Global Research

The UK government has set out plans to amend drug regulations in case it decides that covid-19 vaccines should be used before they are licensed, in a bid to roll them out more quickly.1

In a consultation on the proposals that ran from 28 August to 18 September the Department of Health and Social Care for England explained that if a suitable vaccine emerged with strong evidence of safety, quality, and efficacy the government would seek to license it through the usual route but could supply it in the meantime.

“Unlicensed” not “untested”

Seventy-five years after their destructive power was first unleashed, nuclear weapons are about to be officially and explicitly prohibited by international law. For the average person, it may come as a surprise to know that nuclear weapons, dreadful as they are, weren’t already outlawed. But for the vast majority of nuclear weapons experts, the ban will arrive far sooner than expected.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, informally called the ban treaty, was adopted with the approval of 122 countries at the United Nations in July 2017. It forbids anything and everything related to nuclear weapons, including their development and possession. It also obligates countries that join it to provide support to the victims of nuclear weapons testing and use, and to undertake environmental cleanup.

But to enter into legal force, the treaty needed more than just a vote at the United Nations; it needed ratification by at least 50 countries. It achieved that mark on October 24, after Jamaica, Nauru, and Honduras deposited the 48th, 49th, and 50th ratifications in rapid succession over the course of several days. Accordingly, the treaty will become official international law 90 days hence, on January 22, 2021.

There’s an obvious snag though: The treaty is not binding on countries that have not yet ratified it, and all of the countries that possess nuclear weapons stand in unanimous opposition and have boycotted the entire process of negotiating the treaty from the start. In fact, just days before Jamaica, Nauru, and Honduras acceded to the treaty, the United States took the unusual step of urging other countries to withdraw from it.

In some ways, the ban treaty has already made its mark as more and more countries commit to never building nuclear weapons. In 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, won the Nobel Peace Prize for its key role in bringing the treaty into existence.

So what happens now? Even supporters of the treaty have modest expectations about the effects of its entry into force. In a forthcoming interview that will be published in a special 75th anniversary issue of the Bulletin, Beatrice Fihn, ICAN’s executive director, said, “Obviously it won’t have a direct, immediate sort of change on the situation in the world, but it’s a starting point for moving toward nuclear disarmament.… Implementing the treaty, in many ways, it’s just building normative pressure, building financial pressure through divestments.”

Though change may not be swift, Fihn is optimistic about the long-term outlook, noting that the world’s power dynamics are shifting. “In the top 10 [countries with] the biggest populations in the world, you have five nuclear armed states and five countries that have been leaders in the TPNW.” She said a country like Nigeria, which has ratified the treaty, could become a regional or global power in the coming decades, whereas nuclear-armed countries like France, the United Kingdom, and even the United States are rapidly losing global influence.

With these dynamics in mind, how might the treaty be implemented, stonewalled, or ignored over the coming years? The Bulletin reached out to top experts on nuclear politics to help answer those questions. Their responses, edited for clarity, are linked here.

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John Krzyzaniak is the DC-based associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Featured image is by Jenny Villermin.

“In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. When there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 megahit Brave New World (1) or George Orwell’s 1949 blockbuster 1984 (2)? Two daring novels in the first half of the 20th century that either fascinated or shocked their intrigued readers. It was the apex of an era–the reign of positivism–in the industrial civilization when modern science and technology were uniquely acclaimed as the final point of humanity’s cultural evolution. It was an exclusive period in human history when the strongest voice of modernistic erudition aimed to displace once and for all traditional as well as mystical religions was unilaterally pushed and dictated by the unopposed mechanistic and physicalistic science which later saw its most persistent and seemingly airtight exposition in B. F. Skinner’s highly controversial volume, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (3), published in 1971. It was that particular point in historic time known in social science as the “age of disenchantment” (Entzauberung in German)–a term appropriated from the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller by the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber in his The Sociology of Religion (4)–when modern western society had been drawn into the bandwagon of positivistic science whose chief objective was to devalue the traditional merits of the so-called religious, mystical and spiritual experiences.

In both paradigm-shaping novels, the central issue is the human person: Is s/he an autonomous being, that is a “being-for-itself” (with apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre) endowed with free-will and the inherent power to organize and hence determine her/his future? Or, is s/he solely a physicomechanical “object” whose ideas, thoughts, feelings, and decisions are just by-products of her/his physicochemical constitution, genetic configuration, and environmental conditioning? From where does s/he draw the meaningfulness of her/his life? Or perhaps the more fundamental question is: Is her/his life meaningful at all? Is humanity’s future predetermined by material limitations in a closed system of reality or it depends on one’s choices and decisions in a reality that is open to the unhindered operation of her/his free will? Or, given that there is human free will, could the problem lie in the condition that the majority of human beings conduct their lives like sheep in a flock whose course is stirred, regulated and determined by the strong, the tough and the powerful minority among them? Are manipulation and control an inherent dynamic to make society orderly and organized, well-coordinated, well-managed and properly governed?

In 1984, free will is a given nevertheless a dangerous component of the human personality. Thus, it has to be curbed, controlled, muffled and finally subdued to give way to the uncontested importance of social values and personal virtues to strengthen and fully empower the State machinery. The State in this sense is deemed to be the paramount source of the citizens’ welfare and development measured in terms of social stability achievable only by way of economic productivity, institutional order, and national peace. 1984 is an exposition of how society under the iron hand of totalitarian rule operates. Totalitarian governance is the new power that forces traditional religion with its god(s) out of the sphere of society’s political system without throwing away the dynamic of fear which is always a pre-eminent factor in most religions.

In 1984, a new “god” far more powerful than the nebulous “god(s)-in-heaven” of traditional religions is inaugurated and is now known as “Big Brother”. He is identified as the lead “conductor” in a symphony of fear that characterizes the new social order. His unbendable and unbreakable laws are administered by his loyal minions well-placed in various sectors and levels of the government bureaucracy. They are better described as severe taskmasters whose major importance in the hierarchy is in the area of reward and punishment, though punishment seems to be their chief expertise. Common in a society conditioned by totalitarian rule is the ascendant factor of fear. In every area of life, citizens should get used to the stringent rules and regulations exacted by their leaders who represent in person the sovereign ideals of Big Brother. Citizens are in a state of continual apprehension and terror all the time as their movements and activities both in public and in private are constantly being monitored by ever-present cameras [very similar to the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras we usually find in public places and even on the streets as surveillance devices to capture and record untoward activities which in many cases could be criminal in nature].

Though not exactly in a totalitarian political milieu, this situation is now a reality in the present dispensation known as the “Age of Information”. The condition may not be as harsh as the tyrannical ambience in Orwell’s fiction but in our time, the constant flow of information via online monitoring even on the most guarded secrets of an individual person’s daily conduct of life may be accessed through the most sophisticated instruments and devices electronically connected/linked to computers and hand-held equipment we use and without which life doesn’t seem liveable to many of us on a daily basis.  In other words, we denizens of the post-modern world are generally in one way or another being subjected to constant surveillance by the powers that be both in global and domestic landscapes. There may not be commensurate punishment yet at this point in time for every misdeed and misconduct people do but the fast-evolving information technology we have had in the post-modern reality could sooner or later be utilized by despotic and authoritarian regimes as a concrete tool to effect oppressive and onerous measures against their own citizens. If actual oppression is conceived as a real possibility in 1984 by sowing widespread terror even with all the technological limitations in the plot’s context, could such possibility be more highly conceivable in the present post-modern era with all the sophisticated technological devices the age of cyberspace has at its beck and call?

Huxley’s Brave New World is a different scenario in human manipulation and social control, or “social engineering,” if you will. Unlike 1984, it presupposes the delusionary character of human free will. There is no free will at all and every human being is, in reality, an absolute captive of her/his physicochemical constitution, genetic configuration, and environmental conditioning. Hence, in the creation of a “brave new world” of functional and productive inhabitants predetermined in their talents and expertise, competence and readiness, certain indispensable factors must be realized such as the utilization of a reproductive technology where the birth of a human baby is artificially simulated in a laboratory; the application of psychological manipulation and mental conditioning; and the operationalization of psycho-social reinforcement. All of these are conditions in the successful formation of physically healthy individuals whose optimum contributions in the maintenance of a strong, well-balanced and well-structured society are absolutely necessary.

A “brave new world” is an effective and efficient social order where there is no confusion in its inhabitants’ respective social roles and responsibilities. A “brave new world” is a highly stratified society where the division of labor has to be effected at every level of the stratification. This social stratification is characterized by a caste system wherein the topmost level is occupied by the so-called Alphas who are not mass-produced and hence have the highest degree of individuality in terms of above average intelligence, exuberant personality and exquisite physical qualities. The  Betas are likewise not mass-produced and have a high degree of individuality though some notches lower than the Alphas. The lower caste levels like the Gammas the Deltas and the Epsilons are mass-produced and have lower-level intelligence. They are also much shorter in stature and less good-looking in physical appearance. The different levels in the caste system are the results of laboratory manipulation wherein the developing human organisms at their earliest stage of maturation are subjected to different chemical exposures. Alphas and Betas are very well taken care of. They are constantly provided with an optimum supply of oxygen and excellent nutrition. Such physiological reinforcements are however intentionally expropriated from Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons so as to preclude high-level intelligence in them by stunting brain development. These mental function restrictions are a necessary condition for them not to get further educated and thus always remain happy and satisfied while efficiently serving the State through the specific menial tasks assigned to them.

In Brave New World and 1984 are two different models of a single intent: personality manipulation via  human engineering–both psychological and physiological–to effect the formation of a social order where inhabitants are no longer aiming for higher life status as their present condition is all satisfying by the standards of material security measured in terms of economic stability. In 1984, the general rule of the game is simply toeing the line of Big Brother and everything will be alright. The system–whose main feature is the omnipresent surveillance mechanism–is unconditionally airtight so that even a mere casual thought of staging a rebellion is non-feasible. In this social milieu, the omnipotent control factor is the overarching span of prevalent fear instilled in the cultural apparatus of every citizen. This method of manipulation is a playing-up of the Jungian archetypal presupposition whose main thesis is grounded in the theory of the collective unconscious. In this particular instance of our present discussion, such presupposition touches on the primitive religious impulse of the human species where fear of the unknown is the primal disturbance factor. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, therefore, an exposition of how this so-called religious fear may be politically appropriated to set the stage of an orderly and peaceful society populated by obedient citizens loyal to the State and the powers behind it.

In Brave New World, fear, along with the rest of human emotional tendencies, is generally non-existent in the lower rungs of the caste system. Emotional feelings are solely experienced by the Alphas and Betas since they are the only ones endowed with high-level individual personalities. However, there are always psychogenic drugs to neutralize and transform into positive their negative emotions. Society is so efficiently organized that peace and order are its inherent components. The positively conditioned Alphas are the ruling elites whose intellectual and emotional programmings are always exactly geared for the well-being and maintenance of society’s institutional stability and productivity. In close comparison with Orwell’s society, Huxley’s “brave new world” is the better model. It is more sophisticated with all the trappings of modern science and technology and the air of satisfaction pervades the social atmosphere. Its denizens are more civil and cultured in an environment where there is no hatred, envy, and insecurity. The “brave new world” is a perfect society where there are no sicknesses, insanities, and problems due to emotional imbalance and ignorance commonly found in less-evolved societies represented in the novel by the “savage reservation“.

However, putting aside all the theoretical considerations hitherto discussed and highlighted, something seriously ominous troubles the sanity of a thinking mind in further reflecting on the most fundamental aspects of Orwell’s Big-Brother-managed State and Huxley’s “brave new world”. In the course of a clear-minded analysis, we want to examine not only the logical validity of Orwell’s and Huxley’s presuppositions but also the soundness of states of affairs that constitute the major premises upon which their respective presuppositions are based. In the process, we ask the following basic questions: Would the dynamics of humanity allow the possibility of Orwell’s and Huxley’s societies? Isn’t the continuing history of human civilization replete with defiance and struggles, destructions and violence, sacrifices and deaths which are sheer aggressive displays of humanity’s assertive disposition when challenged and provoked in both small-scale and large-scale contexts? Seriously considering these questions leads us to doubt the realistic grounding of Orwell’s and Huxley’s presuppositions. The next question primed up by such doubt is: Do you think the citizens of a nation would just let people in power form an Orwellian society or a Huxleyan “brave new world” without putting up a reasonable fight?

Orwell’s and Huxley’s societies are founded on institutionalized dehumanization. We call them societies but can we still attach the term “human” to modify them? In Orwell’s society, human free will is suppressed and denigrated. In Huxley’s, it is obsoletized in the majority of the people who constitute the lower rungs of the caste system. In the final analysis, we question the humanity of a society where human freedom is non-existent for such freedom is the only guarantee that bestows dignity to humanity. The persistence of the drive of the human free will to preserve human dignity is the strongest defiant factor expected to aggressively and relentlessly challenge the legitimacy of either an Orwellian or a Huxleyan society.

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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines.

Notes

(1)  http://www.idph.com.br/conteudos/ebooks/BraveNewWorld.pdf

(2)  http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf

(3) http://selfdefinition.org/psychology/BF-Skinner-Beyond-Freedom-&-Dignity-1971.pdf

(4)  http://ir.nmu.org.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/134984/9b765b0dda623b36ce1b928c9c3d8e4f.pdf?sequence=1

Author’s note: Kevin  and I worked on this article together right before his untimely passing on September 6. I met Kevin during Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. Throughout the years since, I appreciated seeing his anti-imperialist and eco-socialist arguments strengthen and crystallize the longer I knew him. Kevin’s work is unfinished, and I intend to honor him by continuing the fight for a better world, one that is anti-capitalist, full of music, delicious food and laughter. Kevin Zeese, Presente.

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It is important to realize we have had two parties of the millionaires governing the United States since its founding. People have always had to pick between which of the millionaire parties we should choose from when neither put the people’s interests first. Some people have found a successful third way that builds people’s power.

Those in the Green Party view popular movements and third-party candidates (who cannot win elections in this rigged system) working together to change the direction of the country. We would rather vote for what we want and not get it in an election but use our vote to build a national consensus for the changes we need. That is a better alternative than voting for what we do not want, i.e. “a certifiable, lying, murdering war criminal” and a racist mass incarcerator, and getting it.

This emphasis on popular movements is the key difference between those building eco-socialist alternative parties like the Green Party, and those who actively or tacitly support the Democrat Party which deliberately deactivates mass movements such as Obama quashing the black players’ wildcat strikes or the DNC twice suppressing at all cost the Sanders campaigns and the vibrant mass of youth and people of color which built a movement around them to lift Sanders’ democratic socialist platform in 2016 and 2020. Socialists understand that movements of the people are what change the conditions of our class. Those who remain shackled election after election to the corporate parties do not have faith in ordinary people, instead relying on corporate politicians to change the conditions that keep 99% of the world’s population down, with most unable to thrive and lacking in their basic needs. Relying on capitalists in capitalist parties who preserve the needs of capitalism and corporate profit to make the fundamental changes needed to have an equitable and just and non-racist society is what spoils elections, and spoils our chances for a better world.

The history of ending slavery, ending child labor, winning the 8-hour workday and union rights, breaking up monopolies (trust-busting), women’s voting rights, ending alcohol prohibition and winning the New Deal – came from the platforms of the Socialist and Progressive parties and were won through social movements. In this century, it was Ralph Nader who ran on single payer, Medicare for All, and Jill Stein who ran on the Green New Deal (after Howie Hawkins first did so at the state-level in 2010). Every Green candidate has called for raising the minimum wage and taxing the wealthy.

This year we are facing multiple crises and the bi-partisan failed state of the two millionaire parties is handing none of them well: the pandemic, the economic collapse, racist police violence, and climate chaos, as well as the long-simmering deadly crises of inequality, inadequate healthcare, and a renewed nuclear arms race. Only one presidential ticket is right on ALL of these issues and that is Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker.

Voting for Biden is immoral in the current electoral reality. Trump is the worst president in our lifetimes and has to be removed from office.  Unfortunately, U.S. presidential elections are determined by the Electoral College so battleground or swing states are the key to winning. Because the presidential ​voting system assigns each state a number of electoral college votes, which​ go to the state’s victor regardless of the​ margin of victory, a handful of swing states will ​probably decide the election and are targeted heavily by the corporate parties, commonly ignoring voters in the remaining 38-42 other states. The swing states are comprised of mixed populations (urban, suburban, rural, etc.) and tend to flip between red and blue each election cycle. They include Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Six battleground states that are close calls right now are interesting because they are all Republican states. The fact that these are now the only battleground states shows Trump is fighting off a landslide defeat — a well-deserved landslide. Swing states will not determine who wins, but whether there is an anti-Trump landslide.

The trends are not good for Trump. But no matter what happens with the polls, people who live in states like New York, California, Maryland, and the other 30 solidly Democratic states would be wasting their vote if they vote for Biden. A vote for Biden does not stand for Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, a public health approach to the pandemic, or ending the never-ending wars. Biden votes get lost in the corporate Democratic agenda of Joe Biden.

Republicans spoil elections by suppressing the Democratic vote and the Black vote. They orchestrate voter roll purges, most notably in the 2000 election in Florida, and restrict the number of polling places in Black and Brown communities. The GOP encourages voter intimidation at polling places.

Democrats spoil elections by trying to suppress the progressive Green vote, kicking us off the ballot instead of fighting in-between elections to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote using ranked choice voting.

Both parties actively participate in gerrymandering which leads to more manipulation by monied interests, districts being drawn around racial lines and lower voter turnout because of the creation of safe seats where the real battle is over the nomination and not the election. Both parties benefit from voter suppression. Campaign financing is paid by billionaires and corporations in support of both major parties so that the super wealthy control our elections.

The GOP’s active suppression of the Black vote and the Electoral College’s anointing candidates who actually lost the popular vote spoils elections. Campaign financing and gerrymandering spoil elections. The election process in this country is a rotted mess that only benefits corporations, the wealthy and the corporate duopoly. Sadly, it’s a spoiled system whether the Green Party runs candidates or not.

Only voting for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker makes sense in 2020 with two terrible candidates — the worst president of our lives and one of the worst corporate Democrats of our lives. We are not limited to those candidates.

Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster construction and warehouse worker who has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, unions, and the environment since the 1960s. He was the first U.S. politician to campaign for a Green New Deal in 2010, in the first of three consecutive runs for New York governor. New York enacted several policies that only Hawkins had campaigned for after he received 5% of the vote in 2014, including a ban on fracking, a $15 minimum wage, and paid family leave. Vice-presidential candidate Angela Walker is a truck driver in Florence, South Carolina, a veteran and a union and racial justice activist.

We need to vote for candidates who represent and are part of the popular movements so we advance the causes of economic, racial and environmental justice. This is why I’m voting Green.

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Into the third decade of this century, China has continued its ascent as the world’s second superpower. The United States, on the other hand, has been stumbling somewhat under Donald Trump’s wrecking ball policies. The Trump era looks likely to be restricted to four years, as huge numbers of Americans turn out to cast their votes in the presidential election. Even so, a Joe Biden victory is not certain yet and Democratic supporters remain anxious, scarred by the experience of Hillary Clinton’s failure four years ago.

The Trump presidency has been a disaster, to put it mildly. Trump’s actions, from further enrichment of the top 0.1% in society, to wide-scale deregulation and shredding of arms treaties – all to benefit multinational corporations – has led to a considerably increased threat of environmental crises and nuclear war occurring. The growing nuclear and climate threats have been highlighted for successive years by renowned experts, like those associated with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organisation concerned with global security challenges and humanity’s future.

The Atomic Bulletin analysts also manage the Doomsday Clock, whose hand has advanced closer to midnight in three out of the past four Januaries. These ominous warnings have coincided with Trump’s arrival into office in January 2017; and, to a lesser extent, because of the election of other extremists in major states like Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro), where deforestation in the Amazon has increased. In January 2020 the Doomsday Clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight, the farthest it has advanced since being established in 1947. (1)

On the international scene, there have been opportunities for Trump to reverse some of the US decline which has unfolded through the decades; most obviously in Latin America (consisting of Central and South America), regions which have mostly shifted back to the right over the past few years, partially because of the left’s inability to tackle corruption and diversify their nations’ economies. In the Barack Obama years, Washington exploited these weaknesses by encouraging rightist opposition groups and promoting instability in Latin American states, from Brazil and Argentina to Haiti. (2)

The right-wing governments that came to power have proven wholly inadequate, and Trump has shown little interest in Washington’s traditional “backyard”. Trump has visited Latin America only once in his presidency, when he arrived in Buenos Aires two years ago for the G-20 summit. Obama paid 16 visits to Latin America during his two terms, even flying to Cuba in the spring of 2016.

Trump has been unable to convince his Latin American allies to shun the overtures of China. One can witness the remarkable spectacle of far-right leader Bolsonaro praising Beijing, with him saying in late 2019 that “China is an ever greater part of Brazil’s future”. Money talks and Beijing’s financial might pays its weight in gold. China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil by far, with the Chinese government investing $63 billion in Brazilian exports during 2019, leaving the US trailing in second place on just shy of $30 billion (3). This is a significant development as Brazil is the strongest country in Latin America.

Mimicking Bolsonaro is the billionaire leader of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, who returned to power in March 2018. Pinera, another right-wing leader, spoke of his desire to “transform Chile into a business centre for Chinese companies”. Chile’s biggest trading partner is China by some distance, with Beijing in 2019 accounting for over $21 billion of Chilean exports, more than twice that of the US (4). In Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, China has also comfortably surpassed the US as a trading country there. China’s investment in Latin America rose from $12 billion in 2000, to $224 billion by 2016. As a consequence, Latin America’s largest trading partner is none other than China.

Even more concerning for US planners, China is the largest investor in the Middle East, recognised as the world’s most important region because of its unmatched oil and gas reserves. China is the biggest foreign investor in both Iran and Iraq, two countries which together possess almost one-fifth of the world’s oil sources. Another oil rich state, Saudi Arabia – a key US/British ally – has likewise doffed its hat to Chinese power. In 2019 nearly 20% of all Saudi exports, mostly consisting of oil, were sold to China, compared to just 2% of Saudi exports destined for the US. (5)

China is a very ambitious nation and one which is looking to the future with enthusiasm. It is dubious whether one can say the same for the US. China’s aspirations seem to have grown since Xi Jinping became president in March 2013. He has since consolidated his power, and expanded Beijing’s vast infrastructural projects like the Belt and Road Initiative.

America has boasted the world’s largest economy since 1871, at a time when Britain first began its decline as the pre-eminent imperial force (6). China currently has the globe’s second biggest economy and is closing in on the US, with Japan trailing distantly in third place (the UK is sixth). China’s economy is measured in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as are the others. Qualifications are needed to gain a realistic picture of living conditions on the ground. GDP is concerned not with people but “finished goods and services made within a country”.

Examining China more closely reveals that it is still a relatively poor nation overall, a statement which may sound strange to some. Among the world’s countries, China lies in 85th place on the 2019 UN Human Development Index (HDI) table, a formula which measures life expectancy, per person income and education (7). China’s modest position, on the HDI, is primarily because the average annual income of a Chinese citizen remains low, amounting to $16,127 last year, compared to an average yearly salary for an American in 2019 of $56,140. Despite its internal problems America retains much wealth, occupying 15th spot in the HDI table, and none of the countries situated above the US (like Norway and Ireland) are obviously a threat to US hegemony. Japan is in 19th, with an average annual income for a Japanese of $40,799 in 2019.

However, there are mitigating circumstances when analysing China. Its population has been the world’s largest for generations, far bigger than the US and Japan – this has posed daunting problems for consecutive leaders in Beijing, encompassing the reign of the communist revolutionary Mao Zedong (in power 1949-1976). There can be little doubt that Chairman Mao, as he was known, ranks as one of the most influential leaders in China’s millenia-long history. It was Mao who set China on to its course of rivalling American power; as he rid China of predatory outside influence and achieved full independence, but his legacy has often been derided to a severe and unfair extent.

The Mao biographer Philip Short, an experienced English historian, wrote that Mao “wielded powers equalled only by the most awesome of Chinese emperors” and that “changes which, in the West, had taken centuries to accomplish” instead “occurred in a single generation” under Mao (8). This includes the major advances in health care he achieved across China, but in other areas also.

Short noted that,

“In Mao’s lifetime, China made the leap from semi-colony to Great Power; from millenial autarky to socialist state; from despoiled victim of imperialist plunder to Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, complete with H-bombs, surveillance satellites and ICBMS”.

After more than 20 years of struggle, when Mao assumed control in 1949 at the age of 55, China was coming off one of its most damaging periods of decline ever. Once he gained power Mao expelled the imperialist states from China, restored the country’s pride in itself, and enacted the structures that would transform China into an international force.

Short acknowledged that Mao possessed “an extraordinary mix of talents: he was visionary, statesman, political and military strategist of genius, philosopher and poet” who had “a subtle, dogged mind, awe inspiring charisma and fiendish cleverness”; while those who succeeded him “were merely a succession of fallible leaders, not better and not worse than in any other country”. (9)

The communist ideology which Mao espoused, and went to enormous efforts in implementing, effectively died with him in September 1976, as China thereafter tilted towards capitalism. In the final months of his life, Mao was aware that his policies would disappear with him into the grave. He had failed to find what he perceived to be anything approaching an adequate successor. Two years after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took charge of China and he quickly moved the country towards capitalism, despite Deng admitting later that “without Mao there would be no new China”.

Mao had criticised Deng for his bourgeois and capitalist tendencies, unfairly many thought. In fact, as Short wrote, Deng “did establish a regime which, while ‘nominally socialist’, was capitalist in every other respect. Mao had been right about Deng Xiaoping: improbable though it had seemed at the time, he was a ‘capitalist-roader’ all along”. With Deng in power “the moment he was in a position to do so, he began dismantling the socialist system Mao had built”. (10)

A recent in-depth study reveals that, since Mao’s death, wealth accumulation in the top 10% of society in China has increased considerably, along with a sharp growth in inequality (11). It can be noted that wages for the Chinese masses are altogether higher now, in comparison to the Mao years, when grinding poverty was more widespread. Yet Beijing’s adoption of capitalism is patently clear, and a symptom of this are the current numbers of Chinese millionaires, 4,400, and billionaires, 878 (12). Elite wealth in China is below that of America, but it is safe to say that Mao would not have tolerated these developments.

China’s drift towards capitalism has only reached a certain point. Beijing has snubbed the most virulent form: the neoliberal model introduced in the West by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; whereby corporate and business influence dictates government strategy, seeping down to affect a nation’s education and health systems. In the US, the world’s leading neoliberal state, the number of hospital beds is dictated by profiteering, as it is in many other rich countries. An extra supply of hospital beds is pivotal for a functioning health service. Hospitals are instead run according to neoliberal doctrine, meaning there is no provision of extra hospital beds as zero profits can be made from it. This is a shabby system in normal times and a recipe for disaster in extraordinary circumstances.

In 1975, during the pre-neoliberal era, there were almost 1.5 million hospital beds in America. By 2018 it had fallen to just over 900,000 beds in US hospitals (13). Bearing in mind, the US population grew by about a third during this period. In a non-neoliberal state like China, in 2018 there were 6.5 million hospital beds there, almost twice larger than the US in per capita figures. This is one indication of the significant advantage that China has over its Western rivals.

The average life expectancy of a Chinese person is merely a couple of years less than an American. The majority of credit for China’s health care progress should indeed be attributed to Mao. As he entered office in 1949, the typical life expectancy in China was 36 years. When he died in 1976, China’s average life expectancy had climbed to 64 years, an almost three decade increase. It ranks as one of the most rapid growths of life expectancy in human history, all the more commendable considering China’s size and population (14). During the same time, life expectancy in America increased by less than seven years.

In China 85% of major corporations are today state-owned, as the World Economic Forum reports to its displeasure (15). Under Xi Jinping, Beijing’s control over big business has increased. The US economist Nicholas Lardy, a noted expert on the Chinese economy, outlined of China in July 2019 that, “Since 2012 private, market-driven growth has given way to a resurgence of the role of the state”.

From a global strategic viewpoint the US remains in a superior position to China, with Washington continuing to enjoy most of the gains made by its victories in World War II. The US military, far larger than its Chinese counterpart, still dominates the Pacific Ocean – which covers 30% of the planet’s surface – while the US Armed Forces hem China in around its coastline, and beyond, with hundreds of bases and high tech weaponry. In the Western hemisphere China’s military presence is barely discernible.

Repeatedly each year US destroyers sail astride China’s shorelines, such as in the Taiwan Strait; American warships even dare to roam further up the coast through the East China Sea, and even entering the Yellow Sea, less than 500 miles from Beijing. Two US destroyers were spotted at separate times this year sailing nonchalantly in the Yellow Sea, placing them within striking distance of the Chinese capital; and much closer again to Shanghai, China’s most populous city, where early this summer the USS Rafael Peralta was sighted fewer than 135 miles from Shanghai (16). On the European mainland, the US retains a foothold across that continent under the NATO military organisation. By 2004 NATO expanded to Russia’s borders and is continuing to enlarge.

US decline did not begin to unfold this century, but can be traced to the late 1940s. The “loss” of China to communism in 1949 is perhaps the heaviest blow to strike American hegemony to date (17). Gradual US regression occurred in following years. By 1970, with the complete recovery from the war of industrial states like Japan, the US share of world wealth dropped to 25%, half of what it was in 1945.

American power received a hefty boost with the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, but Washington largely squandered the opportunities this had provided, with the Americans suffering a lasting defeat in Iraq early this century following its invasion. Over the past decade, US influence has also dwindled in resource rich Central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union. China has promptly moved in, not militarily but through financial means, and Beijing is the largest investor in Central Asia, a strategically important region linked firmly to the Belt and Road.

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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 frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 John Mecklin, “Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 23 January 2020

2 Alexander Main, “The Right Has Power In Latin America, but No Plan”, Jacobin, 3 August 2019

3 Daniel Workman, “Brazil’s Top 15 Trading Partners”, World’s Top Exports, 15 April 2020

4 Ibid., “Chile’s Top Trading Partners”, 26 May 2020

5 Ibid., Saudi Arabia’s Top 10 Exports, 6 July 2020

6 Caleb Silver, “The Top 20 Economies in the World”, Investopedia, 18 March 2020

7 UN Development Programme, Human Development Reports, “2019 Human Development Index Ranking”

8 Philip Short, Mao: A Life, (John Murray Publishers Ltd., 30 Sep. 2004) p. 630

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 628

11 Thomas Piketty, Li Yang, Gabriel Zucman, London School of Economics and Political Science, “Income inequality is growing fast in China and making it look more like the US”, 1 April 2019

12 Recruitment News UK, “China is rapidly producing new billionaires despite Covid-19”, 20 October 2020

13 Statista, “Number of all hospital beds in the U.S. from 1975 to 2018”

14 Kimberly Singer Babiarz, Karen Eggleston, Grant Miller, Qiong Zhang, “An exploration of China’s mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950-1980”, National Center for Biotechnology Information, 13 December 2014

15 Amir Guluzade, “The role of China’s state-owned companies explained”, World Economic Forum, 7 May 2019

16 Kristin Huang, “US destroyer spotted off the coast of Shanghai as PLA Navy begins 11 week exercise in Yellow Sea”, South China Morning Post, 15 May 2020

17 Office of the Historian, Milestones: 1945-1952, “The Chinese Revolution of 1949”

A few years ago, after reading a brillig academic article about how those who believe in conspiracy theories might be inclined toward unethical actions and petty crimes, my conscience got the best of me and I made a public confession. I had been accused of being a conspiratorial thinker, and I knew I had once committed an unethical act, one that might be called a petty crime.  The article made me feel guilty and I felt a strong need to admit my transgression, which I did.  It felt so good to come clean in public.  Oprah would have been proud of me.

In recent days, however, I have seen many mainstream corporate media articles, not just academic studies, warning about deluded people who believe in conspiracy theories and how their erroneous beliefs are messing up the upcoming election and the authorities’ responses to Covid-19 and a lot of other important stuff like the Lockdown. That old devil guilt has revisited me. I don’t want to mess anything up for the authorities.

Let me, however, be clear at the outset what I mean by my conspiracy theories.

They are different from the conspiracy theories of George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Joseph Biden, Donald Trump, the World Health Organization people, and other such luminaries, concerning events such as the attack of September 11, 2011, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the ongoing war on terror, the prosecution of Julian Assange, Russian-gate, the need for dramatically increased censorship, the Lockdown, the Great Reset, etc.  These people’s conspiracy theories have nothing to do with petty crime, for their handiwork is grand indeed. They are big people, and very smart. In any case, I don’t know what small stuff they might be up to when not killing so many people all around the world.

I remember how that academic article that I had read was “backed up by science,” which was very reassuring, and that it wasn’t referring to big people like the aforementioned. The distinguished authors, who were from illustrious universities, meant little people like me, who have concluded that the U.S. national security state conspired to kill President Kennedy, to take one nutty example, and are inclined to take to the dark side and pilfer M&Ms from candy counters and stuff like that.  We are very gullible and prone to pettiness and mass delusions was the authors’ point because the internet has scrambled our brains.

They were saying we tend to believe weird shit like there’s a government spy program that involves electronic squirrels that climb trees and take pictures of you inside your house. That Building 7 at the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition.  Or the really wacked-out thought that all conspiracies take place behind our backs since they can’t take place in front of our backs since our backs are back and not front.  Or that Sirhan Sirhan did not assassinate Senator Robert Kennedy.  That Donald Trump is actually Liberace’s illegitimate son and Queen Elizabeth his mother.  Or that the war on terror was a preplanned government plot devised to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, among other countries. Crazy stuff like there’s a government plot to place signs near low doorways warning “Watch Your Head,” so people will literally try to do that and smash their clueless brains to smithereens and die as part of a population control program.

As we know, all these nutty conspiracy beliefs are of equal value and validity, and to even harbor the thought that the CIA’s 1967 secret Dispatch – Doc 1035-960, showing their employees and media accomplices how to counter and discredit the claims of conspiracy theorists – might be involved in all these articles I’ve been reading is to risk further accusations of being wacked-out and in need of examining one’s proclivity toward everyday crimes.  So I won’t go there.  I’m feeling guilty enough.

So bless me, folks, for I have sinned. For the second time in the past few years I have stolen and eaten the forbidden fruit. Let me confess.

Last week, I again found myself in my local co-op grocery market.  You might wonder where I had been looking for myself when I found myself there, staring into bins of dried fruit, but let’s just say I had been around.  When you’re lost and wacked-out, you never know where you are or why you believe what you believe, and so you can find yourself in strange places. Years ago my good friend went to California to find himself, and when he returned he said he found himself in a mirror and was really his step-brother’s illegitimate uncle. He and my other friends used to always tell me that I tended to do everything ass backwards, even think ass-backwards, and when I said, “Of course, I do, so do you. What’s wrong with that?” they looked at me as if I had flipped.  When I asked them if they could do things ass forward, our friendships ended. I found myself alone.

In the co-op market I was standing over the bulk bins, trying to decide what dried fruit to buy.  They all looked good.  It was a tough choice, sort of like staring at forty different tubes of toothpaste on the store shelf and wondering which to buy or if the one advertised for women would work for a man since men must have different teeth.  The comparison is not exactly apt, I guess, for you can’t test the toothpastes, but the fruit looked so delicious.  So, when no one was looking, I first tried the mangoes, then the apricots, and finally the figs.  I thought I saw the store manager see me when I took the figs because I was so enjoying the fruits of my crime that I let my guard down and was facing in his direction with my mask off.  This was really stupid of me, since the same thing happened the last time and I was paranoid afterward. I know, I know – when you keep repeating something that doesn’t work, they say that’s insane.  But I remembered when I couldn’t afford such expensive fruit and went to orgies just to eat the grapes.  Even then I thought people were watching me.

When I was leaving the store, my heart was pounding.  I kept glancing over my shoulder.  I decided to replace the orange day-glow mask I had used in the store with another I carried. Flesh colored – to blend in.  An old lady on a walker seemed to be following me, but I ditched her by circling the block two-and-a-half times, my lucky number.  As I was close to home, I thought of my narrow escape and the brilliance of the study that connected my conspiratorial thinking to my criminal activity with the fruit.

I also couldn’t help thinking how the figs had reminded me of my latest conspiracy theory, but one supported by sources as confidential and reliable as those referenced by The New York Times or The Washington Post.  In addition, like those devotees of truth and confidentiality, I will never reveal my sources.  They can torture me and I won’t.

Here is what they told me.  It bears repeating.

Legend has it that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity while sitting in a garden, watching apples fall perpendicularly to the ground.  However, this is not true. I have learned from my confidential sources that his nickname was Isaac “Fig” Newton and that those who claim the Fig Newton cookie was named after Newton, Massachusetts are involved in a great cover-up.  That’s nothing new.

My sources tell me that when Isaac was a child, he was so fond of figs that his mother had to warn him against eating too many, for as you probably know, figs, like prunes, are filled with fiber and possess a laxative quality.  Isaac was defecating so much and so often that his mother was alarmed.  But a mother’s panic at a child’s toilet habits can be a source of insight years later.

So it was that years later it was Isaac’s experience on the potty that gave him his great insight into gravity.  Reflecting back on his childhood, he realized that shit always went down, never up (there were no electric fans in those days, so no one would say that it went up when “shit hit the fan” like they’re saying about this year’s election). He remembered his mother’s loving words when as a boy he would tell his mom he had to “take a shit,” she would always remind him that it was always better to give than take, so he should “give a shit.”

Alas, it was Isaac’s chore to take the family potty out behind the house where it was emptied down into a deep hole about six feet under.  Thus, the adult Isaac came to call his discovery gravity, after the grave.  He scientifically proved what everyone already knew: that everything and everyone goes down, eventually.  Not the most uplifting news, I grant you, but I have reliable sources for that also.

So I readily admit I am guilty of this inclination toward low-level “crime,” as the professors so brilliantly explicated. No doubt, it is connected to my conspiratorial and paranoid  mindset.  I hope that much is clear.  Sometimes I just can’t resist the forbidden fruit.  Although not an apple, it seems to give me insight into the knowledge of good and evil, and who is following whom.

For some reason, I suspect those brillig academics and mainstream corporate journalists will not be writing about the elite criminals who conspire to invade countries, kill millions, blame it on others, and conduct vast propaganda campaigns.  Those are crimes against humanity, and are beyond the purview of work aimed at showing how sick everyday people are who suspect that their leaders are big-time criminals.

These writers are following their bosses.  Unlike Isaac, they don’t give a shit.

They are full of it.

I’m not really sorry.  I got that ass-backwards.

*

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

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is the author of the new book: https://www.claritypress.com/product/seeking-truth-in-a-country-of-lies/

Featured image is from InfoWars

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Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

Options: EBOOK – Epub and Kindle, paper, PDF

Click here to order.

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While Americans are re-programmed every four years for the most important desperately crucial national emergency election since the last one, which will assure that Wall Street, the Pentagon, Israel and billionaires maintain power and control over everything that matters, most eligible voters will choose neither of the ruling power’s candidates and in a sense exercise democratic values by refusing to act as majority puppets.

Meanwhile the people of Bolivia and Chile recently went to the polls and in dramatic contrast to America actually voted on substantial issues that could radically change their country’s futures. Bolivia chose returning to the socialist government that had been overthrown by a U.S. aided capitalist -fascist coup and Chile voted to dump its U.S. influenced fascist-capitalist constitution in favor of a new one to guarantee the rights of all and not just some of their people. However things turn out for them what they did comes far closer to what America needs and democracy can create but what we’ll get is the same system with possibly slightly different actions by the crew of our national model of the Titanic. Escape lifeboats will still be available only to the upper income groups while the rest of us can drown. Sorry, we’re in the “real” world and still being convinced that having a new CEO of a petroleum firm who is a transsexual of color or a bi-polar Semite or a Picasso person with seven eyes and eight breasts is more important than ending dependence on fossil fuels and demanding alternate power sources for the future of our nation and our planet.

With manufactured fears of this multi-billion dollar electoral market being sold as democracy but allegedly threatened by Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Disneyland, Lower Slobovia or other fictional scapegoats, the financial fiasco that grows more criminal and psychotic every day supposedly guarantees freedom to the homeless, the poor, the debtors, the millions without health care and the rest of us to whom everything nature’s corporate capitalism offers is available provided we’ve the market force to buy it. Those of us able to buy are a group getting smaller by the minute with plastic replacing money at a faster clip than ever with debt in the trillions and the only hope of paying it off being prayer, drugs or mass murder. The bread and circuses of a past empire has its present version in the moral pornography of a rich nation with people living on the street, under highways and bridges and being stepped over by good folks on their way to rescue a dog or cat while massive political fund raising assures the richest minority maintains   control of the entire political process.

All of this is sanctified by the law of the land, a constitution written by the original 1% to assure that the other 99% would never threaten their power and control, only allowing supposed revolutionary amendments that allow a greater professional servant class and guarantee that the overwhelming majority continue to react to the spectacle of a variety show that passes for an electoral process, as people are convinced that the right to vote is the essence of democracy, with little or no consideration about what there is to vote for. With fears of fascism being charged every minute and attributing that threat to the rich if honest simpleton in the white house, there is also the veneration in the minds of the people that the act of voting is the be all end all of fictional democracy.

Pssst: the popular depiction of the archfiend fascists of Nazism and Hitler leaves out the fact that they took power through the sacred democratic process of voting, and Germany was generally considered the foremost intellectual and artistic culture of the continent.

Past American dominance of the world was never dependent on our exceeding Canada and Mexico in thought and creativity except when it came to making and using weapons to slaughter millions while proclaiming love for mankind, democracy and other good stuff.

The point being that fascism is an aspect of capitalism at an extremely critical crisis during which the most repressive among the ruling class take power and make life better for some and worse for others but in a fashion beyond the usual fake manner which calls attention to poverty, war and social degeneracy as aspects of awful “other” social formations. This is currently the expression of the alleged fascist putz in the white house while his alleged liberal foes engage in the most repressive reactionary politics in the usual guise of democracy in America: Our evil is lesser than their evil. Vote for polio or you’ll get cancer!

Before we were struck by the pandemic spread by market forces, more than half a million Americans were homeless. More than 8 million have since descended into poverty while the billionaire class has expanded its wealth to even more outrageous extremes than before. And while our national situation disintegrates under the moral assault on life and nature called the free market, no less than the World Bank warns of the titanic debt threatening the globe with the poorest countries already facing hardship beyond anything previously experienced in trying to approach paying off debts they owe to richer nations which often got rich by stealing their national wealth through colonialist oppression. The bank warns against global collapse unless the world does something about the fact that the richest 2 thousand people own more wealth than four and a half billion humans combined.

These are not among the issues brought before the American public this election season when Trump’s personal tax figures and sex life take precedence over the fact that his open adoration of Israel and Netanyahu exceeds that of the entire American congress which all but publicly buried its face in his crotch when he spoke to the assembled recipients of Israeli lobby wealth for their political campaigns. Trump openly says he doesn’t need the Israeli lobby’s money so his passion is accepted as sincere where as much of congress and past white house occupants gleefully accept the much needed millions to “democratically” treat the last colonial nation in the world as some divine aspect of humanity.

The outcome of the election may not be known for hours, days or weeks after its conclusion due to the conditions brought about by the pandemic alongside other breakdowns in our political economy. Speculations about whether the post office will sell our ballots to Russia or China or Trump’s family will use them to gain more credit at Amazon or that fascism or civil war will take place are beside the point. Feverish fears or realistic panic, the fact is that Wall Street, the Pentagon, Israel and Billionaires will remain in control of the nation and future acceptance of the lie that this represents democracy will not just make things worse, but much worse than ever before. This needs to be the last vote that accepts the lie of national democracy and must lead to the creation of a new national political party to represent the majority of Americans currently having our lives bargained at a corrupt market and equally corrupt political process over which we exercise no control.

Social conditions may become more dreadful in the short term after this hopefully last exercise of fake democracy. Whatever the lesser evil outcome of the ruling class owned and controlled exercise of the present moment, we need immediate action on the part of the people being bled physically, mentally and spiritually for fictional nonsense we are always fed, never more than during this latest outburst of truly fake democracy. We need the real thing and we need it fast. That struggle has already begun and it needs to take on much greater speed after November3, 2020.

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This article was originally published on legalienate.

The Sudanese-”Israeli” peace deal isn’t a spontaneous act of reconciliation like it’s misportrayed by some as being but the result of lots of behind-the-scenes maneuvering including last year’s military coup and recent reports that Saudi Arabia will secretly pay Sudan’s agreed-upon $335 million in compensation to US victims of terrorism.

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More Advanced Weapons and Nukes for Italy: Defense Minister Guerini on St. Francis’s Footsteps

By Manlio Dinucci, October 29 2020

Mainstream media is pounding out an incessant drumbeat: ‘Get Out and Vote! Mail in Your Ballot! Do It Now! Vote Early!’

But what may well determine the outcome of the election on November 3 may not be the current record voter turnout now underway. That is, not how many actually vote. But rather how many votes get actually counted.

While Democrats are pushing voter turnout, Trump and Republicans are planning to prevent the counting of the votes that do turnout—at least in the three, or at most four, key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin that will in the end determine the results of the 2020 election in the Electoral College.

If the Electoral College were to cast its votes today Trump and Biden would be virtually tied!

Contrary to the mainstream media and the popular vote trend, Biden does not have a comfortable lead in Electoral College votes. By this writer’s estimate, Trump has 248 Electoral College votes, while Biden has 244! Barely 40-50 potential Electoral College are therefore actually ‘in play’ as they say. These 40-50 are in the true swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that together account for a total of 46 votes. The three are also the states in which Trump’s legion of hundreds of lawyers have been preparing for weeks to demand from pro-Trump recently appointed judges that they halt the counting of mail in ballots.

That 248 to 244 close tie in the Electoral College today all but ensures that Trump moves forward on November 3 to implement his plans to stop the mail in ballot vote count in the key swing states. Further encouraging that plan is the fact that those same three swing states don’t start counting mail in ballots until midnight on November 3. Trump could potentially stop the count of virtually all the mail in ballots in those key swing states.

The Electoral College As Bulwark Against Democracy

The Electoral College is an abomination on Democracy. Nevertheless, it will determine the outcome of the 2020 election less than a week from now.

Most election polls, according to mainstream media, show Biden has a commanding lead in the popular vote of 8% to 10%. But the popular vote is irrelevant in America’s 21^st century truncated Democracy. All that matters is the total Electoral College vote and which candidate wins a total of 270 Electoral College votes across all the 50 states wins the November 3 election.

Wait. Check that. All that matters is the Electoral College count in the three swing states this time around.  Well, let me correct that further: All that matters is the mail-in ballot vote count in those three states.

Trump plans to declare himself the winner late evening November 3, or at latest early morning November 4—i.e. well before the mail in ballots are counted in those 3 states. Before the sun comes up on November 4 he’ll launch his hundreds of lawyers already ensconced in those states—and McConnell’s handpicked judges there—to stop the mail in ballot counting with preliminary injunctions and other legal legerdemain! That will be done before most folks wake up for breakfast on the 4^th.  The injunctions and legal motions filed in federal district courts will then be quickly kicked upstairs to the Appeals Courts, both dominated by McConnell’s rushed appointees in recent years. The Appeals Courts will pass it on eventually to Trump’s now 6-3 majority US Supreme Court to rule!

That’s what American electoral Democracy has come down to: the next president will be determined by mail in ballots in just three states; more correctly, whether those mail in ballots in those three states are counted or not.

CNN’s Election Myopia

Both the pro-Trump right wing media like Fox news, as well as the more mainstream CNN, like to play the ‘who’s winning the electoral college’ vote game every day. But their guesstimates are no better than yours nor mine.

CNN has its daily color-coded ‘Electoral Map’ showing which states are firmly for Trump or Biden (red or blue), which states are leaning toward Trump or Biden (light blue or pink), and in which ‘battleground’ state (yellow color coded) is neither candidate leading.

Amazingly CNN has Biden leading with 290 solid or strongly leaning ‘blue’ states. To get to 290 CNN assumes that Biden will eventually win the light blue ‘leaning’ states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, and even New Hampshire. Apart from these ‘leaning blue’, Biden has 204 other electoral college votes solid blue and thus wrapped up for Biden.

The eight states ‘light blue’ and leaning Biden total 86 electoral votes which, when added to the solid 204, result in CNN’s assumed 290 for Biden. So it looks like Biden’s a strong lead in the Electoral College, per CNN analysis. Of course, CNN also assumes all votes for Biden will be actually counted, including mail in ballots.

But will all the ballots get counted? Or will the SCOTUS suspend and stop the counting of mail in ballots—just as it did ballot recounting in 2000 in Florida?

All Trump has to do is succeed in stopping the mail in ballot vote counting in just Pennsylvania (20), Wisconsin (10) and Michigan (16) and Trump wipes out 46 of Biden’s 290 total, leaving Biden with just 244 electoral college votes and well short of the required 270 to win!

CNN assumes further the remaining 5 states’ leaning blue’ actually go blue: That means Colorado (9), Arizona (11), Minnesota (10), Nevada (6), and New Hampshire (4). It also assumes all (4) votes from Maine go for Biden—i.e. are not ‘split’ between Biden and Trump which is possible in only that state (and Nebraska which also can split its 5  votes).

This is a list off some big assumptions! That is, Trump won’t succeed in stopping the mail ballot count in the 3 states; the 3 states will all go Trump on November 3; and the other 5 ‘leaning blue’ states will all go Biden.

Doing the Electoral College math still further, Trump only needs to stop the mail ballot count in two of the three states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania in order to deprive Biden of 270. And should no halt to mail ballot counting occur in any of the three, Biden still needs to win two of the three fairly nevertheless.

In other words, halting the vote count in just two states is all it will take to give Trump another four years. If you think Trump, McConnell & friends haven’t done this calculation, you’re mistaken!

CNN’s analysis of Trump’s solid and ‘leaning’ red states is no less naïve than its analysis of Biden’s.

It has Trump with only 163 solid red state electoral votes, with Texas’s 38 votes indicated as only ‘leaning red’ toward Trump. So Trump only has 201 electoral college votes.

CNN then describes Florida (29), Georgia (16), Ohio (18), and North Carolina (15) as neutral ‘battleground’ states that are up for grabs. Really? Who believes that? These 5 states are the notorious five (when including Texas) states that have a long history of voter suppression by various means.  With no limits put on their vote suppression activities for years, including the last four in particular, these five states will almost certainly go for Trump again. Their legislatures are all solid rabid Republican! And if anything they’ve intensified their voter suppression activity since 2016.

The notorious five are ‘battlegrounds’ only in CNN and the Democrat Party’s wildest dreams.  Hundreds of thousands of eligible, potential Democrat voters have been purged from their voting rolls in recent years and months. Maybe millions. These five are where voters cannot register by mail, nor at the poll on voting day. Where mail in ballots must be received by election day, not merely post marked before. Where drop boxes for ballots are limited one to a county sometimes covering hundreds of square miles. Where witnesses must accompany a voter to get registered. Where a de facto poll tax must be paid in many cases. Where Trump supporters are allowed to ‘stand guard’ at polling sites with their guns if they want, in order to intimidate voters. Where votes in pro-Democrat precincts are often ‘lost’. Where voting machines supposedly break down when voters are kept waiting in line for six and more hours to vote. The list is long and disgusting. No. These five notorious voter suppressor states are not battlegrounds. They’re Trump’s. They are not ‘yellow code’ battleground states; they are Trump states kept in his camp by suppression and voter intimidation.

Voter suppression in these five allowed Trump to win in 2016, just as much as Hillary’s terrible campaign permitted Trump to grab Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by smaller margins. Eight states turned the election in 2016. The five voter suppressor states will repeat. And instead of Hillary giving away the three upper Midwest swing states, this time around Trump’s plan is to deny them to Biden by stopping the mail in ballot vote count there.

When the notorious ‘vote suppressor big five’ states’ 116 electoral college votes are added to Trump’s solid 132 small red states’ votes, Trump has 248 potential votes—to Biden’s 244!

That means the election in the Electoral College today is a virtual tie at 248 to 244! It’s not CNN’s 290 to 163!

Both Biden’s and Trump’s campaign strategists know the election will be close, very close. The virtual tie with less than one week to go explains in large part why both Trump and Biden are paying attention to Maine and Nebraska, both making stops there despite their minimal 4 and 5 electoral votes, given that both states are the only ones allowing a split in their electoral college votes across candidates.  Picking up one or more votes from either may play a role in this election before it’s over as well. Trump knows it. So does Biden.

In summary, what the election appears coming down to is two things:

First, will Trump prove successful in halting the mail in vote count in at least two of the three key states leaning blue: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania? If so, he wins.

Second, will the notorious five voter suppression states—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—pull off enough suppression in order to deliver their states’ electors to Trump yet again? If they don’t, Biden wins.

In other words, it’s not getting more voter turnout that will determine the election. It is voter suppression plus vote count prevention that together will determine the fate of the USA for another four years! That’s what Democracy in America has come down to.

Let’s Fundamentally Restructure the College & the Supreme Court

None of the above abomination of Democracy would be possible were there no Electoral College; and if the US Supreme Court had not have become in recent decades a handmaiden of the right and business interests.

Trump’s strategy to pull off an electoral coup d’etat would not be possible without both institutions working ‘hand in glove’, as they say, to thwart the will of the majority of the American people.

The two institutions, captured by a president like Trump, now make Trump’s planned legal coup a possibility.

So how do we change these two great anti-Democracy enabler institutions—i.e. the Electoral College and the Supreme Court?

Growing popular today is the movement to amend the US Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. But that requires the vote of three fourths of state legislatures and therefore many of the small ‘red’ states in Trump’s camp who enjoy a preferential advantage and influence beyond their population numbers due to the Electoral College. They are not about to vote to eliminate their advantage by voting for a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.

But the Electoral College doesn’t need to be abolished in order to break the stranglehold of the small red states! There is another way to radically restructure it to re-balance it to reflect the population changes and popular vote.

The Electoral College is composed of 535 members, one each for the number of US House of Representatives plus 2 Senators from each state.  That’s 435 Representatives and 100 Senators. The 435 representatives is based on the population of the country. The US Constitution calls for adding representatives as the population rises. The last time Congress did that was in 1913. It is long overdue to add representatives and House districts to reflect that increase in representatives. That would result in more representatives in the more populous blue states, and therefore more blue state Electors. That would effectively break the back of the small, red state lock on the Electoral College and in turn end Trump-Republican red state total electors advantage in presidential elections—an advantage that consistently now is out of line with the popular vote for the presidency.

Another, less effective way perhaps is just to add more states, which would add more electors by adding more representatives and Senators alike. Proposals are already floating around to add Washington DC as a state and perhaps even Puerto Rico if its citizens so voted to do so.

Either or both of these alternatives to change the current Electoral College could result in a less lopsided and imbalance favoring smaller, less populous, Trump dominated red states. Just doing what the Constitution calls for, which Congress has avoided since 1913, is the better restructuring solution.

And what about the growing imbalance favoring the radical right in the US Supreme Court?  Public discourse is already raising the possibility of adding 2-3 or more SCOTUS judges, from the current 9 to 11 or 12. Congress has the Constitutional authority to do that since it created the Supreme Court, not the US Constitution. But reform should go well beyond just adding numbers. The terms of the judges should be reduced from lifetime to no more than 10 years. And SCOTUS judges should be elected not appointed. 12 or 15 districts could be created across the USA and a judge elected from each. And what gets elected can get recalled. The founders of the country and framers of the US Constitution feared that lifetime appointments of what amounts to nine never elected lawyers could thwart the will and sovereignty of the American people.  And that’s what’s been happening in recent decades and is now happening today.

Without a basic restructuring—if not outright abolition—of the Electoral College, American Democracy will continue to result increasingly to produce abominations like the 2000 election and its likely repeat in the upcoming November 3 election. Instead of one person one vote—i.e. true Democracy—we keep getting presidents elected without the support of the majority of the American people. At some point that will explode.

And the same may be said for the rightward and pro-corporate drift of the US Supreme Court. It has already lost serious legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the American people. And it’s about to exacerbate that loss in the wake of next week’s election when it likely comes to the aid of Donald Trump to halt the mail ballot vote counting.

The Court’s myths about being a co-equal branch of government created by the US Constitution, with the authority to overturn the laws passed by the Congress, and with the usurped power to interfere with elections and ‘select’ a president will eventually blow up in the face of the US elite, as Americans come to understand the Supreme Court’s true origins and its truer functions—i.e. origins and functions that have little to do with ensuring Democracy and, increasingly in recent years, far more to do with ensuring its decline.

It is worth concluding one more time: next week’s election is not about ‘getting everyone out to vote’. It’s going to be about preventing the full counting of that record vote turnout!

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Jack Rasmus writes on his blog site where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

US-led Western states promote Islamophobia.

It’s part of seeking dominance over other nations — notably by endless preemptive wars and related hostile actions against nonbelligerent states threatening no one.

It’s the wrong time to be Muslim in the West, notably in the US, Britain and France.

Muslims are war on terror scapegoats. Dirty war targets them unjustly.

Waging war requires enemies. When none exist they’re invented. Muslims are targets of choice, notably in the oil-rich Middle East.

Ignored is what Islam is all about. It has common roots with Judeo/Christian principles.

Its tenets foster love, not hate; peace, not violence; charity, not exploitation; and just, fair societies for people of all faiths.

Islamophobic hate-mongering rages anyway, notably because of US-led wars by hot and other means in the predominantly Muslim Middle East.

They’re all about seeking control over the region’s vast hydrocarbon resources, along with serving Israeli interests.

Both countries seek to redraw the Middle East’s map, replacing independent governments with pro-Western puppet regimes — along with partitioning Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other regional countries for easier control.

For generations, Muslims have been maligned by the West.

Samuel Huntington called for “exploit(ing) Islamic states to support…Western values and interests.”

Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis promoted the notion of a clash of civilizations.

Edward Said called their hostile to Islam views “belligerent,” adding:

They shamefully treat Islam(ic) identity and culture in “cartoon-like” fashion.

It’s similar to how “Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly.”

When active, ideologues like Huntington and Lewis relied on stereotypes and gimmickry — ignoring reason, shunning reality.

So-called Western values are responsible for unparalleled amounts of mass slaughter, vast destruction and human misery worldwide — what’s been going on for generations.

The US-led West fosters might makes right extremism, no matter how misguided, destructive or hateful.

In his notable work titled “The Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad said “the conquest of the Earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, a slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

That’s what US-led imperial wars by hot and other means are all about, the human cost ignored, including by supportive media.

Tribute to Samuel Paty, professor assassinated in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, organized in front of the town hall in Saint-Denis on October 17, 2020. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In response to the grizzly slaying of history teacher Samuel Paty in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a Paris suburb —  stabbed multiple times and beheaded, French President Macron responded with police state actions against what he called “a typical Islamist terrorist attack (sic).”

The incident, his rhetoric and actions aroused greater Islamophobia in France than already, a nation with nearly six million Muslims, about 9% of the population.

Like many times before in the US and other Western countries, Muslims have been unfairly maligned, hunted down, rounded up, and detained — many times falsely charged for crimes they didn’t commit.

The same thing followed in response to Paty’s murder — including hundreds targeted for deportation.

France’s Muslim population is the largest among Western countries.

Muslim organizations in France are at risk of dissolution, their leadership and members threatened with retaliation for what they had nothing to do with.

Yet in a public address, Macron said “Islamists cannot be allowed to sleep peacefully in our country.”

What type society condemns an entire segment of its population for a crime of one individual against another.

Since no one has been tried and convicted, it’s a travesty of justice to automatically consider a suspect for the killing guilty as charged.

That’s for a fair judicial process to decide, according to the rule of law.

It’s highly unlikely to turn out this way because of inflammatory rhetoric by Macron and other French officials.

By ordering retaliation against French Muslims, Macron and other high level officials are in flagrant violation of UN Charter principles and other international law.

According to UN founding principles — applicable to all member states:

“The rule of law is a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards.”

“It requires measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of the law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness, and procedural and legal transparency.”

“The rule of law is fundamental to international peace…security…stability, (and the) fundamental” rights of all people everywhere.

In cahoots with the US, UK, other Western states, Israel, and their imperial partners, France long ago abandoned governance of, by and for all its people equitably, along with rule of law at home and abroad it ignores.

On Tuesday, Macron’s interior minister Gerald Darmanin defied reality, claiming:

The threat of Islamic terrorism in France is “very high (sic).”

Ordering a crackdown on what he called “rampant Islamism which is arming people ideologically,” he called for combatting an invented internal enemy of the state.

In response to hostile anti-Muslim rhetoric by Macron and others in his government, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani slammed French disrespect to the Prophet of Islam, adding:

“Insulting the Prophet is a violation of ethics and an insult to all Muslims, Prophets of God, and human values.”

Most of what Western officials call radical Islam was made in the West, notably by the US, earlier by the UK, part of their imperial projects.

It was used against Russia during and after the Cold War, along with seeking regime change in Syria, Libya, and other predominantly Muslim countries, including Afghanistan against Soviet Russia’s occupation and post-9/11.

In 1999, the year he succeeded Boris Yeltsin as Russian President, Vladimir Putin said the following:

“We are up against a very serious enemy, one that is in fact armed and trained abroad.”

“What’s actually happening is that the extremist part of the Islamic world – and only the extremist part, let me emphasize that has a solid infrastructure in the West, in North America and in Western Europe.”

Stressing the folly of surrendering part of Russian territory they seek, he added:

(W)e can give them the territory, but then we have to be prepared for the fact they’re not going to leave it at that.”

“They will go on to create an extremist Islamic State.”

Post-9/11, it became a US creation, largely eliminated in Syria after infesting the country and seizing large parts of its territory earlier, other US-supported jihadists doing the same thing.

Russian Defense Minister Shoigu believes ISIS is largely neutralized in Syria.

Yet pockets of its US-supported elements still operate in the country and elsewhere.

US-backed jihadists show up wherever the Pentagon and CIA want them deployed.

Adherents to core Islamic principles threaten no one, only radicalized elements that exist in various forms of all faiths in parts of the world.

A Final Comment

In discussing an East/West dichotomy years earlier, Edward Said explained the Western notion that might makes right.

Notably in the Middle East, Islam mischaracterizations are rife. It’s diverse, not monolithic.

It’s not inherently violent or intolerant.

While Western societies preach democratic values they abhor and don’t tolerate anywhere, they accuse Islam of fostering terrorism.

So it’s up to the West to modernize, restrain and tame it, their leaders claim.

It’s a pretext for endless wars to transform independent nations into pro-Western vassal states, their resources plundered, their people exploited.

That’s what the scourge of US-led imperialism is all about.

It’s the real threat to humanity, not Islam, a religion fostering peace, stability, charity, and respect for people of all faiths.

What Western establishment media should explain, they systematically suppress, supporting what demands denunciation.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

After a month of war, the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc continues to keep the initiative in the conflict, exploiting its advantage in air power, artillery, military equipment and manpower. The coming days are likely to show whether Ankara and Baku are able to deliver a devastating blow to Armenian forces in Karabakh in the nearest future or not. If Armenian forces repel the attack on Lachin, a vital supply route from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, they will win the opportunity to survive till the moment when the ‘international community’ finally takes some real steps to pressure Turkey and Azerbaijan enough to force them to stop the ongoing advance. If this does not happen, the outcome of the war seems to be predetermined.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani forces continue their advance in the region amid the failed US-sponsored ceasefire regime. Their main goal is Lachin. In fact, they have been already shelling the supply route with rocket launchers and artillery. The distance of 12-14km at which they were located a few days ago already allowed this. Now, reports appear that various Azerbaijani units are at a distance of about 5-8 km from the corridor. Armenian forces are trying to push Azerbaijani troops back, but with little success so far.

The advance is accompanied by numerous Azerbaijan claims that Armenian forces are regularly shelling civilian targets and that the ongoing advance is the way to deter them. Baku reported on the evening of October 27 that at least four civilians had been killed and 10 wounded in Armenian strikes on Goranboy, Tartar and Barda. On the morning of October 28, the Armenians allegedly shelled civilian targets in Tovuz, Gadabay, Dashkesan, and Gubadl.

On the morning of October 28, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry claimed that in response to these Armenian violations its forces had eliminated a large number of enemy forces, an “OSA” air-defense system, 3 BM-21 «Grad» rocket launchers, 6 D-30, 5 D-20, and 1 D-44 howitzers, 2 2A36 «Giatsint-B» artillery guns, a 120 mm mortar, a “Konkurs” anti-tank missile and 6 auto vehicles.

On October 27, Azerbaijani sources also released a video allegedly showing the assassination of Lieutenant General Jalal Harutyunyan by a drone strike. Azerbaijani sources claim that he was killed. These reports were denied by the Armenian side, which insisted that the prominent commander was only injured. Nonetheless, the Karabakh leadership appointed Mikael Arzumanyan as the new defense minister of the self-proclaimed republic.

On the evening of October 27 , the Armenian Defense Ministry released a map showing their version of the situation in the contested region. Even according to this map, Armenian forces have lost almost the entire south of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijani forces are close to the Lachin corridor. An interesting fact is that the Armenians still claim that the town of Hadrut is in their hands. According to them, small ‘enemy units’ reach the town, take photos and then run away.

Al-Hadath TV also released a video showing Turkish-backed Syrian militants captured during the clashes. Now, there is not only visual evidence confirming the presence of members of Turkish-backed militant groups in the conflict zone, but also actual Syrian militants in the hands of Armenian forces.

Experts who monitor the internal political situation in Armenia say that in recent days the Soros-grown team of Pashinyan has changed its rhetoric towards a pro-Russian agenda. Many prominent members of the current Pashinyan government and the Prime Minister himself spent the last 10 years pushing a pro-Western agenda. After seizing power as a result of the coup in 2018, they then put much effort into damaging relations with Russia and turned Armenia into a de-facto anti-Russian state. This undermined Armenian regional security and created the conditions needed for an Azerbaijani-Turkish advance in Karabakh. Now, the Pashinyan government tries to rescue itself by employing some ‘pro-Russian rhetoric’. It even reportedly asked second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan to participate in negotiations with Russia as a member of the Armenian delegation. It should be noted that the persecution of Kocharyan that led to his arrest in June 2019 was among the first steps taken by Pashinyan after he seized power. Kocharyan was only released from prison in late June 2020. Despite these moves in the face of a full military defeat in Karabakh, the core ideology of the Pashinyan government remains the same (anti-Russian, pro-Western and NATO-oriented). Therefore, even if Moscow rescues Armenia in Karabkah, the current Armenian leadership will continue supporting the same anti-Russian policy.

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“Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist- nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair” (William Blum(1)).

William Blum was an employee of the US state department who became aware of the scale of US crimes abroad and decided to document them. His book, Rogue State, is one of the best beginner’s guides to understanding what really goes on in the world. The following list is an updated version of his analysis of the US government’s most serious crimes.   

US Military and CIA Interventions since World War 2

• China 1945–51
• Korea 1945–53
• The Phillippines 1945–53; 1970s -90s
• Marshall Islands 1946–58
• France 1947 Italy 1947–70s
• Greece 1947–49; 1967–74
• Albania 1949–53; 1991–92
• Eastern Europe 1948–56
• Soviet Union Late 1940s – 60s
• Germany 1950s Iran 1953
• British Guyana 1953–64 Guatemala 1953–90s
• Costa Rica Mid 1950s; 1970–71
• Syria 1956–57; 2011 — present
• Middle East 1956–58
• Indonesia 1957–58; 1965
• East Timor 1975–99
• Western Europe 1950s and 1960s
• Italy 1950s — 70s
• Vietnam 1950–73
• Cambodia 1955–73
• Laos 1957–73
• Iraq 1958–63; 1972–75; 1991 — present
• Cuba 1959 — present
• Haiti 1959; 1987–2004
• France/Algeria 1960s
• South Africa 1960’s — 80s
• Diego Garcia 1960s — present
• Ecuador 1960–63; 2000
• Congo/Zaire1960–65; 77–78
• Brazil 1961–64
• Peru 1965
• Dominican Republic 1963–65
• Chile 1964–73
• Bolivia 1964–75
• Thailand 1965–73
• Ghana 1966
• Uruguay 1969–72
• Panama 1969–91
• Australia 1972–75
• Portugal 1974–76
• Angola 1975-80s
• Jamaica 1976
• Seychelles 1979–81
• Grenada 1979–83
• Yemen 1979–84; 2015 — present
• Nicaragua 1979–90
• Afghanistan 1979–92; 2001 — present
• South Korea 1980
• Honduras 1980s; 2009
• El Salvador 1980–92
• Chad 1981–82
• Libya 1981–89; 2011 — present
• Suriname 1982-84
• Morocco 1983
• Fiji 1987
• Bulgaria 1990–91
• Columbia 1990s — present
• Somalia 1993
• Yugoslavia 1991–99
• Venezuela 2001–04

Adapted From: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide To The World’s Only Superpower

These are just the most thoroughly documented examples. Many records remain classified so this list is incomplete. More recent analysis adds 5 more countries (Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan) where US soldiers have invaded, occupied or bombed in the Middle East alone.(2)

Blum goes on to list US activities as follows:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy of the past century, this is what crawls out…invasions, bombings, overthrowing governments, assassinating political leaders, death squads, torture, biological warfare, drug trafficking, mercenaries, suppressing movements for social change, perverting elections, manipulating labour unions, manufacturing “news”, depleted uranium…” – (William Blum, Introduction to www.killinghope.org)

Two of the wars mentioned above are worth highlighting because of their scale. In the war against Korea from 1945-1953, the US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea, destroying everything of significance, and slaughtering millions of people. In their war with the three neighbouring countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1950 – 1973, the US dropped over 7 million tons of bombs, approximately 3 times as much as were dropped by all sides during WW2(3), and again slaughtered millions of people. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became notorious for ordering “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia…everything that flies on anything that moves,”(4) meaning that all men, women and children were acceptable targets. This is an example of the US actually ordering genocide. The total number of deaths from all of the US’s interventions throughout the world during the last seventy-five years is estimated to be at least thirteen million(5). This has been termed the US holocaust. One would expect that slaughter on this scale would be discussed regularly by the mainstream media, and would be taught to schoolchildren, but in Britain and the US these crimes are almost never mentioned. 

Many of these interventions have been analysed in detail, and some clear patterns have emerged. An excuse is created to justify the intervention. The media consistently present the government’s case without adequate scrutiny, even though supporting evidence is   poor. Years after the events took place, classified documents become available or former government insiders come forward to explain what the true intentions were. In each case, the original justification for the war turns out to be untrue or exaggerated. The real reason is always US imperialism. (This will be discussed in more detail in later posts). US intervention almost always has terrible consequences for the targeted country. There is not a single example of the US or British governments carrying out these activities for humanitarian reasons. None of the wars can be described as ‘last resort’ – there were always non-violent courses of action that could have been pursued:

“War is never the only choice, and always the worst one”(6)

The US now has over 800 military bases around the world outside the USA, and covert (secret) operations in many areas of the world(7). These military activities are an attempt to gain what it calls Full Spectrum Dominance. This refers to control of land, sea, air, space and cyberspace.

The British Government Is Just As Criminal (but with a smaller army) 

The British government has followed similar policies using their military and their intelligence agency, MI6. Britain had a vast empire before 1945, but they were unable to maintain that empire after World War 2, so former colonies gained their independence. British leaders did not give up control graciously. They were worried that the new rulers might choose policies that would stop British corporations from exploiting each country, so British soldiers were sent to ensure that future rulers were acceptable to British decision-makers. Britain’s main goal in their brutal war in Malaya (1948-60) was to make sure that British tin and rubber corporations could continue to plunder the resources there(8). Britain committed atrocities including killing civilians and torture in many countries, such as Aden (South Yemen), Kenya, Palestine, Cyprus, Brunei and Borneo. The leading researcher into British atrocities has written:

“Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945”(9).

In more recent decades, Britain’s actions have mostly been alongside the US. Their combined militaries are the main invaders, occupiers and mass murderers in the world. The US has ensured that torture is widespread. Whenever they turn a country into a war zone or a failed state, they create a zone of lawlessness where brutal, violent rape also becomes widespread, some of it committed by the occupying soldiers(10).

This first post is just a brief summary to give an overview of US and British criminality. Future posts will look in more detail at some of these issues.

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This article was first posted on medium.com/elephantsintheroom-info

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the first in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

Notes

1) William Blum, Rogue State, p.1

Much more detailed information regarding the overthrow of foreign governments can be found in William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA interventions since World War II. 

2) Glenn Greenwald, ‘How Many Muslim Countries has the U.S. Bombed Or Occupied Since 1980?’, 6 Nov 2014, at

https://theintercept.com/2014/11/06/many-countries-islamic-world-u-s-bombed-occupied-since-1980/

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombs_in_the_Vietnam_War

4) John PIlger, ‘From Pol Pot to ISIS: Anything that flies on everything that moves’, 8 Oct 2014, at

http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-everything-that-moves

5) Galtung, J. ‘Learning from Gandhi: Towards a nonviolent world order’, March 22, 2007, Death toll 13-17 million from non-secret operations

http://www.oldsite.transnational.org/Resources_Nonviolence/2007/Galtung_Satyagraha.html

6) David Swanson (2011) War is a Lie, p.106

7) ‘US Defense Department Base Structure Report 2018’, at  

https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Downloads/BSI/Base%20Structure%20Report%20FY18.pdf

8) Mark Curtis, ‘The War in Malaya, 1948-60’, 13 Feb 2007, at

http://markcurtis.info/2007/02/13/the-war-in-malaya-1948-60/

9) Mark Curtis, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, 2004, p.2, pp.310-317

10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

Featured image: Protest against U.S. intervention on Venezuela, in front of the White House, Washington DC. Credit: https://elvertbarnes.com/16March2019

The beheading of a teacher in France elicited inflammatory remarks from President Emmanuel Macron, which in turn has been met with an Arab boycott of French goods and outrage by the Muslim world.

Macron is accusing Muslims of separatism and is introducing a new bill to crack-down on this sin against French values.

Arab boycott of French products

Hashtags in English and French, such as #boycottfrenchproducts, as well as in Arabic are trending on Twitter and other social media following a call to boycott French products across the Muslim world, in response to an “anti-Islam” attitude displayed following the murder of a French teacher.

In Qatar, major supermarket chains started removing French products from their shelves, while the Al Meera company said in a press release October 23, “We affirm, as a national company, that we operate with a vision that is consistent with our religion, established customs and traditions, and in a way that serves our country and our faith and meets the aspirations of our customers.”

Kuwait, Oman, and Morocco are also participating in the boycott of French products.  The oil-rich Arab Gulf countries are an important market for French agriculture, food, beauty, and luxury items.

Qatar University decided to postpone the French Cultural Week in protest of the anti-Islam insults, as their way of participation in the boycott. “Any denigration or violation of the Islamic beliefs, sanctities, and symbols are absolutely rejected,” the university said in a statement. “These insults harm the universal human values and the high ethical principles of all societies,” it added on Twitter.

Mohammad al-Motairi, the head of the Federation of Kuwaiti Travel Agencies, announced 430 travelagencies in Kuwait have also suspended bookings for flights to France.

Charlie Hebdo attacks 2015

Image on the right is from Wikimedia Commons

In 2006, a Danish newspaper published demeaning caricatures of the Islamic prophet Muhammed. This caused a violent reaction across the Muslim world. There is a tradition that holds any image of the prophet as unacceptable, and demeaning to Islam, which is one of the three Abrahamic religions, along with Judaism and Christianity.

Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing French magazine, re-published the anti-Islamic caricatures, which have drawn widespread anger and outrage, and in January 2015, 12 people were killed in and around the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, by terrorists Saïd and Chérif Kouachi.  The next day, gunman Amédy Coulibaly killed a policewoman and killed four persons at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. The Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were killed in separate shootouts with police, and the trial of 14 people suspected of being linked to the January 2015 terror attacks is currently being held in a Paris court and is due to continue until November.

Paris has been on high alert since two journalists from a film production company were stabbed outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo about three weeks ago.

Teacher beheaded

Samuel Paty was beheaded on October 16 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in the Yvelines, a suburb north-west of central Paris. The 47-year-old history-geography professor was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen who had contact with a jihadist in Syria.

France participated in the US-NATO regime change project in Syria and was well aware of the French terrorists in Syria, who were following Radical Islam. Hundreds of French citizens traveled by way of Turkey and entered Syria illegally to rape, maim and murder unarmed Syrian citizens, the majority of which were Muslims.

During a course in “moral and civil education” professor Paty showed pupils, aged 12 to 14, the caricatures that had appeared in Charlie Hebdo in 2012. The lesson was to demonstrate the right of “freedom of speech”; however, the caricature was of a male adult, naked, kneeling, and with his genitals fully exposed.  His lesson to the youngsters was met with complaints from several parents, and a formal legal complaint was lodged against Samuel Paty for “dissemination of pornographic images” to children.

The police chased the killer, but he was shot dead after refusing to surrender and threatening the police. The killer had been unknown to the French intelligence community. Four people, including a minor, are reported to have been arrested since the murder.

Macron’s inflammatory statements

French President Emmanuel Macron visited the murder site and said the victim had been “assassinated” and that his killer sought to “attack the republic and its values”. “This is our battle and it is existential. They [terrorists] will not succeed … They will not divide us.”

Macron’s comments were widely condemned over their timing and divisive message. “One of our compatriots was assassinated today because he taught. He taught his students about freedom of expression, freedom to believe, or not believe. It was a cowardly attack. He was the victim of a terrorist Islamist attack,” Macron said.

On October 21, Macron announced in a press statement that France will not ban the caricatures insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islam.

“Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country,” the French president said in a speech introducing a new bill to strengthen France’s state ideology of militant secularism, known as Laicite.

In Morocco, Rabat municipality Consultant Hisham El-Harch said, “The cartoons published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo targeting the Messenger of Allah are displayed on the walls of some hotels in Toulouse and Montpellier in France after the French president announced that he would not ban these abusive publications.” French activists volunteered to hang the offensive caricatures on walls in public spaces, such as hotels, in tribute to the slain French teacher.

France is struggling to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, while in recent days, raids are targeting Islamic civil society organizations in France.

The new French law drafted

Macron said the government would present a bill on December 9 to the Council of Ministers, which seeks to strengthen a 1905 law that officially separated church and state in France, and cracks down on separatism, in a pointed reference to Macron’s accusations against Muslims.

He also announced stricter oversight of schooling and better control over foreign funding of mosques.

Critics of the bill, particularly those among France’s six million Muslim community, fear the deepening anti-Muslim sentiment in France will be further inflamed.

The French Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, announced arrests, closures of places of worship, and bans of associations including the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and the humanitarian association Baraka City.

Macron is facing a tough bid for re-election in 2022, against stiff opposition from the far-right National Rally party, who have complained that the bill does not go far enough. Political experts have asked if the new bill is politically motivated, and tries to portray Macron in a tough anti-Islam light, to win voters closer to his opposition.

Muslim reactions

Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Morocco, and Kuwait denounced the publication of the Prophet’s caricatures. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation, referring to Macron, said “the words of certain French officials (…) likely to harm Franco-Muslim relations”.

Image below is from Wikimedia Commons

Nobel Peace Laureate, Tawakkol Karman said on Twitter,

“Macron’s attack on Islam reveals intolerance and hatred which is shameful for the head of a state like France.” She added that it is not up to Macron to reform Islam, and “Muslims alone are concerned with that, and they will do that.”

Karman urged Macron to speak about Islam with respect and acceptance, instead of accusations against his citizens who follow the faith. “Macron has delivered his irresponsible inflammatory speech against Muslims and their religion to satisfy a group of fanatics so that they will vote for him,” she added.

Erdogan suggests Macron may be mentally ill

“What can we say of a head of state who behaves like this to millions of members of a different faith in his country,” said Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He added, “First of all, [Macron needs] mental checks.”

Hours after Erdogan’s remarks, France recalled its ambassador to Turkey after the Elysee denounced the “unacceptable” remarks.

Erdogan warned of Europe’s self-destructive Islamophobia, adding that European fascism had entered a new phase with attacks on the rights of Muslims, referring to a recent police raid on a mosque in Berlin.

“Europe is preparing its own end with its front against Muslims,” Erdogan said while addressing a meeting of his governing Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Kayseri.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from MD

Day 240 of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US; anxious New Yorkers are again invited to hear about changing conditions in their state and what the governor’s doing to protect them. Monday’s press briefing must be his 150^th review of the stubborn unsettling disease.

Cuomo’s updates are a cleverly woven tapestry: political analysis, admonishments, comprehensive statistical reports, warnings, evasions of reporters’ questions, and affirmations of his administration’s successes are touched up with a personal anecdote and an attempt at humor. These briefings deserve attention not because they’re contrived to pave his way to any future bid for the White House, but as an effective and (on the whole) exemplary management of the terrifying and still uncontrollable pandemic.

Cuomo’s homilies these past months are worth some critical attention from scholars of rhetoric. These discourses are also valuable in how they contrast with statements by other politicians, incumbents and challengers in the coming election, that saturate our media.

Like Cuomo’s press conferences during the scary, hard months of spring and summer, Monday’s briefing was, admittedly, a kind of speech— a combination of legal acumen, moral appeal, politics and emotion. By and large it works. I think that’s because like most Americans, I’ve been stressed and confused by this raging disease charging among us along an unknown path, and we are all in search for some calming, practical guidance.

I began listening to the governor’s daily reports in March. I asked neighbors for their opinions of Cuomo’s efforts. Whatever their political persuasion, most shared my positive feelings.

Before you admonish us for being uncritical and ignorant of Cuomo’s history, I admit that I agree with the widespread view that he’s shrewd; he evades responsibility for mistakes made and these frequent public appearances may be opportunistic on his part.

That said, I still tuned in to Cuomo’s recent briefing. Besides feeling better informed by this decision, I’m somewhat assured that New Yorkers at least have a chance of negotiating this disease. (Where else can we find hope?) I also grasp and appreciate the pattern of Cuomo’s discourse. It’s in striking contrast to anything proffered by the staggering quantification of the disease’s history in country-by-country comparisons, in daily medical speculations and policy debates or journalists’ analyses. Yes, Cuomo’s briefings are political; yes, he’s showing off; yes, he’s somewhat arrogant; and yes, this could be planned with his eye on a future White House bid.

But you have to give it to him; he has management skills beyond his media appeal, beyond the abilities of Biden or Pelosi, Sanders or Harris to expose the current administration’s incompetence. Cuomo also displays a convincing compassion for our woes; he seems to possess an ability unmatched by others to calm a stressed-out, anchorless American public.

Isn’t it worth trying to understand how he does this?

Cuomo seems to have developed a formula: he mixes a little humor with some outrage; he praises our struggling, essential workers while remembering everyone’s suffering; he analyzes and explains the fundamentals of pandemic management (e.g. his opening-and-closing-the-valve analogy); he presents us with skillfully arrayed, digestible scientific facts.

He regularly appeals to our patriotism and our intelligence—“Don’t underestimate the American people”, he repeats, even declaring America is the greatest country, (with New Yorkers the smartest of all!), and ends by running the gambit of strident questions from reporters. It’s brilliant, you have to admit.

By now you’re ready to chastise my editor for allowing a writer to praise any American politician.

Hold on; these commendations do not exclude my recognition of Cuomo’s misdemeanors and crimes. There’s plenty of muck to throw at the governor—e.g. the dreadful mishandling of nursing home placements in the early days of Covid-19’s crisis. Look how he evades Trevor Noah’s persistent charges— an artful lawyer through and through.

If we can put aside Cuomo’s serious mistakes and political ambitions, allow me to proceed with his general Covid management strategy, and to analyze his formulaic approach to dealing with a stressed, jittery population that includes the nation’s financial center and nine million people residing in our largest city– an unparalleled virus hotspot with over 700 deaths daily– confined to their apartments, with businesses shuttered, medical prognosis unknown, inadequate hospital beds, and tepid federal help.

Mercifully, New York was able to contain the threat. Day by day, it flattened the curve, remarkable by any standard, with the governor’s office temporarily healing its rift with New York City’s mayor.

Today we’re again facing rising infections and continued economic uncertainty; the entire population still needs assurance and guidance, something we used to call ‘leadership’. To whom can we look?

Take Monday’s press briefing as an example of a well-orchestrated address to a nervous public: Cuomo began with a bold yet measured attack on the White House’s announcement that it has no policy to control the pandemic; it would await the vaccine and its associated therapeutics. Cuomo’s response was unrestrained: the federal government’s policy is preemptive capitulation, totally irresponsible. Instead of reviewing the president’s shortcomings, diversions and false claims, Cuomo directs his critique to New York’s past success and how he proposes to move ahead: “Why (did it work)? God didn’t intervene. We controlled the spread. Ask yourself? How did NY reduce the infection rate, if you (Washington) say we can’t control? We did it. You can’t eliminate it, but you can control it”. He then reminds us of his can-do-it alternatives: the valve management system already in place and the new microcluster control he’s introduced. Surely this practical, non-political we-can-do attitude is what we desperately need. (Remember Obama’s winning Yes, we can?)

Cuomo never forgets to affirm how great America is and how New York is first within America. He boasts, not unreasonably, how his state did it; “We flattened the curve. We went to the top of the mountain and down again”, all the time praising the critical agents—the people. “We could not impose rules of mask-wearing, social-distancing, quarantining. You did it. You were disciplined, smart, and you cared for others as well as yourself”.

His boasts are reinforced with an appeal to New Yorkers’ smartness, toughness, and compassion for one another– on the edge only a few months back, in the belly of the beast, with the highest rate of infection, hospitalization and death in the country (if not globally). Cuomo’s chauvinistic New Yorker attitude goes unquestioned–because it works. He knows that like himself, New Yorkers are somewhat arrogant, a little overconfident, and the smartest of the smart (sic).

He tactfully follows his affirmation of the US as the greatest country in the world, asking: “How could this happen to us; our infections are increasing at higher rate than countries like Mexico, Mexico, with 44 per million infections in the past week; Canada with 68, Japan with 4, compared to our 208?”

A little bit of patriotism with some shame can be effective, especially when augmented by comprehensible, convincing empirical facts. This shared pride furtively combined with empiricism probably accounts in part for Cuomo’s policy successes. He ends every briefing, before talking questions from reporters, on his characteristically high “New York is loving, NY is caring, NY is smart, NY is strong, NY is united”.

Don’t knock someone who moves a stressed, fearful people to believe a little more in themselves at a highly tenuous period in US history.

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B. Nimri Aziz is an anthropologist and journalist who’s worked in Nepal since 1970, and published widely on peoples of the Himalayas. A new book on Nepali rebel women is forthcoming. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is a screenshot from a CNBC video

Less than a year after the United States and the U.S.-backed Organization of American States (OAS) supported a violent military coup to overthrow the government of Bolivia, the Bolivian people have reelected the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and restored it to power. 

In the long history of U.S.-backed “regime changes” in countries around the world, rarely have a people and a country so firmly and democratically repudiated U.S. efforts to dictate how they will be governed. Post-coup interim president Jeanine Añez has reportedly requested 350 U.S. visas for herself and others who may face prosecution in Bolivia for their roles in the coup.

The narrative of a rigged election in 2019 that the U.S. and the OAS peddled to support the coup in Bolivia has been thoroughly debunked. MAS’s support is mainly from indigenous Bolivians in the countryside, so it takes longer for their ballots to be collected and counted than those of the better-off city dwellers who support MAS’s right-wing, neoliberal opponents. 

As the votes come in from rural areas, there is a swing to MAS in the vote count. By pretending that this predictable and normal pattern in Bolivia’s election results was evidence of election fraud in 2019, the OAS bears responsibility for unleashing a wave of violence against indigenous MAS supporters that, in the end, has only delegitimized the OAS itself.

It is instructive that the failed U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia has led to a more democratic outcome than U.S. regime change operations that succeeded in removing a government from power. Domestic debates over U.S. foreign policy routinely presume that the U.S. has the right, or even an obligation, to deploy an arsenal of military, economic and political weapons to force political change in countries that resist its imperial dictates. 

In practice, this means either full-scale war (as in Iraq and Afghanistan), a coup d’etat (as in Haiti in 2004, Honduras in 2009 and Ukraine in 2014), covert and proxy wars (as in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen) or punitive economic sanctions (as against Cuba, Iran and Venezuela) – all of which violate the sovereignty of the targeted countries and are therefore illegal under international law.

No matter which instrument of regime change the U.S. has deployed, these U.S. interventions have not made life better for the people of any of those countries, nor countless others in the past. William Blum’s brilliant 1995 book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, catalogues 55 U.S. regime change operations in 50 years between 1945 and 1995. As Blum’s detailed accounts make clear, most of these operations involved U.S. efforts to remove popularly elected governments from power, as in Bolivia, and often replaced them with U.S.-backed dictatorships: like the Shah of Iran; Mobutu in the Congo; Suharto in Indonesia; and General Pinochet in Chile. 

Even when the targeted government is a violent, repressive one, U.S. intervention usually leads to even greater violence. Nineteen years after removing the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the United States has dropped 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghan fighters and civilians, conducted tens of thousands of “kill or capture” night raids, and the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans. 

In December 2019, the Washington Post published a trove of Pentagon documents revealing that none of this violence is based on a real strategy to bring peace or stability to Afghanistan – it’s all just a brutal kind of “muddling along,” as U.S. General McChrystal put it. Now the U.S.-backed Afghan government is finally in peace talks with the Taliban on a political power-sharing plan to bring an end to this “endless” war, because only a political solution can provide Afghanistan and its people with the viable, peaceful future that decades of war have denied them.

In Libya, it has been nine years since the U.S. and its NATO and Arab monarchist allies launched a proxy war backed by a covert invasion and NATO bombing campaign that led to the horrific sodomy and assassination of Libya’s long time anti-colonial leader, Muammar Gaddafi. That plunged Libya into chaos and civil war between the various proxy forces that the U.S. and its allies armed, trained and worked with to overthrow Gaddafi. 

A parliamentary inquiry in the U.K. found that, “a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change by military means,” which led to “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil [Islamic State] in north Africa.” 

The various Libyan warring factions are now engaged in peace talks aimed at a permanent ceasefire and, according to the UN envoy “holding national elections in the shortest possible timeframe to restore Libya’s sovereignty”—the very sovereignty that the NATO intervention destroyed.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser Matthew Duss has called for the next U.S. administration to conduct a comprehensive review of the post-9/11 “War on Terror,” so that we can finally turn the page on this bloody chapter in our history. 

Duss wants an independent commission to judge these two decades of war based on “the standards of international humanitarian law that the United States helped to establish after World War II,” which are spelled out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. He hopes that this review will “stimulate vigorous public debate about the conditions and legal authorities under which the United States uses military violence.”

Such a review is overdue and badly needed, but it must confront the reality that, from its very beginning, the “War on Terror” was designed to provide cover for a massive escalation of U.S. “regime change” operations against a diverse range of countries, most of which were governed by secular governments that had nothing to do with the rise of Al Qaeda or the crimes of September 11th. 

Notes taken by senior policy official Stephen Cambone from a meeting in the still damaged and smoking Pentagon on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 summarized Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s orders to get “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time – not only UBL [Osama Bin Laden]… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

At the cost of horrific military violence and mass casualties, the resulting global reign of terror has installed quasi-governments in countries around the world that have proved more corrupt, less legitimate and less able to protect their territory and their people than the governments that U.S. actions removed. Instead of consolidating and expanding U.S. imperial power as intended, these illegal and destructive uses of military, diplomatic and financial coercion have had the opposite effect, leaving the U.S. ever more isolated and impotent in an evolving multipolar world.

Today, the U.S., China and the European Union are roughly equal in the size of their economies and international trade, but even their combined activity accounts for less than half of global economic activity and external trade. No single imperial power economically dominates today’s world as overconfident American leaders hoped to do at the end of the Cold War, nor is it divided by a binary struggle between rival empires as during the Cold War. This is the multipolar world we are already living in, not one that may emerge at some point in the future. 

This multipolar world has been moving forward, forging new agreements on our most critical common problems, from nuclear and conventional weapons to the climate crisis to the rights of women and children. The United States’ systematic violations of international law and rejection of multilateral treaties have made it an outlier and a problem, certainly not a leader, as American politicians claim.

Joe Biden talks about restoring American international leadership if he is elected, but that will be easier said than done. The American empire rose to international leadership by harnessing its economic and military power to a rules-based international order in the first half of the 20th century, culminating in the post-World War II rules of international law. But the United States has gradually deteriorated through the Cold War and post-Cold War triumphalism to a flailing, decadent empire that now threatens the world with a doctrine of “might makes right” and “my way or the highway.” 

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, much of the world still saw Bush, Cheney and the “War on Terror” as exceptional, rather than a new normal in American policy. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches and the world’s desperate hopes for a “peace president.” But eight years of Obama, Biden, Terror Tuesdays and Kill Lists followed by four years of Trump, Pence, children in cages and the New Cold War with China have confirmed the world’s worst fears that the dark side of American imperialism seen under Bush and Cheney was no aberration. 

Amid America’s botched regime changes and lost wars, the most concrete evidence of its seemingly unshakeable commitment to aggression and militarism is that the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex is still outspending the ten next largest military powers in the world combined, clearly out of all proportion to America’s legitimate defense needs. 

So the concrete things we must do if we want peace are to stop bombing and sanctioning our neighbors and trying to overthrow their governments; to withdraw most American troops and close military bases around the world; and to reduce our armed forces and our military budget to what we really need to defend our country, not to wage illegal wars of aggression half-way round the world.

For the sake of people around the world who are building mass movements to overthrow repressive regimes and struggling to construct new models of governing that are not replications of failed neoliberal regimes, we must stop our government–no matter who is in the White House–from trying to impose its will. 

Bolivia’s triumph over U.S.-backed regime change is an affirmation of the emerging people-power of our new multipolar world, and the struggle to move the U.S. to a post-imperial future is in the interest of the American people as well. As the late Venezuela leader Hugo Chavez once told a visiting U.S. delegation, “If we work together with oppressed people inside the United States to overcome the empire, we will not only be liberating ourselves, but also the people of Martin Luther King.”

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection and Inside Iran: the Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

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

Featured image: Bolivian President-elect Luis Arce (centre) shortly after the announcement of the election results, October 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of Luis Arce/Twitter.

Abstract

With the explosion of digital media and technologies, scholars, educators and the public have become increasingly vocal about the role that an ‘attention economy’ has in our lives[1].

The rise of the current digital culture coincides with longstanding scientific questions about why humans sometimes remember and sometimes forget, and why some individuals remember better than others[2–6].

Here we examine whether spontaneous attention lapses—in the moment[7–12], across individuals[13–15] and as a function of everyday media multitasking[16–19]—negatively correlate with remembering. Electroencephalography and pupillometry measures of attention[20,21] were recorded as eighty young adults (mean age, 21.7 years) performed a goal-directed episodic encoding and retrieval task[22]. Trait-level sustained attention was further quantified using task-based[23] and questionnaire measures[24,25].

Using trial-to-trial retrieval data, we show that tonic lapses in attention in the moment before remembering, assayed by posterior alpha power and pupil diameter, were correlated with reductions in neural signals of goal coding and memory, along with behavioural forgetting. Independent measures of trait-level attention lapsing mediated the relationship between neural assays of lapsing and memory performance, and between media multitasking and memory. Attention lapses partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, and why some individuals remember better than others. Heavier media multitasking is associated with a propensity to have attention lapses and forget.

Click here to read full report.

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On St. Francis Day, the Minister of Defense Lorenzo Guerini (Democratic Party) sent the Frecce Tricolori fighters to fly over the Basilica of Assisi. “It is the strongest homage that our Italy has been able to pay to the Poverello (the little poor fellow),  whom thousands of people turn to, while the pandemic aggravates poverty,” the Franciscan magazine wrote. 

It is a questionable gift: an hour  flight of the nine Frecce Tricolori fighters’ costs over 40,000 euros in public money, an amount  with which 27 average net monthly salaries could be paid. 

Next year the new and more powerful advanced training fighter T-345A, produced by Leonardo,  that the Italian Air Force, buying in the number of 23 units,  at a cost of nearly 380 million euros, will be flying. They will ensure better “training effectiveness” by preparing pilots for the use of F-35s and other warplanes. 

“Our thanks go to the Generals and Minister of Defense Lorenzo Guerini,” wrote the Franciscans after the Frecce Tricolori aircrafts’ flyover. “Tonight, we will all go to sleep hoping for a better day.”

These are soothing words, pronounced while other Italian fighters like Ghedi’s Tornado PA-200s,  are about to be replaced by F-35As, and were already in Germany to participate in Steadfast Noon, NATO’s annual nuclear war exercise under US command. 

Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands participated with their own air forces and kept the US B-61 nuclear bombs ready for use on their territory, soon to be replaced by the more deadly B61-12 . 

In this way, having reached 50 ratifications on October 24 2020, they violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reject the UN Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons which will enter into force within 90 days. However,  nine countries with nuclear weapons and  thirty  NATO partners did not join. 

In Europe, the UN Treaty has only been ratified by Austria, Ireland, Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, and the Holy See. In order to achieve the vital objective of the Treaty, a vast mobilization of public opinion for nuclear disarmament is indispensable, though currently non-existent since the threat of nuclear war is silenced by the political-media apparatuses, today even more than before since they speak only of a virus threat.

Thus, the increasingly dangerous steps, that Italy is taking in war preparation  and  consequent increase in military spending, are hidden. At the NATO Defense Ministers meeting on October 23, Minister Guerini confirmed Italy’s participation in a new NATO Space Center in Ramstein (Germany) and the necessary strengthening of nuclear forces to “keep our nuclear deterrent safe and efficient,” in front of “the serious challenge of Russia’s growing arsenal of nuclear missiles.” 

Minister Guerini also signed on behalf of Italy with nine other NATO countries, a letter of intent for the construction of a ground-based missile system formally directed to the realization of a defense against short and intermediate-range missiles; while in reality it could be used for the launch of intermediate-range nuclear missiles similar to the US Euromissiles of the 1980s. Finally, Minister Guerini has pledged to further increase Italy’s military spending, from the current 26 to 36 billion euros per year. An additional 35 billion has already been allocated to this objective, especially by the Ministry of Economic Development, plus another 30 billion euros to be drawn from the Recovery Fund. 

“The resources allocated to the defense” – said Minister Guerini – “represent a strategic lever for the country’s economy.” It is, therefore, necessary “to make our fellow citizens better understand that in the Aerospace, Defense and Security industry there is a relevant piece of Italy’s competitiveness, which will be able to guarantee the future of the younger generations.” The future is therefore not so black: to paraphrase the well-known film, as long as there is war there is hope.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

In the same way the CIA invented foreign enemies which required us to go to war, there are people who have invented stories of fearful germs that demand medical treatment and prevention. The story tellers know that among the public, many people WANT the germ, need it, and even love it. Yes, love it, after enough conditioning has helped them along the path of surrender.

The COVID operation aims to engulf all of civilization in a preposterous and fake medical nightmare.

The operation has its roots in “modifying” citizens to accept medical dictates.

There are many kinds of such dictates, and it would take volumes to explore them all. Here I present a set of numbers from the US National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the CDC, covering the year 2018:

• Percent of adults who had contact with a health care professional: 84.3%.
• Percent of children who had contact with a health care professional: 93.6%.
• Number of physician office visits (2016): 883.7 million.

Here is another related estimate: according to the US National Alliance on Mental Illness, in a recent year, “More than 25 percent of college studentshave been diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition…”

Try to grasp how this unprecedented rate of exposure to doctors shapes the minds of Americans. Appointments, tests, diagnoses, advice, orders, prescriptions, drugs and vaccines, follow-ups, referrals to specialists.

These factors alone—never mind the toxic effects of treatments, or wall to wall medical ads and other propaganda—add up to a medical civilization.

Given this reality, how do you think people are going to respond when they are told there is a pandemic and they must follow orders?

After a hundred years of Rockefeller Medicine…new normal? We’ve been living under the new normal for a long time.

How many drug prescriptions do you think are written in the US every year? According to statista.com, “It is estimated that in 2019, 4.38 billion retail prescriptions will be filled throughout the United States.”

Many, many people accept the ubiquitous medical civilization without thought or pause. It’s “just the way things are.”

Pretended pandemics are an arm of medical civilization. But now we’ve reached a point where The Medical is a gateway into a technocratic Brave New World.

This attempted transition is launched from the foundation of lifelong conditioning of the public to doctors and everything those doctors order and represent.

Mind control par excellence.

Two important groups of people—politicians and journalists—are operating from bias in their decisions, because they, too, have been trained to place themselves under the care of doctors on an ongoing basis. Are they going to rip out that hard wiring of their own experience when the rubber meets the road, when they’re faced with professional questions about medical credibility? No. They’re going to side with the CDC and WHO and university experts.

What I’m describing in this article goes beyond the acceptance of “Science” as the dominant paradigm. This conditioning is deeply personal and deeply seated in the minds of people who have been trudging along the bleak path of medical care since early childhood. Medical care for every so-called “symptom.”

I have spent many hours exposing the actual death and maiming effects of medicines on the population. Again, here I’m simply discussing the up-close connection between eternal patient and doctor.

In that sense, telling a dedicated person to take off his mask is telling him to destroy what he believes is a deep lifeline, without which he might very well drown.

Medical civilization’s leaders want us to bow down to the germ. They want us to drool like Pavlov’s dogs, when they ring the bell signaling the presence of a “new virus.” Our anticipated food, in this case, is supposed to be treatment. Treatment and containment measures.

Surely, a Declaration of Medical Independence is needed. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the medical bands which have connected them with some Health Authority…whenever any Form of Medicine becomes destructive…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Medicine, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…”

Under the heading of “such principles,” one statement would make it clear that every person has the natural right to reject false faith in the germ, in its power, and in its very existence.

Let those who fear the germ, or want it, cling to it like an idol, if they must, if they refuse to be dissuaded. The rest of us will go our way, secure in our freedom from the idolatry, knowing that medicalized civilization is a tyrant, built without our consent.

Keeping freedom is now the great challenge.

The global lockdowns, present and future; the business closures; the bankruptcies; the resultant family breakups and suicides and drug addictions; the expansion of poverty, hunger, starvation; the desolation of once-great cities—on what basis has all this destruction been launched?

A story about a virus.

So pardon me if I keep attacking that story. If I keep pointing out gaping holes in that story. My basic position is this: I reject the cultish rhetoric coming out of labs. It is divorced from the world of human beings. It aims to claim ownership over our bodies, minds, and souls. Through one abstraction piled on another, its proponents have staked out a cause that is anti-life. With the data they derive and invent from their serums and sequencing, they set up a prison in which we are supposed to be biological machines that merely react to the stimuli of microbes.

Reject that lunatic non-reality.

The set-up and the con are clear: “We say there is a deadly virus on the loose. We describe it and promote it. We run the game and make the rules. We say you are unprotected unless we protect you with treatment and containment measures. We can quibble about which treatments. We can quibble about how much containment, where and when, and under what circumstances, since we define the circumstances; and we can loosen and tighten the rules at our discretion. But in the end, we are the sellers and you are the buyers. You buy our story. We are a protection racket. You give us your lives or we close you down. And guess what? Either one of those choices produces the same result. Get it?”

So when I hear someone say, in effect, THIS containment measure is necessary and effective, but THAT one is minimally effective, and THIS country did well by adopting a LESS RESTRICTIVE MODEL, and SMART CONTAINMENT WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS, I know that person has bought enough of the story to keep the basic con going; and the elite planners are winning.

The war is long. They must not win.

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power.

Featured image is from SHTFplan.com

In any given news cycle it is sometimes the lesser articles that are more illuminating in terms of where everything in a country as vast as the United States is heading. This is particularly true in terms of what the U.S. has been experiencing in 2020: a pandemic, civil unrest, wars and continued turmoil overseas plus an election that promises to result in one of two radically different visions of what America should be.

Ironically, Joe Biden is being depicted as the establishment candidate but the Democratic Party program is actually far more radical than that of the Republicans. The Democrats are locked into support of policies that are ostensibly meant to address racial disparities and gender related issue but will instead increasingly turn government into an intrusive mechanism for social engineering, abandoning America’s traditional meritocracy while also creating categories that some might describe as fostering reverse racism and sexism. There could be devastating impact on American education, on maintaining law and order, on controlling immigration, on setting hiring quotas and on First and Fourth Amendment rights relating to free speech and association. A glorious multicultural and gender bending future shaped by Democratic Party social justice hacks will be nothing but a disaster for most Americans, effectively disenfranchising many citizens based on the color of their skin or for other attributes yet to be determined.

And the widespread support for Biden by neoconservatives, who would return to power with his administration, would mean that the likes of Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin will be driving a pro-Israel anti-Iran policy that might even outdo what Trump and Mike Pompeo have contrived, which now will include labeling international human rights agencies as anti-Semitic. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be headed by Robert Menendez, corrupt even by congressional standards, who is a totally owned shill for the Israel Lobby. Dan Shapiro, who has apparently become Biden’s leading adviser on the Middle East, is an American Jew now living in Israel and working for an Israeli think tank who should be registered as a Foreign Agent.

The neocons and their media allies are also architects of much of the anti-Russian sentiment in Congress, making the current bad relationship measurably worse. As the Democrats have been blaming practically everything on Russian President Vladimir Putin one cannot expect any serious effort to reset the relationship.

Trump for his part brings with him the negative baggage of his abrasive persona as well as his apparent inability to assimilate and apply simple facts relating to how the nation and the rest of the world work. He has been the aggressor directly against Syria and Iran as well as Venezuela and has been using NATO to threaten Russia. His attitudes towards the environment and climate change are also a disgrace but whatever you think of Trump’s actual performance, the fact is that throughout the campaign and since taking office most of the media and the entire “progressive” left has been labeling him a fascist and a racist. And hanging the racist tail on Trump has continued in the current campaign, to include the lines of questioning in the recent presidential debates and the town hall hosted by Savannah Guthrie.

Trump might make America worse in some ways, but he will not substantially change it as the Democrats almost certainly will do either willfully or by not paying attention to what is developing. Several stories circulating on social media demonstrate just how much “equal justice under law” has been eroded in the minds of some Democratic Party luminaries. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted a demand to create a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” after the expected defeat of Donald Trump. The commission borrows the name and would be modeled on the organization set up in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid government and the establishment of majority black rule, an exercise in attempted democratization that has nevertheless failed to put an end to extremely high levels of corruption and communal violence in the country.

Reich’s objective is not limited to punishing the Trump White House’s top officials who may have promoted policies considered anathema by the incoming Democratic administration. Reich tweeted “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” The Reich proposal would potentially mean punishing thousands of otherwise innocent individuals who had little influence over what happened during the past four years. “Enabled” covers a lot of ground, and is prone to devolve into something like a witch hunt. “McCarthyism” only much worse comes immediately to mind.

Reich followed up on his proposal with a second tweet saying “I love the people responding to this tweet as if it’s a radical, undemocratic idea” and, to be sure, there are a lot of people out there who think like he does. One Reich supporter wrote in defense of the proposal “As long as unresolved historic injustices continue to fester in the world, there will be a demand for truth commissions” and there have been numerous comments on social media sites like Facebook insisting that “something be done” about the “deplorables” who voted for and supported Trump.

Other comments made on Twitter in response to the Reich demand include “It is the right idea and I fully support it. It is not right for people to do so much damage to people and get away Scott free. The GOP is Complicit in Genicide and Senicide. There need to be repercussions.” And “I agree 100%… my fear is Joe Biden is going to come into office and want to heal the nation and work with the GOP and ignore all this… if he does that, I will work to ensure he is a 1 term president too.” And also “But it doesn’t go far enough, clearly. Trump’s assets and those of his voters should be seized by the state through legislation and distributed to those he’s harmed as reparations. Surely that’s the only way to heal our nation. Land of the free!” And finally “Robert… you’re right. And after we win… we’ll come for you all… we’re pretty much over trying to share a country with you anyway. Four years ago I thought you were people with bad ideas. I was wrong: YOU’RE BAD PEOPLE.”

Another good Democrats-are-in-power story comes from Virginia where Governor Ralph Northam is preparing to sign a bill that will prevent policemen from stopping cars with expired registrations or inspection stickers, no headlights, brake lights, or other moving violations relating to safety. The reasoning behind the bill is that black drivers appear to be stopped for such offenses disproportionately. That may be true, but the assumption by Northam and his crew is that blacks are being targeted by police, whereas the actual cause just might be that a disproportionate number of blacks don’t maintain their cars very well. Some black public officials including Arlington’s so-called Public Defender Brad Haywood loves the idea, saying: “This might be the most significant reform of the state’s criminal justice system in decades. This is a big step forward for racial justice in Virginia.”

While some of the offenses might be regarded as relatively painless, allowing cars to drive without brake lights in a state like Virginia where drivers routinely proceed at over 70 miles an hour on highways could prove catastrophic if someone had to stop quickly with the cars behind not knowing it until too late. The safety of all citizens is clearly being sacrificed to render what is perceived as social justice for a minority, but when Democrats are in a full pander mode anything is possible.

And a third and final story, also from Virginia, is about the impending death of the once formidable American public education system. It concerns the destruction of what is regarded as the best high school in the United States because it is not diverse enough. The Fairfax County school board has ruled that the high admission standards at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a prestigious magnet school, are now to be eliminated after approval of a proposal submitted by Superintendent Scott Brabrand. The decision by the board eliminates the test and the $100 application fee, long requirements of the rigorous admissions process at Thomas Jefferson. Brabrand’s proposal also increases the size of the school, known as TJ. The changes have been implemented and this year’s eighth-graders — many of whom have prepared for the test — will not take the multi-part exam covering math, reading and science.

Details of how the new admissions policy will work have not been finalized, but a lottery is being considered. One mother protested that a lottery “trashes the meaning of hard work.” TJ’s student body is currently more than 70 percent Asian and about 20 percent white, with single-digit percentages of black and Hispanic students. The intention is to have the school more closely resemble the demographics of Fairfax County’s schools, which is 10 per cent black, 27 per cent Hispanic and 38 per cent white. It will be accomplished by fiat policies and quotas. Though whites are actually under-represented in the school nothing will be done to increase their presence.

Other select by-examination-only schools in New York City, Boston, Chicago and on the West Coast are similarly being stripped of their exclusivity and will instead be embracing diversity. The San Diego school district is completely eliminating testing grades so more minorities can graduate. And the students will no longer be downgraded for exhibiting behavior problems or truancy.

The Beatles once sang “You say you want a revolution!” It seems that many so-called progressives, minority spokespersons and assorted radicals want one here in America. Truth commissions, laws that only apply based on race and quotas in schools are only the beginning. Joe and Kamala, if they are elected, will no doubt encourage all that and more. As there are many “deplorable” Americans who want to preserve what the United States once was, the Democrats might well regret the path that they have chosen even if they do win the election.

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Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Leaked documents seen by Good Law Project set out special pathways by which “VIP” and “Cabinet Office” contacts could be awarded lucrative PPE contracts at the height of the pandemic – and at inflated prices.

Lord Bethell, a junior Health Minister, promised that “suppliers will be evaluated by Departmental officials on their financial standing.” But questions arose over how enormous contracts came to be awarded to dormant or new entities and those of dubious financial standing including:

• PPE Medpro won two contracts worth over £200m to supply PPE to the NHS. The £100 company, set up by the former business associate of Conservative peer Baroness Mone, won the contract just seven weeks after it was set up.
• SG Recruitment UK Limited, a staffing agency, won two PPE contracts worth over £50m, despite auditors raising concerns about its solvency. Tory Peer Lord Chadlington sits on the Board of its parent company, Sumner Group Holdings Limited.
• P14 Medical Limited, controlled by former Conservative Councillor Steve Dechan, who stood down in August this year, was awarded three contracts worth over £276m despite having negative £485,000 in net assets.

The leaked documents disclose that special procurement channels – outside the normal process – were set up for VIPs.

They also show that Cabinet Office was feeding its contacts into the procurement process, outside the normal public channel.

Good Law Project is also aware that successful contractors – like Ayanda which received a £252m contract for supplying facemasks most of which were unusable – were guided through the process by the Cabinet Office.

The leaked documents also evidence a startling opportunity for price gouging by favoured suppliers.  It is only if prices were more than 25% above the average paid to other suppliers that questions were to be asked about value for money.

Good Law Project understands that most suppliers were operating on 10-20% margin. The leaked documents reveal that Cabinet Office contacts and others were helping ‘VIPs’ sell PPE to Government outside normal procurement channels. The information that Government would buy at 25% above the price paid to ‘regular’ suppliers was a licence to make enormous margins – 35% – 45% – on contracts sometimes worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Although Government has tried to cover up the per unit prices it paid to connected suppliers, we know that Ayanda enjoyed staggering margins above the prices paid to others. So there are certainly questions to be asked about whether other politically connected ‘VIPs’ benefited from lucrative inside information about pricing.

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An outstanding characteristic of the Western human rights industry has long been the way it politicizes its production to serve the foreign policy needs of its countries’ governments. To that end corporate and government investors fund leading industry producers like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House or the International Federation for Human Rights. The formal reports and social media content of these producer organizations downplay abuse and violations by governments supported by NATO and allied country governments. By contrast, these Western NGOS exaggerate or even invent human rights abuses in countries targeted by their countries’ governments.

In Latin America, widespread abuses under right wing regimes in, for example, Colombia, Honduras, Haiti or Brazil get mentioned in low key terms, if at all, while false claims by US funded opposition groups in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are amplified and broadcast with minimal or zero effort at responsible corroboration. Neither the human rights industry itself, nor the communications media and academic industries which are its main consumers, make any serious effort at investigation because they too are funded by the same or similar corporate and government investors as their human rights industry brand name suppliers.

Given the close integration across these various Western knowledge and information industries, it has been impossible for them to avoid complicity in the criminal support of their governments for terrorism and organized crime around the world. In Latin America, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are the clearest examples of this reality. In Nicaragua’s case, the violent failed coup attempt of 2018 involved the use of both terrorism and organized crime by US funded and directed proxies. Abundant material exists, for example here and here, based on reliable, often first-hand sources that narrate and document very serious crimes and egregious human rights abuses in Nicaragua by the violent US funded opposition between April and July 2018.

The UN Office on Drugs and organized Crime has produced valuable material on the use of organized crime for political ends in its “University Module Series on Linkages between Organized Crime and Terrorism”. The UNODC Module Series offers various definitions of terrorism, for example:

• the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

• the conduct of premeditated violent acts or the threat of violence perpetrated by members of an organized group, designed to create fear in an adversary or specific segment of society

• the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change

• the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.

• illegitimate use of force to achieve a political objective by targeting innocent people

All of these definitions apply to the violent actions of Nicaragua’s US funded and controlled opposition in 2018. They and their US funders and strategists sought to overthrow Nicaragua’s democratically elected government. They used the threat of violence and actual acts of violence to create fear to achieve the political change they sought. They used illegal force, violent extortion and murder to coerce and intimidate innocent people to achieve their political objectives. Furthermore, the UNODC Module Series explains that the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime defines organized crime as “A structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit.”

The Convention defines a serious crime as any offence punishable by at least four years imprisonment. Likewise, among the Convention’s definitions of transnational organized crime is any offence committed in one State but when a substantial part of its preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another State. All these definitions apply to the violent crimes of the US funded Nicaraguan opposition in 2018. Among the crimes prosecuted by the Nicaraguan authorities many of which have been independently documented and corroborated, figure multiple cases of arson, extortion, hostage taking, serious assault causing grievous bodily harm, robbery with violence, torture and murder.

When in 2018 Nicaragua’s Vice-Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentshcke asked then head of the Inter American Commission for Human Rights delegation to Nicaragua, Paulo Abrao, why the IACHR refused to investigate opposition killings of police officers and government workers, Abrao replied that they fell outside the IACHR mandate because IACHR doctrine was that human rights can only be violated by States. Later, when the Nicaraguan authorities defeated the terrorist coup attempt and applied due process to prosecute those guilty of the opposition’s violent crimes, the IACHR and the rest of the Western human rights industry rose up and accused Nicaragua’s government of mounting political prosecutions.

To the contrary, the material brought together in the UNODC Module Series is very helpful in terms of revealing the nature of the unquestionable systematic crimes committed by the US funded political opposition in Nicaragua during 2018. For example, the 1979 International Convention against the Taking of Hostages expressly asserts that taking hostages is a terrorist act. It defines a hostage taker as “any person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage”.

In relation to the funding of terrorism, the UNODC notes that

“The 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism has far- reaching implications for investigating and punishing criminal financial activities used to fund acts of terrorism. Within the framework of this Convention, a person commits a criminal offence if they: [B]y any means, directly or indirectly, unlawfully and wilfully, provide or collect funds with the intention that they should be used or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in full or in part, in order to carry out: […] (b) Any other act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

Victim testimony and media reports confirm that US funded terrorist criminals and human rights abusers like Felix Maradiaga, Eva Coppens, Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena all committed terrorist crimes in 2018 in Nicaragua. Even so, they and other terrorist criminals have been feted by the Western human rights industry as heroic defenders of human rights. While certainly outrageous, this fact is far from surprising, since the US authorities and their NATO country vassals have been sponsors and funders of terrorism against various target governments and countries for decades. One way or another, governments and corporate interests fund their accomplices in the Western human rights industry and in both the related knowledge and information industry in Western universities and the communications industry of Western corporate and alternative media. Beyond Nicaragua, in their reporting of events from Syria to Venezuela or Iran to Ukraine, they are all guilty to one degree or another of promoting terrorism and covering up organized crime.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Background: An Auspicious October

October 2, 2020: United Nations High Level Meeting Commemorating and Promoting the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons: This Meeting Was Boycotted by United Kingdom, United States and France, AGAIN!

For many years the saner members of the United Nations, the majority, deplored the fact that there were treaties prohibiting biological weapons, chemical weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction, but the only weapons which were not yet prohibited by an international treaty were the most deadly weapons of all: nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and other countries, and Article 6 of this treaty requires the nuclear weapons states to eliminate their arsenals of nuclear weapons. Not only are the major nuclear powers, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom failing to eliminate their nuclear weapons, they are now spending trillions of dollars in upgrading their nuclear stockpiles, in brazen violation of Article 6 of the Nuclear NPT. At the same time, they are inflicting savage sanctions decimating the population of the DPRK, which is developing a nuclear deterrent, in realistic efforts to protect their country from the horrific fate suffered by Libya, and other countries which abandoned efforts to build nuclear protections.

In this connection, it is important to highlight the speech of China, the only major nuclear power state who spoke at this important meeting Commemorating and Promoting the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons:

Ambassador Geng Shuang affirmed:

Ever since the first day of possessing nuclear weapons, China has been advocating the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons. China has declared the policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances, and unconditionally commits itself not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against Non-Nuclear-Weapon States or Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones. China calls upon other Nuclear-Weapon States to make similar commitments and conclude a legally-binding instrument in this area…..The complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons and the ultimate realization of a nuclear-weapon-free-world is in the common interest of mankind. China supports the GA resolutions on nuclear disarmament proposed by NAM, supports the establishment of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, and supports a nuclear-weapons-free world.

Ambassador Geng continued:

“For the past years the US has been advocating American exceptionalism and America First, pushing for modernization of its nuclear arsenal, lowering the threshold of using nuclear weapons, and seeking to free its hands in the nuclear field. The US has unilaterally withdrawn from the INF Treaty, responded negatively to the proposal for extending the New START, and tried to evade its special responsibility in nuclear disarmament by trumpeting the so-called “trilateral talks.” The US is imposing unilateral sanctions and exerting maximum pressure on the Iranian and Korean Peninsular issues to advance its own geo-political agenda. Such US behaviors run counter to the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world and the common interests of the international community.”

Among the memorable speeches at the October 2 meeting was the address by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Algeria, Sabri Boukadoum, who recalled that Algeria had been the Chairman of the First Committee on Disarmament, when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted. Mr. Boukadoum stated that Algeria was well aquainted with the devastation of nuclear weapons, which had been tested on Algerian territory while Algeria was still a colony of a nuclear power. His speech was one of the most powerful and compelling.

On October 9, the DPRK spoke at the First Committee, and excerpts of Ambassador Kim Song’s address follow:

“In order to achieve nuclear disarmament, the countries with the largest nuclear arsenals should take the lead in dismantlement and withdraw nuclear weapons deployed outside their territories. Recently, show-down and rivalry aimed at extending military influence and gaining strategic edge in and around Asia are becoming increasingly fierce, which hampers peaceful development of the countries in the region. The DPRK delegation hereby stresses that any attempt to bring about a new Cold War and trigger a global arms race should not be tolerated as it is an affront to the common aspiration of humankind for a peaceful world. This year, even in the midst of the turmoil caused by the spread of the pandemic, undisguised acts of hostility threatening peace continued in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula such as joint military exercises of provocative nature and steady introduction of modern military hardware from the outside…We possess a self-defensive deterrent to reliably defend ourselves against any form of high-intensity pressure, military threats or blackmail by hostile forces… From the standpoint of using the outer space solely for peaceful purposes, we oppose arms race in the outer space and reaffirm the need to conclude a legally-binding treaty prohibiting militarization and weaponization of outer space at an early date.”

October 24, 2020: Entry-into-Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

In 2017, the majority of nations within the United Nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The DPRK supported the Treaty from its inception. When the UN General Assembly voted, Iran voted “yes,” in support of the Treaty, along with the majority of UN member states.

On October 24, 2020, the fiftieth country, Honduras, ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This fiftieth ratification, deposited with the United Nations Secretary-General, made possible the Entry Into Force of the Treaty. “In accordance with its article 15(1) the Treaty shall enter into force on 22 January, 2021.

“The Secretary-General commends the States that have ratified the Treaty and salutes the work of civil society, which has been instrumental in facilitating the negotiation and ratification of the Treaty. Entry-into-Force is a tribute to the survivors of nuclear explosions and tests, many of whom advocated for the Treaty. The entry-into-force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the culmination of a worldwide movement to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. It represents a meaningful commitment towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons, which remains the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.”

Last week, as the forty-ninth ratification of the Treaty was announced at the UN Daily Noon Press Briefing, with the added remark that only one more nation needed to ratify the Treaty in order for it to Enter-Into-Force, one journalist asked the Spokesman of the Secretary-General if he was aware of pressures upon treaty signatories to persuade (or compel) them not to ratify the treaty; the Spokesman made no comment about the ominous allegation. In fact, on October 24, 2020, the day the fiftieth country, Honduras, ratified the treaty, the distinguished Associated Press correspondent Edith M. Lederer reported that the “United States had written a letter to the treaty signatories saying the Trump administration believes they made ‘a strategic error’ and urging them to rescind their ratification.”

Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a major supporter and campaigner for the treaty stated:

“The 50 countries that ratify this Treaty are showing true leadership in setting a new international norm that nuclear weapons are not just immoral but illegal….The United Nations was formed to promote peace with a goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons.  This treaty is the UN at its best—working closely with civil society to bring democracy to disarmament.”

The arguments in the US letter to oppose and prevent the Entry-Into-Force of this historic treaty are spurious and preposterous, and indicative of their determination to retain possession of nuclear weapons while avoiding the stigma of now being known as a “rogue state.”  The Treaty requires ratifying countries must “never under any circumstances..develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices—and the threat to use such weapons—and requires parties to promote the treaty to other countries.”

The US letter pressured the countries that ratified the treaty to withdraw from it, thereby demolishing its Entry-Into-Force status.  The US, UK and France have ferociously opposed the treaty from its inception, and its Entry-Into-Force will expose and consign the US (and the UK, etc.) to the opprobrium of world history, as the first and only  country to use nuclear weapons on a defenseless civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and henceforth, a danger to the entire world, determined to hold this “Sword of Damocles” over a now clearly demonstrated opposition by the vast majority of humanity.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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

Reviews

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

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

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

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered mutual inspections of each other’s military bases to NATO to prevent the deployment of missiles banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

The INF was signed between the US and the Soviet Union in 1987 and banned land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of 500km to 5,500 km (310 to 3,410 miles). The treaty expired in August 2019 after the US withdrew, citing Russian violations.

“We reaffirm the commitment to the Russian Federation’s previously announced moratorium on the deployment of ground-launched intermediate-and shorter-range missiles as long as no similar class missile weapons of US manufacture emerge in the respective regions,” Putin said, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.

Putin offered access to sites in Kaliningrad, where the US has accused Russia of deploying 9M729 missiles. The US claims Russia’s 9M729 missiles are a violation of the INF, one of the reasons Washington cited to withdraw from the treaty, but Moscow insists the 9M729’s are a lower range than banned under the INF.

Still, Putin says Russia has not deployed the 9M729 in Europe. He is asking for access to US and NATO sites in Europe in exchange for Kaliningrad. Since the US withdrew from the INF, Washington has abstained from deploying INF-banned missiles to Europe but is seeking to deploy such missiles in Asia to face China.

Russia has argued that a US missile system deployed in Europe, known as the Mk 41 Aegis Ashore, violates the INF. Moscow says the MK 41 can launch Tomahawk missiles, but the US maintains the MK 41 is meant for defense purposes.

“In particular, it might be possible to consider verification measures regarding the Aegis Ashore systems equipped with Mk 41 launchers at US and NATO bases in Europe and the 9M729 missiles at Russian military facilities in the Kaliningrad Region,” Putin said.

“The purpose of such verification measures would be to confirm the absence from the facilities, encompassed by the agreements, of ground-launched intermediate and shorter-range missiles as well as weapons whose parameters and classification have remained a controversy between the two parties (Russia’s missile 9M729).”

Putin’s offer comes as the fate of the last nuclear arms control treaty between the two powers remains uncertain. The New START limits the number of warheads each country can have deployed. The treaty will expire in February 2021 if an agreement is not reached. Moscow has offered to extend the treaty for five years with no preconditions, as it allows, but the US is demanding more.

Putin recently offered to temporarily extend the treaty for one year in exchange for a freeze on both countries’ nuclear arsenals, a key US demand. The US State Department welcomed Putin’s offer, and negotiations to finalize a deal are expected to start soon.

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Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

The “Fortress Taiwan” arms deal overseen by ex-Assistant Secretary of Defense Randall Schriver is one of the most provocative U.S. moves against China in years – and a big win for his think tank’s arms industry and Taiwanese patrons.

When the United States finalized a set of seven arms sales packages to Taiwan in August, including 66 upgraded F-16 fighter planes and longer-range air-to-ground missiles that could hit sensitive targets on mainland China, it shifted U.S. policy sharply toward a much more aggressive stance on the geo-strategic island at the heart of military tensions between the United States and China.

Branded “Fortress Taiwan” by the Pentagon, the ambitious arms deal was the engineered by Randall Schriver, a veteran pro-Taiwan activist and anti-China hardliner whose think tank had been financed by America’s biggest arms contractors and by the Taiwan government itself. 

Since assuming the post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in early 2018, Schriver has focused primarily on granting his major arms company patrons the vaunted arms deals they had sought for years.

The arms sales Schriver has overseen represent the most dangerous U.S. escalation against China in years. The weapons systems will give Taiwan the capability to strike Chinese military and civilian targets far inland, thus emboldening those determined to push for independence from China. Although no U.S. administration has committed Washington to defend Taiwan since it normalized relations with China, the Pentagon is developing the weapons systems and military strategy it would need for a full-scale war. If a conflict breaks out, Taiwan is likely to be at its center.

Returning the favor to arms makers and Taiwanese government donors

Schriver is a longtime advocate of massive, highly provocative arms sales to Taiwan who has advanced the demand that the territory be treated more like a sovereign, independent state. His lobbying has been propelled by financial support from major arms contractors and Taiwan through two institutional bases: a consulting business and a “think tank” that also led the charge for arms sales to U.S. allies in East Asia.

The first of these outfits was a consulting firm called Armitage International, which Schriver founded in 2005 with Richard Armitage, a senior Pentagon and State Department official in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Schriver had served as Armitage’s Chief of Staff in State Department and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. (Armitage, a lifelong Republican, recently released a video endorsement of Joseph Biden for President).

As a partner in Armitage International, Schriver was paid consulting fees by two major arms contractors — Boeing and Raytheon — both of which hoped to obtain arms sales to Taiwan and other East Asian allies to compensate for declining profits from Pentagon contracts.

Schriver started a second national security venture in 2008 as President and CEO of a new lobbying front called The Project 2049 Institute, where Armitage served as Chairman of the Board. The name of the new institution referred to the date by which some anti-China hawks believed China intended to achieve global domination.

From its inception, The Project 2049 Institute focused primarily on U.S. military cooperation with Northeast Asian allies — and Taiwan in particular — with an emphasis on selling them more and better U.S. arms. Schriver, known as the Taiwan government’s main ally in Washington, became the key interlocutor for major U.S. arms makers looking to cash in potential markets in Taiwan. He was able to solicit financial support for Institute from Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, BAE and Raytheon, according to the Institute’s internet site, which provides no figures on the amounts given by each prior to 2017.

Equally important, however, is the Project 2049 Institute’s heavy dependence on grants from the government of Taiwan. The most recent annual report of the Institute shows that more than a third of its funding in 2017 came either directly from the Taiwan government or a quasi-official organization representing its national security institutions. 

Project 2049 received a total of $280,000 from the Taiwan Ministry of Defense and Taiwan’s unofficial diplomatic office in Washington (TECRO) as well as $60,000 from the “Prospect Foundation”, whose officers are all former top national security officials of Taiwan.  Another $252,000 in support for Schriver’s Institute in 2017 came from the State Department, at a time when it was taking an especially aggressive public anti-China line.

By creating a non-profit “think tank,” Schriver and Armitage had found a way to skirt rules aimed at minimizing conflicts of interest in the executive branch. The Executive Order 13770 issued by President Donald Trump in early 2017 that was supposed to tighten further restrictions on conflicts of interest barred Schriver from participation for a period of two years “in any particular matter that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients….”

However, the financial support for Project 2049 from Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, and from Taiwanese official and quasi-official bodies were considered as outside that prohibition, because they were not technically “clients.”

Big wins for Schriver’s corporate supporters and anti-China interests

Brought into the Pentagon at the beginning 2018 to push China policy toward a more confrontational stance, Schriver spent 2018 and the first half of 2019 moving proposals for several major arms sales to Taiwan — including the new F-16s and the air-to-ground missiles capable of hitting sensitive targets in China — through inter-agency consultations.  He secured White House approval for the arms packages and Congress was informally notified in August 2019, however, Congress was not notified of the decision until August 2020. That was because Trump was engaged in serious trade negotiations with China and wanted to avoid unnecessary provocation to Beijing.

Lockheed Martin was the biggest corporate winner in the huge and expensive suite of arms sales to Taiwan. It reaped the largest single package of the series: a ten-year, $8 billion deal for which it was the “principle contractor” to provide 66 of its own F-16 fighters to Taiwan, along with the accompanying engines, radars and other electronic warfare equipment.

The seven major arms sales packages included big wins for other corporate supporters as well: Boeing’s AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM), which could be fired by the F-16s and hit sensitive military and even economic targets in China’s Nanjing region, and sea surveillance drones from General Atomics.

In February 2020, shortly after Schriver left the Pentagon, the Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen received the lobbyist in her office in Taipei and publicly thanked him for having “facilitated the sale of F-16V fighter jets to Taiwan and attached great importance to the role and status of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific region.” It was an extraordinary expression of a foreign government’s gratitude for a U.S. official’s service to its interests.

Having delivered the goods for the big military contractors and the Taiwan government, Schriver returned to the Project 2049 Institute, replacing Armitage as chairman of the board.

Realizing the neocon PNAC’s vision

The arms sales to Taiwan represented a signal victory for those who still hoping to reverse the official U.S. acceptance the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of all of China. Ever since the 1982 U.S.-China Joint Communique, in which the United States vowed that had “no intention of interfering in China’s internal affairs or pursuing a policy of “two China’s” or “one China, one Taiwan”, anti-China hardliners who opposed that concession have insisted on making the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which called for the United States to sell Taiwan such arms “as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” as keystone of U.S. Taiwan policy.

The neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan wanted to go even further; it pushed for the United States to restore its early Cold War commitment to defend Taiwan from any Chinese military assault.  Thus a 1999 PNAC statement called on the United States to “declare unambiguously that it will come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an attack or a blockade against Taiwan, including against the offshore islands of Matsu and Kinmen.”

After leaving the World Bank in 2008 amidst a scandal involving his girlfriend, Paul Wolfowitz – the author of that 1999 statement on East Asia – turned his attention to protecting Taiwan. Despite the absence of any business interest he was known to have in Taiwan, Wolfowitz was chairman of the board of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council from 2008 to 2018. The Project 2049 Institute was a key member of the Council, along with all the major arms companies hoping to make sales to Taiwan.

During the first days of Wolfowitz’s chairmanship, the U.S.-China Business Council published a lengthy study warning of a deteriorating air power balance between China and Taiwan.  The study was obviously written under the auspices of one or more of the major arms companies who were members, but it was attributed only to “the Council’s membership” and to “several outside experts” whom it did not name. 

The study criticized both the Bush and Obama administrations for refusing to provide the latest F-16 models to Taiwan, warning that U.S. forces would be forced to defend the island directly if the jets were not immediately supplied.  It also called for providing Taiwan with land-attack cruise missiles capable of hitting some of the most sensitive military and civilian targets in the Nanjing province that lay opposite Taiwan.

The delicacy of the political-diplomatic situation regarding Taiwan’s status, and the reality of China’s ability to reunify the country it chooses to do so has deterred every administration since George H.W. Bush sold 150 F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. That was, until Shriver’s provocative “Fortress Taiwan” sale went through. 

The triumph of corporate and foreign interests in determining one of the most consequential U.S. decisions regarding China is likely to bedevil U.S. policy for years to come.  At a moment when the Pentagon is pushing a rearmament program based mainly on preparation for war with China, an influential former official backed by arms industry and Taiwanese money has helped set the stage for a potentially catastrophic confrontation.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

At last week’s presidential debate, the American people were presented with two widely divergent points of view on how to address North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal: Either engage with its leader (and thereby “legitimize” a “thug”) or apply more sanctions and pressure in order to “control” North Korea.

But this is a false dichotomy. Meeting or not meeting with the North Korean leader hasn’t been the failure of U.S. policy. And more pressure and sanctions will not convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons arsenal.

To make any substantial progress, the next administration must take a wholly new approach to achieve a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.

Most urgently, the next administration should officially end the Korean War with a peace agreement. Contrary to the belief held by most Americans, the 70-year-old war never officially ended and was only halted by a fragile ceasefire signed in 1953. That means that the risk of an escalation (intentional or accidental) that triggers a full-scale — potentially nuclear — war remains, endangering us all.

Both the Trump and Obama administrations depended on a mixture of sanctions, political isolation, and the threat of military force to try to compel North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. But both “maximum pressure” (Trump) and “strategic patience” (Obama) failed to make progress toward that goal. A positive step was the 2018 Singapore Agreement in which the United States and North Korea agreed to establish new relations toward a peace regime and a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. While North Korea has improved its military capability, it has not tested any long-range missiles or new nuclear weapons since then.

But since last year’s Hanoi Summit, talks between North Korea and the United States have stalled. That’s because engagement with North Korea was not accompanied by a fundamental change in U.S. policy. The United States keeps expecting that pressure will convince North Korea to unilaterally disarm without providing any sanctions relief or security guarantees.

What actually put the prospect of denuclearization on the table was the possibility of peace that began with the 2018 Olympics diplomacy between North Korea and South Korea. It manifested in the Panmunjom Declaration, in which President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong Un declared “that there will be no more war and a new era of peace has begun on the Korean peninsula.” The Declaration calls for inter-Korean economic and civic projects and replacing the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement. But the United States has impeded these reconciliation efforts.

Instead of further militarizing the region and applying more sanctions and pressure, which are harming innocent North Korean civilians, the next administration should engage in the hard work of sustained diplomacy based on specific, concrete next steps. Diplomacy isn’t a “gift” to North Korea; it’s what needs to happen to get to peace. Talking with North Korea should not be viewed differently from what Washington does with any authoritarian power. Ignoring North Korea only kicks the can down the road in addressing Pyongyang’s growing nuclear capabilities and arms proliferation. Furthermore, a majority of Americans support the United States negotiating with adversaries like North Korea to avoid a military confrontation.

Specifically, the next administration should replace the “all or nothing” stance with step-by-step, reciprocal, verifiable actions to advance denuclearization and peace. That could mean building confidence through opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American families and their loved ones in North Korea, and formalizing a moratorium on North Korean long-range missile and nuclear testing and U.S.-South Korea military exercises.

But most crucially, we must end the Korean War. This continued state of war is not a mere technicality; it’s the root cause of militarism and tensions that must be resolved if there is to be real progress with North Korea.

The good news is that there are growing voices in Congress that recognize the importance of peace with North Korea as a crucial step towards denuclearization. There are now 50 members of Congress who have co-sponsored House Resolution 152, which calls for an end to the Korean War and a peace agreement. Notably, all of the Democratic contenders for the next chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — Reps. Brad Sherman, Joaquin Castro, and Gregory Meeks — are co-sponsors of this important resolution.

The status quo means more nuclear weapons, more human rights violations, more separated families, more suffering from sanctions, and the ongoing risk of nuclear war. It’s in everyone’s interest to change course with a realistic, concrete plan toward peace and denuclearization, but this is ultimately in the hands of the next U.S. president. Americans must urge him to choose wisely.

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Featured image: Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in holding hands after signing the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Reunification of the Korean Peninsula in April 2018. Photo credit: Cheongwadae/Blue House

A new report from Airwars raises the question of whether the Trump administration has switched to using the CIA for strikes in Yemen in order to shroud US operations there in greater secrecy.

Airwars documented at least 30 locally-claimed US drone strikes, including 11 in the past ten months. The US has not officially declared a strike in Yemen since mid-2019.

The report found that US strikes and raids in Yemen since Trump came into office have killed at least 86 civilians, including 28 children and 13 women.

When Airwars contacted the US military with evidence of these incidents, the US declined to respond. Instead, officials confirmed that there is no functioning civilian casualty monitoring cell covering Yemen operations within the US Department of Defense. The DoD claimed there were zero civilian deaths in both its 2018 and 2019 reports to Congress.

The failure to carry out adequate post-strike investigations was just one of a series of criticisms levelled at the US drone programme by a German court in a landmark decision in March 2019. The case, brought on behalf of Faisal bin ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer who lost family members to a strike in August 2012, marked the first time a European country has been found to play an essential role in US drone strikes. The court’s decision, which held that Germany must do more to ensure its territory is not used by the US to carry out unlawful drone strikes in Yemen, is set to be heard on appeal at Germany’s highest Administrative Court on November 25.

Jennifer Gibson, who leads Reprieve’s work on drone strikes, said:

 “These findings paint a shocking picture of a US administration gone rogue in Yemen, so unconcerned with accountability that they haven’t even allocated a desk to track how many civilians their missiles kill. This shadowy assassination programme makes none of us safer, and is causing irreparable harm.”

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Poland is currently experiencing one of the most difficult periods in its recent history. The effects of the new coronavirus pandemic have been devastating in the country, considering that it has effectively reduced Polish industrial production – which decreased by 24.6% compared to last year – and structurally weakened the tourism sector in which the orders in hotels and restaurants fell by 80%, registering the worst numbers in the country’s history. Unemployment also affects the Polish people terribly. Only in April this year, 165 thousand people lost their sources of income due to the crisis generated by the virus, which is a number five times greater than the Polish citizens who lost their jobs during the 2008 crisis. Still, small and medium-sized private businesses have completely broken down, leading to countless breaches of workers’ contracts who are now unemployed and, therefore, dependent on government aid. The authorities will have to pay benefits of 209 million zlotys to unemployed citizens, the money that comes from the Ministry of Labor’s social security fund, which further increases the government spending. In total, the state has already spent 47 billion dollars to fight the coronavirus pandemic, even though it has had few practical results so far.

Faced with this absolutely catastrophic scenario, the most strategic attitude for the Polish state would be to invest heavily in a national economic recovery plan, rescuing companies affected by the crisis and guaranteeing maximum employment for the people. However, the Polish government’s priorities appear to be different. Poland recently announced an economic aid plan for Belarus valued at more than 500 million dollars. The project goes far beyond the Polish borders since an economic recovery plan for Belarus was already presented to the European Union under the condition of new elections in Minsk. Such economic aid from the EU is valued at more than a billion dollars and is still being evaluated in the bloc.

However, Poland’s situation in the EU is getting worse. Because of the crisis of democracy in the country The EU wants to pressure Poland to move forward in its democratic process through economic punishments that will further affect the Polish economy, and it is possible that Warsaw will soon stop receiving its annual aid from the EU. In fact, despite contributing to various Western interests, Poland is still a nation considered “retrograde” on issues such as the implementation of democracy and the defense of human rights, which creates serious problems in their relations.

Interestingly, neither the crisis of relations between the EU and Poland nor the Polish economic collapse seems enough to stop the plan to “save” Belarus. In this sense, to ensure that the plan for Belarus is carried forward, the Polish government is investing in a truly dishonest propaganda. Polish Finance Minister Tadeusz Kosczynski even announced that “everything is very good with public finances and the banking sector is working normally”, which is contradicted by the country’s official data. Still, the little “stability” that remains in Polish public finances is thanks to European aid – every year Warsaw receives 11 billion euros from the EU.

It is also important to consider that not only is Poland experiencing a serious economic crisis, but also the EU itself is inserted in a scenario of great economic difficulties, which is being aggravated by the advance of the second wave of the new coronavirus. The pandemic makes several European nations impose measures of social isolation that severely hamper economic development. So, what would be the advantage of offering so much money to Belarus?

The idea of a “Marshall plan” to “save” Belarus must be analyzed far beyond the economic aspect. The EU is more concerned with the economy of its members than with the situation of Belarusians. We can only understand the real nature of the plan when we analyze it from a strictly political point of view: in fact, Poland is so concerned with Lukashenko’s victory that in order to change the Belarusian scenario it demands to spend such huge amount of money.

The pandemic situation in Belarus is far less worrying than in Poland or any European country. The small Slavic nation has managed to control the major effects of the crisis. In this sense, the proposal for economic aid from Poland is not intended to rescue a country in ruins due to a crisis, but simply to guarantee the interests of the nation that sends such “aid” which mostly destined for the Belarusian political opposition. Poland has been one of the most active countries in the Belarusian political crisis, openly supporting the opposition, collaborating with protest organizers and protecting political activists who committed crimes during the unrest.

Both Poland and the EU see Lukashenko’s victory as a threat due to the rapprochement between the Belarusian president and Russia, which has strengthened considerably recently. In parallel, Poland, although acting as a satellite of Western interests, is far from the democratic ideal desired by Europeans, who are already considering some kind of sanctions against Warsaw. In this sense, attracting the focus of European concern to Belarus and trying to promote a falsely “democratic” and “humanitarian” campaign of economic support for the opposition is an interesting strategy for Poland. However, until Europeans actually decide to send the large sum requested by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, it is Poland itself that is leading this “new Marshall plan” while its own population suffers from unemployment and exponential increase in poverty.

Undoubtedly, Poland’s priority must be to protect its own people, while the EU’s priority must be to ensure that all its members are indeed in line with the democratic values and standards upheld by the organization (isn’t it the case with Poland?) before worrying about nations outside the bloc.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from fnf-europe.org

The Dangers of Environmental Toxins

By Jemma Nott, October 28 2020

While California, Brazil and Bolivia have spent the past Northern Hemispheric summer burning and we all await more chaos created by more frequent natural disasters, a climate emergency of a different nature has gone under the radar for some time.

In fact, to even raise it as something that requires alarm or a sense of emergency seems to often be dismissed as conspiracy in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Environmental toxins are wreaking havoc through our environment and while it’s cool to challenge our major polluters we ignore some of the other major corporations that are letting toxins go unchecked.

One of the most obvious and best culprits to challenge on this particular topic is Monsanto – one which many perceive as attracting perhaps unwarranted ire.

But yet, Monsanto were discovered in 2018 to have been ghost writing scientific studies only revealed when plaintiffs filed suits against the mega-corporation in an attempt to prove that glyphosate or Roundup was a carcinogen and in particular the result of their aggressive Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. The court case also revealed that a prominent academic and proponent of GMO crops had asked Monsanto to draft an article for him which was identical to an article he had purportedly authored on Forbes.

Even further, one of the ‘BBC reporters’ at the trials was also later revealed to be a “reputation manager” for FTI consulting who’s clients include Monsanto. The results of the trial saw the plaintiffs walking away successfully with a jury satisfied that there is sufficient evidence that it is in fact a carcinogen.

The trial pushed open the door into a world that even the biggest tin-hatters could not have really imagined. Monsanto was revealed to have feelers and money spread all throughout industry and including scientific boards like the American Council on Health and Science, which purports to be independent of industry.

When the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glysophate as a possible carcinogen in 2017, it was revealed that one of Monsanto’s PR firms had ‘contacts’ at Reuters who immediately published an article questioning the legitimacy of the IARC decision.

What’s most troubling about this of course is that the only study on Roundup since the EPA studies with fraudulent data implies that Monsanto has known since 1974 that their products are carcinogenic. In Australia, the agricultural chemical regulator, which receives funding from Monsanto, received pressure to review Roundup after the IARC decision but it refused despite a revelation in a Four Corners episode that they are in fact themselves funded by the agricultural industry.

Companies like Monsanto are a product of the post-WW2 blending of military and industry in the United States.

The military industrial complex sought to normalize the use of chemical weapons in warfare and the consequence of this was the rapid expansion of pesticide industries.

As Frank A Von Hippel reveals in his new book the Chemical Age, DDT an organic pollutant now primarily used for killing mosquitos is not just dangerous and harmful in that it negatively disrupts our hormones but that is has trans-generational epiginetic effects revealed after a study across Africa where it is used heavily. Organaphosphates were later developed as a purported replacement for DDTs as they were considered to able to degrade in the environment and detoxified by the human body several decades ago but this is now known to not be true.

The EPA banned them from being used in the home as late as 2001 because they were revealed to be disrupting developing brains and childrens nervous systems. However, pyrethroids and pyrethrins (a class of insecticide) continue to be used across suburbs, lawns and farmlands globally.

The EPA still considers this class safe for use despite a 2011 study of New York mothers which found that prenatal exposure to piperonyl butoxide — an additive commonly used in pyrethroid sprays — is strongly associated with delayed mental development in toddlers. The Transport Workers Union of Australia even in 2013 considered a class action suit for their airline workers over a link between Parkinsons Disease and insecticides used in long-haul flights since it is an Australian government measure that all flights are sprayed for insects before landing.

Hippel proposes that there is absolutely no square inch of Earth (including extremely remote tribes of the Antarctic, the upper layers of the atmosphere and in women’s breast milk) that insecticides and pesticides do not exist. And what’s more, there are a plethora of other herbicides have known impacts on human health.

Alex Jones is more infamously known for his theories around Atrazine but what we do know is that Atrazine is in fact an endocrine disruptor meaning that it can dysregulate hormones in the human body and any dysregulation of hormones necessarily leads to adverse health effect. And it is a herbicide found in many global populations water supply and was found in a Melbourne University study to be affecting men’s fertility.

Another better known endocrine disruptor is BPA found in most plastic which is most commonly linked to endometriosis or other forms of infertility in women but it can also act to suppress the production of testosterone in men. And if you think you are one of those people that can simply ‘go plastic-free’ I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that, that is quite impossible because it is literally everywhere.

Plastic is not just in your computer, your lunch box, your car or your phone, your clothes but more importantly in the form of microplastics covering the entirety of the Earth from sediments on the deep sea floor to ice in the Arctic.

Microplastics are said to poison the soil and in turn enter into our food supply.

And we know that microplastics are harming animals organs including their liver and bloodstream so its reasonable to guess that they are having at least a low grade negative effect on human health. The Lancet dubbed microplastics an “urgent human health problem” calling for strong regulations on plastic producers. And in fact, with so many endocrine disruptors now in the atmosphere and in every day items that we encounter its suspected to be at least partially linked to drastically declining fertility rates in men – declining by over 50% in the past 40 years. Which not only leaves men less healthy but the species in jeopardy of real decline.

Not only do insecticides and pesticides destroy human fertility but they also destroy long-term soil fertility too creating larger and larger chunks of the Earth that will not be arable in decades to come. But what’s damning right now is that GMO crop production methods are increasingly producing vegetables with higher and higher levels of lectins. If you are unfamiliar with lectins, it is a natural insecticide produced by some plants (a part of their natural defensive mechanisms) which high intake in humans is increasingly showing strong association with an array of chronic diseases from diabetes to fibromyalgia and association with damaged gut permeability.

Most vegetables have some level of lectins already but it’s inconsequential to most GMO Big Agra companies how high the level is that they are raising them to if it is a cheap and profitable guard for their crops.

It’s no coincidence of course that we don’t treat these issues with the same level of alarm that is afforded climate change, which of course deserves weight in its own right, but to ignore a holistic approach to environmental destruction leaves us not knowing the full array of people (or more accurately multinational corporations) to point fingers at. Because ultimately, the reason so many of us are hoodwinked into, in many cases, dismissing this aspect of environmental destruction as nothing but sheer conspiracy is exactly because of industry conspiracy to hide the real harm these producers in fact do.

The only difference is that they’ve somehow managed to wage a much better PR campaign than most coal producers. Most countries regulate these chemicals in different ways the UK has 50% less pesticides and insecticides in their foods than the US does for example but until in all countries we have determined that there are safe human levels (and exactly what that is) without corporate fraud and bullying, we may never know if there even is a safe level for human exposure. Whether it’s the insectides in your soft tissues, or the microplastics you are ingesting, we will never not feel the consequences of pollutant mega-corporations from the military industrial complex to Big Agra, and in the West we need to learn the confidence to teach them to pay a price for it.

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Jemma Nott is a multimedia journalist.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The most radical socialists, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters (Black, White, Latino or Asian), liberal and conservative zealots, diversity and equity gurus, pacifists, denizens of corporates and non-profits, rappers, rockers and country western musicians, Bernie Sanders, racists and White guilt pushers, Baptists, Catholics, and Muslims, children, bland K-16 teachers, members of the military, indeed, every social, cultural, political and economic demographic of the United States of America drinks, swims and drowns in an ocean of Liquid Capitalism. It is nearly as old as humanity itself.

Liquid Capitalism is impressive and horrifying. It floods and absorbs every political movement and message. It dilutes it, repackages it, commodifies it and profits from it. Take the BLM movement. Corporations jumped on the bandwagon finding another bullet point to add to their Multicultural Marketing strategies. BLM is beyond necessary and about time, of course, but look how quickly corporations took up the mantel of political activists: from Coke and Amazon to Walmart and Apple, corporations push the notion that they are really conscientious, nice inclusive people and are going to restructure internally and hire more Blacks from a pool of 13.4 percent of the US population.

Drowning the Message

Behind the smiling corporate face that supports BLM (and other minority/diversity movements like LGBTQ), lurks the backstabbing bottomline: How to keep Black Identity consumers spending on the products that corporate capitalists produce. Consider this from Neilson:

“When it comes to African-American consumer spending, there are millions, sometimes billions of dollars in revenue at stake,” said Andrew McCaskill, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Multicultural Marketing, Nielsen. “With 43% of the 75 million Millennials in the US identifying as African American, Hispanic or Asian, if a brand doesn’t have a multicultural strategy, it doesn’t have a growth strategy. The business case for multicultural outreach is clear. African-American consumers, and all diverse consumers, want to see themselves authentically represented in marketing, and they want brands to recognize their value to the bottomline.”

And that was in 2017 before the Black Lives Matter movement kicked off.  Even BLM has to resort to capitalist practices to keep afloat: The official BLM store is online and needs consumers to purchase clothing and other items to support the movement.

Liquid Capitalism has drowned out the BLM voice [which is generously funded by the Ford Foundation and Soros’ Open Society]. No one in their right mind can’t support their cause. But like everything else in the US, their message, as broadcast on television or the WWW, is mixed in with a hundred other product sells and it gets watered down. It is tough to keep those media corporations and their advertisers—who determine what news you’ll digest—interested in one subject for too long. News and advertisements—along with Social Justice fare—are repetitively pounded into television viewers heads (and with every click of the user’s mouse) and they eventually become numb to what counts. Just as they shrug their shoulders and say, “My gosh, how awful” as another shooting of a Black man is broadcast or a school shooting takes place, they all forget about it in a few weeks time because liquid capitalism dilutes the message by commodifying and selling it for profit, and ultimately it is washed away Besides, there is always a new “thing” just around the corner that will cause an important movement like BLM to drop out of the news cycle.

It’s the same story with the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is this gem from a marketing firm:

“To market to people during this difficult and scary period, to really and cleverly market to them, you must understand their deepest psychological needs. People want what they don’t have, and there are ways of figuring out exactly what it is that they don’t have and how they’d like it served to them—even during a pandemic.”

Liquid Identity

According to Moises Esteban Guitart,

“Liquid modernity [capitalism] provides an explosion of choices. The number of products or options available has increased dramatically: TV channels, telephonic companies, clothes, varieties of foods, retirement pensions, medical care, different computers, gas services, heterogeneity of families, different kinds of jobs, plurality of religions, and so on. However, several researchers have suggested that materialism, extreme consumption as a way of life, could be toxic to subjective wellbeing The consumerist society fosters individualistic identity and is associated with the creation of infinite needs, hedonistic material pleasure, impulsive and hyperactive behavior, dissatisfaction with the “solid life,” craving for novelty, concern with appearance, and deteriorating happiness and interpersonal relations.

The individualistic liquid identity syndrome is the negative psychological effect of the consumerist capitalism. Individualistic liquid identity is the product of cultural capitalistic tools (concepts like materialism, artifacts like money, and institutions like markets) that people utilize to define and understand themselves and others and they interiorize explicitly and implicitly. The individualistic liquid identity syndrome affects people that give a high value to money, possessions, autonomy, appearances (physical and social), fame and independence.

The ideologies and institutions of [Liquid] capitalism foster, maintain and encourage a set of values based in materialism, self interest and a selfish, strong desire for financial success and economic growth, hedonism, high levels of consumption and interpersonal styles based on competition. These values and practices often conflict with pursuits such as caring about the broader world, having a close relationships with others, feeling worthy and free, and sharing or solidarity.” 

Corporations Say, “A Tribal Nation is More Profitable than a Unified Nation”

Liquid Capitalism is destroying the fabric of the United States. Businesses go where the cash is whether it is an LGBTQ Identity market ($3.7 trillion spending power) or Latino Identity market ($1.7 trillion). Corporations and their politicians in the US Congress are salivating for a time when the USA consists of many Identity Tribes. And they are using artificial intelligence to accelerate that process.

“When we identify ourselves and allow ourselves to be identified, when we tribe up and proclaim the characteristics that are uniform throughout our tribe, we give advertisers and marketers just what they’ve been looking for all these years: groups of conformed individuals to whom they can sell things. The last century proved to marketers and advertisers that they could create products that were geared to be consumed by specific subsets of the population, from fan bases to ethnic groups. The new way to do this is through AI and machine learning algorithms that do more than target individuals who subscribe to group identities—it actually herds us into identities…Advertisers are specifically targeting individuals based on their revealed group identity, and the algorithms that are being designed to help us, to give us the content we want, are driving our choices as much as (if not more than) we are driving them.”

Great! Now Artificial Intelligence and Machine Language is in on the gig.

The fact is there is no escape from Liquid Capitalism.

Even leading advocates of Equity in Education/Social Justice are bound by the dictates of capitalism.

Take the case of Australia. It has followed US federal, state and local schemes that push the privatization of education. Here in the US, as in Australia, “Schools compete against each other via test scores; public schools are required to fight for limited resources and for the most talented teachers and students; competition [capitalism] has been significantly amplified by the publication of student performance data; competition includes the creation of unforgiving performance cultures, which result in teachers spending more time “working for the numbers” than delivering pastoral care or addressing issues of equity and inclusion; and young people are sandwiched, therefore, into the same cookie-cutter model of excellence that schools must adopt to retain market competitiveness.” ( Note: I have witnessed first hand “working for the numbers” in a public middle school. Students in a virtual class were given A’s across the board even though some did not complete an assignment work or only partially did so. One teacher quipped, “We’ve got to keep them coming back, right?”)

Eliminate False Consciousness? Reeducation

There is no question that Equity in Education and Social Justice require an alteration of American language/thought. This is commonly called Inclusive Language. Who isn’t for that, if it is implemented sensibly?

To get there, the US public and private school systems have become the primary targets of education strategies pushed by Equity/Inclusion and Social Justice Missionaries (capitalists), regulators and politicians, (lobbied by capitalists) and; of course, corporations. Beyond the noble cause they all proclaim, they all have a financial interest, or capitalist incentive, even as they seek to challenge the norms of American education and language that are insensitive to all minority groups. Get em while they are young, as the saying goes.

American educators, with the “Change” Missionaries in the vanguard, claim that they will transform the inequitable language and thought processes used by some 328 million Americans (they are sure to make a lot of money in the process). But to what end, all this? To some advocates, the goal seems to be to lead the charge to force the majority population to acknowledge its sin of “Whiteness and inherent bias” and “White Violence” that has limited minority freedom of movement in American society whether in the athletic, economic, political or cultural spheres. To other advocates it means fighting to maintain LGBTQ rights, or pushing against ageism, and ensuring societal inclusiveness for those with disabilities (to include military veterans). And to others it is remembering the past pernicious segregation of Mexican Americans in Arizona schools.

To put a fine point on it all, all Americans are being subjected to a massive reeducation campaign. It is also mandate from corporate and military America. It’ll work as long as the practice of shaming by some advocates or particular portion of the American populace is removed.

And the flow of Liquid Capitalism makes it all happen.

Corporations and the US military are well into the process of the reeducation effort. Consider Goldman Sachs manual for Inclusive Language. In it, employees are instructed in the proper use of pronouns. “Goldman Sachs has launched an internal campaign centered around gender identity and pronouns, seeking to provide education on what the different types of pronouns are, guidance for the way to use them and offering new avenues for our people to proactively self-identify.”

Over at Lockheed Martin an ALL-INclusive campaign has been underway since 2019: Transforming for Impactprogram is well underway: “We define inclusion as acknowledging and leveraging diversity by creating an environment where employees feel welcomed, respected, engaged and able to bring their full self to work in order to develop innovative solutions that drive business success.”

Then there is the US Army’s Project Inclusion:

“The Army has enacted a range of initiatives, to include training. The training helps to increase deliberate thinking and shift attention from the visual construct and keep the focus on the value that diversity brings…[we are] redacting race, ethnicity, and gender data from both the Officer and Enlisted Record Briefs.”

Original Sins

In the end, the human species is Capitalist to the core. Archeological finds from the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia (4000 to 3100 BC) show that some of the first writings in human history were used to document expenses and revenues for “transactions involving grain and sheep.” Independently, Egypt (Old Kingdom 2700-2200 BC) developed its own writing system and used it for similar purposes. If that were not Capitalist enough, trade in obsidian (volcanic black glass used to make tools and weapons) between Bingol in Eastern Anatolia to sites hundreds of kilometers away in Mesopotamia and the Levant took place in 10,000 (BC) by river and overland routes. [Making Civilizations: The World before 600, Harvard, 2020].

And humanity’s original sins of war, slavery and Capitalism are at least that old. Will we ever rid ourselves of them?

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John Stanton can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Oakland California, May 30, 2020. Credit: Thomas Hawk/ Flickr

First published by New Eastern Outlook  and Global Research March 10, 2020 coinciding with the announcement of the Lockdown and closure of 190 National Economies Worldwide

Every day world mainstream news reports more people in more countries diagnosed “positive” for the coronavirus illness, now called COVID-19. As the reported numbers grow, so does widespread nervousness, often in the form of panic shopping for masks, disinfections, toilet paper, canned goods. We are told to accept the testing results as science-based. While it is next to impossible to get a full picture of what is taking place in China, the center of the novel virus storm, there is a process, being fed by mainstream media accounts and genuine panic in populations unclear what the real dangers are, that has alarming implications for the post-pandemic future.

During the last week of January the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ordered an unprecedented lock down of an entire city of 11 million, Wuhan, in an attempt to contain a public health situation that had clearly gotten out of control. Never before in the history of modern public health had a government placed an entire city in quarantine by imposing a cordon sanitaire around it. That lock down was quickly extended to other China cities to the extent that, for the past weeks, a major part of the world’s second largest national economy has shut down. That in turn is impacting the global economy.

At this point, as cases and the first deaths are being reported in countries outside of China, especially in South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy, the prime question everyone has is how dangerous this virus is. The fiasco with the US CDC, where the putative tests for the novel virus were shown defective, underscores the fact that the testing for the now-named virus, SARS-CoV-2, said to cause the disease called COVID-19, is anything but 100% reliable. Despite this, influenced by a steady stream of mainstream media images of empty shop shelves in Italy, of police cordons around Washington State nursing homes said to house several presumed Coronavirus patients, of pictures of Iranian hospitals filled with body bags, millions of citizens are understandably becoming alarmed and fearful.

What is being done in city after city and country after country is cancellation of major events where many people come together. This has included the Venice Carnival, major sports events, trade shows in Switzerland and elsewhere being canceled. Major airlines are being financially devastated as people around the world cancel holiday flights, as are cruise ship lines. China orders burning of cash notes claiming they might be contaminated. The French Louvre reopens but does not accept cash, only cards, as paper might be contaminated. WHO warns about paper money contagion risk. Countries are introducing laws such as in the UK allowing legal detention of citizens who might have a virus. Growing media promotion in the West of shop shelves bare of everyday essentials such as rice, pasta, toilet paper is feeding panic buying everywhere.

Questions on Death Rate

It is important to have a perspective on the apparent deaths provably due to COVID-19. Here facts become very imprecise.

As of March 3, 2020 according to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom, worldwide there were a total of 90,893 cases of COVID-19, with 3,110 resulting in death. He then called this a 3.4% mortality rate, a figure highly disputed by other health experts. Tedros stated, “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”

The problem is that no one can say precisely what the true death rate is. That’s because globally we have not tested all who might have mild cases of the virus and the accuracy of those tests are anything but 100% certain. But a statement about a death rate more than three times that of seasonal flu is a real panic-maker if true.

The reality is very likely a far lower true mortality according to epidemic experts. “We do not report all the cases,” says Professor John Edmunds of the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “In fact, we only usually report a small proportion of them. If there are many more cases in reality, then the case fatality ratio will be lower.” Edmunds went on to say, “What you can safely say […] is that if you divide the number of reported deaths by the number of reported cases [to get the case fatality ratio], you will almost certainly get the wrong answer.” The WHO under Tedros seems to be erring on the side of spreading panic.

The WHO and the USA CDC some years ago changed the definition of deaths from seasonal flu to “deaths of flu or pneumonia.” The CDC calculates only an approximate flu death count by totaling death certificates processed that list “pneumonia or influenza” as the underlying or contributing cause of death. The CDC estimates 45 Million Flu Cases, and 61,000 what they deftly call “Flu-Associated” Deaths in 2017-2018 US Flu Season. How many were elderly with pneumonia or other lung diseases is unclear. Naturally the numbers help spread fear and sell seasonal flu vaccines whose positive effect is anything but proven. Worldwide, the CDC estimated in a study in 2017 that, “between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year.”

In China alone the estimate for seasonal influenza-associated (including pneumonia) deaths was about 300,000 in 2018. Note that 3,000 corona-attributed deaths, as tragic as it is, is but 1% of the “normal” annual deaths from lung-related illnesses in China, and because of the mixed or changing China accounting, it is not clear how many of the 3,000 China deaths are even from seasonal pneumonia. But owing to dramatic videos, not verifiable, of people allegedly dropping dead on the streets in China, with no proof, or of Wuhan hospitals filled in the corridors with body bags apparently of dead from COVID-19, much of the world is understandably anxious about this strange exogenous invader.

Amid what is clearly confusion among many well-meaning health officials and likely opportunism by Western vaccine makers like GlaxoSmithKline or Gilead and others, with alarming speed our world is being transformed in ways just months ago we could not have imagined.

‘LOCK STEP’

Whatever has occurred inside China at this point it is almost impossible to say owing to conflicting reactions of the Beijing authorities and several changes in ways of counting COVID-19 cases. The question now is how the relevant authorities in the West will use this crisis. Here it is useful to go back to a highly relevant report published a decade ago by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading backers of eugenics, and creators of GMO among other things.

The report in question has the bland title, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” It was published in May 2010 in cooperation with the Global Business Network of futurologist Peter Schwartz. The report contains various futurist scenarios developed by Schwartz and company.

One scenario carries the intriguing title, “LOCK STEP: A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” Here it gets interesting as in what some term predictive programming.

The Schwartz scenario states,

“In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months…”

He continues,

“The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” This sounds eerily familiar.

Then the scenario gets very interesting:

“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems — from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty — leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

A relevant question is whether certain bad actors, and there are some in this world, are opportunistically using the widespread fears around the COVID-19 to advance an agenda of “lock step” top down social control, one that would include stark limits on travel, perhaps replacing of cash by “sanitary” electronic cash, mandatory vaccination even though the long term side effects are not proven safe, unlimited surveillance and the curtailing of personal freedoms such as political protests on the excuse it will allow “identification of people who refuse to be tested or vaccinated,” and countless other restrictions.

Much of the Rockefeller 2010 scenario is already evident. Fear is never a good guide to sound reason.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

The U.S. supported tarnishing of democracy is only causing a re-birth of sovereignty and freedom movement in Macedonia.

Not standing for democracy, rule of law and human rights, the United States can no longer claim the moral high ground it once proclaimed for itself. The loss of credibility poses a question for the increasingly tenuous superpower: Has the violation of these once defended principles been worth the short term and only seemingly strategic but likely unsustainable gains in various places around the world, including Macedonia?

The textbook case for sacrificing the claimed moral high ground for short term gains only to lose in the immediate aftermath is Macedonia, where all known techniques and practices of overthrowing the legitimate government where deployed. Like elsewhere, the tentacles of the superpower helped subjugate Macedonia through a brutal color revolution that ended up with an illegitimate government and one more humiliated nation. It succeeded, it doesn’t have popular support or legitimacy, and will ultimately fail as elsewhere.

The Republic of Macedonia was praised for its 28 years of independence as a peaceful country, a good neighbor and an island of peace and stability in the otherwise troubled Balkan region.

So many indecent incentives were thrown in front of the Macedonian elites as a cheap trick to bait the country to accept the submissive position of Macedonia and to satisfy Greek demands so Macedonia could be forced into NATO as soon as possible so it can be “saved” from the supposed Russian influence.

The EU, on the other hand, remains a distant goal, and while far from being the promised panacea, it was dangled like a carrot in front of a Macedonian state as a solution to all of its problems. The two main Macedonian parties alternated in power with peaceful democratic transitions in the course of these nearly three decades. In the last decade, with the conservative VMRO-DPMNE in power, Macedonia also came to be considered as a small economic miracle praised by the very World Bank and IMF [2], the financial arm of the US-led globalist order.

However, with the confrontation with Russia becoming an official and open global US policy, after the Sochi Olympic Games in 2014, and the orchestrated coup in Ukraine that took place in parallel, all other potential Russian-friendly hot-spots were marked for a quick takeover and solidification of US imperial positions. Among other such hot spots was the Republic of Macedonia. This was effectively telegraphed to the Macedonians by the former Secretary of State John Kerry [3] who stated in front of the US Senate subcommittee in early 2015 that Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, as well as Georgia, Moldova and Transnistria, are now “in the line of fire.” [4]

Little did we know that soon the well-oiled Ukraine-style machine for overthrowing legitimate democratically elected governments will be put in full motion. Quickly, the stories spread through the globalist mainstream media that Russia was trying to bring Macedonia under its wing [5] — statements by globalist megaphones that are currently an equivalent of the kiss of death for the nations “in the line of fire.”

The government of VMRO-DPMNE was immediately put under pressure to start relinquishing its power, regardless of a full and legitimate parliamentary mandate to govern for two more years. Democracy? Citizens’ will at the ballots? Not the right time now when the Russians are coming! The pressure was exerted by the US Ambassador Jess Baily who before coming to the ambassadorial post in Macedonia led an unsuccessful campaign to overthrow the Turkish President Tayip Rejep Erdogan supposedly over some trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. In this, he received full support and assistance by the other western ambassadors in Macedonia and significant operational help by the tens of NGOs financed by western money.

The interesting part is that both VMRO-DPMNE and SDS are staunchly pro-NATO and pro-EU so there was no big strategic fight between them over Russian or any other influence which simply was not there. However, the thinking among the neocons was that in order to bring Macedonia to NATO quickly and keep Macedonia away from the Russian Bear it had to bring a more constructive government in power that will sell out the Macedonian people on the crucial identity issue with Greece. The choice was made to support the option that was most prepared to shamelessly and quickly give in to the US demands and strip their own people of their statehood for which they strived for generations.

A Macedonian Juan Guaido with low popular support in the face of Zoran Zaev of SDS, a convicted corrupt municipal official, was chosen since he was promising to bend his spine, as he famously said in an interview. The US began its pressure to organize early elections by using illegally taped phone conversations, obtained by a foreign intelligence service and given to the previously soundly defeated opposition.

Virtually all NGOs, artificially created with significant foreign grants and tasked to advance essentially non-issues with little or no popular support, were put in motion to organize what predictably turned out to be unsupported protests around issues such as trees, university exams, etc. In order to beef up the low-scale protests, the same USAID and Soros funded Canvas that trained Venezuelan puppet Guaido and other anti-Chavistas [6], was engaged in Macedonia to train and physically bus in paid protesters from neighbouring Serbia and Greece [7]. The police were forbidden to react, even when these small scale protests turned violent and when the policemen were beaten over thе heads with concrete blocks.

This was supported by generating an outcry led by the media outlets operating in a hyped media landscape funded and supported by USAID for years prior to these by now familiar events [8], so the terrain was well prepared. The “investment” into obedient media continues even today and over the entire Balkans [9] with the help of ever more increasing sums of money. The previously pro-government media outlets were silenced by threats of closure, jail time, and bribery with hush money.

In parallel, good old fashioned tactics of Syria-style import of CIA-created terrorist groups were also employed to put an additional pressure on the government. In May 2015 a group of KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) members that briefly invaded the border region in Macedonia in 2001 with covert support of the US military and diplomacy [10], entered the Macedonian town of Kumanovo from the neighbouring US-controlled Kosovo. The group intended to carry out mass terrorist attacks in public places in the capital of Skopje but was discovered by the Macedonian police and in the ensuing shootout 14 terrorists were killed and the rest surrendered while 8 Macedonian policemen were killed [11].

With multilayered pressure exerted, the ruling party VMRO-DPMNE eventually folded and was forced to sign an agreement to share power with the opposition 100 days prior to the early elections, contrary to the constitution of the Republic of Macedonia.

The arrangement transferred the levers of powers to the opposition in order to allow a possibility for stealing the popular vote in the elections. In affect, the agreements (Przino 1 and 2) unconstitutionally gave half of the power to the opposition SDS even before the elections were announced with five key ministries being controlled by them for a full year before the elections took place. The Przino agreements were themselves not adhered to as the power sharing agreement was supposed to last for only 100 days, not the full year it took for new elections to be held. The elections were postponed twice after an illegal intervention by the American ambassador to allow the conditions to be created under which the vote could be manipulated and the result would be a win by the opposition.

The agreement, also contrary to what is allowed by the constitution, created a body called the Special Public Prosecutor Office alongside an existing public prosecutor. The constitution? Who cares when US strategic interests are in question. An unconstitutional Special Prosecutor Counsel was appointed that investigated only the VMRO-DPMNE party members despite the rampant corruption of the SDS party leaders.

Despite the many occurrences of obvious ballot stuffing and numerous illegalities, the opposition SDS came up second in the elections on the 11th of December 2016 and the ruling VMRO-DPMNE won. This caused all masks to fall and the US went all in by forcing a rag-tag of smaller anti-Macedonian and quite divergent parties to join forces and form a parliamentary majority on the 27th of April 2017. And when they declared the majority, with 59 votes instead of the required 61 out of 120 deputies, even that was swept under the carpet. The unarmed peaceful protesters that were gathering in the 100s of 1000s for months prior to the April 27 symbolically occupied the Parliament Hall, where the act of treason was committed, only to be thrown out by brutal police force and to have its leaders accused of terrorism and subsequently jailed to serve long sentences in a rigged court process led by an SDS-influenced judiciary.

US military vehicles quickly rolled into Macedonia for a brief shameful parade through Skopje in May 2017 from the neighboring US Bondstil base in Kosovo only to settle further south in the key strategic military training base of Macedonia, Krivolak. Since then, little has been heard in the obedient media about the uninvited presence of the foreign armed forces on Macedonian territory, about its aims, terms or length of stay. Macedonia has been formally placed under occupation with a puppet government in power.

Fast forward to 2018, the illegitimate government reached a treasonous deal with Greece called the Prespa Agreement and similarly unfavorable and unnecessary agreements were reached with Bulgaria and Albania causing widespread national protests. If such treasonous acts were part of the election program of the opposition SDS led by the puppet Zaev, they would have not had a single Macedonian vote.

The government put the Prespa Agreement with Greece on a referendum, dangling again the carrots of EU and NATO with all powerful emissaries coming to Macedonia to tell the Macedonian people how to vote. Despite all the pressure, the referendum was boycotted by the Macedonian people. By using all illegal methods known to them, the self-proclaimed government managed to reach only 36.7% of the electorate, far less than the necessary 50% to have a census. Far more people stayed home than this percentage, however. The unofficial count was as low as 20%.

And while the treasonous Prespa Agreement was defeated by the will of Macedonian people as registered by the Election Commission, instead of abandoning the deal, the illegal government pushed forward to adopt the agreement in parliament against an existing constitutional rule against such moves. The will of the people? Crushed by further illegitimacy. Hence the illegitimate Prime Minister Zaev decided to press on with implementing his deal with Greece as if the referеndum had never happened [12]. The police used brutal Macron-style force against the protesters in front of the parliament.

In order to get the required two-thirds majority the illegitimate government used blackmail, illegal bribery payments, and threats of imprisonment to opposition deputies of the VMRO-DPMNE. This dirty tactic was led by the illegitimate Prime Minister with active participation by the US Ambassador Baily [13] who has denied his role in the arm-twisting of the deputies to vote for the deal. As in an old saying: It’s not official and true until a politician officially denies it.

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Baily and others have been investigated by congress regarding the misappropriation of USAID money that was paid to Soros-backed organizations and causes in Macedonia to further the narrow neoliberal agenda abroad [14]. As a consequence, Baily will retire early after a successful reign over Macedonia without the coveted higher position in the State Department. This is a small consolation for the extraordinary role in tampering with the Macedonian state.

In summary, the US-backed coup in the Macedonian parliament led to an illegitimate government that put forward treasonous policies that were never electorally checked, tested and approved; the US supported politicization of the media landscape in favor of only one party; participated in bribery of politicians; showed blatant disregard for the sovereignty of a nation and democracy at the ballot box; used terrorist allies to destabilize a legitimate government; condoned brutal use of force against demonstrators, etc.

What has the US gained? Only temporary support by the SDS that has lost even the marginal support it had. And VMRO-DPMNE, another US ally, now a crumbled former political giant with internal defections caused by blackmail, bribery and threats of imprisonment and its meek and unheard-of for an opposition party tolerant behavior towards the treasonous acts by the SDS-led puppet government, lost all of its appeal with Macedonian citizens whose protests it never joined or supported. The US created a political landscape that is dominated by a small group of alienated non-representatives and corrupt elites. The people’s trust in institutions and politicians has been eroded to zero, the high ideals of democracy, rule of law, popular vote, media independence, tarnished forever. For these reasons, the two severely discredited parties recently agreed not to call early elections because they know they will both be crushed by the electorate.

For now Macedonia has suffered grave damage that will take years and a new generation to repair. And since both, the ruling and the opposition parties have been totally destroyed and discredited in the eyes of the people, this duty will fall on new political forces just forming in Macedonia. This is already happening.

Because of the events leading to a national humiliation for the Macedonian people and the degradation of the political process in the country, the pro-NATO and pro-EU stance of the population is currently at its lowest level since the country’s independence in 1991. Some estimates place the support for the two organizations below the already low 30% mark registered in the days before the coup. As both parties officially declare being pro-NATO and pro-EU, in a truly democratic vote which is not possible under the current occupation environment, they would meet electoral defeat to any new political options that can read the popular mood of the Macedonians.

And since both the ruling and opposition parties have been totally destroyed and discredited in the eyes of the people, this duty will fall on new political forces just forming in Macedonia. The Macedonian political space is ripe for new political forces that are willing to channel the widespread popular sentiment that is anti-globalist, and that calls for all of the forced changes in Macedonian national feeling to be reversed.

And this is already happening, with the newly-formed parties such as Rodina Macedonia and others similarly to other new European parties formulating strong popular anti-NATO and anti-EU sentiment and molding a strategic position for Macedonia within the new Eurasian geopolitical landscape of a union of free and sovereign nations. If such predictions hold, the US spent its political capital, its moral high ground and a lot of its treasury in vain. The accomplishment will then end up being just a blip in the development of a truly Macedonian state but also a permanent stain or one more loss for the vanishing Deep State in the US and the EU.

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Goran Sumkoski (www.sumkoski.com) is an international development expert and full time activist in the anti-globalist battle.

Sources

World Bank praises Macedonia’s efforts to improve business climate. Macedonia News. 21st October 2016. https://macedonia-mk.blogspot.com/2016/10/world-bank-praises-macedonias-efforts.html

Is Russia Showing Special Interest in Macedonia? Radio Free Europe 25th March 2015.
https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/is-russia-showing-special-interest-in-russia/26919885.html

Macedonia: A pawn in the Russian geopolitical game? Deutsche Welle 26th May 2015.
https://www.dw.com/en/macedonia-a-pawn-in-the-russian-geopolitical-game/a-18476013

Imported Serb, Greek, Albanian protesters joining Soros-funded protests in Skopje. Sitel TV 19th of April 2016.
https://sitel.com.mk/srbi-grci-i-albanci-ufrleni-na-antidrzhavnite-protesti?utm_source=daily.mk&utm_medium=daily.mk

Gang for coups! Soros-funded organizations pay 1,500 USD per idea for anti-government protest in Macedonia. 13th of May 2016.
https://puls24.mk/banda-za-drzavni-udari-eve-koj-gi-plaka-demonstraciite-pred-vladata/

Washington Behind Terrorist Attacks in Macedonia, by Michel Chossudovsky. www.antiwar.com July 23, 2001.
https://www.antiwar.com/rep/chuss6.html

Terrorist group destroyed. Nova Makedonija. 11th of May 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150514171748/http://www.novamakedonija.com.mk/NewsDetal.asp?vest=51115957106&id=9&prilog=0&setIzdanie=23464 [11]

Macedonia PM ‘determined’ to change name despite referendum failure. NBC News 1st October 2018.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/macedonia-pm-determined-change-name-despite-referendum-failure-n915296

US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as ‘Watershed Event’ for ‘Galvanizing Public Unrest’ Grayzone 3rd March 2019.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/03/11/us-regime-change-blueprint-proposed-venezuelan-electricity-blackouts-as-watershed-event-for-galvanizing-public-unrest/

Name of the USAID program: Program for Strengthening Independent Media in Macedonia (SIMM). USAID website.
http://mdc.org.mk/en/%D1%83%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%B4

USAID will give 7 milion USD for the media in the Balkans. USAID website. 31st January 2018.
https://civilmedia.mk/usaid-podli-sdum-milioni-dolari-za-mdiumit-na-balkanot/

Baily: I wasn’t at the Parliament as I was watching the voting on TV. Meta Agency. 25th October 2018.
http://meta.mk/en/baily-i-wasn-t-at-the-parliament-as-i-was-watching-the-voting-on-the-tv/

State Department and Congress Should Probe USAID, Soros Promotion of Radical Agenda Overseas. The Heritage. 27th March 2017. https://www.heritage.org/gender/rhttps://www.heritage.org/gender/report/state-department-and-congress-should-probe-usaid-soros-promotion-radical-agendaeport/state-department-and-congress-should-probe-usaid-soros-promotion-radical-agenda [15]

Notes

[2] https://macedonia-mk.blogspot.com/2016/10/world-bank-praises-macedonias-efforts.html

[3] https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/is-russia-showing-special-interest-in-russia/26919885.html

[4] http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5a7_1425064348#kgLzOzME8YlWXoPy

[5] https://www.dw.com/en/macedonia-a-pawn-in-the-russian-geopolitical-game/a-18476013

[6] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/03/11/us-regime-change-blueprint-proposed-venezuelan-electricity-blackouts-as-watershed-event-for-galvanizing-public-unrest/

[7] https://sitel.com.mk/srbi-grci-i-albanci-ufrleni-na-antidrzhavnite-protesti?utm_source=daily.mk&utm_medium=daily.mk

[8] http://mdc.org.mk/en/%D1%83%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%B4

[9] https://civilmedia.mk/usaid-podli-sdum-milioni-dolari-za-mdiumit-na-balkanot/

[10] https://www.antiwar.com/rep/chuss6.html

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20150514171748/http:/www.novamakedonija.com.mk/NewsDetal.asp?vest=51115957106&id=9&prilog=0&setIzdanie=23464

[12] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/macedonia-pm-determined-change-name-despite-referendum-failure-n915296

[13] http://meta.mk/en/baily-i-wasn-t-at-the-parliament-as-i-was-watching-the-voting-on-the-tv/

[14] https://www.heritage.org/gender/report/state-department-and-congress-should-probe-usaid-soros-promotion-radical-agenda

[15] https://www.heritage.org/gender/rhttps:/www.heritage.org/gender/report/state-department-and-congress-should-probe-usaid-soros-promotion-radical-agendaeport/state-department-and-congress-should-probe-usaid-soros-promotion-radical-agenda

Humanity is at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history. To understand the background of the complex web of deceit aimed at luring the American people and the rest of the world into accepting a military solution which threatens the future of humanity, get your copy of these important titles from Global Research Publishers:

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America’s “War on Terrorism”

By Michel Chossudovsky

Year: 2005

365 pages

ISBN: 9780973714715

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In this expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalization is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

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The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century

Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Editors

Year: 2010

416 pages

ISBN: 9780973714739

List Price: $25.95 / Special Price: $18.00

In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The meltdown of financial markets was the result of institutionalized fraud and financial manipulation. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a “war without borders” led by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

This book takes the reader through the corridors of the Federal Reserve, into the plush corporate boardrooms on Wall Street where far-reaching financial transactions are routinely undertaken.

The complex causes as well as the devastating consequences of the 2008 economic crisis are carefully scrutinized with contributions from Ellen Brown, Tom Burghardt, Michel Chossudovsky, Richard C. Cook, Shamus Cooke, John Bellamy Foster, Michael Hudson,  Tanya Cariina Hsu, Fred Magdoff,  Andrew Gavin Marshall, James Petras, Peter Phillips, Peter Dale Scott, Bill Van Auken, Claudia Van Werlhof and Mike Whitney.

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

By Michel Chossudovsky

Year: 2012

102 pages

ISBN: 9780973714753

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The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

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The widespread use of mail-in voting in this presidential election makes it unlikely that a winner will be declared on election night unless it is Biden.  The reason is that polls indicate that a majority of Democrat voters intend to vote by mail.  As long as the ballots are postmarked by November 3 (election day), they are considered valid.  As mail-in votes will be delivered after November 3, unless one candidate wins the in-person vote by a landslide, the outcome will not be known until days later.

If the outcome seems favorable to Trump, this gives Democrats and the media, which is uniformly against Trump, days to make propaganda that Trump is stealing the election (with Putin’s help).  Rioting and looting will be encouraged in cities under Democrat control in order to create more chaos and charges against Trump.  If enough confusion can be sown, an “investigation” can be demanded and/or Democrats can demand the outcome be put in the hands of the House of Representatives where the Democrats have a majority.  It is entirely possible that Trump can win and be denied inauguration.

This, of course, would be more than an attack on Trump.  It would be an attack on the Constitution. 

There is circumstantial evidence that more than opportunism is involved and that this scenario is an orchestrated plot to prevent a second Trump term.

It is highly unusual for an anti-establishment candidate to be elected president.  Such people are carefully kept out of the ranks of presidential candidates.  Even slightly anti-establishment presidents such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are unwelcome in Washington.  If you have forgotten Trump’s inaugural address, listen to it.  Such a challenge to the Establishment is unprecedented in its boldness and recklessness. 

Who could be behind such a plot to interfere so blatently in the presidential election?  The global elite for one and the Deep State for another.  The global elite want an end to national sovereignty and governments accountable to the people and is opposed to national states being made great again.

The Deep State doesn’t want any risk of being made accountable or having its budget and power impaired by a president who wants to normalize relations with Russia, a necessary enemy.  The global elite and Deep State are powerful and largely invisible forces with which Trump must contend.  

Trump has his deplorables, but they are largely people who have been dispossessed by global capitalism and the Deep State. Trump’s allies do not control the public forums.  Biden’s do.  Therefore, facts can be ignored and “truth” can be established by repetition—as we have seen on numerous occasions.

The audacity is unprecedented with which Hillary Clinton and the Obama regime Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA moved against President Trump, first attempting to frame him with their concocted “Russiagate” plot and then with false charges that he attempted to bribe the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden & Son.  It could be done because the US media has been captured by the CIA and the Democrat Party and serves them as a Ministry of Propaganda.  The exclusiveness of One Voice now extends to social media where Twitter and Facebook ban alternative views to the official ones.  Internet search engines, such as Google, make dissenting views difficult to find, a practice that has spread to Amazon’s book monopoly that refuses to make available challenges to the controlled explanations that serve the agendas of the global elite and Deep State.

The definite proof that the “Covid pandemic,” for example, is serving an agenda is the banning of alternative explanations on social media as well as print and TV media.  We are very close to Big Brother’s world of totally controlled information.

So how do Trump and the “Trump Deplorables” protest if the election is stolen from them?  They are not organized for violence, and they are demonized as racists and misogynists.  This is not a strong position.  

If Trump loses or the election is stolen from him, it is likely that he will be indicted on false charges in order to complete the lesson for all future American political candidates that representing the people instead of the Establishment is not tolerated. Washington is long experienced in teaching foreign governments this lesson—Hondurus, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia—and is bringing the lesson home to America. 

As for the Red States, they will be cut out of the federal budget, and the remaining jobs will be moved out of those areas.  

In this election, the Establishment is playing for keeps.  If the Establishment wins, Americans lose.

NOTE:  Trump’s campaign events are heavily attended.  Biden’s events are sparsely attended.  Yet polls show Biden with a 7% lead.  Clearly, campaign event attendance and the polls do not correspond.  This raises a question:  Are the polls faked in order to support the case that a Trump win is the result of fraud?  The question will be: “how can Trump have won when he was 7 points behind in the race?”

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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.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Bill Moyers’s Secret Government was aired on PBS in 1987.

Moyers is a very respected TV journalist who also worked for Lyndon Johnson and has a very professional approach. He interviews many different people involved with the CIA and other government agencies.

This documentary gives quite an overview of what has actually happened in the 40 years before 1987 regarding the CIA and the cold war – including Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile and Viet Nam and features such people as Ralph McGeehee and Phil Retinger (both former CIA agents), Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque (Ret. U.S.N.), Theodore Bissell (active in the CIA at the time), Sen. Frank Church and many others.

Moyers is so very credible. This was at a time when PBS was allowed to air the truth about the CIA and U.S. foreign policy. This film has been “disappeared” for many years.

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We are living history. This documentary is of particular relevance in understanding the Covid crisis and the role of what Moyers called the “Secret Government”.

The fear campaign and media propaganda are there to mislead people around the World into believing that the Lockdown and the Closure of the Planet’s economy is a solution to resolving a public health crisis. And now they are preparing for a Second Wave.  (Michel Chossudovsky, October 2020)

BILL MOYERS: THE SECRET GOVERNMENT

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Subject : COVID

Attention ……. CEO, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF)

My concerns are about SRF reporting on covid.

You realize that there is not one SRF news program without covid being at the center.

Covid discussions appear even between news topics as special shows and discussion “panoramas”.

They are constantly alarming and aiming clearly at fear mongering.

New “cases” are reported almost on an hourly basis, how they double and triple in 24 hours, its astounding, really fear-inflicting; that we are in a second wave, that the hospitals are overflowing, that testing-testing-testing is key, so we can prevent others from being infected…

It is one big horror show, even worse than in other European news programs, alias misinformation programs, where the covid propaganda is also bad, but appears to be not as intense and manipulative as it is in Switzerland.

And, believe me, I’m not alone with this opinion.

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There is never a true and full analysis of “new infections” (“new cases”); never an explanation on how these new “infection cases” are assembled and composed, that, for ex.

1) More than 80% are asymptomatic, and therefore no risk of transmission. Yes, WHO has changed its opinion, already several times, always following instructions from their (financial) Masters;

2) Tthat “cases” increase with increased testing which you are promoting with SRF’s fear-campaigns. Specially now with the flu and cold season coming upon us, fear-fear-fear is what lowers the immune system and people are vulnerable (scientifically proven, as you probably know).

So scared people run to the doctor, or hospital with covid-fear, to be tested.

That’s how testing and ‘cases’ are increased.

3) There is never a mention that in some cases the RT-PCR test deliver, according to various virologists and medical doctors’ associations in Germany and Belgium and the US, and elsewhere – up to 90 % “false positives”. They enter the statistics, but the “patient” is not sick, has no covid.

4) As said above, we are entering the winter flu season. The PCR test cannot make a clear distinction between a common flu and covid-19, since the similarity is so striking. The common flu (cold) is known to contain a portion of corona viruses. Therefore all common flu cases are now conveniently labeled covid, so that the “case” figures can be “sky-rocketed” into fear-dimensions, thereby scaring even more people to death and incite even more people to run to testing facilities — and the spiral rises rapidly, so to justify ever more selective lockdowns, until the country is again totally locked down, for the “good of the people” — and the economy, what’s left of it, is run into the ground — its called asset-grabbing by the rich.

That’s what’s going on.

5) People who die from covid are very few and far in between. More than 90% of them are over 75 or over even over 80 and die with co-morbidities, and would have most likely died anyway from one of the other health preconditions.

Since they are tested positive, and they die with but not of covid, their death certificate will be issued saying “cause of death: covid-19”.

Case in point where this has also happened and is still happening – and was divulged by medical doctors – is Italy. And the same in Germany and France and the US, to name just a few.

6) There is nobody ever questioning the official government narrative, repeated by SRF ad absurdum (and of course other western newscasts); and there is nobody ever independently checking and investigating these figures, how they are assembled. Nobody. Maybe nobody dares challenging our Federal Council and the surrounding covid-taskforce – and other coopted scientists.

It is clear that higher forces are dictating this narrative, this fear-indoctrination – so that people are scared everyday more from an invisible enemy.

They are screaming for the vaccine to come – can’t wait.

Its is clear that SRF just fulfills a job.

It is clear that there is a different, higher agenda behind this all. Worldwide.

Imagine, the coincidence, on 18 October 2019, the Bill Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, sponsor Event 201 in NYC, simulating a pandemic, called SARS-2-Cov, later renamed by WHO as covid-19.

In January 2020 in Davos, the WEF decides in the presence of the Director General of WHO, that this coming “covid-disease” must be declared a “pandemic” – a decision with which Dr. Tedros, DG WHO, complied, declaring on 11 March 2020 covid-19 a “pandemic”, when there were worldwide only a total of 1130 deaths (outside of China) – WHO Situation Report.

On exactly mid-March 2019, all 193 UN member nations declare a general lockdown (with just a few exceptions, Belarus and Sweden). What a coincidence, an invisible enemy strikes simultaneously the entire world, never happened before in human history. But we are moving into strange times in a dystopian world.

Imagine, the Swiss authorities would stop testing tomorrow, at once – covid would be gone. No more cases. We could breathe again and would only be bothered by the usual annual common flu and occasional cold, the death-rate of which, by the way, is far higher than that of covid. And no more immune system debilitating fear!

Please, just think about it, and if you can, PLEASE, reduce the covid-fear propaganda on radio and TV.

You would do the public at large  great favor.

And I am talking about the very public which pays for the SRF services, but not for being fear-manipulated, but for receiving true analysis and non-biased news.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Peter Koenig

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Turkish authorities arbitrary arrests are no longer limited to Turkish opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inside and outside the country, but also reached Syrians within Turkish territory, whether they are displaced, opponents to the Syrian state or even businessmen.

A previous Syrian prisoner inside Turkish prison said that the Syrian opponents who are arrested by the Turkish authorities under various fabricated pretexts “are nothing but leverage that Ankara use for its deals.”

Media sources quoted one of the Syrian detainees who was recently released from prison:

“The Turkish authorities’ approach to the Syrian opposition has changed since 2016, after Erdogan had the excuse of (the military coup), so the charges are ready even before choosing the arrested person, which is dealing with external parties, employment for a foreign country and being involved in the 2016 coup.”

He added:

“I did not really know the reason for my detention for 4 years, we have been used as leverage that Ankara exploits for its deals, in addition to violating human rights inside prisons and even outside, such as forced deportation or killing.”

The former detainee explained that after the coup attempt,

“the Turkish authorities allowed themselves to arrest simply any suspected of involvement in the coup attempt or acquired foreign support from a particular party or country, through several legal amendments. As we have seen, large arresting campaigns of Turkish officers and activists appeared, followed by other campaigns targeting Syrians in turn.”

As for the methods of torture and inhuman treatment prisoners are subjected to, he added:

“I was placed in a prison measuring two meters by three meters long with seven people,” indicating that no one interrogated him until 12 passed and after his great urgency. The torture began when he was transferred to the “Gaziantep” central prison, where a black bag was placed on his head, and upon his arrival to the prison, five security forces hit him severely.”

Another survived Syrian from the Turkish prisons talked about what happened to him of arbitrary detention without any pretext or charge, to stay in prison for 20 days with elements he said were from the terrorist organization “ISIS”, in dormitories he described as “ISIS emirates” controlled by prisoners not jailers. During his trial, the Turkish translators could not understand him well, and instead of bringing another translator, he was detained for all this period without any charge, until he learned that the Turkish authorities had fabricated him the charge of “dealing with foreign entities against Ankara”, to legalise the period he spent imprisoned.

He added:

“One of the most famous forms of torture inside these detention centers is the hammer usually used to strike iron, as I was beaten on the knees with other detainees, causing severe injuries to the foot.”

In the absence of any deterrent against Erdogan and his repressive policy, Syrian opponents in Turkey are living in a state of fear and feelings of great danger, noting that the matter is not limited to coercive crackdowns or arbitrary arrests, but there are other arresting methods which resemble kidnapping and aim to make the detainees’ families ignore where their sons are, and believe that they were indeed kidnapped.

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There is a piece of news on an important anniversary missing from western state and corporate news. This year, 2020, is the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) army entering the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to help in, what the Chinese call, the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.

It is described by the People’s Daily thus:

The war, which happened 70 years ago, was forced upon the Chinese people by invading imperialism. After the U.S. repeatedly ignored the warning from the Chinese government, brazenly started the war against Korea and even attacked the territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government resolutely made the historic decision to resist the aggression of the U.S., aid Korea and protect its homeland, shouldering the historic mission of safeguarding peace with indomitable courage.

After the United Nation forces invaded the DPRK in October 1950 and advanced quickly towards the Yalu River, which forms the border with China, the CPV crossed the Yalu and joined with the DPRK people and army. Two years and nine months later, the CPV and DPRK had “won a great victory.”

American author Bruce Riedel referred to it as “the catastrophe on the Yalu.”

By December 31, 1950, the Americans had been driven 120 miles south back to the 38th parallel and were still retreating. Seoul would fall to [the direct commander of the CPV] Peng [Dehuai]’s armies in early 1951. It was by far the worst military debacle the U.S. armed forces suffered in the entire twentieth century.

It was a military victory for the peasant Chinese and DPRK fighters, but as the People’s Daily made clear this was not military triumphalism.

The Chinese people love and cherish peace. They take safeguarding world peace and opposing hegemony and power politics as their sacred responsibility. They firmly oppose resorting to threat of military force for solving international disputes, and interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs under the name of the so-called democracy, freedom and human rights.

CPC chairman Xi Jinping echoed this earlier on 28 March 2014:

The Chinese nation, with 5000 years of civilization, has always cherished peace. The pursuit of peace, amity and harmony is an integral part of the Chinese character which runs deep in the Chinese people. (1)

The People’s Daily argued,

The victory of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea proves that a nation, which is awakened and dares to fight for its glory, independence and security, is undefeatable.

Does this hold true in all cases? The relative size of the combatant nations and the level of military and technological development likely play a large role.

Nonetheless, there are numerous examples that support this contention. For instance, consider that impoverished Yemen (population 28.5 million) has not only steadfastly resisted the 2015 invasion by US-backed, oil-rich Saudi Arabia (population 33.7 million) but has inflicted some severe strategic damage itself to the invader. And the US is still mired in Afghanistan after 20 years. Following the Vietnamese defeat of French imperialists, who were aided by the US, the US military took over, with the military support of allies such as Australia and South Korea. The final military outcome featured US personnel escaping by helicopters from the rooftops in Saigon.

The DPRK has never attacked the US. It is only the US, when it intervened in a Korean civil war, that attacked the DPRK.

During the US-UN-China-Korean war the US destroyed crops, food reserves, and the energy grid when it attacked the DPRK (2) – actions designed to cause food shortages. It was war in which the US used biological and chemical weapons. (3) US military commanders had even sought permission to use nuclear weapons. (4)  The US caused enormous destruction during the war on the peninsula, a war that some claim was started by the US and the Republic of Korea (ROK) . (5) There had been several ROK troop incursions into the North preceding the DPRK invasion that began on 25 June 1950. (6)

Korea expert Bruce Cummings wrote: “it is the Americans who bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for the thirty-eighth parallel.” (7) The DPRK and China blame the US for the war — a blame that is logically unassailable. Because if the US had not insisted on splitting the Korean peninsula, the casus belli of reuniting the two Koreas wouldn’t have existed. Consequently, today’s precarious security situation would have been avoided.^{(8 -9)}

Ramifications to China of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea

Today, although beset with crunching economic sanctions, the DPRK is independent and fully capable of thwarting any attack. It would be foolish to attack a nuclear-armed opponent. The DPRK for its part has pledged no first use of nuclear weapons.

On the China-US front, the US abrogates its undertaking to recognize one China by supplying the breakaway province Taiwan with military armaments. The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea had thrown a large wrench into the plans of chairman Mao Zedong and the Communist forces to liberate Taiwan from the Guomindang (KMT) and reincorporate it with the Chinese motherland. (10)

As with the division of the Korean peninsula, the US was complicit in the separation of Taiwan from mainland China,

The [KMT] Generalissimo [Chiang Kai-shek aka Jiang Jieshi], his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the slanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people. Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China.¹¹

China is economically rising while the US is battling negative growth. Although now militarily powerful, China is committed to peaceful existence.

The expected outcome is with the US in decline that their Taiwanese kin will proudly one day rejoin the resurgent and unified China.

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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Twitter: @kimpetersen

Sources

1) Xi Jinping, “China’s Commitment to Peaceful Development” in The Governance of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014). 

2) Nhial Esso, What You Don’t Know about North Korea Could Fill a Book (Intransitive Publishers International, 2013): 63%. 

3) See (23 June 2001). Korean International War Crimes Tribunal: Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea 1945-2000, (Korean Truth Commission). 

4) Bruce Cummings, “Korea: forgotten nuclear threats,” Le Monde diplomatique, December 2004. 

5) See Ho Jong Ho, Kang Sok Hui, and Pak Thae Ho, The US Imperialists Started the Korean War (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993).

6) See Won Myong Uk and Kim Hak Chol, Distortion of US Provocation of Korean War (Pyongyang : Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2003). 

7) Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005): 186.

8) Carole Cameron Shaw, The Foreign Destruction of Korean Independence (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2007).

9) Nhial, 11-22%.

10)Lin Cheng-yi, “The legacy of the Korean War: Impact on U.S.-Taiwan relations,” Journal of Northeast Asian Studies, Winter92(11) Issue 4, p40.

11) William Blum, Killing Hope (Zed Books, 2003): 23.

Most of us can still remember where we were on that fateful and tragic day of 11 September 2001 when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York collapsed. Whilst damage to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were widely reported – what is less well known is the damage to some of the other surrounding buildings including WTC #7.

In particular the collapse of Building 7 has attracted a significant amount of controversy. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that fire damage around Column 79 in the north east corner, initiated a progressive collapse mechanism that caused a straight down collapse of WTC#7 into its own footprint. This took place at free fall velocity for the first 32 meters of its descent.

NIST hypothesised this “never seen before” collapse mechanism to explain the collapse thereby making WTC7 the first high rise steel building in history to collapse from fire alone.

Like other steel framed buildings throughout the world, Building 7 was designed by professional engineers to withstand normal office fires.  If the design was indeed at fault, significant changes should be made to steel building design, construction and maintenance standards. But since the NIST report was issued in 2008, NIST’s own records show that the ICC (International Code Council) has not addressed the root causes put forward.

In March 2020 the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) published a report following a detailed four year investigation into the WTC7 collapse. The UAF study ran a multitude of static and dynamic analysis simulation cases to find a scenario that best matched the observed collapse, including those proposed by NIST. Unlike NIST the UAF study found a scenario that exactly matched the observed collapse both visually and in the time domain – a scenario and conclusion that is very different from the official narrative.  In the interests of public safety we need to understand the true cause of this event, so appropriate action and evacuation philosophies can be implemented in similar buildings.

With this in mind the IMechE Construction and Building Services Division (CBSD) has set up a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) to look into the findings of the UAF report and see if they have any merit.

We already have seven members in the TAC, including one each from from ICE and IStructE. If there are other members interested in joining with experience in either structures, fire engineering, or construction please get in touch with Frank Mills, Chair, Construction and Building Services Division, email [email protected].

We expect to complete our work by Summer 2021.

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Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is pleased to announce that its defamation lawsuit with Ezra Levant and Rebel Media News Network Ltd. has been settled. Launched in 2016, CJPME’s suit was based on a series of defamatory publications released by Rebel Media that attacked CJPME for its promotion of the BDS campaign. BDS, standing for “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions,” is an international movement to apply economic pressure on Israel such that it fully respects the human rights of Palestinians. Rebel Media’s publications accused CJPME of anti-Semitism, comparing CJPME to Nazis and calling CJPME “Jew-baiters.” The publications also called for CJPME to be stripped of its charitable status, although CJPME has never had charitable status.

“We have reached a settlement with Levant and Rebel Media, and we are satisfied with the settlement,” announced Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. The settlement was reached several months ago, but issues regarding Rebel Media’s compliance led CJPME to delay announcing it.  The terms of the settlement are confidential. In CJPME’s 2016 statement of claim in the lawsuit, CJPME rejected allegations that its support for the BDS campaign was anti-Semitic, asserting that comparing it to the Nazis was “false, inapposite and deliberately inflammatory.” The statement of claim also pointed out that the BDS movement in Canada is a lawful activity that is constitutionally protected as free expression. CJPME’s statement of claim considered the attack “one of the most egregious kinds of reputational attacks possible” given that the organization welcomes participation from people of all backgrounds who support justice and peace for all people in the Middle East, including both Palestinians and Jews.

CJPME’s statement of claim also made clear that it has never been, nor ever claimed to be a registered charity, contrary to the allegations of Levant and Rebel Media. Rebel’s publications suggested that CJPME was acting in an unlawful manner by misusing its purported charitable status and therefore misallocating public resources. Nevertheless, CJPME’s status as a non-charity is easily confirmed by searching the Canadian Revenue Agency’s public database of charities.

CJPME endorsed BDS in 2008, considering the movement to be an effective means of non-violent protest and pressure grounded on principles of international law. The BDS movement has three objectives: 1) ending Israel’s occupation of all Arab lands and dismantling its Wall, 2) recognizing the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and 3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, or for compensation, as stipulated in UN resolution 194 (1948). CJPME has been one of the movement’s foremost proponents in Canada over the past decade.

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If ever there was evidence of the Johnson government inadvertently aiding the cause of Scottish independence, it was an interview with Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, on the BBC Politics Scotland show last Sunday.  The interviewer Gordon Brewer, came across more passionate for retaining the Union than the interviewee. Reminding Jack of the various polls which have come out in favour of Scottish independence of late, Brewer asked what exactly Jack and his colleagues were doing to try to prevent the 300 year old Union from dissipating.  He gasped, rather exasperatedly, in disbelief, ‘I’m curious, as a member of Boris Johnson’s government and as Scottish Secretary, what you’re saying to Boris Johnson…there’s a crisis here…what are you proposing to him that he does? Presumably you must be saying to him that we have to do something’.

At one point, Brewer started to feed the Scottish Secretary his own ideas, telling him what he could do to try to curry favour with the Scottish public. It couldn’t have looked more pathetic. The contrast between Brewer’s energy and enthusiasm for the Union and Jack’s complete apathy could not have been more stark. But Alister Jack is just the tip of the iceberg. Since Boris Johnson took office it has seemed as if he himself has done everything to boost Scottish independence. It almost makes one ask: does the PM himself secretly support the dissolution of the Union?!  Unlikely. What is more likely of course is that Boris Johnson simply doesn’t care about Scotland and doesn’t value its place in the Union.

After all, Johnson has never been exactly warm towards the northern nation. He once said a Scottish MP should categorically not become Prime Minister of the UK, stating Gordon Brown’s appointment would be ‘utterly outrageous…because he is a Scot and government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context’. He even went further to suggest being Scottish was Brown’s ‘political disability’. Then there was the time he oversaw the publication of an anti-Scottish satirical poem whilst editor of the Spectator magazine.  The poem, written by James Michie, was nothing short of fascist, describing the Scottish people as a ‘verminous race’ who were ‘polluting our stock’ and that the nation should be turned into a ‘ghetto’ with the inhabitants only fit for ‘extermination.’ Johnson may not have written this shocking piece, but he presided over the publication when it was published, and so the ultimate responsibility lies with him.
These examples give something of the angle from which Boris Johnson is coming from in his relationship with Scotland.

One may have thought, given the huge opposition to Brexit in Scotland, that Johnson may have started a special effort to try to win over Scots increasingly disillusioned by the decisions taken by Westminster against their wishes. But instead, Johnson has done nothing. Support for the SNP has been steadily rising in Scotland for the last two decades, with the UK government’s austerity measures clashing with the more socialist values of the north. But the Brexit vote was a turning point from which there is likely no going back. Scots voted decisively against Brexit – 62% – and yet the country is being taken out of the European Union regardless. What makes it worse is the fact that there are hardly any Conservative MPs left in Scotland, and yet these huge decisions are being made on Scotland’s behalf by a ruling Conservative party down in Westminster.

Nicola Sturgeon is a skilful politician however. She has known all along, that if you want to become an independent country, then first you have to start acting like one. And during this pandemic she has perfected this art. Steering Scotland on its own path through the Covid crisis, she has provided incredible leadership to the nation at a time when Boris Johnson has fumbled his way along. The contrast between them couldn’t have been greater, with Sturgeon sailing high above her Westminster counterpart in the polls. And as Sturgeon’s ratings have climbed higher and higher, so have those in support of Scottish independence.

All polls carried out since March this year have come out in favour of independence. The latest survey by Ipsos Mori recorded a high of 58% for Yes – the highest ever figure supporting it. It is becoming increasingly clear that independence is now a question of when, not if. One of the likely triggers of the latest surge is the controversial Internal Markets Bill, which essentially takes away previously devolved powers back to Westminster after Britain leaves the EU. It has caused outcry in devolved nations like Scotland and Wales. But few are taking notice. One Tory peer, Lord Cormack, recently warned that to neglect Scotland’s concerns over the bill would effectively ‘endanger the future of the Union.’ He admitted that Scotland would ‘almost certainly’ become independent in the next decade and stressed the importance of the issue: ‘there is no subject which should cause more concern or potential heartache to any member of this house that the subject of the future of the United Kingdom.’

If only Boris Johnson were listening. But he isn’t. He’s fiddling as Rome burns, and Sturgeon will be there to pick up the pieces…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics. 

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

First published on February 5, 2020. In-depth analysis of the Simulation of a pandemic conducted in 2010 under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

By now, those following the novel coronavirus epidemic are familiar with Event 201, the pandemic simulation staged by Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, and other ruling-class heavy hitters in October. The media establishment has already picked the story clean, set up and eviscerated a straw man (“No, Bill Gates didn’t cause the coronavirus epidemic, silly conspiracy theorists!”), and convinced the group itself to issue a statement denying their exercise was meant to predict the behavior of the actual virus to follow. 

But few are aware that the epidemic playing out in China and two dozen other countries, including the US, is unfolding in line with a decade-old simulation titled “Lock Step” devised by the Rockefeller Foundation in conjunction with the Global Business Network. The scenario, one of four included in a publication called “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” in 2010, describes a coronavirus-like pandemic that becomes the trigger for the imposition of police-state controls on movement, economy, and other areas of society.

The Lock Step scenario describes “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” In “2012” (i.e. two years after the report’s publication), an “extremely virulent and deadly” strain of influenza originating with wild geese brings the world to its knees, infecting 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million people in just seven months – “the majority of them healthy young adults.” It devastates global economies and ruptures international trade. But not everyone, the Rockefeller Foundation makes clear, is hit equally.

Countries of Africa, southeast Asia, and central America suffer the worst “in the absence of official containment protocols” – it wouldn’t be the Rockefeller Foundation if someone wasn’t licking their lips at the thought of a mass die-off in the Global South – but western “democracies” also pay the ultimate price. “The United States’ initial policy of ‘strongly discouraging’ citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the US but across borders,” the report warns. But remove such obstacles as ‘individual rights’ and you have a recipe for surviving, even thriving in the event of a pandemic, the Foundation gushes:

“A few countries did fare better – China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing-off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”

The message is clear – police state good, freedom bad. And other governments rapidly get the message, according to the simulation. First and third world nations alike follow suit by “flexing their authority” and imposing quarantines, body-temperature checks, and other “airtight rules and restrictions” – most of which, the report is careful to note, remain in place even as the pandemic recedes into the past. “In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems – from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty – leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

This global power-grab is facilitated by a frightened citizenry who “willingly gave up some of their sovereignty – and their privacy – to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability…tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight.” Everything from tighter biometric identification to stricter industrial regulation is welcomed with open arms. It takes over a decade for people to “grow weary” of the authoritarian controls imposed in the wake of the pandemic, and hints that even the civil unrest that ultimately manifests is focused on the developed world. After all, a popular uprising in the technocratic police state envisioned by the simulation would be all but impossible – as it will be in real life once 5G makes real-time total surveillance of all cities a reality.

Pin the blame on the dragon

It remains unclear what – or who – unleashed the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. The initial claim that it originated in bats from a “wet market,” in which live animals are sold and then butchered in front of the customer, couldn’t have been more perfect from a western point of view – wet markets are reviled in the West, where consumers prefer that the animal cruelty required to put meat on their tables happens behind closed doors. While wet markets would seem to improve food safety by making it impossible to sell “mystery,” mislabeled or expired meat, time and again they are fingered as disease vectors by the disapproving West, every time followed by calls to ban them entirely. However, the Huanan seafood market hadn’t sold bats for years, meaning – if the “wet market” hypothesis is to persist – an “intermediate host” species would be required to get the virus to humans. Snakes were nominated, even though scientists weren’t sure they could be infected by a coronavirus – it was more important that they eat bats and were sold at the market. Three weeks after the Huanan seafood market was shuttered and disinfected, a Lancet study put the last nail in the hypothesis’ coffin, revealing the first several coronavirus cases had no exposure to the market at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not discouraged the media from continuing to blame it for the epidemic.

Beyond the disintegrating “official story,” rumormongers have pinned the blame on the Chinese government, suggesting that through malice or incompetence Beijing released a virus cooked up in a top-secret bioweapons program operating in the city’s high-security lab. The chief purveyor of this theory is Dany Shoham, an Israeli biosafety analyst, which should raise a forest of red flags in anyone familiar with Israel’s own experiments in gene-targeted biowarfare even before taking into account Shoham’s own history of fraudulently blaming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for the 2001 anthrax attacks. Other outlets spreading this theory cite American biosafety consultant Tim Trevan, who opined in a 2017 Nature article – published before the Wuhan lab even opened! – that “diversity of viewpoint” and “openness of information” are both critical to the safe functioning of such a high-risk lab and alien to Chinese culture. The persistence of the “lab accident” theory of coronavirus’ creation thus owes more to cultural chauvinism and sinophobia than any fact-based clues.

While many alt-media outlets have fingered Event 201 as the replica “drill” that so often coincides with a false flag event, few are aware that on the day after that simulation, the 2019 Military World Games kicked off in Wuhan, bringing 300 US military personnel to the city.

As of February 4, there are over 1,000 times more coronavirus cases in China than outside of it, and the foreign cases appear to be ethnically Chinese where reported. This is not a coincidence – a recent scientific paper revealed the enzyme which serves as a receptor for novel coronavirus is produced by a certain type of lung cell found in “extremely large numbers” in Asian men compared to those of other ethnicities. Even more intriguingly, those lung cells are involved in the expression of “many other genes that positively regulating [sic] viral reproduction and transmission.” The paper’s authors stop short of suggesting the virus came out of a lab, instead drily observing that it seems to have “cleverly evolved to hijack this population of [lung] cells for its reproduction and transmission,” but one man’s clever viral evolution is another’s expert bioweapon development.

Certainly, American researchers have been surreptitiously collecting Chinese DNA for decades. A notorious Harvard School of Public Health program in the mid-1990s drafted village medics to administer “free physicals” to locals “with asthmatic symptoms.” These “checkups” were conducted as part of a genetic project that also involved the US National Institutes of Health and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, supposedly aimed at “identify[ing] and characteriz[ing] genes that play a role in causing asthma and other allergic disorders.” It later emerged that the researchers had secured the required consent forms from neither the local experimental ethics board nor the test subjects themselves. A government inquiry was commandeered by an insider and squelched. Over 200,000 DNA samples were thus collected and spirited out of the country.

US military literature has been lusting after genetically-targeted weapons for at least 50 years. The infamous Project for a New American Century, whose members have been steering the US ship of state into a series of icebergs since the George W. Bush administration, described gene-specific bioweapons as a “politically-useful tool,” part and parcel of the “new dimensions of combat” in which the future’s wars would unfold. In 1998, the year after PNAC’s formation, reports Israel was working on just such a weapon to target Arabs while leaving Jews untouched flooded the media – part PR campaign, part warning. And it is DARPA and other divisions of the US military, not  the Chinese, that has been intensively studying bat-borne coronaviruses for years, even as their own high-security biowarfare labs are being shut down for shoddy safety procedures.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of the Chinese government unleashing a genetically-targeted virus on its own population is vanishingly low. Unlike popular attitudes of “white guilt” in the West born of a hangover from colonialism, the Chinese do not traffic in racial self-loathing – indeed, outsiders have accused the Chinese of an unspoken, unshakeable belief in their own racial superiority, and regardless of whether that belief is problematic, it is unlikely to lead to intentional self-genocide. Even if behavior-correcting false flag was sought by Beijing in Hong Kong, where US-backed pro-“democracy” protests have raged destructively for months, such an event would not have been unleashed hundreds of miles away in Wuhan.

Never let a good crisis go to waste?

The real-life coronavirus is much less virulent than the pandemic described in Lock Step, with an official death toll of “just” 427 and a global infection toll of “only” 20,629 as of February 4, and the dead were mostly over 60 with preexisting medical issues. Economies worldwide are nevertheless in free-fall just like the simulation predicted. This drop is fueled by scare-stories percolating in establishment media and alt-media alike (the name of an actual article in ZeroHedge by a Rabobank analyst: “What if we are on the brink of an exponential increase in coronavirus cases?”) while videos of dubious origin appearing to show horrific scenes from within China keep the virus viral on social media. Adding to the fear is coronavirus’ lengthy incubation period, up to two weeks in which a carrier could be blithely spreading it to everyone they meet, creating a constant threat of a “boom” in cases just around the corner.

China’s economy, of course, is being hit the worst, and the epidemic’s timing could not have been more disastrous from Beijing’s point of view, coming on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday. At this time, some 400 million Chinese travel around the country to see family, mostly in the high-speed bullet trains that have their hub in – you guessed it – Wuhan. With much of this travel having occurred before the city was quarantined, cases are likely in their incubation phase all over the country, making today’s numbers look like a rounding error.

Correspondingly, the situation couldn’t be better for the American ruling class: a pandemic that targets Asians striking China just when it’s most vulnerable is a powerful blow to the rising superpower. And in case anyone still believes the circumstances of the virus’ ascendance are merely an extended string of coincidences, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross took that plausible deniability and stomped on it last month, unable to stop himself from gushing that coronavirus would “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America” in an interview with Fox News. Prefacing his victory lap by saying he didn’t “want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease,” he pointed out that businesses will be forced to take China’s inexplicable susceptibility to deadly viruses into account when reviewing their supply chains. Unmentioned, but adding to the perfect economic storm, was Trump’s signature on the USMCA trade agreement, supposed to bring in an extra 1.2 percentage points in GDP growth.

“On top of all the other things, you had SARS, you had the African Swine virus there, now you have this,” Ross said, hammering home the point by linking coronavirus to other suspect plagues. Just as many scientists concluded SARS was a manmade bioweapon, many – scientists and statesmen as well as alternative media – have raised the alarm about coronavirus. Good luck finding any of their statements on Google, however. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter have been hard at work removing coronavirus “rumors,” and Google has memory-holed hundreds of search results regarding Chinese accusations of biowarfare. Even on platforms that don’t censor on government orders, the baseless claims from Shoham and other disinfo artists about Chinese biowarfare have muscled any comments from Chinese officials out of the way. Even the former Malaysian PM’s comments are obscured behind a Farsi language barrier – his original comments inexplicably missing from English-language media and reprinted only by Iran’s IRIB News Agency (this author can no longer even find the tweet that alerted her to those comments, but would like to thank that person).

Coronavirus is not the doomsday epidemic it is being portrayed as by irresponsible media actors. But as the Lock Step scenario makes clear, one does not need massive die-off or victims exploding in geysers of blood in the streets to achieve desired social goals. It’s possible the novel coronavirus epidemic is a “dry run,” a test of both China’s readiness to handle an outbreak and of the international community’s reaction to such a plague. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that the epidemic was a mistake – that the virus escaped from a lab, likely American, by accident.

It’s also possible the plague may suddenly become more virulent. Certainly the media buzz the first week of February is that coronavirus is close to being declared a “pandemic” by the WHO, which will necessitate the type of control measures hinted at in Lock Step and described more exhaustively in Event 201. From “limited internet shutdowns” and “enforcement actions against fake news” to government bailouts of “core” industries, mandatory vaccinations, property seizures, and other police-state provisions laid out in the Model State Emergency Health Powers Acts passed in many US states in the paranoid aftermath of 9/11, the totalitarian nature of these provisions is limited only by the imagination of the regime carrying them out. Once events proceed to that stage, it is extremely difficult to reverse them. We would be wise not to allow this to happen.

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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Global Research, Ghion Journal, Progressive Radio Network, and Veterans Today. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski or follow her on Twitter at @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

As millions of people in the United States cast early ballots for the upcoming presidential and Congressional elections, tensions are escalating over the future of racial politics inside the country.

On October 26, the police killing of an African American man in Philadelphia resulted in a rebellion where people fought law-enforcement agents and attacked private property well into the following morning.

Police claim that Walter Wallace, 27, had refused to put down a knife while initially standing on his front porch.  The police therefore used this scenario to justify Wallace being shot ten times by two officers.

Wallace walked away from his porch between two vehicles and after emerging, he was gunned down by the police. Such a rationale for the shooting death of civilians by law-enforcement agents is a familiar one amid ongoing demonstrations and rebellions since the public police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

Events in Philadelphia represented the second occurrence of violent unrest since late May. The city has a sordid history of police misconduct going back decades where acting with impunity, law-enforcement personnel have utilized lethal force often without any fear of legal retribution or accountability.

Image on the right: Philadelphia father Walter Wallace, Sr. speaks after his son was shot to death by police (Source: Tom Gralish/TNS)

Police spokespersons in Philadelphia said that 14 shots were fired at Wallace. The father of the victim, Walter Wallace, Sr., told members of the press that his son was on medications and had suffered with mental illness for many years.

Law-enforcement agents claimed that they had been summoned to the predominantly Black Cobbs Creek neighborhood in West Philadelphia saying that Wallace was armed with a knife in the street. At least two people were seen in a video posted on social media following Wallace urging him to put down the weapon.

After police pumped multiple rounds into his body, a woman, said to have been his mother, began to throw objects at the police. Soon after the shooting and the viewing of the video by many people online, crowds gathered denouncing the police action saying that the killing of Wallace was completely unnecessary.

During the course of the evening, dumpsters and police vehicles were firebombed. Riot police mobilized their units along 52^nd street where the community engaged in resistance activities against the cops and local businesses.

In nearby Malcolm X Park, located at 51^st and Pine, people gathered in a spontaneous demonstration chanting “Black Lives Matter.” 52^nd street was the center of the unrest which erupted during late May.

An article on the October 26-27 rebellion was published by the Philadelphia Inquirer saying:

“For hours, protesters confronted officers who stood in a line with riot shields behind metal barricades at the station. People in the crowd could be seen throwing objects at the officers. A group also marched into University City, at least one TV news vehicle was vandalized, and police reported that windows had been broken on Chestnut Street. Between 100 and 200 people then moved to the 52nd Street commercial district and caused considerable property damage from Market to Spruce Streets. Shortly before 1 a.m., a speeding black truck ran over an officer at 52nd and Walnut Street. The incident was captured on an Instagram livestream. The condition of the officer was not immediately known.”

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe has deployed the National Guard in an attempt to control the communities in case of further demonstrations. The White House of President Donald Trump has offered to send in federal troops ostensibly to “restore law and order.”

Social Tensions Escalate Around the U.S.

The recent outbreak of unrest in Philadelphia is by no means an isolated incident. Scores of similar clashes between police, racist vigilantes and thousands of people have taken place leading to many injuries and deaths.

Cities such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, Portland, Louisville, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and others, have been the scene of police and right-wing attacks on anti-racist demonstrators. The administration of President Donald Trump has appealed to law-enforcement agencies to dominate the streets and to liquidate the leadership of the demonstrations and campaigns which have been persistent over the last several months. Trump, and his Attorney General William Barr, have deployed federal forces to numerous municipalities under the guise of fighting crime, anti-racist rebellions and to restore law and order.

In Denver, where demonstrations have been held over the last year demanding justice for Elijah McClain, an African American man killed by the Aurora police, the city has experienced mass demonstrations which have blocked streets and expressways. Only 9.8% of Denver residents are African American while people of Latin American descent represent nearly 30%.

A right-wing demonstration on October 10 in Denver resulted in the death of a participant at the hands of a private security guard hired to protect a camara crew. As Lee Keltner of the pro-police rally used pepper spray against Matthew Dulloff, the guard, he was immediately killed. See this.

Dulloff has been charged with second-degree homicide in the shooting. Such an incident is reminiscent of previous events in Portland and Kenosha when the activities of right-wing zealots has ended in violent deaths to both Trump supporters and anti-racists.

On October 24 in Shelby Township, Michigan, a suburb northeast of Detroit, 100 people gathered at a shopping mall for a rally and later march in response to statements made by the local police chief and a board trustee. Both engaged in racist provocations related to the advent during the summer of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and rebellions nationally.

SHIFT and Detroit Will Breathe activists rally in Shelby Township on Oct. 24, 2020 (Photo by Abayomi Azikiwe)

A leaflet circulated by the locally-based Suburban Solidarity for Social Justice (SHIFT!) organization at the rally emphasized that:

“Our cause is to insist that Shelby Twp. take progressive and corrective steps to become an environment of diversity, inclusion, and address its own systematic racism. Our goals speak to a national movement for social change and racial justice that is rooted in a demand for true and thorough responsibility and accountability from leadership. Until our demands are met, we will continue to assemble, march, and protest, as protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

As the activists from Shelby Township and other communities stepped off into the street for a march, they were immediately attacked by police. Public transport buses were commandeered as potential paddy wagons. Several people were grabbed and thrown to the concrete highway on 23 Mile Road west of Van Dyke and placed under arrest.

Activists from SHIFT!, Detroit Will Breathe, Moratorium NOW! Coalition, Detroit Eviction Defense, among others, then marched through residential areas of the Township. At least 30 police cars from several jurisdictions were deployed against a peaceful anti-racist demonstration. As a result of the arrests, five people have been indicted on felony charges while several people suffered injuries due to police action.

Demonstrators later arrived at the Shelby Township police station to demand the release of their fellow activists. The protesters were then subjected to further harassment and arrest. The following day on October 25, members of some of the same organizations staged a press conference outside the Macomb County Municipal Center and Courthouse in Mt. Clemens to denounce the behavior of the police and to reiterate the call for the immediate release of those held in detention. Another march was held through downtown Mt. Clemens as well as residential areas. The five detainees were released on October 26 having to post bond in relationship to the charges filed by the prosecutor’s office.

According to an article in the Macomb Daily:

“Congressman Andy Levin, who represents much of Macomb County in Congress, is making a personal plea to interim Macomb County Prosecutor Jean Cloud to drop felony charges against five people involved in racial protests in Shelby Township last weekend. The five were among 10 arrested Saturday (Oct. 24) during a protest by members of SHIFT (Suburban Solidarity for Social Justice) Michigan and Detroit Will Breathe. Of those 10, five were released pending further investigation. The remaining five were charged with various offenses, including assaulting, resisting and/or obstructing a police officer and disturbing the peace.”

These struggles which have unfolded in cities and suburbs over the last five months prompted by state repression and right-wing assaults on democratic rights, portend much for the unfolding social crisis in the U.S. Irrespective of the electoral outcome of the November 3 poll, the heightening contradictions within U.S. society will not be resolved until fundamental changes are realized.

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

Featured image: A man carries a sign along with other protestors Monday afternoon.David Angell–For The Macomb Daily David Angell

Relations between Venezuela and Canada are currently at its worst moment.  Although previous Canadian governments did not hide their dislike for our policies aimed at reclaiming sovereignty over our natural resources and prioritizing social policies, none had so actively imitated the U.S. regime change policy as much as the current Trudeau Administration.  Canada is making a calculated and ill-intentioned use of human rights discourse in order to effectively undermine Venezuela’s democratic institutions and promote illegal sanctions that cause enormous pain on the majority of all Venezuelans.

Although Trudeau had been Prime Minister since 2015, it was in 2017, after Donald Trump took office, when Canada escalated its interventionism in Venezuela’s affairs. Prior to that, our foreign ministries were in constant communication and met at least 9 times in 2016 to discuss bilateral issues.  After notorious disagreements with Trump over climate change and to a lesser extent, on the terms of a new free-trade agreement for North America, Trudeau found in Venezuela an issue he could openly support Trump in and in exchange obtain regional leadership that would help him win a seat in this year’s election to the U.N. Security Council. In addition, he would also help the interests of corporate Canada who was longing for occupying Venezuela’s place as the heavy crude supplier in U.S. refineries, and why not even take over Citgo, a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s State oil company, PDVSA.

Nowhere to be seen in this plan was real concern for Venezuelan democracy, human rights or even stability. Trudeau picked up a playbook designed by the likes of John Bolton and issued four rounds of illegal coercive measures against Venezuela imitating and in some cases even amplifying the list of U.S. targets. Officials sanctioned are responsible for organizing elections, carrying out diplomatic duties, and even implementing the country’s official human rights policy. Even Olympic athletes known to sympathize with the government have been blocked from entering Canada and completing their trials for the next Olympics. However, former general Manuel Christopher, who in April of 2019 plotted a failed coup against President Maduro, was swiftly pardoned and erased from the list.

Since 2017, Canada, under U.S. close supervision, engaged in the creation of the Lima Group, a cartel of neoliberal governments in the American continent who failed to carry the majority of votes at the Organization of American States (OAS) to harass Venezuela and were seeking a platform to portray Venezuela as a regional threat in order to benefit the pro U.S. opposition. Where were Canada’s humanitarian concerns when through the Lima Group it sought to revive the Rio Treaty to be used as a framework for a potential military intervention?

Venezuelan democracy has also taken a backseat in this interventionist policy. During the elections of May 20, 2018, Canada was the only country in the world that specifically forbade Venezuelan diplomatic missions – the Embassy in Ottowa and the consulates in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver – from opening as voting centers for Venezuelan citizens living in Canada. Rather, Ottawa’s government has engaged in recognizing self-proclaimed interim President Juan Guaidó in violation of the Venezuelan Constitution.  Since, Canada has politically and materially supported Guaido’s lobbying to other governments in the region and appointed a special advisor, Allan Culham, to use his “network of contacts to advocate for expanded support to pressure the illegitimate government”, as it refers to the democratically-elected government of President Nicolas Maduro.

In supporting Guaido’s Washington-designed farce, Canada has also been complicit in the plunder of Venezuela’s foreign assets. Citgo’s Simon Bolivar Foundation, once dedicated to financing social programs such as low-cost heating oil for low-income North American families or specialized bone marrow treatment for Venezuelan patients, now uses its funds to finance a so-called NGO – the Venezuelan Engagement Foundation, whose board in Canada is filled by Orlando Viera-Blanco and his family, an opportunists who Ottawa recognizes as Guaido’s Ambassador to Canada.

This week, during the Canada continued lobbying the European Union on behalf of the U.S. with the purpose of questioning the upcoming Legislative Elections of December 6.  Millions of Venezuelans -both government and opposition supporters – want to vote, to renew the National Assembly and fulfill the Constitutional mandate, yet Canada, always seeing itself above Venezuelan law, considers otherwise.

On August 20, I had the rare pleasure of addressing Canadians at the invitation of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute on these issues. Today, I reiterate the invitation to minister Champagne and the Canadian government to return to diplomacy, to seek a realistic understanding among our nations and to cease this dead-end policy that the Trump Administration has laid out for Ottawa. Unconstitutional and illegal adventures should no longer be encouraged by Canada. Our invitation is to return to electoral politics as an option, to diplomacy as an option. Only then will Canada be again looked upon as a good neighbor and not as the accomplice to the greatest aggression to the Venezuelan people in its modern history.

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Featured image is from Venezuelanalysis.com

There’s nothing natural about US-engineered coronavirus and economic collapse that made the dismal state of the nation much worse.

Things are unlikely to return to their former state when the current storm passes that won’t  happen any time soon.

Improvement from destructive fallout may never happen in the lifetimes of many people in the US and West.

Things are likely to worsen ahead to more greatly benefit privileged US interests than already by exploiting most others at home and abroad.

According to Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), super-wealth of US billionaires increased by nearly $800 billion this year.

Their gain has come at the cost of human misery affecting tens of millions of US households and countless millions more elsewhere.

It’s not enough for Trump, calling for another capital gains tax cut to further enrich the US super-rich, himself, his family, and cronies.

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once explained that super-wealth and democracy are incompatible. They can’t coexist with each other.

America is a land of extremes. According to ATF, citing Forbes magazine, “of the $3.7 trillion in collective wealth of America’s 650 or so billionaires,” (around) $1 trillion…is held by just the top dozen.”

The dirty dozen includes Jeff Bezos topping the list, followed by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Rob Walton.

They didn’t get super-rich by being good guys. Balzac explained that “(b)ehind every great fortune there is a crime.”

On Fox Business, Trump said if reelected,

“I’m going to do a capital gains tax cut to 15% in (a) second term…I’ll get that done easily (sic).”

The current rate is 20%. For wages, salaries, interest and other income, the top rate is 37%.

Billionaires benefitting mostly from capital gains pay less taxes  than average-earning US workers.

Warren Buffett once said he paid less taxes than his secretary.

According to entrepreneur.com, he and other billionaires pay low taxes by:

• Mainly paying them at the capital gains rate.
• Making large contributions to charity, lowering their tax obligation.
• Having accountants legally reduce their effective tax rate.
• Are rewarded with tax reductions and credits by creating jobs.
• Are benefitting hugely from the 2017 tax cut.
• ATF explained that extraordinary increase in “billionaire wealth is mostly if not all due to capital gains—growth in the value of stock holdings, private businesses and other investments,” adding:

If Trump is reelected and gets capital gains cut to 15%, “America’s tycoons will contribute a quarter less in tax revenue when they cash in their profits.”

According to ATF’s executive director Frank Clemente:

“By demanding even more tax cuts for the rich at this crucial moment President Trump shows he is as out of touch with our nation’s needs as America’s billionaires are disconnected from our nation’s misery.”

Billionaire Bonanza 2020 author Chuck Collins noted that for America’s super-rich,

“this is a heads-we win, tails-you-lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top,” adding:

“This oligarchic dozen of billionaires owning over $1 trillion is an unprecedented and disturbing indicator of the concentrated wealth during a pandemic.”

According to the Tax Policy Center (ATC), three-fourth of capital gains are held by the “highest-income 1%,” over half the total by the top 0.1%.

If the capital gains tax rate is cut to 15%, America’s wealthiest 1% will get 99% of the benefit, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) explained.

During unprecedented hard times for ordinary Americans, increased taxes on the wealthy are needed to aid the unemployed and others in their time of extreme need.

According to ATF, millions of US households are food insecure. Around “40 million families face eviction” because of little or no income to pay rent or service mortgages.

Most working-age Americans are either unemployed or way underemployed earning poverty wages.

According to ITEP, the wealthiest 5% of Americans will get over half the benefits from the 2017 tax law this year.

America’s top 1% “will get an average tax cut of $50,000,” said ATF.

This year alone, America’s super-rich increased their wealth enormously at a time of vast human misery because of engineered coronavirus and economic collapse.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

How do you call something “Russian disinformation” when you don’t have evidence it is? Let’s count the ways.

We don’t know a whole lot about how the New York Post story about Hunter Biden got into print. There are some reasons to think the material is genuine (including its cache of graphic photos and some apparent limited confirmation from people on the email chains), but in terms of sourcing, anything is possible. This material could have been hacked by any number of actors, and shopped for millions (as Time has reported), and all sorts of insidious characters – including notorious Russian partisans like Andrei Derkach – could have been behind it.

None of these details are known, however, which hasn’t stopped media companies from saying otherwise. Most major outlets began denouncing the story as foreign propaganda right away and haven’t stopped. A quick list of the creative methods seen lately of saying, “We don’t know, but we know!”:

1. Our spooks say it looks like the work of their spooks.A group of 50 “former senior intelligence officials” wrote a letter as soon as the Post story came out. Their most-quoted line was that the Post story has “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.” Note they said information operation, not disinformation operation — humorously, even people with records of lying to congress like James Clapper and John Brennanhave been more careful with language than members of the news media.Emphasizing that they didn’t know if the emails “are genuine,” these ex-heads of agencies like the CIA added “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” noting that it appeared to be an operation “consistent with Russian objectives.” Politico, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and many other outlets ran the spook testimonial.
2. It was prophesied.The Washington Post needed four reporters — Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Josh Dawsey — to tell us that “four former officials familiar with the matter” spoke of a long-ago report that the would-be source of the Postemails, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, had been “interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence” in Ukraine. As such, any information he “brought back” from there “should should be considered contaminated by Russia.” Therefore, by the transitive property of whatever, the New York Post story should be dismissed as part of an “influence” operation.
3. Authorities are investigating if it might be Russian disinformation.“The FBI is probing a possible disinformation campaign,” announced USA Today, citing the omnipresent “person familiar with the matter.” Officially, of course, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” to which FBI spokesperson Jill C. Tyson officially said the bureau had “nothing to add at this time.”Many of the outlets who covered this sequence of events described the F.B.I. statement as “carefully worded,” inviting us to read in things left unsaid. Thomas Rid in the Post went so far as to say Tyson was “hinting that actionable intelligence might yet be developed,” which is technically true but also technically meaningless.

   Another neat trick was to discuss the Post story and in the same sentence refer to a present-tense description of an apparently confirmed operation to discredit Joe Biden. CNN’s construction was like this: “The FBI is investigating whether the recently published emails that purport to detail the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine and China are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort targeting the former vice president’s campaign.”

   That “ongoing Russian disinformation effort” is a story again sourced, as so many stories of the last four years have been, to assessments of intelligence officials. Thus the essence of these new headlines comes down to, “Intelligence officials are checking to see if the new story can be connected to prior claims of intelligence officials.”

4. Even if it isn’t a Russian influence operation, we should act like it is.Johns Hopkins “Professor of Strategic Studies” Thomas Rid came up with the most elegant construction in a Washington Post editorial, stating bluntly: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” Err on the side of caution, as it were. As the bosses in Casino put it, why take a chance?
5. The Biden campaign says it’s Russian disinformation (even though they can’t say for sure it’s disinformation at all).The press has elicited from the Biden campaign a few limited, often contradictory comments about what is and isn’t true in the New York Post story. For instance, the campaign’s chief communications officer Andrew Bates said about allegations Joe Biden met with Burisma executive Vadym Pozharski, “We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”In the same article, reporters noted, “Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi.” So no meeting took place (although we’re not saying no meeting took place).

   The campaign continues to not take a concrete position about the veracity of the emails, but allows people like “senior Biden advisor” and former Assistant Secretary of State Michael Carpenter to say things like, “This is a Russian disinformation operation… I’m very comfortable saying that.”

   The natural follow-up question there should have been, “If it’s disinformation, are you saying the emails aren’t real?” But we haven’t seen many questions of that sort, probably because no one wants to be the member of the White House pool six months from now wearing the scars of interactions like this:

   I asked Joe Biden: What is your response to the NYPost story about your son, sir?

   He called it a “smear campaign” and then went after me. “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” pic.twitter.com/Eo6VD4TqxD

   — Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) October 17, 2020

6. Accuse anyone who asks questions about the story of being in league with Russia.Reporters who merely retweeted the story or even just defended its right to not be censored, like Maggie Haberman of the New York Times or Marc Caputo from Politico, were instantly blasted as accomplices to foreign disinformation plots. As a result, many backed away from asking even basic questions about the piece (including to question seeming inconsistencies in the Post report).The poor fellow who asked Biden about the story on the tarmac in the above clip, Bo Erickson of CBS, got raked over the coals by the most aggressive Heathers in the giant high school that is America, fellow media members.

   Remember that the press consistently cheered as brave defenders of truth professional gesticulators like CNN’s Jim Acosta when they hit Trump with “tough” questions, but Erickson was reamed by colleagues for his mild query of Biden.

   Matthew Dowd of ABC snapped, “Lordy, you ask someone about an article that has already been proven false and having Russia propaganda as its basis? I would suggest taking a look in the mirror.” Ben Rhodes, former Obama Deputy National Security Adviser and MSNBC contributor — a member of the growing spook-to-on-air-personality club — made the accusation more explicit:

   Maybe because Bo is acting as the far end of a Russian disinformation operation. https://t.co/oGUPOin3R0

   — Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 17, 2020

7. Adam Schiff says it is! For the last four years, whenever the Democratic Party has sought to make unsupportable claims, it’s usually combined anonymous leaks to legacy outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post with public statements by a party spokesperson willing to say things on record without evidence. That person has often been California congressman Adam Schiff. Sometimes hinting that he’s seen intelligence he can’t speak of publicly, Schiff has repeatedly made statements that later proved false.In March of 2017, he told Chuck Todd, “I can’t get into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now” that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election. He would continue making statements like this for nearly two years, until information was declassified showing that Schiff early on had been told in secret testimony, by people like the aforementioned Clapper, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

   In January of 2018, Schiff dismissed claims of FBI malfeasance in obtaining secret surveillance authority on Trump aide Carter Page: “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” He was later proved incorrect on all of these points by a report by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

   As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Schiff “fabricates accusations… the way that other people change underwear.”

   Of course, no one ever brings up Schiff’s record of wrongness. He gets a clean slate each time, and is rarely asked to substantiate anything he says, as was the case in this exchange last week with Wolf Blitzer, when he used the word “Kremlin” 14 times in one segment:

   SCHIFF: The origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only too happy to have Kremlin help and try to amplify it.

   BLITZER: It’s not like Rudy Giuliani is peddling this information in a vacuum, Congressman. Take a look at this picture of the president in the Oval Office holding up a copy of the New York Post touting this conspiracy theory. It’s made its way all the way to the commander in chief with a big smile on his face.

   SCHIFF: Yes. Well, look, I think we know who the driving force behind this smear has been all along and it’s been the president and the Kremlin.

8. This reminds us of that other time! One of the first reactions by press was to note how the release of the Burisma emails reminded them of 2016, when “Russian hackers and WikiLeaks injected stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign into the closing weeks of the presidential race.”The New York Times went so far as to say it had spoken with “U.S. intelligence analysts” who “contacted several people with knowledge of the Burisma hack,” claiming they’d heard “chatter” that stolen Burisma emails would be released as part of an “October surprise.”

   These people, the Times wrote, expressed concern that the Burisma material “would be leaked alongside forged materials… a slight twist on Russia’s 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked D.N.C. emails through fake personas on Twitter and WikiLeaks.”

   Politico, meanwhile, said the Post story “drew immediate comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump.” (Actually a lot of the accusations of corruption came from supporters of Bernie Sanders, but who’s counting?).

9. Just say it! One of the beautiful things about the post-evidence era in media is that pundits can simply say things willy-nilly, provided it’s the right thing. David Corn and Mother Jones, who this time four years ago were publishing some of the first pebbles from the towering Matterhorn of bullshit that was the Steele dossier, ran a headline proclaiming, “Giuliani and the New York Post are pushing Russian disinformation.” Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer declared the Post story “reads as if it came straight from Russian propaganda playbook 101.” Ken Dilanian of NBC employed a creative double-negative, noting that Ratcliffe’s statement “didn’t say the FBI has ruled out the possibility of foreign involvement.”My favorite, however, was probably former lead impeachment counsel Daniel Goldman, who noted that while the laptop might not be foreign disinformation, it was “part” of foreign disinformation, which feels like the Twitter version of a Magritte painting:
   

   Someone needs to explain to @DonaldJTrumpJr how Russian disinformation works, since he clearly did not learn his lesson from the June 2016 TT meeting.

   The laptop itself is not disinformation. But it is part of a Russian disinformation campaign that has been going on for years. https://t.co/HFOLKuoBx8

   — Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) October 24, 2020

10. Everyone quote everyone else! Donald Trump has taken a lot of grief — deservedly — for his “a lot of people are saying” method of backing up public statements. The response to the New York Post story has been the same kind of informational merry-go-round. Each of the above methods has often been backed up by others on the list, using A=A=A style rhetorical constructions.The “50 former senior intelligence officials” letter cited “media reports” that “say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement.” They cited the USA Today story that cited the “person familiar with the matter” in making that claim, adding that, “according to the Washington Post, citing four sources, U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation.”

    The Washington Post in the person of professor Rid then turned around and citedthe 50 former intelligence officials, while David Corn cited Rid in warning the whole story was “highly suspicious behavior,” especially against the “backdrop of 2016,” and so on.

    In other words, this is a story about media commentators citing intelligence sources who in turn are citing media commentators citing intelligence sources.

    Of course it’s possible there’s a foreign element to the Post expose. But there’s nothing concrete to go on there, which has forced the press to levitate the claims through such propaganda spin-cycles. It’s amazing how quickly these machines get built now…

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Featured image is from Matt Taibbi

Prior to the appearance of COVID-related restrictions and lockdowns, neoliberal capitalism had turned to various mechanisms in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, financial speculation and militarism.

Part and parcel of this has been a strategy of ‘creative destruction’ that has served to benefit an interlocking directorate of powerful oil, agribusiness, armaments and financial interests, among others. For these parties, what matters is the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which open the gates for plunder or through coercion and militarism which merely tear them down.

In the so-called ‘developed’ nations, notably in the US and the UK, along the way millions of jobs have been offshored to cheap labour economies. In effect, societies have become hollowed out. They have increasingly resembled empty boxes whereby the main component lurking inside is a giant mechanical hand of government and media propaganda with the threat of state violence lying in wait. And its only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever dares to tear it open and shed light on things. If successful, they will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies.

And they would also be able to identify cynical methods of social control that have assumed a different level in 2020 with constant COVID fear propaganda being pumped out on a daily basis. If we take the UK, the fact is that excess deaths in 2020 are not out of the ordinary when looking back over a 25-year period.

But we continue to see the rolling out of near-endless restrictions and tiered lockdowns across the country based on questionable PCR tests and the designation of healthy, asymptomatic people as ‘cases’. The narrative has shifted from COVID deaths and ‘flattening the curve’ to an obsession with ‘cases’ as the curve became flattened and COVID-related deaths bottomed out. Even at the height of government- and media-driven COVID paranoia, over 90% of ‘COVID deaths’ were most likely due to the serious co-morbidities listed on the death certificates of the mainly over-75s who make up the vast majority of such deaths.

 

But this is precisely what is supposed to happen when we acknowledge that it is all part of the ‘great reset’ as explained by the recent article ‘Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset’ which appeared on the OffGuardian website: a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the bottom line of the pharmaceuticals corporations, the high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

In other words, a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ which historian Luciana Bohne recently noted on her Facebook page is going to result in a different economy based on new businesses and sectors. In turn, this means older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies. It also entails massive job losses.

Although COVID is being blamed, Bohne notes that the shutting down of the old economy was already happening as there was insufficient growth, well below the minimum tolerable 3% level to maintain the viability of capitalism.

Bohne quotes the World Bank to underline her point:

“In order to reverse this serious setback [COVID] to development progress and poverty reduction, countries will need to prepare for a different economy post-COVID, by allowing capital, labor, skills, and innovation to move into new businesses and sectors.” World Bank, October 2020 Report.

Economies are being ‘restructured’ and ‘downsized’ and COVID restrictions and lockdowns are being used as a battering ram to implement this agenda.

It is very revealing that Matt Hancock, British minister for health, gave a speech to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Fourth Industrial Revolution in October 2017. Klaus Schwab was also in attendance.

Hancock stated:

“And I’m delighted to speak alongside so many impressive colleagues who really understand this, and alongside Professor Klaus Schwab who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Your work, bringing together as you do all the best minds on the planet, has informed what we are doing, and I’m delighted to work with you.”

If readers take time to read the aforementioned piece, they may well be disturbed by many of the beliefs Schwab holds for the future. And now, three years on from Hancock’s presentation, we are seeing him play an active role in implementing the type of scenario Schwab has set out in his various books and speeches by rolling out further restrictions and phased lockdowns, mass surveillance measures, vaccination projects, authoritarian government and economic devastation.

Hancock really does seem to be taking his cue from the influential Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

COVID is being used to inject neoliberal capitalism with new life by destroying livelihoods and implementing a social and economic tectonic shift. If people in the richer countries are perplexed by the destruction of livelihoods under the pretext of COVID, they need look no further than India to appreciate why governments wage financial and social war on their own people and the type of brutality they are capable of and whose interests they ultimately serve.

There is a plan for the future of that country and most of its current farmers do not have a role in it. India remains an agrarian-based society with over 60% of the population still relying on agriculture either directly or indirectly for their livelihood.

Successive administrations have been making farming financially unviable with the aim of moving farmers out of agriculture and into the cities to work in construction, manufacturing or the service sector, despite these sectors not creating anything like the number of jobs required. By uprooting the agrarian base, we are seeing a fundamental attack on Indian society.

The aim is to displace the existing labour-intensive system of food and agriculture with one dominated by a few transnational corporate agribusiness concerns which will then control the sector. Agriculture is to be wholly commercialised with large-scale, mechanised (monocrop) enterprises replacing family-run farms that help sustain hundreds of millions of rural livelihoods, while feeding the urban masses.

As is currently happening in the West, small independent concerns (in this case, smallholder farmers) are being driven to bankruptcy. So why would anyone set out to deliberately run down what is effectively a productive system of agriculture that feeds people, sustains livelihoods and produces sufficient buffer stocks? Similarly, why in 2020 are governments facilitating economic destruction?

Politicians are effectively facilitating the needs of global capital and all it entails: a system based on endless profit growth, crises of overproduction and market saturation and a need to constantly seek out, create or expand into new, untapped markets to maintain profitability.

India’s agrarian base is being destroyed at the behest of predatory commercial interests (via the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, World Bank directives and WTO policies) and the peasantry is being dealt a knock-out blow so global agribusiness and retail concerns can capture financially lucrative markets and further incorporate the agri-food sector into their global supply chains.

Looking at the Industrial Revolution in England, historian Michael Perelman has detailed the processes that whipped the English peasantry into a workforce coerced into factory wage labour. Peasants left their land to work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of industrial capitalists. Perelman describes the policies through which peasants were forced out of agriculture, not least by the barring of access to common land. A largely self-reliant population was starved of its productive means.

It was brutal, just like ongoing developments in India. And what we are now seeing are vested interests forcing through a Fourth Industrial Revolution across the world. This too is brutal and is also having dire consequences in places like India as I have previously outlined in the article ‘Coronavirus Capitalism: Entrenching Dispossession and Dependency’.

The encouragement of identity politics, narcissism, apathy and consumerism’s irretrievable materialism, among other things, have undermined ordinary people’s capacity for action. Not so the billionaire class pushing through the ‘great reset’ which is acutely aware of its own interests.

A lack of class consciousness among ordinary people debilitates their ability to unite and recognise that their interests and those of the government and the people they really serve are diametrically opposed. Free from the shackles of mainstream propaganda, ordinary people would be better placed to resist current restrictions and challenge the prevailing narrative on COVID.

Unfortunately, those who might be expected to be pivotal in this – prominent figures and media outlets which claim to be of the ‘left’ – have failed to lead by example and have capitulated to the agenda of those who are driving the COVID narrative, the restrictions, the fear, the rolling out of draconian surveillance and rushed-through vaccines and the economic devastation leading to millions of job losses.

What must be regarded as the ‘establishment left’ has done little more than cheerlead restrictions and lockdowns.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

At the request of Syria’s government in September 2015, Russia intervened in the country to combat ISIS and other US/NATO/Israeli-backed jihadists.

Moscow’s freedom-fighting operations turned the tide of battle, enabling Syrian forces to liberate most parts of the country.

Most of Idlib province remains occupied by many thousands of jihadists — heavily armed and trained by the Pentagon and CIA.

Along with illegally occupied northern and southern parts of the country by US forces, Idlib remains to be liberated so Syrians again may be free from the scourge of US aggression — launched by Obama/Biden, continued by Trump.

There’s nothing “civil” about a near-decade of US-launched war in Syria — part of its longstanding aim to redraw the Middle East map to control the region unchallenged.

In his important truth-telling book titled “The Dirty War on Syria,” Tim Anderson explained what US involvement since March 2011 is all about.

Separately he said the following:

“Washington and its allies tr(ied) another ‘regime change’ in Syria.”

“A fake ‘revolution’ uses Islamic gangs, during an ‘Arab Spring.’ The Western media constantly lie about this covert, dirty war.”

US, NATO, Israeli, Turkish, Saudi-backed jihadists “carry out a series of massacres, falsely blaming them on the Syrian Army and President Assad.”

“Most of Syria’s opposition backs the state and army against terrorism. Washington calls a puppet exile group ‘the Syrian opposition.’ ”

So-called “moderate rebels” are US-recruited jihadists.

What’s been ongoing in Syria for a near-decade is a failed US imperial effort to transform the country into a vassal state — replacing legitimate President Assad with puppet leadership subservient to US and Israeli interests.

It’s also about wanting Iran isolated regionally. Longstanding US policy calls for gaining control over all independent states not bending to its will — by whatever it takes to achieve its aims, endless wars by hot and other means its favorite strategies.

On Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov explained what Moscow faces on the world stage, saying the following:

“Washington and a number of EU capitals have redoubled their efforts to contain Russia’s development.”

“They are trying to punish us for an independent foreign policy, for consistently upholding our national interests.”

“To justify their actions, the introduction of ever new anti-Russia sanctions, they throw in various accusations and insinuations.”

“At the same time, no one has shown any facts or evidence.”

Anti-Russia Western “rhetoric is always being kept at the ‘highly likely’ innuendo level.”

“Those claims are based on fabricated accusations and run contrary to even elementary logic.”

“All the proposals we make to set up a professional dialogue on any concerns remain without any reaction.”

“So we have no other choice but to conclude we cannot count on” respect from Washington and EU governments.”

“(T)he West has made it a rule to talk with Russia based on the presumption of its guilt.”

Western nations forgot “what diplomacy is and have sunk to the level of vulgar rudeness. Our retaliatory steps in the US and EU are well known.”

Among other issues, hardliners in the US, UK, and other Western nations are smarting over defeat of their imperial project in Syria by Russia’s involvement.

Yet they continue endless war and efforts to starve and otherwise immiserate 17 million Syrians into submission — part of endless US war on the country.

On Monday, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for the Middle East and African countries/Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met with Syrian ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad, saying the following:

Views (were exchanged) on the current situation in and around Syria,” adding:

“The Russian side reiterated its unfailing solidarity with the Syrian people, support to its sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, as well as its readiness to continue efficient cooperation in restoring the socio-economic infrastructure.”

In mid-October, Russian airstrikes in southwestern Idlib reportedly killed or wounded “over 200…Turkish-backed” jihadists in response to their “shelling and rocket fire,” according to AMN News.

Southfront reported that these elements are “being trained on anti-tank weapons and mountain warfare by Turkish officers and private contractors…”

“(P)hotos released by RusVesan.RU confirm that the strikes targeted military installations located far from any urban area.”

Claims of numerous civilian casualties were fabricated like most always in response to Syrian and Russian military strikes on US/Western/Israeli or Turkish-backed jihadists — serving as their proxies against Syrian sovereign independence.

On Tuesday, RT reported that leaked documents revealed a “UK-(run) secret training and PR (operation) for” jihadists in Syria, “costing millions” of dollars, adding:

“(T)he hacktivist collective Anonymous…expose(d) a variety of covert actions undertaken by the UK government against the Syrian state over many years.”

Britain partners with all US wars of aggression against invented enemies.

Efforts to replace Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with pro-Western puppet rule failed.

Yet endless war continues despite Trump’s earlier vow to exit US troops from the country.

More recently he said that US troops are in Syria “only for oil…to “secure the oil” — code language for stealing it.

A near-decade of US proxy war with Pentagon air support is all about gaining control over the country and replacing the government of an Israeli rival state.

On Tuesday, AMN News reported that “Turkish-backed” jihadists “resumed…large attack(s)” in northern Idlib province — in “retaliation” for Russian airstrikes against their fighters that took a heavy toll.

They “launched dozens of rockets and artillery shells towards the government areas…mostly hit(ting) open fields…”

“At the same time, Russian and Syrian military reconnaissance planes are conducting flights over the militant positions to identify where the shelling and rocket fire is coming from” to strike back.

The struggle for Syria’s soul continues to keep the country and its people free from US imperial control.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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US war on China by other means risks direct confrontation between two superpowers if things are pushed too far — what’s been happening since before Trump took office.

On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin addressed unacceptable US regional actions, notably its escalating hostile policies toward Beijing.

In response to newly announced US arms sales to Taiwan — the island state considered a breakaway province by Beijing to be reunited with the mainland — Wang denounced them, saying:

“US arms sales to the Taiwan region severely violate the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques…seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and security interests…”

They “send out wrong signals to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces, and gravely undermine China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”

Calls by Wang and other Chinese officials for the Trump regime to cancel the sales fell on deaf ears in Washington.

Worsening bilateral relations are likely to continue in the wrong direction next year if Biden/Harris succeed Trump.

Wang responded to his UN envoy’s hostile to China New York Post op-ed.

Last week, Kelly Kraft falsely called Beijing “the biggest threat to (the) integrity and effectiveness” of the UN.

Reinventing reality, while ignoring US war on humanity worldwide, she falsely accused China of “increasingly aggressive efforts to manipulate UN agencies to whitewash its bad behavior, silence criticism and advance authoritarian government.”

It’s how the US operates against all nations, entities, and individuals not subservient to its imperial interests.

At the same time, she unacceptably slammed Syria, Venezuela and Iran — nations successfully resisting US efforts to transform them into subservient pro-Western states.

She lied about Chinese treatment of Uighurs and other Xinjiang minority groups.

She reinvented US foreign policy, falsely claiming its policymakers foster “multilateralism” — what they systematically seek to eliminate in pursuit of their aim to rule the world unchallenged.

Saying she, Trump, and Pompeo “fight every day on the side of freedom” is polar opposite how both right wings of the US one-party state operate.

In response to her hostile remarks, Wang accused her of “ignorance and bias,” adding:

The US has a long disturbing history of “criticizing other countries’ cooperation with the UN by wantonly distorting facts.”

Kraft’s “groundless allegation(s) insult…international staff members from various countries (including China), fulfill(ing) their duties according to the collective will of member states.”

Like many other US officials, “Kraft provoke(s) confrontation among great powers and interfere(s) in the internal affairs of other countries at the UN, which is deeply unpopular.”

She’s “complacent about…tell(ing) lies with such pretense and no scruples…not knowing that she has already violated international law and the basic norms of international relations.”

China and many other countries reject US cold war policies.

Right-wing extremist Pompeo — responsible for driving US international relations to a new low — is militantly hostile to peace, equity, justice and the rule of law.

As US world body envoy, Kraft expresses his unacceptable worldview.

Commenting on Pompeo’s India visit, Wang slammed his “attacks and allegations against China,” calling them “nothing new.”

He continued his hostile war of words on China with remarks like the following:

“(I)f China were to go away suddenly, that we all pray might happen…the (US) relationship” with India would benefit (sic).

“(H)undreds of millions of Chinese would like to be out under…the jackboot of the Chinese Communist Party (sic).”

Pompeo again falsely blamed made-in-the-USA covid outbreaks worldwide on Beijing.

He also falsely accused China of an array of US high crimes, notably its rage to the rule the world unchallenged by whatever hostile actions it takes to achieve its hegemonic aims.

He reinvented hostile to democratic values USA as a champion of its principles.

According to Wang, Pompeo represents US “Cold War mentality and ideological bias.”

The so-called “China threat” he pushes doesn’t exist.

US actions on the world stage, “undermine…peace and stability,” Wang correctly explained.

A day earlier, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the following about hostile to China designations of six of the country’s media operations as “foreign missions” by the US:

“In recent years, the US government placed unwarranted restrictions on Chinese media agencies and personnel in the United States…”

It “purposely made things difficult for their normal reporting assignments, and subjected them to growing discrimination and politically-motivated oppression.”

“(I)n total disregard of China’s legitimate and reasonable demand and solemn warning (against these unacceptable actions, the US) ramped up political repression and stigmatization of Chinese media agencies and personnel.”

If what’s going on doesn’t change, “more countermeasures from China” will follow.

Hostile US policies toward Beijing risk rupturing bilateral relations or something worse.

Things could turn hot by accident or design because of US rage to replace all independent governments with pro-Western vassal ones.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from www.fmprc.gov.cn

The world’s largest automotive market, China, is looking to become a dominant player in the rising global electric vehicle market. Chinese EV manufacturers are expected to start expanding overseas, while Beijing already controls a large part of the global EV supply chain, beginning with critical minerals processing.

The United States has started to realize that China could dominate the future of transportation—electric transportation—if it does not counter the current Chinese influence over critical parts of the EV supply chain, from battery metals sourcing and processing to battery manufacturing.

China is the world’s top EV market, and the government is looking to have new energy vehicle (NEV) sales at up to 25 percent of all sales by 2025, although it is not looking to ban sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles anytime soon.

Having supported EV manufacturers and sales over the past few years, Beijing now looks to expand its presence outside China.

“Over the next five years we anticipate Chinese players across the EV supply chain to aggressively enter the overseas market,” UBS said in a note last week, as carried by CNBC. “We believe China materials costs are lower than the overseas market. If this advantage can sustain, China could realize a cost advantage over ex-China players,” according to UBS analysts.

Chinese EV brands are set to challenge Tesla and the western automakers outside China, while Beijing’s dominance in the supply chain is of great concern for U.S. energy security policy experts, as well as to the White House.

U.S. President Donald Trump declared last month a national emergency to deal with the threat that America’s dependence on critical minerals, especially on China, poses to national security and the U.S. economy.

“Our dependence on one country, the People’s Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning. The United States now imports 80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China, with portions of the remainder indirectly sourced from China through other countries,” President Trump’s executive order said.

China controls a large part of the EV supply chain, analysts say. It is a common misconception that China holds most of the natural resources—in fact, 23 percent of global supply of all battery raw materials comes from China, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. However, China dominates chemical production of battery-grade raw materials with a whopping 80 percent of total global production. China will host a total of 101 lithium-ion battery plants currently planned or under construction to 2029 out of all 136 plants planned globally by that date, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence said.

China controls 80 percent of the world’s raw material refining in the lithium-ion battery supply chain, 77 percent of the world’s cell capacity, and 60 percent of the world’s component manufacturing, BNEF said in a report last month.

“The next decade will be particularly interesting as Europe and the U.S. try to create their own battery champions to challenge Asian incumbents who are already building capacity in both places. While Europe is launching initiatives to capture more of the raw material value chain, the U.S. is slower to react on this,” said James Frith, BNEF’s head of energy storage.

China’s push to adopt EVs and support its electric car manufacturing and supply chain industries is not only the result of clean air policies.

“By committing to adopt EVs that reduce its dependence on oil, Beijing would make itself less vulnerable if tensions between the United States and China were to increase. In addition, EVs create opportunities for Chinese companies to benefit from a growing EV industry, and gain global recognition and credibility by developing sophisticated technology at a low cost,” U.S. advocacy group Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) said in a report in September.

The U.S. and its partners need to develop a supply chain of critical minerals less dependent on China to counter Beijing’s dominance, General James Conway and Peter Ackerman, members of SAFE’s Energy Security Leadership Council, wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times last week.

“We risk a scenario in which we swap our dependence on a chaotic oil market dominated by Opec countries that do not share our strategic goals, for a reliance on China for our future transportation needs,” the authors wrote.

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At my blog, Café Hayek, I recently posted several entries in opposition to the Covid-19 lockdowns specifically, and, more generally, to Covid-caused hysteria. These posts sparked negative reaction in the comments section and in my email box. This negative reaction is, I think, unwarranted.

Unwarranted Faith

Among the most frustrating features of the pro-lockdown argument is the blind faith that those who make it place in the politicians who issue the orders and oversee the enforcement. This frustration is hyper-charged when such faith is displayed by classical liberals and libertarians, who normally understand that politicians and their hirelings have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to be trusted with much power. Yet in the face of Covid, executive-branch government officials are assumed somehow to become sufficiently informed and trustworthy to exercise the unbounded discretionary power – that is, the arbitrary power – required to prohibit vast swathes of normal human interaction ranging from the commercial through the educational to the personal (such as prohibiting family gatherings above a certain size).

Why this faith? The proffered answer, of course, is that Covid-19 is unusually dangerous and, therefore, we have no choice but to put faith in government officials. This answer is bizarre, for it insists that we must now trust with unprecedented power people who regularly act in ways that prove them to be unworthy to hold lesser amounts of power. My head explodes….

Moving on, and without pausing to explore just what is meant here by “unusually,” let’s grant that Covid-19 is indeed unusually dangerous. But also unusually dangerous is arbitrary government power. Is it unreasonable for those of us who fear this power to require that proponents of lockdowns meet a higher standard of persuasion before we accede to the exercise of such power? Given that the initial spark for the lockdowns, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States, was Neil Ferguson’s suspect and widely criticized Imperial Model – a model, recall, offered by a man with an awful record of dramatically exaggerating the likely mortality rates of diseases – is it unreasonable to demand that much stronger evidence be offered before we turn silent as governments continue massively to interrupt normal life?

If you’re tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative, recognize that there’s at least one important difference between pathogens and power – a difference that should be, but isn’t, taken into consideration by pro-lockdowners. The difference is this: Population immunity, either through a pathogen’s natural spread or through a vaccine, will at some point significantly reduce that pathogen’s danger; in contrast, for protection against government power there is no population immunity or vaccine. When such power expands, the ratchet effect documented by Robert Higgs ensures that that power remains more elevated and widespread than before.

Unlike pathogens, government power continues to nourish itself as it grows into an ever-greater danger. Quaking at the very thought of Covid while discounting the danger that lurks in the immense expansions of government power done in the name of fighting Covid is wholly unreasonable.

Where’s the Perspective?

Several of Café Hayek’s commenters and my email correspondents push back against anti-lockdown arguments by observing that ordinary people support lockdowns because they don’t wish to die, to become severely ill, or to have their loved ones stricken with Covid. This observation is accurate – as is an accompanying observation that Covid is spread from person to person. But as an argument for lockdowns it’s without merit, for it begs several questions.

How many lives are actually saved, on net, by the lockdowns? Obviously, the Covid-induced expansions of government power are not justified if the net number of lives saved is small. And remember, against the lives saved by lockdowns must be counted the lives lost because of the lockdowns – lives lost to suicide, to the reduced health and safety that comes from lower income, and from the failure to diagnose and treat non-Covid illnesses.

Yet those who insist that the desire not to be killed by Covid justifies the lockdowns largely ignore these questions and trade-offs. It would be as if a sincerely expressed desire not to be killed as a pedestrian by an automobile were taken as justification to prohibit automobiles. Such a prohibition would result in approximately 6,000 fewer pedestrians in America being killed annually by automobiles – itself alone an undeniably happy result. Yet would such a prohibition be justified by this objective fact? Would your answer change if someone with a superficial familiarity with economics declares that the danger posed to pedestrians by automobile traffic is a “negative externality”?

And whose lives are being saved by the lockdowns and for how long? I’m baffled by the ongoing failure in the public discussion to recognize that Covid kills mostly very old or sick people, and is practically of no danger to people under the age of 50. This reality alone should utterly discredit the case for locking down entire economies and life events. (Note, by the way, that I write this essay as a 62-year-old.) Not only does Covid pose no real – and much less no unusual – danger to most people, the group of persons to whom Covid does pose an unusual danger is easily identified.

As the Great Barrington Declaration sensibly argues, preventive efforts should be focused on helping this (relatively small) group of vulnerable persons. Keeping them isolated or otherwise protected from the coronavirus simply does not require the vast majority of the population to be locked down, “socially distanced” from each other, or saddled with other restrictions. In fact, as the Declaration’s authors note, by delaying population immunity, lockdowns likely increase the long-term threat to old and sick people.

Public Panic

It’s no good response to note that the general public is panicked by Covid. This panic is indeed real. It explains why the public isn’t more resistant to the lockdowns. But this panic does not justify the lockdowns.

Consider: The risk in America of being killed by terrorism is, as Bryan Caplan describes it, “microscopic.” Between 1970 and 2012 the chance that an American would, in any one year, be done in by terrorism was 1 in 4 million – much less than half the chance of being killed by a home appliance. Yet the 9/11-sparked panic over terrorism has resulted in a permanent increase in efforts to protect Americans from this virtual non-threat.

How much prosperity – including increased health and safety – are we failing to produce because we now waste billions of dollars worth of resources on protection from this minuscule risk? Too much.

And don’t forget that government’s response to 9/11 also includes America’s seemingly permanent war stance in the Middle East and a scaling up of government’s violation of our privacy. How much of our freedom has been permanently lost because of excessive fear of terrorism? Much too much.

Rather than accept as given the public’s irrational fear of terrorism, the far better course is to stop stoking this fear and, instead, to calm it by broadcasting accurate information about terrorism’s relative risks. (Aren’t we constantly told that one of the core functions of government is to produce and spread accurate information as a “public good?”) The spread of better information would prompt the public to demand better policies.

The same must be said about Covid. Tamping down the Covid hysteria by making available accurate information about this disease is what well-informed and public-spirited governments would do. Yet such governments are largely mythical. Real-world governments behave quite differently. Most governments, in the U.S. and elsewhere, chose – and continue to choose – a course precisely the opposite of what ‘good’ governments would choose. The reason, alas, isn’t mysterious: As H.L. Mencken observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Covid-19 is the perfect hobgoblin. And while its dangers are not imaginary, their degree and impact certainly are. Governments’ failure to ensure that their citizens are accurately informed about Covid is itself sufficient reason to distrust governments with the powers they’ve seized over the course of this hellish year.

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Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University.

The UK government’s decision to resume selling arms to Saudi Arabia, following a one-year pause, is set to face another legal challenge. 

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) announced on Tuesday that it had launched a judicial review application into the UK’s decision to renew selling arms to the Saudi-led coalition involved in Yemen.

In June 2019, all new British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain and Kuwait were suspended after a lengthy legal battle. The Court of Appeal ruled that the UK government had failed to make an assessment of whether there was a risk that the weapons could be used to breach international humanitarian law in Yemen.

Britain has since resumed arms sales to the coalition, after International Trade Secretary Liz Truss told MPs in July that there were no patterns or trends of violations of international law by Saudi forces in Yemen, and any breaches were “isolated incidents”.

CAAT has accused the government of providing little information on how it came to this conclusion and of prologing the conflict through arms sales.

“Tens of thousands of people have been killed in this brutal bombardment, yet arms companies have profited every step of the way,” Andrew Smith, a spokesperson from Campaign Against Arms Trade, said.

“Last year the Court of Appeal found that the government had acted illegally, and nothing that we have seen since suggests otherwise.

“The government may think that the widespread destruction of schools, hospitals and homes can be dismissed as ‘isolated incidents’ but we do not. These arms sales are immoral, and we are confident that the court will confirm that the decision to renew them was illegal.”

Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, and have since carried out more than 20,000 air strikes in an effort to roll back the Houthi rebels, who seized the capital Sanaa in late 2014. One-third of those strikes have been on non-military sites, including schools, factories and hospitals, according to the Yemen Data Project.

Rosa Curling, from the law firm Leigh Day, which represents CAAT, said that every international body that had investigated violations of international human rights law by Saudi Arabia in Yemen had found repeated violations.

“Despite this, our government has determined it appropriate to continue to arm the coalition, a decision which our client considers unlawful and a decision we hope the court will overturn as a matter of priority,” Curling said.

In August, a British soldier born in Yemen was arrested after he publicly protested against UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed al-Batati, a 21-year-old lance corporal from Sheffield, stood outside Whitehall in his military uniform, and reportedly blew a whistle every 10 minutes for nine and a half hours to symbolically mark how often a child dies in Yemen.

“We are soldiers that serve the government, so why should I continue my service to a government that continues to prioritise money over the victims of Yemen,” Batati told MEE at the time. “My message is clear: I refuse to serve them until they make the right decisions to end the unlawful arms trade with Saudi Arabia.”

New figures released by the UK government just this month revealed that Saudi Arabia was by far the world’s biggest defence spender over the past decade, having purchased $116bn in arms – twice as much as any other country.

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A Sotheby’s auction of rare objects from the Museum of Islamic Arts in Jerusalem has been halted at the last minute following an outcry from the Israeli government and culture officials. 

One hundred and ninety Islamic artifacts from the museum’s collection, including ceramics, textiles, and illuminated manuscripts, were set to hit the block in a single-owner sale on October 27 in London, while an additional 68 timepieces owned by the institution were to be included in an Important Watches sale the next day.

But less than 24 hours before the first event went live, the museum and its endower, the Hermann de Stern Foundation, announced plans to postpone the sale.

The news came in response to a public appeal from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, and followed a discussion between the museum and Israel’s Culture Ministry.

“The foundation’s management hopes that the postponement will make it possible to reach agreements that will also be acceptable to the Culture Ministry in the coming weeks,” the museum said in a statement.

In a separate statement sent to Artnet News, Sotheby’s clarified that the sale was moved to November. The statement did not specify what objects would be included in the auction.

“The aim of these sales remains to safeguard and further the founding vision of the museum and to advance its work in fostering cross-cultural dialogue and understanding,” a representative from the auction house said. “Sotheby’s looks forward to working with the museum to bring these plans to fruition in the near future.”

The deaccession plan was put in place to support the museum’s long-term financial outlook, according to the Art Newspaper. The auction had been in the works for over two years, and the institution said the 258 objects set to hit the block were either kept in storage, or were duplicated by other examples in the permanent collection.

But shortly after the auction was announced in September, museum officials and antiquities experts in Israeli questioned this claim, raising additional questions about the ethics of a state-sponsored museum selling off its holdings.

Image on the right: An early Iznik blue and white calligraphic pottery hanging ornament, Turkey, circa 1480. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Michael Sebbane, chief director of national treasures for the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the museum’s move suggested a “lack of professionalism.”

“They are selling items that are very important, very unique, and the moment they sell them, the public will have lost them,” he told the Washington Post.

The backlash reached its peak on Sunday, when Israeli president Rivlin called for a halt to the sale.

“We must find the means available to the State of Israel in the legal and international spheres to prevent the sale of these cultural assets from the region as a whole,” Rivlin said in a statement.

He added that institutions like the Museum of Islamic Art “are the repositories of enormous spiritual and material assets for the State of Israel and the Middle East, and we must do all we can to keep them in Israel.”

The Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem was established in 1974 by British-Jewess heiress Vera Salomons. It includes more than 5,500 objects in its collection, which spans the 7th to the 19th centuries.

Among the artifacts set to be deaccessioned were an 11th–12th century page from a Qur’an written in eastern Kufic script from Persia, and a calligraphic hanging pottery ornament from Turkey, circa 1480. Both were expected to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000 ($261,000–$392,000).

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Featured image: A silver-inlaid Aqqoyunlu turban helmet, Turkey or Persia, second half 15th century. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

The media portrayal of Brazil’s annual fire season — which in 2020 is trending worse than in 2019 — is “surreal” according to the country’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, who spoke during a web seminar on 27 August. Not flames and deforestation, but “development” is the biggest challenge ahead for the Amazon, the VP said then.

“The Brazilian state is not present in the Amazon,” the former general told the Wall Street Journal one week later. “That is why illegality thrives.” Yet, an enhanced government presence alone is not a solution, he added. Only viable economic opportunities can end the poverty which, according to the VP, is the root cause of environmental destruction there.

Mourão’s contention that “development” will save the rainforest may feel counterintuitive to outsiders and especially conservationists, but his words echo the intertwined policies of national “security and development” which have served as the cornerstones of the Brazilian armed forces’ vision for the Amazon for more than half a century.

And his words carry considerable weight: The 67-year-old VP was named head of the Conselho Nacional da Amazônia Legal (the National Council of the Amazon; CNAL) last January. Consisting predominantly of former military officers, this governmental super body is to “coordinate and supervise the implementation of all public policies related to the Amazon.”

CNAL is hardly the only public institution “militarized” during the watch of President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a former Army Captain. Research by Brazil’s Federal Audit Court shows that the current administration employs more than 6,000 active and former military personnel, by far the most since the end of the military dictatorship which ruled the country between 1964 and 1985.

Yet, despite this infusion of military high brass into the heart of the nation’s civil administration, “it is important to understand that the Bolsonaro government is not a military government,” cautioned Joao Roberto Martins Filho, professor of social sciences at the University of Sao Carlos and an expert on the role of the military in Brazilian politics. “It is a government leaning towards fascism, which is supported by the military, as it is supported by other factions. I don’t believe Bolsonaro is controlled by the military. It is much more ambiguous that that. He needs them and they need him.”

Image on the right: Vice President Hamilton Mourão (left) greets President Jair Bolsonaro — both of them, Brazilian military men. Photo credit: Palácio do Planalto on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA

Inside the Amazonian elite

Joao Roberto Martins Filho offers an academic window into the Brazilian military mindset — and potentially the mindset defining the current administration. At first glance, he notes, the president and vice president could not seem more different. Bolsonaro, born in 1955 in a tiny village in the interior of Sāo Paolo state, is a populist who often addresses his core supporters in very crude terms.

Mourão, on the other hand, “is a product of the Amazonian elite,” Martins Filho told Mongabay in an exclusive interview. “This is something little talked about in Brazil, but his family continues to take up important positions in the state of Amazonas.” The VP also shies away from the limelight and tends to choose his words far more carefully than the chief executive.

During the early 20^th century rubber boom, Mourão’s grandfather traveled from Recife in northeastern Brazil to Manaus deep in the Amazon, where he eventually became a judge. His grandmother was a plantation owner’s daughter of Indigenous descent. Mourão followed in the footsteps of his father, who served in the military, to become a general and commander of the nation’s South. Bolsonaro, never made it beyond the rank of captain.

However, the two leaders also share a similar, very conservative, worldview likely born out of the military dictatorship. Both, for example, refuse to perceive the 1964 military takeover as a coup. Both also openly have praised Colonel Carlos Alberto Ustra, the military regime’s chief torturer.

And maybe most critically, both view the Amazon rainforest first and foremost as Brazilian territory subject only to Brazilian sovereignty, that must be aggressively protected from national security threats — including foreign influence and invasion, whether by other countries or international NGOs.

No surrender

“We have to be realistic about why Bolsonaro appointed Mourão head of CNAL,” Martins Filho said. “Bolsonaro’s policy for the Amazon has been one of destruction. He promised to destroy the mechanisms created to control deforestation, to not add one centimeter to the Indigenous territories, and to never reprimand a garimpeiro[artisanal gold miner]. And that is what he did. The problem is that his policy caused enormous international criticism, which could prove costly for Brazil.”

Last June, a group of important international investors threatened to withdraw their funding from Brazil if the government did not clean up its environmental act. Shortly after, 38 Brazilian firms and four business associations called upon CNAL for strong measures against deforestation. France and several other European countries have also signaled they will not ratify the EU Mercosur free trade agreement — the largest single global trade agreement ever negotiated, and vital to Brazil — unless Bolsonaro gives up his Amazon development plans.

“That’s why Bolsonaro called in the help of those who consider themselves the ‘Lords of the Amazon,’ which is the military,” explained Martins Filho. “The Brazilian armed forces see themselves as protectors of the Amazon. [And] Bolsonaro needs their support to shield him from international pressure, and of course for his own personal project: reelection.”

The conquest and colonization of the Brazilian Amazon has a long, often tragic history, which was brutally accelerated under the nation’s military dictatorship. In 1970, the military government launched the National Integration Plan (PIN) under the slogan “Integrar Para Não Entregar,” — integrate to not surrender.

The program oversaw the construction of thousands of miles of roads piercing the Amazon, including the TransAmazonian Highway — roads deemed necessary to protect Brazilian national security. Mining and agriculture were promoted in the rainforest and the first plans for major hydroelectric projects were drawn up. People from Brazil’s drought-stricken northeast were encouraged to resettle in the Amazon under the slogan: “Unite the people without land, with a land without people.”

But at that time, the Amazon, the alleged “land without people” was inhabited by many thousands of Indigenous and traditional inhabitants, who were shoved aside, uprooted, and even killed when they resisted resettlement by the military.

A column of tanks in a show of power along the streets of Rio de Janeiro in April 1968, during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. Image by Correio da Manhã in the Public Domain.

The French Connection

“The military perceived the Amazon as an empty space that needed protection, as an empty space that can easily be infiltrated” by outsiders Martins Filho explained. “But obviously there is a problem with this logic, as the Amazon is home to multiple Indigenous peoples.”

Many Indigenous people revolted against the military regime’s development efforts on their lands. Often with bloody consequences. The National Truth Commission report issued in December 2014 estimated that the Brazilian army killed at least 8,350 Indigenous people during the dictatorship.

“Over the years I have spent a lot of time with the military,” said Martins Filho. “I’ve talked to soldiers, officers, brigadiers and generals. And I’ve always been stunned at how rudimentary their thinking is. To them the Indigenous [person] is still a savage who needs civilizing and is an obstacle to progress.

“The military sees the Indigenous as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty,” he added. They fear that “Their territories, with [the] help of the international community, could one day become independent. This is madness of course, but it is what they believe until this very day.”

France plays a surprising role as villain in this distrustful scenario. It was former French president François Mitterand who in 1989 first launched the concept of the internationalization of the rainforest by suggesting: “Brazil must accept relative sovereignty over the Amazon.” Adding to that national security concern is the presence of French Guyana on Brazil’s northern border — from which a French incursion might be launched.

“This sounds unbelievable,” said Martins Filho. “But ask members of the Brazilian armed forces if France could intervene in the Amazon and 99% will say yes.”

This mindset helps explain Bolsonaro’s move shortly after taking office of reviving a plan of the military dictatorship to extend the BR-163 highway north from the Amazon River, hundreds of miles through undisturbed rainforest, to the nation’s northern border, likely as a means of assuring the quick deployment of troops.

The plan to extend the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname was originally drawn up by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s and has since been revived by President Jair Bolsonaro. Image by Júlia Lima.

Calha Norte

In the 1970s, the military’s protective Amazon policy was an integral element of the country’s National Security Doctrine (NSD), which consisted of two major parts: internal and external security, coupled with economic development.

“In the early 1970s, there was still a real concern for a surge of leftwing guerillas,” Martins Filho explained. “Once this had been contained, and the Brazilian left became a democratic movement, the focus shifted to the frontiers. The military feared problems with Guyana, Columbia and potentially Cuba. This played a role throughout the Cold War. Once the Cold War was over, the main question became: How do we react when one day a foreign power invades the Amazon?“

Unlike in Chile and Argentina, Brazil’s dictatorship did not come to an abrupt end, severing past policies. Instead, the military authorities carefully planned a transition back to civilian rule. That included a policy for the Amazon known as the Projeto Calha Norte (PCN): a plan for “development and security in the region north of the Solimões and Amazon rivers.”

In order to better protect the region between the two rivers, and all the way to Brazil’s northernmost border, the PCN called for an increased state presence there, strengthened by border posts, better infrastructure and economic development.

That plan, an initiative of the National Security Council (NSC), was formulated by a multi-ministerial team and embraced by José Sarney, Brazil’s first civil president after 21 years of military rule.

“The most interesting aspect of the PCN is a formerly secret document from 1986, in which NSC for the first time ever warns of the grave consequences of deforestation in the Amazon,” said Martins Filho. “It states that deforestation will lead to a reduction in rainfall, changing river flows, large scale soil erosion, siltation of rivers and climate change.

“So, trained in discovering threats to the country, the military actually admitted that deforestation will have negative consequences for the whole of Brazil,” Martins Filho added. “The position they took later on was to negate all ecological issues related to Amazonia. But we now have this document, which clearly states otherwise.”

The area across which the proposed extension of the BR-163 Highway will cut is a rich patchwork of conservation units and traditional territories; 40% of the species that live there are found nowhere else on Earth. Image by Júlia Lima.

Good cop, bad cop, same cop

The PCN is of extreme importance to Amazon policy in Brazil today. One of the first things Bolsonaro did following his presidential inauguration was to approve R $150 million (US $40m) for the Ministry of Defense, mostly going to its PCN department.

Three weeks after Bolsonaro’s inauguration, former general Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa launched the Barão do Rio Branco project. In line with the PCN, it proposes the construction of a very expensive bridge across the Amazon River, the building of a power plant north of the river, and the extension of the BR-163 highway to Brazil’s northern border with Suriname.

A PowerPoint presentation related to the project obtained by Open Democracy states: “Calha Norte must be implemented in the Amazon basin to integrate it with the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the project called Triple A.” The so-called Andes–Amazon–Atlantic project, or “Triple A” is an international proposal to create an ecological corridor in the northern Amazon — and, according to conservationists, has nothing to do with a challenge to Brazilian sovereignty.

Advocates of the Rio Branco Project have warned of a “globalist threat” to the Amazon, pointing variously to the perceived French threat, the increased recent Chinese presence in Suriname, along with international socioenvironmental NGOs operating through local allies, including Indigenous and traditional communities, and quilombos — communities composed of the descendants of runaway slaves.

All indications are that Vice President Mourão is military old school, and always considering Amazon development within the context of Brazilian national security and sovereignty. As part of that framework, the VP supports Bolsonaro’s plan to hand landgrabbers legal deeds to land often claimed by traditional communities, showing that these military men are willing to reward what was obtained illegally to develop the region.

On examining the current Brazilian power structure, Mourão may seem the more reasoned of the two leaders. Yet, he is very much pedaling in the same direction as his seemingly less sophisticated presidential counterpart. Martins Filho concludes: “If ever Mourão were to take over as president, I don’t think his policies would be very different from Bolsonaro’s.”

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Featured image: Commodities on the move on the completed southern section of the BR-163 Highway. A planned extension of the BR-163 could result in major new deforestation along a 300-mile corridor stretching north from the Amazon River to the Suriname border. Image by Roosevelt Pinheiro courtesy of Agência Brasil.

In a recent letter written to Secretary of State Pompeo, a number of Congressmen led by Eliot Engel (D–NY) and Michael McCaul (R–TX) expressed their “deep concern” as “strong supporters of the Syrian people” that various countries are attempting to normalize relations with the secular dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

This they say is unacceptable due to the barbaric war crimes Assad has committed in his country against his own people. Topical as ever, the Congressmen add that Russia and Iran are his allies and have aided in some way to the conflict that has killed at least half a million people since Arab Spring, and led to around 12.5 million to flee the country, many thousands of whom drowned while crossing the Mediterranean.

The hypocrisy contained in the letter is breathtaking, as well as the presumption that the 116^th Congress of the United States of America is also the 116^th Congress of the entire world.

“Congress has also used legislation to outline the behavioral criteria that the Syrian regime must meet to rejoin the international community,” reads the letter, published on the House Foreign Affairs Committee website.

Exactly why is it that the elected officials of the American republic get to dictate how and when the other 200 or so countries of the world get to open diplomatic relations with Syria: because they passed the Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act? Was that passed as a United Nations treaty, or as United States law?

Engel and McCaul should stick with more obscure rhetoric, as the examples they use to make their case would be the very same that any journalist paying attention to the war over the years would also use to accuse presidents and congresses past of war crimes, and even treason, of the highest degree.

The Gas Attacks

As the one major accusation that both Obama and Trump invoked to grant themselves authority to use the American people’s military to bomb sovereign Syrian military property, one would imagine that developments in the stories of alleged gas attacks in Khan Shaykun and particularly in Douma, would immediately come to the attention of those seeking to use them continuously as a casus belli.

However the fact that Engel specifically notes the “June 2019 report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),” on chlorine and sarin gas attacks of March 2017 in the area of Ltamenah, shows this is not so.

With the Ltamenah accusation consisting of nothing more than a tweet from unvetted witnesses —doctors allegedly present at the hospital treating the victims, and the word of the OPCW investigators, an organization that has been revealed to be heavily politicized and guilty of covering up conflicting reports from the alleged sarin attacks in Douma that showed it was staged, Engel et al. demonstrate once again that our Congress is filled with unintelligent buffoons, or liars and war criminals.

Support for Militia Groups

“United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic released a report documenting extensive war crimes by the Russian Federation, the Assad regime, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham between November 2019 and June 2020,” reads the letter.

As indirectly confirmed as legitimate by a press release from the UK Foreign Office, a series of leaked documents last month demonstrated that the well-known operations within the Obama Administration to arm and train Sunni veterans of the 2003 Iraq War to try and overthrow the government in Syria, was also accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign by the US and UK.

It was done through media agencies run by former-British and American intelligence officers, and helped to “create the entire western media conflict narrative”. Companies like ARK Media Solutions worked to “soften the image” of the so-called moderate rebels which included at least one group, Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zinki, which joined with several al-Qaeda allies to form the new entity Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Engel and the other Congressmen so diligently remind us are guilty of war crimes, and in doing so quite accidentally accuse some prominent former politicians of treason with those who attacked us on 9/11.

Two of the three governments who attempted to block the testimony and denigrate the OPCW whistleblowers were funding these propaganda campaigns, along with the terrorists themselves, so demanding that Syria “cease its support for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, [and] Hamas” once again reeks of hypocrisy.

“We are pleased that the Administration has imposed sanctions under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which we strongly supported,” the letter concludes. “We look forward to working with you to ensure ongoing robust implementation of the Caesar Act, including sanctions, in order to communicate to the international community that the United States opposes any efforts to rehabilitate Assad and his cronies absent the behavior changes outlined in law”.

Like a difficult boss, Engel is uninterested in whether other nations might feel certain allegations against Assad are not enough to warrant the complete exile of the Near-Eastern dictatorship, or that the price of noncompliance to laws made in another country halfway around the world should not be total economic destruction and endless insurgent war.

America wanted to wage a regime change war in Syria, which they lost, utterly destroying the country in the process. Men like Pompeo and Engel believe that if they tell us lies until the end of their terms in office, it will somehow make their conduct justified, but whomever the “various countries” are that are trying to bring Syria in from the cold, they should ignore the United States and continue to work so that the people of Syria might be free from sanctions, Wahhabi militias, Turkish invasions, and “moderate rebels”.

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Andy Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show.

Featured image is from Syria News

The US-brokered humanitarian ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh collapsed immediately after its start on the morning of October 26. Clashes between the sides did not stop even for a minute and Yerevan and Baku immediately accused each other of sabotaging the peace efforts.

As of the evening of October 26, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan officially stated that the US-brokered ceasefire failed, while Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that “the mediators must either achieve the withdrawal of occupying forces, or move away from the path of Baku”. It seems that the estimation of the Karabakh conflict as an ‘easy case’ by US President Donald Trump did not stand the test of reality.

In a separate statement, the Azerbaijani President said that Turkish F-16 jets, which are deployed in Azerbaijan (just a few days ago the top leadership of Turkey and Azerbaijan was denying this) will be employed to protect his country in response to any act of ‘foreign aggression’. It is interesting to look how the official narrative of Azerbaijan and Turkey has been shifting from claims about Turkish non-involvement in the war to admitting the direct military participation of Ankara in the military escalation. The town of Qubadli and nearby villages were also captured by Azerbaijan as its media and diplomats were blaming Armenians for ceasefire violations.

Apparently, the coward Armenian forces violate the ceasefire regime by attacking the peacefully advancing Azerbaijani troops. The setbacks in the south of Karabakh was confirmed by the Armenian Defense Ministry, but insisted that the situation is still under full control. If this is under full control, it’s hard to imagine how the Armenian side sees the variant of the situation when all is not under control.

During the past days, the Azerbaijani-Turkish bloc continued its advance towards the Lachin corridor, a strategic area where the shortest route between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is located. According to reports, after the recent gains Azerbaijani troops are now about 10-12km from the area. Azerbaijani forces are now working to secure their recent gains and establish strong points there. After this, they will likely establish fire control over the route thus undermining the Armenian ability to send supplies to Karabakh. Then, the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc will likely push towards Stepanakert.

Armenian sources ease the retreats with regular statements about the losses of Azerbaijan accompanied by videos and photos from the ground. For example, on October 26, the Armenian Defense Ministry released a new report claiming that Azerbaijan lost 6,674 troops, 600 armoured vehicles, 6 rocket launchers, 24 planes, 16 helicopters and 220 UAVs since the start of the conflict. While the numbers provided by both sides are expectedly overestimated, the evidence demonstrates that Azerbaijani forces in fact suffered notable casualties in their advance on Karabakh. The problem for Yerevan is that Armenian forces experienced losses of similar or even higher scale.

Members of Turkish-backed militant groups that remain in Syria and are yet to move to some conflict zone to die for Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman dream also suffer hard times. At least 78 Turkish-backed militants were killed and over 100 others were injured in a recent series of Russian airstrikes on their training camps and HQs in the Syrian region of Idlib. The main strikes targeted a former air defense base of the Syrian Army near Al-Duvayla. This area is controlled by Turkish-backed militants and the former military base itself is currently a training camp for members of Faylaq ash-Sham. Syrian sources link the increased number of Russian strikes on Turkish proxies in Syria with their deployment to the Nagorno-Karabakh combat zone to support Azerbaijan.

Russia sees the increase of the presence of radical militant groups there as an unacceptable scenario. It is likely that this lies behind the recent decrease of reports and evidence on the deployment of Turkish proxies from Syria to Karabakh. The Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc estimate the risks and prefers to avoid the situation of the involvement of some third power in the conflict on the side of the Armenians.

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Spread across different economic sectors, some of the global most affluent families continue to amass more wealth. Despite the recent economic uncertainty, the wealthiest families in the world appear to be doing just fine.

Data presented by Buy Shares indicates the top five wealthiest families in the world control a cumulative wealth of $621 billion as of October 2020. The Walton Family, known for the Walmart retail chains, controls the highest wealth at $215 billion. India’s Ambani family that manages Reliance Industries holds wealth amounting to $81.3 billion.

The research also compared the wealth of the five wealthiest people globally. The group’s cumulative wealth is only $3.1 billion less compared to the most affluent families. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos still hold the top spot with a fortune of $188.7 billion. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk is currently the fifth richest person on the planet with a $93 billion net worth.

Challenges of preserving generational wealth among families

Family intergenerational wealth has emerged to be a powerful thing. It often prevails through market crashes, social turmoil, and economic uncertainty, with this year being no exception. For example, the Walton family has been making money for over three generations now and continues to hold about a significant stake in the company to date.

Notably, it is a challenge to preserve wealth over the long-term within family generations. The highlighted families have remained resilient since family-owned operating businesses can shift from booming to declining. The decline usually occurs when a family’s investment portfolio might not be well-diversified or has issues with generational transitions.

The spotlight on the world’s wealthiest comes amid the growing economic inequality in the US and other leading global economies. According to critics, inequality exists due to regimes that allow market dominance and low tax rates imposed on capital, especially in the United States. To some critics, the vast wealth is evidence that capitalism needs fixing. In some jurisdictions, inequality has become an explosive political issue.

Global wealthy families and individuals concentrated in U.S

Contrasting the wealthiest families and individuals shows they are spread across different industries. For instance, most of the wealthy individuals emanate from the technology sectors. The individuals are concentrated in the United States.

For families, their wealth comes from different operations. For example, the Mars family is known for its successful candy manufacturing operations. On the other hand, the Al Saud family draws its wealth from its vast oil reserves while the Ambani family runs Reliance Industries that owns businesses across energy and textiles. For the Koch dynasty, the wealth comes from  Koch Industries, involved in manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, and chemicals.

It is worth highlighting that the wealth of individuals skyrocketed this year in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Since they are concentrated in technology, the sector was vital in providing support during the pandemic. For example, Amazon grew in popularity as stores remained closed forcing people to stay at home, leaving delivery outlets as the go-to options. Additionally, Walmart under the Walton family benefited due to the delivery of essential items during the pandemic.

Notably, global stock markets have since rebounded, making up much of the losses. The shares in some technology companies, which are often owned by billionaires, have risen very significantly.

The billionaires have mostly benefited from betting on the recovery of global stock markets. The markets crashed back in March and April, with the global economies going into lockdowns. During economic crises like those created by the pandemic, wealthy families and individuals combine their huge investing and purchasing power alongside government resources to profit from financial uncertainty. Also, with wealth-friendly tax laws and loopholes, some of the wealthiest individuals can stay on top.

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Justin is an editor, writer, and a downhill fan. He spent many years writing about banking, finances, blockchain, and digital assets-related news. He strives to serve the untold stories for the readers.

Featured image is from Buy Shares