Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors.
That’s, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is all about.
It’s really a replay of the Cold War decades, when Americans were made to believe that the Reds were coming to get them, take over the federal government and the public schools, and indoctrinate everyone into loving communism and socialism.
In those Cold War years, Americans citizens were so scared of the Reds that they were willing to ignore — or even support — the dark-side powers that were being wielded and exercised by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which are the three principal components of the national-security establishment.
The idea was that if the U..S. government failed to adopt the same dark-side totalitarian-type powers, such as assassination and torture, that the Soviet Union and Red China were wielding and exercising, the United States would end up falling to the Reds and becoming communist.
The Cold War notion was that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow — yes, the same Moscow that is now being used, once again, to scare the dickens out of the American people.
Ironically, however, the American right wing, which was the leader of America’s anti-communist crusade during the Cold War, was teaching that socialism was an inherently defective paradigm. They would cite free-market economists like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman to show that socialism was doomed to fail.
Alas, American conservatives were never able to see the contradiction in their position. On the one hand, they were claiming that socialism was an inherently defective system that was doomed to fail. On the other hand, they were claiming that America and the rest of the world was in grave danger of falling to the supposed international communist/socialist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow.
The fact is that there was never any danger whatsoever of a Soviet or Chinese invasion and takeover of the United States. It was always an overblown threat designed to keep Americans afraid — and to keep the national-security establishment and its voracious army of “defense” contractors in power and in “high cotton.”
Oh sure, there was always the possibility of nuclear war, but that was the last thing that China or Russia wanted, especially given the vast superiority of America’s nuclear arsenal. It’s worth mentioning though that the Pentagon and the CIA constantly claimed, falsely, that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was vastly superior to that of the United States. Again, they had to keep Americans afraid as a way to maintain their power and their budgets.
When the Cold War was suddenly over, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA freaked out. That was the last thing they expected or wanted. They needed the Cold War. How else could they keep Americans afraid? What if Americans began demanding the restoration of their founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, which would necessarily entail the dismantling of the national-security state form of governmental structure?
That’s when they turned on their old partner and ally, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam became the new official enemy. Day after day, it was “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam! He is the new Hitler! He is coming to get us with his WMDs!” And the vast majority of Americans bought into the new official scaremongering, no matter how ridiculous it was.
Meanwhile, however, the Pentagon and the CIA were going into the Middle East with a campaign of death and destruction, one that would end up producing another big scary official enemy — terrorism — and, to a certain extent, Islam. Even though commentators continually warned the Pentagon and the CIA that their deadly and destructive interventionist campaign would produce terrorist blowback, the Pentagon and the CIA continued pressing forward, with the result being the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, the USS Cole, the U.S. embassies in East Africa, the 9/11 attacks, and the post-9/11 attacks. Americans now had a new official enemy — possibly one than was scarier than communism — and the national-security state was off to the races with more power and more money.
Then came the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the Global War on Terrorism.
They milked that for some 20 years, keeping Americans deathly afraid of the terrorists and the Muslims, who had supposedly been planning the takeover of America as part of a centuries-old conspiracy to establish a worldwide caliphate, one that would require every American citizen to live under Sharia law.
But throughout the entire war on terrorism and war on Islam, they never gave up on restoring China and Russia as big, scary official Cold War enemies. That’s what is going on today. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA know that Americans are losing some of their fear of the terrorists and the Muslims, especially now that the Pentagon and the CIA are no longer killing people in Afghanistan.
Their big problem, however, is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is proving that Russia is a second-rate military power, one that can’t even conquer a third-rate power like Ukraine. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it’s hard to convince people that America is in grave danger of falling to the Reds — I mean, the Russians — when a crooked and corrupt third-rate regime in Ukraine isn’t even falling to the Russians.
Where do the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA go from here? They will undoubtedly continue indoctrinating Americans into living in deep fear of the Russkies and the Chinese Reds. Don’t be surprised if they gin up another crisis with North Korea, which is always a good-standby official enemy. There is always Iran, of course, or Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua — maybe even (communist) Vietnam again — given that fear of the Reds is always a good one on which to rely. And since they are still killing people in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, as well as in Africa, there is always the possibility of terrorist blowback that will reinvigorate the Global War on Terrorism and Islam.
The solution to all this official-enemy mayhem? Americans need to overcome the fear of official enemies that has been inculcated into them by the national-security establishment as part of their decades-old crooked and corrupt racket. Once that happens, it will be possible to restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and get back on the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Israel has been secretly coordinating with the US on many of its airstrikes in Syria, and senior officials at US Central Command have reviewed and approved many plans in recent years.
Israel frequently bombs Syria and frames the operations as strikes against Iran or Hezbollah, although the air raids often kill Syrian government troops and members of Iraq’s Shia militias. The latest Israeli airstrikes on Syria disabled the Damascus International Airport, marking a significant escalation in the air campaign.
Current and former officials told the Journal that the main focus of the coordination is on airstrikes that pass near al-Tanf garrison, a US military base in southern Syria near the border with Jordan. The officials said that the “vast majority” of the strikes passing through that area had been approved by the US.
The Israelis started flying airstrikes near al-Tanf in 2017 to avoid Syrian air defenses. The officials said that Israel notifies CENTCOM of its plans ahead of time. The command conducts a review of the operation and also notifies the secretary of defense and joint chiefs chairman. Israel has also notified Russian forces at the Khmeimim Air Base in western Syria of planned strikes.
The report said that the US doesn’t review all Israeli operations inside Syria, and doesn’t help Israel pick its targets. A significant number of Israeli airstrikes in the country don’t pass al-Tanf, including the strike on Damascus Airport.
The US has about 1,000 troops stationed in eastern Syria. On paper, the presence is about supporting the Kurdish-led SDF against ISIS, but the occupation is also about putting pressure on Damascus. The US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Syria, preventing the country from rebuilding after over 10 years of war.
The Journal report is the first time that the close US-Israeli coordination on airstrikes in Syria has been reported. But the US has always tacitly endorsed the operations as it never condemns them.
In 2019, Brett McGurk, the top Middle East official on President Biden’s National Security Council, penned an op-ed where he outlined his ideal Syria policy after resigning from the Trump administration over unfulfilled plans to withdraw from the country. In the article, McGurk said the US should support Israeli airstrikes in Syria.
Back in February, when Russia went into Ukraine to denazify and disarm the country, the corporate media declared brave and patriotic Ukrainians would push the Russians out and eventually retake Crimea and the Donbas. In order to do this, we were told, the US must provide tens of billions of dollars in lethal aid.
Months later, as Ukraine’s losses to the overwhelming firepower of Russian artillery made it obvious they were losing—and badly, hundreds of soldiers dying every week—the lying corporate media in the West began to admit the truth: short of direct NATO involvement, it doesn’t matter how many high-tech weapons the US funnels into Ukraine, there is simply no way to defeat the Russians and kick them out of the country.
This does not mean the US will turn its back on Ukraine. It appears the US will double-down on its expensive effort to keep Zelenskyy and the Nazis in power while attempting to kill as many Russians as possible.
But here’s the rub—you will pay for this, and dearly. From the crown jewel of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, The Washington Post.
President Biden on June 14 issued his most expansive warning yet that there would be a significant price for Americans to pay as a result of the war in Ukraine, one that he argued was worth the cost in the name of supporting a fledgling democracy.
On a day when he announced the next escalatory step — and the one most likely to reverberate in the United States — Biden also called for further sacrifice.
“This is a step that we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin, but there will be costs as well here in the United States,” Biden said as he announced a ban on Russian oil imports.
“I said I would level with the American people from the beginning. And when I first spoke to this, I said defending freedom is going to cost. It’s going to cost us as well in the United States.”
In other words, you will be expected to lower your standard of living significantly as a debt-addicted state continues Biden’s war against Russia in support of Ukrainian oligarchs, fascist ultranationalists, and the second most corrupt government in the world.
Archive. Prior to Russian Invasion
The corporate media, of course, still lies through omission. It rarely mentions the nazi-loving “battalions” rolled into Ukraine’s national guard. Moreover, the corporate media continues to claim the prominence of Nazis would not be possible with a Jewish president.
Since the war, Zelensky has been playing the Jewish card to get money from Israel and to try to pretend he is not a Neo-Nazi which means a “new” version of Nazism that believes still in ethnic cleansing, but their targets are Russians, not Jews.
The “objective” Newsweek is pushing the “Zelensky can’t be a Nazi because he’s a Jew” fable.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of a government Putin claims is dominated by Nazis, is a Jew and Russian speaker himself, and the grandson of a man whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. Zelensky’s family history reveals that Putin’s denazification claim is both baseless and cruel.
Adding the Holocaust to the argument makes it more difficult to argue that Ukraine is in fact a nazified country with a blood-lust for Russians, including Russian-speakers in the Donbas, Crimea, Mariupol, Odesa, and elsewhere in Ukraine. Of course, the majority of Ukrainians don’t want to kill Russians or burn them alive like the neo-Nazis did to forty-two anti-Maidan activists in Odesa. Most Ukrainians want to live normal lives, as normal as life can be in a rapidly deteriorating state.
In the months ahead, we can expect the fighting in Ukraine to slowly wind down. However, this does not mean Ukraine and its enabler, the United States government, will admit defeat and negotiate a post-war agreement. On the contrary, I believe the US will begin a destabilizing guerrilla war against the people of the Donbas, Luhansk, and southern Ukraine.
On June 6, The New York Times ran an article detailing the move toward guerrilla tactics in the Donbas.
In the past month, Ukrainian partisans claim, insurgents have attacked Russian trains and killed dozens of Russian soldiers, as well as supporting the Ukrainian military’s counterattacks. Their claims are impossible to independently verify. The partisans also have established a virtual Center of National Resistance, which features instructions for things like setting up ambushes and what to do if arrested.
The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a law prior to the Russian invasion that in essence makes every citizen of Ukraine a partisan warrior.
“According to the law, national resistance is an integral part of the comprehensive defense of the state, which includes a set of measures for the widest possible involvement of citizens of Ukraine in ensuring military security, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country, deterring and repelling aggression.” (Emphasis added.) “The bill provides that within the framework of the territorial defense system, it is also possible to create volunteer formations of territorial communities that are allowed to use their own hunting weapons,” (Interfax-Ukraine reported on January 1, 2022, a month before Russia invaded).
It is curious the war in Ukraine so perfectly dovetails with the end of the highly exaggerated “pandemic” that conditioned billions of people to follow even the most illogical and petty of mandates handed down by government bureaucrats and “experts.”
Following the sacrifices imposed by the covid operation, the world was blindsided with energy shortages, empty grocery shelves, broken supply lines, backlogged port deliveries, social and political disarray, and now the highest inflation in decades (the government claims the inflation rate is 8%; others say it is closer to 16% and climbing).
Because far too many Americans have extremely short memories when it comes to politics, the IMF and others can get away with blaming Russia for economic woes that are the fault of the government, central banks, and especially the Federal Reserve, the latter guilty of pumping trillions of fake dollars into the economy (primarily the stock market), thus priming inflation.
“Global economic prospects have been severely set back, largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the International Monetary Fund will have you believe.
Inflation has become a clear and present danger for many countries. Even prior to the war, it surged on the back of soaring commodity prices and supply-demand imbalances. Many central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, had already moved toward tightening monetary policy. War-related disruptions amplify those pressures. We now project inflation will remain elevated for much longer. In the United States and some European countries, it has reached its highest level in more than 40 years, in the context of tight labor markets.
Add to this Joe’s demand you suffer for the neo-Nazis of Ukraine. Joe and his coterie of warmongering Democrats and neocons, however, will not suffer. They are prized by the financial elite for their ruthless policies resulting in misery, death, and eventually a global tyranny as imagined by the Davos crowd.
“…the richest among us have been siphoning an increasing share of wealth from the masses since at least the early 1980s, if not earlier. It is confirmation of the argument I made in my book Letter to the One Percent, that the “financialization” of America has not been beneficial to most of us, that on the contrary it has taken advantage of our ignorance and our weakness, and that the economic troubles that plague our land — everything from slow growth to low savings to frequent crises — will not stop until the balance of power shifts away from the plutocrats who prey on average Americans like you.”
The war in Ukraine, the idiocy of blaming Putin while ignoring the threats Russia faces from Nazis on its periphery, is also part of that notorious financialization.
The message for the savvy yet conscienceless investor: Buy Raytheon stock.
By chance I picked a copy ofA Fearless Heartwhile browsing at my upstate Roscoe library. I find it’s a memoir that also explains the teaching of mindfulness for which its author, Thupten Jinpa, had become well known.
I didn’t recognize the writer’s name. Nor was I particularly interested in mindfulness training. Yet my attraction to the book cover couldn’t have been entirely chance. As an anthropologist I spent many years of my life engaged in the field of Tibetan Studies and I’d written a great deal aboutTibetan history and culture. That bond began long before I completed my PhD at the University of London.
It started in 1964 when I joined the British Save The Children Fund project in Simla, India, helping to establish a new school for Tibetan refugees where many families settled after their escape from Tibet in 1962. In the opening pages of Jinpa’s memoir, he notes that he’d been a pupil at this school when the Dalai Lama visited. I remembered that I myself was a member of the teaching staff who,along with the rest had welcomed the revered Tibetan leader to the school. This meant that Jinpa and I had been there at the same time: he, a 7-8 year-old boy, and I, the 20-something headmistress.
Among the few photographs we had arranged those days were class photos. Hmmm. I might still have three black and white class portraits pasted in one of my (hardcopy) scrap books. Perhaps Jinpa was in one of them. It didn’t take long, leafing through my collection to locate the pictures. But how would I know which child among the 70 pupils neatly lined up with their teachers was the now famous Dr. Jinpa? Or if he was there at all? After digitizing the three photos, I found Jinpa’s email address, and send them on to him.
Would he remember his childhood at the refugee school more than a half century ago?
Within a few days, I received his excited reply. Not only did he remember his years at the primary school (and this headmistress). He recognized himself.
That was especially exciting for his wife and children, since this was the only snapshot that he had of himself as a child. It was certainly a delight for me, and justification for keeping those old photos in good condition. It’s all the more gratifying that the photo itself continues to circulate, most recently in a BBC film, “Mission Joy”.
Jinpa has become an eminent member of the international Buddhist community. He lectures and leads seminars in many parts of the world. Significantly, he helped establish the teaching of ‘mindfulness’, a core principle of Buddhist meditation, in Western psychology. And he remains active teaching the practice at centers across Europe and the USA.
Before his studies abroad and his marriage, Jinpa had been a monk in India. In that capacity, he became a favorite translator of the Dalai Lama and they worked closely together for several years. Even today, on special occasions the Dalai Lama calls on Jinpa. One such time was the filming of “Mission Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times”. The 2021 film records the wonderfully warm dialogue between Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. Besides being good friends and esteemed religious figures, they’re fellow Nobel Peace Laureates.
I suppose it was Thupten Jinpa’s participation as translator on the “Mission Joy” movie set that a reference arose to the conditions of Tibetan refugee children 60 years ago.
To illustrate that minor but not inconsequential historical moment, where did Jinpa turn?
A rare 1966 class photo that had recently come into his possession.He offered it to the film’s editors; so there he is in genuine black and white (b/w photo above, middle row, 4thfrom the left) with his 24 bright-eyed young classmates– a historical peep slipped in with the wisdom and laughter of these iconic world leaders.
And yes, we ourselves—teacher and former pupil– had a reunion in 2019, after his presentation at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City
The World Health Organization is set to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the end of June 2022 over Covid-19 vaccine-induced shingles which all member states including the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe are legally obliged to respond to.
The world is being told that Monkeypox is on the rise in countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and most of Europe.
But evidence suggests this is a lie, and it is actually a cover-up of the adverse consequences of Covid-19 vaccination.
But either way, the Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization is set to meet on Thursday 23rd June 2022, to assess whether the Covid-19 vaccine-induced shingles outbreak (allegedly Monkeypox) represents a public health emergency of international concern.
And under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), states have a legal duty to respond promptly to a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, meaning we could be about to witness COVID 2.0.
How do we know monkeypox is a cover-up for Covid-19 vaccine-induced shingles and other ailments?
Well first take a look at these two maps side by side. One shows countries where cases of “monkeypox” have been reported to the WHO since May 2022, and the other shows the main distribution of the Pfizer Covid-19 injection by country.
Apart from a couple of countries, there isn’t really any difference, and every country that has reported alleged cases of monkeypox since May 2022 where it was not already endemic, is a country that also distributed the Pfizer Covid-19 injection.
And chickenpox is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, and just like its close relative the herpes simplex virus, it becomes a lifelong resident in the body.
And like its other cousin, genital herpes, varicella may be silent for many years, hiding out inside nerve cells and can reactivate later, wreaking havoc in the form of the excruciating skin disorder, shingles, which is a blistering, burning skin rash.
Unfortunately, or fortunately; depending on whether you chose to get the Covid-19 injection, official Government data and confidential Pfizer documents strongly suggest the Covid-19 injection may be reactivating the dormant chickenpox virus or herpes virus due to the frightening damage it does to the immune system.
This is most likely what has just happened to Justin Bieber, leaving one-half of his face paralysed, and forcing him to cancel his upcoming tour.
On June 10th, he released a video in which he revealed half of his face is paralysed after being diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, leading to the cancellation of his upcoming tour.
Ramsay Hunt Syndrome is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox and occurs when a shingles outbreak affects the facial nerve near one of your ears. In addition to the painful shingles rash, Ramsay Hunt syndrome can cause facial paralysis and hearing loss in the affected ear.
The condition typically affects people over the age of 60, unless you’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19, which has, in turn, decimated your immune system, leading to reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus.
The following chart shows the real-world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated population in England according to the UK Health Security Agency Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 Vaccine Surveillance reports of 2022 –
A negative vaccine effectiveness indicates immune system damage because vaccine effectiveness isn’t really a measure of the effectiveness of a vaccine. It is a measure of a vaccine recipient’s immune system performance compared to the immune system performance of an unvaccinated person.
There’s plenty more official Government evidence out there, but the above chart alone proves that the Covid-19 injections damage the immune system and that damage continues to worsen by the week.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to delay the release of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine safety data for 75 years despite approving the injection after only 108 days of safety review on December 11th, 2020.
But in early January 2022, Federal Judge Mark Pittman ordered them to release 55,000 pages per month. They released 12,000 pages by the end of January.
Since then, PHMPT has posted all of the documents on its website. The latest drop happened on June 1st 2022.
One of the documents contained in the data dump is ‘reissue_5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf’. Page 21 of the confidential document contains data on adverse events of special interest, with one of these specifically being herpes viral infections.
According to the document by the end of February 2021, just 2 months after the Pfizer vaccine was granted emergency use authorisation in both the USA and UK, Pfizer has received 8,152 reports relating to herpes infection, and 18 of these had already led to multiple organ dysfunction syndrome.
The following chart shows the number of Google searches in the UK for ‘shingles’ and the dates of when the first, second and third doses of the Covid-19 injection were administered –
The following chart shows adverse events to the Covid-19 injections reported to the CDC relating to herpes, shingles and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome up to 13th May 2022.
It also shows the number of adverse events reported against the Flu Vaccines, all vaccines combined (excluding Covid-19 injections) and the HPV/Smallpox vaccines between 2008 and 2020 –
As you can see the Covid-19 injections have caused the most herpes-related infections, and this is within 17 months. When comparing these to the number of flareups reported against the HPV/Smallpox vaccines in 13 years, these numbers are extremely concerning.
This isn’t because so many people have been given a Covid-19 injection either. Official CDC numbers actually show 1.7 billion doses of influenza vaccine alone were administered between 2008 and 2020. Whereas, as of 6th May 2022, 580 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been administered in the USA.
The following chart shows the rate per 1 million doses administered of adverse events related to herpes, shingles and multiple organ syndrome –
The rate of herpes-related infections reported as adverse reactions to the Flu jabs is 0.75 adverse events per 1 million doses administered. But the rate of herpes-related infections reported as adverse reactions to the Covid-19 injections is 31.31 adverse events per 1 million doses administered.
That’s a 4,075% difference, and indicative of a very serious problem. A serious problem that is being caused by the fact the Covid-19 injections decimate the immune system.
But you are being told this immune system damage and herpes flare-ups are a result of a monkeypox outbreak, curiously occurring in several countries for the first time in 50 years. And it just so happens every country that is allegedly suffering a monkeypox outbreak happens to be a country where the Pfizer vaccine was administered.
And now, the World Health Organization is set to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the end of June 2022 which all member states including the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe are legally obliged to respond to.
This means we could be about to witness Covid-19 2.0 as a cover-up for the consequences of administering an experimental Covid-19 injection to millions of people.
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“When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is No Moving Backwards” (Michel Chossudovsky)
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The EU has released its guidelines for the implementation of online censorship. It’s the roadway to tyranny. It’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth 2022.
The unspoken objective is to sustain government propaganda and “fake news” by the mainstream media while systematically curtailing freedom of expression and independent analysis throughout the European Union. It is also an attempt to literally bankrupt independent media (financially) through a process of demonetization.
The new Code brings together a more diverse range of stakeholders than ever, empowering them to contribute to wide-ranging improvements by signing up to precise commitments relevant to their field. Such commitments include demonetising the dissemination of disinformation; guaranteeing transparency of political advertising; enhancing cooperation with fact-checkers; and facilitating researchers access to data.
Supporting platforms and industry to meet their commitments under the Code of Practice on Disinformation feeds in to the European Commission’s commitment to a more transparent, safe and trustworthy online environment.
Needless to say, The 2022 Strengthened Code does not address the REAL mainstream media practice of fake news, nor does it question the lies of senior government officials.
“Disinformation related to the coronavirus crisis and Russia’s war in Ukraine clearly show that we need stronger tools to fight online disinformation.
Outright lies regarding the deadly impacts of the Covid-19 Vaccine. Amply documented, the Covid-19 Vaccine has triggered from the outset in December 2020 an upward trend in mortality and morbidity. The evidence is overwhelming. National governments Worldwide are Lying to You the People, to the populations they purportedly serve.
What is at stake is a comprehensive totalitarian project with a view to sustaining official lies and fake science on behalf of the financial elites. The President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is complicit in suppressing the truth on behalf of Big Pharma. If you have doubts, read the bombshell Secret Report by Pfizer, which is now in the public domain (released under FOI).
“More Transparency” points to the Elimination of Freedom of Expression in Online Publishing
Sofar the EU Digital Strategy (with a view to tackling alleged online disinformation) has enlisted Facebook (owned by Meta), Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok.
In this regard, the EU has put forth a detailed Code of Practice which contains 44 commitments and 128 specific measures.
Demonetization
The first objective is entitled “Demonetisation: cutting financial incentives for purveyors of disinformation”. It’s intent is to prevent the independent online media from raising revenue through advertising and/or donations.
The Real “purveyors of disinformation” and “fake news”, namely the mainstream media conglomerates are not affected. Quite the opposite: The main source of their multibillion dollar online revenue is advertising.
“The Code will strengthen the measures to reduce manipulative behaviour used to spread disinformation (e.g. fake accounts, bot-driven amplification, impersonation, malicious deep fakes”…They will be also required to periodically review the list of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) employed by malicious actors”…
Who are those “Malicious Actors”?
Malicious actors are routinely involved to actions which contribute to the destabilization and suppression of the independent media.
It takes on various forms. In the course of the month of April 2022, Global Research was the object of a cyber attack involving a daily average of up to 10 million malicious requests, originating simultaneously from several countries, the objective of which was to paralyze our website.
Other procedures adopted by Facebook and Twitter consist in providing a malicious label to independent media articles:
The EU initiative is to “be better protected from disinformation” to enable online readers “to access authoritative sources”.
The objective is also “to empower” the so-called “fact-checking community”, which is largely controlled by the corporate media in alliance with Facebook, Google et al in liaison with corrupt government officials.
“Steps ahead”.
The EU calls for the rapid implementation of the Code:
Signatories will have six months to implement the commitments and measures to which they have signed up. …
… The established Task Force, which will meet as necessary and at least every six months, will monitor and adapt the commitments in view of technological, societal, market and legislative developments.
Censorship is Mandatory
It is worth noting that while the 2018’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, is “self regulatory”, the revised version adopted on 16 June 2022 is slated to become mandatary:
“the Code aims to become a mitigation measure and a Code of Conduct recognized under the co-regulatory framework of the DSA.”
This insidious project is tantamount to the establishment of a European ‘Ministry of Truth”
in blatant violation of the constitutional provisions of the EU’s 27 member states. It goes far beyond Hitler’s propaganda apparatus led by Joseph Goebbels.
“JosephGoebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, 1933-1945, formulated a principle that if a lie is told often enough, it becomes accepted as the truth.” (Brian Willson)
“A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”- Joseph Goebbels
The dystopian premises of Orwell’s 1984 are now embedded in an advanced online digital communications technology.
Repeated media lies 24/7 are part of a fear campaign.
In turn, the methodology of persistent and repetitive lying inserted into an advanced digital environment has a far greater reach than the repulsive propaganda model proposed by Goebbels to Adolph Hitler.
The European Commission will Finance the “Fact Checkers”
The real purveyors of media disinformation namely the corporate media and its “fact checkers” are not only exempt from these provisions, the EU Commission has promised to generously finance the “fact checkers” (at tax payers expense) which operate under the auspices of the multi-billion dollar corporate media conglomerates including Reuters (owned by the Thomson Family):
“… The Code works towards ensuring fair financial contributions for fact-checkers’ work and better access to fact-checkers to information facilitating their daily work”. (emphasis added)
This project of the European Commission must be forcefully rejected.
It is a model of censorship in derogation of fundamental human rights. It’s a criminal undertaking under Nuremberg.
As the Nuremberg prosecutor stated:
“The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack…. In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.” (emphasis added)
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Covid 19 is not a disease, but a weapon used to re-trigger the so-called “pre-existing conditions” of the person affected using an unknown technique and often damage the lungs, brain or other organ. The nature of this weapon, how it enters the body, whether it stays there, whether and how it can be removed again, and what its actual, possibly longer-term purpose is, is unknown.
The fact that the new corona virus has not been detected should not further mislead us into assuming that there is no problem with the so-called Covid 19 “disease”.
Covid feels like:
A program is unwound in your body.
It begins, for example, with a kind of mind control, namely the destruction of the psychic power together with the physical one and the enforcement of a suicidal indifference towards life, including one’s own. An extreme weakening happens on all levels and the opposite of every joy of life occurs, a miserable feeling of the end that spreads in you. This lasts for the first 4 days, approx. Question: Does this have something to do with a weakening of the lungs, which may also occur without a previous lung disease? (relationship lungs and grief)
Within the body, weak points are docked one after the other, as if a software program is running that can affect all organs, parts of the body, even the bones and touches the whole of life, right down to birth, and of course it is different for everyone.
This causes fever and sometimes severe and long-lasting pain. It awakens so-called pre-existing conditions that we are not always aware of. Some of them are reactivated as if there had been no healing and as if the body’s memory of healing had not existed. The wisdom of the body is turned off. All old illnesses, injuries and even unknown traumas can resurface. This process takes about 4 days, by which time most of the symptoms will subside and only the most stubborn will remain.
To what extent the lungs or the brain are a particular target, and in what form, remains to be seen. Since older people automatically have more “previous illnesses”, they are more at risk – “more vulnerable” – and are therefore more likely to end up in the hospital. Children, on the other hand, rarely get Covid because they usually don’t have any previous illnesses worth mentioning, or they show such effects that are additionally produced.
In the clinic, those who are ill then die “from and with Corona”, i.e. from and with the previous illnesses triggered by the Covid weapon (and the fear campaign), among other things, along with the type of treatment there, especially the lungs. This explains the new language used around it.
It is therefore precisely the various forms of lung and other organ diseases that are to be examined that are not necessarily related to previous illnesses. Vascular diseases, lack of oxygen, etc. So far, however, these have been treated in the same way in the clinics, up to intubation and death by asphyxiation. Why? (WHO patent)
In this way, hardly anyone is already “negative” on the 5th day and can test free if they were really attacked by Covid and not just had the flu. On the contrary, it must be expected that the program in the body, i.e. a kind of programmed nanomachine, will still be there and can be used again. This machine must be a combination of nano-, AI- and eventually bio- and EM-technology, in any case a cutting-edge product of the 4th industrial revolution in the field of micro-technologies, which have the recognized purpose of transforming man and his body. It is a first step to transhumanism.
So this is not (only) about spike proteins or poisoning, for example with snake venom. Rather, it is a technological attack with a “bio” weapon in the sense that it attacks the biology of the body, as if it were mechanical hardware and software (psyche), and breaks it down into its specific components, i.e. mortifies , where there has already been a problem/injury/wound/illness, more so in older people. The mobilization of previous illnesses then also conceals the similarities and additional effects/destructions that are expressed in “Long Covid”, among other things, i.e., Covid is not a disease in its own right insofar as it forcibly brings back the illnesses that the person has gone through, as if there had been no cures. The body is therefore forced to deal with old diseases again, as if it had not already done so successfully. His healing memory is removed and first erased.
But Covid may also cause new diseases and even permanently, so it still has other “tasks” to fulfill or those that are actually at stake.
Without a good immune system, however, the body cannot master the attack of which it was a victim.
Therefore, it is crucial to take the right medication immediately when the symptoms start. The question remains as to what happens to the body in the Covid patient in the long run, and whether it can be “expelled” or whether it can be “thrown on” again later from the outside, e.g. when 5G is switched on (EM).
Covid is a mockery beyond compare. Because everyone “sicks” first of their own illnesses. He/she is therefore “to blame” for everything him-/herself. What morals! This hides the actual damage and changes that (should) be initiated with this weapon.
It is currently not possible for those affected to prove that all this is the case. It is therefore important to collect and sift through experiences, which are different for everyone. Since the new corona virus has not been proven – “isolated” – many people think that there is no disease or only “mild” courses. The opposite is the case.
What should also happen is a comparison with vaccine effects and substances. Is Covid already a pre-vaccination or something else?
Vaccinated persons are to be questioned. How is it the opposite or similar to Covid? Comparison of the applied technique. Comparison of the resulting diseases. In the case of vaccination, the diseases are new, in the case of Covid, they are often old.
These are all the results of the first irreversible global human experiments with products of the 4th industrial revolution in the field of alchemical microtechnologies, which mortify and reassemble into the state of the sick, dead or „transhuman“…
A debate is urgently needed.
*
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Dr. Claudia von Werlhofis Prof. Emerita of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. She is the author of many books and has worked hard to make Rosalie Bertell’s important book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War on Geoengineering available in German, Spanish, Italian, French and English again. Claudia was the founder of the Planetary Movement for Mother Earth (PMME) in 2010.
She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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***
The Tsilhqot’in Struggle
On 26 March 2018, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau addressed the history of the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who had been arrested during a sacred peace-pipe ceremony and subsequently hanged for their part in a war to prevent the spread of smallpox by colonialists:
“We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people.”
“They acted as leaders of a proud and independent nation facing the threat of another nation.”
“As settlers came to the land in the rush for gold, no consideration was given to the rights of the Tsilhqot’in people who were there first,” Trudeau said. “No consent was sought.”
In recent years, the Tsilhqot’in people were engaged in a long, drawn-out fight to gain sovereignty over their unceded territory, spurred by the attempts of Taseko Mines to situate an open-pit copper-and-gold mine near the trout-rich Teẑtan Biny (Fish Lake). Also proposed was “destroying Yanah Biny (Little Fish Lake) and the Tŝilhqot’in homes and graves located near that lake, to make way for a massive tailings pond.”
Sometimes the law works (even colonial law), and sometimes it doesn’t. Neither the Tsilhqot’in or Delgamuukw legal precedents have, so far, buttressed the Wet’suwet’en people’s fight against the encroachment of a pipeline corporation.
In the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, corporate Canada and the government of Canada are violently seeking to ram a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory despite its rejection by all five hereditary chiefs; i.e., no consent has been given for the laying of a pipeline.
The Gidimt’en land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en turned to the international forum and made a submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People on the “Militarization of Wet’suwet’en Lands and Canada’s Ongoing Violations.” The submission was co-authored by leading legal, academic, and human rights experts in Canada, and is supported by over two dozen organisations such as the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and Amnesty International-Canada.
The submission to the UN was presented by hereditary chief Dinï ze’ Woos (Frank Alec), Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), and Gidimt’en Checkpoint media coordinator Jen Wickham. It makes the case that forced industrialization by Coastal GasLink and police militarization on Wet’suwet’en land is a repudiation of Canada’s international obligations as stipulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
Their submission states:
Ongoing human rights violations, militarization of Wet’suwet’en lands, forcible removal and criminalization of peaceful land defenders, and irreparable harm due to industrial destruction of Wet’suwet’en lands and cultural sites are occurring despite declarations by federal and provincial governments for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. By deploying legal, political, and economic tactics to violate our rights, Canada and BC are contravening the spirit of reconciliation, as well as their binding obligations to Indigenous law, Canadian constitutional law, UNDRIP and international law.
Sleydo’ relates the situation:
We urge the United Nations to conduct a field visit to Wet’suwet’en territory because Canada and BC have not withdrawn RCMP from our territory and have not suspended Coastal GasLink’s permits, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling on them to do so. Wet’suwet’en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change. Yet we are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada.
In the three large-scale police actions that have transpired on Wet’suwet’en territory since January 2019, several dozens of people have been arrested and detained, including legal observers and media. On 13 June 2022, the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade expressed outrage that the BC Prosecution Service plans to pursue criminal contempt charges against people opposed to the trespass of Wet’suwet’en territory, including Sleydo’.
Treaty Treatment
The Wet’suwet’en are on their ancestral unceded lands. Would it have made a difference if they had signed a treaty with the colonial entity?
The book We Remember the Coming of the White Man (Durville, 2021), edited by Sarah Stewart and Raymond Yakeleya, does not augur a better outcome for the First People.
We Remember adumbrates how the treaty process operates under colonialism:
When our Dene People signed Treaty 11 in 1921, there had been no negotiation because the Treaty translators were not able to translate the actual language used in the document. There was not enough time for our People to consult with each other. Our Dene People were given a list that had been written up by bureaucrats declaring the demands of Treaty 11. They dictated to the Dene, ‘This is what we want. You have to agree, and sign it.’ We did not know what the papers contained. (p ix)
Treaties and contracts signed under duress are not legally binding. Forced signing of a treaty is on-its-face preposterous to most people with at least half a lobe. It is no less obvious to the Dene of the Northwest Territories:
How can you demand something from People who cannot understand? That’s a crime. I have often said that Treaty 11 does not meet the threshold of being legal. In other words, when we make a treaty, it should be you understand, I understand, and we agree. In this case, the Dene did not understand. (p x)
Unfortunately, the Dene trusted an untrustworthy churchman. The Dene signed on the urging of Bishop Breyant, a man of God, because they had faith in the Roman Catholic Church. (p x)
Oil appeals to those with a lust for lucre. This greed contrasts with traditional Dene customs. Walter Blondin writes in the Foreword,
We Dene consider our land as sacred and owned by everyone collectively as it provides life…. [T]here were laws between the families that insured harmony and sharing. No one was left behind to face hardships or starve when disasters such as forest fires devastated the lands. The Dene laws promoted sharing, and this was taken seriously as failure to follow these laws could lead to war and bloody conflict. (p 3)
The Blondin family of Norman Wells (Tlegohli) in the Northwest Territories experienced first hand the perfidy of the White Man. The Blondins gave oil samples from their land to the Roman Catholic bishop for testing. The Dene family never received any report of the results. Later, however, a geologist, Dr Bosworth staked three claims at Bosworth Creek that were bought by Imperial Oil in 1918. (p 5-6)
Imperial Oil told the families: “You are not welcome in your homes and your traditional lands and your hunting territory.” The Dene people were driven out. “Elders say, ‘It was the first time in living memory where the Dene became homeless on their own land.’” (p 6)
The Blondin family homes were torn down with possessions inside and pushed over the river bank. “No apology or compensation was ever received from Imperial Oil. Imperial Oil considered Norman Wells to be ‘their town—a White Man’s town’ and the Blondin family and other Dene were not welcome.” (p 6)
“Treaty 11 became the ‘treaty for oil ownership.’” (p 8)
“One hundred years after the fact, the Dene can see the collusion between the British Crown, Imperial Oil [now ExxonMobil] and the Roman Catholic Church in the fraud, theft and embezzlement of Dene resources.” (p 10)
Sarah Stewart writes, “Treaty 11 was a charade to legitimize the land grab in the Northwest Territories.” The land grab came with horrific consequences. Stewart laments that the White Man brought disease, moved onto Dene lands and decimated wildlife, and that the teaching of missionaries and missionary schools eroded native languages, cultures, and traditions. (p 14)
Indigenous People, whose land it was, were never considered equal partners in benefiting from the resource. As Indian Agent Henry Conroy wrote to the Deputy General of Indian Affairs in January 1921, the objective was to have Indigenous people surrender their territory ‘to avoid complications in the exploitation of oil.’ (p 15)
Filmmaker Raymond Yakeleya elucidates major differences between the colonialists and the Dene. He points to the capitalist mindset of the White Man: “‘How can we make money off this?’ Dene People are not motivated by that.” (p 24) A deep respect and reverence for all the Creator’s flora and fauna and land is another difference. “When you kill an animal, you have a conversation with it and give it thanks for sharing its body. There are special protocols and ceremonies you have to go through.” (p 28)
While Yakeleya acknowledges that not all missionaries were bad, (p 30) he points to a dark side:
A major confusion came to our People with the coming of the Catholic missionaries. I see the coming of the Black Robes as being a very, very dark cloud that descended over our People. All of a sudden you have people from another culture with another way of thinking imposing their laws. We see that they did it for money, control, and power. I heard an Elder say to me once that the Christians who followed the Ten Commandments were the same people who broke all of them.
The first time we ever questioned ourselves was with the coming of the Christians and to me, I think there was something evil that came amongst our People…. The missionaries were quick to say our ways were the ways of the devil, or the ways of something not good…. Now we see they are being charged with pedophilia and other crimes. (p 29)
As for the discovery of oil, Joe Blondin said, “The Natives found it and never got anything out of it and that’s the truth.” (p 159) As for Treaty 11, John Blondin stated emphatically, “We know that we did not sell our land.” (p 171)
At the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in Fort McPherson [Teetł’it Zheh], Dene Philip Blake spoke words that resonate poignantly with the situation in Wet’suwet’en territory today:
If your nation chooses … to continue to try and destroy our nation, then I hope you will understand why we are willing to fight so that our nation can survive. It is our world…. But we are willing to defend it for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. If your nation becomes so violent that it would tear up our land, destroy our society and our future, and occupy our homeland, by trying to impose this pipeline against our will, but then of course we will have no choice but to react with violence. I hope we do not have to do that. For it is not the way we would choose…. I hope you will not only look on the violence of Indian action, but also on the violence of your own nation which would force us to take such a course. We will never initiate violence. But if your nation threatens by its own violent action to destroy our nation, you will have given us no choice. Please do not force us into this position. For we would all lose too much. (p 229)
The Nature of Colonialism and Its Treaties
Spoken word poet Shane L. Koyczan captures the nature of colonialism in Inconvenient Skin (Theytus Books, 2019):
150 years is not so long
that the history can be forgot
not so long that
forgiveness can be bought with empty apologies
or unkept promises
sharpened assurances that this is now
how it is
take it on good faith
and accept it
except that
history repeats itself
like someone not being listened to
like an entire people not being heard
the word of god is hard to swallow
when good faith becomes a barren gesture
there were men of good faith
robbing babies from their cradles
like the monsters we used to tell each other about
ripping children out of their mother’s arms
to be imprisoned in the houses of god
whose teachings were love
did no one hear?
did god mumble?
god said love
but the things that were done
were not love
our nation is built above the bones
of a genocide
it was not love that pried apart these families
it is not love that abandons its treaties
*
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Kim Petersen is a scuba diver, independent writer, and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen.
Featured image: Wet’suwet’en fishing site on Bulkley River and the entrance of Moricetown Canyon, in Moricetown, British Columbia, Canada. Fishermen capture the running salmon there (mostly cohoes, at that time of year) using nets in order to tag them, after which they are released on the other side of the rapids. (Licensed under FAL)
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The wearing of the face mask started in the immediate wake of the official announcement of the covid-19 lockdown on March 11, 2020.
Worldwide, people have been instructed to wear the mask.
And then one year later, we are told that in some cases it may contain a poisonous substance.
On April 2, 2021 Health Canada acknowledged the presence of graphene nano particles inside the Face Mask allegedly to protect our health as well as prevent the spread of the “deadly virus”.
According to Health Canada: “Face Masks which contain Graphene Oxide May Pose Health Risks”.
It took more than a year for Health Canada to acknowledge that certain unnamed brands of the face mask contain graphene nano-particles:
“There is a potential that wearers could inhale graphene particles from some masks, which may pose health risks.”
“A number of individuals have come forward in Quebec reporting breathing problems, headaches, skin complaints and other adverse effects from the ‘healfiber’ masks,” they said at the time in a memo urging people to stop using them or any other mask that contains graphene. (emphasis added)
The face masks were carefully designed. The specifics of the face mask were then outlined. Production under contract was then outsourced to manufacturing entities including several Chinese companies. The Shandong based Shengquan Group is a major supplier, selling hundreds of millions of face masks Worldwide.
Can Graphene Nano-Particles Enter the Body?
Who designed the face mask containing graphene particles? Not the Chinese manufacturer.
One would expect that Health Canada (back in March 2020) would have been involved directly or indirectly in reviewing and identifying the Face Mask brands containing graphene nano-particles prior to their sale and mass distribution.
Who approved the production of a face mask which contains a poisonous substance?
In an earlier March 2021 unpublished memorandum to the province’s and territories, Health Canada recommended users to “stop purchasing and using face masks containing nanoform graphene”(quoted in a study by Andrew Maynard)
Visibly this March 25, 2021 memorandum was amended. No brand names are mentioned in Health Canada’s April 2, 2021 advisory.
Health Canada has ordered the removal from sale and distribution (Solely) of face masks which are explicitly labelled “contain graphene or biomass graphene”. The advisory does not apply to face masks brands (containing graphene) which do not display an explicit acknowledgement on the product label.
According to Health Canada:
Graphene is a novel nanomaterial (materials made of tiny particles) reported to have antiviral and antibacterial properties. Health Canada conducted a preliminary scientific assessment after being made aware that masks containing graphene have been sold with COVID-19 claims and used by adults and children in schools and daycares. Health Canada believes they may also have been distributed for use in health care settings.
Novel nano-material? Nonsense! Graphene was first isolated in 2004 at the Physics Department of the University of Manchester by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov: Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.
Graphene is by no means “novel”. Moreover, the impacts on human health are amply documented:
“In recent years there have been a number of comprehensive reviews on the potential toxicity of graphene, including this 2018 paper by Bengt Fadeel and colleagues, and this one by Vanesa Sanches and colleagues. Both are solid reviews by highly respected research teams. And both indicate that, while the toxicity of graphene is complex and may be low in some cases, it isn’t negligible.
When it comes to inhaling graphene, the current state of the science indicates that if the material can get into the lower parts of the lungs (the respirable or alveolar region) it can lead to an inflammatory response at high enough concentrations.” Andrew Maynard
Health Canada ignores and distorts the scientific evidence (quoted above). It dispels the impacts on human beings (amply documented), it casually refers in its advisory (below) to “toxicity in animals”:
Health Canada’s preliminary assessment of available research identified that inhaled graphene particles had some potential to cause early lung toxicity in animals. However, the potential for people to inhale graphene particles from face masks and the related health risks are not yet known, … The health risk to people of any age is not clear.
Until the Department completes a thorough scientific assessment and has established the safety and effectiveness of graphene-containing face masks, it is taking the precautionary approach of removing them from the market while continuing to gather and assess information. (Health Canada advisory dated April 2, 2021, emphasis added)
Since the writing of this article, Health Canada has come up with an UPDATE dated July 13, 2021 which essentially removes and invalidates its earlier advisory on the grounds (according to Health Canada) that the graphene nano-particles “are not shed from these masks in quantities that are likely to cause adverse lung effects”.
Despite the scientific evidence, Health Canada does not consider Graphene as “a health risk”.
Case closed.The earlier pro forma restriction on graphene (a poisonous substance if it enters the body) has now been lifted.
Ironically, Health Canada acknowledges that they “did not find evidence that biomass graphene provides any added antimicrobial, or antiviral protection”.
If graphene does not protect Canadians from the virus, what on earth is the purpose of having graphene nano-particles in the face mask?
It would appear that there are “divisions” within Health Canada regarding the alleged “positive effects” of the graphene particles as an instrument of “anti-viral protection”.
Who pressured Health Canada to lift the restriction on Graphene?
And why is graphene contained in face masks sold and distributed Worldwide?
Who is calling the shots? Is there an unspoken agenda?
UPDATE (July 13, 2021): Health Canada previously advised Canadians not to use face masks that contain graphene after a preliminary assessment identified some potential for inhaled graphene particles to cause early lung effects in animals (e.g., early signs of inflammation). As a precaution while a risk assessment was ongoing, Health Canada directed all known importers and distributors of these masks to remove four mask models from one manufacturer, Shandong Shengquan New Materials Co. Ltd., from the market.
Health Canada has reviewed the available scientific literature along with data provided by Shandong Shengquan New Materials Co. Ltd., related to the biomass graphene contained within its four models. The review found that biomass graphene particles are not shed from these masks in quantities that are likely to cause adverse lung effects.
Health Canada also determined that the filtration performance of these masks meets the performance standard listed on the label. The Department did not find evidence that biomass graphene provides any added antimicrobial, or antiviral protection.
As a result, given the evidence supporting the safety and effectiveness of these products, Health Canada is permitting the sale of the four Shandong Shengquan New Materials Co. Ltd. mask models to resume in Canada (see models listed below).
No other graphene face masks are currently permitted for sale in Canada. Consumers should notify Health Canada by submitting an online complaint form should they become aware of other graphene masks being sold in Canada.
Companies wishing to sell graphene masks must first provide evidence to Health Canada demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of their models, as the risks with using graphene masks may vary depending on mask design.
***
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“I am not going to the summit because not all of the countries of the Americas were invited…I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries, the exclusion, the desire to dominate, the lack of respect for the sovereignty of the countries and the independence of every country…There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all of the countries of the American continent do not participate…We consider that to be the old policy of interventionism, of a lack of respect for nations and their peoples.” – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (June 6, 2022) [1]
During his speech at the 9th annual Summit of the Americas, President Biden spoke about the power of the democracies in the region and its role to offset a lot of difficulties, in the wake of COVID-19 and inflammatory pressure worsened by “Putin’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine.” He spoke of “coming together” to address climate change and migration in particular. [2]
One very notable feature of this group was the absence of more than a third of the heads of state through the entire conference including the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This boycott was, apparently triggered by the announcement that Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela would not be welcome in Los Angeles. His rationale was reportedly a lack of respect for democracy and human rights in the three countries. Even the Brazilian President Jair Balsonarohad threatened not to come until a personal envoy from President Biden himself caused him to change his mind.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, in attendance at three summits, said that the Americas had to seem united with a well-attended meeting at a time of tensions with Russia and China. If this is valid, then the lack of participation would be a more prominent feature than any agreement the leaders in attendance ended up signing. [3]
But there is a more enduring legacy besetting the summit is that the much loathed Munroe Doctrine is finally realizing its day of reckoning. With even their long-term ally Columbia about to switch to the left of centre Gustavo Petro at the end of this weekend it seems as though Latin Americans have had enough of US-style “democracy.”
This episode of the Global Research News Hour attempts to review the impact of many empty seats at the Summit of the Americas and examine whether the trend is one which the United States has no hope of reversing.
In our first half hour, Stephen Sefton from northern Nicaragua joins us again to share his sense of where the people of the country stand, and his appraisal of the president’s chances of continuing the doctrine of imperial splendor in the foreseeable future. Later on, journalist Arnold August weighs in on the evidence that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau secretly and clandestinely supports the exclusion and subsequently the imperial agenda of the two Northern Powers. Finally, Ajamu Baraka checks in at the close of the show to explain the Black Alliance for Peace calling for Latin America and the Caribbean to boycott the summit altogether, and how the US is not only arrogant for seeing themselves as protectors of democracy and human rights, they are caught in the grip of “a collective national psychosis.”
Stephen Sefton is a renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, his articles appear on Tortilla Con Sal. He is actively involved in community development work focusing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.
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Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
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First published on June 19, 2022
***
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) mission is to do away with the democratic process and give all ownership and control to the deep state
They openly share and promote this to the world, as if it’s inevitable that their plan for a Great Reset will one day come to fruition
The dystopian society that they envision strips individuals of their autonomy in favor of global, tyrannical control
From mind control using sound waves to smartphones built in to your clothing and body, WEF promotes widespread censorship and control
WEF plans to “recalibrate” free speech, education for children and the idea that individuals should own their own property; you’ll “own nothing and be happy” is one of their most popular dictums
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If you’re not familiar with the World Economic Forum (WEF), prepare to be astounded. This international organization is run by German engineer and WEF founder Klaus Schwab and other members of the technocratic elite. Their mission is to do away with the democratic process and give all ownership and control to the deep state.
If this sounds far-fetched, like a conspiracy theory, you’ll be surprised to know that WEF doesn’t hide their agenda. On the contrary, they openly share it and promote it to the world, as if it’s inevitable that their plan for a Great Reset will one day come to fruition. The dystopian society that they envision strips individuals of their autonomy in favor of global, tyrannical control.
10 Creepy Dictates of the WEF
Just how chilling is WEF’s vision of the future? You’ve got to read their own words to find out. While few of their dictates are heavily picked up by the media, they have a way of infiltrating the collective psyche nonetheless. The Vigilant Citizen recently compiled 10 of the most incredulous — and scary — notions that WEF has championed, in no particular order.1
1. Infiltrating governments — It is WEF’s intention to penetrate and capture governments around the world in order to do away with democracy and establish a globalized world run by a “self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the UN system), and select civil society organizations (CSOs).”2 “This is the exact opposite of a democracy,” The Vigilant Citizen points out.3
Going even further, Schwab, WEF’s owner and chairman, told Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2017, “What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders.”4 In fact, WEF maintains a “Young Global Leaders” program,5 a five-year indoctrination into their principles.
Its goal is to create world leaders who don’t answer to their people but to their bosses at WEF. Graduates of the program include world leaders who are “suspiciously in lockstep” with WEF’s Great Reset, such as:6
Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada
Emmanuel Macron, president of France
Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook
Other Young Global Leader graduates include Germany’s Angela Merkel and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, along with at least half of Canada’s cabinet.7 Sponsors of WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google — “I wonder why Google censors and shapes information to be in exact support of the World Economic Forum’s narrative?” comedian JP Sears asked, satirically, in March 2022.8
2. Sound wave mind control — “Non-invasive neuromodulation” is touted as a “new era of healthcare” by WEF in a 2018 article that’s since been scrubbed from the internet, but is preserved by the Internet Archive.9 Initially discussed as a tool for managing Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, the article — titled “Mind control using sound waves?” — quickly takes a turn:10
“But what happens if this technique for altering our brain waves escapes regulation and falls into the wrong hands? Imagine a dictatorial regime with access to the tricks and tools to change the way its citizens think or behave.”
In an interview with Antoine Jerusalem, a professor of engineering science at Oxford University, the WEF article describes controlling neuronal activity in the brain by directing mechanical vibrations to a certain region.
While it’s stated that this process hasn’t yet been fine-tuned, Jerusalem said, “I can see the day coming where a scientist will be able to control what a person sees in their mind’s eye, by sending the right waves to the right place in their brain.”11
The article then makes the case that, since somebody is going to harness this form of mind control, it might as well be WEF — “If we want to lead that dance 10 years from now, we need to start researching today … Politicians should remember that if we don’t do it, then somebody somewhere will do it anyway … potentially unregulated.”12
3. Pills with microchips in them — At WEF’s 2018 meeting, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla described the U.S. FDA’s approval of the first “electronic pill.” The tablet contains a biological chip that enters your stomach and is capable of sending signals that the pill was, in fact, taken — to ensure compliance. “So imagine the applications of that, the compliance.
The insurance companies would know that the medicines that patients should take, they do take them,” Bourla said.13
4. Praise for lockdowns
Public health policies that restrict movement, ban international travel and close schools and businesses, commonly known as lockdowns, were implemented in virtually every country around the globe during the pandemic, beginning in China, then Italy and spreading like wildfire from there.
Lockdowns caused immense human suffering in the form of job losses, social isolation and suicides, with little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.14 WEF, however, “would love to see ‘covidian’ life become permanent,” The Vigilant Citizen reported,15 as evidenced by the video above, which WEF quickly deleted after backlash.
The video, titled “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world,” praises lockdowns’ role in reducing human activity and leading to the “Earth’s quietest period in decades.”16
5. Dystopian plans for the future — WEF has also released videos showing a “peek at our future,” which include people in masks, plenty of hand sanitizer and QR codes, plus further adjustments away from society as we know it and toward an increasingly isolated, virtual world. In one of WEF’s examples of “how our lives could soon look,” it’s suggested that you could be identified by your heartbeat.17
This is necessary because facial recognition technology is often thrown off by face masks, but “your heartbeat is just as unique as your face.” NASA has invented a system using a laser that can identify people by heartbeat alone. WEF also promotes increasingly teaching children using digital technology and asks, while showing a photo of a person wearing a mask alone, outdoors, “What pandemic-era changes would you like to become permanent?”18
In terms of education, WEF also envisions a “reimagining” of current classrooms with a heavy focus on virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies, along with investments in “reskilling and upskilling.”19
According to WEF, textbooks, notebooks and pencils should no longer be viewed as critical learning tools, due to “environmental pressures.” Instead, education should be digitalized and “coupled with the metaverse” so that students can learn in a virtual environment.20
6. The Great Reset — WEF’s Great Reset involves changing everything from future global relations and the direction of national economies to “the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.”21
Part of the plan involves the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which Schwab has been discussing since at least 2016 and “is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.”22
In terms of government, the Revolution will bring new technological powers that allow for increased population control via “pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure.”23 It also intends to do away with capitalism. The Vigilant Citizen explains:24
“While capitalism is based on a self-regulating system of offer and demand, the Great Reset looks to redefine the way businesses are evaluated through new parameters. The main one: Compliance with the elite’s social and political agendas.”
A propaganda video released by WEF25 talks about their plan to usher in stakeholder capitalism, in which private corporations — not elected leaders — become trustees of society, putting your privacy and data, your food and your freedom at risk.
To get to this point, the video’s narrator states, is “all about getting the right people in the right place at the right time.”26 “In other words, the system would be rigged and compliance with a wider agenda would be mandatory in a new economy,” The Vigilant Citizen pointed out.27
7. Recalibration of free speech — The censorship and regulation of the internet is high on WEF’s agenda, as it would serve as a starting point to recalibrate free speech. This notion was introduced by Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant at WEF’s 2022 Davos meeting, during which she called for a “recalibration of free speech” and a “recalibration of a whole range of human rights …”28
In saying this, they’re openly calling for censorship. “Free speech is, in fact, binary. Either it exists or it doesn’t. And they clearly don’t want it to exist,” The Vigilant Citizen explained.29
8. Digital passports in your clothing — While technology doesn’t appear to have advanced to the point that implantable microchips are being used as brain-machine interfaces to control your thoughts, what does exist today are vaccine passports, which can progress to digital IDs, which then lead to central bank digital currencies (CBDC) — the endgame.
CBDCs appear to be inevitable; it’s not a question of if they’re going to have them, but when. Once CBDCs become widespread, they’ll be able to control everything, as it will be difficult to survive without them. They don’t have to put a microchip into your arm to gain this immeasurable control — they’ll be able to track and control your every move via CBDCs.
To ensure that you can be traced and tracked at all times, WEF announced that clothing of the future will contain built-in digital passports — and they’re slated to reach the market in 2025.30
9. Smartphones in your body — By 2030, you won’t need to worry about carrying a cellphone or wearing clothing with a built-in digital passport, because WEF is planning to launch smartphones that will be implanted directly into your body. This information was released by Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark at the 2022 Davos meeting and coincides with the rollout of 6G technology.31
While 6G networks are still in their infancy, Lundmark stated that they will make smartphones as we know them today obsolete while “physical and digital worlds will grow together.”32 “Many of these things will be built directly into our bodies,” he added,33 echoing the transhumanism movement, which has an ultimate goal of controlling the human population.
Many people regard transhumanism as turning human beings into robots, but it actually describes a social and philosophical movement that involves the development of human-enhancement technologies.34
Elon Musk’s company Neuralink involves a surgically implanted microchip that’s connected to your brain and synced with AI, with the goal of one day allowing humans to control artificial limbs or even engage in telepathy. Musk described it as “a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,”35and, according to India Today, the company “released a video where a macaque was seen playing Ming Pong.”36
While transhumanism may one day use technologies that are physically embedded in the human body or brain to offer superhuman cognition or forms of mind control, keep in mind that at this time transhumanism is already occurring, not from an implantable device but through mass formation psychosis and the manipulation of information.
10. You will own nothing and be happy — One of the Great Reset’s “new normal” dictums is that you’ll own nothing and be happy. This is part of WEF’s 2030 agenda,37 and a plan is already in place to make it happen. In their “8 predictions for the world in 2030,” WEF stated:38
“‘I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes,’ writes Danish MP Ida Auken. Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand.
It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two.”
Part of the plan to do away with autonomy is that all products become services. The Vigilant Citizen reported:39
“In this dystopian future, there are no products you can own. Only “services” that are rented and delivered using drones. This system would make all humans completely dependent on WEF-controlled corporations for every single basic need. There would be absolutely no autonomy, no freedom, and no privacy. And you’ll be happy.”
A Theme of Ultimate Control
One theme that runs through WEF’s multiple agendas is control. “They want to control what we think, where we go, what we say, what we eat, and what we wear,” The Vigilant Citizen reported, adding:40
“Do you know who agrees with the WEF? China. Censorship is widespread, a social credit system controls people’s behaviors and COVID is still used as an excuse for massive lockdowns and total population control. Not to mention the literal concentration camps. Despite all of this, Chinese officials are constantly present at WEF meetings. Why? Because China is basically a laboratory for the WEF’s policies.”
If you want to fight back and opt out, choose elected officials who do not support WEF, and boycott companies — like Google — that are intertwined with it. It’s also urgent that we all take steps to remain free, sovereign individuals, which can be as straightforward as:41
Be guided by your own critical thinking and what your heart and soul know is right
Choose bravery over obedience
*
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***
First published by Global Research on May 27, 2021
As official government data is emerging in Europe and the USA on the alarming numbers of deaths and permanent paralysis as well as other severe side effects from the experimental mRNA vaccines, it is becoming clear that we are being asked to be human guinea pigs in an experiment that could alter the human gene structure and far worse. While mainstream media ignores alarming data including death of countless healthy young victims, the politics of the corona vaccine is being advanced by Washington and Brussels along with WHO and the Vaccine Cartel with all the compassion of a mafia “offer you can’t refuse.”
The alarming EMA Report
.
On May 8 the European Medicines Agency (EMA) an agency of the European Union (EU) in charge of the evaluation and supervision of medical products, using the data base EudraVigilance which collects reports of suspected side effects of medicines including vaccines, published a report that barely warranted mention in major mainstream media.
Through May 8, 2021 they had recorded 10,570 deaths and 405,259 injuries following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots: COVID-19 mRNA VACCINE of MODERNA (CX-024414); COVID-19 mRNA VACCINE of PFIZER-BIONTECH; COVID-19 VACCINE of ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19); and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 VACCINE (AD26.COV2.S).
A detailed analysis of each vaccine gives the following:
The Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA gene-edited vaccine resulted in the largest fatalities– 5,368 deaths and 170,528 injuries or nearly 50% of the total for all four.
The Moderna mRNA vaccine was second with 2,865 deaths and 22,985 injuries. That is to say, the only two gene manipulated mRNA experimental vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, accounted for 8,233 deaths of the total registered deaths of 10,570. That’s 78% of all deaths from the four vaccines currently in use in the EU.
And among the serious side effects or injuries recorded by the EMA, for the two mRNA vaccines which we focus on in this article, for the Pfizer “experimental” vaccine, most reported injuries included blood and lymphatic system disorders including deaths; cardiac disorders including deaths; musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders; respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders, and vascular disorders.
For the Moderna mRNA vaccine, most serious injuries or causes of death included blood and lymphatic system disorders; cardiac disorders; musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders; disorders of the central nervous system.Note that these are only the most serious injuries related to those two genetically manipulated mRNA vaccines. The EMA also notes that it is believed that only a small percent of actual vaccine deaths or serious side effects, perhaps only 1% to 10%, are reported for various reasons. Officially more than 10,000 persons have died after receiving the coronavirus vaccines since January, 2021 in the EU. That is a horrifying number of vaccine-related deaths, even if the true numbers are far greater.
CDC as well
.
Even the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) a notoriously political and corrupt agency with for-profit ties to vaccine makers, in its official Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), shows a total of 193,000 “adverse events” including 4,057 deaths, 2,475 permanent disabilities, 25,603 emergency room visits, and 11,572 hospitalizations following COVID-19 injections between December 14, 2020 and May 14, 2021. That included the two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, and the far less prevalent J&J Janssen vaccine. Of the reported deaths, 38% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated. The official US vaccine-related death toll is greater in just 5 months than all the vaccine-related deaths from the past 20 years combined. Yet the major media worldwide and the US Government virtually bury the alarming facts.
Some 96% of the fatal results were from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the two variants funded and promoted by the Gates Foundation and Tony Fauci’s NIAID with the experimental mRNA genetic technology.
Moreover, Dr. Tony Fauci, the US Biden Administration vaccine czar and his NIAID Vaccine Research Center co-designed the Moderna mRNA vaccine and gave Moderna and Pfizer each $6 billion to produce it. That’s also a blatant conflict of interest as Fauci and his NIAID are allowed to financially benefit from their patent earnings in the vaccine under a curious US law. The NIAID developed the coronavirus spike proteins for the development of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines using taxpayer money. They licensed it to Moderna and Pfizer.
“never seen in nature…”
In a tragic sense, the experience with reactions to the two unprecedented mRNA experimental vaccines since rollout in unprecedented speed “warp speed” as the US Government called it, is only now beginning to be seen, in real trials of human guinea pigs. Few realize that the two mRNA vaccines use genetic manipulations that never before have been used in humans. And under the cover of urgency, US and EU health authorities waived normal animal trials and did not even approve the safety, but gave an “emergency use authorization.” Moreover, the vaccine makers were made 100% exempt from damage litigation.
The general public was reassured of the vaccine safety when Pfizer and Moderna published reports of 94% and 95% “efficacy” of these vaccines. NIAID’s Fauci was quick to call it “extraordinary” in November 2020, and Warp Speed was off and running as was the stock price of Pfizer and Moderna.
Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the British Medical Journal pointed to a huge flaw in the 90+% reports for efficacy of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. He noted that the percentages are relative, in relation to the select small healthy young test group, and not absolute as in real life. In real life we want to know how effective the vaccine is among the large general population.
Doshi points to the fact that Pfizer excluded over 3400 “suspected COVID-19 cases” that were not included in the interim analysis. Moreover individuals “in both Moderna and Pfizer trials were deemed to be SARS-CoV-1- (the 2003 Asian SARS virus) positive at baseline, despite prior infection being grounds for exclusion,” Doshi notes. Both companies refused to release their raw data.
Pfizer in-house scientists did their tests. In short 95% is what Pfizer or Moderna claim. We are told, “Trust us.” A more realistic estimate of the true efficacy of the two vaccines for the general public, using data supplied by the vaccine makers to the FDA, shows the Moderna vaccine at the time of interim analysis demonstrated an absolute risk reduction of 1.1%, while the Pfizer vaccine absolute risk reduction was 0.7%. That is very poor.
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.” As Doshi notes, none of the trials were “designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.” Moderna’s chief medical officer even admitted that, “Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission.”
Possible effects of mRNA vaccines
In a major new study just published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, senior scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Dr. Greg Nigh, Naturopathic oncology specialist, analyze in detail the possible pathways in which the experimental mRNA vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna could be causing such adverse effects in the vaccinated. First they point out that both the Pfizer and Moderna gene-edited vaccines are highly unstable: “Both are delivered through muscle injection, and both require deep-freeze storage to keep the RNA from breaking down. This is because, unlike double-stranded DNA which is very stable, single-strand RNA products are apt to be damaged or rendered powerless at warm temperatures and must be kept extremely cold to retain their potential efficacy.” Pfizer recommends minus 70′ Celsius.
The authors point out that to keep the mRNA from breaking down before it could produce protein, both vaccine makers substitute methyl-pseudouridine to stabilize RNA against degradation, allowing it to survive long enough to produce adequate amounts of protein antigen. The problem they point out is that, “This form of mRNA delivered in the vaccine is never seen in nature, and therefore has the potential for unknown consequences… manipulation of the code of life could lead to completely unanticipated negative effects, potentially long term or even permanent.”
PEG Adjuvants and Anaphylactic Shock
For various reasons to avoid using aluminum adjuvants to boost the antibody response, both mRNA vaccines use polyethylene glycol, or PEG, as adjuvant. This has consequences. The authors point out, “…both mRNA vaccines currently deployed against COVID-19 utilize lipid-based nanoparticles as delivery vehicles. The mRNA cargo is placed inside a shell composed of synthetic lipids and cholesterol, along with PEG to stabilize the mRNA molecule against degradation.”
PEG has been shown to produce anaphylactic shock or severe allergenic reactions. In studies of prior non-mRNA vaccines, anaphylactic shock reactions occurred in 2 cases per million vaccinations. With the mRNA vaccines initial monitoring revealed that, “anaphylaxis occurred at a rate of 247 per million vaccinations. This is more than 21 times as many as were initially reported by the CDC. The second injection exposure is likely to cause even larger numbers of anaphylactic reactions.” One study noted, “PEG is a high-risk ‘hidden’ allergen, usually unsuspected, and can cause frequent allergic reactions due to inadvertent re-exposure.” Among such reactions are included life-threatening cardiovascular collapse.
This is far from all the undeclared risks of the experimental mRNA coronavirus vaccines.
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) is an immunological phenomenon. Seneff and Nigh note that, “ADE is a special case of what can happen when low, non-neutralizing levels of… antibodies against a virus are present at the time of infection. These antibodies might be present due to… prior vaccination against the virus…” The authors suggest that in the case of both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, “non-neutralizing antibodies form immune complexes with viral antigens to provoke excessive secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and, in the extreme case, a cytokine storm causing widespread local tissue damage.”
To be clear, normally cytokines are part of the body’s immune response to infection. But their sudden release in large quantities, a cytokine storm, can cause multi-system organ failure and death. Our innate immune system undergoes an uncontrolled and excessive release of pro-inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines.
The authors add that pre-existing “antibodies, induced by prior vaccination, contribute to severe pulmonary damage by SARS-CoV in macaques…” Another cited study shows that the much more diverse range of prior exposures to coronaviruses such as seasonal flu experienced by the elderly might predispose them to ADE upon exposure to SARS-CoV-2.” This is a possible explanation for the high incidence of post-mRNA vaccination deaths among elderly.
The vaccine makers have a clever way of denial as to the toxicity of their mRNA vaccines. As Seneff and Nigh state, “it is not possible to distinguish an ADE manifestation of disease from a true, non-ADE viral infection.” But they make the telling point, “In this light it is important to recognize that, when diseases and deaths occur shortly after vaccination with an mRNA vaccine, it can never be definitively determined, even with a full investigation, that the vaccine reaction was nota proximal cause. “
The authors make numerous other alarming points including emergence of auto-immune diseases such as Celiac disease, a disease of the digestive system that damages the small intestine and interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food. Also Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) that causes progressive muscle weakness and paralysis. Additionally, Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) in which a person has unusually low levels of platelets — the cells that help blood to clot– could occur following vaccination “through the migration of immune cells carrying a cargo of mRNA nanoparticles via the lymph system into the spleen… ITP appears initially as petechiae or purpura on the skin, and/or bleeding from mucosal surfaces. It has a high risk of fatality through haemorrhaging and stroke.”
These examples are indicative of the fact that we are literally exposing the human race via untested experimental gene edited mRNA vaccines to incalculable dangers which in the end may exceed by far any potential risk of damage from something which has been called SARS-Cov-2. Far from the much-touted miracle substance proclaimed by WHO, Gates, Fauci and others, the Pfizer, Moderna and other possible mRNA vaccines clearly hold potentially tragic and even catastrophic unforeseen consequences. Little wonder some critics believe it is a disguised vehicle for human eugenics.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
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***
During the visit of a delegation from the Donetsk People’s Republic to Syria, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced the official launch of the procedure for the recognition of the two Donbass republics (DPR and LPR) by his country.
On 13 June 2022, an official delegation led by DPR Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova arrived in Syria to continue the cooperation process started between the two countries three years ago.
In 2019, the DPR participated for the first time in the “Rebuild Syria” trade fair, dedicated to the reconstruction of Syria, alongside some 30 other countries. Following this first successful participation, a DPR delegation returned to Syria in 2021, not only to participate again in Rebuild Syria, but also to establish contacts with the Baath Party in order to strengthen cooperation between the two countries.
In total, in 2021, the DPR delegation visited Syria three times in order to lay a solid foundation for cooperation and interaction between the two countries, especially in the economic sphere. The major result of 2021 was the signing of a cooperation agreement between the Donetsk Republic public movement and the Syrian Baath Party.
This multi-day visit of the DPR delegation to Syria is thus a continuation of the diplomatic work started three years ago by the young Donbass republic. The DPR delegation, led by Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova, includes First Deputy Head of the DPR Administration Gennady Lebed, Minister of Culture Mikhail Jeltiakov, First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Peressada, Deputy Chairman of the People’s Council Sergei Prokopenko and People’s Council Deputy Valery Skorokhodov.
On 14 June, the DPR delegation met with the Deputy Secretary General of the Baath Party, Hilal al-Hilal, in the presence of Russian Duma Deputy Dmitry Sablin.
The two sides noted tangible progress in the implementation of the agreement on interaction and cooperation signed in December 2021 between the state movement “Donetsk Republic” and the Baath Party, and also discussed a wide range of options for deepening cooperation between the republics, in particular, on the economic front.
In this context, the DPR Foreign Minister particularly emphasized that the port of Mariupol is now fully operational again, and drew attention to the prospects for trade cooperation with Syria by sea.
Later, DPR Foreign Minister Natalia Nikonorova met her Syrian counterpart, Faisal al-Meqdad. During the meeting, Natalia Nikonorova gave an overview of the conflict in the Donbass and the current situation.
Fayçal al-Meqdad noted the parallels in the fate of the peoples of Donbass and Syria, and condemned the policy of the United States and Western countries in supplying Ukraine with heavy weapons and thus becoming complicit in the crimes committed in Donbass.
He expressed confidence that the joint efforts of the DPR people’s militia and the Russian armed forces would help to liberate Donbass from the Ukrainian regime and establish peace and tranquillity in the republics. Faisal al-Meqdad also expressed his desire to see the establishment of interstate cooperation and the comprehensive development of relations with the two Donbass republics.
At the end of the meeting, the two foreign ministers came to the mutual conclusion that there is great potential for developing areas of bilateral cooperation between the DPR and Syria. An agreement was reached on the implementation of joint measures to establish direct interaction between the two republics in the field of protection of citizens’ interests, as well as in the economic, cultural and scientific fields, among others.
The day ended with a meeting between the DPR delegation and the Speaker of the Syrian Parliament, Hammouda Sabbagh. This was an opportunity for Natalia Nikonorova to suggest the creation of a parliamentary friendship group between the DPR and Syria. In order to work jointly on the details of the creation of such a group, the deputies of the DPR People’s Council invited their Syrian colleagues to visit them in Donetsk.
Mr Sabbagh expressed his interest in this proposal and indicated his readiness to provide a response on this matter from the Syrian Arab Republic in the near future. He also drew attention to the fact that the Syrian people fully support the Donbass and the joint special military operation to liberate the DPR and the LPR from the Ukrainian regime.
Two days after this meeting, on 16 June 2022, the DPR delegation met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The latter reiterated the words of his Foreign Minister about the common path of the peoples of Donbass and Syria in their struggle against the US and other Western countries, and expressed his confidence in the rapid and successful completion of the operation to liberate the territories of the DPR and the LPR and hoped that peace would be restored as soon as possible.
Bashar al-Assad also noted that Syria was ready to recognize the DPR and the LPR, and announced the official launch of the procedure for recognizing the two Donbass republics. He noted that his Foreign Minister would immediately receive ad-hoc instructions from him.
The Syrian President asked Natalia Nikonorova to convey his greetings to DPR leader Denis Pushilin and his gratitude for his active stance in developing constructive and fruitful relations with Syria.
The Foreign Minister in turn conveyed the greetings of the Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the entire Donbass people. She also expressed her gratitude to Mr Assad for his support and willingness to strengthen cooperation with Donbass.
Furthermore, Natalia Nikonorova suggested to Mr Assad to consider the possibility of Syria’s participation in an international tribunal against representatives of Ukrainian armed groups who are accused of committing crimes against the inhabitants of Donbass.
She also expressed the government’s full readiness for a dynamic and mutually beneficial rapprochement between the DPR and Syria.
According to the Head of the Lugansk People’s Republic, Leonid Passetchnik, Syria is not the only country willing to recognize the independence of the DPR and the LPR, but he did not specify which other countries would be ready to take this step.
“Syria is ready. In any case, the Syrian President has made a statement that he is ready to recognize the DPR, and of course the LPR. A number of other countries are at the stage of possible preparation. There are a number of foreign countries that are ready to recognize us,” he said.
According to War Gonzo journalists, Russian MP Dmitry Sablin reported that Bashar al-Assad proposed to isolate the West at this meeting.
“We have to build relationships with each other as if the West did not exist. The West thinks it is the centre of the world. They thought that Russia could not live without McDonald’s. We have to build a relationship in which the West has no place. And the Western countries will feel that they are the ones who are isolated from the rest of the world,” the Syrian President was quoted as saying.
According to the same source, Bashar al-Assad was very interested in the subject of the Mariupol tribunal, believing that it was a necessary measure to prove to the world the atrocities that the West is capable of in order to achieve its goals.
*
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Introduction
On the afternoon of March 9th, 2022, the current White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, used the United States government official Twitter account, @PressSec, to make the following claims (among several others):
“We took note of Russia’s false claims about alleged U.S. biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine. We’ve also seen Chinese officials echo these conspiracy theories.”
We took note of Russia’s false claims about alleged U.S. biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine. We’ve also seen Chinese officials echo these conspiracy theories.
“This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.”
This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.
“It’s Russia that continues to support the Assad regime in Syria, which has repeatedly used chemical weapons. It’s Russia that has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law.”
It’s Russia that continues to support the Assad regime in Syria, which has repeatedly used chemical weapons. It’s Russia that has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law.
“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.”
Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.
When it comes to allegations of preposterous conspiracy theories and disinformation about false flag operations involving chemical weapons, the privileges afforded to Ms. Psaki allow her to avoid being accused of spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, roughly synonymous with false claims.
For example, many people questioned the veracity of reports that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own citizens, but these claims were allegedly debunked by fact-checkers as characteristic of far-right conspiracy theories.
For making such claims, the Huffpost, acting as fact-checker, labeled Piers Robinson, Professor of Journalism at the University of Sheffield, and other academics involved with The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a “useful idiot” and “pro-Russian propagandist” along with calling for his dismissal from his teaching post for being a “9/11 Truther.” I doubt the table that turned on Piers Robinson will turn, also, on Jen Psaki.
I have not studied in depth the empirical claims about Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attacks, nor am I currently learned on empirical claims about biological or chemical weapons labs in Ukraine – though recently, a sitting Republican U.S. Senator accused a former Democratic U.S. Representative of being “a treasonous liar” for asserting that U.S.-based bio labs in Ukraine were under threat by the invading Russian military forces.
This is a remarkable tacit admission oddly made public. What I have studied is the nature of claims-making and how empirical claims operate in terms of conspiracy discourse. This is the first in a series of essays on the topic of conspiracy discourse. Rather than elaborating on what I personally or professionally believe to be evidence of criminal conspiracies, I am interested in discussing the nature of how people talk about conspiracies. In order to better understand how and why some claims of concerted and surreptitious wrongdoing are taken seriously (i.e. as credible) while others are not (i.e. as incredible), I have attended to labels designed to tarnish an individual’s ethos should they make such claims.
Supporting existing empirical research, what I have found is that the labels “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory” act as a tool of propaganda for those who attempt to defend official, authorized accounts of historically significant events from socially disturbing questions.
Those proffering and defending official, authorized accounts can use the same rhetoric as skeptics, yet only (or more often than not) the skeptics are scoffed at and scorned, sometimes with serious consequences. Take for instance James Tracey, a former communications professor who has noted that while credible allegations of “false flag” events have been quite common in non-U.S. news media, often times referring to them as legitimate tactics and strategies used in warfare, the use of “false flag” in U.S. news media associates the term with hoaxes related to conspiracy theories and propaganda. Now, take into consideration James Tracey’s public Wikipedia entry, which begins with the claims that he “is an American conspiracy theorist and former professor who has espoused the view that some American mass shootings did not occur, but are hoaxes.”
Compare this to the official statements issued by the current White House press secretary, and consider why it is that one person is labeled a “conspiracy theorist” and the other is not (nor likely will be). After all, it is now considered to be the case that Jen Psaki spread misinformation about the nature of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. Again, I cannot say what the truth of the situation is.
My interest in the nature of conspiracy discourse developed while I was taking a course on Social Movements during my final Ph.D. seminar at Oklahoma State University in the spring of 2012. My term paper, “’9/11 Was an Inside Job’? Discursive Opportunities and Obstructions for the 9/11 Truth Movement,” developed into my 2014 doctoral dissertation, “Discourse Among the Truthers and Deniers of 9/11: Movement-Counter-movement Dynamics and the Discursive Field of the 9/11 Truth Movement.”
Since 2011, I have conducted dozens upon dozens of face-to-face interviews with street activists when they gather for their annual demonstrations at “ground zero” during the memorial events for “9/11.” I have also spent countless hours conducting an online ethnography via Facebook, and I have spoken with hundreds of individuals about their concept of “9/11.” If you care to read my doctoral work, you will see that I discuss the difference between discursive devices such as “9/11,” which I often place within quotation marks, as compared to references to actual historical events, such as those of September 11, 2001.
Lastly, in that work, I devoted an entire chapter to discussing what the counter-movement of anti-conspiracists asserts is one among many hallmarks of conspiracy theorists, the tactic of “just asking questions.” Are we not allowed to ask questions, lest we be labeled a “conspiracy theorist?” Are there certain types of questions we are and are not allowed to ask, and who decides what are considered conspiracy theories and thereby who are the conspiracy theorists?
In this first installment, I discuss some of the discourse surrounding the alleged origins of the terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory,” which I refer to as the conspiracy label.
No, the CIA did not invent the conspiracy label, but the agency might have helped promote and popularize it as a pejorative. Whether or not operatives did is a matter of an empirical investigation into the rise of the label’s use. The fact of the matter is that there exists a network of functioning and well-funded organizations in operation today that carry out the mission of de-legitimizing what are regarded as “conspiracy theories.”
Origins of the Conspiracy Label
If you say, “The CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theorist’,” you open yourself to being labeled a conspiracy theorist.
Like many aspects of conspiracy discourse, the expression itself immediately smacks of some type of logical fallacy, in this case, circular reasoning. If we were to say that a conspiracy theorist is a person who espouses conspiracy theories, we would need to take the next step, identifying what a conspiracy theory is and is not. In this case, simply alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency invented a disparaging label designed to dissuade people from making such claims is reasoning enough for many people to use the conspiracy label. Many online fact-checkers can be located in a search for “CIA invented conspiracy theorist” that illustrate my point, which is that it is not at all clear what exactly is meant by “conspiracy theorist” because it is not at all clear what is meant by “conspiracy theory.” These are crucial facts that many people, especially those who reflexively follow and obey power, tend to miss. To complicate matters further, it is not clear what the truth of the situation is, which is the entirety of the problem called into question when conspiracy theories are raised. Dismissing them on their face would again be circular reasoning, i.e. “you’re wrong because you’re wrong.” So, we need to investigate the matter.
One fact-checking site that has investigated the matter is AAP FactCheck, which “is accredited by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network and adheres to its rigorous protocols,” and bills itself as “Trusted Accurate Impartial” [sic]. The purported impartiality of AAP FactCheck comes into question with the derogatory title of their fact-checking piece, “Tinfoil hats not needed to repel CIA ‘conspiracy theorist’ creation claim [sic].” Whether or not the “tinfoil” hat reference is derogatory depends on who takes offense, and at least some people do consider it an insult. Here is the AAP FactCheck analysis of the CIA-conspiracy label connection:
“Adjunct Professor Stephen Andrews from the History Department at Indiana University Bloomington, told AAP FactCheck: ‘There is overwhelming evidence the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was used long before the creation of the CIA in the 1940s.’”
So, case closed, right? If the phrase “conspiracy theory” was used before the CIA was created, then the CIA could not have created the phrase. Notice here, though, that the title of the piece uses the phrase “conspiracy theorist” whereas the passages use “conspiracy theory.” Does the difference matter? Maybe, but let’s not split hairs (yet). I would rather quibble over the terms “invented” and “created.” Many results, for example, in a search for “CIA invented conspiracy theorist” claim that the CIA helped to popularize the phrase rather than claiming they had invented or created it. The distinctions are noteworthy.
One time while teaching Introductory Sociology, I was lecturing about myth-making processes, and I used the examples from the discourse surrounding flat Earth myths and the myth that Coca Cola (and Norman Rockwell) had created the modern depictions of Santa Claus. The notion that “At one point, everyone thought the Earth was flat,” as stated in an advertisement for Windows Vista, is itself a myth.
In the ad is pictured a Christopher Columbus-era sailing vessel, indicating the reference is to some storybook version of Columbus convincing kings and queens that he would not sail off the edge of the Earth if he ventured West.
Aside from the thousands of years of history of studying the shape of the Earth that even a child could understand, which is often simplified as just being round, ask yourself how on Earth could everybody everywhere hold the same exact belief about the Earth’s shape before there existed anything resembling a global information network? (Even with the Internet, there remains an annoying subculture of misinformed – or misguided – people keeping the myth of the flat Earth alive.)
So, people who believe that what the ad says is true are themselves succumbing to a myth about people believing in that myth – this is not circular reasoning, yet it is reifying, a concept I will pick up in a follow-up essay. But, did Coca Cola invent Santa?
After that particular lesson, I recall that I had a student approach me and adamantly assert that “Coca Cola did not invent Santa Claus.” “No,” I said, “and I didn’t say they did. I said they helped to popularize the modern image of Santa Claus. Big difference.” (One wonders if that young person still believed in the Santa Claus conspiracy, but more on that in the next essay.)
Now, take for instance the description of a YouTube video that currently has 945,000+ views on a channel, Vice, that has 15.4 million subscribers: “For as long as they’ve existed, conspiracy theories have been laughed off by the mainstream for being too ‘far-fetched’.” What does this even mean? How could this be?
Does all of the so-called “mainstream” (whatever that means) share the same opinions and background assumptions? How and why could that be? What social institutions and organizations could produce such an outcome, or is it a spontaneous coincidence that multitudes would share the same attitudes and, thus, form an emergent norm from the ground up?
And, for how long have conspiracy theories existed? Were the Founding Fathers of the USA conspiracy theorists when they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence? As an example of what can be laughed off by the mainstream, the author of a webpage titled, “In 1967, the CIA Created the Label ‘Conspiracy Theorists’,” makes the following claims (complete with the same image included in the blog post):
But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed.
The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist in 1967
That all changed in the 1960s.
Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term ‘conspiracy theories’ … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked ‘psych’ – short for ‘psychological operations’ or disinformation – and ‘CS’ for the CIA’s ‘Clandestine Services’ unit.” [sic]
It is somewhat true to say “the CIA wrote [the] dispatch,” though an organization cannot do such a thing, only individuals operating within organizations can perform such actions as authoring memorandums. It is false to say the CIA or individuals operating within “coined the term ‘conspiracy theories’.”
After all, the term existed before the CIA was created, right? In any case, “the mainstream” can reflexively laugh off the notion that an organization, like the CIA – or rogue agents within, plotted to weaponize the conspiracy label to function as a tool of propaganda and cultural hegemony.
I am typically careful to even say that the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label. After all, it could easily be misinterpreted as me claiming the CIA created, coined, or invented the term. One person who takes the distinction, as well as conspiracy theories, seriously is Michael Butter, author of numerous scholarly texts on conspiracy theories as well as a blog post titled, “There’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory’ – here’s why.” If you are the nitpicking type, compare this passage with that from AAP FactCheckers above:
“There are even two versions of this conspiracy theory. The more extreme version claims that the CIA literally invented the term in the sense that the words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘theory’ had never been used before in combination. A more moderate version acknowledges that the term existed before, but claims that the CIA intentionally created its negative connotations and so turned the label into a tool of political propaganda.”
“The more moderate version has been particularly popular in recent years for two reasons. First, it is very easy to disprove the more extreme claim that the CIA actually invented the term. As a search on Google Books quickly reveals, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ emerged around 1870 and began to be more frequently used during the 1950s. Even die-hard conspiracy theorists have a hard time trying to ignore this. Second, the more moderate version received a big boost in popularity a few years ago when American political scientist Lance DeHaven-Smith propagated it in a book published by a renowned university press.”
According to the publisher of Lance deHaven-Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America (pictured above), it “raises crucial questions about the consequences of Americans’ unwillingness to suspect high government officials of criminal wrongdoing.” And, as noted above, for raising such questions, deHaven-Smith opens himself to the conspiracy label, i.e being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”
I will return to deHaven-Smith’s book in a follow-up essay, but here is how one self-styled conspiracy theory debunker, journalist David Aaronovitch, **states the matter** about raising socially disturbing questions about historically significant events, i.e. posing “conspiracy theories”:
“Since 2001, a primary technique employed by more respectable conspiracists has been the advocation of the ‘It’s not a theory’ theory. The theorist is just asking certain disturbing questions because of a desire to seek out truth, and the reader is supposedly left to make up his or her mind. The questions asked, of course, only make sense if the questioner really believes that there is indeed a secret conspiracy.”
Presumably, I and any other credentialed scholar would be considered “respectable conspiracists” if we raise socially disturbing questions about the official accounts of historically significant events. One might wonder if we indeed must believe in a secret conspiracy, for if a conspiracy weren’t a secret, would it be a conspiracy? Moreover, what does it mean to say that the questions “only make sense if the questioner really believes…?” Am I not allowed to ask such questions as to why it is, for example, that a third skyscraper collapsed in Manhattan on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, without automatically being thought of as a conspiracy theorist, respectable or not? Doubt has been cast on the official explanation of that particular aspect of “9/11” in full-length book form as well as part of a major university study. Why can I not ask questions about why and how that particular event occurred and why the official explanation of it seems to be so severely undermined by competing narratives without retribution by those who would wield the conspiracy label? Who gets to decide what questions are permissible and what gives them such power and authority to decide?
Organizations Behind the Conspiracy Label
So, did the CIA help to popularize the conspiracy label? Who knows? If you ask Snopes, which bills itself as “the internet’s go-to source for discerning what is true and what is total nonsense,” they refer you back to Michael Butter’s essay, which is published by The Conversation: **
“The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. We publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public…”
The publishers, editors, and contributors of the publication in which this essay appears might say much of the same thing, but since we, for various reasons and capacities, open ourselves to be targets of the conspiracy label, the veracity of our claims can more easily be called into question and by those very same sources allegedly debunking claims about the CIA’s role in promoting the conspiracy label. Why is this the case? Is it just coincidence that the very label used to discredit those who question its origins and uses is in fact a label that serves by its use the interests of powerful, secretive, legitimating institutions and interest groups otherwise entrenched in maintaining the status quo?
In line with this question, James Rankin authored his doctoral study in pursuit of the origins of the conspiracy label’s pejorative connotations, thus acting as a hegemonic tool of cultural control. He identified three root sources, Karl Popper’s 1945 book, Open Society and Its Enemies, Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and a CIA memo from 1967, Dispatch 1035-960, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report.”
Popper argued that while conspiracies do sometimes happen, they are not typically carried successfully to fruition, which is an argument Michael Shermer uses to surmise why conspiracy theories are dismissable prima facie. One criticism of Popper contends with the fact that conspiracies abound throughout history, and while any given conspiracy theory can be wrong, dismissing a conspiracy theory offhand because it is a proposition that a conspiracy has occurred is illogical and disingenuous with respect to scientific practice.
Hofstadter’s essay is a mixture of selective attention to some alleged conspiracies throughout history, such as those about Freemasons and the Illuminati, and armchair psychological theories about how and why the “paranoid style” of “contemporary right-wing thought” led people to believe communists had infiltrated key social institutions in the 1940s and ’50s. Hofstadter’s essay continues to be influential among academicians who study conspiracy theorists.
As recently as 2021, a group of academics used his essay as the basis for their hypotheses, which they used to reach the conclusion that “paranoid ideation” and “distrust of officialdom” couple with conservatism to facilitate the “conspiratorial mindset.” (Never mind that their results explain only half of the variance.) As noted in a philosopher’s article published by The Conversation, consider that the conspiracy label’s discursive function is:
“similar to that served by the term “heresy” in medieval Europe. In both cases these are terms of propaganda, used to stigmatise and marginalise people who have beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.”
“If, as I believe, the treatment of those labelled as “conspiracy theorists” in our culture is analogous to the treatment of those labelled as “heretics” in medieval Europe, then the role of psychologists and social scientists in this treatment is analogous to that of the Inquisition.” [sic]
But was the term originally meant to be pejorative?
“Of course the term is pejorative,” notes Hofstadter at the outset of his 1964 essay, a reference to the “paranoid style” of conspiratorial thinking. As evidenced in a scholarly source from 2007 and a book published in the popular press in 2018, the use of the conspiracy label, both in the form of “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory,” increased in usage in newspapers, books, and academic articles starting in the mid-1960s.
Now, was this in any way connected to the CIA memo, Dispatch 1035-960? How can one say for sure? If the CIA did not meet its goal of providing “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries,” a clause included in self-recognition that the CIA was authorized to operate only outside of the USA, then we might suspect their general efficacy.
As Rankin pointed out in his doctoral thesis, one popular rebuttal to claims about large-scale conspiracies involving government is that it is too large of a bureaucracy to be able to carry out such conspiracies as the JFK assassination or events of September 11, 2001. This squares with Popper’s and Shermer’s reasoning, which is that most conspiracies fail. So, did the CIA fail in its mission to “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics [of the Warren Commission report]?” We cannot say for certain, and the reason is twofold.
First, if we implicate the CIA in a secretive mission to undermine the work of citizen sleuths in investigating historically significant events in ways not sanctioned by officialdom, then we automatically run the risk of being targeted with the conspiracy label. Once issued, its target is immediately suspect of harboring a “paranoid style” of thought that need not be taken seriously (and that might even be harmful). Why run the risk? There exists no scientific study that tracks the rise of counteracting narratives to “JFK conspiracy theories” from the late ’60s on. I suspect that even if that were to happen, the study would be ignored or treated as an outgrowth of the “paranoid style.” Second, consider that there are today several large-scale efforts to combat the rise of conspiracy theories and other types of mis-, dis-, and malinformation, or what the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) simply refers to as MDM. CISA and its MDM team help disseminate propaganda and counter-propaganda in the form of Toolkits, such as is revealed in the following statement:
“These Toolkit resources are designed to help State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) officials bring awareness to misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing online related to COVID-19’s origin, scale, government response, prevention and treatment. Each product was designed to be tailored with local government websites and logos.”
Several organizations align with the organizational goals of CISA as related to its anti-MDM efforts. The Alliance for Science, for instance, covers several conspiracy theories about COVID-19, noting that the “virus escaped from a Chinese lab” claim “has the benefit of at least being plausible.” As reported by the BBC, “the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory – once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory – has been gaining traction.” The New York Post has documented the history of censoring the hotly contested “lab leak theory” by powerful and influential people and organizations, noting that the director of the “National Institutes of Health, immediately decreed this view to be a conspiracy theory that will do ‘great potential harm to science and international harmony’.”
The Alliance for Science is active in the fight against MDM. At the end of its page on COVID-19 conspiracy theories is this passage:
“How to recognize and debunk conspiracy theories
It is important to speak out and combat online misinformation and conspiracist narratives, whether on COVID or climate change or anything else. This handbook (PDF) by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, both of whom have extensive experience in combating climate denialism, is an essential tool.
Note: As in previous coverage, it is our policy to avoid linking directly to websites and social media feeds that promote misinformation and conspiracy theories, so as not to drive traffic to them and give them higher visibility.“
Understandably, rather than sending readers to the sources of the conspiracy theories they address, they want you to refer to their own sources, such as The Conspiracy Theory Handbook. That handbook is similar in structure to the Toolkits provided by CISA, but it is not of the scholarly caliber of The Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight – this is the same Michael Butter whom I cited above with reference to the CIA’s role in popularizing the conspiracy label as a pejorative. In the Acknowledgements section, Butter and Knight state the following with regard to the origins of their handbook:
“This project results from the C.O.S.T. Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) project C.O.M.P.A.C.T. (Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories), whose generous funding enabled us to establish a network of scholars in Europe and beyond working on this interdisciplinary topic (www.conspiracytheories.eu).”
Following their link, you can find COMPACT’s Guide to Conspiracy Theories, which has two main sections, “Understanding Conspiracy Theories” and “Recommendations for Dealing with Conspiracy Theories.” Mind you, they do not suggest engaging in an honest investigation into the empirical claims of “conspiracy theorists.” Rather, they suggest techniques for rebutting conspiracy theories in ways intended to set conspiracy theorists on course to conventional, mainstream ways of understanding the world. Regardless of whether or not the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label as a pejorative to be used to de-legitimate those who pose socially disturbing questions about historically significant events, there exists a consortium of groups and organizations in mutual support of that cause.
Conclusion
One might wonder if any of the anti-conspiracist toolkits, handbooks, or guides will be applied to those in power and positions of authority. After all, Press Secretary Jen Psaki has alleged that other countries will use “false flag” operations – this term is a keyword cited as a sign of a conspiracy theory; she denied conjectures of compromised political officials as being merely “**Russian disinformation,**” postulations now considered factual; and has recently claimed that the Russians “hacked our election” in 2016, a statement that might easily be interpreted as a conspiracy theory by any number of academics who study the topic. Existing research suggests that Psaki will get a pass while those of us who dare to raise disturbing questions contrary to officialdom will face the inquisition.
When the Bush W. administration’s framing of the events of September 11, 2001 took root in corporate media explanations of the event, it became a Sisyphean task to try and offer counter-explanations or even pose questions to the officialdom of “9/11.” The official accounts were activated by a cascade of voices echoing through a network of organizations and institutions with interests in amplifying the drumbeats that marched the U.S. and allied military forces to wars extending throughout the Middle East and through the succeeding Obama administration. Now that the drum beats seem to be signaling a change in the venue of the war theater, and considering corporate media is acting as the DOD’s megaphone, what will happen to those voices raising socially disturbing questions directed toward the current administration?
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Richard G. Ellefritz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of The Bahamas. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Oklahoma State University after successfully defending his dissertation on how the conspiracy label is used to avoid offering direct and rigorous rebuttals to empirical claims made by so-called conspiracy theorists. His research interests range from conspiracy discourse to pedagogical techniques, and his main occupational focus is on teaching a variety of courses in the social and behavioral sciences.
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Western intelligence agencies are once again acting illegally, stealing data around the world and violating the sovereignty of the countries.
In a recent report revealed by the Chinese media, details of the data capture power of the so-called “Five Eyes”, the data sharing network of the secret services of the five Anglophone powers, were shown. In just a month, billions of data were stolen, and phone calls violated, creating a scenario of insecurity of privacy around the planet.
The report comes from a cybersecurity agency called Anzer, which gave information to the Chinese newspaper Global Times last Monday, June 13th.
In all, 97 billion global internet data were stolen, in addition to 124 billion phone records infringed in the last thirty days alone. The main agencies reported by Anzer are US intelligence organizations, but there is also involvement of all agents participating in the scope of the “Five Eyes”, which brings together the secret services of the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
According to Anzer’s agents, such clandestine operations – called “black hand operations” – are mostly carried out by Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which is the cyber warfare agency that directly serves the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The report says that recently increasingly powerful cyber weapons have been used in data theft operations, being capable of indiscriminately capturing information from billions of internet users around the world simultaneously.
An anonymous expert quoted by Global Times commented on the topic saying:
“The NSA’s global indiscriminate intrusion has long been supported by a vast and sophisticated network of weapons platforms, of which TAO is an important weapon maker. Some of these weapons are dedicated to the products of US internet giants such as Apple, Cisco and Dell, and have been developed with the support and full participation of these internet giants (…) The US is taking highly engineered cyber weapons as the winning advantage in future cyber warfare, and is investing resources and increasing chips regardless of cost, bringing endless hidden dangers to global cyber security”.
One of the main advanced cyber espionage instruments used by the NSA/TAO to maintain this type of massive data theft strategy is the so-called NOPEN. Such a weapon had already been denounced by the Global Times, in May, and consists of a mechanism capable of accessing various types of confidential information on any equipment using the Unix/Linux system. Indeed, the weapon is used not only to steal secret files, but also to redirect network communication and view information on other computers connected to the assaulted one.
Now, however, it is revealed in the Anzer’s report the existence of another platform used by the NSA to carry out such operations, dubbed the “boundless informant”. Such a weapon, hitherto unknown, would have an even greater ability to collect, manage and analyze massive data, expanding TAO’s ability to steal information, which explains the power to acquire so much data in such a short period of time (97 billion in 30 days).
In fact, these reports point out that clandestine cyber activities have been systematically practiced by official agencies of the governments of some of the main world powers, mainly the US.
It is a delicate and controversial finding. In general, there is a consensus among experts that cyber weapons should only be used for specific and circumscribed operations, considering that their potential for privacy violations can unnecessarily affect the security of individuals. When it is revealed that US and every Five Eyes country systematically promotes this sort of infringement, it sets a precedent for other nations to respond with the same attitude, culminating in worldwide data insecurity.
To avoid this, it is necessary to neutralize the threats already identified, creating mechanisms to prevent the Five Eyes’ agencies from continuing to steal information.
A joint reaction on the part of international society is urgently needed. It is not acceptable that cyber weapons are used indiscriminately and put data security at risk. In a progressively technologically integrated world, all individuals are threatened by these clandestine activities, which makes the current situation really unsustainable.
The practice of “black hand operation” must be eradicated from the cyber battlefield. Perhaps the only way to do this is through a new international treaty of global dimension, which counts on the goodwill of all the world potentials to sign a document renouncing the use of weapons that promote indiscriminate data theft.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Science sat the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.
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Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that an internal investigation by Israeli police into the attack against unarmed mourners during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Aqla concluded that, despite evidence of misconduct, no police officers will be punished.
Shireen Abu Aqla, the Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist, was murdered by Israeli forces on 11 May.
The funeral, which took place on 13 May, was met by Israeli police dressed in riot control gear, who charged at and beat attendees and pallbearers carrying the coffin covered in the Palestinian flag.
The shocking image of police brutally attacking the pallbearers, who almost dropped the casket carrying Abu Aqla spread around the world, causing international outrage at Israeli police conduct.
#Palestine Israeli occupation forces harass Palestinians during the burial of Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Aqla. pic.twitter.com/nrteefydKz
“Obviously the images that emerged were unpleasant and could have been different, but overall the police acted well in a complex and violent incident,” said a senior Israeli police officer.
The internal investigation was launched in May and submitted on 15 June by the Police Operations Division to Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai.
Anton Abu Aqla, the brother of Shireen, slammed the internal investigation by the Israeli police.
“We don’t care what Israel says or does. Everything is clear from the photos. The police are the aggressors,” he said. “They are trying to cover up their actions and mistakes.”
Images posted on social media showed Israeli police beating attendees who wanted the coffin wrapped in the Palestinian flag. Israel has prohibited the display of the Palestinian flag since its occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem, and its subsequent annexation in 1980.
Ahead of the funeral, the Israeli government had imposed a number of restrictions, including on the number of mourners attending the service and on the use of Palestinian flags and posters.
The occupying forces also stormed the home of Shireen Abu Aqla earlier in the day, in an attempt to tear down a Palestinian flag that was placed in her honor.
While the police conducted an investigation into their response to the funeral for Abu Aqla, the Israeli army decided it would not investigate their murder of Abu Aqla.
Al Jazeeraconfirmed the veracity of a video which showed the moments leading up to the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqla by Israeli occupation troops.
The video corroborated eyewitness accounts, which said there were no clashes in the area as the team of journalists prepared to cover Israeli raids in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Shortly after the murder of Abu Aqla, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett attempted to dodge responsibility, saying she was likely killed by Palestinian gunfire.
Extremist Israeli settlers taunted Abu Aqla during the controversial Flag March on 29 May, chanting “Shireen is dead.”
According to Palestinian news agency WAFA, at least 55 Palestinian journalists have been killed since 2000, with no one ever being held responsible.
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Featured image: Casket of slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqla almost hits the ground due to assaults by Israeli forces against unarmed pallbearers on 13 May 2022. (Photo credit: Screenshot / Washington Post)
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“We would definitely have wanted a different Summit of the Americas. The silence of those absent challenges us. So that this does not happen again, I would like to state for the future that the fact of being the host country of the Summit does not grant the capacity to impose a ‘right of admission’ on the member countries of the continent.” President of Argentina and president pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), Alberto Fernández, at the Summit of the Americas, June 10, 2022, Los Angeles.
While hosting the Ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last week, the Biden administration sought to ostracize Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela by excluding them due to an alleged “lack of democratic space and human rights situations”.
The resulting backlash caused these three countries to be the most discussed topic inside and outside the summit venue, as governments and social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean questioned whether the United States has the right or moral authority to pass judgment on the form of government each nation chooses.
There was also plenty of skepticism about whether the Organization of American States (OAS), which has served as an instrument for advancing US hegemony in the region, really promotes the interests of the countries of the hemisphere. American scholar and activist Cornel West called this “a Malcolm X moment” in which the chickens are coming home to roost.[1] How did we get here?
Sanctioning itself out of business
The United States has targeted Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for regime change, particularly through economic warfare in the form of unilateral coercive measures, commonly called sanctions. The U.S. now wields illegal sanctions on over a third of humanity living in 42 countries.[2]
This blunt instrument seeks to push a nation’s population to revolt against its government, and sanctions were stepped up against Venezuela even during the time of pandemic. Though the tactic rarely succeeds, as the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan people know, sanctions impact the poorest and most vulnerable citizens, particularly children, and cause thousands of deaths, in contravention of the Charters of the United Nations and the OAS. Consequently, sanctioned countries have been looking for ways around the U.S. dollar-dominated banking system. They were further pushed towards this when the U.S. undermined that very system by confiscating the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, then Afghanistan, and now Russia, as economist Michael Hudson has explained.[3]
The Biden administration should have realized by now that nations are no longer blindly following its orders to isolate countries it seeks to punish. For example, although corporate media depict a world united against Russia since February 24 of this year, a vast majority of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (in this case representing the majority of humanity), have refused to impose sanctions on Russia.[4] And when it comes to following Washington’s dictates on voting at the U.N., the picture is not as black and white as it is painted in the global North.
In the recent U.N. General Assembly vote about Russia’s membership in the Human Rights Council—a campaign led by the U.S.—although 92 countries followed Uncle Sam’s lead, 82 countries (including giants such as India, China, Brazil, and South Africa) either abstained or voted against the U.S. initiative. They clearly represent the overwhelming majority of humanity, and actually include 13 countries in the Americas.[5] Of course, the strongest precedent for rejection of U.S. policy has been 29 years of near-unanimous annual votes in the U.N. General Assembly demanding the lifting of the criminal U.S. blockade on Cuba.
People’s Summit, Los Angeles (credit photo, Alina Duarte)
Governments reject U.S. arrogance
The exclusion of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba from the Summit of the Americas caused several heads of state to boycott the summit, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leading the way by saying that the selective invitations showed “disrespect of countries’ sovereignty and independence”.
The presidents of Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines followed his example, while El Salvador and Uruguay stayed away for their own reasons. During the June 6-10 gathering, diplomats representing several governments used the podium to denounce the exclusion of the three countries and called for an end to sanctions, especially the blockade on Cuba. They also questioned whether any country has the right to judge the democracy of other nations, and called for a revamping of the OAS as an inter-American institution. These remarks were echoed by the heads of state of Belize, Argentina, Chile, and several CARICOM countries.It is as if Washington were unaware that there has been a second emancipation underway in Latin America for more than two decades, and that U.S. efforts to turn back the clock on the advance of regional independence and the diversification of trading partners only serve to further undermine its waning influence in the region.
Immigration resolution, in the absence of key nations
News reports after the Summit of the Americas ended questioned the validity of what is purported to be the Biden administration’s greatest accomplishment during the gathering—a declaration on migration —because it was discussed in the absence of the leaders of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the main sources of migration to the U.S. in recent years.[6] It is in any case an extremely paltry initiative that is unlikely to have any significant effect on numbers heading north.
The Summit took place during the trial of former Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez, who seized power after an OAS facilitated a coup d’etat in Bolivia in 2019, a fact not lost on many of the attendees, including the Bolivian representative. It was also raised by members of the audience during the Summit’s sessions, including Walter Smolarek who managed to speak from the floor for several minutes calling out OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro for his complicity in the massacres at Sacaba and Senkata during the Bolivian coup, and leaving Almagro almost speechless. Journalist Eugene Puryear pointed out the hypocrisy of the U.S. in shunning leaders it disagrees with while welcoming others, such as Ariel Henry of Haiti, who is accused by the judge who oversaw the case of murdering his predecessor.[7] President of Colombia, Iván Duque, whose government appears unable to stop the ongoing massacres and assassinations of human rights defenders, community leaders, and ex-combatants of the FARC, was also invited to the summit. And during the same session in which Secretary of State Blinken tried to present his administration as a worthy example of journalistic freedom, independent journalist Abby Martin challenged such a characterization by asking about U.S. client states implicated in murders of journalists, such as Palestinian-U.S. citizen Shireen Abu Akleh at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.[8]
The Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans Biden did invite
The administration did extend invitations to some people from the scorned countries to participate in the Summit’s Civil Society Dialogue. In the case of Cuba, Norges Rodríguez, a telecommunications specialist, and Yotuel, the Cuban rapper living in Spain who became famous on July 11, 2021 for his song “Patria y Vida,” were present. The latter was the subject of an extensive exposé about his ties to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).[9] Mr. Rodríguez, for his part, bragged about bringing photos from last year’s protests in Cuba to be displayed at the Summit, and remarked that he was there to raise awareness about the threat posed by the three excluded governments.[10]
Some Nicaraguan opposition journalists affiliated with outlets that have received funding from the Chamorro Foundation, known to channel funding from USAID and the NED, were invited to the Summit of the Americas, including Lucía Pineda of “100% Noticias” and others from “Confidencial.”[11] Other invitees, such as Francisca Ramírez, who calls herself a “peasant leader” in the anti-canal movement, are part of the militant opposition to the government and is alleged to have been one of the architects of the violent roadblocks that paralyzed Nicaragua for three months during a bloody coup attempt in 2018.[12]
As for Venezuela, at least Washington realized that it was not prudent to impose its puppet Juan Guaidó on the summit, as he has become an embarrassment. But it did invite Guaidó’s former “ambassador” to the UK, Vanessa Neumann,[13] who is under investigation by the Venezuela’s Attorney General’s office for involvement in blocking Venezuela’s gold reserves held by the Bank of England.[14] She resigned as Juan Guaidó’s diplomatic envoy to the UK in December 2020, expressing concern that “The future of Guaidó’s leadership is not clear within the opposition.”[15]
Given that the Summit was supposed to work on topics such as “Health and Resilience,” “Our Green Future,” and “Accelerating the Transition to Clean Energy,” one might wonder whether inclusion of these civil society actors who benefit from U.S. funding is merely intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the unilateral approaches of U.S. policy, while undermining true multilateralism. The fact that these individuals further Washington’s regime-change narratives is just icing on the cake.
The peoples of the Americas unite
Meanwhile, peace and justice activists held their own summits in Los Angeles (June 8 to 10) and in Tijuana, Mexico (June 10 to 12), calling for social justice, respect for national sovereignty, and international workers’ solidarity. Both Summits also called for the immediate release of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, who is being detained by U.S. authorities in violation of the Vienna Convention of 1961, setting a dangerous precedent for diplomatic missions around the world.[16]
The People’s Summit
People’s Summit Assembly, Los Angeles (credit photo, Alina Duarte)
The People’s Summit for Democracy in Los Angeles, endorsed by over 250 grassroots organizations and attended in-person and on-line by thousands, had strong participation from tenants’ rights groups that criticized the U.S. government for staging its event in the city with the highest homelessness rate in the country.[17]
The three-day event included teach-ins and protests with speeches denouncing the U.S. government hypocrisy of claiming to be a champion of democracy and human rights abroad while racism, poverty, voter suppression and an inequitable justice system afflict millions at home. Despite the LAPD’s refusal to grant a permit, the event culminated in a protest outside the Biden administration’s summit, prominently displaying the flags of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The final declaration of this alternative summit states:
“This Summit we have built together has been a bridge across organizations, movements, regions, languages, and borders. We are creating bonds between us and unity across our different struggles. While the time we have spent together is coming to a close, we affirm the ongoing fight for a more just world and rededicate ourselves to it.”[18]
People’s Summit protest march heads for the Summit of the Americas (credit photo, Media Ninja)
The People’s Summit ended up generating a situation contrary to the wishes of the Biden administration. On Friday, June 10, thousands walked the streets of Los Angeles demanding an end to the blockade against Cuba, as well as an end to economic warfare against Venezuela and Nicaragua. A massive mobilization that contrasted with the vacuum at the Summit of the Americas inside and outside the venue.
The Workers’ Summit
Worker’s Summit brings banners to the U.S. border wall, Tijuana (credit photo: Teri Mattson)
The Workers’ Summit in Tijuana also had extensive social movement and union participation, including in-person attendance by grassroots leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who were denied visas for the Los Angeles events. The peoples’ representatives of these three countries explained the advances their revolutionary societies have made in terms of housing for low-income people, socialized medicine, and free education through the highest level. There was a call to consolidate joint solidarity for the three countries against U.S. aggression, and to maintain ties among workers and social movements across national boundaries, in order to disseminate reliable information about what is happening in the different countries, take joint action when feasible, and learn from each other’s struggles. The final declaration of the workers summit states:
“We are witnessing a process of recolonization over the people. This is expressed in the excessive growth of racism, poverty, unemployment, job insecurity, environmental deterioration of territories, criminalization of migration, and gender and cultural violence. For this reason, we call upon the programmatic unity of the American continent’s workers, peasants, and progressive and popular forces to reflect, debate, and take concrete action to combat the labor and social violence applied to our peoples by the U.S. and Canadian governments.”[19]
The Summit proposes “To hold an annual meeting in Tijuana, Mexico, with the workers and social movements of the Americas to express solidarity with the peoples of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua and their revolutions to repudiate unilateral coercive measures against sovereign governments.”
Alison Bodine (Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice, Canada) urged delegates to build on the unity forged during the international encounter:
“When we leave the Workers Summit in Tijuana we need to solidify the unity that we have built over the last two days. We need to develop collaboration and teamwork with patience, confidence, and trust, to forge a united front that can work with consistency, cooperation and creativity to build a campaign that is strong enough to end imperialist attacks, sanctions and blockades against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.”
North South Solidarity
Both the People’s Summit and the Workers’ Summit, then, in response to the exclusive Summit of the Americas, established new bonds of solidarity and the promise of North-South ongoing collaboration.
It does indeed appear that the Biden administration’s effort to isolate the revolutionary governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela was not just a failure but a remarkable own-goal. Instead, North-South solidarity among the peoples of “Our America” was strengthened, despite their being excluded from the official summit. Cuban trade union leader Rosario Rodríguez Remos summed up the situation well when she said, “The time has come for the dog to stop following the master.”
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According to a 2011 Health Grades report, the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the U.S. is estimated to be over 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors daily
In 2014 10.5% of American doctors admitted they’d made a major medical mistake in the last three months
In 2016, Dr. Marty Makary published a report showing an estimated 250,000 Americans die from medical mistakes each year — about 1 in 10 patients — making it the third leading cause of death, right after cancer and heart disease
The World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist, developed by Makary, has been proven to reduce adverse event rates and save lives
In 2019, RaDonda Vaught, a registered nurse, was indicted for reckless homicide for administering the wrong drug to an elderly patient who died. She was found guilty and in May 2022, was sentenced to three years probation. It’s the first time a medical professional has been charged over a medical mistake that did not involve fraud or intentional malice. Many now worry this may prevent openness and transparency about unintentional medical mistakes
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In July of 2000 I was still receiving a print subscription to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and I was shocked that they actually published an article1 from Barbara Starfield, who had an MPH (master of public health) from Johns Hopkins.
Why was I shocked? Because I looked at the data in the article (see below) that physician mistakes were the third leading cause of death in the United States. My article on it went viral and that meme became very popular in 2000, but I was rarely acknowledged as the person who was responsible for it.
Deaths Per Year (From 2000)
12,000 — unnecessary surgery
7,000 — medication errors in hospitals
20,000 — other errors in hospitals
80,000 — infections in hospitals
106,000 — non-error, negative effects of drugs
These total to 225,000 deaths per year from physician or health care mistakes and are only surpassed by heart disease and cancer.
Starfield’s Ironic Tragedy — A Victim to What She Chronicled
Ironically, Starfield became a statistic to her own research. She died suddenly in June 2011, a death her husband attributed to the adverse effects of the blood thinner Plavix taken in combination with aspirin. However, her death certificate makes no mention of this possibility. In the August 2012 issue of Archives for Internal Medicine2 her husband, Dr. Neil A. Holtzman, writes, in part:
“Writing in sorrow and anger, I express up front my potential conflict of interest in interpreting the facts surrounding the death of my wife, Dr. Barbara Starfield … Because she died while swimming alone, an autopsy was required. The immediate cause of death was ‘pool drowning,’ but the underlying condition, ‘cerebral hemorrhage,’ stunned me …
Barbara started taking low-dose aspirin after coronary insufficiency had been diagnosed three years before her death, and clopidogrel bisulfate (Plavix) after her right main coronary artery had been stented six months after the diagnosis.
She reported to the cardiologist that she bruised more easily while taking clopidogrel and bled longer following minor cuts. She had no personal or family history of bleeding tendency or hypertension.
The autopsy findings and the official lack of feedback prompted me to call attention to deficiencies in medical care and clinical research in the United States reified by Barbara’s death and how the deficiencies can be rectified. Ironically, Barbara had written about all of them.”
2022 Updated Medical Mistakes Stats
The video above features an interview between Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, in which they discuss the prevalence of medical mistakes in conventional medicine and advancements in in patient safety.
Makary is also a public health researcher, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today (the second-largest trade publication in medicine), and the author of two best-selling books.
As a busy surgeon, Makary has worked in many of the best hospitals in the country and can testify to the power of modern medicine. But he’s also witnessed a medical culture that leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limb, overdoses patients because of sloppy handwriting or enters prescriptions into the wrong patient chart.
Medical Mistakes Are Commonplace
According to a 2011 Health Grades report,3 the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the U.S. was estimated to be over 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors daily. Makary cites a 2014 Mayo Clinic survey of 6,500 American doctors, 10.5% of whom admitted they’d made a major medical mistake in the last three months.
He also cites a 2015 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital that showed about half of all operations involved some kind of medication error. That study and corresponding press release have since been removed and are no longer available online, Makary says. Possibly because the hospital was embarrassed by the results.
In 2016, Makary and his research team published a report showing an estimated 250,000 Americans die from medical mistakes each year4 — about 1 in 10 patients — which (at that time) made it the third leading cause of death, right after cancer and heart disease.
According to Makary, that number may be higher, because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not collect vital statistics on medical errors. A death cannot be recorded as a medical error as there’s no code for it.
Of course, since they didn’t do autopsies on every death, that number could also be lower, so the final estimate they came up with was between 125,000 and 350,000 deaths per year.
Another widely-cited study5 published in 2013 had estimated the annual death toll for medical mistakes in the U.S. at 400,000 a year,6 Makary says. But whatever the true number, and whether it’s the third cause of death or the ninth, medical mistakes are clearly a serious and too-frequent problem.
An estimated 30% of all medical procedures, tests and medications may also be completely unnecessary,7 and each of these unnecessary interventions opens the door for a medical mistake that didn’t need to happen.
Many doctors have long been concerned about the frequency of medical mistakes, unnecessary testing and overtreatment, but the culture was such that it dissuaded open discussion and transparency.
It’s really only in the past decade or so that doctors and hospital administrators have started being more honest about these problems. Now, a case (discussed below) in which a nurse was charged and found guilty of negligent homicide after accidentally administering the wrong medication threatens to undo much of that progress.
Milestones in Patient Safety
In medical jargon, a “near miss” refers to a medical mistake that could have resulted in patient harm, but didn’t, and “preventable adverse event” refers to a medical mistake that does result in harm to the patient.
A “never event” is one that should never happen, regardless of circumstance. One example of a “never event” would be leaving a surgical instrument or sponge inside the patient.
In 2008, Medicare decided it would no longer pay for “never events,” in an effort to deincentivize sloppiness. Shortly thereafter, private insurance companies followed suit. The following year, in 2009, the World Health Organization organized a committee to address patient safety, as, worldwide, it was becoming apparent that many patients were dying from the care and not just from disease.
At the time, Makary had just published a surgery checklist for Johns Hopkins, and the WHO invited him to present it to the newly formed committee on patient safety. This checklist eventually became known as the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist.8 To this day, it hangs on operating room walls across the world.
Later investigations have revealed this pre-op checklist does in fact reduce adverse event rates and save lives. If a loved one is in the hospital, print it out, bring it with you and confirm that each of the 19 items has been done.
This can help you protect your family member or friend from preventable errors in care. It’s available in several languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, German, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish.
Opioid Overdose Is a Leading Death Among Young Adults
As of 2017, opioid overdoses have been the leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 50.9 The most common drugs involved in prescription opioid overdose deaths are methadone, oxycodone (such as OxyContin®) and hydrocodone (such as Vicodin®).10
Lawsuits that have made their way through the judicial system in recent years have shown opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, knew they were lying when they claimed opioids — which are chemically very similar to heroin — have an exceptionally low addiction rate when taken by people with pain.
As a result of their lies, doctors handed out opioids for pain as if they were candy. Even Makary admits to being fooled by the fraudulent PR. “That is a form of medical mistake,” he says, adding “I’m guilty of it myself. I gave opioids out like candy, and I feel terrible about it.”
In recent years, the medical industry has cracked down on prescription opioids, making them harder to obtain, but many patients still struggle with addiction, and fentanyl-laced products obtained illegally are still causing many unnecessary deaths.
The RaDonda Vaught Case
In this interview, Makary also reviews the RaDonda Vaught case which, as mentioned earlier might reverse much of the progress achieved with regard to openness and transparency about medical mistakes.
Vaught was hired as a nurse at Vanderbilt hospital in 2015. Two years later, on Christmas eve in 2017, she was taking care of a patient named Charlene Murphy, a 75-year-old woman admitted for a subdural hematoma (a brain bleed). Murphy made a rapid recovery and after two days she was ready to go home.
The doctor ordered one last scan while she was in the hospital, so Vaught brought her to the scanner and ordered Versed (midazolam), a sedative commonly used to help the patient lay still. The hospital had installed an automated drug dispensary system, the alerts of which often had to be overridden due to poor coordination between the electronic health records and the pharmacy.
On this fateful day, Vaught typed “ve” into the system to pull up Versed, but by default, the system populated the search with “vecuronium,” a potent paralyzing agent. Vaught didn’t realize the mistake, and overrode the alert. Now, vecuronium is a powder, and most experienced nurses would know that Versed is a liquid.
Vaught, however, didn’t catch the discrepancy and suspended the powder with saline as indicated and gave it to Murphy, who subsequently died inside the scanner.
“The nurse [Vaught] immediately feels horrible; says exactly what she did, recognized her mistake as the patient was deteriorating, and felt ‘I may have caused this,’” Makary says. “[She] admitted [and] reported this whole thing; was 100% honest. I mean, [she] even said, subsequently, that her life will never be the same, that she feels that a piece of her has died.”
In 2019, Vaught was indicted for reckless homicide.11,12 She was found guilty and in May 2022, was sentenced to three years probation with judicial diversion,13 which means her criminal record can be expunged if she serves her probationary period with good behavior. Her nursing license was also revoked.
Should Medical Mistakes Be Prosecuted?
Now, while Vaught immediately admitted her mistake, Vanderbilt hospital, for its part, appears to have been trying to cover it up.
“Vanderbilt had documentation where two neurologists listed the cause of death as the brain bleed. It was deemed, essentially, a natural cause of death. This was reported to the medical examiner,” Makary says.
An investigation by the Tennessean revealed Vanderbilt did not report the death to state or federal officials as a preventable adverse event, as is required by law. Instead, they fired Vaught and immediately negotiated an out-of-court settlement with the family, which included a gag order.
So, it wasn’t the family that brought charges against Vaught but rather a team of district attorneys in Davidson county. Vaught’s case is the first of its kind, and has triggered emotional reactions across the country among doctors and nurses alike, as everyone knows how easily and frequently medical mistakes occur.
According to the Tennessean, “The case has put a spotlight on how nurses should be held accountable for medical mistakes.” But should they? Never before has a medical professional been criminally charged for a medical mistake that didn’t involve intentional fraud or malice. As noted by Makary:
“One of the principles of patient safety that we have been advocating throughout the entire 23 years of the patient safety movement in America has been the concept ‘just culture’ — a doctrine which says that honest mistakes should not be penalized … That is a doctrine that has enabled people to speak up about this epidemic of medical mistakes in the United States …
In my opinion, we have had decades of progress in patient safety, about 23 healthy years of significant improvements in the culture of safety and the way we approach safety, undone with a single group of assistant young district attorneys that decided to go after one individual at the exclusion of doing anything about a hospital that, unlike the nurse, did not admit to anything initially and broke the law.
There’s a preliminary statistic that 1 in 5 nurses are quitting during the pandemic. Now, some of that is pandemic burnout, some of it’s a number of [other] factors, but a lot of nurses are leaving the profession and there’s this feeling that they don’t feel valued, and this [case] has been a bit of a smack in their face.
So, hospitals around the country that are dealing with critical nursing staffing shortages are trying to pay attention to the concerns that nurses have about this case. I have talked to lawmakers at the state level in different states who are thinking about passing protections for nurses. It’s delicate, but this is now a conversation that has surfaced.”
US Is an Unmitigated Failure at Treating Chronic Illness
The U.S. has the most expensive health care in the world, spending more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined (Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia). If the U.S. health care system were a country, it would be the sixth largest economy on the entire planet.
Despite that, the U.S. ranks last in health and mortality when compared with 17 other developed nations. We may have one of the best systems for treating acute surgical emergencies, but the American medical system is clearly an unmitigated failure when it comes to treating chronic illness.
The fact that properly prescribed and administered drugs kill well over 100,000 every year in the U.S. should really be food for some serious thought. For starters, drug safety needs to become a priority, not an afterthought.
Indeed, one of Starfield’s points of contention was the lack of systematic recording and studying of adverse events, and her own death highlights this problem. It was the Plavix-aspirin combination that actually killed her, yet if it hadn’t been for an autopsy and her husband insisting on an adverse event report, no one would ever have been the wiser about such a connection.
Only a tiny fraction of all adverse drug reactions are ever reported to the FDA; according to some estimates, as few as 1%. In order to truly alert the FDA to a problem with a product they’ve approved, they must be notified by as many people as possible who believe they have experienced a side effect.
By filing a report, you help make medicine safer for everyone. So, if you believe you’ve experienced a side effect from a drug, please report it. Simply go to the FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator page, find the phone number listed for your state, and report your adverse reaction.
In all, preventable medical mistakes may account for one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the U.S. annually.14 To put these numbers into even further perspective, medical mistakes in American hospitals kill four jumbo jets’ worth of people each week.15
According to statistics published in a 2011 Health Grades report,16 the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the U.S. may be as high as 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors DAILY. According to co-author John T. James, Ph.D.:17
“Perhaps it is time for a national patient bill of rights for hospitalized patients. All evidence points to the need for much more patient involvement in identifying harmful events and participating in rigorous follow-up investigations to identify root causes.”
Many Tests and Treatments Do More Harm Than Good
Overtesting and overtreatment are also part of the problem. Instead of dissuading patients from unnecessary or questionable interventions, the system rewards waste and incentivizes disease over health.
According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30% of all medical procedures, tests and medications may in fact be unnecessary, at a cost of at least $750 billion a year.18 To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.
It’s also important to be aware that many novel medical treatments gain popularity over older standards of care due mostly to clever marketing, opposed to solid science. An investigation by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 proved this point. To determine the overall effectiveness of our medical care, researchers tracked the frequency of medical reversals over the past decade.
They found that reversals are common across all classes of medical practice, and a significant proportion of medical treatments offer no patient benefit at all.
In fact, they found 146 reversals of previously established practices,19 treatments and procedures over the previous 10 years. The most telling data in the report show just how many common medical treatments are doing more harm than good. Of the studies that tested an existing standard of care, 40.2% reversed the practice, compared to only 38% reaffirming it.
The remaining 22% were inconclusive. This means that anywhere between 40 and 78% of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of NO benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies.
Safeguarding Your Care While Hospitalized
Knowing that medical errors can and do frequently occur, what can you do to ensure your safety, or the safety of a loved one, who has to go to the hospital? Makary offers the following suggestions:
“Every hospital has a patient relations department and if things just don’t seem right, if you feel that you’re not communicating effectively with your care team, if you feel care is not coordinated, if you have a concern or there was an error, you can call the patient relations department. They’ve got somebody on call 24/7. That’s basically a standard thing in the hospitals now.
It’s important to have an advocate with you anytime you get medical care or you’ve got a loved one in the hospital. It’s amazing how it seems that the care is just overall much better, holistic, comprehensive and coordinated when there’s a family member or loved one there, taking notes, asking questions …
Ask about the medication that’s being given to you. You should know what it is and what it’s for, and you should ask your doctor or whoever walks in the room if they’ve washed their hands …
This is the sort of new dialogue that we are trying to promote to make the patient a participant in their care and not just a bystander. When you do it, what I’ve noticed the more educated they are, or their surrogate is, the better the care is. You are in the middle of a very complicated system of care when you’re in the hospital. The more you can be aware of what’s happening, the safer the care.”
Once you’re hospitalized, you’re immediately at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there with you. Dr. Andrew Saul has written an entire book20 on the issue of safeguarding your health while hospitalized.
Frequently, you’re going to be relatively debilitated, especially post-op when you’re under the influence of anesthesia, and you won’t have the opportunity to see the types of processes that are going on. This is particularly important for pediatric patients and the elderly.
It’s important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes. For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: “What is this medication? What is it for? What’s the dose?” Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they’re getting it right if they know they’ll be questioned about it.
If someone you know is scheduled for surgery, you can print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual, which is part of the campaign “Safe Surgery Saves Lives.” The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. If a loved one is in the hospital, print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.
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A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.
The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.
On the website of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, for example, clicking the “Schedule Online” button on a doctor’s page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the search term we used to find her: “pregnancy termination.”
Clicking the “Schedule Online Now” button for a doctor on the website of Froedtert Hospital, in Wisconsin, prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the condition we selected from a dropdown menu: “Alzheimer’s.”
The Markup also found the Meta Pixel installed inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems. On five of those systems’ pages, we documented the pixel sending Facebook data about real patients who volunteered to participate in the Pixel Hunt project, a collaboration between The Markup and Mozilla Rally. The project is a crowd-sourced undertaking in which anyone can install Mozilla’s Rally browser add-on in order to send The Markup data on the Meta Pixel as it appears on sites that they visit. The data sent to hospitals included the names of patients’ medications, descriptions of their allergic reactions, and details about their upcoming doctor’s appointments.
Former regulators, health data security experts, and privacy advocates who reviewed The Markup’s findings said the hospitals in question may have violated the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The law prohibits covered entities like hospitals from sharing personally identifiable health information with third parties like Facebook, except when an individual has expressly consented in advance or under certain contracts.
Neither the hospitals nor Meta said they had such contracts in place, and The Markup found no evidence that the hospitals or Meta were otherwise obtaining patients’ express consent.
“I am deeply troubled by what [the hospitals] are doing with the capture of their data and the sharing of it,” said David Holtzman, a health privacy consultant who previously served as a senior privacy adviser in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which enforces HIPAA. “I cannot say [sharing this data] is for certain a HIPAA violation. It is quite likely a HIPAA violation.”
University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center spokesperson George Stamatis did not respond to The Markup’s questions but said in a brief statement that the hospital “comport[s] with all applicable federal and state laws and regulatory requirements.”
After reviewing The Markup’s findings, Froedtert Hospital removed the Meta Pixel from its website “out of an abundance of caution,” Steve Schooff, a spokesperson for the hospital, wrote in a statement.
As of June 15, six other hospitals had also removed pixels from their appointment booking pages and at least five of the seven health systems that had Meta Pixels installed in their patient portals had removed those pixels.
The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020, according to the most recent data availablefrom the American Hospital Association. Our investigation was limited to just over 100 hospitals; the data sharing likely affects many more patients and institutions than we identified.
Facebook itself is not subject to HIPAA, but the experts interviewed for this story expressed concerns about how the advertising giant might use the personal health data it’s collecting for its own profit.
“This is an extreme example of exactly how far the tentacles of Big Tech reach into what we think of as a protected data space,” said Nicholson Price, a University of Michigan law professor who studies big data and health care. “I think this is creepy, problematic, and potentially illegal” from the hospitals’ point of view.
The Markup was unable to determine whether Facebook used the data to target advertisements, train its recommendation algorithms, or profit in other ways.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, did not respond to questions. Instead, spokesperson Dale Hogan sent a brief email paraphrasing the company’s sensitive health data policy.
“If Meta’s signals filtering systems detect that a business is sending potentially sensitive health data from their app or website through their use of Meta Business Tools, which in some cases can happen in error, that potentially sensitive data will be removed before it can be stored in our ads systems,” Hogan wrote.
Meta did not respond to follow-up questions, but Hogan appears to be referencing a sensitive health information filtering system that the company launched in July 2020 in response to a Wall Street Journal article and New York Department of Financial Services investigation. Meta told the investigators that the filtering system was “not yet operating with complete accuracy,” according to the department’s February 2021 final report.
The Markup was unable to confirm whether any of the data referenced in this story was in fact removed before being stored by Meta. However, a recent joint investigation with Reveal found that Meta’s sensitive health information filtering system didn’t block information about appointments a reporter requested with crisis pregnancy centers.
Internally, Facebook employees have been blunt about how well—or not so well—the company generally protects sensitive data.
“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ ” Facebook engineers on the ad and business product team wrote in a 2021 privacy overview that was leaked to Vice.
The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code that tracks users as they navigate through a website, logging which pages they visit, which buttons they click, and certain information they enter into forms. It’s one of the most prolific tracking tools on the internet—present on more than 30 percent of the most popular sites on the web, according to The Markup’s analysis.
In exchange for installing its pixel, Meta provides website owners analytics about the ads they’ve placed on Facebook and Instagram and tools to target people who’ve visited their website.
The Meta Pixel sends information to Facebook via scripts running in a person’s internet browser, so each data packet comes labeled with an IP address that can be used in combination with other data to identify an individual or household.
HIPAA lists IP addresses as one of the 18 identifiers that, when linked to information about a person’s health conditions, care, or payment, can qualify the data as protected health information. Unlike anonymized or aggregate health data, hospitals can’t share protected health information with third parties except under the strict terms of business associate agreements that restrict how the data can be used.
In addition, if a patient is logged in to Facebook when they visit a hospital’s website where a Meta Pixel is installed, some browsers will attach third-party cookies—another tracking mechanism—that allow Meta to link pixel data to specific Facebook accounts.
And in several cases we found—using both dummy accounts created by our reporters and data from Mozilla Rally volunteers—that the Meta Pixel made it even easier to identify patients.
When The Markup clicked the “Finish Booking” button on a Scripps Memorial Hospital doctor’s page, the pixel sent Facebook not just the name of the doctor and her field of medicine but also the first name, last name, email address, phone number, zip code, and city of residence we entered into the booking form.
The Meta Pixel “hashed” those personal details—obscuring them through a form of cryptography—before sending them to Facebook. But that hashing doesn’t prevent Facebook from using the data. In fact, Meta explicitly uses the hashed information to link pixel data to Facebook profiles.
Using a free online tool, The Markup was also able to reverse most of our hashed test information that the pixel on Scripps Memorial Hospital’s website sent to Facebook.
Scripps Memorial didn’t respond to The Markup’s questions but it did remove the Meta Pixel from the final webpages in the appointment booking process after we shared our findings with the hospital.
On other hospitals’ websites, we documented the Meta Pixel collecting similarly intimate information about real patients.
When one real patient who participated in the Pixel Hunt study logged in to the MyChart portal for Piedmont Healthcare, a Georgia health system, the Meta Pixel installed in the portal told Facebook the patient’s name, the name of their doctor, and the time of their upcoming appointment, according to data collected by the participant’s Mozilla Rally browser extension.
When another Pixel Hunt participant used the MyChart portal for Novant Health, a North Carolina–based health system, the pixel told Facebook the type of allergic reaction the patient had to a specific medication.
The Markup created our own MyChart account through Novant Health to further investigate and found the Meta Pixel collecting a variety of other sensitive information.
Clicking on one button prompted the pixel to tell Facebook the name and dosage of a medication in our health record, as well as any notes we had entered about the prescription. The pixel also told Facebook which button we clicked in response to a question about sexual orientation.
“Our Meta pixel placement is guided by a third party vendor and it has been removed while we continue to look into this matter,” Novant spokesperson Megan Rivers wrote in an email.
Epic Systems, the software company behind MyChart, has “specifically recommended heightened caution around the use of custom analytics scripts,” Stirling Martin, a senior vice president for the company, wrote in an email.
Facebook is able to infer intimate details about people’s health conditions using other means—for example, the fact that a person “liked” a Facebook group associated with a particular disease—but the data collected by pixels on hospitals’ websites is more direct. And in sharing it with Facebook, experts said, health care providers risk damaging patients’ trust in an increasingly digitized health system.
The Markup found that filling out a survey through Novant Health shared sensitive information like sexual orientation with Facebook via the Meta Pixel. Source: www.novantmychart.org
“Almost any patient would be shocked to find out that Facebook is being provided an easy way to associate their prescriptions with their name,” said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. “Even if perhaps there’s something in the legal architecture that permits this to be lawful, it’s totally outside the expectations of what patients think the health privacy laws are doing for them.”
Legal Implications
Facebook’s data collection on hospital websites has been the subject of class action lawsuits in several states, with mixed results.
Those cases involve types of data that health law experts said are sensitive but less regulated than the health information The Markup documented the Meta Pixel collecting.
In 2016, a group of plaintiffs sued Facebook and a handful of health systems and organizations, alleging that the organizations had breached their own privacy policies and several state and federal laws—including wiretapping and intrusion on seclusion statutes—by collecting data via tracking technology on the health care providers’ websites.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed that case in 2017 for a variety of reasons, including that the plaintiffs failed to prove that Facebook had collected “protected health information,” as defined by HIPAA. Rather, the court found, Facebook had tracked plaintiffs on public-facing pages of the websites—such as the homepage or informational pages about diseases—where there was no evidence that the plaintiffs had established a patient relationship with the provider.
In 2019, plaintiffs brought a similar class action lawsuit in Suffolk County Superior Court against Massachusetts-based Partners Healthcare System, which has since changed its name to Mass General Brigham, alleging that the system had violated patients’ privacy and its own policies by installing the Meta Pixel and other tracking tools on its websites.
The parties settled the case in January, with Mass General Brigham denying the allegations and admitting no wrongdoing or liability but paying $18.4 million to the plaintiffs and their attorneys. After the settlement, Mass General Brigham appears to have removed Meta Pixel and other tracking tools from many of its hospitals’ websites—but not all of them.
When The Markup tested the website of Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, clicking the “Request Appointment” button on a doctor’s page caused the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the doctor’s field of medicine. Mass General did not respond to The Markup’s request for comment.
As with all such data we found the Meta Pixel collecting, it was sent to Facebook along with our computer’s public IP address.
“When an individual has sought out a provider and indicated that they want to make an appointment, at that point, any individually identifiable health information that they’ve provided in this session, in the past, or certainly in the future, is protected under HIPAA and could not be shared with a third party like Facebook,” Holtzman said.
The U.S. Department of Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights “cannot comment on open or potential investigations,” spokesperson Rachel Seeger wrote in an emailed statement.
“Generally, HIPAA covered entities and business associates should not be sharing identifiable information with social media companies unless they have HIPAA authorization [from the individual] and consent under state law,” said Iliana Peters, a privacy lawyer with the firm Polsinelli who previously headed HIPAA enforcement for the Office for Civil Rights.
Patients have the right to file HIPAA complaints with their medical providers, who are required to investigate the complaints, Peters said, adding, “I would hope that institutions would respond quickly to those types of complaints so that they aren’t escalated to a state or federal regulator.”
“Plausible Deniability“
Most of the hospitals The Markup contacted for this story did not respond to our questions or explain why they chose to install Meta Pixel on their websites. But some did defend their use of the tracker.
“The use of this type of code was vetted,” wrote Chris King, a spokesperson for Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago. King did not respond to follow-up questions about the vetting process.
King said that no protected health information is hosted on or accessible through Northwestern Memorial’s website and that “Facebook automatically recognizes anything that might be close to personal information and does not store this data.”
In fact, Meta explicitly states in its business tools terms of service that the pixel and other trackers do collect personally identifiable information for a variety of purposes.
Houston Methodist Hospital, in Texas, was the only institution to provide detailed responses to The Markup’s questions. The hospital began using the pixel in 2017, spokesperson Stefanie Asin wrote, and is “confident” in Facebook’s safeguards and that the data being shared isn’t protected health information.
When The Markup tested Houston Methodist’s website, clicking the “Schedule Appointment” button on a doctor’s page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the name of the doctor, and the search term we used to find the doctor: “Home abortion.”
Houston Methodist doesn’t categorize that data as protected health information, Asin wrote, because a person who clicks the “Schedule Appointment” button may not follow through and confirm the appointment, or, they may be booking the appointment for a family member rather than for themself.
“The click doesn’t mean they scheduled,” she wrote. “It’s also worth noting that people often are exploring for a spouse, friend, elderly parent.”
Asin added that Houston Methodist believes Facebook “uses tools to detect and reject any health information, providing a barrier that prevents passage of [protected health information].”
Despite defending its use of the Meta Pixel, Houston Methodist Hospital removed the pixel from its website several days after responding to The Markup’s questions.
“Since our further examination of the topic is ongoing, we elected to remove the pixel for now to be sure we are doing everything we can to protect our patients’ privacy while we are evaluating,” Asin wrote in a follow-up email.
Facebook did not launch its sensitive health data filtering system until July 2020, three years after Houston Methodist began using the pixel, according to the New York Department of Financial Services’ investigation. And as recently as February of last year, the department reported that the system’s accuracy was poor.
That type of Band-Aid fix is a prime example, privacy advocates say, of the online advertising industry’s inability to police itself.
“The evil genius of Facebook’s system is they create this little piece of code that does the snooping for them and then they just put it out into the universe and Facebook can try to claim plausible deniability,” said Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
“The fact that this is out there in the wild on the websites of hospitals is evidence of how broken the rules are.”
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As our world spirals toward the catastrophe of nuclear war, there has never been a greater need for a new global balancing, a rejection of great power, war, exploitation, and aggression. Now more than ever, we need to reject the brutal unipolar agenda of the United States, the dividing up of the world between hostile powers, and the suppression of the rights of the many in the interests of the few. Nowhere is this clearer than the possession of nuclear weapons: only nine states possess these ultimate weapons of mass destruction, yet they can hold the rest of the world to ransom with their nuclear terror.
The struggle for a genuinely multipolar world, aligned only with the world’s people, not military blocs, has peace and disarmament at its heart: this is as true now as it was 60 years ago when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was founded. As well as opposition to colonization and economic subjection, those founding the movement championed self-determination and equality in states’ relations, and they also agreed on their opposition to military blocs, their commitment to world peace, and a very strong advocacy of global nuclear disarmament. That thread has remained a constant ever since, and today we continue to see the countries of the Global South leading global disarmament initiatives.
Virtually the entire Global South is self-organized into internationally recognized nuclear weapons-free zones, originating in the 1960s. In 1968, a nuclear-weapons-free zone was established by 20 countries in Latin America, renouncing the acquisition and siting of nuclear weapons on their territories. Signatories to this treaty, the Treaty of Tlatelolco, also agreed to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) jurisdiction over their nuclear power facilities. In return, nuclear weapons states agreed not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any of the signatory states. The Treaty of Rarotonga was signed in 1985, and prohibited nuclear explosive devices in the South Pacific, as well as banning the testing and use of nuclear explosive technologies. The African nuclear weapons-free zone was formalized in 1996 by the signing of the Treaty of Pelindaba, following the disarmament by South Africa of its apartheid-era nuclear weapons.
There has been strong regional development in disarmament, led by the Global South, but there have also been-and continue to be-global attempts made too. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), negotiated during the 1960s, which came into force in 1970, was in large part initiated by India, to bring proliferation and spiraling arsenals under control. India and Pakistan both declined to join the NPT, asserting that it enshrined nuclear haves and have-nots in law-a two-tier, double standards system. Regrettably, they both went on to test and develop their own arsenals. But the point was correct-nuclear weapons states did not comply with their NPT obligations to disarm. Indeed, they have subsequently attempted to reinterpret the NPT as allowing them to retain nuclear weapons.
The West Departs
In the early years of the 21st century, in the context of the so-called “war on terror,” U.S. President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair attempted to shift the international legal framework governing nuclear weapons. They tried to overturn the disarmament requirement, focusing on preventing more countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Their goal was to reinterpret the NPT as legitimizing the possession of weapons by existing nuclear states, while using it as the justification for confrontation with states accused of proliferation. They claimed that a new document was needed to reflect the drastic changes in international security conditions, including the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The reality was that the U.S. and UK were researching new weapons and would be prepared to use them even against a non-nuclear weapons state, as well as developing weapons for confrontation with more powerful states such as Russia or China. This was the real driver of nuclear proliferation, together with the U.S. determination to make Israel the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East.
A New Path
It was frustration with the NPT that led to the founding of the Humanitarian Initiative on the consequences of nuclear weapons in 2013. This initiative came to fruition in the form of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force in January 2021.
The treaty makes nuclear weapons illegal for the first time, outlawing the development, possession, and deployment of nuclear weapons by participating states.
The treaty currently has 61 states parties that are legally bound by the treaty, and many more that are in the process of coming on board. The countries of the Global South are at the forefront of achieving this treaty; they understand any nuclear weapons use by states in the Global North will disastrously affect their own populations, lands, and food production. As has always been their position, any possession of nuclear weapons is unacceptable; no hands are safe hands when it comes to nuclear weapons.
In a remarkable development, the treaty also places obligations on signatories to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing. It requires environmental remediation for lands contaminated by nuclear testing. It also explicitly recognizes the disproportionate impact of nuclear weapon activities on Indigenous peoples, because of the choices made by colonial nuclear powers for their testing sites. For example, many of the UK tests were conducted on the Australian First People’s territories in Emu Field and Maralinga, contaminating large parts of South Australia. France conducted nuclear tests in its former colonies, including 17 in Algeria and 193 in French Polynesia. These historic wrongs must be righted.
The initiatives of the global majority for peace and disarmament show that another world is possible. War is terrible. In all wars, people suffer, and war’s consequences last for generations. Countless people’s futures are destroyed, as we see in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Sahel. The priorities of humanity are the fight against inequality and poverty, tackling the climate crisis, and expanding access to health and vaccines. Massive spending by states on military production and destruction is a criminal waste of resources. Military alliances do not solve our problems, but dialogue, demilitarization, and international cooperation do.
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Kate Hudson is the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She is a leading anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigner in the United Kingdom and internationally.
All Global Research articles can be read in51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
“What is most concerning, at no point did anyone from the Metropolitan police from December 20th 2021 up to and including the 22nd of February 2022 make contact with any of the victims, any of the witnesses, or any of the world renowned experts who were offering their evidence and expertise to assist The Metropolitan Police. It is also believed not one of the alleged offenders were spoken to or contacted.” – Mark Sexton, former police officer. Participant in the legal team filing a criminal complaint of Gross Negligence Manslaughter and Misconduct in Public Office. [1]
Numerous lines of evidence detailed on numerous sites including Global Research from hundreds of medical and scientific sources around the world, including highly revered experts like Sucharit Bhakdi, Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and so on, have documented the severe injuries and deaths coinciding with the application of the COVID vaccine.
Citizens everywhere are taking note, and legions of lawyers are stepping up prepared to address a likely crime against humanity.
The legal firm PJH Law Solicitors came up with an interesting approach. They brought the case to the attention of the criminal investigators at the Hammersmith Police station and the Metropolitan Police Station. [2]
They claimed based on their evidence that the public office in the United Kingdom was responsible for corporate manslaughter, gross negligence causing injury and death, and serious misconduct. They alleged that the same people responsible for creating the SARS-CoV-2 virus containing a harmful spike protein also funded the solution, the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
They claimed the “vast, fully documented, irrefutable and damning” evidence was “supplied by many world renowned experts in the field of medicine, cardiology, immunology, science, data, lawyers, barristers, serving and retired nurses and doctors and retired police constables.” They had “over four hundred victim and witness statements” and supplied over ten weeks electronic files, memory sticks, videos and other forms of evidence. Among numerous other allegations. [3]
The Met police have since reportedly dropped the case. But several questions linger about how and at what level the evidence was rejected.
Why were none of the witnesses contacted? Why supply the link to submit evidence?
Why did they tell the complainants that they had major notes and investigations one week, and yet a spokesperson told Reuters:
“While the assessment continues, to date there is nothing to indicate that a crime has been committed and no criminal investigation has been launched.”
This quandary may speak to an even more interesting result. But given the efforts in question, the Global Research News Hour felt it was urgent to bring this case to the attention of our listeners.
In our first half hour, we had discourse with the lead lawyer himself, Philip Hyland. He talks about the weight of the evidence, the implications of the Met closure of the case, and the failures of so-called media “fact-checks.”
In the name of balancing the debate, we followed with another interview with high profile promoter of the COVID-19 Vaccine Dr Peter Hotez. He spoke not only of the evidence supplied in the previous interview but also about some of the other points raised by critics, including the recent and damaging Pfizer Dump of Documents as a result of a freedom of information request.
Philip Hyland is a lawyer who founded the group PJH Law in 2002 based in Stamford Lincolnshire in England.
Dr. Peter Hotez serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics, and University Professor of Biology at Baylor College of Medicine.
VIDEO and transcript of interview with Philip Hyland.
Philip Hyland: We were gathering evidence and looking at an injunction to take out against the Medical Health Regulatory Authority that licenses drugs and medical devices in the UK, because the evidence collected suggested that there were statistically significant increases in certain conditions like myocarditis and pericarditis. Plus there was statistically significant increase in deaths. In some male cohorts, it was 10% additional deaths post vax and all that. And I think that women it was about 8% increasing number of deaths. And then we had the issue of increase in certain conditions like myocarditis and pericarditis. A lack of information on spontaneous abortions plus what appeared to be bad batches circulating. And all that put together, when we look at what happened in the past, if a medicine caused, or could have caused those amounts of adverse events, they would normally be withdrawn.
But with the SARS COV 2 vaccine there seemed to be, at best, an indifference by the regulator as to what adverse events were happening, and there didn’t seem to be too much enthusiasm for collecting data and… and I think we can compare that with how SARS COV 2 deaths were treated in that any death within 28 days of a positive test was put down as a SARS COV 2 death, whereas any death 28 days from vaccination was a, subjected to complete indifference.
Except when we looked at it, we saw that the bad batch issue was a key issue that the regulator wasn’t addressing, but the flip side of that coin is that the regulator hadn’t authorized hydroxychloroquine and zinc. And hadn’t authorized Ivermectin. Now you can say what you like about those two therapeutics, and there’s been a lot said, anything from horse tranquillizer onwards, but what I don’t think anyone can dispute, judging by the data collected at VigiAccess, which is the World Health Organization database, I don’t think anyone can dispute that those drugs or therapeutics, or medicines are safe. I don’t think anyone can dispute that.
Global Research: Well, actually, there are a lot of experts in the WHO who appear in the mainstream media who do. They’ll say that the hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and that the Ivermectin, that these things could be actually deadly for a… So they say they’re going to continue doing tests but so far it’s not proven…
PH: Yeah, I mean what terms to gather by is official figures and the World Health Organization collect data on safety, and the data collected on HCQ zinc has been created since 1968 and the data on Ivermectin since about 1994, and both drugs or medicines have got very good safety records. And I don’t think that’s in dispute. I think what’s in dispute is whether they work. But on the flip side of that, we’ve got a vaccine where the safety doesn’t look to be particularly good, and alsoaccording to the figures, we got a vaccine that doesn’t appear to work as advertised and so when we look at, and if we’re going back to last December, Public Health Scotland had got some figures out which they compare a hundred thousand of the vaxxed population against a hundred thousand of the unvaxxed population, and there’s a far higher incidence of COVID and deaths in the vaccinated population, and that increase was statistically significant. I think… off the top of my head… it’s about 1.5 per hundred thousand in the unvaccinated and depending on how many boosters we had it went up to about 3.4 per 100,000 if you’ve had four boosters.
So I think when you look side by side, the vaccine has got safety and efficacy issues. The alternatives don’t really have safety issues, there’s fierce debate as to whether they both, Ivermectin and HCQ and zinc work. But it’s part of a Metropolitan Police complaint, we had gathered evidence from clinicians who had used these HCQ and Ivermectin in clinic with good results. So what we went into the Met police for on the 20th of December, the seriousness come back to the public office, but it really covered the whole gamut of the COVID response, the tests that weren’t reliable, the use of toxic psychology, misrepresentation of figures, suppression of safe alternatives, plus a haphazard and, we’d say, grossly negligent roll out of the vaccine and so we were given a prime reference number, and we were also given a Dropbox facility or box upload center to upload documents, so as far as we were concerned, the Met police were investigating.
GR: The Met police says that two months ago, that an assessment of all the available evidence, it’s clear that no criminal offences are apparent, that the Metropolitan Police will not be launching a criminal investigation and no further action will be taken in relation to the allegations.
PH: I won’t say too much other than a press release issued by the Met didn’t catch what the crime reference number catches, which was a whole gamut of alleged criminality from testing through to haphazard and we’d say grossly negligent vaccine roll-out and all points in between. It just focussed on the vaccine. And that wasn’t, that wasn’t the only crime that was alleged. It was a bigger crime. So the Met police issued a, in my view, a misleading statement saying that they’ve looked into allegations of suppression of information on the vaccine except there were no crimes committed. But the criminal complaint was far wider than that.
So…so where we are at the moment is in rather an unhappy situation of we complain to the independent office or ombudsman to police complaints about the police’s failure to look into this properly, and my own analysis of the situation is that the police we were interacting with did want to investigate it but the police at the head of the organization didn’t, and squashed it. That’s my own reading of the situation.
And so we’ve now got a complaint in with the office that regulates the police about the failure to investigate, but the Met police were giving mixed messages because when we went in to see them, we went in to see them on December the 20th, January 28th, February the 12th off the top of my head, and on those two occasions, January 28th we took in a witness who’s a very experienced journalist actually. She rounded 9/11. But she’d also used HCQ for the last 15 years for a chronic condition she had. And what we went into the police on the 28th of January, – I’ve got the dates right _ was this: that before the recovery trial used 2400 mg, a standard of care on that trial, an eyewitness said that as a frequent user of HCQ, if you’d given her 2400 mg she would have been hospitalized because the standard dosage is between 200 and 400.
Yet patients on this trial were given in the first 24 hours a dosage of 2400 and of course the trial was abandoned because it was killing too many patients, but that that’s not surprising if you’re giving 8 to 10 times the normal dose. And not only that, but we did have evidence that the two principal investigators on that trial had been warned that 2400 mg in the trial protocol was too much of a dose. And I think they were also warned that the optimal time for using HCQ and zinc is at the early onset of the disease, not when the disease has progressed. So we, our allegation was that the trial was basically flawed by dosing the patients at the wrong stage of disease when their organs were inflamed and it’s an anti-inflammatory and also dosing at the wrong level.
We brought along a witness and the police took all the details. We’d also given her, given the police, Tess Lawrie’s evidence relating to Ivermectin and her exchanges with, I think it’s Andrew Hill, [inaudible]in the video, and we just said, isn’t that a coincidence. There are too many competitors, if you like, that HCQ and zinc and Ivermectin were both not recommended but look as though they were set up to fail. Given the trial protocol of HCQ and zinc and given what Professor Hill said to Tess Lawrie where he was alleged to have set up, I’ve seen the video, he came under pressure from the sponsors and when I looked at it, both the HCQ trial and the Ivermectin non-recommendation both had sponsors in common, indirectly, which was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Of course, that foundation via its trustees who stood to benefit from vaccination because Bill Gates is on record as saying that he looks for 20 return…20 fold return on vaccine investments. Yet his foundation appeared to be, either indirectly or directly, influencing the outcome of competitors to vaccination.
So to the neutral, like myself, I did see something there for the police to investigate as to whetherprivate money with a vested interest had influence the outcome of knocking out HCQ and Ivermectin, and to the detriment of public health. Because even if you think Ivermectin is false developer, and HCQ is harmful, particular stations, citizens, individuals, in my view, should have been able to have a choice between these medicines over here, which have been around for since ‘94 and 1968 or this new shiny vaccine with a novel experimental mode of action.
And that’s partly informed consent process, whereby individuals should be offered, or should have a discussion about what alternatives there are to the treatment on offer. But I think at the same time in Canada and America and all around the world and a lot of people haven’t been around access to HCQ and haven’t been around access to IVM, and I think…or Ivermectin, and I think in South Africa certainly, in America there have been court cases where the courts have ordered Ivermectin to be used and people have literally come off their ICU beds.
And I think there’s some countries in Europe, maybe Slovenia or the Czech Republic, that use Ivermectin. And I’ve discussed this with Tess Lawrie, she said have a look at the data in Peru, where they used Ivermectin until I think October – November ‘21, and to great effect … yet in Peru when the president changed, they went on a vaccine roll out which then proved successful. So I think what this illustrates to a lay person like myself is that if you give the big pharmaceutical companies the right to set their own exam, mark their own exam, moderate their own exam, and so be regulator that they pass the exam, that you really rely on the good faith of big pharma companies to stay honest and reliable, and they’re recorded data. I think if you certainly look at one company that caught by their criminal record.
So, yeah, I’ve sidetracked a little bit, so, we went into Met Police on the 28th of January just to go through the suppressed alternatives, and I think on the 12th of February thereabouts we went into the police because via Tess Lawrie, we got a vial or vill, however you pronounce it, of vaccine, I think it was Pfizer (or) AstraZeneca – I believe it was Pfizer – analysed and it had, it had substances in it that weren’t on the packaging, and which tied in with results from Almeria University and other places in Spain, graphene, I think it was graphene oxide or something like that in the vaccine. So we took that down to the police. And when we took that back to the police, they said on the database they’ve got over 70 pages of notes and investigations. Yet about a week later they said that there’s no further action and no crimes were being committed.
GR: Well, you said you took it a batch of it to a lab and then had it analyzed?
PH: That wasn’t me. It was Dr. Tess Lawrie. We were involved at the periphery of that with Dr. White. He got the batch analyzed, and it had graphene and, from memory, graphene… I’m not a scientific brain, but it had substances in there that weren’t on the label. So we took that to the police and we also sent it to MI5 which is our military intelligence and also actually a former agent of MI5 also handed it in to Military Intelligence as well or emailed it in. And what we understand, I’ve got no way of corroborating it, it had this certain faction within MI5 that is quite sympathetic to vases they were saying about the COVID response has been at best a criminally negligent over-reaction and at worst a deliberate operation to almost to mislead the public as to the severity of the illness in order to get them to take the vaccine and roll out a political agenda of vaccine cards.
GR: Well I’m just wondering, there’s a been a lot of fact checks in the mainstream media? They say that it’s not proven that there’s graphene, that that’s a mythology, and also talking about the fact that just because you have a, get a crime number doesn’t necessarily mean they’re investigating at all. What do you say to that?
PH: Okay, so on the fact checks, the fact checks are basically around, run by large companies but I got associations with big business and with the WEF. But…when you look at the Kenyan Catholic doctors in 2015, they took a sample of, I can’t remember what the vaccine was, and got it analyzed, and they said that had anti-fertility substances in. Of course, that got fact checked at the time and, excuse the lan—I don’t know whether you’ve got this expression in Canada, but it was pooh-poohed by the fact checkers, load of rubbish of course it hasn’t got anti-fertility substances in. But the last time I looked at that, there was an issue with women’s fertility in Kenya, and I think about 900,000 women were infertile.
So you have—I think that’s the problem throughout SARS COV. Everyone is looking for a reliable information. And because you’ve got what the mainstream media puts out, in my view, not strictly balanced version of events, and then you’ve got the independent media which puts out probably more balanced version of events, and then you got the fact checkers in the middle, acting as referee. And I know, having been fact-checked myself, by Full Fact, but when they fact check me, some of what they said was factually wrong.
So they said that we’d gone into the police station and handed in a large number of documents on the 20th of December. That is factually incorrect. But if you go to Full Facts, that’s what happened, but I was there. So Full Facts are denying my lived experience, which is, we went in, and all we handed them was a sheet of paper with a list of expert witnesses, Professor Bhakdi, Dr. McCullough, Dr Ardis, Dr. Pierre Kory, Robert F Kennedy Jr, all these people agreed to be witnesses to the police, we had them on one sheet of paper, so how can that be hundreds of pages of documents? But if you go to the fact-checkers, that is the factual record, and that factual record doesn’t align with what happened.
And when we wentto Hammersmith police on the 20th, they actually told us don’t bring any documents because CID will lose them. That’s why they gave us a document upload facility, which, by the way, is still open. So, you’re right, fact checkers referee factual disputes, but as with any referee, with any, whatever the referee is refereeing, people who are being refereed also, always going to say the referee is biased. And that’s almost the nature of referee, in that if you’ve got opposing views, and fact check comes down on one side, the other side’s going to say they’re biased.
So I don’t set too much in store with fact-checkers in relation to the police saying they weren’t investigating, that doesn’t tally with my lived experience. Because on the 20th of December we were told that they would investigate.
Mark Sexton went in on the 5th of January and was told that they were investigating, it’s a large investigation, that they need outside resources.
28th of January I went in with others and we’re told they were investigating.
The 12th of February we went in and they said they were investigating.
And then it’s either the 14th of February or 22nd of February the Met said they weren’t investigating the suppression of information on vaccine safety. And that to me narrowed down what the crime we alleged, and was itself misleading, so my own analysis is that the top of the police didn’t want to investigate, and the people we were talking to did see that there were grounds to investigate.
GR: What sounds like an interesting… As opposed to just bringing into a typical court case, let a judge decide. But I think we’re at the end of our time Mr. Hyland. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Thanks again.
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***
Since June 7, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been engaged in a so-called “Eurasian Tour” aimed at reaffirming and expanding Venezuelan cooperation with numerous states in North Africa, West Asia, and likely beyond. He has already visited Algeria, Turkey, Iran, and Kuwait. He has spoken with the future leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and signed numerous economic cooperation agreements with the aforementioned states, agreements which involve collaboration “in the political, cultural, economic, oil, petrochemical and tourism fields,” as well as in the areas of agriculture and food production. While in Iran, he also announced that direct flights from Caracas to Tehran would begin on July 18.
At the time of this writing, Maduro is in Qatar, and his next stop is unknown. One would expect him to pay a visit to one of the leading countries in the Eurasian Union, such as Russia or Kazakhstan, given that his trip is officially labelled a “Eurasian” tour and that Delcy Rodriguez, vice president of Venezuela, spoke virtually at the 2022 Eurasian Economic Forum in Bishkek to urge greater investment between Venezuela and the regional bloc.
With each new stop, Maduro has announced increased economic ties with states which the United States has labelled as both enemies and friends. These agreements come on the heels of the Biden administration’s disastrous ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, which sought to continue the political isolation of Venezuela despite the regional turn toward re-engagement.
¡Tremenda Noticia! A partir del #18Jul, se abrirá el vuelo Caracas – Teherán, con el fin de promover el turismo y la unión entre ambos países, a través de paquetes que nos permitan compartir turistas. Sin duda, las relaciones entre Irán y Venezuela, se fortalecen y expanden. pic.twitter.com/NUNdDBjWj8
Biden’s decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from the summit—a matter on which Justin Trudeau refused to comment—was met with widespread protest across Latin America and the Caribbean. The heads of state of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines refused to attend the summit in protest of the exclusions, while the leaders of Chile, Argentina, and the thirteen Caribbean states of CARICOM attended the meeting but expressed their disapproval of the Biden administration’s actions.
Opponents of Biden’s decision to arbitrarily rule upon the legitimacy of states in the Western Hemisphere organized their own parallel summit in Los Angeles. It was called the People’s Summit. Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel, former Bolivian president Evo Morales, and Nicolás Maduro recorded video messages addressed to the organizers and participants of the summit, thanking them for their solidarity and expressing the need to found a new social, political, economic, and cultural paradigm in the hemisphere.
In Maduro’s address, which he recorded during his Eurasian Tour, the president spoke of his “hope for a new humanity without imperialist hegemony, without neocolonialism, without neoliberalism,” and cited his international state visits as an indication of Venezuela’s continued economic recovery and resistance.
Now we have been on this Eurasian tour—but we are passing through Algeria, which is in North Africa—engaging in an in-depth dialogue with the governments, with the people, learning from the experiences, of the responses, of the public policies that are being implemented in different countries…The world is much bigger than the dominance and arrogance of Washington…an empire in decline, that wants to behave as if it were still the hegemonic and dominant empire of the world and of our America…Please know and be assured that Venezuela has resisted. Venezuela is moving forward and is recovering.
2021 was Venezuela’s first year of economic growth since the simultaneous drop in oil prices and onset of US sanctions almost a decade ago, and Maduro claims that “in 2022, we are seeing the expansion of the comprehensive recovery of our economy…and, in general, of the Bolivarian Revolution.”
This economic recovery has been accompanied by a number of significant international and domestic political victories for the Bolivarian Revolution. In October of last year, Maduro was invited to attend the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Mexico as Venezuela’s legitimate president. Shortly thereafter, the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won a landslide victory in regional elections that saw the participation of every major opposition party—the fifth electoral victory for the left in four years. As Leonardo Flores explains, there are five main reasons behind the PSUV’s November 2021 victory: good governance in health, housing, and food; the improving economic situation; the unity of the left; and the division and persistent unpopularity of the right wing opposition within Venezuela. With the economy continuing to improve and the opposition as disorganized as ever, the PSUV will likely hold onto power for years to come.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has announced its intention to permit select US and European oil companies to begin investment negotiations with Venezuela, indicating a slight alleviation of the US government’s maximum pressure campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution.
It would seem that, after years of economic devastation, political instability, and thwarted US coup attempts (six in total according to Justin Podur and Joe Emersberger, authors of Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela), the Revolution has weathered its nadir. After hitting bottom and holding out, Maduro and the popular revolutionary process of which he is the figurehead have nowhere to go but up. Meanwhile, the right wing opposition, led by self-appointed president Juan Guaidó, is more powerless than ever. Any clear-headed observer can see the writing on the wall: the Bolivarian Revolution is here to stay.
With Maduro in power and Guaidó thoroughly discredited, some centrist Canadian papers like the Globe and Mail are now calling for a “reset” to Canada-Venezuela relations. If Canada truly wants a reset of relations, however, it will need to be—and should rightfully be—on the Venezuelan government’s terms.
When it comes to the Bolivarian Revolution, Canada has a lot to atone for. Senior Canadian government figures have boasted about interfering in domestic Venezuelan politics affairs while acting in their official diplomatic capacity in the country, including by “emboldening Venezuela’s opposition” and “work[ing] to get the country’s opposition parties to coalesce” behind Guaidó. This anti-democratic meddling was only one aspect of Canada’s anti-Bolivarian crusade, which included participation in the catastrophic US-led sanctions campaign through its leading role in the Lima Group.
Now, all the imperialistic efforts of Canada and its allies have come to naught. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans are dead as a result, and shamefully, Canada still recognizes Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela. And while Canada’s man continues to playact as president, Maduro is travelling around the world and representing his country while signing actual economic agreements with actually existing states.
Everyone reading this knows that Canada will never admit its role in sowing the political and economic destabilization that has resulted in the deaths of so many Venezuelans over the past eight or so years. It is not even a possibility—imperialist arrogance runs too deep across the Canadian elite. What is possible, however, is that Canada implicitly admits its folly by maturing away from its imaginary Venezuelan president and beginning a process of reengagement with the real Venezuelan president, who, like it or not, is currently enjoying an international victory lap.
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Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com.
Featured image: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro delivers a press conference, June 14, 2022. Photo from Twitter.
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***
The resumption of Indo-Pak trade by itself wouldn’t influence either side’s stance towards the Kashmir Conflict, but it would strongly hint that Islamabad has tacitly shifted its position if this happens without Delhi reversing its abrogation of Article 370 like former Prime Minister Khan’s government demanded as a prerequisite for this occurring.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Bhutto told the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad on Thursday that the prior government’s disengagement from India doesn’t serve his country’s interests. Dawn, which is regarded as very close to the incumbent authorities who scandalously ousted former Prime Minister Khan in early April and should thus be regarded as a credible source when reporting on its official’s statements, said the following in their article about his speech: “The foreign minister contended that if Pakistan had achieved economic engagement with India in the past, it would have been in a better position to influence Delhi’s policy and prevented both countries from taking extreme positions.”
For as wishful as that scenario sounds, it’s not realistic. While Indo-Pak trade would be mutually beneficial with respect to improving their largely impoverished populations’ lives, neither nuclear-armed neighbor would be compelled to unilaterally concede on issues that they regard as being in their national interest, nor would their military be deterred from defending such as they see it. The Kashmir Conflict is regarded altogether differently by both state parties, and they’re not going to let bilateral trade influence their stance towards it. Nevertheless, Foreign Minister Bhutto might have actually been implying something else if one attempts to read between the lines.
While it’s admittedly speculative at this point, he probably wasn’t all that serious about bilateral trade influencing either country’s politicians or their military. Rather, while acknowledging that India hasn’t provided a “conducive environment” for economic re-engagement according to Dawn’s report, Pakistan’s top diplomat might have been hinting that the new authorities favor a gradual return to the pre-2019 status quo. In the event that the strict policy of former Prime Minister Khan’s government is “moderated” in any tangible way such as the resumption of trade with India despite Delhi not reversing its abrogation of Article 370 like Islamabad demanded, then it would be a concession from Pakistan.
Furthermore, any move in that direction would also hint that the new authorities tacitly accept that Delhi will never reverse that decision and that it thus represents the “new normal”. From there, it might just be a proverbial hop, skip, and a jump away from reviving the spirit of the so-called “Musharaff Plan” that would simply result in turning the Line of Control (LoC) into the international border. Regardless of whatever anyone on either side of the LoC thinks about that, it’s difficult to argue with the scenario sequence that was just described with respect to what the resumption of Indo-Pak trade absent the reversal of Delhi’s August 2019 decision per the demand of Islamabad’s prior government would imply.
Once again, nobody should doubt the mutual benefits of economic re-engagement, but nor should they believe that it would influence either conflicting party’s political or military decisions in and of itself since each side regards their respective stance as being in their objective national interests. Nevertheless, interpretations thereof can theoretically change so it also shouldn’t be discounted that the group that scandalously ousted former Prime Minister Khan might be considering the “recalibration” of their approach to the Kashmir Conflict, which Foreign Minister Bhutto might have been tasked with “gently” introducing to the public on the unrealistic pretext that he put forth.
To put it another way, the resumption of Indo-Pak trade by itself wouldn’t influence either side’s stance towards the Kashmir Conflict, but it would strongly hint that Islamabad has tacitly shifted its position if this happens without Delhi reversing its abrogation of Article 370 like former Prime Minister Khan’s government demanded as a prerequisite for this occurring. In that event, this development would be yet another piece of evidence contradicting the “official narrative” that he was ousted purely for economic reasons that his replacements claimed had nothing to do with changing his foreign policy. Whether that would for the best or worst when it comes to the Kashmir Conflict would be for Pakistanis to decide.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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***
While a few are asking why DeSantis won’t get with the program to jab every man, woman, and child in America, the real question is why the 49 other governors have, especially Republicans.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may be the only sane governor in the country. All of the others, whether Republican or Democrat, pre-ordered Covid jabs for kids under the age of five. Meanwhile, DeSantis is getting attacked by corporate media. According to the Miami Herald:
Every state has placed an order with the federal government to ensure coronavirus vaccines for young children are delivered as soon as regulators authorize their use — except for one. Florida missed a Tuesday deadline to request delivery of COVID-19 pediatric vaccines for children under 5, guaranteeing a delay in access for parents across the state, according to two U.S. government sources.
All other 49 states placed pre-orders, which will be delivered in two tranches beginning as early as Monday to thousands of pediatricians’ offices, children’s hospitals, pharmacies and health centers across the country. Those facilities in Florida will not have access during this time and will remain without supply until Florida places an order.
Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the Florida Department of Health, confirmed the department “chose not to participate” in the vaccination program because the state health department is not following federal public health recommendations.
“The Florida Department of Health has made it clear to the federal government that states do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies,” Redfern said.
The Miami Herald is not alone in posting vaxx-friendly hit pieces against Florida and DeSantis. But a funny thing happened that may have caught corporate media by surprise. The people in Florida aren’t outraged. In fact, even Democrats who are actively opposed to DeSantis haven’t made a big fuss about this. Why? Because it appears the people aren’t nearly as concerned about jabbing small children as media and government want them to be.
Lest we forget, Covid-19 poses such an infinitesimal risk to young children that it’s almost statistically insignificant.
Sadly, responses to the statement that any death to any young child is “statistically insignificant” will draw predictable responses. They’ll say,
“if only one child can be saved…” or “no child’s death is insignificant.”
These emotion-driven responses may actually hold some weight if it weren’t for two facts. First, the jabs do not work anywhere near what we are still being told, let alone the promise of “100% effective” that dominated narratives for weeks when the jabs were first rolled out.
Second, and this is a big one, the intentionally blurry statistics surrounding vaccine adverse reactions indicate MORE kids and young adults die from the jabs than from Covid-19 itself. These “safe and effective” injections, as the U.S. government and corporate media call them, are neither safe nor effective, statistically speaking.
It is a disgrace that every single governor except DeSantis has put in orders for Pfizer's kill shots for babies.Rather than be distracted by soap opera news this is what every red state conservative must be focused on. These governors must be made to give an account for genocide
You say that like it’s a BAD thing: Miami Herald’s attempt to DRAAAG DeSantis over COVID-19 pediatric vaccines only makes him MORE popularhttps://t.co/yxExbVdsFJ
While a few are asking why DeSantis won’t get with the program to jab every man, woman, and child in America, the real question is why the 49 other governors have, especially Republicans. Is DeSantis the only sane governor in America?
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Comments Off on Why Did 49 Governors Pre-Order Deadly COVID Jabs for Kids Under 5? “MORE Kids and Young Adults Die from the Jabs than from Covid-19 itself”.
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Our thanks to CTV for having brought this article to our attention.
***
The Justin Trudeau brand is in trouble.
The 2015 fresh prince of politics with the celebrity hair and rock star aura is heading into a 2022 summer of inflation-driven Canadian discontent as a faded force of personality in need of an exit strategy.
You know there’s a reputation hit happening when Trudeau becomes the unnamed star of a children’s book “How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom,” a satire about his handling of the Freedom Convoy and vaccination mandates, which now sits atop the Amazon Canada bestseller list.
On a more serious vein, there’s an alarm sounding over his leadership style when former top bureaucrat Paul Tellier unleashes in Policy Options magazine, warning Trudeau’s control freakdom of an office is “in the process of destroying the public service … and the word ‘destroying’ is not too strong.”
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***
Last year, the International Energy Agency made headlines by calling for an end to new oil and gas exploration by the end of the year. A few months later, the IEA was calling for more oil.
This week, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said that investing in new oil and gas production was “delusional”, calling on “all financial actors to abandon fossil fuel finance” and focus on renewables instead.
But the UN’s most senior official did not stop there. Guterres then went on to say that
“The only true path to energy security, stable power prices, prosperity and a livable planet lies in abandoning polluting fossil fuels — especially coal — and accelerating the renewables-based energy transition.”
This is a sentiment shared by the head of the IEA, too, on numerous occasions. Like Guterres, the IEA’s Fatih Birol is a staunch supporter of the energy transition, which he sees as the only way forward. Unlike Guterres, Birol seems willing to allow for the fact that we still need oil, and lots of it.
Last month, Birol warned of even higher oil prices during the summer because of strong demand, expressing hope that several large oil producers would increase their output this year.
“I very much hope that the increase coming from [the] United States, from Brazil, Canada this year, [will] be accompanied by the increase coming from the key producers in Middle East and elsewhere,” Birol told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Davos gathering.
“Otherwise, we have only one hope that we don’t have big trouble in the oil markets in summer, which is hoping … that the Chinese demand remains very weak.”
In other words, the IEA’s head, unlike the head of the UN, acknowledged the fact that the world is consuming ever-growing volumes of oil, and the fact that these volumes cannot come from wind parks and solar farms in what could be seen as a big win for realism.
Guterres, meanwhile, is not only calling for the end of oil but is also telling university graduates to avoid getting a job in the oil and gas industry, calling these companies “climate wreckers” and warning that “accountability is coming for those who liquidate our future.”
Meanwhile, a barrel of Brent crude is trading above $121, West Texas Intermediate is trading for over $119 per barrel, and OPEC just reported that its output last month had declined. Libya is on its last oil legs, producing about a tenth of what it was producing at the start of the year.
U.S. shale companies have flatly refused to upend their plans following calls from President Biden—another energy transition devotee—to pump more, Saudi Arabia appears reluctant to tap its spare oil capacity, and Russia is redirecting oil flows under sanctions, although few believe it would be able to place all barrels that currently go to Europe elsewhere, predicting a substantial loss of output.
The oil market imbalance, then, may be about to deepen further, making oil even more expensive, highlighting its vital importance for every economy in the world, including Mr. Guterres’ very own Portugal, a leader in renewable energy and a country dependent on oil imports because it ended its own oil and gas production as part of its transition.
Speaking of renewables, the UN’s secretary-general is not the only one eager to see a lot more money being poured into wind and solar. The European Commission’s leadership is likewise eager for this. It has even suggested cutting red tape for new wind and solar projects in order to speed up the buildup in renewable energy capacity.
Taking care of the demand side, the European Parliament recently voted in favor of a ban on internal combustion engine car sales, to enter into effect in 2035. This means that EVs must go from 0.5 percent of all cars in the European Union to 100 percent in eight years. Nobody is calling this delusional.
Talking about the costs of the transition to renewables is also something that is not being talked about much, although news about metals and minerals prices is making it to the public. Despite this news, neither Guterres, the Biden administration, nor the EU administration seems willing or able to make the connection with their renewable energy plans, which are about to become even more expensive than they were. Meanwhile, the price of oil keeps rising.
Denying a certain reality because it is too far from your preferred reality is perhaps a form of self-preservation. This form of self-preservation, however, cannot go on forever because sooner or later, actual reality asserts itself, often painfully.
Calling oil and gas investment “delusional” might sit well with climate activists in June but come winter, when these activists, just like everyone else, will have to pay for heating, things might look differently, especially in Europe, as less sunlight reaches the surface in the northern hemisphere and wind speeds decline as they tend to do during the winter.
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Irina Slav is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.
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***
Ladies and gentlemen, we face a grave danger. The leader of a major European power wants to make territorial revisions. He is surrounded by hostile powers who threaten him. He does not seek war with other countries but if the hostile powers continue to encircle him, he will fight. A European war looms.
You probably think I’m talking about the current crisis between Russia and the Ukraine, but I’m not. I’m talking about Europe just before World War II began in September 1939. At that time, Hitler wanted small territorial revisions with its Polish neighbor. East Prussia was cut off from the rest of Poland by a band of territory called the Polish Corridor.
“The losses of territory to Poland were, for most Germans, the indelible grievance against Versailles. Hitler undertook a daring operation over this grievance when he planned co-operation with Poland. But there was a way out. The actual Germans under Polish rule might be forgotten—or withdrawn; what could not be forgiven was the ‘Polish corridor’ which divided East Prussia from the Reich. Here, too, there was a possible compromise. Germany might be satisfied with a corridor across the corridor—a complicated idea for which there were however many precedents in German history. German feeling could be appeased by the recovery of Danzig. This seemed easy. Danzig was not part of Poland. It was a Free City, with its own autonomous administration under a High Commissioner, appointed by the League of Nations. The Poles themselves, in their false pride as a Great Power, had taken the lead in challenging the League’s authority. Surely, therefore, they would not object if Germany took the League’s place. Moreover, the problem had changed since 1919. Then the port of Danzig had been essential to Poland. Now, with the creation of Gdynia by the Poles, Danzig needed Poland more than the Poles needed Danzig. It should then be easy to arrange for the safeguarding of Poland’s economic interests, and yet to recover Danzig for the Reich.”
The British responded by guaranteeing Poland’s western boundary against Germany. They also issued a guarantee to Romania, even though there had been no threat to that country. As a result of the guarantee, Poland refused to negotiate with Germany. War broke out, and Poland was destroyed. The great Murray Rothbard tells us what happened:
“And as a direct result, Poland was destroyed. Hitler’s ‘demands’ on the Poles were almost non-existent; as Taylor points out, the Weimar Republic would have scorned the terms as a sell-out of vital German interests. Hitler at most wanted a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ and the return of heavily-German (and pro-German) Danzig; in return for which he would guarantee the rest. Poland resolutely refused to yield’ one inch of Polish soil,’ and refused even to negotiate with the Germans, and this down to the last minute.”
Murray draws an important lesson from what happened then. This lesson provides the key to keeping us out of a nuclear war today. And of course a nuclear war would destroy the world. Here is what Murray says:
“[Polish Foreign Minister Józef] Beck clearly knew that Britain and France could not actually save Poland from attack. He relied to the end on those great shibboleths of all ‘hard-liners’ and other ‘crackpot realists’ everywhere: X is ‘bluffing’; X will back down if met by toughness, resolution, and the resolve not to give an inch. (Just as in the case of Finland, when the ‘X is bluffing’ line of the hard-liners is shown to be sheer absurdity, and X has already attacked, the ‘hard-liner’ turns, self-contradictorily, to the dictum that not ‘one inch of sacred soil’ will be given up, no peace while the enemy is on our soil, etc., which completes the ruin of the country by its ‘hard-line’ rulers. This is what Beck did to Poland.) As Taylor shows, Hitler had originally not the slightest intention to invade or conquer Poland; instead, Danzig and other minor rectifications would be gotten out of the way, and then Poland would be a comfortable ally, perhaps for an eventual invasion of Soviet Russia. But Beck’s irrational toughness blocked the path.”
Now we have the background we need to understand what’s going on today. Russia is surrounded by a hostile NATO alliance. The propagandists for brain-dead Biden like to say that Putin had Ukraine surrounded. But in fact, the US and its NATO satellites had Russia surrounded. In the years before the current crisis, we had ample opportunity to reach a compromise settlement. Instead, we kept the option of membership in NATO open to Ukraine and overthrew a Ukrainian President who was pro-Russian. “At the Kremlin. . . in a speech in November 2021] Putin drew his red line:
‘The threat on our western borders is … rising, as we have said multiple times. … In our dialogue with the United States and its allies, we will insist on developing concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO and the placement there of weapons systems in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory.’
A story in The New York Times exposes what brain-dead Biden and the gang of neo-cons that controls him have in store for us. According to an item that was published April 26,
“When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III declared Monday at the end of a stealth visit to Ukraine that America’s goal is to see Russia so ‘weakened’ that it would no longer have the power to invade a neighboring state, he was acknowledging a transformation of the conflict, from a battle over control of Ukraine to one that pits Washington more directly against Moscow. . . in word and deed, the United States has been gradually pushing in the direction of undercutting the Russian military.
It has imposed sanctions that were explicitly designed to stop Russia’s military from developing and manufacturing new weapons. It has worked — with mixed success — to cut off the oil and gas revenues that drive its war machine. . . over the longer term, Mr. Austin’s description of America’s strategic goal is bound to reinforce President Vladimir V. Putin’s oft-stated belief that the war is really about the West’s desire to choke off Russian power and destabilize his government. And by casting the American goal as a weakened Russian military, Mr. Austin and others in the Biden administration are becoming more explicit about the future they see: years of continuous contest for power and influence with Moscow that in some ways resembles what President John F. Kennedy termed the ‘long twilight struggle’ of the Cold War.
Mr. Austin’s comments, bolstered by statements by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken about the various ways in which Mr. Putin has ‘already lost’ in the struggle over Ukraine, reflect a decision made by the Biden administration and its closest allies, several officials said on Monday, to talk more openly and optimistically about the possibility of Ukrainian victory in the next few months as the battle moves to the Russian-speaking south and east, where Mr. Putin’s military should, in theory, have an advantage.
Let’s make sure we understand this. Critics of US policy have pointed out for a long time that America has surrounded Russia with nuclear bases. It helped overthrow a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. Naturally, this made Putin nervous. He does not want an invasion of Russia though the Ukraine, as happened in World War II, when Russia lost millions of lives. Now, the brain dead Biden gang of neocons is saying to Putin, “You are exactly right! We do want to degrade Russia to a minor power and use the Ukraine as a base for attack!”
Nothing could be more certain to lead to nuclear disaster. The Russians warn us about this A story in The Guardian says:
“Russia’s foreign minister has accused Nato of fighting a proxy war by supplying military aid to Ukraine, as defence ministers gathered in Germany for US-hosted talks on supporting Ukraine through what one US general called a ‘very critical’ few weeks.
He also warned that the risks of nuclear conflict were now ‘considerable’. . . When asked about the importance of avoiding a third world war, Lavrov said: ‘I would not want to elevate those risks artificially. Many would like that. The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.’”
If it weren’t for the US arms shipments to the Ukraine, Russia and the Ukraine would quickly arrange a settlement that would protect Russia’s security interests. Those in control know this, but they don’t want a peaceful settlement along these lines. They want to rule the world. They don’t want countries that reject US supremacy to have a role in the world.
“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Tuesday that the entire ‘global international security order’ put in place after World War II is at stake if Russia gets away ‘cost-free’ following its invasion of Ukraine. . . ‘What’s at stake is the global international security order that was put in place in 1945. That international order has lasted 78 years. . . Milley’s warning about the potential global implications of Russia’s actions in Ukraine also underscores the current sense of urgency felt by the US and its allies as the war enters what they say is a critical juncture.. . Shortly after Milley’s interview, [Defense Secretary]Austin also stressed the importance of moving quickly to provide Ukraine with the military aid it needs, saying during a news conference that the US and other allies and partners ‘don’t have any time to waste’ when it comes to providing crucial assistance to counter Russia as their invasion continues.
Is there anything we can do to de-escalate the situation? The greatest Congressman in American history, Dr. Ron Paul, whom we are here today to honor, has the answer. America should end its encirclement of Russia and disband NATO. Let’s look at his vital message to us: “When the Bush Administration announced in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would be eligible for NATO membership, I knew it was a terrible idea. Nearly two decades after the end of both the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War, expanding NATO made no sense. NATO itself made no sense.
Explaining my ‘no’ vote on a bill to endorse the expansion, I said at the time:
NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of its Warsaw Pact adversary… This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of US-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and Rose Revolution.
Providing US military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. This NATO expansion may well involve the US military in conflicts unrelated to our national interest…
Unfortunately,. . . , my fears have come true. One does not need to approve of Russia’s military actions to analyze its stated motivation: NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line it was not willing to see crossed. As we find ourselves at risk of a terrible escalation, we should remind ourselves that it didn’t have to happen this way. There was no advantage to the United States to expand and threaten to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep. There is no way to argue that we are any safer for it.
NATO itself was a huge mistake. . . I believe as strongly today as I did back in my 2008 House Floor speech that, ‘NATO should be disbanded, not expanded.’ In the meantime, expansion should be off the table. The risks do not outweigh the benefits!”
The saddest part of this whole manufactured crisis is that it should make absolutely no difference to us whether Russia controls Ukraine. How is that a threat to the United States? Whatever Biden and his neocon advisers say, America should stay out of conflicts that are none of our business. As usual, Murray Rothbard put it best. “In the context of the 1980 Afghan war, he quoted Canon Sydney Smith – a great classical liberal in early 19th century England who wrote to his warmongering Prime Minister, thus: “For God’s sake, do not drag me into another war!
I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself.
I am sorry for the Spaniards – I am sorry for the Greeks – I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Baghdad is oppressed, I do not like the present state of the Delta; Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people?
The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?
We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other’s throats. No war, dear Lady Grey! – No eloquence; but apathy, selfishness, common sense, arithmetic!”
The same people who imposed Covid-tyranny on us now want us to risk war with Russia. Let’s stop them before it’s too late.
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***
On May 18, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a Norwegian named Jens Stoltenberg, stood on a stage, flanked by the ambassadors to NATO of Finland and Sweden, Klaus Korhonen and Axel Wernhoff, respectively.
It was one of those made-for-television moments that politicians dream of — a time of high drama, where the ostensible forces of good are faced off against the relentless assault of evil, which necessitates the intervention of like-minded friends and allies to help tip the scales of geopolitical justice toward those who embrace liberty over tyranny.
Left unsaid was the harsh reality that hundreds of miles to the east the military forces of Russia and Ukraine were locked in deadly combat on Ukrainian soil. Also left unsaid was the role played by NATO in facilitating that conflict.
But the gathering had not been convened for the purpose of self-reflection on the part of the civilian head of NATO. Instead, it was to commemorate the furtherance of the very same policy of expansion of the alliance which had helped trigger the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia.
“Thank you so much for handing over the applications for Finland’s and Sweden’s membership in NATO,” Stoltenberg continued. “Every nation has the right to choose its own path. You have both made your choice, after thorough democratic processes. And I warmly welcome the requests by Finland and Sweden to join NATO.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, center, after receiving letters of application from Klaus Korhonen, ambassador of Finland and Axel Wernhoff, ambassador of Sweden on May 18. (NATO)
The day prior, May 17, Finland’s parliament voted 188-8 to join NATO, breaking its multi-decade tenure as a neutral country. Finland’s actions followed a similar debate and vote on the part of the Swedish legislative body, the Riksdag.
Both nations cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as their respective motivation to transition from neutrality to membership in an alliance whose behavior has itself transitioned over the years. From an exclusively defensive identity, NATO has embraced expansion both in terms of its own size and in its scope — by undertaking military operations outside of the confines of Europe that were both offensive and designed to promote political change in the targeted countries.
Historical Ignorance
The historical ignorance captured in the actions of Finland and Sweden was astounding regarding the role played by NATO in triggering the very conflict political leaders cited as the reason to seek the protection of alliance membership. It was as if a family whose house had been set afire sought shelter in the home of the arsonist in order to shield itself from the services of the fire department.
There was also an absolute ignorance of their own respective histories. The idea that Finland would cite Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine as the trigger for breaking its decades-long pledge of neutrality is particularly troublesome. It is as if Finland forgot its own troubled past, in particular its role in the so-called War of Continuation in 1941-1944, where Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany in its war of subjugation against the Soviet Union, following the 1939 Soviet attack on Finland.
Finnish troops participated in the siege of Leningrad, where over a million Soviet civilians lost their lives. Only by pledging to become neutral in perpetuity did Finland avoid the logical consequences of its actions, namely dismemberment and elimination as a sovereign state. The Soviet Union and later Russia both were adamant in making sure Finnish soil would never again be used as a launching pad for foreign aggression against Russian territory. Finland appears to have forgotten both the pledge it had made, and the reasons behind that pledge.
NATO ambassadors Klaus Korhonen of Finland and Axel Wernhoff of Sweden, with letters of application on May 18. (NATO)
Sweden, too, cites the Russian military invasion of Ukraine as the reason for ending centuries of neutrality. But the Swedish politicians behind this decision have yet to explain what exactly it is about the Russian action that sets it apart from, say, the behavior of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
If the slaughter of tens of millions of civilians and the destruction of nations were not enough to push Sweden off its neutral perch between 1939-1945, it is hard to see how Russia’s actions, which did not take place in a vacuum, but rather in the context of eight years of conflict in the Donbass which killed over 14,000 people and the threat to Russian security posed by an expanding NATO, could be cited in good faith as a legitimate cause of action.
“You are our closest partners,” Stoltenberg continued. “And your membership in NATO would increase our shared security.” That he said this with no apparent recognition of the irony contained in those words, and that the ambassadors of Finland and Sweden were able to avoid shuffling in embarrassment, is a testimony to either hubris-driven self-delusion, collective ignorance of historical context, or both.
Stoltenberg moved on to the final scene in this one-act drama.
“The applications you have made today are an historic step,” he told the Nordic ambassadors.
“Allies will now consider the next steps on your path to NATO. The security interests of all Allies have to be taken into account. And we are determined to work through all issues and reach rapid conclusions. Over the past few days, we have seen numerous statements by Allies committing to Finland’s and Sweden’s security. NATO is already vigilant in the Baltic Sea region, and NATO and Allies’ forces will continue to adapt as necessary.”
Stoltenberg closed the made-for-television family special with words that would soon come back to haunt him. “All Allies agree on the importance of NATO enlargement. We all agree that we must stand together. And we all agree that this is an historic moment, which we must seize.”
Enter Erdogan
Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan addressing a North Atlantic Council meeting in 2019. (NATO)
A happy ending? Not so fast. Enter Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who decided he would crash Stoltenberg’s scripted moment. Not all NATO members were in accordance with the bid by Finland and Sweden to join the alliance. Since NATO is a consensus-driven organization, all it takes to ruin this made-for-TV moment was one disaffected member. That member was Turkey.
“As all NATO allies accept Turkey’s critical importance to the alliance,” Erdogan wrote in a guest essay he penned for The Economist on May 30,
“it is unfortunate that some members fail fully to appreciate certain threats to our country. Turkey maintains that the admission of Sweden and Finland entails risks for its own security and the organization’s future. We have every right to expect those countries, which will expect NATO’s second-largest army to come to their defense under Article 5, to prevent the recruitment, fundraising and propaganda activities of the PKK [the Kurdish People’s Party], which the European Union and America consider a terrorist entity.”
Erdogan called for the extradition from Sweden of “members of terrorist organizations” as a pre-condition for Turkey considering its application for NATO membership. Erdogan also demanded that both Sweden and Finland end their respective arms embargoes against Turkey, imposed in 2019 in response to Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria that targeted Kurdish groups affiliated with the PKK.
“Turkey stresses that all forms of arms embargoes — such as the one Sweden has imposed on my country — are incompatible with the spirit of military partnership under the NATO umbrella. Such restrictions not only undermine our national security but also damage NATO’s own identity.”
Kurdish PKK guerillas in Kirkuk, Iraq, April 24,2016. (Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)
As things stand, neither Finland nor Sweden appears prepared to accede to Erdogan’s demands. Despite high-level meetings between delegations from both Finland and Sweden with Turkish officials, no headway appears to have been made.
According to Fahrettin Altun, an adviser to Erdogan, neither Finland nor Sweden have put anything discernable on the table. Turkey, Altun told a Swedish newspaper, needs more than just words. “It is not right that Finland and Sweden waste NATO’s time at this critical moment,” Altun declared.
A similar incursion in 2019 triggered the arms embargo against Turkey that Erdogan now demands be lifted. And the hue and cry that can be anticipated from human rights groups if Turkey follows through with its threat to invade northern Syria will not only make it virtually impossible for either Sweden or Finland to give Erdogan the concessions he is demanding, but also further strain Turkish relations with other NATO members, such as the United States, France and Great Britain, all of whom view Turkey’s presence in northern Syria as complicating their ongoing operations inside Syria targeting the Islamic State (IS). The fact that the U.S., France and the U.K. have allied themselves with the YPG in this effort only muddies the waters.
Stoltenberg will convene the annual NATO summit in Madrid on June 29. NATO has much on its plate, with trying to craft a viable response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine topping the list.
Stoltenberg had hoped that he could use the applications of Finland and Sweden as a foundation from which he could project an atmosphere of strength and optimism around which NATO could plot a path forward.
Instead, the NATO secretary general will preside over an organization at war with itself, unsure of its future and unable to provide a cohesive answer to the problems with Russia which originated from the very policies of expansion Stoltenberg was trying to continue through the now abortive membership applications of Finland and Sweden.
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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
Featured image: Letters of application to NATO from Finland and Sweden, presented to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on May 18. (NATO)
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***
Five months after breaking the story of the CEO of One America insurance company saying deaths among working people ages 18-64 were up 40% in the third quarter of 2021, I can report that a much larger life insurance company, Lincoln National, reported a 163% increase in death benefits paid out under its group life insurance policies in 2021.
This is according to the annual statements filed with state insurance departments — statements that were provided exclusively to Crossroads Report in response to public records requests.
The reports show a more extreme situation than the 40% increase in deaths in the third quarter of 2021 that was cited in late December by One America CEO Scott Davison — an increase that he said was industry-wide and that he described at the time as “unheard of” and “huge, huge numbers” and the highest death rates that have ever been seen in the history of the life insurance business.
The annual statements for Lincoln National Life Insurance Company show that the company paid out in death benefits under group life insurance polices a little over $500 million in 2019, about $548 million in 2020, and a stunning $1.4 billion in 2021.
From 2019, the last normal year before the pandemic, to 2020, the year of the Covid-19 virus, there was an increase in group death benefits paid out of only 9 percent. But group death benefits in 2021, the year the vaccine was introduced, increased almost 164 percent over 2020.
Here are the precise numbers for Group Death Benefits taken from Lincoln National’s annual statements for the three years:
2019: $500,888,808
2020: $547,940,260
2021: $1,445,350,949
Here are the key numbers for 2021, below, shown on the company’s annual statement that was filed with the Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services. These are national numbers, not state-specific:
Lincoln National is the fifth-largest life insurance company in the United States, according to BankRate, after New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, MetLife and Prudential.
The company was founded in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1905, getting the OK from Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, to use his father’s name and likeness in its advertising.
It’s now based in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
The annual statements filed with the states do not show the number of claims — only the total dollar amount of claims paid.
Group life insurance policies, in most cases, cover working-age adults ages 18-64 whose employer includes life insurance as an employee benefit.
How many deaths are represented by the 163% increase? It is not possible to determine by the dollar figures on the statements.
But the average death benefit for employer-provided group life insurance, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, is one year’s salary.
If the average annual salary of people covered by group life insurance policies in the United States is $70,000, this may represent 20,647 deaths of working adults, covered by just this one insurance company. This would represent at least 10,000 more deaths than in a normal year for just this one company.
The statements for the three years also show a sizable increase in ordinary death benefits — those not paid out under group policies, but under individual life insurance policies.
In 2019, the baseline year, that number was $3.7 billion. In 2020, the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, it went up to $4 billion, but in 2021, the year in which the vaccine was administered to almost 260 million Americans, it went up to $5.3 billion.
The statements show that the total amount that Lincoln National paid out for all direct claims and benefits in 2021 was more than $28 billion, $6 billion more than in 2020, when it paid out a total of $22 billion, which was less than the $23 billion it paid out in 2019, the baseline year.
A $6 billion increase in expenses is something few companies could absorb, but Lincoln National has been working to do just that — by increasing sales of new insurance polices.
In the press release accompanying its annual report, and in its press release announcing the first quarter 2022 results — in which the company announces a $41 million loss in its Group Protection business — it trumpets an increase in sales. For first quarter 2022 that increase was 42 percent. The company also mentions that premiums have gone up 4 percent.
Interestingly, in the press release accompanying the first-quarter 2022 results, Lincoln National attributes the $41 operating million loss to “non-pandemic-related morbidity” and “unusual claims adjustments.”
“This change was driven by non-pandemic-related morbidity [emphasis added], including unusual claims adjustments [emphasis added], and less favorable returns within the company’s alternative investment portfolio.”
Morbidity, of course, means disease. A lot of people are sick.
This matches what I was told by OneAmerica in January in emails following the publication of my story in The Center Square — that it was not only deaths of working-age people that shot up to unheard-of levels in 2021, but also short- and long-term disability claims.
Annual statements for other insurance companies are still being compiled and reviewed. So far, Lincoln National shows the sharpest increases in death benefits paid out in 2021, though Prudential and Northwestern Mutual also show significant increases — increases much larger in 2021 than in 2020, indicating that the cure was worse than the disease — much worse.
Lincoln National’s stock price fell from about $70 a share on January 3 to $50 a share this week, and last month, a new CEO was installed. It doesn’t appear to be a sudden change, but could have been timed to assuage major shareholders who have no idea what’s really happening and may think that a fresh face and fresh ideas can turn this around. Could I suggest instead an honest and thorough assessment of what’s really driving these stunning numbers?
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Margaret Menge is a journalist with 20 years of experience as a reporter and editor for newspapers magazines, websites: US News & World Report, News of the Highlands, Miami Herald Company, UPI, InsideSources, Langley Intelligence Report, The Center Square.
Comments Off on Breaking: Fifth Largest Life Insurance Company in the US Paid Out 163% More for Deaths of Working People Ages 18-64 in 2021. Total Claims/Benefits Up $6 Billion
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***
Far too often, the elite U.S. press has been a reliable mouthpiece for Washington’s dubious foreign policies. That was true during the Cold War, except for a brief period of disillusionment and dissent once the Vietnam War became such an obvious debacle. That period of more vigorous scrutiny and skepticism did not last long, however. When George H. W. Bush launched his drive for U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite outlets were fully on board with that agenda, as their shamelessly biased treatment of the relevant issues confirmed. That pro-interventionist bias became even more flagrant during the Balkan crises of the 1990s, the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Washington’s subsequent campaigns for forcible regime change in Libya and Syria. There was very little daylight between the official U.S. government positions on those issues and the dominant media narratives.
A similar pattern has emerged with press coverage of the war in Ukraine. Once again, pro-interventionist accounts dominate the airwaves and the leading editorial and op-ed pages. That was especially true of the first weeks of the war, when the media overwhelmingly supported the argument that America must “stand with Ukraine.” The imbalance has eased slightly as concerns about the costs and risks of the Biden administration’s policy of lavishing military and financial aid on Kiev mount. Nevertheless, hawks still provide the vast majority of commentaries on the war in top-tier establishment forums.
The elite U.S. press has even served as a conduit for outright Ukrainian propaganda. During the early weeks of the war, American news outlets circulated the story about the “Ghost of Kiev”—the fighter pilot who supposedly became an ace in a matter of days by shooting down numerous Russian warplanes. That account had all the characteristics of transparent propaganda, and the Ukrainian military ultimately conceded that the story was fictional. In the meantime, however, it had served its purpose to influence credulous Western audiences.
Multiple unfiltered stories from Ukrayinska Pravda, New Voice of Ukraine and other Ukrainian media outlets routinely have appeared on Yahoo’s daily news feed, often accounting for a third or more of the site’s top dozen stories. Press releases from Ukraine’s government also have appeared in the U.S. media, at times without even an acknowledgment that the accuracy of those official accounts could not be confirmed. Moreover, there are virtually no competing stories from Russian news sources, creating an even greater pro-Ukraine imbalance. A similar imbalance has been evident on the principal social media platforms.
Much of the bias in news coverage of Ukraine and other high-profile U.S. foreign policy issues is brazen. However, there also are more subtle, insidious manifestations. A new report from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) highlights one important example. Looking at the front pages of the New York Timesduring the first full calendar month of the 2003 Iraq War and the first full calendar month of the current Ukraine war, FAIR demonstrated that a difference in the scope and nature of the coverage was substantial:
In April 2022, there were a total of 179 stories on the Times’ front page, and 79 (44%) concerned the Ukraine invasion. All but three were located at the top of the page (i.e., with no articles above them), where editors put the stories they consider to be the most important of the day. Fully 75% of all top-of-the-page stories were about the Ukraine war. Not a single day went by without a Ukraine story being published on the top of the page, and on 14 different days only stories about Ukraine were published on the top of the front page.
The contrast between the coverage of the two wars is striking. The report noted that, “In May 2003, when there were 226 stories on the front page, only 41 of them (18%) reported on the Iraq invasion. Thirty-two of those were at the top of the page, with nine below; 25% of all top-of-the-page stories were dedicated to the Iraq War.”
The FAIR researchers highlighted the significance of that difference. A “major conflict launched by the country where the paper is published was given less than half as many front-page articles—and a third of the top of the front page, where highest-priority stories are placed—compared to a war in which that country was not directly involved. Six days out of the month, the paper did not feature a single Iraq story at the top of the page, and the top-of-the-page stories were never exclusively about Iraq.”
That disparity suggests just how much the elite media’s flagship publication had cast its lot with Ukraine’s cause and the policy agenda of the Biden administration. Another portion of the FAIR report noted that coverage on the nightly news shows at ABC, CBS, and NBC exhibited a similar pattern.
The study also discovered a stunning difference between accounts of civilian populations’ suffering in the two wars. “Of the 79 front-page New York Times stories on the war in Ukraine in May 2022, 14 of them were primarily about civilian deaths as a result of the Russian invasion, all of which appeared at the top of the page,” the report found. The extent of the coverage was arguably warranted. As the report added, “By the beginning of May, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (5/2/22) estimated that there were at least 3,153 civilian deaths in Ukraine.”
The Times’s handling of civilian suffering during the early phase of the Iraq War was quite different, however. In the first full calendar month of the conflict, there was only one story on the front page about civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military. The FAIR researchers note that the lack of coverage “did not reflect a lack of civilian casualties during this period: Iraq Body Count estimated that at least 7,984 civilian deaths had occurred by the end of May 2003.” In other words, the civilian carnage was roughly twice as bad as it has been in Ukraine. Emphasizing that point, though, would have caused discomfort in Washington. Conversely, highlighting the suffering of civilians in Ukraine caused by Russian forces is fully consistent with the policy agenda of the U.S. national-security apparatus.
It should surprise no one that members of the elite press are again helping to advance a dangerous U.S. policy. It is a familiar pattern, and one that violates the supposed mission and purpose of an independent press. The news media should adopt aloof relationships with U.S. policymakers and serve as the public’s watchdog with respect to questionable foreign-policy initiatives. Instead, the elite press—the portion of the media with the greatest reach—is once again serving as the national-security state’s lapdog.
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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. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy(forthcoming, September 2022).
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What is the reliability of the “information system on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict” is confirmed by this latest episode: Senator Bruno Tabacci, Undersecretary of State for the Presidency of the Council, credits the Corriere’s fake news: “Dinucci’s book quoted by Putin in the celebratory speech in Moscow.”
The desecrated document on “Disinformation in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict,” compiled by the Republic’s Security Information System, attributes the presence of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine and Russophobia to “narratives of Russian propaganda,” and presents “attacks on Zelensky’s image” as the fruit of Russian propaganda. What the real situation is emerges from the reports released by the Ukrainian news agency itself. These include the banning of the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the confiscation of its assets, measures taken against ten other political parties; Zelensky’s order to destroy 100 million Russian books, including all the classics of Russian literature, because they “spread Evil.” While Russian and Belarusian athletes are excluded from 125 international competitions, at an international boxing competition in Hungary a Ukrainian athlete displays the neo-Nazi Azov flag and refuses to remove it.
The desecreted document also attributes to Russian propaganda reports that there are 30 bio-laboratories in Ukraine linked to the Pentagon and a network of U.S. and European companies. There is plenty of evidence, however, from a U.S. investigative journalism agency and other sources, not only of their existence but of their activities consisting of developing and testing pathogenic viruses for biological warfare. The Russian government asked the United Nations to send a commission of inquiry to Ukraine, but received a sharp refusal. What the dangers posed by the bio-laboratories in Ukraine are to the whole of Europe and the world is also denounced by Tultsi Gabbard, a U.S. politician from the Democratic Party.
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This article was originally published on byoblu.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden, tested positive for COVID-19, his office said Wednesday.
The NIAID said Fauci, 81, tested positive for the virus through a rapid antigen test and is currently “experiencing mild symptoms.”
“Dr. Fauci will isolate and continue to work from his home,” the statement said. “Dr. Fauci will follow the COVID-19 guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and medical advice from his physician and return to the NIH [National Institutes of Health] when he tests negative.”
This is the first time Fauci, who is quadruple-vaxxed against COVID-19, has announced he’s tested positive for the virus.
The NIAID confirmed Fauci received four COVID-19 vaccine doses, including two boosters.
Despite testing positive, Fauci today testified remotely during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where he was grilled about the federal response to the pandemic.
“Our current vaccines have maintained their effectiveness for preventing severe COVID-19,” Fauci said, referring to the Omicron variant during his opening statement. “Individuals who have received only their primary vaccine regimen have a greater likelihood of getting infected with the Omicron variant than with previous variants.”
“Importantly, booster shots have been shown to significantly reconstitute and enhance the level of antibodies that neutralize the Omicron variant and in sub-lineages,” he added.
In May 2021, in an interview on MSNBC, Fauci said people who got vaccinated would not get infected.
“When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected.” —Fauci
In another interview, in Jun. 22, 2021 with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Fauci said:
“The situation is so clear, the data affirm if you get vaccinated you are protected, even with the Delta variant — which by the way has a greater capacity to spread from person to person — and when you’re infected it has a greater likelihood of giving you serious disease. We know that as a fact.”
“It’s as simple as black and white,” Fauci said. “You’re vaccinated, you’re safe. You’re unvaccinated, you’re at risk. Simple as that.”
Pfizer’s clinical trials of Paxlovid excluded vaccinated individuals
According to Pfizer’s high-risk and standard-risk clinical trials, vaccinated individuals who received a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine within 12 months of screening were excluded from clinical trials that assessed the safety and efficacy of the drug.
“Paxlovid would be significantly more effective in people who have not been primed by vaccination or prior infection, so the trial supporting its use serves to exaggerate the benefit that most people would see from the medication,” Fenyves said.
Although Pfizer began a clinical trial of Paxlovid in vaccinated high-risk individuals, the trial combines vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, potentially clouding the issue, Fenyves said. “More importantly, results of the trial will not be made available until November 2022.”
Fenyves pointed out that Americans have seen scandals with drugs like Vioxx being sold despite known cardiovascular risks and OxyContin contributing to the opioid epidemic due to lax oversight, and a “much-needed independent review” of Paxlovid’s pharmaceutical clinical trial was needed.
Fenyves said Pfizer’s first trial was designed to overstate the efficacy of Paxlovid because the company’s goal was to maximize sales, but he was surprised the U.S. government would buy $5 billion worth of Paxlovid without requiring the pharma giant to show how the drug performs in high-risk people who have been vaccinated or previously infected.
CDC admits Paxlovid causes rebound COVID-19 symptoms in some patients
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on May 24 issued a health advisory to people taking Pfizer’s Paxlovid. Walensky warned the drug could lead to a rebound in COVID-19 symptoms, but claimed the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks.
“If you take Paxlovid, you might get symptoms again,” Walensky told CBS News. “We haven’t yet seen anybody who has returned with symptoms needing to go to the hospital. So, generally, a milder course.”
People who experience a “COVID-19 rebound” after treatment with Paxlovid can be contagious even if they don’t have any symptoms, researchers warned.
The CDC, citing case reports and concerns that relapsed patients could spread the virus, advised users to isolate themselves for another five days if symptoms rebound.
“I am shying away from giving it to people who are very low-risk, and are not terribly ill, particularly people who are vaccinated and boosted,” Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, told Reuters.
Pfizer, in an email, said it is monitoring the issue but believes the return of detectable SARS-CoV-2 is uncommon and not “uniquely associated” with its drug. “We have not seen any resistance emerge to date in patients treated with Paxlovid,” a Pfizer spokesperson told Reuters.
As The Defender reported last month, NIH researchers said they would investigate how often and why coronavirus levels rebound in some patients who complete a five-day course of Paxlovid.
Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research at the NIAID, told Bloomberg it was a priority and a “pretty urgent thing for us to get a handle on.”
Lane said the agency is discussing with scientists at the CDC possible epidemiological and clinical studies to examine post-Paxlovid rebound.
In response to reports of patients relapsing after taking Paxlovid, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla suggested they take more of the treatment, contrary to the established protocol, prompting a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official to contradict Bourla.
“There is no evidence of benefit at this time for a longer course of treatment (e.g., 10 days rather than the 5 days recommended in the Provider Fact Sheet for Paxlovid) or repeating a treatment course of Paxlovid in patients with recurrent COVID-19 symptoms following completion of a treatment course.”
As The Defender reported in March, Pfizer stands to make $54 billion in sales from its COVID-19 vaccine and Paxlovid.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman and chief legal counsel, told The Defender that taxpayers are paying billions for vaccines that don’t work, they get COVID-19 anyway and then they pay billions more for an inferior treatment.
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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
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Today more than ever, hatred toward Russia has never had such dire implications for the world. The fears of yesterday have become the even greater fears of tomorrow. The idea of peace has been waved away as meaningless, and any chance for a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine is not readily entertained, even by formerly peace-loving people.
They firmly believe that any compromise will lead to the annihilation of Ukraine and the entire world. Is this a reasonable perspective? How and why has peace become equated with escalation? Are we really going to save the world by waging war against Russia? Or is this potentially an apparition of sorts?
By the late 1940s, the power of Russian weaponry was on the minds of Americans as a harbinger of future calamities: unstoppable missiles and nuclear-powered planes were just some of the rumored advancements. Even early flying saucer sightings were suspected to be secret Russian technology.
Will the world ever learn from the ghosts of past wars? The dilemma starts here: those calling for war say it’s precisely the lessons learned from previous wars that prove this war must go on. Should the war really not be opposed? The biggest obstacle in understanding this war is the unwillingness to study it beyond newspaper headlines.
Recently, the esteemed American scholar Noam Chomsky was dismissed as a Russian propagandist for emphasizing the necessity of negotiations. Those echoing his thoughts are now the Neville Chamberlains of the world, derided as too simple-minded to see the totality of the situation. American democracy is suffering because unpopular opinions have become enemy propaganda.
Any form of compromise is strongly assumed to be what will erase Ukraine from this planet, but is this rather a confused conclusion? Influenced by decades of fear and worries about a foreign enemy. It is not only Republicans who oppose this war. Opposing the war in Ukraine and supporting the idea of a peace deal will help Ukraine more than arguing for the fighting to continue.
The first thing that should be studied and discussed about this war is whether there is freedom to be won. This is not to say it’s impossible. War proponents have sincerely asked, what are alternatives to the fight for freedom? The question should be, is freedom possible? Because it will not be won through an endless war, it is more likely to be won through dialogue.
More specifically, does democracy even exist in Ukraine? It’s very easy to think of this war as a noble battle for democracy, but democracy must exist first. Despite the appearance of a democratic election, Ukraine unfortunately is not a democracy, therefore it is not fighting for democracy. Ukrainians would need to elect an entirely new leader to even begin to have the possibility of democracy.
Even if Ukrainians were to win the war, they still will not have a democratic government. This puts the war in another light which only proves that the fight for victory is a tragically absurd proposal. To ignore all of this and still want the war to continue is the height of madness. The war in Ukraine has become a superstitious war.
We are losing ourselves in superstition rather than actually trying to understand this war. We will do more harm than good by letting our assumptions get the best of us. If people want to support Ukraine they should be against this war in every way. Ukraine is not saving democracy, Ukraine is not saving the world, no matter how amazing all of that sounds.
Zelensky’s endless demands for more weapons will not magically make things better, but is and will continue to make things worse. Until an agreement is reached, this war will spiral more and more out of control, not the other way around. It is our plunging into superstition which has convinced us that a peace deal will lead to the end of the world. It’s time to wake up.
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Edward Alvarez writes from San Diego.
Featured image: SBU raid in Kharkiv. [Source: mercurynews.com]
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The European Union (EU) announced a tripartite natural gas export deal with Israel and Egypt on Wednesday, June 16, claiming that it will be a crucial alternative to Russian gas imports. The three parties are looking to build infrastructure which will be “fit for renewables,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
As per the deal, Israeli gas will be brought to Egypt via pipeline and then transported to the EU via ships in liquified form. The EU has agreed to help Israel and Egypt in their future exploration for increasing the production of gas.
The deal was signed during the East Mediterranean regional energy conference in Cairo. Von der Leyen claimed that a deal with Israel will help the EU reduce its dependence on Russia for its energy needs.
The EU imported around 40% of its gas from Russia last year. A total of 155 billion cubic meters of gas was imported by various EU countries from Russia in 2021 through pipelines and tankers. However, the EU has imposed numerous sanctions on Russia and tried to impose a ban on imports from the country following its attack on Ukraine in February.
The deal with Israel has come under severe criticism from human rights groups who accuse the EU adopting a hypocritical position on illegal occupation and violations of international human rights.
Following the EU sanctions, Russia has demanded payments in its own currency for the sale of gas, failing which it stopped supply to countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, and others. The sanctions and stoppage of supply has led to a historic rise in the prices of gas in European countries.
Israel has been exploring for gas inside its Exclusive Economic Zone and so far has been able to discover 690 billion cubic meters of natural gas in two offshore gas fields. Some of the areas under these gas fields (Karish) are under dispute with Lebanon.
Nevertheless, Israel’s total production is around 20 billion cubic meters. It is trying to increase its production to 40 billion cubic meters in the next few years. However, even if Israel manages to double production, it will be very difficult to compensate in any significant way for the lack of Russian gas in Europe.
In 2020, Israel, Greece and Cyprus had signed a USD 6 billion deal to construct an undersea pipeline (EastMed) to transport gas from Israel’s offshore fields to Europe. However, experts have raised questions about its viability claiming that it will be too expensive.
Various human rights groups, including the Palestinian Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement, have condemned the EU’s deal with Israel. They argue that it is hypocritical for the EU to criticize one country for illegal occupation (Russia) and reward another for the same (Israel).
The EU is outrageously hypocritical. To punish Russia over its illegal, months-long invasion of Ukraine, the EU is replacing Russian gas by, among others, gas from Israel despite its decades-old apartheid regime against Palestinians.
Several commentators have called the EU’s stand on the Russia-Ukraine war a sign of its double standards since it has no problem in dealing with Israel, which has been involved in attacks on its neighbors Syria and Lebanon and has bombarded occupied Gaza.
What shared beliefs exactly? Shooting Palestinian journalists and blowing up Syrian airports? https://t.co/quoogMRjq7
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First published on globalresearch.ca on June 9, 2022
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“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video
Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”
For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.
Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.
As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”
Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.
Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.
Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.
Weaponizing violence.
With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.
Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.
Weaponizing compliance.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.
Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security.
The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
Weaponizing fear and paranoia.
The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Weaponizing genetics.
Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Postreports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
Weaponizing the future.
With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.
The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The facts speak for themselves.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.
When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.
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Yesterday Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced the WHO was officially changing the name of the monkeypox virus.
This article focuses on the debate and search for new possible models by a few countries that are dissatisfied with the unipolar system and the world dominated by the United States. The United States has outstretched its political and economic interests around the world.
Knowing how professional this world-class diplomat is and how he never has a slip of the tongue since he always puts a lot of thought into every word that he says, this development should be interpreted as a subtle change in policy. It’s not in any way whatsoever aimed at sending some kind of negative signal to China, but to the contrary, it’s meant to show that Russia is flexibly adapting to regional trends.
Anyone who has spent any time in Washington and who has been reasonably engaged in watching the fiasco playing out there might agree that the most powerful foreign lobby is that of Israel, backed up as it is by a vast domestic network that exists to protect and nourish the Jewish state.
Craig Lang, a US Army veteran accused by US authorities of carrying out murders on American soil as well as torture and other war crimes in Ukraine, allegedly joined a band of insurgents armed by the Colombian police to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
Since the arrival of the gene-therapy injections, New Zealand has pushed to have 90% of its population receive two injections. In December, the country successfully reached its milestone. To achieve its 90% “vaccination” goal, Dr. Monchy explained that every citizen who received the injection was bribed with a voucher of 20 NZD (12 euros). At the same time, doctors have been given 359 NZD (216 euros) per vaccine.
The CIA also initiated a scheme designed to induce the Chilean national-security establishment to implement a violent coup that would keep Allende from taking office and, most likely, leave him dead in the process.
When Henry Kissinger surprised the world with his address at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos (22-26 May 2022), by telling Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy, he had to make some concession in return for Peace, he was right.
The federal government’s own data indicates that the COVID-19 vaccines U.S. service members are forced to receive are dangerous, medical experts explained as part of a Flag Day press conference hosted Tuesday by the medical freedom nonprofit Truth for Health Foundation.
Patrick Lyoya, 26, an African immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), was shot in the back of the head by patrolman Christopher Schurr on April 4. This act of police violence was met with widespread shock and mass demonstrations demanding that Schurr be terminated from the Grand Rapids police department and charged with murder.
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Yesterday Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced the WHO was officially changing the name of the monkeypox virus.
This decision was allegedly taken due to “stigmatization” and “discrimination” of the current “inaccurate” name.
I’m not sure how “monkeypox virus” can be an inaccurate name for a virus allegedly found in monkeys that allegedly causes pox, but that is the contention of the “experts” who called for an “urgent name change” in this report from last week.
In the context of the current global outbreak, continued reference to, and nomenclature of this virus being African is not only inaccurate but is also discriminatory and stigmatising,”
Of course, the problem here, as always with mainstream news, is their own mutually contradictory stories/agendas.
Because, according to the official narrative the virus does come from Africa, where it is endemic in some West African nations.
Changing the name of the virus will not change that, or make people forget they said so, will it?
So why do it?
Well, in yet another parallel with Covid, it allows them to fold a racism storyline into the greater narrative. With Covid they first engendered, suspicions about China and Chinese people being “the source” of the non-existent problem. Then they condemned these suspicions as racist.
Here, they are spreading fear about Africa, and then claiming that fear is racist.
It is just another great way to divide and distract people.
Alongside this, the irrationality itself seems to serve some purpose.
With Covid we were warned that “super-spreader events” were incredibly dangerous…but that Black Lives Matter protests were the exception because “racism is a worse pandemic than Covid”.
With Monkeypox, despite the narrative claiming it’s spreading among “men who have sex with men”, any decision to cancel pride events or close known cruising spots is apparently “homophobic”.
So maybe there’s an element of simply being irrational for irrationality’s sake. Confusing people to the point they don’t know where to stand.
There’s another potential answer too, a directly pragmatic answer related to other Monkeypox news that came out the last few days.
On June 14th it was announced the WHO will be meeting next week to consider whether or not to declare monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
Earlier today, Bloomberg was reporting the US had “not learned from Covid” and “testing bottlenecks” could mean monkeypox cases being missed.
And yesterday Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, released a statement calling monkeypox a “neglected disease”, going on to say:
The magnitude of this outbreak poses a real risk; the longer the virus circulates, the more it will extend its reach, and the stronger the disease’s foothold will get in non-endemic countries. Governments, health partners and civil society need to act with urgency, and together to control this outbreak;
So, do you know what I think?
I think the real problem here is that they want to take the monkeypox narrative to the next level, but they’ve saddled themselves with a silly name that will never frighten anybody.
That is why they’re changing it…they want people to be afraid, and “monkeypox” just isn’t scary.
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Ankara and Moscow have put forward potential solutions to reopen Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, with Russia offering safe passage to ships while Turkey said it could help guide vessels around Ukrainian naval mines deployed to stall the Russian advance.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenziatold reporters on Wednesday that the Kremlin is open to creating a “safe passage” for grain shipments, but said Moscow could not guarantee a route that would be free of mines
“We are not responsible for establishing safe corridors. We said we could provide safe passage if these corridors are established,” he said. “It’s obvious it’s either de-mine the territory, which was mined by the Ukrainians, or ensure that the passage goes around those mines.”
While Turkey has said it would “take some time” to clear away the munitions, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu suggested safe corridors could be found in some Ukrainian ports, presenting the offer a short-term solution.
“Since the location of the mines is known, certain safe lines would be established at three ports,” the FM said earlier on Wednesday, adding that ships could “come and go safely to ports without a need to clear the mines.”
Cavusoglu went on to say that Ankara has not received a response from the Kremlin on the proposal, but is currently working with the United Nations on a plan. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric confirmed that discussions were underway, though noted that an agreement from both Ukraine and Russia would be needed to move forward.
Turkey’s National Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, meanwhile, told TRT that the three nations recently created an “emergency communication mechanism” to resolve the problem and reopen Ukraine’s ports, but it’s not yet clear whether any progress had been made in negotiations. Last Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also announced that he plans to hold a three-way dialogue on the issue with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts sometime in the coming weeks, after Ankara hosted several rounds of lower-level peace talks.
Kiev, however, has signaled that it will not accept the Russian or Turkish proposals. Speaking at an event in Washington on Wednesday, David Arakhamia, a lawmaker and the head of Ukraine’s negotiation team, said
“Our military people are against [de-mining the ports], so that’s why we have very, very limited optimism for this model.”
The UN has warned that the disruption of grain exports from Ukraine could have a massive impact on global food supplies. Together, Moscow and Kiev provide up to 40% of Eastern Europe’s grain purchases, and make up an even greater part of some countries’ total imports.
While Ukrainian and American officials have repeatedly blamed Russia for the shortages, Moscow has rejected the charge, instead pinning the scarcities on US sanctions and the explosives still deployed at key Ukrainian seaports. The Kremlin previously offered to help establish a safe route for shipping vessels in exchange for sanctions relief, but Washington refused to take up the deal.
The US and its Western partners have attempted to cripple the Russian economy through heavy sanctions in response to the invasion, some pledging outright embargoes on the country’s energy exports. While the penalties initially sent the ruble tumbling, it has since made a significant comeback and is now among the best performing currencies against the dollar in 2022. Meanwhile, the White House is now quietly pushing US shipping companies to do business with Russian fertilizer suppliers.
The conflict raging in Eastern Europe has not severed all business ties between Moscow and Kiev, as Ukraine’s state-run Naftogaz has continued to work with its Russian equivalent, Gazprom. Though the two firms have reportedly done hundreds of millions of dollars in trade since the war kicked off in February, the shaky truce could soon fracture, as Naftogaz is now pursuing a lawsuit against Gazprom for alleged underpayment.
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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute.
Will Porter is the assistant news editor of the Libertarian Insitute and a staff writer at RT.
Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter host Conflicts of Interest along with Connor Freeman.
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***
This article focusses on the debate and search for new possible models by a few countries that are dissatisfied with the unipolar system and the world dominated by the United States.
The United States has outstretched its political and economic interests around the world,
China has similarly and strategically extended its tentacles across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. It has moved south conquering Africa, and intensifying commercial operations in the Central Asia regions including the former Soviet republics – the backyard of the Russian Federation, which still considers itself as a global power.
While still struggling and raising shoulders, many experts say, Russia has little global influence and authoritarian compared to China.
Despite its large population of 1.5 billion which many have considered as an impediment, China’s domestic economic reforms and collaborative strategic diplomacy with external countries have made it attain superpower status over the United States. While United States influence is rapidly fading away, China has indeed taken up both the challenges and unique opportunities to strengthen its position, especially its trade, investment and economic muscles.
Monitoring mainstream news and information reports indicated that Russia has been teaming up with China and India (and that could be interpreted as BRICS platform initiative) and a few other external countries in the process of establishing a new global economic system.
On the other hand, its aim is to break the unipolar system, and defeat American hegemony around the world. Some experts have argued that successive White House administrations have maintained the status quo. Due to socialist economic planning and their advancement of the notions of international cooperation and peace even among states with varying social systems, there has been tremendous progress in the areas of international solidarity.
The Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) grouping is a manifestation of the role of Beijing, Moscow and Pretoria along with the other states which have varied in regard to their political orientation in recent years. These new alliances are perceived as a threat to the role of the United States, Britain and the Europen Union since they are not participant-members and cannot directly impact the agendas and goals established by the BRICS.
But a careful study and analysis monitored by this author vividly show that Russia has some limitations. Its external economic footprints are comparatively weak. And its external policies are hardly promoting its economic models.
The geopolitical reordering of the world cannot simply be achieved through war or challenging the West’s political influence in its various global domains. The economic component is possibly the most significant of the ongoing tug of war between Russia and its western detractors.
In the global South for instance, Russia is still struggling to win the hearts of leaders. It however needs a carefully formulated broad public outreach policies to permeate the message of new global order, at least, to the middle class. It has to enlist the understanding of its aims using the communication tools in addition to its own diplomatic statements and globe-throttling juicy rhetoric.
Russia has to invest in all these if it really wanted to succeed in leading the world.
As Dr. Ramzy Baroud, a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle, wrote recently
“the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, is vital for the current global economic order and is equally critical for any future reshaping of that order. If Moscow is to succeed in redefining the role of Arab economies vis-à-vis the global economy, it would most likely succeed in ensuring that a multipolar economic world takes form. Russia is clearly invested in a new global economic system, but without isolating itself in the process.”
In the past few months, Russia exited many international organizations, instead of sustaining its membership and using those platforms to propagate its new global mission. Some experts and academics describe Russia making a desperate attempt at reversing the alarming trend in the world’s economic affairs. In order to win this battle, Russia needs a designed geopolitical outreach scheme and strategies for exert economic influence to match its dreams. It has rather gone into self-isolation, with much heavy-handed criticisms against the United States and Europe.
With the rapid geopolitical changes leading to repartitioning and creating a new global order, and Russia, over the course of the last decade, has been desirously strengthening its Greater Eurasian Union alongside with others, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and BRICS.
May 2022 Meeting of the CSTO
The Greater Eurasian Union focuses on the economic integration and supporting economic development among the members, and expected to build its structure and method of functions by replicating the European Union.
The CSTO, a military alliance consisting of mostly the former Soviet republics (Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), and signed the Collective Security Treaty in 1992. Its primary task is to collectively depend the territorial sovereignty of these member states.
The BRICS member countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) collectively represent about 26% of the world’s geographic area and are home to 2.88 billion people, about 42% of the world’s population.
Historically, the first meeting of the group began in St Petersburg in 2005. It was called RIC, which stood for Russia, India and China. Then, Brazil and subsequently South Africa joined later, which is why now it is referred to as BRICS.
Informal Meeting of BRICS, June 2019
South Africa was a late minor addition to the group, to add a “bridgehead to Africa” says Charles Robertson, Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital. All the BRICS countries are facing economic challenges that need addressing urgently. The BRICS is keenly aware of the importance of contributing to Africa’s development agenda.
“So, it could expand because the BRICS are under-represented in the global financial architecture. Europe and the United States dominate institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and to some extent many others,” explained Robertson.
According to him,
“Russia and others in the BRICS would like to see larger power centres emerge to offer an alternative to that Western dominated construct. That is reasonable enough – providing there are countries with the money to backstop the new institutions, such as China supporting the BRICS bank, and if the countries offer an alternative vision that provides benefits to new members.”
“Now is a very good time to show that BRICS members and relations between them are an alternative to the format existing in the West,” Executive Director at the Russian National Committee for BRICS Research, Professor Georgy Toloraya, told the Kommersant, a Russian daily business newspaper, adding that “BRICS favours order, compliance with agreements and development.”
Moreover, plans are in store to expand the group to include Argentina, Turkey, Indonesia and some other African countries. According to Toloraya, India is currently opposed to expanding BRICS fearing that new members will support China. On the other hand, Moscow argues that “the entrance ticket” to the group is independence and sovereignty, and under no circumstances, potential candidates be called China’s satellites.
There are not so many countries like that—they would include Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and Iran. But then, there are certain political requirements for new members, including recognition of BRICS values and core foreign policy principles, he said, and added “initially, the goals and tasks were very modest, primarily focusing on the economy and the coordination of efforts toward attaining more ambitious goals.”
What is BRICS Plus and what is the purpose of this new mechanism?
On 19 May, China’s State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi chaired a videoconference dialogue between foreign ministers of BRICS countries and their counterparts from emerging economies and developing countries. This was the first BRICS Plus dialogue at the level of foreign ministers. Participants in the dialogue came from BRICS countries as well as invited countries such as Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, United Arab Emirates and Thailand.
According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the dialogue is of significant importance to further expand cooperation between the BRICS countries and other emerging economies and developing countries.
As a BRICS Plus participant country, Argentina has on several occasions expressed its interest in joining this mechanism. The Argentine president, Alberto Fernández, considered that BRICS represents for Argentina “an excellent alternative for cooperation in the face of a world order that has been working for the benefit of a few.”
Understandably some leaders are advocating for multipolar system. Primarily due to geopolitical tensions, rivalry differences and competition to lead the world, Russia is currently pushing an initiative for creating a group. In June 2022, Russian State Duma (the lower house of parliament) Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on Telegram that the United States and its allies are destroying economic ties by their sanctions policy, but at the same time creating new points of growth in other countries.
“The move by Washington and its allies to cut the existing economic ties has created new points of growth in the world,” he pointed out. According to the parliament speaker, Western sanctions are leading to the establishment of another group of eight nations – China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran and Turkey – that is 24.4% ahead of the old group of developed countries in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and purchasing power parity.
“The United States, with its own hands, has created conditions for countries willing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations to actually establish a new G-8 group with Russia,” Volodin noted.
Understandably, there is a Group of Seven (G-7), an inter-governmental political forum, that includes highly developed countries. These are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, the European Union is a non-enumerated member. Its members are the world’s largest IMF advanced economies and wealthiest liberal democracies.
According to reports, the group is officially organized around shared values of pluralism and representative government. As of 2020, the collective group accounts for over 50 percent of global net wealth (which is US$418 trillion), 32 to 46 percent of global gross domestic product, and approximately 770 million people or 10 percent of the world’s population.
Its members are great powers in global affairs and maintain mutually close political, economic, social, legal, environmental, military, religious, cultural, and diplomatic relations. From 2022, Germany has taken over the rotating presidency of the G-7, following the presidency of the United Kingdom.
Russia dismembered itself from the group. This prompted the U.S. President Donald Trump’s reiteration that Russia should be readmitted to the group, instigation of a trade war with China, increased tensions in Iran, Trump’s alleged reluctance to attend the conference and a number of international crises made the 2019 G-7 meeting in Biarritz, France the most divided since its inception.
Following Trump’s previous rescinding of his signature to a joint communiqué agreed in 2018 due to an alleged slight from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron agreed that the group would not issue a joint communiqué at the Biarritz conference. Since then, Russia has remained critical about the group, basing its argument that the G-7 has no relevance to exist as there the members meet at Group of Twenty (G-20).
Similarly to the above argument, if the establishment of another new Group of Eight nations – China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran and Turkey – and compared to BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, it follows that BRICS will have to be absorbed by the new Group of Eight organization, and thus pushing out South Africa.
Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, argued that the already established BRICS may have better chances of enticing new members. The new members could be Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, and Thailand that participated in recent consultations.
In fact, UAE along with Bangladesh and Uruguay became the first expansion members of BRICS’ National Development Bank (NDB), last September. But the timing makes parties cautious. With no permanent secretariat and a fixed hub, at least the NDB fixed its headquarters in Shanghai, and further establish its regional offices in South Africa (Johannesburg).
As the world is facing massive challenges, it also requires international collaboration and cooperative solutions, importantly not to grossly endanger the economic prospects of poor and underdeveloped countries. Here live millions and millions of impoverished population.
Indonesia is hosting the G-20 summit in Bali this November and is doing its best to insulate the meeting from politics. Whether Indonesia is capable to arbitrate between angry clashing superpowers is simply unpredictable. The chances of a sudden rapprochement between the United States and China – let alone between the US and Russia – are exceedingly low.
Russia and China’s strategic alliance is strengthening and China has resisted so many attempts for excluding Russia from international organizations. Both are staunch members of BRICS. On the other hand, China’s push for expanding BRICS’s roster may alleviate external pressures on its relations with Russia and its own actions in disputed spaces with neighbours.
The author of this article has contacted several experts on this question. But for Dr. Pankaj Kumar Jha, an Associate Professor at O. P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana, China and India border conflict will continue influencing BRICS. However, India and China are cooperating to develop alternate financial structures, cohesive guidelines within Asia and the global south on many issues such as trade, investment and developing an understanding so that dominance of the of west could be reduced to a minimum in global financial architecture, he said and added, “the foundation of cooperation in BRICS brings potential resources and critical development requirements under one umbrella.”
Questions about the future of BRICS are bound to be there especially when a new world order is being discussed. Drawing inspiration from Quad plus, BRICS countries are also discussing BRICS plus format. The formation of new grouping G-8 is primarily a fusion of BRICS and VISTA (Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina). The formation is primarily to connect BRICS to middle income and middle power countries, according his explanation.
Dr. Pankaj Kumar Jha concluded his argument: “This geopolitical configuration is in exploratory phases, undoubtedly meant to bring a new axis of Russia-China but inclusion of Mexico , Indonesia and Turkey has its own strategic baggage. How much successful this grouping would be is still a matter a conjecture. From geopolitical point of view, much would depend on how sanctions on Russia shapes up and the post-coronavirus recovery of China.”
Professor Aslan Abashidze, Head of the Department of International Law of the Russian University of Peoples’ Friendship and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained to the author of this article that in general, international associations in the form of international intergovernmental organizations or integration associations emerge on the basis of prerequisites that may be of a different nature: political, defensive, cultural, et cetera.
The emergence of such “para-organizations” as the Group of Seven (G-7), Group of Eight (G-8), Group of Twenty (G-20) is associated with the inability of international institutions of the global level to meet the increased needs of modern development in the face of growing challenges in the form of pandemics, financial crisis et cetera.
The invitation and then exclusion of Russia from the Group of Seven (G-7) and similar unilateral restrictive measures of the “collective” West headed by the United States control all institutions of global control, including the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Recontruction and Development, force other states that are not inferior in their raw material, human and intellectual potentials to the United States and the European Union to seek their own development path.
Therefore, it does not matter whether BRICS, or the unification of China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Iran and Turkey, will be more viable or not. The main thing is that the process of searching for new models by the states dissatisfied with the United States policy has started, which means the end of the dominance of the United States in all spheres of international relations. At some point, the West, headed by the United States, will have to negotiate new models of international economic and other relations, based on new international treaties that ensure equality of all states.
According to Professor Abashidze’s conclusion is that “until this is achieved at the global level, Russia, China and India will establish trade relations on national currencies and therefore it will be attractive and beneficial to other states, not only from the Asia-Pacific region, but also from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.”
Whether Russia, China and India and a number of countries, there are arguable variations in political, economic and cultural capabilities. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin last year explained in one of his speeches that after the collapse of the Soviet era, Russia has to begin from the scratch. It was the ideological confrontation between the West and the East that gave birth to Soviet era. Lenin spoke about the birthmarks of capitalism, he reminded, and added that “It cannot be said that we have lived these past 30 years in a full-fledged market economy. In fact, we are only gradually building it, and its institutions. Russia had to do it from the ground up, starting from a clean slate. Of course, we are doing this, taking into consideration, developments around the world. After all, after almost one hundred years of a state-planned economy, transitioning to a market economy is not easy.”
On other way round, it is necessary to take a closer look at approach, economic capability and the services by the Chinese. China has such a diverse landscape, with investment and trade around the world. According to the World Bank, China has the largest economy and one of the world’s foremost infrastructural giants. China is the world’s largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods.
China holds 17.7% of the world’s total wealth, the second largest share held by any country. It has the world’s largest banking sector, with assets of $40 trillion and the world’s top 4 largest banks all being in China.
In 2019, China overtook the US as the home to the highest number of rich people in the world, according to the global wealth report by Credit Suisse. It has the highest number of rich people in the world’s top 10% of wealth since 2019. There were 658 Chinese billionaires and 3.5 million millionaires.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has expanded significantly over the last six years and, as of April 2020, includes 138 countries and 30 international organizations. Along with Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, China is a member of the BRICS group of emerging major economies.
Nearly all the experts contacted for this article have the arguable points. They acknowledged the fact that the countries seeking multipolar system have to address problems of the less developed world.
In addition, judging from their lengthy discussions, one key factual description is given – the western dominance and imperial approach of the United States. These imperialist endeavors aimed at maintaining the political and economic domination of the world’s population has created enormous difficulties for peoples globally including the working class, nationally oppressed and impoverished living within the western capitalist countries.
The emerging new coalition group is feasible and coming up at the crucial time when over the last two decades, the United States, Britain, the European Union (EU) countries and their allies globally, have been embroiled in numerous imperialist interventions resulting in destabilization, military interventions, proxy wars and the expansion of western imperialism throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a regular and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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Knowing how professional this world-class diplomat is and how he never has a slip of the tongue since he always puts a lot of thought into every word that he says, this development should be interpreted as a subtle change in policy. It’s not in any way whatsoever aimed at sending some kind of negative signal to China, but to the contrary, it’s meant to show that Russia is flexibly adapting to regional trends.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s press conference that followed his participation in the CSTO Council of Foreign Ministers meeting last week was remarkable in the sense that he used the term “Indo-Pacific” for the first time ever when describing what his country hitherto always called the “Asia-Pacific”. The specific instance in which he employed it was when he said that “The principle of the indivisibility of security obviously applies to the Indo-Pacific Region today.” Up until this point, Russian representatives always used the term “Asia-Pacific”, which aligns with what their comprehensive strategic partners in China always say. This time, however, Lavrov opted for the more popular regional term instead.
Knowing how professional this world-class diplomat is and how he never has a slip of the tongue since he always puts a lot of thought into every word that he says, this development should be interpreted as a subtle change in policy. It’s not in any way whatsoever aimed at sending some kind of negative signal to China, but to the contrary, it’s meant to show that Russia is flexibly adapting to regional trends. Every single country in this part of the world with the notable exception of China and perhaps also North Korea describes their region as the Indo-Pacific nowadays. This term used to be considered a subtle nod to American grand strategic designs but is now simply an accurate geostrategic description.
The rise of India as a globally influential Great Power following its decisive intervention after the start of Russia’songoingspecialmilitaryoperation in Ukraine to preemptively avert its partner’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China in response to the US-led West’s unprecedented sanctions against it completely changed the trajectory of the New Cold War. This South Asian civilization-state is now a force to be reckoned with across the world after surprising literally every observer by what it just did. It’s therefore reasonable to pay a nod towards its newfound global importance by finally describing the wider region as the “Indo-Pacific”, especially since almost everyone else is nowadays too.
Building upon that observation, it’s in Russia’s grand strategic interests to signal to others in this part of the world that it’s indeed strategically autonomous from China and hasn’t become its “junior partner” like some in the US-led Western Mainstream Media have falsely claimed since the start of its special operation in Ukraine. Countries like Vietnam for instance should be reassured that Russia isn’t going to take China’s side over theirs in disputes over the South China Sea but would instead remain neutral and aspire to help them balance between the American and Chinese superpowers that currently dominate the bi-multipolar intermediary phase of the global systemic transition to more complexmultipolarity.
With these motivations in mind, it makes sense why Lavrov finally used the term “Indo-Pacific” instead of “Asia-Pacific”, though it’s unclear whether he’ll continue to do so or if this was just an acknowledgement of the need for Russia to pay attention to this regional trend at least once. In any case, it certainly wasn’t a slip of the tongue since Lavrov never has any of those but was instead a deliberate signal sent to all those countries that use this term instead of the one that China, Russia, and perhaps also North Korea always use. Even though none of them formally reacted to this, there’s no doubt that they noticed it and would have appreciated what Lavrov just did, especially India.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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First published on June 14, 2022
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The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations held a videoconference on May 31 titled Russia’s War in Ukraine: How does it end? The president of the think tank Richard Haas chaired the panel of distinguished participants — Stephen Hadley, Prof. Charles Kupchan, Alina Polyakova and Lt. Gen. (Retd) Stephen Twitty. It was a great discussion dominated by the liberal internationalist stream that has so far guided President Biden’s national security team, which wants to help Ukraine fight a long war against Russia.
The striking thing about the discussion was the acknowledgement candidly articulated by an ex-general who hadactually fought in wars that there is no way Russia can be defeated in Ukraine, and, therefore, there has to be some clarity as to the stated endgame to “weaken” Russia.The gloomy prognosis was that European unity apropos the war is no longer holding.
Third, one plausible scenario would be that Russia turns Ukraine into a “frozen conflict” once the current phase of the war reaches the administrative boundaries of Donbass, connects Donbas to Crimea and incorporates Kherson and a “strategic pause and a stalemate in the not-too-distant future” may open the door for diplomacy.
Conceivably, a cold air of realism is blowing across the Washington establishment that Russia is winning the Battle of Donbass and an ultimate Russian military victory over Ukraine is even within the realms of possibility. Notably, Georgetown faculty member Prof. Kupchan injected a heavy dose of realism:
“The longer this [war] goes on, the more the negative knock-on effects economically and politically, including here in the United States, where inflation really is… putting Biden in a difficult position”;
“We need to change that narrative [ that anybody who talks about a territorial settlement is an appeaser] and begin a conversation with Ukraine and, ultimately, with Russia about how to end this war sooner rather than later”;
“Where the front line ends, how much territory the Ukrainians are able to take back, remains to be seen”;
“I do think that the hot war aspect of this is more dangerous than many people perceive, not just because of escalation but because of the blowback effects”;
“I think we’re starting to see cracks in the West… there will be a resurgence of ‘America-first’ Republicanism as we get near the midterms”;
“This all leads me to believe that we should push for war termination and have a serious conversation after that about a territorial disposition.”
None of the panellists argued that the war must be won, or it still can be. But none recognised Russia’s legitimate security interests, either. Gen. Twitty warned that Ukraine may be close to military exhaustion; Russia has established maritime domain control in the Black Sea — and, yet, “as you look at the DIME—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—we’re woefully lacking on the diplomatic piece of this. If you notice, there’s no diplomacy going on at all to try to get to some type of negotiations.”
The liberal internationalists mistakenly believe NATO is the cornerstone of US national security. Despite the failure of Biden’s reckless decision to wage a proxy war against Russia, the US is transfixed on NATO and unwilling to consider a security deal with Moscow.
If the old narrative in Washington was about winning the war, the new narrative is daydreaming about “partisan activity aimed at Russian occupation forces.” Of course, this narrative is even less possible to verify independently than the tall claims previously.
It is in this twilight zone that President Putin situated his taunting remarks on June 9 drawing the historical analogy of Peter the Great’s 21-year long Great Northern War between 1700-1721 — Russia’s successful contestation of the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. After attending a function marking the 350th birth anniversary of the iconic Russian emperor, Putin was chatting up an elite audience of the best and brightest young scientists in Moscow.
Putin said: “Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it. He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was… He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing…everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control.”
“Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.”
Putin gave a complex message here about Russia’s total rejection of NATO supremacy. No matter what it takes, Russia will reclaim its heritage. That is first and foremost a promise to his countrymen, who rally behind Putin, whose poll rating today exceeds 80 percent (as compared to 33% for Biden.)
The point is, there are unspoken fault lines, too. It is noaccident that Russian discourses freely use the expression “Anglo-Saxon” to refer to the challenge on the country’s western border. Demons have been unleashed there. Indeed, what was the meaning of the trip to the Vatican by the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen for an audience with Pope Francis at this point?
The Irish professor Dr. Declan Hayes recently wrote an essay titled Holy War in Ukraine against the backdrop of violent assaults on Russian Orthodox priests inside their churches in the city of Stryi, Lviv region and in Zelensky-controlled Ukraine in general. He saw NATO’s “divide and conquer paw marks” all over them. “Although the fascist assaults on vulnerable Russian priests in front of their Galician congregations are one manifestation that the ghosts of Ukraine’s dark past have resurfaced, murals of the Virgin Mary posing with American Javelin missiles are another,” Prof. Hayes wrote.
Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu announced last week that a “land bridge” has been established to Crimea, one of Moscow’s key war aims, and it is working! It involved the repair of hundreds of kilometres of railway line. Simultaneously, the media reported that rail traffic from Ukraine to the border with Russia has been restored and trucks have begun carrying grain taken from the elevators in the city of Melitopol to Crimea.
Shoigu promised “comprehensive traffic” to and from Russia to Kherson and on to Crimea. Alongside, there’s been a steady stream of reports lately that the integration of the southern regions of Ukraine into Russia is rapidly progressing — Russian citizenship, number plates of cars, internet, banks, pensions and salaries, Russian schools, and so on.
Last week, the influential newspaper Izvestiya cited unnamed military sources claiming that any peace settlement at this point should also include Kiev’s acceptance of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as breakaway regions, in addition to Donbass and Crimea. The key question is no longer whether Kiev can retake the captured south, but how it can stall Russia’s “land bridge” from advancing further westward to Moldavia.
On the other hand, obduracy over peace talks may mean Kiev having to accept at a later date the loss of Odessa as well. But who is there in Europe in a position to bell the cat — reason with Zelensky? Besides, Zelensky is also riding a tiger. He survives on Anglo-Saxon support and in turn the Anglo-Saxons swim or sink with him.
There is no clear end in sight yet for this seamless war. At the end of the day, what stands out is that Putin has compared his actions with regard to Ukraine to Peter the Great’s reclamation of lost historical and cultural space (and lands) for the Slavic peoples during his 18th-century war against Sweden.
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Featured image: Ukrainian casualties in the conflict are running at a rate of somewhere between 600 and 1,000 a day, according to Guardian. (Source: Indian Punchline)
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Anyone who has spent any time in Washington and who has been reasonably engaged in watching the fiasco playing out there might agree that the most powerful foreign lobby is that of Israel, backed up as it is by a vast domestic network that exists to protect and nourish the Jewish state. Indeed, it is the domestic element of the lobby that gives it strength, supported as it is by extravagantly well-funded think tanks and a media that is Jewish dominated when it comes to developments in the Middle East. The power of what I prefer to call the Jewish lobby is also manifest down to state and local levels, where efforts to peacefully boycott Israel due to its war crimes and crimes against humanity have been punished and even criminalized in more than thirty states. In several states, including Virginia, special trade arrangements are designed to benefit Israeli companies at the expense of local residents and taxpayers.
Given all of that, it should be no surprise that Israel consistently gets a pass on its aberrant behavior, even when it acts directly against US interests or kills Americans. Recall, for example, how when General David Petraeusrashly observed in 2010 that Israeli intransigence in advancing its own interests complicated relations with Arab states and could cost American lives in the Middle East, he was quickly forced to recant. And more recently an Israeli sniper murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh without any consequences coming from the Joe Biden White House or from the Tony Blinken-led State Department. Biden has declared himself a Zionist and Blinken is Jewish.
But one of the most horrific Israeli outrages directed against Americans remains little known and hidden from view by the media and the political elite.
Last week, on Wednesday June 8th there was a commemorative gathering at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia that was unreported in the mainstream media. It was the annual day of remembrance for the dwindling group of survivors of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by Israel fifty-five years ago.
The moving service included the ringing of a ship’s bell for each one of the thirty-four American sailors, Marines and civilians that were killed in the deliberate false flag attack that sought to sink the intelligence gathering ship and kill all its crew. The surviving crewmembers as well as friends and supporters come together annually, bound by their commitment to keeping alive the story of the Liberty in hopes that someday the United States government will have the courage to acknowledge what actually happened on that fateful day.
In truth the attack more than half a century ago on the USS Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, has virtually faded from memory, with a younger generation completely unaware that a United States naval vessel was once deliberately attacked and nearly sunk by America’s “greatest friend and ally” Israel. The attack was followed by a cover-up that demonstrated clearly that at least one president of the United States even back fifty-five years ago valued his relationship with the state of Israel above his loyalty to his own country.
It was in truth the worst attack ever carried out on a US Naval vessel in peace time. In addition to the death toll, 171 more of the crew were wounded in the two-hour assault, which was clearly intended to destroy the intelligence gathering ship operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David markings covered up, attacked the ship repeatedly from the air and with gunboats from the sea. They sought to sink the ship, blaming Egypt, so the United States would respond by attacking Israel’s Arab enemies.
“No Member of Congress has ever attended our annual memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery on the anniversary of the attack. We are condemned as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘bigots’ simply because we have been asking that the attack on the USS Liberty be treated the same as every other attack on a US Navy ship since the end of WWII. All we have is ourselves. Not Congress. Not the Navy. Not the DoD. Just ourselves. We need a place where we are welcome. We need our reunions.”
Indeed, the incredible courage and determination of the surviving crew was the only thing that kept the Liberty from sinking. The ship’s commanding officer Captain William McGonagle was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic role in keeping the ship afloat, though a cowardly and venal President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who may have connived with the Israelis to attack the ship, broke with tradition and refused to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, also declining to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in a closed to the public presentation held only reluctantly at the Washington Navy Yard. The additional medals given to other crew members in the aftermath of the attack made the USS Liberty the most decorated ship in the history of the United States Navy.
The cover-up of the attack began immediately, to include concealing the White House’s actual recall of fighter planes launched by the Sixth Fleet to assist the under-attack Liberty. The Liberty crew was subsequently sworn to secrecy over the incident, as were the Naval dockyard workers in Malta and even the men of the USS Davis, which had assisted the badly damaged Liberty to port. A hastily convened and conducted court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry’s senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a “deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew,” also described how “President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The court’s findings were rewritten and sections relating to Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his father’s footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona subsequently used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public in spite of the 55 years that have passed since the attack took place.
There has been one independent investigation into the Liberty affair headed by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer, but it had no legal standing. Its report was headed “Findings of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty, the Recall of Military Rescue Support Aircraft while the Ship was Under Attack, and the Subsequent Cover-up by the United States Government, CAPITOL HILL, WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 22, 2003.” It concluded that “That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence of such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Undersecretary of State George Ball, former CIA director Richard Helms, former NSA directors Lieutenant General William Odom, USA (Ret.), Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret.), and Marshal Carter; former NSA deputy directors Oliver Kirby and Major General John Morrison, USAF (Ret.); and former Ambassador Dwight Porter, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon in 1967…”
More recently, the claim by apologists for the Jewish state that Israel acted in error or due to the fog of war, has been debunked by previously suppressed National Security Agency intercepts that included an Israeli pilot calling his flight controller and stating, in alarm, that they were about to attack what was clearly an American ship. The controller ordered him to continue his attack.
The faux court of inquiry and the medals awarded in secret were only the first steps in the cover-up, which has persisted to this day, orchestrated by politicians and a media that seem to place Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States. Libertysurvivors have been finding it difficult even to make their case in public. In early April 2016 a billboard that read “Help the USS Liberty Survivors – Attacked by Israel” was taken down in New Bedford Massachusetts. The billboard had been placed by the Honor Liberty Vets Organization and, as is normal practice, was paid for through a contractual arrangement that would require the billboard company to post the image for a fixed length of time. It was one of a number of billboards placed in different states. Inevitably, Israel’s well connected friends began to complain. One Jewish businessman threatened to take his business elsewhere, so the advertising company obligingly removed the billboard two weeks early.
After fifty-five years, the dwindling number of survivors of the Liberty are not looking for punishment or revenge. When asked, they will tell you that they only ask for accountability, that an impartial inquiry into the attack be convened and that the true story of what took place finally be revealed to the public.
That Congress is deaf to the pleas of the Liberty crew should surprise no one as the nation’s legislative body has been for years, as Pat Buchanan once put it, “Israeli occupied territory.” The Jewish Lobby’s ability to force Congress and even the presidency to submit to its will has been spelled out in some detail by critics, first by Paul Findley in They Dare to Speak Out, later by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby and in Alison Weir’s Against Our Better Judgment and most recently in Kirk Beattie’s excellent Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.
Congressional willingness to protect Israel even when it is killing Americans is remarkable, but it is symptom of the legislative body’s inclination to go to bat for Israel reflexively, even when it is damaging to US interests and to the rights that American citizens are supposed to enjoy. To cite only one example of how ambitious politicians rally around to protect Israel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a former Navy officer who once served as a congressman for a district in Florida where several Liberty survivors were living. They recount how repeated attempts to meet with DeSantis to discuss a possible official inquiry were rejected, with the Congressman refusing to meet them. Even the veterans’ organization the American Legion walks in fear of Israel. It has refused to allow the USS LibertyVeterans Association to have a table or booth at its annual convention and has even banned any participation by the group at its meetings in perpetuity!
So, the treatment of the USS Liberty should surprise no one in a country whose governing class has been for decades doing the bidding of the powerful lobby of a tiny client state that has been nothing but trouble and expense for the United States of America. Will it ever end? As the Israel/Jewish Lobby currently controls the relevant parts of the federal government and much of the media, change is not likely to happen overnight, but there are some positive signs that the public is regarding Israel less favorably. As Israel is countering that trend by supporting legislation at federal and state levels declaring any group that criticizes Israel to be anti-Semitic, recounting the USS Liberty story could fall under that description and be declared a “hate crime” complete with civil and criminal penalties. One has to hope that the American people will finally wake up to realize that they are tired of the entire farce and decide to wash their hands of the Israel contrived narrative relating to the Middle East. Just imagine picking up the morning newspaper and not reading a front-page story about the warnings and threats coming from an Israeli Prime Minister or from Israeli mouthpieces named Biden, Schumer and Pelosi. That would be a quite remarkable development.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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No College Mandates has launched a major letter campaign to put colleges on notice that continued Covid-19 vaccination mandates put their students, their reputations, and potentially their endowments at risk. The purpose of the letter is to make these policy makers aware of new information they likely did not know existed and to prompt them to further investigate.
To date, more than 60 college presidents have received this letter via certified mail. Across those 60 colleges, approximately 1400 individuals were copied. Many more college letters are in process. By the time we are finished, thousands of college administrators and trustees will be notified.
The letter is below. If you are interested in working on this effort, email us at [email protected]. We’ll set you up to fight this fight with us and make change.
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To College and University Presidents, Senior Leadership and Trustees:
We are writing to notify you of recently available information prompting concern that fraud has been committed by Pfizer and by the FDA in the development and continued distribution of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. Given that your institution mandates Covid-19 vaccination for students as a condition of enrollment, it is incumbent upon you to be fully informed about the safety and efficacy of these vaccines and the claims of fraud that call both into question.
If fraud or willful misconduct is proven, the manufacturers and those involved in the distribution or mandating of the vaccines will lose immunity from liability granted to them under the existing EUA and the PREP act.
We urge you to further investigate. We believe that once you do, you will see how continued Covid-19 vaccine mandates jeopardize the safety of your students and the reputation of your institution.
The new information consists of Pfizer’s biological product file used to obtain FDA approval of Comirnaty and data from the insurance industry showing a huge rise in excess deaths in Millennial and Gen X populations concurrent with the implementation of vaccine approvals and mandates. The excess death data is raising concerns in the insurance industry and on Wall Street. We are also including timely news about product safety, given the FDA’s recent restriction of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to blood clotting concerns.
Following is a brief overview of each category and starting points for further inquiry. We are standing by to provide you with additional information or to connect you to scientists, lawyers and investors who are reviewing the current and evolving data.
Pfizer Biological Product File – background and highlights:
The Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) is a nonprofit group made up of public health professionals, medical professionals, scientists, and journalists. The group exists solely to obtain and disseminate the data relied upon by the FDA to license Covid-19 vaccines. Four days after the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was approved for children over 16, this group submitted a Freedom of Information Act for all data within Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine biological product file. When the FDA asked for 75 years to release that data, PHMPT sued to obtain it and won. Beginning in March 2022, the public has access to Pfizer’s clinical trial data, which is being downloaded in batches monthly. You can find the document releases to-date here.
Thousands of volunteers including scientists, statisticians, doctors, and lawyers continue to examine these downloads and publish their findings. For ready reference, below are just a few of the findings of greatest concern that call into question the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer product and support a thesis of fraud:
Pfizer failed the all-cause mortality endpoint in their unprecedentedly short 28-day clinical trial. In brief, more people died in the vaccinated group than in the placebo group. This was known yet has still not been widely disclosed to the public.
The CDC talking point that vaccines stopped transmission was based on no data, as this metric was notevaluated during Pfizer’s clinical trials. Pfizer and the FDA knew this yet did not disclose it to the public.
Pfizer and the FDA knew as early as November 2020 that Pfizer’s clinical trials showed:
Vaccine failure
Waning vaccine efficacy
A baseline condition for granting a product Emergency Use Authorization is that it must be safe and effective. The data showed that the products are not effective. Yet, based on FDA approval, the CDC promoted them as such. From the initial roll-out in December 2020 through April 1, 2021, the public health messaging was that if you received the shot, you could not get infected and could not transmit the virus. The Pfizer documents are proof that they and the FDA colluded to lie to the American people and the CDC created false public health narratives based on these lies.
Pfizer and the FDA most likely knew in May 2021 that the vaccines caused heart damage in teenagers based on a paper that was already in peer review at that time. The FDA approved the product for teenagers in June 2021 yet did not disclose this risk factor to consumers until August. During that time, all those who received this product did not have informed consent. Parents were not made aware of this known potential risk to their children.
Brook Jackson, a regional director employed by Pfizer sub-contractor Ventavia Research Group, came forward in September 2020 with documented evidence that the company falsified data, unblinded patients and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial conducted by Ventavia. Her findings call into question the integrity of not only Ventavia’s results but of all of the results from Pfizer’s other trial sites and the entire clinical trial. Further information is available in The British Medical Journal.
Excess death data and the insurance industry:
In December 2021, Midwest insurer One America CEO Scott Davidson disclosed a 40% increase in excess deaths over pre-pandemic levels in the working-age (18-64) population in the third quarter. Putting the number into context Davidson said, “The data is consistent across every player in this business . . . Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic. So 40 percent is just unheard of”. Other major insurers have subsequently reported increases in death claims ranging from 21–57 % over expected levels. Most of these deaths are not Covid-19 deaths. Long-term disability claims are also seeing an uptick.
These reports prompted a former institutional investor who was a #1 ranked Wall Street sell-side insurance analyst to confirm the numbers using CDC reported data. His findings, independently confirmed by others, show the spikes in excess deaths are related to the timing of vaccine approvals and mandates. This data is prompting concern at insurance and reinsurance companies, who will bear the financial brunt of this unexpected and unprecedented rise in mortality. It is raising questions about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines in the investment community and beyond.
Of related interest is Pfizer’s amendment in February of its business risk disclosures in its Q4 2021 earnings report. The changes from the Q3 2021 report language center around disclosures of unfavorable safety data and “further information regarding the quality of pre-clinical, clinical or safety data, including by audit or inspection”.
It is likely that neither Pfizer nor the FDA anticipated the court-compelled release of their clinical trial and post-marketing surveillance data and the subsequent public scrutiny of it.
Additional product safety concerns:
The FDA announced on May 5 that they were restricting use of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine due to the risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a syndrome of rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets. The decision to restrict was based on 60 reported cases and 9 fatalities. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also have serious risks and fatalities associated with them including but not limited to blood clots and myocarditis in college-aged populations. These are shown in Pfizer’s post-marketing surveillance data and in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Recording System (VAERS). As of April 29, 2022, there were approximately 1.2 million reports of adverse events following Covid-19 vaccination including more than 18,056 reports of deaths following the Pfizer vaccine, and 7,223 following the Moderna vaccine. Logic demands that Pfizer and Moderna products be restricted immediately as well. Why have they not been? Further, a recent Danish review of all three products in preprint in The Lancet showed that the J&J reduced all-cause mortality but that Pfizer and Moderna did not and may have increased it. Given all this, it is reasonable to think that Pfizer and Moderna products could be restricted or discontinued very soon due to safety concerns. This might well trigger a much higher level of scrutiny of the now-publicly available Pfizer data and the actions of our public health institutions. How would such a situation impact institutions such as yours that continue to mandate the products while knowing such risks exist?
One last thing to consider is the nature and associated secrecy of the contracts that Pfizer forced upon governments as conditions of sale and distribution of their Covid-19 vaccines in their respective countries. A review of some of these contracts can be found here. Terms included such things as the waiving of sovereign immunity, countries assuming full liability in the event that Pfizer was shown to have used another entity’s intellectual property, and that Pfizer be held harmless in the event of injury or death from the products. Why would a company require such terms if it knew its conduct and its products were sound?
We sincerely hope this information has been useful and that you will investigate this matter fully. We urge you to end your vaccine mandates to protect your institution’s students, reputation, and, in the event that fraud is proven, potentially your endowment.
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Comments Off on Fraud Committed by Pfizer and the FDA in the Continued Distribution of COVID-19 Vaccine. Letter Putting Colleges and Universities on Notice
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Pakistan can’t afford to remain the last Sunni Islamist bastion resisting Saudi normalization with Israel. But the country’s rulers, both political and military, want safeguards against a frenzied domestic backlash
The visit to Israel of a group of Pakistani-Americans and Pakistanis last month has mainstreamed the debate surrounding the formalization of ties between the two countries. From newspaper columns, to blogs, to YouTube videos, to Twitter threads in the local Urdu language – all are dedicated to the discussion. While the most visible narrative still betrays Islamist hyperbole and antisemitic hysteria, even the hyper-nationalist internet fora in Pakistan have found space for arguments in favor of recognizing Israel.
That change which is in the air is clear from the surprisingly robust defense of former state television journalist Ahmed Quraishi, who was part of the Pakistani delegation that visited Israel last month, who himself isn’t the only prominent voice championing the formalizing of ties between the two countries today. Despite being sacked by the government affiliated Pakistan Television Cooperation, and being targeted by the recently ousted Imran Khan, many mainstream journalists have come to Quraishi’s defense.
An expert I recently interviewed for a piece on the country’s environmental policies reiterated that he has been saying for years that Pakistan should “learn from Israel” and use Israeli tech knowhow to bring about a green revolution. A similar argument was made here in Haaretz by Pakistani agriculture experts a couple of years ago, and back then, the backlash was severe.
A decade ago, when some of us found space in local English-language newspapers then willing to push the proverbial envelope, questioning the state’s duplicity over Israel, highlighting the similarities between the two countries, and arguing for ties between them, it was an eccentric opinion that barely anyone would take seriously. Today, it is one of the top-level foreign policy deliberations in Pakistan’s corridors of power.
This, of course, is not to suggest that these handful of Pakistani writers penning the occasional piece in local, and more recently Israeli, newspapers have rejigged the national ethos. It is the new geopolitical realities that have transformed what was until recently unthinkable to now being increasingly inevitable.
Even so, decades of anti-Israel frenzy was never going to evaporate without a whimper, even if the push for formalization is coming from the omnipotent military establishment.
On cue, Imran Khan, who had already been fanning conspiracy theories about an “Israeli plot” against him before his removal as the prime minister in April, is now amplifying them in front of crowds of many thousands. At one recent mass rally he declared that his government was “ousted because of a conspiracy to install America’s puppets,” and alleged that the Israel visit was not only masterminded by the Sharif government that replaced his, but that it was “an attempt to impose the Indian-Israeli-American agenda on Pakistan and enslave Pakistan.”
Further than that, Khan is increasingly spilling the beans on the military leadership which once secured his position but with which he’s now at loggerheads. Khan has been reiterating how his successors have been “tasked with” recognizing Israel and a settlement over Kashmir with India, because of course that is precisely what he had been “tasked with” when he was in power.
Last week, the day after Khan first made the allegation that Pakistan’s current leaders were effectively Israel’s pawns, his rival, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, attended the National Assembly session with a performative riposte, wearing a Palestinian scarf with “Jerusalem is ours” inscribed on it.
Antisemitic slurs are being hurled by both the government and the opposition. Maryam Nawaz, vice president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) saying that Khan is the “only person in Pakistan with family ties to Israel,” alluding to his erstwhile marriage with Jemima Goldsmith. Fazlur Rehman, the Islamic cleric who is presiding over the ruling coalition Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), and who has spent the past couple of decades directing antisemitic hatred towards Khan, last week said that it was the ousted prime minister whose “agenda” was to recognize Israel and “taint Islam.”
— Shahidullah Neezami (@Shahidneezami) June 2, 2022
Meanwhile, as the current government, like its predecessors, gaslights its way towards ties with Israel, the leaders of Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) are digging out developments from the PML-N’s previous tenure to suggest that the “plot” had been hatched even before Khan came to power. For Shireen Mazari, the former Khan administration’s human rights minister no less, the current government allowing a Jewish man, Fishel Benkhald, to correct his religion on official documents in 2017 came at the initiation of the “Israel agenda.” Benkhald, Pakistan’s “last Jew,” was part of the delegation that visited Israel last month.
Clearly, neither the government nor the Khan-led opposition wants the formalization of Israeli ties under their watch unless the military can guarantee protection from the inevitable electoral dent that the move would trigger. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has been keen on subservience to the military. However, his government still isn’t certain of the depth and breadth of support it enjoys from the powers that be.
For instance, it took the government two months to make the commonsensical move on removing the unsustainable subsidy on fuel which had pulverized the Pakistani rupee, exacerbated the current account deficit and crashed the markets. Where aligning fuel prices with global crude hike is politically touted as a “tough decision,” recognizing Israel obviously goes off the difficulty charts. However, given that even in a crippling economic crisis, the government has managed to find a way to hike the defense budget by six percent shows that Sharif is willing to put it all on the line over the military bailing his regime out in the election now likely to be in 2023.
The military, of course, has much to gain from the godfathers of normalization with Israel, namely Saudi Arabia and the United States, and was increasingly alarmed by the strident anti-American tone adopted by Khan, particularly in his final months in office.
When Khan was visiting Putin and openly slamming the U.S. in the weeks leading up to his ouster, Army Chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa was orchestrating damage control with Washington in his public statements and diplomatic engagements, both official and backchannel. However, with Khan’s popularity escalating following his unceremonious exit in April, both Gen Bajwa and the institution that he leads, are facing vitriol across social media. #BajwaHasToGo was the top Twitter trend in Pakistan on Monday.
Indeed, a behind-the-scene turf war has been brewing within the military leadership, with a faction backing Khan, whose exit was prompted by the fallout his attempt to exercise the prime minister’s constitutional right to prolong the term of his spymaster instead of nominating Gen Bajwa’s choice. With Bajwa’s term ending in November, he wants a government willing to obediently follow his call and pick his choice as the next army chief.
But this has made Gen Bajwa enemies with Khan’s party, the political grouping that dominates social media like no other. As result, pushing ties with Israel, a treasonous, “anti-Pakistan” argument until last year, is now a popular accusation directed at the military leadership.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the principal force behind Pakistan’s Israel move, cannot afford to wait too long for Pakistan’s civil-military leaders to sort out their wariness over the consequences. With Israeli businesspeople, frequenting Saudi Arabia, the kingdom wants to formalize the ties swiftly especially with Joe Biden’s visit to the two countries – now postponed till July – likely to fortify defense alliances in the region.
Formalizing ties with Israel, coupled with peace in Jerusalem – which, in turn, would require a settlement acceptable to the Palestinian leadership – is the final piece in the Islamic jigsaw of the al-Saud family, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pivoting, in recent years, towards selling a tourism-friendly version of Islam.
The hub of Salafi jihadism for the past four decades, Saudi Arabia, is now coping with new economic realities after losing out oil dominance to U.S. shale in recent years, and with Islam evolving from being the source of al-Saud family’s control over Islamic sites in the Arabian Peninsula to now growing as the bedrock of the Saudi economy.
With Islamic pilgrimage already contributing over $12 billion to the Saudi economy, a reformed, moderate Islam will bolster Saudi geoeconomic power, especially if it can be coupled with hegemony over the Islamic heritage in the region. Easy access to Jerusalem would complete the Mecca-Medina-Jerusalem Islamic trail connecting the three holiest sites in Islam, with the theological rationale for brotherhood with Jews – fellow ‘people of the book’ in Islam – already being peddled by leading Saudi clerics in official sermons.
With the seven-decade old Turkey-Israel ties recently growing warmer after years of frigidity, encouraged by Saudi Arabia which has petrodollars that Recep Tayyip Erdogan desperately needs, and ever-closer ties between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners, it is Pakistan that remains the last Sunni Islamist bastion resisting Saudi normalization with Israel. Pakistan, too, will inevitably be offered sweeteners to soften its stance: massive financial gains to heal an ailing economy, which is once again at the doorstep of the International Monetary Fund for a bailout.
That bailout could allow the government, for instance, to pass a more populist budget next June in the lead up to national elections. A Saudi-backed influence campaign championing both subsidies for essential goods and access to Al-Aqsa could offer an enticing electoral slogan. Despite that, Saudi protection is largely for the military rulers invested in the country not imploding, financially or otherwise. The government wants safeguards from the army that in turn wants safeguards from Riyadh and DC, a veritable food chain of guarantees.
But with a significant chunk of Pakistanis, most notably Imran Khan’s followers, no longer being under the army’s control, it is already more difficult for both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to leverage their influence. Biden and MBS will find little reassurance in solely incentivizing the military leadership, which has hitherto sufficed in guaranteeing Pakistan’s position in regard to Israel. In the meantime, Saudi Arabia is likely to soon make its move on Israel, with or without a Pakistan high on self-righteousness but running out of economic lifelines.
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Craig Lang, a US Army veteran accused by US authorities of carrying out murders on American soil as well as torture and other war crimes in Ukraine, allegedly joined a band of insurgents armed by the Colombian police to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
An FBI affidavit against Lang states that he was in Colombia with an Army pal when the country’s national police provided him with weapons to attack Venezuela.
Lang’s history tracks closely with that of Paul Gray, a fellow US military veteran and white nationalist also fighting in Ukraine. According to new revelations by a former compatriot of US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, Gray was also involved in a scheme to attack Venezuela from Colombian territory.
The startling disclosure by Guaidó’s former associate was prompted by a May 31, 2022 report by The Grayzone which exposed Lang and Gray’s exploits in Ukraine, and identified Lang as having participated in a failed mission to destabilize Venezuela’s government from Colombian territory.
But before Lang arrived on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, at the site of a regime change operation managed by top-level US and Colombian officials, he helped execute a heinous robbery and murder in Florida to finance his trip.
Lang is now back on the battlefield and appears to have joined back up with Right Sector. He's also fully kitted out and wearing a Ukrainian military uniformhttps://t.co/3zkGHAznhNpic.twitter.com/mXEPrb3H2r
Source: wanted murderer “able to obtain firearms from law enforcement in Bogota” for Venezuela regime change plot
Back in 2016, Lang met a fellow army veteran named Alex Zweiefelhofer who shared his hunger for combat and international adventurism. They were in Ukraine at the time, fighting in the ultra-nationalist Right Sector battalion, which was integrated into the Ukrainian military to do battle with pro-Russian separatists.
As the low intensity war dragged on, Lang and Zweiefelhofer grew restless. In a search for action, they tried and failed to insert themselves into the US-backed Somalian army’s fight against Al-Shabaab insurgents, but were deported upon arrival. It was then that they decided to head south in hopes of killing “communists” in Venezuela.
On April 9, 2018, according to the FBI affidavit, Zweiefelhofer said Lang murdered a couple in Florida and robbed them of $3000 to finance their trip to the Colombian border with Venezuela.
But Zweiefelhofer was arrested before he could leave the US and indicted for murder, for which he pled not guilty. A year later, another associate of Lang – a former army buddy identified only as “M.S.M.” in the FBI criminal complaint – came forward to law enforcement with details of their exploits together on the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
According to the FBI affidavit, “Lang told M.S.M. that Lang was going to join combat forces opposed to the Venezuelan government. M.S.M. advised that Lang was going to join a Venezuelan resistance group.”
In his interview with the FBI, M.S.M. claimed he hesitated on the mission because he “did not want to kill people.” He said Lang left alone to the border town of Cucuta, where he linked up with right-wing insurgents.
According to the FBI’s timeline, which was informed by Homeland Security Investigations, Lang arrived in Bogota on September, 25, 2018 and “thereafter departed from Colombia on November 23, 2018.”
The affidavit pegged the Colombian government as a key supplier of the regime change mission against Venezuela:
“M.S.M. told detectives the resistance group Lang joined was able to obtain firearms from law enforcement in Bogota. M.S.M. advised that the resistance group had a safe house in the mountains of Cucuta, Colombia. The group planned to cross into Venezuela and fight the Venezuelan government.”
Lang’s alleged arming by Colombian authorities adds a new layer to Bogota’s well-documented role in US-directed destabilization operations against the Venezuelan government. In fact, the foreign fighter’s brief adventure in Colombia began one month after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro survived an assassination attempt in which commercial drones were strapped with explosives and hovered over his head during a military parade.
Following the failed attack on Maduro, the Venezuelan president immediately blamed Colombian authorities, while US media regurgitated Colombia’s denials. Then-National Security Advisor John Bolton suggested the whole televised incident was a false flag orchestrated by Maduro.
Several participants in the assassination plot were soon arrested, and some were later exchanged for prisoners held by Colombia. One of the ringleaders, Juan Requesens, a leader of the US-funded, Venezuelan Primero Justicia party, confessed to collaborating with a Colombian immigration official to kill Maduro.
In a CNN interview with a perpetrator of the attack “somewhere in Colombia,” one of the attackers admitted to three meetings with American officials following the failed assassination plot. (CNN did not disclose the location where the interview was conducted or where the explosives were made).
In a stroke of absurdity, the FBI affidavit against Lang flatly states: “The United States is at peace with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
Guaidó defector claims Paul Gray was involved in Operation Gideon plot against Venezuela
One day after The Grayzone’s report on the exploits of wanted murderer Craig Lang and white nationalist Paul Gray in Ukraine, an unnamed former associate of Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó came forward with a major revelation.
In an interview with the Venezuelan public TV network TeleSUR, the former Guaidó associate stated that he recognized Paul Gray from planning meetings held for Operation Gideon, a disastrously failed invasion of Venezuela conducted by 60 anti-government insurgents led by US mercenaries.
The source told TeleSUR correspondent Madelein Garcia that like Craig Lang, Gray was in Cucuta as a member of a “group of around 10 or 12 American mercenaries” planning Operation Gideon in February 2019.
That same month, the United States Agency for International Development staged an invasion of Venezuelan territory under cover of a caravan of trucks filled with supposed aid. Complimented by a Live Aid concert organized by British billionaire Richard Branson in Cucuta, the stunt ended in ignominy, as hooligans associated with the US-backed Venezuelan opposition torched USAID’s aid deliveries and attempted to blame their destruction on Maduro. USAID later admitted the entire operation was little more than a regime change ploy.
Like the drone attack and the supposed aid caravan, Operation Gideon was a disaster for everyone involved. According to one key member of the insurgent team, Yacsy Álvarez, the operation was backed by the US with a major assist from Colombian intelligence.
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Some 60 Venezuelan insurgents and private mercenaries with the now-disgraced Silvercorp USA company attempted to enter Venezuela by boat, overtake an airport, and eventually capture President Maduro. But government officials had embedded within the group and easily wrapped up what has since been dubbed “The Bay of Piglets.”
The former Guaidó insider told Telesur that he first encountered Paul Gray, the US white nationalist, at a farm belonging to Don Pedro Barrigas, a Colombian businessman, accused paramilitary leader, and ally of Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Barrigas’ brother also happens to be a senator.
According to the source, Gray went by the name “Snake” during the Gideon planning meetings.
“Paul Gray was sitting there, three seats from me,” the Guaidó defector asserted.
The involvement of an infamous activist who has belonged to four US-based neo-Nazi groups, served in the Georgian National Legion in Ukraine, which is led by a US asset welcomed by members of Congress, and the new revelations of his alleged involvement in Operation Gideon raise serious questions about whether he and Lang are just ideologically-motivated war tourists or whether they are, in fact, imperial shock troops traversing a US intelligence ratline from one operation to the next.
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The following are excerpts of a carefully documented report by Al Jazeera. Our thanks to Al Jazeera for bring this article to our attention.
Since the Russian invasion on February 24, Ukraine has received billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and military equipment from at least 28 countries.
Twenty-five of the 28 nations providing military assistance to Ukraine are NATO members, including the US and UK, which are supplying Kyiv with sophisticated weapons such as multiple rocket launch systems (MLRS). Despite its growing arsenal, Ukraine, which has an active military personnel of just 200,000, is significantly outgunned by Russian forces.
Source: Al Jazeera
What weapons has Ukraine received?
The military aid sent to Ukraine includes conventional weapons as well as more advanced equipment and weaponry.
…
What weapons has the US provided?
During the Russian invasion, the US has committed at least $54bn in aid for Ukraine, including more than $20bn in military support approved by Congress in May, as well as a number of aid packages approved in March.
The DoD package includes:
High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition;
Five counter-artillery radars;
Two air surveillance radars;
1,000 Javelins and 50 Command Launch Units;
6,000 anti-armour weapons;
15,000 155mm artillery rounds;
Four Mi-17 helicopters;
15 tactical vehicles;
Spare parts and equipment
Source: Al Jazeera
Advanced weaponry
On June 1, the Biden administration said it would provide Ukraine with high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) under the condition that Ukrainian forces not use them to hit targets inside Russian territory.
The M142 HIMARS is a high-tech lightweight rocket launcher that can strike targets at a range of 80km (50 miles). This is almost double the range of the current M777 howitzers, which the US promised to provide earlier in the conflict.
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“For God’s sake, people, let’s make our Police and MPs put a stop to this now!”
“The situation is getting out of control,” New Zealand doctors warn: The list of probable deaths due to the Covid “vaccinations” are getting longer and longer; the doctors are talking about a “humanitarian crisis.”
First, in an open letter, they denounced the actions of the regulatory authorities. Then, they went directly to the police to finally demand an investigation and an end to the unspeakable suffering caused by the Covid “vaccines.” But the police prefer to ignore such appeals. The damage that has been done is not “significant” enough for them.
Since the arrival of the gene-therapy injections, New Zealand has pushed to have 90% of its population receive two injections. In December, the country successfully reached its milestone. To achieve its 90% “vaccination” goal, Dr. Monchy explained that every citizen who received the injection was bribed with a voucher of 20 NZD (12 euros). At the same time, doctors have been given 359 NZD (216 euros) per vaccine.
Demand Police Investigate Covid ‘Vaccine’ Deaths
The New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science (NZDSOS) fight against coercion and censorship in the context of Covid vaccinations. In a lengthy open letter, they described the consequences of compulsory vaccination and the suppression of unpleasant facts. The Health Forum NZ People’s Database, run by volunteers, now contains almost 500 deaths with a temporal and presumed causal connection to the Covid vaccination. The group has made part of the list available to the public, with changed names to protect the privacy of the victims. However, the doctors have sent an unedited list to the New Zealand police.
To the NZ Police, who have the actual patient’s names, we say this: It is not enough to hide behind apparently controlled, failed or corrupted government institutions. You are here to defend the public good. Period. You are supposed to know wrong from right; lies from truth.
The doctors are urgently calling for investigations – not least because many reports on the alleged vaccine deaths show connections to the Covid shots should be covered up.
We are alleging death by regulatory failure, as you know. You will see in the summarised death reports (representing a third of over 450 available) that there are some allegations of professionals and Police deviating from the usual processes that should follow a possible death from medical treatment. Of course, the unredacted list we give you is absolutely confidential except as needed for your formal investigations.
However, the group also notes that police have already ignored three open lettersfrom their legal colleagues, New Zealand Lawyers Speaking Out with Science.Police commanders are said to have dismissed the accusations of critical experts because no level of actual damage had yet been reached. But then, what are all the people who suddenly died just days after their Covid shot? Irrelevant? Expendable?
Victims of all ages, from teenagers to seniors, are listed on the group’s website. The majority of people were previously healthy, but some also had previous illnesses and were therefore “in need of the vaccine,” according to the left’s narrative. However, sick people were excluded from the vaccination studies, and consequently, no data on safety are available. The authorities’ ignorance is a slap in the face to the victims’ families while allowing the list of deaths to continue growing unchecked.
Blood Money
“Rumours abound that some families have been paid off to keep quiet after losing a child to the coerced injection program,” stated NZDSOS. The group is in the process of speaking with “parents who would be in the midst of the worst grief imaginable yet might dig deep for the courage to disclose government bribery.”
As reported previously by RAIR Foundation USA, New Zealand doctor René de Monchy has been spotlighting the Globalist forces using Covid to help them seize control of the country. This past December, the brave doctor questioned why doctors and patients receive monetary “vaccine” incentives. Furthermore, Dr. Monchy believes the actual number of people who have died from the vaccines is not reported, and relatives of those killed from the injection are receiving “hush money.”.
Some of the deaths on the list include:
Eddie, age 13, Wellington. He died in his sleep several nights after receiving the jab. He died at an event with some of his school buddies. presumably, he is the teen mentioned here by MOH
Joanna. 15-year-old Auckland. A friend’s mum reported the death. Joanna collapsed in her bathroom; her heart had stopped. She died on the way to the hospital or while there.
Julio, age 19, Feb ’22. Known epilepsy but had a seizure and DIED 2 HOURS AFTER 2nd jab. Shouldn’t this be investigated? Unfortunately, all medical conditions were excluded from clinical trials.
Timothy, 33, Paraparaumu. Died of a heart attack at home two days after jab.
Janice, 35, Taupare, healthy, was found dead in the bathroom approx 12 days after the shot.
Aneela, in her 30s, died suddenly during childbirth in Auckland, a week prior had her jab. She was found to have blood clots. Her baby was delivered by cesarean and died at four days.
Rory Nairn, 26, of Dunedin. Died of myocarditis on 17/11. The MOH has acknowledged this as one of 3 vaccine-related deaths up to this point. They implied he delayed seeking medical help.
Piotr, 53, Auckland. He was found dead by his mother sometime shortly after the first dose. Unexplained
Tongan couple, South Auckland, BOTH died mid-March 2021, within 12 hours of each other. 5 children left who have been awarded compensation during teenage years. Names withheld. Lawyers confirm the case.
Louis, age 29, is a keen soccer player. Sudden chest pain, then collapsed and died after practice. Healthy and energetic. Leaves a young family. Joins many dead athletes aroundthe world.
In Dunedin, Liam, age 17, died after rapid onset rare autoimmune disease following vaccination.
Claire, 33, Christchurch, sudden post-vaccine death just after Xmas day 2021. Shocking and sudden. His elder care company mandated it.
Annabelle, age 51, at home in Christchurch, was found dead in bed in October 2021 by her partner. Had 2nd jab 2-3 days before.
Clarice, 54, Rangiora, died three weeks after 2nd jab. Sudden. Leaves 6 children.
Morty, Karori, age 21. A sudden medical event at home after the first jab.
Florence, 42, Wellington. Unexpected fatal brain blood clot sometime after 1st jab on 16/7/21—health care worker.
Hettie, age 50, Pahiatua. Unexpected death March 2022, just after having his 2nd or booster. They had an inherited neuromuscular disorder that was not assessed before roll-out in the brief Pfizer trial. One of your authors has the same condition.
Louisa, 67, Manawatu. She had known heart issues prior, but her cardiologist assured her it would be safe and effective for her as she was scared to be jabbed. Instead, she collapsed the same morning and died in ED later that day.
Anne, 42. Invercargill was fit and healthy. One day she sat up in bed with a head rush. Then ten days after the 2nd jab in February 2022, she died. The autopsy showed no known cause.
Aio, age 16. Schoolgirl from Whangarei. Died in December 2021, 2 weeks after vaccination, of cerebral hemorrhage and blood clots. Some hospital workers privately agreed that the vaccine killed them.
Isabella Alexander, 17 years old, died in September 2021. The cause of death was multiple blood clots. She collapsed in her father’s arms while running. She had been feeling unwell for a week after the 1st vaccination.
The list of examples goes on and on. Read more here.
A Plea for Sanity and Action
“For God’s sake, people, let’s make our Police and MPs put a stop to this now,” exclaims NZDSOS:
From all our research, and according to our personal experiences within our families and social networks, we believe the rates of heart disease from the vaccine are already hundreds of times worse than the government is claiming and, along with other aspects of this ‘pandemic response’, will scar the history and the very hearts of this country for generations.
There is an evolving humanitarian crisis, and the government, Police, the vaccine industry, and most doctors are lost at sea.
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Amy Mek is an investigative journalist: Banned in parts of Europe, Wanted by Islamic countries, Threatened by terror groups, Hunted by left-wing media, Smeared by Hollywood elites & Fake religious leaders.
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***
From the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western media have systematically misrepresented developments on the battlefield. Time and again, major media organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, have cited military ‘experts’ from NATO armies and officials from the US, British and Ukrainian governments—none of whom constitute objective sources—to support the false claim that Ukraine is either winning the war or has battled Russian forces to a standstill.
One of starkest examples of the Western media’s dishonesty is the assertion that Russia was forced by Ukrainian resistance to make a humiliating retreat from Kyiv. The Associated Press is one of the many media organizations which advanced that narrative, reporting on April 7 that Vladimir Putin’s government had “counted on a quick victory” by attempting to “storm” Ukraine’s capital, but that the Russian offensive ‘failed’:
When Russian forces invaded Ukraine from the north, east and south on Feb. 24. President Vladimir Putin counted on a quick victory, similar to its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
The Russian troops that pushed into Ukraine from Moscow’s ally Belarus quickly reached the outskirts of Kyiv, only 75 kilometers (47 miles) south of the border, but they got bogged down facing Ukrainian defenses.
After the failed attempts to storm the capital and other big cities in the north, Russian forces tried to encircle and pummel them with artillery and airstrikes. The relentless barrages led to massive civilian casualties and damaged infrastructure, but didn’t weaken Ukraine’s resolve. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, successfully used artillery and drones against Russian convoys that stretched for dozens of kilometers (miles) along highways outside Kyiv. That created massive logistical problems for the Russians.
On March 29, Russia announced a drastic change in strategy, saying it would scale down military activities around Kyiv and Chernihiv, focusing instead on the “liberation” of Donbas.
A quick withdrawal from areas in the north and northeast followed, with forces pulling back to Belarus and Russia for rest and re-supply.
Moscow sought to put a positive spin on what Ukrainian and Western officials described as the failure of the offensive. Russia said the action in the north was intended to tie down and weaken Ukrainian forces there and prevent them from joining troops engaged in the fighting in the east.
Numerous military analysts, including former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter, disagreed with the mainstream narrative of ‘the battle for Kyiv.’ They argued that Russia’s advance on Kyiv was not a genuine attempt to take the city, but a “feint” designed to tie Ukrainian forces down in and around Ukraine’s capital while other Russian forces ‘shaped the battlefield’ in the Donbas—the Russian military’s principal objective.
Among other things, Ritter pointed out that the Russian columns that had advanced on Kyiv consisted of some 40,000 troops, and that no one with half of a military brain would attempt with so few soldiers to conquer a city of three million people defended by 60,000 Ukrainian troops. According to Ritter, “the so-called ‘battle for Kyiv’ is a clear-cut example of the difference between perception and reality.”
Scott Ritter is not the only military analyst who rejected the West’s claims that Russia had lost the “battle for Kyiv” and was losing the war.
Larry C. Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, argued that Russian forces had reached the outskirts of the capital with extraordinary speed and that, within the first day of the conflict, Russian forces wiped out all Ukrainian Ground Radar Intercept capabilities and thereby deprived the Ukrainian Air Force of its ability to do air to air intercept.
Five weeks after Russia launched its invasion, Lt. Gen Prakash Katoch, a retired special forces officer from the Indian military, authored an article entitled “America’s Information War is Self-Delusional.” In it, Katoch argued that Russia was winning the war decisively. “The West doesn’t need state media,” he wrote, “it has corporations that own both the state and the media; much more potent and dangerous who together are blowing Biden’s trumpet.”
Seven weeks after Russia launched its invasion, Jacques Baud, a former colonel of the Swiss General Staff and an ex-member of the Swiss Strategic Intelligence, wrote “the idea that Russia is trying to take over Kiev, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, comes typically from the West—that is what they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and what they wanted to do in Syria with the help of the Islamic State. But Vladimir Putin never intended to shoot or topple Zelensky. Instead, Russia seeks to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate, by surrounding Kiev… From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of its kind: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.”
These and other voices of dissent were systematically excluded from Western mainstream discourse about the state of the Ukraine war.
Then, a strange thing happened.
In early April, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, blurted out the truth.
Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that US officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.
Remarkably, however, the Western mainstream media have largely ignored Sullivan’s admission that “Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment.” Supposedly reputable news organizations have continued to peddle the nonsense that Russia’s military attempted to conquer Kyiv and was forced to retreat by Ukrainian resistance.
As recently as June 9, The Guardianpublished an analysis of the battle for Sievierodonetsk (a battle which Ukraine has essentially lost) in which the authors asserted that “Russia changed its invasion plan in April after its botched attempt to seize the major cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa.”
So determined are Western mainstream media to peddle the Ukraine-is-winning fantasy that, even when Western officials tell the truth about the war, the media often ignore them.
Afghanistan veterans get a taste of their own medicine
Shortly after Russia’s invasion began, Western media trembled with excitement upon learning that the renowned Canadian sniper known as ‘Wali,’ a veteran of Canada’s failed mission in Afghanistan, had gone to Ukraine to kill Russians.
Perhaps it’s just my pacifist sensibilities, but I don’t believe that a soldier who kills ‘up to 40 persons a day’ in an unjust war is a hero. Whatever the legality of Wali’s killing sprees may have been, I tend to view such ‘heroes’ as mass murderers.
Nonetheless, the Western media’s love affair with Wali became so intense that, in March of this year, the Norman Brigade (the international combatants’ brigade of which Wali was a member) issued a statement noting that media attention around Wali was starting to endanger their mission in Ukraine.
Whether or not you approve of Wali’s (alleged) military exploits, Wali himself admits that he in fact does not hold the world record for the longest-range kill. He also admits that “the adrenaline rush” plays a role in his decision to serve in war zones. “I think a lot of military folks are like that,” he added.
To a considerable degree, Wali’s mystique is hype. That became abundantly clear when Wali and his Canadian teammate in Ukraine revealed to the media what they had experienced there.
On May 6, CBC published an extensive interview of “Shadow,” a former Canadian soldier from Sherbrooke who accompanied Wali in Ukraine. After serving on the eastern Ukrainian front with Wali, Shadow had withdrawn to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he elected to confine himself to humanitarian work. He told the CBC that he would not return to the eastern front because it was “just hell” and he had had “too many close calls” there. As explained by the CBC:
The last two months for Shadow have been a mad kaleidoscope of firefights and near-misses—nothing like the somewhat tame life he experienced over a dozen years in a Canadian uniform.
His first time in combat—ever—saw him thrown into the pitched battle for Irpin, a once-pleasant tree-lined community 20 kilometres west of Kyiv that proved to be the high-water mark for the Russian advance on the capital.
Shadow was tasked with assisting Wali by carrying ammunition and watching his friend’s back. During one Russian assault, the two men were blown out of their sniper’s nest by a shell.
“We got hit by a tank,” Shadow said. “He shelled the building and missed us by, like, three metres. After that, we started to get more small arms fire, and then we got out of the building, and then after that … a huge firefight.
“I haven’t … that was my first firefight. The Russians, they were like 50 metres from us, bullets flying everywhere, everywhere. We couldn’t do anything, and they actually tried to surround us.”
According to Shadow, the sniper’s nest was situated in an “apartment building” which he and Wali had entered for the purpose of targeting Russian soldiers. By using that building to fire upon Russians, Wali and Shadow turned it into a legitimate military target. Shadow does not explain to the CBC journalist (nor does the CBC journalist ask) whether he and Wali took adequate steps to ensure that there were no civilians sheltering in that building before they turned it into a military target.
Later, in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Wali and Shadow narrowly escaped with their lives while attempting, unsuccessfully, to target a Russian tank. Their two Ukrainian colleagues were not so lucky: they were killed by a shell fired from a Russian tank after they ignored Wali’s advice and emerged from their trench to smoke a cigarette.
Some days after Shadow’s interview by the CBC, Wali himself was interviewed by the right wing, pro-war National Post. According to the Post, Wali described his experience of the Ukraine war as a “terrible disappointment.” “It was pretty much close calls every week,” he said, adding that his hunting for enemy tanks was often hampered by “the overwhelming Russian forces” he faced.
Tellingly, Wali confessed to the Post that, “if I had all the means I had in Afghanistan, it would be slaughter all day long … it would be easy.” (Who would have imagined that the “slaughter” of human beings could be “easy”?)
Other international combatants in Ukraine have recounted similarly daunting experiences. Former British soldier Aidan Aslin, who was captured in Mariupol last month, told the British press about having to cope with a lack of food, no ammunition and relentless artillery bombardment. Ben Grant, a former British Royal Marine and veteran of Afghanistan, told The Telegraph that the fighting in Ukraine was worse than any he had previously experienced.
After Wali and Shadow revealed their experiences to the world, CIA veteran Larry Johnson offered this scathing assessment of the Afghan war veterans who had gone to fight in Ukraine:
Watch this video. Afghanistan, US infantry take small arms fire from the building in front of them, call in an airstrike, a bullet appears to strike the ground in the camera field at 2:26, bomb hits at 2:32, Now watch this video. Afghanistan, US infantry in a hollow, some gunfire but pretty relaxed, call in the air force, A-10s arrive at 3:34 and make several passes, loud cheers. There are plenty more videos like this from NATO’s recent wars. Take fire, sit still, call in the air force to blast whoever is shooting at you (collateral damage? Who cares? Blow up the whole building and everybody in it).
No doubt “Shadow” and “Wali” and the rest of them, remembering their experience in a NATO war, expected to be on the giving end. Instead they found themselves on the receiving end. In their interviews, they describe two front-line experiences in Ukraine. In the first they are setting up a sniper position in an apartment building (not using civilians as a shield, I hope) when they’re knocked out by a tank round. Never saw it coming. In the next story “Wali” learns how to use a Javelin anti-tank missile and the two set off to go tank-hunting. They find two Ukrainian soldiers in a trench and “Shadow” gets in the trench while “Wali” goes off to look at the Russian tank. The two Ukrainians get out to have a smoke—BANG!—when “Shadow” recovers consciousness, one of the Ukrainians is dead and the other dying. The two Canadians apparently decide that that’s enough for them. They never actually saw a Russian through their sniper scope.
What’s going on in Eastern Ukraine right now is something like the two Afghanistan videos but the other way around and on a much larger scale. The Russians inch forward, if they meet resistance, they plaster it with artillery. Inch forward, repeat. It’s slow but it’s destroying the Ukrainian Armed Forces (it’s destruction of the enemy’s fighting power, not territorial gain, that wins wars. Just ask NATO—capture Kabul in six weeks, leave twenty years later in defeat). The daily briefings given by the Russian Defense Ministry mention hundreds of artillery fire missions every day. Ukrainian prisoners speak of continuous artillery fire. “The god of war” Stalin (or was it Suvorov?) called it. Here is the result of this relentless shelling.
The Western volunteers have no idea and neither do the cable TV “experts.” No one in NATO knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end (“Shadow” and “Wali” and some others know now, however, but it doesn’t look as if they want to re-live the experience).
And that’s one of the reasons why Western coverage of the war is so off-track – the TV “experts” can only process what’s happening through their NATO-made spectacles.
As I explained recently in an article entitled “NATO is a multi-trillion-dollar fraud,” there is a world of difference between fighting the Taliban and fighting a large modern army. The Taliban relied almost entirely on small arms and improvised explosive devices—and yet NATO militaries, which collectively spend over US$1 trillion per year, were unable to defeat the Taliban in twenty years of warfare in which NATO militaries and their Afghan army proxy employed a vast array of sophisticated weaponry.
Russia’s military, by contrast, is ranked as the world’s second most powerful military. It possesses a vast arsenal, including hypersonic cruise missiles, highly accurate artillery systems, more than 12,000 tanks and nearly 800 fighter jets.
In the Ukraine war, we are witnessing the collective astonishment of Afghanistan war veterans who have spoken proudly of their military exploits in that poor and devastated country, but who have never had to wage war against a large, sophisticated and modern army.
Reality is catching up with the West
Recently, the triumphalist tone of Western discourse about the Ukraine war has become more muted. The disparity between the reality on the ground and the West’s semi-fictional narrative of the war has simply become too obvious. Accordingly, NATO states and the Western mainstream media have begun to prepare the public for Ukraine’s looming defeat.
🔴Exclusive: Ukraine forces 'outgunned up to 40 to one' by Russian forces https://t.co/tvG4tI6bfp
Last week, reports appeared in the British press about an assessment of the war that has been compiled by Western and Ukrainian intelligence services. The assessment is grim, to put it mildly. According to The Independent:
Ukrainian troops are suffering massive losses as they are outgunned 20 to one in artillery and 40 to one in ammunition by Russian forces, according to new intelligence painting a bleak picture of the conflict on the frontline.
A report by Ukrainian and Western intelligence officials also reveals that the Ukrainians are facing huge difficulties responding to Russians shelling with their artillery restricted to a range of 25 kilometres, while the enemy can strike from 12 times that distance.
For the first time since the war began, there is now concern over desertion. The report, seen by The Independent, says the worsening situation in the Donbas, with up to a hundred soldiers being killed a day, is having “a seriously demoralising effect on Ukrainian forces as well as a very real material effect; cases of desertion are growing every week.”
Not only is Russia winning decisively on the battlefield, but arguably, it is winning the economic war as well.
Recently, Wolfgang Münchau, the former co-editor of Financial Times Deutschland and the director of Eurointelligence, published a commentary entitled “Are sanctions making Russia richer?” Münchau wrote:
Three months on, it’s time to ask: are the sanctions working?
The answer from the Bank of Russia’s balance of payment data for January to April isn’t reassuring. It showed that the sanctions are emphatically not working, at least not in the way that they were intended. Russia’s current account surplus (roughly speaking: exports minus imports) jumped to an all-time high at $96 billion—almost four times the same period last year. The total balance of goods and services shows an even wider gap: $106 billion, treble that of last year.
At this rate, Russia’s current account surplus could hit $250 billion. So the extra money being banked by Russia is almost the same amount as the $300 billion of central bank assets and foreign currency reserves that were frozen by the West after the invasion.
Sensing that NATO is about to suffer a humiliating defeat—and make no mistake, NATO is at war with Russia—some notable figures from the Western political establishment have begun to argue for negotiations with Russia and for major Ukrainian concessions, in order to secure peace.
In late May, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a stunned audience at Davos that Ukraine should accept giving up part of its territory to reach a peace deal with Russia and end the war immediately.
On June 6, in a rare public speech, Greece’s former Conservative Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis cautioned that a long Ukraine war risked pitting the West against an anti-Western coalition and that “such a convergence… would be an enormous challenge for the West and would portend tectonic changing in the currently acceptable rules of the game and unfathomable consequences.” Karamanlis said the EU should take the initiative to conclude the war in Ukraine the soon as possible.
Then, on June 11, Edward Luttwak, a US military strategist and former presidential advisor, gave an extensive interview on the Ukraine war to Radio Free Europe in which Luttwak argued that Ukraine’s government should agree to a plebiscite on independence in Luhansk and Donetsk.
Yes, Ukraine has a right to resist Russia’s invasion, but should it exercise that right?
I, too, believe that Ukraine’s government should negotiate with Russia, and that it should make major concessions in order to secure peace for its people.
In recent weeks, when I have expressed that view publicly, I’ve sometimes been met with indignant protestations that Ukraine has a right to resist Russia’s invasion.
I readily agree that resistance is Ukraine’s right, but having the right to resist does not necessarily mean that resistance is prudent or humane.
Ukraine’s military is suffering massive losses. The wounded and the family members of the dead will be an enormous burden for Ukrainian society to bear in the years ahead. With each day the war goes on, that burden will increase, as will the deterioration in Ukraine’s devastated economy and the destruction of vital Ukrainian infrastructure. Meanwhile, Russia’s military continues to expand its control over the Donbas, and could eventually move on Odessa and permanently deprive Ukraine of access to the Black Sea.
As for the warmongers who reflexively proclaim ‘send more weapons,’ we have no good reason to believe that the transfer of yet more NATO weaponry to Ukraine will carry its forces to victory. The billions of dollars worth of weaponry that NATO states have delivered thus far have not halted the Russian advance, nor have they mitigated the Ukrainian losses to any material degree. Moreover, in twenty years of warfare in Afghanistan, NATO repeatedly employed much of its most sophisticated weaponry, and yet its forces were unable to defeat an adversary that was far less formidable than Russia’s military.
The delivery of more NATO weaponry is unlikely to alter the final outcome of this war, but it may well prolong this war, with disastrous consequences for all of Ukraine and, potentially, for the world.
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Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, human rights activist and former candidate for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada. He is based in Montréal.
Featured image: A Ukrainian soldier carries a Javelin anti-tank missile through a trench in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Photo courtesy the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Facebook.
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In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials. After all, why else would the members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon’s assets within the mainstream press, react so vociferously against the idea of having the Inspector General monitor how the money is being used? And what better way to ensure that Ukrainian officials remain on board for perpetual war than the payment of bribes to officials serving in what is perhaps the most corrupt regime on the planet?
For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the U.S. and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.” The article then goes on to detail some of those “luxurious landings.”
Okay, yes, it is conceivable that those Afghan officials are all honest politicians and bureaucrats in an impoverished nation who became millionaires by dutifully saving portions of their government salaries.
But there is another possibility, a much more likely one in my opinion. Do you remember those planeloads of U.S.-taxpayer-provided hundred-dollar bills that Pentagon officials were shipping into Afghanistan? Do you recall how there wasn’t any Inspector General monitoring how all that moolah was being disbursed? I think there is a very good chance that it was being handed out to Afghan officials as bribes to bring them on board in support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country.
I’m reminded of the CIA’s plan to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile after he received a plurality of votes in the 1970 presidential election. Since the election was thrown into the Chilean congress, the CIA decided to secretly bribe the members of the Chilean Congress with U.S.-taxpayer money as a way to induce them to vote against Allende.
The CIA also initiated a scheme designed to induce the Chilean national-security establishment to implement a violent coup that would keep Allende from taking office and, most likely, leave him dead in the process. As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, when the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, refused to go along with the CIA’s evil and illegal scheme, the CIA orchestrated his kidnapping/assassination, which left Schneider shot dead on the streets of Santiago.
Ironically, the strong public reaction in Chile against Schneider’s assassination doomed the CIA’s bribery plot, and the Chilean congress ended up confirming Allende as president. Three years later, the CIA’s regime-change operation succeeded when the Chilean national-security establishment, with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, took control over the government, leaving the democratically elected Allende dead in the process.
As I have repeatedly written, the war in Ukraine is not about freedom. It’s about membership in the old, rotten Cold War dinosaur known as NATO. Ukrainian officials were willing to sacrifice thousands of their citizens and the destruction of their country ostensibly for the sake of joining NATO. The question that obviously arises is: Was there something else — like the payment of multimillion bribes from U.S.-taxpayer-provided moolah — that induced crooked and corrupt Ukrainian officials to sacrifice their citizens and their country?
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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The war in Ukraine is serving as a justification for multinationals to speculate massively on the prices of commodities, as well as energy and world transport. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if its president had not wanted to make his people suffer by destroying a nation, or if the European Union had taken the necessary steps to bring Russia and Ukraine closer together in peace and thus avoided what is happening today, a global economic war of unprecedented speculation with unpredictable consequences for civilian populations.
The presidents of the governments involved, both in the direct conflict and those who unconditionally support Ukraine, could have diplomatically stopped this war madness in which we are immersed, where the only beneficiaries are undoubtedly the arms companies – which have their great field of business in war conflicts – and the politicians who, with their bad public management, blame the war driven by themselves for the rises in all basic prices. It has been the perfect dish to avoid having to justify their mistakes and mismanagement.
And while all this is going on, they are asking the civilian population to tighten their belts, turn down their heaters and save energy. Who has asked the people for a consultation to enter into an economic war that has got out of hand? Why have they given arms to kill, instead of diplomacy and peace? Where are the demonstrations that the Socialist Party promoted to say No to war when now they themselves have entered into a war that will cause more poverty and hunger in the world?
But this is not all. The European Union’s support for the war has clouded and erased from its objectives the fight against climate change, or those other war conflicts that nobody talks about and which are claiming the lives of thousands of people. What hypocrisy and what foolishness the leaders of the European Union possess, those who have not been elected by the citizens and those MEPs who dance to the beat of the drum that warms their armchairs the most. That is the reality. There is no democracy and there is no freedom of vote even among the deputies, senators or MEPs who are beholden to obeying the particular interests of each party. The world political system must change if we are to have a society with dignity.
At the same time, the murder of indigenous peoples continues in a shameful and unscrupulous manner, without the governments themselves respecting them, breaking the laws that protect them, violating their constitutional rights, devastating their communities, denying them citizenship and cutting off all aid, while expelling them from their legally acquired and legally recognized territories.
Today, as reported by Survival International without any media coverage (they are too busy with Ukraine), thousands of Maasai fled their homes and took refuge in the bush after a brutal police crackdown, as they demonstrated against the Tanzanian government’s attempts to drive them out of the Serengeti National Park, in order to make more space for trophy hunting by wealthy foreigners or mass tourism which only increases the serious problem against the native peoples, in a clear business deal between the government and the various companies involved in the exploitation of the Serengeti.
Survival International reports that on 8 June, dozens of police vehicles and some 700 officers arrived in Loliondo, Northern Tanzania, next to the Serengeti National Park, to demarcate 1,500 square kilometres of Maasai land as a game reserve. On 10 June, the officers fired on Maasai protesting against the attempt to evict them from their land. There have been numerous injuries and one death so far, as the exact number of victims is not known, as there has been a huge raid to try to ensure that no images taken on mobile phones have recorded the brutality of the police, confiscating the mobile devices and arresting numerous people.
Where is the European Union that does not call for immediate sanctions against Tanzania for the brutal repression of the Maasai? Where are the politicians denouncing these genocides and crimes against humanity? Where are the images that inform citizens of what is happening to the Maasai so that no one travels to Tanzania to protest this serious aggression?
According to Survival International in its press release, Germany is a major funder of nature conservation projects in Tanzania and is heavily involved in the development of conservation policies in the country, which have led to the expulsion of thousands of indigenous people from their land. The Frankfurt Zoological Society, according to Survival, funds rangers and officials, some of whom, according to the Maasai, have been involved in recent evictions. The UAE-based Otterlo Business Company (OBC) organises hunting trips for the country’s royal family and their guests, and we are calling on the company to stop organising trips to Tanzania in protest at the government’s infamous harassment of the Maasai, the true owners of their land.
Clearly, we are facing an acceleration of harassment and genocide of indigenous peoples to take their lands and exploit the natural resources found on them, in the face of the looming global crises and the need to remove the land in search of minerals essential for rich societies to continue to subsist, for example with electric vehicles that on the one hand claim to be environmentally friendly while thousands of companies are already looking like real moles for the minerals needed to power the batteries, at the cost of the massive destruction of our sensitive planetary biodiversity.
And this is not just about the Maasai. I recently denounced what is happening to the Batwa in the Kauzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo or the direct harassment of the Qom Indigenous Community in Formosa (Argentina). The Consejo Indigenista Misionero-Cimi denounces that the Bolsonaro government uses the war in Ukraine to advance its project of death against indigenous peoples, using a private and hidden war in front of the media that are often complicit in the silence of these criminal genocides, which today continue to advance irremediably violating their human rights. This is just one example of a long list of oppression of original peoples that is being silenced without action being taken against the governments that carry it out.
The Maasai have been the latest victims so that rich people from all over the world can go to the Serengeti to kill elephants and lions without shame or consciousness, or for those long queues of tourist vehicles to see the animals without realising that because of them, an ancestral people are dying and being repressed so that the business of tourism or hunting can continue to line the pockets of politicians and officials of an already poor country. It is therefore necessary that tour operators cancel trips to Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo until they respect the Maasai and Batwa as they deserve, with all the guarantees, and hand over their stolen territories.
It is outrageous and beyond all rationality, the behaviour of the governments and the passivity of the International Community that is only interested in seeing what it wants and at a certain time, closing the doors to the evidence of the crimes against humanity that are being committed and the passivity of doing nothing, closing their eyes and only shouting when they see their personal interests being endangered. This is the current political model that has been implanted in the world’s societies. Until it is changed, and it will be difficult to change, we will be doomed to the destruction of human society, where ambition and economic power, which uses politicians as absolute puppets, will put an end to the world’s democracies and envelop us in an absolute chaos that will be difficult to escape. This is not science fiction, it is a reality and future generations will find themselves in a dead end.
That is why society needs to wake up and, shouting “enough is enough”, we must learn to take the peaceful course of the Earth ship and take it to a safe harbour for repair so that, once repaired, we can sail in peace and freedom on the seas and paths of our own evolution.
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U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative public health group, has filed numerous lawsuits against federal agencies for violating provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The lawsuits are part of our efforts to uncover what is known about the origins of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, leaks or mishaps at biosafety labs, and the risks of gain-of-function research that seeks to augment the infectivity or lethality of potential pandemic pathogens.
We have filed more than 90 state, federal, and international public records requests seeking information about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the risks of biosafety labs and gain-of-function research.
(1) U.S. Department of State. On April 25, 2022, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for violating provisions of FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks documents and correspondence of State employees, including C.S. Eliot Kang, Ann Ganzer, David Feith, Bruce Turner, Robert Wood and Laura Gross, related to a State Dept. investigation of the origins of Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, gain-of-function research, dual use research of concern, the Global Virome Project, and other matters. Case 1:22-cv-01130-JMC.
(2) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On April 18, 2022, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for violating the provisions of the North Carolina Public Records Act. The lawsuit, filed in North Carolina District Court in Orange County, seeks records for seven public records requests to the University of North Carolina, including: (1) emails between Prof. Ralph Baric, former Prof. Lishan Su or Ms. Toni Baric with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the EcoHealth Alliance, or others; (2) emails to or from Prof. Ralph Baric containing any of the search terms “DEFUSE” or “DARPA” or “DTRA”. Case 22CV463.
(3) Defense Threat Reduction Agency. On January 14, 2022, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the DTRA for violating provisions of the FOIA.The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks: (1) finished intelligence, documents and reports about accidents, containment failures or deliberate release of biological agents from facilities in 21 countries around the world; (2) assessments of risks, hazards and efficacy of BSL-2, BSL-3 and BSL-4 containment schemes (including flaws, failings or weaknesses) in those same 21 countries; and, (3) grant proposals and other documents from the EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota.Case 3:22-cv-00299-JCS.
(4) National Institutes of Health. On November 8, 2021, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the NIH for violating provisions of the FOIA. The lawsuit (amended complaint filed 2/10/22), filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, seeks records for nine FOIA requests to NIH regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and communications between the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records requests also included EcoHealth Alliance grant applications, scientific reviews, funding agreements, and correspondence with Dr. Erik Stemmy, NIAID (NIH) project officer, as well as documents regarding NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML), the DARPA-funded Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) Program, and communication between the NIH and the World Health Organization (WHO) concerning the origins of COVID-19. This is our second FOIA lawsuit against NIH related to the origins of COVID-19. Case 1:21-cv-02936-TSC.
(5) U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): On October 14, 2021, USRTK filed a lawsuitagainst USAID for violating provisions of the FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks records related to USAID funding and oversight of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), which was a lead consortium partner in USAID-funded projects in the Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program. Initiated in 2009, USAID’s EPT PREDICT programs funded collaborations between EHA and researchers at University of California, Davis; Wuhan Institute of Virology; Metabiota, Inc.; and others, to study the pandemic potential of infectious diseases including bat-associated coronaviruses. Case 3:21-cv-08058-SK.
(6) U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): On October 14, 2021, USRTK filed a lawsuitagainst HHS for violating provisions of the FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks correspondence between senior HHS employees, including Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response, with the World Health Organization’s director general’s office, and others, related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Case 3:21-cv-08056-TSH.
(7)University of Maryland: On October 6, 2021, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the University of Maryland for violating provisions of the Maryland Public Information Act. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland Circuit Court for Prince George’s County, seeks correspondence and documents of Professor Rita R. Colwell, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, relevant to the origins of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Colwell serves on the board of directors of the EcoHealth Alliance, which funded and conducted research with bat coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and others. On June 10, 2022, Maryland Judge John P. Davey denied the University of Maryland’s motion for partial summary judgment. Case CAL21-11730.
(8)U.S. Food and Drug Administration: On Feb. 4, 2021, USRTK filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for violating provisions of FOIA.The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks documents and correspondence with or about China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with and funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among other subjects. Case 21-cv-00884-KAW.
(9) U.S. Department of Education: On Dec. 17, 2020 USRTK filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education for violating provisions of FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks documents that the Education Department requested from the University of Texas’ Medical Branch at Galveston about its funding agreements and scientific and/or research cooperation with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Case 3:20-cv-09117-DMR.
(10) U.S. Department of State: On Nov. 30, 2020 USRTK filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for violating provisions of FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks documents and correspondence with or about China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with and funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among other subjects. See news release. Case 3:20-cv-08415-JCS.
(11) National Institutes of Health: On Nov. 5, 2020 USRTK filed a lawsuit against National Institutes of Health (NIH) for violating provisions of FOIA. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks correspondence with or about organizations such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with and funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. See news release. Case 1:20-cv-03196-CKK.
U.S. Right to Know is an investigative research group focused on promoting transparency for public health. For more information about FOI lawsuits we have filed to vindicate the public’s right to know, see our FOIA litigation page.
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The federal government’s own data indicates that the COVID-19 vaccines U.S. service members are forced to receive are dangerous, medical experts explained as part of a Flag Day press conference hosted Tuesday by the medical freedom nonprofit Truth for Health Foundation.
The conference, which was live-streamed here on LifeSiteNews, addressed numerous aspects of the issue, starting with an overview of medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), first brought to light in January by attorney Thomas Renz, during a COVID vaccine hearing arranged by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)
“Keep in mind, these serious medical conditions are happening in a young, healthy population of very fit military people who are not at risk of dying of COVID and who typically don’t have these health problems,” said Truth for Health president and CEO Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet. “The CDC database and the DMED database shows heart attacks and myocardial infarctions in the young, healthy military groups are up over 269% in ten months. Pericarditis up 175%. Myocarditis inflammation of the heart muscle up 285%. Pulmonary embolism. Blood clots in the lungs up 467%. Blood clots to the brain. Cerebral infarction. Bell’s Palsy, Multiple Sclerosis Immunodeficiencies Cancers, miscarriage. All are up over 250%, and some are up more than 350%.”
“Why would the DOD knowingly continue to force these vaccine mandates in the face of such damage?” she asked.
“Using the CDC’s own data, our insurance industry experts associated with [former Blackrock portfolio manager] Edward Dowd and others in the field analyzed the data broken down by age group and created baselines to show the excess mortality by age group,” Vliet continued. “Millennials, age 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in deaths in the second half of 2021, the absolute worst record in our entire history. And this is the age group of our military. Starting in the summer and fall of 2021, there were 61,000 excess millennial deaths. Put that in perspective: 58,000 Americans died in the entire Vietnam War. So this generation of millennials experienced a greater number of excess deaths in part of one year of 2021. 61,000 versus the entire deaths of 58,000 in the entire Vietnam War.”
“The CDC’s own data is a smoking gun,” she declared.
In a statement to left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact, Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson Peter Graves confirmed the authenticity of the DMED records but claimed that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years, an explanation that PolitiFact took at face value despite questions about its plausibility.
Retired Army Lt. Colonel Peter Chambers, a former flight surgeon, also relayed the story about a “fit as a horse” 27-year-old infantryman who came to see him a week after taking the vaccine.
“Comes in and says, My chest hurts, doc. Okay, well, we take him over to the hospital. We run EKGs, got minor pericarditis, inflammation of the muscle and the lining of the heart. Right now, that kid has a 50% ejection fraction. Well, let me ask you this. What is his […] five year survival rate for a 27 year old with a half functioning heart? It’s not very long. That was my first case. And since then, I’ve had after before I left, there was at least 12 that went to the hospital. Anything from anaphylaxis, which is a reaction just to the shot itself. Two strokes, one hemorrhagic stroke, a bleeding stroke.”
“These are real things, people,” Chambers stressed. “I look at them. I look at, I talk to their families. This is real. This is real as it gets. And when I talk to legislators and they turn around and say, well, that’s just too sensitive, I can’t talk about that. Well, then let me tell you something. Let’s get those guys out, too. Let’s start putting some people in that understand that this warfare is usurping the nation. And is destroying our country.”
Last August, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austindirected the secretaries of all military branches to “immediately begin full [COVID] vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces” and “impose ambitious timelines for implementation.” The majority of service members complied, but tens of thousands remain unvaccinated, with many seeking exemptions.
Several thousand have secured exemptions for non-religious reasons, but the military has been largely unwilling to approve religious exemptions to the shots, which were developed and/or tested with the use of fetal cells from aborted babies. In December, the military began discharging soldiers for vaccine refusal, prompting legal challenges that have so far been neglected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While defenders of vaccine mandates are quick to point out that the military has long requiredsoldiers to vaccinate against a range of diseases due to the harsh and exotic locales soldiers are sent to for extended periods of time and the close quarters they typically share with one another, previous vaccines were typically subjected to far more evaluation and development time before being put into widespread use than the COVID shots received during their accelerated clinical trials.
U.S. service members facing medical coercion over the COVID-19 shots or denied effective treatment can apply for Medical Freedom Fund Grants at Truth for Health’s website by clicking here. The group’s website also contains additional resources, including medical information, civilian legal resources, news, COVID treatment information, and a form for reporting vaccine injuries.
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The U.K. stockpiled 650 million doses of COVID-19 injections during the pandemic, but only 142 million have been used
The remainder expire six to 12 months after their date of manufacture, which means millions of doses are going to end up as trash; about $5 billion stands to be wasted on unused shots in the U.K.
The U.K. government has also written off billions of dollars in money spent on protective equipment and ventilators that went unused
The overuse of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to another problem — a massive volume of medical trash that’s straining waste management systems and the environment
According to WHO, 87,000 tons of PPE were accumulated from March 2020 to November 2021 in order to fight COVID-19, but most of it has gone to waste
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The U.K. stockpiled 650 million doses of COVID-19 injections during the pandemic. Only 142 million have been used. The remainder expire six to 12 months after their date of manufacture,1 which means millions of doses are going to end up as trash.
It’s unknown whether some doses from the 650 million figure have yet to be manufactured, or exactly how much was paid for each dose, but what’s clear is that a massive waste of federal funds is imminent.
Based on estimates that the U.S. government paid about $20 for each dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot, about $15 for Moderna shot doses and about $4 for each dose of Astra Zeneca’s shot, assume an average price of $10 per dose of COVID-19 injection purchased.
Given this estimate, about $5 billion stands to be wasted on unused shots. “Will the public be forgiving of this massive waste of public funds on account of it occurring with good intentions during a state of emergency?” Daily Sceptic asked. “That remains to be seen.”2
Billions of Dollars Squandered in the Name of COVID-19
In addition to millions of doses of COVID-19 shots set to expire, the U.K. government has also written off billions of dollars in money spent on protective equipment, including items not used before their expiration dates and other equipment deemed unsuitable for use. Another $715.9 million was spent on ventilators, only 10% of which were actually used.
Similar ventilator stockpiling occurred in the U.S. but as early as August 2020 it was clear that this was a mistake. “The U.S. has too many ventilators,” The Washington Post wrote on August 18, 20203 — an about-face from media headlines posted just months earlier, which talked of ventilator shortages and a “desperate need for ventilators.”4,5
At the time, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had distributed 15,057 ventilators, while 95,713 sat unused in a federal stockpile. For comparison, 10,000 ventilators made up the federal stockpile in April 2020.6 By September 2020, HHS stated that the national ventilator stockpile had reached maximum capacity, with close to 120,000 available ventilators.7 As the Daily Sceptic explained:8
“This gross misuse of taxpayers’ money must be examined in the independent inquiry and by Government so the lessons can be learned and in future a robust management system applied in real time so that even stocks purchased in haste and with urgency are kept in reasonable proportion to anticipated demand.
The over-reaction and panic in spring 2020 resulted in decisions that have now turned out to be a huge waste of public money. If there was perceived to be a shortage of anything that might conceivably be needed to fulfil the needs of the public emergency, the public purse was always open.
Actually, the purse appeared to be treated more like Mary Poppins’ bottomless magic carpet bag, with no sign of any prudent oversight applied to funding decisions as long as they served the purpose of proving to the public that the Government was ‘doing something’ about Covid. The results of that fiscal incontinence are now clear for all to see.”
Millions of COVID-19 Shots Wasted in US
The money wasted stockpiling COVID-19 shots is not unique to the U.K. In the U.S., an ABC News investigation found that millions of shots have gone unused as the demand for the injections fizzled out. In speaking with health department officials in all 50 states, they found millions of instances of COVID-19 shots going to waste, sitting unused or set to expire in coming weeks. This includes:9
1.7 million doses wasted in Michigan since December 2020
619,000 doses unused in Colorado
3.6 million shots sitting in a stockpile in California
Close to 760,000 doses deemed nonviable, spoiled or expired in Oregon
More than 850,000 doses wasted in Wisconsin10
‘Sleeping Contracts’ Ensured Past Pandemic Vaccine Purchases
It’s said that history repeats itself, and we’ve seen massive waste from stockpiled vaccines before. Pandemics have been coming and going around the globe for centuries, but in recent history they’ve been used as points of manipulation that have profited corporations, particularly pharmaceutical companies.
In 2005, you may remember, it was predicted the bird flu epidemic would kill from 2 million to 150 million people,11 but turned out to be a whole lot of hot air, and prompted me to write the book “The Great Bird Flu Hoax.”
At the time, Nature Immunology published an editorial stating that the fear of bird flu had prompted government officials to prioritize developing plans to deal with pandemic influenza, and WHO had named bird flu as the No. 1 health concern.
In the years that followed, WHO executed agreements — so called “sleeping contracts” — with European and African nations in the name of protecting people from a future global pandemic.
The contracts stated that countries would buy vaccines in the event of a pandemic, but this would only be necessary if WHO declared a phase 6 influenza pandemic.12 Both GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Baxter were named in contracts with the U.K. parliament, for instance, which stated the pharmaceutical companies would supply a pandemic influenza vaccine to the U.K. and were valued at £155.4 million (more than $206 million) over four years.13
“Unfortunately,” CHD noted, “the government officials who signed the contracts never suspected that GSK makes multimillion-dollar donations to the WHO in return for control over decisions that result in GSK windfalls.”14
Swine Flu: Is History Repeating Itself?
On June 11, 2009, WHO declared H1N1 swine flu to be a phase 6 global influenza pandemic, even though it had only caused 144 deaths worldwide. That declaration put the sleeping contracts into an active state, to the tune of $18 billion directed to the production of H1N1 vaccines, including GSK’s Pandemrix.
It was later revealed that scientists who drafted WHO guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs for swine flu had been paid by the pharmaceutical companies that would profit from the recommendations.15 WHO sought the opinion of an Emergency Committee from WHO’s International Health Regulations Review Committee.
The guidance of many of these leading experts benefited the pharmaceutical industry, but their identities were kept secret in order to “protect them from outside influences.”16 In 2010, a joint investigation by the BMJ and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed troubling conflicts of interest between key panel members and the pharmaceutical industry. According to the BMJ:17
“The investigation by the BMJ/The Bureau reveals a system struggling to manage the inherent conflict between the pharmaceutical industry, WHO, and the global public health system, which all draw on the same pool of scientific experts.
Our investigation has identified key scientists involved in WHO pandemic planning who had declarable interests, some of whom are or have been funded by pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were drafting.
Yet these interests have never been publicly disclosed by WHO and, despite repeated requests from the BMJ/The Bureau, WHO has failed to provide any details about whether such conflicts were declared by the relevant experts and what, if anything, was done about them.”
At the time, the late Paul Flynn, Labour MP, told The Guardian, “The tentacles of drug company influence are in all levels in the decision-making process … there has been distortion of priorities of public health services all over Europe, waste of huge sums of public money and provocation of unjustified fear.”18
In a similar example, a whistleblower lawsuit filed against drug maker Roche alleges the company made false claims and misrepresented studies, causing the U.S. government to stockpile $1.5 billion of its influenza medicine Tamiflu (oseltamivir).19
The lawsuit, which was unsealed in September 2019, alleges Roche duped the U.S. government into stockpiling Tamiflu while mispresenting its effectiveness. According to the Houston-based Lanier Law Firm, which filed the suit:20
“The lawsuit claims the drugmaker’s scheme involved publishing misleading articles falsely stating that Tamiflu reduces complications, severity, hospitalizations, mortality and transmission of influenza. The company then used those articles to aggressively market the drug to the government for pandemic use.”
Excessive Use of PPE Leads to Glut of Pandemic Waste
Personal protective equipment, or PPE, amassed during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to another problem — a massive volume of medical trash that’s straining waste management systems and the environment. The World Health Organization pointed to overuse of gloves and “moon suits” during the pandemic as instrumental in the glut of health care waste now being seen worldwide.21
According to WHO, 87,000 tons of PPE were accumulated from March 2020 to November 2021 in order to fight COVID-19. Most of it has gone to waste. The unprecedented injection campaign also created 143,000 tons of waste from syringes, needles and safety boxes, which pose a risk to people living in communities near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites.22
A WHO global analysis of health care waste due to COVID-19 also found that more than 140 million tests kits may generate 2,600 tons of noninfectious — mostly plastic — waste, while “731,000 liters of chemical waste (equivalent to one-third of an Olympic-size swimming pool) have been shipped.”23 In the U.K., nearly 5 billion PPE items, worth nearly $3.4 billion, will also be wasted because they’re no longer needed or aren’t suitable for use.24 The WHO analysis noted:25
“Today, 30% of healthcare facilities (60% in the least developed countries) are not equipped to handle existing waste loads, let alone the additional COVID-19 load.
This potentially exposes health workers to needle stick injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, while also impacting communities living near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites through contaminated air from burning waste, poor water quality or disease carrying pests.”
Masks Are Stressing the Environment
WHO’s analysis paints a dire picture of the environmental havoc wreaked by the massive overuse of PPE during the pandemic, but it doesn’t even account for another major waste source — masks. According to Maggie Montgomery, technical officer for water, sanitation and health in the WHO Department of Environment:26
“In terms of the waste generated by the public, in particular masks. For example, in 2020, there were 4.5 trillion additional disposable masks thrown away by the public, which led to 6 million tons of additional waste. So, certainly, the public is generating the most. At the same time, we feel that the health sector has a really important role and there are many concrete things that can be done to reduce, unnecessary use of PPE.”
Montgomery said that waste in health care facilities increased by an average of three to four times during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some facilities seeing 10-fold increases.27 “We saw a lot of investments happening on the PPE side, on the vaccine side, on the testing side,” she said. “None of these investments were thinking, ‘How are we going to handle all the waste?’”28
COVID-19 pandemic waste — in the form of billions of dollars in unused shots and a massive volume of PPE and mask trash — is now something that the world will be grappling with for years, and possibly decades or more, to come.
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Greek Defence Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos said in April, and received much anger from the Greek public, that due to the war in Ukraine, “now is not the best time to speak against Turkey in NATO.” Less than two months later, on June 3, the defence minister said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “always provokes tension whenever he feels threatened or faces problems at home.” This was said following the escalating Turkish claim that many of the Greek islands are indeed Turkish and need to be demilitarised.
“It is our capabilities that deter the other side from daring a military engagement, because they know the heavy cost that they would be forced to pay. Our armed forces are at all times vigilant, fully ready and decisive,” Panagiotopoulos added.
As Panagiotopoulos downplayed the permanent threat of Turkey (whether it be ruled by Erdoğan or a Kemalist), he effectively invited an escalation by announcing that Greece is more focussed on carrying out anti-Russia actions in Ukraine than prioritising the security of Greek territory and citizens.
By June 9, the defence minister changed his tune:
“We will not provide [to Ukraine] anti-aircraft missiles from our islands or anti-ship missiles, no matter how much they ask us to do so, because we face a real threat,” Panagiotopoulos said in reference to the threat Greece faces from Turkey in the Aegean that has now become a crisis but two months earlier he did not want to deal with.
On the same day, Erdoğan said he is “not joking” about his calls for Greece to demilitarise islands in the Aegean Sea, adding:
“I warn Greece to avoid dreams, acts and statements that will result in regret. Come to your senses.”
For his part, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on June 7 that Greece has an “inferiority complex”, has become “much more aggressive” and that “the sovereignty of the islands will be questioned if (Greece) does not end its violation.” At the same time, Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar demanded that Greek officials get permission from Ankara before visiting the Aegean islands.
This barrage of assaults against Greece’s sovereignty over the Aegean Islands was of course preceded and followed by pro-Erdoğan media increasing propaganda that the Greek islands must be demilitarised as per the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne and/or that they are indeed Turkish islands instead.
CNN Türk hosted professor Hakan Bayrakçı, who outlined how Turkey can invade the Greek islands; former Turkish State Minister Masum Türker also appeared on CNN Türk to propose the idea of the Turkish Armed Forces carrying out “clearing operations” on Greek islands; and, Haber Turk hosted former army chief and professor Naim Babüroğlu to claim that Greece illegally occupies Turkish islands, among a plethora of other recent examples available in Turkish media.
Responding to this barrage of propaganda and revisionism on the status of the Aegean Islands, Athens on June 14 published 16 maps that seek to demonstrate and explain the illegal and revisionist nature of the Turkish assertions and actions concerning the Greek islands from 1973 until the present.
“In an effort to increase the wider public’s awareness of Turkish revisionism, the attached maps depict in a vivid and irrefutable way the Turkish illegal unilateral actions and claims,” a Greek foreign ministry announcement said.
The US State Department clarified in statements made on February 11 and June 2 that Greece’s sovereignty of these islands is beyond question, while the European Commission spokesman for external affairs Peter Stano said on June 10 that Turkey must respect the sovereignty of all EU member states “in their territorial waters and airspace.”
Panagiotopoulos revealed in February 2021 that Greece and Turkey had almost gone to war three times in the summer of 2020 due to the crisis with the Turkish Oruç Reis research vessel violating Greece’s territorial waters. Turkey’s aggression was quiet in the summer of 2021 as the country was in the midst of dealing with a COVID-19 pandemic and the consequential economic fallout.
This evidently gave Greece a false sense of security as the country downplayed any Turkish threat as it instead prioritised carrying out Washington’s demands against Russia. It is now appearing that summer 2022 will be another “hot” one, so-to-speak, as relations between Athens and Ankara continue to deteriorate.
Although the possibility of a Greek-Turkish war remains low despite Ankara’s massive escalation in rhetoric and revisionism, Erdoğan has proven to be an unpredictable leader, another reason why he continues to cause angst and frustration in NATO. Regardless, the words of Panagiotopoulos in April that “now is not the best time to speak against Turkey in NATO” will be one that hurts the ruling New Democracy party in Greece further as its popularity continues to decline according to polls following rising living costs and the violation of neutrality in the Ukraine war.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Patrick Lyoya, 26, an African immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), was shot in the back of the head by patrolman Christopher Schurr on April 4.
This act of police violence was met with widespread shock and mass demonstrations demanding that Schurr be terminated from the Grand Rapids police department and charged with murder.
There was an announcement made on June 15 saying that Schurr had been fired from the Grand Rapid Police Department. This came less than a week after his indictment on second degree murder charges in the death of Lyoya.
Despite the national attention focusing on the killing of Lyoya, it would take more than two months for Schurr to be indicted for second degree murder. A Kent County judge presiding over the hearing set the $100,000 cash bond which was posted on June 10.
The defense attorney for Officer Schurr, Mark Dodge, stated that the policeman was justified in the firing of a single point-blank range shot into the back of the head of Lyoya. Schurr pleaded not guilty and was allowed to go home. Dodge argued that Schurr was not a flight risk and therefore should have been released pending the outcome of the trial.
Schurr was not charged for felony firearms violations since he is a police officer. Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said that Schurr could not be charged with firearm felonies because of a previous Michigan Supreme Court decision, People v. Khoury. The ruling essentially absolves the police for crimes committed with their weapons even if it results in the death of civilians.
Nonetheless, many people who have watched the video of the incident feel very strongly that the shooting was clearly unjustified. Lyoya was attempting to flee the scene after a traffic stop. He was not armed and therefore posed no real threat to the officer or others in the vicinity.
After the shooting and the advent of antiracist demonstrations in Grand Rapids, Schurr was placed on paid administrative leave. He was subjected to a review by the police department to determine whether his actions warranted termination. His firing was a direct outcome of the international exposure related to the killing of Lyoya and the protests by people in Grand Rapids.
Several activists in Grand Rapids had requested that the case be turned over to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel because the Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker was too close politically to the police department. It is very rare in the United States for white law-enforcement officers to be indicted in the killing of African Americans and other people of color.
Grand Rapids City Manager Mark Washington, who is African American, faced a demonstration outside his home just hours after Schurr was released on bail. The activists insisted that justice had not been carried out considering the severity of the crime committed against Lyoya.
“These types of tactics and attempts to harass and intimidate will not be tolerated nor will bullying impact my judgement in carrying out my duties as City Manager. As was discussed during Thursday’s press conference, I suspended Officer Schurr without pay on Friday pending his termination hearing which is scheduled to take place this coming Thursday. I made that decision because I believe it was the right thing and not because of the obnoxious tactics of a handful of confrontational activists who tried to intimidate me and my family into action.”
National Pattern of Continuing and Escalating Police Violence
Yet the aggressive tactics utilized by the Grand Rapids police over the years has endangered the health and well-being of the community. This pattern is national where the police killings of civilians has not lessened since the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Hakim Littleton, among others since 2020.
So far in 2022, 243 people have reportedly been killed in interactions with the police. These figures are collected by media agencies and independent groups since law-enforcement routinely refuses to supply statistics on the number of people they injure or kill. (See this)
On municipal, state and national levels the funding for law-enforcement has actually increased despite the demands by various antiracists and other organizations calling for the defunding of the police. The current U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated during the State of the Union Address earlier in the year that his objective was not to defund the police. Quite to the contrary, the Biden administration has funneled more federal funding to police agencies by utilizing money allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief.
These funds from the Cares Act and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) should be used exclusively to assist working families in their day-to-day struggles against inflation and the overall declining standard of living. The rise in domestic violence, street crime and other forms of illegal activities can be traced directly to the increasing uncertainty within the national economy. There is no scientific proof that the recruitment of police officers and the increase in their funding has any positive impact on reducing criminal activity. Even with the bolstering of law-enforcement agencies around the U.S., mass shootings are on the incline.
During 2021, there were 693 mass shootings in the U.S. These incidents are defined by four or more people being shot, indicating that 2021’s total is 13.4 percent higher than 2020. These mass shootings claimed 702 lives in 2021 with 2,844 people being injured.
Although mass shootings in 2021 in Boulder, Colorado, supermarket shooting; the metro Atlanta spa killings; and the San Jose transit shooting were given widespread attention by the press, most of the mass shootings disproportionately impact Black and Brown peoples and unfortunately are receiving relatively little attention from the corporate and governmental-controlled media outlets. For more information see The Trace website. (See this)
In 2022 so far, not even halfway through the entire year, approximately 250 mass shootings have occurred. The most noted and egregious involved the murder of 10 African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo and the killing of 21 people, 19 of them being children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Another article on the Schurr case published by the Iosco County News Herald reports on the view of activists seeking justice for the Lyoya family:
“’He’s just been charged, not convicted,’ said LaDonna Norma, the co-founder of Together We Are Safe, a grassroots group that works to address issues around policing and housing in Grand Rapids. ‘It’s clear as day that the system is protecting this man, and they have from day one. If at any given time, he feels like his life is over, he can go out and go postal. And then I bet people would still protect him,’ said Norma.”
Defunding and Restructuring of Police Services Remain Imperative Demands
There is no way around the necessity of restructuring law-enforcement in the U.S. in light of the police killings of civilians and the proliferation of mass shootings. In the Uvalde case, police refused to take action against an active shooter even though there were numerous calls by children to the emergency first responders requesting immediate assistance.
US police killings far surpass those in other capitalist states (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
Law-enforcement agencies are considered sacrosanct by the ruling class inside the U.S. where the gap between the wealthy and the working class is consistently increasing. African Americans have been targets of police violence since the earliest days of the colonial and antebellum periods of U.S. history when between 1619 and 1865, millions of people were subjected to chattel slavery and the forced removal from lands coveted by the Europeans.
After the conclusion of the Civil War (1861-1865), law-enforcement agencies were utilized in the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation and the criminalization of successive generations of oppressed peoples. The ascendancy of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements during the post-World War II period witnessed the further militarization of the police through federal funding mechanisms such as the Law-Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) during the late 1960s.
Then there was the exponential growth within the prison system which increased the population of inmates by 500% since the 1980s. Those held in U.S. detention centers, jails and prisons are disproportionately Black and Brown peoples.
The demands for defunding of police are being made amid the worsening plight of growing numbers of African Americans, Latin Americans and other people of color communities suffering from rising costs for food, fuel, housing and other commodities. Consequently, a comprehensive social and political program is needed to link the problems of police violence with the overall necessity of transforming U.S. society into a just, equal and self-determined existence.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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“Rejection of Russian energy resources means that Europe will become the region with the highest energy costs in the world. This will seriously undermine the competitiveness of European industry which is already losing the competition to companies in other parts of the world…. Our Western colleagues seem to have forgotten the elementary laws of economics, or simply prefer to ignore them.” Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation
On Tuesday, Russia announced a 40% reduction in the flow of natural gas to Germany through the Nord Stream pipeline. The announcement, that was made by Gazprom officials, sent tremors through the European gas market where prices quickly soared to new highs. In Germany—where prices have tripled in the last three months—the news was met with gasps of horror. With inflation already running at a 40-year high, this latest reduction in supply is certain to tip the German economy into recession or worse. All of Europe is now feeling the impact of Washington’s misguided sanctions on Russia. Here’s more from Oil Price website:
“Russia’s Gazprom said on Tuesday that it would limit natural gas supply via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany by 40 percent compared to planned flows because of a delay in equipment repairs… The lower supply of gas via Nord Stream to the biggest European economy, Germany, sent Europe’s gas prices surging by double digits...
Russian gas deliveries to Europe… have already been down after Ukraine stopped last month flows from Russia to Europe at … one of the two transit points… thus supply was cut off for a third of the gas transiting Ukraine onto Europe.” (“Europe’s Gas Prices Surge 13% As Russia Reduces Nord Stream Flow“, Oil Price)
The United States and its European allies have imposed more sanctions on Russia than any country in history. But Tuesday’s announcement helps to illustrate who is actually suffering from the sanctions and who is not.
Russia is not suffering, in fact, Russia does not seem particularly perturbed at all. It has calmly brushed aside Washington’s attacks as one would whisk-away a fly at a family picnic. Even more surprising is the fact that the sanctions have strengthened the ruble, increased revenues from raw materials, sent Russia’s trade surplus into record territory, and pushed gas and oil profits into the stratosphere. By every objective standard, the sanctions appear to be benefiting Russia which, of course, is the opposite outcome that was expected.
Washington’s Economic Sanctions on Russia: Success or Failure?
The Russian currency (the Ruble) has rallied to a five-year high.
Russia’s commodities are raking in windfall profits
Russia’s trade surplus is projected to hit a record high this year
Russia’s oil and gas sales have risen sharply
There’s no evidence that Washington’s sanctions have achieved the objective of “weakening” Russia or damaging its economy. There is, however, considerable proof that the sanctions have backfired and inflicted a heavy toll on their supporters and their people. And while it’s hard to quantify how much damage has actually been done, we’ve tried to identify specific categories where the impact has been most dramatic. The sanctions have:
Triggered a sharp rise in food and energy prices. (soaring inflation)
Caused major disruptions in global supply-lines (Deglobalization)
Greatly increased food shortages and the likelihood of famine
Precipitated a severe slowdown in the global economy
So far, Russia has withstood these attacks patiently and without any retaliatory response. But we must assume that the sudden 40% reduction in gas flows to energy-dependent Germany is intended to send a message. Keep in mind, Nord Stream 2 was a massive multi-year, $10 billion project to which Russia was fully committed until Germany ‘pulled the rug out from under Putin’ at the eleventh hour. Germany proved that—when push comes to shove—Berlin will always march in lockstep with Washington rather than fulfill its business agreements or act in the interests of its own people. What Germany is discovering now, however, is that acting as Washington’s poodle comes at a very high price indeed. Here’s more from Reuters:
“Gazprom said on Tuesday it has curbed supplies via the Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline to Germany to up to 100 million cubic metres (mcm) per day, down from 167 mcm, citing the delayed return of equipment that had been sent for repair….
Gazprom no longer exports gas westwards through Poland via the Yamal-Europe pipeline following Russian sanctions against EuRoPol Gaz, which owns the Polish section. Flows via Yamal-Europe continue eastwards from Germany to Poland.
“Due to the delayed return of gas compressor units from repair by Siemens … and technical engines’ malfunctions, only three gas compressor units can currently be used at the Portovaya compression station,” Gazprom said..
“Due to the sanctions imposed by Canada, it is currently impossible for Siemens Energy to deliver overhauled gas turbines to the customer. Against this background we have informed the Canadian and German governments and are working on a viable solution,” the company said.” (“Nord Stream gas capacity constrained as sanctions delay equipment“, Reuters)
Naturally, the media is going to point to a maintenance snafu as an excuse, but how credible is that? How often is supply of a vital resource cut by nearly half due to a compressor malfunction?
Not often. Russia is sending a simple but poignant message to Germany: “You made your bed, now sleep in it.” Russia’s reaction is perfectly normal after having been “stabbed you in the back.”
And, Germany’s travails are just beginning because it has no way to make up for the energy shortfall it will face in the near future; a shortfall that will precipitate rolling blackouts, freezing homes, and a relentless strangulation of its domestic industry. As the German government is discovering, there is no viable substitute for Russian hydrocarbons which is neither readily available nor does the quality fit Germany’s particular requirements. In other words, the US has led Germany down the primrose path believing that they could simply switch to other energy suppliers and everything would be just dandy. That is certainly not the case. As it happens, Germany and all of Europe are going to pay more for their energy than any region in the world which will severely undermine the EU’s competitiveness. This, in turn, will lead to a sharp decline in living standards as well as growing social unrest. Here’s more from the Wall Street Journal:
“For decades, European industry relied on Russia to supply low-cost oil and natural gas that kept the continent’s factories humming.
Now Europe’s industrial energy costs are soaring in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, hobbling manufacturers’ ability to compete in the global marketplace. Factories are scrambling to find alternatives to Russian energy under threat that Moscow could abruptly turn off the gas spigot, bringing production to a halt.
Europe’s producers of chemicals, fertilizer, steel and other energy-intensive goods have come under pressure over the last eight months as tensions with Russia climbed ahead of the February invasion. Some producers are shutting down in the face of competition from factories in the U.S., the Middle East and other regions where energy costs are much lower than in Europe. Natural-gas prices are now nearly three times higher in Europe than in the U.S.” (“Some European Factories, Long Dependent on Cheap Russian Energy, Are Shutting Down; Industrial energy costs are soaring in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, hobbling European manufacturers’ ability to compete globally”, Wall Street Journal)
The Wall Street Journal would like you to believe that Russia is responsible for Europe’s poor choices, but, it’s not true. Putin didn’t raise prices. Prices rose in response to the EU’s increased demand due to shortages brought on by the sanctions. How is that Putin’s fault?
It’s not. And the same goes for the EU officials who accused Putin of “blackmail”, a claim for which there was no basis whatsoever. When that accusation was made, the price of gas in the EU was one-third of its price today. Is that how blackmail works, by charging less than the market price?
Of course, not. It’s ridiculous. Europe was getting a great price on a scarce resource until they decided to take Uncle Sam’s bad advice and ruin it for themselves. Now they’re paying through the nose, and they can only blame themselves.
Did you know that EU leaders are already making plans to ration energy this winter?
It’s true. Europe has agreed to become another basket-case US lapdog in order to faithfully execute Washington’s ambitious global strategy. Here’s the story:
“Europe could be forced to start rationing energy this winter, starting with industrial uses of natural gas, especially if the winter is cold and China’s economy rebounds, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, told the Financial Times in an interview.
“If we have a harsh winter and a long winter . . . I wouldn’t exclude the rationing of natural gas in Europe, starting from the large industry facilities,” Birol told FT.
The world faces a “much bigger” energy crisis than the one of the 1970s, Birol told German daily Der Spiegel last month.
“Back then it was just about oil,” Birol told the news outlet. “Now we have an oil crisis, a gas crisis and an electricity crisis simultaneously,” said the head of the international agency created after the 1970s shock of the Arab oil embargo.” (“IEA: Europe Could See Energy Rationing This Winter“, Oil Price)
She’s wrong, isn’t she? We don’t have “an oil, gas and electricity crisis”. What we have is a political crisis. All of these shortages can be easily traced back to the foolish choices that were made by incompetent politicians doing the bidding of neocon fantasists who think they can turn the clock back to the heyday of American global primacy. But those days are over, and everyone seems to know they’re over except the insulated group of self-deluded fanatics at the Washington think tanks and their political spawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Bottom line: We all would have been much better off listening to Kissinger who advised his pals at the World Economic Forum (WEF) to wrap up the Ukrainian war pronto before Russia made changes that could not be reversed. Unfortunately, Kissinger’s appeal fell on deaf ears and Putin has already started redirecting his energy flows eastward. Check out this eyepopping excerpt from an article at oilprice.com:
“The biggest reshuffle of oil trade flows since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s is underway—and things may never return to normal. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russian oil exports are changing global oil trade routes. Over the past nearly five decades, oil flowed more or less freely from any supplier to any customer in the world…
This free energy trade is now over, after …. the Western sanctions that followed, plus Europe’s irreversible decision to cut off its dependence on Russian energy at any cost…
By the end of this year, Europe expects to have effectively banned 90% of all its imports of Russian oil before the war… For oil going to Europe, crude from the Middle East will now travel longer distances to European ports compared to the shorter routes to India and China…
For Europe, the choice of oil supply is now political, and it will be willing to pay a premium to procure non-Russian oil. This will tighten supply options and continue to support elevated oil prices for months to come.
Commenting on the EU’s embargo on Russian seaborne oil imports, Fitch Ratings said last week:
“This ban will have a significant impact on global oil trade flows, with about 30% of EU’s imports needing replacement from other regions, including the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sustained production spare capacity of about 2MMbpd and 1MMbpd, respectively), Africa and the US.” (“The Biggest Reshuffle Of Oil Flows Since The 1970s”, Oil Price)
What does it mean?
It means that inflation will continue to rise as Russia’s prodigious crude supplies are redirected eastward. It means that Washington has abandoned its 30 year-long ‘pet project’, Globalization, and splintered the world into rival blocs. It means that the dollar, the bond market, the western financial system and the so-called “rules-based order”—all of which are inseparably linked to economic growth that depends almost-entirely on the availability of cheap energy—will begin to creak-and-groan beneath the weight of feather-headed policy decisions that have brought certain ruin to the nations of the west and their people.
We’re going to pay a heavy price for Washington suicidal power-grab.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Close military ties between Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) and India have been going on ever since the British colonialist occupiers were driven out and modern-day India was established in 1947. With the possible exception of the US and Israel, there are very few examples of such a high level of strategic military cooperation between two countries. Unlike the colonialist powers of the political West, Russia never looked down on India and treated the Asian giant as an equal.
Just how much of a prominent strategic partner India is for Russia is seen in the fact that the Eurasian powerhouse is often accused of providing India with the necessary know-how to produce nuclear weapons. Even if not true and although it’s highly unlikely Russia and India would ever openly talk about such a sensitive topic, there are still dozens of other examples of critically important Soviet and Russian military technology transfers without which it is virtually impossible to imagine India’s standing as a great power of our time.
Initially, in the immediate aftermath of its declaration of independence, India was reliant on the political West, almost solely on the UK, for weapons procurement. The country was never properly industrialized during British colonial rule, resulting in a rather dangerous dependence on importing arms from the increasingly pro-Pakistani West. Luckily, this dependence waned thanks to Russia, as India started importing most of its weapons from the then Soviet Union by the late 1960s. This made Russia the Asian giant’s largest defense partner, a state of affairs prevalent to this very day. In terms of both basic and sophisticated weapons systems, Russia has provided some of the most sensitive and important weapons platforms that India has required from time to time, including advanced assault rifles, tanks, rocket artillery, fighter jets, advanced missiles, and even nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
India’s armored and mechanized fleet is almost entirely Russian-made, except for two regiments of the indigenous Arjun tanks. Numerous variants of T-72/T-90 tanks and modifications of BMP APC/IFV vehicles are all either Russian-made or Russian-designed. The same goes for India’s main rocket systems, BM-30 “Smerch” and BM-21 “Grad”. Not to mention small arms, where Russia has been dominant for decades. With India’s well-meaning, yet unfortunately troubled INSAS rifle being slowly phased out, India and Russia have also signed an agreement to jointly manufacture AK-203 (highly updated version of Russia’s timeless AK-47) rifles in India.
In addition to nearly all of its naval missiles being of Russian origin, India’s Navy also operates numerous Russian-made ships, especially missile corvettes and destroyers. The Rajput-class destroyers are modified Kashin-class destroyers made during the Soviet era, while Russia’s Yantar Shipyard launched the advanced Talwar-class frigates in 2021. India continues to operate 8 advanced Kilo-class submarines procured from Russia, which form the bulk of India’s conventional submarine fleet. Also, the only Indian Navy fighters are 45 MiG-29Ks, which are operated from its sole aircraft carrier, INS Vikramaditya, also of Russian origin. India also operates the Russian Kamov anti-submarine warfare helicopters. For years, the Asian giant has been leasing the Chakra series of Russian nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) to train crews for India’s own fleet of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs).
While the Indian Air Force (IAF) acquired a number of French and Israeli systems, the majority of its equipment, including fighters and missiles, is still of Russian origin. This includes the Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighter jets, the heaviest in IAF, which constitute nearly half of its (14 of 30) squadrons. There are also the MiG-29UPG and MiG-21 fighters, the IL-76 heavy-lift aircraft and IL-78 tankers. India has also converted two IL-76s into AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control Systems) platforms.
Naturally, such a high percentage of Russian jets also means IAF operates numerous Russian missiles, including the R-77, R-37 and R-73 air-to-air missiles, the Kh-59, Kh-35 and Kh-31 air-to-surface missiles, along with the KAB series of laser-guided bombs. The IAF also operates Russian-made Mi-17 multirole, Mi-35 attack and Mi-26 heavy-lift helicopters. IAF also operates the now legendary S-400, deliveries of which began in December last year, in addition to numerous other Russian-origin air defense systems.
According to various estimates, Russian-based systems make up around 85% of India’s massive military. Although India has started diversifying its weapons procurement, Russia is still at the forefront. This cooperation also includes hypersonic technologies. Namely, the BrahMos Aerospace, an Indo-Russian missile-producing joint venture, has now started intensive testing of the highly anticipated BrahMos II hypersonic missile.
At Mach 6, the missile is set to be at least twice as fast as the previous BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. Even though the missile is officially projected to have a range of 600 km, experts suggest that the BrahMos II will reach Mach 8 and a range of 1000 km. Mostly based on Russia’s Zircon hypersonic missile, the world’s first successful scramjet-powered (supersonic combustion ramjet) missile, BrahMos II is expected to give India an unrivaled capability, not just in the Global South, but even in comparison to the political West, where prominent US generals now admit Russia is far ahead in hypersonic technologies.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
A rare 1966 class photo that had recently come into his possession.
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