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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed concern over the weekend about NATO’s efforts to expand into Sweden and Finland. She warned that “It’s quite obvious that Finland and Sweden joining NATO … would have serious military and political consequences that would require an adequate response from the Russian side.” Although Finland isn’t officially regarded as part of Scandinavia, its history of Swedish rule prior to incorporation into the Russian Empire and geographic proximity to that neighboring state can lead to observers considering it to be part of “Greater Scandinavia”, if one will.
This region is arguably one of the targets of “Shadow NATO”, a concept that refers to the de facto inclusion of countries into the US-led military alliance. Shadow NATO has already crept into Ukraine, which was one of the triggers for the undeclared US-provoked missile crisis in Europe after Russia became concerned that America plans to clandestinely deploy strike missiles there under the cover of so-called “anti-missile systems”. “Greater Scandinavia”, in particular Sweden and Finland, are also targets of this plot and have been since 2015 when they both began engaging in phantom Russian sub hunts at the time.
Seeing as how Russia’s “security equation” proposal aims to responsibly regulate that country’s military rivalry with the US in Europe, it’s imperative that Shadow NATO’s creeping influence into Greater Scandinavia is kept in check as part of the forthcoming negotiations. Neither Ukraine nor Sweden or Finland should be allowed to become de facto members of that alliance since such efforts are responsible for the unprecedented post-Old Cold War security crisis in the continent. Even if Russia’s concerns over Ukraine’s informal membership are addressed, the crisis will inevitably repeat itself with time in Northern Europe if Sweden and Finland continue being informally absorbed by the bloc.
After all, the Arctic is considered by many observers to be an emerging front in the New Cold War. The US aims to militarize this region as it becomes more important for international shipping through the gradual opening of the “Northern Sea Route” (NSR) via the waterways under Russia’s sovereign control. China will begin to utilize this route more frequently through its “Polar Silk Road” vision of expanding trade ties with the EU through the Arctic. US-led NATO militancy in Northern Europe will directly harm Russia’s security interests even if it’s implemented under the pretext of “containing” China. Under no circumstances must Sweden and Finland be allowed to functionally move closer to NATO.
Not a lot of attention has been paid to the “Viking Bloc” that the US plans to assemble between the three traditional Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (the last of which isn’t formally part of NATO) and the other two countries that comprise the “Greater Scandinavian” concept: NATO-member Iceland and aspirational “Shadow NATO” member Finland. This issue will have to be settled as part of the forthcoming negotiations over Russia’s “security equation” that explicitly proposes halting the bloc’s expansion. The devil is in the details, as they say, but it was timely for Zakharova to bring this up ahead of next year’s talks in order to signal that this issue will definitely be on the agenda.
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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.
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Dr Peter McCullough is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases and clinical lipidology. He cares for advanced patients with common medical problems including heart and kidney disease, lipid disorders and diabetes.
He has broadly published on a range of topics in medicine with more than 1,000 publications and 600+ citations in the National Library of Medicine. He also has a master’s degree in public health and is known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals. He has 51 peer-reviewed publications on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He is considered to be an expert on early intervention protocols in the treatment of COVID-19.
Dr McCullough has testified before the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Colorado General Assembly, the New Hampshire Senate and the South Carolina Senate concerning many aspects of the COVID-19 response.
He recently gave a brief interview for the India-based Qvive media network where he discusses the vaccine rollout and the Omicron variant. He concludes that this variant is very mild, resolves on its own and “may mark the end of the pandemic”. He argues there is no need to persist with the vaccine rollout. This interview discusses the global situation as well as the implications for India.
It coincides with a statement signed by medical scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, civil servants, civil society organisations and citizens of India who call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to end the mass rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. The statement asserts that these vaccines should be halted immediately, not least because they pose serious dangers.
Dr Peter McCullough was one of a group of internationally renowned professionals in the field of medical science who contributed to the statement by providing relevant expertise.
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal.
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In the early hours of 28 December, the Israeli occupation launched an attack on the Syrian port of Latakia, leaving dozens of shipping containers in flames.
Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that the occupation fired several missiles targeting the container terminal in the port. Quoting a senior military official, SANA said most of the missiles were intercepted and destroyed by the country’s air defense system.
SANA added that firefighters were deployed to the site. Videos shared on social media show explosions followed by huge flames and plumes of smoke billowing from the port.
A local television station reported that the attack also caused damage to a hospital and residential buildings near the port. Initial reports have not indicated if there were any casualties.
The attack is the second that the occupation has carried out on the port of Latakia in the month of December.
On 7 December, Israeli fighter jets fired missiles on the port destroying several shipping containers. Israeli media claimed that the airstrike was targeting a shipping container that contained arms destined for the Hezbollah resistance movement.
The Israeli occupation has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian territory since 2011, when western-backed armed groups launched an insurgency to overthrow the government of Syria.
Five people were killed in the governorate of Homs on 24 November when Israeli missiles hit a residential building.
A Syrian soldier was killed on 16 December when the Israeli occupation fired a barrage of missiles into the southern region of Syria.
Damascus has, on numerous occasions, launched complaints to the United Nations demanding an end to the attacks by Israel.
Most of the Israeli missile attacks have been launched from the Syrian Golan that Israel has occupied since 1967 despite numerous resolutions from the United Nations demanding Israel’s withdrawal from the territory.
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Featured image: Firefighters putting out a blaze caused by an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian port of Latakia on 28 December 2021. (SANA)
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Iran and Iraq issued a joint statement today on the “criminal and terrorist” assassinations of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and Popular Mobilisation Forces deputy head Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The two nations condemned last year’s killings as a “violation of the rules of international law, including relevant international conventions on the fight against terrorism.”
According to senior Iranian judiciary official Kazem Gharibabadi, they remain determined to “identify, prosecute and punish all those involved in deciding, planning and implementing this criminal act.”
He was speaking after the second joint session of an Iran-Iraq committee that is investigating the killing of the two men in a drone strike at Baghdad international airport in January 2020.
The attack was ordered by then US president Donald Trump and there were claims that the victims were lured to their death by being invited to talks sanctioned by Washington.
Tehran claims to have information on scores of individuals and organisations involved in the plot and has previously called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for Mr Trump and other senior US officials.
British outsourcing company G4S, which operates Baghdad airport, has denied allegations that it was complicit in the assassinations after Iran accused it of providing details of Gen Soleimani’s arrival.
Earlier this week, retired Israeli Major-General Tamir Hayman gave the first admission that Tel Aviv had played a role in the killings, supplying US intelligence with at least three of Gen Soleimani’s mobile phone numbers.
Tehran alleges that the assassination took place with German support, with the US air force’s Ramstein base believed to have been used to co-ordinate the attack.
Research also revealed in October that “it was probable” that the Menwith Hill electronic spying base in Britain had also played a part in Gen Soleimani’s killing.
Iran and Iraq pledged to continue to use “legal and judicial capacities at national and international levels to deliver justice and prevent the occurrence of such criminal acts,” Mr Gharibabadi said.
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We are at a Dangerous Crossroads in the History of Humanity.
Rick Rozoff provides us with a selection of excerpts from major Russian media sources pertaining to the Russia- US/NATO confrontation on Russia’s Western border with Ukraine.
The objective is to inform Western readers on how the official Russian media views and analyses this ongoing crisis which could lead the World into a World War III Scenario.
The excerpts include statements by Russia’s Defense Ministry
“NATO is preparing for an armed conflict with Russia , Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing for military attachés and representatives of foreign embassies accredited in Moscow.
“The military construction of the bloc has been completely redirected to prepare for a large-scale, high-intensity armed conflict with Russia,” the colonel-general said.
He explained that the North Atlantic Alliance in its documents, including the military strategy of 2019, directly calls our country the main source of “threats to coalition security.”
At the same time, Fomin noted, the Rome Declaration is still in force, which states that Russia and NATO do not consider each other as adversaries. The parties confirmed this at the 2010 summit in Lisbon. [At which Dmitry Medvedev became the first and to date only Russian or Soviet head of state to participate in a NATO summit – RR]
Targeted provocations by NATO near the Russian borders are highly likely to lead to an armed conflict, the Deputy Defense Minister emphasized. As an example, he cited the attempt of the British destroyer Defender in June of this year to penetrate the territorial waters of Russia off the coast of Crimea. At the same time, the actions of the British Navy ship were provided by the American strategic reconnaissance aircraft RC-135.
As Fomin pointed out, the intensity of such flights in the Black Sea region increased by more than 60 percent compared to 2020, the number of sorties increased from 436 to 710. Strategic bombers B-IB and B-52H of the US Air Force flew 92 times against 78 in 2020 in the airspace of the Black Sea region with access to the conditional line of using weapons. To the west of Crimea, the planes flew up to the Russian borders at a distance of 15 kilometers.
“In total, this year, the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted 15 exercises in the Black Sea. In 2020, there were eight,” the Deputy Defense Minister continued.
The presence of ships and auxiliary vessels from non-regional NATO states “has become virtually permanent.”
“From January to December of this year, 30 calls of NATO ships were made, in 2020 there were 23 of them. The total duration of stay was more than 400 days, in 2020 – 359,” Fomin said.
Activity in the Baltic region
In the Baltic zone, aircraft of NATO countries made more than 1,200 sorties, and more than 50 warships went out for naval reconnaissance. More than 20 exercises were held in the region in 2021.
“At the same time, neutral states and our closest neighbors: Finland and Sweden are actively involved in coalition activities ,” the colonel-general noted.
He also stressed that after the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, NATO actually ignored Vladimir Putin ‘s initiative to impose a moratorium on the deployment of new intermediate and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the possibility of developing reciprocal measures to remove existing fears.
“Every year, the NATO bloc conducts 30 major exercises, during which scenarios for conducting military operations against Russia are being worked out. Within the framework of combat training events, special attention is paid to the creation of strike groups near the borders of our country. In particular, a series of Defender exercises were held in May-June of this year. Europe-2021 with the transfer from the United States of America and Western Europe to the “eastern flank” of reinforcement troops of up to 40 thousand people,” Fomin said.”
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At the same time, a contingent of about 13 thousand troops from the non-regional states of the bloc is constantly present in Eastern Europe. It has about 200 tanks, 400 armored vehicles, 50 guns and three dozen aircraft and helicopters.
Moscow has expressed concerns about the concentration of Western alliance missile systems, troops, warships and aircraft near Russia’s borders, and NATO’s decades’ long eastward expansion. This month, the Russian Foreign Ministry formally signalled that it considers Ukraine to be a ‘red line’ for Moscow which NATO is strongly advised not to cross.
NATO is preparing for a large-scale armed conflict with Russia, in contravention of the Rome Declaration of 2002, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin has said.
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From Drang nach Osten “Push Eastwards”
[Russia’s] deputy defence minister warned that NATO’s efforts to expand and strengthen its military infrastructure on its eastern flank have had a negative impact on the security architecture of the entire European continent, but are only one of multiple actions taken by the alliance over the decades to do so.
“In 1999, a military operation which was not approved by the United Nations was carried out in Yugoslavia. The bombing of Belgrade killed innocent civilians, and the country’s economy was disrupted. The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a new round expansion of the bloc and the incorporation of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro, and after that Northern Macedonia,” Fomin said.
At the same time, he noted, the ‘Western partners’ continued to assure Moscow “of the absence of aggressive designs against Russia,” and that Russia believed these assurances, notwithstanding the freezing of interaction with NATO in 1999 in connection with the Yugoslav crisis.
Fomin recalled that the most significant expansion of NATO eastward took place in 2004, when the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the bloc.
This and other waves of expansion significantly increasing the alliance’s military potential on its eastern flank, he said, pointing out that NATO’s borders have moved over 1,000 km eastward, providing it with opportunities to use non-strategic weapons to strike targets inside Russia.
“For example, the minimum flight time from air bases in Estonia to St. Petersburg has been reduced to several minutes. Most of Kaliningrad region is within striking range of artillery systems alone….A significant number of pieces of infrastructure have been transferred to NATO’s disposal, expanding the possibility for the deployment and transfer of troops,” Fomin said.
The reference to Lakenheath is outdated.
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The officer added that the bloc’s arsenal was beefed up considerably by weapons, vehicles and personnel of the former Warsaw Pact members, plus new ports in the Baltic and Black Seas, and an expansion of NATO’s naval forces.
NATO has focused on the military deterrence of Russia while it used to prefer engaging in joint projects, said Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin.
“The current deplorable state of relations between Russia and NATO can be explained by the fact that the alliance has often resorted to using hybrid methods to contain Russia, combining dialogue with a build-up of military preparations,” Fomin said on Monday….
He said that the deterioration of relations between Russia and NATO began earlier than 2014.
“After the end of the Cold War, the Russian Federation has repeatedly made attempts to find new forms of engagement with NATO, to create a stable, equal system of European security for all,” Fomin said. “It would be wrong to believe that the deterioration of Russia-NATO relations began in 2014.”
“The declared goals of equal cooperation by the alliance were not fulfilled much earlier, in fact, immediately after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact,” he went on to say. “At the same time, Russia was then unprecedentedly open to constructive partnership with the West and carried out a voluntary demilitarization of the country on its western borders.”
Russia also withdrew its troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, the deputy minister said.
North Macedonia has joined as a full member and Finland, Georgia, Sweden and Ukraine as Enhanced Opportunity Partners since the above map was designed.
The Rossiya 1 state television in Moscow broadcast today President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on Friday. It conveys a much fuller picture of the grave crisis brewing in the Russian-American relations than what the excerpts in the Russian media sought to convey over the weekend.
Putin has, for the first time, explicitly warned that if the US and NATO decline to provide the security guarantees Moscow has sought, his future course of action will be solely guided by “the proposals that our military experts will make to me.” Clearly, there is no more wriggle room left.
This is anything but the White House cliche that “all options are on the table” when Washington intervened in Venezuela or Syria. Putin implies that since core issues of Russia’s national defence are involved here, military considerations will reign supreme.
That is to say, Russia cannot accept NATO’s eastward expansion and the US deployments in Ukraine and elsewhere in East Europe or the creation of anti-Russian states along its borders. And Russia expects “to reach a legally binding outcome of diplomatic talks on the documents.”
Unsurprisingly, Putin also said Russia will seek to achieve a positive outcome in the talks on security guarantees.Moscow is demanding an early meeting. Interestingly, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has underlined that Moscow is not seeking a presidential meeting between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
The probability is low that the US will agree to give a security guarantee to Russia in legally binding terms. There are obstacles on the way. For a start, Biden simply doesn’t have the political capital to carry the Congress along on a conciliatory path towards normalisation with Russia. A consensus is hard to reach among the US’ European allies, too, over the tricky issue of NATO expansion — that is, assuming that Washington is amenable to Russia’s demands (which it is not.)
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned yesterday that not only Ukraine and Georgia, but a possible inclusion of Sweden and Finland in NATO also will have “serious” military and political consequences that won’t be left unanswered by Moscow. Simply put, Russia expects the US and its allies to fulfil the assurance given to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that the NATO would not expand “an inch” further. (The Kremlin-funded RT publicised on Saturday the relevant declassified documents.)
Yet, the heart of the matter is that so soon after the debacle in Afghanistan, NATO’s withdrawal from Ukraine will irreparably dent its credibility. In fact, NATO may wither away if it stops expanding. Unless NATO can focus on an “enemy”, it loses its mooring and lacks a raison d’etre for its very existence. The transatlantic system will be in disarray if NATO starts drifting. And NATO happens to be the anchor sheet of the US’ global strategies. It is as simple as that.
As regards Ukraine, the West bit more than it could chew when the CIA staged a coup in 2014 in Kiev to overthrow the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich and had it replaced by a pro-US set-up. The regime change agenda was pushed with no real understanding that present-day Ukraine is a country but not a nation.
Ukraine was the creation of Josef Stalin. In a brilliant essay last week, titled Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided, Ambassador Jack Matlock, the American envoy to Moscow who played a seminal role as the confidante of Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in negotiating the end of the Cold War, has forewarned that Ukraine has no future without Russia’s helping hand.
On the other hand, the Deep State in the US and large sections of the foreign and security policy establishment in the Beltway have been harbouring fantasies that the CIA can entrap Russia in a quagmire in Ukraine. Last week, David Ignatius at the Washington Post penned a columnthreatening Moscow that it will face a full-blown guerrilla war backed by the US if it dared to intervene in Ukraine militarily. Matlock’s essay will come as a cold shower to these daydreamers.
The main problem here is that Biden finds himself in a fix personally. Biden had a hands-on role in the regime change project in Ukraine. Whether President Obama delegated the dirty job to Biden or the latter asked fro it, we will never know.Suffice to say, Biden must take the responsibility today for the mess in Ukraine, which has turned into a kleptocracy, a bastion of neo-Nazis, a basket case, and a cesspool of venality and depravity.
One false step and Europe will have a refugee flow from that country (population: 45 million) of such massive proportions right on its doorstep that will make Syria seem a picnic — and this, at a time when the ghost of Yugoslavia is stalking the Balkans.
Equally, given his past record of being an ardent votary of Obama’s containment strategy against Russia, it will be a bitter pill to swallow for Biden if he were to be the Western leader chosen by destiny to underwrite Russia’s national security. And that too, with Vladimir Putin at the helm of affairs in the Kremlin, a leader towards whom Obama and Hillary Clinton harboured visceral hatred.
Biden himself has barely concealed his dislike of the Russian leader. Biden brought into his presidency as his foreign policy team people who are known to be Russophobes. The incumbent Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland was personally involved in the regime change in Kiev in 2014 and is today in charge of the policies on Ukraine.
The protagonists in Washington have been delusional. Fundamentally, they fancied that Russia is a declining power — a broken, sulking, petulant country nostalgic for its superpower pedestal. Dire prophesies of Russian collapse have belatedly given way lately to a grudging acceptance that Russia is a persistent power. Russia’s resurgence — its soft and has power as well as its smart power — has taken the West by surprise.
The upgrading of Russia’s nuclear and conventional forces under Putin has produced staggeringly impressive results. Putin restored the nation’s pride that it is the “heir to an old and enduring identity – forged during the time of Peter the Great and persisting through the Soviet era – as a major player on the international stage” — to quote from a commentary by Andrew Latham, American professor in international relations, titled Reports of Russia’s decline are greatly exaggerated.
Why such a crisis at this point in time? The crux of the matter is that the US has decided that it must first clip Russia’s wings before taking on China. Although there is no formal military alliance between Moscow and Beijing, Russia provides “strategic depth” to China simply by being a great power pursuing independent foreign policies and sharing an alternate vision to the so-called liberal international order in terms of a democratised world order based on UN Charter and multipolarity. The Russia-China relations are at their highest level in history today.
The pragmatism of the Russian elite is legion. The Americans apparently thought that the Kremlin can be placated somehow. Putin’s statements must have come as a rude shock. The point is, Russia’s maximalist demands and minimalist stance are one and the same. That leaves no leeway for wheeling-dealing for even a consummate politician like Biden.
“We have nowhere to retreat,” Putin said, adding that NATO could deploy missiles in Ukraine that would take just four or five minutes to reach Moscow.
“They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross. They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’”
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For those who find themselves with excess time this holiday season which they would prefer not to squander with idleness or Netflix binges, then I’d like to offer this serving of Frank Capra films to uplift the soul.
Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It’s a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:
“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”
During World War II, Capra’s Why We Fight series was one of the most important educational tools used to shape the hearts and minds of the American population towards the strategic nature and purpose of the war against the fascist machine which had received much of its support from financiers in the Anglo-American establishment. In America, these groups were masquerading as “patriots” under the American Liberty League promoting America’s neutrality in that conflict. It was an open secret that these groups preferred to let Hitler and Mussolini usher in a new order which they saw as a wonderful opportunity to rule the world, and it was to these groups that FDR declared famously “they who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”. The President knew of what he spoke as he had declared open war on these American fascists from 1932 onward.
Capra not only struggled to revive Roosevelt’s mission to end poverty, hunger and war after the war ended, but also struggled against the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was created in 1949 to shape the new era of art, music and cinema in the post war age as weapons against communism. The CCF had spared no time in purging Hollywood of all “FDR patriots” under the FBI-steered witch hunt known as Mcarthyism on the one hand while promoting a new culture of banality on the other pouring millions of dollars into mind deadening film scripts conducive to an age of white collar consumerism. This CIA/CCF agenda was recognized by only a few leading film directors as a spiritual virus that had to be stopped at all costs.
Other film makers at the time that stood against this corruption included Robert Kennedy’s close friend John Frankenheimer (7 Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate), and Stanley Kramer, whose film Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) still stands alone as one of the most potent artistic exposures of the western support for eugenics and fascism.
Frankenheimer’s 7 Days in May (1964) showcased the real-life planned coup to overthrow JFK which had been arranged by the Military’s Joint Chiefs under the helm of Anglophile General Lyman Lemnitzer in 1962 after Kennedy rejected the General’s plans for Operations Northwoods.
Capra’s approach to combating this virus during the years of Cold War terror took a different path to that chosen by Frankenheimer and Kramer. Rather than exposing the rot directly, Capra focused on uplifting the image of mankind by channeling all his efforts on science documentaries for children which he felt would have the most long term benefit to humanity.
Capra had been a target of the House on Un-American Activities due to his friendship with many blacklisted film makers, and watched as Hollywood was purged of those key individuals who acted as it’s conscience when Hollwood’s role as a tool of patriotism or fascism was still undetermined. Just as the political world was being re-shaped to a new post-moral world order, so too was Hollywood, and as historian Micheal Medved stated, “Capra refused to adjust to the cynicism of the new order.”
Capra’s documentary The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays illustrates his powerful technique that sought to unite science and art through a reverence for God’s creation which is in many ways as cutting edge today as it was 60 years ago.
Capra’s Greatest Films for this Holiday Season
After watching the brilliant It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) which not only exposed the crushing schemes of Wall Street financiers who sought to ruin local productive businesses/commercial banks but also awoke a higher sentiment of transformative love in the hearts of the audience, I would highly recommend watching his lesser known, yet equally powerful pieces You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Meet John Doe (1941) and State of the Union (1949). Taken alongsideMr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), these films act as incredible Schillerian masterpieces which express the best potential for the moral use of cinema as a tool to both spiritually and politically ennoble a nation’s citizenry.
Capra dedicated himself to John F. Kennedy’s challenge to embark upon a new age of “open-system” collaboration around un-ending discoveries in space, producing his last film “Rendez-vous in Space” in 1964. Spliced with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony which set Schiller’s immortal poem Ode to Joy to music celebrating humanity’s eventual emergence into an age of reason, Capra had his narrator end with the powerful words: “The Sun still lights up and gives life to our planet, but only the mind of man can light up, and give meaning to the light of the universe.”
Even though darkness clouds the path to that better future towards which world citizens like Frank Capra dedicated their lives, the light that they knew was there is getting stronger by the day. So take the time to welcome the year 2022 by adding some spiritual kindling onto your flame and let Capra’s intention come alive again.
Happy Holidays to all.
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At a recent online symposium on covid science that was organized by Doctors for COVID Ethics, the most detailed evidence yet against Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” was presented for the world’s consideration.
This international group, which has long opposed the mass rollout of Fauci Flu shots, argued that the human immune system, provoked by the injections, could end up attacking its own tissues (autoimmune disease) when it detects the presence of synthetic spike proteins.
Untold thousands of deaths have already occurred from this, though most of them never make it into the government databases. Numerous presenters, including Dr. Peter McCullough, who has also long stood against the injections, revealed scientific evidence to support these and other claims.
McCullough, by the way, has actually come out to say that covid “vaccines” are the “most dangerous biological medicinal product rollout in human history.” He remains one of the most vocal opponents to the current agenda.
German pathologist and professor Dr. Arne Burkhardt, who has more than 40 years of experience in the field, also presented at the symposium. He conducted his own research on the tissues and organs from 15 different patients where a post-mortem had been performed.
Eight of the bodies were women and seven were men, all between the ages of 28 and 95. Each of these individuals died between seven days and six months post-injection.
What Burkhardt found is that in nearly every case, the jabs caused the individuals’ bodies to self-destruct. A specific type of immune cell called a lymphocyte was found to have invaded various parts of the body, eventually causing early death.
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Burkhardt presented slides showing that lymphocytes had infiltrated the heart muscle in particular, causing systemic inflammation. The resulting lesions were small and probably overlooked, “but the destruction of just a few muscle cells may have a devastating effect,” he warned.
“If the inflammatory infiltration is found where the impulse for the contraction of the heart is given, this may lead to heart failure,” he further said.
It was also discovered that a lymphocyte invasion occurred in other vital organs such as the liver, kidneys, uterus, brain, thyroid and skin, all of which showed signs of autoimmune damage.
How much mRNA poison can the body handle before it goes kaput?
Canadian microbiologist and professor Dr. Michael Palmer summed up Burkhardt’s presentation by explaining that anyone with honest medical training will clearly see “just how devastating the effect of these vaccines can be, at least in those who die after the vaccination.”
“We also now know why the authorities were very hesitant to have autopsies performed on such victims,” Palmer added.
As to why some people are not suffering such an extreme fate post-injection, Palmer warned that the total lifetime dose of messenger RNA toxins is limited, suggesting that it varies from person to person.
Due to a lack of experimental data, it is unknown what these thresholds are. And according to Palmer, this is “one of the great scandals of these vaccines, that no proper toxicity studies have been carried out.”
We do know from animal studies that the contents of the jabs do not remain at the site of injection. They circulate throughout the entire body, combining with receptors and lining blood vessels, which in many people causes clotting and excessive bleeding.
The long-term risks of this are what will really be telling once the contents of the jabs really make their way throughout people’s bodies over the long haul. Widespread death from seemingly no specific cause is likely to occur in the coming months and years.
More related news about Fauci Flu shots can be found at Genocide.news.
On 27 October 2020 Lord Sumption delivered the 2020 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled “Government by decree – Covid-19 and the Constitution”.
The disputes over Brexit last year saw an attempt to make the executive, not Parliament, the prime source of authority in the Constitution. The coronavirus crisis has provoked another attempt to marginalise Parliament, this time with the willing acquiescence of the House of Commons. Is this to be our future?
Lord Sumption is an author, historian and lawyer of note. He was appointed directly from the practising Bar to the Supreme Court, and served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012-18.
In 2019, he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, “Law and the Decline of Politics”, and is now a regular commentator in the media. He continues to sit as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. Alongside his career as a lawyer, he has also produced a substantial and highly-regarded narrative history of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (with volume V still to come).
Full transcript of the video follows.
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, the British state has exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted.
It has taken effective legal control, enforced by the police, over the personal lives of the entire population: where they could go, whom they could meet, what they could do even within their own homes. For three months it placed everybody under a form of house arrest, qualified only by their right to do a limited number of things approved by ministers. All of this has been authorised by ministerial decree with minimal Parliamentary involvement. It has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one.
It is customary for those who doubt the legality or constitutional propriety of the government’s acts to start with a hand-wringing declaration that they do so with a heavy heart, not doubting for a moment the need for the measures taken. I shall not follow that tradition. I do not doubt the seriousness of the epidemic, but I believe that history will look back on the measures taken to contain it as a monument of collective hysteria and governmental folly. This evening, however, I am not concerned with the wisdom of this policy, but only with its implications for the government of our country. So remarkable a departure from our liberal traditions surely calls for some consideration of its legal and constitutional basis.
The present government came to office after the general election of December 2019 with a large majority and a good deal of constitutional baggage.
It had not had an absolute majority in the previous Parliament, which had rejected its policy on the terms for leaving the European Union. It had responded to Parliamentary opposition with indignation. The Attorney- General told the House of Commons in September 2019 that they were unfit to sit, surely one of the more extraordinary statements ever made in public by a law officer of the Crown.
The government had endeavoured to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of their negotiations with the EU by proroguing it, and had been prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller (No. 2).
The ground for the Court’s intervention was that the prorogation impeded the essential function of Parliament in holding the government to account. This decision was certainly controversial in expressing as a rule of law something which had traditionally been regarded as no more than a political convention, although I have no doubt for my part that the Court was right. But whether it is properly classified as law or convention, the constitutional principle which the court stated was surely beyond question. Governments hold power in Britain on the sufferance of the elected chamber of the legislature. Without that, we are no democracy. As the court pointed out, the dependence of government on Parliamentary support was the means by which “the policies of the executive are subjected to consideration by the representatives of the electorate, the executive is required to report, explain and defend its actions, and citizens are protected from the arbitrary exercise of executive power.” The present government has a different approach. It seeks to derive its legitimacy directly from the people, bypassing their elected representatives. Since the people have no institutional mechanism for holding governments to account, other than Parliament, the effect is that ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at general elections.
Within four months of the election, the new government was faced with the coronavirus pandemic. The minutes of the meetings of SAGE, its panel of expert scientific advisers, record that shortly before the lockdown was announced the behavioural scientists advised against the use of coercive powers. “Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk,” they had said. The government did not act on this advice. Encouraged by the public panic and the general demand for action, it opted for a course which it believed would make it popular. It chose coercion. For this, it needed statutory powers.
There were three relevant statutes.
The Coronavirus Act was passed specifically to deal with Covid-19. This hefty document of 348 pages with 102 sections and 29 schedules was pushed through all its stages in a single day in each House as the lockdown was announced. In the time available, no serious scrutiny of its terms can have been possible.
The Act was primarily concerned to enlarge the government’s powers to marshal the medical resources of the country and to authorise additional public expenditure. But tucked away in Schedules 21 and 22 were additional powers to control the movement of people. Schedule 21 authorises public health officials to screen and test people for infectious diseases. They are given extensive powers to control the movement of anyone found to be infectious and to call on the police to enforce their directions.
Schedule 22 confers on the Secretary of State extensive powers to forbid “events” or “gatherings” and to close premises for the purpose of controlling the transmission of Covid-19. For present purposes, however, the important point to note is that apart from the power to prevent events or gatherings, the Act conferred no power to control the lives of healthy people. The measure stood in a long tradition dating back many centuries by which infectious diseases were controlled by the confinement of infectious people, not by the confinement of healthy ones.
A power to confine healthy people was, however, conferred by another Act, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The Civil Contingencies Act is the only statute specifically designed for emergencies serious enough to require the kind of measures that we have had. It authorises ministers to make regulations to deal with a wide variety of “events or situations”, including those which threaten “serious damage to human welfare”. These are defined so as to include things which may cause loss of life or illness. The regulation-making power could not be wider. Ministers are authorised to do by regulation anything that Parliament could do by statute, i.e. anything at all. In other words, it authorises government by executive decree. Specific examples given in the Act include restricting the movement or assembly of people and controlling travel. In enacting these provisions, Parliament recognized that emergency legislation of this kind is constitutionally extremely dangerous. It therefore provided for the powers to be exercisable only under stringent Parliamentary control. I shall return to that.
The government chose not to include a general lockdown power in the Coronavirus Act and not to use the power that it already had under the Civil Contingencies Act. Instead it resorted to the much more limited powers conferred by Part IIA of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, as amended in 2008. Section 45C(1) authorises the Secretary of State to make regulations “for the purpose of preventing, protecting against, controlling or providing a public health response to the incidence or spread of infection or contamination in England and Wales.” That sounds very wide, but the problem about it is that the power is couched in wholly general terms. It is a basic constitutional principle that general words are not to be read as authorizing the infringement of fundamental rights. The best known formulation of what has been called the “principle of legality” comes from the speech of Lord Hoffmann in Ex parte Simms [2000] 2 AC 115, 131. His words are well known, but they are so apposite as to be well worth repeating. Parliament, he said,
“must squarely confront what it is doing and accept the political cost. Fundamental rights cannot be overridden by general or ambiguous words. This is because there is too great a risk that the full implications of their unqualified meaning may have passed unnoticed in the democratic process. In the absence of express language or necessary implication to the contrary, the courts therefore presume that even the most general words were intended to be subject to the basic rights of the individual. In this way the courts of the United Kingdom, though acknowledging the sovereignty of Parliament, apply principles of constitutionality little different from those which exist in countries where the power of the legislature is expressly limited by a constitutional document.”
There are few more fundamental rights than personal liberty. The effect of the principle of legality is that those proposing its curtailment must be specific about it and take the political heat.
So what specific powers to curtail personal liberty does the Public Health Act confer? The answer is that its main purpose is to confer extensive powers on magistrates to make orders in relation to particular people thought to be infectious or specific premises thought to be contaminated. Magistrates can make orders disinfecting infectious people, quarantining or isolating them or removing them to hospitals, among other things. They can order the closure or decontamination of contaminated premises. Ministers are given very limited powers in this area, only two of which were relevant to the lockdown or to current measures of social control. Under Section 45C they have a specific power to make regulations controlling “events or gatherings”. A “gathering” is not defined, but the context shows it to be concerned with more substantial assemblies than ordinary social interchange in peoples’ homes. The object was to deal with threats to public order. Otherwise the only specific power conferred on ministers is a power to do some of the things that a magistrate could do. The result is that ministers can make regulations controlling people thought to be infectious. There is no specific power under the Act to confine or control the movements of healthy people. To interpret it as conferring such a power would not only be inconsistent with the principle of legality. It would also be contrary to the whole tenor of this part of the Act. It is axiomatic that if a statute deals in terms with the circumstances in which a power can be exercised so as to curtail the liberty of the subject, it is not open to a public authority to exercise the power in different or wider circumstances. The courts will I suspect be tempted to give the government more leeway than they are entitled to. But on well established legal principles, the powers under the Public Health Act were not intended to authorise measures as drastic as those which have been imposed.
Why did the government not include a lockdown power in the Coronavirus Act given that it was drafted at the inception of the crisis? The most plausible explanation is that it thought that there might be difficulty in getting such a thing through Parliament without further debate and possibly amendment. Why did they not use the Civil Contingencies Act, which was already on the statute book? The most plausible answer is that the Civil Contingencies Act required a high degree of Parliamentary scrutiny which ministers wished to avoid. Emergency regulations under the Civil Contingencies Act must be laid before Parliament in draft before they are made.
If the case is too urgent for that, they must be laid before Parliament within seven days or they will lapse. If necessary, Parliament must be recalled. Even if the regulations are approved, the regulations can remain in force for only 30 days unless they are renewed and reapproved. Unusually, Parliament is authorised to amend or revoke them at any time. By comparison the degree of scrutiny provided for under the Public Health Act is limited. In urgent cases, regulations under the Public Health Act have provisional validity, pending Parliamentary approval, for 28 days, and that limit is extended for any period when Parliament is not sitting. Parliament cannot amend them, and once it has approved them it cannot revoke them. They remain in force for whatever period ministers may decide. These differences in the level of Parliamentary scrutiny were remarked upon at the time when the powers in question were added to the Public Health Act in 2008. The government of the day told the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords that the lesser degree of Parliamentary scrutiny was appropriate because the powers under the Public Health Act were not intended to authorize anything very radical. They were mainly directed at controlling the behaviour of infected people, and then only in cases where the proposed measure was urgent but “minor in scope and effect.”
The problems begin with the very first days of the lockdown. In his televised press conference of 23 March, the Prime Minister described his announcement of the lockdown as an “instruction” to the British people. He said that he was “immediately” stopping gatherings of more than two people in public and all social events except funerals. A number of police forces announced within minutes of the broadcast that they would be enforcing this at once. The Health Secretary, Mr. Hancock, made a statement in the House of Commons the next day in which he said: “these measures are not advice; they are rules.” All of this was bluff. Even on the widest view of the legislation, the government had no power to give such orders without making statutory regulations. No such regulations existed until 1 p.m. on 26 March, three days after the announcement. The Prime Minister had no power to give “instructions” to the British people, and certainly no power to do so by a mere oral announcement at a Downing Street press conference. The police had no power to enforce them. Mr Hancock’s statement in the House of Commons was not correct. Until 26 March the government’s statements were not rules, but advice, which every citizen was at liberty to ignore.
To complain about the gap of three days during which the government pretended that the rules were in effect when they were not, may strike some people as pedantic. The regulations were eventually made, albeit late. But it revealed a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers which has continued to characterise the government’s behaviour. Over the following weeks the government made a succession of press statements containing what it called “guidance”, which went well beyond anything in the regulations. These statements had no legal status whatever, although this fact was never made clear. The two-meter distancing rule, for example, never had the force of law in England. Many police forces set about enforcing the guidance nonetheless, until the College of Policing issued firm advice to them that they had no business doing so.
Why did the government, once they had announced the lockdown on 23 March wait for three days until 26th before making their regulations, and then resort to the emergency procedure on the ground that it was so urgent that Parliament could not be consulted in advance? The obvious answer, I am afraid, is that Parliament adjourned for the Easter recess on 25th. They deliberately delayed their urgent regulations so that there would be no opportunity to debate them before the recess. The period of 28 days before any kind of Parliamentary scrutiny was required was thus extended by the 21 days of the recess, i.e. to the middle of May.
This is not the only respect in which the level of Parliamentary scrutiny of the executive has been curtailed. The Coronavirus Act authorises any payments connected with coronavirus without limit and without any form of advance Parliamentary scrutiny. The Contingencies Fund Act, which passed through every stage in the House of Commons on the day after the Coronavirus Bill, authorised an increase in the statutory maximum in the Contingencies Fund, from to 2 per cent of the previous year’s authorised expenditure, to 50 per cent. The result was to make an additional £266 billion available to the government with no advance Parliamentary scrutiny. These measures departed from a century and a half of constitutional principle by which Parliament controls exactly how public funds are spent.
There was a number of other steps radically affecting the rights of individuals, which the government took without any Parliamentary sanction. Most of these involved exploiting existing regulatory regimes. The two meter distancing rule, for example, was uncritically adopted by the Health and Safety Executive. As a result, a number of building sites and factories where it was impractical to observe it were required to close although not included in the closure orders made under statutory powers. Perhaps the most remarkable example concerns the steps which the government took to deprive people of access to medical and dental services. The provision of medical and dental services was expressly excluded from the closure orders made under the Public Health Act. But a combination of government advice and government-inspired pressure from regulators was used to limit access to general practitioners. They were required to conduct video triages and refer serious cases to hospitals while telling other cases to wait. This has had a serious impact on the diagnosis and early treatment of far more mortal diseases than Covid-19, notably cancer. More drastic still were the steps taken to close down dental practices. On 25 March the Chief Dental Officer, a government official, published a statement referring to the Prime Minister’s announcement of the lockdown and requiring dentists to stop all non-urgent activity. In reality, they were required to stop even urgent activity.
Their role was limited to carrying out a video triage of patients. Urgent cases were to be referred to a small number of local urgent dental units which essentially performed extractions. Treatment was refused in other cases. This direction, which had no statutory basis, left many people in pain or discomfort and threatened a significant number of dental practices with insolvency. Even after it was lifted at the beginning of June, distancing rules were imposed which seriously reduced the number of patients that a dentist could see and made many dental practices financially unviable. This is a serious matter, because the government’s use of non- statutory procedures like these escapes Parliamentary scrutiny. Parliament may, for example, be taken to have approved, albeit seven weeks late, the exception in the Health Protection Regulations which allowed the provision of dental services to continue. Parliament has never had the opportunity to approve the instruction of the Chief Dental Officer to the opposite effect.
These events give rise to concern on a number of counts. The most draconian of the government’s interventions with the most far-reaching economic and social effects have been imposed under an Act which does not appear to authorise them. The sheer scale on which the government has sought to govern by decree, creating new criminal offences, sometimes several times a week on the mere say-so of ministers, is in constitutional terms truly breathtaking. The government has routinely made use of the exceptional procedure authorizing it in urgent cases to dispense with advance Parliamentary approval, even where the measure in question has been mooted for days or weeks. Thus the original lockdown was imposed without any kind of Parliamentary scrutiny until the middle of May, seven weeks later. Thereafter, there was little scope for further scrutiny. Even the powers which the government purported to exercise were gratuitously expanded by tendentious and misleading “guidance”, generally announced at press conferences.
A special word needs to be said about the remarkable discretionary powers of enforcement conferred on the police. The police received power to enforce the lockdown regulations by giving directions to citizens which it was a criminal offence to disobey. Fixed penalty notices are normally authorised in modest amounts for minor regulatory infractions, parking and the lesser driving offences. The government’s Regulations, however, authorised them for a great variety of newly created offences and sometimes in very large amounts.
On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence. The power, which was originally advertised as being intended to deal with “raves” has of course been widely exercised for other purposes. In particular, it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps to ensure safety. On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.
There is a noticeable process of selection involved in these actions. No such fines, arrests or assaults have been seen in other demonstrations, such as those organised by Black Lives Matter, or Extinction Rebellion which did not observe social distancing but were thought to have greater public support. The Mayor of London applauded the police action. The silence from civil rights organisations such as Liberty was deafening.
The police’s powers of summary arrest are regulated by primary legislation, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Under Regulation 9(7) of the original lockdown regulations, the government purported to amend that Act by enlarging their powers of arrest so that they extended to any case in which a policeman reasonably believed that it was necessary to arrest a citizen to maintain public health. I need hardly say that the Public Health Act confers no power on ministers to amend other primary legislation in this way.
In fact, the police substantially exceeded even the vast powers that they received. In the period immediately after the announcement of the lockdown, a number of Chief Constables announced that they would stop people acting in a way which the regarded as inessential, although there was no warrant for this in the regulations. One of them threatened to go through the shopping baskets of those exercising their right to obtain supplies, so as to ensure that they were not buying anything that his constables might regard as inessential. Other forces set up road blocks to enforce powers that they did not have. Derbyshire police notoriously sent up surveillance drones and published on the internet a film clip denouncing people taking exercise in the Derbyshire fells, something which people were absolutely entitled to do. When I ventured to criticise them in a BBC interview for acting beyond their powers, I received a letter from the Derbyshire Police Commissioner objecting to my remarks on the ground that in a crisis such things were necessary. The implication was that in a crisis the police were entitled to do whatever they thought fit, without being unduly concerned about their legal powers. That is my definition of a police state.
Many people think that in an emergency public authorities should be free to behave in this way because the ordinary processes of lawmaking are too deliberate and slow.
I do not share this view. I believe that in the long run the principles on which we are governed matter more than the way that we deal with any particular crisis.
They are particularly important in a country like ours in which many basic rights and liberties depend on convention. They depend on a recognition not just that the government must act within its powers, but that not everything that a government is legally entitled to do is legitimate.
The Public Health Act requires any exercise of its regulation-making powers to be proportionate. The government has included in every regulation to date a formulaic statement that it is. But its actions speak differently. Its public position is explicable only on the basis that absolutely anything is justifiable in the interest of hindering the transmission of this disease. I reject that claim. Powers as wide and intrusive as those which this government has purported to exercise should not be available to a minister on his mere say-so. In a society with the liberal traditions of ours, the police ought not to have the kind of arbitrary enforcement powers that they have been given, let alone the wider powers that they have not been given but have exercised anyway.
These things should not happen without specific Parliamentary authority, in the course of which the government can be required to explain its reasons and the evidence behind them in detail, and its proposals can be properly debated, amended or rejected by a democratic legislature. Their imposition by decree, even if the decrees are lawful, is not consistent with the constitutional traditions of this country.
There are, I would suggest, at least three lessons to be learned from this dismal story.
The first lesson is one to which I drew attention in my BBC Reith lectures last year. Our society craves security. The public has unbounded confidence, which no amount of experience will dent, in the benign power of the state to protect them against an ever wider range of risks. In Britain, the lockdown was followed by a brief period in which the government’s approval ratings were sky-high.
This is how freedom dies. When societies lose their liberty, it is not usually because some despot has crushed it under his boot. It is because people voluntarily surrendered their liberty out of fear of some external threat. Historically, fear has always been the most potent instrument of the authoritarian state. This is what we are witnessing today. But the fault is not just in our government. It is in ourselves. Fear provokes strident demands for abrasive action, much of which is unhelpful or damaging. It promotes intolerant conformism. It encourages abuse directed against anyone who steps out of line, including many responsible opponents of this government’s measures and some notable scientists who have questioned their empirical basis. These are the authentic ingredients of a totalitarian society.
So, I regret to say, is the propaganda by which the government has to some extent been able to create its own public opinion.
Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections of the mathematical modellers; the manipulative use of selected statistics; the presentation of exceptional tragedies as if they were the normal effects of Covid-19; above all the attempt to suggest that that Covid-19 was an indiscriminate killer, when the truth was that it killed identifiable groups, notably those with serious underlying conditions and the old, who could and arguably should have been sheltered without coercing the entire population. These exaggerations followed naturally from the logic of the measures themselves.
They were necessary in order to justify the extreme steps which the government had taken, and to promote compliance. As a strategy, this was completely successful.
So successful was it that when the government woke up to the damage it was doing, especially to the economy and the education of children, it found it difficult to reverse course.
The public naturally asked themselves what had changed. The honest answer to that question would have been that nothing much had changed. The threat had not been fairly presented in the first place. Other governments, in Germany, in France, in Sweden and elsewhere, addressed their citizens in measured terms, and the level of fear was lower. It is not fair to criticise the government for the mere fact that the death toll in Britain is the second highest in Europe. There are too many factors other than government action which determine the mortality of Covid-19. But it is fair to blame them for the fear which means that Britain seems likely to suffer greater economic damage than almost every other European country.
The ease with which people could be terrorized into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence as social beings came as a shock to me in March 2020. So has much of the subsequent debate. I certainly never expected to hear the word libertarian, which only means a believer in freedom, used as a term of abuse. Perhaps I should have done. For this is not a new problem. Four centuries ago the political theorist Thomas Hobbes formulated his notorious apology for absolute government. The basis of human society, he argued, is that people have no right to be free, for they completely and irrevocably surrender their liberty to an overpowering state in return for security. In an age obsessed with escaping from risk, this has become one of the major issues of our time.
I have criticised the way in which the government has invaded civil liberties with limited Parliamentary scrutiny or none. But of course Parliamentary scrutiny is not enough unless Parliament is also willing to live up to its high constitutional calling. It has to be ready to demand rational explanations of ministerial actions and to and to vote down regulations if they are not forthcoming. There is unfortunately little evidence of this. The public’s fear effectively silenced opposition in the House of Commons.
The official opposition did not dare to challenge the government, except to suggest that they should have been even tougher even quicker.
Parliament allowed the Coronavirus Act to be steam-rollered through with no real scrutiny. It agreed to go into recess at the critical point in March and April when the need for active scrutiny of government was at its highest. When it returned, it meekly accepted government guidance on social distancing, and submitted to a regime under which only 50 out of the 650 members could be in the Chamber at any one time with up to 120 more participating remotely on screens. This has meant that instead of answering to a raucous and often querulous and difficult assembly, whose packed ranks can test governments with the largest majorities, ministers had an easy ride. The exclusion of most of the House from participating in the core activities for which they had been elected by their constituents, was a most remarkable abdication of the House’s constitutional functions. It has reduced its scrutiny of the government to the status of a radio phone-in program.
However, the basic problem is even more fundamental. Under its standing orders, the House of Commons has no control over its own agenda.
Its business is determined by the Leader of the House, a government minister, and by the Speaker. Backbenchers, however numerous, have no say and the official opposition not much more. In this respect the Commons is unlike almost every other legislature in the world.
Other legislatures determine their own agenda through bipartisan committees or rules which entitle members with a minimum level of support to move their own business. When, in September, MPs began to kick back against the government’s dictatorial measures, the only way that they could do it was to tack a proviso onto a resolution authorizing the continuance of the Coronavirus Act, requiring the government to obtain Parliamentary approval of regulations made under the Public Health Act. The Speaker, probably rightly, ruled this out as an abuse. But it should not have been necessary to resort to devices like this. The standing orders date from another age when there was a shared political culture at Westminster which made space for dissenting views, and a shared respect for the institution of Parliament. The procedures of the House are not fit for a world in which the government seeks to shove MPs into the margins. Speaker Hoyle was surely right to accuse ministers of despising Parliament. But it will take more than schoolmasterly lectures to address the problem. Over the past few decades, the House of Commons has lost much of the prestige and public respect that it once enjoyed. Mr Cox’s strictures against Parliament in September 2019 were outrageous. But Parliament will richly deserve them unless it can rise to the challenge of controlling the most determined attempt by any modern government to rule by decree.
So much for the first lesson of recent events. The second is a variant of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Ministers do not readily surrender coercive powers when the need has passed. The Scott Inquiry into the Matrix Churchill scandal, which reported in 1996, drew attention to a broad class of emergency powers which had been conferred on the government at the outset of the Second World War until such time as His Majesty should declare by Order in Council that the war had ended. These had been kept in force by the simple device of ensuring that no such Order in Council was ever placed before His Majesty. They were still being used in the 1970s and 1980s on the footing that the Second World War was still in progress, for purposes quite different from those originally envisaged. Likewise, the powers conferred on ministers and the police by the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006 have been employed not just to combat terrorism but for a variety of other purposes, including the control of peaceful demonstrations, the enlargement of police stop and search powers to deal with ordinary non-terrorist offences, and the freezing of the assets of Icelandic banks for the protection of their UK depositors. It will therefore surprise no one that the present government, having announced on 23 March that the lockdown would last until the NHS was able to cope with peak hospitalisations, should have continued them in May and June after this objective had been achieved. Ministers did this notwithstanding the warning of their scientific advisers in reports submitted to SAGE in February and March that a lockdown could delay infections and deaths but not stop them. Once again, fear persuaded people to accept the surrender of their liberty, even when the lockdown was no longer capable of the objective originally claimed for it. If the government had made its regulations under the Civil Contingencies Act, as it should have done, they would have had to be reapproved by Parliament every 30 days. Even with a relatively supine House of Commons, it is permissible to hope that Parliament would at least have called for a coherent explanation of this pointless and profoundly damaging decision.
The third and last lesson which I want to draw from these events is that government by decree is not only constitutionally objectionable. It is usually bad government.
There is a common delusion that authoritarian government is efficient. It does not waste time in argument or debate. Strongmen get things done.
Historical experience should warn us that this idea is usually wrong.
The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables governments to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning or research. Within the government’s own ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice. The want of criticism encourages self-confidence, and self-confidence banishes moderation and restraint. Authoritarian rulers sustain themselves in power by appealing to the emotional and the irrational in collective opinion. The present government’s mishandling of Covid-19 exemplifies all of these vices. Whatever one might think about the merits of its decisions, it is impossible to think well of the process which produced them, which can only be described as jerky, clumsy, inconsistent and poorly thought out.
There is not, and never has been an exit plan or anything that can be described as a long-term strategy – only a series of expedients. The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons reported in July that the lockdown was announced without any kind of cost-benefit analysis or advance planning for its disruptive economic effects. The many relevant social and educational considerations were disregarded in favour of an exclusive concentration on public health issues and only some of those. These are all classic problems of authoritarian government. It is habitually inefficient, destructive, blinkered and ultimately not even popular.
The British public has not even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening to our country. Many, perhaps most of them don’t care, and won’t care until it is too late. They instinctively feel that the end justifies the means, the motto of every totalitarian government which has ever been. Yet what holds us together as a society is precisely the means by which we do things.
It is a common respect for a way of making collective decisions, even if we disagree with the decisions themselves. It is difficult to respect the way in which this government’s decisions have been made. It marks a move to a more authoritarian model of politics which will outlast the present crisis. There is little doubt that for some ministers and their advisers this is a desirable outcome. The next few years is likely to see a radical and lasting transformation of the relationship between the state and the citizen. With it will come an equally fundamental change in our relations with each other, a change characterized by distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. In the nature of things, authoritarian governments fracture the societies which they govern. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion is corrosive. It divides and it embitters. In this case, it is aggravated by the sustained assault on social interaction which will sooner or later loosen the glue that helped us to deal with earlier crises. The unequal impact of the government’s measures is eroding any sense of national solidarity.
The poor, the inadequately housed, the precariously employed and the socially isolated have suffered most from the government’s measures. Above all, the young, who are little affected by the disease itself, have been made to bear almost all the burden, in the form of blighted educational opportunities and employment prospects whose effects will last for years. Their resentment of democratic forms, which was already noticeable before the epidemic, is mounting, as recent polls have confirmed.
The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way. It will not forget. Aristotle argued in his Politics that democracy was an inherently defective and unstable form of government. It was, he thought, too easily subverted by demagogues seeking to obtain or keep power by appeals to public emotion and fear. What has saved us from this fate in the two centuries that democracy has subsisted in this country is a tradition of responsible government, based not just on law but on convention, deliberation and restraint, and on the effective exercise of Parliamentary as opposed to executive sovereignty. But like all principles which depend on a shared political culture, this is a fragile tradition. It may now founder after two centuries in which it has served this country well. What will replace it is a nominal democracy, with a less deliberative and consensual style and an authoritarian reality which we will like a great deal less.
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Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.
Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:
Riots, martial law and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequent military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security. The January 6 attempt to storm the Capitol by so-called insurrectionists created the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.
The imperial president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Joe Biden, the nation’s 46th president.
The Surveillance State. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Consider that it took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots. Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.
A new war on terror. “Domestic terrorism,” used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous,” became the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to wage war on so-called political extremism, ushering in what investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald described as “a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Culture wars. Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend “certain” viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory also moved to the forefront of the culture wars.
Bodily integrity. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these were just a few ways in which Americans continued to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
COVID-19. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it remains to be seen how the rights of the individual will hold up in the face of long-term COVID-19 authoritarianism.
Financial tyranny. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) exceeded $29 trillion and is growing. That translates to almost $230,000 per taxpayer. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didn’t have on programs it couldn’t afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounter global supply chain shortages (and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.
Global Deep State. Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it became increasingly obvious that we had entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. Fascism became a global menace.
20 years of crises. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before.
The state of our nation. There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.
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This video was originally published in November 2020.
The Story of Benjamin Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.
Just in his twenties – after landing on the beaches of Normandy, fighting in the Battle of the Buldge, and liberating various Nazi concentration camps – Ben became responsible for prosecuting members of the Einsatzgruppen death units, responsible for the deaths of over one million innocent people during the Nazi invasion of Russia.
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Benjamin Franklin once famously wrote to his fellow colonials: “Either we hang together or we hang separately.”
Those words are just as true today as they were 270 years ago, for empires have always controlled by dividing their victims into regional tribal interests in order to be better conquered.
While techniques have adapted to modern times, the essential ingredients for the science of discord remain relatively unchanged: keep resources scarce, fear and ignorance high, and let a targeted population clash over diminishing returns of scarcity.
Amid this division, myopic ethnic, religious, and linguistic prejudices have fertile soil to grow to the benefit of an oligarchic elite.
Today’s Americans, sitting as they are on the precipice of a their own internal civil clashes, and economic collapse more broadly, have not heeded the advice of their own founding fathers well enough.
However, it is no small irony that Ben Franklin’s advice is being taken to heart in another part of the world far removed from the decaying republic.
The China-Russia-Iran alliance challenges rules-based disorder
Since Iran finalized its Comprehensive 25 Year Cooperation Plan with China on 27 March, a completely new geometry has arisen in Southwest Asia, which is evolving at breakneck speed.
An ancient civilization serving as the third foundational pillar supporting the Greater Eurasian Partnership, and having joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on 17 September, Iran has finally emerged as a leading driver for stabilization and progress.
Alongside security agreements with Russia that have seen the two nations conducting Indian Ocean military drills in February 2021, Russia, Iran and China (RIC) have also announced that all three parties would hold joint naval drills in the Persian Gulf by the start of 2022.
Russian-Iran relations don’t end here, but a 20-year cooperation agreement – modelled on the Iran-China agreement – between the two powers is also in the final stages of negotiation.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh stated on 11 December: “Like the 25-year cooperation roadmap we developed with China, we can do the same with major neighboring countries.”
This transformative corridor is an obvious synergistic component to the China-led east-west Belt and Road Initiative, and Russian-Indian led International North South Transportation Corridor, both of which are sweeping across the world island.
The Iran-Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan gas swap
At the 28 November Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) summit in Ashgabat, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan overcame immense hurdles by finalizing an important gas swap deal that will involve Iran receiving two billion cubic meters of gas per year from Turkmenistan, which it will also send in equal proportions to Azerbaijan.
This agreement broke through the five-year block on gas relations between Turkmenistan and Iran, which had collapsed in 2016 due to complaints over unpaid oil from over a decade earlier. Additionally, the war which many commentators were warning might break out just a few months ago between Azerbaijan and Iran makes the agreement for renewed cooperation between the two nations that much more important.
Iranian president Raisi alluded to the foreign interests that were provoking fires during that heated period saying: “We must never allow others to interfere in our relations. We must resolve our own problems, work together to advance our relations and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation. Experience so far shows that when we discuss our issues ourselves, we manage to resolve many of them.”
The Trans-Caspian and White Stream pipelines complement the Southern Gas Corridor (Source: Trans-Caspian Pipeline)
The three nations also agreed to deepen integration and cooperation in transportation, trade, shipping, tourism and, most importantly, the development of the incredibly bountiful offshore oil and gas resources within the Caspian Sea.
While southern Iran holds the world’s second largest oil and natural gas reserves (behind Russia, who sits at #1), Turkmenistan is 4th on the list, while offshore deposits in the Caspian Sea represent some of the largest in the world.
As Pepe Escobar has observed in his recent contribution to The Cradle, the Chalous Gas fields in the Caspian not only represent the tenth largest reserves in the world with a $5.4 trillion value but, according to experts, this region alone could service 52 percent of Europe’s natural gas needs for 20 years. As of this writing, agreements have been signed, which will see this region developed by Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests.
The long overdue 300 km Trans Caspian Pipeline (TCP) crossing the Caspian has also come much closer to being realized alongside this harmonization of interests. With its completion in 2022, the TCP will connect to the Southern Gas Corridor and Turkey’s TANAP.
The final branch to Europe via the Nabucco gas pipeline will easily be completed (if political sabotage is avoided), providing Europe with abundant gas for generations. This will give both Iran and Russia a position of vast economic leverage with a mismanaged Europe now experiencing one of the worst man-made energy crises in history.
The INSTC as a game changer
The International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC, involving Russia, Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India) is a 7,200 km multimodal transit system very much in synergy with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Source: CSIS: Reconnecting Asia
Since the ECO summit, a plethora of agreements have been signed to accelerate this megaproject as well. While many talking heads have tried hard to paint this 20-year-old project as a Russian competitive challenge to China’s BRI, it is increasingly obvious that the two projects are entirely harmonious.
On 28 November, a three-way Iran-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan memorandum of understanding was signed to build a new railway which will add to the 917 km railway from Ozen (in Kazakhstan) to Gorgan (in Iran) via Turkmenistan that began in 2014 and which was funded primarily by the three powers.
Another agreement was signed on 10 December to create an Iran-Azerbaijan-Georgia transit route connecting the Persian Gulf with the Black Sea to be completed in March 2022.
Once built, this new route will allow goods to move from Iran’s southern ports to Europe and Central Europe directly over land.
Reporting on this development, the Caspian Report stated that “effectively combining the capacity of all three would allow Iran to connect the Oman Sea and the Gulf to the south, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, Central Asia to the northeast and the Caucasus to the northwest.”
On 12 November, Iranian, Turkish and UAE leaders signed a new cooperation agreement to start work on a new transportation corridor between the three nations with goods arriving from the UAE to Iran’s Port Shahid Rajaee, then transported over land to Turkey and thence to Europe, cutting eight days off conventional sea routes.
This is all part of the broader INSTC which just last summer saw the first cargo arriving to India via Iran from Finland.
Security cooperation
In addition to building new transport and energy grids between the historic rivals, the leaders of Turkey and Iran signed a strategic security agreement on 21 October with Iran’s Interior Minister Vahidi saying: “Iran-Turkey ties will speed up. The two states will together end regional instability and foil enemy plots. The two countries will not allow others to disrupt their relations.”
One month later, Vahidi’s sentiments were amplified by Prime Minister Erdogan who held a press conferencealongside Raisi saying: “The White House is training and arming all terrorist groups in the region, including ISIS and the PKK, and providing them with terrorist equipment and tools to create insecurity.”
The two leaders not only signed security cooperation agreements to fight foreign-sponsored terrorism, but also advanced plans for a new free trade zone with preferential tariffs for all regional nations.
While Saudi Arabia has been among the most stubborn of the Persian Gulf states to adapt to the new reality shaping Southwest Asia, the UAE has been among the quickest.
No longer do the promises of western backers appear as attractive as they did a decade ago, especially considering the speed of economic disintegration of the ‘Titanic’ speculative bubbles known as the Trans-Atlantic economy.
On 6 December, Iran’s President met with the UAE’s National Security in Tehran saying: “the security of the countries in the region is intertwined and Iran supports the Persian Gulf littoral states. There should be no obstacle in the relations between the two Muslim countries of Iran and the UAE, and these relations must not be influenced by outsiders.”
The UAE representative stated in return: “We are the children of this region and we have a common destiny, so the development of relations between our two countries is on our agenda … we hope that a new chapter of relations with our two countries will begin.”
A new paradigm emerges
While the west is busy sabre-rattling, imposing unilateral sanctions and virtue signaling their rules-based superiority, the world has moved ahead towards a new multipolar system premised on genuine cooperation.
Based on this positive momentum, it is only a matter of time before the Economic Cooperation Organization fully incorporates into the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) which itself has already integrated deeply into China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
As it stands the long-awaited Iran-EAEU free trade zone is on the cusp of being finalized and this watershed will create many potentials for an expanded power bloc.
As Iranian MP Mohsen Zanganeh stated: “I think that if we focus our attention on Eastern countries, especially those in Central Asia, East Asia, as well as Eastern Europe, instead of focusing on the West, we can definitely benefit from their considerable economic potential… As you are aware, we are facing a lot of challenges in interacting with Western countries, because of the United States and Israel’s attitudes toward Iran. But the same challenges don’t exist in our ties with Eastern nations. That creates a great opportunity for our economy.”
If the 2018 Iraq-Iran Provisional Agreement is also revived, then this small railway can be extended 1,570 km through Iraq to Syria’s Latakia Port and Lebanon as a southern corridor for the New Silk Road. Syria’s return to the Arab League in the coming months makes this project much easier to achieve.
Despite the fact that old imperial habits die hard, there is obviously a new game in town, and anyone who wants to have a future should come to the recognition that they must learn to play by a new set of rules. These are rules which reject regime changes, divide-to-conquer tactics, or zero-sum thinking.
Much more in alignment with natural law, the Greater Eurasian Partnership is driven by win-win cooperation and building up the powers of productivity within a community of sovereign nation states.
Where one paradigm is unipolar, the other is multipolar; and where one is premised on extracting wealth from a fixed set of resources in order to get nations to fight for scraps, the other creates new wealth while harmonizing diverse interests into a greater whole. Which one would you rather live in?
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This article was originally published on The Cradle.
We are told by our governments that It’s Christmas under Lockdown. To protect you and your loved ones against the so-called deadly Covid Omicron Variant. The announcement was made on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Anthony Fauci led the disinformation campaign, intimating that Omicron “is already in the United States but has yet to be detected”.
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver.
Different methods in choosing and employing judges form a possible factor in the contrasting judicial reception to schemes for mandatory injections in the United States and Canada.
It is a proven, indisputable scientific fact that the “vaccine” does not prevent infection and spread of the Covid virus or variants. It is also an indisputable fact that we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated.
Omicron, a so-called covid-variant, has never been isolated. Whatever the current narrative – 193 UN member governments tell you in lockstep, what the mainstream media tell you in lockstep – and what the majority in the street of the 193 betrayed UN member countries believe in lockstep – is a Big Lie.
On Christmas Eve, Dr Scott Jensen, a general practitioner and candidate for Governor of Minnesota, released a video explaining how he has been targeted by his state’s medical board with an investigation for the FIFTH time. The move by the state appears to be political in nature, and is designed to harass and deter Jensen from continuing to help his patients.
As a child of the Cold War, I grew up only knowing the Soviet Union as our enemy. When it collapsed, it created a vacuum when it came to defending the US. It turns out we needed the USSR to bring purpose to our own existence.
There is no doubt that Christmas is a time when we become aware of the precariousness of nature as the sun’s light fades, leaves fall off the trees and the weather gets colder. The sun seems to stop moving (solstice) for three days, and then as if by magic starts moving again in the other direction and seems to be reborn.
Following the Taliban’s victory over US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington is walking into another death trap, but this time on Russia’s borders with the neighboring Ukraine. So now, Washington’s non-partisan bureaucrats and the Military-Industrial Complex are calling for ways to fight “Russian aggression”.
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We have clients in 23 different countries, but most reside within the continental United States – in recent weeks, we keep hearing countless stories of self-proclaimed 24-hour turnaround testing centers to do a PCR test, then taking more than 80 hours to get the results back. Friends in New Jersey tell us not one pharmacy or walk-in clinic in a 100-mile radius has appointments available in the next week. Home testing has improved but for those traveling overseas – it is a PCR test that is needed.
The question that haunts us now is that, almost two years into this crisis and an $11 Trillion U.S. Fiscal and Monetary spending deluge, we still don’t have an adequate testing infrastructure? It blows us away – we are still dealing with endless waiting lines, no availability of testing appointments, shortages of at-home tests and overwhelmed testing labs scrambling to process vials. Where did all that money go?
State and Federal Debts Add Up
In the US, the corona crisis started on January 29, 2020, when the White House initiated its coronavirus task force. Since then, the US has gone from crisis to crisis and the media and our politicians have been obsessed with this epidemic and its consequences ever since. Amidst all the turmoil, the US government has left no stone unturned to throw money at this disaster. The Fed kicked off in early March by lowering interest rates to zero and shortly after began rolled out an alphabet soup of emergency programs. From buying high yield debt to bankrolling bailout checks (PPP loans), nothing was left on the table for our adroit stewards at the Fed. The byzantine maze of fiscal stimuli has left everyone confused. Nevertheless, the total amount of support the Fed has pumped into the economy is best measured by the expansion of its balance sheet. When the Fed finishes its asset tapering program in March of 2022, its balance sheet will have expanded by $5 Trillion. In less than two years the Fed deployed more money than during, and in the 10 years after, the great financial crisis ($3.5TR). This monetary support alone is also more than that of the entire GDP of Japan, the third-largest economy in the world.
Not to be outdone, the Federal government opened the floodgates by quickly passing spending bill after spending bill. After less than two years, the total amount of fiscal stimulus, as measured by the fiscal deficit spending, has reached a mind-blowing $6 Trillion. U.S. Federal debt has reached $29 Trillion and $32 Trillion if you add State and Local debt. At this point, US debt is a whopping 134% of GDP, giving the U.S. the dubious honor of being among top ten most indebted countries worldwide. This is a spot the erstwhile creditor to the world shares with the likes of Italy and Venezuela.
Where did all the money go?
And what did we, the American people, get for this colossal $11 Trillion in a monetary and fiscal deluge? As we find ourselves in the midst of yet another massive outbreak is case count, this seems like a valid question. You would think that the priority for these funds is to bolster essential healthcare needs to address this medical crisis. But even now, the US is still woefully ill-equipped with testing capabilities, almost two years into this crisis. Our friends in Europe tell us testing is quickly done there. They live in urban areas such as Paris where testing is still readily available. France is also in the midst of another outbreak but seems to have no problem providing its citizens with ample testing facilities.
In hospitals, there has apparently been no improvement in available capacity in the critical ICUs, judged by the Johns Hopkins weekly hospitalization trends.
Hospitalizations
Incredulously, ICU beds-in-use compared to overall availability is almost higher now than it was a year ago.
So Where did the Money Go?
According to the Congressional Research Service, $25 Billion was appropriated for “selected domestic COVID-19 vaccine-related activities”. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a mere 0.5% of the federal emergency spending in the last two years. It turns out that the department of health and human services wasn’t even the biggest recipient of all the emergency spending. It was fourth on the list, which was topped by the Treasury Department, the small business administration, and the department of labor. Other major recipients were the department of education and the agriculture department. Why farmers needed a $160 Billion windfall during the pandemic is incomprehensible, especially since most crop commodities have been at record highs for a year now.
Reasonable people can agree that small businesses needed support during this crisis, especially during the lockdown. But the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed security Loan Facility (TALF), Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities ((P/S) MCCF), and Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) had absolutely nothing to do with small business assistance. These programs, together with the $5 Trillion purchases of Treasuries and agency debt, helped to foster an explosion in debt issuance by big business. Fueling stock buybacks – Investment-grade debt issued in this year and last year was a total of $3.1 Trillion, almost half the size of the total IG market. High yield issuance was even more baffling, setting issuance records two years in a row amidst a debilitating epidemic.
Junk Bond Bonanza Fueling Stock Buybacks
The effect of all this government largesse has had a profound impact on the stock market. The total market value of all stocks has risen from $34 Trillion to $53 Trillion; a whopping $19 Trillion (50%) increase from pre-pandemic levels. The IPO market has been red hot this year, with 1000 deals for the first time in history. Rock bottom interest rates and epic multiple expansion have driven investors into IPOs, as they clamor for excess returns in the most unsavory deals. U.S. junk bonds, we see new supply to plunge as much as 30% in 2022 as refinancings, the driver for almost 60% of issuance this year, will shrink because companies already capitalized on low yields and lengthened maturities. Likewise, a Fed in a hiking cycle should tighten financial conditions – shrink issuance.
Buybacks Driving S&P and Nasdaq Higher – On Leverage
Congress wants to tax stock buybacks – the implications are sky-high as a colossal equity market bid comes from Fed-induced corporate bond sales- See above with @SamRo – he notes just 20 companies are responsible for half the stock buybacks – this is one enormous – central bank fueled – leveraged Ponzi is driving stock indexes (S&P 500 and Nasdaq) higher. Of course in Q1 – Q2 2020 when stocks were on sale – few companies were buying back stock. Per Fitch – U.S. dollar-denominated, investment-grade (IG), corporate bond volume, excluding financial institutions, supranationals, sovereigns, and agencies, tallied $705 billion through Dec. 16, 2021. We saw the second-highest issuance through the first 10 months of the year and are up 27% and 13%, from 2018’s and 2019’s respective levels. Volume is down 36% versus the record 2020 amount; though that gap could shrink by year’s end as the final two months of 2020’s issuance was well below 2021’s monthly average. The volume disparity between 2020 and 2021 relates to deal size. Last year, there were double the number of transactions done for $4 billion or more compared with this year (60 in 2020 versus 29 in 2021). Both years featured at least two $20 billion issuances, with AT&T Inc. and The Boeing Company driving 2020 while Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T led 2021. Several prominent companies tapped the IG market in 2021, including Verizon, AT&T, Amazon.com Inc., Oracle Corp., Comcast Corp. and Apple Inc. These six issuers comprised 21% of the year’s total volume, with all completing bond transactions of $15 billion or more. In fact, the 10 largest issuers make up 29% of 2021’s volume, highlighting the market’s concentration.
The problem is – central banks are fueling unsustainable inequality.
Share of Total Net Worth held by the Top 1%
2021: 32.5%
2010s: 31.2%
2000s: 27.2%
1990s: 26.7%
1980s: 23.2%
*Since 2003, the Bottom 50% total net worth held has plunged from 39% to 30%. Federal Reserve data. For 20 years 1990-2010, the top 1% net worth held was range-bound 26-27% – since central bank aggression in balance sheet expansion in 2009, inequality has exploded higher.
The Great Heist at the Taxpayers Expense
This is all great if you own stocks, or when you are a Fortune 500 company issuing debt to repurchase your own stock, but neither the deluge in debt nor the record number of buybacks (at a run-rate of $1 Trillion this year) have done anything to bolster our country’s medical care or Americans’ health. More troubling even is reports showing outright theft of funds earmarked for pandemic emergency spending. The Wall Street Journal quoted the U.S. Secret Service who said that “some $100 billion has potentially been stolen from Covid-19 relief programs designed to help individuals and businesses harmed by the pandemic.” The main culprits are worldwide organized crime networks, who defrauded primarily the pandemic unemployment insurance program. On top of that, as much as 15% of the PPP loans ($76 billion out of $800 billion total) may have been fraudulent, according to the New York Times.
The Middle Class is in Pain
After $11 Trillion of emergency spending and support, the US healthcare system is just as inadequate as it was before the crisis, violent crime is rampant, drug overdoses have never been higher and the economy is showing signs of stagflation, as illustrated by the record spread between Treasury breakevens and TIPS yields¹. What these bond market metrics suggest is that the potential growth rate of the US economy has structurally declined since the pandemic (it already declined a lot since the “great financial crisis”) and that any growth future growth is coming from price increases. The bond market is telling us – a significant portion of future GDP growth is coming from price increases, but there is little real growth in the economy, which is why TIPS yields are -1.00%.
Consumers in Pain
Since August – we have had THREE sub-80 readings from the University of Michigan Consumer Economic Confidence Data. Looking back over the last 30 years – it is HIGHLY unusual for the Fed to hike rates with consumers in this kind of pain. Inflation´s taxing powers over the consumer have already hiked rates 100bps for the Fed in our view – colossal demand destruction has taken place. These stagflationary conditions erode people’s real disposable income, making them worse off. Ultimately, most of the $11 Trillion ended up benefiting the top wealthiest Americans, by inflating the prices of assets such as bonds and stocks and lowering interest rates for borrowers with the highest credit rating. For the average citizen, this has been a very raw deal.
Loud Covid Narrative Hides Inconvenient Truths
We must look at the big picture. There is a high price from lockdowns and Covid human suppression / OUTSIDE of cases. The number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45 is now fentanyl overdoses, with nearly 79,000 victims in the age range dying to them between 2020 and 2021.
Inflation is a Regressive Tax on the Middle Class
TIPS: Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities: The principal of a TIPS increases with inflation and decreases with deflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. When a TIPS matures, you are paid the adjusted principal or original principal, whichever is greater. Breakeven yield is calculated by deducting TIPS yields from real yields. Breakeven rates derive the rate of inflation priced in by the bond market for applicable maturity (such as 10-year breakevens express the implied rate of inflation in the next 10 years).
Trillions of Fiscal and Monetary Support
What is so painful is that not only is there no discernable improvement in the healthcare infrastructure to deal with the corona crisis, but other facets of America’s healthcare are now even worse off. The CDC reported this week that fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among teenagers. These drugs have killed more people between the ages of 18 to 45 than corona, car accidents, and suicides. Data from Families Against Fentanyl suggests that now one person dies from an overdose every 8.5 minutes. The pandemic has pushed drug abuse into overdrive as “the stress of the pandemic has led more people to use these types of drugs, according to experts.” The Census Bureau this week reported that America’s population grew at the lowest rate in history. In the year that ended July 1, the U.S. recorded only 148,000 more births than deaths, with the balance coming from net immigration. America’s life expectancy last year declined by an unprecedented 1.8 years to 77 years. Besides corona, increases in mortality from drug overdoses, heart disease, homicide and diabetes also decreased life expectancy. Violent crime especially has seen a dramatic increase in the last two years. CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported that homicide rates rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 and they continue to go up this year. At least 12 major U.S. cities have broken annual homicide records in 2021 — and there’s still three weeks to go in the year.
US Annual Population Growth
2021: 0.1%
2011: 0.8%
2001: 1.0%
1991: 1.2%
*America is dying – and it’s NOT just a Covid narrative. From 1999–2019, nearly 500,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids -CDC data.
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Lawrence McDonald is the New York Times Bestselling Author of “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” – The Lehman Brothers Inside Story – one of the best-selling business books in the world, now published in 12 languages – ranked a top 20 all-time at the CFA Institute.
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Begun in California, but spreading throughout the United States and the world, the Unity Project pulls together parents, activists, doctors, and scientists, all working together to stop, block, and end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for children.
With corporate-captured media and public health agencies working aggressively and criminally to inject children with the experimental shots that have proven to be all risk and no benefit, it is up to us. It is up to each and every one of us to stand up, to speak out, and protect the children.
It is time to nullify the unjust, unethical, and unconstitutional mandates.
How can YOU help? Wherever you are, wherever you go, distribute information to help parents find the facts. Below is a printable flyer. For more resources from the Unity Project, visit their website.
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It is a proven, indisputable scientific fact that the “vaccine” does not prevent infection and spread of the Covid virus or variants. It is also an indisputable fact that we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated. Vaccination causes injurious side-effects and deaths that hospitals mislabel “Covid deaths,” and the vaccine damages the human immune system, thus spreading the virus. The “vaccine” also cause variants that are used propagandistically to keep the fear hype going despite the fact that hardly any serious injuries or deaths are associated with the “Omicron variant.”
So why are public authorities using extreme tyrannical methods to force people to infect themselves with a dangerous “vaccine” when, even if the “vaccine” did protect, the mortality of Covid is extremely low and does not justify the dangerous side effects of the “vaccine.”
It is an established fact that there are very few “deaths from Covid.” The deaths are “with Covid” among untreated infected people denied HCQ and Ivermectin who had serious comorbidities. In other words, the entire panic is orchestrated and nonsensical.
Here again are the infection fatality ratios and survival rates by age group.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Government has been paying for purchasing, promoting, and distributing experimental coronavirus “vaccines” to Americans. Government has even been mandating many people take the shots in order to continue working at their jobs, while also pressuring these and other people to take the shots by imposing vaccine passport requirements that bar from ordinary activities people who have not taken the shots.
Yet, at the same time, government is saying that if individuals who succumb to the marketing and coercion end up being hurt or killed by the shots, those individuals or their families are barred from suing the pharmaceutical companies that have been raking in big bucks off the shots.
Legal commentator Andrew Napolitano took on this liability shield outrage in a brief compelling video commentary. In the Wednesday video commentary, Napolitano tags the United States government created liability shied for the big pharmaceutical companies behind the experimental coronavirus vaccine shotes as both “morally wrong” and “corporatism.”
As Napolitano explains in the video commentary, absent the creation of special legal protections these big pharmaceutical companies would be, as are other companies that provide products, liable for harm their products cause. Indeed, there is a field of law called torts that deals largely with such liability and a class of lawyers who sue companies for injuries caused by products.
But, the United States government has given these large pharmaceutical companies a shield protecting them from this liability that is otherwise a routine part of doing business in America. This special protection, Napolitano points out is “morally wrong.” Napolitano elaborates:
But, look, one of the principles of American law is “where there’s a wrong, there’s a remedy.” If the vaccine manufacturers have done something wrong or put something into your body or a loved one’s body that harms or kills them, there ought to be a remedy, and Congress is not in the business of interfering with that remedy. Someone punches you in the nose, you have the right to punch them back, and then you have the right to sue them for the cost of repairing your nose. Someone puts a vaccine in your arm and you get sick, you have the right to sue them. These are moral rights, and they used to be legal rights until the Congress interfered with them.
This special protection from liability for vaccine manufacturers Napolitano further condemns as an exercise of corporatism — “the government favoring certain capitalistic ventures by making it easy and inexpensive for these capitalistic groups to distribute their product.” That’s something that can work out great for big pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line by letting the companies avoid having to pay anything to people harmed by the companies’ dangerous shots.
But, maybe that is not the end of this story. Napolitano intriguingly concludes his discussion of the issue with this comment: “Wait until the lawsuits start coming.” This suggests Napolitano thinks there may be means to overcome the pharmaceutical companies’ liability shield for damages caused by the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. Maybe there will be some justice after all.
Watch Napolitano’s video commentary here:
Napolitano is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
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What should be understood is that according to statements by the WHO and the CDC the PCR test used to “detect” and “identify” SARS-CoV-2 and its variants should be considered as invalid.
Omicron has not been identified. Testing positive for Omicron using the PCR test (which has been used since November 26, when Omicron was first announced) is an impossibility.
The so-called estimates of “Test Positive for Omicron” for vaxxed indicate that vaccinated individuals are more likely to test PCR positive for two reasons.
Because their immune system has been affected by the vaccine, they are more likely to test PCR positive in comparison to the unvaxxed.
Moreover, the vaccinated will seek medical care upon developing adverse events. Upon their admission to hospitals and clinics, they will be routinely subjected to the taking the PCR test.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2021
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According to figures released by the UK government via the Office for National Statistics, people who are triple vaxxed are 4.5 times more likely to test positive for Omicron than those who are unvaccinated.
The numbers also illustrate how the double-vaccinated are 2.3 times more likely to be infected with Omicron than those who haven’t taken any jabs.
The data, which is summarized by the Daily Sceptic’s Will Jones in this article, bolsters assertions that the Omicron variant is effective at evading vaccines.
“Note that this is the probability of an infection being Omicron given a person is infected, so it doesn’t tell us how likely a person is to test positive in the first place,” writes Jones.
“This means it doesn’t tell us that the vaccines are making things worse overall, only that they are making it much more likely that a vaccinated person is infected with Omicron than another variant. In other words, it is a measure of how well Omicron evades the vaccines compared to Delta. The fact that the triple-vaccinated are much more likely to be infected with Omicron than the double-vaccinated confirms this vaccine evading ability.”
Jones concludes from the data that, “The current Omicron outbreak is largely an epidemic of the vaccinated and is being driven, not by the unvaccinated, but by those who have been double and triple jabbed.”
The numbers completely demolish claims that the Omicron outbreak is a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.
As Will Jones also documents in this piece, claims that NHS hospitals are being overwhelmed by the unvaccinated aren’t backed by any actual evidence.
Despite this, over the weekend UK Health Secretary blasted unvaccinated people for taking up hospital beds, telling them they “must really think about the damage they are doing to society.”
UK scientists will today present evidence that the Omicron variant is milder than previous strains of COVID-19, something that health experts in South Africa have been saying for weeks.
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On Christmas Eve, Dr Scott Jensen, a general practitioner and candidate for Governor of Minnesota, released a video explaining how he has been targeted by his state’s medical board with an investigation for the FIFTH time. The move by the state appears to be political in nature, and is designed to harass and deter Jensen from continuing to help his patients. His crimes, according to the state: “spreading misinformation”, not being vaccinated, recommending children not wear masks in school, “promoting natural immunity,” and prescribing Ivermectin, What’s worse, his faceless, nameless accusers are asking him to handover the private medical records of his patients who have been given Ivermectin. Dr Jensen warns that this is a dangerous precedent, and could be the shape of things to come.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to you. It’s happening to you right now,” said Dr Jensen. Watch:
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China’s State Assets Management and Supervision Commission has approved the merger of three major companies operating in the rare earth mining sector. As such, the new super-enterprise includes three of the world’s six largest rare earth producers, and keeping in mind that China controls about 80% of the global rare earth supply, these mergers will secure the Asian country’s dominance in the industry. In fact, state media described the China Rare Earth Group as an “aircraft carrier” due to its size and industrial might. They also noted that the China Rare Earth Group will control over 70% of the country’s rare earths output.
The new group will be formed under the merger of China Minmetals Rare Earth Co, Chinalco Rare Earth & Metals Co and China Southern Rare Earth Group Co. According to media reports, the newly formed company will mine rare earths in China’s south. The State Assets Management and Supervision Commission will own 31.21% of the total shares of the new group. Each of the three group members will receive a 20.33% stake.
Rare earth metals, as the name suggests, are critical in almost every modern electronic device, from the standard smartphone to the most advanced military equipment. Although China has huge reserves of rare earths, about 36 million tons, or a third of the world’s reserves, extracting rare earths is extremely difficult.
China’s main competitive advantage today is the establishment of an integrated technology process of metal ores. The US was once the main supplier of these products, but since rare earth mining and processing is difficult from a safety point of view and is associated with environmental risks, the US phased out the industry gradually. Due to this, about 80% of US imports of rare earths now comes from China.
As relations with Beijing deteriorate, Washington has repeatedly spoken out about the need to create independent supply chains that bypass China. However, as the US completely abandoned the industry, it is almost impossible for them to challenge China anytime soon. None-the-less, in the context of globalization and the international division of labour, relying on suppliers with a competitive advantage often brings much greater efficiency.
Western experts note that China is creating a giant corporation and is merging rare earth producers for tighter controls on rare earth prices. Meanwhile, because the new group is mainly focused on primary production, management will be able to strengthen control over compliance with environmental standards. The distribution market is much harder to control, and as small companies that also exploit rare earths have fewer opportunities, their operations can harm the environment due to cost cutting measures.
It should also be understood that the combined companies in the new group specialize in heavy group rare earth mining. At the same time, outside of China, investments in the US, Australia and the UK focus mainly on light group rare earths. With the Anglo countries focusing on light group rare earths, China will continue to play a key role in the supply of heavy group rare earths.
On the one hand, the global economy and industry are recovering from the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the demand for rare earth metals is increasing – in the past year, the price of dysprosium and terbium has increased by about 60% and 90% respectively compared to a year ago. On the other hand, political instability in Myanmar, the second-largest supplier of rare earths, is forcing China to shoulder the responsibility of meeting global rare earth demand.
Contrary to the concerns of Washington and some other Western countries, for Beijing, it is important to show that it is a responsible party in the global supply chain. Under the five-year plan, starting in 2020, China increased its annual rare earth mining quota to 140,000 tons, and this year increased it by 20%.
Enigmatic former leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, previously said that “The Middle East has oil and China has rare earths.” In this way, China has certainly positioned itself to dominate the industry, and the latest merger between major Chinese companies will ensure that this status quo will remain this way for the foreseeable future.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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The Israeli military has changed its rules of engagement to allow its forces to fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. The new rule is a sop to Israeli settlers, the IDF’s clientele.
From now on, Israel Defense Force militants may fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. Or, in the IDF parlance, when they’re escaping. These changes in the IDF’s Rules of Engagement (RoE) were exposed by Roee Sharon of Channel 13 on Sunday (Hebrew). This change requires three comments.
First of all, the timing. Sharon notes that the RoE were changed within the last few weeks – but the IDF allowed the publishing of the information only on Sunday. Why? Because of the crisis in the illegal outpost of Homesh, situated on the land of the village of Burqa, near Nablus. Following the killing of a settler, Yehuda Dimentman, and a wave of settler violence, hundreds of settlers attempted to reach the outpost, and clashed with the army, wounding one soldier by running him over (Hebrew).
The army knows it will likely have to remove the outpost soon, so it bribes the settlers: Here, you see, we made shooting Palestinians easier!
An interjection is essential here. On Saturday, the IDF militants shot 15 Burqa residents, protesting the mass emigration of settlers to their land, with rubber-coated bullets, and caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas; on Sunday, the IDF militants again shot eight Burqa residents with rubber-coated bullets, and again caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas. Needless to say, the Israeli media didn’t cover those incidents.
The IDF has a record of allowing the injuring of Palestinians in order to mollify settlers. In 2015, then-Brigadier General Tamir Yadai, then the commander of the AYOSH Division (West bank, but he’s been promoted since) told (Hebrew) the settlers of Halamish that he changed the RoE, saying:
“We’ve been a bit tougher with the people around here. Where we used to fire gas grenades or rubber [coated bullets], we now shoot Ruger [bullets] or live fire.”
Contrary to what Yadai implied, the Ruger 0.22 fires rounds which, while less powerful than normal ammunition, are still very much lethal. Note that it was to settlers, Yadai’s true clientele, that he announced the order for the use of excessive force – so as to mollify them.
Secondly, the use of excessive force, when you know it’s excessive, is a war crime. Shooting an escaping, unarmed, person who poses no threat to you is a war crime. These war crimes are committed essentially for public relation purposes. The IDF returns to the RoE it used in Operation Doorstep Keepers, the massacre on the Gaza border in 2018-2019 during the Great March of Return. Those RoE were changed quietly afterwards, because they caused the IDF public relations damage.
But now it’s time to bribe the settlers again; the IDF has become inured to committing war crimes; and it knows no one in Israel will complain, and that if it kills children who threw stones and escaped, the Israeli media will simply not report it, or at worse will run the IDF’s Spokesman daily lie. So what’s to lose?
And thirdly, the elephant in the room: While the official RoE does not discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers, the rules on the ground certainly do. No IDF militant will shoot to injure, much less kill, Jewish stone throwers. A soldier will not use live ammo, Ruger bullets, rubber-coated bullets, CS grenades, or stun grenades against Jews.
He will not do so if even if the Jewish rioters personally attack him, run him over. Not only will he not shoot at them, he will not even detain them.
Stones thrown by Jews are as damaging as stones thrown by Palestinians, but the procedures – and how can that be otherwise, in an Apartheid regime? – change according to the ethnic origin of the stone thrower. And the Israeli public grows inured to that, day by day.
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In response to an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility back in April, Tehran began enriching some uranium at 60 percent, which is still below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade. When asked by Sputnik if Iran would exceed 60 percent enrichment, Iran’s atomic energy chief Mohammad Eslami answered, “No.”
“All our nuclear activities are carried out according to the agreements, statutes, and regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Eslami added.
The JCPOA negotiations in Vienna are currently on pause but are expected to resume on Monday. Since the talks resumed at the end of November, the US has been accusing Iran of not taking the process seriously. The Biden administration wants Tehran to accept a draft agreement that was reached during earlier negotiations with the previous Iranian government, but Iran wants more sanctions relief.
US officials have also been warning that time is running out on the talks. Last week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Israel and said the deadline for the negotiations will come “within weeks” if an agreement isn’t reached.” He also met with Israeli officials to reassure them that the US was willing to take a harder line on Iran.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace prize laureate, died on Sunday aged 90.
A contemporary of Nelson Mandela, Tutu was known not just for his role in ending a dark chapter of racial discrimination in his country but also for speaking out against injustices around the world, including in the Middle East.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa honoured this fight in a tribute to Tutu announcing the archbishop’s death.
“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” he said in a statement.
“A man of extraordinary intellect, integrity and invincibility against the forces of apartheid, he was also tender and vulnerable in his compassion for those who had suffered oppression, injustice and violence under apartheid, and oppressed and downtrodden people around the world.”
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Archbishop Tutu was an outspoken critic of Israeli occupation in Palestine and the siege on Gaza.
“I wish I could keep quiet about the plight of the Palestinians. I can’t! The God who was there and showed that we should become free is the God described in the Scriptures as the same yesterday, today and forever,” he told the Washington Post in 2013.
He drew parallels between Israeli occupation and apartheid in South Africa.
“What’s being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it’s the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.”
Tutu was to lead a UN fact-finding mission with Professor Christine Chinkin to investigate a November 2006 Israeli attack on Gaza’s Beit Hanoun district that led to the deaths of 19 Palestinians, including seven children.
Israel refused to grant Archbishop Tutu and Professor Chinkin authorisation to enter Gaza, but they were eventually able to travel to the besieged territory via Egypt. They met with survivors and eye-witnesses and produced a report to the Human Rights Council.
In a May 2008 statement about his mission, the archbishop decried the Israeli siege on Gaza, in place since 2007, as “a gross violation of human rights”. He also said the Israeli siege contradicted the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
“Those scriptures speak about a God: a God of the Exodus, a God notoriously biased in favour of the weak, of the oppressed, of the suffering, of the orphan, of the widow, of the alien,” he said.
“We are in a state of shock, exacerbated by what we subsequently heard from the victims and survivors of the Beit Hanoun massacre. For us, the entire situation is abominable,” the joint statement by Desmond Tutu and Professor Chinkin said.
“We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege if they knew what it meant for ordinary people like themselves. No, they would not support a policy which limits fuel supplies or automatically cuts off the electricity supply.
“They would not support a policy which jeopardizes the lives of ordinary men and women in hospital, that cuts off water and food from hospitals jeopardizing the lives of babies.”
In August 2009, Desmond Tutu joined a delegation of the international NGO “The Elders” in a visit to Israel and occupied Palestinian territories to advocate for peace.
Most recently, in an article published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2014, Desmond Tutu declared his support for the international movement of boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) as a peaceful means of opposing Israeli occupation.
“Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of ‘normalcy’ in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice. They are contributing to the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo,” he wrote.
The archbishop voiced his opposition to acts of violence by both sides of the conflict, although he described Israel’s response to Palestinian missiles as “disproportionately brutal”.
“I have condemned those in Palestine responsible for firing missiles and rockets at Israel. They are fanning the flames of hatred. I am opposed to all manifestations of violence.
“Missiles, bombs and crude invective are not part of the solution. There is no military solution.
“The solution is more likely to come from that nonviolent toolbox we developed in South Africa in the 1980s, to persuade the government of the necessity of altering its policies.”
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The South African Ministry of Health has announced that it has suspended all quarantine measures for asymptomatic Covid-19 cases with immediate effect, official broadcaster SABC News reported. This applies to both the unvaccinated and vaccinated people.
In addition, contact tracking will be discontinued – except in cases of so-called cluster outbreaks.
According to a statement by the ministry, people with a positive Corona test but without symptoms would no longer be obliged to self-isolate.
There is also no longer the obligation to submit a negative Corona test before resuming work after an isolation period of eight days. All infected people should be able to return to work after eight to ten days without presenting a test.
The majority of new cases are incidentally in the Western Cape, which is also the most vaccinated province. Overall, South Africa has a low vaccination rate of around 20 percent.
If South Africa can get through Omicron without panic why has all of Europe lost their minds? https://t.co/zIWmopwUSb
The rich, vax'd & boosted, "West" currently reporting 3X the case rate as the rest of the world (22X per capita).
More importantly, infections in the relatively unvax'd nations have trended down since late April while infections spike in the West. pic.twitter.com/1GxJpmn03O
The same pattern holds for deaths, as well, with deaths per capita 6X higher in the West currently.
For 88% of the world, the pandemic appears to peaked when only 1.5% were vaccinated and Omicron is not apparently impacting these nations. pic.twitter.com/IY1HGiKW4t
The rich, vax'd & boosted, "West" currently reporting 3X the case rate as the rest of the world (22X per capita).
More importantly, infections in the relatively unvax'd nations have trended down since late April while infections spike in the West. pic.twitter.com/1GxJpmn03O
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An intensive six-week study of key political shows across multiple networks and a review of lobbyist filings conducted by Ricochet in collaboration with Jacobin Magazine has revealed significant bias in Canadian television news shows. Lobbyists for banks, oil companies, arms manufacturers and other sundry corporate interests routinely appear on news shows without any public disclosure of their big money ties.
In a typical example of the practice, former Liberal New Brunswick premier Brian Gallant appeared numerous times on CBC News Network’s flagship political show, Power and Politics, in the days leading up to this year’s federal election. Viewers of the show were not informed of Gallant’s position as a senior advisor at Navigator Inc., one of the country’s largest corporate PR and lobbying firms.
More than one in every 10 guests analyzing the news worked for firms paid to influence the government and the public. Despite their vested interests, networks often described these panellists as “strategists.”
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Political panelists’ corporate lobbying interests are rarely disclosed on Canadian news shows, and this lack of transparency undermines news outlets’ claims to impartiality.
In the wake of the federal election, there was plenty of commentary about how media coverage of the party leaders and campaigns has shaped the views of the electorate. What this framing ignores is that even between elections, our media moulds our politics.
Manufacturing consent
Despite the digital revolution, television remains the dominant source of news in Canada. Last year, a study by the Media Technology Monitor found that nearly half the population finds out about current affairs by watching TV. More than twice as many said TV was their go-to medium rather than online sources, apps and social media.
Jacobin and Ricochet’s review of Canadian television news commentary and analysis from March 29 to May 9, 2021, catalogued data on more than 860 relevant television appearances. More than one in every 10 guests analyzing the news worked for firms paid to influence the government and the public. Despite their vested interests, networks often described these panellists as “strategists.”
Among on-air commentators, lobbyist or PR professional was the fourth-most-common occupation. Government officials and politicians, journalists, and medical professionals (during a pandemic) were the only occupations more commonly featured.
Corporate influencers are, unsurprisingly, more often present in discussions of certain key issues. Across Canada’s big three networks — CBC, CTV and Global — one in every five guests brought on to comment on climate change, one in every five guests analyzing the federal budget, and a staggering one in every three guests analyzing federal politics were active in the PR industry.
Furthermore, comments made by guests often found their way into other news programs as part of reports or were included in online stories. In some cases, there was no disclosure at all of the guests’ ties. At other times, critical information on a group’s funding was omitted. Often there was a lack of disclosure of guests’ relevant clients or lobbying interests. In still other instances, guests were introduced as being affiliated with one organization or company but no mention was made of their affiliations with other relevant corporations or lobbies.
PR hacks on CBC
Gallant, for example, appeared on CBC’s Power & Politics on five occasions during the study period. CBC’s hosts introduced him as the head of the Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation (CCPC). No details were provided about the organization on-air.
A review of the CCPC’s website reveals that it is a subsection of the main website for Navigator Ltd. The online news outlet VICE described Navigator as “the company famous Canadians turn to when they face public relations crises.” The PR and corporate lobbying giant created and continues to fund the CCPC.
The CCPC’s website fails to properly explain the organization’s aims. Instead, the company hides behind a series of poorly written platitudes:
The Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation is an initiative that will help equip Canadian businesses and organizations with insights, tools, and support as they work to redefine and strengthen both the scope of their purpose and the contributions they make more broadly to society.
For clarification, Ricochet and Jacobin reached out to Gallant. Reproducing the policy wonk–speak from his company’s website, Gallant wrote back that the CCPC seeks to help businesses “redefine and strengthen the scope of their purpose and the contributions they make to their stakeholders — and more broadly to society — through insights, tools, and research.”
Aside from being head of the CCPC, Gallant also works as a senior advisor at Navigator. This affiliation is disclosed on the CBC’s website. However, over the six-week viewing period, the audience was not made aware of this fact in five of his six appearances on the CBC, where he was called upon to give his opinion on COVID-19, corporate taxation, infrastructure spending, and climate change.
Gallant was mostly forthcoming in response to media questions, stating that the CBC asks all panellists to self-disclose “any interests that are potentially linked to any of the subjects which will be discussed.” However, he said he could not discuss whether Navigator has any clients with interests in areas that would need be disclosed under these guidelines, due to the company’s privacy policy.
Giving limited disclosure the heave-ho
The CBC introduced Shakir Chambers, another regular TV panellist associated with the firm at the time, as a “political commentator” on four occasions. Viewers were not given any details of his work for Navigator. The CBC is well aware of his work for the firm — at the time of his appearances, the Power & Politics website noted that he “plays a leading role in the firm’s government relations practice and provides strategic counsel for high profile clients.”
On three occasions, former Alberta United Conservative Party president Erica Barootes of Enterprise Canada, a national lobbying firm, provided on-air commentary about COVID-19 for the CBC. The network did not disclose her registration as a lobbyist for both Astellas Pharma Canada Inc. and Shoppers Drug Mart. In addition, she was registered in three provinces as a lobbyist for Purolator — one disclosure filing shows her lobbying was related to COVID-19 vaccine distribution logistics, a frequently discussed news topic given the delay in the vaccine rollout at the time. Only her affiliation to Enterprise was noted during her appearances. The CBC did not make viewers aware of what business Enterprise conducts, let alone any of Barootes’ potentially relevant lobbying or business activities.
One in every seven guests appearing on the CBC programs was from a lobbying or government relations firm.
Earlier this year, in response to a complaint from a member of the public, the CBC’s public ombudsman, Jack Nagler, noted that merely stating the name of a firm during an introduction is “rather pointless.” In his view, the name of a firm is of little use to viewers seeking to understand whose interests they represent. “The reference to their company names is a form of shorthand that might work for people familiar with Parliament Hill but does not work for the rest of us,” he wrote.
The CBC also invited Jenni Byrne, former top aide to Doug Ford and Stephen Harper, to share her opinions on the pandemic while she was a registered lobbyist for Tridan/CBS Group Inc. The company was, at the time of her appearance, pursuing a government contract for its COVID-19 rapid test kits. In addition, Byrne lobbies the Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care and has also registered to lobby for BioVaxsys Tech, Bausch Health Companies, and Proctor & Gamble. Only her eponymous company name was disclosed by the CBC.
PR on CTV
CTV is also guilty of failing to disclose commentators’ affiliations. In April, the network twice invited former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt to discuss the federal budget and pandemic-related airline bailout packages.
Raitt was introduced as a former cabinet minister, but no mention was made at that time of the fact she is the vice-chair of global investment banking at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Presumably the bank and its clientele would have an interest in the government’s approach to issues such as corporate taxes, wealth taxes, wage subsidies, and federal deficit spending contained in the budget.
In cases where a television commentator’s most relevant company affiliation was noted, the nature of the firm’s lobbying or business activities often wasn’t disclosed by CTV. This was the case even when they were related to the supposed expert analysis being provided to viewers.
CTV did not disclose that Marr is the former CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, or that the Canada West Foundation is heavily funded by fossil fuel corporations.
Greg MacEachern, the senior VP of Proof Strategies, appeared on CTV News Channel multiple times to discuss subjects such as the federal budget and COVID-19. His affiliation with the lobbying firm was properly disclosed, but the fact that he is a registered lobbyist for companies such as Netflix and eBay was not mentioned. These firms stood to be negatively affected by changes to internet taxation and regulation contained in the federal budget and in Bill C-10, which sought to alter how the internet is regulated in Canada. A review of the federal lobby registry shows that, around the time of his appearances, MacEachern held discussions with the federal government ministries involved in these changes.
Proof Strategies is registered in multiple provinces to lobby on behalf of Scarsin Corporation, a health technology firm seeking COVID-related contracts from provincial governments. MacEachern has led the government relations work at Proof Strategies since 2011, according to the lobby firm’s website.
In response to emailed questions, he stated that he meets with producers “a few hours before the panel is taped and the topics [that will be discussed] are specifically reviewed and flagged for any conflicts.”
Not just the right
One might assume that these undisclosed ties to corporate interests occur mostly among guests representing the right wing of the political spectrum. However, a number of former operatives from Canada’s New Democratic Party have also transitioned into lobbying.
In one instance, former NDP strategist Kathleen Monk — at the time a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group — discussed the ongoing pandemic on Power & Politics. CBC did not note that she is listed in the federal lobby registry as a representative of organizations with interests in COVID-related policy. This work includes lobbying for a company named InkSmith. The aforementioned firm has advocated for intellectual property rights to be applied to vaccines during the pandemic. In fact, Monk met with a senior ministerial staffer to represent InkSmith on files related to COVID-19 issues two days before one of her CBC appearances, according to lobbying filings reviewed by Ricochet and Jacobin.
The “responsibility to disclose and address conflicts of interest to our audience — perceived or otherwise — falls to the lobbyists.”
The publicly funded broadcaster regularly invites Monk onto its shows to represent the NDP perspective. Brad Lavigne, a former senior aide to late NDP leader Jack Layton, is also regularly brought onto CBC shows to discuss current affairs and present the NDP perspective. Lavigne is currently a partner and vice president at Counsel Public Affairs, another national lobbying firm.
On five occasions, Lavigne discussed COVID-19 in on-air appearances without CBC noting that he was a registered lobbyist for a health industry firm in Alberta. The CBC also did not mention Lavigne’s presence in the B.C. provincial lobby registry due to his COVID-19 work on behalf of multiple clients.
Counsel Public Affairs has several other staff lobbying for pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and other health industry clients on issues that may be linked to the analysis Lavigne provides on national television. Lavigne and Counsel Public Affairs did not respond to questions about this work.
Think tank “shadow lobbying”
Ricochet and Jacobin’s review also provided a glimpse into possible disclosure issues among guests representing think tanks. Such guests can engage in what is often called “shadow lobbying,” in which donors underwrite their work and benefit from seemingly neutral third parties advocating for their interests.
CTV’s Power Play invited Gary Mar, president of the Canada West Foundation, to discuss the potential shutdown of the Line 5 pipeline, which brings fossil fuels to Quebec and Ontario via the United States. The governor of Michigan along with several environmental groups are opposed to the pipeline, which is owned by Alberta-based Enbridge. In his CTV segment Mar stated that he thought that “Enbridge is taking the right position to say ‘we are not shutting down any of the supply until we are ordered to do so by a court.’”
This range of perspectives does not appear to include civil society, or advocacy or activist groups. Such voices were largely absent from the airwaves.
CTV did not disclose that Marr is the former CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, or that the Canada West Foundation is heavily funded by fossil fuel corporations, including Cenovus, Suncor, Husky Energy, Shell, Imperial Oil, Ovintiv and others. Most notably, Enbridge itself has provided at least $50,000 annually to the think tank, according to its most recent publicly available annual report. This makes the corporation a top donor to the foundation. Enbridge’s funding may in fact be significantly higher than that number — $50,000 and above is the highest donation threshold listed in the report.
The Canada West Foundation declined to comment on whether CTV was aware of Mar’s ties to Enbridge prior to arranging what turned out to be positive commentary on the company’s pipeline. A spokesperson responded that the think tank acknowledges supporters publicly on its website and in communications materials: “We think it’s great that engaged citizens and organizations are willing to open their wallets in the pursuit of good public policy.”
Ricochet and Jacobin reached out to multiple CTV staff for comment but did not receive a reply.
Suspicious ratios
The proportion of guests who were journalists or medical professionals was roughly the same across both CTV and CBC. However, the proportion of commentators on CBC whose day jobs were in lobbying or PR was roughly double that of CTV.
Although COVID-19 dominated the news, making up nearly half of the news coverage on both networks, one in every seven guests appearing on the CBC programs was from a lobbying or government relations firm. This is roughly the same proportion as that of medical professionals invited onto panels during a pandemic.
In an email, Chuck Thompson, CBC’s head of public affairs, said that lobbyists are featured “on occasion” due to “their past experience, often as government leaders or decision makers.” He added that they are not invited for their objectivity, but for their ideological perspective and partisan political analysis. Thompson claims that the network achieves the right mix of guests comprising “a cross section of individuals who bring different perspectives to any given discussion.” This range of perspectives does not appear to include civil society, or advocacy or activist groups. Such voices were largely absent from the airwaves.
When guests’ views are informed by their lobbying work, this narrows the spectrum of viewpoints available to an audience. CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices states that “it is important to mention any association, affiliation or special interest a guest or commentator may have so that the public can fully understand that person’s perspective.”
CBC was asked what processes the network uses to adhere to this principle. The public broadcaster replied that it takes the issue seriously, and the “responsibility to disclose and address conflicts of interest to our audience — perceived or otherwise — falls to the lobbyists after speaking with our chase producers. The process we have in place goes a long way to ensuring transparency.”
What this research shows is that these processes clearly do not go far enough.
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The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Unicameral Parliament) adopted a law that allows foreign forces on its territory to participate in multinational exercises in 2022. The decision was made at a meeting on Tuesday and was supported by 318 parliamentarians (out of the 423 seats that are occupied), far surpassing the required minimum of 226 votes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the Rada to approve his decision on allowing foreign forces on Ukrainian territory to participate in military exercises in 2022. In particular, these are for the United Efforts multinational exercises, the Ukrainian-American Rapid Trident exercises, the Ukrainian-British Cossack Mace, the multinational Light Avalanche, the Ukrainian-Polish Silver Saber, the Ukrainian-American Sea Breeze, the Ukrainian-Romanian Riverine, the multinational Maple Arch exercise and the Viking multinational exercise.
According to Ukrainian legislation, the functioning of any military formation is not provided for by law and is therefore prohibited on the country’s territory. Also, the deployment of foreign military bases is not allowed in Ukraine, therefore, foreign troops are only allowed each time into the country by a special law.
The Ukrainian law change comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin held his 17th annual major press conference this week, where he highlighted that it is not Russia building military bases or placing missiles on the US’ border, but rather it is the US with their missiles that are “coming to our home, they’re on the doorstep of our home.” Putin also highlighted that NATO broke their 1990’s promise of not expanding the bloc eastwards towards Russia’s borders.
Even if Ukraine is not a NATO member, Kiev is certainly desperate to be accepted into the NATO Membership Action Plan and loyally enacts Washington’s interests in Eastern Europe. With this, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second CIS Department said that in 2021, seven joint military maneuvers between Kiev and NATO members took place on Ukrainian territory. Nine maneuvers will be carried out in 2022 and the number of military personnel participating in them will almost double compared to 2021 – to 64,000. The number of aircraft and helicopters will more than triple – to 361, and warships almost 4 times – to 256.
“The scale, territorial scope and duration of joint exercises between Ukraine and NATO countries are increasing… All exercises are linked by a single concept and have an anti-Russian orientation,” highlighted the Second CIS Department.
On Thursday, a senior US official felt the need to reiterate that the Biden administration would issue “massive sanctions” on Russia if it were to invaded Ukraine, something that Moscow continually repeats that it has no plans of doing. However, even more provocatively, the official stressed the increase in defensive aid to Kiev and NATO allies in central and Eastern Europe. “We and our allies are prepared to impose severe damage to Russia’s economy, and bring about exactly what it says it does not want: more NATO capabilities, not less, and closer [geographically] to Russia, not further away.”
Effectively, the US announced that it has no plans on scaling back escalations with Russia in Eastern Europe, and rather plans to continue provocations and tensions by promising more pressure on the borders of the Eurasian Giant.
Germany’s Welt newspaper quoted an unnamed senior NATO source as saying that NATO has strengthened its Response Force’s combat readiness because of Russia’s supposed actions.
“Before the Russian military increased near the border with Ukraine, NATO responded with the first concrete military measure and increased readiness for 40,000 rapid response forces,” the source said.
In this way, Putin’s claim that it is NATO encroaching on the borders of Russia and not vice versa is shamelessly not even denied by the Biden administration and NATO, but rather is highlighted with a sense of pride. The increase in combat readiness of NATO rapid response forces and Ukraine welcoming foreign troops on its territory near Russia’s borders is part of the ongoing hybrid war against Moscow.
NATO is attempting to pressure Moscow before the upcoming scheduled Putin-Biden meeting in an attempt to influence the negotiation process between the two leaders. It is also likely that Biden will weaponize this Ukrainian law change to place more US troops right on the border with Russia to continue its campaign of pressure that aims to limit Russian influence and compete for its traditional sphere of influence.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Canada’s diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s Olympic Games flouts the Olympic spirit, is based on false reports, and promotes cold war with China.
The ancient Olympics brought Greeks together in a peaceful sporting/cultural festival, despite inter-city conflicts. An Olympic Truce was declared, so all Greeks could participate in safety.
Impressively, on December 2nd, in a consensus vote, the 193-member UN General Assembly reaffirmed the Olympic Truce for the Beijing Games. UNGA President Shahid observed:
“Nations should use sport as a tool to support dialogue and reconciliation, striving for a peaceful world aligned with the principles and values enshrined in the United Nations Charter.”1
International Olympic Committee Chair Bach stated,
“We can only accomplish this mission… if the Olympic Games are politically neutral and do not become a tool to achieve political goals.”2
Clearly, in mimicking Biden’s petty diplomatic boycott, Trudeau is playing politics and is out of step with this international consensus.
Additionally, Trudeau’s diplomatic boycott is based upon false charges of human rights abuses. Contrary to your editorial, China’s Uyghur population is growing in number3 and prosperity.4
Unlike Canada’s native peoples, Chinese Uyghurs have an Autonomous Republic. Along with 800 million Chinese, Uyghurs were lifted out of poverty during the past five years – an unprecedented accomplishment in world history.5
One might question Trudeau’s concern about Uyghur Muslims in the context of Canada’s role in recent US wars.
In mainly-Muslim Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers routinely conducted night-time raids on civilian homes and reportedly turned over Afghanis for torture.
Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament to avoid this scandal in 2008. In predominantly-Muslim Libya, a Canadian general led NATO’s attack, turning Libya into a failed state. Canada was part of the US regime-change coalition in mainly-Muslim Syria, where a half million were killed and more than thirteen million turned into displaced persons.6 So, why is the PM so concerned about Muslims in China? I suggest there’s an ulterior motive.
Again, contrary to your editorial, most Hongkongers are relieved finally to be peacefully reunited with the People’s Republic after 150 years of British imperialism.
For several years, they endured western-funded NGO’s terrorizing the former colony with violence, arson, and property damage.7 Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai is doing fine, as she has attested in recent public communications.8 She merely requested the western media respect her privacy.9 Taiwan is a Chinese province, recognized so officially by Canada since 1970.10 And it wasn’t China, but Canada, which politically kidnapped Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the Trump Administration. The Two Michaels signed confessions of violating national security laws, according to Chinese sources,11 facts unreported in the Spec.
China’s Ottawa embassy recently stated:
“Canada… has committed heinous crimes against indigenous people. Until today, systematic racial discrimination is still severe in Canada. Canada… is certainly in no position to judge China on this front.”12
The embassy is correct: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Finally, the Biden-led diplomatic boycott isolates Canada and promotes cold war with China.
So far, it appears only four countries formally joined: Canada, USA, UK, and Australia, all predominantly-white, English-speaking countries, representing a tiny minority of countries and the global population. This tiny cabal is out of step with most of the world on many issues but especially on China, with which, since Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”, it appears endlessly to be causing problems and raising tensions.
The rest of the world, however, looks to China for prosperity through its Belt-and-Road Initiative.
Canada, whose second largest trading partner is China, should too. Most countries are increasingly focussed on preventing twin nightmares of nuclear warfare and climate chaos. But the “anglosphere” seems intent on recreating a cold war with China. Its ulterior motives are hegemony and profits through an arms race, including Canada’s obscenely expensive new fighter jets and warships.
The diplomatic boycott is one more reason that Canadians have been calling for an independent foreign policy. Instead of aping US pettiness, Canadians should applaud the Olympic Truce and celebrate the participation of our athletes in Beijing.
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Ken Stone is a long time antiwar, anti-racism, environmental, and labour activist, resident in Hamilton. He is Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual press conference on December 23, 2021. Expanded meeting of the Board of the Ministry of Defense took place on December 21, 2021.
“The ball is in their court.”
Putin expressed optimism toward talks with Washington on security guarantees proposed by Moscow. He called the current negotiations with the U.S. “positive” and hinted at fresh direct talks in Geneva in 2022.
But “Russia’s actions will depend on whether the unconditional guarantee of Russia’s security will be ensured rather than on the results of negotiations.”
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“NATO’s eastward expansion is unacceptable… They lied to us. There’ve been five waves of NATO’s enlargement. And here’s the result – Romania and Poland received missile systems. We are not the ones threatening someone. We are not the ones approaching the US or British borders… The West must provide us with guarantees immediately. Now.”
“Not too much to ask”
“It was the United States that came to our home with its missiles … Is this too much to ask for? Not to place attack systems near our home? What is so unusual here?”
Earlier, Putin claimed that Moscow is
” extremely concerned that elements of the US global missile defense are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers located in Romania and planned to be deployed in Poland are adapted to the use of Tomahawk systems. If this infrastructure is moved towards, if the US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, then their flight time to Moscow will be reduced to seven to ten minutes, and when placing hypersonic weapons – up to five. This is a serious challenge for us – a challenge to our security.”
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu: “US units with a total number of about 8000 military personnel are deployed in the countries of Eastern Europe. Infrastructure is being created to accommodate the US armored brigade. The deployment of the Aegis Ashore anti-missile complex is being completed in Poland. In Romania, combat duty is already being carried out at a similar missile defense facility.
“Third Military Operation”
“There is an impression that, maybe, they are preparing for the third military operation [in Ukraine] and give us a fair warning: do not intervene, do not protect these people but if you do intervene and protect them, there will be new sanctions. Perhaps, we should prepare for that.”
Sergei Shoigu :
“The United States and NATO are purposefully increasing the scale and intensity of troop training activities near Russia with increased involvement of strategic aviation, carrying out conditional launches of nuclear missiles at our facilities. The number of their flights near the Russian borders has more than doubled. NATO pays special attention to the transfer of troops to the eastern flank of the alliance, including from the USA.”
He added that advisers from U.S. private military companies (PMCs) have been dispatched to Ukraine’s Donbass setting up firing positions and defences, training Ukrainian special forces. He claimed that provocations with chemical weapons are prepared in Eastern Ukraine.
“The situation is aggravated by the supply of helicopters, attack unmanned aerial vehicles, ATGMs by the US and its allies. The presence of more than 120 employees of American private military companies in the settlements of Avdiivka and Priazovskoye in the Donetsk region has been reliably confirmed.”
Sanctions for Democracy
Putin:
“It is a strange situation: if someone thinks that Crimea is occupied then Crimeans are victims of aggression. So why are they being punished more? But if they chose to rejoin Russia in a referendum then it is a display of democracy.
Are they [the West] fighting democracy? The answer is: they don’t give a damn about the interests of Crimeans and Russia or democracy. They are pursuing their geopolitical agenda. That’s all. We understand it and we will respond accordingly”.
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JFK’s April 1961 message the America’s Media is of utmost relevance to the global crisis which we are currently living, namely the role of the mainstream media in obfuscating the truth,spreading lies, not to mention the relentless threats, smear campaigns and acts of censorship taken against the voices of independent media.
When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no Moving Backwards
Michel Chossudovsky,
Global Research, December 27, 2021
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President John F. Kennedy
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City
April 27, 1961
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.
You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.
You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.
I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight “The President and the Press.” Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded “The President Versus the Press.” But those are not my sentiments tonight.
It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.
Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.
Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.
If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.
On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.
It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one’s golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.
My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.
I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future–for reducing this threat or living with it–there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security–a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.
This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.
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The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.
Today no war has been declared–and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security–and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.
For the facts of the matter are that this nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage; that details of this nation’s covert preparations to counter the enemy’s covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least in one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.
The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.
The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.
On many earlier occasions, I have said–and your newspapers have constantly said–that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.
I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.
Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: “Is it news?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?” And I hope that every group in America–unions and businessmen and public officials at every level– will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests.
And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.
Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.
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It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation–an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people–to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well–the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.
No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.
I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers–I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.
Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed–and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment– the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
This means greater coverage and analysis of international news–for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security–and we intend to do it.
III
It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.
And so it is to the printing press–to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news–that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.
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The following note was originally published almost three years ago; however, with the victory of Gabriel Boric in the Chilean presidential race on Sunday, we consider it important to take another look at it.
In the midst of the joyous celebrations in Chile for Boric’s win against pinochetista Kast, and perhaps as a response of memory to some who are exaggerating too much about the president-elect to compare him with Salvador Allende, with Pablo Neruda or with other icons of the international left, a text by doctor Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, grandson of Chile’s former President Salvador Allende who was overthrown and assassinated in 1973, has been circulating on social media as well as on some online publications. Said text was an “open letter” in response to statements made by the Frente Amplio deputy—now president-elect—Gabriel Boric, who has repeatedly called on the Chilean left to “condemn the human rights situation” in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all of them Latin American countries with socialist projects.
It is worth rereading it, in order to have all the information at hand and not just those which are being amplified by the logical enthusiasm generated by Kast’s defeat.
Doctor Sepúlveda Allende’s open letter to Boric is translated and reproduced below:
Deputy,
I dare to respond to you because I see the danger that it represents for important leaders like you, young referents of the “new left” that has emerged in the Frente Amplio, to make simplistic, absurd and misinformed comparisons on issues as delicate as that of human rights.
It is very biased and rude that you equate—without the slightest argument—the supposed “weakening of the basic democratic conditions in Venezuela,” the “permanent restriction of freedoms in Cuba” and “the repression of the Ortega government in Nicaragua” with the proven atrocities of the military dictatorship in Chile, the evident criminal interventionism of the United States around the world, and the State of Israel’s terrorism against the people of Palestine.
The fact that you write such nonsense does not “make you a pseudo CIA agent,” but it does denote a significant irresponsibility and political immaturity that can transform you into a useful idiot for the right-wing, or worse, make you end up being that “left” that the right craves: a dumb, ambiguous left, a harmless left which, due to opportunism, prefers to appear as “politically correct,” a lukewarm left that does not want to have problems with anyone.
Such a left is confusing, because it does not dare to point out and courageously confront the true enemies of the peoples. Hence the danger of issuing politically immature opinions.
Have you ever wondered why Venezuela is being so vilified and attacked in the media?
Why is it on the news every day in practically all the countries of the Western world where the mainstream media dominate?
Why is it outnumbered and attacked from all sides?
Why do these big newscasts keep quiet about the continuous massacres in Colombia and Mexico?
Why do those who tear their hair out worrying about a Venezuelan deputy who confessed to participating in an assassination attempt not have the courage to demand that Israel stop the genocide of the Palestinian people?
A world upside down. That is the world of politics without heart and without courage.
Margarita Labarca Goddard [Chilean human rights lawyer] has already argued clearly and forcefully why you are mistaken in your judgments towards Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. I will only add that Venezuela has a much healthier and more transparent democracy than the one in Chile, if you wish I can point out my arguments to you and we can have a debate, if you are interested.
It is also easy to argue why the “permanent restriction of liberties in Cuba” is a fallacy. Not to mention that the word “freedom” is so misused that by now its true meaning is ambiguous, and a sensible definition requires even a philosophical debate. Or tell me, what is freedom?
I name these two countries because I know them quite well. I lived in Cuba for nine years and in Venezuela I have been living for another nine.
I do not know Nicaragua first-hand, but I invite you to ask yourself what would have been the reaction of a right-wing government to the actions of hired and heavily armed criminal gangs who took over whole sectors of the most important cities in the country.
Additionally, said mercenary gangs were organized to commit abominable acts such as kidnapping, torture, maiming, rape and even burning dozens of human beings alive, for the mere fact of being sympathizers of a cause—in this case, Sandinistas. The persecution reached the point where entire families were murdered in their own homes.
Even with the resources, the legal framework, and the strength to take immediate forceful action against such fascist destabilization, the legitimately elected government of Nicaragua exercised restraint. Do you think that if a right-wing government had been in power, they would have had such a conciliatory position and would have called for dialogue to resolve the conflict?
History gives us answers.
I understand that you may have been confused by the powerful “media” that took upon itself the charge of victimizing the perpetrators, just like they did a year ago in Venezuela during the time of the so-called guarimbas.
Therefore, Gabriel, objectively speaking and through a serious argumentation—and not opinions formed and shaped by a media that repeats misrepresentations and lies on a daily basis—there is no such thing as a double standard by which we defend Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
These countries do not have disappeared or tortured people; they do not imprison those who think differently, but yes, they imprison criminals, be these deputies, politicians or so-called students. Rather, it seems to me that you are the one with the “double standards,” issuing comfortable judgments of morality formed through manipulation and ignorance,
When it comes to the media, democracy and freedoms, we could compare Chile with these countries. I assure you that, unfortunately, Chile would not fare very well, and even less so, if we include human, economic and social rights, since in Chile these seem to be nothing more than merchandise.
“A person reaches his highest level of ignorance when he repudiates something of which he knows nothing.”
Regards!
Featured image: Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, a doctor, a coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity (REDH), and grandson of former President Salvador Allende Gossens, responded to now president-elect Gabriel Boric over his position on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Photo: The Clinic
“The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” Genesis 9:2-3
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There is no doubt that Christmas is a time when we become aware of the precariousness of nature as the sun’s light fades, leaves fall off the trees and the weather gets colder. The sun seems to stop moving (solstice) for three days, and then as if by magic starts moving again in the other direction and seems to be reborn. This phenomenon was noticed thousands of years before Christian celebrations of the birth of Jesus.
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At some point, elements of Saturnalia, Midwinter, Yule and other pagan traditions became merged into the general Christmas traditions that are observed today. It is a festival that celebrates life in all its forms.
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Christmas cards glorify nature in their depictions of many types of snowy woodland scenes and animals: robins, reindeer, donkeys, sheep, oxen (bullocks), doves, etc. In every culture today there are still elements of nature-worship: in the maintenance of old traditions like the goddess Pachamama (revered by the indigenous peoples of the Ande) or various forms of neo-paganism that hark back to pre-Christian times.
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Çatalhöyük Wall Paintings, Çatalhöyük, Bull hunting scene. Copies of painting on plaster. 6 th millennium BC.
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Modern secular paganism places “great emphasis on the divinity of nature” while the animistic aspects of Pagan theology asserts “that all things have a soul – not just humans or organic life – so this bond is held with mountains and rivers as well as trees and wild animals.” For example:”Secular Paganism is a set of principles shared by diverse groups around the world. It is a natural outgrowth of many peoples’ personal ethics and beliefs about life. It is not a religion but rather an ethical view based on the belief that nature is sacred and must be respected and treasured. Secular Pagans believe that we are a part of nature, not her master.”
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Illustration of medieval pig stunning, from The Medieval Cookbook
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However, our relationship with nature is contradictory and we treat the different parts of nature in very different ways. This can be seen in the way we treat some animals as pets, others as a danger, and most as a source of food that is produced on a massive industrial scale with slaughterhouses, factories, and many forms of processing. This is reflected in art down through the ages, some of which glorifies hunting and killing animals, and some which tries to show the terror animals are put through before coming to a grisly end. In her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, Melanie Joy tries to make sense of this and theorizes a distinction between carnivores and carnists: “Carnivores require meat in their diet for survival, but carnists choose to eat meat based on their beliefs.” Thus:
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“Carnism denies there is a problem with eating animals; second, it justifies eating meat as normal, natural, and necessary; third, to prevent cognitive dissonance, carnism alters the perception of the animals as living individuals into food objects, abstractions, and categories. Joy argues there is a neurological basis for empathy; most people care about nonhuman animals and want to prevent their suffering. Further, humans value compassion, reciprocity, and justice. However, human behavior does not match these values. To continue to eat animals, Joy argues, people engage in psychic numbing, which alters the perception of our behavior towards animals and uses defense mechanisms to block empathy.”
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Psychic numbing describes the way we withdraw from overwhelming issues like the contradiction between our love of animals and the way we treat them. It can be the way we deal with many big problems such as “impending doom, chaos, and ultimately mankind’s extinction.”
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The Butcher and his Servant (1568), drawn and engraved by Jost Amman
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We withdraw because we know that dealing with one serious issue tends to open up many other interlinked issues, while, at the same time getting progressively bigger as well as stretching backwards and forwards in time. Claudia von Werlhof grasps these widening problems and deals with them head on. She believes that the essential problem is rooted in an ideology which has as its basis a hatred for life itself. She blames the centuries-old socio-political systems of patriarchy and capitalism that are “characterized by exploitation, extraction and appropriation.” She notes:
“The sinister motive of hating life needs to be hidden. The unspeakable crimes that all patriarchies have committed against life itself, against children, women, and all human beings, against the Earth, animals, and plants must not be revealed. The hatred of life is the reason and the rational justification for the violence against it; a violence that intends to prevent any rebellion or uprising of those not believing in the system it protects; a system that many would see as a grave assault on their dignity if they only recognized it.”
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Furthermore she makes a distinction between killing and death:
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“It has been repeatedly suggested that the patriarchal system is a system of death. That is not entirely correct. The patriarchal system is a system of killing, that is of artificial death: ecocide, matricide, homicide in general and finally “omnicide,” the killing of everything. […] We are up against a totalitarian system that does not care for its subjects, that cannot (or no longer) be stopped, and that is constantly becoming faster and more efficient in its attempt to end life on this planet – while turning even this very process into a tool for further accumulation of profit and power.”
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Man’s best friend, animals’ worst enemy
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Over the centuries the system of killing has become more and more sophisticated. In art, depictions of hunting show changes from trapping to chasing with dogs to shooting with guns. In many paintings dogs are the ‘collaborationists’ who turn on their fellow animals for the benefit of their masters.
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A 14th-century depiction of boar hunting with hounds from Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century)
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Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Hunting At The Saint-jean Pond In The Forest Of Compiegne, Before 1734
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In one extraordinary set of paintings by the artist Paulus Potter (1625–1654), Punishment of a Hunter, we see different forms of entrapment and killing depicted around two central paintings, one of which shows the hunter going on trial before a court of animals, while the other shows some animals dancing for joy as the ‘treacherous’ dogs are hung and the dead hunter is roasted in a roaring fire.
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Punishment of a Hunter, painting with 14 frames by Paulus Potter, 1 of which is by Cornelis van Poelenburgh (ca.1650)
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Frans Snyders (1579-1657) (studio of) – The Fowl Market
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Changing attitudes towards hunting and selling of animal carcasses has been growing in recent decades and can be seen similarly in the artistic depiction of such practices as Maxwell Williams notes: “Upset students at Cambridge University successfully petitioned to have a painting depicting a butcher removed from their dining hall. The painting, The Fowl Market by the studio of early-17th-century Dutch painter Frans Snyders, loomed large above those in the dining room at Hughes Hall, a postgraduate school within Cambridge. The painting depicts the butcher at his labors, surrounded by a veritable mountain of dead animals. Nearby, a living dog appears to be barking.”
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Hunting the seas
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Negative attitudes towards hunting on land also extend to whale hunting and fishing as the seas are depleted of life and thus potentially creating a catastrophic collapse of the marine ecological cycle. Factory ships, fish farming and whaling have come in for much criticism, while quotas for certain species of fish have been imposed by governments due to overfishing. In the examples shown here we see whale hunting being depicted as heroic as the hunters deal with huge whales and fierce weather, then an ambivalent merchant, to a later painting of a cruel, knife-wielding monger.
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Robert Walter Weir Jr, Taking a Whale / Shooting a Whale with a Shoulder Gun (ca. 1855-1866)
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A 16th-century Flemish fishmonger painted by Joachim Beuckelaer.
The greatest criticism in recent decades has been reserved for the practices carried out in slaughterhouses using what were declared to be ‘humane’ ways of killing animals.Time and time again shocking, secretly filmed footage has emerged of extreme cruelty towards sentient beings uttering horrific shrieks as they are chased and battered to death. In recent depictions shown here artists use Expressionist techniques to try and depict the horror of the slaughterhouse bloodletting.
Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955) – The Slaughterhouse (1919)
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Sue Coe (born 1951) is an English artist and illustrator who goes one step further by using her works to benefit animal rights organizations as well as illustrating books and essays to explore issues such as factory farming and meat packing.
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Sue Coe – My mother and I watch a pig escape the slaughterhouse
The struggle against all these different old and modern practices of industrializing and converting our fellow beings into various types of products seems to be finally taking hold of the popular imagination. In a recent article in the UK Andrew Anthony wrote that:
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“Meat consumption in this country has declined by 17% over the past decade. The Economist magazine named 2019 “The Year of the Vegan”. And last year the World Health Organization recommended a plant-based diet for a healthy life. That endorsement, along with growing concerns about the impact of dairy farming on the environment, combined with the lifestyle rethink enabled by the lockdown, has significantly increased the number of people turning their backs on animal products in the UK.”
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The Vegan Society commissioned research that found that: “At least 542,000 people in Britain are now following a vegan diet and never consume any animal products including meat, fish, milk, cheese, eggs and honey. This is a whopping increase since the last estimate of 150,000 ten years ago, making veganism one of Britain’s fastest growing lifestyle movements.” Furthermore, Jasmijn de Boo, CEO of The Vegan Society commented that “more people than ever before are acting upon the health and environmental benefits of veganism, and finding out what really goes on in the meat and dairy industries and deciding they do not want to contribute to the pain and suffering of animals.” Maybe we are seeing the seeds of a new enlightened attitude towards animals which will also be reflected in a more positive art in the future.
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.
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He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver.
He even published a book in July 2020 outlining his blueprint. It has been rightly called a technocratic society with global top-down central planning. Schwab uses global warming fears and the plight of the world’s poor to justify what is in effect a plan for global totalitarianism where, as the Davos website puts it, nobody will own anything.
What is not well-known is the fact that the inspiration for Schwab’s dystopian plans comes from a Catholic bishop whom he met in Brazil in the 1970’s. That bishop links Schwab’s vast globalist network with the powerful political influence of the present Pope Francis.
Far from a traditional Catholic priest, this bishop was known as the “Red Bishop” and endorsed Castro’s Cuba model, as well as the Mao Cultural Revolution in which millions of Chinese were killed or destroyed in a purge of the enemies of Mao. His name was Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, the leading early figure spreading the Church movement known as “Liberation Theology” during the 1960s and 1970s.
From Nazi to Communist?
Helder Camara made a transition from the two extremes of the political spectrum. In 1934 Camara was a leading figure in a pro-Mussolini Brazilian clerical fascist movement,
Brazilian Integralist Action or Acao Integralista Brasileira (AIB). It was no casual involvement. As a young Catholic Priest Father Camara became part of the Supreme Council of the AIB. By 1936 Camara had become personal secretary of AIB founder, Plinio Salgado, and National Secretary of the AIB.
Similar to Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts in the 1920s, Brazil’s AIB were the Greenshirts, fielding paramilitary groups who actively and violently attacked communists on the streets during the 1930s in Brazil.
When Camara was ordained a priest in the early 1930s he reportedly wore the Greenshirt under his cassock. Later when a Brazilian author wrote a biography of Camara, by then a Bishop, Helder Camara and the Church intervened to prohibit mention of the now famous leftist as an earlier pro-fascist activist, one of the many curious parts of Camara’s history.
By the end of the war, in 1946, Helder Camara had somehow managed to transition from the pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler fascism of the AIB to a pro-Marxist “progressivism” as Assistant General of the Brazilian Catholic Action, whose youth group, JUC, openly embraced the Castro Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1963 a faction of the JUC with whom Camara was supportive, the Ação Popular (AP), defined itself as socialist and declared their support for the “socialization of the means of production.”
The Catholic group AP adopted statutes which contained praise for the Soviet Revolution and a recognition of “the crucial importance of Marxism in revolutionary theory and praxis.” Dom Helder became Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in the Northeast of Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
A Founder of Liberation Theology
Helder Camara was an instrumental figure in a movement that soon spread worldwide not only in the Catholic Church but among other churches as well. It was later called Liberation Theology by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez.
The “liberation” referred to what the priests claimed was the message of Christianity that, “God loves the poor preferentially.”
Helder Camara at the WEF in 1974 (source WEF)
The movement claimed that the role of the Church should be committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land in the Third World. The movement marked a radical shift in the position of the Catholic Church. Priests began to legitimize violence against dictators such as Nicaragua’s Somoza, even as a number of them took arms and joined the Sandinistas and other Marxist groups in the 1970s.
Gustavo Gutierrez explicitly called “to abolish the current unjust situation and to build a different society, freer and more human.”
To put it mildly, this was a radical departure in which the Church was to focus on liberating the poorest of society in the developing world by force if necessary and redistribute the wealth. Communist-backed guerilla movements in predominately Catholic countries were quick to see the usefulness of priests giving their wars a social legitimacy beyond Marxist doctrine. Gutierrez said, “The theology of liberation is rooted in a revolutionary militancy.”
A fellow Brazilian advocate of Helder Camara’s social activism for the Church, Father Leonardo Boff, stated,
“What we propose is Marxism, historical materialism, in theology.”
Boff and others have since moved from advocating radical land reform, taking land from large owners and giving it to poor peasants, to backing radical global warming agendas as part of their liberation agenda. The movement has since spread from Latin America to Africa and Asia, from Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka.
In essence, Helder Camara’s Liberation Theology created the social climate and fostered the spread through society for the “victim” ideology of today’s widespread movements from ANTIFA to BLM and the entire Green Agenda movement.
Red Bishop Meets Schwab
In recent public statements Klaus Schwab, founder of the Davos World Economic Forum a half century ago, cited two men who he said changed his life.
One was Henry Kissinger who was his mentor when Schwab was at Harvard in the late 1960s.
The other, surprisingly, was the Red Bishop, Dom Helder Camara.
It was Kissinger who as Nixon Secretary of State plotted to assassinate left-leaning governments in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, replacing them with brutal military dictatorships such as Pinochet and Videla, while Helder Camara was working the opposite end, mobilizing the poor against the state.
In 2010 Schwab’s World Economic Forum published a self-congratulating book modestly titled, “The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History–The First 40 Years 1971 – 2010.”
There Schwab describes the central role Kissinger played from the first in selecting speakers and guests for Schwab’s elite business gatherings.
For the year 1974 Schwab wrote,
“At the 1974 European Management Symposium (today WEF), Dom Hélder Câmara, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, made a notable appearance, bolstering the Forum’s role as a platform for provocative yet vital voices.”
Câmara had been invited to Davos despite the fact that he was considered persona non grata by many governments and business leaders.
He had dubbed himself “the spokesperson of those two-thirds of humanity who suffer from the unfair distribution of nature’s resources.”
Schwab’s account continued,
“Dom Hélder predicted that developing countries could some day challenge and clash with the leading economic powers. He criticized multinationals for keeping so much of mankind in appalling conditions. He called for a higher social responsibility, fairer wealth distribution and a reassessment of “the false values of a ‘waste society’” to achieve prosperity for all people.”
Schwab in a video stated,
“one example which for me was probably a crucial moment in my life. I traveled for the first time to Brazil, I met a priest who was known at that time as the priest of the poor people, his name was Dom Hélder Câmara.”
WEF and Pope Francis
In a 2013 visit to Brazil early in his papacy, Francis named Dom Helder Camara as someone who indelibly marked the “journey of the Church in Brazil.”
In his Evangelii gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) the same year, Francis declared in language of the Liberation Theology of Helder Camara and others,
“Without the preferential option for the poor, the proclamation of the Gospel … risks being misunderstood or submerged.”
The term “preferential option for the poor” is key. It sounds noble but what in reality does it mean?
Notably, in 2014 Klaus Schwab extended a personal invitation to Pope Francis to address the Davos meeting.
Francis has since written numerous such letters to Schwab and is listed by the World Economic Forum as an Agenda Contributor. In October 2020, the official website of the Davos WEF wrote,
“In a striking, 43,000-word-long encyclical published last Sunday, the pope put his stamp on efforts to shape what’s been termed a Great Reset of the global economy in response to the devastation of COVID-19.”
By 2015 Francis, who himself poses as the special guardian of the poor, had given his sanction to initiating the official process, by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, to begin a process of Helder Camara’s “beatification.”
Since then the present Pope has taken unprecedented political stands for Global Warming Green Agenda measures, vaccines against covid, support for gender equality, migration, wealth redistribution from rich to poor, and other social actions which have dominated his controversial papacy.
The Great Reset
The relevant question to be asked is why the founder of the world’s most influential corporate globalization forum, Klaus Schwab, would embrace the founder of the Liberation Theology and the current liberal Pope Francis, the first-ever Jesuit Pope who slyly revives those ideas today?
It’s definitely not that Klaus Schwab who is embracing Marxism. Schwab is the “Godfather of Globalization.”
The fusion of the ideologies of Francis and Schwab is a clever way of creating mass support, especially among younger and poorer people round the world for the wholesale attack on private property and on a stable middle-class required for the global corporatist Great Reset, a global technocratic fascism from above.
In November 2020, Pope Francis declared that a new “social justice” is needed, and that private ownership is not something obvious in Christianity: “Let us build the new social justice and admit that the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and immovable,” said Francis. He does not elaborate.
Image source: WEF (Pope Francis Message at WEF Annual Meeting, Davos, 2018
In October, 2020 the pope issued an encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti, in which he went after private property. He wrote,
“Business abilities, which are a gift from God, should always be clearly directed to the development of others and to the elimination of poverty…”
He declared,
“The right to private property is always accompanied by the primary and prior principle of the subordination of all private property to the universal destination of the earth´s goods, and thus the right of all to their use.”
This is remarkably similar to what Schwab of the WEF writes in his 2020 book, The Great Reset, where he states,
“First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.”
Schwab claims that the era of free market neoliberalism is over and major Government intervention is needed to enact “sustainable” environmental policies.
On the WEF website Schwab’s organization described their vision of the reset to a world where no one owns anything. A video declares of their vision of the world in 2030, “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” adding that “Whatever you need, you will rent.”
It would even include renting your clothes!
In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)
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Schwab states that this radical redistribution of property rights globally will be necessary to attain “ecological justice.” This echoes Francis’ call for a “green financial agenda” to replace the current financial system.
The Davos embrace of the Vatican agenda is far more sinister than it might seem.
Their Great Reset is about the end to human liberty or freedom in favor of a new globalist agenda of total control, high-tech surveillance, mandated medications and massive income redistribution from the middle class of society down. Schwab is nothing if not a master of marketing, and his dystopian Great Reset and its “ecological justice” is just that.
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.
He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
The Fed has options for countering the record inflation the U.S. is facing that are more productive and less risky than raising interest rates.
The Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place. Inflation grew by 6.8% in November, the fastest in 40 years, a trend the Fed has now acknowledged is not “transitory.” The conventional theory is that inflation is due to too much money chasing too few goods, so the Fed is under heavy pressure to “tighten” or shrink the money supply. Its conventional tools for this purpose are to reduce asset purchases and raise interest rates. But corporate debt has risen by $1.3 trillion just since early 2020; so if the Fed raises rates, a massive wave of defaults is likely to result. According to financial advisor Graham Summers in an article titled “The Fed Is About to Start Playing with Matches Next to a $30 Trillion Debt Bomb,” the stock market could collapse by as much as 50%.
Even more at risk are the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are the backbone of the productive economy, companies that need bank credit to survive. In 2020, 200,000 more U.S. businesses closed than in normal pre-pandemic years. SMEs targeted as “nonessential” were restricted in their ability to conduct business, while the large international corporations remained open. Raising interest rates on the surviving SMEs could be the final blow.
Cut Demand or Increase Supply?
The argument for raising interest rates is that it will reduce the demand for bank credit, which is now acknowledged to be the source of most of the new money in the money supply. In 2014, the Bank of England wrote in its first-quarter report that 97% of the UK money supply was created by banks when they made loans. In the U.S. the figure is not quite so high, but well over 90% of the U.S. money supply is also created by bank lending.
Left unanswered is whether raising interest rates will lower prices in an economy beset with supply problems. Oil and natural gas shortages, food shortages, and supply chain disruptions are major contributors to today’s high prices. Raising interest rates will hurt, not help, the producers and distributors of those products, by raising their borrowing costs. As observed by Canadian senator and economist Diane Bellemare:
Raising interest rates may cool off demand, but today’s high prices are tightly tied to supply issues – goods not coming through to manufacturers or retailers in a predictable way, and global markets not able to react quickly enough to changing tastes of consumers.
… A singular focus on inflation could lead to a ratcheting up of interest rates at a time when Canada [and the U.S.] should be increasing its ability to produce more goods, and supplying retailers and consumers alike with what they need.
Rather than a reduction in demand, we need more supply available locally; and to fund its production, credit-money needs to increase. When supply and demand increase together, prices remain stable, while GDP and incomes go up.
So argues UK Prof. Richard Werner, a German-born economist who invented the term “quantitative easing” (QE) when he was working in Japan in the 1990s. Japanese banks had pumped up demand for housing, driving up prices to unsustainable levels, until the market inevitably crashed and took the economy down with it. The QE that Werner prescribed was not the asset-inflating money creation we see today. Rather, he recommended increasing GDP by driving money into the real, productive economy; and that is what he recommends for today’s economic crisis.
How to Fund Local Production
SMES make up around 97-99% of the private sector of almost every economy globally. Despite massive losses from the pandemic lockdowns, in the U.S. there were still 30.7 million small businesses reported in December 2020. Small companies account for 64 percent of new U.S. jobs; yet in most U.S. manufacturing sectors, productivity growth is substantially below the standards set by Germany, and many U.S. SMEs are not productive enough to compete with the cost advantages of Chinese and other low-wage competitors. Why?
Werner observes that Germany exports nearly as much as China does, although the German population is a mere 6% of China’s. The Chinese also have low-wage advantages. How can German small firms compete when U.S. firms cannot? Werner credits Germany’s 1,500 not-for-profit/community banks, the largest number in the world. Seventy percent of German deposits are with these local banks – 26.6% with cooperative banks and 42.9% with publicly-owned savings banks called Sparkassen, which are legally limited to lending in their own communities. Together these local banks do over 90% of SME lending. Germany has more than ten times as many banks engaged in SME lending as the UK, and German SMEs are world market leaders in many industries.
Small banks lend to small companies, while large banks lend to large companies – and to large-scale financial speculators. German community banks were not affected by the 2008 crisis, says Werner, so they were able to increase SME lending after 2008; and as a result, there was no German recession and no increase in unemployment.
China’s success, too, Werner attributes to its large network of community banks. Under Mao, China had a single centralized national banking system. In 1982, guided by Deng Xiaoping, China reformed its money system and introduced thousands of commercial banks, including hundreds of cooperative banks. Decades of double-digit growth followed. “Window guidance” was also used: harmful bank credit creation for asset transactions and consumption were suppressed, while productive credit was encouraged.
Werner’s recommendations for today’s economic conditions are to reform the money system by: banning bank credit for transactions that don’t contribute to GDP; creating a network of many small community banks lending for productive purposes, returning all gains to the community; and making bank behavior transparent, accountable and sustainable. He is chairman of the board of Hampshire Community Bank, launched just this year, which lays out the model. It includes no bonus payments to staff, only ordinary modest salaries; credit advanced mainly to SMEs and for housing construction (buy-to-build mortgages); and ownership by a local charity for the benefit of the people in the county, with half the votes in the hands of the local authorities and universities that are its investors.
Public Banking in the United States: North Dakota’s Success
That model – cut out the middlemen and operationalize community banks to create credit for local production – also underlies the success of the century-old Bank of North Dakota (BND), the only state-owned U.S. bank in existence. North Dakota is also the only state to have escaped the 2008-09 recession, having a state budget that never dropped into the red. The state has nearly six times as many local banks per capita as the country overall. The BND does not compete with these community banks but partners with them, a very productive arrangement for all parties.
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published an article stating that the BND was more profitable even than JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author credited North Dakota’s oil boom, but the boom turned into a bust that very year, yet the BND continued to report record profits. It has averaged a 20% return on equity over the last 19 years, far exceeding the ROI of JPMorgan Chaseand Wells Fargo, where state governments typically place their deposits. According to its 2020 annual report, in 2019 the BND had completed 16 years of record-breaking profits.
Its 2020 ROI of 15%, while not quite as good, was still stellar considering the economic crisis hitting the nation that year. The BND had the largest percentage of Payroll Protection Plan recipients per capita of any state; it tripled its loans for the commercial and agricultural sectors in 2020; and it lowered its fixed interest rate on student loans by 1%, saving borrowers an average of $6,400 over the life of the loan. The BND closed 2020 with $7.7 billion in assets.
Why is the BND so profitable, then, if not due to oil? Its business model allows it to have much lower costs than other banks. It has no private investors skimming off short-term profits, no high paid executives, no need to advertise, and, until recently, it had only one branch, now expanded to two. By law, all of the state’s revenues are deposited in the BND. It partners with local banks on loans, helping with capitalization, liquidity and regulations. The BND’s savings are returned to the state or passed on to local borrowers in the form of lower interest rates.
What the Fed Could Do Now
The BND and Sparkassen banks are great public banking models, but implementing them takes time, and the Fed is under pressure to deal with an inflation crisis right now. Prof. Werner worries about centralization and thinks we don’t need central banks at all; but as long as we have them, we might as well put them to use serving the Main Street economy.
In September 2020, Saqib Bhatti and Brittany Alston of the Action Center on Race and the Economy proposed a plan for stimulating local production that could be implemented by the Fed immediately. It could make interest-free loans directly to state and local governments for productive purposes. To better fit with prevailing Fed policies, perhaps it could make 0.25% loans, as it now makes to private banks through its discount window and to repo market investors through its standing repo facility.
They noted that interest payments on municipal debt transfer more than $160 billion every year from taxpayers to wealthy investors and banks on Wall Street. These funds could be put to more productive public use if the Federal Reserve were to make long-term zero-cost loans available to all U.S. state and local governments and government agencies. With that money, they could refinance old debts and take out loans for new long-term capital infrastructure projects, while canceling nearly all of their existing interest payments. Interest and fees typically make up 50% of the cost of infrastructure. Dropping the interest rate nearly to zero could stimulate a boom in those desperately needed projects. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates in its 2021 report that $6.1 trillion is needed just to repair our nation’s infrastructure.
As for the risk that state and local governments might not pay back their debts, Bhatti and Alston contend that it is virtually nonexistent. States are not legally allowed to default, and about half the states do not permit their cities to file for bankruptcy. The authors write:
According to Moody’s Investors Service, the cumulative ten-year default rate for municipal bonds between 1970 and 2019 was just 0.16%, compared with 10.17% for corporate bonds, meaning corporate bonds were a whopping 63 times more likely to default. …[M]unicipal bonds as a whole were safer investment than the safest 3% of corporate bonds. … US municipal bonds are extremely safe investments, and the interest rates that most state and local government borrowers are forced to pay are unjustifiably high.
… The major rating agencies have a long history of using credit ratings to push an austerity agenda and demand cuts to public services …. Moreover, they discriminate against municipal borrowers by giving them lower credit ratings than corporations that are significantly more likely to default.
… [T]he same banks that are major bond underwriters also have a record of collusion and bid-rigging in the municipal bond market. … Several banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, have pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid billions in fines to financial regulators.
… There is no reason for banks and bondholders to be able to profit from this basic piece of infrastructure if the Federal Reserve could do it for free. [Citations omitted.]
To ensure repayment and discourage overborrowing, say Bhatti and Alston, the Fed could adopt regulations such as requiring any borrower that misses a payment to levy an automatic tax on residents above a certain income threshold. Borrowing limits could also be put in place. Politicization of loans could be avoided by making loans available indiscriminately to all public borrowers within their borrowing limits. Another possibility might be to mediate the loans through a National Infrastructure Bank, as proposed in HR 3339.
All of this could be done without new legislation. The Federal Reserve has statutory authority under the Federal Reserve Act to lend to municipal borrowers for a period of up to six months. It could just agree to roll over these loans for a fixed period of years. Bhatti and Alston observe that under the 2020 CARES Act, the Fed was given permission to make up to $500 billion in indefinite, long-term loans to municipal borrowers, but it failed to act on that authority to the extent allowed. Loans were limited to no more than three years, and the interest rate charged was so high that most municipal borrowers could get lower rates on the open municipal bond market.
Private corporations, which the authors show are 63 times more likely to default, were offered much more generous terms on corporate debt; and 330 corporations took the offer, versus only two municipal takers through the Municipal Liquidity Facility. The federal government also made $10.4 trillion in bailouts and backstops available to the financial sector after the 2008 financial crisis, a sum that is 2.5 times the size of the entire U.S. municipal bond market.
Stoking the Fire with Credit for Local Production
Playing with matches that could trigger a $30 trillion debt bomb is obviously something the Fed should try to avoid. Prof. Werner would probably argue that its policy mistake, like Japan’s in the 1980s, has been to inject credit so that it has gone into speculative assets, inflating asset prices. The Fed’s liquidity fire hose needs to be directed at local production. This can be done through local community or public banks, or by making near-zero interest loans to state and local governments, perhaps mediated through a National Infrastructure Bank.
Following the Taliban’s victory over US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington is walking into another death trap, but this time on Russia’s borders with the neighboring Ukraine. So now, Washington’s non-partisan bureaucrats and the Military-Industrial Complex are calling for ways to fight “Russian aggression”.
The Russian leader, who questioned why NATO had ignored repeated Russian warnings and expanded its military infrastructure eastwards, singled out the deployment in Poland and Romania of the Aegis Ashore missile defence system. He made it clear he did not want to see the same launch MK41 systems, which Russia has long complained can be used to also launch offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, in Ukraine.
“Creating such threats (in Ukraine) would be red lines for us. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that a sense of common sense, responsibility for both our countries and the world community will prevail,” said Putin
To make matters worse, US senators from the Republican party submitted a bill that calls for $450 million in military aid to the Ukraine with new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project. The bill will also label Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” according to a December 18th report from rt.com, ‘Russia reacts to US ‘state sponsor of terrorism threat’:
On Wednesday, eight American Republican party senators submitted a bill, speculatively titled the ‘GUARD Act’, containing a range of measures designed to support Kiev. The proposed legislation would authorize an additional $450 million in military aid and impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the recently constructed pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe through the Baltic Sea, which Ukraine and the US have strongly opposed.
The bill would also officially designate Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” if Moscow advances militarily on its eastern European neighbor. In recent weeks, American and Ukrainian intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of “aggressive actions” on the border with Ukraine, including troop buildup, and said they suspected a Russian invasion could be in the works
A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value
Russia and China has also been working on alternatives to the SWIFT system:
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.
China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further
The US wants its dollar to remain king by any means necessary. One of the main reasons Washington went to war with Iraq was not only about oil, it was because Saddam Hussein had switched from selling oil in US dollars to accepting payments in Euros as retribution for US sanctions. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered by US-backed forces because he was creating an alternative currency which was a gold-backed African dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros in the African continent.
A recent press conference, the US president and liberal war hawk, Joe Biden was asked about what consequences Russia would face if they invaded Ukraine’s territory. The liberal cheerleaders for war at CNN have been reporting what US and European leaders have been up to in regards to planning harsh sanctions on Russia because it’s President, Vladimir Putin is misbehaving, therefore punishment must be served by the American empire, So how dare you Vlad for wanting to protect your country!, “the kinds of costs the US and European allies are discussing for Russia are “designed to be implemented very, very fast,” the official said, without detailing what those measures would be. “That is partly why we have chosen the measures that we are working on.” One of their actions is most likely to cut Russia off the Swift payment system since the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency for the moment. “The Biden administration has repeatedly said there will be severe economic consequences. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan also made clear last week there will be further US defensive military support for Ukraine as well as US support for NATO countries on the eastern flank of Russia invades Ukraine”, continued:
I’ve made it absolutely clear to President Putin,” Biden said. “If he moves on Ukraine, the economic consequences for his economy are going to be devastating. Devastating, number one. Number two, we will find it required that we’ll have to send more American and NATO troops into the Eastern Flank, the (Bucharest) 9, all those NATO countries where we have a sacred obligation to defend them against any attack by Russia. And number three, the impact of all of that on Russia and his attitude, the rest of the world, his view of Russia would change markedly. He’ll pay a terrible price
In early December, rt.com also has been documenting what’s been happening with the Ukraine’s decision to recklessly build-up its troop levels in the Donbass region which is a clear threat to Russia’s security concerns:
Ukraine has now stationed well over 100,000 troops and large quantities of hardware in the war-torn Donbass region, the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged on Wednesday morning, amid rising tensions. Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that “the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasing [their] military force, pulling heavy equipment and personnel.”
“According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said. Zakharova also condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for submitting a bill to the national parliament that would allow units from foreign armed forces to enter the country as part of multinational exercises next year. According to her, such a move directly contradicts the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 in a bid to end the fighting between Kiev’s forces and troops loyal to two self-declared breakaway republics
What’s even more dangerous is the talk of a first-strike option with nuclear weapons against Russia by Mississippi’s high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker as reported by FOX news:
Sen. Wicker made the startling comment during an on-air interview where he was asked about the escalating situation abroad. Wicker, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he is ruling nothing out as a potential response to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground,” Wicker said, adding, that “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action”
Let’s make something clear, if the US and Europe are considering a war against Russia through Ukraine, it can escalate into another nuclear standoff reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands. Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders. Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia. Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet. The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.
The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict. Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war. Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right.
Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours.
Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs.
Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
* how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
* whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
* how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
* whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
* and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. For anyone who believes people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too.
This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
The complaint filed with the International Criminal Court continues to provide a broad-picture view of the various ways governments have used the coronavirus to exploit the people.
INFLATED COVID FIGURES
Nurses and doctors from hospitals across the world have noted that nearly every death recorded is due to the coronavirus. The complaint notes that if an individual died for any reason within 28 days of receiving a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, their death is deemed a coronavirus casualty. The report notes that between March and June 2020, England and Wales recorded 4,476 deaths with no pre-existing condition.
Yet, deaths for the same period suddenly spiked to 49,607:
The complaint alleges that governments have been artificially inflating figures and misbranding common flu, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses as COVID-19. To further show that the common flu has been mislabeled as COVID, data from the ONC shows that flu and pneumonia deaths in 2018 and 2019 came to 29,516 and 26,398, respectfully. In 2020, only 394 people died from the common flu and 13,619 passed away from pneumonia.
Conclusion: The number of fatalities from the coronavirus has been drastically overstated. As mentioned in an earlier post, PCR tests were never meant to be used in their current manner, and often produce false-positive results. Anyone who dies within 28 days of a positive test result is deemed a casualty of coronavirus, even if the virus was not the cause of death.
CENSORSHIP
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and countless social media platforms have removed any and all information regarding the coronavirus that does not fit the broader agenda. “.
Authorities have blocked legitimate websites and ordered the removal of unwanted content. Officials have reinforced these controls by criminalising [sic] more categories of online expression and arresting journalists, activists, and members for public speaking about the government’s performance. To suppress unfavourable [sic] health statistics, critical reporting and other COVID-19 content the UK government has blocked websites or forced users, social media platforms, or online outlets to delete information,” the report states.
Furthermore, Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the RNA vaccine, has been removed from all social media platforms for speaking out against the vaccine. “Smear campaigns are being waged against any doctors and scientists who challenge the WHO narrative on Covid-19 and the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’. We are in a situation where governments and global NGO’s have seized control of the medical profession,” the complaint continues.
Conclusion
Media companies are directly filtering and altering public information.
Even reputable medical professionals have been scrubbed from the internet. Governments around the world are using the pandemic as a reason to crack down on free speech and information.
On the day before Christmas, when the world’s two billion Christians celebrate the birth of the prince of peace, the Washington Post accorded Senators Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen – Republican and Democrat, from Ohio and New Hampshire, respectively – a guest editorial entitled Ukraine stood with the West in 2014. Today we must stand with Ukraine.
The decidedly less than pacific title, tone and substance of the screed is in marked contrast to the Christmas Proclamation chanted on the occasion to 1.2 billion Roman Catholics that, toward the end of a chronology of the world from its creation to the birth of Jesus, contains a line worth reading more than once: in the forty-second year of the empire of Octavian Augustus, when the whole world was at peace (anno Imperii Octaviani Augusti quadragesimo secundo, toto orbe in pace composito).
The 18th century English writer Laurence Sterne was not the only one to remark that at such a moment, and such a moment only, when Augustus had closed the temple of Janus (and of war), would God descend to the earth.
Not so much as a matter of theology but of politics – and the most essential human morality – that concept would be beyond the ken of the Washington Post and Senators Portman and Shaheen, both leaders of the Senate Ukraine Caucus. As indicated, they chose exactly the day they did to publish an unapologetic call to war. A war that could rapidly escalate into a catastrophe that humanity so far has been spared.
Senators Shaheen, Portman and Murphy after laying flowers at a memorial to Ukrainian troops killed in the Donbass. Photograph: U.S. Embassy in Kiev.
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The senators, who in any other nation would be more concerned with at least feigning interest in the well-being of the people of the states they nominally represent and the nation that handsomely pays them, began their war tocsin with the assertion that in 2014 in “what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, the people of Ukraine stood up to their Russian-backed leaders….”
They of course are referring, in however oblique and inverted a manner, to the violent, deadly uprising incited in large part by their then-colleagues Republican John McCain and Democrat Christopher Murphy (also a prominent member of the Senate Ukraine Caucus) over eight years ago, in December 2013. Addressing a crowd of what the Washington Post stated were hundreds of thousands of anti-government forces in the capital of Kiev, McCain stated: “We are here to support your just cause: the sovereign right to determine [your] own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe.” He seemed to be informing them of – or issuing orders regarding – that fate.
Murphy chimed in with “Ukraine’s future stands with Europe, and the U.S. stands with Ukraine.”
What the Senate began with a coup, the Senate continues in the form of a war, prospectively one that could drag in the world’s two major nuclear powers.
Senators McCain and Murphy and then-ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev in December 2013. Photo: Agence France-Presse.
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As to the Ukrainian government that was overthrown two months later, the one labeled (or libeled, it’s the same thing) as “Russian-backed,” it was one that permitted annual NATO war games (ones transparently aimed at Russia) like Sea Breeze and Rapid Trident to occur on its soil and in its territorial waters. It’s not enough that the administration of Viktor Yanukovych accommodated the U.S., including the Pentagon, and NATO; the fact that it had the temerity to cultivate normal state-to-state relations with its nation’s eastern neighbor was sufficient to incur its political death penalty. An event that Senators Shaheen and Portman hail as Ukraine’s national foundation myth; some combination of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the convening of the Continental Congress here and the storming of the Bastille in France.
The “yearning for freedom” of eight years ago, the conscript fathers assure the reader, that motivated the setting on fire and killing of hundreds of police officers and the torching of much of the Ukrainian capital, now burns yet brighter than ever as is evidenced by a passionate desire of “joining the European Union and NATO.” As no one else seems to mention this basic fact, Ukrainians in effect voted in a referendum on NATO membership when they elected Yanukovych president in 2010, rejecting the leader of the first American-engineered regime-change “color” coup of 2004-2005, Viktor Yushchenko, who only received 5.4% of the vote. If the election was a plebiscite on NATO membership, and in effect it was, the answer was a firm No.
Portman and Shaheen are both inflammatory and delusional in claiming “Russian troops invaded the Ukrainian border regions of Donbas in 2014,” an absurdity claimed by few others outside a psychiatric ward. Whom the gods would destroy they first make…senators.
Their blathering about “Media reports warn that Russia could invade Ukraine as early as January” conjures up the quip by the Austrian journalist and dramatist Karl Kraus over a century ago: How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.
The jointly (no doubt ghost-) written piece runs through the litany of how the U.S., NATO and whichever post-putsch Ukrainian leader has not been deposed or charged with treason at the moment are the epitome of both the classical and cardinal virtues and the Russians are – Russians. Over a century of meticulously-cultivated, handsomely-funded Russophobia under the guise of interstate rivalry and “ethnic studies” has not been without effect.
In what lies somewhere firmly between hubris and derangement, the Pentagon’s two praetorians issue this choice observation: “Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding to sovereign countries….” When, except in the minds of the likes of Portman and Shaheen, did Russia explicitly or even implicitly agree to NATO expanding to absorb every nation in Europe other than itself (if even that exception is allowed), including then of course all those that border it, and where U.S. and NATO strategic bombers and missiles are within immediate striking distance of Moscow.
Hardly enough for the senators’ satisfaction. Congress must expedite the provision of more military hardware such as “antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems” and what is termed electronic warfare capabilities. If delivering such weapons and capabilities is not actively entering the war as a belligerent it’s close enough to it to give Russia the impression it is.
Not content to beat the war drums over the Donbass, they compare Russia’s “invasion” of that region to “similar” acts of aggression in Crimea and in “the occupied Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the U.S. and NATO won’t rest until the “occupied territories” of Donetsk, Lugansk, Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and, for good measure, Transdniester are “liberated.”
Portman and Shaheen also urged their commander-in-chief Biden, as observed earlier no disinterested party to the Ukrainian catastrophe of the last eight years, to demand that Ukraine’s president of the day Volodymyr Zelensky “require Russia to withdraw troops from the border before further negotiations begin.” If that sounds like crude diktat it’s because it is. Mind you, the two are not addressing Russian “invasion forces” in the Donbass but Russian troops in their own nation.
And of course they demand that Biden impose more sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. That project has to be aborted and it doesn’t much matter which ruse is employed to effect that end. So it can be thrown in as a legislative amendment as it were. In that context Russia was also accused of hostile acts against Moldova – using “its outsize energy resources as a weapon” – which for thirty years has had its traps set for Transdniester with the full support of the U.S. and NATO.
Lastly, Portman and Shaheen advocate the creation of an “international coalition” in Europe and “elsewhere” to confront Russia, contemptuously dismissing Russian security concerns in respect to “Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states and other former ‘republics’ of the Soviet Union.” The quotes around the word republics is theirs. That the former Soviet union republics mentioned were also part of Russia for a century or more before there was a Soviet Union is conveniently ignored.
The senators’ Christmas Eve appeal for exacerbating the almost-eight-year war in Ukraine with even more direct American involvement is a stark indication of what the New Year portends.
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With foresight, this carefully researched article by Dr Pascal Sacré was first published in August 2020, several months prior to the launching of the mRNA vaccine.
**
The COVID-19 vaccine…
Is this THE final goal of this crisis, to impose a compulsory vaccination on everyone, with a biometric health passport and without it, the impossibility to move, to buy, to eat?
The near future will tell.
With time, the accumulation of side effects, the testimonies of more and more doctors, vaccination has become a subject of controversy, often passionate, sometimes violent.
This is not just a question of being for or against vaccination in general.
It is about being vigilant in the face of enormous pressure from companies and governments to inject billions of healthy people with a hastily manufactured product, using immature technologies such as DNA manipulation, with as yet unknown side effects.
The cure should not be worse than the disease.
Given the fear, the terror in people’s minds, given the enthusiasm of certain leaders and given the power of the vaccine companies and manufacturers, will we, as ordinary citizens, be able to resist, keep our cool and prevent these people from playing with our health?
Do you know what the marketing of vaccines brings to the pharmaceutical companies?
References on the Statista website, figures for the year 2019 [1] :
GSK (GlaxoSmithKline): more than 8 billion euros.
Merck: €7.3 billion
Pfizer: €5.9 billion
Sanofi: €5.8 billion
Billions, in a single year!
Do you think that the conservation of such gains would not motivate the transgression of limits by sweeping away everything in its path, all scientific ethics, all moral values?
As Emma Kahn [2] stated to the AIMSIB (International Association for Scientific, Independent and Benevolent Medicine) website, May 3, 2020:
“Strangely enough, the three vaccines in clinical trials in the West (excluding China) against COVID-19 are being developed by start-ups and not by Big Pharma (the nickname of the pharmaceutical industry). Why haven’t the big companies (Merck, GSK, Sanofi, Pfizer) launched any clinical studies? A first reason is worrying: … industry experts already know that coronavirus vaccines are too risky, they induce facilitation and immunopathological phenomena. The phenomenon of facilitation of infection by antibodies” is crucial to understand.
Vaccines too risky!
Facilitation and immunopathological phenomena!
This is not conspiracy, nor the elucubrations of a quidam [dictionary]. It is published data, well known to scientists, virologists and published in many journals.
These facts are particularly relevant to the coronavirus family and SARS [3].
With vaccines,
“the biggest problem is the fear of an ADE (antibody dependant enhancement, facilitation of infection by the vaccine, mediated by antibodies induced by vaccination): facilitation of the penetration of the virus into cells by the receptor for the Fc fragment of immunoglobulins” [4].
On March 5, 2020, Peter Hotez [5] (vaccine expert) warned the U.S. Congress about the facilitation of antibody infection and its relationship to vaccination [6] :
“We must be very careful and go slowly with clinical trials, animal trials have shown facilitation”!
So Big Pharma is cautious. This confirms the credibility of this information.
Not only will this vaccine not protect you at all or not enough, but it can make things worse by facilitating your infection with COVID-19!
The phenomenon of facilitating viral infection by antibodies (ADE or antibody dependent enhancement) has been known for a long time and exists for many viruses.
Antibodies of this type have been demonstrated in vitro in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and candidate vaccines would only aggravate this immunopathological effect!
This is even more likely if we skip the steps.
Journalist Céline Deluzarche, in an article on Futura Sciences (Futura Santé) of March 19, 2020 reviewed on June 15, said :
“Coronavirus: the dangers of a hastily developed vaccine.
Faced with the urgency, scientists call for speeding up testing procedures and dispensing with the usual animal tests. A laudable strategy, but one that could prove to be at best counterproductive and at worst cause deaths” [7].
“Normally, it takes between 15 and 20 years to obtain an effective, non-toxic and usable vaccine. The first step is to develop a formulation with the chemical and pharmaceutical prerequisites, conduct immunogenicity studies [8] in animals, evaluate the toxicity of the vaccine [9] in animals, then in humans, and finally test its effectiveness on a large scale.”
Yet some people are putting pressure on, invoking urgency.
Why do they do that?
They exploit fear to get reach their goal. It’s never good to decide anything out of fear.
What dangerous game are these people playing?
The Europe Union (EU) in particular, and its new president, Ursula von der Leyen, after organising a world telethon to fund research for a vaccine [10], is trying to impose the idea that only a vaccine can save us.
“… in the face of urgency and pressure from governments and health authorities, some are calling for the procedures to be speeded up. The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday that she hoped for a vaccine against the new coronavirus before the autumn.” [7].
One has the feeling that all this was planned in advance, when one knows that Brussels, today, has been working for a long time on a “vaccine” passport in order to put the population under total surveillance and control [11].
Is COVID-19 just a pretext for imposing totalitarian measures which would otherwise have been impossible to accept?
I ask the question.
We find Peter Hotez [5], who advises us to be very careful:
“A vaccine is not insignificant: it is most often a deactivated or weakened virus, and in some cases it can aggravate the disease it is supposed to prevent. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, who worked on the SARS outbreak in 2003, found that some vaccinated animals developed even more severe symptoms when exposed to the virus because of a weakened immune system. This is called “antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)” [7].
The work and research on vaccines against CVDO 19 in Cambridge, Oxford, sponsored by the NIH (National Institute of Health in the United States, Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump’s anti-COVID czar) does not reassure me at all, and should not reassure you either [12]!
These same people are behind one of the worst vaccine and medical scandals of the last ten years by wanting already, in 2009-2010, to vaccinate the entire population for a fake pandemic (H1N1) [13-14-15].
A survey in France reports that nearly a quarter (25%) of the French population do not intend to accept the vaccine against COVID-19 [16].
I understand them and even find it surprising that this figure is not higher.
These vaccines are a race for profits [17], huge amounts of money!
Even independently of plausible and frightening ideas such as the association of the vaccine with GMOs [18], with a puçage and tracing of the population [19], the inherent danger of any vaccine and the specific danger of an anti-coronavirus vaccine (facilitation of viral infection by antibodies – ADE or antibody dependent enhancement) should make all citizens think about accepting such a measure without flinching!
Through the fear instilled by our mainstream media, fear maintained by the experts of our own governments, people would be ready to accept remedies as dangerous as they are ineffective.
Like Tony Carlucci says:
“While Covid-19 may be a true pathogen, evidence suggests it does not justify the overreactions we’ve seen around the world. Covid-19 hysteria has – by far – a far more devastating impact on humanity than the virus itself. In the midst of this hysteria, the greatest real threat to human health – a corrupt pharmaceutical industry and its partners in government – are on the verge of increasing both their profits at the expense of the public and their power over the public.” [20]
Citizens should no longer take everything they are told at face value, even, or even more so, if it comes from the official media or governments [21].
Their health, mental and physical, is at stake.
As for the vaccine, the mere fact that it can itself facilitate coronavirus infection and aggravate symptoms should put a stop to any craze for it.
The loss of time and money in the search for this vaccine prevents the population from turning to other, healthier and more realistic solutions:
Return to a healthy social lifestyle with an acceptable compromise between imposing targeted and limited quarantines (for really sick people and not just RT-PCR positive), and allowing the virus to circulate among those least at risk (healthy youth and adults) protected by their healthy immunity.
Give greater preference to effective NPIs (non-pharmaceutical measures) such as hand washing, physical distance and ventilation of confined spaces, rather than continuous mask wearing, which is more harmful than beneficial.
Allow front-line physicians to freely prescribe hydroxychloroquine and zinc early enough at the onset of symptoms of COVID-19 under medical supervision to minimize the well-known cardiac risks of HCQ.
Give priority again to the recovery of the economy, of social activity, because today, the solution against the problem of COVID is worse than the problem itself (by far).
Remember that we have immunity! Innate and cell specific immunity, not just antibody-mediated immunity! That the best allies of these immunities are our lifestyles (diet, physical activity, stress management, mental management). Everything should be done, today more than ever, to improve this.
To deal with the immense fear and post-traumatic stress that have been generated in recent months by the media and by our governments.
This fear alone makes us more vulnerable both to illness and to totalitarian abuses.
Provided that we wean ourselves from fear, lies and illusions, everyone can regain power over their health, their society and their lives.
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[19] Coronavirus, vaccin, implant et traçabilité, Medias-Presse.info, 18 April 2020. Bill Gates, through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ID2020 project that he finances and the pharmaceutical industries in which he holds important shares, intends to take advantage of the coronavirus to impose an almost global vaccination and include an identification and traceability implant.
Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It’s to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it’s widely acknowledged not to be his birthday.
Along with its religious significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26 – January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and historical heritage. Jews as well celebrate the season with the Hanukkah Festival of Lights. It’s to commemorate their struggle for survival, but for Jewish children it’s their Christmas with gifts from parents like their Christian friends get.
Christmas is also the time when the national obsession to shop and consume reaches its zenith. It traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve, and after the holiday continues into January with plenty of extra buying power from holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other resources gotten or borrowed. It’s for everything people never knew they wanted until creative advertising wizardry made their lives incomplete without them.
Perhaps this single dominant trait characterizes American culture more than any other. It’s a variant of the kind of consumerism economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous” in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” F. Scott Fitzgerald explained that “the very rich….are different from you and me.” Veblen wrote about their spending habits and coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” Today, it’s called “keeping up with the Joneses” or consumerism, and it’s practiced by status-seeking people obsessed with personal gratification. But not just by the rich. Most people, except the poor, do it and to excess.
The term “consumption” originated hundreds of years ago. Then, it referred to infectious tuberculosis or TB. But its original meaning is relevant in today’s acquisitive society where consuming for essentials is worlds apart from gluttonous consumerism. This variant refers to overindulgent shopping and spending for things people buy irrespective of need but not without consequences for themselves and society.
Untreated TB, or consumption, consumes its victims in a slow, painful death. Consumerism mimics it with it’s similarly harmful fallout: ecological destruction; unhealthy and unsafe consumer products; corporate empowerment; profits pursued over people; militarism and foreign wars; health, education and other essential needs neglected; and democratic decay in a corporatist state disdaining the public interest.
People take pride saying “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” – but not without consequences. The personal fallout is over-indebtedness millions can’t handle in the wake of unexpected medical emergencies or loss of employment. The toll: since the early 1980s one in seven families forced into bankruptcy, over 2 million in 2005 alone (30% above 2004), and millions more ahead from unchecked borrow and binge-spending made worse by the subprime crisis.
Overindulgent spending is what clinicians call an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At its worst, it’s pathologically characterized by obsessive, repetitive thoughts that need compulsive tasks and rituals to relieve. For addicted consumers, it’s an obsession to shop and spend and a compulsion to buy and accumulate. In excess, it’s clinically pathological and destructive when it causes bankruptcy.
In America and the West, tens of millions of otherwise normal people shop excessively for what they never knew they wanted until Madison Avenue mind manipulators convinced them. Economist Paul Baran described the process as making us “want what we don’t need (all unessential consumer goods and services) and not….what we do (good health care, education, clean air and water, safe food, and good government providing essential services).”
Future insolvency is risked, but few consider the possibility until it’s too late. It’s worst at Christmas when it becomes a pathological orgy of frenzied spending dismissively called getting into the holiday spirit. Maybe for merchants, but not when bills come due with growing millions unable to pay them or needing more debt to delay for later what they can’t handle now.
Institutionalized consumerism also plays into social control. It’s empowered when people are focused on bread and circus distractions that include the sights and sounds of the season. Media theorist Neil Postman once called Americans the most over-entertained and under-informed people in the world and wrote about it in books like “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Attracted to self-gratification and its reinforcing images, they’re diverted from what matters most – challenging wars of aggression, loss of civil liberties and human rights, violations of law, gutted social services, environmental harm, and policies benefitting the privileged at the expense of beneficial social change.
Consumerism also lets corporate power prosper and grow. It feeds unfettered capitalism and out-of-control greed. It helps direct our tax dollars to a militarized state instead of going for essential social needs. It diverts the national wealth to an imperial juggernaut that consumers finance through overindulgence. The more we shop, the stronger it gets and is better able to exploit new markets, resources and cheap labor at the expense of the more expensive kind at home whose future consumption is endangered by today’s self-gratifying excesses.
Adam Smith was capitalism’s ideological godfather who was also concerned about concentrated wealth and wrote about it in “The Wealth of Nations.” He explained an “invisible hand” of unseen forces worked best in a free market with many small businesses competing locally against each other. He contrasted them with concentrated mercantilism and wrote about the “merchants and manufacturers” who used their power to wreak “dreadful misfortunes” and grave injustices on the vast majority of people using the British East India Company as a case study example.
Today’s monopoly capitalism would have been unimaginable in his day, but he’d recognize it. He wrote that throughout history we find the wreckage of the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind….All for ourselves and nothing for other people….unless government takes pains to prevent” this outcome. No invisible hand works in manipulated markets where governments sanction Smith’s “vile maxim,” and the greater good is nowhere in sight. Under neoliberal rules, capital wins, people lose, and consumerism makes things worse. It’s most extreme at Christmas when shopping trumps the holiday’s meaning and seasonal sights and sounds drown out everything else.
The toll is tragic. Whatever Christmas was, it no longer is, and our behavior corrupts it and the spirit of the man it honors. He spread it in deeds and teachings from his Sermon on the Mount and message to “turn the other cheek,” love thy neighbor, not kill, and do unto others as you’d want them doing to you. The consumerist ethic glorifies receiving, not giving; condoning predatory capitalism and ignoring its harm; neglecting the greater good; sanctifying overindulgence while forgetting those most in need throughout the year. In the spirit of the season, thoughts should be on helping others and giving thanks. In an unfettered marketplace, it’s impossible.
It’s a sad testimony to a society obsessed with greed and gratification at the expense of beneficial social change. At Christmas, it defiles the holiday spirit and forgets the needy. For them, Christmas is “Bah Humbug,” and Santa Scrooge – all take and no give.
New Year’s Day
New Year’s day is one week after Christmas and concludes the long holiday season. It starts after Thanksgiving, reaches a climax around Christmas, ebbs for a day and builds again for a final celebratory new year’s welcome with more overindulgent eating, drinking, partying, and binge-shopping for nonessentials.
The new year is also a traditional time for resolutions that include some with merit like losing weight, quitting smoking and getting fit. Most are forgotten, and those most important never made: working for peace, good will toward others, loving they neighbor, respecting everyone, and treating people as we want to be treated in a society of caring and sharing with equity and justice for all. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful resolution for the new year. Long ago in simpler times before the old world became America, it was that way. It can be again, but wishing won’t make it so.
Award winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Of relevance to the ongoing US-NATO agenda directed against the Russian Federation:
The history of Nuclear Weapons dates back to World War II. The Manhattan Project was intended to “Subdue The Soviets” while the US and the USSR were allies.
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Though remaining unmentioned in official texts, the origins of the dubiously titled Cold War can be traced to policies pursued by American leaders during World War II itself. Following Nazi Germany’s calamitous defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, Washington’s ongoing construction of the atomic bomb was implemented with the Soviets in mind.
Three months before even the D-Day landings US General Leslie Groves, a virulent anti-communist, confirmed in March 1944 that the atomic bomb was being produced in order to “subdue the Soviets”, then an irreplaceable ally of the West.
Aged 46, Groves assumed charge of the US nuclear program in September 1942, and he proved a ruthless, crafty figure who possessed huge power in his new position. Groves in fact held control over every facet of America’s nuclear project, from the technical and scientific aspects, to areas of production and security, along with implementing plans as to where the bombs would be deployed.
Nagasaki bombing, 1945
Less than six weeks after the atomic attacks over Japan, on 15 September 1945 the Pentagon finalized a list: Through which it expounded strategies to annihilate 66 Soviet cities with 204 atomic bombs, to be executed through synchronized aerial assaults. This ratio averages at slightly more than three bombs discharged upon each city.
However, six atomic weapons apiece were categorized to obliterate 10 of the Soviets’ biggest urban centres, that is 60 bombs combined would be dropped over the following: Moscow (Russian capital), Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Kiev (Ukrainian capital), Kharkov, Koenigsberg, Riga (Latvian capital), Odessa, Ulan-Ude and Tashkent (Uzbekistan capital). This alone would have gone a long way towards destroying the Soviet Union.
Yet it was the mere beginning. Five atomic weapons each (35 altogether) were identified to liquidate another seven large cities in the USSR: Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk, Vilnius (Lithuanian capital), Lvov, Kazan, Voronezh and Nizhni Tagil.
Continuing, four bombs apiece (28 in total) were earmarked to desolate seven more significant urban areas: Gorki, Alma Ata, Tallinn (Estonian capital), Rostov-on-Don, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Chimkent.
In addition, three atomic bombs each (36 combined) were marked down to eliminate 12 other notable cities, ranging from Tbilisi (Georgian capital) and Stalinsk to Vladivostok, Archangel and Dnepropetrovsk.
Of these 36 Soviet cities outlined to be blown up – requiring between three to six atomic bombs per city – 25 of them belong to Russia, while the remaining 11 cities stretch across the Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The process of annihilation was to be directed not simply against eastern Europe and Russia, but extending to Central Asia too.
All of the USSR’s remaining 30 cities were highlighted as needing either one or two atomic weapons each, split down the middle: 15 cities necessitating two bombs apiece and the other 15 designated for one bomb each. Among these are yet more countries and well known places such as Minsk (Belarusian capital), Brest Litovsk, Baku (Azerbaijan capital) and Murmansk. The devastation was once more to spread past eastern Europe, and beyond Russia itself as far as Turkmenistan, where oil and gas rich Neftedag was to be hit with one atomic weapon.
A few of the above cities that the Pentagon was aiming to destroy are located in nations that have since joined NATO, a US-led military organization – like those in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose capital cities were listed as requiring 15 atomic bombs combined. The city of Belostok, in now NATO state Poland, was to be struck with two atomic weapons. These programs, if followed through, would have resulted in many tens of millions of deaths, far exceeding the loss of life during the Second World War.
Moreover, in 1945 some of the aforementioned Soviet urban regions were already lying in ruins following years of Nazi occupation, such as Kharkov, Vilnius, Tallinn and Rostov-on-Don. US atomic attacks over these places would largely have been hitting wrecked buildings. The Soviet Union lost more than 25 million people to Hitler’s armies, and was still reeling internally at war’s end.
Three weeks before Groves was completing his atomic plans, a late August 1945 Gallup poll found that nearly 70% of Americans believed the atomic bomb’s creation was “a good thing”, with just 17% feeling it to be “a bad thing”. It can be surmised these opinions would have altered somewhat, had the public been aware of what was occurring in the corridors of power.
One can but look on aghast at the sheer devious and audacious nature pertaining to the proposed demolition of 66 cities, across land areas spanning thousands of miles. In an age before the Internet and convenient handheld technology, these in depth stratagems would have required months of toil. The schemes may well have begun formulation around the time of Groves’ March 1944 confession to nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Groves was a driving force behind the plan to eviscerate all Soviet industrial and military capacity, with key assistance coming from Major General Lauris Norstad. Yet high ranking soldiers cannot undertake operations at this level without approval emanating from elite political circles.
As a consequence of America’s nuclear programs dating to World War II, it is grossly and historically inaccurate to suggest that the self-styled Cold War began in 1947 – as likewise are the claims that the Russians were to blame for resumption of hostile attitudes and policies. The masses have been sorely misled on these issues for more than seven decades.
Despite its importance, virtually the entire Western mainstream press (and most alternative media) have continued ignoring the Pentagon’s 1945 plan to incinerate dozens of Soviet cities. In isolation amid commercial media the British Daily Star newspaper, on 8 January 2018, issued a report regarding US proposals “to completely wipe Russia off the map” with “a stockpile of 466 bombs”.
Nonetheless the 466 total was then not a realistic one, and such high bomb estimates were dismissed by Groves himself as “excessive”, in his top secret memorandum to Norstad on 26 September 1945. Groves also outlined in the same letter that, “It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy its effectiveness. Hiroshima no longer exists as a city, even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total”.
Relating to their nuclear designs, Groves and Norstad had a most serious problem before their eyes, and one that would infuriate them both; along with, as we shall see, president Harry Truman. In late 1945, the US military held just two atomic bombs, and thoughts of decimating the USSR at this point were that of a pipe dream.
Accumulation of the necessary weapons was painstakingly slow, even for the world’s wealthiest nation. By 30 June 1946, the stockpile of US atomic bombs had increased to nine. Come November 1947 the arsenal had risen to 13 bombs, still remarkably small.
Seven months previously on 3 April 1947, president Truman, who was privy to proposals in wiping out the USSR, was himself informed of just how diminutive the US nuclear stash was. Truman “was shocked” to learn they had just a dozen atomic weapons, as he presumed the Pentagon had amassed a far greater number. Such was the secrecy of America’s nuclear program, few enjoyed intimate knowledge of the facts.
That same year, 1947, Winston Churchill implored Styles Bridges, a Republican senator visiting London, that an atomic bomb be dropped on the Kremlin “wiping it out”, thereby rendering Russia “without direction” and “a very easy problem to handle”. Churchill was hoping that Bridges would persuade Truman to effectuate this action. During the recent past, Churchill had received a royal welcome at the Kremlin and enjoyed a feast with Stalin there in August 1942, before he returned to Moscow for further meetings in late 1944. Three years later Churchill wished for the Kremlin to be turned into dust.
Meanwhile by 30 June 1948, the US nuclear cache climbed to 50 atomic bombs, and from therein the figures rocketed – come summer 1949, the US military finally held ownership of over 200 atomic bombs, heralding the era of “nuclear plenty”. Groves was since removed from his post, and even more dangerous individuals like General Curtis LeMay became prominent in American nuclear war planning.
In October 1949, LeMay expanded the plans so as to include 104 Soviet urban zones to be destroyed with 220 bombs “in a single massive attack”, and another 72 held back for “a re-attack reserve”. The 292 bombs allocated were available by June 1950.
However, the preceding year in August 1949, the global balance had irrevocably shifted, as Soviet Russia successfully detonated an atomic weapon over a testing ground in north-eastern Kazakhstan. Soviet acquisition of the bomb before 1950 came as a nasty shock to Washington. It would prove a vital deterrent to American nuclear designs, with the Russians having little choice but to follow suit and earmark urban areas in the West, relating to their own nuclear war schemes.
America’s invention of the hydrogen bomb in late 1952, quickly followed by the Soviets, dramatically altered the scope and killing estimates of nuclear war. The humble atomic bomb it seems was no longer of sufficient yield, and underwent an “upgrading” as humanity took a leap towards self-destruction.
The new hydrogen weapon, or H-bomb, was hundreds of times more powerful than its atomic cousin, and by the late 1950s H-bombs were being produced en masse by the Pentagon. Come December 1960 – with the American arsenal now at a staggering 18,000 nuclear weapons – it was calculated that practically every citizen in the Soviet Union would be killed, either from the hydrogen bombs’ blast radius or through resulting fallout. As was known, much of the radioactive poisoning would likely be blown on the wind across Europe, further affecting Warsaw Pact states and NATO allies.
Since 1950, the People’s Republic of China was added to the US nuclear hit list, a country which then consisted of over half a billion people; more than twice that of the USSR’s populace; while the Chinese themselves did not obtain nuclear weapons until the mid-1960s. Communist China and her cities were categorized to be levelled in tandem with Soviet metropolises, bringing an overall predicted death toll to hundreds of millions.
Due to a combination of deterrence, mutually assured destruction (MAD), and hefty portions of luck, no such terrible programs were executed, during what has been described for over 70 years as the “Cold War”. Rather than a cold conflict, the post-1945 years were organized for humanity to witness the hottest war in human history.
Because of Soviet intelligence reports, Stalin knew as early as four years prior to Hiroshima that America was developing “a uranium bomb”. By confirming to the Russians they held a new weapon of unparalleled destructive might Washington would furthermore, as envisaged, hold greater influence in boardroom negotiations with the Soviets.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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After only three months in office, a prophetic President John F. Kennedy was fully aware at the time of dark forces swirling around him and our nation, firmly entrenched in power and posing an alarming threat to the safety and well-being of both America’s last great leader as well as our democratic way of life:
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment… Our way of life is under attack.
Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe… no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of ‘clear and present danger,’ then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent…
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”
A huge part of humanity’s current problem that we are all facing today is the direct result of allowing this very same monolithic, invisible shadow government that Kennedy so accurately confronted way back in 1961 to infiltrate, infest and continue to grow over the next six decades as today’s international crime cabal currently and brazenly operating as the crystalized enemy of all humanity in 2021, insidiously wielding its unsatiated power and control over the citizenry of both the US constitutional republic as well as the entire world.
As a grave consequence, we’re all now paying an enormously heavy price for collectively failing to heed JFK’s foreboding warnings.
But Kennedy was far from the first US president to alert citizens about the paramount importance of protecting and safeguarding our precious yet vulnerable freedoms. In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt alluded to this same elusively dangerous enemy of the people:
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
In three months, it’ll be a full century ago that then New York City Mayor John F. Hylan astutely stated:
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation… The little coterie of powerful internationalbankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, … and control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country.
They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.
Apparently President Woodrow Wilson felt so despairingly duped by those same invisible powers-that-be after signing into law the infamous Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that handed America’s money supply over to the private Rothschild central banks:
[W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world – no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men…
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in the condemnation of it.
The Federal Reserve
It was exactly 108 years ago on December 23rd, 1913, after the vast majority of Congress had already gone home for the holidays that the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through in the dead of night, passed into law by order of the notorious secret 1910 Jekyll Island conspiracy between Rothschild, Rockefeller and JP Morgan bankers conspiring the financial coup d’état enabling the central banking cartel to begin printing fiat currency out of thin air. Such unbridled monopolistic power over America’s money supply gained purely by cunning deception and manipulation is how the psychopathic elite has stolen ungodly trillions from the ill-informed public.
That same year in 1913 the Federal Income Tax Act was also fenagled through, unconstitutionally swindling Americans out of tax dollars to pay off past war debt interests of engineered bankers’ wars. American citizens get reamed paying debtor interest on money the banks never even possess. This fraudulently rigged scheme was referenced by industrialist Henry Ford:
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Along those exact same lines, it was President George H.W. Bushwho admitted in 1992 to longtime White House reporter Sarah McClendon:
If the people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.
Today’s Fake Coronavirus Pandemic
For centuries it’s been more than evident that a relative handful of elite bloodline controllers have been calling the shots on planet earth, engaging in systematic rape, pillage and wholesale slaughter of all life forms that include both humans as well as natural resources.
But with the puppet masters’ Wuhan China launch of their fake Coronavirus pandemic outbreak in late 2019, inducing worldwide panic throughout 2020 based upon calculated lie after lie, the initial first step of their long-premeditated depopulation plan was sufficiently complete.
With nonstop mandated lockdowns and enforced mask wearing pumping unrelenting 24/7 fear porn propaganda into the increasingly paranoid public throughout 2020, the US lifespan from 2019 to 2020 has recently been reported by mainstream media to have dropped by an unheard of near two years, the largest drop in 75 years since WWII.
Then starting with Trump’s “warp speed” vaccine delivery that to this day he so proudly brags about, Step 2 of the elite’s depopulation agenda is the genocidal bioweapon that after one year in operation, by December 2021 is plunging humanity off its first Dark Winter die-off cliff.
So much for the great big lie of “flattening the curve” in two weeks for a back-to-normal life, or the incessant lies of a totally “safe and effective” nonvaccine. Bottom line, the earth controllers have used Big Pharma to globally buy off nearly every major politician, governmental public health “expert” corporate media and tech giant to perpetrate what is on track to becoming the worst and first global genocide in human history.
Meanwhile, the real experts, frontline doctors, nurses, virologists, that at great risk to themselves, have been courageously informing, educating and alerting the public about the Coronavirus hoax and lethal danger posed by experimental non-vaccines have been targeted for pervasive censorship, harassment or worse.
At the same time, 2020’s total number of human deaths worldwide due to Covid-19 turns out to be little different than any of the preceding pre-Covid years, anecdotally backed up by honest, brave whistleblowing morticians like UK’s John O’Looney.
Additionally, the near constant number of flu deaths that regularly occur every year, in 2020 was conveniently falsely blamed on the Covid-19 virus, and, as a result, the preposterous supposition that 2020’s number of flu deaths was virtually zero logically proves the pure absurdity and flagrantly false exposure that the crime cabal has been scamming the global population with the Gates-Fauci pre-concocted and gain-of-function patented, never scientifically isolated nor proven, virtually harmless so-called virus with a 99.7% survival rate.
But the Gates Foundation, the WHO, the Rockefeller Foundation and its NWO creation the United Nations in lockstep with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are all smelling mass blood sacrifice and like predatory sharks are zeroing in on their long-awaited dream of one world governance.
To head them off at the pass, legal pushback has arrived in the form of a 46-page lawsuit charging guilty parties with the genocidal crime against humanity filed December 6, 2021 at the International Criminal Court. Stateside challenges opposing imposter puppet Biden’s vaccine mandates have also been cropping up recently with several federal court judges ruling against his unconstitutional dictates.
One year after the vaccine rollout in combination with 2021’s widespread death jab mandates causing millions around the globe, including hundreds of healthy young athletes, to suddenly keel over and die en masse droves, the human lifespan in 2021 is fast plummeting to a far lower age of death like never before, all by diabolical elitist design.
And in keeping with the nonstop consistent deception, the nonvaccinated have been singled out, falsely blamed and scapegoated for spreading the virus and increasing the hospitalizations and deaths, bogusly hyped to justify booster shots every few months due to the latest confabulated variant “waves” like delta and now omicron, known to be so mild that its mortality rate is zero. In the West apartheid governments with vaccine mandates and passports are pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, criminalizing the death jab resistors many of whom in 2022 are slated for concentration camp incarceration. But organized resistance to tyranny is growing.
Yet with worldwide death rates surging in nations with highest vaccination – Israel, Gibraltar, Singapore, Denmark, UK and Netherlands among them, there’s no denying it’s the vaccinations that are currently wreaking the most havoc, killing millions of hypnotized, brainwashed normies dying from blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and compromised autoimmune deficiency not unlike Fauchi’s AIDS.
Meanwhile, all these same nations are busily cancelling Christmas, international flights and imposing rigid lockdowns and mask mandate orders again… so much for those “safe and effective” kill shots.
It is the courageous dissenters worldwide, billions of us refusing to bow down and roll over and die, who are holding the line through active and peaceful civil disobedience that will be the difference between either succumbing to or defeating the Satanic enemy forces of evil bent on our destruction.
But it’s of paramount importance to recognize that there will be no external savior to rescue us from apocalyptic doom and gloom other than the brave souls exercising their freewill together who will successfully outlast the criminal elite’s agenda for mass extermination and total enslavement. Having recently taken his booster shot, Trump has shown his true colors as a sold-out Big Pharma cheerleader, publicly touting that his deluded, rushed experimental vaccine rollout has “saved millions of lives,” while his refusal to stand up for medical freedom and sovereign liberty clearly smacks of betrayal toward his loyal political base. Offering his lukewarm, tacit approval against forced vaccination is weak at best.
Likewise, all those “hopium pushers” who’ve been so cocksure their hero will be coming back any day, week, month and now year, constantly moving their goalposts back after being dead wrong so many times, have also posed a grave disservice to both humanity and the world wary, fragile truth movement.
For way too many years, too many of the pied piping hopium influencers on the internet with thousands of followers have been promising the patriot millions to sit back, break out the popcorn, and passively “trust the plan bro,” as their inside “intel sources” keep assuring us that all those thousands of unsealed indictments against all those high profile US traitors are receiving their just desserts, compliments of the military white hats quietly holding the evil ones accountable for their ungodly sins at their Gitmo military tribunals and still secret executions.
The masses have been patiently, complacently, desperately waiting and waiting and waiting for any real solid evidence that never seems to quite come, that the good guys are finally moving in to save the day, restoring what’s left of our battered and tattered US constitutional republic from a tragic fate of total ruin, collapse and controlled demolition, to destroy America from within.
Our window of opportunity for taking assertive action is fast closing. At this point, we’ve reached the endgame and it appears there will be no savior to rescue us, not Trump, nor his so-called white hats, not even advanced benign ETs, nope, it’ll be up to us alone to band together in solidarity with God’s support and guidance to stand up to evil, fight to right the wrongs and preserve our divine human species from utter decimation as an AI controlled, robotic transhuman cyborg hybrid.
About the Author
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolically lethal pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last 8 years, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, particularly Global Research and lewrockwell.com. As a published author of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia& Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, Joachim’s books and chapters are Amazon bestsellers in child advocacy and human rights categories. His A-Z sourcebook series fully documents and exposes the global pedophilia scourge and remains available for free at Joachim’s blogsite at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com/ and https://pedoempire.org.
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First published on December 5, 2021, updated December 18, 2021
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The Event 201 simulation pertained to a coronavirus epidemic entitled nCoV-2019. It was held on October 18, 2019, less than 3 months before SARS-2 was “officially” identified in early January 2020. Among the 201 John Hopkins table top scenario “players” were key personalities holding advisory or senior positions in a number of core organizations. Less than 3 months later, these 201 “players” became actively involved in the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is also worth noting that the WHO initially adopted a similar acronym (to designate the coronavirus) to that of the John Hopkins Pandemic Event 201 Exercise (nCoV-2019). “…The new virus was initially named 2019-nCoV by WHO.”
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Incisive and carefully researched video comparing Simulation 201 to Covid pandemic 2020-21
“The following prominent individuals from global business, government, and public health were exercise players tasked with leading the policy response to a fictional outbreak scenario in the Event 201 pandemic tabletop exercise”
The entities directly or indirectly “represented” by the “players” included the WHO, John Hopkins, the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) (Dr. Timothy Grant Evans), US Intelligence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Dr. Chris Elias), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (Chairwoman Jane Halton), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Foundation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Stephen Redd), China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Director Dr. George Fu Gao). Big Pharma (Adrian Thomas), the World Bank and Global Banking, the Airline and Hotel industries. For more details click here.
It is worth noting that China’s CDC Director Dr. George Fu Gao played a central role in overseeing the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, acting in close liaison with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, John Hopkins et al. George Fu Gao is an Oxford graduate with links to Big Pharma. He was also for several years a fellow of the Wellcome Trust.
Dr. Stephen Redd (CDC) played a key role in the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign in the US, which turned out to be fake.
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Above text is an excerpt from Chapter I of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s E-Book entitled
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For the first time ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has put its foot down. No NATO for Ukraine and Georgia. Period.
As I predicted would happen, the Kremlin’s acceptance over many years of insults and provocations encouraged more until Russia’s very existence became threatened. Now that the foot has come down, will Washington’s arrogance and hubris allow Washington to notice?
Not if the Russian media keep whining about unfair treatment of Russia, now denounced for allegedly not meeting its WTO commitments and threatened with being kicked out of the international monetary and payments system.
A great power doesn’t whine. It presents as a danger that other countries avoid antagonizing. But this has not been the Russian way. The Russian Foreign Ministry sports its good will and good intentions as if Washington cared. Washington does not.
Washington sees Russia as an obstacle to Washington’s power and hegemony. Washington’s only interest is to destabilize Russia. Washington is willing to negotiate as long as it is Russia’s surrender.
Have the Kremlin and Russian media noticed that Nuland, the Obama regime assistant secretary of state who oversaw the US overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government and installation of a Washington puppet hostile to Russia, has now been promoted to Undersecretary of State in the Biden regime?
Washington always promotes those who cause trouble for Russia and gets rid of those who do not. President Trump, who wanted to normalize relations with Russia, was confronted with three years of “Russiagate” and evicted from office in a stolen election. Trump was proposing to leave the US military/security complex without an enemy–an unforgivable offense.
I understand that Russia wants peace–so do I–but the way you get peace is to show that you do not accept insults and provocations, not that, as Lavrov always says, “we are willing to negotiate with our partners.” In Washington good will is regarded as a weakness. It encourages provocations that eventually go too far and result in war.
Lavrov should have said: “Russia doesn’t accept insults from enemies.” The only thing Washington wants to negotiate with Russia is Russia’s surrender. Washington’s terms are: Russia can be part of the West as long as it is a puppet state like France, Germany, UK, and all the rest.
Had Russia shown strength and dangerousness instead of good will, the West would have approached Russia asking to negotiate. Russia will not ever have meaningful negotiations with Washington until Washington fears Russia. A country whose top officials and media are always whining about being treated unfairly is a country that Washington will NEVER take seriously.
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Since the early 2000’s, drone use in warfare became more prominent in US military planning and engagement. Successive US presidents, particularly Barack Obama, promised that the use of all-seeing drones and precision bombs would reduce civilian casualties. However, documents unveiled by the New York Times show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths, and perhaps most disturbingly, scant accountability.
The New York Times shockingly outlines various cases of civilians in the Middle East, including children, being killed by US drone strikes with no repercussions for the war crime. The cases they outline were drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of American airstrikes in the Middle East since 2014, i.e., since the US campaign against ISIS began.
The trove of documents revealed that by the US military’s own assessments, there were more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties by American airstrikes. The author of the article, Azmat Khan, said that the unveiled documents “lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.”
She added that “despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity.” Khan also explained how despite the 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, “only [in] a handful of cases were the assessments made public” and “not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action.”
Despite thousands of people devastated by reckless American airstrikes, including survivors being left with horrific disabilities and expensive medical bills, less than a dozen of condolence payments were made to victims. This is an unsurprising outcome considering that the efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned from intelligence failures are rare.
Obama called the strikes against ISIS as “the most precise air campaign in history” and lauded it as being more protective for troops and civilians alike. However, this belief was contradicted by Captain Bill Urban, the spokesman for the US Central Command. In responding to questions from The Times, he said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available.”
Although he claimed that the US tries to learn “from those mistakes”, “[…] works diligently to avoid such harm” and “investigate each credible instance,” the evidence proves otherwise as the hidden documents show civilians regularly as collateral victims.
The Times, as Khan says, “did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution.” The investigation found that although it is impossible to determine the full civilian death toll from US strikes, it is certainly far higher than the 1,417 victims that the Pentagon actually admits to.
The London-based newspaper found that many civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, on-the-ground reporting involving a sampling of credible cases were dismissed, and lessons rarely learned.
It is unsurprising that lessons were not learned when chat logs accompanying some assessments revealed that American soldiers treated drone strikes as if they were playing video games. In one recorded case, American soldiers expressed glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst. By removing soldiers from the ground and putting them behind a computer monitor, it not only reduces on-the-ground intelligence, but also desensitizes soldiers to the social and familial effects that their criminal actions have on ordinary civilians.
Captain Urban attempts to downplay this desensitization by saying that drone operators often “do not have the luxury of time” and that “the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm.”
However, in another recorded case in Mosul in 2016, three civilians were killed in a US-approved strike because they had decided to save more-precise weapons for other imminent strikes. In fact, The Times analysis found that civilians were frequently killed in airstrikes that were planned well in advance. This makes a mockery of Captain Urban’s claims that there are “collateral scans”. Disturbingly, some of these “collateral scans” were found to be only 11 seconds long.
Such lazy intelligence gathering has resulted in schools, bakeries and hospitals in Syria and Iraq being hit by targeted strikes, especially after they were removed from the “no-strike” list. For all the benevolence that the US espouses, especially in its “humanitarian interventions” (as it advertises its occupations of Syria and Iraq), its use of drones is really something incredible – operators treating strikes like playing video games, thousands of innocent civilians (including children) being exterminated, and no recourse or responsibility to face.
Effectively no courts, no judges and no prosecution for some of the worst war crimes perpetrated in modern history.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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An academic called Jonah Walters has recently published a couple of attacks on the political and economic model being worked out in Nicaragua under the country’s Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega. One attack published by the North American Congress on Latin America “Ortega’s Developmentalism Is Based on the “Popular Economy”—But What Does that Mean?” alleges that the unquestionable economic democratization of Nicaragua’s economy is in fact a mirage, in reality reinforcing neoliberal patterns of oligarchic and corporate economic power in Nicaragua. Another attack in New Left Review, “Ortega’s Synthesis” deploys a series of falsehoods to justify Walters’ argument that Nicaragua’s political and economic model is in crisis and unlikely to survive.
Both attacks follow the familiar pathological moebius strip logic Western psychological warfare always follows against target nations from Cuba to Syria or Iran to Venezuela. NATO country governments fund local opposition media and NGOs to generate falsehoods frequently based on deliberate terrorist provocations by opposition political activists. Those false opposition reports get recycled as fact by Western academics, media and NGOs which in turn generate reactions in international institutions. Those reactions are then taken up by the original local sources of the false reports to intensify their NATO country funded psychological warfare campaign both domestically and overseas. The process is endless.
In that context, Walters’ articles are simply one more example of the faithless deceit and self-deceit of the Western pseudo-progressive intellectual managerial classes in academia and non governmental organizations overwhelmingly funded by NATO country governments and multinational corporations. In relation to Nicaragua, this phony-progressive intellectual managerial class have used their media outlets and NGOs for over twenty years to attack the Sandinista Front, categorically siding with the country’s US government sponsored, right wing aligned political forces, most particularly the social democrat Sandinista Renewal Movement originally led by Sergio Ramirez and Dora Maria Tellez, supported by other leading ex-Sandinistas like Monica Baltodano.
When Rodolfo Walsh wrote, “History looks much like a piece of private property whose owners are the the owners of everything else” he prefigured the class role of media outlets like NACLA and the New Left Review. These and other apparently radical or progressive media report on international affairs essentially publishing neocolonial propaganda with a progressive flavor. As often as not, these outlets instruct the majority world on where they have gone wrong and admonish majority world governments and political movements for alleged human rights failings or for not being sufficiently progressive or revolutionary.
Walter’s two articles on Nicaragua follow that neocolonial template. His NACLA article concludes of President Ortega’s government that “having already heightened the rate of exploitation in key capitalist sectors to an unsustainable degree, it also lacked the popular influence to contain disruptive social conflicts any longer. This is the source of the Ortega administration’s deep and ongoing political crisis, which will not be easily overcome…”
Walter’s false, obfuscating conclusions betray the fact that he lacks even the first clue of the grass roots development of Nicaragua’s political and economic life since 1990. His perspective is dominated by the delusional views of the social democrat ex-Sandinistas who split from the Sandinista Front in 1994. That fact becomes even more self-evident when one reads Walters’ misleading and downright inaccurate misrepresentations of the 2018 crisis that he advances in his New Left Review article where he attributes as a cause of the crisis in 2018: “a proposed social security reform that would have increased personal and employer contributions while imposing a 5% reduction in benefits”
To the contrary, there was no proposed across the board 5% cut in workers and pensioners benefits. The full text of the proposed Social Security reform clearly defends workers and pensioners rights, seeking to extend to pensioners the same comprehensive health care enjoyed by active contributing workers financed by a modest 5% levy on retired people’s pensions. Walters derisory summary completely ignores the reality of the proposed measure which put the burden of the Social Security increase on employers, not workers. In fact, the government sought to protect the social security health system and increase social security coverage and benefits as a collective public good, proposing:
Gradually increasing the employer’s contribution by 3.25 percent
Increasing the employee’s contribution by 0.75 percent
Increasing the government’s contribution for public sector workers by 1.25 percent
Making people on high salaries pay social security contributions proportionate to their income
Taking 5% from retirees’ pensions to offer them the same health care as that of active workers
Maintaining the number of weekly contributions to qualify for a full pension at 750
Maintaining the reduced pension and the minimum pension for those eligible
Maintaining the Christmas bonus
Maintaining pensions’ value against the annual Central Bank sliding devaluation
Keeping all INSS clinics in the public system
Supporters of Nicaragua’s social democrat political opposition, like Jonah Walters, constantly conceal the fact that the employers organization COSEP argued for stripping away most of these rights, doubling the number of weekly contributions and privatizing the INSS clinics. Thus, Walters’ account of the Social Security issue in Nicaragua in April 2018 is downright mendacious. Any conscientious editor would have spotted that. Instead, throughout his New Left Review article Walters’ gets away with advancing one US funded opposition lie after another while deliberately omitting accounts contradicting his misrepresentations.
For example, Walters also falsely asserts in the New Left Review that “the Ortega government has unleashed the police on striking workers and underwritten settler violence in Nicaragua’s indigenous regions.” But Nicaragua’s police under the Sandinista governments in office since 2007 have never attacked striking workers and Walters offers no examples of such attacks. If he has in mind the fierce confrontations of 2018, then in fact the police were under constant savage attacks from heavily armed protestors, often under cover of otherwise supposedly peaceful demonstrations as verified by these interviews here , here and also here.
Similarly, Walters’ claim of some government role in violence against indigenous peoples is utterly false. Since 2014, when the miskito Yatama party led by ex-CIA agent Brooklyn Rivera lost elections for control of the regional government in Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region, foreign progressives have persistently repeated Yatama and other opposition propaganda claiming government inspired violence against indigenous peoples. But the reality of decisive government support for indigenous people’s rights and of opposition lies about that reality can be gauged here, here, here and here. Nicaragua’s government promotes and defends one the most advanced systems of indigenous peoples’ self-government in the world.
Walters continues his mendacious account of events in Nicaragua in 2018 asserting : “On Mother’s Day, hundreds of thousands marched to mourn the university students slain by state forces. Police responded by firing bullets into the crowd.” In fact that day there were two huge marches, one by the opposition, largely organized by the Catholic Church, and one in support of the government. In the incidents Walters refers to in Managua, 20 police officers and several Sandinista supporters suffered serious injury from opposition snipers including several fatal woundings, those events have been covered here, here and here. That same day, in La Trinidad, near Estelí, opposition gunmen attacked a Sandinista peace caravan wounding a total of 47 police officers and Sandinista supporters, one of them fatally, while another died later of his wounds. Of around 260 deaths throughout the 2018 crisis around a dozen were either university or secondary school students of whom a number were killed by opposition violence.
These examples of Walters’ mendacity in his New Left Review article lead us back to the false conclusions he draws in his NACLA article. Walters’ key argument attacking Nicaragua’s revolutionary economic democratization is that government policies promoting the popular, cooperative and associative economy in fact foment a kind of “neoliberalism from below”. But applying that formulation in Nicaragua is ridiculous and crass, given that Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front has resolutely defended its historic 1969 revolutionary program for over fifty years. President Ortega’s government has delivered universal free health care, free education from pre-school to university including free vocational technical training, food security, land reform, accesible housing as well as having among the most advanced policies on gender equality and indigenous peoples rights in all the Americas.
Walters consistently betrays his comprehensive ignorance of Nicaragua’s reality and recent history, arguing for example, that leading Sandinista Orlando Nuñez Soto in the 1990s proposed a strategy for socialist transition, “which emphasized cooperative enterprise over political confrontation with neoliberalism”. But this too is simply untrue. On the contrary, what the Sandinista Front leadership, including Orlando Nuñez, proposed was that peasants and workers in the countryside and in the cities should organize to defend the properties they had seized after decades of struggle.
Between 1990 and 2006 Nicaragua witnessed fierce battles of the country’s popular sectors against neoliberalism, in defence of the revolutionary achievements of the 1980’s, against moves to privatize public services like water, and supporting the defence of the country’s universities’ statutory share of 6% of the nation’s budget, among many other examples of vigorous protests and determined civic action. Just as everywhere else in Latin America, Nicaragua during neoliberalism was a theatre of bitter social struggle, with the Sandinista Front both in its midst and at its head. The popular movement in post-1990 Nicaragua made key advances compared with other popular movements in the region.
Nicaragua had a mass radical political party, the largest in the country. It had decades of revolutionary experience with thousands of professionals from the popular sectors that had completed their university studies in the 1980’s. Above all, it could face a neoliberal state whose security forces had not been educated and trained to attack workers and peasants. This is why no massacres took place during that period in Nicaragua, despite repeated efforts by the US backed neoliberal administrations to get Nicaragua’s national police and army to use their firearms to shoot protestors.
Immediately after the electoral defeat of 1990, Comandante Daniel Ortega said that from then on the FSLN would “rule from below”, meaning an open political confrontation with neoliberalism. He also affirmed that the FSLN would return to power by popular vote, not by violence, convinced that Nicaragua’s people would inevitably hold the neoliberal US owned administrations accountable for the chaos and suffering caused by their policies. Daniel Ortega was proven right then and now, 30 years later, Nicaragua’s people have once more ratified their faith both in his leadership and in the Sandinista Front in the country’s first ever elections free of US and allied interference.
The country’s popular, family, cooperative and associative economy has pulled Nicaragua politically, economically and socially intact through the crisis of 2018 and the severely damaging effects of the global economic measures taken to address Covid-19. As a result Nicaragua’s economic growth in 2021 will be over 9% with conservative projections of between 4% and 5% for 2022. That reality makes nonsense of Walters assertion that the country has been undergoing a political crisis driven by economic contradictions. He pretends against all the facts that Nicaragua has experienced some kind of broad based popular resistance to the government’ economic policies.
The very opposite is true. Through 2018 and 2019 Nicaragua’s Sandinista government defeated a desperate, concerted attack by the country’s financial, business and media oligarchy allied with US funded opposition organizations with practically no popular base. Only the now widely despised and discredited reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy was able to mobilize truly mass support for demonstrations during April and May 2018. In June the general population reacted against the criminal repression they were suffering at the hands of the thugs and delinquents extorting, assaulting and killing people on the orders of the coup organizers. By mid July, the attempted coup was over.
Via the coup attempt they organized, the country’s US backed oligarchy – epitomized by the Chamorro family – sought to reverse the revolutionary economic democratization carried out under President Daniel Ortega since January 2007. Devoid of genuine popular support, they had to rely on criminal gangs like those organized by Felix Maradiaga in Managua that burned down the Managua central office of the country’s most important savings and loan cooperative CARUNA. Or the gangs supplied and paid by Dora Maria Tellez in Masaya that burned down a large part of Masaya’s popular market area.
This is the political and economic reality of the failed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018 which opposition apologists like Jonah Walters try to cover up in everything they write. Meanwhile in North America and Europe, the self same phony progressives and radicals attacking Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government policies have proven incapable of defending even the most basic rights of their peoples. They have twice failed to prevent massive transfers of wealth to the ruling elites in North America and Europe, first during the crisis of 2008-2009 and again in 2020. Instead, most recently, they have colluded in the the most reactionary State and corporate abuse of public health pretexts to reset their economies and remake their societies in an anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian corporate mould.
Nor have they been able to mobilize effectively to protest against their NATO country governments’ repeated overseas aggression targeting the majority world’s peoples about whom all those neocolonial progressives and radicals claim to care about so much. In Nicaragua’s case, the country’s people have many challenges ahead to meet and overcome. They are doing so with pride and confidence in their own abilities and justified optimism that their Sandinista government will help them realize their country’s sovereign potential. And they will do so together with the peoples of Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela and the rest of the region to defeat continuing attempts from North American and European elites and governments and their class allies to dominate them.
Stephen Sefton, author and renowned political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
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If anything, Washington’s neoconservatives have an unerring instinct for survival. Having brought about multiple disasters in the two decades since 9/11—from the Iraq War to the twin debacles in Libya and Syria—the neoconservatives seem to have perfected the art of failing up.
Harvard University’s Stephen Walt once quipped that “Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” And in this regard, the story of the Kagan family is instructive. Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of pseudohistories such as The Jungle Grows Back, has for years been a leading advocate of American militarism.
His brother, Frederick, is a resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Writing in the Hill on December 7, Frederick Kagan claimed that Russian control of Ukraine, “would create an existential threat to Poland and even to Romania—one that could be met only by major deployments of U.S. and European ground and air forces to what could become a new Iron Curtain.” He and his wife, Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War—another pro-war Washington think tank—were close advisers to the disgraced General and former CIA Director David Petraeus. Indeed, both Frederick and his wife are frequently cited as the brains behind the surge strategy pursued by George W. Bush’s administration in 2007-2008.
But the most powerful member of the Kagan clan is Victoria Nuland, who is the wife of Robert and is the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. Under Obama, Nuland served as the State Department spokesperson, a position for which she was manifestly overqualified (and that becomes especially clear if one takes the qualifications of the current spokesman into consideration), before assuming the role of the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. It was in this role that Nuland helped orchestrate the overthrow of a democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014 that led to a civil war in Ukraine, in which more than 13,000 people have died, according to the United Nations.
Part of the reason the U.S. is at grave risk of a war with Russia—and there is precious little debate about the policies that have brought us to this point—is that foreign policy in Washington is conducted by a virtually closed circle.
And that circle is dominated by people like the Kagans.
Washington’s legacy media organizations play their part in perpetuating these foreign policies as well by functioning as the permanent bureaucracy’s echo chamber. For proof, look no further than the Washington Post editorial page, which from the very start of the Ukraine crisis has been cavalierly dismissing calls for diplomacy and engagement and, instead, has been calling for outright war.
An example of this is the Washington Post view published on their editorial page on August 21, 2014:
“…it is tempting to look for a cease-fire or some kind of time out that would lead to a period of diplomatic negotiation. But what would a pause and diplomacy accomplish? Any negotiations that leave this blight festering in Ukraine must be avoided. The only acceptable solution is for Mr. Putin’s aggression to be reversed.”
As Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, and I
at the time, “Almost as bad as the callousness on display is the lack of candor. At no point did the [Washington] Post actually explain how it would propose to go about reversing Putin’s aggression.”
This remains the case even today. At no point do the armchair warriors braying for war with Russia over Ukraine discuss how such a “reversal” might be carried out, or, even more tellingly, what the odds might be of a successful outcome of a war between the U.S. and Russia.
Not much has changed since the start of the Ukrainian crisis nearly eight years ago. Consider for a moment the testimony on “Update on U.S.-Russia Policy” by Nuland made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on December 7.
“We don’t know whether Russian President [Vladimir] Putin has made a decision to attack Ukraine or overthrow its government but we do know he is building the capacity to do so. Much of this comes right out of Putin’s 2014 playbook but this time, it is on a much larger and more lethal scale. So despite our uncertainty about exact intentions and timing, we must prepare for all contingencies, even as we push Russia to reverse course.”
Nuland went on to note that the U.S. government has given $2.4 billion to Ukraine since 2014 “in security assistance,” which included $450 million that was given in 2021 alone.
What, one wonders, has been the United States’ return on this massive investment?
SFRC Chairman Bob Menendez, who, in 2015, was indicted on federal corruption charges, seems to be under the impression that Russians do not have the overwhelming military advantage on their own border. Likewise, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) intoned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would “require us [the U.S.] to escalate.”
Nuland on “what measures are being considered by the administration to counter Russian aggression,” while Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) indicated
that during her conversations with members of parliament (MP) from Estonia, they spoke about the importance of “European unity with respect to Ukraine.” Also, the MPs from Estonia along with Poland and other Eastern European countries expressed anxiousness about “whether or not to station more troops in the Baltic nations,” Senator Shaheen said.
The most astute comment of the day came from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was clearly proud that the committee had achieved a rare bipartisan agreement for a change. He further emphasized that the U.S. stands “united” in support of Ukraine and against Russia.
And Johnson was absolutely correct: The committee was completely united in its desire for conflict over Ukraine, with whom the U.S. has no treaty obligations whatsoever.
Indeed, both Nuland and the SFRC seem to see U.S. national interests where none exist. More worrying still, they seem to possess a kind of blind faith in America’s ability, indeed duty, to shape outcomes of conflicts that are taking place thousands of miles from our shores through a combination of sanctions and military threats.
The SFRC hearing showed, if nothing else, that American foreign policy is held hostage by a venal, avaricious and, above all, reckless claque of elites: From the members of the SFRC to the high U.S. government officials who testify before them; from the staffers who brief them to the scholars and policy hands on whom the staffers rely; right down to the reporters and journalists who uncritically regurgitate what they are told by their ‘anonymous’ administration sources.
As such, one of the most urgent questions before us is: How do Americans of good conscience finally break their stranglehold on power before it’s too late?
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Israeli authorities yesterday demolished the homes of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb in the southern Negev region, for the 196th time since the year 2000.
The demolition of the tents sheltering Al-Araqeeb’s residents during the winter storm came less than a month after the village was last levelled on 24 November.
This is the 14th time that the Israeli authorities have demolished the tents in Al-Araqeeb since the start of the year.
The village was first levelled in July 2010, and every time the residents of Al-Araqeeb rebuild their tents and small homes, occupation forces return to raze them, sometimes several times in a month.
Located in the Negev (Naqab) desert, the village is one of 51 “unrecognised” Arab villages in the area and is constantly targeted for demolition ahead of plans to Judaise the Negev by building homes for new Jewish communities. Israeli bulldozers, which Bedouins are charged for, demolish everything, from the trees to the water tanks, but Bedouin residents have tried to rebuild it every time.
Bedouin in the Negev must abide by the same laws as Jewish Israeli citizens. They pay taxes but do not enjoy the same rights and services as Jews in Israel and the state has repeatedly refused to connect the towns to the national grid, water supplies, and other vital amenities.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed Moscow’s great concern over the deployment of the US Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems near Russian borders, including their possible location in Ukraine.
“We are highly concerned over the deployment of the US ABM systems near Russian [borders],” the head of state noted at the expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board on Tuesday.
According to Putin, “if this infrastructure advances, if the US and NATO missile systems appear in Ukraine, then their flight time to Moscow will be reduced to 7-10 minutes, and speaking about hypersonic weapons – to 5 minutes.”
“For us, this is a serious hurdle, a challenge to our security,” the Russian leader noted.
“The buildup of US and NATO forces directly at the Russian borders, as well as holding large-scale drills, including unplanned ones, causes serious concern,” Putin pointed out.
The United States and its allies need to understand that Russia simply “has nowhere to retreat” if its weapons appear in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday at an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry board.
“They [the US] simply do what they want. But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now, or trying to do and going to do – this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further,” Putin said.
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“Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blanky at the threats posed to Russia? [Good question] That is the problem: we simply have nowhere to move further, that’s the question,” Putin said.
Standard Missile 3 of the sort currently deployed in Romania and soon in Poland.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Both are alleging without providing a speck of evidence that 97% of Covid cases/hospitalizations/deaths are the unvaccinated. This is a total lie.
Information from every country shows that it is the vaccinated who are suffering injuries and deaths.
The “Omicron variant” is being used to create a new wave of public fear and government control over civil liberties and citizens’ bodies–essentially rape with a needle–despite the known fact that the variant is rarely harmful. Hospitals are falsely reported to be full of Omicron patients.
The presstitute media stresses that the more or less harmless variant is highly contagious, and are creating fear out of the ease of catching it. People are urged to protect themselves by taking the jab even though it is a known fact that the Omicron variant is immune to the “vaccine.”
Acquaint yourself with the facts:
In Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths were in the vaccinated. Boosters are merely boosting COVID infections. Some 40,000 deaths have occurred in the USA, UK and EU following vaccination but Omicron is mild. The UK Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated but the vaccinated are at greatest risk.
It was clear from the first cases in South Africa and now in the UK and EU that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease and very few deaths [not from Covid but] “with COVID”. Indeed South African experts have advised stopping stop-and -trace and quarantining because most of the infected have no symptoms.
More evidence of the failure of vaccines in the face of new infections comes from the USA where one of the largest US outbreaks of the new Omicron variant to date is believed to have occurred at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where almost all 930 cases over the past week are believed to be of the variant.
All of the confirmed Omicron cases in the Cornell University case are among people who are fully vaccinated, and some of them are in people who’ve also had the booster.
The booster is of course more of the same in the hope that the third dose will do what the first two doses were supposed to do! And the new variant, “omicron”?
Most of the Omicron cases in the United States have been among the vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on Friday 10/12/21. Most patients have experienced mild symptoms.
When the media of the entire Western World lends itself to blatant lies in order to boost Big Pharma profits, enhance governments’ destruction of civil liberty, suppress dissent, and perhaps facilitate a depopulation agenda, the Western World is lost. It is the corrupt Western media that has conspired with governments to destroy freedom and nazify the Western World to the point that Australia has concentration camps for the unvaccinated and Germany and Austria intend to imprison the unvaccinated–all of this for a “vaccine” that all evidence proves beyond any question does not protect against a virus, a virus moreover that has a very low death rate and is easily cured and prevented with HCQ and Ivermectin.
Western peoples need to understand that their enemies are not Russia and China but their own governments and their own “public health” officials. It is these people who are the enemies of mankind.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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News of the deployment of National Guard troops to an unspecified location in the Horn of Africa is an indication that US interference in the region will continue.
The dominant corporate and state media have reported for months that Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, will soon fall to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a treasonous splinter of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) that started a civil war by attacking an Ethiopian federal army base on November 3, 2020. However, the dominant press have of late been unable to deny that the ENDF has retaken cities, towns, and territory in the Amhara and Afar Regional States, both of which border the Tigray Regional State.
The TPLF is a longstanding ally of the US, which supported its brutal 27-year, minority rule in exchange for its army’s service to the US agenda on the African continent. Its proponents have stridently called for US military action to stop what they call genocide in Tigray, even though UN and Ethiopian Human Rights Commission investigators concluded that there is no genocide taking place.
AG: Ann Fitz-Gerald, news came out this week that a thousand National Guardsmen from Virginia and Kentucky are deploying to Ft. Bliss, Texas now to train for deployment to the Horn of Africa at the turn of the year.
Nearly half the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were National Guardsmen, so that’s nothing new. But what do you think of this escalation of boots on the ground? Especially to a region as increasingly volatile as the Horn?
AF: It’s not totally clear what these troops have been deployed for. A press release stated that it was to support safety and stability in the region. The statement said the objective is to provide security for the forward operating bases maintained by the Department of Defense, to build partnerships with host nations, and to improve safety and stability in the region.
The National Guard is a unique element of the military, with a direct line of command both to the state governor and the federal authorities. But they respond to domestic emergencies and overseas combat missions, counter drug efforts, reconstruction missions, and more. Sometimes the National Guards, which are often called “paramilitary forces” in other countries, are more effective than the regular military units in supporting things like domestic emergencies such as crowd control, disaster management, and community defense and resilience.
In this case, the deployment may be for contingency purposes, augmentation purposes. Should the military contingency force, known as CJTF—the Horn of Africa Combined Joint Task Forces— be deployed, maybe the National Guard troops would provide security to this and other forward operating bases and/or be used for other augmentation purposes, not only in the case where the main force would become deployed, but also for the purposes of drawing on wider competencies of the Guards, which are more oriented to domestic crises like civil unrest and natural disasters.
One may argue that it’s quite surprising with troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drawdowns in those theaters of operations, that the government would draw on the National Guard to deploy overseas. On the other hand, the National Guard could arguably cover a wider range of missions. We are dealing these days with wider security threats. So maybe the US government is looking for that wider flexibility and agility in support of its ongoing operations on the continent.
AG: It seemed for a moment that you might be saying the National Guard does especially nice things. But this is alarming, to say the least, to Ethiopians who’ve expected the US to start drone bombing, or invade in some other way, for the past year.
AF: That’s what the risk always is when the directives come across as very general or slightly unclear, and when there is a crisis in the region as well. It is easy to jump to conclusions and make assumptions.
And I am sure that constituencies in the US might also be alarmed by the costs of losing domestic support in states like Virginia to overseas missions. They might ask whether that’s the best use of the National Guard while we’re still in the COVID crisis and facing climate calamities like wildfires, hurricanes, and rising sea levels.
Others may assume that the US is scaling up its military operations in the Horn of Africa so as to take military action in Ethiopia, but I would encourage people not to jump to conclusions. This may be part of a wider vision that the US government has for its military footprint in Africa, not just in the Horn.
The US recently announced, back in March 2021, a new direction for national security that was intricately tied to the US’s economic interests at home and overseas. So it may be part and parcel of a wider mission, all of which would involve a more deeply embedded footprint in the Horn of Africa.
AG: I can’t say I find that reassuring.
AF: Well, it may also relate to the US Embassy in Addis Ababa encouraging US nationals to get out of the country as soon as they can and suggesting that they might need help.
In addition to that, there are more regional issues such as the recent coup in Sudan. The US military still has a dominant presence in the Sudanese government. We also see election uncertainty and unrest in Somalia.
AG: Do you think there’s any good reason for the US military to be in Africa and/or any benefit for the African people?
AF: Well, we’ve been talking for a long time now about African solutions to African challenges and a wider role to be taken on the by the African Union. And not just the African Union, but the continent’s regional economic mechanisms and regional economic communities.
The US Department of Defense was in the past focused on the potential for mass migration to Europe and North America. Another concern is keeping shipping routes and waterways protected and open.
AG: Today California 30th District Congressman Brad Sherman suggested blocking trade going in and out of Ethiopia and Eritrea through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman. With a Chinese base as well as a US base in Djibouti, that could cause a greater logjam than that cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal earlier this year.
AF: I agree that doesn’t sound wise. Are Americans really served by a wider US military footprint than the one we have already seen on the African continent? During a time when the number of African standby forces across the continent has increased? When there have been efforts to develop a collaborative arrangement between the UN and the African Union (AU) to support African peacekeeping missions? One would think this US presence should now be scaled down to let Africans solve their own problems.
AG: Lots of people on the African continent, and those who are critical of US and Western policy in Africa, think that elite Western interests are just there to dominate, exploit, and indebt them, and steal their natural resources. Do you think they are honestly there for anything else?
AF: They are there to protect US foreign policy interests and US national security interests. It should also be noted that earlier on this year, the US announced new plans for their national security strategy to be indistinguishable from their plans for a new economic strategy.
That economic strategy has implications for building back better at home in the US vis a vis its overseas economic interests. So it seems that there is a renewed interest that the US has taken in mineral resources across the African continent and the Arabian/Nubian Shield . There is an interest in having access to those natural resources: lithium, niobium, and other minerals that are key to pivoting to a cleaner, greener economy, which is the main thrust of the US economic plans. That would require access to these minerals and resources, but also stability to support that access.
AG: But the US sows chaos wherever it goes, as it has in Libya, Syria, and Somalia, just to name those nations nearest Ethiopia.
AF: Well, its logical goals should be stability, peace, and security on the African continent. In the longer term, stability should in fact benefit the pursuit of American economic interests across the continent.
AG: I can’t help laughing. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I talk more colloquially, like a journalist, while you talk like an academic. We are both who we are.
AF: Yes we are. As an academic I’m required to discuss things in a certain way, but we agree about a lot and have enough in common to talk.
AG: OK, the TPLF has been claiming that they are winning the war in Ethiopia, and the western press has been chanting day after day that the TPLF is close to seizing Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Every day there are reports in the US and European capitals that they are withdrawing embassy personnel and that NGO staff and foreign citizens are fleeing at the behest of their governments.
Today, however, these outlets, even the dominant corporate outlets, are reporting that the Ethiopian National Defense Force is recapturing northern towns and districts. What do you think is going to happen militarily?
AF: We’ve seen a lot of different media reports on issues concerning the trajectory of the conflict, and developments on the battlefield. And of course CNN published a story with photos taken way back in May in the Tigray Regional State, but said that they were TPLF rebel forces on the outskirts of Addis, and that the TPLF had the city encircled.
On the contrary, we’ve now learned from local Ethiopian media that the town of Lalibela has been retaken, as have a number of other northern districts in the North Wollo Regional State, the region just south of the Tigray Region. North Wollo is where there are communities all along the border with Tigray.
Lalabella is an historic and holy city, famous for its churches carved out of rock in the 12th and 13th centuries. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site, and people both inside and outside Ethiopia were alarmed when the TPLF seized it.
The national defense forces have also retaken cities including Gashena, where five strategic routes come together, including the road into Tigray Region and onward onto Tigray’s capital, Me’kele. We have also been informed by national and local media sources that the TPLF has suffered some very heavy losses at the front lines of these battle areas.
I understand that the TPLF no longer have a presence at all in the Afar Region.
Forced recruitment by the TPLF rebels, however, has continued across different segments of the Tigray Regional State population, and as a result, many people who lack experience in soldiering are coming to the front lines. This has resulted in large, tragic losses.
Local Ethiopian news is also reporting that there’ve been significant losses to the TPLF leadership. There was an announcement last week citing that 12 senior leaders had been killed. The Ethiopian army’s air strikes are also continuing and they have targeted the TPLF supply lines that were running between Mek’ele and other areas, and in the border region with Amhara Regional State.
We are seeing a likely TPLF defeat in the Amhara region, but the question is, now that Afar has been cleared of conflict, why do remaining TPLA fighters from Amhara keep increasing in numbers? What happens next? I expect a TPLF defeat, after which democracy and peace should be declared as the pillars of the post-conflict pathway.
Priority has to be given to an interim administration set up in the Tigray Region which makes space for all political groupings, all opposition groups as well—plural politics. And in all the conflict-affected regions, rebuilding the infrastructure must take priority.
The Ministry of Peace reported back in August that some critical infrastructure in Tigray had been destroyed repeatedly by TPLF fighters and had been reconstructed and rebuilt several times. But these services extend to banking as well. All these critical services need to be supported. And social programs. Support to these sorts of programs will win the support of the people. It is the confidence of these conflict -affected communities that the government really needs to win back.
Social programs are important for community healing and community-based and political-based dialogue. There are issues concerning accountability and rule of law, which very much depends on which leaders remain in position at the top of the TPLF organization.
What leaders were responsible for strategic command and control of the fighting, and specifically the attack on the northern manned outposts that launched this war in the first place? I would say, in the spirit of prioritizing peace and democracy, that in parallel with holding this very small group of leaders to account, the government should consider granting a blanket amnesty to all others. It would be a magnanimous move on the government’s part and it would help support the much needed healing and space for dialogue.
AG: The US has seemed determined to see the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed fall. The constant calls of genocide in Tigray are like those that usually precede US bombing campaigns, as they did in Libya and Syria. There was a piece in The Guardiansaying that genocide is imminent and we must act. One of its authors was a former head of the United Nations Development Program, whom WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—a former TPLF minister—had appointed to co-chair the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
Do you see any retreat from all this crusading and the very real possibility that the US might attack Ethiopia, claiming it has to “stop genocide?”
AF: I’ve seen some concerning things that have come out as statements by US policy makers, particularly by the State Department. That has generated anti-U.S. sentiment back in Ethiopia and also across the Ethiopian diaspora community. There’s been constant criticism of the Ethiopian government, and punitive sanctions imposed on Ethiopia and its ally Eritrea, but none on the TPLF. This has emboldened the TPLF and given it no incentive to stand down. So the TPLF incursions outside Tigray have continued, the insurgency has continued, and the violence and destruction has continued.
On the genocide issue, I read some online US national news about this, which referred to a decision to halt any official decision made on a genocide designation. The claim of genocide has been debunked by a recent reportwritten by investigators from the UN and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, but despite this report, many media outlets, most of all CNN and its foreign correspondent Nima Elbagir, have continued to cry genocide. Elbagir, in her recent moderation of a panel hosted at Yale University—which featured 2 senators from the human rights caucus—seemed to be pushing the US to disregard the UN report and adopt a domestic designation of genocide.
AG: You were disinvited from that panel at Yale, weren’t you? I read this report, Yale hosts Ethiopia conference amid social media controversy, disinvites speaker . It quotes you saying, ““I had no objection to being asked to stand down from the event. I understand that others did complain on the basis that Ethiopian voices were not represented at the event.”
AF: There wasn’t a single Ethiopian voice and in the end, the panel was not only all white but also all male. CNN’s Nima Elbagir, the only woman and the only person of color, moderated.
AG: So they didn’t even much bother with the optics of ten white men debating the fate of a Black African nation.
AF: No, they didn’t.
AG: The US has also demanded “negotiations without preconditions” for almost a year, implying that the TPLF and the federal government are equals who should surrender everything, then just sit down and talk to each other. What do you think about that?
AF: The issue of negotiations, much less negotiations without preconditions, is a non-starter with Ethiopians. You can flip this on its head and say the Biden administration wouldn’t go to the negotiation table with the insurrectionists who stormed Capitol Hill after Trump lost the last US presidential election. Ethiopia should not be treated with different standards.
The Ethiopian people need this war to end. The world needs this war to end. The unnecessary loses, the destruction to livelihoods, all of this needs to stop. And a more peaceful pathway involving rebuilding, needs to start. This is not going to be an easy task, but it is one that the country must prioritize, one that should be supported and cannot be rushed. Healing, development, forgiveness, and social reconstruction will take many years. That’s what we should be thinking about, as western partner countries at the moment. Support for peace.
AG: Despite its protestations about negotiations, the US government has acted as though peace in the region is the last thing they’re interested in. Just as peace is the last thing they were interested in when they went to war with Libya and Syria. So why would you expect anything different?
AF: That’s the disappointing side of things about US policy on Ethiopia and the wider Horn of Africa region. While the US takes a very short term view of its own interests, enormous diplomatic and cooperative opportunities are foregone. Arguments about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which US ally Egypt does not want to see completed, has taken away from discussions on regional economic cooperation that could have gone on in the meantime. The US needs to take a longer view of its own interests and those of the region.
AG: As a journalist, I feel it’s my job to describe what is as well as I can, and I can’t help being cynical, but I know that, as a professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs , you need to propose a better way forward, as you’re doing.
AF: Trying to.
AG: This week, we’ve seen leaked footage of a meeting in which former and current western diplomats met with a senior TPLF member and spokesperson, despite US claims to neutrality. What do you think of this video?
AF: The video became viral and infamous quite quickly. It was a big leak. My own concerns about the video were the way in which a so-called civil society organization platformed a known leader of a nationally declared terrorist group, the TPLF.
AG: Hold on, you need to explain what you mean by “nationally declared terrorist group.”
AL: There was a vote in the Ethiopian parliament which designated the TPLF as a terrorist group following its attack on the Northern Command post on the 3rd and 4th of November 2020. To give a platform to Berhane Gebre-Christos, a leader and spokesperson of that group—for a civil society organization to do that—is not good practice. No one should provide platforms for groups that commit high crimes.
Berhane Gebre-Christos said he wanted to create a “transitional government,” meaning to topple the legitimately elected government of Ethiopia, and the Western diplomats and former diplomats there agreed with him.
It’s totally inappropriate for any current or previously serving diplomat to get mixed up with a group plotting a coup.
My other concern is that the website of this NGO in question claimed that the organization had been receiving funds from the USAID and the NED. And then, very quickly, after the video was released, we saw many so-called board members and founding members speaking out, claiming that they had in fact not been playing the role suggested by the video and the organization’s website.
AG: What organization?
AF: The civil society group that was hosting the meeting. It’s called Peace and Development Center Ethiopia, and its website is pdcethiopia.org . They hosted the meeting that the leaked video had covered.
AG: Is there anything you’d like to say about the role of the USAID and NED?
AF: I don’t know the extent of their projects that USAID and NED are funding.It just stated on the website that the organization did receive funds from both USAID and NED.
AG: The US government’s aggressive policy is so short sighted that it’s obviously pushing Ethiopia into collaboration with China, which is exactly what they’re trying to stop. It’s incredibly stupid. One might imagine that USAID Administer Samantha Power and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken are agents of the Chinese government.
AF: I agree that it’s very unwise and short-sighted. And it is the opposite of the U.S.’s stated and perceived goals.
AG: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
AF: I hope to see peace take root in Ethiopia and across the wider Horn of Africa region very soon. I hope we’ll be having interviews of a very different sort in the near future.
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Ann Fitz-Gerald is a professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and the Director of the Balsillie School of International Relations . She has many years of experience working as a research professor across most of Ethiopia’s regional states and the wider Horn of Africa region. She has also supported internationally sponsored peace talks in the region and has worked as a Course Director for a masters program delivered in Addis Ababa.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Russian Deputy-Ambassador Dmitri Polyanskiy moderated this scintillating Arria Formula Meeting. The opening briefer was Dr. Fernand de Varennes, UN Special Rapporteur on Minorities Issues.
In a powerful exposure of egregious discrimination against ethnic minorities, residents of Latvia and Estonia and other Baltic states and Ukraine, denied their rights to citizenship, their rights to speak their native languages, denied their right to government representation, presented an alarming description of the fascistic trends throughout the Baltics, and Ukraine.
In a passionate and powerful presentation, Alexander Gaponenko, Civil activist of Latvia described the relegation to second, or third class citizenship of Russian speakers in Latvia, and the brilliant Valery Engel, Director of Latvia’s European Center for Democracy described the Kafkaesque reception he received in Estonia where he had been invited to present a speech on anti-Semitism in Latvia.
Dr. Engel was denied entry into Estonia on the basis of articles he had written exposing anti-Semitism in Latvia, despite the fact that he was a principal speaker invited to the conference denouncing anti-Semitism to be held in Estonia. To his great credit, Dr. Engel recognized the irony in this preposterous denial of entry.
In Latvia, the Russian language was prohibited in public and private schools, and Russian speaking children who were unable to speak with the fluency of their Latvian-speaking classmates, were often categorized as “retarded,” and refused promotion to grades of higher learning. And thus they were forced into categories of expertise beneath their favored Latvian classmates. A spiral of downward mobility was thus engineered, depriving Russian-speaking children of opportunities imperative for development throughout their life.
In an overwhelming and heartbreaking description of the surge of Nazism in Ukraine, Ms. Elena Berezhnaya, of the Ukranian Anti-Fascist-League described the scourge of neo-nazi groups in Ukraine, which were tacitly, and often actively supported by the Ukranian government “authorities,” undoubtedly on whose behalf they were rampaging throughout Ukraine.
Ms. Berezhnaya described the current deification of Ukraine’s most famous nazi-collaborator, Stefan Bandera, and she mentioned that in 2016 a law was passed in Ukraine making it illegal to criticize nazi collaborators.
When Russia’s moderator, Deputy Ambassador Dmitri Polyanskiy opened the meeting for comments by other Security Council members, the U.S. Representative made a statement bordering on the absurd, and revealing zero knowledge of history.
After stating that the United States was totally anti-nazi, and opposed all forms of Nazism, (despite the fact that the United States, with Ukraine was the only UN member state opposing the human rights resolution “Prohibiting the glorification of Nazism,”) the US representative totally ignored the fact that it was the U.S. government, led by Victoria “f**k the EU” Nuland that led the destabilization and violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Yanukovich, and Nuland then selected and packed the post-coup Ukranian government with pro-nazis, who have metastasized into the nazi horror from which the Donbass is desperately trying to escape, as the entire region is sliding (or being engineered) into confrontation with Russia.
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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York.
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Vaccine injury is everywhere. The federal government collects reports of vaccine injury through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). The system is intentionally clunky and difficult to navigate.
So some warrior mamas created OpenVAERS that takes all of the federal reports and makes them easily searchable. Pharma and the bougie mainstream are terrified of OpenVAERS because by making the reports easily searchable it wakes lots of people up to the catastrophic harms from vaccines.
OpenVAERS started before COVID. But with the introduction of COVID vaccines, OpenVAERS has become even more important. OpenVAERS tracks COVID vaccine injuries every week through what has become known as the Red Box Summaries. The Red Box Summaries are so powerful that Facebook and Instagram have programmed their artificial intelligence to censor screenshots from OpenVAERS in order to protect the Pharma cartel.
Over time, OpenVAERS has added additional charts and graphs to help people understand the data and its context. For example these two charts are better than anything produced by the federal government during this whole debacle.
This week the warrior mamas at OpenVAERS outdid themselves. They produced a new chart (below) that graphs the number “Fully” vaccinated (divided by 1,000), the number of covid vaccine injuries reported to VAERS, and the population (divided by 1,000) for all 50 states.
As you can see, the number of covid vaccine injury reports in each state corresponds to the number of people fully vaccinated in that state. While this is obvious to everyone who has been paying attention, this will be a revelation to people who tried to bury their head in the sand in hopes that this problem would go away on its own.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that a majority of VAERS reports are sent in by vaccine manufacturers (37%) and health care providers (36%). The remaining reports are obtained from state immunization programs (10%). Only 7% of VAERS reports are submitted by the vaccine injured and their families (with 10% of reports from other sources).
Nearly every independent scholar who has studied VAERS agrees that it is a significant undercount of actual vaccine harms.
Former FDA Director David Kessler in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that “only about 1% of serious events are reported to the FDA.” A report for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Inc. confirmed that VAERS undercounts actual vaccine injuries by a factor of 100.
More recently several scholars have attempted to refine these initial estimates.
Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford estimate that VAERS undercounts fatal vaccine reactions by a factor of 41.
Dr. Jessica Rose, a statistician in Israel, recently calculated an under-reporting factor of 31 for all severe adverse events following vaccination.
We are in the midst of the most catastrophic vaccine campaign in U.S. history.
Sign up at OpenVAERS to have their weekly reports delivered to your email inbox for free.
Mess with a mama bear you’re gonna get mauled.
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The White House was viciously mocked over the weekend after pushing the message that unvaccinated Americans would experience a winter of “severe illness and death” due to the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
President Biden, as well as White House COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients, each pushed the messaging last week, with the former issuing the stark and gloomy warning to Americans following a Thursday White House briefing on the pandemic.
“I want to send a direct message to the American people: Due to the steps we’ve taken, omicron has not yet spread as fast as it would have otherwise done,” Biden said.
“But it’s here now, and it’s spreading, and it’s going to increase … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” he added. “But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated, and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.” (emphasis added)
Conservatives on social media wasted no time blasting the morbid statement which some believed almost seemed to almost take pleasure in the thought of the suffering of the unvaccinated.
Read this Christmas Message from Resident Biden. The second paragraph can fuel panic and chaos. More than they already have. This administration is fkd up beyond all repair! pic.twitter.com/y8Ahkp7m9j
President Biden’s warning of a “winter of severe illness and death” makes President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech urging Americans to lower expectations seem a cheerful upper by contrast. How do Democrats run as the party of “severe illness and death”? This is madness.
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Featured image: Joe Biden on Election Night in Pittsburg, Nov. 3, 2020. (Adam Schultz, Flickr, Biden for President)
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In a message that could have come straight out of Nazi Germany, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has said that anyone who remains unvaccinated should be completely cut off from hospitals, planes, public transport, and the ability to get food at supermarkets. He added that governments should place increasing restrictions on the unvaccinated – including making vaccination mandatory for air travel.
“I have no difficulty saying to people, you can fly, but you have to be vaccinated.
We fully respect your right to be not vaccinated if you are one of the lunatic fringes who believe this is some government, big pharma conspiracy.
But if you are not vaccinated, you can’t go to the supermarket, you can’t go to the pharmacy. You shouldn’t be allowed into hospital if you’re not vaccinated”
Leaning into his enthusiasm for coercion, O’Leary added that not allowing unvaccinated people to participate in certain activities would incentivize them to get the vaccine.
“If you tell someone under 30 years of age that they cannot get into a pub they’d get vaccinated pretty damn quickly.
But governments should place increasing restrictions (on the unvaccinated) while recognizing the rights of everybody. If you want to be unvaccinated, that’s fine, but we should increasingly not allow those to go to work, to travel on the Underground, to fly etc.”
However, O’Leary did say that he ‘fully recognizes’ the choices of those who believe in conspiracy theories between government and big pharma not to get the jab, he does not think they should enjoy the same freedoms as those who have received the vaccination. In other words, he respects your choice, as long as you make the one he agrees with.
These kinds of comments are par the course for O’Leary, who is described on Wikipedia as arrogant and prone to making comments which he later contradicts. He has been extravagantly outspoken in his public statements, sometimes resorting to personal attacks and foul language.
We await to see whether he regrets his decision to back proposals that would hurt the airline he is running.
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Last November, an expert group headed by Sergei A. Karaganov, the Honorary Chairman of the Presidium, Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, presented its final 150 paged assessment policy report with some recommendations intended to improve and scale up the existing Russia’s influence in Africa. The report, put together by 25 academic researchers and experts, further indicated concrete pitfalls and setbacks in the policy implementation in Africa.
This latest policy report unreservedly criticized Russia’s policy towards Africa. It claimed that there have been inconsistencies in the policy implementation. It said that the policy strategy regarding Africa has to spell out and incorporate the development needs of African countries.
While the number of top-most and high-level meetings have increased, the share of substantive issues on the agenda often remains intangible and negligibly small. There are little definitive results from such meetings, which were to demonstrate, a large extent, the “demand for Russia” by Africa and its leaders. In addition, disorganized Russian-African lobbying combined with lack of “information hygiene” at all levels of public speaking were listed among the main flaws of Russia’s current Africa policy.
“In many cases and situations, ideas and intentions are often passed for results, and unapproved projects are announced as going ahead. Russia’s possibilities are overestimated both publicly and in closed negotiations. Worse is many projects announced at the top and high political levels have not been implemented,” according to the report presented in November.
Long before the historic Russia-Africa summit, at least during the past decade, several bilateral agreements between Russia and individual African countries were signed. Besides, memoranda of understanding, declaration of interests, pledges and promises dominated official speeches. On the other side, Russia is simply invisible in economic sectors in Africa, despite boasting of decades-old solid relations with the continent.
It has however attempting to transform the much boasted political relations into a more comprehensive and broad economic cooperation. Its economic footprints are not growing as expected. Interestingly, Russian authorities always acknowledge the enormous potentials and advantages Russia has, and at the same are puzzled by the comparatively high level of economic influence by other foreign players in Africa.
Russia has intensified efforts to strengthen political dialogue, including the exchange of visits at the top levels. Interaction between foreign ministries is expanding. During the year prior to the first Russia-African summit, 21 African foreign ministers visited Russia. According to the calculation with information made available officially at the website, Sergey Lavrov and his deputy Minister, Mikhail Bogdanov, have held talks with nearly 100 African politicians including ministers, deputies between January and September 2019. Bogdanov interacted with all African ambassadors in the Russian Federation. Russian ambassadors and staff are also at their posts inside Africa.
Russians like historical references. As always expected, they have nostalgic interest towards Africa, relying on the traditions of friendship and cooperation established back to the days of the political liberation struggle for freedom and independence and eager to use that as unifying factor. Soviet Union, in many respects, supported most of the countries during the decolonization of Africa.
The question being asked three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union: What has noticeably changed between Russia and Africa? In answering this basic question, Lavrov acknowledged talking to students and staff at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO): “Africa is one of our priorities. Our political ties in particular are developing dynamically. But economic cooperation is not as far advanced as our political ties.”
According to Lavrov, the process of Russia returning to Africa is taking the form of intensifying political dialogue, which has always been at a strategic and friendly level, and now moving towards a vigorous economic cooperation. It is necessary to consolidate these trends and draw up plans for expanding consolidated partnerships with the African countries.
That however, just as the coronavirus pandemic subsided leading to the opening of air space and borders, a lined-up of African foreign ministers including Algeria, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Togo came, as always, for political consultations and dialogue.
The significance of diplomatic meetings and most possibly those to follow preceding the next Russia-Africa summit slated for 2022, Lavrov has always indicated in his introductory speeches –these visits are to review the status of the bilateral relations and prospects for their further development.
Russian and African experts have expressed their concern about official visits proliferating both ways, with little impact on the sustainable development currently needed by the majority of African countries. While some see official visits simply as diplomatic tourism, a number of the African leaders keep in mind how bilateral policies would help tackle key questions such as rising unemployment, healthcare problems, poor infrastructure and industrial development – how to turn Russia’s focus towards realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Russia has shown interests in niche sectors such as nuclear power development, launching African satellites, and energy and mining projects. It has been seeking to exploit conventional gas and oil fields in Africa; part of its long-term energy strategy is to use Russian companies to create new streams of energy supply.
In terms of a strategic outlook and action on economic engagement, it is seriously lagging behind. Russia has long ago cut the “red-ribbon” marking the completion of an infrastructure project in Africa. With regard to other economic areas, it may have to identify wide range of sectors as with members of the European Union, China, the United States, India, the Gulf States and others.
Nevertheless, within the framework of the African Continental Free Trade (AfCFTA) that promises creating a single borderless market, it offers opportunities for localization, production and marketing of consumables throughout Africa. This should perhaps, be the strongest dimension of Russia’s dealings in Africa.
Currently, Russian trade is heavily concentrated in North Africa, especially with Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. Noticeably, in 2019 bilateral trade information from Russian Export Centre shows (trade statistics) that Russia’s relationship with North Africa is the most significant, US$17 billion of the aggregate total US$20 billion for the whole of Africa. President Vladimir Putin has asked that this trade figure be doubled, up to US$40 billion before the next summit planned for 2022.
In an interview with Steven Gruzd, Head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), he similarly noted that Africa is a busy geopolitical arena, with many players, both old and new, operating. Apart from EU countries, China and the US. There are players such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, the UAE, Japan and others. Russia has to compete against them, and distinctively remain focused its efforts. On the other side, Russia uses the rhetoric of anti-colonialism in its engagement with Africa, and that it is fighting neo-colonialism from the West, especially in relations with their former colonies. It sees France as a threat to its interests especially in Francophone West Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahel.
“I would largely agree that there is a divide between what has been pledged and promised at high-level meetings and summits, compared to what has actually materialized on the ground. There is more talk than action, and in most cases intentions and ideas have been officially presented as initiatives already in progress. There needs to be a lot of tangible progress on the ground for the second summit to show impact. It will be interesting to see what has been concretely achieved in reports at the second Russia-Africa summit scheduled for late 2022,” he said.
Steven Gruzd also heads the Russia-Africa Research Programme initiated this year at SAIIA, South Africa’s premier research institute on international issues. It is an independent, non-government think tank, with a long and proud history of providing thought leadership in Africa.
In another interview, George Nyongesa, a Senior Associate at the Africa Policy Institute in Nairobi (Kenya) reminded that Africa is heading for its defining moments. By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population especially its young people and thus the largest labor force will be in Africa.
Human capital is definitely an important feature of Africa’s global profile besides its natural resources. Thus, it is no wonder that global players like the United States, Europeans and Asians are competing for influence, simultaneously investing and focusing on the youth, on the African continent. The competition for the control of the continent by global players is a geopolitical reality and by nature multidimensional: economic, education and training, and social; and brings to memory the rivalry of the Cold War era when the United States often treated African states as pawns or prizes rather than partners, according to Nyongesa.
However, 21st century Africa is different in the sense that African leaders seem aware of their windfall potential in human capital and resources and are no longer interested in patrons or protector and this new attitude has opened wide a range of partners necessary for the achievement of security and prosperity they seek.
In the interview, he further underlined that “the continent is enjoying enviable attention as key global players from the United States, Europe and Asia continue to outfox each other. This can be seen from the fact that US retreat from its fight against violent extremism in Africa, allows Russia to fill in security gaps; hence the growing Russian military influence on the continent. At the same time, the United States expansion of trade and business in the continent is proving a constructive counter Chinese ever-increasing economic influence.”
There are still some challenges and persistent problems with perceptions. With economic engagement, Russia often interprets the influence of foreign players as neo-colonizers. In order to make successful economic inroads into Africa, Russia is signing agreements exchanging military weapons for mining concessions. It finds it expedient to militarize and deal with its competitor, as exemplified in Central African Republic, Guinea and Mali and in the Sahel-5 region.
Lipton Matthews, an American researcher and business analyst in recent discussions with this research writer about foreign players and the “scramble” for resources, he explained that the weak governance structures in Africa, the perception that China is colonizing Africa is a consequence of Africa’s history of defective governance. Though China through its infrastructural projects is presiding over the modernization of Africa, similar to what Europeans and Americans did in the developing world years ago.
On the other hand, he argued: “We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that colonialism is inherently exploitative. Most people would prefer sovereignty to colonial rule, but the truth is that colonial status does not impede economic growth and some colonies in Africa experienced faster growth during the colonial era. We should give greater priority to good governance than national sovereignty. It is better to be under the rule of benevolent colonizers than to be the subject of a dictator.”
In order to aid Africa, Russia should assist Africa in transitioning to a knowledge-based economy by promoting technology transfer agreements. Russians must also invest in more R&D collaborations with their African partners. This agreement will revolutionize Africa’s economy and a richer Africa is a positive for Russian investors. If Africa is properly managed, the continent should succeed with sustainable development and, to a considerable extent, attain an appreciable economic independence.
In October 2018, before the start of the first Russia-SADC business forum, Stergomena Lawrence Tax, then Executive Secretary of SADC, explained an exclusive interview that Russia has a long history of bilateral engagements with the Southern African countries, which constitute the Southern African Development Community.
On the other hand, for the past several years, it has not been that visible in the region as compared to China, India or Brazil. It is encouraging that, of late, Russia has positioned itself to be a major partner with Southern Africa and being part of the BRICS promotes engagement with the region. It has to move with concrete steps into such areas like agriculture, industrial production, high technology and transport.
In the interview, Stergomena shortlisted some of the southern Africa priorities that are also in line with SADC as indicated below:
Prospecting, mining, oil, construction and mining, purchasing gas, oil, uranium, and bauxite assets (Angola, Namibia and South Africa);
Construction of power facilities—hydroelectric power plants on the River Congo (Angola, Namibia and Zambia,) and nuclear power plants (South Africa);
Creating a floating nuclear power plant, and South African participation in the international project to build a nuclear enrichment centre in Russia;
Railway Construction (Angola);
Creation of Russian trade houses for the promotion and maintenance of Russian engineering products (South Africa).
Participation of Russian companies in the privatization of industrial assets, including those created with technical assistance from the former Soviet Union (Angola).
Stergomena further discussed questions relating to public diplomacy. Russia has all but overlooked or underestimated many aspects of it. These include cultural exchanges, scholarly visitors’ programmes, and of course, the use of media to cover and project issues on Africa from a Russian perspective.
These are instruments and aspects of public diplomacy, which would have the effect of reaching audiences on our continent and beyond and impacting positively on what Russia has to offer the world. In the same vein, this can be seen as a form of “soft power” as its aim is to appeal and attract partners rather than coerce them into a relationship of one form or the other, she in an emailed interview in October 2018.
There are the Intergovernmental Commissions on Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation and Trade fixed with African countries. There is the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Trade, the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Trade. The Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States established back in 2009.
According to historical documents, the Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States was created at the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation and Vnesheconombank with the support of the Federation Council and the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. It has the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
Within the framework of the joint declaration adopted at the first Russia-Africa Summit, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation established the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum also moved to create an Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS). Alexander Saltanov, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, is the Chairman of AECAS and feverishly stepping forward to advance significant issues of business cooperation between Russia and Africa.
The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum has a useful structure, and its primary task is to find real opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation and joint implementation of projects between Russian and African entrepreneurs. There are coordination, public and scientific councils operating under its roof. The Secretariat seems to coordinate and support some kind of public outreach initiatives from the civil society.
As most contemporary researchers do, they have offered additional strategic proposals and authorities have to bite on them to make the long-expected progress. It is a well-known and irreversible fact that Russia’s economic presence in Africa is significantly inferior in comparison to the top-ten key global players. It is time to overcome this yawning gap, use the existing structures to expeditiously operationalize the set goals and accelerate the economic return the continent.
Indeed, judging from the above discussions about the changing geopolitical relations, there are well-functioning structures and mechanisms to reap the benefits of a fully-fledged economic partnership and to achieve a more practical and comprehensive results expected from the new multifaceted relations between Russia and Africa.
By all purposes, the relationship requires a new approach, broad levels of interaction including the civil society to forge a new positive image and change public perceptions, and work consistently with the private sector for diversified corporate partnerships. Strategically speaking, Russia needs to adopt an agenda – rather than running on ad hoc basis– and it further needs an effective Action Plan, both the agenda and plan have to conform to African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN Development Goals 2030.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent 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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When Pavel Zavalny, the chairman of Russian parliamentary committee on energy, made the forecast last Friday that Nord Stream 2 pipeline could start shipping natural gas to Germany as early as next month, it was received with disbelief. But Zavalny was categorical, and was quoted by Reuters as saying, “I can say with a high degree of certainty that the first gas via Nord Stream 2 will go in January.”
He added that Europeans would not want to drag their feet with the certification process over Nord Stream 2 at a time when their storage levels of gas is so abysmally low.
But Zavalny was effectively contradicting the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who had stated only four days back previously that the certification process stood suspended “due to the existence of clear regulation in European law regarding the energy area on unbundling and other issues of the [company’s] structure.”
Expert opinion since then has been that the earliest the gas would flow through the new pipeline can be only by the second half of 2022, if at all.
Meanwhile, the lawmakers in the US Congress have been demanding that Washington should simply kill the pipeline project. Baerbock has the reputation of being a proxy of the Americans and the general impression is that after the exit of Angela Merkel as chancellor, 40-year old Baerbock is determined to steer Germany toward a “tough” line on Russia.
Conceivably, the Kremlin wasn’t amused. The undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been built at a cost of $11 billion. But the Kremlin kept its thought to itself. We now know why.
The data from German network Cascade shows that all Russian natural gas shipments to Germany through a major transit pipeline known as the Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline reversed direction today.
The Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline runs from northwest Siberia to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in eastern Germany via Belarus and Poland. Last year, around one-fifth of all natural gas sent to Western Europe went via Belarus.
The flows through the Yamal-Europe pipeline dropped to 6% of its capacity on Saturday, 5% on Sunday, and fell to zero by today morning.
Plainly put, Russia has halted its gas exports to Germany and it also transpires that Gazprom, the system’s operator in Russia and Belarus, has booked no capacity for transiting natural gas to Germany for the near future, either.
Moscow’s explanation is that Gazprom prioritises domestic consumption within Russia over export of gas to foreign countries and temperatures have plummeted in Moscow and other large Russian cities this week. It is a plausible explanation.
However, this is happening at an inflection point when due to the winter cold and the restricted supply, European energy prices have soared. The prices in Europe spiked 7% on Monday and are surging. (here, here and here)
Pressure is building on Germany as its emergency reserves have dropped to a “historically low level” of below 60% last week for the first time in years.
Moscow is offering that if only licence is granted to operate Nord Stream 2, Gazprom will promptly begin additional supplies to meet Germany’s needs. In anticipation of the German regulator’s approval, Gazprom even filled the first of the two parallel pipes with so-called technical gas in October and the second started to fill up in December.
But Germany claims it is a stickler for rules and regulations and the Nord Stream 2, which is registered in Switzerland, must first restructure its operations to comply with the requirements of the German energy watchdog BNetzA and abide as well by relevant EU law and only then can the intricate approval process, which started in September and was suspended in mid-November, resume.
The BNetzA head Jochen Homann predicted on Dec. 16 that a decision on Nord Steam 2 “won’t be made in the first half of 2022.”
The bottomline is that while all protagonists pretend that this is a commercial issue, the US has transformed it as a geopolitical issue. Simply put, the US abhors the very idea of Russia consolidating its presence further in the European energy market and wants to kill Nord Steam 2 in its cradle.
Second, Washington worries (rightly so) that such heavy German dependence on Russian energy will inevitably soften up Berlin’s attitudes toward Moscow in general, which will be detrimental to the interests of the transatlantic alliance.
Third, Washington wants Ukraine to continue to be the beneficiary of the transit fee of over 1 billion dollar annually which Gazprom was paying to Kiev for use of the Soviet-era pipelines passing through that country to western Europe. That is to say, whileworks systematically to turn Ukraine as an anti-Russian state, it expects Moscow to keep subsidising Ukrainian economy which is a basket case.
Finally, the US hopes to make inroads into the lucrative European market for its own shale gas exports. In a long term perspective, the US wants Europe to be dependent on its energy exports, just as NATO is its captive market for arms exports.
The new German government has walked into the American trap. By acting tough on Russia, Berlin forfeits Russia’s goodwill. The recent expulsion of two Russian diplomats posted to Berlin on dubious grounds most likely put Russia’s back up further. The German ministers have lately been speaking harshly about Russia in the context of Moscow’s tensions with NATO and the US.
Germany has played a double role on Ukraine running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. On the one hand, it played the role of a peacemaker along with Russia in the Normandy Four format (France, Germany, Ukraine, Russia) while at the same time secretly encouraging Kiev to be recalcitrant in the Donbas situation.
Moscow recently exposed Germany’s perfidious role by releasing its diplomatic correspondence with Berlin.
As the winter sets in and Germany’s energy requirements increase, it a shortage of gas can be expected in the coming weeks. The European continent may face rolling blackouts if the winter is cold. The price of gas will go through the roof, which will hit the consumers and German industry.
Moscow only can come to Germany’s and Europe’s rescue in these dire circumstances by exporting more gas via existing pipelines. But Gazprom linking it to clearance for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which it has constructed at heavy cost.
The catch is, the new German chancellor Olaf Scholz went one significant step further than Merkel and has agreed, pushed by Washington, to “consider” stopping Nord Stream 2 if Russia invades Ukraine (according to the FT).
German politicians ultimately pay heed to the captains of industry. Forty-year old Baerbock from the Green Party happens to be a greenhorn. Scholz, a conservative social democrat, has a lot of experience with political top jobs, albeit lacking in charisma and often underestimated.
In foreign policy, the buck stops at the Federal Chancellery — and Scholz stands for continuity in foreign policy so that he can focus on the German economy in pandemic times.Zavalny may have a point.
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Moscow has recently taken the first step towards the rapprochement with Washington. Russia outlined an eight-point draft treaty of security guarantees aimed to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine. The demands include ending Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership, limiting the deployment of troops and weapons close to Russia’s borders, and a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion.
Russian officials stressed that Moscow wants to begin negotiations “without delays and without stalling”, emphasizing that this is not some kind of ultimatum, but seriousness of their warning should not be underestimated. It was highlighted that ignoring Moscow’s request for discussions could lead to a “military response” similar to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia will not be satisfied if Western partners want to “chat up” negotiations on security guarantees.
In her turn, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that there’s no reason the U.S. can’t do that, but it is going to do that in partnership and coordination with its European partners. Washington reportedly disagrees with parts of Moscow’s proposal, but is willing to discuss its content.
Unfortunately, there have been no official calls from Washington to launch the negotiation process yet. All the claims remain within diplomatic rhetoric. In fact, neither the United States nor NATO are changing their aggressive policy towards Russia.
On December 21, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called on NATO to increase its military capabilities in Eastern Europe as well as cooperation between the member countries to confront the threat from the East.
According to recent statements by some of its top officers, the Western military alliance plans to deploy troops in Romania and Bulgaria as a way to strengthen the current “security scheme” for Ukraine.
The offensive claims are accompanied by military aggression in Eastern Ukraine.
On December 21, the civilian settlement of Alexandrovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic was shelled with 20 rounds from the 120 mm mortars of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).
Russian Defense Minister General of the Army Sergei Shoigu confirmed that the number of the UAF attacks on civilians in Donbass and the positions of the DPR, LPR People’s militias is not decreasing, provoking local fighters to retaliate.
Sergei Shoigu revealed that more than 120 US PMCs were identified in the settlements of Avdiivka and Priazovskoye in the Donetsk region. They equip firing positions in residential buildings and social facilities; preparing for UAF operations as well as radical armed groups to increase hostilities.
Along with support preparing the attacks, the U.S. PMCs are preparing a chemical attack in Donbass. Russian Defence Minister claimed that tanks with unidentified chemical components were delivered to the settlement of Avdiivka and the village of Krasny Liman to commit provocations.
In practice, as winter has come, the situation in Eastern Ukraine revealed its dependence on fluctuations in natural gas prices. When the price increases, the situation worsens.
On December 21, the price of gas in Europe in the course of exchange trading broke another historical record and came up to $ 2,228 per thousand cubic meters. According to various experts, a rise to $2,500 and even up to $3,000 should be expected if there are no signals about the imminent launch of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Only a sharp increase in supply may change the situation in Europe.This is possible only with the conclusion of additional contracts with Russia for gas imports and the launch of Nord Stream 2.
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