras) that can be rendered as a weapon through a turnkey maneuver at any moment.

5)  International treaty banning bioweapons

The United States will draft and sign a comprehensive global treaty that bans the development, deployment, and use of bioweapons of a variety of forms (to be determined in negotiations). The term bioweapon refers not only to viruses, bacteria, and other biological materials that have been modified to serve as weapons, but also to weapons innocuously disguised as medicines such as the COVID-19 vaccines. Nano-technologies are also classified in some cases as bioweapons.

The treaty will set in place walls that prevent the weaponization of medical and scientific research. Above all, there will be a clear wall that separates 1) scientific inquiry into the nature of natural phenomena from 2) the development of medications and treatments, from 3) the speculation of private capital, and from 4) the development of weapons and security-related technologies.

6) International treaty banning all weather modification programs

The United States will establish an international treaty banning all programs for weather modification globally and making it a crime to release chemicals (or particles) into the atmosphere aimed at modifying the weather, at contaminating the water or soil, or harming the health of citizens. Such actions will be considered to be acts of war, even if they are supposedly undertaken to fight climate change, and the chemicals, or devices, released will be considered as weapons.

All existing weather modification programs will be immediately declassified and if criminal intent is revealed, legal action will be taken.

The atmosphere belongs to all citizens of the Earth and any effort to contaminate the atmosphere, to affect the climate, or to contaminate the air, the water, or the soil will be seen as a grievous attack on all citizens of the Earth. This treaty will have broad implications for air pollution as well—making it impossible for corporations to pollute the air with impunity.

7) Strict international regulation of GMO technology and ban on GMO weapons

The United States will establish an international treaty banning the use of GMO (genetically modified organisms) plants and animals, as well as weapons that cause the genetic modification of plants, animals, and humans using biological or nanotechnological means. The weaponization of plants, animals, and humans by means of GMO technology as a means of controlling sources of food, destroying biodiversity, and modifying humanity is an act of war, and the GMO technologies thus employed, including vaccines, must be designated as weapons.

This long-term project to establish slavery and subjugation through the use of GMO technologies must be stopped. The United States will create a strict inspection regime to enforce this international treaty, prohibiting the development and use of GMOs, as well as the technologies employed to surreptitiously modify the genetic material of plants and animals.

Set Three: Treaties and Agreements that Bring the Quest for International Peace and Security Up to Date

1)  Treaty banning super-computer assisted mass psychological operations

The United States will propose an international treaty banning the use of supercomputers to coordinate mass psychological operations, such as the COVID-19 operation, that employ false narratives, the disruptive stimulation of the brain through advertisements and media, electromagnetic radiation, and other tools so as to induce a hypnotic state or to impede rational thinking by citizens.

Image source

The treaty will prohibit the destruction of the capacity of citizens to think for themselves through the use of addictive, repetitious, or mentally degrading stimulation. Such weapons are currently being deployed and employed through the corporate media, educational institutions, the internet, and elsewhere around the world.

The strategy of using supercomputers that run sophisticated algorithms driving international campaigns to dumb down, distract, and delude citizens using a weaponized media-entertainment-education complex must be rightfully identified as a criminal campaign, an act of war, and the tools employed, such as supercomputers and social media algorithms, must be designated as weapons that are potentially even more dangerous than bombs in that they attack the ability of citizens to think independently.

We must develop international regulations on such weapons of psychological manipulation that will be strictly enforced through an international treaty, including inspection regimes for supercomputer banks so that wealthy citizens (and the trusts and corporations that represent them) cannot employ computers that run complex psychological operations to manipulate the entire population of the Earth.

2) Treaty banning the military use of Antarctica, the Artic, the oceans, and other wildlands

The United States will establish an international treaty to ban the military use Antarctica, the Artic, the oceans, and other natural wildlands around the world.

The vast majority of the natural formations of the Earth shall be placed off limits for military activity, and in many cases for commercial exploitation as well.

The United States will strengthen the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 so as to end all military use of Antarctica, starting with the declassification of all current projects that will reveal, and terminate, all of the illegal and unethical uses of Antarctica by the US military, and other militaries, taking place today.

We will establish a similar treaty for the Artic that will ban all military exploitation of that region by all militaries and intelligence agencies of the United States, and other countries. Moreover, we will establish large sections of the oceans and of wildlands (forests, jungles, and mountains) that will be similarly off limits for use by the military, and also off limits for commercial exploitation.

The sea floors will be off limits for military exploitation, and also for commercial exploitation for minerals, gas, and oil. We must protect the ocean for future generations, looking forward for hundreds of years, and not destroy them for the short-term profits of corporations. We will also set substantial restrictions on the use of destructive fishing technologies.

New technologies for digging tunnels under the Earth will be tightly regulated, perhaps in a separate treaty, especially tunnels with military, or dual use, applications. The Earth beneath our feet, and the sky above our head, is the common property of all of humanity that no one has a right to exploit, above all not in a covert manner.

The protection of the natural environment for future generations will be the primary mandate in security discourse in the United States. The role of future militaries will be to protect those natural environments.

3) Ban on secret treaties for diplomatic and security cooperation

The current crimes against humanity taking place around the world, whether rigged up military conflicts, false-flag operations, or covert actions to kill (quickly or slowly) citizens through radiation, false medications, food additives, pesticides, and other weapons would not be possible if not for the presence of a lattice of secret treaties (intelligence agreements and secret corporate-government contracts) that permit such clandestine cooperation in the development and deployment of such weapons between nations, multinational corporations and banks, and international governmental organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

These secret agreements currently overrule the constitutions, local and national laws, as well as the chain of command within the nation state (and in international bodies) in a manner that is illegal, unconstitutional, and unethical.

Secret agreements in the form of non-disclosure agreements for employees, secret contracts, classified directives and national security letters, or secret laws and guidelines issued by nations, global organizations, or private corporations and banks make possible an invisible chain of command that is beyond the reach of the political system and is capable of overruling every organization in the nation.

We will establish an international treaty that will severely limit the use of secret treaties and agreements (including nondisclosure agreements and secret law) between nations, multinational corporations, and international organizations as a means to determine policy and process.

The treaty will require that all existing secret treaties and agreements (whether agreements between governments and governments, or between multinational corporations, intelligence sharing agreements, or other cooperative agreements between governments and private entities) that are illegal or unethical be declassified and made available to the public.  

4) Bring the definition of the actors making political and security decisions up to date through a revision of the language of international law and treaties

Efforts to promote diplomacy are hobbled by forced adherence to outdated concepts concerning the actors involved in international relations that are promoted intentionally so as to obscure the true players determining policy.

Citizens, scholars, government officials and politicians currently are forced to speak only in terms of nation states in the discussion of diplomatic and security policy. This practice continues on even though it is self-evident that political decisions are not made by presidents and ambassadors, but rather by private equity and investment banks, multinational corporations, private intelligence and consulting firms, global special interests such as the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the Gates Foundation, and other opaque and undemocratic institutions that serve the rich and powerful.

The United States will draft and promote an international treaty that lays out clearly who these non-state actors are and how they will be treated in the discussion on international relations and in practice. These institutions are too powerful, and too dangerous, to be permitted to operate at will in secret. 

Whereas the term “non-state actors” is employed to refer exclusively to terrorist organizations in current policy debate, the fact is that many non-state actors exist which are not terrorist organizations but that have displaced nation states as the functional unit in international relations—many are involved in planning and carrying out state crimes.

We must extend the use of the term “non-state actor” to include multinational banks, private equity, private trusts, multinational corporations, political consulting and lobbying firms, the private research and PR teams of wealthy individuals and families, and the forest of pay-to-play private intelligence firms. Together, these organizations work to corrupt and subvert the rule of law in nation states and they must be treated as threats, at times as criminal institutions, that are formally named in the discourse on security and international relations and responded to directly.  

Their illegal activities, and their manipulation of government policy in nation states through institutionalized bribery, cannot be dismissed as lobbying and consulting, but must be treated explicitly in public discourse on international relations, and in treaties and security agreements, as corruption, as an attack on the nation, and as a tremendous threat to international security.

For example, we will identity the parts of the United States Department of Defense, or of the intelligence community, that no longer serve as part of the United States government due to privatization or infiltration by such non-state actors as private equity and investment banks as “non-state actors.”

When appropriate, we will bring criminal charges against those units responsible for state crimes and strip them of all authority as a government institution. Their members will no longer be permitted to employ clearance to hide their crimes, and all classified documents and non-disclosure agreements related to such criminal syndicates will be made public.

5) International treaty that establishes clear institutional walls domestically and internationally between 1) finance, 2) scientific research, 3) the development and manufacture of weapons, and 4) healthcare and medical treatment

The dangerous merger of finance, science, weapons, and medicine has created deadly alliances for profit between fields that should be inherently autonomous and distinct thus creating to a weaponized medical system that is aimed at the unsuspecting citizen.

The United States will take the lead in drafting a set of international treaties, and domestic laws, that establish clear walls between banks and financial institutions, scientific research institutions and universities, weapons manufacturers, and medical and health care providers that follow the model of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which separated investment and commercial banking so as to avoid dangerous speculation.

Banks will be limited to the cooperative function of serving the needs for finance of individual citizens and prohibited from speculation in scientific research, weapons, or health care. Corporations will be stripped of their unconstitutional powers as “persons” and in many cases closed down in response to their criminal activities over the last twenty years.

Scientific research at institutes and universities will be conducted as an investigation of natural phenomenon, or an effort to provide technologies that improve the lives of citizens in a concrete and unambiguous manner, and that research will be separated from financial speculation, the production of weapons, or any efforts to create profits from medical treatments.

Weapons are necessary at some level in human society, but will be produced only by highly-regulated public monopolies for specific purposes, and the manufacturers must be cut off all ties to financial speculation by banks, and to scientific research in its pure form, and the medical field.

Healthcare and medicine must focus on the wellbeing of citizens, on diet, air and water quality, food quality and nutrition, exercise, long-term health, and treatment of acute injuries and diseases as well as chronic conditions.

Although the government can play a role in supporting healthcare, healthcare must be cut off from the speculation of banks and from the development of biological weapons. Healthcare is intimately connected to scientific research, but it must be at a distance from that process lest citizens become the subjects of research and development themselves, rather than the beneficiaries of effective treatments.

The most important aspect of these treaties will be taking the profit out of speculation in weapons and weapons systems and thus eliminating the incentive for promoting conflict.

A lively debate among experts and citizens on the nature of a healthy financial system, on science and technology, on security, and on healthcare must be conducted in an objective environment that assures that profit plays no role in the assessment of the interests of society. 

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments.

Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark nuclear arms control treaty in 1987. (Photo: White House Photographic Office/National Archives and Records Administration)

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In a recent article discussing how US Treasury Department tax breaks are exploited by groups that raise money in America in support of the Israeli so-called Defense Forces (IDF), I concluded that it does not require any particular brilliance on the part of even a casual observer to realize that both politically and economically Israel and Israelis are not treated like everyone else by governments at various levels in the United States, quite the contrary in many cases.

Nevertheless, some key questions must be asked even at risk of being repetitive about Israel’s clearly privileged status. One must consider how is it possible that organizations that are committed to financially supporting war crimes and even genocide by a foreign nation are allowed to have tax breaks that enable them to collect more money which in turn helps them to corrupt the system that feeds them while also empowering those foreign militaries? How is it possible that the foreign army carrying out the war crimes is also allowed to benefit directly from the US laws that have created exemption from taxation? In short, is there no sense of responsibility and/or consequences on the part of American government when it comes to the behavior of the pariah apartheid Jewish state?

In the event, comments and insights from some readers both on my posting and privately in emails and on Facebook have convinced me that I have greatly understated the case. Those who argue, perhaps somewhat in jest, the Congress is the Knesset West and that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in fact Israeli puppets are very close to being on the mark, making Israel and its all-powerful billionaire funded lobby indisputably in control of many key aspects of American government beyond the obviously targeted foreign policy. Combine that with control over the media and entertainment industries that shape the Israeli preferred narrative at all times, and you have a situation where when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “jump” 95% of Congress and everyone in the White House begin hopping. We will no doubt see that in play when the monstrous Netanyahu arrives in Washington to address a joint session of Congress on July 24^th. The performing monkeys who will appear on television leaping up and down while cheering Bibi will definitely be something to see, though one hopes that at the same time there will also be a million demonstrators surrounding Capitol Hill calling for the head of the world’s leading war criminal.

One thing that should be completely clear is that the United States gets absolutely nothing out of the relationship with Israel, which all flows in only one direction to the tune of what probably amounts to more than a billion dollars a month if all the extras and the inevitable fraud are taken into account. And that does not even include special donations like the $14 billion recently granted by Congress and President Joe Biden to fund Israel’s never-ending war of extermination against the Palestinians. In my recent piece, I took particular aim at 501(c)(3) non-profits set up in New York City and in Massachusetts which exist to provide funds to the Israeli army. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), based in New York but with twenty branches in the US, boasts on its website that it has provided tens of millions of dollars to the Israeli military. The money contributed is federal income tax exempt and most of the donors are able to write the contributions off on their own federal taxes as an inducement to give. Such non-profits are generally granted that special status through demonstrating that they are religious, charitable or educational. Sending money to the Israeli army satisfies none of those requirements.

Not only does Israel take advantage of a tax break on money coming from groups that are ostensibly US-based, one of my correspondents advised me that the corruption goes far deeper than that, consisting of the fact that 501(c)(3) organizations must be registered through what is referred to as a “domicile.” Most are in the United States but domiciles in Canada and Mexico are also accepted given the economic realities of the North American market. Only one other country has an acceptable domicile and that is, of course, and, inevitably, Israel. In other words, an allowable exemption and the related deductible contribution for US tax purposes, might uniquely consist of US taxpayer money that goes to a charity registered in Israel. As Israeli charities have no reporting requirements vis-à-vis the US Treasury and no mechanism exists to validate their function and activity, they only answer to the government of the state of Israel.

And of course the pandering to Israel includes much more in the way of manipulating the political process to provide benefits to the Jewish state. It has long been a cliché in Washington that any long bill like defense appropriations that passes through the Congress will inevitably have some goodies for Israel inserted in it. Recent and current legislation reflects the perceived need by Congressmen to show the flag, which would be the Star of David rather than the Stars and Stripes, given the Israeli engagement in the military extermination of Palestinians that has no sign of ending as it is entering into its tenth month. The United States is not only funding and arming the Israelis, it is also providing political cover by vetoing nearly every United Nations proposal that would have led to a cease fire accompanied by some kind of exchange of hostages and prisoners. Along the way, no excess by Israel is considered to be too outrageous to require an objection coming from Congress and/or the White House, including Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s proposal that he would relieve the overcrowding in the prisons with Palestinians who are being held without charges by taking them out and killing them, one pistol shot to the head each. Former defense minister Avigdor Liberman has gone one step farther, calling on his country to use its nuclear weapons to obliterate Iran, presumably with full US approval. Israel has also been charged with killing journalists, humanitarian workers, medical workers including doctors, and torturing and starving Palestinian prisoners, but hey, that all constitutes minor stuff when one is best friends with the “Chosen” in Israel.

Image: Health center operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the southern Gaza Strip. UNRWA was established by the General Assembly in 1949 and mandated to provide assistance and protection to some 5.6 million registered Palestine refugees. Photo by United Nations/Flickr.

And there is much more. The International Criminal Court ruling that Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister should be on the receiving end of arrest warrants over war crimes and possible genocide in Gaza was responded to by US Congress with a letter threatening the jurors and their families if the court were to proceed. The US also cut off all funding and even cooperation with the United Nations’ UNRWA which, Israel has declared to be a terrorist organization, but which has been the major source of what food and medicine was actually getting through to Gaza in spite of Israeli efforts to block it. Congress also has moved to ignore any reports coming from the remaining Gazan authorities revealing the casualties resulting from the Israeli bombing and other killing, as if hiding the death toll will make it go away. The respected British medical journal The Lancet is now reporting that as many as 186,000 Gazans might be dead, mostly among the rubble of their homes, uncounted because the Gazan officials who would have performed that task are dead and whole families are wiped out so no one is reported missing. It is a far larger number than the ca. 37,000 that keeps appearing in the western media in an attempt to mitigate what Israel is up to.

And there is also the really petty stuff that surfaces regularly from the pro-Israel message control network. Three Columbia University senior officials have been removed from their positions because of comments and private emails they have written deriding the claims of “surging” antisemitism at colleges. Among the “evidence” was an intercepted message suggesting that a panelist could have used recent campus protests as a fundraising opportunity and another that appeared critical of a campus rabbi’s essay about antisemitism.

The university will also launch a “vigorous” antisemitism and antidiscrimination training program.” Meanwhile a leading New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, headed by an Orthodox Jew, is setting up an index that will identify law students who have been demonstrating against Israel, creating a “do not hire” list of the names so they will not be offered employment after graduation. “The firm is scrutinizing students’ behavior with the help of a background check company, looking at their involvement with pro-Palestinian student groups, scouring social media and reviewing news reports and footage from protests. It is looking for explicit instances of antisemitism as well as statements and slogans it has deemed to be ‘triggering’ to Jews.” And then there is Donald Trump using the word “Palestinian” as a slur in his debate with Joe Biden and efforts by politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis to reject the arrival of any refugee Palestinians as immigrants to Florida as they are all “terrorists.” You know, little stuff like that and the efforts at criminalization of free speech if it comes to criticizing either Israeli or Jewish group behavior. You know, minor stuff. Pretty soon we Americans will all be terrorized into dancing to the same tune that Congress and the White House dance to. Then it will be too late.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: US Embassy in Jerusalem. Image: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Flickr

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Thomas Matthew Crooks is the identified shooter who tried to murder the future Republican nominee for President, Donald Trump from a rooftop roughly 130 yards away during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania hitting the former president in the upper part of his right ear while speaking to his supporters. Crooks was eventually killed by secret service agents but only after he fired several rounds at the former president and killing one person and injuring two others in the crowd. It looks like the US Secret Service was either incompetent or in on the assassination plot by letting it happen, that’s the only conclusion that can come out of this incident. 

However, many people in the Democratic Party, from politicians, to celebrities to voter’s alike all instigated for someone to kill Trump because he is a “threat” to democracy. Celebrities such as Snoop Dogg whose music video “Lavender” where Trump is dressed as a clown and the rapper points a gun at him and shoots him in the head to comedian Kathy Griffin who back in May 2017, posted a photo of her holding a bloody, decapitated Trump head.  The singer Madonna also said that she had “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House” during a speech at a Women’s March in Washington back in January 2017.

It’s fair to say that these celebrities (most of them are hardcore Democrats) added to the flames of hatred called Trump Derangement Syndrome also known as TDS which many liberals have to this day.  These celebrities and some politicians have instigated violence against Trump since he became President in 2016. 

But there is a period of history that the US Secret Service can learn from and that is from the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) or Cuban Intelligence that protected Cuba’s Fidel Castro for many years from the US government, namely, the CIA.  You may ask, what can the US Secret Service learn from Cuban Intelligence?   

Well for starters, the CIA and other intelligence services tried to assassinate Fidel Castro more than 638 times. Yes, 638 times and not once a bullet got close enough to Fidel Castro. 

Image: Fabian Escalante (Source)

Cuban Intelligence agents led by its director, Fabián Escalante, protected Castro for close to five decades until the Cuban leader died of natural causes at the age of 90.  In 2016, The New York Daily News had an interesting article titled, ‘Fidel Castro survived over 600 assassination attempts, Cuban spy chief said’ published what Fabián Escalante, a former director of Cuban Intelligence had said about Castro’s assassination attempts by various US presidents from both sides of the aisle:

Before old age finally took its toll, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had survived a mob hit, poisoning at the hands of a former flame and cigars dosed with drugs. All told, the revolutionary survived over 600 assassination attempts, Cuban officials boasted.

The U.S. government’s attempts on Castro’s life — who died Friday at the age of 90 — were so frequent that the former director of Cuban intelligence, Fabián Escalante, broke them down by administration: Eisenhower, 38; Kennedy, 42; Johnson, 72; Nixon, 184; Carter, 64; Reagan, 197; Bush Sr., 16; Clinton, 21

Cuban Intelligence agents were obviously competent enough to prevent 638 assassination attempts on the Cuban leader. In fact, Castro once said that “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.” 

Some of the assassination attempts where even so ridiculous that it seemed that the ideas were made for a comedy series on TV including an attempt to get Castro to smoke an explosive cigar to blow his head off or giving him poisoned ice cream in Havana by the Italian mafia who was angry that they got kicked out of Cuba.  They even attempted to get Castro to put on a “flesh-eating wetsuit” filled with fungus.  That’s how desperate the CIA became to kill the Cuban leader. 

According to The Gaurdian, the last known assassination attempt was in 2000,

“As recently as 2000, when Castro was due to visit Panama, a plot was hatched to put 200lb (90kg) of high explosives under the podium where he was due to speak. Castro’s personal security team carried out their own checks before he arrived and foiled the plot.”

The US government, the CIA and the Right-Wing Cubans in Miami tried everything in the book to kill Castro, but it never happened because the Cuban Intelligence agents could protect Castro wherever he went.  They were steps ahead of the CIA.

Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) has been considered one of the best spy agencies in the world with the ability to identify threats before they happen. The DGI was established in 1961 with the help of the former Soviet Union’s KGB shortly after Castro came to power.

Trump’s security detail failed to access the area for any potential threats.  The US Secret Service failed to protect Trump especially against those in the Democratic party who has ruthless insiders like Hillary Clinton who is closely tied to the Deep State. They want Trump gone because he is on the projection to win in a landslide on November 5th and they can’t stand it. 

Trump has embarrassed the political establishment especially in the Democratic party and even a handful of politicians from the Republican party with their failed methods of trying to take him out of the elections with what is now called “Lawfare” by prosecuting him in court with numerous made-up charges and it all has failed.

This is not to say that Trump is anti-establishment in any way because in his last administration, he had many people from the deep state as well including his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and many others, but that’s besides the point.

The point is that the TDS crowd is still calling for Trump’s head. It’s a dangerous situation and there is still three and a half months before the Presidential elections take place, so put on your seatbelt, it’s going to be a wild and unpredictable ride.

*

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

According to the official story, an apparent lone nut, 20 years old Republican named Thomas Matthew Crooks, allegedly fired from a rooftop around 150 meters from the stage, where former President Trump gave a Presidential Campaign address.

One of the bullets brushed Trump’s ear, causing blood spilling over his face but without causing major damage. However, an assistant of Trump’s campaign tour was killed and two spectators gravely injured.

The presumed shooter was shot dead by Secret Service snipers stationed on a different rooftop.

Was Thomas Crooks indeed the shooter?

This is currently being investigated by the FBI.

This happened just two days before the beginning of the Republican Party Convention, on 15 July 2024, in Milwaukee. Coincidence?

Thomas Crooks lived in Bethel Park, a small town also in Pennsylvania, about an hour’s drive south from Butler. Thomas Crooks graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School, according to a statement from the Bethel Park School District received by a local ABC affiliate. He was apparently not known to police.

When his dad was contacted by the media and police, he seemed to be shocked, having no idea what happened to his son, a quiet young man, who graduated with honors.

Trump’s security guards immediately killed the shooter, no attempt whatsoever to arrest him, so he could NOT be put on trial. There is no trace and Thomas can no longer talk about his possible motives, what may have prompted his shooting, whether he acted alone or in a team or whether he was in one way or another prepared for the assault – if so, by whom. He was silenced.

Isn’t it typical for this type of assassination attempt or shooting? The alleged murderers are silenced.

No traces, no witnesses, no trial, nobody can talk. Thomas Crooks will be registered as lone nut who committed this atrocious crime.

Wasn’t this the case with the Kennedy Brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King? Until much later, when the truth surfaced, or at least the lie about the “lone nut”. The truth is still not officially out about the JFK killing. But Donald Trump said, when he will be President, he will open the “secret” files and make them available to the public.

There was clearly a major security lapse. No close-by security protection surrounded Trump when he was speaking. The sharpshooters from the rooftops were warned by at least one man that there was a man on a roof with a gun. They did not react. See this from Reuters.

Also see this video clip (1:59 min) with a close-up witness who ran to help Trump.

An eyewitness said in a BBC interview that his alerting the secret security detail, the snipers on the roof, was ignored. This prompted Elon Musk (“X” former Twitter) calling on the leader of the Trump security team to resign.

The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign https://t.co/ihlEC5NP1w

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2024

Right now, the news are full with speculations, hearsay and finger-pointing. There are even people, who suggest it may have been a Trump fabricated attempt at himself, so his popularity would increase. This assumption is insane because he could have been killed.

The bullet missed his brain by just a few centimeters.

No doubt, though, Trump’s popularity may increase due to this botched “martyr event”.

However, what nobody ever talks about anymore these days is the science-refined MK-Ultra brain manipulation program designed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a semi-secret Pentagon think-tank, that often works hand-in-hand with the CIA and Mossad – and frequently also with the British MI6.

Vulnerable people are “recruited” by the program. They are told their mission was secret and could not be talked about. During their training, their brains are prepared to react to certain signals, music, specific words, specific noise – or other trigger moments. Then they are told to attend the event where their target is or targets are located. Maybe they are given a weapon to be able to “defend” their target if necessary.

When the “trigger” moment happens, they start shooting at the target. They may not even know what happens to their mind. If they were given a chance to wake up from their trance condition, they might not remember what they did.

This is of course not to say, that this is what happened. Far from it. It is just one more option thrown in the ring for consideration because the MK-Ultra program exists, is alive, and has been used on many instances before.

Who would be interested in “canceling” Donald Trump from the Presidential race – just before the Republican Convention, July 15 to 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump will most likely be nominated as the Republican candidate for the November 5, 2024, Presidential elections?

Mr. Trump has already an almost-landslide lead over Joe Biden, the (still) official candidate of the Democrats.

Earlier this year, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson proposed legislation that would strip this protection from former presidents convicted of felonies, as Trump was in May.

After Saturday’s shooting, one of Thompson’s staffers wrote on Facebook that the shooter should “get some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time.” Ms. Thomson removed the post, which Republicans called despicable. (RT – 14 July 2024 – see this).

Guessing whose interest is at stake is up to the reader.

Abroad, who might be interested in a true Democrat Party alternative to Biden, a Globalist as new US President? Another Globalist, of course. Someone who may be Zionist / Jewish and in full support of Netanyahu’s killing spree and attempt at establishing Greater Israel – with the Ben Gurion Canal, gradually replacing the Suez Canal, with the foremost petrol riches of the Middle East falling under the control of the Zionists, the same Zionists who also largely control Washington, and by proxy, Brussels, the EU gnomes.

Let us not forget, Donald Trump is not a Globalist. He is a nationalist. He wants a sovereign United States for a sovereign US population. Quite the contrary form what the Dems strive for – a Globalist, One World Order.

Not too long ago, Donald Trump has distanced himself from a unilateral support for Israel, warning Bibi Netanyahu about his atrocious genocide war in Gaza.

The truth is hanging in the air.

Will it ever hit the ground and continue shaking people awake – open and receptive to the truth, and nothing but the truth?

*

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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***

The interview covered the hardly noticeable but with warp speed advancing digitization of everything, the implementation of what Klaus Schwab — World Economic Forum (WEF) — professes in his “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. A dystopian world, where humans are enslaved by digital means, transhumanism, self-driving cars, total control through QR-codes, and – the final straw – by a fully digitized monetary system.

If it goes unnoticed, as the masters of the universe would like it, it will lead to a drastically reduced-world populations, with mostly transhuman survivors, who will own nothing but are happy.

Only We, the People can stop it, if and when, we wake up, and reject the plan, simply refuse to go along with it, creating an alternative life society, alternative monetary system – and re-introducing true human values, ethics, togetherness, solidarity, work-places that care, trust and friendships.

It is high time.

We can do it.

We MUST do it.

The interview streamed on 11 July 2024. 

This is a loose transcript of the interview.

Questions or topics of conversation were introduced by Dr. Ana Mihalcea of Humanity United Now.

Dr. Ana Mihalcea (DAM): How do you see the progression of digital ID and digital money evolving?

Peter Koenig (PK): Unfortunately digitization is advancing rapidly, without most people noticing it. Publication about it is sparse, and mostly only by the non-mainstream media.

Digital money is evolving much faster than digital ID. On purpose.

Why?

Digital ID has been propagated by the EU to such an extent that rejection became loud.

So, they switched to an alternative.

Full digitization of money. Because once money is fully digitized, with or without the infamous so-called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a formal digital ID is just a question of converting each one of our QR code into an ID. And bingo. The money is controlled and so are we.

Yes, we all have a QR code. During Covid, whether vaccinated or not, each time we were compelled to take a PCR test, we were given a QR code. This personal QR code is automatically linked to all other QR codes we use… in restaurants, purchasing goods, airline tickets / boarding passes …. Just about anything is QR coded nowadays. 

Back to digital money: In fact, CBDC is not even necessary, if all banks go along with digitization – and if the respective governments tell them they must – they will, no choice, if they don’t want to be sidelined or completely closed then cash can be abandoned basically from one day to the next.

Several countries have been selected to test-case the digitization of money. Switzerland is one of them. Selected banks have agreed to do so.

I know from personal experience.

When refusing to change my bank account transactions to using a QR code, my bank account was blocked. For over three weeks I had no access to it. Only when I agreed, thinking of changing banks afterwards, they gave me access to my account again.

I am now with another bank, where I have an alternative option – for now. How long that will last – I have no idea.

DAM: Do we have a chance to stop it?

PK: Yes, we do. By insisting on using cash, by refusing to use credit cards, and electronic payment systems as much as possible.

This is a challenge, as most people are still unaware of what digital payment modes eventually will do to them. Especially young people find it cool to be able to just pass a card over a payment device, or pay with their watch, or their cell phone, or in some Scandinavian countries, they have an option of an implanted chip in their hand, between the index finger and the thumb.

We, the elders, must find ways to tell the up-and-coming generation to what dangers they expose themselves, full enslavement – if they fall for the comfort of paying “playing” digitally.

Many will not listen. Their answer is often – “Well, I have nothing to hide”. This is very shortsighted, of course.

Maybe more importantly – we must launch public activities, protests, against digital money – more protests, more people become aware of the risk and start thinking by themselves.

Because the best method of awakening is when someone feels the spark of conscience by himself.

And we must become more vociferous in the non-mainstream – and to the extent possible – in the mainstream, about preserving CASH.

Even banks, I have noticed when talking to bankers, are not convinced about a future of exclusively digital money. Because they too, may become victims of repressive actions, for example, if they do not follow globalist rules – of which they have no clue today, that they may come.

DAM: How does slavery and social credit system connect in your view with the push for digital money?

PK: Digital money IS already slavery. At first it is slavery in a passive stage, but it can be activated at will of the powers-that-be.

The slavery is already occurring, even without digital money. It has happened in France and Canada – and maybe other countries, that people’s bank accounts have been blocked, because they did not conform to the rules of Government, or because they have not been paying a so-called government-issued fine for misbehaving.

The government has access to your bank account.

This option is already open for governments under the “Rules-based Order”.

As to social credit systems – as far as I know, China is the only country that uses Social Credit system. It is not linked to individual bank accounts.

In China, although digital money is very popular – cash is still available and can be used almost everywhere.

If the WEF and the UN want to introduce a Social Credit System, link it to our bank accounts – to help push through their Agenda 2030, it is again up to us the People, to say no and resist it.

If we stand up in masses, there is little so-called authorities can do to implement it. But to stand up in masses, it needs a critical mass. And today we are not yet there.

Our honest thinking – and the thoughts of living in another sphere, outside of the darkness and government-imposed globalist actions — will proliferate without our knowing. Without thoughts of anger and revenge, we may have what we often call a “butterfly effect”. It is part of quantum science. We just start learning about it.

DAM: Can you explain how far along we are in the process?

PK: As I said at the beginning, unfortunately, the process of digitization of everything is already quite advanced. It is what Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s (former) boss, calls the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. It consists of first reducing the world population to the extent possible, and replacing the survivors with robots or transhumans or completely with AI-driven robots.

Gadgets such as “ChatGPT”, translations by AI, driverless cars – and much — are being introduced, if accepted, made mandatory. That we must be aware of. This is not just a trial.

The trial are We, the people.

If we accept, bingo – it will become mandatory. Accepting is not objecting, not protesting; it is going along with it, even if we do not like it. Active resistance is needed.

Otherwise, our chance has gone.

We must stop evil at the gate; like right now, REFUSING, to being subjected to driverless cars.

Go even further, refuse all digitized cars, with everything from the car window to turning on and off the engine at red light… and so on, request old-style cars where you open your window by hand – no automatics, the less digitized the better. Same for kitchen equipment and other household tools.

It is hard to believe that less than 50 years ago we have lived analogue lives, without digitization whatsoever. Life was less complicated, human contact was warmer and closer. Solidarity was of the order.

Again, what is needed, are aware people, who know of the dangers of digitization, of the risk of total enslavement by AI.

We are not there yet.

Programs such as yours [Humanity United Now] can and will help bringing more people to senses; to think for themselves what AI and digitization can do to them.

DAM: What concrete things can the average citizen do?

PK: Well, some of them, I mentioned before:

• refusing digital money – insisting in using CASH instead.
• refusing digital payment systems
• refusing all-automated tools, cars, kitchen machines …..
• take to the streets – talk to each other about the enslavement risk of digitization, of digitized money

Write about it…

For example, quit banks that have been pre-selected to digitize money by using the QR code.

The QR code can accumulate almost unlimited amounts of personal information, and eventually knows you better than you know yourself.

Stay away to the extent possible from QR codes.

For example, I know restaurants they presented their menus ONLY by giving you a QR code to read in our cellphone. By doing that – you have already been caught and registered.

Since, using a QR code to read the menu is also uncomfortable, many customers have complained. So, many of these restaurants have gone back to printed menus.

That is a small success, but every big change starts small.

DAM: How do you view the threat of Artificial Intelligence and convergence of man and machine?

PK: Yes, listening to the WEF’s Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030, there is a chance that such convergences may happen. For sure, they are working on it – in the various Silicon Valley IT corporations.

Their goal is: for those who survive, “you will own nothing but be happy.” That would be typical for a trans-humanized being.

But it is my strong belief they will not succeed for a simple reason. Anything digital, including AI, is based on linear information, on linear inputs, maybe millions of them, but still linear. Human beings are living beings, and living beings are not linear or digital, they are dynamic, adjusting to circumstances, often spontaneously, unpredictably. That is also why making economic projections – I’m talking as an economist – usually does not work. Since they are all based on linear inputs.

The longer-term such projections are attempted – I know from experience with the World Bank – the further off reality they are.

Dynamism is perhaps a forerunner of quantum mechanics that can switch dimensions instantaneously.

If we Humans are convinced and aware that we belong to the creation of LIFE – which is analogue and has nothing to do with digital linearism, they will not succeed.

I am convinced of it.

The timing is crucial, though. The longer it takes for Us, the People, to become conscience of these facts and act accordingly, the more damage their attempts to digitize the world and us humans can do.

It is up to We, the People, to stop it.

*

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). 

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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***

[First published in 2022, with updates on 14 July 2024.]

Trump’s near assassination this weekend represents an incredibly important reminder of the stakes going into the 2024 election amidst a vast systemic collapse and heightened threat of a thermonuclear war. At this stage, despite the cast of compromised characters among Trump’s support network, no one has displayed so consistent a quality of leadership that qualifies them for dealing with the current crisis as Trump has displayed.

I thought it fitting to revisit the recent Canadian Patriot Review film (based upon the essay “Why Assume There Will be a 2024 Election?“) where we are introduced into this dense period of history from the orchestrated demolition of the financial system in 1929, the Wall Street/London fueled “economic miracle solution” of fascism and eugenics between 1930-1934, and the story of FDR’s war with the financier oligarchy’s London and Wall Street tentacles. From this vantage point, we are then thrust into a deep dive into the person of Smedley Butler and his courageous defense of the republic.

Why Assume There Will be a 2024 Election? America’s 1934 “Bankers’ Coup Plot” Revisited

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, July 19, 2022

Earlier this week, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run in the 2024 elections which is a no-brainer considering his support among potential republican contenders is 49% (compared to a 25% support for DeSantis) and no other candidate earning above 7%.

It didn’t take two days before Defense Authorization Act of 2022 (HR-4350) was passed by the House of Representatives giving the President full controls over the military in all domestic operations and which takes direct aim at all “domestic extremists” in the USA.

Obviously, the senile and politically compromised Biden’s days in power are shaky to say the least and echoes of the 1933 Reichstag fire that provided a newly elected Hitler regime the excuse it needed to impose tyrannical ‘enabling acts’ rings in the memory.

With the perfect storm of crises now converging onto our beleagured world (economic meltdown, energy crisis, food crisis, and general dangers of both civil and global wars), it is worth considering the very real possibility that the days of elections may soon be over. Despite the many talking heads yapping about the 2024 elections as if it were a football game, reality and real history paints a very different picture of bankers’-directed military coups both in the USA and abroad.

In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.

The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932

1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.

This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.

In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.

The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.

In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated:

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.

Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

Who was General Butler?

Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).

By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:

“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”

In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.

The Wall Street Putsch Is Launched

These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.

Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power[1].

Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.

Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.

Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly:

“Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”

Butler Blows the Whistle

When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.

At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon  substantiated everything over the course of  a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.

Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it

“wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.

When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded:

“We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”

Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.

The Aftermath of the Exposure

This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.

Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.

The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. Without understanding this fascist deep state operation within the heart of the American establishment, it were impossible to make sense of the manichean Cold War dualism that destroyed FDR’s vision for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states or.

This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.

Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup and general war should be taken more seriously than ever.

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This article was originally published on Matthew Ehret’s Insights.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow, and Director of The Rising Tide Foundation. He has authored three volumes of the Untold History of Canada book series and four volumes of the Clash of the Two Americas. He hosts Connecting the Dots on TNT Radio, Breaking History on Badlands Media, and The Great Game on Rogue News.

Note

[1] The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”

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As I have observed in previous columns, our era in the United States is frequently beset with incidents characterized by a catastrophic loss of competence. Decades of procedural knowledge seem to vanish from one day to the next, leaving sensible people wondering how it could possibly happen.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump this evening at the the Butler Farm Show Grounds is a perfect example of this bizarre phenomenon. The shooter climbed onto the roof—purportedly with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle —120 meters from Trump on the stage. From this vantage point, he had a clear line of sight for a shot that would have been easy for even a middling marksman. The following aerial photograph shows the shooter’s position relative to Trumps.

 

 

As anyone who understands the rudiments of security knows, the FIRST thing you do is secure all rooftops within sniper range. Note in the following video that a counter sniper (with the word POLICE embroidered on the back of his vest) on the roof behind Trump is scoping the would-be assassin’s position.

 

 

He appears to see the would-be assassin and start to engage (while flinching) right before the would-be assassin’s shots can be heard. Clearly the counter snipers knew that the rooftop presented a high risk position or they wouldn’t have been scoping it.

 

 

Why wasn’t this building—AGR International Inc., a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm show ground—secured before Trump began speaking? It seems to me that this building would be the first thing a security detail would secure. The green pin on the roof to the east of Trump’s position marks where the counter snipers are posted. Again, why didn’t they just secure the building onto which the shooter climbed? This makes no sense.

 

 

The gunman apparently fired right as Trump looked to the right, towards the gunman. The grazing shot to Trump’s right ear was just a centimeter to the left (from the gunman’s POV) of a fatal head shot. I emphasize that the gunman was positioned at very close range. In the following video, I hit a small condiment package at 75 yards on the second shot with the same kind of rifle with open sights.

 

Click here to watch the video

Note what appears to be a vapor trail behind the bullet.

 

The Nato 5.56 cartridge fires the bullet at a velocity of 3,250 feet per second — almost three times the speed of sound (1,125 feet per second). A bullet moving at this speed induces air pressure changes around the bullet that produce a contrail similar to those that form on the low pressure side of aircraft wings.

What could possibly explain the catastrophic failure to secure the perimeter around the stage? It’s hard for me to imagine a legitimate explanation for such a lapse of such elementary security procedures.

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“Berit “Bear” was healthy when he was born on January 29th, 2015. He was three weeks early, but never had any issues whatsoever. (He received his first dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine on January 30th.) Being a first time mom I was very protective, but not protective enough.

He had started smiling and rolling over and was really alert. Bear was a cuddle bug. He loved to be held. He was a happy baby and very laid back until he was done with that and wanted to be held. He would smile when he heard people talking, especially if they were talking to him.

The days before his 2-month checkup I started feeling like I really didn’t want to get him vaccinated. I expressed my concerns to the doctor which they told me “many parents feel this way before their child’s shots” and assured me he would be fine. Bear was vaccinated on the 26th of March. He received the DTaP, Hep. B, IPV, Hib, Pneumo Conjugate 13, and Rotavirus vaccines.

After his shots, he slept a lot. He slept almost all day. I had to wake him up to feed him – that was very unusual. He cried so much more than normal. He never ran a fever. Looking back on pictures now I can see his eyes were glazed over. He was not alert anymore, and he was swollen.

It was the 28th of March at 3:00 a.m., I woke up having really bad cramps (I had ovarian cysts ever since I received the HPV/Gardasil vaccine). I had Bear sleeping on my chest (he was wanting to be held more than usual), so when I got up, I had to put him down. He went right back to sleep. I put him down in bed on his back and went to take a bath.

I came back 15 minutes later and picked him up — he was limp. I screamed. Woke up my now ex-husband and he began doing CPR while I called 911. I remember I was in such a shock that I told them our old address and not our new one. I finally gave up trying to explain and told them to call the hospital in our town and tell them we were coming. We lived two minutes away.

When we got there, the doctors and nurses immediately took Bear from us and started working on him. By the time we got there, he had blood running out of his nose. They got him back and lost him several times. That beeping sound still to this day makes me feel like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. Neonatal nurses were flown in from Oklahoma University via helicopter to try to stabilize him, so we could transfer him. It wasn’t happening. Even on the ventilator he was still going in and out.

Around 9:00 a.m., all family and close friends were there. The doctor pulled us back to a room by ourselves and told us Bear was without oxygen to his brain for too long and he would never be able to have a normal life. We were still losing him on and off at this point too.

We had to make the hardest decision ever. We decided to take him off of the machine and hold him while he took his last breaths. At 10:13 a.m., he was pronounced dead.

Those months following, and still to this day, are sometimes unbearable. Sometimes it’s like you think you’ll eventually wake up from this nightmare that’s actually your life. I’ve had two children since then – a girl (2016) and a boy (2018). Neither are vaccinated and both are very healthy.

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The European Union’s legal service informed members of the bloc that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recent visit to Moscow and his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin violated EU treaties, the Financial Times reported on July 11. Nonetheless, despite EU threats to have Hungary stripped of the presidency of the Council of the European Union, Orbán remains committed to his “peace mission” to end the war in Ukraine and even shunned US President Joe Biden to meet with his predecessor instead, Donald Trump.  

On July 7, Orbán visited Russia for talks with Putin. The Hungarian prime minister described his visit as a continuation of the “peace mission” he began with a trip to Kiev in early July. Nonetheless, the EU’s legal service told member states on July 10 that Orbán had violated agreements that prohibit “any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the Union’s objectives,” FT reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

At the same time, the Hungarian leader is said to have violated a provision requiring all members to conduct foreign policy “unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity.”

According to sources involved in the investigation, during the NATO summit in Washington on July 10, European leaders were discussing, among other things, a joint letter to Orbán that clarified their objections to his actions and demanded that he stop his independent foreign policy initiative. Another suggestion was a special meeting of EU foreign ministers specifically on the subject.

Some diplomats told the FT that many EU members have also discussed a possible boycott of informal ministerial meetings during Hungary’s presidency of the Council of the European Union.

A smaller number of countries have launched informal talks on how to use the EU treaty to limit Orbán’s ability to act during his presidency. Some EU officials have even privately suggested taking the presidency away from Budapest.

Politico reported that Hungary’s EU envoy, Balint Odor, was verbally heckled by his Brussels counterparts like never before.

“It’s unprecedented that the presidency would be reprimanded in such a way by all the others,” a senior EU diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Since Budapest took over the rotating EU presidency in July, Orbán has undertaken self-declared “peacekeeping missions” to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. However, they were “not conducted in the name of the European Union or any of its institutions,” Hungarian EU Affairs Minister János Bóka stressed at a news conference.

Media outlets reported earlier that Orbán had also sent confidential letters to European Council President Charles Michel and EU leaders detailing his recent trips to Kiev, Moscow and Beijing. Orbán reportedly said that Russia and China hoped that peace talks between Moscow and Kiev would begin by the end of this year.

Hungarian Foreign noted that Orbán met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO summit.

“We [Hungary and Turkey] have taken a common position that in the coming times, a peace conference in which both parties to the conflict will participate will be necessary. This is the only opportunity to reach an agreement,” he told M1 television.

Szijjártó also highlighted that the peace conference in Switzerland failed because Russia was not involved, adding:

“It is important that the peace conference planned for the second half of this year, whether in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, involves both sides, Russia and Ukraine, to give the best opportunity to find a solution.”

Although the EU is outraged by Orbán’s peace mission, the Hungarian leader is a realist and has consistently said that Russia has won the war and that Western powers are just prolonging the suffering by continually sending weapons to Ukraine. In fact, he is so much of a realist that he, along with most pollsters, believes Donald Trump will win the US election and, therefore, he decided to fly into Mar-a-Lago on July 11 to discuss the Ukraine situation, effectively shunning Joe Biden by not requesting a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit.

Orbán has not had an official meeting with Biden since he became president nearly four years ago. The Hungarian prime minister met Trump in March this year in Mar-a-Lago and has endorsed him several times throughout the past eight years, even describing the billionaire as a “man of honour.”

It is unlikely that Hungary will be stripped of its presidency of the Council of the European Union, but it does indicate the anger and frustration that Orbán’s peace mission has caused in Brussels. Although the EU desperately wants the Kiev regime to prevail over Russia, a Trump reelection will all but end the war in a relatively short time, and this is the reality that Orbán is working with.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban made statements for the press. Photo: Aleksey Maishev, RIA Novosti

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The FBI is investigating an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.

Former President Donald Trump is injured but safe after a bullet fired by a would-be assassin pierced his right ear about 10 minutes after the start of the rally.

The FBI named Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, as the subject involved in the assassination attempt. The agency said the investigation remains active and ongoing. Agency officials said they believe Mr. Crooks acted alone. No motive has been identified.

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Western-supported Zionists bomb civilians in areas identified as “safe” as policy.

Gaza journalist Bisan Owda describes how Zionists recently  bombed and massacred, from the air and the sea, about 300 civilians taking shelter in their tents.

The number 300, she says, does not include those buried alive or those who have not interfaced with hospitals.

The bombs upturn the earth and bury people alive.

This massacre of 300 is only one of the 3,000 that have so-far been committed by Zionists against Gazan civilians.

Imagine that.  No, we can not imagine that. Impossible.

This genocide is even more impossible for Westerners to imagine because not only do the American-supplied bombs bury people alive, but the Zionists also target civil defence workers and ambulances.

This of course is all part of the Western/Zionist-imposed genocide against Palestine and Palestinians.

As mentioned earlier, the genocide also involves targeting electrical, water, and health care infrasctructure, with a view to further imposing famine, disease, and disaster. Famine and disease are fabricated instruments of genocide.

In this video, Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, reporting from Deir Al Balah, describes the staggering and grossly under-reported death count from the bombs and the bleeding, from the siege and the restrictions on humanitarian aid.

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik noted on his Telegram page,

“Today’s horrific massacre & savage bombing of displaced Palestinians in Israeli designated ‘safe’ zones of Muassi, Khan Younis is the latest in an escalation that has turned all of Gaza into one massive death zone. American bombs & shells rain down on Gaza while the Israeli government & thugs succeed in preventing any form of medical, food, or fuel supplies from reaching the devastated population.”

This is genocide, in plain view, for all to see.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. He writes on his website where this article was originally published.

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NATO celebrated the 75th anniversary of its foundation at the Washington Summit, it should have been held on April 4, but Washington – which for 75 years has been keeping the key commands of NATO starting from the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, an American general has always been appointed by the President of the United States – decided to celebrate it more than three months later for its internal political reasons.

The official history of NATO, presented at the Washington Summit, explained the birth of NATO thus:

“In 1949, 12 European and North American countries, faced with the growing threat from the Soviet Union, signed a Treaty based on the principle of collective defence.”

The text is accompanied by the front page of a newspaper dated August 29, 1949, with a headline in large letters: “RUSSIA HAS ATOMIC BOMB” – “RUSSIA HAS THE ATOMIC BOMB”.

It is a colossal historical fake. The Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War largely destroyed, after being attacked and invaded in June 1941 by Nazi Germany with 201 divisions, including 5.5 million soldiers equal to 75% of all German troops, 3,500 tanks, and 5000 aircraft, plus 37 divisions from satellite countries (including Italy). The USSR had repeatedly asked the Allies to open a second front in Europe, but the United States and Great Britain had deliberately delayed doing it.

Image: Ruins in Stalingrad, typical of the destruction in many Soviet cities. (From the Public Domain)

The price paid by the Soviet Union was very high: around 27 million deaths, over half of them civilians, corresponding to 15% of the population (compared to 0.3% in the USA throughout the Second World War); around 5 million deported to Germany; over 1700 cities and large population centres, 70 thousand small villages devastated; 30 thousand factories destroyed. The Soviet Union could not therefore constitute a threat to the West, also because the United States was the only one to possess the atomic weapon, of which it held a monopoly from 1945 to 1949. Already from September 1945, just a month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Pentagon calculated that around 200 nuclear bombs were needed to attack the USSR. In 1949 the US arsenal rose to around 170 atomic bombs. At this point, the United States was confident that it would have enough bombs to attack the Soviet Union within a short time. In that same year, however, the American dream of maintaining the monopoly on nuclear weapons vanished. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union carried out its first experimental atomic explosion. Now the USSR also has the Bomb. At this point, the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers begins.

Since then, for 75 years, NATO has justified its war strategy with the false claim of being threatened. Today’s “threat” comes, according to the Washington Summit, from the “growing alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea”. For this reason, “NATO works increasingly closely with partners in the Indo-Pacific and with the European Union to help maintain peace and protect the rules-based international order”. Based on this historical falsification, NATO – which has expanded from 12 to 32 countries increasingly close to Russia – is dragging Europe and the world into catastrophe.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: The NATO Summit at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., July 11, 2024 (Photo by U.S. Department of State from United States / From the Public Domain)

A Cúpula de Washington, com a qual a OTAN comemorou o 75º aniversário de sua fundação, deveria ter sido realizada em 4 de abril, mas Washington – que há 75 anos detém os principais comandos da OTAN, a começar pelo de Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa, sempre um general norte-americano nomeado pelo presidente dos EUA – decidiu, por motivos próprios também de política interna, celebrá-la mais de três meses depois. A história oficial da OTAN, apresentada na Cúpula de Washington, explica o nascimento da OTAN da seguinte forma

“Em 1949, diante da crescente ameaça da União Soviética, 12 países europeus e norte-americanos assinaram um tratado baseado no princípio da defesa coletiva.”

O texto é acompanhado pela primeira página de um jornal datado de 29 de agosto de 1949, com uma manchete em letras grandes: “RÚSSIA TEM BOMBA ATÔMICA”.

Uma falsificação histórica colossal. A União Soviética emergiu da Segunda Guerra Mundial em grande parte destruída, tendo sido atacada e invadida em junho de 1941 pela Alemanha nazista com 201 divisões, compreendendo 5,5 milhões de soldados ou 75% de todas as tropas alemãs, 3.500 tanques e 5.000 aeronaves, além de 37 divisões dos países satélites (incluindo a Itália). A URSS havia pedido repetidamente aos Aliados que abrissem uma segunda frente na Europa, mas os EUA e a Grã-Bretanha haviam deliberadamente adiado.

O preço pago pela União Soviética é muito alto: cerca de 27 milhões de mortos, mais da metade deles civis, o que corresponde a 15% da população (em comparação com os 0,3% dos EUA em toda a Segunda Guerra Mundial); cerca de 5 milhões de deportados para a Alemanha; mais de 1.700 cidades e grandes vilas, 70 mil pequenos vilarejos devastados; 30 mil fábricas destruídas. Portanto, a União Soviética não poderia representar nenhuma ameaça para o Ocidente, até porque somente os Estados Unidos possuíam a arma atômica, da qual detinham o monopólio de 1945 a 1949. Já em setembro de 1945, apenas um mês após o bombardeio de Hiroshima e Nagasaki, o Pentágono calculou que seriam necessárias cerca de 200 bombas nucleares para atacar a URSS.

Em 1949, o arsenal dos EUA aumentou para cerca de 170 bombas nucleares. A essa altura, os EUA estavam confiantes de que logo teriam bombas suficientes para atacar a União Soviética. No entanto, naquele mesmo ano, o sonho americano de manter o monopólio das armas nucleares desapareceu. Em 29 de agosto de 1949, a União Soviética realizou sua primeira explosão nuclear experimental. Agora a URSS também tem a bomba. Nesse momento, teve início a corrida armamentista nuclear entre as duas superpotências.

Desde então, há 75 anos, a OTAN tem justificado sua estratégia de guerra com a falsa alegação de estar sendo ameaçada. A “ameaça” de hoje vem, de acordo com a Cúpula de Washington, do “crescente alinhamento da Rússia, China, Irã e Coreia do Norte”. É por isso que “a OTAN está trabalhando cada vez mais estreitamente com seus parceiros do Indo-Pacífico e com a União Europeia para ajudar a manter a paz e proteger a ordem internacional baseada em regras”. Com base nessa falsificação histórica, a OTAN – ampliada de 12 para 32 países cada vez mais próximos da Rússia – está arrastando a Europa e o mundo para uma catástrofe.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo em italiano :

SUMMIT NATO: Europa in Prima Linea sotto Comando Usa contro Russia e Cina

Tradução do italiano por Mondialisation.ca com DeepL

 

VIDEO (em italiano) :

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Manlio Dinucci é geógrafo e jornalista, e ex-diretor executivo italiano da International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, associação que recebeu o Prêmio Nobel da Paz em 1985. Porta-voz do Comitato no Guerra no Nato (Itália) e pesquisador associado do Centre de recherche sur la Mondialisation (Canadá). Vencedor do Prêmio Internacional de Jornalismo de Análise Geoestratégica 2019 do Club de Periodistas de México.

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In September 2024, the first 10 international students in the fields of Medicine and Dentistry within the quota of the Government of the Russian Federation are expected to arrive at Donetsk State Medical University named after M. Gorky.

Russian public figures discussed the possibility of cooperation between the Ministry of Higher Education of the Republic of Cameroon and educational institutions of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

The Minister of Higher Education of Cameroon, Mr. Jacques Fame Ndongo, expressed interest in closer cooperation between Russia and Cameroon in the field of education, emphasizing the desire to actively cooperate with specialized universities focused on development and training in complex specialized areas. According to the minister, in the modern world, not just basic education is especially important, but the training of specialists in high-tech and promising fields such as neurology and cardiology, who can effectively solve complex problems and tasks.

During the meeting, the head of the delegation Vladislav Chevachin spoke in detail about the wide opportunities of Donetsk State Medical University named after M. Gorky in training professional staff, touched upon the issues of expanding academic student exchange between Russia and Cameroon, as well as professional development for teachers from Cameroon in cooperation with Russian universities. Mr. Jacques Fame Ndongo confirmed Cameroon’s readiness to consider Donetsk as an international base for the training of medical specialists, in coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic.

The Minister supported the proposal for a partnership to strengthen the professional training of Cameroonian teachers using the Russian teaching methodology through industrial training practice, continuing education, and multifaceted academic cooperation. Mr. Jacques Fame Ndongo proposed to hold an expanded meeting of the Ministry in the near future with the participation of all relevant departments on strengthening Russian-Cameroonian cooperation in the field of education. The new system of distribution of Russian scholarships has become the subject of special attention from the Ministry of Higher Education of the Republic of Cameroon.

During the meeting, the Minister of Higher Education of the Republic of Cameroon proposed to work out mechanisms to improve the scholarship distribution system of the Government of the Russian Federation. According to Mr. Jacques Fame Ndongo, they are aimed at providing more effective and equitable access to financial support for students who seek quality education abroad. One of the key proposals of the Minister is the creation of transparent criteria and procedures for the selection of fellows. This will ensure equal opportunities for everyone who wants to get an education in Russia.

At the end of the meeting, the Minister of Higher Education of Cameroon was presented with memorable gifts, as well as an invitation to personally visit the Donetsk People’s Republic. In the near future, a number of educational events are planned in Cameroon and other African countries about the possibilities of studying in the Donetsk People’s Republic.

These steps are aimed at strengthening friendly ties between Russia and Cameroon, as well as expanding opportunities for future cooperation in the field of education and health between the two countries.

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This article was originally published on VT Foreign Policy.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida is a Brazilian journalist, geopolitical analyst. Graduated from the Cultural Extension Program of the Brazilian War College. Researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. Professionally, he works as a journalist and geopolitical analyst. Researcher in the “Crisis, Development and International Relations” research group at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. At the invitation of the Russian Delegation in Geneva, he presented a report on the use of chemical weapons by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the 52nd Session of the UN Human Rights Council and at the OSCE’s “Supplementary Discussions”.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from VTFP

First published on July 21, 2024

July 14, 2024 (below) – 35 year old Lauren Ballas of Monroe, CT, died suddenly on Saturday at her home.

I have reported over 6000 “Died Suddenly” cases since April 2023, and I have seen it all.

Most recently, it’s young women, cardiac arrest after cardiac arrest.

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July 16, 2024 – Costa Rica – 26 year old Francini Maria Campos Martinez died suddenly from a cardiac arrest on July 16, 2024.

July 13, 2024 – Louisville, KY – 30 year old lawyer and mom, Hunter Hayes-Price died suddenly on July 13, 2024. “On a recent outing to a waterpark with her children, Hunter suffered a severe heat stroke, which led to cardiac arrest” She was a graduate of 2021 at Appalachian School of Law.

July 5, 2024 – 32 year old Rebecca Trudel (Manitou Beach, SK, Canada), died unexpectedly on July 5, 2024.

July 3, 2024 – BRAZILIAN DOCTOR DEAD – 23 year old Sao Paulo medical student Maria Eugenia Assis Lins died suddenly on July 3, 2024 (“she had myocarditis”).

June 24, 2024 – South Portland, Maine – 37 year old Emma Brosnan died unexpectedly in her home on June 24, 2024. She was a pharmacy technician.

June 17, 2024 – Tunisian Influencer 36 year old Farah El Kadhi died suddenly on June 17, 2024 from a cardiac arrest while on holiday in Malta. She died in her sleep. She had 1.1 million followers on Instagram.

June 11, 2024 – Lebanon, KY – 35 year old Traci Leann Wright died suddenly in her sleep on June 11, 2024.

June 2, 2024 – Hoffman, MN – 30 year old Shaylee Anderson died unexpectedly at home on June 2, 2024. She was found dead in her bed without a pulse. Her father thought she was just resting.

June 2024 – Buenos Aires, Argentina – 15 year old Milagros Chavez, soccer player U16 at the River Plate Athletic Club died suddenly in June 2024.

May 18, 2024 – Stony Plain, AB, Canada – 18 year old Hayley Janice Power died on May 18, 2024 from complications of a sudden cardiac arrest.

May 2024 – “My daughter Melissa died of a heart attack at 35. She didn’t have to”. Melissa died in 2023.

My Take…

No one is protecting these young women. No one is fighting for them either.

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines cause cardiac damage in 1 in 30 within the first week after vaccination

Study #1 – Thailand study (2022, Mansanguan) 202 boys ages 13-18, from two different schools, 7 of them developed subclinical myo/pericarditis after 2nd Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA dose. That’s 1 in 30 per Pfizer dose. 

Study #2 – Swiss Study (2023, Muller) – 777 healthcare workers had Moderna COVID-19 mRNA booster shot, 22 had evidence of myocardial injury (22/777 = 1 in 35 per Moderna dose). 

“Conclusion: mRNA-1273 vaccine-associated myocardial injury was more common than previously thought, being mild and transient, and more frequent in women versus men.”

Doctors are still not allowed to discuss these risks with their patients as part of informed consent. That is an ongoing crime being committed by American Medical Boards and Canadian Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons.

Our politicians tell us people have the choice to get the COVID-19 Vaccines for themselves or their children. That’s false. Where there is no informed consent, there is no choice.

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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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***

Using creative tactics, the Resistance to U.S.-Israeli terror is causing frustration and reversals for the oppressors. Consider the following:

CNN reported June 22 that the U.S. will support Israel in the event of a war with Hezbollah with everything it has.

U.S. officials publicly reassured top Israeli officials at a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., on June 20 that if a full-out war were to break out between Israel and Hezbollah, the Biden administration is fully prepared to back its ally. 

The U.S. officials gave the assurances in person to a delegation of Israeli security officials, including National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. The face-to-face assurances come amid active Israeli mobilization on the Lebanese border.

Faced with months of failure in Gaza, both Israeli and the U.S. war planners appeared determined to go in another direction — widen the war.

Israeli officials issued multiple threats claiming they will launch a major attack on Lebanon. This includes attacking civilian areas in the capital, Beirut, in order to provide security for 100,000 displaced Israeli settlers so they can return to northern Israel. Major infantry and armored forces were being moved into place along the Lebanese border. 

Israeli war threats on Lebanon became the big media story, crashing in from every direction. 

From the BBC on June 22:

“Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war.”

The Jerusalem Post announced June 24:

“Countdown to war between Israel and Hezbollah has begun – Israel will do what it needs to do.”

Politico asks:

“Are Israel and Hezbollah about to square up?”

Time Magazine’s headline of June 22:

“The Coming Israeli-Hezbollah War.”   

Corporate think tank, The Center for Strategic and International Studies announced its assessment:

“The Coming Conflict with Hezbollah.”

Then a Sudden U.S. Change

After the promises at the White House to support Israel to the max in war with Hezbollah, it took only four days for a reversal. In a national news conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Charles Brown suddenly warned Israel that the U.S. was likely unable to assist Israel in an all-out war with Hezbollah, unlike the way the U.S. stepped in during the April drone launch from Iran.

What caused this reversal? General Brown said that any Israeli military offensive into Lebanon could risk triggering a broader war, pulling in Iran and putting U.S. forces in danger. He said the safety of U.S. forces was the priority. He admitted that it is hard to fend off the shorter-range rockets Hezbollah fires. 

Air Force Gen. Brown must understand that even with U.S. military backing, Israel can’t reverse the creative low-tech capacity that the Palestinians in Gaza, the Ansarullah movement in Yemen and the Hezbollah movement have developed under the pressure of decades of occupation, bombings and invasions.

Hezbollah Video with Exact Coordinates 

Just days after the June 20 White House meetings, on June 22, Hezbollah released a 10-minute video that showcases the most vital targets in Israel, with locations believed known only by those working with Israeli and U.S. military security systems. (The video is titled “To Whom it May Concern. Here is the link.)

Screenshot from the linked video

The widely distributed video includes drone footage, with the exact pinpoint coordinates of strategic Israeli facilities. The video opens with Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s declaration that “if a war is imposed on Lebanon, Hezbollah will fight without restraints and without limits” and that Israel’s seaports and airports will be targeted. This was a clear warning.

Using small “Hoopoe” drones, the Lebanese resistance group monitors Israeli military installations, strategic structures like power stations, a swath of Israeli commercial centers and in the Haifa region also arms factories, power plants, warship docks and oil reservoirs. Haifa isa key seaport. Shutting Haifa down would ravage the Israeli economy, already crumbling. (same verb tense)

The Hoopoe drone, named after a small bird in the region, uses low-altitude flyovers that evade Israeli radar. 

The video includes precise coordinates and visuals of key Israeli military installations Iron Dome batteries, David’s Sling defenses, the Dimona nuclear reactor, missile testing radar and more. Hezbollah thus demonstrated its ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses and reach deep into Israel without detection. 

Israeli analyst Or Heller, whose media work is widely read, explained on Iran’s Press TV that Hezbollah “wants to show Israel that it has the ability to fly over its airspace as Israel flies over Lebanon.” Striking critical infrastructure such as substations and hydro plants can paralyze neighborhoods, even entire cities. 

“Hezbollah is putting everyone in check,” Heller continued. “If the Israeli regime invades and strikes Lebanese citizens, then they can be reached too.”

The destruction of the economy in northern Israel, paired with the shut-down on Israel’s southern tip of the port of Eilat on the Red Sea by Yemen’s Ansarullah Movement, warns Israeli top brass that their best assets are at risk. Military sites have now been identified, labeled and displayed for the world to see. (presstv.ir, June 23) 

The Jerusalem Post admitted June 19 that the video was a challenge for the Israeli regime, because “it is used to being the hi-tech superpower in the region and prides itself on being able to use drones and other means of surveillance against enemies near and far.”  

Hezbollah spent the past two decades training revolutionary militia units and accumulating military, scientific and technical expertise to deter Israel from attacking Lebanon. 

Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri, senior public policy fellow at American University of Beirut, summarized this new development: “If Hezbollah has these capabilities, you can be pretty sure that its friends and allies all around the region have either the same or something similar, and/or Iran or Hezbollah will help them develop it soon. … About two years ago, we passed the point where Israel and the U.S. dominated the strategic realities, military realities, in the Middle East.  (democracynow.org, June 24) 

Hezbollah Technical / Military Capacity Grows

Hezbollah not only has the exact coordinates of Israeli sites, but according to Haaretz News,

“Hezbollah has managed to increase its stockpile of missiles, shells and drones by hundreds of percentages, either smuggled through Syria into Lebanon or produced locally, despite all attempts by the [Israeli] Air Force in Syria and on the Syrian-Iraqi border to thwart and disrupt the entry of these weapons.”

This claim is corroborated by Hezbollah’s Resource and Border Affairs official Nawaf Al-Musawi, who told Al-Mayadeen in March that Hezbollah is opening new warehouses for more accurate missiles and that they can restock in a month what they used to restock in six months.

Both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen have said since October that their strikes on Israel and its backers will end only when an agreement is reached in Gaza.

Why Is Israel Unable to Defeat Hamas?

It is revealing to read how the Zionist media evaluates the reasons for Israel’s failure in Gaza.

An article in the June 23 issue of the Jerusalem Post asked in a headline, “Why is Israel unable to defeat Hamas?” 

“The most widespread public frustration regarding the war, after the October 7 failure,” continued this article, “concerns Israel’s inability to defeat Hamas. Although Israel put boots on the ground in Gaza and carried out a massive military maneuver, almost unlimited in resources or time, Hamas is still standing on both feet. The organization populates the tunnels, maneuvers in them, maintains a chain of command, mobilizes armed forces, and holds hostages underground. … 

“[I]t was impossible to imagine that the strongest military power in the region, which previously defeated several armies in six days, would not be able to defeat a local terrorist organization when forced to do so. … The area above the ground is controlled by Israel, and below the ground is occupied by Hamas.  

 “The use that Hamas was able to make of the tunnels is groundbreaking, giving it technological supremacy in the underground battlefield.” The tunnels are the “underground iron dome” of the Resistance.

“The Biden administration first clearly supported the dismantling of Hamas, but stopped doing so when it realized that, unfortunately, this goal was not practical with the existing capabilities.”

Numerous other articles and video footage from Resistance organizations working in the tunnels give video evidence of how Palestinians now have the capacity to build small shoulder rockets by repurposing the endless supply of unexploded Israeli bombs dropped on them.

Yemen Develops Hypersonic Missiles

Since Israel opened its all-out attack on Gaza, following the October 7 military action by Hamas, the Ansarullah Movement in Yemen has vowed to block ships traveling the Red Sea through the Suez Canal to Israeli ports on the Mediterranean Sea.

According to reports in Bloomberg News, from mid-November to May 1 approximately 65 merchant ships have been attacked for attempting to violate the Ansarullah ban on trade with Israel at a time when Israel is waging a genocidal war on Gaza. Cargo shipping traffic has dropped by about half. U.S. efforts using aircraft carriers and jet bombers have failed to stop the missile, drone and small-boat attacks against commercial vessels linked to Israeli shippers.

The Yemeni movement now claims to have developed a hypersonic missile. They announced a strike on the U.S. Aircraft Carrier Eisenhower.  The commander of the giant warship denied it was hit. But the U.S. Navy did pull the aircraft carrier, valued at $4.5 billion dollars, further out of range.

Israel Lacks Troops, Preparation and Morale 

In Gaza, Israel has failed to achieve any of its publicized goals, despite almost nine months of continuing genocidal attacks. Netanyahu’s war cabinet has crumbled in resignations. Escalating internal dissention and demonstrations of tens of thousands of people within Israel are demanding negotiations. Finding housing, schools, jobs and subsidies for over 100,000 angry settlers driven out of stolen lands is creating a crisis in Zionist ideology and in the economy.

The head of the Israel Occupation Forces Herzi Halevi said the army is facing troop shortages amid rising casualties in the war against Hamas in Gaza. Enlisting more troops is difficult due to rising public opposition to the war. There is open conflict between Netanyahu, his defense minister and conflicting infighting among his gaggle of small reactionary political parties.

The U.S. military machine has overwhelming deadly capacity. Imperialist strategists flaunt their power in obscene ways. Military contractors sell their weapons in ways that increase their profits and ensnare countries in debt traps.

Israel, as a primary ally in U.S. regional domination of West Asia, has access and use of an endless supply, paid for by workers in the U.S. from the U.S. treasury. 

Impoverished and developing countries, determined to assert their sovereignty and escape a colonial death grip, are using science and applying their limited locally available resources to engineer weapons and strategies of self-defense that can prevent the destructive U.S. mega-weapons from determining the outcome. 

The Zionist movement and its U.S. imperialist backers face a strategic dilemma — in order to avoid a very destructive wider war, for which they are not prepared and cannot win, they need to end the current genocidal war on Gaza. Ending the war without defeating the resistance would be a huge setback for the Zionist movement and an even larger humiliation for its protector and co-conspirator — U.S. imperialism. It will be a huge advance on a world scale.

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Sara Flounders is an American political writer active in progressive and anti-war organizing since the 1960s. She is a Contributing Editor of the Marxist Workers World newspaper as well as a principal leader of the International Action Center. Sara also works actively with the SanctionsKill Campaign and United National Antiwar Coalition. Sara can be reached at [email protected].

She is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: Missiles are seen during a military parade held by the Houthi group in Sanaa, Yemen, on Sept. 21, 2022. (Source: Workers World)

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Iran has a new president, but that won’t affect the US-Iran relationship, because the US is held hostage to the Israel Lobby, AIPAC. Masoud Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old cardiac surgeon, former health minister, and current Member of Parliament, won 53% of the vote in a runoff election in Iran.

Pezeshkian is open to a new relationship with the US, but any policy change will have to wait until the outcome of the US election in November. Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting for the outcome of the US election.

“I have come … to seek lasting peace and tranquility and cooperation in the region, as well as dialogue and constructive interaction with the world,” Pezeshkian said in a speech.

Regardless of which candidate will be elected, they will be a supporter of Israel. President Donald Trump will remember in his 2020 election race Netanyahu stabbed him in the back, and came out publically in support of Joe Biden, even though Trump had done more for Israel than any previous US president.

“I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said in an interview with Axios’ Barak Ravid in December 2021, in reference to Netanyahu. “F**k him,” he said.

Israel keeps Iran as their designated ‘Enemy Number One’. Regardless of leadership change, or international diplomacy, Iran is destined to remain the bad guy in the Israeli drama.

The US has a similar policy, which is designed to keep the American public in fear of something foreign. At one time, Americans were afraid of Al Qaeda, and then it morphed into ISIS. Putin has taken the place of the enemy as portrayed in the Biden-controlled US media.

Pezeshkian has been a member of parliament since 2008, representing Tabriz in northwestern Iran. His father is of Turkic descent, while his mother is Kurdish. Pezeshkian grew up speaking Turkic, Kurdish, and Farsi. Some analysts see Pezeshkian as a moderating force who may sympathize with minorities.

According to Netanyahu, Iran seeks to develop a nuclear bomb with which to ‘nuke’ Israel into non-existence. According to the Iranian supreme leadership, Iran wants nuclear ability to have a source of electricity, rather than polluting the environment by burning fossil fuels.

Saudi Arabia, a close US ally and US-made weapons customer, also has told the US administration they will pursue building a nuclear power plant, which is common in many Western countries. The US will allow the Saudis their nuclear project, but in exchange for signing the Abraham Accords, which will normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. Experts view Saudi Arabia as the powerhouse in the Middle East, and signing a deal with Israel has been one of the two main goals of Netanyahu since taking office. His second goal is to expand the illegal settlements in the West Bank, effectively annexing the land. The Gaza War has put normalization plans on hold as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has reiterated the official Saudi position rejecting the occupation of Palestine and demanding a two-state solution.

Iran and Hezbollah, and others in the resistance movement are demanding the end of the occupation of Palestine. If Israel would negotiate a final peace deal with the Palestinian people, there would be no armed resistance. In theory, the UN, the US, the UK, and almost every country have agreed that the UN resolution for a two-state solution should be implemented as soon as possible. That peace deal would mark the end of violence against Israel, and both Israelis and Palestinians could live in peace, and with human rights.

Pezeshkian signaled there would be no change in Iran’s backing of Hezbollah, whose attacks since Oct. 7 have raised the specter of a wider war in the region. He wrote to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that “support for resistance groups will continue vigorously.”

But, Netanyahu’s extremist government has said they will never give one inch of land to the Palestinians, and instead want to keep Gaza under military occupation forever and continue to hold the 3 million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank under an iron-fist rule which is designed never to end.

The US has a two-faced policy on Israel. On the one hand, the US President says they are committed to a two-state solution, and on the other hand, he is sending Israel all the weapons they request to keep the genocide going in Gaza. On April 20, the House passed a bill to provide $26.3 billion in assistance to Israel. This split personality is due to AIPAC. From the White House to Capitol Hill, every politician knows their political career depends on bowing down to AIPAC.

The White House, regardless of its occupant, will have the opportunity to see whether a serious diplomatic process containing the nuclear issue and de-escalation is possible with the Pezeshkian leadership.

Although Pezeshkian is open to dialog with the West, he will face a serious obstacle because the US is unwilling to engage in diplomacy with Iran, and that stems from the political power of AIPAC which is determined to keep Iran as the enemy.

Iran is a regional power with important allies: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine. Pezeshkian recently thanked Russia and China for their support during some of the darkest days in Iran.

The US would like to isolate Iran, but that has failed, as the days of the US as the sole superpower are over, and a new world is emerging with opportunities for change and growth.

Pezeshkian will not likely change the US-Iran relationship fundamentally, but he might be able to improve the lives of Iranians.

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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.

Featured image is from MD

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It is of extreme importance to understand the concept and motivation of soft power by China – the most rising emerging market power today and already the first export nation with the second-largest economy in the world. 

Concerning China and its foreign policy, soft power is one of the most frequently used political and social concepts during the last two decades. It has to be immediately noticed that one of the major reasons for China’s easy acceptance of soft power is that soft use of power has historically a strong cultural foundation in traditional Chinese foreign policy (for instance, in the case of the Korean Peninsula). Traditional China has a rich military-free culture, which mostly contributes to China’s use of cultural power in its foreign relations[1]. The revival of material and cultural power prompts China to easily find an echo in the concept of soft power. As a matter of fact, all ethnic Chinese people are proud of their cultural history. 

Given that soft power is highly related to culture, it can be said that it is natural that China should stress the importance and use of cultural and soft power concerning its competitive cultural advantage in international society. Additionally, for most Chinese political and economic elites, the factor of civilization is playing a key role in shaping the future global order of world politics. In other words, in the eye of the Chinese elite, the way civilizations shape world order is not through clashes, as Samuel P. Huntington claims (a theory of Clash of Civilizations), but through dialogue between them. Such belief in civilization as well as is reinforcing the Chinese emphasis on soft power. Another reason for this is that Chinese society is fundamentally a relation-based society. This means, practically that social power is originating mostly, but not entirely, from the density of relational networks. Social power should be used for strengthening rather than disrupting the balance of social relations. Such a particular understanding of power is as well as consistent with the nature of soft power.

Some principles relating to Chinese use of soft power in foreign policy could be summarized briefly as follows:

1. At the cultural level, people from different cultures and civilizations should be mutually appreciated through communication. Diplomacy is, therefore, understood by the Chinese political authorities to be a useful means to reduce tensions among different civilizations.
2. At the economic level, China prefers to use persuasive rather than coercive means in order to address political disputes. In practice, in many cases, China insists that disputes cannot easily and simply be resolved through economic sanctions. 
3. At the societal level, soft power building should help to establish mutual social assistance systems in international areas. That is why China is stressing the importance of transnational societal linkage in a globalized world.

It has to be emphasized that most citizens of China like officials and scholars are fully aware of the great gap in terms of soft power capacity between China and the USA. There is an opinion when the long line at the USA embassy visa application window in Beijing starts to get shorter, this may well mean that the soft power gap between China and the USA has become more balanced. In a soft power survey in East Asian countries in 2008, for instance, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that the USA has much more soft power than China in East Asia. Even more, China’s soft power, in some indices, was even weaker than that of South Korea and Japan[2]. Through the opposite lens, with the growing wave of China-craze and businessmen’s rush to China, however, is it accurate to think that China is facing an unprecedented opportunity to upgrade its soft power around the globe? 

It is frequently reported that China’s image in Africa, compared with its image there before the reform program started in 1979, is quite mixed. On one hand, China greatly increased its official aid to several African states, but on the other hand, its image is more or less damaged by some Chinese companies’ profits-before-everything activities there (that is the same with many Western companies too).

Several indicators are showing that China’s soft power is increasing in Asia and the rest of the world during the last 20 years, particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis that started in the USA[3]. From that time onward, soft power has become a keyword in Chinese foreign policy as there is great potential for the development of China’s soft power[4]. It has to be noticed that in many countries in developing world of emerging market economies Chinese formula of authoritarian government and successful market economy (China’s tripling of its GDP over 30 years) has become more popular than the previously dominant American formula of liberal market economics with democratic government.

However, from a general point of view, even if the authoritarian growth model produces soft power for China in authoritarian countries, it does not produce attraction in democratic countries. In other words, what attracts Venezuela, may repel in France[5]. However, many Western nations are losing their image and soft power in developing countries in their race with both China and Russia because of their neo-imperialistic policies recognized as such by ex-Western colonies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For instance, the G. W. Bush (Junior) administration’s general tendency towards unilateralism and in particular its approach to the “war on terror” damaged the USA’s soft power and bred resentment, particularly within the Muslim world. This US unilateralism was dramatically demonstrated by the USA’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly that, as the invasion had not been sanctioned by the OUN SC, and was not following the principles of the UN Charter, it was a clear breach of international law (like NATO’s aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999). The 2003 Iraq War demonstrated how the OUN could be reduced to the role of a bystander in a world dominated by the hegemonic USA. However, such action undoubtedly weakened the USA’s soft power[6].

Instead of placing weight only on the economy and material resources, for the application of soft power, the future of China’s soft power will depend on what kinds of ideas China can contribute to the world, especially under the current uncertain international conditions and global rivalry between China and the USA and the USA and Russia.

The most significant challenge to US power and global hegemony is the rise of emerging market states (like BRIC) especially China. In general warnings about the decline of US global hegemony date back after the Vietnam War and the Iranian Islamic revolution. The rise of China is, nevertheless, the most significant phenomenon in IR during the last 40 years, suggesting the emergence of a new global hegemon, with China, set to overtake the USA in economic terms during the 2020s. Although China’s global power is very closely related to its economic resurgence, its influence is as well as growing in other respects.

China has by far the largest army in the world and is second only to the USA in terms of military spending. Chinese influence over Africa, in particular, has expanded considerably due to massive financial investment, linked to securing supplies of energy and raw materials. China’s structural power is as well as growing, as is reflected in the growing influence of the G-20, its role within the WTO, and the fate of both the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change and the 2021 Glasgow Climate Change conferences. China’s soft power is linked to its association with anti-colonialism and its capacity to portray itself as the representative of the global South.

On the other hand, the USA’s soft power has declined in several respects. Its reputation has been damaged by its association with corporate power and widening global inequality, and resentment developing against “globalization as Americanization”. Serious damage has also been done to the USA’s moral authority by the military invasion of Iraq and by the terrible treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo detention camp.

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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] See more in [Lei Haizong, Chinese Culture and Chinese Soldiers in History, Beijing: Commercial Press, 2001 (in Chinese)].

[2] Christopher Whitney, David Shambaugh, Soft Power in Asia: Results of a 2008 Multinational Survey of Public Opinion, Chicago Council on Global Affairs [www.thechicagocouncil.org].

[3] Sheng Ding, The Dragon’s Hidden Wings: How China Rises with Its Soft Power, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.

[4] People’s Daily Online, “How to Improve China’s Soft Power”, 2010-03-11.  

[5] Ingrid d’Hooghe, The Limits of China’s Soft Power in Europe: Beijing’s Public Diplomacy Puzzle, Clingendael Diplomacy Papers, No. 25, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, Clingandel, 2010.

[6] By definition, soft power is the power of attraction rather than coercion. It is the ability to influence others by persuading them to follow or agree to norms and aspirations that produce the desired behavior, as opposed to using threats or rewards.

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***

As a nation, the United States, as if we did not already know, is convulsed.  Paranoid and divided, giddy with conspiracy and deranged by a fear of totalitarian seizure, hyper partisan and hostile to debate and any loose definition of facts (this condition afflicts the entire political spectrum), the only thing missing so far was this: an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.

Till now, we were seeing the cruel spectacle of an aged president visibly and publicly being mauled, a wounded beast let out on safari in order to be hunted by all manner of trophy hunting punditry. Joe Biden has mumbled and fumbled his way through a haze, even as his stage managers desperately try to operate the strings. With each day, another Democratic lawmaker is expressing concern that he voluntarily yields to a fitter model.

In this whole business, the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has remained unusually reticent. Let the Democrats keep finding the rope, and the rest will follow.  Then came the shots at a rally held in Pennsylvania on July 13.

Cue to the event.  Videos aplenty to choose from.  Faint gunshots register in the background.  Trump seems to grab his head and proceeds to fall to the ground.  Secret Service agents form a scrum.  Trump is then lifted, blood streaking his head, seemingly from a grazing wound.  A moment of near martyred glory follows: Trump, pausing the agents, salutes to the crowd.

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he stated in a post on Truth Social.  “Much bleeding took place, so I realized what was taking place.”

The shooter in question is said to have been shot by the Secret Service, making this the first attempt to assassinate either a president or presidential candidate since an effort was made on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981.  One spectator was also killed, with two others “critically injured”. “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country.  Nothing is known at this time about the shooter, who is now dead,” stated Trump.

President Biden, in condemning the attack, told reporters that “the idea – the idea – that there’s political violence, or violence in America like this, is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate.”

Far from this being incredible, such acts of violence speckle and blood US politics.  Candidates have been previously gunned down in cold blood.  Presidents, whether going to the theatre or appearing in public motorcades, have been very publicly assassinated.

Within minutes, the metre on the political gauge was ticking, making Trump sound like an oppressed jihadi warrior.  These are the effusive words of Texan Gov. Greg Abbott: “They try to jail him.  They try to kill him.  It will not work.  He is indomitable.”  The state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton sounded forbiddingly biblical: “The world is evil.  Praise God that President Trump was able to walk away on his own.  Praying for his complete healing and that this person is captured immediately.”

Republican Florida Senator Rick Scott also gave an inkling about how the shooting will be processed in the political mix.  “Democrats and liberals in the media have called Trump a fascist.  They’ve compared him to Hitler.  They’ve tried to lock him up.  They tried to remove his Secret Service protection.”  This was nothing less than “an assassination attempt by a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.”

While the US is a republic proud of overthrowing a supposedly tyrannical monarch, it sports one unassailable kingdom: that of conspiracy.  With its vast court, it exercises a curious tyranny over the mind.  All can fall for it.  There are those who will assume, and already have, that Trump staged his own shooting for the sheer convenience of it all.  Nothing he will say will convince them otherwise, seeing that his relationship with truth is estranged beyond repair.

On the other side, there will be a narrative that lone shooters in these instances never exist.  Behind the gun is a long cast shadow of the Establishment: the intelligence community, law enforcement, and other dark annexes of the Deep State.

As both Trump and Biden have been seen by their respective detractors as satanic guarantors of doom should they return to the White House, the moderates have a mere sliver to work with.  The tedious words of “existential threat” are used as wounding weapons to excoriate opponents.

Despite such cheap language, the United States has previously endured an effort to constitutionally and tangibly divide it, leading to a Civil War that continues its haunting reach.  It has also survived the assassination of its political figures, in large part because the Republic, at some point, took less interest in representative politics than politics bought.  It was a point Gore Vidal proved relentless on: Why run for office when you can buy its occupants?

A mad patient, an inspired experiment, a cruel manifestation, a sprawling empire, the republic will continue surviving, even in decline, overseen by corporate boardrooms and unelected figures.  “The lesson,” the Financial Review remarked optimistically, “is that American democracy has proven itself resilient.”  Despite making the usual error about a political system that is distinctly not democratic – the Founding Fathers hated the idea of a fully represented demos – the paper is unlikely to be proved wrong.  A spell of febrile lunacy, however, is likely to follow first.

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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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It’s been just over two years since NATO officially restarted the Cold War. Obviously, the conflict never really stopped, as the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel kept expanding eastward, exclusively through lies and deceit. Namely, it turned out that NATO deliberately crossed all Russian red lines in order to provoke a reaction. Moscow kept its cool, but American belligerence made it virtually impossible to maintain even basic bilateral ties. The Kremlin realized it could not rely on any sanity in Washington DC, as the warmongering elites fully took power. NATO’s strategic setup for yet another Western invasion of Russia was all done, or so it seemed. Namely, after eight years of futile attempts to reason with the political West, Moscow realized it was time for action (SMO).

In the last nearly two and a half years, the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta became the proverbial punching bag for probing Russian military might. And while the mainstream propaganda machine is doing a somewhat decent job hiding the atrocious results, the massive amount of resources that the Kiev regime is demanding only keeps growing, clearly indicating what’s really going on. What was supposed to be NATO’s third most powerful member (had it ever joined) turned into a virtual junkyard of the latest Western military equipment. And yet, it seems there are several other nations in NATO that would want this horribly unflattering role as well. Namely, Poland is the “logical” choice for many, although most of those people don’t seem to understand the gravity of the current situation.

High-ranking NATO officials have already announced a number of major moves that can only be described as extremely hostile toward Russia.

The annual NATO summit in Washington DC this week is a clear indicator of that. Apart from the regular weapons shipments to the Neo-Nazi junta, particularly air defense systems, the much-touted F-16s are in the spotlight again. The Netherlands, Denmark and the United States jointly announced that the deliveries of these US-made jets are ongoing. The Dutch F-16 are of particular concern, as they’re also nuclear-capable. However, while this could certainly lead to an uncontrollable escalation, the moves of some individual member states are a real danger to global peace. As previously mentioned, the situation with Poland is particularly concerning.

For instance, on July 10, Polish Army Chief of Staff General Wieslaw Kukula openly called for Warsaw to prepare its troops for an all-out war, insisting that it shouldn’t focus on asymmetric warfare, but a full-scale one. Although he didn’t really mention any specific country, it’s only logical to presume he was talking about war with Russia. Such provocative statements accomplish nothing, and yet, here we are.

“Today, we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict, not an asymmetric-type conflict,” General Kukula said at a press conference, adding: “This forces us to find a good balance between the border mission and maintaining the intensity of training in the army.”

Another thing that’s easy to miss in General Kukula’s statement is the escalating situation on the border with Belarus, the closest Russian ally and member of virtually all international multipolar organizations as Russia itself, including the CSTO and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). What’s more, Minsk and Moscow are part of the Union State. Although still de facto not implemented, this post-Soviet supranational entity gives both countries security from outside threats. Namely, while Belarus is important for Russia historically, ethnically, culturally, militarily, you name it, Minsk needs Moscow for the same reasons, as well as geopolitical and economic stability. Not to mention that Russia repeatedly warned that attacking Belarus also means attacking Russia itself.

“Speaking at the same event, Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Bejda said that as of August, the number of troops guarding Poland’s eastern border would be increased to 8,000 from the current 6,000, with an additional rearguard of 9,000 able to step up within 48 hours notice,” Reuters reported.

And indeed, Poland is investing billions in “beefing up defenses”, particularly along the Belarussian and Russian border. It’s also massively increasing troop numbers, a trend that is the complete opposite of what’s going on in the vast majority of other NATO member states. The current size of the Polish military is estimated at 190,000 soldiers, but the government wants it at a staggering 300,000 in the next several years. Such a massive expansion also suggests that Warsaw is preparing for “something big”. This is without even taking into the latest agreement between Poland and the Kiev regime which will effectively allow Warsaw to target Russian missiles, making Poland a direct party to the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. This alone could light the fuse of a new war in Europe.

Neighboring Belarus might be smaller and less populous, but its military is similarly sized and it has not one, but two superpower allies – Russia and China. Minsk acquired a number of technologies from both sides to help modernize its military industry, while exercises are regularly conducted with both Moscow and Beijing. In fact, one such with the latter was conducted this week. However, apart from that, Belarus can also use Russian nuclear weapons stationed in the country in case of a foreign aggression. In other words, Poland is risking thermonuclear war by allowing its top-ranking military officials to openly talk about preparations for an all-out conflict. And to say nothing of the possibility of Poland shooting down Russian missiles in airspace under the Neo-Nazi junta’s control.

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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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***

What has been taking place in Gaza during the last nine months is one of the most horrible man-made and entirely avoidable human tragedies. This tragedy is still continuing although it can be stopped any day if there is sincerity for peace and high commitment to peace on the part of the aggressors and their weapon suppliers.

For the record, over 38,000 people have died and thousands of unidentified persons are reported to be buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings. Over 80,000 people are reported to be injured in very painful ways while proper medical help has become extremely difficult to access. Hunger in extreme forms, deprivation of housing in extreme weather conditions, denial of clean drinking water and sanitation, spread of disease and repeated displacement have been reported extensively among others by UN sources. People of Gaza time and again get arbitrary instructions from Israeli military forces to move from one place to another.

Most people have been displaced at least once and some have been displaced about 9 times in 9 months. On the basis of the reasonable assumption that due to all these factors the indirect mortality related to the Israeli attack is about four times the directly caused mortality, the total mortality related to this aggression is close to 200,000 or two hundred thousand in a very small region with a total population of around just about 2.3 million at the start of the attack. At the same time, the Palestinian population in the sister territory of West Bank has also faced increasing aggression resulting in many tragic deaths.

Amazingly, this horrible tragedy has taken place in a small region which is surrounded by much bigger and well-endowed Arab countries. As expected, there have been a lot of shrill voices condemning this aggression. But rhetoric without real action is meaningless and isolated actions without real results also mean nothing when such a great human tragedy is unfolding day by day. What is more, it appears that although many responsible Israelis also oppose this unjust war, the Israeli prime minister appears to be bent on prolonging it due to reasons which are increasingly seen to be related to his own selfish interests.

Panelists speak at ‘The War on Gaza: What’s Next for Palestine?’ event, hosted by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, on 30 October 2023 (MEE)

So should Arab countries not take more united and firm action to stop the horrible atrocities and human rights violations in Gaza which have been described as genocidal actions by many well informed observers? Here it should be added that the International Court of Justice has found it ‘plausible’ that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention in Gaza. 

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not at all speaking of any armed intervention by neighboring Arab countries. In fact this writer has been consistently writing against any widening of existing conflicts. In addition this writer is also very firmly against all acts of terrorist violence. What this writer is pleading for here is the achievement of much greater firmness, unity and continuity in the peaceful efforts and actions of Arab countries to stop the horrible killings and human right violations by Israel in Gaza.

The Arab countries should get over all their other differences to speak with completely one voice and united voice to try to end this most horrible violence as early as possible.  In terms of their many joint meetings and declarations they should very clearly convey the message that firstly, the entire Arab world is united in demanding an immediate end to this terrible aggression and secondly, that the Arab world will not rest till this aim is achieved. This united action should also convey this message that those who are leading weapon suppliers for this aggression will not be considered as a friend. For balance, this message should make it clear that as long as Israel is peaceful and causes no harm to Palestinians, the Arab countries are happy to live peacefully with Israel.

Such increasing unity and firmness in the Arab world reflected in a series of continuing actions will certainly have a much bigger influence and will be much more effective in achieving the desired results compared to the isolated, weak and indecisive actions for the support of the cause of Gaza that have taken place so far particularly in the bigger and more influential Arab countries. These efforts should be made in transparent ways in the form of open declarations made jointly by all Arab countries, and the Arab people should be free to voice support for these declarations in peaceful ways at the street level. One important meeting calling for immediate end of aggression should lead to yet another effort and so on till the desired result of durable ceasefire and peace is achieved, to be followed by very large-scale relief and rehabilitation effort for the people of Gaza and of course the release of all Israeli hostages (who should never have been taken as hostages in the first place). 

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071.     

Featured image: Yazan al-Kafarna is one of the latest to die of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza since the start of the war on 7 October (Screengrab/X)

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***

The next President of the United States will likely be called upon to decide about engaging in a nuclear conflict. This doesn’t have to be our future.

It’s time to get real, America.

Election Day 2024, November 5, is rapidly approaching, and the reality is that the person who wins will either have an R or a D next to his or her name.

Many Americans support a candidate with an I or a G next to their names.

But these candidates won’t win the White House.

A vote for those candidates is little more than a protest vote.

The time for protest is over.

It is now the time for action.

America is fundamentally divided over who should occupy the White House for the next four years.

If you support the D candidate, you think the R candidate, who previously served as President for four years, was the worst President in American history.

And if you support the R candidate, you think the same about the current D candidate.

The reality is, however, that America survived four years of the R guy.

And so far, we have survived four years of the D guy.

And it is highly likely that we will survive the next four years as well, regardless of who wins.

Unless there is a nuclear war.

Then we all die.

There are many issues confronting America today.

All of them are important.

Most of them divide us.

None are of immediate existential concern.

Nuclear war is an immediate existential threat to our existence.

And yet this issue is not being discussed or debated in the lead-up to the November 5 elections.

As such, no matter who we put in the White House, America will face the real probability of nuclear war during their term in office.

And we all die.

So, the question we all face as Americans is what are we willing to do to prevent this outcome?

What would you do to save Democracy?

What would you do to save America?

What would you do to save the World?

The answer? By making your vote count in November.

Make your vote about the one issue which is literally life and death—preventing a nuclear war by promoting peace.

How?

By pledging your vote to the single issue of preventing nuclear war and promoting peace.

By avoiding the trap presented by political party or personality.

By declaring that your vote will go to the candidate that best articulates a policy designed to avoid nuclear war and promote peace.

This election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters spread out among several critical battleground states.

If enough Americans commit their vote to the issue of preventing nuclear war and promoting peace so that they constitute a constituency capable of swinging a state to the candidate that earns their vote by promulgating such a policy, then we have a chance to put someone in the White House who won’t kill us all by getting us involved in a nuclear conflict once he or she is elected.

The 1986 Doomsday Map

In 1986, scientists from the Institute of Medicine published a study exploring the potential impact of a nuclear strike on the continental United States.

The study highlighted the most dangerous zones produced by such a strike on a map, indicating areas where radiation exposure would surpass 3,500 rads. “Within this region… more than three-quarters of the population would die,” the study concluded.

“It is our hope,” the authors of the study declared, “that national decision-makers will develop a better understanding of the ‘collateral’ consequences of hypothetical first strikes and of the enormous destructive capacity of the weapons that would survive. That understanding should make them less likely to seek counterforce capabilities or to fear such attacks from the other side.”

In 1987, the US and Soviet Union signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, a foundational arms control agreement which eliminated entire categories of nuclear missiles and set the stage for even larger reductions in the strategic nuclear arsenals of the respective sides.

Today the INF treaty is no more. The last strategic arms control treaty is set to expire. There are no new arms control negotiations. Both the US and Russia are building new nuclear weapons as part of an arms race that has the world on the cusp of general nuclear war.

The next President of the United States will more than likely be faced with a decision regarding whether or not to enter into a nuclear conflict with Russia.

So, I ask again:

What would you do to save Democracy?

What would you do to save America?

What would you do to save the World?

What would you do to make your vote count in November?

By supporting Operation DAWN, you will have the opportunity to accomplish all these tasks.

Operation DAWN is a nationwide event designed to garner a million-plus pledges by American voters to make preventing nuclear war and promoting peace the single issue upon which they will cast their vote come December.

Join us in Kingston, New York on September 28, at one of our satellite locations throughout America, or online through one of our affiliated podcasts.

Help save your future.

For more information and updates, visit ScottRitter.com.

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***

In late October 2023, the Pentagon announced—to the surprise of many, including congressional staffers who work on these issues—that it was pursuing a new nuclear weapon to be known as the B61-13, a gravity bomb.

This is a troubling development for many reasons. First, it is merely the latest in a long line of new nuclear weapons that the United States is building or proposing, in yet another sign that a new nuclear arms race is expanding. In addition, it breaks a promise the Obama administration made to eliminate almost all types of US nuclear gravity bombs, while further undermining President Biden’s pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US security. Most tragically, it further cements an absolute commitment on the part of the United States to retain nuclear deterrence as the centerpiece of its security policy for decades to come. While most of us hope the world can eventually stop relying on the threat of mass murder at a global scale as the basis for international security, the B61-13 moves everyone further away from that day.

Starting from the top, here is the entire, vast set of new nuclear bombs and warheads the United States recently developed or is pursuing: 

• The Trump administration’s new “low-yield” warhead, deployed on sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) carried by US submarines, with an estimated explosive yield roughly one-third the size of the gravity bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “Low-yield” is a relative term; this warhead could still kill tens of thousands in an instant.
• The new, more lethal B61-12 gravity bomb that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently started producing, after many years of delay (and with each bomb costing more than its weight in gold).
• The updated warhead for the stealthy air-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Obama administration, ideally suited to start a nuclear war.
• A variant of that cruise missile warhead for a sea-launched cruise missile that a) the Trump administration proposed, b) the Biden administration is trying to cancel, but c) Congress recently required the administration to pursue.
• The precedent-setting warhead for land-based missiles that, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, will be made entirely from new components, with nothing being reused except the basic design of the warhead.
• The momentous new warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the first entirely new bomb since the end of the Cold War, with both the components and the design of the weapon made anew.
• The B61-13.

All these new bombs and warheads are just part of a massive rebuilding of the entire US nuclear arsenal, which also includes new long-range, land-based missiles, new submarines, new stealthy, long-range bombers that will carry the new stealthy cruise missiles mentioned above, and major upgrades to the missiles carried by the submarines. The total cost to do all that while maintaining the existing weapons will be well over $1.2 trillion during the next 25 years.

In short, a new nuclear arms race is exploding across the globe, and while the Biden administration has not announced plans to increase the size of its nuclear arsenal (despite bipartisan pressure to do so), it is racing to climb what is often called a “modernization mountain”—a journey that will certainly take longer and cost far more than currently projected, all to produce a vastly oversized nuclear stockpile that everyone hopes will never be used.

The broken promise. There is a second and compounding problem with the B61-13: It breaks a promise made during the Obama administration to eliminate all but one of the types of US gravity bombs. Specifically, to win support for the B61-12­—a new guided gravity bomb the Pentagon and NNSA badly wanted—the Obama administration proposed to retire the B61-3, B61-4, B61-7, B61-10, B61-11, and the B83 gravity bombs, trading six weapons for one. Unfortunately, since its inception the B61-12 has faced major cost overruns and years of delays. The NNSA initially said the bomb would cost $4 billion, then quickly raised the tab to $8 billion, while the Pentagon initially estimated it at $10 billion. The actual cost, including work the Air Force is doing, will be as much as $14 billion. The NNSA initially projected it would begin making the bombs in 2017, while the Pentagon said it would be 2022 before work started. The Pentagon was right, with the B61-12 finally entering production late in 2022.

On top of all the cost increases and delays, the associated commitment to retire the six other gravity bombs is changing significantly.

First, it is not clear the B61-11 will be retired at all; planning documents no longer include it as something the B61-12 will replace. That variant is designed to penetrate into the Earth, to attack hardened and deeply buried targets. No administration has ever explained why it was removed from the retirement list; it simply stopped being included on it. Second, the sole bright spot is the B61-10, but oddly so. Although the bomb’s retirement was tied to starting production of the B61-12, the B61-10 was removed from the stockpile in 2016. Apparently, it really was not needed at all, regardless of the B61-12.

More dangerously, the decision to retire the B83—by far the most destructive weapon in the US nuclear stockpile—was reversed by the Trump administration. The B83 has an explosive yield of some 1.2 megatons—or 80 times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In a simulation developed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS, where I work), dropping one bomb like the B83 on a nuclear facility in Iran would kill over three million people and spread deadly radiation across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It is this behemoth that the Trump administration declared its intention to keep “until a suitable replacement is identified.” Fortunately, the Biden administration reversed the reversal, and the B83 is currently on a path to be retired at some point, though the plan for when that will happen is classified.  (Unfortunately, election results this year could again change that outcome.)

In the meantime, the Biden administration has announced the B61-13.

Significantly, this new bomb will be based on the B61-7, the most destructive of the B61 variants, with a maximum yield of 360 kilotons, or 24 times more devastating than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Just to remind you, that one bomb killed 70,000 to 140,000 people. In other words, the B61-13 will be massively destructive, accompanied by immense and widespread fallout. In other other words, this is yet another tool for nuclear warfighting—or, more specifically, seeking to win a nuclear war.

That mission should not exist. Indeed, as five of the countries with nuclear weapons—the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom—have declared, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Yet fighting and winning a nuclear war is precisely the goal of developing the B61-13. There are, apparently, specific targets that this more powerful gravity bomb can hold at risk—ones that cannot reliably be destroyed with the B61-12, despite its vastly increased accuracy in comparison to existing gravity bombs. But existing nuclear warheads on submarine-based missiles can already hold those same targets at risk. So the B61-13, it turns out, is just another option to blow up something the Pentagon can already destroy, and many times over. In fact, each US nuclear-armed submarine carries seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

The scope of the mistake. Coming from a Biden administration that pledged to seek to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, with a president who, as a candidate for office, declared his support for the policy that the United States would never use nuclear weapons first in any conflict, the decision to pursue the B61-13 is not only deeply disappointing, but a profound mistake. In short, the B61-13 is yet another sign that the United States intends to make its nuclear arsenal even more deadly and the foundational element of the existing security system. That system is based on the principle that this country, to keep itself “safe,” needs to be able to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in less than an hour.

On moral grounds, and under international law, that prospect alone should be evidence enough to conclude that such an approach to security is grievously wrong, and that the United States should do everything it can to move away from that system.

But the reality is far worse, because Russia already has and China is now moving toward nuclear arsenals that will give them similar capabilities. Even with their vastly smaller arsenals, the other six nuclear weapons states—the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—also have the capacity to kill tens of millions of people in hours. That horrible reality is the basis of the world’s security system. If everyone can kill everyone else, and no one can be safe from that threat, then—in the supreme irony of nuclear deterrence—everyone is supposed to be safe.

The mutual assured destruction precept of deterrence theory is ludicrous. For such a system to make sense, it would have to work perfectly and for all time.If it doesn’t, then we are all dead.What human system has ever worked perfectly for any significant length of time? In just one example of far too many, nuclear war was barely averted when a Russian officer refused to go along with two colleagues who wanted to use a nuclear-armed torpedo against US Navy ships harassing their submarine at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As has been noted, it was as much luck as careful choices that avoided the start of a nuclear war that would almost certainly have spiraled out of control.

Rather than develop a new nuclear weapon that adds fuel to a rapidly growing arms race, the Biden administration should launch a concerted effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons. It should publicly announce this intention, invite representatives from other nuclear-armed states to the table, and begin talks about what would be required to eliminate nuclear weapons from Earth. In an ideal world, we could turn the tragedy of the B61-13 into the launching point for a global effort to push for that outcome.

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Stephen Young is a senior Washington representative for the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Featured image: A US F-35A combat aircraft tests an unarmed B61-12 bomb in the Nevada Desert. Source: Sandia National Laboratory

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Through persistent, systematic, and widespread targeting of the Gaza Strip’s water sources and desalination plants, Israel is using water as a weapon against Palestinian civilians. In addition to imposing famine, Israel is deliberately reducing the amount of water available to residents of the Strip—especially potable water sources—intentionally targeting the over 2.3 million people who live there as part of its genocide, ongoing since last October. 

On Monday, July 1, the Euro-Med Monitor field team observed significant damage to a desalination plant in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, south of Gaza City, as a result of direct Israeli targeting. This also resulted in the killing of a young man who was filling a gallon with water, plus the wounding of other individuals. The station, which provided services to at least 50,000 people in several nearby residential neighbourhoods, sustained significant damage after being bombed by the Israeli army with a GBU missile that broke through multiple stories and detonated on the ground floor.

As summer temperatures rise, the people of the Gaza Strip are facing significant challenges in accessingwater. Estimates show that since October of last year, the per capita share of water in the Gaza Strip has decreased by 97% due to the extensive destruction of water infrastructure by Israel. Therefore, as a result of the genocide, the per capita share of water in the Strip has decreased to between 3 and 15 litres per day, while in 2022 it was approximately 84.6 litres per day.

In view of the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people that deprive them of necessities for survival—such as the destruction of over 700 wells and water desalination plants since the start of the genocide—all areas of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a shortage of water, and the sewage system is collapsing. Meanwhile, certain areas of the Strip are suffering from a shortage of fuel, which Israel forbids from entering the Strip, despite the large number of casualties—including children—caused by infectious diseases and epidemics that spread through the accumulation ofcontaminated water due to inoperative sewage stations.

Continued destruction and devastation by the Israeli army is rendering the Gaza Strip unlivable, particularly after the army’s destruction of 9 out of 10 water tanks and half of the water networks, or 350 km out of 700 km.

Additionally, as a result of the crimes and arbitrary policies of Israel, all six wastewater treatment plants have been disrupted, approximately 65 sewage pumps stopped, and 70 km of sewage networks destroyed. This has resulted in the unchecked disposal of wastewater, estimated to be around 130 thousand cubic metres per day, onto Gaza Strip roads and shelters for displaced people.

According to United Nations estimates, about 96 percent of the Strip’s population (2.15 million people) faces high levels of acute food insecurity. While the whole territory is classified in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), over 495,000 people (22 per cent of the population) are still facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 5). In this Phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities.

Euro-Med Monitor warned last January that distress is engulfing Gaza City and the Strip’s northern regions in alarming ways—a result of Israel’s cutting off of the water supply in the Strip, systematic and intentional Israeli bombing of water sources and wells, and a lack of fuel required to run water conversion and distribution facilities.

The lack of drinking water in the Gaza Strip has become a matter of life and death, with residents currently being forced to drink unclean well water amid continued Israeli military attacks and lack of food, water, and fuel supplies.

The excessive consumption of undrinkable salt water leads to high blood pressure; kidney disease; increased risk of stroke, intestinal, and stomach diseases; constant vomiting; and diarrhoea. These effects willultimately result in excessive dehydration of the body’s tissues, particularly brain tissue. 

Euro-Med Monitor conducted an analytical study last December month that included a sample of 1,200 people in the Gaza Strip in order to ascertain the impact of the humanitarian crisis experienced by residents of the enclave in the midst of Israel’s genocidal war.

According to the study, the rate of access to water in the Strip, including drinking, bathing, and cleaning water, is just 1.5 litres per person per day. This is 15 litres less than the minimum amount of water required for survival at the level required by international standards.

International humanitarian law forbids attacks, destruction, or disruption of vital facilities necessary to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water facilities and networks. International humanitarian law also strictly prohibits the use of starvation as a weapon; as an occupying power, Israel is obligated under international humanitarian law to provide basic needs and protection to the Palestinianpeople of the Gaza Strip.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides that intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime.

Israel has been committing acts of genocide against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023 according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and pertinent international judicial rulings. Israel’s egregious crimes include depriving the civilian population in the Strip of enough potable water, which has caused serious, intentional harm and trapped them in living conditions meant to destroy them.

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Forty-six thousand Israeli businesses have been forced to shut as a result of the ongoing war and its devastating effect on the economy, Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported on 10 July, referring to Israel as a “country in collapse.” 

“This is a very high number that encompasses many sectors. About 77 percent of the businesses that have been closed since the beginning of the war, which make up about 35,000 businesses, are small businesses with up to five employees, and are the most vulnerable in the economy,” Yoel Amir, CEO of Israeli information services and credit risk management firm, CofaceBdi, told Maariv. 

The report adds that

“the most vulnerable industries are the construction industry, and as a result also the entire ecosystem that operates around it: ceramics, air conditioning, aluminum, building materials, and more – All of these were significantly damaged,” according to CofaceBdi’s risk ratings.

The trade sector has also been severely affected. This includes the service sector and industries including fashion, furniture, housewares, entertainment, transport, and tourism. 

Israel is in a situation where “there is almost no foreign tourism,” the report said, adding that “damage to businesses is all over the country, and almost no sector has been spared.” 

This includes the agriculture sector, which is based mainly in the south and the north – both considered active combat zones due to the threat posed by the Palestinian resistance and Lebanon’s Hezbollah – whose support front against Israel has significantly contributed to the downfall of the economy. 

The CofaceBdi CEO estimates that 60,000 Israeli businesses are expected to be shut down by the end of 2024. 

Hezbollah’s attacks have severely affected local business and education in the north. Tens of thousands of settlers have been forced to evacuate.

“Our goal of draining the enemy’s economy … has been achieved,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on 10 July. 

The Yemeni army’s maritime operations have also contributed to the economy’s downfall. Revenues at key ports, such as the southern port of Eilat, have fallen significantly.

In the final months of 2023, the Israeli GDP plummeted by nearly 20 percent.

The threat of escalation with Hezbollah has also posed fears in Israel that any full-scale war with the Lebanese resistance would plunge the economy much deeper into the abyss. Hezbollah has demonstrated through recent video warnings that it is capable of attacking energy infrastructure such as oil refineries and gas tanks.

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Featured image source

Os EUA estão a aproveitar a cimeira da OTAN para promover medidas nucleares na política interna. Num comunicado recente, o Departamento de Defesa anunciou que continuará o seu projeto de desenvolvimento de um novo míssil balístico intercontinental Sentinel, apesar do aumento exponencial dos custos. O Congresso aprovou a proposta apesar da sua natureza altamente irresponsável. O objetivo é melhorar as capacidades nucleares dos EUA na atual crise de segurança.

Espera-se que o programa Sentinel substitua todos os obsoletos mísseis nucleares Minuteman III do país. Os custos do projeto estão atualmente estimados em 140 mil milhões de dólares, um aumento de 81% nas expectativas de custos em comparação com a primeira avaliação do programa. O Pentágono tinha prometido anteriormente gastar apenas 77 mil milhões de dólares na produção dos novos mísseis, mas os avaliadores dizem agora que o projeto custará quase o dobro disso.

De acordo com a lei americana, quando se espera que um projeto cresça mais de 25% no custo, o departamento responsável pela proposta deve revisar o programa e justificar sua necessidade ao Congresso. Depois de estudar o projeto, o Pentágono concluiu que não existem alternativas ao programa Sentinel, e que os legisladores americanos deveriam consentir o mais rapidamente possível na sua implementação, garantindo assim a renovação das capacidades nucleares americanas. Temendo supostas “ameaças”, os políticos norte-americanos aprovaram a exigência. 

“[Estamos] plenamente conscientes dos custos (…) Mas também estamos conscientes dos riscos de não modernizarmos as nossas forças nucleares e de não enfrentarmos as ameaças reais que temos”, disse William LaPlante, subsecretário de Defesa da ONU sobre o caso.

Obviamente, as “ameaças” vistas pelos EUA em relação às questões nucleares centram-se na Federação Russa. Desde o início da operação militar especial, o Ocidente tem respondido às medidas de Moscou através da chantagem nuclear. Alguns líderes ocidentais declararam mesmo que estariam prontos para enfrentar uma guerra nuclear com a Rússia. Paralelamente, os EUA deram recentemente permissão à Ucrânia para atacar unidades militares russas fora da zona de conflito, o que poderia colocar em risco algumas instalações nucleares.

Em retaliação à chantagem nuclear ocidental, Moscou suspendeu a sua participação no Novo Tratado START. O acordo bilateral russo-americano assinado em 2010 limita as capacidades nucleares de ambos os países e, embora a Rússia tenha suspendido a sua participação, o país ainda segue as regras do pacto, limitando severamente o seu número de armas e sistemas de lançamento. Contudo, em 2026 o acordo expirará e é pouco provável que as partes cheguem a qualquer tipo de consenso para renová-lo.

Na prática, é possível dizer que as ações irresponsáveis ​​do Ocidente desde fevereiro de 2022 estão a conduzir o mundo para uma nova corrida nuclear. O Ocidente liderado pelos EUA está a tomar várias iniciativas para escalar esta corrida, sendo a aprovação de um novo programa nuclear multibilionário, mesmo no meio de uma grave crise interna nos EUA, um exemplo disso. Em vez de usar dinheiro público para resolver o problema nas fronteiras ou criar medidas para aliviar as tensões sociais e étnicas, Washington está a dar prioridade ao investimento em armas nucleares para alegadamente enfrentar “riscos” que são criados pela própria política externa dos EUA.

Todas as ações nucleares russas foram meramente reativas. Moscou pôs recentemente fim à proibição de testes nucleares e iniciou exercícios conjuntos de armas táticas com a República da Bielorrússia – um país ao qual foi recentemente fornecido equipamento nuclear para fortalecer Minsk no meio de ameaças representadas tanto pelo regime de Kiev como pelos países vizinhos da OTAN. Estas ações foram retaliatórias, dada a pressão nuclear e as constantes ameaças representadas pela aliança liderada pelos EUA no ambiente estratégico russo. Na prática, os EUA criam a ameaça, levando a Rússia a reagir – e então a retaliação russa é descrita pela propaganda ocidental como um “perigo”, endossando novas ações dos EUA e criando um ciclo vicioso.

É importante sublinhar que a última medida americana ocorreu no primeiro dia da cimeira da OTAN em Washington. Os responsáveis ​​da aliança reúnem-se precisamente para discutir novas estratégias para confrontar a Rússia no atual conflito por procuração. Dado o contexto, a atmosfera política americana está ainda mais paranóica quanto à possibilidade de uma guerra direta com a Rússia, o que explica porque o discurso da “ameaça nuclear” persuadiu os congressistas a aprovar o novo programa Sentinel, apesar dos seus custos exorbitantes.

Na verdade, os EUA e a OTAN estão a seguir um caminho perigoso. A escalada nuclear poderá não terminar se as medidas para expandir as capacidades militares continuarem a ser tomadas com frequência. Dada a natureza estritamente defensiva da política nuclear da Rússia, o caminho para a desescalada é simples: os EUA e os seus parceiros só precisam de parar de representar ameaças à Rússia e convidar Moscou a renegociar um novo acordo nuclear.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês : As NATO leaders discuss “Russian threat”, US approves new nuclear project, InfoBrics, 10 de Julio de 2024.

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Lucas Leiroz, membro da Associação de Jornalistas do BRICS, pesquisador do Centro de Estudos Geoestratégicos, especialista militar.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://x.com/leiroz_lucas

Il Summit di Washington, con cui la Nato ha celebrato il 75° anniversario della sua fondazione, avrebbe dovuto tenersi il 4 aprile ma Washington – che da 75 anni detiene i comandi chiave della NATO a partire da quello di Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa, sempre un generale statunitense nominato dal presidente degli Stati Uniti – ha deciso, per sue ragioni anche di politica interna, di celebrarlo oltre tre mesi dopo. La storia ufficiale della NATO, presentata al Summit di Washington, spiega così la nascita della NATO:

“Nel 1949, di fronte alla crescente minaccia dell’Unione Sovietica, 12 paesi europei e nordamericani firmarono un Trattato basato sul principio della difesa collettiva”.

Il testo è accompagnato dalla prima pagina di un giornale del 29 agosto 1949 con un titolo a caratteri cubitali: “RUSSIA HAS ATOMIC BOMB” – “LA RUSSIA HA LA BOMBA ATOMICA”.

Un colossale falso storico. L’Unione Sovietica esce dalla Seconda guerra mondiale in gran parte distrutta, dopo essere stata attaccata e invasa nel giugno 1941 dalla Germania nazista con 201 divisioni, comprendenti 5,5 milioni di soldati pari al 75% di tutte le truppe tedesche, 3500 carrarmati e 5000 aerei, più 37 divisioni dei paesi satelliti (tra cui l’Italia). L’URSS aveva chiesto ripetutamente agli Alleati di aprire un secondo fronte in Europa, ma Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna lo avevano volutamente. ritardato.

Il prezzo pagato dall’Unione Sovietica è altissimo: circa 27 milioni di morti, per oltre la metà civili, corrispondenti al 15% della popolazione (in rapporto allo 0,3% degli USA in tutta la Seconda guerra mondiale); circa 5 milioni di deportati in Germania; oltre 1700 città e grossi centri abitati, 70 mila piccoli villaggi devastati; 30 mila fabbriche distrutte. L’Unione Sovietica non può quindi costituire una minaccia per l’Occidente, anche perché gli Stati Uniti sono gli unici a possedere l’arma atomica, di cui detengono il monopolio dal 1945 al 1949. Già dal settembre 1945, appena un mese dopo il bombardamento di Hiroshima e Nagasaki, al Pentagono calcolano che per attaccare l’URSS occorrono circa 200 bombe nucleari.

Nel 1949 l’arsenale statunitense sale a circa 170 bombe nucleari. A questo punto gli Stati Uniti sono sicuri di poter avere, entro breve tempo, abbastanza bombe per attaccare l’Unione Sovietica. In quello stesso anno, però, svanisce il sogno americano di conservare il monopolio delle armi nucleari. Il 29 agosto 1949, l’Unione Sovietica effettua la sua prima esplosione nucleare sperimentale. Ora anche l’URSS ha la Bomba. Comincia a questo punto la corsa agli armamenti nucleari tra le due superpotenze.

Da allora, per 75 anni, la NATO giustifica la sua strategia di guerra con la falsa affermazione di essere minacciata. La “minaccia” odierna proviene, secondo il Summit di Washington, dal “crescente allineamento di Russia, Cina, Iran e Corea del Nord”. Per questo “la NATO lavora sempre più a stretto contatto con i partner dell’Indo-Pacifico e con l’Unione Europea per contribuire a mantenere la pace e a proteggere l’ordine internazionale basato sulle regole”. Su questa falsificazione storica, la NATO – allargatasi da 12 a 32 Paesi sempre più a ridosso della Russia – sta trascinando l’Europa e il mondo alla catastrofe.

Manlio Dinucci

VIDEO :

Emmanuel Macron and Segments of The Left

Support the Nazi Regime in Kiev

by

Michel Chossudovsky,

July 13, 2024

 “Plus Ça change, plus c’est la même chose” . “The more things change the more they stay the same”

Ironically, the only party firmly committed to suspending military aid to the Nazi Kiev regime is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is tagged by people on the Left as “fascist” and “anti-semitic”.

Meanwhile, according to the Kiev Post, Ukraine is rejoicing.

Several of France’s  leftist parties which are part of the NFP socialist coalition are firmly supportive of Ukraine’s Nazi regime.

To my Friends on the Left

How is it that people who are committed to social democracy and socialism are endorsing a Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine? 

 

Brigitte Macron, Baron David de Rothschild, Emmanuel Macron  

In the above report emanating from the Rothschilds (image February 2016) Emmanuel Macron endorsed by Baron David de Rothschild is casually announced as the future president of France, more than a year prior to the April 2017 elections.

Emmanuel Macron is not acting on behalf of the French people. Since the inauguration of his presidency on May 14, 2017, endorsed by powerful financial interests, he has acted as a proxy, supported by France’s “imperial American partner”

The Left is misinformed

Supporting the Nazis in Ukraine, serves the interests of the Global Financial Establishment and the hegemonic interests of the US. 

The following image is revealing. From Left to Right: the Blue NATO flag, the Azov Battalion’s Wolfangel SS of the Third Reich and Hitler’s Nazi Swastika (red and white background) are displayed, which points to collaboration between NATO and the Neo-Nazi regime. 

 

While Western governments (including France) are actively repressing the protest movements against Israel’s act of genocide, —with mass arrests on charges of antisemitism—, those same governments are supporting Ukraine’s Nazi movement which actively participated and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the genocide directed against the Jewish population of Ukraine during World War II.

What this implies is that our governments are antisemitic. 

Specifically, the German penal code prohibits “Denial of the Holocaust” as well as the “dissemination of Nazi propaganda”.

We are dealing with something far more serious than Nazi “hate speech”, namely the relationship of the German Government with the Kiev regime’s Nazi Movement.

See the legal procedures of the European Parliament pertaining to Holocaust Denial

See also the Resolution of the UN General Assembly, dated January 2022 quoted in the above document.

Unquestionably, the German Government of Chancellor Scholz’s decision to support the Kiev regime’s Nazi Movement constitutes a criminal act under German law., namely the violation of. the Penal Code. 

The World is Upside Down

C’est Le Monde à l’Envers 

Michel Chossudovsky,  Global Research.   July 13, 2024

 

For more analysis on the Holocaust in Ukraine, see:

Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Government Is Supported by the International Community. Adolph Hitler is “The Torchbearer of Democracy” in Ukraine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 21, 2024

Guess Who Are the Real Protagonists of Anti-Semitism

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 11, 2024

See also

Ukraine’s “Neo-Nazi Summer Camp”. Military Training for Young Children, Para-military Recruits

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 13, 2024

A Head of State of Jewish-Russian descent is sponsored by the CIA: 

Video: A Jewish-Russian Proxy President: Zelensky Transformed into a Neo-Nazi.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Silview Media, June 15,  2024

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Today our thoughts are with Stephen Lendman

The late Stephen Lendman’s book  is  titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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“First off, it’s vaccine injury awareness month and a memory popped up today about me taking Faith to get another round of vaccines, which just so happens to be the day of her first vaccine injury.

Her little eyes started crossing right after.  

She’s under went surgery to try and fix the problem which it didn’t do. Because surgery will rarely fix a vaccine injury like this. Her eyes still cross to this day. This picture from the other day shows it, even though it looks much more dramatic at other times. But look how beautiful she still is.

Her second injury was when she stopped speaking after her MMR, but thankfully after detoxing her, words started flowing again, but we are still working with her speech for sure

For those of you that don’t know, after extensive doctors appointments and extensive DNA testing our girls are exempt from vaccines for life.

They carry THREE different MTHFRs, one of them being the one that makes it very hard for their bodies to rid of toxins (vaccines are LOADED with toxins.) I know I still get judged for not vaccinating by some on my friends list. But why?

It’s extremely dangerous for our girls to get vaccinated, which was confirmed by a doctor. 

Vaccines are not one size fits all, but yet they are treated like one.

They are dangerous for everyone, some more than others.

Where I stand today, it’s my biggest regret I have in life. Literally the biggest regret I have was vaccinating my babies.

I’m just extremely thankful her life was not taken from us by vaccines. From this point on, its about healing and doing what’s right. It took my baby being injured twice from vaccines before I got woke. I don’t want that being the reason you get woke too.”

My Take…

What is MTHFR?

The abbreviation MTHFR refers to a relatively common genetic mutation. It stands for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, and having this mutation may lead to high levels of homocysteine in the blood and low levels of folate and other vitamins.

Its main function is to provide your body with instructions for creating the MTHFRprotein, which helps your body produce folate. This B vitamin is necessary to create DNA.

There’s been concern that certain health issues are associated with MTHFR mutations, so testing has become more mainstream over the years.

You can have either one or two mutations — or neither — on the MTHFR gene. These mutations are often called variants

Health conditions linked to MTHFR depend on your type of mutation and how many copies you contain.

If you have only one copy of the C677T or A1298C mutation or two copies of the A1298C mutation, there are typically no health conditions or risks linked.

Conditions that may be associated with MTHFR include:

• homocystinuria
• hearing loss in older age
• alopecia areata
• anencephaly
• spina bifida
• high blood pressure
• blood clots
• recurrent miscarriages
• psychiatric disorders such as depression or bipolar disorder
• certain cancers

A person with two gene variants or who is homozygous for the MTHFR mutation may have an increased chance of health conditions.

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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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***

One result of the just concluded NATO Summit is Germany’s decision to host US intermediate-range missiles. Prior to 2019 when Washington cancelled the INF Treaty, the treaty prevented such deployment.

The INF Treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on December 8,1987, and the treaty was ratified on June 1, 1988. The treaty was part and parcel of ending the cold war. Reagan called the treaty a “step toward a safer world.”

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark nuclear arms control treaty in 1987. (Photo: White House Photographic Office/National Archives and Records Administration)

“The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and employ extensive on-site inspections for verification. As a result of the INF Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed a total of 2,692 short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles by the treaty’s implementation deadline of June 1, 1991.”

Blaming Russia the Trump administration pulled out of the treaty. The consequence was to kill the nuclear disarmament that the INF Treaty began and to renew the arms race. If I had to bet I would say Washington’s withdrawal was a consequence of the US nuclear industry needing the source of profits that the arms race provided and the neoconservatives’ determination to revive US hegemony through the buildup of force.

If Russia was truly out of compliance, Trump’s focus should have been to work to bring Russia into compliance, not terminate the treaty.

The efforts of several American presidents and Soviet leaders in the 20th century to defuse tensions and to build trust were squandered by Washington in the 21st century.

Regardless, what is clear is that Washington is pushing both Europe and Russia into preparing for war, and is itself preparing.

The US Senate has joined the House of Representatives in creating a draft registration system from which to field a conscripted army. The Senate’s version includes women in the draft, as equal treatment requires. Clearly, Washington sees the need for a larger army than a volunteer army can provide.

Now that the Biden regime is supplying F-16s and long-range missiles to Ukraine, weapon systems that Biden said would never be given to the Ukrainians, along with targeting information, clearly Washington’s intent is to further widen the war by carrying it deep into civilian areas of Russia. Simultaneously, Washington is using its NGOs in Georgia to orchestrate a color revolution there in order to open a second front against Russia. Putin’s slow forever war in Ukraine has played directly into Washington’s hands.

China is the main focus of Washington’s strategy of isolating Russia. At the recent NATO Summit China was accused of being a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. By allegedly supplying armaments to Russia, China is accused of challenging “our interests, security and values.”

I would have expected a different Chinese reply than was made. China should have said to Washington/NATO: “You started the conflict and your weapons systems and French troops are supporting and widening the conflict. You have blocked all efforts to end the conflict; yet you dare accuse us of responsibility for it.”

Instead, the Chinese disavowed supplying Russia with any military support.

This is an extremely weak response. It suggests that all the Russian-Chinese assurance of a “no-limits partnership” is just words. An appropriate response from China would have been: “We are considering sending 500,000 of our best soldiers to serve under Russian command in Ukraine and have called up another million men for military training.

A response such as this is what would end the conflict before the dumbshit hegemonic West puts us all in a war of annihilation.

In recorded history one can find very few competent civilian and military leaders. Alexander the Great, Constantine, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, the Duke of Marlborough, Robert E. Lee. No such men exist today, but the weapons are far more terrible. Moreover, modern war targets civilians and civilian infrastructure, as the Israelis are doing in Gaza. The goal is less to defeat an opposing army than it is to foreclose an opponent’s ability to conduct war.

In Europe a warrior class no longer exists. European male ethnicities are so oppressed by their own governments and by immigrant-invaders favored by European governments, that the defense ministers of Europe are women. What does a white ethnic European male have to fight for?

In the US the fighting force has always come from the southern states. But what have these traditional Americans, these military families, witnessed? They have seen all southern names struck from military bases. They have experienced their promotions on hold while homosexuals, black females, and transgendered people confused about their own gender are promoted. Taking orders from such people is not a southern man’s idea of the military. So recruitment has collapsed.

There are so few people willing to fight for America that Congress entertains proposals to enroll immigrant-invaders, paid with citizenship for fighting for American hegemony.

America has reached the point that Rome reached. Once the Roman military was German, the Germans became the emperors. The Germans did a fairly decent job compared to the decadent Romans, but the Empire was exhausted by its internal conflicts and collapsed.

Perhaps it is the collapse of the West that Putin and Xi are banking on. Why bother to fight people busy destroying themselves.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

For several weeks officials from the United States administration of President Joe Biden have led the international community to believe once again that an end to the fighting in Gaza was imminent.

Nonetheless, as in recent months, movement towards ending the occupation of Gaza and the efforts to secure a permanent cessation of hostilities remain elusive.

The reality is that the Biden administration is still sending weapons and bombs to Tel Aviv which are being utilized to inflict terror upon the Palestinian people on a daily basis. During a press conference held in the aftermath of the NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., Biden emphasized that the administration has not wavered in its support of the State of Israel.

His slight references to a ceasefire and the need for a two-state solution was no different than the same rhetoric enunciated by successive administrations, both Democrat and Republican, for decades. Biden said that the war must end while never citing the 76-year occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide as the underlying causes of the ongoing crisis.

Official statistics from the Health Ministry in Gaza indicate that more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed and approximately 88,000 wounded after nine months of the most recent genocidal onslaught beginning after October 7. The entire length and breath of the Gaza Strip is filled with displaced persons. (See this)

Several examples of recent massacres provide a clear assessment of the devastating impact of U.S. foreign policy which props-up the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in Gaza. The almost daily evacuation orders given by the Israeli military reinforces the overall insecurity of the Palestinians.

Nuseirat

Reuters reported on the current situation in an article published on July 9 noting:

“Palestinian officials said an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza Strip killed more than two dozen people while advancing tanks in Gaza City forced residents to flee under fire as Israel on Tuesday stepped up an offensive that Hamas warned could jeopardize ceasefire talks. The airstrike hit the tents of displaced families outside a school in the town of Abassan east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing at least 29, most of them were women and children, Palestinian medical officials said. The Israeli military said it was reviewing reports that civilians were harmed. It said the incident occurred when it struck with ‘precise munition’ a Hamas fighter who took part in the Oct. 7 raid on Israel that precipitated the Israeli assault on Gaza. Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said Israeli strikes on central Gaza areas killed 60 Palestinians and wounded dozens of others on Tuesday. 

These incidents illustrate the complicity of U.S. imperialism and its allies in the genocide against the Palestinians. Ordinances made in the U.S. and transferred by the administration are essential to maintaining the status-quo.

A systematic campaign of bombings and shelling of residential areas all across Gaza has been condemned as war crimes. In addition to the efforts to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza by destroying houses, apartment buildings, encampments, hospitals, schools, universities, religious institutions, marketplaces, infrastructure and social service agencies, the Israeli military units have blocked the shipments of food, fuel, medical supplies and freshwater.

A ridiculous announcement made by the Biden administration months ago saying it would build a temporary pier in the Mediterranean to facilitate the shipment of humanitarian assistance to those suffering in Gaza has been exposed as just another ploy in its efforts to reinforce the settler-colonial project in Palestine. Finally admitting the scheme had collapsed even before it started, Biden has further illustrated his deceitful enunciations which pretend to express concern for the oppressed while carrying on with its imperialist policies. (See this)

In the same above-mentioned Reuters report it points to the widespread attacks throughout Gaza emphasizing:

“Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said Israeli strikes on central Gaza areas killed 60 Palestinians and wounded dozens of others on Tuesday. Residents said Israeli tanks that pushed into the Tel Al-Hawa, Shejaia and Sabra neighborhoods of Gaza City shelled roads and buildings, forcing them to flee their homes. This was followed by Israeli military orders to evacuate several districts in eastern and western Gaza City posted on social media, which included these neighborhoods. ‘We hold the occupation and the U.S. administration responsible for the horrifying massacres against civilians,’ said Thawabta in a statement. The Palestinian Red Crescent said early on Wednesday on Facebook that its crews received dozens of humanitarian distress calls from Gaza City but were unable to help due to the intensity of the bombing there. On Gaza City’s front lines, the armed wings of Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad said their fighters battled Israeli forces with machine guns, mortar fire and anti-tank missiles and killed and wounded Israeli soldiers.”

The reality of the situation on the ground in Gaza makes a mockery of the purported diplomatic efforts in the West Asian and North African region. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been traveling throughout the region for nine months, yet the genocidal program aimed at the Palestinians remains the order of the day.

In fact, the resistance against the occupation of Gaza has escalated over the recent period. Not only are the armed Palestinian brigades stepping up their attacks on the IDF the war has intensified with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon carrying out military operations against Tel Aviv.

Imperialist Diplomacy and Regional Hegemony

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on July 11 that Tel Aviv would send a representative to talks in Doha, Qatar which have so far failed to reach any satisfactory agreement on achieving a ceasefire. Hamas, the leading Palestinian resistance organization in Gaza, has demonstrated flexibility in the negotiations for an end to the fighting.

However, it has been quite obvious over the last nine months that the State of Israel and the U.S. does not want a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. An end to the fighting with the resistance forces intact would place further political pressure on the imperialists and the Zionist regime to contemplate a general political solution to the Palestinian question.

Another formidable resistance movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), said recently in an interview with Al Mayadeen television that the negotiations have not made any headway in ending the recent phase of the war. PIJ and its military wing, the Al-Quds Brigade, have fought alongside Al-Qassam, the armed forces of Hamas, over the last nine months.

The Al Mayadeen interview emphasized:

“The latest round of mediated negotiations between the Palestinian Resistance and the Israeli occupation did not lead to any results, the Deputy Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Mohammad al-Hindi, told Al Mayadeen.  Al-Hindi explained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government’s priority is unrelated to retrieving Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, but instead, it is to carry on the war on the besieged territory. ‘The Israeli negotiator is stalling, as he told the mediators that he would return to Tel Aviv, and then he would give them a response regarding what was proposed (in the meetings),’ al-Hindi explained. Pointing to the crucial opportunity to finalize a deal that recently presented itself to the Israeli government, the PIJ official said that Israeli authorities encroached on a dangerous escalation when they demanded that all residents of Gaza City leave their residences and head southwards.” 

The resistance to the Zionist state and its imperialist allies poses a serious challenge to the efforts by Washington and Wall Street to maintain their hegemony over the entire region. In Yemen, the Ansar Allah movement has intervened in the siege on Gaza by utilizing its naval forces to impose a blockade from the Red Sea. Other resistance organizations in Iraq and Syria have been utilizing their military capabilities to strike blows against the occupation forces in Palestine.

In response, the White House has ordered a series of airstrikes by the Pentagon against Yemen. Ansar Allah leader Sayeed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi noted in a recent interview with Al Mayadeen that the examples set by the resistance forces in the region from Palestine and Lebanon to Syria, Iraq and Iran has influenced the solidarity movement in the U.S. where students took center-stage during the spring by demanding the full disclosure and divestment of all economic interests which are enabling the genocide against the oppressed peoples living under occupation. 

The NATO Summit reconfirmed the imperialist commitment to continue the war in Ukraine, the attempts to contain China and the genocide in Gaza. Consequently, it will take the global solidarity movement working in conjunction with the regional resistance forces and all anti-imperialists and anti-war groupings to create the conditions for the total liberation of oppressed peoples throughout the world.

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

All images in this article are from the author

Advise to the UN Summit of the Future: Establish a Global Governance Body to Control All Life Supporting Systems on the Planet

By Jacob Nordangard, July 12, 2024

I recently became aware of a policy brief with recommendations for the 2024 Summit of the Future, which lays out in plain terms what our “Overlords” have in store for us. It reads like a plot from a Bond-movie.

Hungary’s President Viktor Orban – The European Peacemaker or International Game Changer?

By Peter Koenig, July 12, 2024

With the EU’s and NATO’s wrath and vehement disapproval, President Viktor Orban of Hungary used the occasion of Hungary’s European Union Presidency from 1 July to 31 December 2024, to go on a peace mission. Mr. Orban wants peace against the will of the EU and against the mandate of NATO.

Army Moves to Ban “Extremism”, Repeal the Truth

By Emanuel Pastreich, July 12, 2024

The issue by the Army of a directive entitled “Handling Protest, Extremism, and Criminal Gang Activities” on June 14, 2024, essentially forbids the discussion of any issues that the military designates as “extremist” by any member of the army, even when off duty.

Similar to Biden, NATO Is Aged and Unfit for Leadership

By Medea Benjamin, July 12, 2024

At 75, NATO has not aged well. Back in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron was already sounding the alarm, accusing NATO of being “brain dead.” While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given NATO a new lease on life, NATO’s embrace of Ukraine actually makes the conflict–and the world–more dangerous.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer: Was He “Elected” or “Selected”? He Started His Election Campaign in Davos. “Favourite Candidate” of the World Economic Forum (WEF)

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 11, 2024

Keir Starmer, leader of  the remodelled Labour Party is now Britains’s “progressive” Prime Minister. As we recall Keir Starmer was invited to Davos back in January 2024, by the World Economic Forum’.Ironically, Starmer started his election campaign in the Swiss Alps, in conformity with Klaus Schwab’s  Fourth Industrial Revolution.

An Injection of Truth: The Ongoing Covidian Controversy in Alberta

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, July 11, 2024

The Canadian government is extending its Covidian preoccupations by trying to push the population into embracing a broad array of synthetic biology initiatives. In other words, the senior figures in the Trudeau government once again see nothing wrong with putting the untested and unknown consequences of genetic modification at the forefront of Canadian health care.

Britain’s Pathological Russophobia: Prime Minister Keir Starmer Supports “Unrestricted Use of its Long-range Weapons Against Moscow”

By Drago Bosnic, July 11, 2024

Starmer’s Labour Party won the general election on July 4, with him confirmed as the new PM on July 5. Just four days later, he reiterated that the British government supports the unrestricted use of its long-range weapons against Moscow.

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***

Most certainly, Russia’s final irreversible decision to suspend its membership and future participation in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly on July 3, on the eve of U.S. Independence Day, marked another significant chapter in its shifting geopolitical relations with United States and Europe.

As global situation heightens, particularly over security in Europe, Central EurAsia and the former Soviet space, Russia has also engaged in transforming not only economic relations but also paying attention to its security.

Over the past three decades, Russia became a member of many global bodies, participating actively at the United Nations. It spearheads the formation of the Greater Eurasia Union, the informal association BRICS—a group of states comprising Brazil, India, China and South Africa—and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Ukraine, which shares common geographical borders with Russia, and has primary ambitions of moving up to the global stage, has attempted joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union. These systematic steps angered the Russian President and the Kremlin administration, the Executive Cabinet, the Federation Council and the State Duma, resulting into Russia undertaking “special military operation” in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, stressed that Moscow had no plans to occupy Ukrainian territories.

As the United States and European sanctions broadened due to the “special military operation”, largely directed at “demilitarization” and “denazification” in Ukraine, Russia was ultimately expelled from most of foreign organizations including the Council of Europe.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has also announced it had suspended Russia and Belarus from any participation in that organization. The OECD is one of the world’s major multilateral economic bodies with a membership of mostly of the rich, highly developed countries. The exclusion of Russia and Belarus will mean both countries are barred from participating in negotiations on issues including taxation, international business regulation and trade.

We can establish the fact that Russia and Belarus are not official members of the Paris-based group. But, Russia’s accession into the OECD was postponed after the country annexed Crimea in 2014 and was terminated because of Russian aggression against Ukraine. The group announced a plan “to develop proposals to further strengthen support to the democratically elected government of Ukraine, including to support recovery and reconstruction”.

Remarkable, during these past few years, Russia also exited from a number of international organizations. The simple interpretations and far reaching implications are that, as the world undergoes evolutionary process, Russia, emerging out of Soviet era setting, has broadly been restructuring its architecture and status. It emphasizes its national interest, sovereignty and better lives for its citizens while exercising its legitimate roles in the global system.

Noticeably, Russia continues to seek a profound respectable position and lately plays the role of an advocate for multipolar order, and consistently opposes conservative western-style rules-based order and hegemony. Reports monitored by this author indicated that Russia has already exited, the historic fall of the Soviet era, from international organizations, including

Russia’s upper and lower houses of parliament, the Federation Council and the State Duma, have expectedly decided to suspend Moscow’s participation in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly. That said of the withdrawal from the OSCE, Russia still reserves the right to return if conditions are improved for its delegation, according to several interviews conducted with parliament members by local Russian media Izvestia in late June 2024, just before the final suspension.

Prominent Russian Senators have spoken:

• Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, pointed out that since 2022, Russia has faced increasing obstacles from the organization, such as its delegation members being denied entry visas and the right to speak.
• Konstantin Kosachev, member of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, noted that “the OSCE was conceived as a platform for comparing positions and trying to align them, if possible.” “The OSCE has recently stopped addressing general issues, becoming a vehicle for the collective West to impose its views on all others. It’s not us that have changed but the organization; it has been changed from within and actually destroyed. It certainly makes no sense for Russia to work in an organization that no longer is a platform for comparing and harmonizing positions,” the senator stated. “If and when the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly creates normal conditions for our work, if and when we receive guarantees and the principle of consensus is established in the organization, the decision may be reviewed,” Kosachev added.
• Alexey Fenenko, professor with the Department of International Security at Moscow State University’s Faculty of World Politics, believes that things are heading towards Russia’s gradual withdrawal from the OSCE. “Following Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s high-profile statement in 2004 that the OSCE in its current shape does not suit us, Russia has been trying to promote various reforms of the organization. But this did not work out at all,” the expert explained. “In fact, we have to deal with a new version of the Russia-NATO Council. I think that it’s only a matter of time before Russia decides to pull out of it,” Fenenko added.

In spite of the marked outrages, the Federation Council (the upper chamber) and the State Duma (the lower house) unanimously voted to adopt the Russian Federal Assembly’s motion to suspend the Russian delegation’s participation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) and stop paying dues to the organization.

“The Russian senators and State Duma members consider it sensible and justified to suspend the participation of the delegation of the Russian Federal Assembly in the OSCE PA and the payment of contributions to the OSCE PA budget. During the suspension period, any actions to amend the rules of procedure of the assembly with the aim of prejudicing the Russian delegation will be considered legally null and void,” the document states.

The parliamentarians also believe that the leadership of the OSCE PA and its members have ignored repeated appeals to return to an equal interparliamentary dialogue, the statement says. “Despite the Russian delegation’s repeated appeals and proposals, the priorities of the OSCE PA leadership indicate that at present, instead of creating conditions for a constructive exchange of views and the formation of a unifying agenda, this platform is being used as a politicized tool to deliberately implement an anti-Russian course, and also to intentionally distort what is going on in Ukraine,” the senators and MPs state.

The MPs emphasize that biased discriminatory approaches, double standards and total Russophobia, as well as an unwillingness to engage in substantive discussion, testify to the extreme degradation of the OSCE PA as a mechanism for interparliamentary co-operation. In addition, they draw attention to the fact that for many years the Parliamentary Assembly has ignored the problems related to the violation of the rights of national minorities in Ukraine and the Baltic States, the freedom of communication and education in one’s native language, has not paid attention to the blasphemous glorification of the Nazis and their accomplices, the harassment and murder of journalists who voice a position different from that of Brussels and Washington.

The parliamentarians also emphasize that the Russian delegation to the OSCE PA has, under spurious pretexts, “repeatedly been deprived of the opportunity to continue dialogue and to participate fully and equally in the work of the plenary sessions and governing bodies of the OSCE PA.” Romania’s demonstrative refusal to issue visas to members of the Russian delegation to participate in the annual session of the OSCE PA in Bucharest in 2024 was “the last point in the emerging deadlock,” as it has demonstrated that “confrontational tendencies and intolerance have taken over the common sense, spirit and values of this organization,” the statement reads.

Early July 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin participated in the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana, Kazakhstan. Twenty-four documents were adopted at the summit. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the leaders of several international organizations were invited, including CIS Secretary General Sergey Lebedev and Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Imangali Tasmagambetov. The topic of the meeting is “Strengthening multilateral dialogue – the pursuit of sustainable peace and development.” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko expected Belarus would be formally granted full-fledged membership. Minsk filed a bid to join the SCO in 2022, but started to participate in the organization’s work as early as in 2009. The SCO was founded on June 15, 2001, in Shanghai. Initially the organization included Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in 2017 they were joined by India and Pakistan. Tehran applied to join in 2008 and became a full-fledged member of the organization in July 2023.

The OSCE has a comprehensive approach to security that encompasses politico-military, economic and environmental, and human aspects. It therefore addresses a wide range of security-related concerns, including arms control, confidence- and security-building measures, human rights, national minorities, democratization, policing strategies, counter-terrorism and economic and environmental activities.

It has a secretariat and currently headed by Helga Maria Schmid, who was appointed to the post of Secretary General of the OSCE in December 2020 for a three-year term and then extended until September 2024. OSCE also has specialized institutions with specific functions. But what is important here is that all 57 participating States enjoy equal status, and decisions are taken by consensus on a politically, but not legally binding basis.

The fall of the Soviet Union required a change of role for the CSCE. And Russia, after Soviet’s collapse, renewed its membership in  According the records researched by this author, Then Soviet Union was admitted on 25 June 1973. Along the line, members of OSCE have criticized the organization for being in a position where Russia, and sometimes Belarus, can veto all OSCE decisions, Moscow has, for a number of years, not allowed the approval of the organization’s budget, the organization of official OSCE events or the extension of missions. In November 2023, they vetoed the appointment of Estonia as chairman from 2024.

The OSCE Mission to Georgia was established in November 1992 with its headquarters in the capital Tbilisi. The Mission’s mandate expired on 31 December 2008. Between these dates it was powerless to control the outbreak of the August 2008 Russo-Georgian war.

The objective of the mission to Moldova is to facilitate a comprehensive and lasting political settlement of the Transnistria conflict in all its aspects, strengthening the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova within its internationally recognised borders with a special status for Transnistria.[15]

OSCE promoted a 5+2 format as a diplomatic negotiation platform, which began in 2005, suspended by Russia and Transnistria in 2006 until it started again in 2012, before making slow progress over the next ten years. The process stopped following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as two of the parties were then at war with each other. In December 2022 Russia blocked the renewal of the annual mandate by limiting it to a six month period, repeated again in June 2023 to another six month period.

OSCE involvement in Ukraine. It has deployed its Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine at the request of Ukraine’s government. The mission has received mixed reviews. While some observers have applauded its function as the “eyes and ears of the international community”, others have accused the mission of bias towards either Russia or Ukraine.

OSCE has had so many disagreements with Russia, especially since the Ukraine crisis began on 24 February 2022 to de-nazify and de-militarize that former Soviet republic. It has protested the detention of four staff members in Donetsk and Luhansk, without specifying who had detained them. Further, two Ukrainian OSCE staffers were sentenced to 13 years of prison by a court in the Luhansk People’s Republic for “alleged high treason and espionage for the United States.”

The Russian delegation was not invited to the 29th OSCE Ministerial Council held in December 2022 where the delegates considered the ramifications and regional security challenges created by Russia’s continued ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine. There were calls to assess the reparations that Russia should be accountable for.

Since the start of its conflict with Ukraine, Russia has seized €2.7 million worth of armored vehicles that were previously part of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. According to a letter that was sent by Russian OSCE representatives to OSCE Secretary-General Helga Schmid in January 2023, 71 trucks and cars were brought to the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic as “evidence” and criminal proceedings were initiated against former OSCE personnel for espionage.

As a regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization comprising member states in Europe, North America, and Asia, its mandate includes issues such as arms control, the promotion of human rights, freedom of the press, and free and fair elections. It employs around 3,460 people, mostly in its field operations but also in its secretariat in Vienna, Austria, and its institutions. It has observer status at the United Nations.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), Weekly Blitz and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. He researches Eurasia, Russia, Africa and BRICS. His focused interest areas include geopolitical changes, foreign relations and economic development questions relating to Africa. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

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***

This strongly hints that Poland isn’t ruling out a conventional intervention in Ukraine under certain circumstances and expects that it would rapidly escalate into another Polish-Russian War just like the one that broke out after World War I.

Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces General Wieslaw Kukula told a press conference on Wednesday that

“Today, we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict, not an asymmetric-type conflict.”

This came right after the newly signed Polish-Ukrainian security pact, which was summarized here and analyzed in detail here. The relevant takeaways are that Poland will obtain enormous economic stakes in Ukraine, will assemble a ‘Ukrainian Legion’, and is contemplating intercepting Russian missiles.

With these terms in mind and noting how Kukula’s comments coincided with the NATO Summit, some observers suspected that they signaled progress on Poland’s possible plans to conventionally intervene in Ukraine to safeguard its investments there if Russia threatens them or achieves a breakthrough. The military-strategic dynamics of the conflict have trended in Russia’s favor for the past year, but no game-changing developments have yet to occur, though Poland isn’t taking any chances.

Kukula’s decision to prepare for a “full-scale conflict” strongly hints that Poland isn’t ruling out a conventional intervention in Ukraine under the abovementioned circumstances and expects that it would rapidly escalate into another Polish-Russian War just like the one that broke out after World War I. Not coincidentally, the Polish-Ukrainian security pact stipulates that they’ll “build on the Polish-Ukrainian brotherhood in arms in the 1920 war with Bolshevik Russia” when crafting new school curricula.

The reader should also be reminded that their pact calls for the creation of a ‘Ukrainian Legion’ in Poland, which head of the National Security Bureau Jacek Siewiera said could potentially include “millions” of “volunteers”. It’s obvious that this claim is overly ambitious, but the point is that this fighting force could function as the tip of the spear if Poland conventionally intervenes in the conflict, plus Polish servicemen might masquerade as Ukrainians to bolster its numbers and effectiveness.

Regardless of however another “full-scale” Polish-Russian War might begin, there’s no doubt that it would spike the risk of World War III. Poland is a NATO member to whom the nuclear-armed US has mutual security obligations, and even if their extension to allies’ activities in third countries is legally dubious, it’s unlikely that the US would hang any of its allies out to dry if their uniformed troops get pulverized by Russia in Ukraine. The Western elite would demand that the US respond in some way.

Leaving aside speculation about how such a conflict might end, it’s time to turn towards what Poland’s endgame would be for conventionally intervening in the first place. It was argued here back in spring 2022 that Polish interests wouldn’t be best served by annexing the Western Ukrainian regions that it controlled during the interwar period. Rather, this follow-up here from summer 2023 argues that a “sphere of influence” would be much better, which was already being pursued before their security pact.  

Accordingly, upon weighing the costs and benefits, it’s much more likely that Poland would refrain from annexing Western Ukraine and instead remain content with turning it into a client state where Polish companies have privileged access to its natural and labor resources without any of the responsibilities. The ‘Ukrainian Legion’ could then act as Poland’s praetorian guards while some uniformed troops might still be deployed for training and other purposes behind the scenes.

Poland’s plans to nearly triple its border forces from 6,000 to 17,000, 9,000 of whom will form a rapid border reaction force, were also coincidentally announced on the same day as Kukula’s scandalous comment and could facilitate a conventional intervention. Those that might cross into Ukraine wouldn’t leave the Belarusian border vulnerable to illegal immigrant invaders or whatever other threats though since Poland already called on Germany to assume partial responsibility for that front.

As it stands, however, Poland would be taking a huge gamble by conventionally intervening in Ukraine anytime soon. Its planned military buildup isn’t complete and will still require at least a few more years before it’s ready to fight a “full-scale conflict”. There’s also no guarantee that the US would directly attack Russian forces in response to them pulverizing Poles ones in Ukraine. It might instead agree to asymmetrically partition Ukraine as a swift de-escalation compromise to avoid World War III.

That said, a limited intervention that’s concentrated in Western Ukraine and focused on non-combat roles can’t be ruled out, though the reader should know that a top European think tank’s latest survey proved that it would still be very unpopular with Poles. This could take the form of a “no-fly zone” over Lvov, around which its military-industrial and other investments could be based, and the deployment of uniformed troops there for training purposes alongside its ‘Ukrainian Legion’ praetorian guards.

Russia couldn’t ignore that development if it unfolds since doing so could embolden NATO as a whole to rapidly scale this Polish-led intervention to cover everything up to the Dnieper, after which the bloc’s hawks might get frisky and flirt with crossing the river to threaten Russia’s new regions. The resultant game of nuclear chicken that was described here could end in mutual catastrophe if Russia feels that it must employ tactical nukes as a last resort in self-defense to stop an impending invasion.

It’s therefore expected that Russia would kinetically respond to the official introduction of Polish troops in Ukraine and/or a limited “no-fly zone” over its western regions, though depending on the scale of Poland’s intervention and Russia’s response, the US might not get directly involved in the fray. To be clear, Poland might not do either of these two and could formally remain outside of the conflict, but Kukula’s comments nevertheless strongly hint that there are conditions under which it’ll take the plunge.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, 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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US President Joe Biden used the opening of the NATO summit in Washington DC on July 9 to reassure member states that he can fight off an election challenge from Donald Trump. Nonetheless, Democratic Party donors are already writing off the presidential election and want another candidate.

Although Biden defiantly spoke for about 13 minutes at the NATO summit and delusionally said, “Russia will not prevail; Ukraine will prevail,” visiting diplomats expressed scepticism about Biden’s leadership capabilities.

“We don’t see how he can come back after the debate,” one unnamed European envoy told Reuters news agency. “I can’t imagine him being at [the] helm of the US and NATO for four more years.”

Politico spoke to several fundraisers and donors who said they do not believe that President Joe Biden will triumph over Donald Trump in the November elections. Therefore, they said, they are thinking about where else to invest their money.

“The events of recent days have put at risk House and Senate Democrats, and we feel it around the country,” said a New York Democratic donor on condition of anonymity.

“Clearly, Democratic donors are looking at down-ballot candidates to try to salvage the House or Senate,” the source added.

The president has said that he will not withdraw from the presidential race and insists that he is the strongest political figure in his party to win the election. However, more than 70% of Americans believe Biden’s mental state is unfit for a second term, according to a CBS News poll conducted after the June 28 debate.

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Jerry Nadler and Joe Morelle, a representative from New York, have already urged Biden not to accept the presidential nomination due to his advanced age.

A New York fundraiser working with Democratic and Republican donors and speaking on the condition of anonymity said that the ruling party has been in “a tizzy” since Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, whilst Republicans are elated and predicting a red wave.

“The feeling is that the problems at the top will drag everything else completely under: local, state, federal, everything,” the fundraiser told Politico.

The New York Times also reported a few days ago that some of the Biden campaign’s top donors are quietly pressuring the Democratic Party to replace Biden with someone else for the presidential election after support for the president plummeted after the debate with Trump. According to the newspaper, in various private meetings of Democratic donors, many favour Biden resigning and being replaced by someone capable of facing the Republican candidate.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the issue, that major Democratic donors have chosen Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom as their favourite candidates to succeed Biden in the presidential race.

“Biden’s candidacy is doomed,” a donor and fundraiser close to the president told the British outlet. “I’m Joe’s biggest fan, he’s an admirable public servant but he’s condemned (…) we have to start concentrating on what comes next.”

Even major figures in the Democratic Party, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schummer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have held crisis talks with big donors to gauge their mood, the FT notes, citing donors and fundraisers.

“You’re starting to see a lot of frustration among donors and the pressure is mounting to turn the page and start focusing on finding the right candidate to win against Trump,” one New York fundraiser told the paper. “Everybody is talking to their contacts to make sure we are ready to back the right candidate as soon as Biden steps down.”

Some donors have warned that any move to replace Biden with one of the governors could spark a “civil war” among Democrats, warning that Vice President Kamala Harris would be a less controversial choice. According to The Washington Post, despite having a popularity level as low as Biden’s, current Vice President Kamala Harris could be considered a replacement.

Another party figure who has emerged as an option is Pete Buttigieg, the current Secretary of Transportation. However, The Washington Post claims that he has little chance of attracting the diversity vote since, for example, he obtained little support from the African-American community.

The current president’s poor performance during the debate, which included stammering and blanking out at times, has clearly generated concern among the Democrats regarding the future of the president’s candidacy. However, Biden, as his speech at the NATO Summit opening indicates, appears to have no plans to abandon the presidential race

Seventy-seven percent of registered voters who watched the debate said Trump performed better, while only 33% of respondents reported Biden won the debate, according to a CNN poll. The two will debate again on September 10 in an event moderated by ABC News, and if there is a repeat of the June debate, it will all but likely secure Trump’s return to the White House.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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This week NATO is convening its three-day summit in Washington, celebrating its 75th birthday. Much has been talked about Ukraine, of course. One of the highlights of this year’s summit however is the issue of Asia – China appearing in this summit’s declaration again (this being the third time in a row). The Asian superpower was described as a “decisive enabler” in Russia’s conflict against Ukraine. The document further describes Beijing as posing “systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.”

Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister told his Thai counterpart Maris Sangiampongsa in Beijing this week that “It is necessary to resist the negative impact of the Indo-Pacific strategy and guard against NATO reaching out to the Asia-Pacific.” This was a message to ASEAN countries in general.

The matter of opening a NATO office in Tokyo is part of this larger context. It is not officially on this week’s agenda, but Tobias Billström (Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs) has said that NATO members are likely to bring the issue up with France soon (Paris opposes it). It was discussed last year, and often described in very humble terms. According to a 2023 Reuters report:

“NATO officials have said the proposed Japan office would be small, with a staff of only a few people focused on building partnerships, and would not be a military base.”

Last year, this seemingly modest proposal (heavily criticized by China) was nevertheless blocked by France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who, at the time, said that, although the Alliance should have partners “with whom we manage major security issues in the Indo-Pacific, Africa and also the Middle East”,  NATO “remains an organization of the North Atlantic Treaty.” Macron added, ironically, that  “whatever one says, geography is stubborn: the Indo-Pacific isn’t the North Atlantic.” As I wrote back in 2021, Paris is still a global player, and has its own interests in the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) and globally – and sometimes they clash with NATO and Washington in a number of issues.

This relatively modest proposal of setting up a NATO office in Tokyo, which, as I mentioned, has resurfaced, means in fact much more. According to Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer (Foreign Policy’s reporters)  it is all about giving the Atlantic Alliance “its first-ever permanent footprint in the Indo-Pacific region.”

On Tuesday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went as far as to say that “Japan, [South] Korea, and Australia are all on the road to invest 2 percent of their GDP on defense, a historic step forward”, adding that “put simply, the ties between the United States, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific have never been more important or more interrelated than they are today.” The 2 per cent figure is clearly a nod to NATO’s two per cent spending target, which has always been an internal issue.

As I wrote recently, back in 1997, then senator Joe Biden was already saying that the attitudes of European NATO members pertaining to the American share of the Alliance’s costs, “seem to many senators to be variants of taking the United States for suckers” and that “unless we quickly come to a satisfactory burden sharing understanding in all its facets with our European and Canadian allies, the future of NATO in the next century will be very much in doubt.” This rhetoric finds an echo in Donald Trump points today. In other words, Sullivan is saying that the West might find allies that are more eager and ready to invest on defense in the East.

In the same page, ahead of his participation at the summit, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Reuters that “Japan is determined to strengthen its cooperation with NATO and its partners.” Along with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea (known as the “Indo-Pacific Four” – IP4), are also attending the Alliance’s meeting. Kishida  also echoed NATO officials’ accusations against Beijing, by saying, without naming China, that “some countries” have been providing Moscow with dual-use civilian-military goods.

Last year, as mentioned, Macron, in an appeal to the institution’s founding treaty and to the acronym itself, described NATO, in a rather simplistic manner (his words), as “an organization of the North Atlantic Treaty.” Since the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, however, it has become increasingly clear to anyone that a “global NATO” (as Liz Truss, who was briefly the British First Minister in 2022, famously called it) has been emerging.  Truss, at the time, claimed that London rejected “the false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security” in favor of “a global NATO”: “I mean that NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats.”

While there has been much talk about a “new Asian NATO” (pertaining to the QUAD or even the so-called “new QUAD”), the specter of a new (US-pushed) “global NATO”, comprising allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East still haunts global peace. This proposed “bloc” raison d’être would be – what else? – to counter the so-called “threat” of Chinese-Russian cooperation, a “threat” that is nothing but the outcome of the  Alliance’s own encirclement policies against these two great powers.

The whole “pivoting east” talk is nothing new and has often been pushed by Washington – Hillary Clinton’s “Pacific Century” comes to mind, for instance. US foreign policy (in pursuit of the “American Century” and maintaining unipolarity) often resembles the swing of a pendulum. It often oscillates, in the long run, back and forth, between the idea “countering” Beijing or Moscow – and at times it might even attempt to accomplish both things simultaneously, as was the case with the incumbent American presidency and its ambitious and risky “dual containment” approach.

Such geopolitical voracity (albeit pendulous) is to face more than a few challenges. For one thing, up to very recently, very few Alliance members could even keep up with their military spending commitments (a fact which, by the way, explains much of Trump’s rhetoric against the organization). Washington itself is an increasing overextended superpower.

To sum it up, today one can see an increasingly divided NATO, which does not possess a clear view on the challenges of dual containment. With Ukraine’s fatigue lingering on, and the specter of Biden’s senility and a new Trump presidency (amid a US political crisis), the idea of pivoting east is gaining traction – however important allies within the Alliance will challenge that notion.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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I recently became aware of a policy brief with recommendations for the 2024 Summit of the Future, which lays out in plain terms what our “Overlords” have in store for us. It reads like a plot from a Bond-movie. In order to avoid “irreversible tipping points”, it is advised that all life supporting systems – “the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), lithosphere (land), and cryosphere (ice)” – be administered collectively by a “global governance body” . This means total control of the earth system (Planetary Commons) and the establishment of a global government.

As stated in the policy brief:

Governance of the planetary commons would require a shift from present-day nationalistic, siloed approaches to environmental protection, recognising the core fact that our planet is composed of interconnected, interdependent systems. Instead of a fragmented, treaty-based system, the planetary commons approach proposes a “nested” governance structure involving multiple layers of regulation enacting highly tailored local responses, all overseen by a global governance body.

It also means that no nation will have a sovereign right to exploit its own resources because it may have consequences for the planetary whole.

Today’s system is predicated on the sovereign right of nation-states to exploit resources within their national boundaries with little regard for global consequences. A concept of global stewardship of planetary commons as environmental resources we all depend on would run directly against this core understanding of international law and would face stiff resistance, including from developing countries that might see such a step as impinging on their ability to develop quickly. However, the science is increasingly clear and incontrovertible: without a major change to governance frameworks, our planet will become increasingly unstable, unpredictable, and unliveable. The planetary commons may be the only way to manage systemic change in the Anthropocene.

We must therefore be managed from above.

And who is behind the recommendations for the 2024 Summit of the Future?

The policy brief, “Towards a Planetary Commons Approach for Environmental Governance”, is issued by Global Challenges Foundation, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research(PIK).

It means that the very same actors who have defined the problem offer us the solution. As Professor Johan Rockström, director of PIK and board member of Global Challenges Foundation, said in 2015:

I cannot see any other way than 200 nations having to surrender some of their decision-making sovereignty to a global institutional administration. We have to work with the institutions we have, and their is only one institution that is global, the UN.

The Swedish Global Challenges Foundation has, as I have written about in a previous article, a big influence on the UN-agenda (with financial support to the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism and the Executive Office of the Secretary-General).

They also have some problematic Malthusian and futuristic beliefs (as I have analysed in an earlier article).

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day (July 8–9) official visit to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated the significant depth of their bilateral relations within the context of global changes. Russia’s closeness in enhancing and deepening economic cooperation also has an intertwined strategy for ensuring readiness against threats from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a political and military alliance of countries from Europe and North America. But India has, thus far, shown pragmatism in approach as it builds a strong partnership with the United States and, at the same time, maintains ties with Russia.

Narendra Modi’s agenda was really loaded. Choosing Moscow after his re-election as prime minister underlined the importance of Russian-Indian relations, at least from the Soviet era through Moscow’s post Soviet economic transformations until today. Today, both are staunch members of the ‘informal association’ – BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.)  Long before that was RIC ‘trioka’ (Russia, India and China), which according to the Russia Foreign Ministry would be revived. Russia and India also belong to the G20, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Notwithstanding the common visions, Russia and India have distinctive features in geography, politics and economy. India is the third-largest economy in the world. It is probably the largest country in the world by population,1.4 billion people. Russia was only recently upgraded into middle-income category and said to have overtaken Japan, which has only stripes of land and estimated population of 128 million people. By contrast, Russia with an extremely huge territory and vast natural resources, can boast of tiny population of 143 million. It took Russia more than thirty years, after Soviet’s collapse, to join middle-level income countries and to overtake Japan. Despite its achievements, Russia is still far away from what economists referred to as private-oriented economy. Russia’s economy is largely state-controlled.

Modi emphasized during his conversation with Putin that “India is the largest democracy; it is considered the mother of democracy” and therefore democratic elections were very important and huge in scale. “It is the first time in 60 years that a government has been elected for a third term in a row. The first time it happened was when India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was elected for a third term. I have done the same 60 years later. The people of India have given me a chance to serve my homeland,” underscored Modi. According to the official transcript, the Indian people voted for Modi on the principle: reform, perform and transform. Putin and Modi had their first informal encounter at the presidential residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, Moscow Region.

A new era is setting in the world, wrote the local Russia’s Kommersant newspaper on the eve of PM Modi’s visit. According to the newspaper, India considers itself the leader of the Global South, and Russia, one of the driving forces shaping a multipolar world, recognizes each other as important political partners. An additional factor pushing Moscow and New Delhi toward rapprochement is the increasing pressure on Russia and India from the United States.

What Moscow Offers India

Russia-India relations have flourished across all areas under Putin’s leadership for 25 years, i.e. since 1991. The trustworthy relations has hit new milestones and new heights these past few years. In the current global context, India and Russia, as well as their partnership, have taken on a new importance. It is hard to overestimate Russia-India cooperation in the ff; trade and the economy, in the military-technical industry, nuclear and hydrogen energy, in high technology and space development.

In the Grand Kremlin Palace, several documents were discussed, negotiated and outlined bilateral economic sectors for India’s strategic cooperation with Russia until 2030.

The programme was signed of Russian-Indian cooperation in trade, economic and investment spheres in the Russian Far East for 2024–2029, and on the principles of cooperation in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation. Given the vast territory of the Far East, and with its tiny 6.3 million people, China and India have been showing high interest in investment sectors in the region. In the Far East region, Russia is collaborating with Asian countries in trade and investment, strengthening its economic ties especially with China, India, North Korea and Vietnam.

Already local media reports said earlier that India has been a major buyer of Russian oil since the start of the ‘special military operation’ and it has amassed a trade deficit worth around $60 billion in its dealings with Russia.

Head of the Center for the Indian Ocean Region at IMEMO, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Alexey Kupriyanov said in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta:

“While the trade deficit problem cannot be solved through negotiations, it can be resolved as the trade structure levels off and Indian exports to Russia grow. These mostly include high-tech products that India either produces itself or buys in the West to resell to Russia.”

In January-April, Russia was the second largest supplier of goods to India (with only China ahead of it with deliveries worth $32.6 billion). In turn, exports of Indian goods to Russia increased by 21% to $1.6 billion, with Russia rising from 33rd to 29th place among recipients of goods from India. The top five importers of Indian goods include the United States, the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, Singapore, and China.

During negotiations on July 9, inter-agency documents were signed concerning issues of climate change and low-carbon development, geodesy and cartography, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, scientific research and logistics in the polar regions, and cooperation in the field of television broadcasting. A number of signed agreements concern investment and arbitration issues.

In addition, economic cooperation featured prominently in the bilateral discussions, ended with signing memorandums of understanding between the all-Russia Public Organisation Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia) and the Trade Promotion Council of India, as well as between the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India). The world will be watching with eagles eyes for the tangible results from these ambitious initiatives and strategies in shaping the evolving regional politics and economy not only in Russia but also in Eurasian region and, further the global dynamics.

Crowning the two-day interaction, President Vladimir Putin decorated Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, with “the Order of St Andrew the Apostle” in a modest ceremony held in St Andrew’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. According to the decree, Modi was honored with this award “for his outstanding merit in development of the particularly privileged strategic partnership between the Russian Federation and the Republic of India, as well as friendly ties between Russian and Indian peoples.”

This order can be awarded to heads of foreign states for outstanding services to the Russian Federation. It is the oldest order instituted more than three centuries ago by Russian Emperor Peter the Great.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Indian economy in 2024 was nominally worth $3.94 trillion. Driven by growth, India’s nominal GDP per capita increased steadily from $308 in 1991 and now reached an estimated $2,731 in 2024. India is officially known as the Republic of India located in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country as of June 2024. India borders the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

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The excessive support and public adoration the U.S. government has given to Kenya’s President William Ruto represents the racist contempt this settler state has for all of Africa and the domestic population of descendants from the continent. Two days before African Liberation Day on May 25th and one month before the Kenyan police’s brutal crackdown on protests against the US-IMF backed Finance Act that increases taxes up to 35% on essential goods, U.S. President Biden rolled out a red carpet for Ruto at a White House state dinner.

The debt this bill is supposed to address only exists because of the incessant and indiscriminate borrowing by the previous government of Kenya, for which Ruto was vice president. Ruto is a Grade A lackey for U.S. interests reminiscent of the dictator Mobutu of the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) who U.S. imperialism supported for 32 years in order to plunder the Congo.

U.S. neo-colonialism praised as an “endearing” and “enduring” democracy, the Ruto presidency, a puppet government that unleashed its notoriously vicious police to reportedly arrest more than 300, kill as many as 23 and injure dozens of Kenyan citizens in the demonstrations over the past week. These police are the same force U.S. imperialism has maneuvered into being dispatched to Haiti to contain the people’s resistance against imperialism in that Caribbean nation.

An elevation in the parlance of U.S. statecraft is the paternalistic promise of granting Kenya the status of a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” a role granted to the African Union’s African Standby Force. This designation is in sharp contrast to the Alliance of Sahel States newly formed confederation, a declaration of African self-determination.

The Africa Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the organizing arm U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) stand in uncompromising solidarity with the masses of Kenyans fighting against the proposed Finance Bill 2024. We denounce in the strongest terms the complicity of the U.S., especially its Black misleaders in Congress, in passing this legislation. In fact, on the day the bill was introduced in the Kenyan parliament, members of the U.S. Congress including Barbara Lee.

Ruto must go! U.S. Out of Africa! BAP and USOAN salute the courage and determination of the masses of youth throughout Kenya “Gen Z”! The blood spilled will not be in vain. Our martyrs are alive alongside the living. We stand unwaveringly with the Gen Z Movement, our people of Kenya!

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