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The 2022 Congressional midterms are around the corner. Based on historical precedent and the state of the union, they should be a slam-dunk for the GOP.

Runaway inflation, brazen warmongering, ongoing COVID hysteria, record-setting crime spikes, and unchecked illegal immigration of the past two years has all been overseen and endorsed by the Democrats who control Congress and the presidency. In a functional two-party system, this would and should guarantee a landslide loss come the 2022 midterms.

But we will likely see no such thing, on account of the undeniable reality that the GOP sucks almost as much as the Democrats because they largely serve the same donor class.

Republicans rarely, if ever, follow through on their campaign pledges. Trump, who won by posturing as an outsider intent on shaking up the system, pledged to #DraintheSwamp:

“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him (Ted Cruz). Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” -Donald Trump on the campaign trail, 2016

Once elected, though, he proceeded to fill his cabinet with the slimiest Swamp creatures he could recruit, like the multiple Goldman Sachs bankers he hired for his staff and cabinet.

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Based on the GOP’s fecklessness and obvious corruption, Democrats, in addition to capitalizing on a culture war win in the aftermath of the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, have enjoyed a bump in the polls.

Democratic Congressional candidates, on average, are doing unexpectedly well for an incumbent party holding the presidency in an off-year election cycle.

(Yes, polls are usually wrong, and often immensely so. But the point remains: if the GOP was worth a damn, it would be running the table.)

But don’t conflate their improved polling numbers with actual grassroots enthusiasm.

Amazingly, more than half of Democratic voters (56%) are so dissatisfied with their president that they want Biden gone by 2024. He has a pathetic 39% approval rating.

Biden’s cackling hyena-esque diverse sidekick, Kamala, is received even more coldly, with an icy 37% approval rating.

Sad!

Yet, in spite of those historically terrible numbers – even from members of their own party – the Biden/Kamala duo is somehow still outperforming Trump in most 2024 projections.

Again, with the deluge of disasters, one after another, since dementia-riddled Biden assumed office, the former president should be running away with it in the head-to-head.

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The 2016 election pitted the two most unpopular presidential candidates in recorded history against each other. 2020 wasn’t much different. 2024 will probably be more of the same.

Almost no one — except the most diehard MAGA loyalists and the Blue MAGA K-Hive cult members on the Team Red and Team Blue, respectively — vote for a party. The best they can be asked to do electoral-participation-wise is vote against the other party.

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The discontent cuts across partisan lines. A Gallup poll last year found that:

• “Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the “parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed”
• “A record-high 63% of Republicans favor a third party”
• “33% of Americans believe the two major political parties are doing an adequate job representing the public”

Source: Gallup poll

Nothing changes in the American electoral system because it is actually functional – just not in the self-governance small-d democracy sense of the word.

For the corporate state, the status quo offers the best of both worlds:

• On the one hand, since there’s no meaningful difference between the two major parties, it maintains the kind of functional control that typifies a one-party dictatorship.
• On the other hand, it maintains the façade of a “democracy” and all of the fake moral authority that lends. Then the US government gets to gallivant across the globe running coups on uncooperative governments under the guise of promoting “human rights” and “our values.”

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The reality of the system is that disillusioned have nowhere to turn for relief, and are conditioned to believe that they have no viable alternatives outside of the duopoly – the “lesser of two evils” voting paradigm.

We no longer live in a representative democracy (to the extent that we ever actually did), and the above-cited polling confirms that average Americans are increasingly sick of both factions of the de facto one-party state.

This is functional totalitarianism – North Korea with more Democratic© window-dressing like pluralistic Diversity©.

“Americans are led to feel free through the exercise of meaningless choices. There are only two political parties. There is a reduction of the number of media companies. Banking has been reduced to only a handful of banks. Oil companies. These are important, and you’re given very little choice.

Oh, but the flavor of jellybeans? The flavor of muffins? A bagel? You can get a Pina Colada bagel. We’re given the illusion of choice by the meaningless of choices of trivial things. You know what your freedom of choice in America is? Paper or plastic, buddy?… Pepsi or Coke? Window or Aisle? Smoking or [Nonsmoking]?”
-George Carlin

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Eventually the chickens will come home to roost.

If and when the piper comes for his due, and popular discontent erupts into an uncontrollable fire in the vein of the French Revolution, winning elections will become a secondary concern to politicians, replaced by their primary occupation of keeping their heads attached to their necks.

In any case, let us, to whatever extent possible, separate our political destiny from the corporate state uniparty. Enlist in a parallel society/economy.

“You can vote however the fuck you want,
But power still calls all the shots.
And, believe it or not,
Even if democracy broke loose,
They’ll just make the economy scream
Until we vote responsibly.”
– Propagandhi, ‘A People’s History Of The World’

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Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TDB

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***

There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.  — Aleksander Solzhenitsyn  

In high school we were taught that capitalism refers to an economic system comprised of privately run for-profit companies that sell products and/or services. We learned that, whether its stock is privately held or traded on a public exchange, a capitalist enterprise has, generally speaking, a relatively small number of people (owners, a board of directors, senior management) who function as the employer and a relatively large number of people who function as the employees.

The employer pays a salary or wages to the employees for their labor, including their ideas, but all the final decisions—how, what, and where to produce the goods and, most importantly, what to do with the profits—are made by the handful of employers at the top. The entire capitalist model is based on a hierarchical system wherein a small minority has complete authority over the majority.  

In the capitalist system, the wage the employer pays to the employee will always be of less value than the worker’s labor plus the other inputs used during the entire production process. In other words, to make a profit the employer must pay the worker less than the surplus income his labor generates. The higher the surplus, the more competitive the company is in its industry. By contrast, the employee wants higher wages—wants to increase his standard of living. Therein lies the struggle between employer and employee. Ever since capitalism’s inception, that conflict has always been a source of tension between the two opposing sides.  

Capitalism comes in several variations, but the one constant is the unequal employer-to-employee relationship. That unequal relationship exists in state-controlled capitalism—found, for instance, in the communist countries of China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and the former USSR—as well in as the democratic-socialist countries of Scandinavia. It also exists in so-called capitalist countries, in which privately held businesses operate under an economic system variously labeled free market, free trade, free enterprise, corporate, shareholder, or laissez faire. Each type falls under the umbrella of capitalism.  

Therefore, regardless of the brand of capitalism, all forms of it are inherently autocratic: The employer owns the means of production and has final—if not exclusive—say in all business decisions. In sum, capitalism’s built-in designrequires inequality.  

These days you’ll often hear the expression “crony capitalism” bandied about. In fact, it’s a deceptive term, for it leads one to think there’s such a thing as “good capitalism” and “bad—crony—capitalism.” In reality, they are one and the same.  

The Cooperative Model     

There is, however, another economic model that most of us never hear mentioned in high school or college and that even in our adult years we rarely, if ever, learn about: the “cooperative.”  A cooperative is a special type of corporation that places ownership and control of the corporation in the hands of the employees. In a cooperative—and only in a cooperative—there exists, not an employer-versus-employee relationship but an employer-and-fellow-employer mutuality. What this means is that all of the workers, from bookkeeper to janitor, own the means of production. They are all employers. They have no employees working for them—that is, under them.              

We will call the cooperative’s workers “employees” simply because that word is more understandable in the context of this article.  

Being non-hierarchical, the cooperative system gives everyone an equal voice in the decision-making process. When it is time to make a collective decision, every employee has one voting share, referred to as a membership share. The share represents the employee’s ownership of the cooperative. Regardless of professional position or personal wealth, each employee may own and exercise only one voting share. No employee can buy or control the share of another employee. In other words, all personnel in a cooperative function as their own board of directors, each with an equal voice in the decision-making, whether they are hiring a new administrator or conducting day-to-day operations.  

By contrast, in a traditional capitalist model (sometimes referred to as shareholder capitalism), the workers do not own the enterprise. (They may own a portion of the shares, but that right gives them neither ownership nor a major influence on their company’s board of directors.) There are usually three classes of shares: Class A voting shares, held by regular investors; Class B voting shares, held by the company’s founders; and Class C shares, normally held by the employees. Class B shares typically do not trade in the open market, whereas Class A shares trade, but Class B shares have ten times the voting power of Class A shares. Class C shares have no voting rights, but still trade in the open market. For instance, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, issues Class A shares and Class C shares. Both classes trade in the market, with negligible difference between the two share prices.  

In a capitalist-run corporation, if a wealthy shareholder or a group of shareholders buys up the majority of the voting shares, they will have the majority of the voting power when choosing a new CEO or electing new members to the board of directors or voting on other key issues that determine the company’s destiny.  The entire process doesn’t even remotely resemble an egalitarian way of organizing a business structure.  

Stakeholder Capitalism  

As if shareholder capitalism were not problematic enough, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has of late been foisting on the world the concept of “stakeholder capitalism.” In stakeholder capitalism, either a single unelected and unaccountable individual or a group of unelected and unaccountable individuals—they could be vendors or customers or even community activists—get to decide if a company is fulfilling its obligation to live by sustainable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. By embracing ESG metrics such as diversity and inclusivity, among other measurements, a company can get a favourable score, enabling it to receive future investments and bank loans. Naturally, the opposite happens if a company refuses to report or comply with the WEF’s ESG standards. It could be boycotted and deprived of all future investments, thereby ensuring its demise. In short, the intellectually bankrupt concept of ESG is nothing more than a thinly veiled deception employed by social engineers to gain control of companies and their assets.  

Although no consolidation between two cooperative-run corporations has ever taken place, it might be instructive to outline how the process would be carried out if there ever were such a merger. First, the workforce from both companies would have to vote on whether combining the two cooperatives would be acceptable to them. Unlike capitalist mergers or acquisitions, where layoffs are common—sometimes affecting thousands of workers—in a cooperative merger, all employees must be retained. The wealth from the combined entity would be distributed evenly throughout the workforce. The CEO would have no more earnings or influence after the merger than before it. The top salary would still be capped up to a maximum of four times that of the lowest base wage in the firm (or whatever ratio the employees, through a vote, have agreed upon). The CEO would never earn ten times—much less 1,000 times—more than the cooperative’s lowest wage earner.  

Incidentally, in a cooperative, the CEO and the other executives work for the employees, who are technically the CEO’s employers! I say this because managers with a particular skill set or type of expertise are often brought into a cooperative from the outside. No matter how senior a manager’s position may be, if his performance is subpar he can be removed at any time by the employees (his employers) in a vote of no-confidence.  

In stark contrast, after a merger between large companies in the capitalist system, their senior managements use the combined entity’s swelled size and wealth to exert more control, more clout, not only over the remaining employees but also over their external surroundings—that is, the political, social, and economic milieu.  

Put another way, companies that are capitalist behemoths are apt to flex their enlarged, “merged” muscles—often in bullying, despotic fashion. The lesson: Concentrating affluence and influence in the hands of a small minority, whether in large corporations, big banks, centralized governments, or, really, any institution, tends to widen and deepen already existing inequalities throughout the entire structure of a society.  

This intrinsic tendency of capitalism to narrow the field of companies while simultaneously creating enormous enterprises—thereby reducing industry competition—is why in every capitalist economy the federal government is eventually called upon to pass antitrust laws that prevent monopolization. Small-to-mid-sized businesses simply cannot compete and thus cannot survive in such an environment.  

Granted, the capitalist production system does temporarily provide more efficiency in some areas. However, that efficiency is eventually offset by a creeping accumulation of power, which serves a nation’s ruling class well while undermining all other social and economic classes. So, we have the ruling class both creating and benefitting from massive mergers and acquisitions.  

The capitalist system that came to the fore in late nineteenth-century America and that rose in prominence and power in the twentieth century is so potent today that it controls, to one degree or another, all levels of government and all levers of power. This paradigm holds true not just for the American Empire but for almost all nations that are home to capitalism. Consequently, any perceived notion of democracy we once had in the West is now nothing more than an illusion.  

The Origin of Democracy  

I say “perceived” because the original meaning of “democracy,” as envisioned by the ancient Greeks, has long since been reduced to a meaningless slogan. As we may recall, the word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from the Greekdemos, meaning “people , ” and the Greek kratos, meaning “power.” Literally translated, it means “people power.”   

Centuries later, the members of the US ruling class who drafted the American government’s constitutional system interpreted democracy as, literally, mob rule by the majority—by “the many”—to the detriment of all minorities. This unfavorable definition of democracy is reminiscent of the views of Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Plato (c. 420s–347/348BCE), two aristocrats who, perhaps unsurprisingly, given their social status, despised democracy.  

What is politely avoided by the anti-mob rule folks is the answer to the question: Who exactly are “the many”? For, throughout history, “the many” have always occupied the middle and lower rungs of the social ladder. They have never been allowed to be on par with, much less rule over, the few at the top—the blue-blooded, the landed, the wealthy, the highly decorated, the educated, the titled, and, given all those traits, the entitled.  

This mob rule definition of democracy is actually an adulteration of the original concept of democracy. Our school textbooks have mysteriously neglected to tell us that there once existed a true democracy, formally established in Greece by an Athenian statesman who predated Aristotle and Plato by more than a century: Cleisthenes (c. 570–508BCE). In that first and—as far as we know—only perfect democracy, the citizens quite literally were the government. They protected themselves from their own excesses and potential errors through checks and balances built into their legislative and judicial systems, which were set up and administered solely by the citizens—that is, by themselves. This was not mob rule. It was rule truly by the people and truly for the people.  

Yet when we read Aristotle’s writings about earlier Greeks, we discover that he never once mentioned Cleisthenes and his remarkable achievements. Why is that? Probably because, as we said above, Aristotle was a member of the establishment and as such couldn’t abide the thought of future generations of young minds learning about—or even organizing—a government that would upset the privileged positions of power that the parasitic ruling class enjoyed.  

The Pretense of Democracy  

Though we in the West have been indoctrinated by our government schools to believe that capitalism and democracy thrive together and cannot survive without one another, in fact just the opposite is the case. All forms of capitalism are completely incongruous with all forms of democracy—direct, representative, presidential, parliamentary, participatory, social, and Islamic.  

Indeed, capitalism and democracy can coexist only temporarily. Capitalism’s inevitable dysfunctions—undemocratically run enterprises, extreme concentration of wealth and power, unequal distribution of goods (resulting in artificial excess and scarcity), and public-private partnerships (creating unholy alliances between capitalists and government officials)—become manifest in, and eventually erode, any well-intended brand of democracy.  

Thus, no matter how noble the aims of some of the American Founding Fathers in creating a constitutionally limited representative democratic republic, that republic was, by the end of the nineteenth century, barely functioning. Granted, representative democracy may have still been working at municipal and county levels, but at the state and national levels it had become nothing more than an illusion.  

Today, the United States “republic”—such as it is—and other so-called Western democracies are under attack by a global financial oligarchy. Intertwined with and embedded in the WEF and its parent, the United Nations, these financial oligarchs forward a neo-Malthusian depopulation agenda that targets all of humanity.  

Ironically, capitalists who give lip service to the idea of “democracy” and pretend it actually exists in politics have never allowed “democracy” in the workplaces they own, control, and amass personal fortunes from. Why not? Surely it is because they recognize that the deprivations, inequities, bought-and-paid-for politicians, and ecological disasters that plague the world today are natural outgrowths of the unaccountable power wielded by the privileged few at the top of global capitalist-run organizations.  

In short, by not democratizing the economy and its means of production, a political system that calls itself a representative democracy or any other kind of democracy can never stand the test of time. The autocratically run,undemocratic institutions that make up its economy will eventually dominate that nation’s political and economic spheres.  

Put another way: Any nation, without exception, that utilizes the capitalist economic system has always succumbed and will continue to succumb to the aforementioned erosion in democracy at the state (or provincial) and national levels of politics.  

The Grand Deception  

The federal election process in the West also deserves a few words. Just because registered voters can go to a ballot box every two or four or six years to cast a vote for plutocrat A or oligarch B does not mean they live in a free country or have equal representation or guaranteed rights. Citizens of Western countries are programmed from childhood to believe that they are choosing between ideological dualities, when, in reality, they are merely choosing between two sides of the same coin, which is minted by their masters. This is the grand deception of the two-party or multi-party paradigm.  

Clued-in contemporary authors, pundits, and documentary filmmakers have opined that we are living in a time when the leadership of many nations is compromised. In saying this, they mean that individuals are placed in positions of power—as president, prime minister, or chancellor—based on whether they can be influenced and even silenced, notbased on their meritorious character, leadership skills, or statesman-like wisdom. It should be noted: Although this is an accurate assessment of the twenty-first century, the phenomenon of “captured” politicians and their bureaucrat lackeys is hardly new. It has been well underway in American politics since the end of the nineteenth century—and in older nations throughout all time.    

Elections have become—if they were not always—merely a stamp of approval given by deceived voters to candidates who have been pre-selected for political office by an exclusive coterie of money men. More precisely, these money men are members of an alliance of billionaire, supranational, multigenerational families. They profess undying devotion to free enterprise, to their countrymen, and to the so-called democratic process. But in reality they are loyal only to themselves and their clan. It’s not surprising that they are beholden to money and power, for they have been taught from birth that enormous wealth and outsized influence are rightfully theirs, based on their bloodlines, their genes, their smarts, and their self-deluded belief in their godlike status. They are what we might call global financial oligarchs.  

These supposedly superior human beings are behind Big Everything: Big Government, Big Capital, Big Industry, Big Science, Big Pharma, Big Military, Big Agriculture, Big Intelligence, Big Media, Big Academia, Big Entertainment—behind anything and everything that enables them to retain their presumed authority over, even ownership of, the rest of the human race—and, indeed, over all the earth. Any thought they have, word they utter, or move they make is in support of their will, their wealth, their comfort, their control—all with the intention of making subservient or physically annihilating everything and everyone else.  

The global financial oligarchy’s lust for control has in this era wed itself to technology and pseudoscience as a means of engineering society into a scientific dictatorship, aka technocracy. Their diabolical plan, which is already well underway, is designed to eradicate representative democracy, sovereign nation-states, and individual liberties, not to mention small businesses, national currencies, and cash. The end goal of this global technocratic dictatorship is to control, commodify, digitize, and financialize absolutely everything on earth—including nature and human beings’ bodies and minds.  

In ancient Egypt, in the Roman Empire, and in many other early civilizations, the wealth of a nation resided in the hands of a few families, and it has remained in the hands of these ruling family dynasties ever since. In the nineteenth century, they bore prestigious names like Morgan, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Schiff, Warburg, Loeb, DuPont, House, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (the British Royals). 

Today, those same dominating, power-craving, status-seeking men and women—and their descendants and protégés—are steering humanity towards a neo-feudal dystopia. These privileged individuals—and their associated societies/councils, news outlets, Wall Street/City of London financiers, philanthropic organizations, universities, and think tanks—operate, entirely apolitically, behind the scenes. They lurk in the shadows of government offices and in other halls of power, always designing ways to subvert the popular vote and steal the property, liberty, happiness, health, welfare , and every God-given right of all people.   

With most of the world now peering into the jaws of the technocrats’ nightmarish “Great Reset” and their equally spine-chilling transhumanist agenda, it is time to peacefully organise and find new alternatives to our broken economic paradigm. The cooperative model, which I described above, is already taking hold on a global scale.  There are, at present, millions of people organising cooperatives around the world.  

For instance, twelve percent of humanity is currently part of three million cooperatives dotting the earth. As of 2020, ten percent of the planet’s employed population was involved in some kind of cooperative—whether food, banking, or manufacturing. For instance, one of the largest cooperatives in the world, Zen-Noh (Japanese National Federation of Agricultural), has an annual revenue of over $56 billion USD. Even during the pseudopandemic, food cooperatives across the US were thriving.  

And that’s only the beginning. There are other alternatives to our dysfunctional economic system. These are by no means one-size-fits-all solutions, but taken either individually or in combination, they can provide answers for each unique situation or region of the world. These include, for example, Freedom Cells, which are self-organised peer-to-peer groups that can peacefully assert sovereignty; create alternate, parallel institutions; and participate in innovative counter-economic activity. Freedom Cells can use either Bitcoin or a barter system as a medium of exchange. The latter is also called agorism. In theory and in practice, agorism serves the people, not the ruling oligarchy.  

Throughout history, humanity has gone through prolonged periods of trial and error when seeking ways to organize an economy. At first, some humans kidnapped, owned, and controlled other humans, and the system of forced labor—slavery—was the main way work was accomplished. Next came the feudal system, in which lords allocated a portion of their property to be cultivated by serfs. Though retaining ownership of the land, the lords gave a share of the crops to the peasants who produced them.    

While feudalism was an advance, in every sense of the word, beyond slavery, there was still much room for improvement. What followed was the capitalist system. True, capitalism was a big change for the better over its predecessor. But does that mean capitalism is the be-all and end-all of economic systems? Does it mean we should stop trying out alternate economic models? Of course not. I sincerely believe we can do better.  

The cooperative model and Freedom Cells, both of which are growing in number and gaining in stature these days, are only the beginning of this exciting, emerging new chapter in human economic development.  

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

He is the author of a recently published e-book, “Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified,” and a regular contributor to Global Research.

Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified. Are We Witnessing Humanity’s March Toward Extinction? Viruses Are Our Friends, Not Our Foes

Author: David Skripac

Click here to read the e-Book.

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***

13 people were killed and 58 wounded when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards fired precision missiles and suicide drones at Kurds near Irbil and Sulaimaniya in northern Iraq on Wednesday morning.

The attack was in retaliation after Iranian authorities accused Iranian Kurdish dissidents in Iraq of collaborating with Kurdish protesters in northwest Iran which is home to over 10 million Kurds.

The first series of attacks began on Saturday, followed by more on Monday as Iran unleashed a wave of drone and artillery strikes targeting Kurdish positions.

Koya, about 65 kilometers east of Irbil, was shelled.  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in a statement said the attacks “impacted the Iranian refugee settlements” in Koya, and that refugees and other civilians were among the casualties.

Why did Iran attack Kurds in Iraq?

On September 24, a protest was held in support of the women of Iran outside the UN compound in Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Posters with the face of Mahsa Amini were held aloft as the protesters chanted “women, life, freedom.”

“We are not against religion, and we are not against Islam. We are secularists, and we want religion to be separate from politics,” said Maysoon Majidi, a Kurdish Iranian actor and director living in Irbil.

Last week, Masoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan’s governing party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, called Amini’s family to express his condolences for her death.

Kurdish political identity is tied to the secularist, nationalist and communist ideology of the jailed founder of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan.

Tasnim news agency in Iran said the shelling targeted the offices of Komala and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran for allegedly sending “armed teams and a large number of weapons … to the border cities of the country to cause chaos.”

Mahsa Amini, her scarf, and her death

Protests erupted in Iran this month over the death of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini.  She was arrested on September 13 in Tehran by the morality police, who enforce a strict dress code which includes covering the head of women with a scarf.  The 22-year-old Kurdish woman from Saqez died three days later in a hospital after being held in police custody.

Her death has focused on women’s rights in Iran, as well as the Kurdish population, and has touched the Iranian Kurdish community in exile in the Kurdistan region in Iraq.

“Woman, Life, Freedom!” the protesters have chanted in Iran’s biggest demonstrations in almost three years, in which women have defiantly burned their headscarves and cut off their hair.

The headscarf (hijab) is currently required by law to be worn by women in Iran and Afghanistan. It is no longer required by law in Saudi Arabia since 2018.

Amini’s family has asked for an investigation into her death, which the authorities blame on a heart attack; however, her cousin living in Iraq charged that she died after a “violent blow to the head,” with reports she was bleeding from her ear.

Protests in Iran have continued for almost two weeks as police vowed to confront protesters, which have been said to have killed at least 76 people, and spread to at least 46 locations in Iran, with more than 1,500 demonstrators arrested.

On Wednesday, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi condemned the “chaos” sparked by a wave of women-led protests over Amini’s death.

On September 23, the Kurdish-majority town of Oshnavieh in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province briefly fell into the hands of protesters, who set fire to government offices, banks, and a base belonging to the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What is Kurdistan Region Iraq?

In 1991, Iraqi Kurds broke away from central government control with the help of a US-led no-fly zone. The Kurdistan Region Iraq (KRI) is an autonomous region in Iraq comprising the four Kurdish-majority governorates of Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, and Halabja.

The new Iraqi constitution stipulates that Iraqi Kurdistan is a federal entity recognized by Iraq, and has developed its oil and gas sector independently of Baghdad based on a 2007 law.

Baghdad’s reaction to attack

Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, and his foreign ministry condemned the attacks in a statement on Wednesday and would summon the Iranian ambassador to inform him of Iraq’s objection to the attacks on Iraqi territories and that Iraq considers this action a violation of sovereignty.

US reaction to the attack

On Wednesday, the US condemned the Iranian attack on northern Iraq and said,

“We stand with Iraq’s leaders in the Kurdistan region and Baghdad in condemning these attacks as an assault on the sovereignty of Iraq and its people. “

Saddam Hussein and past stability

In 2018, journalist Jane Arraf interviewed Iraqi General Nijm al-Jabouri.  He recalled the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and said,

“We thought we would breathe freedom, we would become like Europe,” instead he says “We returned to the Dark Ages.” He added, “But many people, when they compare between the situation under Saddam Hussein and now, find maybe their life under Saddam Hussein was better.”

Almost 20 years after the US invasion, electricity is still unreliable in Baghdad, water is in short supply, and hospitals are ill-equipped. Security and basic services are in shambles and the government is in disarray.  Al-Jabouri said, “It was very difficult to imagine that the United States would allow religious people to control Iraq.”

Qathem Sherif al-Jabouri, a mechanic in Baghdad, recalls helping to bring down the large statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.

“Those who came after haven’t improved the infrastructure, they haven’t built anything, they haven’t done anything for the people,” and added, “Saddam’s was a brutal regime. But now, I regret hitting the statue.”

The US invasion of Iraq destroyed the region

On March 19, 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq began the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history.  The war led to the death of millions of people; fueled sectarian violence; allowed for the rise of militant religious groups and empowered Iran. US President George W Bush’s case for the war was discovered to be based on lies and propaganda.

The bombing of Baghdad was so severe that its infrastructure has yet to be fully rebuilt, and the city remains scarred not only by the US assault but also by the more than a decade of the bombing that followed.

US administrator L. Paul Bremer III allocated power along religious and ethnic lines. Iraq became the Arab world’s first Shiite-led government in centuries. Many of the leading Shiite political figures were Iranian-backed, and today Iran plays a major role in the political life of Iraq, thanks to the American invasion. The war would go on for eight years killing an estimated 151,000 to 600,000 Iraqi civilians during its early stages.

The US withdrew its troops from the conflict in 2011 and is said to have spent nearly $2 trillion in war-related costs in Iraq during its eight years of engagement.

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

Featured image: Iranian protestors on the Keshavrz Boulvard (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think tanker titled “Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us“.

This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy.

With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history.

“In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threat and call-up of reservists, it was reassuring for the leader of the free world to be unflinching,” writes the article’s author Kori Schake, who then adds, “Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in numerous other ways that Putin’s threats have constrained support for Ukraine.”

As though the possibility of nuclear war should not constrain U.S. proxy warfare in that country. As though the crazy thing is not the U.S. government’s insane nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, but its reluctance to go further.

“The gap between what the administration is claiming as their foreign policy objectives, and what it is actually willing to do, is a serious problem for American security, for Russia and beyond,” writes @KoriSchake. https://t.co/SX32lJKNgM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) September 26, 2022

More Money for War

Schake criticizes the fact that while Biden has been saying a PRC attack on Taiwan would mean a direct U.S. hot war with China, the U.S. military would need far more funding and far greater expansion to be able to win such a war, so it should definitely do those things instead of simply not rushing into World War Three.

“But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the United States could indeed defend Taiwan,” Schake writes, adding:

“The ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capability. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed that the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 is ‘acute,’ yet the defense budget is not geared to providing improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More broadly, the Biden administration isn’t funding an American military that can adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Department of Defense budget request, a measure of just how inadequate the Biden budget is.”

The Pentagon. (Joe Lauria)

As Shchake discusses the urgent need to explode the U.S. military budget [already at $777.7 billion] in order to defend Taiwan, The New York Times neglects to inform us that Schake’s employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been caught accepting a small fortune from Taiwan’s de facto embassy while churning out materials urging the U.S. government to go to greater lengths to arm Taiwan.

In a 2013 article titled “The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute,” The Nation’s Eli Clifton reports that, thanks to a filing error by AEI, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office was found to have been one of the think tank’s top donors in 2009. Had that filing error not been made, we never would have learned this important information about AEI’s glaring conflict of interest in its Taiwan commentary.

AEI is one of the most prominent neoconservative think tanks in the United States, with extensive ties to Bush-era neocons like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Kristol and Kagan families, and has played a very active role in pushing for more war and militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Dick Cheney sits on its board of trustees, and Mike Pompeo celebrated his one year anniversary as C.I.A. director there.

Epitome of the Revolving Door

Schake herself is as intimately interwoven with the military-industrial complex as anyone can possibly be without actually being a literal Raytheon munition.

Her resume is a perfect illustration of the life of a revolving door swamp monster, from a stint at the Pentagon, to the university circuit, to the National Security Council, to the U.S. Military Academy, to the State Department, to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, to the Hoover Institution, to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, to her current gig as director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.

Her entire career is the story of a woman doing everything she can to promote war while being rewarded with wealth and prestige for doing so.

And now here she is being granted space in The New York Times, a news media outlet of unrivaled influence where enemies of U.S. militarism and imperialism are consistently denied a platform, to tell us all that the Biden administration is endangering us not with its insanely reckless hawkishness, but by being too “cautious”.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being trained to freak out all the time about Russian propaganda, which barely exists in the west, even as we are hammered every day with extreme aggression by the immensely influential propaganda of the U.S.-centralized empire.

You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.

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Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

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***

Dear Editor of the once-upon-a-time Famous-for-truth New York Times,

With headlines like this, Sabotaged Pipelines and a Mystery: Who Did It? (Was It Russia?), even suggesting that Russia may have blown up their own pipeline, the NYT is killing its last vestige of credibility.

You know exactly this is a lie.

The only force that has a vital interest in doing so is the US / NATO conglomerate – to make sure, there is no way Germany could change their mind and go back on their decision to let their people freeze to death this winter, and to economically destroy Germany, THE economic force and leader of Europe.

You, and your analysts know that.

Unfortunately, there is no common people’s influence on our reporting. There are stronger forces that have bought into your mind-bending journalism.

Still, once a supporter of the NYT, I feel I want to tell you.

The Same with this reporting

Russian Proxies in Ukraine Push Moscow to Annex Occupied Regions

and

Vladimir Putin will sign agreements on Friday to take over four Ukrainian regions, the Kremlin said, after votes widely denounced as a sham

Here too, these are not “proxy” Russians who signed a sham petition to be annexed to Russia. You know it very well.

These are real Russians, living in the far Eastern part of Ukraine, the Donbas area mostly, who have been discriminated ever since the US instigated the Maidan coup on 22 February 2014 – when a neo-Nazi government was installed that let the Nazi Asov Battalions literally slaughter Ukraine’s own people in Donbas — at least 14,000 were reported killed – about half of them children – in the eight years since the “Victoria Nuland” (“Fuck Europe”) coup. See this.

We are talking about the same Asov Battalions, that helped Hitler during WWII fight against Russia.

Already in 2014 / 2015 the Donbas districts wanted to join Russia. President Putin did not allow it, because at that time he still believed in the “Minsk” Agreements, sponsored by France and Germany.

These agreements were principally meant to protect the Donbas people, as well as to demilitarize – de-Nazify – Ukraine, and to keep NATO out of Ukraine. None of the conditions of the Minsk Agreements (September 2014 and April 2015) were ever adhered to.

If truth-seeking geopolitical analysts around the globe know the real background, you, Editor-in-chief of the NYT, and your journalists, know the real story too. Still, you report lies and half-truths to further influence and promote people’s opinion against Russia.

The New York Times has become weaponized against Russia and China, by your mere reporting.

Don’t you think that this will eventually backfire?

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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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is from FAIR

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***

MEP Nathalie Loiseau of France is lobbying for individual sanctions on all observers of the Russian-organized referendums in the Donbass region. She has singled out journalist Vanessa Beeley not only for her coverage of the vote, but for her reporting on the foreign-back war against Syria’s government.

A French Member of European Parliament (MEP), Natalie Loiseau, has delivered a letter to EU High Representative of Foreign Affairs, Joseph Borrell, demanding the European Union place personal sanctions on all international observers of the recent votes in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and certain Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine.

Obtained by The Grayzone from an EU source, the letter is currently being circulated among European parliamentarians in hopes of securing a docket of supportive signatures.

“We, as elected members of the European Parliament, demand that all those who voluntarily assisted in any way the organization of these illegitimate referendums be individually targeted and sanctioned,” Loiseau declared.

The French MEP’s letter came after a group of formally Ukrainian territories held a vote on whether or not to officially incorporate themselves into the Russian Federation in late September. Through the popular referendum, the independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which announced their respective successions from Ukraine in 2014 following a foreign-backed coup against the government Kiev, as well as the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhia, voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining the Russian Federation.

Loiseau singled out Vanessa Beeley, a British journalist who traveled to the region to monitor the vote. Extending her complaint well beyond the referendum, the French MEP accused Beeley of “continuously spreading fake news about Syria and acting as a mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin and Bashar el [sic] Assad for years.”

Loiseau, a close ally of French President Emanuel Macron, specifically demanded Beeley be “included in the list of those sanctioned.”

Beeley responded to Loiseau’s letter in a statement to The Grayzone:

“Imposing sanctions on global citizens for bearing witness to a legal process that reflects the self-determination of the people of Donbass is fascism. Should the EU proceed with this campaign, I believe there will be serious consequences because the essence of freedom of speech and thought is under attack.

Russia’s referendums: drawing a line with NATO

In mid-September 2022, Beeley and around 100 other international delegates traveled to eastern Europe in order to observe a vote to join the Russian Federation in the regions of Kherson, Zaporozhia, and the independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Why did their presence trigger such an outraged response from Western governments? The answer lies in the recent history of these heavily contested areas.

The formally Ukrainian territories of Kherson and Zaporozhia fell under Russian control earlier this year as a result of the military campaign launched by Moscow in February, while the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics declared their independence from the government in Kiev in 2014.

Russia began its special military campaign in Ukrainian territory on February 24. The operation followed Moscow’s decision that same week to formally recognize the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic (the Donbass Republics) in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region. Pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass have been embroiled in a bloody trench battle with the US-backed government in Kiev since 2014.

Ukraine’s civil conflict broke out in March 2014, after US and European forces sponsored a coup in the country that installed a decidedly pro-NATO nationalist regime in Kiev which proceeded to declare war on its minority, ethnically Russian population.

Following the 2014 putsch, Ukraine’s government officially marginalized the Russian language while extremist thugs backed by Kiev massacred and intimidated ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine. In response, separatist protests swept Ukraine’s majority-Russian eastern regions.

The territory of Crimea formally voted to join Russia in March of that year, while the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region declared their unofficial independence from Kiev that same month. With support from the US military and NATO, Ukraine’s coup government officially declared war on the Donbass in April 2014, launching what it characterized as an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in the region.

Russia trained and equipped separatist militias in Donetsk and Lugansk throughout the territories’ civil campaigns against Kiev, though Moscow did not officially recognize the independence of the Donbass republics until February 2022. By then, United Nations estimates placed the casualty count for Ukraine’s civil war at roughly 13,000 dead. While Moscow offered support to Donbass separatists throughout the 2014-2022 period, US and European governments invested billions to prop up a Ukrainian military that was heavily reliant on army and intelligence factions with direct links to the country’s historic anti-Soviet, pro-Nazi deep state born as a result of World War II.

Ukrainian armed forces reportedly flew the flag of the German Third Reich from their position in the Donbass, according to surveillance footage from militias on the pro-Russian side pic.twitter.com/ezwmBHo1bs

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 13, 2021

Russia’s military formally entered the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, following Moscow’s recognition of the Donbass republics. While Russian President Vladimir Putin defined the liberation of the Donbass republics as the primary objective of the military operation, he also listed the “de-nazification” and “de-militarization” of Ukraine as a goals of the campaign. As such, Russian troops have since secured control of Ukrainian territories beyond the Donbass region, including the territories of Kherson and Zaporozhia.

Facing increased Western investment in the Kiev-aligned bloc of Ukraine’s civil war, authorities in the Donbass republics announced a referendum on membership in the Russian Federation in late September 2022, with Moscow-aligned officials in Kherson and Zaporozhia announcing similar ballot initiatives. Citizens in each territory proceeded to approve Russian membership by overwhelming majorities.

The results of the referendum not only threatened the government in Kiev, but its European and US backers. Western-aligned media leapt to characterize the votes as a sham, claiming Moscow’s troops had coerced citizens into joining the Russian Federation at the barrel of a gun. Their narrative would have reigned supreme if not for the hundred or so international observers who physically traveled to the regions in question to observe the referendum process.

Observers like Vanessa Beeley now face the threat of returning home to the West as wanted outlaws. But as Loiseau’s letter made clear, the British journalist was in the crosshairs long before the escalation in Ukraine.

Beeley among European journalists targeted and prosecuted for reporting from Donetsk

Vanessa Beeley was among the first independent journalists to expose the US and UK governments’ sponsorship of the Syrian White Helmets, a so-called “volunteer organization” that played frontline role in promoting the foreign-backed dirty war against Syria’s government through its coordination with Western and Gulf-sponsored media. Beeley also played an instrumental role in revealing the White Helmets’ strong ties to Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, as well as its members’ involvement in atrocities committed by Western-backed insurgents.

Beeley’s work on Syria drew harsh attacks from an array of NATO and arms industry-funded think tanks. In June 2022, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which receives funding from a variety of NATO states, corporations and billionaires, labeled Beeley “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” on Syria prior to 2020. (According to ISD, Beeley was somehow “overtaken” by The Grayzone’s Aaron Mate that year). The group did not provide a single piece of evidence to support its assertions.

Though Beeley has endured waves of smears, French MEP Natalie Loiseau’s call for the EU to sanction the journalist represents the first time a Western official has moved to formally criminalize her work. Indeed, Loiseau made no secret that she is targeting Beeley not only for her role as an observer of the referendum votes, but also on the basis of her opinions and reporting on Syria.

Loiseau’s push to issue personal sanctions against EU and US citizens comes on the heels of the German government’s prosecution of independent journalist Alina Lipp. In March 2020, Berlin launched a formal case against Lipp, who is a German citizen, claiming her reporting from the Donetsk People’s Republic violated newly authorized state speech codes.

W/o explanation, @YouTube has demonetized my interview w/ Alina Lipp, the only German journalist in Donetsk

The German state has seized funds from Lipp's bank account and is prosecuting her under new speech laws for her reporting on Ukrainian war crimes https://t.co/No7OjRb8be pic.twitter.com/93BRKVq2FF

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 17, 2022

Prior to Lipp’s prosecution, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue launched a media campaign portraying her as a disseminator of “disinformation” and “pro-Kremlin content.”

In London, meanwhile, the UK government has imposed individual sanctions on Graham Philips, a British citizen and independent journalist, for his reporting from Donetsk.

And in Brussels, Loiseau’s campaign against Beeley appears to have emerged from a deeply personal vendetta.

Who is Natalie Loiseau?

In April 2021, Beeley published a detailed profile of Loiseau at her personal blog, The Wall Will Fall, painting the French MEP as a regime change ideologue committed to “defending global insecurity and perpetual war.” Beeley noted that Loiseau served as a minister in the government of French President Emanuel Macron when it authorized airstrikes in response to dubious allegations of a Syrian government chemical attack in Douma in April 2018.

Beeley also reported that Loiseau has enjoyed a close relationship with the Syria Campaign, the public relations arm of the White Helmets operation. This same organization, which is backed by British-Syrian billionaire Ayman Asfari, was the sponsor of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report which branded Beeley a “top propagator of disinformation” on Syria.

Loiseau has taken her activism into the heart of the European parliament, using her position as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defense to silence colleagues who ask to many questions about the Western campaign for regime change in Syria.

During an April 2021 hearing, MEP Mick Wallace attempted to question Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Director General Fernando Arias about allegations he personally aided the censorship of an OPCW investigation which concluded no chemical attack took place in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Loiseau immediately descended into a fit of rage, interrupting Wallace and preventing him from speaking.

“I cannot accept that you can call into question the work of an international organization, and that you would call into question the word of the victims in the way you have just done,” Loiseau fulminated.

Wallace responded with indignation, asking, “Is there no freedom of speech being allowed in the European Parliament any more? Today you are denying me my opinion!”

.@wallacemick of Ireland asked OPCW chief Arias whether he will account for the scientific fraud in the Douma investigation and why he's refused to meet the dissenting inspectors. Wallace was interrupted by the chair, and Arias refused to answer: pic.twitter.com/c043R3111V

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 15, 2021

A year later, Wallace and fellow Irish MEP Clare Daly sued the Irish network RTEfor defamation after it broadcast an interview with Loiseau during which she baselessly branded them as liars who spread disinformation about Syria in parliament.

Now, Loiseau appears to be seeking revenge against Beeley, demanding that she be criminally prosecuted not just for serving as a referendum observer, but for her journalistic output.

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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.

Featured image: Left: French MEP Nathalie Loiseau Right: Journalist Vanessa Beeley (Source: The Grayzone)

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***

On the very day the world learns about the sabotage of Russia’s Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2, guess what else happened? Well, Ukrainians from the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia and Kherson oblasts voted in overwhelming numbers to become Russians. While that is a game changer that is not what I had in mind.

How about this–Poland on Tuesday inaugurated a new pipeline that will transport gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea? That is it!!! What a coincidence!! Or is it?

There is at least one prominent Polish citizen who believes the United States merits praise for sabotaging the Nordstream pipelines. Former former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, who happens to be married to Anne Appelbaum, an enthusiastic neo-con masquerading as a journalist, tweeted the following upon learning that the Nordstream lines were now “złamany” (Polish for”kaput”): “Thank you, USA.”

But, perhaps that is a bit of deflection. Poland has longstanding animus towards Nordstream. In other words, Poland has a clear motive for backing the destruction of the Russian pipeline. More than a year ago -April 2021 to be precise–this appeared in print:

Poland strongly opposes the development of Nord Stream 2, which will give Gazprom a subsea alternative route for supplying natural gas to Western European customers. At present, that gas has to pass through overland pipeline networks in Poland and Ukraine, bringing in valuable transit fees and providing both nations – which do not always have cordial relations with Russia – a measure of energy security.

One month later, Poland pitched a Kielbasi fit:

Poland has reacted angrily to President Joe Biden’s decision to waive US sanctions on Nord Stream II, warning the move could threaten energy security across Central and Eastern Europe.

“The information is definitely not positive from the security point of view, as we know perfectly that Nord Stream II is not only a business project – it is mostly a geopolitical project,” said Piotr Muller, a spokesman for the Polish government. . . .

Announced following a phone-call between Joe Biden and Chancellor Angela Merkel, the US decision to lift sanctions was welcomed in Berlin, with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas noting that “it is an expression of the fact that Germany is an important partner for the US, one that it can count on in the future.”

The highly controversial pipeline has met with vigorous opposition across Central and Eastern Europe, including in Poland and Ukraine where officials say the project would be used by the Kremlin as a geopolitical weapon, de-facto increase Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and threaten energy security in the Eastern half of the continent.

Makes you wonder if there was some wheeling and dealing was going on between Washington and Warsaw. Given Warsaw’s critical location and role in ensuring U.S. and NATO military supplies is delivered to Ukraine, the Poles have a bit of leverage to push the United States to take out the pipelines or to help Poland take out the pipelines. Poland’s message to the United States was simple–reverse course on Nordstream and rupture the pipelines or you can find another way to move your military supplies to Ukraine.

But wait, doesn’t this create some real problems for Germany? Sure. But Poland “don’t” (sic) care. There was this little incident called World War II and it seems that the Poles are still miffed at the Germans. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then this sucker is a frozen dinner:

Poland’s top politician said Thursday that the government will seek equivalent of some $1.3 trillion in reparations from Germany for the Nazis’ World War II invasion and occupation of his country.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice party, announced the huge claim at the release of a long-awaited report on the cost to the country of years of Nazi German occupation as it marks 83 years since the start of World War II. . . .

Germany’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday the government’s position remains “unchanged” in that “the question of reparations is concluded.”

See this.

With this new supply of Polish controlled natural gas, Germany is in a tough spot. Buy from Poland or buy from the United States. Either way, the Germans pay a premium while the United States and Poland make some bank.

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***

Something really strange just happened.  On Monday, large underwater “explosions” were detected in the precise areas of the sea where the Nord Stream pipeline system is now leaking.  In fact, the explosions were so large that they actually registered on the Richter scale.  If someone wanted to purposely damage the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, very large explosions would be needed because those pipelines are extremely thick.  So it appears that this was a deliberate act of sabotage, and that is what many European officials are now alleging.  But if that is the case, who was behind it?

At this point we just don’t know.

But there are certain facts that we do have.  The following are 14 things we know about the “mysterious explosions” that severely damaged the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines…

#1 We are being told that the sections where the pipelines were damaged are “70-90 meters below sea level”.  So someone would need to go down pretty deep to get to them.

#2 It is extremely unlikely that these pipelines could have been ruptured by accident because they are extremely thick…

The steel pipe itself has a wall of 4.1 cm (1.6 inches) and is coated with steel-reinforced concrete up to 11cm thick. Each section of the pipe weighs 11 tonnes, which goes to 24-25 tonnes after the concrete is applied.

#3 It is being reported that explosions “were heard” in the areas where gas is now leaking out of the pipelines…

Explosions were heard near the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipes where gas is now leaking into the Baltic from three holes, scientists have confirmed, while chronic safety concerns have led to a five-mile exclusion zone being imposed around the affected area.

#4 The Swedish National Seismic Network detected one explosion that registered 1.9 on the Richter scale and another one that registered 2.3 on the Richter scale…

Two powerful underwater explosions were detected on Monday in the same area of sea as the Nord Stream gas leaks, according to the Swedish National Seismic Network.

The monitoring network said the first explosion occurred on Monday at 2:03 a.m. Swedish time with a magnitude of 1.9 on the Richter scale, followed by a second at 7:04 p.m. on the same day with a magnitude of 2.3.

#5 The largest leak is reportedly “spreading bubbles a good kilometre (3,280ft) in diameter”…

It comes after shocking footage released earlier today by the Danish military from a flyover of the affected region showed huge swathes of the sea near the Danish island of Bornholm churning as the gas bubbled to the surface.

A military statement claimed that the largest leak ‘is spreading bubbles a good kilometre (3,280ft) in diameter. The smallest is creating a circle about 200 metres (656 feet) in diameter’, while the head of Denmark’s Energy Agency said it could take up to a week for gas to stop draining into the sea.

#6 German officials are claiming that this was a deliberate act of sabotage…

Germany is reportedly far less hesitant, however, with officials believing sabotage is virtually the only plausible cause for the leaks.

“We can’t imagine a scenario that isn’t a targeted attack. Everything speaks against a coincidence,” a government official reportedly told German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

#7 Interestingly, this incident took place just one day after thousands of German protesters took to the streets and demanded the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline…

Thousands of protesters took to the streets in the northeastern German seaside town of Lubmin on Sunday, urging officials to put into service the halted Nord Stream 2 pipeline project that was designed to transport fuel from Russia to Germany.

Germany had stalled the launch of the ambitious energy project for months before putting it on the back burner in the wake of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, which is now in its eighth month.

#8 The prime minister of Denmark also believes that this was a deliberate act of sabotage…

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has said her government believes the leaks were caused by ‘deliberate actions’, adding that the gas supply pipeline will be out of action for around a week.

She said this evening: ‘It is now the clear assessment by authorities that these are deliberate actions. It was not an accident. There is no information yet to indicate who may be behind this action.’

#9 The Ukrainians are blaming the Russians for the explosions…

It comes after Kyiv’s presidential advisor Mikhaylo Podolyak said on Twitter: ‘The large-scale gas leak is nothing more than a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.’

Podolyak accused Russia of seeking to ‘destabilise the economic situation in Europe and cause pre-winter panic’.

#10 It is being reported that the CIA recently warned Germany about a potential attack on the pipelines…

German magazine Spiegel said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently warned Berlin about the increasing signs of a possible planned attack on the Nord Stream pipeline system.

Spiegel reported, citing unnamed sources, that the CIA tipped off Berlin in the summer about possible attacks on NS1 and NS2.

#11 A Polish member of the European Parliament seems absolutely convinced that the United States was behind the attack…

A former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, has attributed to the United States the sabotage of two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Thank you, USA,” Sikorski wrote on Twitter. Sikorski was Minister of National Defense from 2005 – 2007 and served as Deputy Minister of National Defense and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, previously. He is currently an elected member of the European parliament.

Nord Stream 1 and 2 lie on the bed of the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 2 was finished last year but Germany never opened it because Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

#12 Joe Biden previously threatened to “end” the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

#13 Victoria Nuland has also previously threatened the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

.@UnderSecStateP Victoria Nuland: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” pic.twitter.com/hEGBrx6HJj

— Department of State (@StateDept) January 27, 2022

#14 Meanwhile, European officials just gathered for a ceremony “to mark the opening of the new Baltic Pipe”…

Leaders from Poland, Norway and Denmark have attended a ceremony to mark the opening of the new Baltic Pipe, a key stage in the drive to wean Poland and Europe off Russian gas.

The pipeline will transport natural gas from the Norwegian shelf via Denmark and through the Baltic Sea to Poland. It is the centrepiece of a Polish strategy to diversify away from Russia that began years before Moscow’s February invasion of Ukraine triggered a global energy crisis.

The flows from Norway along with supplies via liquefied gas terminals are central to Poland’s plan. The country was cut off from Russian gas supplies in April, allegedly for refusing to pay in roubles.

So what does all of this mean?

I don’t know.

But this certainly is not going to be good for the rapidly growing energy crisis in Europe.

It is going to be a bitterly cold winter all over the continent, and there will be a lot of anger.

As I keep warning, the comfortable lifestyles that we are all currently enjoying will soon be rudely interrupted.

Everything is changing, and a lot of pain is on the horizon.

So I would encourage you to monitor global events very, very closely in the months ahead, because they are going to have very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.

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Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, is a technique for obtaining oil and gas from shale rock. Sometimes referred to as ‘unconventional oil and gas development’, the process involves drilling into the earth and directing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals at rock. While governments commonly claim the process poses little or no risk to public health, the truth is the exact opposite. Studies have demonstrated clear links between fracking and cancer, heart attack, adverse birth outcomes, and numerous other negative health effects.  

Undermining their assertions that the process is safe, the fact is that only rarely have governments assembled detailed assessments of the public health risks associated with fracking and weighed these against its supposed benefits. Anyone carrying out such in-depth analyses would find there is much to be concerned about.

Fracking and cancer

Examining the links between fracking and cancer, a review published in the Science of The Total Environment journal in 2017 identified 55 chemicals released into air and water that are known, probable, or possible human carcinogens. These chemicals included 20 that have been shown to increase the risk of leukemia and lymphoma. The researchers warned that millions of people living within a mile of fracking wells may have been exposed to such chemicals.

Recent research has validated these concerns by finding that Pennsylvania children living near unconventional oil and gas developments at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between the ages of 2 and 7 than those who did not live near such oil and gas activity.

Fracking and heart problems

Research published in 2021 shows that unconventional natural gas developments are associated with heart attacks. Published in the journal Environmental Research by researchers in the United States, it found that such developments are associated with increased heart attack hospitalization rates among middle-aged men, older men, and older women, as well as with increased mortality from heart attack among middle-aged men. The researchers say their findings lend support for increased awareness about the cardiovascular risks of unconventional natural gas developments and suggest that bans on fracking can be protective for public health.

Unconventional natural gas development has similarly been linked to hospitalization in patients suffering from heart failure. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2021 found that older patients with heart failure appear to be particularly vulnerable to adverse health impacts from unconventional natural gas development activity.

Adverse effects on infant health

Multiple studies show that fracking has negative effects on birth outcomes and infant health. A recent study published in the Journal of Health Economics found “consistent and robust evidence” that drilling shale gas wells negatively impacts both drinking water quality and infant health.

Evidence from Pennsylvania confirms the link between fracking and negative effects on infant health. Research published in the Science Advances journal in 2017 found evidence for negative health effects from in utero exposure to fracking sites within 3 km of a mother’s residence, with the largest health impacts seen for in utero exposure within 1 km of sites. The health impacts included a greater incidence of low–birth weight babies as well as significant declines in average birth weight and in several other measures of infant health.

A 2019 study exploring the impact of fracking on infants’ birth health across Oklahoma counties made similar findings, demonstrating that the closer the mother’s residence at birth to fracking wells, the more negative are the effects on the infants’ birth health. The link between proximity to fracking wells and adverse birth outcomes is further supported by separate research from California and rural Alberta, Canada.

Increased hospitalization and other problems

Studies show a clear link between fracking and increased hospitalizations. Research examining the health implications of unconventional natural gas development in Pennsylvania has found a significant association between shale gas development and hospitalizations for pneumonia among the elderly. Evidence from Pennsylvania similarly shows that unconventional natural gas development is associated with hospitalization rates for genitourinary problems such as kidney and urinary tract infections. Other Pennsylvanian research has confirmed a link between unconventional gas and oil drilling and hospital inpatient prevalence rates for the medical categories of dermatology, neurology, oncology, and urology.

Evidence clearly shows that many of the chemicals used in fracking can damage the lungs, liver, kidneys, blood, and brain. Symptoms commonly reported by residents living within 1 km of fracking wells include sleep disruption, headache, throat irritation, stress or anxiety, cough, shortness of breath, sinus problems, fatigue, nausea, and wheezing.

Dancing to the tune of the energy cartel

Given the weight of scientific evidence that now exists, it is impossible to believe that governments are not aware of the adverse health effects of fracking. As such, we can only conclude that public health is knowingly being sacrificed on the twin altars of corporate profit and economic benefit. While currently only four countries (United States, Canada, China, Argentina) produce shale gas or shale oil commercially, others are increasingly attempting to do so. The UK government has recently lifted a ban on fracking that had been in place in the country since 2019, saying it could now go ahead despite opposition from local councils.

Only rarely do politicians focus on the negative health effects of fracking, preferring instead to argue over its environmental impacts. We need to be aware however that dancing to the tune of the energy cartel has a dark and criminal history dating back more than a century and involving two global wars. Politicians and corporations placing profit before human health must be held to account for their actions. Ensuring this happens sooner rather than later may be our best defense against history repeating itself.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings. You can find Paul on Twitter at @paulanthtaylor

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***

It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so.  It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match.  The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia, the Biden administration and their media lackeys

… will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have  made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous.  The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology.  It is nothing new.

I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate.  For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits.  The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers.  The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.”

For years, the U.S.- run NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well.  We know what the U.S. response would be, but when President Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.

In 2014, when the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine, bringing into power neo-Nazi elements, and Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.

For years the U.S. has supported the Ukrainian killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbas region, the Russian government had had enough and sent troops into the region to defend this area.  Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring.  Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine.  And now a full-fledged U.S. war against Russia is out in the open and it will become more dangerous as it continues.  Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Biden administration continues to push the envelope.

There will be no end to the war in Ukraine because the U.S. is intent on doing everything in its power to try to bring Russia to its knees.  It is madness on its face, but then insane people are in charge. In this process, everyone is expendable, friends, foes, and anyone who stands in its way, including the U.S.’s supposed European allies whose leaders seem intent on destroying their own countries.

Perhaps ironically – but I think not, as a knowledge of history confirms – the volte-face of the American liberal class with its promotion of the new Cold War, censorship, the CIA, and FBI and the so-called progressive Democratic politicians in the U.S congress, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, embracing and voting for war with Russia via Ukraine, should be no great surprise. These people, and their Republican counterparts, with rare exceptions here and there, live on desolation row and flip when so ordered.  But “nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row,” in Dylan’s words, because it’s the social disease we inhabit, and like fish in water, many know nothing else.

On a similar note, Ray McGovern has also recently reminded those who pay attention to him that The New York Times, as is its tradition, is promoting the U.S. war against Russia just as it did with the Vietnam War in the 1960s.  Little changes is his theme, no apologies are ever offered, and the readers of the most famous American newspaper and CIA conduit are asked to swallow daily doses of propaganda that are so egregiously obvious that only children would be fooled.  Sadly, the United States has become a country of children, Babes in Toyland who never realize that at the end of the plot the gun is reversed and is aimed at them.  And it’s not funny.

A century ago in the years before World War I, American progressive intellectuals, as Stuart Ewen writes in PR: A Social History of Spin:

… had espoused the Enlightenment dictum that people – at least middle-class people – were essentially rational, capable of evaluating information and then making intelligent decisions.  In the context of the CPI [the U.S, Committee on Public Information, a large propaganda apparatus set up in April 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson to sell the American entry into the war against Germany as necessary to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ whose members included Edward Bernays, the propagandist and so-called father of public relations] ‘public opinion’ became something to be mobilized and managed; the ‘public mind’ was now seen as an entity to be manufactured, not reasoned with.

Faith in reason was abandoned in favor of psychological manipulation of emotion and the use of unreason – the “night mind” – which became the template for future propaganda and the application of psychological techniques, a forerunner of the CIA’s MKUltra and Operation Mockingbird  As the crackdown on dissent increased with passage of the 1917 Espionage Act (under which Julian Assange is falsely charged today) and then the Sedition Act in 1918, many so-called progressives embraced the authoritarian imposition of state controls on dissent, just as they do today.  An important exception was Randolph Bourne, who in 1917 castigated these turncoats in his blistering essay, “War and the Intellectuals.”  “Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, [and] practitioners of literature,” he wrote, “had assumed the iniquitous task of ‘riveting the war mind on a hundred million of the world’s people.’”  Today such people debate whether they should be called liberal or progressive.  I say, call them warmongers of the lowest order.

I remember when I was an impressionable child and television had only a few channels.  This was in the years between the Korean War and the one against Vietnam. There was a movie that was repeated on television regularly: Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring the amazing performer Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, the Irish-American composer/lyricist/playwright, who, in the years before WW I was known as the man who owned Broadway and whose statue stands in Times Square in New York City.

Child that I was, I saw the film many times and was mesmerized.  My emotions rose with every viewing.  My heart strings vibrated to the tunes of “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”  I marched proudly to WW I with Cagney/Cohan.  This was a movie that appeared in 1942 to promote the WW II war effort by using the lies about WW I to do it.  But oh what fun!  And the stirring songs – fodder for a child.  And this was before the CIA completely owned Hollywood.

Yet I grew up.  I am no longer a child.  I have studied and seen through the propaganda of The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Fox News, The Guardian, Hollywood, etc.

Many of those I know have not.  They believe in the unbelievable. They still live in what Jim Garrison called the “Doll’s House” and accept what Harold Pinter termed “a vast tapestry of lies.”  Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel address what has not changed an iota since about the U.S.’s murderous foreign policy:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

When I was a child, I was hypnotized by “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

I’ve grown a bit.  McGovern and Pinter are right; little has changed – Vietnam, WW I, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, China, etc.  And of course, Russia, always Russia, at whose heart the weapons are always aimed, fiendish Russia that must be destroyed to make the world safe for the predators that pose as lovers of democracy and international law.

When President Kennedy, deeply chastened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, spoke about real peace and democracy at American University on June 10, 1963, he was the last American leader to recognize that international relations had to undergo a radical change, especially in the nuclear age.  Demonizing other countries had to give way to dialogue and mutual respect.  He said:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

Five months later the CIA made sure his voice was stilled.  Such sentiments have been verboten ever since.

Only children still believe the America propaganda and its war machine.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

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

He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

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“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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***

The War of Economic Corridors has entered incandescent, uncharted territory: Pipeline Terror.

A sophisticated military operation – that required exhaustive planning, possibly involving several actors – blew up four separate sections of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) gas pipelines this week in the shallow waters of the Danish straits, in the Baltic Sea, near the island of Bornholm.

Swedish seismologists estimated that the power of the explosions may have reached the equivalent of up to 700 kg of TNT. Both NS and NS2, near the strong currents around Borholm, are placed at the bottom of the sea at a depth of 60 meters.

The pipes are built with steel reinforced concrete, able to withstand impact from aircraft carrier anchors, and are basically indestructible without serious explosive charges. The operation – causing two leaks near Sweden and two near Denmark – would have to be carried out by modified underwater drones.

Every crime implies motive. The Russian government wanted – at least up to the sabotage – to sell oil and natural gas to the EU. The notion that Russian intel would destroy Gazprom pipelines is beyond ludicrous. All they had to do was to turn off the valves. NS2 was not even operational, based on a political decision from Berlin. The gas flow in NS was hampered by western sanctions. Moreover, such an act would imply Moscow losing key strategic leverage over the EU.

Diplomatic sources confirm that Berlin and Moscow were involved in a secret negotiation to solve both the NS and NS2 issues. So they had to be stopped – no holds barred. Geopolitically, the entity that had the motive to halt a deal holds anathema a possible alliance in the horizon between Germany, Russia, and China.

Whodunnit?

The possibility of an “impartial” investigation of such a monumental act of sabotage – coordinated by NATO, no less – is negligible. Fragments of the explosives/underwater drones used for the operation will certainly be found, but the evidence may be tampered with. Atlanticist fingers are already blaming Russia. That leaves us with plausible working hypotheses.

This hypothesis is eminently sound and looks to be based on information from Russian intelligence sources. Of course, Moscow already has a pretty good idea of what happened (satellites and electronic monitoring working 24/7), but they won’t make it public.

The hypothesis focuses on the Polish Navy and Special Forces as the physical perpetrators (quite plausible; the report offers very good internal details), American planning and technical support (extra plausible), and aid by the Danish and Swedish militaries (inevitable, considering this was very close to their territorial waters, even if it took place in international waters).

The hypothesis perfectly ties in with a conversation with a top German intelligence source, who told The Cradle that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or German intelligence) was “furious” because “they were not in the loop.” 

Of course not. If the hypothesis is correct, this was a glaringly anti-German operation, carrying the potential of metastasizing into an intra-NATO war.

The much-quoted NATO Article 5 – ‘an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us’ – obviously does not say anything about a NATO-on-NATO attack. After the pipeline punctures, NATO issued a meek statement “believing” what happened was sabotage and will “respond” to any deliberate attack on its critical infrastructure. NS and NS2, incidentally, are not part of NATO’s infrastructure.

The whole operation had to be approved by Americans, and deployed under their Divide and Rule trademark. “Americans” in this case means the Neo-conservatives and Neo-liberals running the government machinery in Washington, behind the senile teleprompter reader.

This is a declaration of war against Germany and against businesses and citizens of the EU – not against the Kafkaesque Eurocrat machine in Brussels. Don’t be mistaken: NATO runs Brussels, not European Commission (EC) head and rabid Russophobe Ursula von der Leyen, who’s just a lowly handmaiden for finance capitalism.

It’s no wonder the Germans are absolutely mum; no one from the German government, so far, has said anything substantial.

The Polish corridor

By now, assorted chattering classes are aware of former Polish Defense Minister and current MEP Radek Sirkorski’s tweet: “Thank you, USA.” But why would puny Poland be on the forefront? There’s atavic Russophobia, a number of very convoluted internal political reasons, but most of all, a concerted plan to attack Germany built on pent up resentment – including new demands for WWII reparations.

The Poles, moreover, are terrified that with Russia’s partial mobilization, and the new phase of the Special Military Operation (SMO) – soon to be transformed into a Counter-Terrorism Operation (CTO) – the Ukrainian battlefield will move westward. Ukrainian electric light and heating will most certainly be smashed. Millions of new refugees in western Ukraine will attempt to cross to Poland.

At the same time there’s a sense of “victory” represented by the partial opening of the Baltic Pipe in northwest Poland – almost simultaneously with the sabotage.

Talk about timing. Baltic Pipe will carry gas from Norway to Poland via Denmark. The maximum capacity is only 10 billion cubic meters, which happens to be ten times less than the volume supplied by NS and NS2. So Baltic Pipe may be enough for Poland, but carries no value for other EU customers.

Meanwhile, the fog of war gets thicker by the minute. It has already been documented that US helicopters were overflying the sabotage nodes only a few days ago; that a UK “research” vessel was loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; that NATO tweeted about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage. Not to mention that Der Spiegel published a startling report headlined “CIA warned German government against attacks on Baltic Sea pipelines,” possibly a clever play for plausible deniability.

The Russian Foreign Ministry was sharp as a razor: “The incident took place in an area controlled by American intelligence.” The White House was forced to “clarify” that President Joe Biden – in a February video that has gone viral – did not promise to destroy NS2; he promised to “not allow” it to work. The US State Department declared that the idea the US was involved is “preposterous.”

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

It was up to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to offer a good dose of reality: the damage to the pipelines posed a “big problem” for Russia, essentially losing its gas supply routes to Europe. Both NS2 lines had been pumped full of gas and – crucially – were prepared to deliver it to Europe; this is Peskov cryptically admitting negotiations with Germany were ongoing.

Peskov added, “this gas is very expensive and now it is all going up in the air.” He stressed again that neither Russia nor Europe had anything to gain from the sabotage, especially Germany. This Friday, there will be a special UN Security Council session on the sabotage, called by Russia.

The attack of the Straussians

Now for the Big Picture. Pipeline Terror is part of a Straussian offensive, taking the splitting up of Russia and Germany to the ultimate level (as they see it). Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal, by Paul E. Gottfried (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is required reading to understand this phenomenon.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago, is at the root of what later, in a very twisted way, became the Wolfowitz Doctrine, written in 1992 as the Defense Planning Guidance, which defined “America’s mission in the post-Cold War era.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine goes straight to the point: any potential competitor to US hegemony, especially “advanced industrial nations” such as Germany and Japan, must be smashed. Europe should never exercise sovereignty: “We must be careful to prevent the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO, and particularly its integrated military command structure.”

Fast-forward to the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, adopted only five months ago. It establishes that Kiev has a free lunch when it comes to all arms control mechanisms. All these expensive weapons are leased by the US to the EU to be sent to Ukraine. The problem is that whatever happens in the battlefield, in the end, it is the EU that will have to pay the bills.

US Secretary of State Blinken and his underling, Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, are Straussians, now totally unleashed, having taken advantage of the black void in the White House. As it stands, there are at least three different “silos” of power in a fractured Washington. For all Straussians, a tight bipartisan op, uniting several high-profile usual suspects, destroying Germany is paramount.

One serious working hypothesis places them behind the orders to conduct Pipeline Terror. The Pentagon forcefully denied any involvement in the sabotage. There are secret back channels between Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

And dissident Beltway sources swear that the CIA is also not part of this game; Langley’s agenda would be to force the Straussians to back off on Russia reincorporating Novorossiya and allow Poland and Hungary to gobble up whatever they want in Western Ukraine before the entire US government falls into a black void.

Come see me in the Citadel

On the Grand Chessboard, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan two weeks ago dictated the framework of the multipolar world ahead. Couple it with the independence referendums in DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye, which Russian President Vladimir Putin will formally incorporate into Russia, possibly as early as Friday.

With the window of opportunity closing fast for a Kiev breakthrough before the first stirrings of a cold winter, and Russia’s partial mobilization soon to enter the revamped SMO and add to generalized western panic, Pipeline Terror at least would carry the “merit” of solidifying a Straussian tactical victory: Germany and Russia fatally separated.

Yet blowback will be inevitable – in unexpected ways – even as Europe becomes increasingly Ukrainized and even Polandized: an intrinsically neo-fascist, unabashed puppet of the US as predator, not partner. Vey few across the EU are not brainwashed enough to understand how Europe is being set up for the ultimate fall.

The war, by those Straussians ensconced in the Deep State – neocons and neoliberals alike – won’t relent. It is a war against Russia, China, Germany and assorted Eurasian powers. Germany has just been felled. China is currently observing, carefully. And Russia – nuclear and hypersonic – won’t be bullied.

Poetry grandmaster C.P. Cavafy, in Waiting for the Barbarians, wrote “And now what will become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of a solution.” The barbarians are not at the gates, not anymore. They are inside their golden Citadel.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties. He’s been politically canceled from Facebook and Twitter. Follow him on Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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***

As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. military and many of America’s senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they’ve suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.

Where’s the “honor” in that?

It may surprise you to learn that “integrity first” is the primary core value of my former service, the U.S. Air Force.  Considering the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971; the Afghan War papers, first revealed by the Washington Post in 2019; and the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, among other evidence of the lying and deception that led to the invasion and occupation of that country, you’ll excuse me for assuming that, for decades now when it comes to war, “integrity optional” has been the true core value of our senior military leaders and top government officials.

As a retired Air Force officer, let me tell you this: honor code or not, you can’t win a war with lies — America proved that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — nor can you build an honorable military with them. How could our high command not have reached such a conclusion themselves after all this time?

So Many Defeats, So Little Honesty

Like many other institutions, the U.S. military carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. After all, despite being funded in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).  Even the ending of the Cold War, allegedly won when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only led to further wanton military adventurism and, finally, defeat at an unsustainable cost — more than $8 trillion — in Washington’s ill-fated Global War on Terror. And yet, years later, that military still has a stranglehold on the national budget.

So many defeats, so little honesty: that’s the catchphrase I’d use to characterize this country’s military record since 1945. Keeping the money flowing and the wars going proved far more important than integrity or, certainly, the truth. Yet when you sacrifice integrity and the truth in the cause of concealing defeat, you lose much more than a war or two. You lose honor — in the long run, an unsustainable price for any military to pay.

Or rather it should be unsustainable, yet the American people have continued to “support” their military, both by funding it astronomically and expressing seemingly eternal confidence in it — though, after all these years, trust in the military has dipped somewhat recently. Still, in all this time, no one in the senior ranks, civilian or military, has ever truly been called to account for losing wars prolonged by self-serving lies. In fact, too many of our losing generals have gone right through that infamous “revolving door” into the industrial part of the military-industrial complex — only to sometimes return to take top government positions.

Our military has, in fact, developed a narrative that’s proven remarkably effective in insulating it from accountability. It goes something like this: U.S. troops fought hard in [put the name of the country here], so don’t blame us. Indeed, you must support us, especially given all the casualties of our wars. They and the generals did their best, under the usual political constraints. On occasion, mistakes were made, but the military and the government had good and honorable intentions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Besides, were you there, Charlie? If you weren’t, then STFU, as the acronym goes, and be grateful for the security you take for granted, earned by America’s heroes while you were sitting on your fat ass safe at home.

It’s a narrative I’ve heard time and time again and it’s proven persuasive, partially because it requires the rest of us, in a conscription-free country, to do nothing and think nothing about that. Ignorance is strength, after all.

War Is Brutal

The reality of it all, however, is so much harsher than that. Senior military leaders have performed poorly.  War crimes have been covered up. Wars fought in the name of helping others have produced horrendous civilian casualties and stunning numbers of refugees. Even as those wars were being lost, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower first labeled the military-industrial complex has enjoyed windfall profits and expanding power. Again, there’s been no accountability for failure. In fact, only whistleblowing truth-tellers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale have been punished and jailed.

Ready for an even harsher reality? America is a nation being unmade by war, the very opposite of what most Americans are taught. Allow me to explain.  As a country, we typically celebrate the lofty ideals and brave citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution. We similarly celebrate the Second American Revolution, otherwise known as the Civil War, for the elimination of slavery and reunification of the country; after which, we celebrate World War II, including the rise of the Greatest Generation, America as the arsenal of democracy, and our emergence as the global superpower.

By celebrating those three wars and essentially ignoring much of the rest of our history, we tend to view war itself as a positive and creative act. We see it as making America, as part of our unique exceptionalism. Not surprisingly, then, militarism in this country is impossible to imagine. We tend to see ourselves, in fact, as uniquely immune to it, even as war and military expenditures have come to dominate our foreign policy, bleeding into domestic policy as well.

If we as Americans continue to imagine war as a creative, positive, essential part of who we are, we’ll also continue to pursue it. Or rather, if we continue to lie to ourselves about war, it will persist.

It’s time for us to begin seeing it not as our making but our unmaking, potentially even our breaking — as democracy’s undoing as well as the brutal thing it truly is.

A retired U.S. military officer, educated by the system, I freely admit to having shared some of its flaws. When I was an Air Force engineer, for instance, I focused more on analysis and quantification than on synthesis and qualification. Reducing everything to numbers, I realize now, helps provide an illusion of clarity, even mastery.  It becomes another form of lying, encouraging us to meddle in things we don’t understand.

This was certainly true of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his “whiz kids,” and General William Westmoreland during the Vietnam War; nor had much changed when it came to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General David Petraeus, among others, in the Afghan and Iraq War years. In both eras, our military leaders wielded metrics and swore they were winning even as those wars circled the drain.

And worse yet, they were never held accountable for those disasters or the blunders and lies that went with them (though the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era certainly tried). All these years later, with the Pentagon still ascendant in Washington, it should be obvious that something has truly gone rotten in our system.

Here’s the rub: as the military and one administration after another lied to the American people about those wars, they also lied to themselves, even though such conflicts produced plenty of internal “papers” that raised serious concerns about lack of progress. Robert McNamara typically knew that the situation in Vietnam was dire and the war essentially unwinnable. Yet he continued to issue rosy public reports of progress, while calling for more troops to pursue that illusive “light at the end of the tunnel.” Similarly, the Afghan War papers released by the Washington Post show that senior military and civilian leaders realized that war, too, was going poorly almost from the beginning, yet they reported the very opposite to the American people. So many corners were being “turned,” so much “progress” being made in official reports even as the military was building its own rhetorical coffin in that Afghan graveyard of empires.

Too bad wars aren’t won by “spin.” If they were, the U.S. military would be undefeated.

Two Books to Help Us See the Lies

Two recent books help us see that spin for what it was. In Because Our Fathers Lied, Craig McNamara, Robert’s son, reflects on his father’s dishonesty about the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Loyalty was perhaps the lead one, he writes. McNamara suppressed his own serious misgivings out of misplaced loyalty to two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, while simultaneously preserving his own position of power in the government.

Robert McNamara would, in fact, later pen his own mea culpa, admitting how “terribly wrong” he’d been in urging the prosecution of that war. Yet Craig finds his father’s late confession of regret significantly less than forthright and fully honest. Robert McNamara fell back on historical ignorance about Vietnam as the key contributing factor in his unwise decision-making, but his son is blunt in accusing his dad of unalloyed dishonesty. Hence the title of his book, citing Rudyard Kipling’s pained confession of his own complicity in sending his son to die in the trenches of World War I: “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

The second book is Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Danny Sjursen. In my view, the word “misguided” doesn’t quite capture the book’s powerful essence, since it gathers 15 remarkable essays by Americans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and witnessed the patent dishonesty and folly of those wars. None dare speak of failure might be a subtheme of these essays, as initially highly motivated and well-trained troops became disillusioned by wars that went nowhere, even as their comrades often paid the ultimate price, being horribly wounded or dying in those conflicts driven by lies.

This is more than a work of dissent by disillusioned troops, however. It’s a call for the rest of us to act.  Dissent, as West Point graduate and Army Captain Erik Edstrom reminds us, “is nothing short of a moral obligation” when immoral wars are driven by systemic dishonesty. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who blew an early whistle on how poorly the Afghan War was going, writes of his “seething” anger “at the absurdity and unconcern for the lives of my fellow soldiers displayed by so many” of the Army’s senior leaders.

Former Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from the State Department in opposition to the Afghan “surge” ordered by President Barack Obama, speaks movingly of his own “guilt, regret, and shame” at having served in Afghanistan as a troop commander and wonders whether he can ever atone for it. Like Craig McNamara, Hoh warns of the dangers of misplaced loyalty. He remembers telling himself that he was best suited to lead his fellow Marines in war, no matter how misbegotten and dishonorable that conflict was.  Yet he confesses that falling back on duty and being loyal to “his” Marines, while suppressing the infamies of the war itself, became “a washing of the hands, a self-absolution that ignores one’s complicity” in furthering a brutal conflict fed by lies.

As I read those essays, I came to see anew how this country’s senior leaders, military and civilian, consistently underestimated the brutalizing impact of war, which, in turn, leads me to the ultimate lie of war: that it is somehow good, or at least necessary — making all the lying (and killing) worth it, whether in the name of a victory to come or of duty, honor, and country. Yet there is no honor in lying, in keeping the truth hidden from the American people. Indeed, there is something distinctly dishonorable about waging wars kept viable only by lies, obfuscation, and propaganda.

An Epigram from Goethe

John Keegan, the esteemed military historian, cites an epigram from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as being essential to thinking about militaries and their wars. “Goods gone, something gone; honor gone, much gone; courage gone, all gone.”

The U.S. military has no shortage of goods, given its whopping expenditures on weaponry and equipment of all sorts; among the troops, it doesn’t lack for courage or fighting spirit, not yet, anyway. But it does lack honor, especially at the top. Much is gone when a military ceases to tell the truth to itself and especially to the people from whom its forces are drawn. And courage is wasted when in the service of lies.

Courage wasted: Is there a worst fate for a military establishment that prides itself on its members being all volunteers and is now having trouble filling its ranks?

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William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Featured image is from The Cradle

Anteprima della sessantaseiesima puntata della trasmissione Pangea Grandangolo, la rassegna stampa internazionale di Byoblu, che andrà in onda sul canale tv Byoblu il 30/09/2022 alle 20:30.

Intervista a Vandana Shiva: riprendiamoci la sovranità In questa terza intervista a Berenice Galli, Vandana Shiva aggiorna i temi di fondo del sistema da lei proposto, alternativo a quello oggi dominante.

Le questioni che affronta non riguardano solo l’India. Esse sono strettamente legate ai drammatici problemi che abbiamo in Italia, in particolare quelli riguardanti i piccoli produttori agricoli. Riportiamo qui di seguito alcuni brani dell’intervista:

“Gli agricoltori in India lottano contro le leggi che distruggono la loro sovranità. I piccoli produttori potranno sopravvivere solo se la loro sovranità viene difesa. Nel momento in cui la sovranità viene loro tolta, i piccoli produttori scompariranno, proprio come avviene con la diversità delle specie, che scompaiono se la loro sovranità non viene rispettata.

Quando le leggi sono fatte su misura per le multinazionali affinché queste ottengano mercati sempre più grandi, sempre più controllo sull’utilizzo della terra, sempre più controllo sul decidere e disegnare i sistemi agricoli, ecco che subiamo gli enormi problemi a cui stiamo assistendo. Ma per me questo momento storico ha un aspetto interessante perché non solo gli agricoltori indiani si stanno rivoltando, ma anche gli agricoltori olandesi, quelli tedeschi, irlandesi, italiani. E lo fanno perché gli oligarchi, i miliardari, possiedono la più alta concentrazione di ricchezza, hanno in mano le attività finanziarie che controllano le multinazionali.

Questi miliardari hanno un progetto comune: sterminare tutte le specie e tutta l’umanità produttiva. L’economia della cura è per me un processo rivoluzionario perché la cura è la prima cosa che sostiene la vita, sia nella società che nella natura, ma ancora più importante è che, introducendo la cura nell’economia, ci riappropriamo dell’economia, e la riconvertiamo dall’essere economia di pirateria e furto ad essere un’economia di rigenerazione ed amore”.

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***

Since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, Washington has shown that it is willing to do anything to move global society against Moscow, even if it means violating international law. According to a recent report, the US government plans to take measures against Russia within the UN framework to respond to the integration of the liberated regions into the territory of the Federation. Considering that Russia would veto any measure of this kind in the UNSC, it is possible to say that once again the US is planning a kind of “coup” at the UN.

A report recently published by Politico says the US government has a plan to impose measures against Russia globally, adopting a resolution at the Security Council to condemn Moscow for the referendums in the liberated oblasts. In fact, such a resolution has already been proposed by American diplomats, promoting sanctions not only against Moscow but also against all countries that recognize the referendums as legitimate and the liberated zones as part of Russian territory.

However, the proposition of resolutions is a mere bureaucratic practice, subject to control by countries with veto power. The West has tried several times to sanction Russia in the Security Council and was prevented precisely because Moscow has the right of veto, due to its permanent seat. But apparently the US would be seeking to pass the resolution independently of the bureaucratic procedure of the Council, trying to prevent Russia from vetoing the measure.

There are still no very clear details on how this would be done, but articles published about the issue cite internal US government sources and it is alleged that something is being planned in this regard. There is also no clear information on the material implications of such a resolution, on whether it would be limited to imposing sanctions against Russia or whether it would attempt to promote massive military support to Kiev on an international scale. However, it is expected that the US government will use a strategy similar to that adopted in the Resolution 82, which approved the condemnation against North Korea in 1950 and “legitimized” the US invasion of the Peninsula.

It is necessary to remember that this would not be the first time that the US government has tried to do something of this kind. A few months ago, Washington officials made statements that the US was planning a Security Council’s reformulation, excluding Russia, due to intervention in Ukraine, and China, due to strong ties with Moscow. After several denunciations and criticisms, the American plan seems not to have gone ahead, but apparently the US continues to plan illegal maneuvers against the current institutional arrangement of the UN.

It is important to mention that the strength of the UN as an international institution is due to the willingness of its member states to comply with the commitments made in international deliberations. It is the member states that make the organization strong, not the organization that coerces the states. In this sense, if illegal maneuvers, coup attempts, institutional illegitimate reforms and other similar attitudes become common in the organization’s praxis, the tendency is not that the affected countries are deterred, but that they simply withdraw from the UN and the organization ends.

If the US continues to try to create a “UN without Russia”, the UN will not last long, as no organization with global dimensions can survive in the absence of Russia. That is why it is absolutely irrational to want to impose coercive measures against Russia on a global level. What the US and other Western powers can legally do is try to pass measures through the regular procedure, submitting resolutions and peacefully accepting an eventual Russian veto. It is this bureaucratic structure that has allowed the UN to balance international interests and avoid a new world war since 1945.

For the West, however, ensuring peace is no longer a priority in the face of the agenda against Moscow. The US objective is to carry out every possible form of attack on Russia, even appealing to coups in the UN itself. It remains to be seen when the other signatory states of the UN Charter will perceive the threat posed by American anti-Russian belligerence and will take measures to prevent the catastrophe.

Undoubtedly, reforms in the UN are necessary, but not to make it subservient to Washington, but to adapt it to the multipolar world order. It is necessary to expand the Security Council and include the new emerging powers, in addition to guaranteeing the existence of mechanisms that improve international security. Any way that acts contrary to this will only contribute to the failure of the UN.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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***

While the propaganda machine works round the clock to create an alternate reality that doesn’t exist past a TV or smartphone screen, the economic and social unraveling resulting from the failed economic siege of Russia has been affecting hundreds of millions around the world.

After Russia launched its counteroffensive against NATO aggression, the state and corporate-run mainstream media of the political West started spreading multiple false narratives about it. One of the most common themes was that the Russian military supposedly “failed” because the Kiev regime didn’t collapse in a matter of days.

In the following months, especially after the Russian forces withdrew from northern areas of Ukraine, this was used to further reinforce the narrative that the Russian military was somehow “defeated”. However, the truth lies in the Russian military and geopolitical nomenclature regarding the events in Ukraine. While the political West is unanimous in calling it “an unprovoked, brutal invasion”, the Russian side calls it a special military operation.

Although the wording may seem irrelevant, it does have serious implications. The whole operation has been limited from the start. As Russian President Vladimir Putin himself stated, Moscow didn’t really show more than a fraction of its capabilities. And indeed, given the number of Russian troops initially engaged in the special military operation, which was approximately 100-150 thousand, versus more than 200,000 troops of the Kiev regime, it’s clear that Moscow never expected to take control of the entire territory of Ukraine. In addition, the Kiev regime forces exponentially grew in size after the forced mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men. And although Western media are trying to downplay it, multiple estimates put the number of conscripted personnel anywhere between several hundred thousand and nearly a million soldiers.

For its part, Russia decided not to increase the number of troops engaged in the special military operation. What’s more, with troop rotation, the true number of Russian soldiers actively engaged in combat operations was much lower, most likely standing between 50 and 100 thousand, stretching for well over a thousand kilometers from the northern areas of the Kharkov, through Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions all the way to the Black Sea coast. These forces have consistently been outnumbered by the Kiev regime troops for over 7 months now and have stood their ground.

And although this could be attributed to the Russian military’s vast technological and numerical superiority, especially in terms of artillery and air dominance, it can only be considered a remarkable achievement from a purely military standpoint. This also explains the Kiev regime’s reaction to Moscow’s recent low-level mobilization announcement, which will increase the number of Russian troops engaged in the special military operation by 300,000, pushing the total to well over 400,000 soldiers.

As per usual, the mainstream media in the United States and other countries of the political West have been trying to portray this as a sign of Russia’s supposed “weakness”. However, the Pentagon’s and NATO’s reaction speaks volumes of how the political West really feels about the mobilization. With Western Military Industrial Complexes already working at maximum capacity to supply the Kiev regime forces with additional weapons, having a twofold or threefold increase in the number of Russian troops is the last thing they needed (at least in the short term). If the Russian military was able to conduct successful offensive operations for months, while being outnumbered, what could one expect when Moscow decides to exponentially increase the size of its forces engaged in the special military operation?

In the meantime, the Western press and other media are constructing the narrative that millions of Russian men are supposedly trying to flee the country in order to avoid mobilization. Naturally, they are ignoring the fact that the Russian Ministry of Defense registered nearly 900,000 requests for joining the armed forces, with many regions and federal subjects in the country providing several times more troops than they’re required to. The most prominent example of this is Chechnya, which overshot its mobilization quota by over 250%. And yet, the Western media keep insisting that there’s supposed “widespread opposition to Putin’s war”. In reality, the fact that the Russian police arrested several hundred protesters in a country of approximately 150 million shows just how truly “widespread” the opposition to mobilization is.

Expectedly, the propaganda war isn’t only limited to the supposed “failures” of the Russian military, but also its leadership. Recent speculation that Vladimir Putin is ill, on the verge of death or losing power, while ignoring the rapidly deteriorating mental and physical health of Joe Biden serves as a testament to that. To make matters worse, the attempts by the so-called “fact-checkers” to whitewash Biden’s string of dementia-induced gaffes can only be described as comical. And while the political West’s propaganda machine works round the clock to create an alternate reality that doesn’t exist past a TV or smartphone screen, the economic and social unraveling resulting from the failed economic siege of Russia has been affecting hundreds of millions around the world and is only bound to get worse.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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***

During an interview on the corporate media “Face the Nation” program, the “president” of the fake nation Ukraine, revealed how much of your money is being shoveled into the coffers of oligarchs infamous for theft and forming neo-Nazi paramilitaries.

“The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight,” said Zelenskyy, and added that there is “a deficit of $5 billion in our budget,” as if the US, with a staggering deficit problem of its own, is somehow responsible for propping up the neo-Nazi infested “democracy.”

See the entire interview here:

Like most conmen, Zelenskyy will never be satisfied with the amount of debt (that is expected to be the responsibility to pay off for American children and grandchildren) incurred to shovel devalued dollars into the dark neo-Nazi hole that calls itself Ukraine.

Zero Hedge notes:

Zelensky said, after revealing the astonishing $1.5 billion in aid on a monthly basis figure, “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”

In other words, we are responsible to make up for what the oligarchs and kleptocrats in Ukraine have stolen to pad their private fiefdoms and paramilitaries.

As for his fellow Ukrainians, if billions of devalued US dollars defeat Russia (and it most certainly will not), this will convince those that have escaped war and misery, will decide “it’s safe [to] come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won’t have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody,” Zelensky insisted.

No mention here that thousands have fled Ukraine to escape neo-Nazi persecution, torture, and targeted assassination (for the crime of speaking Russian).

🇺🇦 Ukrainian nationalists terrorizing the people of Eastern Ukraine

In late February 2022, Russian forces & volunteers helped Donbas refugees to leave their destroyed homes & have a chance at a new life. The number of refugees in February exceeds 3.2 million.@georgegalloway 😔 pic.twitter.com/MsFhC08h9a

— Bro Fii (@OB_Ages) September 23, 2022

“And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support,” he concluded, though the way things are going it could be years before the US might “not have to continue” the nonstop aid. Zelensky appeared to be trying to present a strange “win-win” for American, though again if average US taxpayers grasped the full enormity of it, they certainly might question that narrative.

Right. And I have a bridge and a stable of pink ponies on the Moon for sale.

On Monday, Reuters reported:

Negotiators of a stop-gap spending bill in the U.S. Congress have agreed to include nearly $12 billion in new military and economic aid to Ukraine, sources familiar with the talks said on Monday, reflecting continued bipartisan support for the Kyiv government in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

In response to a request from the Biden administration, the funding would include $4.5 billion to provide defense capabilities and equipment for Ukraine, as well as $2.7 billion to continue military, intelligence and other defense support, said the sources, who asked not to be identified ahead of the announcement.

Reading this, one might believe neolibs and neocons, so prevalent in Congress and our government, are generously helping the Ukrainian people, but this is nothing short of a sick joke. In fact, the US national security state doesn’t give a fig about the fate of the Ukrainian people. It is using Ukraine as a battlefield in an undeclared war between Russia and NATO, a fight NATO has itched for since its inception in 1949.

Of course, “defending” Europe from “Russian [and previously Soviet] aggression” is only part of the manufactured picture, as NATO has long been used as an enforcer in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

As for the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia by the neoliberal NATO hit squad, the late Ramsey Clark, a former senior official in the Kennedy and Johnson Justice Department, organized “Text of Indictment by the Independent Commission of Inquiry Hearing to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia.” Ramsey indicted

The Government of every NATO country that participated directly in the assaults on Yugoslavia with aircraft, missiles, or personnel and Commanding Generals, Admirals, NATO personnel directly involved in designating targets, flight crews and deck crews of the NATO military bomber and assault aircraft, NATO military personnel directly involved in targeting, preparing and launching missiles at Yugoslavia, the governments of the NATO countries’ personnel causing, condoning or failing to prevent violence in Yugoslavia before and during NATO occupation and Others to be named.

The document, of course, was ignored by NATO, the US, and the corporate war propaganda media. NATO prefers to take out media that does not support its murderous and unprovoked actions, as it did when Obama decided to use NATO to turn Libya into a third-world hellhole and slave market.

A press conference held by the Broadcast Employees Libya declared:

In an act of international terrorism and in violation of Security Council resolutions of the UN, NATO attacked the facilities of the Broadcasting Department of Libya during the early hours of [July 7, 2011]. Three of our technicians were killed and 15 injured while performing their professional duty as Libyan journalists… We are employees of Libyan state television. We are not a military target, we are not officers in the army and not a threat to civilians. We are doing our job as journalists in representing what from the bottom of my heart we believe is the reality of the NATO aggression and violence in Libya.

According to research conducted by the Foundation to Battle Injustice,

not only the United States, but also other members of the NATO, including the United Kingdom, are responsible for war crimes in the Middle East. So far, none of these States has suffered any economic or legal responsibility for their crimes, despite the confirmed and recognized facts of brutal reprisals against civilians and the use of prohibited weapons against civilians.

NATO enforcers committed numerous war crimes, according to a November 2020 report.

According to a report on the actions of the military in Afghanistan, which has long been classified, Australian soldiers deliberately killed farmers and civilians in Afghanistan as part of a rite of passage through which all recruits had to go. The report was published after a four-year investigation, during which more than 400 witnesses were interviewed and several thousand documents were examined. The report provides evidence that one of the Australian soldiers knocked a local unarmed resident to the ground and shot him in the back of the head, despite the fact that the civilian posed absolutely no threat. The investigation also learned about another incident when Australian mercenaries and patrol members “deliberately attacked” unarmed civilians, after which they planted weapons and ammunition on them, trying to create the impression that they were in danger. Soldiers also competed to outperform other patrols in the number of civilian enemies killed in combat.

The United Kingdom, being a NATO member country, was one of the first to take part in the operation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. British forces were involved in the killing of nearly 300 Afghan civilians, including at least 86 children and more than 200 adult civilians. The British Armed Forces paid compensation to Afghan civilians in the amount of $940,657 for 289 dead civilians between 2006 and 2014, which is an average of $3,254 per family. In other words, for the UK, the life of an Afghan civilian during the war cost an average of 2,380 pounds. The youngest victim was a three-year-old boy who was killed during a mine clearance operation by British forces. One of the most serious incidents listed in the protocols is the death of four children who were allegedly “mistakenly shot” by British soldiers during an incident in December 2009. Many military experts are still wondering how four children from the same family can be “shot by mistake”. (Emphasis in original.)

The manifest absurdity of NATO propaganda focusing on unproven and fake (e.g. Bucha) war crimes is intended to rationalize mass murder on a large scale.

Day 204.
Ukrainian army attack, deliberately targeting civilian areas in Donetsk. There is no Russian military element there. This coverage will never appear in the Western media. They are just waiting for news of slander and propaganda like #Izyum, #Bucha, & #Kramatorsk. pic.twitter.com/tSm5bC8jhE

— AW. Wikanadi  (@awwikanadi) September 21, 2022

Important video segment for discussions with people who believe the US and west war propaganda wholeheartedly. Like the russian systematic rape stories or bucha. I found it in the intro to "redacted" live shows, then googled because no source.Sry fr ads.https://t.co/Ow1oYfwM7D

— Dodo Dadabi (@DDadabi) September 21, 2022

NATO war propaganda has remained an integral part of the “alliance” since its inception. NATO’s pernicious media spin has focused on the Cold War, anticommunism, the arms race, the Vietnam War, “Team B” (to overestimate the effectiveness of the Soviet military), the propaganda by Le Cercle, also known as the “Piny Group” (mostly from intelligence services), the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, and the effort to turn the “war on terror” into a noble cause (as if 900,000 deaths and $8 trillion squandered was worth it, as the late Madeline Albright might have said).

All of the above should provide enough evidence of the murderous character of NATO, the serial murdering midget created by the US national security state to enforce neoliberal doctrine on the reluctant.

Ukraine hopes for a surplus of gravy from the United States and, despite public opposition, will get pretty much what it wants, including missiles able to reach the interior of Russia, including its nuclear power plants (a truly psychopathic proposal of murder en masse).

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Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seen earlier this year. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service)

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Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin has confirmed that the U.S. was not responsible for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion, because the Pentagon told her so.

Yes, really.

Despite accusations flying that the United States could have been involved in the blasts that have reportedly could scupper the pipelines permanently, and without any investigation having taken place, Griffin’s crack journalism has solved the case.

“There is no evidence or indication the US was involved in any way with the Nordstream 2 pipeline explosions,” Griffin tweeted. “My question at the Pentagon briefing today: Can you rule out that the U.S. was involved? Senior Military Official: ‘Yeah, we were absolutely not involved.’ ”

There is no evidence or indication the US was involved in any way with the Nordstream 2 pipeline explosions.

My question at the Pentagon briefing today: Can you rule out that the U.S. was involved?
Senior Military Official: “Yeah, we were absolutely not involved.”

— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) September 28, 2022

Well, that’s that then, case closed.

As Chris Menahan notes, the Fox News reporter has been guilty of brazenly amplifying false regime propaganda before.

“Earlier this year, Griffin put out the debunked hoax story that Russia bombed the Babi Yair holocaust memorial in Ukraine.”

The reporting was later debunked after an Israeli journalist visited the site and found it to be completely unscathed.

Griffin also recycled the lie that Russia was using “mobile crematoriums” to “evaporate” war dead, when the supposed video proving it was taken from a 2013 YouTube video.

“When news came out about US biolabs in Ukraine, Griffin also simply repeated Pentagon talking points to dismiss the story as a nothingburger,” writes Menahan.

When Griffin was recently rewarded with a new multiyear contract, she stated that it “has been an honor to provide viewers with trusted reporting from the Pentagon and across the world on issues that are paramount to all of us – the security and safety of our fellow citizens and allies.”

“Trusted reporting.”

Here is Jennifer Griffin laundering Victoria Nuland talking points on behalf of the Pentagon

She offers no proof to back up these claimspic.twitter.com/dgjf9vxjEX

— Jack Posobiec XLV (@JackPosobiec) March 10, 2022

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The Israeli MOH had no adverse events reporting system for the entire year of 2021. They commissioned a research team to analyze the reports from a new system implemented on December 2021. A leaked video reveals that in June, the researchers presented serious findings to the MOH, that indicated long-term effects, including some not listed by Pfizer, and a causal relationship – so the Ministry published a manipulative report, and told the public that no new signal was found

“Here we will have to really think medical-legal. Why medical-legal? Because for quite a few adverse events we said: ‘OK, it exists, and there is a report, but still get vaccinated’. I mean, we have to think about how to write it and how to present it correctly. So this will not yield lawsuits later: ‘Wait, wait, wait, you said everything will pass and you can get vaccinated. And now look what happened to me. The phenomenon continues'”.

The speaker is Prof. Mati Berkowitz, a pediatric specialist, head of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology unit at Shamir Medical Center, and head of the research team appointed by the Israeli Ministry of Health (IMOH) to examine the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. This crucial study was based on a new adverse event reporting system the MOH launched in December 2021 – 12 months AFTER rolling out the vaccines to the public, as the system implemented in December 2020, as they now officially admit, was dysfunctional and did not allow an analysis of the data. In an internal Zoom meeting in early June, the recording of which was leaked to the press, Prof. Berkowitz warned MOH senior officials that they should think carefully how to present his study’s findings to the public, otherwise they may be sued, since they completely contradict the MOH’s claims that serious side effects are rare, short term and transient. After analyzing the reports received over a period of 6 months, the research team found that many serious side effects were in fact long-term, including ones not listed by Pfizer, and established causal relations with the vaccine. Yet, instead of publishing the findings in a transparent manner to the public, the MOH withheld the findings for nearly two months, and when it finally released an official document, it misrepresented and manipulated the findings, minimizing the extent of reports, and stating that no new adverse events (“signals”) were found, and that the events that were detected were not necessarily caused by the vaccine, even though the researchers themselves said the exact opposite.

Background: “The world’s laboratory” had no reliable monitoring system

As is well known, Israel was crowned, by none other than Pfizer’s CEO Albert Burla, “the world’s laboratory”. And for a good reason. Indeed, Israel has a very high vaccination rate and was the first in the world to give boosters to everyone. In fact, Pfizers’ request for the approval of the boosters was at least partially based on the so-called study conducted in Israel. Israel was also one of the first countries in the world to vaccinate pregnant women.

Yet, as the MOH now admits, during this entire critical year in which the vast majority of Israelis were vaccinated, most of them with 2-3 doses, the vaccine adverse events reporting system was dysfunctional and did not enable a reliable analysis of the data.

In fact, since the beginning of the vaccination campaign, many Israeli experts have expressed serious concerns regarding the ability of the IMOH to monitor the safety of the vaccine and provide reliable data to the world. Nevertheless, the IMOH told the Israeli public, the FDA, and the entire world, that they have a surveillance system, and that they are closely monitoring the data. For example, Prof. Retsef Levy from MIT, an expert in health systems and risk management, voiced serious criticism during a Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting on September 17 which focused on the approval of the booster dose, stating that the system is dysfunctional and that the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is not monitored properly. In response, Dr. Sharon Alroi-Preis, the Health Ministry’s head of public services and a top COVID adviser to the Israeli government, claimed that she is “pretty surprised with Retsef Levi’s comment that Israel doesn’t follow adverse events”. Dr. Alroi-Preis stated: “It’s our data. I’m in charge of it. So I know exactly what is being reported to us”.

Only at the end of December 2021, a year after starting the vaccine rollout did the MOH finally institute a proper system, to coincide with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in children aged 5-11. The new system is based on a non-anonymous digital reporting form, which the Ministry asked all public HMOs (Health Management Organizations) to distribute among all patients after they had been vaccinated, so that those who suffered side effects could report them. At the same time, the ministry appointed Prof. Mati Berkowitz and his staff members to analyze the reports. The analysis was done on reports received from the HMOs in Israel over a period of 6 months – from the beginning of December 2021 to the end of May 2022.

The team examined both the close categories of side effects that were set by the MOH (there were 7 such categories), and the free text (they identified 22 categories of side effects). Due to limited time and resources, they decided to first analyze only the 5 most common side effects they identified: 1. neurological injuries; 2. general side effects; 3. menstrual irregularities; 4. musculoskeletal system disorders; and 5. digestive System/kidney and urinary system.

New signals, long-term adverse events, and re-challenge

In early June, the researchers presented their findings to MOH senior officials, including Dr. Emilia Anis, head of the MOH’s epidemiological department. Here are their main findings and points:

1. New signals – The research team identified and characterized side effects not listed by Pfizer, including neurological side effects such as hypoesthesia, paresthesia, tinnitus, and dizziness; back pain; and Digestive System symptoms in children (abdominal pain).
2. Long-term events – The research team repeatedly stressed during the discussion that their findings indicate that, contrary to what we were told so far, in many cases, serious adverse events are long-term, last weeks, months, a year, or even more, and in some cases – are ongoing, so that the side effect still lasted when the study was over. These include menstrual irregularities and various neurological side effects, muscle-skeletal injuries, GI problems, and kidney and urinary system adverse events.
3. Re-challenge – The researchers found many cases of re-challenge – recurrence or worsening of a side effect following repeated doses of the vaccine. In fact, they identified cases of re-challenge in all the 5 most common side effects they analyzed – e.g., neurological injuries; general side effects; menstrual irregularities;  musculoskeletal system disorders; and digestive system/kidney and urinary system.

An important example that demonstrates the severity of these findings is menstrual disorders.

* Long-lasting – In one of the slides, the researchers wrote: “Studies carried out on the above-mentioned subjec noted short-term abnormalities (up to a few days) in the menstrual cycle. However, over 90% of the reports detailing the characteristics of the duration of this adverse event indicate long-term changes (emphasis in the original. Y.S). Over 60% indicate duration of over 3 months”.

* Rechallenge – Then in ~10% of the cases, the problem recurred following additional doses.

1. Professor Retsef Levi, who is also a member of the Israel Public Emergency Council for the COVID 19 Crisis, said in an interview with GB News that the example of long-term menstrual disorders detected in the study also demonstrates the authorities’ response to the public’s reports. At first, they utterly deny any causal relationship between these disorders and the COVID-19 vaccines – in this case they denied it despite countless reports that flooded the internet from the very beginning of the vaccination rollout. Then, when the reports still continued and became impossible to deny, the authorities, and experts on their behalf, changed the narrative admitting there might be a relationship, but even if there is one, the symptoms are mild and transient. They only last a few days and they have no future implications on fertility.
   

   The researchers’ conclusions: The findings establish causality, and may lead to lawsuits

   1. Causality – The researchers emphasize that, according to the literature, these findings establish causal relations between the vaccine and the side effect.

   As can be heard in the following clip, Prof. Berkowitz stresses that it increases the chances of causality “from possible to definite”:

   “One of the things that are strong here is the re-challenge. We know about medications. There is the Naranjo scale [the Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) Probability Scale]. Naranjo, when there is an adverse event which recurs with the re-challenge, it turns from ‘possible’ to definite, to significant”.

   2. Think Medical-Legal – as if all this wasn’t damning enough, Prof. Berkowitz warns the MOH officials, in reference to the long-lasting side effects, they should think carefully how to present his study’s findings to the public, since they completely contradict their claims that serious side effects are rare, short term and transient.

The HMO’s are keeping the data close to their chests

The research team explained during the meeting that their study one important limitation – they only got cooperation from one small HMO to share the data it received from the new reporting system. (Israel’s health system is divided into 4 different HMO-type organizations; each Israeli is signed up with one of them), while none of the other 3 HMO’s shared their data, including Israel’s 2 largest ones – Clalit and Maccabi. Prof. Berkowitz said that they are keeping the data ‘close to their chests.

The only HMO that did fully cooperate (Meuhedet) is very small, representing only about 15% of the Israeli population, with a heavy religious population, who has lower vaccination rates than the general population, and seldom use smartphones, so most of them were not even able to receive the text message.

Two other limitations mentioned by the research team:

• The most severe cases were not even included in the analysis. There were 173 cases of hospitalization and ER visits that were separately examined by a dedicated expert committee.
• The researchers stressed they still have a lot of work, since they only analyzed the 5 top common side effects,  but there were 17 others (including cardiovascular, which was 6^th most common) that they did not yet analyze.

‘The denominator report’ – concealment, manipulation and cover-up

Although the IMOH was aware of these findings, they withheld them for 2 months, not only from the public, but even from their own expert committee that decided on June 30 to approve the vaccine for infants as young as 6 months. That decision was made 3 weeks after the IMOH had been warned about these results and their implications.

The formal report was finally released, on August 20, in a closed press briefing, and surprisingly, the MOH admitted in this report, black on white, that Israel did not have a functional adverse events reporting system until December 2021. The unbelievable explanation was: “As the vaccination operation progressed, data was received from the anonymous online form, but without the ability to process and professionally validate the data”.

Yet, even after receiving such serious findings and warnings, they manipulated the data and tried to hide crucial information to make the vaccine look safe.

• ‘No new signal’ – The MOH went so far as to claim there were no new adverse events found in the study that were not already known – no new signals. What about the neurological injuries, which the researchers said are not even mentioned in Pfizer’s label? What about the long duration, or the re-challenge? None of these findings are anywhere to be found in the official report.

• Manipulating the numbers – In order to promote the narrative of “rare adverse events”, the MOH divided the number of reports received with a denominator of the total number of doses given in Israel for the entire year and a half since the beginning of the vaccine rollout – ~18 million, hiding the fact that they only instituted the system in December 2021, and that the analysis was done on reports received during the 6 months until May 2022, from one small HMO.
  This ignores the known fact that such passive reporting systems cover only a fraction of the actual events. That would still be true even if the system was operational throughout the entire vaccination period and used by all HMOs (which of course is not the current case). This manipulation – using the denominator of the total doses, was repeated in each of the categories of the side effects in the report.

Furthermore, it turns out that in order to downplay the rate of reports on menstrual irregularities, the MOH used a denominator of the total number of all adult doses – ~16 million – and thus, absurdly, included men in the equation of how common menstrual irregularities are.

Global implications

The discussion exposed in the leaked video has far-reaching and worrying implications, at a global level. While Israel is a relatively small country, it was dubbed “the world’s laboratory”. The eyes of much of the world were on it, and the FDA and other regulators have repeatedly cited its experience with the vaccine as a basis for policymaking, including for boosters and mandates and much else. So if Israel did not in fact have a functioning adverse event monitoring system in place and its data was a fiction, and even when it did launch a proper monitoring system a year too late, with analysis of the system’s findings, completely ignored and withheld – what was the FDA really relying on? What were all those regulators relying on?

The Ministry of Health did not respond to Real-Time Magazine’s requests for comment. Prof. Mati Berkowitz refused to comment and referred us to the IMOH.

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Situation

The Senate might vote on the fiscal year 2023 military budget this month. Or it might not; nobody’s sure. What’s for certain is that the bill the Senate considers will have at least as much as $850 billion for the Pentagon. In other words, we’re staring down a $72 billion year-to-year increase in military spending with this legislation: The FY2022 version of the same bill (National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA) licensed $778 billion for the Pentagon.

How we got to an $850 billion Pentagon budget

In March, Joe Biden proposed increasing annual military spending by $35 billion—to $813 billion—as part of his FY2023 budget request. In June, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) added another $37 billion on top of that before advancing the $850 billion bill to the House floor for approval.

This decision was reportedly a matter of course for the committee. According to one HASC member, there was “almost no debate” on dumping another $37 billion on top of Biden’s own proposed increase. An overlooked reason why the committee’s move was so automatic was the ‘expertise’ that made a $72 billion year-to-year increase seem appropriate or even natural.

Think tanks are said to be free from the ugly forces that bias in-house policy planning—namely, all the lobbying and campaign cash that encourage members of Congress to make decisions based on parochial interests and not the public’s. The problem is that establishment think tanks are corrupted by the same monied interests members of Congress are. In this case, we’re talking about the arms industry.

Every think tank represented in a House Armed Services Committee hearing to provide expert testimony from January 1, 2020 through September 16, 2022 that disclosed its donors received funding from military contractors (the one that didn’t disclose its donors was the hawkish American Enterprise Institute).

The result? Military contractors were able to launder their profit-driven interests through ostensibly non-political institutions, while powerful lawmakers on the HASC got their parochially-driven policy positions validated by ostensibly unbiased ‘expertise’.

UPDATE (19 Sep): AEI is the think tank that doesn’t disclose its donors, but after some digging you’ll find that AEI has taken money from the military industry by way of its board chair (so the chart above should be a solid yellow pie). Here is Ben Freeman with the receipts:

Excellent, must read, research here. The one think tank that doesn't disclose its funders (for shame, AEI) also has $ ties to the weapons industry. #Thread (1/3) https://t.co/c71RX3irHa

— Ben Freeman (@BenFreemanDC) September 19, 2022

AEI's board chair, Daniel A. D’Aniello, is co-founder of the Carlyle Group which owns several DoD contractors: https://t.co/8RfUogxCUb

D'Aniello has given at least $20 million to AEI: https://t.co/eDNtqNcipi (2/3)

— Ben Freeman (@BenFreemanDC) September 19, 2022

In other words, 100% of think tanks represented in HASC hearings since Jan 2020 have accepted $ from the arms industry. (3/3)

— Ben Freeman (@BenFreemanDC) September 19, 2022

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In his remarkable book, The Psychology of Totaitarianism, the Flemish psychologist Mathias Desmet explains how collective psychosis can cause people to lose their critical faculties.  He cites a famous experiment in which a person can be made to say that one line on a diagram is the same length as another, when in fact it is longer, if seven or eight actors have pretended to come to the same conclusion before him.

Desmet is writing mainly about the coercive psychosis of Covid.  But the same arguments apply to the current collective psychosis about Russia.  For years and decades now, we have been fed horror stories about Russia.  These have of course only increased in intensity since the invasion of Ukraine. We have now reached a situation in which entire sections of the media, and their respective national governments, claim to believe things which are simply impossible.

The latest example is the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.  Russia has been immediately blamed but the accusation is not credible, for the following reasons.  I defy any person endowed with normal critical faculties to show the opposite.

The Americans have been opposed to Nord Stream 2 for years.

It was Germany, on the orders of the USA, that decided not to open the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in February. Joe Biden said in front of Olaf Scholz, ‘We will put an end to it.’  When asked how the US would do this, he replied, ‘I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.’[1] Victoria Nuland made it even more clear in January.[2] 

This is a long-standing American position.  Under the Trump administration, extraterritorial sanctions were imposed on European companies working on the construction of the pipeline.  Trump attended the Three Seas summit in Warsaw in 2018, an initiative to encourage the building of infrastructure to make Europe able to receive American liquefied natural gas in place of Russian gas. There is therefore a very long-standing US opposition to the continuing and increased supply of gas by Russia to Germany.

The Americans, together with the Poles and the Ukrainians, have been mounting a vociferous campaign against Nord Stream 2 for years, the Poles comparing the pipeline to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of September 1939. The former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has been vilified and nearly expelled from his own party for working for Nord Stream 2.  In the face of all this hostility, Russia has continued to build the pipeline, completing it last year to the absolute fury of all the above-mentioned countries. Why would Russia blow it up after spending billions on it?

Russia has no motive to destroy the pipelines, but instead has an active interest in their remaining operational, including for political reasons. 

In the current situation, Germany refused to open Nord Stream 2 and then the Russians, ostensibly for technical reasons, idled Nord Stream 1. 

If you believe that the technical reasons are just a pretext, and that in reality the Russians idled Nord Stream 1 to put pressure on the Europeans, as has been widely alleged, then only possible logical conclusion is that that the pressure in question is being wielded in an attempt to force the Europeans to open Nord Stream 2, by making them realise they need it. 

As Russia continues to supply gas through the overland Yamal and Druzhba (Friendship) pipelines, and as Russia recently foiled a plot to blow up the Turk Stream pipeline[3], it is incredible to allege that Russia wants to stop supplying Europe with gas. 

On the contrary, the continued supply of gas, which is now sold for roubles, has helped the rouble become one of the strongest performing currencies in the world, its strength enabling the Russian Central Bank to cut interest rates and recover from the initial shock caused by the sanctions in March.  Russia has every interest in continuing to sell gas, including in the current conditions of economic warfare.  By the same token, Russia’s enemies have every motive for removing this leverage from Russia.

If you argue, as does the President of the European Commission, that Russia is trying to blackmail Europe by cutting gas supplies, then by what possible logic would Russia sabotage the pipeline?  The destruction of the pipeline removes precisely any ability of Russia to blackmail anyone.  That is presumably why it was sabotaged.

Could Russia have done it?

The crazier media have been full of speculation about Russian frogmen carrying out a secret mission.  Anything is possible.  But if this is the truth, then it shows up Nato in rather a bad light. The explosions occurred just a few kilometres or a few dozen kilometres from the Polish, Danish and German coasts – all Nato members.  If Nato is not capable of protecting a key item of European infrastructure, then what is the use of it?

By contrast, the Americans conducted exercises in June 2022 on Bornholm, the Danish island where the pipeline blew up, testing underwater explosives and drones.[4]  So while it is very difficult to see how Russian frogmen could have carried out an operation under Nato’s very nose, it is easy to see how the Americans could have done it because they were practicing that very thing right there three months ago.  Maybe that is what the exercises were really all about.

However, if you do believe that the Russians could have sent a secret hit squad to blow up a pipeline under the Baltic Sea, then it is inconceivable that they would blow up their own pipeline and not Baltic Pipe, which (coincidentally?) was officially opened on the very day after Nord Stream 2 was attacked.  Baltic Pipe is a Norwegian-Danish-Polish project designed to supply gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland and to reduce dependency on Russia.  If you think that Russia is trying to sabotage Europe’s gas supplies, you must surely conclude that it  would blow up Baltic Pipe instead.  If Russia wants to starve Europe of gas, it needs only not to put any gas into Nord Stream 2, it does not need to blow it up.

“F**ck the EU”

The US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, who as we saw above, said in January that she had told the Germans Nord Stream 2 would not go ahead, famously had a phone conversation in 2014 with the then US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which the two of them decided the composition of the new Ukrainian government.[5]  At one point, Nuland expressed in vulgar but succinct terms US policy over Ukraine: “Fuck the EU.”

That is exactly what the Americans have just done. At least, that is what the former Polish Foreign Minister and former Defence Minister, Radek Sikorski, thinks.  One of the most vicious Russophobes in a very Russophobic country, Sikorski is very close to the security services.  On the day of the attack, he tweeted quite simply, with a photo of the gas bubbling up to the surface of the sea, “Thank you, USA.”[6]

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John Laughland is Director of Forum for Democracy International.

Notes

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=95&v=OS4O8rGRLf8&feature=youtu.be

[2] https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1486818088016355336

[3] https://tass.com/society/1511625

[4] https://seapowermagazine.org/baltops-22-a-perfect-opportunity-for-research-and-resting-new-technology/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/07/eu-us-diplomat-victoria-nuland-phonecall-leaked-video

[6] https://twitter.com/radeksikorski/status/1574800653724966915

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***

This week New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Her address was remarkable. The same person who ordered an invasion of peaceful protesters at Parliament earlier this year, had the chutzpah to say:

“In Aotearoa New Zealand, we deeply value our right to protest. Some of our major social progress has been brought about by hikoi or people power – becoming the first country in the world to recognise women’s right to vote, movement on major indigenous and human rights issues to name but a few.”

She then continued to call for a campaign of global censorship comprising governmental alliances in partnership with the private sector, for the purpose of combating “mis and disinformation”, which she characterized as weapons of war.

From her speech it appears that questioning climate change would be verboten, and attempting to understand the basis of an actual military conflict, e.g., in Ukraine, if it falls outside the approved governmental narrative, would trigger a warning to State censors.

I recall, incidentally, that this same Prime Minister locked down the entire country after a single positive case of Covid emerged in Auckland, that she pushed mandatory inoculations in healthcare, required mask-wearing and social distancing, and helped to create a vax apartheid society that divided people into two camps, the jabbed and the unjabbed, wherein those who exercised their right to choose not to receive an inadequately tested and dubious novel medical intervention were prevented from basic human social interaction: no haircuts, gyms, restaurants, cafes, no theatre-going, no assembly at places of worship, not even school sports for the “unclean”.

She allowed no debate regarding the so-called science behind measures that resulted in hardship, the loss of livelihoods, psychological turmoil and, too, the actual loss of life. And at no time did she support the early treatment of those who contracted Covid.

However I wish to call attention to another kind of disinformation about which the Prime Minister should be concerned: the disinformation of no information. It is a deviously clever tactic and I will illustrate its employment here.

Recently I was contacted by a midwife who had received anecdotal reports of an increase in perinatal deaths in 2022.  She filed Official Information Act requests with every District Health Board in New Zealand to obtain data on perinatal mortality, and in a number of these catchment areas there appeared to be a worrisome increase of deaths over the previous three years.  For example, in the Waikato District Health Board there were 49 perinatal deaths for 2021, and in only the first six months of 2022 there were already 46 total perinatal deaths.

I do not wish to present an analysis of the statistical data received, which is complex and outside my area of expertise – that is an undertaking for another time and by a qualified epidemiologist – but I do wish to point out one variable, one factor, that is glaringly absent, namely, whether mothers had received the Covid so-called vaccine.

This is an astonishing omission.  It signifies that of all the many variables involved in health outcomes, this particular one – the contribution of a Covid injection – would never be able to be determined. In light of the fact that the rollout of the injections represented New Zealand’s largest mass medical intervention in history, the failure to gather these essential data is a dereliction of duty that amounts to criminal neglect.

The Perinatal and Maternal Mortality Review Committee (PMMRC) is charged with the responsibility “to review and report on perinatal deaths with the aim of reducing them while continuously improving the quality of systems and policy.” Their most recent report covers the calendar year 2018; there is no information from that time until the present, though they claim to work  “towards zero preventable deaths or harm for all mothers and babies, families and whānau.”

When asked to include maternal Covid “vaccination” status as a datapoint, the PMMRC wrote evasively and skirted the request with assurances that they were keeping a close eye on perinatal deaths.

An honest government presiding over an honest healthcare system should be mandating the collection and reporting of maternal Covid “vaccine” data for routine analysis. Its failure to do so – purposefully or as a result of pure incompetence – should not be excused.

Instead, the Prime Minister rails on about “dangerous” purveyors of “mis or disinformation” who must be combated with the ways and means of modern warfare, and covers her own malfeasance by providing no information where information is essential.

Come to think of it, how much information was conveyed about the Pfizer inoculation? Oh, yes, I remember: safe and effective.

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from a video by UNTV

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***

US military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream pipelines incident near Bornholm Island earlier in September, Flightradar24 data showed.

Earlier this month, a US Navy Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter spent hours loitering over the location of the damaged natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea near Bornholm for several days in a row, September 1, 2, and 3, in particular.

Denmark’s maritime traffic agency and Sweden’s Maritime Authority on Monday reported a “dangerous” gas leak in the Baltic Sea close to the route of the inactive Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which experienced an unexplained drop in pressure.

The leak, southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, “is dangerous for maritime traffic” and “navigation is prohibited within a five nautical mile radius of the reported position,” the agency warned in a notice to ships.

Following the incident, German newspaper Tagesspiegel claimed Monday that Berlin is convinced that the loss of pressure in the three natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany was not a coincidence and suspects a “targeted attack“.

The cause of the incidents remains unknown and an investigation is underway. Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said on Tuesday that the disruption was caused by detonations, which indicates that it was sabotage.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs parallel to Nord Stream 1 and was intended to double the capacity for undersea gas imports from Russia, was blocked by Berlin in the days before the start of the war in Ukraine.

Flightradar24 showed an unidentified aircraft that did not even have a helicopter icon hovering over the site. However, the aircraft’s 24-bit ICAO code included in the description makes it possible to establish the model, which is the US military’s Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk. The code is verified through open resources that collect data on military aircraft.

The US helicopter is also shown by the aircraft tracking service to have flown into the area of loitering over the Nord Stream pipelines from Gdansk, Poland.

On the second day of the loitering, almost in parallel with their US counterpart, a Dutch navy NH9 helicopter was flying in the vicinity of Bornholm Island, and it is expected to have been observing the Americans’ activity.

US helicopters also took flights over other Nord Stream pipelines on September 10 and 19 and others stayed over the incident site for hours on the night of September 22 and September 25.

Reportedly, helicopters that made sorties on the night of September 22-23 and 25-26 have especially confusing tracks.

These revelations come after German newspaper Der Siegel reported Tuesday that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned the German government there would be attacks on Nord Stream gas pipelines weeks ahead of any incident being reported around the pipelines.

An informed source told the German magazine that Berlin had been told by the CIA a few weeks ago that there would be attacks on the key pipelines supplying a huge portion of Europe’s energy from Russia.

*

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Featured image: The US military’s Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter (Source: Al Mayadeen English)

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***

The results of the referenda on the accession of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to the country, have been released by Moscow.

The head of the regional electoral committee Galina Katyushchenko declared that 93.11% of voters supported reunification with Russia, as 100% of ballots have been counted in the Zaporozhye Region.

Lugansk People’s Republic

In the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), 98.42% of voters backed accession to Russia, as per the head of the regional electoral committee, Elena Kravchenko.

“With 100% of the protocols of precinct commissions processed, 98.42% voted for the republic’s entry into the Russian Federation,” Kravchenko said.

Kherson

In the Kherson region, 87.05% of voters supported reunification with Russia, according to the head of the regional election commission, Marina Zakharova.

“A total of 497,051 (87.05%) participants in the referendum answered ‘Yes’ to the question put forward at the referendum ‘Are for the withdrawal of the Kherson region from Ukraine, the formation of an independent state by the Kherson region and its entry into the Russian Federation as a constituent entity of the Russian Federation?'” she said.

Donetsk People’s Republic

With all referenda counted, Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) reported 99.23% of voters in favor of becoming part of Russia.

There were 2,133,326 voters who voted, accounting for 97.51% of the total number of voters, as per the DPR central election commission.

Meanwhile, more than a hundred foreign observers from 40 countries, excluding specialists from Russia, attending the referenda in the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, as well as in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, on joining the Russian Federation, reported no violations, with the exception of threats and shelling from Ukraine.

The voting in the referenda of DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye, and Kherson’s accession to the Russian Federation has begun early on Friday.

Residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson areas joined the initiative last Tuesday after local public organizations submitted identical demands to their authorities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has lately indicated in a televised address last Wednesday that Russia will support the referenda results.

NATO countries came together to condemn the referenda, according to a statement revealed last Thursday.

On his account, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has lately threatened Russia with new sanctions in the event of referenda after White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that the US condemned the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye, and Kherson referenda to join Russia as “sham” actions and asserted that the US would not recognize the results.

The referenda, according to Sullivan, and a reported Russian plan to mobilize more soldiers, reflect Moscow’s recent military defeats, including ceding sizable amounts of land to the Ukrainian military.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Russian military took control of the Azov part of Zaporozhye and Kherson, liberating large cities, such as Kherson, Melitopol, and Berdiansk, and cutting off Kiev from the Sea of Azov.

*

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Featured image: A woman voting in a referendum (Source: Al Mayadeen English)

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***

Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove featured an unhinged Air Force General named Jack D. Ripper, who orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after he becomes convinced that the Soviets were polluting the U.S. water supply.

The scenario presented in the film, unfortunately, is not inconceivable today given the Dr. Strangelove type characters who are prevalent in the upper-ranks of the U.S. military and political establishment.

Source: filmartgallery.com

On September 16, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, Anthony J. Cotton was asked at his Senate confirmation hearing by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) whether he thought nuclear war was unthinkable.

He responded that if confirmed as STRATCOM commander, his role would be to “ensure that the 150,000 men and women supporting strategic command are prepared to do what some folks think may be unthinkable”—that is to deploy weapons from the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Later in the hearing, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IO) asked Cotton whether in light of the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s conclusion that the U.S. would struggle to win a war with China over Taiwan, “the president should have flexible nuclear options to prevent conventional defeat at the hands of our adversaries in this particular scenario.”

Cotton replied: “yes I do.”

Criminally Insane?

Cotton’s predecessor, Carl J. Richard, would have likely responded in the same way. Last year, he wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine that the U.S. military had to “shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’” in the face of threats from Russia and China.

Former Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg stated that Richard sounded like he was “criminally insane.”

Pitch For Even Bigger Nuclear Weapons Budget

The son of an Air Force Master Sergeant who served in the Korean War, Anthony Cotton grew up in Dudley, North Carolina and was commissioned in the Air Force through ROTC at North Carolina State University in 1986.

He went on to rise through the Air Force, becoming deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, a senior military assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, commander of the 45^th space wing and commander of the Air Force global strike command.

Besides specifying his intent on preparing U.S. forces to wage nuclear war, Cotton used his confirmation hearing to make a pitch for an even bigger budget for the U.S. nuclear arsenal—when the U.S. government is already slated to spend $634 billion over the 2021-2030 period, for an average of $60 billion per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

U.S. nukes [Source: cbo.gov]

According to Cotton, “for the first time since 1945, the first time for us as a nation, we have two near-peer nuclear adversaries [China and Russia] [and will have to] roll up our sleeves to ensure that we are doing everything we can strategy-wise to [deal with] two.”

Cotton said that the U.S. nuclear arsenal was helping “constrain” Russia’s actions in Ukraine and could serve as a bulwark against a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. “I absolutely believe that our nuclear deterrent force held,” he said.

“We did not see Russia do anything with our NATO partners. We may have heard the rhetoric, but I think at the end of the day, Russia and China both understand that we have a strong, resilient nuclear force that is offering deterrence to ourselves and extended deterrence to our allies.”

Such logic obscures the fact that it was the U.S. that provoked conflicts with Russia in China in the first place—and has provoked the new nuclear arms race which could end with the obliteration of much of planet earth with people like Cotton in positions of authority.

*

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image: Anthony J. Cotton [Source: airandspaceforces.com]; left, Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove [Source: commonedge.org ] [Collage courtesy of Steve Brown.]

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

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***

The leaders and most of the news media in the U.S. seem to believe that Washington’s foreign policy over the past several decades has been a success and benefitted both the United States and the world. That assumption wasn’t really true even during the Cold War, although that confrontation eventually resulted in the peaceful demise of America’s nasty totalitarian adversary. There was plenty of collateral damage along the way, with the suffering caused by Washington’s conduct in Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most glaring examples.

The performance of U.S. leaders after the Cold War has been even worse. An array of disruptive, bloody tragedies—most notably those in the Balkans, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—mark Uncle Sam’s global trail of wreckage. The Biden administration’s decision to use Ukraine as a pawn in Washington’s power struggle with Russia is fast becoming the latest example.

Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned. The news media, which is supposed to serve as the public’s watchdog, have routinely ignored or excused America’s foreign-policy disasters. Instead, when one intervention fails, they simply move on to lobby for the next crusade pushed by U.S. leaders.  Consider how few news accounts now deal with the ongoing violence and chaos in places such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, even though Washington was a major contributor to all of those tragedies. Paul Poast, a scholar with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, aptly describes the conflict in Syria as America’s “forgotten war.” “That the war in Syria has become the “forgotten war,” he observes, “points to a more disturbing trend in U.S. foreign policy: The United States is so engaged in wars and interventions around the world that a conflict involving the U.S. military that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians does not even register with the American public anymore.”

Daniel Larison, in a post on his Eunomia Substack, likewise notes that the pattern in Syria has been replicated in many other places, including Somalia. Despite the extensive human suffering caused by Washington’s long war in Afghanistan, that episode is already fading in prominence now that U.S. troops are no longer in the country. Ukraine is the new center of attention, and the conflict there is portrayed in the same, simplistic, melodramatic fashion that has characterized Washington’s previous crusades.

The elites’ post-Cold War track record is not a pretty one. Even the cases touted as successes fail to stand up to scrutiny. Interventionists emphasize that NATO’s use of military force ended both Bosnia’s civil war and fighting in Kosovo. Although that can be considered a success, it is a partial one at best. Despite the passage of 27 years, Bosnia is no closer to being a viable, united country today than it was in the mid-1990s. The three antagonistic ethnic groups still refuse to cooperate, and the Serbs even periodically threaten to secede.  By all measures, Bosnia is utterly dysfunctional, both economically and politically. Indeed, NATO’s military intervention merely may have postponed the day of reckoning.

The outcome in Kosovo was not much better. Tensions between the Serbian and Kosovar governments are sufficiently acute that NATO intends to increase its “peacekeeping” troop presence and take direct action if the situation gets worse. Belgrade still is unwilling to recognize Kosovo’s independence, a position shared by approximately half of the countries in the international system.  The regime in Pristina and its NATO backers stubbornly refuse to let the predominantly Serbian northeast be governed by Belgrade, even though that concession might resolve the ongoing diplomatic impasse. As in the case of Bosnia, Kosovo remains a powder keg that could cause major problems for the United States and NATO. Yet the Balkan interventions are considered Washington’s great success story.

Matters are even worse following the U.S. crusades in other countries.  The fighting between Syria’s “coalition of religions” government and the Sunni jihadists trying to unseat Bashar al-Assad continues, despite its absence in U.S.-government statements and Western news accounts. Washington also continues to support Kurdish separatists in northeastern Syria and has effective control over that area’s oil production.  The country, though, may be shattered beyond repair from the years of fighting facilitated by U.S. leaders.

The turmoil in Iraq is less severe, but is still damaging the country. Political disputes and mass demonstrations against the current government regularly surface in Iraq. Pro-Iranian militias continue to play a prominent role in the country’s government, and the three-way split among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds is becoming ever more contentious. Political violence among rival factions shows no signs of subsiding, nor does public resentment against the presence of U.S. troops. Washington so lacks trust in its “ally” that officials once threatened to seize the country’s bank reserves if Iraqi leaders continued to press for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The level of human tragedy in Libya and Yemen is horrifying. Washington and its NATO allies bear almost exclusive responsibility for the situation in Libya. U.S. and NATO air strikes played a decisive role in overthrowing Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Libya thereafter became an arena of chaos as a multitude of militias vied for power, displacing more than a million residents. There were even credible reports of open-air slave markets for immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. In the past few years, the fighting has coalesced into a contest for political dominance between a government that the United States supports and an insurgent army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hafter, who was once a CIA asset. Scheduled national elections have been postponed numerous times, and fighting continues to periodically erupt.

Washington bears less direct, but still significant, responsibility for the suffering in Yemen. The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all supported the war of aggression that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their Gulf allies have waged against the nominally Shiite Houthis. The result has been appalling suffering by civilians, including widespread disease and famine conditions.

The latest application of Washington’s meddlesome policy is in Ukraine. U.S. leaders ignored repeated Russian warnings that making Ukraine a NATO member or even an unofficial NATO military assetwould cross a line that threatened Russia’s security.  When Moscow finally responded to the provocations with an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia. The conflict has already done enormous damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and taken thousands of lives. Worse, Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev.

The U.S. foreign-policy record over the past three decades could hardly be worse. It is crucial not to let policymakers and their media mouthpieces get away with convenient collective amnesia and imitations of Pontius Pilate. Instead, they need to be held fully accountable for their blunders and deception.

Future U.S. policymakers also need to avoid repeating the faulty performance of their predecessors. To do so, they must make three significant changes to U.S. foreign policy.

First, Washington should utterly renounce nation-building. Trying to remake alien societies by force and impose Western political, economic, and social values is the essence of folly. Even when the United States has not yet been drawn into a new war to enforce crumbling nation-building goals, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, such armed social experiments are an exercise in futility and frustration. Worse, nation-building missions frequently worsen conditions in the targeted country, and the predictable failure of U.S. objectives even can lead to Washington’s outright humiliation. The debacle in Afghanistan is a stark reminder of that danger.

Second, the United States must avoid the temptation to engage in regime-change wars. Such offensives often are a prelude to disastrous nation-building ventures. That was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Those wars not only made matters worse for the populations in the three countries, but worsened the security situation for neighboring states and even the United States. In both Iraq and Libya, U.S. actions toppled secular dictators, paving the way for chaos that strengthened the position of Islamic jihadists. Granted, the secular dictators were brutal and sometimes caused problems for the United States, but Washington’s “solution” clearly made matters worse, not better.

Third, U.S. leaders must do a much better job of distinguishing vital national interests from secondary or peripheral ones. Washington’s current policy of using Ukraine as a proxy for a war against Russia is a troubling example of the failure to make such basic distinctions. The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States. Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest. To accept the risks the Biden administration is incurring is irresponsible and violates the U.S. government’s responsibility to the American people.

Unless these policy changes are made, it is just a matter of time until a new set of officials repeat the disastrous blunders of their predecessors. If they do, the consequences to America and the world will be equally damaging.  Indeed, the Ukraine adventure reveals that the consequences could be even worse than the wreckage already wrought by Uncle Sam.

*

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

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In light of the recent events surrounding the Ukraine war and the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, we present to you two important titles from Global Research that are both available in PDF formats. 

***

Price: $11.50 

Purchase directly from the Global Research Online Store

You may also purchase directly at DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page! (NOTE: User-friendly)

Reviews

“Michel Chossudovsky, in his book “The Worldwide Corona Crisis” describes in clear and concise and unabashed language the origins of this war, its conduct and its goals. No book of this kind can be infinitely comprehensive, nor should it aspire to be. But in this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight.”
–Dr. Emanuel Garcia, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

“In The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Michel Chossudovsky succinctly and methodically pierces through the numerous layers of lies surrounding the “pandemic.” This meticulously researched chronicle is a must-read for anyone wanting to truly understand world events of the past two-and-a-half years.”
–David Skripac, former captain in the Canadian Air Force

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

“Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.”
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

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By Pepe Escobar, September 29, 2022

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Federal Bureau of Intimidation: The Government’s War on Political Freedom

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The Bombing of the Nord Stream Pipeline: Who Benefits?

By Alex Lantier and Johannes Stern, September 30, 2022

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This Tory fundamentalist arch villain is surely not Boris, as lamentable as his politics is. In her tenure at the Home Office, Priti Patel was clearly and decisively heading for fascist status, triangulating policy to attack the most vulnerable.

Has the CIA Blown Up the Nord Stream Gas Pipeline to Prevent Russia Coming to Europe’s Rescue this Winter?

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 28, 2022

As both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 both suddenly lost pressure last Monday, Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions.  The pipeline director reports unprecedented damage.  Clearly this is deliberate sabotage and could only have been done by a government with submarine capability to place underwater mines.

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This month, the United States announced it will provide Afghanistan with $327 million in humanitarian assistance, largely funneled through federal agencies supervised by the U.S. State Department such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While this may seem like a lot of money considering Washington’s failure to pass basic social and infrastructure policies for people in the United States, it’s only a fraction of the $7 billion in Afghan financial reserves the Federal Reserve Bank of New York illegally seized last year. Moreover, as with all USAID projects, “aid” is primarily used to serve U.S. economic and political interests. Finally, these funds will not ameliorate the damage tens of millions of Afghans are forced to endure from the devastating U.S./EU-led sanctions.

The contradictions in U.S. foreign policy, coordinated by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, continue to sharpen. The Taliban’s regressive policies toward women are still being used to justify calls for U.S.-backed regime change in Afghanistan. Many seemingly well-meaning reports from popular outlets like Reuters, AP News, New York Times, Foreign Policy and the U.S. military’s own, Stars and Stripes, continue to push imperialist propaganda, justifying continued U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

These outlets confuse the U.S. public as to who is primarily to blame for the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and erase the violent U.S. history there.

The Taliban continues to condemn the impact of the U.S.-led asset freeze and sanctions, along with a growing number of other countries, such as China and Russia. If conditions for all Afghans—including women, children and the rural poor—are to improve, it is clear the United States must end its war on Afghanistan as well as be held to account for its decades-long campaign of destruction and destabilization in the region.

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On Monday, powerful underwater explosions blew gaping holes in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. Gushers of gas a kilometer in diameter are rising to the surface from the blasts, which occurred in Danish waters. Tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure vital to financing Russia’s economy, and powering and heating the German and European economy, lie in ruins.

As the US and NATO wage war against Russia in Ukraine, this event points to the reckless military escalation underway in Europe. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the blasts were the results of “deliberate action” by unknown parties, while Swedish seismologist Bjorn Lund said, “There’s no doubt, this is not an earthquake.”

Though European media instantly accused Russia of having bombed the Nord Stream pipelines, such charges are rapidly falling apart.

Even the New York Times, normally a source of aggressive anti-Russian propaganda, refrained from blaming the bombing on Moscow. “At first glance, it seems counterintuitive that the Kremlin would damage its own multibillion-dollar assets,” it acknowledged. “While some European officials were quick to speculate about Russian involvement, American officials were more cautious, noting the lack of available evidence,” it continued, noting that Washington “and most of its European allies stopped short of naming any suspects.”

Former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, a member of several NATO think tanks who is married to prominent US foreign policy commentator Anne Applebaum, suggested openly that Washington was behind the bombing. He tweeted a picture of the gusher of natural gas with the label: “Thank you, USA.” He added, “Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine.”

Accusations of Russian involvement in the bombings lack all credibility and detract from the far more likely perpetrator: the United States. The first question that has to be asked about the Nord Stream bombing is: Cui bono? Who benefits, and who had the motive to carry it out?

Russia had no motive to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline. Russia’s Gazprom conglomerate owned half of the pipeline, alongside German, French and Dutch shareholders, and the pipeline was at the heart of Moscow’s plans to rebuild economic ties with Europe, if and when the war with NATO in Ukraine ended. It had no reason to blow up its own pipeline.

For Washington, the bombing presented two benefits. Firstly, coming amid the NATO military escalation against Russia in Ukraine, it would help fuel more anti-Russian war propaganda. Secondly, by making Europe more dependent on US natural gas imports to replace Russian gas, it corresponded to a major US aim in the Ukraine war from the outset: to bring Europe more firmly under US control. These aims have increasingly come into the open in recent years.

In 2018, bitter conflicts erupted between the Trump administration and Berlin, as Trump slapped sanctions on German car exports to America and demanded Berlin shut down Nord Stream 2.

On February 7, 2022, as he stepped up economic and military threats against the Kremlin before the Russia invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden invited German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington for talks. During a joint press conference with Scholz, Biden pledged to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. “If Russia invades,” Biden said, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

Asked how he would do this—as the Nord Stream pipeline is jointly owned by Russia and ostensible NATO allies of the United States such as Germany, France and the Netherlands—Biden refused to answer, simply saying: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

The Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 not only paved the way for NATO to wage bloody imperialist wars from Iraq and Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It deprived NATO of its main enemy, which had helped unify the alliance, and threw Eurasia open to major US and European corporations. Tensions between the NATO imperialist powers, as they competed for the division of the spoils of the world economy, exploded.

Trump demanded that Berlin end Nord Stream 2 after it called for an EU military buildup and a defense policy independent from NATO. While then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for Germany to “fight for our own future ourselves,” French President Emmanuel Macron called for the EU to prepare to confront Russia, China or America.

EU officials rejected Trump’s calls to end Nord Stream 2. Such demands, said German lawmaker Rolf Mützenich, “affect German and European companies and represent interference in our internal affairs. The EU and Germany are apparently not allied partners for Trump, but tributary vassals…”

The US policy towards Europe recalls Leon Trotsky’s warning, nearly a century ago, that in a period of crisis “the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.” Trotsky described US imperialism’s plans for Europe after World War I as follows:

It will slice up the markets; it will regulate the activity of the European financiers and industrialists. If we wish to give a clear and precise answer to the question of what American imperialism wants, we must say: It wants to put capitalist Europe on rations.

This concisely describes Washington’s policy today. This year, it seized upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to escalate the war with Russia and impose the cutoff of EU energy trade with Russia that it had long sought. The impact on Europe is devastating.

Millions of workers in Europe face the prospect of freezing this winter, with gas prices surging tenfold as Europe replaces cheap Russian gas transported by pipeline with US liquefied natural gas. The price hikes are further magnified as European currencies fall against the US dollar, which is rising as the US Federal Reserve increases its interest rates. European steel, chemical and other companies, the Wall Street Journal noted, “are shifting operations to the U.S., attracted by more stable energy prices and muscular government support.”

The EU imperialists have agreed to this, insofar as the war is a pretext to keep diverting billions of euros to rearmament. The German bourgeoisie in particular aims, after losing two world wars, to re-emerge as Europe’s leading military power. This month Scholz called for Germany to “become the cornerstone of conventional defence in Europe, the best-equipped force in Europe” and demanded a German seat on the UN Security Council.

While Berlin officially ended its support for Nord Stream 2 after the Russian invasion, it is raising the issue of renewed energy ties with Russia. This week, Merkel said one should never lose sight of “the day after.” She called to think about what is “sheerly unimaginable at the moment—namely, how something like relations towards and with Russia can be developed again.”

It is more credible to explain the Nord Stream attack, not as an act of economic and political suicide by Russia, but as a signal sent by Washington to its EU “allies”: “Yes, you can re-militarize, but your energy and military policy will be set on our terms.”

These conflicts make all the more clear the enormous dangers facing masses of workers and youth as NATO and Russia teeter on the edge of an all-out global conflagration.

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Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future.  Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation.

The central feature of Adani is having a nose for getting on the bandwagon and pushing to its front.  Everyone is doing it, at least when it comes to renewable energy sources.  Recently, the Adani Group, an entity specialising in power generation, real estate, commodities, and port infrastructure, promised it would invest $US70 billion in the green energy transition and associated infrastructure in what it calls “an integrated Hydrogen-based value chain”.

In terms of solar energy, the company has jostled its way up the ranks through Adani Green Energy, creating sprawling “solar parks” comprising thousands of hectares in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.  The acquisition of such land has come at considerable cost to local farmers, many of whom have protested such alienation and loss of fertile land.

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Adani’s program is relentlessly expansive, part of a suite of approaches that seems to be winning investment from such companies as the French multinational TotalEnergies, which poured in money to acquire 25% of a stake in Adani New Industries.  In this, the Indian billionaire is simply pursuing what his other colleagues in the fossil fuel line are doing: pretend to go green and hope that no one notices the off-colour joke.  In this enterprise, Adani hopes to make his company the world’s largest renewable energy producer by 2030 (surely the joke), which might encourage some laughter but for its seriousness.

At the Forbes Global CEO conference held in Singapore, Adani was preeningly confident, exhibiting the cocksure awareness of a crossdressing trickster. “We are already the world’s largest solar player, and we intend to do far more.  Adani New Industries is the manifestation of the bet we are making in the energy transition space.”  He also told his audience that the new business, additionally “to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio” would “be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares”.  Boastfully, he reminded those caring to listen that this was “an area 1.4 times that of Singapore.”

In April this year, he told the India Economic Conclave that his country was “on the cusp of decades of growth that the world will want to tap into.  Therefore, there can be no better defence of our interests at this time than atmanirbhar.”  The Hindi word in the statement, denoting self-reliance, is instructive enough, a feature of the Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s nationalist drive.

As with most billionaires in history, success is a convenient wedding of self-aggrandisement and patriotic purpose, a case of making money and wrapping oneself in the flag.  More to the point, it is a shamelessly calculating push to combine interests of another sort, notably of the environmentally appealing nature.  “For India,” Adani told the audience at the IEC, “the combination of solar and wind power coupled with green hydrogen opens up unprecedented possibilities.”

Making greenwashing an essential part of its public relations, the Adani Group is globally engaged in promoting souped up ecological crossdressing.  In October 2021, the London Science Museum announced a sponsorship deal with Adani at the Global Investment Summit, a lead-up event to the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.  The agreement involves the development of an exhibition space titled, “Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery”.

Dame Mary Archer, chair of the Science Museum Group, explained that the gallery would “take a truly global perspective on the world’s most urgent challenge.  We face a grave threat, but the future is not predestined”.  Critics were less than impressed by the Museum’s breezy refusal to consider Adani’s blotchy human rights records and treatment of indigenous communities both in India and Australia.  Protests were organised at the entrance to the museum.  Two trustees resigned.

Nothing, however, gets away from the core business of the Adani Group, which has close ties with the Modi government, ever keen to fashion it as a spear of influence.  The renewables canard cannot hide the practical, solid elements that keep Adani big in coal mining, gas distribution and transportation.

The latter has been particularly striking, with the company winning government tenders to operate a number of airport facilities despite lacking any experience in aviation.  This was a source of consternation for Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac, whose state government was ignored in the bid for Thiruvananthapuram airport.  “People of Kerala will not accept this act of brazen cronyism,” he declared in 2020.

Whether its brazen cronyism or thick-as-thieves solidarity, no one, in terms of scale and influence, has as much influence with New Delhi as Adani does.  As Tim Buckley of Climate Energy Finance, a Sydney-based think tank explains, “His political power, his ability to understand the lay of the land in India, is second to none.”

The Adani Group also remains controversially, and deeply embedded in such controversial projects as the Carmichael Mine in Queensland, Australia, where it is looking, increasingly, like a relic, an echo of habitual ecological vandalism best shelved.  The company made a concerted effort to suppress the findings of a university report into its lack of consultation in mining operations with Traditional Owners, who had not “given their free, prior and informed consent” to the operations.  The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination also expressed its concerns in 2019 that Adani’s consultations regarding the Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) “might not have been conducted in good faith”.

All this paints a picture of a company keen to cut corners and stomp on toes with ruthless disdain.  For his efforts, Gautam Adani finds himself at a peg below the summit of wealth, being the second wealthiest man on the planet.  Only the extra-terrestrially minded Elon Musk bars his route on the rich list’s chart.  Ecological crossdressing, it would seem, pays.

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

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It’s only fitting that literally hours after the most clueless dwarf in capital markets history, Janet “No crisis in my lifetime” Yellen said that financial markets are functioning well, that the Bank of England literally panicked, and shocked markets by resuming unlimited QE.

“We haven’t seen liquidity problems develop in markets — we’re not seeing, to the best of my knowledge, the kind of deleveraging that could signify some financial stability risks,” Yellen said in answering reporters’ questions Tuesday on a trip to North Carolina.

Fast forward just a few hours when the the Bank of England saw quite a few “liquidity problems” when it cited “significant repricing of UK and global financial assets… This repricing has become more significant in the past day – and it is particularly affecting long-dated UK government debt.” It warned that “were dysfunction in this market to continue or worsen, there would be a material risk to UK financial stability” and used that to justify the end of QT (before it even started) and the restart of QE.

Read the full article here.

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On September 28th, the AP headlined “Record methane leak flows from damaged Baltic Sea pipelines” and reported that “Methane leaking from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines is likely to be the biggest burst of the potent greenhouse gas on record, by far. … Andrew Baxter, a chemical engineer who formerly worked in the offshore oil and gas industry, and is now at the environmental group EDF …  said, ‘It’s catastrophic for the climate.’”

The article pointed out that methane “is 82.5 times more potent than carbon dioxide at absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the Earth.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin had been aiming ultimately (and maybe soon) to get the gas to Europe flowing again, and said to EU nations on September 16th,

“Just lift the sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which is 55 billion cubic metres of gas per year, just push the button and everything will get going.”

Here is what U.S. President Joe Biden had already promised about that on February 7th:

If Germany — if Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the — the border of Ukraine again — then there will be — we — there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2.  We will bring an end to it. 

Q    But how will you — how will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  We will — I promise you, we’ll be able to do it. 

He had promised to cause permanently the end of Nord Stream if Russia invaded, which it did on February 24th. He fulfilled on that promise on September 27th.

Radek Sikorsky, who is a Member of the European Parliament and had been Poland’s Foreign Minister and is the husband of the famous writer against Russia Anne Applebaum, and has been affiliated with Oxford University, Harvard University, and NATO, tweeted on the day of the explosions, “Thank you, USA.” He also tweeted explanations: “All Ukrainian and Baltic sea states have opposed Nordstream’s construction for 20 years. Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine.” And: “Nordstream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.”

Furthermore on September 27th, Germany’s Spiegel magazine reported that, as Reuters put it,

“The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had weeks ago warned Germany about possible attacks on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea” 

On September 28th, SouthFront headlined “No Way Back for Europe” and reported: 

It is reasonably suspected that the pipeline was blown up by the special services of the United States in order to finally stop the gas supplies to Germany from Russia.

On September 27, a detachment of warships led by the US amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge reported on the completion of their tasks in the area of the alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea and headed for the North Sea.

Since the beginning of September, suspicious activity by anti-submarine helicopters of the US Navy has been observed in the area. In the last few days, reconnaissance activities of NATO aircraft have significantly intensified in the Baltic Sea area. In particular, a US Boeing E-3 Sentry reconnaissance aircraft was on constant patrol over the Baltic States, and a US Joint STARS was spotted over Germany and Poland.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.

This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.

The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.

That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.

Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.

The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.

The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers –  would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.

German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.

As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.

Cui bono? 

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.

Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.

It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.

NS2 had already been attacked – in the open – all along its construction. Back in February, Polish ships actively tried to prevent the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel from finishing NS2. The pipes were being laid south of – you guessed it – Bornholm.

NATO for its part has been very active on the underwater drones department. The Americans have access to long distance Norwegian underwater drones which can be modified with other designs. Alternatively, professional navy clearance divers could have been employed in the sabotage – even as tidal currents around Bornholm are a serious matter.

The Big Picture reveals the collective West in absolute panic, with Atlanticist “elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss.

Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal.

So that brings us to the key question of which Western intel apparatus designed the sabotage. Prime candidates are of course CIA and MI6 – with Poland set up as the fall guy and Denmark playing a very dodgy part: it’s impossible that Copenhagen was not at least “briefed” on the intel.

Prescient as ever, as early as in April 2021 Russians were asking questions about the military security of Nord Stream.

The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli. Outside of the appalling mediocrity and cowardice of the current administration in Berlin, it’s clear that the BND – German intel – as well as the German Navy and informed industrialists sooner or later will do the math.

This was far from an isolated attack. On September 22 there was an attempt against Turkish Stream by Kiev saboteurs. The day before, naval drones with English language IDs were found in Crimea, suspected of being part of the plot. Add to it US helicopters overflying the future sabotage nodes weeks ago; a UK “research” vessel loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; and NATO tweeting about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage.

Show me the (gas) money

The Danish Minister of Defense met urgently with NATO’s Secretary General this Wednesday. After all the explosions happened very close to Denmark’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That may be qualified as crude kabuki at best; exactly on the same day, the European Commission (EC), NATO’s de facto political office, advanced its trademark obsession: more sanctions against Russia, including the certified-to-fail cap on oil prices.

Meanwhile, EU energy giants are bound to lose big time with the sabotage.

The roll call includes the German Wintershall Dea AG and PEG/ E.ON; the Dutch N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; and the French ENGIE. Then there are those which financed NS2: Wintershall Dea again as well as Uniper; Austrian OMV; ENGIE again; and British-Dutch Shell. Wintershall Dea and ENGIE are both co-owners and creditors. Their fuming shareholders will want serious answers from a serious investigation.

It gets worse: there are no holds barred anymore on the Pipeline Terror front. Russia will be on red alert not only for Turk Stream but also Power of Siberia. Same for the Chinese and their maze of pipelines arriving in Xinjiang.

Whatever the methodology and the actors who were in the loop, this is payback – in advance – for the inevitable collective West defeat in Ukraine. And a crude warning to the Global South that they will do it again. Yet action always breeds reaction: from now on, “funny things” could also happen to US/UK pipelines in international waters.

The EU oligarchy is reaching an advanced process of disintegration at lightning speed. Their window of opportunity to at least attempt a role as a strategically autonomous geopolitical actor is now closed.

These EUROcrats now face a serious predicament. Once it’s clear who are the perpetrators of the sabotage in the Baltic, and once they understand all the life-changing socio-economic consequences for pan-EU citizens, the kabuki will have to stop. Including the already running, uber-ridiculous subplot that Russia blew up its own pipeline when Gazprom could simply have turned off the valves for good.

And once again, it gets worse: Gazprom is threatening to sue the Ukrainian energy company Naftofgaz for unpaid bills. That would lead to the end of Russian gas transiting Ukraine towards the EU.

As if all of that was not serious enough, Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030.

Just say no? They can’t: Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. That’s the spirit of a long-term contract. And it’s already happening: because of sanctions, Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.

All the devils are here

Now it’s painfully clear the imperial velvet gloves are off when it comes to the vassals. EU independence: verboten. Cooperation with China: verboten. Independent trade connectivity with Asia: verboten. The only place for the EU is to be economically subjugated to the US: a tawdry remix of 1945-1955. With a perverse neoliberal twist: we will own your industrial capacity, and you will have nothing.

The sabotage of NS and NS2 is inbuilt in the imperial wet dream of breaking up the Eurasian land mass into a thousand pieces to prevent a trans-Eurasia consolidation between Germany (representing the EU), Russia and China: $50 trillion in GDP, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) compared to the US’s $20 trillion.

We must go back to Mackinder: control of the Eurasian land mass constitutes control of the world. American elites and their Trojan Horses across Europe will do whatever it takes not to give up their control.

“American elites” in this context encompass the deranged, Straussian neo-con-infested “intel community” and the Big Energy, Big Pharma and Big Finance that pays them and who profits not only from the Deep State’s Forever War approach but also wants to make a killing out of the Davos-concocted Great Reset.

The Raging Twenties started with a murder – of Gen Soleimani. Blowing up pipelines is part of the sequel. There will be a highway to hell all the way to 2030. Yet to borrow from Shakespeare, hell is definitely empty, and all the (Atlanticist) devils are here.

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This article was originally published on PressTV.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties. He’s been politically canceled from Facebook and Twitter. Follow him on Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

“In so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn’t exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”—Howard Zinn, historian

Discredit, disrupt, and destroy.

That is how the government plans to get rid of activists and dissidents who stand in its way.

This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.

Back in 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.

That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s latest nationwide spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics.

For instance, just before dawn on Jan. 25, 2019, the FBI sent 29 heavily armed agents in 17 vehicles to carry out a SWAT-style raid on the Florida home of Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s longtime supporters. Stone, charged with a political crime, was taken away in handcuffs.

In March 2021, under the pretext of carrying out an inventory of U.S. Private Vaults, FBI agents raided 1400 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, seizing “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”

In April 2021, FBI agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, seizing 18 electronic devices. More than a year later, Giuliani has yet to be charged with any crimes.

In June 2022, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump Administration, was led out of his home in pajamas while federal law enforcement officials raided his home.

In the summer of 2022, FBI agents wearing tactical gear including body armor, helmets and camouflage uniforms and carrying rifles raided multiple homes throughout Little Rock, Ark., including a judge’s home.

In August 2022, more than a dozen FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, the winter home of Donald Trump.

And in September 2022, 25 to 30 armed FBI agents raided the home of an anti-abortion activist, pointing guns at the family and terrorizing the man’s wife and seven children.

Politics aside, the message is clear: this is how the government will deal with anyone who challenges its authority.

You’re next.

Unfortunately, while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.

The government has been playing these mind games for a long time.

As Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, noted in 1971, the FBI was engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of the agency’s purpose.

The objective: target anti-government dissenters for wide-scale harassment, widespread surveillance and intimidation in order to enhance their paranoia and make them think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

Medsger, the recipient of stolen government files that provided a glimpse into the workings of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, would later learn that between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents.

The explicit objective, according to one FBI memo: “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity      .”

Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.

Among those most closely watched by the FBI was King, a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” All told, the FBI collected 17,000 pages of materials on King.

With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received blackmail letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.

John Lennon, a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, was another high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Lennon was singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.

For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics.

J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.

As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”

The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, echoed these concerns about the government’s abuses:

“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

The report continued:

“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”

Fifty years later, we’re still having this same debate about the perils of government overreach.

For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.

The lesson to be learned is this: whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now, rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government and its henchmen today will eventually be meted out on the general populace.

At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.

At that point—when you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.

Frankly, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed.

These are no longer experiments on our freedoms.

These are acts of aggression by a government that is no friend to freedom.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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***

We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the UN’s founding and defining principle.

But what has not been reported in the United States is that leaders from 66 countries, mainly from the Global South, also used their General Assembly speeches to call urgently for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine through peaceful negotiations, as the UN Charter requires. We have compiled excerpts from the speeches of all 66 countries to show the breadth and depth of their appeals, and we highlight a few of them here.

African leaders echoed one of the first speakers, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, who also spoke in his capacity as the current chairman of the African Union when he said, “We call for de-escalation and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, as well as for a negotiated solution, to avoid the catastrophic risk of a potentially global conflict.”

The 66 nations that called for peace in Ukraine make up more than a third of the countries in the world, and they represent most of the Earth’s population, including India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Mexico.

While NATO and EU countries have rejected peace negotiations, and U.S. and U.K. leaders have actively undermined them, five European countries – Hungary, Malta, Portugal, San Marino and the Vatican – joined the calls for peace at the General Assembly.

The peace caucus also includes many of the small countries that have the most to lose from the failure of the UN system revealed by recent wars in Ukraine and the Greater Middle East, and who have the most to gain by strengthening the UN and enforcing the UN Charter to protect the weak and restrain the powerful.

Philip Pierre, the Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, a small island state in the Caribbean, told the General Assembly,

“Articles 2 and 33 of the UN Charter are unambiguous in binding Member States to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state and to negotiate and settle all international disputes by peaceful means.…We therefore call upon all parties involved to immediately end the conflict in Ukraine, by undertaking immediate negotiations to permanently settle all disputes in accordance with the principles of the United Nations.”

Global South leaders lamented the breakdown of the UN system, not just in the war in Ukraine but throughout decades of war and economic coercion by the United States and its allies. President Jose Ramos-Horta of Timor-Leste directly challenged the West’s double standards, telling Western countries,

“They should pause for a moment to reflect on the glaring contrast in their response to the wars elsewhere where women and children have died by the thousands from wars and starvation. The response to our beloved Secretary-General’s cries for help in these situations have not met with equal compassion. As countries in the Global South, we see double standards. Our public opinion does not see the Ukraine war the same way it is seen in the North.”

Many leaders called urgently for an end to the war in Ukraine before it escalates into a nuclear war that would kill billions of people and end human civilization as we know it. The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, warned,

“…the war in Ukraine not only undermines the nuclear non-proliferation regime, but also presents us with the danger of nuclear devastation, either through escalation or accident. … To avoid a nuclear disaster, it is vital that there be serious engagement to find a peaceful outcome to the conflict.”

Others described the economic impacts already depriving their people of food and basic necessities, and called on all sides, including Ukraine’s Western backers, to return to the negotiating table before the war’s impacts escalate into multiple humanitarian disasters across the Global South. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh told the Assembly,

“We want the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. Due to sanctions and counter-sanctions, …the entire mankind, including women and children, is punished. Its impact does not remain confined to one country, rather it puts the lives and livelihoods of the people of all nations in greater risk, and infringes their human rights. People are deprived of food, shelter, healthcare and education. Children suffer the most in particular. Their future sinks into darkness.

My urge to the conscience of the world – stop the arms race, stop the war and sanctions. Ensure food, education, healthcare and security of the children. Establish peace.”

Turkey, Mexico and Thailand each offered their own approaches to restarting peace negotiations, while Sheikh Al-Thani, the Amir of Qatar, succinctly explained that delaying negotiations will only bring more death and suffering:

“We are fully aware of the complexities of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the international and global dimension to this crisis. However, we still call for an immediate ceasefire and a peaceful settlement, because this is ultimately what will happen regardless of how long this conflict will go on for. Perpetuating the crisis will not change this result. It will only increase the number of casualties, and it will increase the disastrous repercussions on Europe, Russia and the global economy.”

Responding to Western pressure on the Global South to actively support Ukraine’s war effort, India’s Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, claimed the moral high ground and championed diplomacy,

“As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there. We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles. We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out. We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at escalating costs of food, fuel and fertilizers.

It is therefore in our collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, in finding an early resolution to this conflict.”

One of the most passionate and eloquent speeches was delivered by Congolese Foreign Minister Jean-Claude Gakosso, who summarized the thoughts of many, and appealed directly to Russia and Ukraine – in Russian!

“Because of the considerable risk of a nuclear disaster for the entire planet, not only those involved in this conflict but also those foreign powers who could influence events by calming them down, should all temper their zeal. They must stop fanning the flames and they must turn their backs on this type of vanity of the powerful which has so far closed the door to dialogue.

Under the auspices of the United Nations, we must all commit without delay to peace negotiations – just, sincere and equitable negotiations. After Waterloo, we know that since the Vienna Congress, all wars finish around the table of negotiation.

The world urgently needs these negotiations to prevent the current confrontations – which are already so devastating – to prevent them from going even further and pushing humanity into what could be an irredeemable cataclysm, a widespread nuclear war beyond the control of the great powers themselves – the war, about which Einstein, the great atomic theorist, said that it would be the last battle that humans would fight on Earth.

Nelson Mandela, a man of eternal forgiveness, said that peace is a long road, but it has no alternative, it has no price. In reality, the Russians and Ukrainians have no other choice but to take this path, the path of peace.

Moreover, we too should go with them, because we must throughout the world be legions working together in solidarity, and we must be able to impose the unconditional option of peace on the war lobbies.

(Next three paragraphs in Russian) Now I wish to be direct, and directly address my dear Russian and Ukrainian friends.

Too much blood has been spilled – the sacred blood of your sweet children. It’s time to stop this mass destruction. It’s time to stop this war. The entire world is watching you. It’s time to fight for life, the same way that you courageously and selflessly fought together against the Nazis during World War Two, in particular in Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin.

Think about the youth of your two countries. Think about the fate of your future generations. The time has come to fight for peace, to fight for them. Please give peace a real chance, today, before it is too late for us all. I humbly ask this of you.”

At the end of the debate on September 26, Csaba Korosi, the president of the General Assembly, acknowledged in his closing statement that ending the war in Ukraine was one of the main messages “reverberating through the Hall” at this year’s General Assembly.

You can read here Korosi’s closing statement and all the calls for peace he was referring to.

And if you want to join the “legions working together in solidarity… to impose the unconditional option of peace on the war lobbies,” as Jean-Claude Gakosso said, you can learn more at https://www.peaceinukraine.org/.

*

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in October/November 2022. They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image from  Â© Liu Jie/Xinhua via ZUMA Wire

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***

Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, is the most anti-China British leader in decades. In the Conservative leadership contest that brought her to power, candidates competed to show who could be more belligerent against Beijing.

Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, must be in the running for the most anti-China British leader in a century.

Truss has done more than any other single politician to move the Conservative Party, and therefore the British government, from wanting to be a close friend of China, during the David Cameron premiership, to today where the UK is openly threatening Beijing’s economic stability and political security.

As foreign secretary in 2021, Truss convinced fellow G7 foreign ministers to include a line in their closing communique condemning China’s economic policy. Then, in a major speech this April, she threatened to crack down on China’s rise if they “don’t play by the rules”.

As she vied for the top seat in 10 Downing Street this August, Truss pledged that, if she were made prime minister, she would officially designate China a “threat” to British national security.

When the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan that same month, in a deeply provocative trip aimed at angering China, Truss openly talked about the need for the West to support the Taiwanese separatist movement.

Britain’s Conservatives compete to be the most belligerent against Beijing

To see the significant influence that anti-China hawks now have in the UK’s domestic politics, we need look no further than the Conservative Party leadership contest, where candidates competed to see who could be the most aggressive against Beijing.

Truss’ major opponent in the race was the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. As chancellor, Sunak had emphasised closer economic ties with China. But it seems he feared appearing “soft” before the Conservative Party membership, and so in July, he came out as an anti-China hawk, claiming Beijing was Britain’s “number one threat”.

Sunak was not alone. Penny Mordaunt, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to remain in the Conservative party leadership race this summer, criticized Boris Johnson for having a supposed soft touch on China. She argued Johnson had prioritized the economy over national security.

Tom Tugendhat, another failed Conservative leadership contender, who served as chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was Truss’ pick for minister of security, warned in an interview that China allegedly poses a great danger to the British people.

NATO’s new cold war on China

The UK’s Conservative leadership race came on the heels of a NATO summit in Madrid in June, where the Western military alliance declared China to be a “strategic competitor” that poses a “systemic challenge” to “our interests, security and values.”

Britain’s shift toward hard-line anti-China policies also coincides with the same move in the United States, where the Joe Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s campaign to counter China’s influence across the globe.

After decades of relatively stable co-operation and co-existence, Western leaders are now falling over themselves to attack China.

Yet these claims of Chinese aggression toward Europe have no real basis. In its thousands of years of history, China’s armies have never set foot on European soil, never mind marched victorious into a European capital.

The Chinese state has never colonized European cities. Looted European art does not sit in Chinese museums. Chinese people have never demanded exemption from European law, nor inserted themselves into European politics. Chinese businesses have never used the threat of Chinese naval fleets to open European markets on favourable conditions.

Certainly, China has become more assertive on the world stage in the era after the 2008 financial crash. As Beijing-based journalist Michael Schuman lays out in his book “Superpower Interrupted”, for many in China, the late 19th and 20th centuries were a period of aberration, a time when one of the world’s natural great powers was forced by colonialism, war, and internal crisis into a diminutive role.

Economic expansion since the 1980s, and the sense of perpetual crisis in the West, has allowed the Chinese leadership to reassert Beijing’s place as a potential superpower.

Yet the Western media always takes the least charitable view of any move made by Chinese leadership. Every time a Chinese fund invests in Africa, or a Chinese ship enters the South China Sea, or the Chinese government signs a security agreement with another country, Western media outlets will warn, Cassandra-like, of the impending doom of Chinese global domination.

China’s newfound assertiveness must be put in its proper geopolitical context.

For decades, the Western alliance has been at war continuously. In this same period, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on a single person.

China has just one foreign military base, in Djibouti, which is part of international anti-piracy operations. (Western governments allege that China is building another secret base in Cambodia. It is not clear if this is true, but even if it is, that means Beijing has a mere two foreign military bases.)

The United States, on the other hand, has some 800 foreign military bases in more than 70 countries.

Even the United Kingdom, a country with a total population smaller than the membership of the Communist Party of China, dwarves Beijing in foreign base totals.

China is not involved in regime-change operations. And unlike the United States, it does not seek to assassinate foreign leaders.

While several countries on China’s borders suffer under stifling economic sanctions, which bring death and misery to untold numbers, none of these sanctions were initiated by China.

Judged by any metric, China is by far the least aggressive of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and is the only member not currently involved in a war.

China poses no threat to the West

Given these historical and contemporary geopolitical realities, there is no basis for anyone in the US or Europe to consider China a national security threat.

The United Kingdom and Europe as a whole face manifold issues, from the effects of climate change, to the energy crisis, to entrenched inequality, to an ongoing public health crisis. None of these can rightly be blamed on China building bridges in Africa or developing security arrangements in the Pacific.

What truly motivates British political leaders to feel this way can be gleaned from passing comments made by figures like Tom Tugendhat, one of the candidates in the Conservative leadership contest.

Tugendhat was the long-time chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and the co-founder of the China Research Group (CRG), a self-appointed Beijing watchdog.

In response to a question by Quartz about why he saw the rise of China as such a threat, Tugendhat responded:

The UK, by accident of history, was fundamental to the writing of the operating system of the global system from 1700 through to 1990, and the UK economy, more than almost any other, was built on the basis of it…

We therefore have a choice, which is, do we defend the system upon which our prosperity is built?

In other words, the UK’s economic prosperity still rests on the system that came out of the colonial period, and China represents a credible challenge to that colonial legacy.

The “threat” felt in Western capitals, then, is not of Chinese gunboats on the Thames, but of something much less tangible. The return of China to superpower status is not a threat so much for what Beijing will or will not do, but of what this represents for Western hegemony.

As Tugendhat put it, since the 19th century, the West – and particularly the UK and the USA – have used their status as the pre-eminent imperial powers to write a rule book of their own design.

This is often euphemistically called the “rules-based international order”, but amounts to nothing more that the fruits of centuries of colonialism.

China, with its 1.4 billion population, huge economy, and strong state, is the first credible challenge to that Western colonial framework since the end of the first cold war.

Indeed, given China’s integration into the global economy, and the parallel rise of other nations in the Global South, this may be the greatest challenge to the colonial order since the Age of Victoria.

The fear among Western policy-makers is real, but the concern is not that Europe will be dominated by China; instead, it is a fear that China’s rise means the end of European domination.

After all, the long, bloody, and exploitative history of European involvement in Asia, Africa, and much of the Americas gives the people of the Global South little reason to remain loyal to their old colonial masters, even if they try to forcibly return the gunboats to port.

*

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***

Beginning on September 20, the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly held its annual gathering in New York City.

This multilateral institution has its origins in 1945 after the conclusion of the second world war where tens of millions of people were killed and displaced resulting in a restructured international balance of political and economic forces.

With the United States emerging in the postwar period as the leading capitalist and imperialist country in the world, it was not surprising that the headquarters was eventually established in New York after its initial assembly in San Francisco. At that time, the majority of peoples and nations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean remained under the yoke of imperialism.

However, during the latter war years and with fury after its conclusion, the national liberation movements erupted demanding independence and freedom for the oppressed colonies and semi-colonies. Today in the third decade of the 21st century there are 193 countries recognized by the UN encompassing all of the continents and many island-nations.

Nonetheless, the media coverage of the UN General Assembly within the U.S. largely focused on the address delivered by President Joe Biden. His remarks were heavily centered on continuing the proxy war against the Russian Federation in Ukraine.

At no point during the Biden speech did he put forward any viable peace initiatives for Ukraine to end the fighting. Neither did Biden suggest a different tone towards the People’s Republic of China which has been provoked by the trips to Taiwan by leading members of the U.S. Congress in recent months.

Biden began his remarks on September 21 by denigrating Moscow and its motivations. He said in part:

“Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter — no more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force.  Again, just today, President Putin has made overt nuclear threats against Europe and a reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the non-proliferation regime. Now Russia is calling — calling up more soldiers to join the fight.  And the Kremlin is organizing a sham referenda to try to annex parts of Ukraine, an extremely significant violation of the U.N. Charter.”

Biden whose approval rating in the latest polls has him enjoying just 41% support among the electorate in the U.S. The majority of people in the country, some 84%, are concerned about the worsening economic crisis and have almost no faith in the capacity of the current administration to enact policies to stem inflation and provide adequate housing, education and other necessities of life in the near future.

The U.S. is Answered by Many Nations

Of course, Washington was the focus of the address by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the UNGA. Lavrov repudiated Biden’s accusations and pointed to a long list of atrocities which have resulted from U.S. foreign policy in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

A summary of the official speech before the UNGA notes:

“SERGEY V. LAVROV, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, said the United States, declaring victory in the cold war, has behaved as if it has the sacred right to act with impunity whenever and wherever it wants.  Recalling the war of aggression — in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya — which claimed many hundreds of thousands of lives, he also asked: ‘What is the outcome of the adventurism of the United States in the Middle East?  Has the human rights situation improved?  Is the rule of law better?  Has the socioeconomic situation stabilized?’… The incapacity of Western countries to negotiate and the continued war by the Kyiv regime against their own people left Moscow with no choice but to recognize the independence of the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics and start a special military operation to protect the Russian and other people in Donbas, he stressed.  He also underlined the intention to remove the threat against Russian security which NATO has been consistently creating in Ukraine.  For the Anglo‑Saxons, Ukraine is just an expandable material, as they are fighting against the Russian Federation.”

Several African representatives, following the consensus of the 55 member-states African Union (AU), continued to demand the expansion of the Security Council which only has five permanent members: the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China. Although the African continent has 1.4 billion people, there is no permanent presence on the Security Council while states with far less population are represented.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs Awatif El Tidjani Ahmed Koboro of Chad said to the UNGA:

“On the reform of the Security Council, the body responsible for peace and international security, Chad once again urges member states to move from rhetoric to action in order to achieve the said reform and correct the historic injustice towards the African continent, which excludes it from full and equal participation in this body.”

The Federal Republic of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, had already gone on record demanding that two permanent seats be allocated on the UN Security Council to Africa. The general theme of many African, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian-Pacific states was that they had concerns other than those being promoted by the U.S. and other allied European governments.

Acting Prime Minister of Mali, Abdoulaye Maiga, blasted the former colonial power of France saying that the policies of Paris towards Africa were unacceptable. Maiga said to the West:

“Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable. Your intimidations and subversive actions have only swelled the ranks of Africans concerned with preserving their dignity.”

In a speech from the leader of the Caribbean island-nation of Barbados, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, the stateswoman laid bare the inequalities related to international finance which served to perpetuate the underdevelopment of the Global South. A summary of her address said of the present conditions of the developing states:

“Mia Amor Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, urged world leaders to ‘use the power of the pen’ and impose natural disaster and pandemic clauses in developing countries’ debt, as well as remove the current barriers to accessing financial assistance from multilateral development banks…. During her speech, Ms. Mottley spoke extensively about the need to reform the ageing global financial architecture to better reflect today’s realities, for instance making it easier for climate-stricken countries to access capital. Indeed, the Bretton Woods Agreement that gave rise to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘no longer serve the purpose in the 21st century that they served in the 20th century,’ she said.”

Another Caribbean island-nation, the Republic of Cuba, was the subject of several leaders who called for the lifting of the U.S.-imposed blockade of the socialist state. This call was made by the South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor along with the President of the Republic of Namibia, Gage Geingob.

The Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez spoke on the vast inequalities prevailing in the existing world system dominated by the western industrialized states:

“Never has humankind had this wealth of scientific and technical potential that it has now, neither has it ever had the extraordinary capacity than it does now to create wealth and well-being. However, never has the world been so unequal in terms of just how much people suffer.”

Rodrigues cited statistics indicating that some 828 million people are going to bed hungry every night and that around 50 million children suffer from stunting while joblessness will impact 207 million persons in 2022. Despite the more than sixty years of the blockade by Washington, Cuba is able to conduct international solidarity in the areas of education, healthcare and humanitarian assistance to peoples throughout the globe.

The progressive African states also called for the liberation of Palestine and the Western Sahara, where the U.S. has sponsored the continued national oppression of these peoples so deserving of self-determination and independence. In addition to the call for the recognition of the right to self determination for the oppressed, there was equal emphasis on the responsibility of the industrial states as it relates to climate change. The next UN Climate Conference (COP27) will be held in November in Egypt where African states are preparing to put forward unified positions on the current environmental crisis.

These and other features of the UNGA illustrated that the struggle for a just world in the current period remains the preoccupation of billions throughout the globe. Working and oppressed peoples within the western capitalist states must recognize the inextricable links between their own well being and that of the majority of humanity in the Global South.

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

Featured image: Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez addresses UNGA 77 in NYC 2022 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

U.S. Act of War Against the European Union: Did President Biden Order the Terror Attack Against Nord Stream?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 28, 2022

In a televised news February 7, 2022 interview the President of the United States acknowledged that the United States would act against Nord Stream if required. This statement was made 3 weeks prior to the Russian invasion.

JAMA: mRNA Vaccine Shedding in Breast Milk Proven!

By Igor Chudov, September 29, 2022

The times are changing! Remember how we said that vaccine shedding is a real thing and breastfeeding after vaccination is dangerous? Our warnings were dismissed as “misinformation” and we were cast as ignorant, science-denying cranks.

Famous Pro-Vaccine Doctor Suspects Pfizer Booster Shot Sent His Cancer Into Overdrive

By Dr. Suzanne Burdick, September 29, 2022

After realizing his COVID-19 booster shot may have sent his cancer into overdrive, Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said going public with the information was the “right thing to do.”

The Anglo-American Axis vs. Eurasia: The Nord Stream Terrorist Attack in the Baltic Sea

By Andrew Korybko, September 28, 2022

This terrorist attack destroyed any chance of an energy-driven Russian-German rapprochement, immediately catapulted Poland into the position of being one of the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, and thus took the Anglo-American Axis’ plans for dividing and ruling Europe to the next level.

NATO-US Prime Suspects in Nordstream Gas Leaks

By Kurt Nimmo, September 28, 2022

Increasingly, it is relatively easy to put two and two together and figure out who is behind certain cui bono operations. The latest case in point is the “mysterious” Nordstream 1 and 2 massive gas leaks. As of this writing, the corporate propaganda media has not blamed Russia for the dangerous leaks, but they will probably get around to it sooner before later.

How America Is Crushing Europe

By Eric Zuesse, September 28, 2022

America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.

A Fateful Moment of History Is Upon Us

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 28, 2022

The Kremlin has limited its military operations to the areas in Ukraine where the majority Russian population was being shelled, occupied, and murdered by Ukrainian forces and which faced last February an invasion of a large Western-trained Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias intended to overthrow the two independent Donbass republics recognized  by the Russian government. 

Nothing Is More Inexcusable Than War and the Call to Hatred of Nations. Albert Camus

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, September 28, 2022

Russia is a thorn in the eye of the capitalist system and the capitalist system cannot exist without war. The West has not only been opposed to the East since the Ukraine war and calls for hatred of nations. It has been fighting against it for a long time with all permissible and impermissible means. The danger of nuclear war as an “ultima ratio” (last, extreme means) or as America’s plan to win the Third World War is great.

Cholera and US Sanctions Killing Syrian Civilians

By Steven Sahiounie, September 28, 2022

On September 23, the Al Qaeda-occupied area in Idlib Province reported the first confirmed case of cholera in the last terrorist-controlled area in Syria. The deadly outbreak has claimed 39 lives in Syria, with thousands of suspected cases across the country.

U.S. Blew Up Russian Gas Pipelines Nord Stream 1 & 2, Says Former Polish Defense Minister

By Michael Shellenberger, September 28, 2022

A former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, has attributed to the United States the sabotage of two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Thank you, USA,” Sikorski wrote on Twitter. Sikorski was Minister of National Defense from 2005 – 2007 and served as Deputy Minister of National Defense and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, previously.

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The times are changing! Remember how we said that vaccine shedding is a real thing and breastfeeding after vaccination is dangerous? Our warnings were dismissed as “misinformation” and we were cast as ignorant, science-denying cranks.

Well, now the Journal of American Medical Association published a letter (archive link) that proved conclusively that mRNA vaccine shedding is real! The vaccine mRNA is indeed shed in breast milk and is affecting babies that receive said milk.

This letter provides lab results proving that concerns of the so-called “antivaxxers” were fully justified!

The JAMA letter is quite simple. Scientists picked 11 lactating women, who received Pfizer (6 women) or Moderna (5 women) vaccines during lactation.

After vaccination, breast milk was analyzed for the presence of mRNA nanoparticles. Not surprisingly, 7 samples were POSITIVE for the presence of mRNA.

The authors also point out that the promises of mRNA vaccines that “vaccine stays in the shoulder” were lies. The vaccine traveled to the breasts and was transferred into breast milk.

These data demonstrate for the first time to our knowledge the biodistribution of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA to mammary cells and the potential ability of tissue EVs to package the vaccine mRNA that can be transported to distant cells.

Little has been reported on lipid nanoparticle biodistribution and localization in human tissues after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.

Despite that, the authors say the following, possibly to get their letter past the JAMA censors:

The sporadic presence and trace quantities of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA detected in EBM suggest that breastfeeding after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is safe, particularly beyond 48 hours after vaccination.

Your first reading of the above sentence might suggest that the authors said “COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is safe”. But it is ominously qualified with “particularly beyond 48 hours after vaccination”, plainly meaning that breastfeeding within 48 hours after vaccination is NOT safe.

It is sad that researchers have to say things (it is safe and effective) that contradict the plain meaning of this article (women shed mRNA nanoparticles on their infants). Our friend Modern Discontent recently posted a great guide to reading scientific papers, where he also lamented how article conclusions often contradict article data. This article is a perfect example of that, and there is plenty more of such examples in the Covid world.

This is why paying attention to what the article says, beyond platitudes, is paramount.

Wildly Differing Concentrations of mRNA make it MORE Dangerous

Look at this chart showing concentrations of mRNA in milk. The worst concentration was EIGHT TIMES the lowest concentration. This means that likely, in a larger sample of women, the disparity between highest and lowest values would be even greater.

What is the deadly concentration of mRNA that could cause the death of an infant in the Pfizer trial (see below)? Nobody knows and the FDA does not care.

The detection limit (per supplement) was 1 pg/mL. What if levels just below 1 pg/mL could be harmful? We have no idea.

Dead Infant

Confidential Pfizer documents, which the FDA wanted to hide from us for 75 years, show a case of an infant, possibly killed by mRNA nanoparticles shed by a recently vaccinated mother.

The “neonatal death” and numerous other neonatal problems in infants exposed to vaccinated mothers’ breast milk are discussed in my article above.

Astute reader ChrisCoonsToupee located the VAERS entry for this dead infant.

They Lied to Us 

Remember how we were assured that “vaccines are safe for mothers”?

Turned out that not only they were NOT safe, but also that the fact-checkers and authorities outright lied about safety, since they studiously avoided collecting any data that would confirm it! They also IGNORED Pfizer’s own reports of 17 neonatal problems and wanted to hide that for 75 years.

Now we know WHAT they wanted to hide.

They could have done this simple study two years ago. But they did not even bother to conduct such a trivial check! Why?

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Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky boasted in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview which aired Sunday that Washington is providing him with a whopping $1.5 billion per month for state coffers as the country piles up a large war-time deficit.

“The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight” against Russia the Ukrainian leader explained, but pointed out there remains “a deficit of $5 billion in our budget.” He immediately pivoted to repeating Kyiv’s longtime complaint that it’s not enough – because it’s never enough – though by and large the common American taxpayer seems oblivious amid the onslaught of constant war headlines.

Zelensky said, after revealing the astonishing $1.5 billion in aid on a monthly basis figure, “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”

“If it’s safe, they will come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won’t have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody,” the Ukrainian leader continued. “Because as of today the United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight- fight this war. However, if our people will come back- and they do want to come back very much, they have a lot of motivation- they will work here.”

“And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support,” he concluded, though the way things are going it could be years before the US might “not have to continue” the nonstop aid. Zelensky appeared to be trying to present a strange “win-win” for American, though again if average US taxpayers grasped the full enormity of it, they certainly might question that narrative.

Ironically, or tiresomely, just a day after Zelensky complained “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough”… Congress is poised to push through another $12 billion, according Reuters.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson says, This is insane!…

“Negotiators to a stop-gap spending bill in the U.S. Congress have agreed to include about $12 billion in new aid to Ukraine in response to a request from the Biden administration, a source familiar with the talks said on Monday,” Reuters detailed. “Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden asked Congress to provide $11.7 billion in new emergency military and economic aid for Ukraine.”

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It should be recalled that it was only in July that the Associated Press and NPR called attention to a hugely inconvenient fact and problem which never went away:

As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine’s suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.

Those issues, which date back decades and were not an insignificant part of former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, had been largely pushed to the back burner in the immediate run-up to Russia’s invasion and during the first months of the conflict as the U.S. and its partners rallied to Ukraine’s defense.

But Zelenskyy’s weekend firings of his top prosecutor, intelligence chief and other senior officials have resurfaced those concerns and may have inadvertently given fresh attention to allegations of high-level corruption in Kyiv made by one outspoken U.S. lawmaker.

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After realizing his COVID-19 booster shot may have sent his cancer into overdrive, Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said going public with the information was the “right thing to do.”

Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, suspects his third dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may have sent his cancer into overdrive.

Goldman, 67, is one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research and a lifelong promoter of vaccines.

But he told The Atlantic he wants discussion of the COVID-19 vaccine to be transparent — so he went public about his suspicion that the Pfizer booster shot he received on Sept. 22, 2021, may have induced rapid progression of his angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL), a type of lymphoma he’d been diagnosed with before he got the booster shot.

After his diagnosis, Goldman said he rushed to get the booster shot, believing he would need it more than most people because once he started chemotherapy, his immune system would be compromised.

But after receiving the shot, Goldman’s follow-up CT scan showed something unexpected: Within only a few days, his cancer had grown so fast that cancerous points were lighting up all over his scan.

“It looked like someone had set off fireworks inside Michel’s body,” The Atlantic reported.

Goldman and his brother, Serge Goldman, a fellow scientist and head of nuclear medicine at the teaching hospital of the Université libre de Bruxelles, suspected Goldman’s COVID-19 booster shot may have triggered the rapid proliferation of cancerous growth in his body.

The initial CT scan had been “a bit disturbing,” Serge Goldman told The Atlantic, because it showed an asymmetrical cluster of cancerous nodes around Goldman’s left armpit, where Michel’s first two doses of vaccine had been delivered.

The CT scan done after Michel’s third dose showed the cancer’s asymmetry had flipped and was clustered by his right armpit, where he received the third shot.

The brothers knew it could be a mere coincidence, but they thought it was important to investigate the possibility that the vaccine might be behind the clustering — because it could mean other people with certain forms of cancer might be at risk of a COVID-19 vaccine causing their cancer to progress more rapidly.

So on Nov. 25, 2021, the brothers — who had written prior papers together — and other colleagues published a case report in which they described Michel Goldman’s experience and urged the scientific community to study the phenomenon to see if it occurred in patients diagnosed with AITL.

“Since nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines strongly activate T follicular helper cells, it is important to explore the possible impact of approved SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines on neoplasms affecting this cell type,” the authors wrote.

The brothers said the case study “suggests that vaccination with the [Pfizer-BioNTech] BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine might induce rapid progression of AITL.”

They noted, however, that it would be “premature” to extrapolate the findings from Michel Goldman’s case to other patients with the same kind of cancer and that “dedicated studies are needed.”

Going public was ‘the right thing to do’

Michel Goldman’s case study added to the scientific literature that aims to understand the relationships between mRNA vaccines and the functioning of helper T-cells.

For instance, previous researchers have noted mRNA vaccines rev up helper T-cells, which may explain why Michel Goldman’s AILT went into overdrive following his third booster shot.

“Perhaps the shots gave such a jolt to his helper T cells that they went berserk,” The Atlantic reported. “If they were prone to forming tumors, or if they were already cancerous, then overstimulation could have made the problem even worse.”

Research involving body scans of some people who get mRNA vaccines — including cancer patients — shows heightened activity in the lymph nodes near the armpit on the side where the shot was received.

In February 2018, a team of researchers at Columbia University’s Institute for Cancer Genetics published a study using mice with a pair of gene mutations — the same two mutations found in Michel Goldman’s tumor — showing that the mutations predispose T-cells to go rogue.

The study also showed that when the mice were injected with red blood cells from sheep — as an experimental stand-in for invading microbes — the mice developed the same subtype of lymphoma Michel Goldman had.

Michel Goldman previously headed a $2 billion European endeavor to accelerate the research of new medicines and in December 2020, he publicly spoke out in support of the safety of mRNA vaccines — the technology used in both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

At that time, he said the highest risk — especially for vulnerable people — is not to be vaccinated and that his main concern about mRNA vaccination was that people might use the possible side effects as an argument against getting the vaccine.

He currently leads the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Healthcare, or I3h, a university hub aimed at assisting in drug-design projects.

Michel Goldman doesn’t regret going public with his case, even though it presented challenging evidence regarding the safety of mRNA vaccines for individuals such as himself.

“I’m still convinced it was the right thing to do,” he told The Atlantic.

He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are useful for the vast majority of people, but he is unsure whether he himself will get another booster dose.

“I don’t know what I will do,” he said.

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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***

Global currency and bond markets are being hit by a growing storm driven by the rise of the US dollar fuelled by interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve, which could start to shake the financial system.

The turmoil reached a new level of intensity this week, sparked by the reaction of financial markets to the UK mini-budget which handed out £45 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy while increasing government debt by £72 billion.

The reaction of the markets was to send the pound down to its lowest level in history. This led to a rapid sell-off of government bonds, sharply lifting their yields, or interest rates.

It was, in effect, a savage directive to the UK government of Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng that the handout to the wealthy had to be accompanied by deep cuts to government social spending, coupled with further suppression of wages.

Yesterday the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervened to give voice to the concerns of international finance capital, issuing what the Financial Times called a “biting attack” on the government’s plan and calling for a “re-evaluation.”

The IMF said it was “closely monitoring” developments and was “engaged with the authorities” in the UK.

“Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture,” it stated. “It is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy.”

Like other central banks, the Bank of England (BoE) is lifting interest rates, inducing a recession, to try to clamp down on workers’ wage demands as inflation reaches its highest levels in more than four decades, now at double digit levels in the UK and threatening to go even higher. The bank is also reducing its holdings of financial assets.

But while the BoE is tightening monetary policy, the government’s handouts to the wealthy are to be financed by the creation of still more debt.

The IMF statement also showed it is focused on the development of the class struggle. “The nature of the UK measures will likely increase inequality,” it said.

The IMF is very conscious that the blatant handout of billions of pounds to the rich and super-rich, lifting inequality to new record highs, will make even more difficult the task of the trade unions in suppressing the struggle for wage increases. This struggle, now being joined by ever-wider sections of the British working class, is creating the basis for a general strike against the Tory government.

There was a near universal response from the representatives of finance capital to the UK government’s measures, insisting they had to be accompanied by cuts in government spending.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said Kwarteng was gambling with the UK’s fiscal stability to push through the tax cuts “without even a semblance of an effort to make the public finance numbers add up.”

Vivek Paul, the UK chief investment strategist for the giant global hedge fund BlackRock, said the government’s moves were “just extraordinary.” The market had delivered its verdict on the government’s fiscal plans, and it was “not a good one.”

The situation is increasingly being described as a “crisis of confidence.”

For the financial system, confidence rests on two essential components: first, a belief that its political representatives have a clear plan for the overall economy and second, they can contain the most disruptive force of all—the movement of the working class. This confidence has been battered on both fronts.

Moreover, there are fears of mounting global turbulence. This is under conditions where the crisis of the British pound is the sharpest expression of the slide in all currency values against the dollar due to ongoing hikes in US interest rates. The Japanese yen is down to its lowest level in 25 years and other currencies are falling rapidly.

Those fears are focused on the bond market where prices are falling and yields are rising at an alarming rate.

In a comment yesterday, Bloomberg columnist John Authers noted: “This isn’t at core a currency crisis, but a crisis of confidence in the bond market, which is much more dangerous. The shock to gilt yields [those on UK 10-year bonds] in the last five trading days has been epic. No shock this great and this sudden has happened before.”

So far this month, the yield on the UK 10-year government bond has risen by 1.45 percentage points, the largest ever monthly rise according to data going back to 1979. In “normal” conditions rises in the order of just 0.5 percentage points, or even less, are considered large.

Authers raised the broader implications. Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, he wrote, “everyone in the asset markets has known that there is one great risk above all others—that at some point confidence would run out and the bond market would revolt, causing a disorderly rise in yields. Then the edifice would fall.”

That day of reckoning was delayed because the central banks could always print more money when they did not have to worry about inflation. Those conditions have now changed.

“The UK appears to be the first case of a truly disorderly bond selloff, where the moves are so swift that they affect the functioning of the financial system,” Authers wrote. The whole world had to watch what was happening in Britain because it was a “test case for the confidence game that’s likely to be repeated everywhere.”

And while King Dollar reigns supreme at this point, the US is not exempt from the rising global storm.

Ralph Bostic, president of the Atlanta branch of the Fed, in comments reported by the Financial Times, said the UK situation had increased uncertainty over the trajectory of the US economy.

“The key question will be, what does this mean for ultimately weakening the European economy, which is an important consideration for how the US economy is going to perform.”

Susan Collins, the incoming president of the Boston branch of the Fed, speaking at an event on Monday, warned that a significant economic or geopolitical event could push the US economy into a recession as the central bank’s monetary policy tightens.

In a comment published in the Australian Financial Review on Monday, columnist Karen Maley cited remarks by Michael Hartnett, an investment strategist at Bank of America. Hartnett warned that what Maley termed a “savage” fall in bond prices would leave investors with no choice but to liquidate “the world’s most crowded trades,” namely the US dollar, US tech stocks and private equity.

According to Maley, Hartnett pointed out that “the present market shares many of the same traits that led to the 1987 share market collapse: including a volatile geopolitical situation, abnormal US markets far outperforming the rest of the world, and a lack of international coordination.”

The only thing missing from the list, as Maley noted, was a currency crisis. That is now clearly unfolding, centring on, but by no means confined to, the British pound.

And it has a historical resonance. The crisis of the pound and the UK financial system at the end of the 1960s, was the harbinger of a dollar crisis that led in August 1971 to the decision by US President Nixon to remove the gold backing from the US currency and end the Bretton Woods monetary system established after World War II.

Much has changed since that time, but the crisis of the British pound could well be a warning of the demise of the entire system of fiat currencies, based on the US dollar, which has prevailed since the Nixon decision.

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More than 50 paid employees of global arms companies are working inside the UK’s Ministry of Defence, openDemocracy can reveal, sparking questions about conflicts of interest and national security.

They include nine staffers on long-term secondment from the UK’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, some of whom have been embedded inside the department for years.

Last year, the company made more than £4.1bn in sales from the MoD, boasting about its “strong and long-standing relationships” with the UK government. Almost all of this money was spent through contracts that were awarded without competitive tender.

The government would not say whether the secondment scheme represented a conflict of interest.

Campaigners today called on the government to come clean about lobbyists and business officials working in Westminster. The finding comes after it emerged that Liz Truss’s top aide, Mark Fullbrook, is being paid via his own lobbying firm.

Dr Michael Ofori-Mensah, head of research at Transparency International Defence and Security, said:

“Seconding industry insiders for senior Whitehall roles can provide invaluable insight, but also carries major conflict of interest risks.

“Government should do more to mitigate the risks of captured policy and procurement by establishing a comprehensive register of lobbyists and strengthening oversight of the revolving door between the public and private sector.”

Records obtained by openDemocracy show that at least four BAE officials have been based for over three years in Defence Equipment and Support, the arms-length government body that purchases military goods and services from companies like BAE.

A further six MoD staff are on secondment from Qinetiq, a huge defence technology company, while Rolls-Royce and Babcock have supplied at least two staffers each.

But other officials installed in the ministry appear to have been lost in the system, with no record of who is paying them. Responding to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the department admitted it could not identify the employers of at least 23 people currently there on secondment.

A spokesperson did not respond directly to openDemocracy’s questions about why this had happened and whether it could represent a national security risk.

Meanwhile, employees of seven arms companies including BAE, Leonardo and MBDA are currently on secondments at the Department for International Trade (DIT), documents obtained by openDemocracy show.

The DIT did not disclose what roles the staff had been seconded to work in, but confirmed they were largely concentrated in the UK Defence Security and Export directorate, which helps weapons companies sell arms abroad.

A government spokesperson told openDemocracy the secondments were part of “a long-standing arrangement designed to encourage better collaboration and improve technical expertise”. They added that all secondees work under normal civil service rules and are subject to “robust security checks”.

Dr Sam Perlo-Freeman, research coordinator at Campaign Against the Arms Trade, said the setup showed how “deeply embedded” the weapons industry is in government.

“The very department charged with regulating arms exports has representatives of the arms industry at its heart,” he said.

“The government essentially treats the industry’s interests as its own, with tragic consequences for victims of conflict and repression in Yemen and worldwide.”

BAE, Leonardo and MBDA have all exported weapons to Saudi Arabia that have subsequently been used in its war in Yemen. All three companies were named as parties to alleged Saudi war crimes in a complaint by human rights groups to the International Criminal Court.

The complaint states that aircraft, missiles and other arms supplied by the companies “contributed to the capacity” of the Saudi-led coalition, which is accused of bombing schools, hospitals and civilians.

BAE Systems alone has sold £15bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia – including Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets – since the conflict in Yemen began in 2015. Last year it brought in nearly £2.5bn in sales to the country, providing “operational capability support” for Saudi air and naval forces”.

A spokesperson for the company said that its work for Saudi Arabia “does not involve the company in military operational activity and our people are not involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties”.

She added:

“A handful of our employees are seconded to roles in government to help increase understanding of our complex industry… Seconded employees are subject to strict confidentiality and proprietary rules to prevent any possible conflict of interest.”

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***

This terrorist attack destroyed any chance of an energy-driven Russian-German rapprochement, immediately catapulted Poland into the position of being one of the continent’s most pivotal energy hubs, and thus took the Anglo-American Axis’ plans for dividing and ruling Europe to the next level.

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***

Increasingly, it is relatively easy to put two and two together and figure out who is behind certain cui bono operations. The latest case in point is the “mysterious” Nordstream 1 and 2 massive gas leaks.

As of this writing, the corporate propaganda media has not blamed Russia for the dangerous leaks, but they will probably get around to it sooner before later.

Meanwhile, here is blue check Radek Sikorski, a member of the European Parliament for Poland, expressing his gratitude on Twitter:

Thank you, USA. pic.twitter.com/nALlYQ1Crb

— Radek Sikorski MEP (@radeksikorski) September 27, 2022

Now why would Mr. Sikorski post such a thing? Because he’s a Russian-hating neocon, a former resident fellow of the organized war crime outfit, the American Enterprise Institute. He was also the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a “nonpartisan” organization determined to push NATO right up to all exposed sides of Russia.

His wife, Anne Applebaum, is even more strident and anti-Russian. In fact, she has made a career trashing Russia. A “reformed Jew,” she was educated at the Quaker established Sidwell Friends School, described as “the Harvard of Washington’s private schools.” Sidwell has “educated” the children of notable war criminals, including Obama, Clinton, Al Gore, Nixon’s daughters, and the grandchildren of Joe Biden, no doubt to make sure their misanthropic agenda moves forward.

Applebaum has spent a large portion of her despicable career thus far serving the empire. She covered the fall of the Soviet Union for The Economist and The Independent. She was neck-deep in neoliberal propaganda operations at The Spectator as deputy editor and also political editor at the Evening Standard. She was a member of The Washington Post (think CIA, Philip Graham, and Operation Mockingbird) editorial board. As if all of that was not enough, she is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and became a George Herbert Walker Bush/Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. I wrote about Springer and his propaganda media operations in a previous post.

Ambitious and aggressive in her hatred of Russia, Applebaum is the author of numerous anti-Russian books with titles such as “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” and “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe.” She routinely wins big-name literary awards for her anti-Russian propaganda.

Considering the praise of methanol poisoning in the Baltic Sea by Applebaum’s Polish hubby—following seismic recordings of explosions near the pipelines—and the rabid hatred of Russia they both share in addition to their high and influential positions, it is fair to conclude NATO and the US are behind the explosions and release of toxic gas.

Russia, which has spent billions on the Nordstream 1 pipeline and its as of yet (and possibly never) functional sister, Nordstream 2, has zero reason to blow up its own meticulously constructed pipeline.

However, NATO and the apparatchiks at the EU have an interest in freezing Germany this winter. If they can get the German people angry enough and this antipathy spreads across Europe, we may very well see NATO directly confronting Russia on its own land, most notably the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine (following ongoing referendums to join the Russian Federation), the chance many of us will starve during a protracted nuclear winter increases ten-fold.

I’m sure Sikorski and her neocon wife have a space reserved in the bunker. I’m not sure if they were told they may have to stay down there for the rest of their lives, maybe dining on those insects pushed by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. It is often said cockroaches will be the inheritors after a nuclear war.

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***

Joe Biden and his handlers are building a structure to censor facts and opinions contrary to Joe’s teleprompter-read neoliberal talking points. Simply imposing censorship and arresting activists as “extremists,” minus a nasty pretense, would undoubtedly elicit outrage and politically activate pushback from an increasingly shrinking number of Americans who actually use their brains to arrive at conclusions while navigating a tidal wave of propaganda.

The FBI, essentially America’s political enforcers, are the force majeure behind this effort. Regardless, a number of members have recently stepped forward to set the record straight on what the state and its enforcers have designated as extremism and terrorism.

“Rank-and-file FBI agents are accusing the Biden administration of exaggerating the threat of White supremacists and pressuring agents to cook up domestic terrorist cases involving racist extremists,” write Kerry Picket and Jospeh Clark.

“Current and former FBI agents told The Washington Times that the perceived White supremacist threat is overblown by the administration. They said top bureau officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics.”

One anonymous agent pointed out that there are more people at the agency focused on “white supremacism” than there are actual white supremacists.

The truth about Biden’s White Supremacy. FBI can not find any. It is all a DEM hoax. https://t.co/M4PUbAjRHM

— Mike (@MGupdate) September 23, 2022

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

Notice no mention of white supremacy in the above statement. That’s because white supremacy is an excuse to target other, legitimate forms of protest and opposition. It is used because most people find racism reprehensible.

On the other hand, the FBI apparently cherishes its dog whistle “racists” who are essentially agents provocateurs, most notably radio talkshow host Ted Turner.

More than a decade ago, I wrote:

Radio talk show host and blogger Hal Turner was an FBI trained agent provocateur, his attorney told reporters in Hartford [August 18, 2009]. The supposed white supremacist worked for the agency from 2002 until 2007. “His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest,” Michael Orozco told the Associated Press.

The article I wrote originally appeared on Infowars and Prison Planet. The above link in the byline of the repost now points to an ad for an old Alex Jones documentary. I am persona non grata at both websites and I imagine a lot of the work I did there has made it to the memory hole.

But let’s not wander off track.

As the case against Turner and the revelations of his attorney reveal, the government did not abandon its COINTELPRO tactics, as it claimed in the mid 1970s. The FBI, acting as the establishment’s political secret police, continues to undermine political movements the elite consider dangerous and a threat to their control and influence.

Recall, I wrote the above  more than a decade ago, and since that time the situation has grown far worse, predictably so under the mentally compromised Joe Biden.

The FBI infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s.

“During the 1960’s, the FBI’s role was not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror,” the authors of “COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story.”

Church Committee hearings and internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants. However, Bureau intelligence “assets” were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964.

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. Needless to say, the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan’s fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator’s loyalty and commitment.

The report, nearly impossible to find on the internet, notes the FBI established “dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than ‘blow his cover.’ One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, ‘We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.’”

In other words, the FBI was a prime motivator in racist violence, same as it has more recently worked behind the scenes to fabricate Islamic terror groups.

In the 1960s, the FBI specialized in disrupting and destroying constitutionally legal protest groups and activists. Much of the violence our “historians” now attribute to leftist radicals of the period was in fact the product of FBI interference:

Many details are now available concerning these extensive campaigns of terror and disruption, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups organized and financed by the national government, but primarily through the much more effective means of infiltration and provocation of existing groups. In particular, much of the violence that occurred on college campuses can be attributed to government provocateurs. (Emphasis added.)

Political provocation runs back to antiquity. However, it became far more effective under the Sûreté nationale, the French national police, and under the direction of the criminal Eugène François Vidocq in the early 1800s. He was appointed by Emperor Napoleon to form the Brigade de la Sûreté (“Security Brigade”) to undermine political opposition, most notably during the French Restoration (the installation of the House of Bourbon). In the 1820s, the excessively reactionary monarchy of Charles X gave a steroid boost to this secret police designed to crush all dissent. So important was this task to the monarch, he often had Vidocq pull police off regular duty to help destroy dissent.

Since that time, not much has changed beyond the addition of technology and the creation of a powerful national security state. The CIA, in particular since the outset of the so-called war on terror, has embedded itself in police departments, most notably the NYPD. The nation’s largest police department dispatched agents provocateurs in protests during the 2004 Republican Convention, while Denver police used “undercover agents” to instigate violence against police during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

The effort by the state to tar and feather legitimate protest as criminality and terrorism received a boost under the cognitively impaired 46th president. This is a Democrat organized effort (both “parties,” however, have equally engaged this illegal behavior). He embraced and adopted, for instance, the magnificent absurdity that all “extreme right-wing” behavior is motivated by racism and disgust of the pretzel logic embraced by Democrats (for instance, that humans can willy-nilly decide what gender they are, despite indisputable biology, and that folks with a lack of skin pigmentation are somehow born racist and “privileged”).

Are you fucking kidding me? If she was around in the 60s, she would have been in the cointelpro. https://t.co/IVKVWDC2L2

— Paul Hogarth (@paulhogarth) September 23, 2022

This insanity is not so much a political philosophy (although millions of “liberal” adherents believe it to be so) as a psychological operation to divide citizens and promote the idea we are on the verge of a “civil war,” which is nonsense.

Inventing such a scenario, and having agent provocateurs perform acts leading to one half of Americans believing the other half is seditious (and vice versa), will result in further political repression and, eventually, the trashing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under martial law or something similar.

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***

America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.

Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.

Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.

The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).

Europe’s leaders have cooperated with America’s leaders, to cause this European decline (by joining, instead of rejecting, America’s sanctions against Russia), but Germany’s companies can also enjoy significant benefits from relocating or expanding in America. Germany’s business daily newspaper, Handlelsblatt, reported, on September 25th, “More and more German companies are expanding their locations in North America: Washington attracts German companies with cheap energy and low taxes. This applies above all to the southern states. Berlin is alarmed – and wants to take countermeasures.”

(Original: “Immer mehr deutsche Unternehmen bauen ihre Standorte in Nordamerika aus: Washington lockt deutsche Firmen mit billiger Energie und niedrigen Steuern. Das gilt vor allem für die Südstaaten. Berlin ist alarmiert – und will gegensteuern.”)

It says that:

“Numerous German companies are planning to set up or expand their U.S. locations. … U.S. states such as Virginia, Georgia, and Oklahoma, show increasing interest” in offering special inducements for these firms to relocate, or to at least expand, their production in the U.S. For example, Pat Wilson, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, tells German companies that,

“Our energy costs are low, and the networks are stable. … Companies coming to Georgia [from Germany] are reducing their carbon footprint.”

Considering that one of the major reasons why Germany’s Government is squeezing-out Russia’s fuel-supplies (other than to ‘support democracy in Ukraine’, etc.) is that those Russian supplies are fossil fuels, an important benefit by which America can attract European firms (even on the basis of ‘Green’ arguments) is by advertising bigger ‘energy efficiency’ than in Europe — not necessarily in a strictly environmental sense, but definitely in the bottom-line sense, of lowered energy-costs, since America’s regulations are far less strict than in the EU. 

Also on the 25th, the Irish Examiner bannered

“European industry buckles under weight of soaring energy prices: Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest carmaker, warned last week that it could reallocate production out of Germany and eastern Europe if energy prices don’t come down.”

Also on the 25th, Oil Price dot com headlined “Europe Faces An Exodus Of Energy-Intensive Industries”, and mentioned especially that

“the U.S. Steel giant ArcelorMittal said earlier this month that it would slash by half production at a steel mill in Germany and a unit at another plant, also in Germany. The company said it had based the decision on high gas prices. … ArcelorMittal earlier this year announced it had plans to expand a Texas operation.”

On September 26th, the New York Times bannered

“Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s: U.S. manufacturing is experiencing a rebound, with companies adding workers amid high consumer demand for products.”

In total, “As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above prepandemic levels.” And this is only the start of America’s re-industrialization and economic recovery, because the hemorrhaging of jobs from Europe has only just begun. These German firms are getting in on the ground floor in America, leaving Europe’s workers behind, to swim or sink on their own (the ones that can).

Also on September 26th, Thomas Fazi at unherd dot com headlined “The EU is sleepwalking into anarchy: Its sanctions are crippling the bloc’s working class”, and documented that this hollowing-out of Europe’s economies is being experienced the most by Europe’s lower economic classes, who are the least capable of dealing with it but are being abandoned by the higher-wealth group, the investors, who are sending their money abroad, like banana-republic oligarchs do, and who might easily relocate themselves there too. 

On September 19th, the New York Times headlined

“‘Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark: Manufacturers are furloughing workers and shutting down lines because they can’t pay the gas and electric charges.”

For example, a major employer in northern France, Arc International glass factory, doesn’t know whether they will survive:

“Nicholas Hodler, the chief executive, surveyed the assembly line, shimmering blue with natural gas flames [gas that came from Russia and that now costs ten times as much as just a year ago]. For years, Arc had been powered by cheap energy that helped turn the company into the world’s largest producer of glass tableware. … But the impact of Russia’s abrupt cutoff of gas to Europe [forced by the sanctions] has doused the business with new risks. Energy prices have climbed so fast that Mr. Hodler has had to rewrite business forecasts six times in two months. Recently, he put a third of Arc’s 4,500 employees on partial furlough to save money. Four of the factory’s nine furnaces will be idled; the others will be switched from natural gas to diesel, a cheaper but more polluting fuel.”

The “Green” Parties throughout Europe, such as in the persons of Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and Germany’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck, had led the European movement against importing Russian fuels, and could turn out to have led Europe actually to increase its carbon footprint, if the end result turns out to be to switch to more coal and diesel fuels, as they now are doing.

It could not have happened without the leaderships both in America and in Europe, who are leading the way for Europe’s economies to decline, and for America’s to boom from this — attracting more and more investors, and their investments, into America, from the U.S. regime’s vassal-nations (such as Germany and France), especially in the EU and NATO (these new banana-republics). The beneficiaries of all this are not only America’s weapons-manufacturing firms, such as Lockheed Martin, and extraction firms such as ExxonMobil, that are growing because of the plunge in Europe that’s due to Europe’s cutting itself off from the cheap energy that it had formerly enjoyed. The future is opening up again, for investors in the United States. It’s come-one, come-all, to investors from Europe, and leaving everyone else in Europe simply to sink, if they can’t get out. 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

This Tory fundamentalist arch villain is surely not Boris, as lamentable as his politics is. In her tenure at the Home Office, Priti Patel was clearly and decisively heading for fascist status, triangulating policy to attack the most vulnerable. 

A political paradox: spontaneously but according to plan, as if to repudiate the idea and ideal of rational policy making, we Brits, a multicultural tapestry borne aloft by our blood, sweat and dreams, seem to generate absolute hatred in the shrivelling heart of Home Secretary Priti Patel, hatred distilled in her cruel, reactionary policy targeted at vulnerable minorities. At an immigration raid, I remember her crowing glee as she watched the lives of a vulnerable group of people ruined, they destined to land in a Serco run carceral unit that stands juxtaposed to the spirit of goodwill in human rights law. She’s spent the whole of her entire tenure repeatedly emerging from the throne of hell with a – frankly fascist – agenda, reconstituted into palatable form for people who still watch and trust the news. Fuhrer Patel’s hate mongering we have no time for, appealing to and unleashing and pandering to the worst aspects of humanity.

There is her persecutory, dehumanising mistreatment of immigrants for a start, then she presided over deeply oppressive policing and protest legislation, a veritable clusterfuck of attacks on peaceful assembly, essentially illegalising it, a counterstrategic manoeuvre to neutralise the threat of extinction rebellion to the carbon-wed establishment. A grueling flight to Rwanda to facilities whose safety has not been determined awaits those whose cultural heritage is not deemed compatible with the mythic, illusionary “British” identity, an insincere neo-Tory attempt to exhume one nation conservatism. Rich immigrants, however, are safe from extradition. The pattern seems to be: No poverty, no ostracism. Persecution for persecutions sake.

An authentic testimony to the cruelty of Patel is the data on her on Wikileaks, a repository of information which has a reputation for 100% accuracy. The Wikileaks data confirms she is a creature incapable of pity and capable of vast terror. Tragically for the reputation of Britain on human rights, she welcomed sponsorship for the 2012 Olympics from Dow Chemical, the inventors of agent orange and white phosphorus, she tacitly endorsing the human rights atrocities they provide ammunition for. It must be this that accounts for our basis of appraising Patel, the dirty deals done through exposure to, sympathy for and allyship with corrupt corporate lobbyists.

There used to be, at one point, meaningful influence for UK voters over parliamentary representatives and public policy. Lobbyists, while some are ethical, are largely corrosive to democracy and dominate the public policy process. The register of political discourse is banal rhetoric, inscribed with duplicity. There used to be, if you remember, government and legislation with a popular mandate, Parliament as embodiment of “the will of the people” based on the electorate’s choices at the ballot box, a time before politics as high drama, a perpetual trainwreck driven by carousing mega-egos into dystopia.

The force of the UK press recently has been largely focused on scrutinising the malfeasance of Boris Johnson in his blatant, nauseating contempt for Parliament and the British public. In this atmosphere, the arguably more dangerous – if that’s possible- cabinet member, Priti Patel, has largely evaded scrutiny. A perfunctory glimpse at the data Wikileaks have on her suggests we henceforth scrutinise her more closely. The data revealed that some Labour grandees did act with due diligence and focus on the Dow deal in their quest for accountability and transparency at the time, but this signal was mistaken for mere noise and so the dodgy deal was not widely acknowledged.

As a citizen journalist it is my responsibility to document the hidden realities of power that are purposefully kept secret, to honour first amendment ethics and staunch the foundations of the fourth estate, the future of which is thwart with peril in the wake of the prosecution of Julian Assange for basic journalism. Priti Patel is only the beginning of my campaign. Until I am silenced I will continue to shine a light on corruption wherever it breeds. It starts here.

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Megan Sherman is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Dear Readers, I have explained to you that there has been no Russian defeat in Ukraine and will not be a Russian defeat.  I informed you that Putin and the Kremlin are committed to  one important thing that differentiates Russia from the US and that is that Russia follows international law and the US does not.  This is why there has been no “Russian invasion of Ukraine” as proclaimed by Western propagandists.  Kiev, the functioning of the Ukraine government, and the cities and infrastructure of western Ukraine have not been attacked. 

The Kremlin has limited its military operations to the areas in Ukraine where the majority Russian population was being shelled, occupied, and murdered by Ukrainian forces and which faced last February an invasion of a large Western-trained Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias intended to overthrow the two independent Donbass republics recognized  by the Russian government.  The republics requested Russia’s intervention, which made the “limited military operation” legal under international law.

As my readers know, I regard the limited operation a mistake as it has drawn out the conflict and allowed the West to get deeply involved, thus promising a wider war that would likely turn nuclear.  I thought and still do that Russia was emphasizing legality at the risk of nuclear war.

The Kremlin has now acted to remove the constraint of international law with the referendums in the four areas whether the inhabitants wish reunification with Russia.  It is clear that the vote will be yes, and that the Duma and the Kremlin will proceed rapidly to reincorporate the former Russian territory back into Russia.

At that point Ukraine’s continuation of the war involves direct Ukrainian aggression against Russia herself.  This frees the Kremlin’s hands as the war becomes Russia’s response to Ukrainian aggression.  At this point it will be clear to all involved that Kiev, the Ukraine government, and the cities and infrastructure of western Ukraine no longer have immunity.  In other words it becomes a real war with devastating consequences for Ukraine and possibly as well for all Western suppliers of weapons and intelligence.

Americans are not prepared for this, because all they have heard about the conflict is Russophobic propaganda and false reporting of the reality.  

Larry Johnson, an honest and competent commentator, repeats this account and adds that the West lacks the capacity to produce weapons and ammunition  on the scale demanded by a full war and that the European economies are facing shutdowns as the consequent of US sanctions against Russia.  The message is that the US/NATO have no means of preventing a rapid Russian conquest of Ukraine except by resort to nuclear war, in which case the Western World will cease to exist.

That we could be in this extremely dangerous position is due to the total absence in the West of an honest and independent media and of honest and competent Russian experts.  Essentially, there is no intelligence in the West among those making decisions and no accurate information getting through to the Western populations.

I and a few others have made huge efforts, but we are called “conspiracy theorists,” “Russian agents/dupes,” and other names used to discredit those who actually understand the reality of the situation.   The growing restraints on what can be said, or if said paid attention to, has created massive ignorance as we come to a possible fateful moment in history.

Here is Larry Johnson: MORE ON THE REFERENDUM GAME CHANGER.

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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.

Featured image is from Al Mayadeen English

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***

Es ist müßig zu erwähnen, dass wir in einer Welt leben, in der Gewalt, Diktatur, Mord, Totschlag, Kriege und Ungerechtigkeit an der Tagesordnung sind. Nehmen wir das Beispiel Ukraine: Es ist eine Tatsache, dass sich Russland vom Westen bedroht fühlt – mit gutem Recht. Russland ist ein Dorn im Auge des kapitalistischen Systems und das kapitalistische System kann ohne Krieg nicht existieren. Der Westen ist nicht erst seit dem Ukrainekrieg gegen den Osten eingestellt und ruft zum Völkerhass auf. Er kämpft seit langem mit allen erlaubten und unerlaubten Mitteln gegen ihn. Die Gefahr eines Atomkrieges als „ultima ratio“ (letztes, äußerstes Mittel) oder als Amerikas Plan, den Dritten Weltkrieg zu gewinnen (1), ist groß.

Menschen mit traditioneller Erziehung fallen immer wieder auf die Lockrufe der Autoritäten herein

Eigentlich leben wir seit einigen Jahrhunderten in der Zeit der Vernunft. Lange hat die Menschheit im Glauben gelebt und es hat gegolten, was der Pfarrer gesagt hat. Neue Gedanken waren nicht erlaubt, sie sind geahndet worden. Doch wie schaut die Zeit der Vernunft aus?

Die meisten Menschen sind aufgrund ihrer Erziehung nicht fähig oder willens, sich gefühlsmäßig vorzustellen, was auf die Menschheit zukommen wird. Obwohl das Geld dafür nicht da ist und Menschen hungern müssen, werden ungeheure Summen für Kriegsrüstungen ausgegeben und mörderische Kriege geführt.

Bis heute werden die Menschen von allen gesellschaftlichen Institutionen – angefangen von der Erziehung zuhause, von der Kirche und vom Staat – so erzogen, so programmiert, dass sie nicht Nein sagen könnenund alles machen, was die anderen, die Machthaber, von ihnen wollen. Das ist Programm! Das ist bewusst! Und sie werden in dieser Stimmung erhalten, damit sie immer wieder auf die Lockrufe der Autoritäten hereinfallen.

Das ging im letzten Jahrhundert so weit, dass das deutsche Volk von 100 Millionen Menschen – das Volk der Dichter und Denker – Hitler zugejubelt hat und sich in den Tod führen ließ. Alle, bis auf circa 100.000 Oppositionelle, die er umgebracht hat, sind mit ihm mitgegangen; angefangen vom Papst, von der katholischen Kirche, den anderen Kirchen, alle Gelehrten, die Philosophen und Psychologen, alle Arbeiter, alle Sozialisten.

Da sich die Erziehungsmethoden der Vergangenheit nicht grundlegend geändert haben, folgen Menschen mit traditioneller Erziehung auch einem neuen „Führer“ wie einst einem Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin oder Johnson.

Und da es keine Politik gibt ohne Psychologie und keine Erklärung der politischen Meinung und der menschlichen Belange ohne Kenntnisse der Psychologie, wird die Menschheit ohne Psychologie nicht weiterkommen.

Russland könnte heute für den Frieden wirken – Russland braucht keinen Krieg

Politisch Orientierte wissen, dass das ganz Unterfangen Hitlers gegen den Osten, gegen Russland gerichtet war. „Mein Kampf“, das war der geplante Krieg gegen Russland, und das hat Russland gewusst. Doch Russland war in arger Bedrängnis und konnte sich gegen Deutschland und Hitler nicht erwehren.

Deshalb wurde in Russland verhandelt, wie man Hitler beikommen soll. Russland war bereit, gegen Hitler zu marschieren. Doch die anderen Staaten sagten, dass sie nicht wollten. Sie haben Angst gehabt vor Russland. Russland ist dann in großer Verlegenheit gewesen, weil sie nicht gerüstet waren. Deshalb haben sie mit Hitler einen Pakt geschlossen, um sich Zeit zu verschaffen.

Wirft man heute einen Blick in die offiziellen Tageszeitungen oder sieht man sich für einige Minuten das offizielle TV-Programm an, so gewinnt man den Eindruck, dass zumindest die jüngere Generation, die noch keinen Krieg erlebt hat, keinen Respekt vor diesem größten Übel der Menschheit, diesem Massenmord hat, den wir Krieg nennen. Anders lässt sich der permanente Aufruf zum Völkerhass, die unentwegte Kriegshetze oder die zur Schau getragene Gleichgültigkeit vieler Zeitgenossen nicht erklären. Sowohl Führer als auch Geführten sind Schwachköpfe.

Heute könnte Russland für den Frieden wirken. Wegen der eigenen Ressourcen brauchen sie keinen Krieg und könnten viel bewirken. Aber es fehlen ihnen noch die Fähigkeiten: sie kennen die Psychologie noch nicht. Hätte man die Menschen während der Russischen Revolution frei gelassen, hätte man mit ihnen gesprochen und wäre das ganze System menschlicher gewesen, wäre der Zweite Weltkrieg eventuell nicht ausgebrochen (2).

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych. mit Schwerpunkt: Klinische-, Pädagogische-, Medien- sowie Individual-Psychologie). Viele Jahrzehnte unterrichtete er. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Sein Wahlspruch nach Albert Camus: Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.

Noten

Eingangs erwähntes Zitat Camus‘:

Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg 2013, S. 268

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-responds-america-plan-win-world-war-III/5794403

2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/open-letter-politicians-federal-republic-germany-russia-thorn-eye-capitalist-system/5776623

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It is pointless to mention that we live in a world where violence, dictatorship, murder, manslaughter, wars and injustice are the order of the day. Let’s take the example of Ukraine: it is a fact that Russia feels threatened by the West – with good reason.

Russia is a thorn in the eye of the capitalist system and the capitalist system cannot exist without war. The West has not only been opposed to the East since the Ukraine war and calls for hatred of nations. It has been fighting against it for a long time with all permissible and impermissible means. The danger of nuclear war as an “ultima ratio” (last, extreme means) or as America’s plan to win the Third World War (1) is great.

People with traditional upbringings keep falling for the lure of the authorities

Actually, we have been living in the age of reason for several centuries. For a long time, mankind lived by faith and what the priest said applied. New thoughts were not allowed, they were punished. But what does the time of reason look like?

Most people, because of their upbringing, are not able or willing to imagine emotionally what is in store for humanity. Although the money is not there and people have to starve, enormous sums are spent on war armaments and murderous wars are waged.

Until today, people are educated by all social institutions – starting with education at home, by the church and by the state – so that they cannot say no and do everything that the others, the rulers, want them to do. That is the programme! That is conscious! And they are kept in this mood so that they fall for the lure of the authorities again and again.

This went so far in the last century that the German people of 100 million – the people of poets and thinkers – cheered Hitler and allowed themselves to be led to their deaths. All but about 100,000 opposition members whom he killed went along with him; starting with the Pope, the Catholic Church, the other churches, all the scholars, the philosophers and psychologists, all the workers, all the socialists.

Since the educational methods of the past have not changed fundamentally, people with traditional education also follow a new “Führer” as they once did a Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin or Johnson.

And since there is no politics without psychology and no explanation of political opinion and human concerns without knowledge of psychology, humanity will not make any progress without psychology.

Russia could work for peace today – Russia does not need war

Politically oriented people know that Hitler’s whole enterprise was directed against the East, against Russia. “Mein Kampf”, that was the planned war against Russia, and Russia knew that. But Russia was in dire straits and could not defend itself against Germany and Hitler.

Therefore, Russia was negotiating how to deal with Hitler. Russia was ready to march against Hitler. But the other states said they did not want to. They were afraid of Russia. Russia was then in great embarrassment because they were not equipped. That’s why they made a pact with Hitler to buy themselves time.

If you take a look at the official daily newspapers today or watch the official TV programme for a few minutes, you get the impression that at least the younger generation, which has not yet experienced war, has no respect for this greatest evil of humanity, this mass murder that we call war. There is no other explanation for the permanent call for hatred of nations, the incessant warmongering or the indifference displayed by many contemporaries. Both leaders and led are fools.

Today, Russia could work for peace. Because of their own resources, they do not need war and could achieve a lot. But they still lack the skills: they do not yet know psychology. If people had been let free during the Russian Revolution, if they had been talked to and if the whole system had been more humane, the Second World War might not have broken out (2).

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych. with a focus on clinical, educational, media and individual psychology). He taught for many decades. As a retiree he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education and an education for public spirit and peace. His motto according to Albert Camus: Give when you can. And not to hate, if that is possible.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

Quote from Camus mentioned at the beginning:

Marin, Lou (ed.). Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg 2013, p. 268

(1) https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-responds-america-plan-win-world-war-III/5794403

(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/open-letter-politicians-federal-republic-germany-russia-thorn-eye-capitalist-system/5776623

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***

On September 23, the Al Qaeda-occupied area in Idlib Province reported the first confirmed case of cholera in the last terrorist-controlled area in Syria. The deadly outbreak has claimed 39 lives in Syria, with thousands of suspected cases across the country. In areas under the Ministry of Health in Damascus, 23 deaths were reported recently, 20 of them in Aleppo, and at least 253 cases.

In the northeast region of Syria controlled by the US-backed SDF, a Kurdish militia with ties to the outlawed terrorist group the PKK, are a reported 16 deaths and 2,867 cases since September 5.  The US occupation forces there are controlling the main oil fields in Syria to prevent the Damascus government from using the oil to provide electricity for people’s homes, water pumping stations, and gasoline for their cars.

The cases were reported in several provinces, including Aleppo with 676 cases, Raqqa in the north with 17 cases, Latakia on the Mediterranean coast with 4 cases, Hama with 2 cases, Al Hasakeh with 38 cases, and Deir Ez Zor along the border with Iraq with 201 cases. There were two cases in Damascus, but the patients had just come from Aleppo.

This marks the first cholera outbreak since the conflict began in March of 2011, with the last outbreak recorded in 2009.

The source of the outbreak is the river

The Euphrates River runs for almost 2,800 kilometers (1,700 miles) across Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

During the rainy winter season, and fed by spring snow melt-offs in Turkey, the river runs full entering Syria from the Turkish border and then running in a diagonal towards Iraq.

Climate change has brought steadily rising temperatures combined with drought, and during this long and very hot, dry summer the river has sunk to its lowest point. So low that ancient antiquities once buried on the river bed have been suddenly revealed, but government reports warn the river could go completely dry by 2040.

Health authorities tested the Euphrates and found the bacteria causing cholera.  The river is polluted by raw sewage and oil spills from the US-occupied oil wells at Deir Ez Zor.  If the river can be replenished this winter the contamination might be mitigated.

Over five million Syrians rely on the Euphrates for their drinking water, which is pumped to them without filtering or sterilization. Farmers use irrigation pipelines to pump water out of the river onto their crops.  Syria is self-sufficient in ground crops, but using contaminated water to grow food is what has spread the outbreak.

Residents of the northeast who rely on the Euphrates know that it is polluted but are faced with no other choice or immediate solution.

The treatment plan and prevention

On September 19, Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the World Health Organization’s regional director, said that medications and other supplies had landed in Damascus.  The second shipment arrived on September 23 to fight the cholera outbreak.

The Syrian Ministry of Health advised people to make sure they drink water coming from “a secure source” and if that is not available people should boil water, then preserve it in a clean and closed-gallon container.

Cholera is an acute diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine with Vibrio cholerae bacteria. People can get sick when they swallow food or water contaminated with cholera bacteria. The infection is often mild or without symptoms, but can sometimes be severe and life-threatening.

Cholera can be simply and successfully treated by immediate replacement of the fluid and salts lost through diarrhea. Patients can be treated with oral rehydration solution (ORS), a prepackaged mixture of sugar and salts that is mixed with 1 liter of water and drunk in large amounts.

Boiling is the most effective way to make water safe. If boiling, bring your water to a complete boil for at least 1 minute.

Water used as a weapon of war

On August 22, 2016, Maher Ghafari of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), reported on the water situation in Aleppo during the occupation of East Aleppo by terrorist groups including Al Qaeda which ended in December 2016.  He confirmed that Aleppo gets its water from the Euphrates River which is pumped through four pipelines in a water plant, then under the control of an armed terrorist group. Water destined for the city of Aleppo is then re-pumped through three pumping stations: one then controlled by the government, and two by different armed terrorist groups.

All through the conflict in Syria, water was used as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists would simply shut the water valves tight, and hold the lives of thirsty civilians hostage.  At other times, the terrorists would bomb the pumps or the water station. During the war years, the water maintenance crews were prevented from staying or repairing facilities.

Today, the war is over, the terrorists have left, and the only Al Qaeda-occupied area is Idlib, but the damages to water infrastructure have never been reconstructed because of the US-EU sanctions which prohibit the importation of materials that can be used to repair or reconstruct government infrastructure.

US-EU sanctions kill Syrian civilians and prevent reconstruction

The US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’ failed, but the collective punishment of an entire nation caused most to support the Damascus government, as it was seen as the only source of basic services and stability.

According to the UN, nearly two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of the pumping stations, and one-third of water towers have been damaged by more than a decade of war.

Last winter, Syrians died in their homes without heating, while snow drifts lay on the streets of Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus. Diesel fuel is used in Syria for home heating, but it is expensive and often in short supply because of the US occupation of the oil wells in the northeast, and the US sanctions preventing importing fuels. Most Syrians get about one hour of electricity because the fuel used to generate electricity is taken by the US troops.

The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, a law signed by President Donald Trump, has brought starvation, darkness, plague, misery, robbery, kidnappings, and the destruction of a nation. International aid no longer reaches Syria to the extent it did previously because many charities fear being hit with penalties from the severe US sanctions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Syrians suffered shortages of oxygen and basic medical supplies due to the crippling sanctions.

According to Hasan Ismaik, a Jordanian writer, “No Syrian children under the age of 10 have ever seen their country at peace. And if they remain starved and deprived of basic medical care in a country with no economic opportunities, they could eventually become the foot soldiers of a new terrorism outbreak in the Middle East.”

Richard N. Haass, a US foreign policy expert, wrote in 1998 “Economic Sanctions: Too Much of a Bad Thing.”  He wrote that US sanctions often have no effect on the target, and Congress and the Whitehouse need to have rigorous oversight of the sanctions, which are doomed to fail if the desired results are large and require limited time.

Haass further warned that secondary sanctions, such as going after foreign nations who might send goods to Syria for rebuilding make matters worse. He prophetically added that sanctions hurt innocent civilians, which will bolster authoritarian governments and trigger large-scale emigration.

The US-EU sanctions due have humanitarian exemptions for food and medicine.  However, Elizabeth Hoff, former WHO director in Damascus, said that many medical machines in Syrian hospitals lay in disrepair, needing parts from Europe or the US, but the foreign companies will not sell the parts to Syria because the paperwork surrounding the exemption is so costly and time-consuming it is not worth it.

Migration caused by sanctions

The migration boats continue to sail across the deadly Mediterranean because of the suffering caused by the sanctions. The Syrians set sail with nothing to lose, except their lives, and carry their anger as baggage.

Josep Borrell, the EU minister for foreign affairs, insists on the collective punishment of the Syrian people by saying that the EU “will not lift the sanctions imposed on Syria before the start of a political transition in the country.” Great Britain, France, and Germany have all renewed their sanctions on Syria.

The US-EU sanctions have not achieved their goals, but have added to the suffering of the Syrian people. Unless the sanctions are lifted, Syria cannot rebuild and its people will be hopelessly tied to the US-NATO plan of maintaining chaos as the status quo.

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

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***

Guest is Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, founder of the Klinghardt Academy in the USA, as well as founder and director of various other academies, institutes and clinics in the USA and Switzerland, among others. He is an author of a textbook on psycho-kinesiology. His research interests are psychological factors in pain disorders, heavy metal stress, autism, and treatments of chronic diseases (e.g. Lyme disease).

This session is about a study on climate change and geoengineering.

From 2017, in an article in the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, geoscientist J. Marvin Herndon made some startling assertions that would prompt climate scientists to radically change their assumptions. Among them were:

• evidence for the Earth’s variable heat production,
• global, non-anthropogenic climate change, and
• geoengineering-induced global warming and polar melting.

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***

Since 2014, the US-led political West has invested billions into propping up the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev. This paid off exponentially, as major corporations now had a 100% free hand to tap into and plunder Ukraine’s resources. The country’s territory was always considered a breadbasket of Europe and beyondand its grain has been a target of every foreign power invading the area. This is precisely what happened this time as well, with Western corporations controlling approximately 30% of Ukraine’s arable land. The country’s massive Soviet-era industrial sector was also carved up and bought for pennies, both by foreign corporations and local oligarchs.

The brutal exploitation of Ukraine was further exacerbated after 2014 and continues unabated. However, since February 24, the political West found itself in a situation where it had to keep the unsustainable Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev afloat, at all costs. Nearly a decade of mismanagement and lack of meritocracy left the regime in a state of near complete incompetence to tackle the issues of tens of millions of Ukrainians. The political West was well aware of the uselessness of the puppets it installed, just like in any other country it hijacked or invaded, so it decided to do what it always does in such situations – throw money at the problem until it’s fixed or until it all crumbles into oblivion, as it did in Afghanistan in 2021.

According to the Kiev regime’s current frontman  Zelensky himself, this is precisely what is happening in Ukraine. In a CBS “Face the Nation” interview which aired on Sunday, Zelensky stated that the US is providing the Neo-Nazi junta with a mindboggling $1.5 billion per month. He claimed the regime would be completely unable to function without these funds. “The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight against Russia,” the Kiev regime’s official leader explained. And yet, he pointed out that “there still remains a deficit of $5 billion in our budget.” He kept parroting the same trope that this is far from enough for the Neo-Nazi junta.

After revealing the whopping $1.5 billion provided to the Neo-Nazi junta monthly, Zelensky said:

“But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”

“If it’s safe, they will come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won’t have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody,” he continued. “Because as of today the United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight – fight this war. However, if our people will come back – and they do want to come back very much, they have a lot of motivation – they will work here.”

“And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support,” Zelensky concluded. And yet, it seems the Kiev regime will never be in a position where the US-led political West “will not have to continue” providing such a massive and constant cash flow. And indeed, it seems it’s never enough for the Neo-Nazi junta and the corrupt oligarchs, who keep demanding more. Only a day after Zelensky complained that “it’s not even nearly enough” US Congress kept pushing with another $12 billion arrangement, according to AP.

“Negotiators to a stop-gap spending bill in the U.S. Congress have agreed to include about $12 billion in new aid to Ukraine in response to a request from the Biden administration, a source familiar with the talks said on Monday,” AP claims.

It should be noted that this arrangement isn’t that one-sided. The political West has also appropriated most of Ukraine’s gold and foreign exchange reserves. The political elites in Washington DC and Brussels have certainly not gone empty-handed as a result of this premeditated conflict. And neither have the oligarchs running the Kiev regime. It should be noted that it was only in July that the Associated Press and NPR called attention to a hugely inconvenient fact that there was no way the enormous funds being provided to the Neo-Nazi junta could be held up to scrutiny. The report states:

“As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine’s suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.

But Zelensky’s weekend firings of his top prosecutor, intelligence chief and other senior officials have resurfaced those concerns and may have inadvertently given fresh attention to allegations of high-level corruption in Kyiv made by one outspoken U.S. lawmaker.”

What’s clear from this is that both the political elites of the collective West and the corrupt oligarchs of the Kiev regime are profiting from the “financial aid” back and forth, while regular people are suffering the consequences. All the while, the state and corporate-run propaganda machine of the political West continues trying to sell the “moral high ground” narrative that this is precisely what’s necessary to “protect the people of Ukraine,” the same people who have been pushed into a conflict with a nuclear-armed military superpower, one which they cannot hope to win in any conceivable way.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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***

As both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 both suddenly lost pressure last Monday, Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions.  The pipeline director reports unprecedented damage.  Clearly this is deliberate sabotage and could only have been done by a government with submarine capability to place underwater mines.

Who could that be?

US Secretary of State Blinken said the pipeline damage presents a “significant opportunity” for Western Europe to abandon Russian natural gas in favor of liquified natural gas from the US.

A Polish member of the European Parliament thanked the US for putting the pipeline out of commission as now Russia will have to negotiate with Poland in order to deliver gas to Europe. See this.

When faced with Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine’s invasion of Donbass, US President Biden said:

“There will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Washington’s well trained European puppets will, of course, blame Russia for blowing up her own pipeline. See this and this. 

As I have warned would be the case, the Kremlin’s dilly-dallying over Ukraine has given Washington plenty of time for more mischief and widening of the conflict.  The Kremlin’s emphasis on legalisms might end in nuclear war.  The only safe way for Russia to deal with the threat from Ukraine would have been a blitzkrieg attack that conquered Ukraine before the West could react.  The go-slow, limited, drawn out conflict has played directly into Washington’s hands.  We might all die as the result.

There is no doubt that the war has widened, and now the Kremlin is betting Ukraine and the West will not continue the war if it involves direct attacks on Russian territory, thus the referendums.   

As I explained yesterday, a fateful moment of history is upon us. See this and this.

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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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***

The Taliban have signed a provisional agreement with Russia to supply gasoline, diesel, gas, and wheat to Afghanistan, acting Afghan Commerce and Industry Minister Haji Nooruddin Azizi told Reuters.

The announcement marks the first major international economic deal by the Taliban with a foreign government beyond its borders since the group came to power following the US’s chaotic withdrawal from the country in August 2021.

No country, including Russia, has formally recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, although Russia is one of several countries that has maintained its embassy in the capital Kabul.

Azizi said that Russia had agreed to discount supplies to the Taliban, compared to average global commodity prices. The deal will see Moscow supply around one million tonnes of gasoline, one million tonnes of diesel, 500,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and two million tonnes of wheat annually, to the country.

The agreement will begin with a trial period for an unspecified amount of time and a final deal will be struck if both sides are satisfied with the arrangement.

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***

UK participation in the Ukraine conflict is far-reaching, involving military and intelligence support, arms supplies and information warfare. But as Ukraine makes gains on the battlefield, Whitehall sees the war not only as a way to defend Kyiv but to ensure the strategic defeat of its rival, Russia – a dangerous strategy.

The Ukraine conflict is also a British one, given the extensive UK role in the war, with Whitehall supporting Kyiv to repel Russia’s brutal invasion in numerous ways outlined in this Explainer.

However, UK governments do not go to war for moral or humanitarian purposes; only for strategic gain. In Ukraine, Whitehall’s main goal is to counter Russia, a power UK governments have long wanted to put back in its box and end Moscow’s independent foreign policy, which challenges NATO’s supremacy in the whole of Europe and, to an extent, the Middle East.

Russia’s brutal invasion needs to be condemned and reversed, Ukrainian sovereignty upheld and the rights of Ukrainians defended.

But the reasons for this to Whitehall planners are not their professed high-minded claims about defending democracy or stopping Russian war crimes – the UK is perfectly happy to acquiesce in such crimes in its own current conflicts, notably Yemen.

London’s interest in democracy is nowhere to be seen when it comes to supporting various dictatorships such as in the Gulf or Egypt. And its opposition to illegal foreign occupations is put aside when it comes to its increasing military support for Israel.

The problem with Russia

Whitehall sees the Ukraine war as an opportunity. Liz Truss has gone so far to say that “we will cripple Russia’s economic development in both the short and long term” with the sanctions imposed on the country following its invasion of Ukraine in February.

Image is by Tim Hammond / No10 Downing Street, licensed under CC

She has also in effect called for regime change in Moscow, saying the UK “can never allow Russia to be in a position to undertake this aggression again… which is why we wholeheartedly support Navalny”, referring to imprisoned opposition leader Alexander Navalny.

In a sign of how Russia is firmly in the sight of British leaders, the new head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, has even told troops they need to be ready to face Russia on the battlefield.

Whitehall’s major problem with Moscow is that it “is seeking its own independent sphere of influence separate to any American-backed global order or rule book”, the then head of the British army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, said last year.

Unacceptably to British planners, Russia elected to become a rival. Then defence secretary Michael Fallon said in 2017 that “Russia has chosen to become a strategic competitor of the West”.

His successor, Gavin Williamson expressed a similar lament, saying that “after 1990 we … believed there would be only one superpower”, referring to the US. Now, “Russia wants to assert its rights”, he complained.

This Russian independence and rivalry has contributed to the “erosion of strategic advantage” for the West which must be regained, General Sanders says. The UK wants to see Russia confined to a status of global pariah.

Whitehall is making extraordinary efforts to help Ukraine, and defeat Russia, in its war. Six main contributions can be identified.

1.    Foreign fighters

There have been several reports of “retired” SAS soldiers being active in Ukraine. Whether this is correct or a Whitehall ruse is hard to establish.

Days after the invasion, a “crack team” of “retired” UK special forces soldiers were reported to have volunteered “for missions deep inside Ukraine”. They were said to be highly-trained snipers and experts in the use of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. The following month three of the soldiers were killed in a Russian airstrike.

The UK forces are believed to be directly killing Russians. One report in June claimed that a team of ex-SAS soldiers, all veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had killed up to 20 Russian generals and 15 mercenaries of the pro-Moscow Wagner Group.

As many as 3,000 Britons may be fighting in Ukraine, according to one source – a Georgian commander who said there are around 20,000 foreign soldiers in the country in total. By our count around nine Britons have been killed or captured in Ukraine, with five just released.

Some are reported to have left the British army to join the conflict. “A small number of serving British personnel have disobeyed orders and may have travelled to Ukraine to fight”, defence minister James Heappey told parliament in June.

Initially, then foreign secretary Liz Truss encouraged Britons to go to Ukraine, and many subsequently did so, including the son of a senior Conservative politician.

Ministers then backtracked and said they didn’t want Britons joining the war at all. The government now says that fighting in Ukraine may amount to an offence under UK legislation and open people up to prosecution on their return to the UK. But no-one is so far known to have been prosecuted.

2.    Official boots on the ground

The UK sent special forces to Ukraine in February, weeks before the invasion, with SAS, SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the Special Forces Support Group working in the country to train Ukrainian special forces in counter-insurgency tactics, sniping and sabotage.

Those special forces were soon instructing local troops in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv on how to use British-supplied anti-tank missiles that were delivered in late February as the invasion was beginning.

In July the Ministry of Defence said it had 97 troops in Ukraine but it has been unwilling to divulge their location.

👀 Ministry of Defence confirms UK military personnel are in #Ukraine — but won’t give the “exact number” or their location. #DCUKparliament pic.twitter.com/UiUsijHGTt

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) May 17, 2022

3.    UK arms killing Russians

It’s not only British soldiers but also UK arms that are killing Russians. Earlier this month defence secretary Ben Wallace told parliament that long-range weaponry supplied by the UK and other states had enabled Ukraine to strike more than 350 Russian command posts, ammunition dumps, supply depots, and “other high-value targets far back from the frontline”.

The UK’s supply of £2.3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine has included over 10,000 anti-tank missiles, hundreds of other missiles and guns, 200 armoured fighting vehicles, and three million rounds of small arms ammunition.

Precisely how the UK is spending its military aid is secret – the government has refused to give a full breakdown of its expenditure.

👀 The UK ministry of defence refuses to give a breakdown of the £2.3bn in public money it is spending on the Ukraine war.

More excessive state secrecy.#DCUKparliament pic.twitter.com/RGRTLEUiRF

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) September 13, 2022

Neither is it known how many Russian soldiers these British arms have killed, but the figure may be substantial – Wallace claims Russia has lost no less than 25,000 soldiers in Ukraine.

It is likely that UK-supplied next generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs) have been especially devastating, and they have been credited with helping to stall Moscow’s armoured units.

The UK has essentially been coordinating the international supply of weapons into Ukraine since the invasion. British arms are being purposely provided “to go beyond” defending Ukraine to enable it to “mount offensive operations”, the UK government has said.

Indeed, defence minister James Heappey has backed Ukraine striking targets inside Russia with UK-supplied weapons. Heappey observed: “We don’t seek to tell the Ukrainians what they can and can’t be used for other than they should be used in a lawful way”.

It appears Ukraine is acting as a testing ground for new British weapons. Ukrainian troops have, for example, used Martlets, a laser-guided missile initially designed to help the Royal Navy combat swarms of small, unmanned attack boats. The Martlet is a weapon being tested by UK troops that is yet to be fully deployed by the British military.

More generally, the UK is using Ukraine “as an opportunity to showcase British-made arms”, the Independent’s Andrew Buncombe reports. Liz Truss, as foreign secretary, was unequivocal about this: she said in March that British arms for Ukraine are “a very important export for us”, and contribute to jobs and growth.

4.    Military training

Britain’s military training is directly aiding Ukrainian combat operations. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are being given intensive infantry instruction, including on urban warfare and marksmanship, at an army base in England.

Image by Chris McAndrew, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Training in the use of anti-tank weapons is one direct way the UK is aiding the Ukrainian military, but there are others. For example, SBS special forces instructed Ukrainian troops how to use small submarines called ‘sea scooters’ in order to help take back Snake Island, which lies 22 miles off Ukraine’s south coast in the Black Sea, from the Russians.

The UK training may also help the British military itself to fight Russians directly. In a candid comment, Baroness Goldie, a UK defence minister, recently told parliament the instruction of Ukrainians provides “a great learning opportunity, because our troops are learning what our enemy does in the latest battlefield situation and how we should deal with it”.

5.    Intelligence support

Information on support to Ukraine from the UK intelligence agencies is, as ever, murky. But US reporter Tom Rogan, citing three Western intelligence sources, writes that the UK military effort is being led by MI6 and that “Ukraine’s deep battlespace effort owes especial thanks to Britain — specifically to British strike and reconnaissance special forces personnel inside Ukraine”.

The US and UK are providing satellite, electronic warfare, signals, and cyber intelligence, Rogan writes.

He adds that Ukraine’s escalating campaign is a direct extension of long-standing British special forces doctrine. This involves the deployment of very small (4, 8 or 16 person) patrols deep into enemy territory which gather targeting intelligence for commanders at the rear.

Those teams also conduct sabotage operations against targets such as logistics trains, command centres, and high-value targets such as aircraft, ammunition dumps, and fuel depots.

MI6 is known to have had contacts with Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky since well before the invasion. In October 2020 Zelensky is said to have held a secret meeting with MI6 chief Richard Moore in the UK. Zelensky told the media one of the subjects discussed related to countering disinformation and fake news.

British and US spy planes are also monitoring Russian battlefield communications by conducting regular missions on the fringes of Ukraine’s airspace, it is reported. Intelligence gathered by three RAF electronic surveillance aircraft, known as Airseekers, is fed back to Defence Intelligence in London – and, presumably, on to Ukraine.

Jeremy Fleming, head of the UK’s largest intelligence agency, GCHQ, has said the UK is “shoring up” Ukraine’s defences by supporting its cyber security, but gave no further details.

But GCHQ is certain to be playing a role in the war. It has said it supports UK troops “whenever and wherever” they are deployed.

6.    Information war

Britain’s key role in the information war against Russia builds on long standing support to Ukraine. Simon Baugh, chief executive of the UK Government Communication Service – which oversees government media operations – says Britain has provided “strategic communications support” to the government in Kyiv since 2016.

This ranges “from helping to build a professional communications capability at the centre of Government, to building resilience to cyber security threats, to jointly delivering a campaign to support the shared values of our democracies”.

Before the invasion, at the start of February, Whitehall created a Government Information Cell, drawing on 35 staff from across different ministries, which seeks to counter Russian disinformation.

Baugh says this Cell works with NATO, the EU and the Five Eyes intelligence network (involving the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK) and “creates content to bolster the morale and confidence of the Ukrainian people by showing them they are not alone”.

He adds: “We are building the capability to deliver fast communication with impact, in real-time and on the basis of 24/7 monitoring, content production, response and rebuttal.”

The focus on “content production” is noteworthy. Baugh claims that the Cell does not propagate disinformation itself and that “our model is based on the UK Government using facts to expose the truth”.

This is not easy to verify, however, as the Cell’s activities are opaque. Various apparently false stories are appearing in the media about Russia, with unclear provenance. Assertions are being made by UK intelligence agencies which are also difficult or impossible to verify, such as GCHQ’S claim that Putin’s advisers were lying to him about Russia’s performance in Ukraine.

My colleague Matt Kennard recently found the UK government was spending over £80m on media projects in Eastern Europe, in countries surrounding Russia, which are often presented as fighting “Russian disinformation”.

There is a long history of the UK promoting covert information operations, including the planting of false material in media outlets.

What is clearer is that Whitehall is investing in promoting one-sided information, which can amount to a form of propaganda. In March, for example, the government announced an additional £4.1 million in “emergency funding” to the BBC World Service to support its Ukrainian and Russian language services broadcasting into both countries.

The UK’s proxy war on Russia is very high risk given Moscow’s losses on the battlefield due partly to UK military activity and arms supplies combined with Russia having the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Russia, like Nato, likely sees nuclear arms as useable weapons.

Putin may be most likely to employ nuclear missiles precisely at the point of British/Ukrainian military ‘success’, i.e., if Moscow were close to defeat, and especially if Ukraine looked like recapturing Crimea, a region Russia regards as its own territory, which it illegally annexed in 2014.

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Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.

Featured image: Defence Secretary Ben Wallace meets with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu at the Ministry of Defence, 11 February 2022. (Photo: Tim Hammond/No 10 Downing Street)

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***

Although the porous Iraqi-Syrian border stretches for over 600 kilometers, about half of it – in practice – is not subject to the authority of either state. Over the years, this lack of comprehensive border control has given rise to a number of security threats to both nations, not least the persistent presence of ISIS elements in border regions.

From the Iraqi side, there has been a pro-active approach in countering this low-level terrorism with the establishment of two defensive lines by the Joint Operations Command, in addition to concrete barriers and watchtowers.

Smuggling from Syria into Iraqi border towns is another salient feature of current border activities, and one which presents both a threat and an opportunity for the US-led international coalition whose forces operate on both sides of the border.

The US loots and smuggles Syria’s oil

Under the guise of this international coalition, the US army controls the borders between Iraq and Syria, specifically at the Fishkhabour-Semalka crossing, the illegal Al-Waleed crossing between Iraqi Kurdistan and US-occupied Syrian territory, and the Al-Mahmoudiyah crossing. All of these border crossings have become notorious for the illicit smuggling of Syrian crude oil into northern Iraq, with direct involvement from US military forces.

New footage of a US military convoy smuggling stolen oil out of Raqqah, Syria.

The US army has been consistently looting the country's oil and smuggling it into their Iraq bases.

Washington steals over 80 percent of Syria's oil output per day
MORE https://t.co/s1z2uIjzJk pic.twitter.com/ko7EsxTRdh

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) August 10, 2022

Reconnaissance drones routinely hover over the skies of the region, and security is contracted out to private security firms by the US military. The employees of these companies, who travel in four-wheel drive vehicles under US air cover, are responsible for securing the transportation of Syrian oil to Iraqi territory – even though their mandate is solely to transport logistical equipment belonging to the international coalition.

When The Cradle reached the border area to investigate further, we were prevented from reaching beyond the joint control point of the Peshmerga and Asayish forces, the Kurdish military and intelligence agency forces, respectively.

This checkpoint reflects the security coordination between the Pentagon and the Ministry of Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan, and is conducted without Baghdad’s knowledge or coordination. The central Iraqi government’s lack of awareness of the situation on its borders may be summed up in what one senior Iraqi security source told The Cradle: that the US troops were there “supporting Kurdish forces as part of the Iraqi defense system to combat terrorism.”

Destination: Iraqi Kurdistan

However, tribal sources confirm that under the cover of this “security zone,” illegal crossings between Iraq and Syria are active, with dozens of tankers passing weekly in convoys transporting smuggled Syrian oil, accompanied by US warplanes or helicopters.

Shepherds in the region also corroborate these claims, and indicate that the Syrian oil is transported to the Harir military site in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), for the benefit of the Kurdish oil company KAR Group, owned by Sheikh Baz Karim Barzanji, who is close to the family of the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Massoud Barzani.

The latter has strong relations with the new so-called “Club of Influential Countries” in Iraq, in reference to the UAE and Turkey. Barzani also maintains a strong relationship with the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria, whose members have been protecting convoys of Syrian oil tanks.

Sheikh Baz came under some scrutiny in March when one of his villas, reportedly used as a safe house by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, was struck by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) missiles, killing and injuring agents inside.

At the time, Kurdish politician Hiwa Seid Salim told The Cradle he suspects the reason for the Iranian attack on Sheikh Baz’s villa was due to his business activities, which Iranian security sources say includes selling Iraqi (or Syrian) oil and gas to Israel.

Sheikh Baz was one of the channels of communication between the KDP and government of Saddam Hussein on the transportation of Iraqi oil to Turkey during the economic embargo on Iraq. After the 2003 US invasion, he worked with USAID and transformed his construction contracting company – set up in the 1990s – into an oil conglomerate.

The logistics of the looting

Speaking to The Cradle, a former Iraqi diplomat points out that the theft of Syrian natural resources witnessed a significant increase when former US President Donald Trump came to power. At that time, he told Iraqi officials that “Syrian oil is a cheap price for Washington’s contribution to the fight against ISIS.”

While it is not possible to accurately determine the quantities of looted oil, Iraqi tribal sources confirm that the tanker journey takes approximately 48 hours through the main crossings, approved by the US army (Fishkhabour, Al-Waleed or Al-Yaarubiyah), in a process that only pauses for brief periods to fill their tanks.

According to these sources, there are usually no less than 70 to 100 tankers transporting Syrian oil during each journey.

Inside Syria, tanker convoys travel through areas outside the authority of the central state. The trip starts from the Syrian Al-Jazira region and passes through Al-Hasakah, where it stops for hours before continuing to one of the border outlets to procure supplies, and then proceeds to the Harir site in Erbil in the KRI.

There, the oil is emptied into other tanks that carry it to the US base at Ain al-Assad in Iraq’s Anbar province, or to Halabja province, where another US military base is located.

Map depicting the transportation of stolen Syrian oil to Iraq

The transfer of tankers from Kurdistan to the Ain al-Assad base or any other US military site must obtain prior approval from the National Operations Center. Therefore, these transfers take place under the guise of “logistical support for the international coalition forces,” according to one Iraqi security source in close contact with the US. Although Baghdad is unlikely to be completely kept in the dark about this repeated violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, it appears to have very little say in the matter.

The source tells The Cradle that the tankers’ journey through the Al-Qaim-al-Bukamal crossing would have been shorter had this crossing not been under the control of armed Iraqi factions that accuse Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi of “opening the doors” for the Americans.

The same security source points out that these factions “have not stopped calling for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, which continue their security and intelligence work inside the state under the cover of providing security and military advice to the Iraqi forces in the fight against terrorism.”

How much does the Iraqi government know?

The US military’s “advisory work” is ostensibly limited to providing Iraqi forces with some satellite images of the ISIS presence in the mountains in northern Iraq. However, this information is arguably already attainable by Iraqi authorities without US help, according to sources in the military joint operations room, the highest military and security authority in Iraq.

The Cradle attempted to reach out to officials in the Iraqi government for a comment on what is happening at Iraq’s border crossings, but there was no response.

A political source attributed this non-response to “political fragility,” whereby it has become common for decision-makers to avoid commenting on what is considered “sensitive” information. This is particularly the case at a time when Iraq is undergoing political uncertainty while very tentatively emerging from its economic crisis.

There are positive steps recently undertaken by the Iraqi authorities, including a recent meeting by the country’s border guards with Syrian army officers in Baghdad – the first of its kind since 2021 – aimed at strengthening cooperation and fortifying the border against terrorism and smuggling networks.

Yet Baghdad’s failure to confront and clamp down on the illegal transportation of stolen Syrian oil into Iraq further cements – and confirms – the perception of a number of Iraqi factions that the government of Mustafa al-Kadhimi is a mere puppet in American hands.

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Featured image is from The Cradle

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

A former Polish Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski, has attributed to the United States the sabotage of two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Thank you, USA,” Sikorski wrote on Twitter. Sikorski was Minister of National Defense from 2005 – 2007 and served as Deputy Minister of National Defense and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, previously. He is currently an elected member of the European parliament.

Nord Stream 1 and 2 lie on the bed of the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 2 was finished last year but Germany never opened it because Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.

Thank you, USA. pic.twitter.com/nALlYQ1Crb

— Radek Sikorski MEP (@radeksikorski) September 27, 2022

Poland’s Secretary of State, Stanisław Żaryn, denounced Sikorki’s claim on Twitter as “Russian #propaganda,” calling it “a smear campaign against Poland, the US, and Ukraine, accusing the West of aggression against #NS1 and #NS2. Authenticating the Russian lies at this particular moment jeopardizes the security of Poland. What an act of gross irresponsibility!”

Russian #propaganda instantly launched a smear campaign against Poland, the US and Ukraine, accusing the West of aggression against #NS1 and #NS2.

Authenticating the Russian lies at this particular moment jeopardizes the security of Poland.
What an act of gross irresponsibility! pic.twitter.com/S9YJKRCv9B

— Stanisław Żaryn (@StZaryn) September 27, 2022

But it’s not out of the realm of the possible that the U.S. is indeed behind the attack. President Joe Biden promised on February 7 to prevent Nord Stream 2 from becoming operational if Russia invaded Ukraine. “If Russia invades,” said Biden, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”

Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

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Featured image is from Michael Shellenberger