Trump’s unlawful Deal of the Century scheme green-lighted Israeli annexation of illegally established settlements on stolen Palestinian land and the Jordan Valley.

Netanyahu earlier vowed to press ahead with annexation. 

Reportedly on or around July 1, he’ll initially announce the annexation of what the Times of Israel called “three West Bank (settlement) blocs,” not the Jordan Valley for now, adding:

“Well-placed sources told The Times of Israel last week that the joint mapping committee tasked with delineating the contours of the annexation move still had weeks if not months of work, and the IDF has not been told precisely what Netanyahu has in mind.”

For starters, Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion, three large settlements, will be annexed in the coming days, ruling coalition partner Benny Gantz reportedly going along with what’s clearly a flagrant breach of international law.

According to the broadsheet, there’s “relative consensus, domestically and in Washington,” to making the move.

Or is there? The Times of Israel added the following:

“The US initially said it would recognize annexation immediately, but subsequently appears to have at the very least tempered its enthusiasm for the controversial move before the joint mapping committee can complete its work.”

“The (Trump regime) is highly unlikely to approve an Israeli move to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank by the July 1 date envisioned by Netanyahu,” according to an unnamed “well-placed source.”

Annexation of historic Palestinian land in whole or in part will formally end the two-state illusion — what long ago was possible, clearly not now.

Trump regime hardliners are on board with the most extremist of Netanyahu regime policies — time and again blaming victims of US/NATO/Israeli high crimes for what’s committed against them.

At most, Trump and Pompeo et al may only press Netanyahu to slow, not abandon, illegal annexation of Palestinian land.

It’s highly unlikely that Biden will soften US policy toward long-suffering Palestinians if he succeeds Trump in January.

Throughout his time as US senator and vice president, he one-sidedly supported Israel, including three preemptive wars on Gaza based on Big Lies.

On June 16 at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and four Palestinian human rights groups discussed the illegality of Israel’s annexation scheme.

They warned that it’ll “normalize Israel’s colonial project and amounts to apartheid via the continued expansion and construction of illegal settlements, displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and demographic manipulation,” adding:

“The Israeli plan would further entrench racial, ethnic, and religious segregation as a legal norm, and Israel will formally establish itself as the sole sovereign regime over the Palestinian people in historic Palestine.”

On the same day, 47 UN special rapporteurs denounced the annexation scheme as “a vision of 21st century apartheid.”

A presentation by Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies’ international advocacy officer Nada Awad to the UNHRC on behalf of Adalah and the four Palestinian human rights groups said the following:

“Last month, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Israel swore in a new government seemingly committed to formally annexing parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) in the West Bank in July, in a blatant violation of international law.”

“This annexation, part of the so-called Trump-Netanyahu ‘Deal of the Century’ and the Netanyahu-Gantz coalition agreement, normalizes Israel’s colonial project and amounts to apartheid via the continued expansion and construction of illegal settlements, displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and demographic manipulation.”

“The principles of this plan are enshrined in Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Basic Law enacted in July 2018.”

“This law established a constitutional order based on systematic ethnic supremacy, domination, and segregation in the so-called ‘Land of Israel’ and the denial of the realization of national self-determination for the Palestinian people.”

“Article 7 of this law provides that Jewish settlement is a national value to be encouraged and strengthened, giving the state authorities further constitutional legal tools to justify the illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories.”

“This law intends to justify as constitutional segregation in land and housing that targets all Palestinians in historic Palestine, including Palestinians citizens of Israel, who have suffered decades of systematic oppression.”

“Annexation would further entrench racial, ethnic, and religious segregation as a legal norm.”

“In this context, Israel will formally establish itself as the sole sovereign regime over the Palestinian people in historic Palestine.”

“We call on the UN and the international community to call for the dismantling of all settlements, to vehemently oppose any annexation, and to guarantee the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right of return to their homes and property.”

Separately, Adalah called Netanyahu’s annexation scheme a flagrant breach of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and other international law, including binding Security Council resolutions.

Israeli occupation, settlements, land confiscations, resource theft, and related abusive practices are “profound” high crimes against peace and the fundamental rights of all Palestinians.

If annexation proceeds as planned, the West Bank will resemble Gaza, a second open-air prison for a bludgeoned into submission people.

It’ll resemble Dante’s hell, its gate bearing the inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

A Final Comment

On Monday, thousands of Palestinians rallied in Jericho against Netanyahu’s annexation scheme.

Dozens of foreign diplomats joined them, including Nickolay Mladenov, UN special coordinator for Middle East peace — a position accomplishing nothing because of the US/Israeli regional imperial project.

As long as Washington supports Israeli aims, views of other nations never made a difference because a price to pay by the world community on its ruling authorities for the worst of their high crimes was never imposed.

The so-called peace process was and remains a colossal hoax, a notion the US, NATO and Israel reject.

Yet the illusion of what never was and isn’t now persists, establishment media, Western officials, and UN secretary general fostering it.

Palestinians were abandoned over a century ago by the infamous Balfour Declaration, the beginning of the end of historic Palestine.

Generations of political, military and cultural repression of its people followed, including dispossession from their land, other property, their fundamental rights, and in countless thousands of cases their lives.

Establishment of a nation for Jews on stolen Palestinian land was and remains a scheme to advance Western interests in the oil-rich region.

It led to over 100 years of endless conflict, occupation, dispossession, and repression, along with social and cultural fragmentation,

Historic Palestine and rights of its people were and continue to be abandoned in deference to Western/Israel regional control.

Palestinians are largely on their own, resistance their only option, staying the course no matter the long odds against them.

The world community never offered more than lip service help — the plight of ordinary people everywhere, exploited to benefit privileged interests.

It’s much the same in the West as in the Middle East and Occupied Palestine.

Ordinary people are largely on their own to press for positive change they’ll never get any other way.

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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 Another Day in the Empire

A longstanding line of control dispute along the border separating China and India flared up weeks earlier.

Both countries claim sovereignty over the disputed territory. Until April, forces of both countries hadn’t used live fire for decades.

According to Indian media, the Modi government gave commanders along the line of control freedom to handle things on their own tactically.

Live fire used by forces of both countries killed and wounded unclear numbers of soldiers.

Tensions remain high, risking escalation. It’s in the interests of both countries to resolve differences diplomatically.

Both sides deployed more forces along the disputed line of control.

The Trump regime supports India, a US intelligence report claiming Chinese General Zhao Zongqi authorized an attack on Indian forces in the Galwan River valley last week — no evidence cited backing the claim.

Supporting India is part of Washington’s aim to press Modi against working with Chinese tech giant Huawei to develop its 5G infrastructure.

Beijing and Delhi are trying to resolve differences. Conflict serves the interests of neither country.

Last week, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Indian forces of “cross(ing) the Line of Actual Control,” calling it a “deliberate provocation,” causing casualties, adding:

“The adventurous acts of the Indian army have seriously undermined the stability of the border areas, threatened the lives of Chinese personnel, violated the agreements reached between the two countries on the border issue, and breached the basic norms governing international relations.”

“China has lodged solemn representations and strong protests to the Indian side.”

He stressed that Beijing urged Delhi to maintain bilateral communications and pursue efforts for mutual accommodation.

In response to last week’s clash, Pompeo tweeted:

“We extend our deepest condolences to the people of India for the lives lost as a result of the recent confrontation with China.”

He’s been very vocal in expressing Trump regime hostility toward China.

A similar 1962 border dispute escalated to war between both countries, what neither Beijing or Delhi want now.

If skirmishes continue, they’re likely be limited. Both countries best serve each other’s interests as allies, not adversaries.

For the US, it’s the other way around, its hardliners wanting China marginalized and weakened, a prescription for rupturing relations.

On Monday, China’s Global Times reported that Beijing “doesn’t want to escalate conflict with India, but (it has) sufficient capacity to smash any provocations from the Indian troops,” adding:

“It’s hoped that Indian troops can remain sober and Indian elites keep rational.”

“It’s in the India’s interests to work with China to put the border disputes under control.”

In 1996 and 2005, both countries signed agreements, stressing that neither side will use military force against the other.

Did Modi change India’s position? After last week’s clash, he sounded conciliatory, saying “(n)obody has intruded into our border, neither is anybody there now, nor have our posts been captured.”

India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishanka was more hardline, accusing Beijing of responsibility for “violence and casualties,” adding:

“The Chinese side (must) reassess its actions and take corrective steps.”

In response, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi demanded that Delhi “severely punish those responsible” for last week’s violence,” adding:

Indian “frontline troops (must) immediately cease all provocative actions. (Delhi) must not underestimate China’s firm will to safeguard its territorial sovereignty.”

Modi is playing a dangerous game, allying with the US in provoking China, a reliable ally — polar opposite how Washington operates, exploiting other countries to serve its interests.

US strategy aims to co-opt other countries, Months earlier, Sergey Lavrov warned India about its intentions, saying:

Washington’s “us(e) (of) term the Indo-Pacific instead of Asia-Pacific” is all about “contain(ing) China,” what Modi and other Indian officials surely understand.

There’s nothing “benign” about US strategy. It’s “divisive,” not “inclusive.”

US interest in India is co-opting its government, using it as a “counterweight” to China, aiming to undermine its economic and technological development.

Beijing is working more closely with Pakistan strategically and economically, including by construction of pipeline, rail and road links to its Gwadar Arabian Sea port.

The China Pakistan Economic Corridor includes Beijing’s Aksai Chin region — near where clashes with Indian forces occurred.

Pretending to want differences between China and India resolved diplomatically, conflict between both countries serves US interests at their expense.

Beijing is much stronger militarily, why India’s show of force is limited.

If things escalate ahead, China will force Modi to back off.

According to Beijing-based military expert Wei Dongxu, his tough talk aims to please his base — with no intention of wanting an escalated clash with a militarily superior neighbor he’ll lose.

Asian Studies expert Lin Minwang said while it’s “normal to see heated nationalism in India, (it won’t) hijack (its) policymaking…to further provoke China.”

Tough talk may be heard, little more. India’s plate overflows with domestic problems.

Modi won’t invent a major new one by challenging China militarily, what he’ll lose, gaining nothing but lots of casualties and egg on his face.

Beijing’s military superiority “is why India hasn’t dared to launch a full attack against the PLA in decades but keeps creating low-level tensions occasionally,” Lin explained.

A Final Comment

On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said both sides “agreed to take necessary measures to promote a cooling of the situation,” adding:

“Both sides want to deal with their disagreement, manage the situation and de-escalate the situation through dialogue and consultations.”

A statement by India’s military said talks between both sides were “positive.”

“There was mutual consensus to disengage. Modalities for disengagement from all friction areas in Eastern Ladakh were discussed and will be taken forward by both sides.”

Clearly China wants confrontation ended. It’s up to both sides to back their statements with commitment, notably the belligerent Modi regime.

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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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Video: The Social Impacts and Economic Dimensions of the Drug Trade

June 24th, 2020 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Being a neighbor to one of the biggest producers of drugs in the world has caused the Islamic Republic of Iran to shoulder a heavy burden as one of the main routes for drug transport.

Iran is at the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking and thousands of Iranian forces have been so far martyred to protect the world from the danger of drugs. Despite high economic and human costs, the Islamic Republic has been actively fighting drug trafficking over the past decades.

Iran has spent more than $700 million on sealing its borders and preventing the transit of narcotics destined for European, Arab, and Central Asian countries.

The war on drug trade originating from some regional countries has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police officers over the past four decades.

According to reports, in 2018 alone, Iranian forces carried out 1,557 operations against drug traffickers, seizing approximately 807 tons of different types of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.

Tehran has always asked for international help in such operations, noting that the other countries, especially European states, should take responsibility and play a positive role in this fight or face its threats themselves.

The issue of drugs is a global scourge and there is the need for wide-scale cooperation at the international level so as to tackle this problem. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran has adopted an interactive approach with the global community concerning the issue of drugs and has virtually indicated that it spares no efforts in enhancing cooperation with other countries and international organizations in the campaign against illicit drugs.

On this basis, Iran has always voiced its resolve for countering illicit drugs and reducing its harms at the global level. Iran’s performance in countering drug trafficking has been effective in maintaining the security of different regions of the globe.

On the eve of ‘International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking’ observed annually on 26 June, the geopolitical and economic dimensions of the drug trafficking were discussed with Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa.

Addressing the geopolitical and economic dimensions of the drug trafficking Chossudovsky said,

“Despite President Trump’s announced US troop withdrawal, the Afghan opium trade continues to flourish. This multibillion-dollar operation is protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of a nexus of powerful financial and criminal interests.”

“In 2004, the proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade yielded an estimated global revenue of the order of 90 billion dollars. Today a rough estimate based on US retail prices suggests that the global heroin market is above the 500 billion dollar mark. This multibillion-dollar hike is the result of a significant increase in the volume of heroin transacted Worldwide coupled with a moderate increase in retail prices.”

“Based on the most recent (UNODC) data (2017) opium production in Afghanistan is of the order of 9000 metric tons, which after processing and transformation is equivalent to approximately 900,000 kg. of pure heroin.”

Referring to the role of the US waged war on Afghanistan which resulted in an increase in opium production in the country, he noted,

“The 2001 war on Afghanistan served to restore as well as boost the multibillion-dollar drug trade. It has also contributed to the surge in heroin addiction in the US. Opium production had declined by more than 90 percent in 2001 as a result of the country’s drug eradication program. Immediately following the invasion and the occupation of Afghanistan by US-NATO troops, the production of opium regained its historical levels.”

He went on to say,

”The 2017 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in May 2018 by UNODC confirms that the farm areas allocated to opium are of the order of 328,000 hectares with opium production in excess of 9,000 tons.”

Answering a question about the reasons behind an increase in production of the opium in Afghanistan after being occupied by the US, Chossudovsky said that big money coming from the drug trade and political dimensions of the issue are the two main reasons behind the increase.

Referring to the political dimension of the issue he said for example George Bush, former US President’s family including his son and brother had good personal relations with heads and members of drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia.

Commenting on the significance of Iran’s role in the fight against drug trafficking, he said that as Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan so it plays a significant role in fighting drug trafficking on behalf of the international community and in protecting its national interest.

He added that people of Afghanistan that share historical relations with the Iranian people are victims of the international drug cartels.

On the seriousness of the European countries which are target market of the narcotic drugs in the fight against drug trafficking and fulfilling their international commitments in supporting Iran in the fight against drug trafficking, Chossudovsky believes  European countries and generally the western countries not only have done nothing to fight drug trafficking but also they have been complicit in allowing drug trade.

He also added that the CIA which is behind allowing the entrance of the narcotic drugs to the US is using drugs as a tool to marginalize the black people community of the country.

Chossudovsky further said that due to increasing of synthetic drugs all over the world, pharmaceutical factories also have significant responsibility and role in combating drugs.

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Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.


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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

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Click here to order.

“This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized political movement…It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious, it will grow. It’s goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization itself. This is an ideological movement… Even now, many of us pretend this is about police brutality. …We think we can fix it by regulating chokeholds or spending more on de-escalation training. We’re too literal and good-hearted to understand what’s happening. …But we have no idea what we are up against. ..These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political movement and someone needs to save the country from it.” Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy. The Black Lives Matter protests are just the tip of the spear, they are an expression of public outrage that is guaranteed under the first amendment. But don’t be deceived, there’s more here than meets the eye. BLM is funded by foundations that seek to overthrow our present form of government and install an authoritarian regime guided by technocrats, oligarchs and corporatists all of who believe that Chinese-type despotism is far-more compatible with capitalism than “inefficient” democracy. The chaos in the streets is merely the beginning of an excruciating transition from one system to another. This is an excerpt from an article by F. William Engdahl at Global Research:

“By 2016,… Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network….. That year the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), “a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition” in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros foundations had already given some $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement….

The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations.” (America’s Own Color Revolution“, Global Research)

$100 million is alot of money. How has that funding helped BLM expand its presence in politics and social media? How many activists and paid employees operate within the network disseminating information, building new chapters, hosting community outreach programs, and fine-tuning an emergency notification system that allows them to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets in cities across the country at a moment’s notice? Isn’t that what we’ve seen for the last three weeks, throngs of angry protestors swarming in more than 400 cities across America all at the beck-and-call of a shadowy group whose political intentions are still not clear?

And what about the rioting, looting and arson that broke out in numerous cities following the protests? Was that part of the script too? Why haven’t BLM leaders condemned the destruction of private property or offered a public apology for the downtown areas that have been turned into wastelands? In my own hometown of Seattle, the downtown corridor– which once featured Nordstrom, Pottery Barn and other upscale retail shops– is now a checkerboard of broken glass, plywood covers and empty streets all covered in a thick layer of garish spray-paint. The protest leaders said they wanted to draw attention to racial injustice and police brutality. Okay, but how does looting Nordstrom help to achieve that goal?

And what role have the Democrats played in protest movement?

They’ve been overwhelmingly supportive, that’s for sure. In fact, I can’t think of even one Democrat who’s mentioned the violence, the looting or the toppling of statues. Why is that?

It’s because the Democrats think that kowtowing to BLM will give them the winning edge in the November balloting. That’s what it’s all about. That’s why they draped themselves in Kente cloth and knelt for the cameras. They think their black constituents are too stupid to see through their groveling fakery. They think that blacks will forget that Joe Biden pushed through legislation “which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior.”

According to the Black Agenda Report: “Biden and (South Carolina’s Strom) Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.” Biden also spearheaded “the attacks on Anita Hill when she came forward to testify against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas”. All told, Biden’s record on race is much worse than Trump’s despite the media’s pathetic attempts to portray Trump as Adolph Hitler. It’s just more bunkum from the dissembling media.

Bottom line: The Democrats think they can ride racial division and social unrest all the way to the White House. That’s what they are betting on.

So, yes, the Dems are exploiting the protests for political advantage, but it goes much deeper than that. After all, we know from evidence that was uncovered during the Russiagate investigation, that DNC leaders are intimately linked to the Intel agencies, law enforcement (FBI), and the elite media. So it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that these deep state agents and assets work together to shape the narrative that they think gives them the best chance of regaining power. Because, that’s what this is really all about, power. Just as Russiagate was about power (removing the president using disinformation, spies, surveillance and other skulduggery.), and just as the Covid-19 fiasco was essentially about power (collapsing the economy while imposing medical martial law on the population.), so too, the BLM protest movement is also about power, the power to inflict massive damage on the country’s main urban centers with the intention of destabilizing the government, restructuring the economy and paving the way for a Democratic victory in November. It’s all about power, real, unalloyed political muscle.

Surprisingly, one of the best critiques of what is currently transpiring was written by Niles Niemuth at the World Socialist Web Site. Here’s what he said about the widespread toppling of statues:

“The attacks on the monuments…were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.

It is worth noting that the one institution seemingly immune from this purge is the Democratic Party, which served as the political wing of the Confederacy and, subsequently, the KKK.

This filthy historical legacy is matched only by the Democratic Party’s contemporary record in supporting wars that, as a matter of fact, primarily targeted nonwhites. Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and under Obama destroyed Libya and Syria. The New York Times was a leading champion and propagandist for all of these war.” (“Hands off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!, WSWS)

What the author is referring to is The 1619 Project, which is a racialized version of American history that was published by the Times on August 19, 2019. The deliberately-distorted version of history was cobbled together in anticipation of increasing social unrest and racial antagonism. The rioting, looting and vast destruction of America’s urban core can all be traced back to a document that postulates that the country was founded on racial hatred and exploitation. In other words, The 1619 Project provides the perfect ideological justification for the chaos and violence that has torn the country apart for the last three weeks. This is an excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

“The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development….Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes….where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions….

…. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, World Socialist Web Site)

Keep in mind, this essay in the WSWS was written a full year before BLM protests broke out across the country. Was Hannah-Jones enlisted to create a document that would provide the dry tinder for the massive and coordinated demonstrations that have left the country stunned and divided?

Probably, after all, (as noted above) the author’s theory is that one race is genetically programed to exploit the other. (“Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”) Well, if we assume that whites are genetically and irreversibly “racist”, then we must also assume that the country that these whites founded is racist and evil. Thus, the only logical remedy for this situation, is to crush the white segment of the population, destroy their symbols, icons, and history, and replace the system of government with one that better reflects the values of the emerging non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.

The 1619 Project is a calculated provocation meant to exacerbate racial animosities and pave the way to open conflagration. And it has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The nation is split into warring camps while Washington has devolved into fratricidal warfare. Was that the objective, to destabilize the country in preparation for the dissolution of the current system followed by a fundamental restructuring of the government consistent with the identity politics lauded by the Democrats?

The Democrats, the Intel agencies and the media are all in bed together fomenting unrest with the intention of decimating the economy, crushing the emerging opposition and imposing their despotic one-party system on all of us. Here’s a clip from a piece by Paul Craig Roberts that sums up the role of the New York Times in inciting race-based violence:

“The New York Times editorial board covers up the known indisputable truth with their anti-white “1619 project,” an indoctrination program to inculcate hatred of white people in blacks and guilt in white people.

Why does the New York Times lie, brainwash blacks into hatred of whites, and attempt to brainwash whites into guilt for the creation of a New World labor force four centuries ago? Why do Americans tolerate the New York Times fomenting of racial hatred in a multicultural society?

The New York Times is a vile organization. The New York Times attempts to discredit the President of the United States and did all it could to frame him on false charges. The New York Times painted General Flynn, who honorably served the US, as a Russian agent and enabled General Flynn’s frame-up on false and now dropped charges. The New York Times spews hatred of white people. And now the New York Times accuses the American military of celebrating white supremacism.

Does America have a worse enemy than the New York Times? The New York Times is clearly and intentionally making a multicultural America impossible. By threatening white people with the prospect of hate-driven racial violence, the New York Times editorial board is fomenting the rise of white supremacy.” (“The New York Times Editorial Board Is a Threat to Multicultural America“, The Unz Review)

The editors of the Times don’t hate whites, they are merely attacking the growing number of disillusioned white working people who have left the Democratic party in frustration due to their globalist policies regarding trade, immigration, offshoring, outsourcing and the relentless hollowing out of the nation’s industrial core. The Dems have abandoned these people altogether and –now that they realize they will never be able to lure them back into their camp– they’ve decided to wage a full-blown, scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on them. They’ve decided to crush them mercilessly and fill their ranks with multi-ethnic, bi-racial groups that will work for pennies on the dollar. (which will keep the Dems corporate supporters happy.) So, no, the Times does not hate white people. What they hate is the growing populist movement that derailed Hillary Clinton and put anti-globalist Trump in the White House. That’s the real target of this operation, the disillusioned throng of working people who have washed their hands of the Democrats for good. Here’s more background from Paul Craig Roberts:

“On August 12 Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, met with the Times’ employees to refocus the Times’ attack on Trump…. The Times, Baquet said, is shifting from Trump-Russia to Trump’s racism. The Times will spend the run-up to the 2020 presidential election building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. Of course, if Trump is a racist it means that the people who elected him are also racists. Indeed, in Baquet’s view, Americans have always been racist. To establish this narrative, the New York Times has launched the “1619 Project,” the purpose of which is “to reframe the country’s history.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — ‘Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.’

The premise that America originated as a racist slave state is to be woven into all sections of the Times — news, business, sports, travel, the entire newspaper. The project intends to take the “reframing” of the United States into the schools where white Americans are to be taught that they are racist descendants of slave holders. A participant in this brainwashing of whites, which will make whites guilty and defenseless, says “this project takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country’s history.” In other words, the New York Times intends to make slavery the ONLY explanation of America.

At the meeting of the executive editor of the New York Times with the Times’ employees to refocus the Times’ attack on President Trump, Baquet said: “Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.” (“Is White Genocide Possible?“, The Unz Review)

Repeat: “Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.” Either Baquet has a crystal ball or he had a pretty good idea of the way in which the 1619 Project was going to be used. I suspect it was the latter.

For the last 3 and a half years, Democrats and the media have ridiculed anyone who opposes their globalist policies as racist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic, Bible-thumping, gun-toting, flag-waving, Nascar boosting, white nationalist “deplorables”. Now they have decided to intensify the assault on mainly white working people by preemptively destroying the economy, destabilizing the country, and spreading terror far and wide. It’s another vicious psy-ops campaign designed to thoroughly demoralize and humiliate the enemy who just happen to be the American people. Here’s more form the WSWS:

It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the world.

The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history” WSWS)

Can you see how the protests are being used to promote the political objectives of elites operating behind the mask of “impartial” reporting? The scheming NY Times has replaced the enlightenment principles articulated in our founding documents with a sordid tale of racial hatred and oppression. The editors seek to eliminate everything we believe as Americans so they can brainwash us into believing that we are evil people deserving of humiliation, repudiation and punishment. Here’s more from the same article:

“In the months preceding these events, the New York Times, speaking for dominant sections of the Democratic political establishment, launched an effort to discredit both the American Revolution and the Civil War. In the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the American Revolution was presented as a war to defend slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was cast as a garden variety racist…

The attacks on the monuments to these men were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, WSWS)

Ideas have consequences, and the incendiary version of events disseminated by the Times has added fuel to a fire that’s spread from one coast to the other. Given the damage that has been done to cities across the country, it would be nice to know how Dean Baquet knew that “race was going to play a huge part” in upcoming events? It’s all very suspicious. Here’s more:

Given the 1619 Project’s black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts that “we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military,” and celebrates the fact that “we” have fought “in every war this nation has waged.” Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a “volunteer” army whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the “War on Terror” and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria—all supported by the Times—that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably “color-blind.” She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of “people of color” butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world histor y”, WSWS)

So, black nationalists like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are excluded from the The 1619 Project’s narrative, but the author boasts that blacks “are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the US military”?? How does that happen unless Hannah-Jones was coached by Democrat leaders about who should and shouldn’t be included in the text? None of this passes the smell test. It all suggests that the storyline was shaped by people who had a specific goal in mind. That isn’t history, it’s fiction written by people who have an ax to grind. The Times even admitted as much in response to the blistering criticism by five of “the most widely read and respected authorities on US history.” The New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein rejected the historians’ objections saying:

“The project was intended to address the marginalization of African-American history in the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?”

WTF! “We are not ourselves historians”? That’s the excuse?? Give me a break!

The truth is that there was never any attempt to provide an accurate account of events. From the very onset, the goal was to create a storyline that fit the politics, the politics of provocation, incitement, racial hatred, social unrest and violence. That’s what the Times and their allies wanted, and that’s what they got.

The Deep State Axis: CIA, DNC, NYT

The three-way alliance between the CIA, the Elite Media, and the Democratic leadership has clearly strengthened and grown since the failed Russiagate fiasco. All three parties were likely involved in the maniacal hyping of the faux-Covid pandemic which paved the way for Depression era unemployment, tens of thousands of bankrupt businesses and a sizable portion of the US population thrust into destitution. Now, these deep state loyalists are promoting a “falsified” race-based version of history that pits one group against the other while diverting attention from the deliberate destruction of the economy and the further consolidation of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent.

Behind the veil of the protest movement, the war on the American people is gaining pace.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

Late on June 22, Russian air defense units repelled a massive drone attack on Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Syria. According to local sources, Russian Pantsir and Tor systems launched almost two dozen missiles at unmanned aerial vehicles launched by militants from the southern part of the Idlib de-escalation zone. Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported that Syrian air defenses were also activated in the Jableh area of Latakia province, where the Russian airbase is located.

Firefights between the Syrian Army and Turkish-led forces broke out near the village of Abu Rasin in the province of al-Hasakah. According to pro-government sources, the fighting erupted when Turkish-backed militants tried to set on fire crops being grown in nearby fields.

Earlier, the Damascus government accused pro-Turkish forces of intentionally burning crops in the area of Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring and nearby areas in order to pressure farmers that do not want to pay bribes to pro-Turkish militants.

The Turkish Army and the Russian Military Police regularly conduct joint patrols along the contact line between Turkish-backed forces and the Syrian Army in northeastern Syria. This allows to prevent the sides from initiating large-scale offensive operations against each other. However, the situation on the ground remains tense.

On June 22, pro-government locals blocked a US military convoy near the village of Fares Kabir in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah. The protesters burned a US flag and forced the convoy to retreat from the area. Positions of the Syrian Army near Kafr Mus, Kawkabah and as-Safah in southern Idlib came under fire from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies early on June 23. Pro-militant sources claim that several army troops were either injured or killed.

On June 21, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement released a new video threatening Israel with a retaliation strike on its strategic facilities in the event of a new escalation.

“Today, we can not only hit the city of Tel Aviv but also, if God wills it and with His help, we can hit very precise targets within Tel Aviv and anywhere in occupied Palestine,” Nasrallah can be heard as saying during the video.

Israel is pretty sensitive towards such threats and uses them to justify the continuing military campaign against Iranian-backed forces.

In its own turn, Hezbollah often intensifies its propaganda efforts against Israel as the situation in the region is once again heading to a military confrontation or its leadership expects possible Israeli hostile actions that would impact its interests.

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It is totally unbelievable to imagine that Trump purportedly solicited China’s support for his re-election campaign via international economic means and even endorsed the country’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton‘s book contains many passages that are receiving a lot of attention from the mainstream media, but one stands out among the rest. The disgraced official, who was fired by Trump last September, claims that the President sought China’s help for his re-election campaign. According to Bolton, Trump asked President Xi to buy more agricultural products so that the American leader can win the next election. He also allegedly supported China’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang.

Both claims are patently false and are disproved by factual evidence of Trump’s own policies towards China. The entire world is witness to the US’ strategy of aggression against the People’s Republic, which relevantly includes actively working to restructure global supply chains away from China and promulgating the “Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act”. The first-mentioned is an act of extreme economic hostility while the second threatens sanctions against officials that are connected to China’s anti-terrorist policies in its western region.

It is therefore totally unbelievable to imagine that Trump purportedly solicited China’s support for his re-election campaign via international economic means and even endorsed the country’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang. Nothing could be further from the truth. The President has even gone on record accusing Democrat presidential candidate Biden of being the man who he said without any evidence at all is the one who China wants to win the presidency. Plus, the US has consistently condemned China’s anti-terrorist policies.

Bolton’s unsubstantiated allegations can therefore be interpreted as yet another incredulous conspiracy theory by Trump’s institutional opponents in the country’s permanent bureaucracy (particularly its military, intelligence, and diplomatic ones that have collectively been referred to by some as the “deep state”) to manipulate voters’ minds ahead of the upcoming elections. Both the Russiagate and Ukrainegate scandals were proven to have never happened, just as the Chinagate one will surely be disproved as well.

The pattern at play is that Trump’s “deep state” opponents are desperately trying to portray him as “treasonous” considering the documented consistency of their weaponized narrative claiming that he has a history of “colluding” with foreign countries. Be it for supposedly nefarious intentions or simply because of the false perception that he’s so inept for the presidency that he doesn’t understand what he isn’t legally allowed to do, the common thread connecting these conspiracies is that Trump’s actions are a betrayal of America.

The very fact that this fake news narrative has mutated to the point where it now involves China of all countries speaks to just how desperate those behind this campaign have become since nobody with any sense whatsoever would pay any credence to these latest claims. What’s especially curious about all of this is how actively the Democrat-aligned mainstream media is promoting Bolton’s allegations considering that he was universally reviled by them for years up until he was fired by Trump last September.

This observation shows that the “unholy alliance” between two supposedly antagonistic “deep state” factions, the Democrats and neoconservatives like Bolton, continues to this day. They used to be intense rivals during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years, but began joining forces in the run-up to the 2016 elections when Democrat-aligned mainstream media began hosting and promoting the views of disgruntled neoconservatives referred to as the “Never Trumpers”.

What’s presently on display is but the latest manifestation of this “unholy alliance” wherein the Democrats and their surrogates actively support the most ludicrous accusations against Trump that are being spread by a prominent neoconservative. Trump did not ask President Xi for help in winning the 2020 elections, nor did he endorse China’s anti-terrorist policies in Xinjiang. He’s overseen the most intense period ever of American hostility against China and would never have even countenanced asking it to meddle in his country’s elections.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

在电晕危机的原因和后果方面,世界正在被误导。

COVID-19危机的特点是卫生组织主持的公共卫生 “紧急状况”,它被用来作为引发全世界经济、社会和政治结构调整进程的借口和理由。

正在实施社会工程。各国政府迫于压力,不顾其毁灭性的经济和社会后果,延长了封锁期。

正在发生的事情在世界历史上是前所未有的。

著名的科学家们眼都不眨地支持封锁,认为这是解决全球卫生紧急情况的 “办法”。

有充分的证据表明,对COVID-19疾病包括死亡率的估计被严重操纵。

反过来,人们也在服从他们的政府。为什么呢?因为他们害怕?

原因与解决方案?

在世界范围内应用的国家经济的关闭将不可避免地导致贫困、大规模失业和死亡率的增加。这是一种经济战争的行为。

第一阶段:对华贸易战

2020年1月30日,世界卫生组织总干事确定冠状病毒疫情构成国际关注的公共卫生紧急事件(PHEIC)。作出这一决定的依据是:中国境外确诊病例150例,人与人传播的首例病例:美国6例,加拿大3例,英国2例。

世卫组织总干事得到了比尔和梅林达-盖茨基金会、大药厂和世界经济论坛(WEF)的支持。世卫组织宣布全球紧急状态的决定是在瑞士达沃斯世界经济论坛(WEF)期间作出的(1月21日至24日)。

在WHO全球紧急状态启动一天后(1月31日),特朗普政府宣布将拒绝 “过去14天内在中国旅行过的外国公民 “入境。这立即引发了航空运输、中美贸易以及旅游业的危机。意大利也紧随其后,取消了1月31日所有飞往中国的航班。

第一阶段伴随着对华贸易关系的中断以及出口制造业的部分关闭。

一场针对中国以及华裔的运动立即展开。经济学人》报道说

“冠状病毒传播对华裔的种族主义和华裔中的种族主义”

 

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Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 18, 2020

 

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After decades of widespread use as company scientists played down research showing a definitive link between the product and growing rates of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Monsanto parent company Bayer has agreed to pay up to $10 billion to settle claims that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer.

Citing people familiar with the matter, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the company has agreed to settle tens of thousands of glyphosate-related lawsuits in the US for between $8 billion to $10 billion.

Of that number, $2 billion is considered a “reserve” which can be used to settle future claims.

The rest will be used to settle all of the lawsuits pending in the United States from users of the controversial weed killer, the number of active lawsuits against the Roundup purveyor recently numbered more than 50k.

Talks for an out of court settlement have been ongoing since last summer.

Last year, scientists evaluated a batch of existing studies and determined that Monsanto’s ubiquitous weed-killer Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate increased cancer risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) by 41%, according to a research published in February 2019. Back in 2018, a San Francisco Jury awarded $289 million in damages to a former school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, who said Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller gave him terminal cancer. That award consisted of $40 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.

Bayer inherited the glyphosate problems during its $60 billion acquisition of Monsanto. After losing three lawsuits and getting stuck with high damages judgments pertaining to risks with the weed killer, Bayer changed its strategy and abandoned its aggressive defense in favor of trying to negotiate a sweeping settlement of the tens of thousands of US lawsuits pending. Analysts had feared the settlement could cost as much as €20 billion, which is roughly double the final amount, which should be a positive for the company’s shares.

So far, science has not been able to conclusively clarify whether glyphosate is carcinogenic or not. Bayer holds numerous studies against the classification of the IARC and other researchers. The US environmental agency EPA supports the group and, despite the heated debate about glyphosate, has so far maintained that the controversial pesticide poses no health risk to people if used properly.

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China vs India: Who Benefits? US Meddling

June 24th, 2020 by Tony Cartalucci

A recent border dispute between China and India have resulted in multiple casualties including deaths. It is the first time in decades that this scale of violence has been seen between the two nations. Western headlines have immediately tried to play up the notion of conflict between China and India, but to what end?

China and India respectively have the two largest populations. Both find themselves within the top 5 largest economies on Earth. Both have tremendous historical, cultural, and political influence regionally as well as growing influence globally.

Recent headlines have focused on a simmering conflict along China and India’s borders, but at other times in recent years, Chinese and Indian cooperation have been on the rise – a fact conveniently underreported in many articles.

Of course, neither China nor India as nations benefit from armed conflict between one another. Both nations possess large conventional armed forces and both nations possess nuclear weapons. Both nations have suffered from the impact of COVID-19 economically. A large-scale conflict would be costly and catastrophic for China and India.

China has maintained that it was merely responding to Indian aggression along the border and claims it seeks to quickly deescalate tensions.

China’s CGTN in an article titled, “China’s military urges India to stop provocative actions along border areas,” would claim:

China’s military voiced strong dissatisfaction and opposition Tuesday to India’s provocative actions on Monday evening in the Galwan Valley region, which caused severe clashes and casualties. It urged India to go back to the right track in properly managing disputes.

Conversely, India’s media tells a different tale. The violence has been immediately leaped upon by hawks to bolster entirely unrelated issues involving China’s “challenge” to the international “status quo.” It is a narrative that sounds torn straight from a Washington-based think tank’s white papers.

The Indian Express in an article titled, “Explained: What the clash in Ladakh underlines, and what India must do in face of the Chinese challenge,” cites Indian politicians, explaining that the incident serves as impetus to create a wider confrontation with China in a bid to roll back not only its regional influence – but its growing global reach.

It claims (emphasis added):

According to Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Congress leader in Lok Sabha, this escalation “underlines the scale of the problem and the challenge ahead” for New Delhi in its dealings with Beijing. Chowdhury argues in The Indian Express that “China has clearly twisted the crisis into a strategic opportunity by taking advantage of the geo-political distraction”.

That China is becoming more belligerent across strategic theatres, challenging the status quo, is supported by multiple examples from the South China Sea. For the Government of India, this is a moment to guard against complacency, fostered by decades of nimble diplomacy that led to equilibrium, however precarious, on the border issue with China.

The issue regarding the South China Sea is one entirely manufactured out of Washington, with many of the actors involved – including the Philippines – having long since distanced themselves from the potential conflict in favor of building better ties with Beijing.

For certain Indian politicians to cite Washington’s game in the South China Sea, and to then lump it in with this most recent border dispute – rather than simply seeking to deescalate tensions is highly suspicious.

British state media – the BBC – in its article, “India-China clash: An extraordinary escalation ‘with rocks and clubs’,” would claim:

Mr [Shivshankar] Menon, who served as India’s ambassador to China, believes that China is resorting to strident nationalism, due to “domestic and economic stresses” at home. “You can see it in their behaviour in Yellow Sea, towards Taiwan, passing laws without consulting Hong Kong, more assertive on India’s border, a tariff war with Australia.”

The BBC fails to point out that China’s policies toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, and recent trade disputes with Australia are all – without exception – owed to US meddling in China’s internal affairs. The US which officially recognizes Taiwan as China’s territory has all but worked to carve it off from China and establish it as a US foothold on China’s doorstep.

The same can be said of Hong Kong with recent violence there openly sponsored by the US.

Australia – who counts China as its largest trading partner – and whose government is increasingly friendly with Beijing, has recently caved to US pressure and joined in political campaigns accusing China of unleashing COVID-19 – thus kicking off renewed tensions between the two nations.

If Indian politicians and diplomats see the recent border incident as “related” to US-driven conflicts aimed at encircling and containing China – does that mean this most recent border incident and the decidedly more aggressive reaction by some of India’s politicians falls into the same category?

Cui Bono? 

China and India have had border issues in the past. Total war has been avoided and the conflicts have done little to change any significant aspects of either nation’s regional or global influence. In other words, even if India felt it was losing out to China’s rise – using a border incident to start a wider conflict would harldy help India change this fact.

For India – seizing on this conflict regardless of who really initially provoked it – does nothing to serve India’s interests in the short, intermediate, or long-term. They do – however – perfectly serve the interests of the United States who would prefer neither China nor India rise as regional powers – and would find it as ideal for both nations to destroy one another partially or entirely while the US reasserts itself across the region.

Provocations and those attempting to exploit them may represent Washington’s best interests, but they do not represent India’s or China’s. Those involved are hawkish and decidedly pro-Washington serving US interests at India’s expense.

Meanwhile, other Indian leaders and their Chinese counterparts have worked since the conflict arose to deescalate and resolve border issues – or at least resolve them to where military exchanges are no longer an option.

Even the BBC, at the very end of its article, admitted that despite the illusion of imminent war – China and India have enjoyed growing ties, stating (emphasis added):

“For 10 years, Sino-Indian rivalry has steadily intensified, but remained largely stable,” he [Shashank Joshi] said. India and China have also been more engaged. Bilateral trade increased 67 times between 1998 and 2012, and China is India’s largest trading partner in goods. Indian students have flocked to Chinese universities. Both sides have held joint military exercises.

It is unlikely that the vast majority in both China and India benefiting from constructive ties between the two nations will give in to a tiny minority who ultimately serve the interests of neither nation and instead the interests of Washington far abroad and away from the consequences of unchecked conflict.

For these reasons it’s safe to say that while this conflict is dangerous and both sides need to treat it with maximum caution and care, the fact that neither side benefits from the conflict unraveling out of control means it is very unlikely to do so.

While the recent violence has been unseen in decades, it can be hoped that it is one of the last disputes between China and India that involves violence, and the last gasp of malign interests seeking to sabotage and set back both nations.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Filing Challenges Trump Administration Approval of Alaska LNG Project

June 24th, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity

Environmental groups and an Alaskan Native village council filed a formal request Monday for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reconsider its approval of the Alaska LNG project, which would export U.S. fossil fuel to Asia.

The appeal says the May 21 approval failed to consider the project’s impacts on climate change and endangered species, including polar bears, Cook Inlet beluga whales and North Pacific right whales.

The Alaska LNG proposal calls for an 807-mile pipeline, a facility to liquefy Arctic gas, and the shipping of about 20 million tons of the condensed fuel abroad every year. The rehearing request was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center and Sierra Club.

“It makes no sense to fuel climate change to export American fuel to Asia,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This risky project would be a disaster for our climate, Alaska and its endangered wildlife. FERC’s approval ignored climate change and federal law, and this decision needs to be reconsidered.”

The project’s pipeline would have a daily capacity of 3.3 billion cubic feet of gas. Burning that amount of gas could result in more than 76 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually. That’s almost the same global warming impact as building 20 coal-fired power plants.

“Even those who support this project should be appalled at how dismissively FERC has treated its numerous significant impacts on Alaska and the climate, telling the public essentially not to look behind the curtain,” said Erin Whalen, an attorney at Earthjustice. “The agency needs to scrap its order and start over.”

Today’s request cited comments by FERC Commissioner Richard Glick, who was appointed to the commission by President Trump in 2017, dissenting against the approval.

“The Commission once again refuses to consider the consequences its actions have for climate change,” Glick said. “Claiming that a project’s environmental impacts are acceptable while at the same time refusing to assess the significance of the project’s impact on the most important environmental issue of our time is not reasoned decisionmaking.”

The pipeline would connect drilling operations on the North Slope to an export terminal on Cook Inlet and bring tanker ships through the habitat of endangered North Pacific right whales and Cook Inlet beluga whales. FERC estimates the project would increase large vessel traffic in the Inlet by nearly 75%.

Alaska is currently warming at twice the global rate, and the state’s infrastructure is being compromised by thawing permafrost and related subsidence. The project, with a price tag of at least $43 billion, would also involve the construction and operation of a gas-treatment plant and associated 60-mile pipeline on the North Slope.

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A new scientific paper warns that the world cannot lower its guard on protecting elephants.

The paper, published yesterday (24 June), presents rigorously peer-reviewed analysis showing that while elephant poaching has declined in East Africa, it has not diminished in the rest of the continent since 2011.

Poaching levels remain high in West, Central and Southern Africa – and are likely unsustainable in West and Central Africa, meaning some elephant populations in these regions are at risk of extinction.

The sobering news comes as there appears to be a creeping, unsubstantiated and arbitrary perception that elephant poaching is in decline across Africa. Indeed, certain governments in southern Africa – Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – support the resumption of commercial international trade in ivory and last year attempted to sell their ivory stockpiles despite increasing poaching in the region and the risk of such trade further exacerbating it.

Mary Rice, EIA’s Executive Director, said:

“This is a reminder to those who think we have solved the problem of elephant poaching that it is a reckless belief. Let us be clear – elephant poaching is not declining across Africa and in fact remains high and unsustainable.”

EIA investigations and engagement with wildlife traffickers show that elephant poaching and ivory trafficking continue to pose a serious threat to elephants, particularly in West and Central Africa. EIA is also very concerned about increasing poaching in in countries such as Botswana and South Africa, previously considered safe havens for elephants.

In 2019 alone, more than 44 tonnes of ivory were seized, representing at least 6,500 dead elephants, with more ivory seized last year than in the previous three years (2016-18); this includes the world’s largest ivory seizure of 9,120kg of ivory, in Vietnam in March 2019.

Rice added:

“While certain developments such as the ivory ban in China and improvements in enforcement in East Africa are having a positive impact on elephant populations in East Africa, we cannot ignore the onslaught of poaching in all other regions across the continent.

“We cannot afford to take our collective eye off the ball and must continue to enhance our efforts to tackle wildlife crime and the associated corruption and poor rule of law which facilitates such crime.”

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Is the JCPOA Nuclear Deal Doomed?

June 23rd, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Trump regime hardliners want the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal eliminated to facilitate escalation of sanctions war on Iran — risking things turning hot. 

Decades of US hostility toward the country are all about wanting it transformed into a vassal state subservient to its interests.

Approved unanimously by Security Council members, the JCPOA is binding international and US constitutional law.

Yet geopolitical know-nothing Trump, manipulated by hardliners surrounding him, illegally abandoned the agreement in May 2018.

His action and what followed reflect reflect how Washington always operates — by its own rules exclusively, at the expense of world peace, stability, and the sovereign rights of all nations.

E3 countries Britain, France and Germany, along with the EU, breached the landmark agreement — opposing the US pullout rhetorically, supporting the move by their actions.

Last week, the E3 countries introduced a hostile to Iran IAEA Board of Governors resolution in deference to US/Israeli interests — adopted overwhelmingly through pressure tactics.

Most BoG members went along with what demanded rejection. Russia and China alone voted against it, seven of the BoG’s 35 member states abstaining.

Based on fabricated information supplied by the Trump and Netanyahu regimes, their aim is all about wanting the JCPOA eliminated to pave the way for reimposition of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.

If things go their way, regional tensions will be greatly heightened, the threat of unthinkable war on Iran increased, risking possible global war with nuclear weapons.

Saving the landmark JCPOA is greatly jeopardized by the E3’s failure to uphold its principles — followed by introducing and supporting the unacceptable/hostile to Iran IAEA resolution.

On Monday, a strongly worded statement by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following:

“Reassurances of British, German and French colleagues that they are committed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program and looking for ways to minimize negative effect of American sanctions against Iran run counter to their actions to heighten tensions surrounding the Iranian nuclear program in the IAEA as well as speculations about triggering the dispute resolution mechanism under article 36 of the JCPOA,” adding:

“The adoption of IAEA Board of Governors resolution on Iran was not dictated by the reality of applying guarantees in Iran.”

“We are certain that all questions arising, including the agreement of access to facilities that the agency is interested in, could be resolved in the framework of standard procedures of cooperation between states and the IAEA Secretariat.”

“It is not coincidental that the resolution in the end was not supported by states representing more than half of the world’s population, including two UN Security Council permanent members,” — China and Russia.

“We repeatedly urged against playing up to backers of the policy of maximum pressure on Iran which completely discredited itself both politically and practically.”

“The root cause of all difficulties and faults in the process of implementation of the Iranian nuclear deal has been and remains the destructive actions of the United States (that) unilaterally quit the JCPOA and to this day continues to systematically violate demands of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.”

“Clearly, this is understood in European capitals, since they deemed it necessary to remind (the world community) about their regrets and concerns in this regard.”

“We believe it is vital that all current parties (to the JCPOA) reaffirm their unwavering commitment to (its) high goals.”

“The great occasion to do that seems to be July 14, the fifth anniversary of (its) signing.”

“We are urging the European parties…to seize this opportunity to return to the unifying agenda and continue fighting for the common good.”

Earlier in June, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov slammed the Trump regime’s aim to eliminate the JCPOA, saying:

Its “actions are out of line with (SC) Resolution 2231. And if these actions are continued, it will inevitably lead to a serious crisis of the UN Security Council and undermine its authority.”

Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif tweeted:

“E3 must stop public face-saving & muster the courage to state publicly what they admit privately: their failure to fulfill even own JCPOA duties due to total impotence in resisting US bullying.”

“Behind facade, E3 are accessories to Trump & Netanyahu—& in no position to counsel Iran.”

The IAEA “BoG should not allow JCPOA enemies to jeopardize Iran’s supreme interests. E3 should not be an accessory, after failing own JCPOA duties.”

“We’ve nothing to hide. More inspections in Iran over last 5 yrs than in IAEA history.”

“An agreeable solution is possible, but (adopted) Res will ruin it.”

Former Iranian Defense Minister/current Ayatollah Khamenei  advisor Hossein Dehqan minced no words saying the following:

“Iran will never engage in negotiations with…Trump, because we consider him to be a criminal, not a president.”

It’s very much uncertain whether Iranian relations with the US improve if Biden succeeds him in 2021.

Since Iran’s 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US installed despotic rule, bilateral relations have been dismal.

As long as the Islamic Republic remains independent of US control, the aim of both right wings of its one-party state will be to replace its sovereignty with subservient to Washington puppet rule.

The same objective applies to all nations, notably Russia and China, the only ones standing in the way of its aim for unchallenged global dominance.

It’s a prescription for endless conflicts, instability, and risk of unthinkable global war 3.0.

Humanity’s fate hangs in the balance.

US presidents, Trump included, are hostage to dark forces controlling its domestic and geopolitical policies.

The US is a belligerent state, an imperial state, a plutocratic state, an undemocratic state, a lawless state, a nation from inception run by its privileged class for its own self-interest by its own rules exclusively.

Throughout most of its history, it’s been at war on invented enemies at home and abroad — peace, stability, equity, justice, and the rule of law considered anathema notions for standing in the way of its diabolical aims.

No matter who serves in high US executive, congressional, and judicial positions, dirty business as usual will continue like always before.

A state of permanent US war on humanity exists at home and abroad.

The aim of its ruling class to control planet earth, its resources and populations — by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives — may kill us all if not challenged and stopped while there’s still time.

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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.


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   

WWIII Scenario

La Nato al timone della politica estera italiana

June 23rd, 2020 by Manlio Dinucci

I ministri della Difesa della Nato (per l’Italia Lorenzo Guerini, Pd), riuniti in videoconferenza il 17/18 giugno, hanno preso una serie di «decisioni per rafforzare la deterrenza dell’Alleanza». Nessuno però in Italia ne parla, né sui media (social compresi) né nel mondo politico, dove su tutto questo regna un assoluto silenzio multipartisan.

Eppure tali decisioni, dettate fondamentalmente da Washington e sottoscritte per l’Italia dal ministro Guerini, tracciano le linee guida non solo della nostra politica militare, ma anche di quella estera. Anzitutto – annuncia il segretario generale Jens Stoltenberg – «la Nato si sta preparando a una possibile seconda ondata del Covid-19», contro cui ha già mobilitato in Europa oltre mezzo milione di soldati.

Stoltenberg non chiarisce come la Nato possa prevedere una possibile seconda pandemia del virus con un nuovo lockdown. Su un punto però è chiaro: ciò «non significa che altre sfide siano scomparse». La maggiore – sottolineano i ministri della Difesa – proviene dal «comportamento destabilizzante e pericoloso della Russia», in particolare dalla sua «irresponsabile retorica nucleare, mirante a intimidire e minacciare gli Alleati Nato». Essi rovesciano in tal modo la realtà, cancellando il fatto che è stata la Nato, finita la Guerra fredda, a estendersi a ridosso della Russia con le sue forze e basi nucleari, soprattutto statunitensi. È stata metodicamente attuata, con la regia di Washington, una strategia mirante a creare in Europa crescenti tensioni con la Russia.

Per decidere nuove misure militari contro la Russia i ministri della Difesa si sono riuniti nel Gruppo di pianificazione nucleare, presieduto dagli Stati uniti. Non si sa quali decisioni in materia nucleare abbia sottoscritto il ministro Guerini per conto dell’Italia. È comunque chiaro che, partecipando al Gruppo e ospitando armi nucleari Usa (utilizzabili anche dalla nostra aeronautica), l’Italia viola il Trattato di non-proliferazione e respinge il Trattato Onu per la proibizione delle armi nucleari. Stoltenberg si limita a dire: «Oggi abbiamo deciso ulteriori passi per mantenere sicuro ed efficiente il deterrente nucleare Nato in Europa». Tra questi passi vi è sicuramente il prossimo arrivo, anche in Italia, delle nuove bombe nucleari Usa B61-12. L’altra crescente «sfida», di cui hanno parlato i ministri della Difesa, è quella della Cina, che per la prima volta è «in cima all’agenda della Nato».

La Cina è partner commerciale di molti alleati, ma allo stesso tempo «investe pesantemente in nuovi sistemi missilistici che possono raggiungere tutti i paesi Nato», spiega Stoltenberg. La Nato comincia così a presentare la Cina come militarmente minacciosa. Allo stesso tempo presenta come pericolosi gli investimenti cinesi nei paesi dell’Alleanza. In base a tale premessa i ministri della difesa hanno aggiornato le linee guida per la «resilienza nazionale», miranti a impedire che l’energia, i trasporti e le telecomunicazioni, in particolare il 5G, finiscano sotto «proprietà e controllo stranieri» (leggi «cinesi»).

Queste le decisioni sottoscritte dall’Italia alla riunione Nato dei ministri della Difesa. Esse vincolano il nostro paese a una strategia di crescente ostilità soprattutto verso Russia e Cina, esponendoci a rischi sempre più gravi e rendendo franoso il terreno su cui poggiano gli stessi accordi economici.

È una strategia a lungo termine, come dimostra il lancio del progetto «Nato 2030», fatto dal segretario generale Stoltenberg l’8 giugno per «rafforzare l’Alleanza militarmente e politicamente» includendo paesi come Australia (già invitata alla riunione dei ministri della Difesa), Nuova Zelanda, Giappone e altri asiatici, in chiara funzione anti-cinese.

Per il progetto della Grande Nato Globale 2030 è stato formato un gruppo di 10 consiglieri, tra cui la prof. Marta Dassù, già consigliera di politica estera nel governo D’Alema prima e durante la guerra Nato alla Jugoslavia, a cui l’Italia partecipò nel 1999, sotto comando Usa, con le sue basi e i suoi bombardieri. 

Manlio Dinucci

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Amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration has made numerous reckless decisions to combat the virus, demonstrating a deadly incompetence. Indeed, with even minimal intelligent preparedness in the richest country on the planet, up to eighty percent of the more than one hundred thousand deaths from the virus in the US so far could have been prevented. 

Navarro is Trump’s Advisor on Trade and Manufacturing Policy as well as  National Defense Production policy.

Assigning Peter Navarro with the responsibility of managing the US production of emergency medical supplies is one such asinine decision. With Trump’s little regard for common sense, it is no surprise that he chose Navarro for this job.

Trump seems to see himself in Navarro’s ability to confidently (and laughably) assert his opinions in matters that he has no knowledge of or background in whatsoever. Navarro does not have either the experience of the private sector nor the skills or expertise of supply chain management – skills required for the task at hand. Also, his unconventional ideas about the economics of trade lack an iota of credibility even amongst the most rabid of either neoliberal or neo-isolationist economists.

Navarro strongly advocates the increase in trade tariffs in order to protect American manufacturers/manufacturing jobs and to help the economy. What he foolishly misunderstands is that this would not only harm the consumers due to price increases, but the economy and the manufacturers as well who need to import intermediate goods for their manufacturing. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics would understand this. His ideas, to emphasize again, are hardly agreed upon by anyone but he has been the chief advisor to the President on trade policy since 2016. To benefit from Navarros’ abundance of economic rigmarole, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was created, and he was appointed Director.

Through his position, Navarro was able to gradually advance his project of preventing Chinese products from entering the American market, to supporting heavy tariffs and effectively escalating a trade war with China. Tariffs have been imposed on goods worth billions of dollars imported from China. These policies have also been extended to countries like Germany, Japan, Mexico and South Korea. They are likely to retaliate with similar policies thereby curbing world trade and retarding economic growth, including, most of all, in the United States itself. That’s how Navarro is helping Trump to ‘Make American Great Again.’

Navarro’s real notoriety springs from his unrelenting and bigoted vitriol against the Chinese. He has written a series of books on China including Death by China, The Coming China Wars and Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World. President Trump seems  to gravitate toward Navarro precisely because of the message contained in these books, with Trump’s particular favorite being the Coming China Wars. In his books, Navarro not only blames China for worker abuse, intellectual property infringement and currency manipulation but also selling cheap, dangerous goods to the United States in order to become the “planet’s most efficient assassin.”

The China experts, both in scholarly and journalistic circles, regard Navarro’s writings on China as an absolute farce based on next to knowledge about the subject on which he loves to pontificate. He has hardly spent any time in the country and does not know an iota of Mandarin. His ideas essentially stem from the hatred that he has for the country. In five of his books, Navarro uses an imaginary character that he has named Ron Vara. Ron Vara is an anagram of his own name. He is used to affirm his own ideas about China. It is rather comical how Ron Vara accompanied Navarro to the White House and Navarro even created a fake email for him to support his ideas about increasing tariffs since he could not find any support elsewhere.

Since Navarro is managing the US production for emergency medical supplies, his ideas about trade, particularly with China, become incredibly relevant. Navarro is on a quest for making the United States completely self-reliant and avoiding any help from China. The need of the hour is to trade with China but unfortunately, it is also precisely the right time for Navarro to further his anti-China agenda. China has successfully controlled the spread of the virus and has aided many countries in the world to fight the virus. The United States could use this help as well. Navarro has been blaming China for the pandemic in ways such as naming the COVID-19 as the ‘China virus’, for hacking vaccine research, and for hoarding medical supplies and data on COVID-19 to profit from creating the first vaccine.

It is the perfect time to give rise to anti-Chinese sentiments to cease trade with China (to ostensibly make America self-reliant and bring manufacturing jobs back – all rhetorical pipedreams sold to a gullible support base of Trump), and provide a distraction from the incompetence of the Trump administration. People are confused, scared and dying because of the pandemic so it gives the perfect opportunity to feed racist sentiments into the population. Navarro’s utter lack of expertise and willful ignorance to manage his newfound responsibility is one huge handicap, but, in addition, his racist tendencies are certainly bound to break down the pre-existing chain of medical supplies from outside of the United States. This diabolical agenda is going to cost millions of lives.

Navarro has not only abused his power to further his anti-Chinese agenda and accelerate the collapse of the global economy. But in an attempt to buffoonishly demonstrate how vast his knowledge is beyond simply economics – in an sycophantic manner to foolishly back Trump on his ideas, he has shamelessly argued with the leading infectious disease expert in the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, for the treatment of the novel coronavirus. Navarro has no background in medicine or science. He still acquired the drug and promoted it to Americans even when Dr. Fauci explained that there was no evidence of the drug being beneficial in treating COVID-19. Upon being questioned about his qualifications for making such recommendations, Navarro said, “My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist. I have a PhD. And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”

Navarro’s incompetence is not only reflected in his ideas, writings and claims, but in his five election losses from his hometown in San Diego. In addition, his memo from the 29th of January that supported a Chinese travel ban in order to, according to ‘expert’ Navarro, to prevent about half a million people in the country dying from the disease was not taken seriously. Nonetheless, his incompetence, racist agenda, laughable reputation, sheer lack of empathy and plain disregard for common sense seems to merely make Trump like him more. He is addressed as “My Peter” by the President.

His current role requires establishing good relations to channel resources towards the United States. Instead, he is accelerating the collapse of an already crumbling global economy as well as provoking a dangerous conflict. He is playing with the lives of countless people not only in the form of the pandemic but a potential clash with China and the world.

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Dr. Junaid S. Ahmad is director of the Center for Global Dialogue and professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Whatever can be said, we have been about three or four billion people locked down on the five continents, forced to experience a kind of “house-arrest”. Unexpectedly, in a few weeks, this “exception” has become the standard status for crowds of honest citizens, blowing on the planet a backward wind and generating a crazy surrealistic atmosphere. However you call it a “lockdown”, it is a real “containment” of the populations evoking warfare, cold war, repression, fear and mistrust.

Some questions and some answers

Of course, this staggering episode will sustain thoughts, reflections and questions about the origin of this mysterious virus that was capable to plunge all of a sudden our familiar society into an unknown but very disturbing future.

What is unprecedented indeed in the Covid 19 crisis is not the event in itself, but its uncommon impact, resulting from its huge, systematic, world-wide, at first sight irrational instrumentation. Why did it get such an extraordinary importance, as soon as pandemics, far from being an exception, are rather usual? Looking back to a recent past, remembering or not that an epidemic alert used to be launched every two or three years, every individual will discover at that occasion the many types of fevers or influenzas possibly fraught with dangers he has escaped from. So we have a right to wonder and ask why or for which reasons this famous Covid19 has become so extravagantly famous and fearsome. Of course, we can’t predict the final toll. Let’s say it is not a mild epidemic, but to believe daily figures, it has nothing to do with a pandemic of the millennium. There must be an explanation…

“Containment” being conducive to reflection, it’s within everyone’s capabilities to ponder about the impact of media coverage of the crisis, since everything has been done everywhere to condition the populations and bring them to focus on the so-called “War on Coronavirus” at every moment, every detail in their daily life, 24/24 and 7/7.. It is indeed a permanent brainwash that is imposed on those millions of house-locked down citizens through an omnipresent TV propaganda, the channels altogether centering unremittingly their programs on the “coronavirus”.

Intentionally or not, this oppressive context makes it possible to push into the far-off background some of the upsetting realities that were unveiled at the occasion of the pandemic, insofar as those realities were bringing to the fore the profound geopolitical reversal which stood out during the last ten years. Indeed the obsessive campaign makes the viewers forget the evidence that the Atlantic hegemony is quickly swinging to the Eurasian Block, thus reshaping the World on new bases. This bias raises some questions.

If the tidal wave we are referring to were just an “illuminati” illusion, would the virus have been dramatized to this extreme as it has been, so as to relegate to the rank of memories the geopolitical mutation? Would the situation – that is not really to the advantage of the West – raise so violent attacks demonizing Russia and China? Unless we consider that the pandemic – or the storytelling – has been a catalyst favorable to the advent of this messianist “New World Order” preached and prophesied by Henry Kissinger, Attali, Gordon Brown, George Soros, Rockfeller, Bill Gates&Co… In fact, these visionaries of bad omen seem to be ready to bank on the most vicious or haziest plans to preserve the US/Atlantic hegemony as if it were a divine privilege: business as usual. But their approach is distorted by their misperception of the realities.

Corona as a geopolitical tool

If the debate on the ins and outs of the crisis can last for ages, there is no doubt as regards the conclusion: it is firstly because of the geopolitical context that the Corona episode made such an impact. Those prominent public figures above-mentioned, leading from behind or on the frontline the so-called “World Government Project”, do not belong exactly to the new generations, rather looking like figures of the past, at the relative exception of their present leader, Bill Gates (aged 64). In spite of their presupposed “genius”, they are blinkered in their vision, misguided by the conviction that the World will remain forever under western rule. It is true that God’s will and “elected peoples” destiny used to be omnipresent in the American political speech as well as in the minds of many citizens, as a deeply-rooted conviction since the Pilgrim Fathers and the founders of the United States, but this self-centered conviction gained a renewed favour in the seventies/eighties with the arising of neoconservatism, a neocapitalist doctrine religiously permeated by Zionism. It reached the height of its glory during George W. Bush administration, when the White House meetings used to look and sound like religious services.

To a lesser extent, this bigot inspiration remains alive in the political speech, including in immoderate statements by Donald Trump. Beyond differences and conflicts, most US politicians – with few exceptions – do agree about the innate supremacy of their country and its vocation to lead the World. A British writer (living in the States), S. Mallaby, wrote: “Neo-imperialist America is still in charge of the Burden chanted by Kipling, but The Burden of the White Man has changed into the Burden of the Rich Man”.

Taking this conviction for granted, we can understand how difficult it is for American leaders to bow before the first conclusions that can be drawn from the ongoing global Grip, namely the gradual but fast decline of the US Atlantic Empire in front of the arising or the come-back of two rival powers to begin with. Economically, China has become number one in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reckoned in PPP (Parity Purchasing Power) some years ago, as well as the “Factory of the Planet”: by the way, 80% of the medicines produced in the World are “made in China”. Last but not least, the OBOR project (One Belt One Road) referred to as the “Silk Road” is for Peking “the Great National Strategy for the Century”, reflecting the ambition to propose to the World a counter-balance to the “Greater Middle East” of George W. Bush…

Militarily, and according to many standards, US seem to have been outclassed by Russia with regard to nuclear, ballistics, Navy and Aeronautics, telecommunications high technology. Moreover one can say that Moscow has become the referring political and diplomatic power, not only where it used to be influential, but in many regions, including in well known US backyards (Middle East, Africa, Latin America).

Even more impressive is the loss by the US of their moral, intellectual and ideological power. Legacy from World War 2 and imposed on the “Free World” in the framework of the struggle against communism, this US magisterium had overcome the whole “international community” in the aftermath of the unexpected implosion of USSR, but the coronavirus will have ruined this stereotype of America and Europe. Most countries, even unexpected ones, have fetched assistance from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Asian partners) but also from Cuba.

Therefore, the Coronavirus episode is doubtlessly and straightly connected with the battle raging between the US flanked by its allies, and the block headed by Russia and China, gathering the Asian partners above mentioned. What is at stake? The World leadership…

The American dream at all costs

Just as Zbigniew Brzezinski (who died recently), Kissinger is one of those prominent “advisers” who survive the alternations and turbulences of the spoils-system, thus becoming permanent references. Whispering in the ear of all the presidents since the seventies, he symbolizes this continuity of the US foreign policy, inspired by the neoconservative messianism, and the total faith in the American natural supremacy. Kissinger served as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford. He accessed to celebrity in 1973 at the occasion of the arabo-israeli Ramadan War, promoting an innovative “shuttle diplomacy” between Damascus, Cairo and Tel-Aviv in order to reach cease-fire agreements. Praised to the skies for being a peacemaker, “Dear Henry” succeeded to conceal that he had played in the meantime a leading role in bombing campaigns (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), inspiring violent regime-change operations in Argentina and Chile and supporting horrible anti-communist repression in Indonesia.

In 1974 he presented to President Gerald Ford a comprehensive study on the population of the World and its evolution up to 2070, expressing his concern about the high level of world birth rate increase, the disparities between developing and industrialized countries, the discrepancy between developmental needs and demographic pressure in poorer societies, suggesting that “dramatic events” could happen just in time to solve the problem (sic). The paper remained unpublished until 1989. Kissinger was a confident or spokesman for Rockefeller and G. Soros. He got acquainted with the inevitable Bill Gates and inspired his projects. Those good guys are apparently well-intentioned, but they have never concealed their purpose: their Health Programs supposed to “eradicate poverty” are to some extent ambiguous, involving some eugenicist concepts and perverse technical tricks under the cover of Welfare. The guidelines can be read as follows: taking into account the limited potential of earth resources, a small elite of intelligent “happy few” could easily have a much longer life (Kissinger is 97 while life-expectancy in the Rockefeller’s family is over 100 years) and enjoy more welfare in the frame of a world population reduced to its minimum level (sic), if you see what he means.

The noble concept is the devotion to the needs of populations and the welfare of mankind….Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and his foundation could be the financial fountain of universal vaccination firstly in Africa, usual experimental field for West activist “witches”, with the dream of launching this worldwide operation in the aftermath of the “containment”. Bill and his wife Melinda are warm supporters of Kissinger’s thesis, a position widespread among the “Rich Men” (cf.supra): World Economic Forum, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Morgen, etc….

The notion of pandemics being used as a drastic opportunity to march towards a “Global World Order” or a “Government of the World” has been integrated in all the CIA and intelligence reports for many years. In this context, was Covid19 just a splendid opportunity or a man-made virus? Some CIA strategic reports in past years (2014) are very instructive in this regard.

Many honest people have doubts about the reality of these ugly rear thoughts. That’s why their attention must be drawn to the mechanisms that have been and are still used by the Atlantic Empire with a view to extend its global dominance, through a noble “democratization” project. (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, etc…).

Come back to the Bad Tricks

It was once upon a time, but it is still today. At Kissinger’s peak of glory,and because the Cold War balance of forces and the right of veto made impossible to pass resolutions according to the sole western views, US and other Atlantic thinkers, experts or leaders were already searching for a mechanism making possible to counter the communist bloc. The first step of this demarche was taken in the late sixties during the so-called “Biafra War” in the newly independent republic of Nigeria, where the richest oil-producing region of the country was the theater for a secession attempt, supported by foreign countries (France and Ivory Coast). This bloody War generated a huge humanitarian crisis attracting foreign western volunteers, including a young medical doctor, Bernard Kouchner, and a lawyer Mario Bettati. The first NGO “Médecins sans Frontières” will be created in the wake of this conflict. The idea was to instrument a new “Humanitarian Law” to by-pass the basic UN principles. It was the “Right of Interference” that won’t be theorized before the late eighties (1987) by the two initiators during a conference on “Morale and Humanitarian Law”. But the context was not suitable.

It got more favorable some years later, with the disintegration of USSR. The new idea was presented again as a “Duty of Interference”, that was to change to a “Duty To Protect” before being crystallized into a terminology in tune with the times: the “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P)was presented as a subsidiary responsibility of the “international community” reduced in fact to the three western permanent members of the Security Council (US, UK and France) and some like-minded countries on occasions. This demarche was of course in contradiction with the international law, since it limited, for the sake of globalization, the reach of the “westphalian” principles of the UN charter (equal sovereignty of the States and non-interference). But the World was entering a new era, the dissolution of the communist bloc paving the way for the US neocons determined to impose the United States as the Ruler of the World.

If you leaf through the pages of a “Book of Tricks” of the Axis of Good, you won’t need to go very far to drive out one of the favorite stratagems of the “Indispensable Nation” which had undertaken to “annex” the World, no more no less. The technique consisted of waving a noble concept in order to reach a shameful goal. Of course, this trick is old as imperialism, but “the most powerful Empire that ever existed on the earth” couldn’t poison international life as it wished until 1991. But in the following years, boosted by the divine surprise above-mentioned, America would catch up. The “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) would be this “noble pretext” selected to render acceptable the crazy adventure of “democratization” without any significant resistance of an “international community” deeply shocked by the political earthquake. As it is well known, this “false flag” has been used for thirty years (until today) to cover interferences in order to destabilize the regimes of concern”: “Rogue States” if they support terrorism, detain Arms of Mass Destruction and violate International Law, or “Failed States” if they are accused of not fulfilling their duties, the “international community” (US and allies) thus being entrusted to intervene in order to “protect the people”.

After a running period, George W. Bush, under the pressure of fanatics inspired by the Zionist neoconservative doctrine (Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Donald Rumsfeld, etc…), will engage the World in “an endless war on terror” against interchangeable enemies. In February 2004, he will introduce his « Greater Middle East » project (published on 13/02/2004 by Al Hayat newspaper): the plan was about reforming, bringing democratization, security, and above all “liberalizing” the “Muslim Green Belt” from Mauritania to Pakistan. In fact, it had nothing to do with democracy, but aimed at taking control of the natural resources, besieging Russia and marginalizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the destruction of the Iraqi State, “Democratization » ought to make the region more “receptive” to American wishes and « friendlier » to Israel.

Anyway, the ancestors of our Bill Gates and Co Globalists had the dream to get the UN to shoulder the “Responsibility To Protect” so as to integrate it into the Charter, thus opening the way to military actions for “humanitarian reasons”. They needed the blessing of the Council, which was theoretically an impossible task. Guardian of the international law and guarantor of the UN principles, the Council plays the main role in the field of peace-keeping and That’s whyfor years,security. He has the monopole in conflicts and crises settlement. even though recognized by the General Assembly in 2005/2006 about Darfour, the R2P will just remain a casual reference.

In March 2011, the R2P will be invoked again, with a view to engage in Libya the well-known “humanitarian” operation that will result in tens of thousands of victims and destroy the country. Russia and China will realize – but too late – that they had been fooled by their western “partners”. Consequently, in October 2011, after Kadhafi’s murder, Moscow and Peking will use for the first time (after twenty years of prudent abstention) their veto to bar any intervention in Syria, apparently closing the road to R2P based resolutions.

From the New Middle East to the New Global Order

2011was a turning-point in the post-Cold War “American Century” and a partial stop to the global dominance of the US, opening a challenging period of contest, not on an ideological basis as it had been during the East-West conflict, but between US unilateralism and supporters of a multilateralism to come.

There is nothing new in the “New Global Order”, which is to the World what the “international community” used to be years ago: three Atlantic permanent members of the Security Council and like-minded countries talking on behalf and in the name of the United Nations. Obviously, the project is nothing else than a new version of the strategy aiming at the maintenance of the US hegemony on the World.

To get convinced, so try to find in the starring list of the initiators and leading figures involved in this “World Government Project” any non-western, non anglo-saxon “Big Man”? The sole exception is Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian doctor with a british training background, Director General of the World Health Organization, coming under World Health Assembly (a part of the UN network), widely in the clutches of the lobbies. As for the rest, the “World Government” network is intricate and compact: GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and immunization), World Economic Forum, World Bank, UNICEF, pharmaceutical corporations, Gates Foundation, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Most of those structures are turning around Bill Gates and thepublic figures already cited, and under the supervision of Agenda ID2020, initiated by the Gates Foundation. We should not forget to mention Neil Ferguson, the guru of the London Imperial College, a member of the “Covid 19 Response Team” comprising 50 scientists linked to the WHO. Ferguson was the promoter of the “Total Lockdown”, propagating apocalyptic reports which convinced the UK and US governments and (according to the New York Times) the French president, in spite of many disputable predictions forecasting hundreds of thousands or millions of victims, in absence of any total containment.

Just replace some words in the “toxic” coverage : democratization with Global Welfare, “Responsibility to Protect” with Health Security, vaccination and immunizationInternational community with Global World Order, and endless War on terror with endless War on pandemics, and you will perceive the continuity of the western project of dominance.

And so what?

If it is carried out, this world-scale operation (ID 2020), carefully planned in the United States at mid-october 2019 by a numeric simulation of coronavirus, would realize a new razzia led by the West under the pressure of the so-called “Big Pharma” lobby and the guidance of powerful sectors of the American “Deep State”. If it were successful, it would bring back to some extent the geopolitical balance to the situation that prevailed ten years ago. But there is noinevitability in the success of Bill Gates and Co, whose projects are coming within the scope of a global hegemony. For the strategists, intellectuals and zealous followers of Westernism, as well as for some UN institutions, traditional go-between for US plans, there is no room for another prospect than a “New American Century”. But they are probably wrong. The Atlantic Empire has lost its global supremacy. This shift in the balance from the West to Eurasia is observed by all analysts. It is hard for Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Bolton and Co, but also for the supporters of Gates, Soros and Rockefeller to admit that the nightmare is coming true.

One of the possible options, feared by many, is a gradual evolution towards a totalitarian system spreading all over the World. But it is hardly conceivable. Completely outdated, the Westernism dream implies that Russia and China would accept nowadays, in the new international order, any kind of transnational Gates-style vaccination and/or a Global Government suiting Kissinger’s views. Russia emerged as born again on the ruins of USSR, while China carries on its irresistible ascent on the Great Game Chessboard. It doesn’t mean that the future will be a paradise on earth. It depends of course on the real visions of the forthcoming leadership, but even more on the strength of popular aspirations. This is the main stake of the crisis.

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Consult Michel Raimbaud’s Archive of articles in French at mondialisation.ca/author/michel-raimbaud

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Our thanks to Basma Qaddour for sharing Michel Raimbaud’s analysis via Mark Taliano’s blog site.

Based on an interview held in the White House last Friday, June 19, the U.S. website Axios reported:

“Asked whether he would meet with Maduro,” Trump said, “I would maybe think about that…. Maduro would like to meet. And I’m never opposed to meetings — you know, rarely opposed to meetings. I always say, you lose very little with meetings. But at this moment, I’ve turned them down.”

The context of what may appear to be a sudden reversal in Trump’s Venezuelan policy is to be found in John Bolton’s recently released memoir on life under Trump, The Room Where It Happened. According to Bolton (cited by Axios), after throwing the full diplomatic weight of the U.S. government behind Juan Guaidó, Trump’s private feelings about his protégé were ambivalent:

“He thought Guaidó was ‘weak,’ as opposed to Maduro, who was ‘strong.’”

“By spring [of 2019], Trump was calling Guaidó the ‘Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,’ [Democratic Party candidate for the 2016 presidential elections won by Hilary Clinton] hardly the sort of compliment an ally of the United States should expect.”

In the Trump lexicon, the honorific applied to O’Rourke generally means “loser,” a term to deprecate political opponents. It may be that this tentative reaching out to Maduro, as opposed to hanging on to what was appearing even in Trump’s eyes as a lost cause, has its roots in previous discussions among Trump’s Cabinet.

Any eventual contact between Trump and Maduro is an ongoing but controversial story emerging from U.S. corporate media, the White House and perhaps Bolton. In fact, only one day after Trump seemed to have opened the door to discussing with Maduro, he tweeted on June 22.

“I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!“

However, “meeting” and “discussing” is still in the news. Moreover, the fact remains, following the latest divulgations cited above, that Trump is evaluating “discussion” from a position of weakness. As Trumps has admitted, his anointed “president“ is a complete failure to date.

The situation in Canada is different. Action can be taken now as there is nothing to wait for. The Trudeau government plays a leading role in carrying forward Trump regime-change policy through the right-wing Lima group, with its avowed intention of overthrowing Maduro and installing Guaidó.

The time is ripe, because on June 17 the Trudeau government suffered a humiliating defeat in its high profile bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. In the spotlight during the weeks leading up to the vote, we saw just how close Trudeau’s relationship is to Trump. In fact, many Canadians viewed it as subservience. This evaluation even found its way into some corporate editorials on the defeat. Also under scrutiny in the UNSC debacle was the Trudeau government’s lack of respect for international law and UN resolutions.

In a word, since June 17, Trudeau does not have either an international or domestic mandate to conduct foreign policy as he has carried out since winning office. Along with other grassroots organizations and personalities, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute was instrumental in pushing for the NO vote and creating domestic support to back up the international appeals.

If Trudeau would like to make up for his past errors and show the world there is indeed a difference between the U.S. and Canada, and that we do not perhaps stand behind every Trump move, what better opportunity that to build on Trump’s short-lived opening to Maduro? Why should Trudeau not declare that, unlike Trump, he would like to have fair and open discussions with Maduro, as anyone who believes in an “international rules-based order” should do? Surely it would take courage to do so. But this is far closer to “Canadian values” than what Trudeau has been repeating over the last few weeks. Such a courageous stand would also constitute a rebuttal of Trump’s heavy-handed, dictatorial methods. Since the vote on the 17th, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, encouraged by its and others’ success in breaking through the usual mainstream media blackout, is following up on what many see as a mandate from the grassroots. It is calling for a popular discussion and consultations on foreign policy in these terms:

“Dear PM Trudeau,

Time to Fundamentally Reassess Canadian Foreign Policy

One of the 10 subjects raised is:

  • Why is Canada involved in efforts to oust Venezuela’s UN-recognized government, a clear violation of the principle of non-intervention in other country’s internal affairs?

Trudeau has admitted that he has to take stock of a foreign policy that has been so soundly rejected by United Nations’ member states. By revising its failed and harmful policy toward the Venezuelan people, it would contribute to a much-needed atmosphere of discussion and consultation on Canada’s outdated and unpopular foreign policy.

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Featured image is from The Santiago Times

Accountability has always been a problem in the nuclear industry, despite praises to the contrary.  Constantly keeping its muddled head above water with government handouts to remain competitive; ostensibly keeping a hand in the energy sector despite a sketchy record, there has always been a sense that “going nuclear” is a term that simply will not die. 

Even during the novel coronavirus crisis, those within the nuclear industry stressed their plumed credentials.  The World Nuclear Association rosily describes the role of nuclear technologies in their use “to detect and fight the virus”.  The body is insistent that nuclear reactors are to be celebrated for keeping the house in order as electricity supplies are maintained.  Those operating reactors have also been considerate of their staff. “Reactor operators have taken steps to protect their workforce and have implemented business continuity plans to ensure the continuing functioning of key business activities where appropriate.” According to a Forbes contributor, the industry “first developed pandemic response plans in 2006,” plans which were revised in March by the Nuclear Energy Institute to “align with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended actions for COVID-19 as well as those of the World Health Organization.”

A good deal of this is deceptive.  It is true that 2006 saw the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) broach the issue of pandemic threats to the industry, floating the possibility of having response plans.  It duly conducted a workshop with the title theme “Sustaining Safe Nuclear Operations During an Influenza Pandemic”.  This did not prove successful.  As Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Societies noted,

“A number of difficult policy questions were discussed, including the potential need to sequester workers early in an outbreak and the effect of high rates of absenteeism.  But little was done to resolve these questions.”

The Nuclear Energy Institute went so far as to recommend a Pandemic Licensing Plan for the NRC to review, recognising “the potential for an influenza epidemic to reduce nuclear plant staffing below the levels necessary to maintain full compliance with all NRC regulatory requirements”.  The white paper was intended to balance “projected staffing reductions with the importance of continued operation to help maintain grid stability and provide reserve power to offset losses of other sources of generation.”  Greater discretion in terms of enforcement on the part of the NRC was suggested, one that would square regulatory standards with the integrity of a continued system. More risk, in other words, might tolerated during a pandemic. 

The response from the NRC was terse, finding that “without bounding entry conditions and more specific technical bases for the proposed regulatory relief, NEI’s approach still presents significant challenges that may prevent meaningful overall progress in pandemic preparation.” 

Across the globe, nuclear power plants, and nuclear armed states, face critical issues with COVID-19.  At stages, the safety of workers has been gravely compromised.  In April, the US Navy announced that a sailor who tested positive for COVID-19 on the nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt the previous month had died.  The virus had scored a veritable hit on the crew, with 600 sailors testing positive.   The scrappy handling of the entire affair led to the resignation of acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, who had, in turn, dismissed the aircraft carrier’s captain Brett Crozier.  Crozier had warned of the threat posed to his crew in a memo to the Navy’s Pacific Fleet that was subsequently leaked.  “We are not at war.  Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset – our Sailors.”

The Russian nuclear corporation, Rosatom, revealed in March that it had been assailed by the coronavirus at the construction site of a nuclear power plant being built in Grodno, Belarus.  According to Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev, the site of the plant had been locked down, but an easing of physical distancing measures saw a viral return of some vengeance.  His address to employees did not inspire confidence. “Now we are facing the busiest season as in the coming weeks we are about to obtain a license and get ready for the physical launch [of the first VVER-1200 reactor].  At the same time we should protect and take care of our staff as much as possible.”

Workers have found themselves quarantined and monitored on site.  Rosatom’s utility subsidiary Rosenergoatom took such measures in April, isolating workers in dormitories at the plants of their employ.  Similar measures are supposedly being implemented in the various nuclear cities in Russia that remain sealed and concealed from external scrutiny. 

William Toby, Simon Saradzhyan and Nikolas Roth are almost complimentary regarding efforts being made by nuclear organisations in coping with COVID-19.  They are, for instance, “implementing broad public health measures, having employees work from home when possible, use personal protection equipment, wash their hands frequently, and keep a proper distance at workstations.”  The temperatures of employees are also being checked prior to entering the facility.

In certain cases, nuclear related activities have been halted.  In Britain and France, the Sellafield and La Hague plants were shut down.  Mining of uranium was halted in South Africa and Namibia.  But all these point to a laundry list of items that mask the deep troubles that beset the industry. 

In the United States, movement since the disagreements on regulation and safety in 2007 has been minimal.  NRC staff doddered over enforcement criteria; the NEI remains committed to its Pandemic Licensing Plan, gathering dust for 13 years.  We are left with the less than comforting words of Lyman.  “The NRC assured me … that its risk standards for granting enforcement discretion have not changed and that if they deemed any plant unsafe they could and would issue an order to shut it down.”

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

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For months, this has been a story that I have wanted to share with young readers in Hong Kong. Now it seems to be the really appropriate time, when the ideological battle between some West superpowers and China is raging, and as a result of it, Hong Kong and the entire world is suffering.

I want to say that none of it is new, that the West superpowers already destabilized so many countries and territories, brainwashed tens of millions of young people.

I know, because in the past, I was one of them. If I weren’t, it would be impossible to understand what is now happening in Hong Kong.

I was born in Leningrad, a beautiful city in the Soviet Union. Now it is called St. Petersburg, and the country is Russia. Mom is half-Russian, half-Chinese, artist, and architect. My childhood was split between Leningrad and Pilsen, an industrial city known for its beer, at the Western extreme of what used to be Czechoslovakia. Dad was a nuclear scientist.

The two cities were different. Both represented something essential in the Communist planning, a system that you were taught, by the Western propagandists, to hate.

Leningrad is one of the most stunning cities in the world, with some of the greatest museums, opera and ballet theaters, public spaces. In the past, it used to be the Russian capital.

Pilsen is tiny, with only 180,000 inhabitants. But when I was a kid, it counted with several excellent libraries, art cinemas, an opera house, avant-garde theaters, art galleries, a research zoo, with things that could not be, as I realized later (when it was too late), found even in the US cities of 1 million.

Both cities, one big and one small, had excellent public transportation, vast parks, and forests coming to its outskirts, as well as elegant cafes. Pilsen had countless free tennis facilities, football stadiums, even badminton courts.

Life was good, meaningful. It was rich. Not rich in terms of money, but rich culturally, intellectually, and healthwise. To be young was fun, with knowledge free and easily accessible, with the culture at every corner, and sports for everyone. The pace was slow: plenty of time to think, learn, analyze.

But it was also the height of the Cold War.

We were young, rebellious, and easy to manipulate. We were never satisfied with what we were given. We took for granted everything. At night, we were glued to our radio receivers, listening to the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other broadcasting services aiming at discrediting socialism and all countries which were fighting against Western imperialism.

Czech socialist industrial conglomerates were building, in solidarity, entire factories, from steel to sugar mills, in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. But we saw no glory in this because Western propaganda outlets were simply ridiculing such undertakings.

Our cinemas were showing masterpieces of Italian, French, Soviet, Japanese cinema. But we were told to demand junk from the US.

The music offering was great, from live to recorded. Almost all music was, actually, available although with some delay, in local stores or even on stage. What was not sold in our stores was nihilist rubbish. But that was precisely what we were told to desire. And we did desire it, and copied it with religious reverence, on our tape recorders. If something was not available, the Western media outlets were shouting that it is a gross violation of free speech.

They knew, and they still know now, how to manipulate young brains.

At some point, we were converted into young pessimists, criticizing everything in our countries, without comparing, without even a tiny bit of objectivity.

Does it sound familiar?

We were told, and we repeated: Everything in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia was bad. Everything in the West was great. Yes, it was like some fundamentalist religion or mass-madness. Hardly anyone was immune. Actually, we were infected, we were sick, turned into idiots.

We were using public, socialist facilities, from libraries to theaters, subsidized cafes, to glorify the West and smear our own nations. This is how we were indoctrinated, by Western radio and television stations, and by publications smuggled into the two countries.

In those days, plastic shopping bags from the West became the status symbols! You know, those bags that you get in some cheap supermarkets or department stores.

When I think about it at a distance of several decades, I can hardly believe it: Young educated boys and girls, proudly walking down the streets, exhibiting cheap plastic shopping bags, for which they paid a serious amount of money. Because they came from the West. Because they were symbolizing consumerism! Because we were told that consumerism is good.

We were told that we should desire “freedom”. Western-style freedom.

We were instructed to “fight for freedom”.

In many ways, we were much freer than the West. I realized it when I first arrived in New York and saw how badly educated local children of my age were, and how shallow their knowledge of the world was; and how little culture there was in regular midsize North American cities.

We wanted, we demanded designer jeans. We were longing for Western music labels in the center of our LPs. It was not about the essence or the message. It was form over substance.

Our food was tastier, ecologically produced. But we wanted colorful Western packaging. We demanded chemicals.

We were constantly angry, agitated, confrontational. We were antagonizing our families.

We were young, but we felt old.

I published my first book of poetry, then left, slammed the door behind me, went to New York.

And soon after, I realized that I was fooled!

This is a very simplified version of my story. Space is limited.

But I am glad I can share it with my Hong Kong readers, and of course, with my young readers all over China.

Two wonderful countries which used to be my home were betrayed, literally sold for nothing, for pairs of designer jeans, and plastic shopping bags.

The West celebrated! Months after the collapse of the socialist system, both countries were literally robbed of everything by Western companies. People lost their homes and jobs, and internationalism was deterred. Proud socialist companies got privatized and, in many cases, liquidated. Theaters and art cinemas were converted into cheap secondhand clothes markets.

In Russia, life expectancy dropped to African sub-Saharan levels.

Czechoslovakia was broken into two parts.

Now, decades later, both Russia and Czechia are wealthy again. Russia has many elements of a socialist system with central planning.

But I miss my two countries, as they used to be, and all surveys show that the majority of people there miss them too. I also feel guilty, day and night, for allowing myself to be indoctrinated, to be used, and in a way to betray.

After seeing the world, I understand that what happened to both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia also happened to many other parts of the world. And right now, the West superpowers are aiming at China by using Hong Kong.

Whenever in China’s mainland, whenever in Hong Kong, I keep repeating: Please do not follow our terrible example. Defend your nation! Do not sell it, metaphorically, for some filthy plastic shopping bags. Do not do something that you would regret for the rest of your lives!

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. He is the author of 20 books including“China’s Belt and Road Initiative”, and “China and Ecological Civilization”.

Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America?

June 23rd, 2020 by Prof. Anthony J. Hall

In Russia Today, Helen Buyniski reflects on corporate responses to the depiction of Black people in brand labeling. Buyniski highlights the comments of B and G Foods as it jumped onto the bandwagon of corporate virtue signaling. The company signaled its intentions to “proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism.” The company informs consumers that B and G Foods “unequivocally stand against prejudice and injustice of any kind.”

Two of the brands Buyniski highlights were introduced at the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. Whooopeee! The World’s Columbian Exposition is exactly the kind of event that merits close consideration in any meaningful re-examination of American history.

Both Cream of Wheat and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix were introduced at the Columbia Exposition during an era when brands were still a relatively new form of capitalist commodity.

The Columbian Exposition introduced America to a vast array of new products, concepts, celebrities and systems, everything from hamburgers to motion pictures to Harry Houdini and Antonín Dvořák. The US identification with Columbus’s westward expansion of Christendom was calculated to advertise the emerging role of the United States as the self-declared leader of “Western Civilization.”

There was at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 a “Colored Peoples Day” when “negroes” attending the Fair were given a free slice of watermelon. I’m serious. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show touched down in Chicago at the edge of the Fair. The Buffalo Bill spectacle featured for a time the real Sitting Bull as part of the primal dramatic interaction of cowboys and Indians.

(Looking West From Peristyle, Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Public Domain)

The competition for providing electricity to the Fair featured Edison’s Direct Current system versus Tesla’s Alternating Current system. Backed by George Westinghouse, Tesla’s system won the contract to provide the fair with electricity. After the Chicago Exposition, Tesla and his backers went to Niagara Falls to build up their AC “hydro” system.

Swami Vivekananda captured huge attention at the World’s Parliament of Religions that was part of the 1893 Exposition. And a young historian from the then-frontier jurisdiction of Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered the academic essay that would become the most famous ever published on US history. The essay is entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

In his presentation Turner extended the civilizational meme of the Columbian Exposition.  He explained his vision of the conquest of primitive Amerindians on the westward-moving frontiers of US expansion. This violent expansionary push was said by Turner to form the basis of an American nation founded on the rugged individualism of its pioneers. Where is there any informed discussion in the current political tempest in a teapot on the implications of Turner’s hugely influential Frontier Thesis emphasizing American “civilization’s” conquest of Indigenous peoples?

I find it amazing how this current round of riotous revisionism so far has all to do with slavery and its aftermath. Alternatively it has almost nothing to do with the treatment of Indigenous peoples. The absence exposes the gaping blind spot of the current organizers of the media-highlighted extravaganza, “Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America.”

There is nothing in this bizarre spectacle of BIG BUCK political intervention by the wealthy on behalf of the oppressed to highlight the original genocidal history at the roots of America. This blind spot signals the inauthenticity of this mob and its Obamameisters who fail to consider who was pushed aside in order to make living space available for the newcomers including Africans. It is written that Hitler studied the Trail of Tears carefully in contemplating policies for Germany’s planned removal and subordination of Slavs in Eurasia.

Thus bigotry prevails on all sides of the current media-driven scam. When the real thing was developing back in the day, the Black Panthers took organizational and ideological form along with the American Indian Movement, AIM. Remember AIM’s return to Wounded Knee in 1973. Remember the civil war at Pine Ridge Reservation where the FBI-backed regime of Chief Dick Wilson assassinated dozens of AIM members. Emerging from these episodes, the saga of Leonard Peltier remains America’s number one example of the creation and holding of political prisoners in the United States. Will Trump grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier?

I wonder how much history is actually being read by the well-funded and well-covered media darlings pushing forward the protests and the riots and the property destruction and the monument wrecking? As I see it, the ring leaders of this anarchy revolve around Barack Obama and the operations he and his Democratic Party agents set in motion through the Organization for Action and its Antifa offshoots.

The seedbed of these Antifa revolutionaries is our corrupt and ADL-controlled university systems where weak-minded progressives try to compensate for giving in to the threats of the Israel Lobby. All but a handful of pseudo-leftist faculty members compensate by directing their virtue signaling energies into anti-capitalism, anti-racism (except when it comes to Israel-Palestine) and “climate change” hocus-pocus. What happened to the project of limiting the proliferation of pollution, an honest word describing a broad array of environmental contaminations?

The change of topic away from the pandemic is currently taking place with the blessing of our governors and their media flunkies. To refer to them as “presstitutes” does an injustice to honest sex trade workers.

One of the main aims in the sudden alteration of highlighted topics is meant to divert attention from the huge public scandals coming to light in the US health care system. The stream of revelations being brought forward in genuine truth telling operations like Trunews and Del Bigtree’s The Highwire have been exposing the leadership of the public health care system in America as a new version of war profiteers.

In an era of hybrid warfare, war profiteering is becoming manifest in many new ways. Vaccine warfare on humanity is one the most significant new theatres of battle. For the war profiteers, the proliferation of indemnified vaccines in a cradle to grave system of injections has long since crossed the threshold of a genocidal assault on almost all of humanity.

The problems we have to address go way beyond racism into the realm of eugenics and reverse Robin Hood— to steal systematically from the poor and middle class in order to further enrich the already disgustingly wealthy. With their offshore money hideouts and high priced accountants the rich pay no taxes yet expect full obedience from their indentured servants in governments.

These same governments perpetuate themselves by taxing average folks to the hilt. These governments answer the dictates of their multibillionaire masters by plunging us deeper into debt, incessantly lying to us, spying on us, abusing us and condemning us as “conspiracy theorists” when we try to speak truth to power. As Harry Vox has so eloquently states, basically the multibillionaires and their captive governments want to kill us.

The unaddressed kleptocracy of the rich extends to massive financial, political and logistical support for Wall Street’s current favored project of genocidal national expansion. The Trail of Tears extends from the domain of the uprooted and genocided Cherokees to the uprooted and genocided Palestinians.

The manufacturing of enemies has gone from the “merciless Indian savages” referred to in the Declaration of Independence to the new targets for the robotization of almost everything including human consciousness. The aim is to “depopulate” our numbers as well as to render the survivors sickly and subordinate with lifetimes of needs for all sorts of exotic and expensive pharmaceutical products. The founder of Microsoft, the vaccine czar Bill Gates, intends to go a step farther. The patrons, clients and lackies of Bill Gates are intent on exploiting weaponized compulsory vaccines to render us all AI compatible and ultimately AI compliant.

I draw many of these points from my text, Earth into Property, which starts out with a full chapter on the World’s Columbian Exposition.

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Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.

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

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It is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though he has come dangerously close in the cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be considerable incentive in the next four months to begin something to bolster his “strong president” credentials and to serve as a distraction from coronavirus and black lives matter.

Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch up to the record set by his three predecessors Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led, including in his administration Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.

Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.

So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. The America the exceptional mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief that the United States is empowered by God to play only by its own rules when dealing with other nations. That would include following the advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

One of the first families within the neocon/liberal interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing 500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was “worth it.” Nuland also has significant neocon connections through her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick Cheney.

Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supportinggovernment opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And make no mistake about Nuland’s broader intention at that time to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony she cited how the administration was “providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia.” Her use of the word “frontline” is suggestive.

Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine on the proper way for the United States manage what she sees as the Russian “threat.” It is entitled “How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia.” Foreign Affairs, it should be observed, is an establishment house organ produced by the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal interventionists.

Nuland’s view is that the United States lost confidence in its own “ability to change the game” against Vladimir Putin, who has been able to play “a weak hand well because the United States and its allies have let him, allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe… Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia’s threat to the liberal world has grown.”

What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state threatening the “liberal world.” She sees Russian rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares her fear that Putin might seek “…reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors. Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin’s agenda to see Europe in zero-sum terms.”

Nuland’s view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had provided assurances that expansion would not take place. She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin’s great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his having “…always understood that a belt of increasingly democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a direct challenge to his leadership model and risk re-infecting his own people with democratic aspirations.”

Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her analysis is ridiculous, as “Russian troops regularly test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain access to the country’s oil fields and smuggling routes. If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian oil or smuggled drugs and weapons.”

Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She accuses the Kremlin of having “seized” Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand.

Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House’s threats against countries that do not toe the American line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of those nations threaten the United States and all the kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington, not from “undemocratic” leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas or Beijing.

Victoria Nuland recommends that “The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia—one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens.” Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine.

Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those who are interested in the current state of interventionism in Washington should not ignore her. Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an interest in what goes on right on top of its border while the United States five thousand miles away and possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden of being the world’s self-appointed policeman.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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The coronavirus mutation discovered to be currently dominating the world has been pinpointed as the cause of the latest COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing, which experts say indicates that the virus was imported from outside China.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released the viral genome sequence from the recent clusters of COVID-19 infections related to Beijing’s Xinfadi wholesale market late Thursday, which came from both COVID-19 case samples and environmental samples.

The [China] CDC has submitted the relevant genome sequence to the World Health Organization and the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data to share the data globally.

Data shows that the virus carries a point mutation in the Spike protein D614G.

According to previous research and media reports, the mutation Spike D614G began spreading in Europe in early February, and increased significantly to 26 percent of the total isolated sequences available in the GenBank. In May, this viral strain had become the most dominant strain spreading around the world, presenting itself in 70 per cent of sequenced samples in the Genbank.

According to a research paper released on the bioRxiv on June 14, the mutation can increase transduction of the virus across a broad range of human cell types, including cells from the lung, liver and colon.

The mutation is also more resistant to proteolytic cleavage during production of the protein in host cells, suggesting that replicated viruses produced in human cells may be more infectious due to a greater proportion of functional (uncleaved) Spike proteins per virion.

The mutation Spike D614G has been discovered in the virus spreading around Europe, Taiwan island and Colombia in South America. But it has not been discovered on the Chinese mainland so far, media reported citing a virologist.

Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the Pathogen Biology Department at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Monday that the results potentially indicate that the virus causing the latest outbreak in Beijing was imported from outside China.

Yang said the fact that cases in Beijing rocketed from zero to more than two hundred in just more than one week indicate that the virus is more contagious than the strain that spread in Wuhan, which Yang deemed maybe a reason for why the epidemic outside China still cannot not be controlled while most parts of China have not witnessed new domestic cases for months.

From June 11-21, Beijing reported 236 COVID-19 cases, all of whom have been hospitalized. Another 22 asymptomatic cases are under medical observation, Beijing health authorities said.

According to the Hubei provincial health authority, COVID-19 cases in Wuhan reached 270 as of January 20, nearly one month after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in the city on December 27.

Concerns mounted if the more contagious strain would increase the difficulty for Beijing authorities to curb the outbreak.

Experts explained that with the path of the virus causing the clustered infections at Xinfadi Market being clear along with the infection source, the outbreak in Beijing can be quickly controlled.

Beijing discovered nine new cases on Sunday, the first time the city’s new daily cases fell below single digits since June 12.

Some experts reached by the Global Times estimated that the outbreak could ease within the week due to Beijing’s strict measures and city-wide screening.

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Featured image: Volunteers from the Beijing Blue Sky Rescue Team spray disinfectant in Yuegezhuang wholesale market in Fengtai district, Beijing. The market is about 12 kilometers from the Xinfadi market, which is linked to the recent COVID-19 outbreak in the capital city. Photo: people.cn

According to a local information centre, in the past decade alone, Israel has demolished 200 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem leaving 440 Palestinians homeless. In the cruellest and most vicious way, the occupation forces obliged the owners of these houses to demolish their own properties or be charged for the Israelis to do it. The Israeli authorities issue demolition orders and impose huge fines — amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars — on Palestinian Jerusalemites who are already strained financially. It is an outrageous and under-reported injustice.

The same Israeli information centre reports that from January 2006 until 31 May 2020, Israel demolished at least 1,554 Palestinian residential units in the occupied West Bank (not including East Jerusalem), causing 6,780 people – including at least 3,403 minors — to lose their homes. The figures reported by the Palestinian Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission are much higher. It says that the occupying authorities demolished 6,114 Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the past decade. We should also consider the 19,000 homes destroyed by Israel during its three military offensives against the Palestinians in Gaza since 2008/9.

The Commission documented the demolition of 1,841 houses in the city of Jerusalem alone from 2009 until July last year. In a provocative manifestation of arrogance and sadism, apartheid Israel often uses the pretext that the buildings were built “without a permit”. Israeli courts rule routinely that the structures have violated a construction ban. In reality, it’s almost impossible for a Palestinian to obtain a building permit from the Israeli authorities.

There is tiny amount of land allocated for construction and the Israeli-run Jerusalem Municipality routinely denies Palestinian applications for such permits. As such, they find themselves forced to violate the unmanageable and crippling Israeli orders and build or extend their homes “illegally” without permits.

According to the Palestinian Land Research Centre, since the Nakba in 1948, the Israelis have wiped more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages off the face of the earth, and an estimated 170,000 homes have been demolished. During the Nakba, of course, around 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by armed terrorist groups. There are now an estimated seven million Palestinians in the global diaspora.

While Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes, it is building more and more on illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. This has continued even during the so-called “peace process”; the number of Israeli settlements on land occupied since 1967 doubled from 144 pre-Oslo to 515 in 2018. There are even more now.

Israel’s demolition policy is enforced within the context of a comprehensive strategy targeting the Palestinian presence, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The discernible target is to have large swathes of the West Bank emptied of the indigenous population and annexed to Israel.

The story doesn’t start with Donald Trump’s promises; it’s well-established in the doctrines espoused by Israeli politicians since the 1967 Allon Plan which proposed that Israel relinquish the main Palestinian population centres in the West Bank to Jordan while retaining land along the Jordan Valley under Israeli military control. In fact, Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, has always sought to get as much Palestinian land, with as few Palestinians on it, as possible.

The ultimate goal of the apartheid system in Israel is to keep Palestinian communities in Jerusalem besieged and marginalised in the hope that they will move out voluntarily. The areas thus emptied of their residents will be classified as “nature reserves” or “military zones” in which Palestinians are forbidden to live. Settlements will then appear, as such a restriction doesn’t apply to Jewish settlers.

While this has been happening for decades, there are reportedly new tactics to replace Jerusalemites. Palestinian middlemen apparently financed by Israeli settlers’ organisations and, shockingly, by individuals in the United Arab Emirates are trying to buy land for use by others. This was exposed early last year when the deputy head of the Islamic Movement in Israel accused agents from the UAE of attempting to buy a home near Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. Sheikh Kamal Al-Khatib accused the UAE’s Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of being behind this endeavour.

Although the attempt failed despite the owners being offered $20 million, an investigation showed that some of the Palestinians involved in buying houses in Jerusalem received funds from a company owned by Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah official who has lived in the UAE since 2011. Dahlan was expelled from Fatah by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and is now a serious political rival. He also works as a special adviser to Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed.

Back in 2019, Amnesty International stated clearly that,

“These demolitions are a flagrant violation of international law and part of a systematic pattern by the Israeli authorities to forcibly displace Palestinians in the occupied territories; such actions amount to war crimes.”

Moreover, the European Union reiterated that Israel’s demolition policy in occupied territory is illegal under international law. The Palestinian Authority should thus be acting to take Israel to the international courts for these violations.

The PA’s legal case can rely on documents dating back to the Ottoman era from the archive in Turkey which proves Palestinian ownership of land and buildings well before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This may not stop house demolitions and further ethnic cleansing, but at least it will serve to expose even further the brutal nature of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Palestinian refugees — like all other refugees anywhere in the world — have a legitimate right to return to their land; that’s the law. If Israel allowed them to return, then they would not be forced to build and extend homes “illegally” without permits. Nor would they be forced to demolish their own homes to avoid paying Israel to do so.

There is a clear breach of human rights and international law happening in front of our eyes. Palestinian Jerusalemites shouldn’t be left alone to face the Israeli bulldozers. We must stand in solidarity and do something about this massive injustice.

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Dr. Ahmed al-Burai is a lecturer at Istanbul Aydin University. He worked with BBC World Service Trust and LA Times in Gaza. He is currently based in Istanbul and mainly interested in the Middle East issues. His article appeared in MEMO.

Featured image is from TPIC

The International Atomic Energy Agency has once again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel, provoking a needless conflict with Iran

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The approval by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of a June 19 resolution calling on Iran to comply fully with agency demands for cooperation marks a new stage in the long-running Israeli campaign to isolate Iran over alleged covert nuclear weapons activities. 

The IAEA has demanded that Iran provide “clarifications” regarding “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities,” as well as access to two sites in question.

Those demands are based on alleged Iranian documents that Israeli intelligence supposedly stole from Iran in 2018. And as The Grayzone has reported, their authenticity is highly questionable, and their theft may have never occurred.

The Israeli pressure campaign gains way with US help

The latest phase of the Iran crisis erupted in June 2018, when the Israeli government informed the IAEA that its intelligence services had discovered a new “secret atomic warehouse” in the Turquzabad district of Tehran. In his September 2018 United Nations speech announcing the find, Netanyahu demanded that IAEA Director General, Yukio Amano “do the right thing. Go inspect this atomic warehouse, immediately, before the Iranians finish clearing it out.”

Amano pushed back publicly against the Israeli pressure in October 2018, however, asserting his independence from Netanyahu’s agenda. Under his watch, the IAEA also failed to accede to Israeli pressure to publicize documents from the “archive” they had provided.

When Brian Hook, a neoconservative operative serving as the State Department’s lead official on isolating Iran, visited Israel in November 2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s political director told him his government was furious with the IAEA for failing to take the documents seriously. Hook assured the Israelis that his administration would apply pressure on the IAEA to take action. He assigned the new U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA, a protege of John Bolton named Jackie Walcott, as his point person.

In January 2019, as an apparent result of the pressure campaign, the IAEA asked Iran to visit the warehouse that Netanyahu had identified and take environmental samples. Iran agreed, suggesting that Iranian officials did not believe the agency would find anything supporting the Israeli allegations.

Months later, laboratory results showed the presence of what the IAEA called “natural uranium particles of anthropogenic origin.” That meant that the particles had been subject to a process of uranium conversion but not enrichment. The most likely explanation for the finding was that that a part of retired equipment or other material that had been used in Iran’s fully-monitored uranium conversion program had ended up in that warehouse. 

The logical next step for the IAEA at that point would have been to have to request visits to sites where Iran’s declared conversion program has operated so the results could be compared with the those of the samples found at the warehouse. That was what precisely Iran proposed to the Agency in January 2020. The IAEA did carry out the sampling, but the laboratory tests on those samples are not yet available.

While the IAEA stalled on requesting environmental samples from the declared uranium conversion sites for several months, when it would have made the most sense to do so, the Israeli government exploited the lab results to resume its political offensive against Iran. With backing from the US, they pushed a dubious argument that particles of natural uranium confirmed their claim that Iran had run an undeclared program to process natural uranium for use in covert nuclear weapons-related testing.

Israel enhances its position in the IAEA

The Israeli lobbying coincided with the first phase of a transition within the IAEA that would ultimately advance their position. Amano underwent an unspecified medical procedure in September 2018, grew steadily weaker with a serious illness and died on July 2, 2019. 

Before his physical decline, Amano had announced plans to step down by March 2020, touching off a competition between senior IAEA officials for election to the Director General position. US and Israeli influence was immediately enhanced by the race, because any interested candidate required substantial U.S. support to for the requisite votes among the agency’s board of directors.

The Israelis had focused IAEA’s attention on an alleged Iranian overt conversion program the very beginning.  Drawn from a covert program that took place from 2000 to 2003, the collection of supposedly purloined documents included a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting uranium ore into a form of uranium that could be enriched. 

But in its December 2015 “Final Assessment” of questions of “possible military dimensions,” the IAEA had concluded that the process shown in the document “was technically flawed and of low quality in comparison to what was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle.” In other words, it wasn’t taken very seriously.

Netanyahu’s new “Iranian Nuclear Archive” included what was purported to be a May 2003 letter from the “project manager” of the “Health and Safety Group” for that same alleged covert nuclear weapons program.  The letter described a large covert uranium conversion plant and three plant designs.  But the letter bore no marking that connected it with any Iranian government entity — only a crudely drawn symbol that could have been drawn by anyone.

What’s more, nothing about the facility designs supported the documents’ authenticity, especially considering a senior Israeli intelligence official’s acknowledgment to pro-Israel lobbyist David Albright that no such plant was ever built. Nevertheless, the Israelis continued to deploy those dubious documents to hammer home their point.

The IAEA caves to Israel and the US

The documents and photos the Israelis pushed with U.S. support eventually prompted the IAEA to cave in to their demands. The agency sent three letters to Iran on July 5, August 9 and August 21, 2019 based entirely on the Israeli claims about three “undeclared sites.”  In the missives, the IAEA claimed to have “detailed information” about what it called “possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities” at each of site. It demanded “clarifications” in each case.

According to the IAEA, the first letter related to the “possible presence” between 2002 and 2003 of a natural uranium metal disc which it said “may not have been included in Iran’s declarations.” The letter was obviously referring to Lavisan-Shian in Tehran, when it said the site “underwent extensive sanitation and leveling in 2003 and 2004.” At the time, the Agency decided there was no point in visiting it.

The U.S. and Israel have always argued that Iran had completely removed the topsoil at the site in order to avoid detection by environmental sampling of some kind of nuclear-related work at the site. But that claim was false. In fact, the buildings belonging to the military contractor of Lavisan-Shian had been torn down, but topsoil remained.

The IAEA did undertake environmental sampling of the site in June 2004, acknowledging that the vegetation and soil samples collected at Lavisan-Shian revealed no evidence of nuclear material. Reuters reported at the time that an IAEA official had said that “on-site inspections of Lavizan produced no proof that any soil had been removed at all.”

In its July 5 letter, the IAEA demanded to know whether an undeclared natural uranium metal disc had been present at the site and, if so, where it was located. That question was clearly based on a slide in the Israeli collection that Albright’s organization has described as summarizing how to make uranium deuteride, which has been used to create a neutral initiator for a nuclear explosion, with uranium metal chips and deuterium gas.

The second site, which has not been otherwise identified, “may have been used for the processing and conversion of uranium ore including fluorination in 2003,” according to the IAEA letter. It said the site “underwent significant changes in 2004, including the demolition of most buildings,” as though that constituted evidence of wrongdoing.

The claim made little sense given that in April 2003, Iran had formally declared to the IAEA that it was opening lines at its Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center for production of natural uranium metal for use in the production of shielding material.

At the third site, the IAEA stated, “outdoor conventional explosive testing may have taken place in 2003” on “shielding” for use with “neutron detectors.”  As part of the rationale for demanding clarification,” the agency cited supposed efforts beginning in July 2019 to “sanitize part of the location.” This language was designed to imply that evidence of wrongdoing had been removed from the Iranian site.

We know that the site in question was near Abadeh, because Netanyahu showed satellite photos of the Abadeh site in June 2019 and again in late July of this year, when a set of buildings had been removed by the latter date. Netanyahu bragged that he was revealing “yet another secret nuclear site…exposed in the archives.” However, IAEA wording suggested its letter was prompted not by any concrete evidence of nuclear activity at the Abadeh site, but by some evidence of the destruction of those buildings.

The IAEA thus chose the three sites based on nothing more than the fact that buildings were razed, and thanks to pressure applied by the Israelis and the the United States. The notion that Iran “may have” used and stored undeclared nuclear material at undeclared site, moreover, was based solely on unvetted Israeli documents, contrary to the IAEA claim of “extensive and rigorous corroboration process.”

In provoking a needless crisis over obscure hypotheticals, the IAEA has once again lent itself to the political interests of the United States and Israel – just as it did during the Bush and Obama administrations. But this time the IAEA’s highly politicized campaign is serving the Israeli aim of making it political impossible for the next administration to return to the Iran nuclear deal.

On June 8, Iran’s Permanent Mission the IAEA demanded that any request for clarification under the Additional Protocol should be based on “authenticated information” and expressed “concern” over attempts to “reopen outstanding issues” that had been closed in 2015. Iran views the new IAEA exercise as yet another salient of the U.S.-Israeli “Maximum Pressure” strategy. It has therefore insisted the IAEA cease its role as a de facto prosecutor for the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.

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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

Nobody should have the false expectation that the virtual Foreign Minister’s meeting between the Russian, Chinese, and Indian dignitaries, nor the presence of the latter two’s Defense Ministers in Moscow this week to attend the delayed Victory Day celebration there, will see Russia’s globally renowned and highly skilled diplomats broker peace between their country’s strategic partners since the best that they can do is “balance” its response to the Himalayan Crisis in order to ensure that the Eurasian Great Power isn’t perceived as taking either of their sides.

Debunking The False Expectation

Many in the Alt-Media Community have the false expectation that the virtual Foreign Minister’s meeting between the Russian, Chinese, and Indian dignitaries and the presence of the latter two’s Defense Ministers in Moscow this week to attend the delayed Victory Day celebration there will see Russia’s globally renowned and highly skilled diplomats broker peace between their country’s strategic partners. This prediction lacks any plausible basis since it’s extremely unlikely that Russia will suggest any “mutual compromises” that weren’t already thought of by its Chinese and Indian counterparts first. Furthermore, neither of them has even requested Russia’s diplomatic intervention in the first place and have no practical need for it to “mediate” between them anyhow when bilateral channels of communication are still open and actively in use. The best that Russia can do is to “balance” its response to this crisis in order to ensure that the Eurasian Great Power isn’t perceived as taking either of their sides, but that’s a lot easier said than done.

Required Reading

For those readers who aren’t already familiar with the author’s recent analyses on the Sino-Indo border clash, they’re requested to at least skim through the following articles in order to bring themselves up to speed:

Basically, India’s attack on China was meant to advance it and the US’ shared goal of “containing” Beijing, as well as help carve out the “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu fundamentalist state) of “Akhand Bharat” (“Greater India”).

Unbalancing Russia’s “Balancing” Act

Russia’s grand strategy is to become the supreme “balancing” force in Eurasia, which is principally sound but extremely difficult to pull off in practice. Moscow’s partisan support of New Delhi’s annexation of Kashmir last August caused the first public diplomatic rift between it and Beijing since the end of the Old Cold War. This trend accelerated so much in the months that followed that the author felt compelled to publicly advise that “Improved Russian-Indian Ties Must Be Balanced With Improved Russian-Chinese Ones“. It’s for this reason why he concluded that “2019 Was The Year That Russia’s South Asian ‘Balancing’ Act Became Unbalanced“, which might also partially explain the political undercurrents that caused Russia and China to publicly criticize one another over their respective responses to the coronavirus like the author analyzed in his piece at the time titled “Rare Wrinkle Or Growing Rift?: Russia & China Exchange Criticisms Over World War C“. All of this sets the stage for the strategic dilemma that India is imposing on Russia in the aftermath of its clash with China.

Russia’s Sino-Indo Dilemma

In response to India’s request, Russia reportedly agreed to consider expediting its delivery of warplanes to the South Asian state and is even allegedly considering doing the same for spare parts and even the S-400s. Upon completion, this would de-facto result in Russia lethally arming the greatest threat to the Chinese mainland’s territorial integrity in decades. Moscow isn’t doing so to explicitly contribute to the multilateral “containment” of Beijing alongside the US and its allies, but for financial reasons related to its intent to retain its rapidly diminishing dominance in New Delhi’s lucrative military marketplace, as well as to outfit India with armaments that the Chinese themselves are also at least familiar with unlike its Western rivals’ wares since Russia sells the same equipment to it as well. Even so, the People’s Republic might perceive this to be an unfriendly act even if its politicians decline to comment on it or say otherwise in public, which is why Russia must urgently consider how it could “balance” such expedited deliveries with something that it could do for China to retain its trust.

A Symmetrical Solution Is The Only Realistic One In This Instance

While Russia is known for its clever asymmetrical solutions to seemingly intractable challenges, it’ll more than likely have to uncharacteristically opt for a symmetrical one as the only realistic recourse in this instance. Expanding trade, connectivity, and other non-military ties with China after strengthening its military relations with India won’t be enough to assuage any creeping suspicions that Beijing might have about Moscow’s strategic motives. It’s of the utmost importance that Russia urgently explores what sort of similar military deals it can strike and subsequently expedite with China in the event that it does the same with India first. Russia’s military-technical cooperation with India isn’t regarded as worrisome by China so long as Russia places equal focus on this sphere of cooperation with China too. Failing to do so will only raise serious questions about whether Russia is tacitly taking India’s side in its latest border clash with China. Should China come to conclude that the aforesaid is a credible scenario, then the future of multipolarity might be in jeopardy.

Concluding Thoughts

Russia has a responsible role to play in equally “balancing” between China and India in the midst of its strategic partners’ latest border clash with one another, but it mustn’t under any circumstances do anything that can result in it being perceived by one or the other as taking their rival’s side. India has thrown Russia onto the horns of a dilemma by requesting that it expedite the delivery of warplanes, spare parts, and even S-400s in the aftermath of the Galwan Incident, and reports claim that Moscow has agreed to at least consider it when it comes to aerial equipment. Should it do so, however, then Russia runs the risk of inadvertently stoking China’s suspicions about its strategic motives unless it responds symmetrically by striking a similar such deal with the People’s Republic. These considerations are predicted to play a large part in Russia’s diplomatic engagements with China and India across the current week, thus making it even more difficult for Russia to broker peace between its two strategic partners despite people’s false expectation that it’ll actually pull this off real soon.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

In a sign that the Federal Reserve is growing increasingly desperate to jump-start the economy, the Fed’s Secondary Market Credit Facility has begun purchasing individual corporate bonds. The Secondary Market Credit Facility was created by Congress as part of a coronavirus stimulus bill to purchase as much as 750 billion dollars of corporate credit. Until last week, the Secondary Market Credit Facility had limited its purchases to exchange-traded funds, which are bundled groups of stocks or bonds.

The bond purchasing initiative, like all Fed initiatives, will fail to produce long-term prosperity. These purchases distort the economy by increasing the money supply and thus lowering interest rates, which are the price of money. In this case, the Fed’s purchase of individual corporate bonds enables select corporations to pursue projects for which they could not otherwise have obtained funding. This distorts signals sent by the market, making these companies seem like better investments than they actually are and thus allowing these companies to attract more private investment. This will cause these companies to experience a Fed-created bubble. Like all Fed-created bubbles, the corporate bond bubble will eventually burst, causing businesses to collapse, investors to lose their money (unless they receive a government bailout), and workers to lose their jobs.

Under the law creating the lending facilities, the Fed does not have to reveal the purchases made by the new facilities. Instead of allowing the Fed to hide this information, Congress should immediately pass the Audit the Fed bill so people can know whether a company is flush with cash because private investors determined it is a sound investment or because the Fed chose to “invest” in its bonds.

The Fed could, and likely will, use this bond buying program to advance political goals. The Fed could fulfill Chairman Jerome Powell’s stated desire to do something about climate change by supporting “green energy” companies. The Fed could also use its power to reward businesses that, for example, support politically correct causes, refuse to sell guns, require their employees and customers to wear masks, or promote unquestioning obedience to the warfare state.

Another of the new lending facilities is charged with purchasing the bonds of cash-strapped state and local governments. This could allow the Fed to influence the policies of these governments. It is not wise to reward spendthrift politicians with a federal bailout — whether through Congress or through the Fed.

With lending facilities providing to the Federal Reserve the ability to give money directly to businesses and governments, the Fed is now just one step away from implementing Ben Bernanke’s infamous suggestion that, if all else fails, the Fed can drop money from a helicopter. These interventions will not save the economy. Instead, they will make the inevitable crash more painful. The next crash can bring about the end of the fiat monetary system. The question is not if the current monetary system ends, but when. The only way Congress can avoid the Fed causing another great depression is to begin transitioning to a free-market monetary system by auditing, then ending, the Fed.

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Mexico and US are two countries that have a curious political history, alternating in long periods of rivalry and Mexican subordination. In fact, Mexico was the first country to suffer the consequences of American expansionist ideology, both for its policy of expanding westward and for the old “Monroe doctrine”, which aimed to consolidate a supremacy of Washington on the American continent. However, what few people realize is that these expansionist policies on the continent are still active in many areas, such as the economic one.

The economic war that Trump is waging against Venezuela is well known. The American government has tried in every way to overthrow Nicolás Maduro in recent years, financing an attempt of colorful revolution, appointing Maduro as an international criminal for drug trafficking (without any evidence), sending Colombian mercenaries to invade the country by the coast and now imposing a severe economic blockade, aiming to overthrow the regime by a suffocation tactic. Washington has entered a global economic and tariff war where any company, individual or state that maintains economic relations with Venezuela is subject to sanctions.

Recently, some Mexican companies adopted an unusual method to maintain their economic ties with the South American country: to abolish the money of the negotiations and to adopt an exchange system. Under this method, these companies received millions of barrels of oil from Venezuela and delivered tons of food in exchange. The measure was positive to alleviate the economic and supply crisis imposed by the blockade, which severely undermines the country’s food security. This was the case of the prominent Mexican companies Libre Abordo S.A and Schlager Business Group, which signed agreements with the Venezuelan government establishing an exchange of millions of barrels of oil daily for tons of food – mainly corn and derivatives – and water. In theory, these negotiations would be excluded from sanctions because they do not involve real money, but this was not the American interpretation.

The US accuses Mexican companies of reselling Venezuelan oil to other companies, mainly Asian ones. The question, however, remains: in this resale, what would be the economic advantage for Venezuela, which would be receiving only food? This does not seem to matter to Washington, which has not hesitated to impose severe sanctions on Mexican companies. The pressure, finally, fell on the Mexican State itself, who was left with the decision to adhere or not to the American measures. Just two days after Washington announced the sanctions, Mexican financial authorities chose to adhere to American policy. Santiago Nieto, head of the Mexican Financial Intelligence Unit, announced the freezing of bank accounts for all Mexican companies and citizens sanctioned by the United States.

The Mexican decision directly affects Mexican citizens and companies, who are already suffering international sanctions outside their country and will now have to deal with the blockade by their own State. In addition to the aforementioned companies, Mexican citizens Verónica Esparza Garcia, Olga María Zepeda Esparza and Joaquín Leal Jiménez, who maintained individual economic relations with the South American country, are included in the sanctioned list. All those cited in the list provided by the US Treasury Department have maintained relations with Venezuela since the end of last year, however, the international devaluation of Venezuelan oil affected severely the supply of food, creating instability in the negotiations. Mexican companies alleged that only 500 tankers with drinking water have been sent to Venezuela, but the Mexican State still supports the US in punishing its own citizens.

However, we should analyze the measures taken by the Mexican State taking into account the history of the country’s current government. Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador came to power in 2018 amid great popular pressure against neoliberal policies that were destroying the country. The president took the position of rebuilding Mexico and started a crusade against neoliberalism, saying repeatedly that he would start a new age of Mexican politics, in which the neoliberal model would be completely rejected. In fact, the president has managed to impose successful economic policies that have brought improvements to the people of his country, however, he is still a long way from something like “a new political era for Mexico” – as he had promised.

The government has been extremely ineffective in dealing with the growth of the new coronavirus pandemic in Mexico. The speed of the spread of the infection is truly impressive, with the country currently occupying the seventh position in the ranking of countries with the highest number of deaths. The country already counts more than 21 thousand deaths and more than 180 thousand cases, having registered impressive records of daily cases, having already passed 5,300 new cases in 24 hours. Even so, President Obrador maintains a minimalist stance, having for a long time denied the gravity of the situation, adhering to the speech promoted by the American government.

In fact, there is no point in announcing a crusade against a flawed economic model and maintaining an international policy of subordination to another country and failing to protect the population against a deadly virus. The attitude of adhering to any measure imposed by the American State departments while the population dies infected is extremely inadequate and reveals a serious error regarding the Mexican government’s priorities. The next step to be taken by Obrador is precisely to realize that no economic measure is sufficient in itself and depends substantially on the guarantee of national sovereignty.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from dreamstime via InfoBrics

An Israeli diplomat filed a complaint last week with police after he was pulled to the ground in Jerusalem by four security guards, who knelt on his neck for five minutes as he cried out: “I can’t breathe.”

There are obvious echoes of the treatment of George Floyd, an African-American killed by police in Minneapolis last month. His death triggered mass protests against police brutality and reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement. The incident in Jerusalem, by contrast, attracted only minor attention – even in Israel.

An assault by Israeli security officials on a diplomat sounds like an aberration – a peculiar case of mistaken identity – quite unlike an established pattern of police violence against poor black communities in the US. But that impression would be wrong.

The man attacked in Jerusalem was no ordinary Israeli diplomat. He was Bedouin, from Israel’s large Palestinian minority. One fifth of the population, this minority enjoys a very inferior form of Israeli citizenship.

Ishmael Khaldi’s exceptional success in becoming a diplomat, as well as his all-too-familiar experience as a Palestinian of abuse at the hands of the security services, exemplify the paradoxes of what amounts to Israel’s hybrid version of apartheid.

Khaldi and another 1.8 million Palestinian citizens are descended from the few Palestinians who survived a wave of expulsions in 1948 as a Jewish state was declared on the ruins of their homeland.

Israel continues to view these Palestinians – its non-Jewish citizens – as a subversive element that needs to be controlled and subdued through measures reminiscent of the old South Africa. But at the same time, Israel is desperate to portray itself as a western-style democracy.

So strangely, the Palestinian minority has found itself treated both as second-class citizens and as an unwilling shop-window dummy on which Israel can hang its pretensions of fairness and equality. That has resulted in two contradictory faces.

On one side, Israel segregates Jewish and Palestinian citizens, confining the latter to a handful of tightly ghettoised communities on a tiny fraction of the country’s territory. To prevent mixing and miscegenation, it strictly separates schools for Jewish and Palestinian children. The policy has been so successful that inter-marriage is all but non-existent. In a rare survey, the Central Bureau of Statistics found 19 such marriages took place in 2011.

The economy is largely segregated too.

Most Palestinian citizens are barred from Israel’s security industries and anything related to the occupation. State utilities, from the ports to the water, telecoms and electricity industries, are largely free of Palestinian citizens.

Job opportunities are concentrated instead in low-paying service industries and casual labour. Two thirds of Palestinian children in Israel live below the poverty line, compared to one fifth of Jewish children.

This ugly face is carefully hidden from outsiders.

On the other side, Israel loudly celebrates the right of Palestinian citizens to vote – an easy concession given that Israel engineered an overwhelming Jewish majority in 1948 by forcing most Palestinians into exile. It trumpets exceptional “Arab success stories”, glossing over the deeper truths they contain.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been excitedly promoting the fact that one fifth of its doctors are Palestinian citizens – matching their proportion of the population. But in truth, the health sector is the one major sphere of life in Israel where segregation is not the norm. The brightest Palestinian students gravitate towards medicine because at least there the obstacles to success can be surmounted.

Compare that to higher education, where Palestinian citizens fill much less than one per cent of senior academic posts. The first Muslim judge, Khaled Kaboub, was appointed to the Supreme Court only two years ago – 70 years after Israel’s founding. Gamal Hakroosh became Israel’s first Muslim deputy police commissioner as recently as 2016; his role was restricted, of course, to handling policing in Palestinian communities.

Khaldi, the diplomat assaulted in Jerusalem, fits this mould. Raised in the village of Khawaled in the Galilee, his family was denied water, electricity and building permits. His home was a tent, where he studied by gaslight. Many tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in similar conditions.

Undoubtedly, the talented Khaldi overcame many hurdles to win a coveted place at university. He then served in the paramilitary border police, notorious for abusing Palestinians in the occupied territories.

He was marked out early on as a reliable advocate for Israel by an unusual combination of traits: his intelligence and determination; a steely refusal to be ground down by racism and discrimination; a pliable ethical code that condoned the oppression of fellow Palestinians; and blind deference to a Jewish state whose very definition excluded him.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry put him on a fast track, soon sending him to San Francisco and London. There his job was to fight the international campaign to boycott Israel, modelled on a similar one targeting apartheid South Africa, citing his own story as proof that in Israel anyone can succeed.

But in reality, Khaldi is an exception, and one cynically exploited to disprove the rule. Maybe that point occurred to him as he was being choked inside Jerusalem’s central bus station after he questioned a guard’s behaviour.

After all, everyone in Israel understands that Palestinian citizens – even the odd professor or legislator – are racially profiled and treated as an enemy. Stories of their physical or verbal abuse are unremarkable. Khaldi’s assault stands out only because he has proved himself such a compliant servant of a system designed to marginalise the community he belongs to.

This month, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself chose to tear off the prettified, diplomatic mask represented by Khaldi. He appointed a new ambassador to the UK.

Tzipi Hotovely, a Jewish supremacist and Islamophobe, supports Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the takeover of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She is part of a new wave of entirely undiplomatic envoys being sent to foreign capitals.

Hotovely cares much less about Israel’s image than about making all the “Land of Israel”, including the occupied Palestinian territories, exclusively Jewish.

Her appointment signals progress of a kind. Diplomats such as herself may finally help people abroad understand why Khaldi, her obliging fellow diplomat, is being assaulted back home.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Ishmael Khaldi

Another attempt to resolve the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over a large Chinese-funded hydroelectric dam built on the Nile River has failed. This has increased tensions over control of the most important water source in the region, especially for Egypt that has relied on the Nile for thousands of years.

Cairo sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council requesting it to intervene in the dispute over the Great Renaissance Dam of Ethiopia (GERD). A hasty filling of the dam in Ethiopia threatens food and agriculture in Egypt and Sudan, and for this reason Cairo wants the UN Security Council to lend a hand in tripartite negotiations.

In its letter, Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs activated Article 35 of the UN Charter, which allows member states to warn the international entity of any crisis that threatens peace and security. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry decided to appeal to the UN after tripartite negotiations stalled due to Ethiopia’s “non-cooperative behavior.” The GERD, that Ethiopia has been working on since 2011, is to provide electricity for not only the whole country, but also its neighbors. The main problem Egypt and Sudan have with the Ethiopian project is the timeline to fill up the $4.8 billion dam with water.

Source: InfoBrics

Leaders in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa insist on continuing to fill the GERD unilaterally and without consideration how it will affect waterflows in Sudan and Egypt, according to Cairo. Ethiopia’s activities would be a violation of the Declaration of Principles that is supposed to prevent Addis Ababa from taking any action that would detriment the interests of Egypt and Sudan.

Egypt proposes that the dam should be filled gradually over a 10-year period, something that Ethiopia rejects as it wants to fill the dam in only three years. As a result of this rush, Egypt and Sudan may run out of 25 billion cubic meters of water a year that could lead to a severe drought and crop destruction.

Before Cairo appealed to the UN Security Council, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew warned on Friday that if his country were forced to “wait for others’ blessing” then “the dam may remain idle for years.” He added that “we want to make it clear that Ethiopia will not beg Egypt and Sudan to use its own water resource for its development.”

This raises the question on whether Cairo and Addis Ababa are on the brink of a war over water.

“We will never allow any country to starve us, if Ethiopia is prudent, we, the Egyptian people, will be the first to call for war,” Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire with nearly 7 million followers on Twitter, wrote in a tweet. This comment comes as Egypt has consistently said for many years that it is willing to airstrike the dam if drought is imminent because the dam is not filled up over a 10-year period. Egypt is concerned that once the dam’s locks begin controlling the flow of the Nile, Ethiopia may not release water in times of drought because it needs it for itself. Ethiopia says once the dam is filled, it will not affect the water supply to other countries.

In 2015, the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan agreed to appoint a neutral consultant to assess the impact the dam would have on these countries. Ethiopia should have carried out this consultation before the construction of the GERD began. Egyptian officials believe this reluctance from Ethiopia was due to the country seeking to establish “hydro-hegemony” in the region. This suspicion is heightened because of the Gibe III Ethiopian dam on the Omo River that was built without prior cross-border consultation with Kenya. In 2018, the UN warned that Gibe III was taking water from Lake Turkana in Kenya and threatening national parks that are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The GERD, which will generate up to 15.7 gigawatts of electricity a year, represents a matter of national survival for Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. Egypt obtains 97% of its water from the Nile, while for Ethiopia the dam is vital because it would increase energy production by 150% at a time when more than half of its population does not have access to electricity.

Although the Nile is more than 2,480 kilometers long, its flow is low and it transports only 1.4% of the water that the Amazon is capable of, or one sixth of that of the Mississippi River in North America, and less than half of the Danube. Furthermore, its volume is expected to be further reduced by climate change, making it critical for Egypt and its 100 million people for their very survival. It is for this reason that Cairo will exhaust every diplomatic effort possible, but will likely take military action if Egypt suffers a drought as a result of the dam.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Global Research Provides Penetrating Analysis of World Events

June 22nd, 2020 by The Global Research Team

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Colorado Adopts Mandatory Vaccinations for Children

June 22nd, 2020 by Renee Parsons

Since the arrival of the coronavirus,  the use of and familiarity with  vaccines has dramatically increased prompting a more aware and questioning public.  With little more than a 48 hour public notice,  many Coloradans were enjoying a brilliant  Sunday afternoon as the State Senate Health and Insurance Committee was squirreled away in the  confines of the State Capitol to approve the School Entry Immunization Act, also known as SB 20-163.  

While a Sunday afternoon may not seem an appropriate  time for a legislative body to accept witness testimony or to conduct its legislative business  unless there is a clear intent to limit public participation.  That kind of strategy has a way of boomeranging with a loss of public trust and confidence; yet the Democrats had an intense legislative urge to  codify SB 163 with as little public input as possible.  The Dems control both Houses of the General Assembly as well as the Governor’s mansion; thereby controlling the  State’s entire legislative agenda.

What the Democrats were not counting on was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on his way to becoming a national icon, who arrived to testify against SB 163. He was allotted two minutes to address the committee.  What else the Dems were not counting on was a last-minute rally attended by 3,000 outside the Capitol  that Sunday afternoon. Kennedy quoted one of the Democratic members of the Committee who told the media:

If we can’t get a vaccination bill passed during a pandemic, then we’ll never get it passed.”

Speaking to the throng, Kennedy went on to call out the Democrats:

I am a lifelong Democrat …what they are doing here today is antithetical to every value that the Democratic party has expressed in its 200 year history.” 

Adoption of SB 163 was accomplished on a party line vote; beginning with  Committee approval and through the Senate and House votes to  adoption. During House consideration, a bi partisan amendment was added to allow for a voter referendum in the 2022 election but the majority on the Conference Committee removed that language.

In addition, much of the state’s  MSM provided minimal reporting on  the Dems slipping SB 163 through on a Sunday afternoon, Kennedy’s appearance before the Committee or the size of the last minute rally.

As its name implies, SB 163 mandates “immunizations“ for all children entering Colorado public schools; thereby taking the decision out of the parent’s hands and requiring a doctor to certify approval.  The fact that the bill  contains elements akin to Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother regime is disturbing.

SB 163 requires the State’s educational system to aid and abet in the monitoring of its students as it  requires each public school to accept each proof of immunization and each  exemption request that is filed.   Each school must  also  establish a tracking system and provide an annual report on that school’s  rate of immunizations and the number of exemptions issued.  Such bureaucratese indicates, rather than a parental responsibility,   each child’s vaccination will be tracked by the school district  throughout that child’s history as a student. 

Of special interest, SB 163 indicates there is an onerous  ‘submission process”  for those wishing to claim a non medical exemption such as a “religious belief whose teachings are opposed to immunizations or a personal belief opposed to immunizations.”  Those individuals must submit a “certificate” that their chosen religion has adopted a policy regarding vaccinations and a certificate that they have completed an online “educational module“ which can expect to be little more than a one-sided harangue on the virtues of vaccinations.

As adopted, SB 163 is compatible with another totalitarian oriented legislation introduced by Congressional Democrats as HR 6666, the Trace Act (Testing, Reaching and Contacting Everyone).  The TRACE Act will establish a nation wide vaccine monitoring system with a force of vaccine tracking agent.

It is essential for the American people to understand, as the national debate begins, the objection to mandatory vaccinations is based on the science of injecting a potentially toxic substance into the human body.

While the goal of any vaccine is to  stimulate the production of antibodies to prevent illness and provide immunity, there is a widespread  belief, encouraged by the CDC,  that vaccines are a form of medicine and contains medicinal properties.

The CDC, however, confirms that “some vaccines contain only a part of the disease germ.” such as the MMR vaccine which contains some inert measle virus.  Much of the American public remains unaware that  frequently used synthetic materials such as mercury, aluminum, msg, formaldehyde, polysorbate 80. and glyphosate are routinely inserted (among other ingredients) which  RFK Jr identifies as neurotoxins, carcinogens or related to auto immune disease.

The US was the first country in the world to be founded on the concept that each person has an inherent individual right to live their own life without government intrusion.  Those rights were enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment and remain a bedrock of  the American system.  Just as  the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision was based on an individual right to choose, the same inherent right exists for those who deserve the choice  to vaccinate

Colorado Governor Jared Polis has promised to sign SB 163 into law.

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter.  She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC.  Renee is a student of the Quantum Field.  She may be reached at [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Buying Freedom on the Free Market

Obscured by the mythology of pursuing economic and political autonomy, Ukraine plays the latest role in a long, unfolding process of western corporate, political and military interests establishing the “territorial integrity” not of independent Eastern European states, but of “NATO’s border” under the monolithic control of the United States. Ukraine has long served as a Western frontier—its political and economic ambitions co-opted by Washington’s pundits and financiers—and what the NATO Association of Canada has described as “the only country standing between Russia and the EU”.  

While NATO regularly conducts military training at the Russian border, including intensified military exercises through Forward Presence in Latvia, Canada maintains a presence in Ukraine through Operation UNIFIER, and in the Balkans through NATO’s Operation Reassurance. Canada’s own slogan for its military mission, Operation UNIFIER—“Linking people to reforms”—reflects much more than the military aid it has given to Ukraine, signifying the vast economic reforms imposed upon an “independent” Ukraine.

NATO has recently intensified its US-led military exercises in Eastern Europe by launching Defender Europe 2020, the largest exercise in 25 years, based on an imaginary war in 2028. The exercise shipped 20,000 American soldiers to Europe, and spans Russia’s borders with the Baltic States, Poland and Georgia.

In the media’s flaunting of NATO militarization in Eastern Europe, however, it’s often overlooked that the encroachment of NATO bases and intensifying military exercises in Eastern Europe have long been in blatant violation of an agreement that “broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable”, “not one inch eastward”—as was agreed between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990. The question of NATO’s military expansion was deliberated within the context of competing economic systems.

“You are moving to a price system that is very important,” Baker had praised the perestroika during their conversation, “I am delighted that you made the decision and it is not easy to get there.”

Just three years earlier, during a meeting on March 30, 1987, Gorbachev had confronted Margaret Thatcher about the “whiff of the spirit of the 1940s-1950s” that was present in Thatcher’s earlier speech in the English resort town of Torquay. “Again Communism and the Soviet Union were presented as the “evil forces”, he stated, “again the same words about the need to grow a position of power in the West.”

“We duly appreciate the contribution of the bourgeoisie to the historical process,” Gorbachev quipped, remarking on what he called the “sophisticated mechanism” created by the powerful class under capitalism. “It is you who does not acknowledge socialism’s contribution, or even its historical right to exist. With this we emphatically disagree.”

When Margaret Thatcher visited Ukraine three years later—in June 1990, while the country was still part of the Soviet Union—her visit was seen as symbolic of Ukraine’s transition to a “market economy”, prescient of the first privatization law that Ukraine adopted in March 1992. Thatcher’s guiding light has since left a strong impression on Ukraine. In an interview with Euronews in 2013, former Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Leonid Kozhara—who is presently under investigation for the murder of an advertising executive—praised Thatcher, “Her personal contribution into the new composition of a new Europe is a great one. That’s why we are all today in great sympathy to this great person.”

As NATO continues to scoop up the Baltic States—including North Macedonia on March 27, 2020—Washington’s stance has been to aggressively push for the integration of Ukraine and Georgia. Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma famously declared the intention for Ukraine to join NATO in May 2002.

Proposals have since been floated for Ukraine to act as a neutral buffer state—notably proposed by political scientist John Meirsheimer in his controversial critique of the West’s role in aggravating conflict in Eastern Ukraine. This “buffer” role would supposedly position Ukraine akin to Finland or Switzerland, though even Finland has experienced pressure to align with NATO.

But opposition to Ukraine as a “buffer state” has been louder, claiming without a hint of irony that neutrality would be “meddling” by “external actors”, and that “buying sovereignty with neutrality simply does not compute”. Clearly, Ukraine’s independence from Washington, and its Canadian military support base, is not realistic. Ukrainian political leaders have consistently proven that the country will be harnessed to serve American interests in Washington’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq—despite majority domestic opposition to Ukrainian deployment in the early 2000s, and polls that reflected more concern from Ukrainians over George W. Bush as a threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein.

On February 5, 2020, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Cabinet of Ministers approved the 2020 Annual National Program, which intends for Ukraine to join NATO within five years—on the basis of what the Cabinet has referred to as the “human-centric approach the North Atlantic Alliance is committed to”. Additionally, this past May 27, Zelensky signed off on an agreement that pushes ahead Ukrainian military and civil reforms to meet the criteria for NATO membership. Zelensky’s acceleration of reforms is just a continuation of former President Petro Poroshenko’s own pledge for reforms in 2017, which was intended for Ukraine to meet NATO requirements already by 2020.

Yet, even within NATO there has been no consensus on Ukraine’s place in the US-led military alliance. Washington’s push for the addition of both Ukraine and Georgia has consistently been met with reservation from some European members—notably France and Germany—as it would risk further destabilization in Eastern Europe. During the Bucharest NATO Summit in April 2008, leaders of France and Germany opposed George W. Bush’s position on Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, although it was ultimately agreed that Ukraine would eventually join the alliance.

Eastern European militaries are widely introducing reforms and upgrades for “interoperability” to meet NATO military standards, which are essentially set by the United States. In September 2019, for example, the U.S. approved the “potential” sale of 32 F-35 fighter jets to Poland, worth $6.5 billion (USD). The fighter jets are described in the United States’ 2018 Nuclear Posture Review as an integral part of NATO military capacity, and are ultimately intended to carry upgraded B61 nuclear bombs.

For Ukraine to meet the conditions required to join NATO, it must introduce both military and economic reforms. In 2015, Ukraine adopted a National Security Strategy that would prioritize a “maximum level of interoperability” and the implementation of NATO standards. Its Annual National Program also includes reforms for the introduction of a civilian, parliamentary oversight committee for the Ukrainian military—which, since 2014, has integrated extremist, far-right militias like the Azov, Dnipro and Donbas battalions. These reforms go hand in hand with the privatization of state-owned weapons manufacturing enterprises.

Bulgaria, for example, had begun the process of privatizing its arms production companies in 1997, apparently to recover from debt but also as a strategy to join NATO—leading up to its admission to the alliance in 2004. During Bulgaria’s early years of privatization, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned of the dangers posed by Bulgaria’s stocks of surplus weaponry as, in its reforms to meet NATO standards, the country sought to buy new weapons from the West. This is particularly an issue when military technology quickly becomes obsolete.

Already in 1998, HRW reported that a suspicious arms deal of surface-to-air missiles was halted, en route for Zambia from Bulgaria—while the Angolan government claimed that Bulgaria was in fact arming Angola’s UNITA, following the party’s shift from socialism to supporting capitalism. HRW was informed by government officials, and an end-user certificate, that the missile deal “was brokered by a U.S.-Ukrainian company registered in the United States, Miltex”—though, at the time, this was denied by Ukrainian officials. Bulgaria is still considered to be the centre of European manufacturing of AK47s; the town of Kazanlak subsists on the Arsenal factory’s continued manufacturing of the assault rifles, now for Europe and NATO, despite growing illegal proliferation.

“Bulgaria has a long record of exporting surplus weapons to war-torn countries,” wrote HRW in those first years of Bulgaria’s reforms. “Such sales demonstrate the potential for NATO-inspired military modernization to generate a dangerous “cascade” effect, providing a source of weapons to abusive military forces.”

The story is no different for Ukraine today, as the privatization of weapons manufacturers creates “favourable investment conditions” for opportunistic Western companies to set up shop with their own weapons and munitions factories in Ukraine. The privatization of Ukraine’s weapons manufacturing was part of an Agreement on Friendship and Cooperation signed between Kuchma and former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on October 24, 1994, which sought for the Ukrainian military industry to become “technologically and economically competitive”.

The Canadian Liberal Party under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau jumped at the opportunity to construct a jointly-owned ammunition factory in October 2017, shortly before Canada added Ukraine to the Automatic Firearms Country Control List (AFCCL) in December 2017, allowing the export of Canadian-made sniper rifles. By July 2019, Trudeau had confirmed that an unnamed Canadian company had invested in an ammunition factory, and Zelensky confirmed during a joint meeting on defense cooperation, “We already see the investments from Canadian companies in the production of ammunition in Ukraine.”

Amid the ongoing Donbass conflict and NATO’s aggressive maneuvers on Russia’s borders, Washington’s own pundits are salivating at the thought of turning Ukraine into “a leading supplier of weapons”. Michael Carpenter of the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, and non-resident fellow of the Atlantic Council, clearly reflects this perspective and has been widely quoted in the media.

Ukroboronprom is a state-owned association of around 130 enterprises in the military sector, and regulates export licenses and imports of foreign military equipment. The association should face reforms that “essentially gets rid of Ukroboronprom in its current form,” Carpenter wrote in 2018, and should be replaced with an “independent” supervisory board that consists of, naturally, representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Canada, Germany, and Poland. The “corporatization” and “injection of foreign capital” into Ukroboronprom’s newly formed constituents, Carpenter described, would groom Ukraine’s military companies for privatization.

Ukroboronprom’s reforms began in 2015, eliciting support from Anthony Teter, former head of the US’ Advanced Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and later DARPA director Steven Walker, who provided Ukraine with assistance on information warfare. Under the guidance of Teter, Ukraine and its American partners have endorsed the creation of a DARPA analogue through the Kiev Polytechnic Institute.

The “corporatization” of Ukroboronprom is but one part of Ukraine’s Annual National Program, accompanied by other requirements for a “shaped market economy”—considered to be part of ongoing “democratic transformations”. Ukraine’s extensive privatization is also a condition pushed upon the country by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of its provision of a $17.5 billion loan to the country.

The IMF has been pushing Ukraine to “accelerate reforms” including privatizing remaining state-owned enterprises, introducing pension reforms that include an increase in age of retirement (called “modernizing”), and restructuring “excessive regulation” that currently deters foreign investment. Poroshenko’s government approved the privatization of 23 large state-owned companies in July 2018, primarily in the industrial and medical sectors. These included an insulin manufacturer that sells within Ukraine, as well as to Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Brazil; electricity companies; as well as mining and chemical companies. That same year, Ukraine invited a delegation of twelve “large American companies” for an exclusive tour of the state assets being sold off. But while these “market-friendly” reforms characterized Poroshenko’s own term, such neoliberal reforms have just accelerated under Zelensky.

It was only recently, on October 28, 2019, that Zelensky overturned a two-decade old law that prevented the privatization of state-owned companies. Zelensky also lifted a moratorium on selling Ukrainian agricultural land, a move that was opposed by Ukrainian farmers, with fears that foreign land owners would take away Ukrainians’ ability to farm and work on their own lands, on their own terms.

Ukraine has also been obligated by the IMF to raise gas prices for domestic consumers, though the IMF claimed in 2017 that utility subsidies were “hiked to limit the impact on the poor”. Clearly, this wasn’t the case for long, as cuts to subsidies have been ongoing—such as those in 2016, and more recently in 2019 to “reduce budget deficit”. The latter cuts under Poroshenko proved to be an election issue in May 2019, gaining votes for Zelensky.

The IMF describes these cuts to subsidies as beneficial for Ukraine, reducing corruption from businesses that divert subsidized gas from households to their own purposes. Meanwhile, American policy analysts have centered US interests in Ukraine’s gas, advocating for the privatization of Ukraine’s gas production, which would “prove popular among the international donor community and those looking to do business in the country”.

More recently, at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22, 2020, Zelensky offered a five-year “tax vacation” to lure foreign capitalists willing to invest at least $10 million into state enterprises now being privatized. Ukrainian debt bonds were put up for sale following this “tax vacation” overture, shortly before the quarantine and pressures of COVID hit with full force—with recent buyers including Abderdeen Standard Investments.

One of Ukraine’s early debt owners was American investment firm Franklin Templeton, which bought $7.4 billion in debt bonds between 2011 and 2014, and was notoriously accused of money laundering, selling its bonds in 2017. Franklin Templeton has also bought bonds out of Italy and Spain’s economic troubles—when the appeal of Italian debt was described by Franklin Templeton’s David Zahn as “a sweet spot between too risky and too safe”, and Spain’s debt was summarized as “No risk, no return”.

Under the economic pressures of COVID, Ukraine’s intensifying austerity measures have also included cuts to the cultural sector—usually one of the first social sectors to see devastating cuts. Zelensky’s government announced in April 2020 that funding will be cut for all activities of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, threatening the very existence of cultural funds and organizations like the State Film Agency of Ukraine, the Ukraine Cultural Fund, and the Book Institute.

Meanwhile, in the months to come during the economic fall-out of the COVID crisis, the US is expected to push for Ukrainian partnerships between companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. American exceptionalism is fully on display with similar investments by China denounced as “predatory”, and US investments described as “an opportunity”.

As George Soros proclaimed that South Africa was “in the hands of international capital” at the 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos—a new bourgeois business class ushered into the post-apartheid era by foreign capital—so it is with Ukraine today1. The IMF describes its reforms as intended to “fight corruption” and “reducing the role of the state and oligarchs in the economy”. But the IMF’s missions to Ukraine make no note of the role of international financiers and Western oligarchs.

Back in 2014, Greek economist and former member of Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis wrote, “the IMF cannot wait to enter Russia’s underbelly with a view to imposing another ‘stabilization-and-structural-adjustment program’ that will bring that whole part of the former Soviet Union under its purview.” Varoufakis has recently remarked on how Greece itself has remained in the chokehold of the IMF and its demands for cuts to social services and sweeping privatization reforms—despite the comfortable returns for foreign investors on their debt bonds. Indeed, last March, the IMF stated that “Greece should reconsider recent changes in collective bargaining policies and press ahead with its unfinished reform agenda.”

History has shown that promises by the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization of “trickle down” wealth and empowering a middle class—dare they even mention the unnamable working class and poor—have proven to only enforce reforms that exacerbate income inequality. In this long-game, the conditions are being created in order to concentrate income among a few, foreign capitalists and their Ukrainian partners. Clearly, Ukraine’s future is being shaped into only one possible form—that of free market capitalism. Ukraine’s democracy, and political and economic autonomy, has ultimately been equated with reforming the country in a vision that suits American foreign policy, and the model is being strong-armed by the IMF, WB, and WTO. But these reforms rarely meet the criticism they deserve, lest this critique trample on the fragile illusion of a so-called democracy.

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Lital Khaikin is an author and journalist based in Montréal, Canada. Her journalism has been published in Canadian Dimension, Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and the Media Co-op. She has also published poetry and prose in literary publications like 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges” journal, among others.

Note

1. George Soros’ quote via John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, Black Swan Books (2007).

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In my last article, I reviewed the case of Gough Whitlam’s firing at the hands of the Queen’s Governor General Sir John Kerr during a dark day in November 1975 which mis-shaped the next 45 years of Australian history. Today I would like to tackle another chapter of the story.

I used to believe as many do, in a story called “the American Empire”. Over the last decade of research, that belief has changed a bit. The more I looked at the top down levers of world influence shaping past and present events that altered history, the hand of British Intelligence just kept slapping me squarely in the face at nearly every turn.

Who controlled the dodgy Steele dossier that put Russiagate into motion and nearly overthrew President Trump? British Intelligence.

How about the intelligence used to justify the bombing of Iraq? That was British Intelligence too.

How about the Clash of Civilizations strategy used to blow up the middle east over decades? That just so happened to be British Intelligence’s own Sir Bernard Lewis.

How about the CFR takeover over of American foreign policy during the 20th century? That is the British Roundtable Movement in America (created as Britain’s Chatham House in America in 1921).

Who did Kissinger brag that he briefed more than his own State Department at a May 10, 1981 Chatham House seminar? The British Foreign Office (1).

How about William Yandall Elliot who trained a generation of neocon strategists who took over American foreign policy after the murder of JFK? Well, he was a Rhodes Scholar and we know what they are zombified to do.

How about the financial empire running the world drug trade? Well HSBC is the proven leading agency of that game and the British Caymen islands is the known center of world offshore drug money laundering.

Who ushered in the Cold War? Churchill.

Where did the nouveaux riche oligarchs go after Putin kicked them out of Russia? Back to their handlers in London.

What about the creation of ‘too big to fail’ banks that took over the world over the past decades? That was launched by the City of London’s Big Bang of 1986

Who created Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel in the 20th century (as well as both nations’ intelligence agencies?) The British.

What was the nature of the Deep State that Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, and JFK combatted within their own nations?

What the heck was the American Revolution all about in the first place?

I could go on, but I think you get my point.

The Disrupted Post-WWII Potential

Franklin Roosevelt described his deep understanding of British operations in America, telling his son in 1943:

“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

Where the British Empire certainly adapted to the unstoppable post-WWII demands for political independence among its colonies, it is vital to keep in mind that no empire willfully dissolves or “gives its slaves freedom” without a higher evil agenda in mind. Freedom is fought for and not given by empires which never had a reason to seek humility or enlightenment required for freedom to be granted.

In the case of the post-war world, the deliverance of political freedom among colonies of the “former British Empire” was never accompanied by an ounce of economic freedom to give that liberation any meaning. Although it took a few years to iron out America’s anti-colonial impulses over the deaths of such figures as JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK, eventually the rebellious republic was slowly converted into a dumb giant on behalf of the “British brains” controlling America’s Deep State from across the ocean.

The Case of Africa and the Crown Agents

Take the case of Africa as a quick example: Over 70% of the mineral control of African raw materials, mining, and refining are run by companies based in Britain or Commonwealth nations like Canada, South Africa or Australia managed by an international infrastructure of managers called “Crown Agents Ltd” (founded in 1833 as the administrative arm of the Empire and which still runs much of Africa’s health, and economic development policies to this day).

Crown Agents was originally set up as a non-profit with the mandate to manage British Empire holdings in Asia and Africa and its charter recognizes it as “an emanation of the Crown”. While it is “close to the monarchy” it is still outside governmental structures affording it the ability to get its hands dirtier than other “official” branches of government (resulting in the occasional case of World Bank debarment as happened in 2011).

In 1996 Crown Agents was privatized as ‘Crown Agents for Overseas Government and Administration’ where it became active in Central and Eastern Europe with its greatest focus on Ukraine’s economic, energy and health management. The agency is partnered with the World Bank, UN and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and acts as a giant holding company with one shareholder called the Crown Agents Foundation based in Southwark London.

A big part of Crown Agents’ program is designed to embed Africa with “green energy grids” as part of the anti-BRI OSOWOG Plan (surnamed “Sun Never Sets Plan”) announced by Modi in 2018.

As outlined in the 2016 report New Colonialism: Britain’s Scramble for African Energy and Mineral Resources:

“101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) — most of them British — have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over $1 trillion worth of Africa’s most valuable resources. The UK government has used its power and influence to ensure that British mining companies have access to Africa’s raw materials. This was the case during the colonial period and is still the case today.”

As we can see by this most summary overview of the modern imperial looting operations of Africa, the spirit of Cecil Rhodes is alive and well. This will take on an additional meaning as we look at another aspect of Rhodes’ powerful legacy in the 20th century.

The British Takeover of American Intelligence

Although many falsely believe that Britain was replaced with an American Empire after WWII, the sad truth on closer inspection is that British assets embedded in America’s early deep state (often Rhodes Scholars and Fabian Society assets tied to the Council on Foreign Relations/Chatham House of America) were behind a purge of leaders loyal to FDR’s vision for the post-colonial world. These purges resulted in the dismantling of the OSS months after FDR died, and the formation of the CIA in 1947 as a new weapon to carry out coups, assassinations and subversions of leaders within America and abroad seeking economic independence from the British Empire. This history was outlined brilliantly by Cynthia Chung in her paper Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny: Who is Really in Charge of the U.S. Military.

The Five Eyes grew out of these British imperial operations which essentially followed the mandate set out by Cecil Rhodes in his 7th Will calling for a new global British Empire and recapturing of the lost colony. In his will, Rhodes asks:

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

Later on in his will Rhodes stated: “Let us form the same kind of society, a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.”

Among the four Anglo-Saxon members of the Five Eyes that have the Queen as the official head of state (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), all feature irrational forms of government structured entirely around Deep State principles organized within two opposing forms of social organizing: democratic and oligarchical… with the true seat of power being oligarchical.

Because this peculiar self-contradictory form of government is so little understood today, and because its structure has made Britain’s globally extended empire so successful, a few words should be devoted to it now.

A House Divided Against Itself…

In the case of Westminster-modelled Parliamentary systems, Senates represent the House of Lords, while Houses of Commons (for the Commoners) represent the elected parts of government. A prime minister selected by the governing party is assumed to be that nation’s leader, but unlike republican forms of government, instead of the “buck stopping there” (at least legally speaking), it is precisely there that the true sphere of power only begins to be felt.

Here parliamentary/quasi-democratic systems projected for public consumption find themselves enshrined within a much more shadowy and Byzantine world of Governor Generals (acting as the heads of state) who give Royal Assents to all acts and wielding the infinite prerogative powers of the Queen (aka: the “Fount of All Honors”). In the British Imperial system, hereditary power is seen as the source of all authority for all aspects of government, military, and economic- whereas in republican forms of government that authority is seen as deriving from the consent of the governed.

Where rights are “granted by the sovereign” within hereditary governments, republican forms of government recognize correctly that rights are fundamentally “inalienable” to humanity (in principle though not always in practice as the troubled history of America can attest).

By being essentially the legal “cause” of all authority among every branch of the British official and unofficial corridors of power, an obvious absurdity strikes which the empire would prefer plebs not think too seriously about: The queen and her heirs cannot themselves be UNDER any law, since they “cause” the law. This means that the queen, her heirs and anyone whom she delegates authority to literally have “licenses to kill”. The queen cannot be taken to court and she has no need of a passport or even a drivers’ license… since these items are issued by her crown’s authority alone. Within the logic of British legal systems, she cannot be held legally accountable for anything which the Crown has done to anyone or any nation of the world.

Although much effort goes into portraying the Crown’s prerogative powers as merely symbolic, they cover nearly every branch of governance and have occasionally been used… although those British spheres of influence where they most apply are usually so self-regulating that they require very little input from such external influence to keep them in line.

These powers were first revealed publicly in 2003 and in an article titled ‘Mystery Lifted on the Prerogative Powers’, the London Guardian noted that these powers include (but are not limited to):

“Domestic Affair, the appointment and dismissal of ministers, the summoning, prorogation and dissolution of Parliament, Royal assent to bills, the appointment and regulation of the civil service, the commissioning of officers in the armed forces, directing the disposition of the armed forces in the UK (and other Commonwealth nations), appointment of Queen’s Counsel, Issue and withdrawal of passports, Prerogative of mercy. (Used to apply in capital punishment cases. Still used, eg to remedy errors in sentence calculation), granting honours, creation of corporations by Charter, foreign Affairs, the making of treaties, declaration of war, deployment of armed forces overseas, recognition of foreign states, and accreditation and reception of diplomats.”

When a 2009 bill was introduced into parliament proposing that these powers be limited, a Privy Council-led Justice Ministry review concluded that such limitations would ‘”dangerously weaken” the state’s ability to respond to a crisis’ and the bill was promptly killed.

Acting on Provincial levels, we find Lieutenant Governors who (in Canada) happen to be members of the Freemasonic Knights of St John of Jerusalem (patronized by the Queen herself).

All figures operating with these authorities within this strange Byzantine world are themselves a part of, or beholden to figures sworn into the Queen’s Privy Council- putting their allegiance under the total authority of the Queen and her heirs, rather than the people or nation in which that subject serves and lives. If this is hard to believe, then take the time to listen to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s oath upon entering the Privy Council to get a visceral taste of this medieval policy in action (every cabinet member, Prime Minister and opposition leader must take this oath if they are to be granted intelligence briefings from her majesty’s intelligence services.)

Take note that not even once does the welfare of the people or the nation arise in this oath.

Standing Defiant Against Natural Law

Despite these un-natural power structures, history has shown that from time to time, good leaders have found themselves in executive positions of high office. As rare as they are, such anomalies occurred in the cases of Canada’s Prime Ministers Wilfrid Laurier (1896-1911) and John Diefenbaker (1957-1963), Quebec Premiers Paul Sauvé (1959), Daniel Johnson Senior (1967-68), and Australia’s Gough Whitlam (1972-1975). Yet when these anomalies arise and such figures trespass beyond their acceptable sphere of action into policy territories reserved only for the governing elite, then more often then not a Rhodes Scholar-run coup occurs [Laurier 1911 (2), Diefenbaker 1963], an untimely death strikes [Sauvé 1959 and Johnson 1968] or a sacking by the Queen’s Governor General happens [Whitlam 1975].

In all aforementioned cases, Democratic institutions that are premised around the concept that all citizens are made equal and free in the image of a creator are never long tolerated within the cage of a system of oligarchism premised upon the belief that only one person is sovereign and her/his word is absolute law for all slaves, and minions of the ruling bloodline.

As Gough Whitlam discovered in 1975, the real British Empire is a nasty beast, and probably one which should have gone extinct a couple of centuries ago. Unfortunately, until this moment, history has been tainted by more than a few disruptions of progressive leaders who sacrificed their comfort, careers, and often their lives to resist this stubborn parasite which would rather suck its host dry than admit that the system of organization upon which it is based is an abomination to natural law and morality.

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Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. He can be reached at [email protected]

Notes

(1) Kissinger stated at that event: “The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”.

(2) After his 1911 coup coordinated by the early members of the Round Table Movement, the Ontario Orange Men and forces around Quebec’s Henri Bourassa, Wilfrid Laurier lamented the loss of Canada’s sovereignty saying: “Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as ‘The Round Table’, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.” [O.D. Skelton, The Life of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, p. 510]

Muslim Heroines Find Their Way into New American Literature

June 22nd, 2020 by Barbara Nimri Aziz

Years ago in John Killens’s  writers’ workshop of largely African Americans, one member woefully explains the thwarted plot of her novel in progress: — how, despite her effort to feature a Black hero: “By the second chapter, I had killed him off”. That Black character, even in her imagination, was irretrievably doomed; in a fictional scenario she still can’t rescue a Brother from his overriding Black American destiny.

My memory of that dilemma becomes personal as I review more and more books authored by American Muslims. These writers may find themselves in a similar quandary, namely how to overcome, in our case, the established Muslim terror scenario, and re-imagine our heroes.

Forty years ago, our history included no 911 attacks, no American assaults on Middle East nations, and only a handful of Muslim mosques. Most of us originating from those yet-to-be-targeted lands were not ‘Muslims’ then; we were simply immigrants– Arab, Turkish, Iranian –trying our best to pass unnoticed.

How fellow Americans view Arabs and how we perceive ourselves under their gaze has dramatically changed these past decades. Today, while scanning the range of our literary output, I wonder: will we ever break through our fraught and stereotyped identities?

Racist-based school bullying of our children, endless wars in our homelands, misconceptions of our faith, alarming news headlines and pressures from our overriding culture are so insistent, we feel compelled, even through art, to explain ourselves in terms of the smothering American framework.

Muslim writers are caught in this net. Honing our artistic skills and determined to speak for ourselves, we are turning to fiction, devising new themes and redefining our heroes. Still, unceasing references to terror threats and pressure to explain or defend our faith worm their way into novels, even by writers only faintlyMuslim.

Afaf Rahman is the heroine in The Beauty of Your Face, a first novel by Chicago-based writer Sahar Mustafah (image on the right).  We’re just introduced to challenges Rahman faces as headmistress of Nurrideen School for Girls when a crisis explodes:–the school is under armed siege. But we barely detect the attack when the author abruptly transports us back when Afaf was 10 and one of three children in a family of struggling Arab immigrants. Alienated from the surrounding American culture, the Rahmans are adrift with no cultural or religious bonds to anchor them.

Nada the oldest child has run away leaving Afaf and her brother to muddle on, their fate complicated by an embittered mother and an inattentive, discomfited father. We follow Afaf through her teenage years, aimless and friendless, incapable of dealing with bullying classmates and the disdain of teachers. How this floundering child stumbles through a tangle of impediments becomes the core of the novel.

This portrait of Arab and other peasant immigrants who settled in the U.S. between World Wars I and II isn’t completely fictional. With ties to their homelands ruptured, many newcomers lacked meaningful cultural foundations, including religious faith.  (To personify that cultural barrenness, the author gives us Muntaha, Afaf’s hapless mother. Muntaha’s perfunctory offerings of Arab food are no substitute for love; they neither save her marriage nor redeem her children.)

Ongoing crises in the Rahman family reach a climax when the father, a heavy drinker, has an auto accident. After members of a local mosque reach out to assist him, he begins to rebuild his life, joined by Afaf but not Muntaha or his son. (Mosque membership is not the answer for everyone.)

The author, drawing on a sober picture of Arab-American life, offers her heroine redemption less through lofty Islamic ideals than from solid emotional sustenance proffered by a community of confident women. Among those sisters, Afaf finds friendship and respect she’d never known. Moving forward with pride and direction, she learns to pray with others and covers her hair in a gentle rite of passage.

The only interlude in this long narrative is a brief return to the siege where we find ourselves with the killer rampaging through the school. We learn how his own unhappy childhood, a lost brother, and his personal failures had bred the vengeance he eventually directs at Muslims.

The siege ends. Afaf recovers from a gunshot wound, although many students have perished. And the terrorist is captured and convicted.

The issue of how Muslims might move on after such trauma is never resolved, however. This dilemma is manifest in Afaf’s naïve determination to visit and dialogue with the imprisoned killer. There’s no satisfactory resolution. Although Afaf resumes her life reasonably healed, her society is unrepentant.

Another newly released Muslim family’s story is No True Believers.  It’s by Rabiah York Lumbard (image on the left), an award-winning children’s author, also Muslim-American. The heroine in this invigorating, fast-paced conspiracy thriller for young readers is 18-year-old Salma Bakkioui, a computer geek at Franklin High in Arlington, Virginia, where we (again) find anti-Muslim bullying entrenched.

Unlike Afaf, Salma enjoys solid friendships and savvy parents (Moroccan-origin father and Georgia-born Muslim-convert mother) who are with her all the way. This spunky, non-nonsense teenager invokes her hacking skills to counter attacks by fellow students whose spite and bias are reinforced by school staff and police.

Author Lumbard exhibits masterful skill in contemporary teen language while her young Muslim sleuth uncovers and foils a white supremacist plot against the town. It’s a fast moving adventure offering suspense, action and a rich cast of characters at the same time that it educates readers about the ‘cool’ daily life of a hip Muslim family.

These two novels signal a real advance in Muslim literary narratives. Yet, terror threats seem to remain essential to their plots.

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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.

All images in this article are from the author

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Prime Minister Modi released the genie of Indian jingoism after coming to power six years ago, irresponsibly hoping that the state-sponsored cultivation of hyper-nationalist sentiment would lead to the false domestic perception of the country as the “superpower” that it claims to be, which has actually been more successful than he planned since the indoctrinated masses are now becoming very disillusioned upon experiencing severe cognitive dissonance and are thus asking politically uncomfortable questions of his government after the disastrous aftermath of its brief border conflict with China last week.

The Genie Of Jingoism

The state-sponsored cultivation of hyper-nationalist sentiment is a dangerous tiger that few leaders in history have ever been able to tame, something that Indian Prime Minister Modi is quickly learning the hard way after he let the genie of Indian jingoism out of the bottle over the past six years as part of his irresponsible strategy of cultivating the false domestic perception that his country is truly the “superpower” that it claims to be. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the indoctrinated masses were successfully conned after hearing this narrative multiple times a day in practically every media out in the country. Following the disastrous aftermath of India’s brief border conflict with China last week, however, many can’t help but feel disillusioned after the government itself was forced to acknowledge that it lost at least 20 soldiers and counted several times as many injuries as a result of non-firearm clashes with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Furthermore, Prime Minister Modi made an epic mistake when he told an all-party meeting on Friday that “no one has intruded into our territory“, which has been widely interpreted as ceding India’s claims to the recently disputed Galwan Valley and tacitly admitting to provoking the latest incident by invading Chinese territory, which essentially means that India’s servicemen were killed for no domestically justifiable reason.

Modi In Panic Mode

The author wrote more on this topic in his recent piece about how “Modi’s Major Himalayan Mistake Crushed The Indian Military’s Morale“, which explains that India expected to impress its new American ally by taking a high-profile lead in “containing” China at its behest. What it didn’t anticipate, however, was that the much more formidable PLA would so brutally expose India’s Bollywood dreams as nothing more than a dangerous self-delusion, which in turn prompted Modi to panic and instinctively try to “save face” in pretending that New Delhi had never laid claim to the Galwan Valley in the first place. That’s not factual true, but it goes to show just how much the Chinese have shaken the Indian leadership to its core that the country’s chief jingoist, Prime Minister Modi, was cowering in fear to such a degree that he conveniently forgot about his past six years of chest-thumping. A rapidly growing segment of Indian society is furious that their leader, who handily won re-election last year in a sweeping landslide largely due to his hyper-nationalist rhetoric, would behave in such a weak way that’s totally at odds with his strongman reputation and even arguably disrespects the recent losses that the Indian military recently experienced. The Prime Minister’s Office has since attempted to walk back his controversial statement by attacking its “mischievous” interpretation by many, but the damage is already done.

Cognitive Dissonance

Many Indians are experiencing severe cognitive dissonance after having been brainwashed into believing that their country was a “superpower” but then realizing that it’s really a “paper elephant” like the author described it in his previously cited analysis from last week. This is extremely dangerous for the country’s stability because the resultant psychological stress brought about by this revelation can provoke people into acting in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t, be it participating in violent protests or more peacefully disowning the ruling party that they used to sincerely look up to. Either way, the situation is untenable and Modi knows that he has to do something more to “save face” otherwise his, his party’s, and India’s reputations are all irreversibly ruined. There’s a chance that he might simply sit back and hope that the genie of jingoism that he unleashed over the past six years will go back into the bottle, but the likelihood of that happening is nil and some form or another of blowback is bound to occur in the coming future. For that reason, last week’s unconfirmed report by Nepal 24 Hours alleging the presence of “RAW And Indian Guard Commando Force With Weapons In Soaltee Crowne Plaza Nepal” deserves to be taken more seriously than it might initially seem.

India’s False Flag Plot

The report cites unnamed Nepalese security officials who allege that Indian intelligence agents and highly trained military forces are surreptitiously surveilling the capital from a safe house owned by the former King, who they claim is passively facilitating this treasonous activity out of hope that the conventional, unconventional, or false flag attack that these foreign forces might be planning could restore the monarchy. It’s unclear whether the details of Nepal 24 Hours’ report are true, but suspicions about Indian intentions towards Nepal are certainly warranted considering the recent thawing of their long-frozen border dispute that was caused by India’s jingoistic publication of a map last November that included the disputed Kalapani region as its own. The author analyzed the situation a month ago after Nepal’s tit-for-tat publication of its own map claiming Kalapani caused India to go into a tizzy. Titled “India’s Hybrid War On Nepal Backfired By Creating A Geopolitical Nightmare“, it explores the origins of this dispute and points out how the recent escalation might have been avoided had Indian leaders not been drunk with Bollywood-driven neo-imperial dreams of carving out “Akhand Bharat” (“Greater India”) in order to impose a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu fundamentalist state) in the region. The past month has seen relations between the two formerly “fraternal” countries deteriorate real drastically.

Hybrid War Blowback

Regarded as an Indian puppet state for decades, Nepal began liberating its foreign and military policies from de-facto Indian suzerainty following New Delhi’s disastrous unofficial blockade of the landlocked country in fall 2015 in response to the promulgation of a new federal constitution for ending the landlocked country’s long-running civil war. After India decontextualized, over-amplified, and propagated Nepal’s tit-for-tat cartographic response to New Delhi’s provocative publication of its jingoist map in November as “unprovoked aggression”, the tiny state realized that it was one of the next targets in India’s “Akhand Bharat” crosshairs. Accordingly, it began beefing up its border defenses, and some of its security forces even engaged in a lethal shootout with India two weeks ago. Shortly thereafter, the Nepalese Chief Of Army Staff visited the disputed Kalapani border area, following which it was revealed that Nepal will deploy its troops to that part of the frontier for the first time in India’s post-independence history. Quite clearly, Nepal perceives India to be a credible threat to its national security, which is a direct result of the larger state’s Hybrid War on its much smaller neighbor. It’s for this reason why Nepal 24 Hours’ unconfirmed report should be taken seriously because it conforms with the expectations that an objective observer might have of the next phase in India’s Hybrid War on Nepal.

The Reverse-Donglang Scenario

That said, it remains to be seen whether Modi will go through with the scenario of launching some sort of attack (whether conventional, unconventional, or false flag) against Nepal in a desperate attempt to “save face” before India’s uncontrollably jingoistic population that his government is entirely responsible for provoking to this point. Perhaps the only thing causing him to think twice is his fear that China might undertake a “reverse-Donglang” in response. Just like Bhutan requested Indian assistance during the months-long summer 2017 border incident with China over the Donglang Plateau (referred to as “Doklam” by India and therefore most of the world’s media), so too might Nepal do the same in any forthcoming border incident over the disputed Kalapani region or any other part of their extensive frontier. The prospect of Chinese troops rushing to assist their Nepalese counterparts upon request, in spite of such a request being at odds with Nepal’s 1950 “Friendship Treaty” with India (but justified on the basis that India was the first to violate it by provoking whatever incident might eventually transpire), could worsen the nightmarish blowback from India’s Hybrid War on Nepal by possibly resulting in the PLA being deployed all along the Terai plains bordering India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh in the “worst-case” scenario.

Concluding Thoughts

Modi is visibly panicking after realizing that the genie of Indian jingoism can never be put back in the bottle after he irresponsibly unleashed it over the past six years as part of his party’s mistaken belief that it’ll unify the nation behind his Hindu nationalist leadership. The utter humiliation that the PLA inflicted on the Indian military last week without a single shot being fired, on top of Modi’s mistake in tacitly acknowledging Chinese sovereignty over the recently disputed Galwan Valley, is leading to tremendous pushback from his disillusioned population that’s now suffering in the throes of severe cognitive dissonance after having previously fallen for the lie that their country is truly the “superpower” that it professes to be. Faced with yet another looming disaster entirely of his own making, this time one which credibly runs the risk of further delegitimizing the ruling party and its ideology, Modi might desperately seek to “save face” by bullying what he wrongly regards as the weakest of his neighbors that India has some sort of dispute with. The unconfirmed report from Nepal 24 Hours suggests that some sort of operation might already be in the works, but that would be among the most epic mistakes that Modi ever made if he actually goes through with such a scheme because it could very easily result in the “reverse-Donglang” scenario of PLA troops being deployed all along India’s border with Nepal.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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Today we are experiencing in the American public space an electric historic occurrence. We are, as a society, finally passing vocal moral judgment on anti-Black racism, which has emerged as an intensely emotive issue.

Anti-Black racism is no longer acceptable in the same way that anti-Jewish racism is no longer acceptable. On the other hand, as a Palestinian, I continue to be baffled and anguished that anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism are still far off the emotive radar for most people in the West — not just their governments.

The historical baggage of Palestine and the Nakba, their enduring horrific impact, lie heavily on the shoulders of Palestinians. Unfortunately, such baggage is not bearing down on Israel, which has flourished and dominated despite being on the wrong side of history.

History works for Israel, not against it, because Israel has falsified history — literally covering it up with forests and rewriting it in Hebrew. Israeli Zionist hasbara (propaganda) has long permeated every nook and cranny of Western popular consciousness, culture and media.

Israel’s monumental lie is its denial that political Zionism, its founding ideology, is racist. Israel thus continues to evade moral judgment on the international stage with astoundingly shameless audacity.

Israel’s lies go beyond the denial of fact. Pro-Israel forces label all those who defend against anti-Palestinian racism, such as BDS activists, as themselves racist. In an Orwellian double-shuffling, Zionists are defining acts against Zionist racism as themselves racist by framing such definitions as Holocaust-related.

Politically and culturally, the memory of the Holocaust plays a crucial role in the identity of Israelis.

We now know that, in its zeal to propagandize its ideology claiming Jews worldwide have a right to a state, the world Zionist movement did little to help save European Jewry from the Nazis, going so far as to offer, in 1941, “to take an active part in the war on Germany’s side.”

There was a time, before Zionism’s “array of untruths and irrelevancies” had evolved and spread like poison among us, when the fundamental rot at the heart of the Zionist enterprise was clearly apparent, as can be seen in Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew by Jewish American Rabbi Elmer Berger, published by The Institute of Palestine Studies in 1978.

Today, pro-Palestinian activists who articulate this truth are being silenced as “radical”, leading to a bizarre environment, even in academia, where pro-Palestine speech is repressed in order to silence dissent against Israel and U.S. foreign policy.

Given the historical facts regarding the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and its aggressive, expansionist, colonizing character, it is easy to demonstrate that principles of morality and justice should prevail when discussing the plight of the Palestinian people. It is necessary, for Palestinian liberation, to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish supremacist state that deploys a lethal and greedy system of racism and oppression against the Palestinian people.

In the foreword to Ben White’s Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy, Haneen Zoabi, a ’48 Palestinian who served as a member of the Knesset for the Balad party between 2009 and 2019, says:

The argument that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is … a racist settler project that was founded on notions of ethnic purity is understood implicitly by all Palestinians. We Palestinians were quick to comprehend the relationship between ourselves — as indigenous inhabitants of this land — and those who came to take our place (in every sense) without even considering a common life with or alongside us, and without acknowledging that which had gone before them.

Delegitimizing Israel does not delegitimize the idea, rooted in Jewish culture and religion, that Jews are “a people” for those who wish to identify with this construct. In fact, as Rabbi Elmer Berger, whose book I mention above, believed, Israel possesses dangers to the spiritual message of Judaism, because it is a “racist, discriminatory political sovereignization of Zionism.”

Berger expanded on the fact of Israel’s racism by writing:

“Israel is a state … in which if apartheid is not blatant or as territorially visible as South Africa, ‘Jews’ are nevertheless ‘more equal than others.’ … If racism is a form of government or a structure of society in which national rights and responsibilities are officially legislated upon the basis of creed, color, ethnic derivation, then the Zionist character of much ‘Basic’ Israeli law qualifies.”

Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism today is as territorially visible as the apartheid of South Africa used to be — look at infographics here. It is systemic, embedded in the fabric of its Basic Law, as an infographic about Israel’s ID system reveals.

It is as blatant and deadly for Palestinians as the anti-Black racism being dramatically exposed in the United States today — check out this single recent report by Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

How much longer must Palestinians wait for the weight of history to crush Zionism? How long before the “international community” acknowledges its own out-and-out racism and culpability in propping up the Jewish state?

Almost everything Israel has done since its bloody foundation 72 years ago has been in violation of international law and Palestinian human rights. Nevertheless, Western powers continue to dehumanize Palestinian Arabs and regard them as nothing more than “a mere nuisance” or, when they buy into Israel’s hasbara, as terrorists and villains.

When Will the Statue of Theodor Herzl Fall? When will racism, rather than “Jewish redemption”, become the defining experience of Israel’s founding?

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In what has already become a parody of a shrinking empire’s habit of clutching at the vestiges of its Cold-War era mistakes, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and fellow war-hungry reactionaries in the United States Senate, Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ted Cruz ((R-TX) have put a bill on the Senate floor meant to undercut Cuba’s medical missions program, which sends trained medics all around the developing world to assist in general healthcare services and emergencies in more than 60 countries.

The bill, if passed, will require the U.S. State Department to publish a list of nations contracting with the Cuban government for their medical services and consider that as a factor to include said nations in the Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report; opening the door for further economic sanctions and other measures against any country on that list.

A class-action lawsuit brought against the D.C.-based Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in 2019 by four defectors out of the 50,000 Cuban doctors who participate in the program alleged that the “Mais Medicos” program run by the Brazilian government from 2013 to 2017 was an “illegal, forced labor enterprise,” which profited from the Cuban medical workforce in collusion with the Castro government, whom they accused of pocketing money they claim should have gone to them.

The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District Court Division of Miami, Florida – a bastion of anti-Castro sentiment and a republican stronghold led by generations of Cuban exiles with entrenched Cold War politics. Ramona Matos Rodriguez, Tatiana Carballo Gomez, Fidel Cruz Rodriguez, and Russela Margarita Rivero Sarabia are the plaintiffs named in court documents accusing PAHO of human trafficking and seek full compensation for what the organization allegedly paid for their services.

Coinciding with the filing that September, U.S. officials publicly urged “nations to stop using Cuba’s medical missions” and called the international medical programs a form of “modern slavery” following statements made by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro a year earlier on the eve of assuming office when his invectives caused Cuba to withdraw thousands of doctors from the South American nation, who were serving that country’s most marginalized communities.

The political spat may have ended up costing thousands of Brazilian lives given the severity of that nation’s COVID-19 toll, which reportedly reached 1 million cases and 50,000 deaths yesterday. The Cuban government has deployed over 1,400 doctors to fight the pandemic and has been one of the brightest hopes for the world’s most voiceless nations, while the United States has targeted nations fighting and struggling with COVID-19 with crippling sanctions.

The Height of Hypocrisy

Cuba’s free healthcare system is funded largely by these international medical assistance programs and provides critical financial support for medical research projects in the Caribbean nation, which have yielded some important breakthroughs over the years and boasts one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates, despite a multi-decade embargo imposed on the nation by the world’s most powerful economy.

The “Cut Profits to the Cuban Regime Act” proposed by Senators Rubio, Scott, and Cruz represent yet another attempt to sabotage Cuba’s historic efforts for self-determination in a political and economic landscape dominated by predatory capitalism. But, it is especially egregious when we consider the history of one of the bill’s sponsors, former Florida governor Rick Scott, who administered the largest case of Medicare fraud in the history of the United States, siphoning over $300 million into his own personal bank account.

Trump’s pick to lead the GOP’s healthcare reform, pled the fifth no less than 75 times during his deposition in the year 2000, including to the simple question of whether or not he was “employed.” Scott would reach a settlement with the federal government before it pursued criminal charges against his company Columbia/HCA, that eventually resulted in a $1.7 billion-dollar fine over convictions involving investors and physicians who bought equity stakes in the company and defrauded senior citizens who depended on its 380 hospitals, 200 home health agencies and 130 surgery centers.

Scott was able to walk away largely unscathed, later becoming governor of Florida supplanting termed-out GOP governor Jeb Bush and taking his place in the conveyor belt of arch-conservative, reactionary Cold War Republicans of that state.

The End of Duplicity

The accusations levied by Scott against the Diaz-Canel government in order to justify the absurd bill are the height of hypocrisy, to say the least. The “ultimate Medicare thief” claims that “Cuba is using the coronavirus pandemic for profit at the expense of […] hardworking physicians” and deems “any country that requests medical assistance from Cuba” to be aiding and abetting human trafficking.

The Canadian of Cuban-descent Ted Cruz, for his part, joins the chorus of duplicity and projection by painting Cuba’s genuine efforts to present an alternative to U.S. hegemony for the world’s poorest nations as “a tactic used by Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel to exert power and fill government coffers.”

The same dynamic employed in the Cuban embargo, which the United States has enforced against Cuba and any nation doing business with it since the early 1960s, is at play with the bill now a vote in the Senate. As the power and influence of the world’s only superpower begins to wane and the imminent reality of capitalism’s total failure to provide for basic human needs like universal healthcare, the sheer political opportunism and crass hypocrisy of legislative proposals like these become more and more transparent.

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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.

Featured image: Cuba’s “Henry Reeve” medical brigade arrives in Nicaragua (Photo: La Voz del Sandinismo)

Will the ”Gate(s)keepers” of the so-called Corona-pandemic force a vaccination upon us, without which we will not be allowed to return to normality? What is really meant by the ”new normality”?

It is these questions that are intensely debated at the moment: there are speculations, insinuations, then again denial.  Resistance is rising among the population, if anything, out of a sense of premonition. 

According to Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, sociologist and political science professor, the central issue in this entire debate has not even begun to be touched.

The current events should be viewed in a much larger context. In her analysis, she anticipates a variety of scenarios, all of which are following an already existing, much larger ”plan”– belonging to the field of ”transhumanism”, the seemingly unavoidable paradigm of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Unless….

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”We are human beings and not machines!” shouted one of the speakers during the May 1st demonstration in Vienna, receiving applause from the crowd. In fact, all the measures taken against the Corona virus could be summarized under this motto:

we are asked to behave as if we were not human beings, but machines.

We are discouraged from having any empathic feelings towards one another, thinking our own thoughts, speaking our minds, or acting spontaneously. Least of all should we be singing, dancing and exercising together, or even rising up together. We should not be close to each other, definitely not touch each other and in the whole get out of each other’s ways. We should be leaving the elderly alone and indoctrinating our children with the idea that they represent a threat to grandma and grandpa, so they too may already learn what it is like to be a machine –   without any empathy.

As such machine-like human beings, the only emotion we are allowed to maintain and are even encouraged to have, is the feeling of fear. Fear of the virus because the virus could be harmful to us, as a ”pest“, and as all those who have to be considered as potential carriers of it.

In this way fear settles in; fear of not following the instructions carefully enough to protect ourselves from the ”pest“ – via the constant pushing of the hygiene message – handwashing, general cleanliness and disinfection – turning away from the body and its ”dirt”, which is now defined as a danger, for ourselves and in relations to others.

We are even a danger to ourselves by still being alive and still having a bodily being, a sensory organism, instead ofbeing a machine; in this way, we become afraid of ourselves.

We should be ”purging” ourselves of our bodily self. We should feel disgust towards ourselves and even towards our somatic, bodily being, not to mention that of others.

From a technological perspective, ”a human being” is an outdated model and in urgent need of being ”transformed”. In this process, s/he will allegedly be ”improved.” 

What are the results of this? We should really wish to be more a machine than a human being, more dead than alive, better to be in a high security prison than living in freedom where invisible and omnipresent dangers threaten us.

A real conspiracy theory from above

My proposition is that the relentless propagation of the dangers of Corona virus functions like a conspiracy theory from above.

It is intended to terrorize us to such a degree that we consent to practices we otherwise would have never accepted (1). To be precise, we are being made to fear an alleged danger from nature, which is now, with the help of massive counter measures, supposedly being circumvented in order to ”protect” us.

Furthermore, I argue, the corresponding practices are intended to turn us into beings who are better equipped against such alleged dangers from nature. In this way, we would be allowed to turn into ”better” humans, i.e. be altered increasingly in the direction of machines; so we would cease having to be only natural human beings. In this case: medical advancement makes it possible!

Surely, the script for this alteration has already been written for some time, visible in the especially deliberate course of action currently being taken (2). At this point, however, we are far from knowing everything. This Corona-mania has not been put into the world – from above – just for the fun of it, bringing life around the globe to a standstill, only to return later to ”normality” as we knew it.

The expected, so-called ”new normality” has to be concluded from what we already know today. A return to the same economy as before Corona is not intended, nor is it intended that we shall dispose of a stronger and healthier body after Corona. We shall now stay with this latter topic, that of our physical health, the somatic part of the problem, because so far this part remains completely unexplained.

Because, before a sufficiently tested vaccine is developed, there is already talk about a comprehensive compulsory vaccination program soon to be implemented for all people on this Planet, and the necessary legal regulations are currently being prepared, as well.

What we are dealing with here and now, to further my argument, is not a measure in service of our health, but a new definition of what we, as living human beings, are to be in the future, or rather, should no longer be in the future, as well as the practical implementation of such a concept. 

The transformation of ourselves as human beings 

This problem is as such not yet a part of the public discussion. The current discussion focuses mainly on money, on the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and its scandalous measures to increase them. A further focus is on the attempt to establish the utmost control over people and, in order to do so, the abolition of their rights.

However, what has not been focused on so far, is the ”technological progress” which has taken place behind closed doors and which is now being implemented. The issue at stake is the transformation of ourselves as human beings. This topic is not addressed anywhere in the public realm. It is not considered to be a matter worth of a public debate.

The ”technological progress”, I am speaking about here, is not only utilized to ”dominate“ external nature, by dissecting and re-assembling her in new ways, thus transforming her into a ”second”, supposedly ”better” nature – the machine – but this is also what paradoxically seems to be in store for us ourselves, the alleged ”pride of creation”. From the perspective of technological advancement ”a human being” is a worn-out model, in urgent need of being ”transformed”. In its course, s/he will allegedly be ”improved”. Human beings are supposed to become something like ”machines”.

The first we are hearing on this is ”inoculation”. This is precisely what is in store for us soon, after being sworn in on the fear of nature, the fear of the other and the fear of ourselves. We are supposed to become inoculated with something, even if we should not want it – any resistance being considered ”backward” or even ”ruthless” – this much heralded possibility of salvation from fear, via globally decreed mass vaccinationas the final liberation from the evil ”pest”.

In this context, it can mean only two things: it is supposed to become a gigantic multi-billion dollar business, that much is clear. Furthermore, this could be the big chance to begin the transformation of mankind into something like man-machine-chimeras, ”cyborgs” or ”transhumans”. 

The machine as an alleged improvement of nature, a nature-substitute is – in congruence with its very invention – not a democratic, but a totalitarian construct.  

The debate on machine-humans and human-machines 

This debate is now taking place in very concrete ways (3), not only as fantasy, as was the case in the past. The reason for this is obvious: technological advancement has led to the invention of the machine as the central technology of modern times. The machine is in the process of gradually taking over all areas of life. It functions in imperialistic ways, so to speak, and does not stop at any thing, i.e. it does not stop for human beings. The machine’s principle is to transform anything of nature into machine. That means, us as well, we, the ones who are living already next to, with and even within the machine. This is the machine’s– apparently so far largely unacknowledged – logic.

Generally, at first, there was an adaptation of human behavior towards that of the machine – from soldiers to factory workers. And today it is from all of us towards the computer, ”the machine of the machines”. We must follow the orders (prompts) of this machine (4) as if we were a part of it or, just like any machine, it won’t function properly.

Because the machine as an allegedly better than nature substitute is – in congruence with its invention – not a democratic but a totalitarian construct (5). The machine takes precedence over nature, and the violent act of destroying her is always required. However, since the advent of science and its violent methodology, science has defended itself by claiming that nature is ”dead matter“ anyway which is not true, of course (6).

We should not be surprised that contact with the machine has already had consequences that have changed us. There have been applied increasing external measures for a”mimetic”approximation and a convergence of the body with machine – ”aesthetics”.

The ”fitting” of artificial limbs has taken place and even substitute organs have been implanted into the human body.

Up to now, however, the transformation of the human body from within, in order to make the body machine-like or machine-compatible and even the gradual transformation of the body into a living machine or machine-life, on the whole, has not yet taken place. However, this is exactly what is now on the agenda of new technologies (7). It has already been on the agenda for a fairly long time.

The famous American sociologist Daniel Bell declared: ”People can be created anew or released, their behavior can be controlled and their consciousness can be altered” (8)He intends this as a positive statement, just as his colleagues in the field of science do. Is this naiveté? Where, otherwise, does this optimism come from that still surrounds technological progress and which, so far, has prevented most of us from systemically challenging it?

What is the relationship between the ”pandemic” and such ”progress”? 

We are now confronted with the fact that the ”pandemic” could indeed have a relationship to such a ”progress”. At the moment, it looks like there is a plan to vaccinate all of humankind in an alleged attempt to free humanity from the hostage of the virus.

After all, vaccination now offers the one-time opportunity to get directly into as many bodies as never before, and, on this favourable occasion, to place something into the body that will transform it from the inside. Furthermore, it will make the body ”available” from the outside, i.e. connect it with a larger technological system, the Mega-Machine (9). Consequently, in the meantime, questions need to be asked about what technological progress has to offer in this respect.

Bill Gates, former head of Microsoft and planner of the worldwide Corona-vaccination, effectively wants to vaccinate all possible 7.8 billion people on planet earth, including pregnant women, newborns as well as those who have already recovered from Corona (!). However, for the time being, the German government has not yet decided to implement the anticipated, so- called ”immunity identity card”.

Furthermore, and of concern in the meantime, is the ongoing surveillance of citizens via artifical intelligence, artifical intelligence systems and censorship of the internet, i.e. the abolition of freedom of speech in the internet (10). Apparently, there is an expectation that not everybody will be excited about the alleged relief a vaccination might bring, despite the related promises of freedom of travel and freedom of professional choice seeming to be tempting. Inversely, i.e. in the case of refusal of vaccination, there is the threat that those liberties will be withheld, which is nothing less than the abolition of essential civil rights!

In the treatment of the pandemic and its aftermath, our health is not the issue.

For our health is threatened by much more serious dangers, e.g. radioactivity, particulate pollution, glyphosate, food that is a health hazard and 5G, none of which is mentioned anywhere. Even the prescribed facial masks are not serving our health, quite the contrary. They are a health hazard as they can lead to self-infection and cut us off from oxygen supply. Thus, they can even cause the objected symptons of the illness, not to mention the psychological repercussions. The issue is precisely not the battle against the virus, even though this is what we are made to believe for months.

Because, according to genuine medical perspectives, the Corona-virus is not more dangerous than other influenza viruses, the virus mutates constantly and most notably, it cannot be regarded as an enemy one could eradicate with one vaccine, least of all in the long run (11).

Besides, at this point, a vaccine has not been developed since the virus itself has not yet been properly identified. Upon discovery of a vaccine, it must be tested over a period of several years before it should be allowed to be administered, not to mention the likely mutation of the virus.

It is not logical, and it is not responsible to push for a quick mass compulsary vaccination, possibly by the end of 2020, and incidentally, without anyone having the legal right to hold anyone responsible for possible noxious effects (12). Such effects often occur even with vaccines that have been tested over many years and that are regularly administered. This means, it is not about a vaccination in the medical sense. The planned vaccination can thereby only be explained in such ways that itis intended for very different purposes. 

What all this is really about 

We are currently in the midst of the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution. This means the mass introduction and massive expansion of all new technologies, i.e. genetic engineering including synthetic biology, articificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, as well as geo-engineering, coupled with increased utilization of electromagnetic technologies in the higher atmospheres of the earth and also, in our bodies (13).

At the same time, in light of the current success of companies working with such technologies, respectively, the military-industrial complex, one can recognize what the new structuring of the global economy, using its ”controlled collapse” through the ”lockdown“, is all about (14).

The now propagated economic model and form of society, connected to the new technologies is also called the ”Green New Deal”. It is supposedly about the introduction of a post-capitalistic, de-globalized and a nature-friendly society.

The now propagated economic model and form of society, connected to the new technologies is also called the ”Green New Deal”. It is supposedly about the introduction of a post-capitalistic, de-globalized and a nature-friendly society.

However, in this context – and puzzingly so – the new technologies are largely considered to be ”green”, including even nuclear energy, the new industrial revolution and the means by which it is intended to be introduced and to implement these technologies. This ”deal”, that amongst others, the EU Commission and especially also the ”green” parties are propagating, is actually the opposite of what it claims to be (16). How is this to be understood ?

Digitalization is a new project that – amazingly – receives nothing but extensive consent, so far however, digitization is an expression of the new technologies, especially in the form of ”the Internet of Things” IoT. This is a digitized Mega-Machine of artificial intelligence in and through which all related ”things” are now to be ”cybernetically” connected.

Digitization, now propagated everywhere, makes precisely this possible. Each ”thing” deposits its ”information” in the IoT. This information is the ”energy” on which the IoT runs, i.e. it is considered its ”oil” – as Chancellor Angela Merkel called it, figuratively speaking.

The IoT activities are fed into the system via sensors that need to be mounted on all equipment, buildings, the entire infrastructure, also outdoors, as well as on human beings who are supposed to interact with IoT (17).

In and via the IoT machine, all information receive ”equal treatment”, i.e. factual information as well as human information. Hence, there is no longer any differentiation between different types of information.

As a result, human beings are not considered to be different from things and their information. There is a software program regulating the treatment of these things, i.e. this information, being able to forward or to delete them. It is like working on our personal computer, which we have become used to in the last decades.

What is new, however, is the fact that it is applied to us ourselves, i.e. we are the ones being turned into a ”thing” or into ”information” in the IoT.  This means that we ourselves need to be fitted with sensors that will report all our activities. It is only in this way that we can participate, or be made to participate in the Mega-Machine. This new ”participation” is supposed to become the premise for the new norm for all citizens. The cellphone or smart phone are already its precursors.

The ”transformation of human kind”

We are now supposed to become linked to the machine also from the inside of our bodies, not only from the outside. We are intended to become a part of the Mega-Machine of the IoT, and even turn into quasi-machines ourselves.

For, soon, weare perceived of not only being like machines, and this means we should not only just aspire to such behaviors, but could rather be technically forced to become machines:

Predictable, quantifiable, reduced in our complexity, to be operationalized, obedient to practical constraints, to be regulated from the outside, identically reproducible, interchangeable, able to be controlled, made transparent and unquestionable within the closed-loop control system”, in a way, to operate without fail one hundred percent in intended ways (18).

In order to function as reliably as machines function, we need to be altered on a bodily level, i.e. in the inside of our bodies. The external adaptation to the machine, i.e. unconditional obedience, is no longer sufficient to the system, because of the ”residual risk of being human”. Part of the agenda is that we should have diverse chips implanted, a practice already established with animals since some time. We should be ”vaccinated” with sensors and other memory storage devices or mini-machines including nanobots. Provided that such devices, including their ability to self-replicate, i.e. self-reproduce, will have been developed, which is precisely foreseen to be the case during this year (19).

Through this treatment we would be ”linked”, registered and able to be reached from the outside, via electromagnetic waves and soon also via satellites in space (20). It is even possible that this procedure of an internal ‘mechanization’ could turn into a progressive one and gradually transform humans into machines. One model for tracking and identifying an individual at the moment is the ID2020-implant (21). 

…the issue at stake here is none less than to intentionally turn the entirety of human evolution into chaos 

This attempt culminates in the development of new vaccines that, with the help of genetic engineering, can genetically alter the human body. This seems to be intended (directly via our DNA and indirectly via mRNA)

This is planned to be accomplished via specific 3-way injections, making sure that cell resistance against foreign DNA is broken down, by „electroporation”, i.e. quasi inner electro shocks, forcing the cells to open their membranes for foreign DNA, or mRNA transmitters (22).

Thereby we would be transformed by force into genetically modified organisms, GMO’s and we can guess what we should then be: Chimeras? Machines without a will? Definitely we would no longer be human beings in full possession of our natural power.

The issue at stake here is none less than to intentionally bring the entirety of human evolution into chaos:the fundamental trust into the human body we could have had until now will basically become obsolete. Nobody knows how the body will react and what kind of consequences such interference will have, nor how to deal with these, if we can no longer rely on the self-healing capacities of the human organism.

Genetic messages, which nature has preserved to stay seperate since millenia…are supposed to be mingled and freak chimaera will populate the future…apprentices of molecular sorcerers are already waiting to finally beginn the genetic rearrangement of the human being…What frightens me is the irreversibility of such a process”, commented Erwin Chargaff (23), the great chemist, geneticist and genetic engineering critic on this kind of technological advancement.

It seems it has come to this point now. Jeremy Rifkin, a former critic of genetic engineering, now recommends the Green New Deal, which propagates the introduction of new technologies, pleads for a ”comprehensive transformation of human kind” and for ”a fusion of computer technology and genetics towards a powerful new technological reality”(24).

Thus, he is spot-on with Mr. Bill Gates.

What is at stake is nothing less than a ”new creation of the world” and alongside it, the new creation of humans. It is also about a:

second creation story, sourced in the halls of laboratories (and) the establishing of an artificially created nature through a bio-industry, intended to replace the original concept of nature’s evolution”(25).

A ”New World Order” with ”new humans”? 

It would indeed be a ”new world order” if such outrageous, per se damaging, irreversible, even inheritable invasions of our right to physical integrity, of our genetic heritage on into the future, would succeed in being implemented on a global scale.

Such interference would even affect the Conditio Humana itself, i.e. our reproduction as a human species. It would not be an exaggeration to call such an intervention the biggest possible crime against humanity.

However, even if we were able to escape this kind of massacre on being human, an existence outside of the Mega-Machine of the IoT is not intended in the long run. China is the first country that surged ahead, but probably only on an organisational level, so far regarding the external forms of ”mechanization“or ‘machinization’. It is not by chance that China is increasingly mentioned as a positive example of a future development. Besides the problem with political totalitarianism and the eventual technical transformation of the human being, there is, however, already a general juridical problem.

Human Rights – technically obsolete? 

Since in the IoT there is no differentiation between information and human beings, asall are treated as ”things”, we are no longer defined or treated as human beings within the Mega-Machine of the IoT. That is why our rights as human beings will effectively fall apart under such conditions, because they are technically ”obsolete”. This even applies to basic human rights, not only to civil liberties. Things, information and machines have no such rights. In an equal treatment, based on the norm of ”things”, such rights would dissolve, and with them eventually the legal effects regarding our contingent artifical genetic transformation, i.e. the Conditio Humana itself, too! With technological progress, legislation can be polished off, so to speak. Or what?

The Mega-Machine, like any other machine, is by definition totalitarian in character and it is actually a weapon. It consists of order and obedience. Whoever or whatever is not obedient is becoming harmful to him- or herself.

Civil liberties are already largely restricted or have fallen apart with the lockdown due to the Corona-pandemic.

Furthermore, it is apparently not planned to fully re-instate these liberties. Rather, on the contrary, human rights themselves, such as the right to physical integrity and human dignity could be next to go; at some point possibly even the right to life… That is the lasting logic of ‘machinization’. This means there would be no life except that of the machine which is indeed defined as such. For, the machine itself now means ”life”, even a ”better” form of life. In such a world, humans become ”obsolete”, even an ”endangered species” (26). How will this be reflected bylegislation?

In the context of new technologies, all this has already been verbalized and discussed at length. When it comes to artifical intelligence, human rights are not an issue, neither in a general nor an individual sense. This also applies to the field of genetic engineering and even to synthetic biology, a fieldactively trying to create humans in artifical ways.

Rather, in the end, it is about us as possible ”inventions”, upon which someone may, for example, claim a patent, presumably the one who has genetically altered us.

If patents on human life and not only on the lives of animals and plants, were to be recognized, we then would belong to our inventor and this person could annihilate us, could wipe us out– ”delete“ us.

Within the Mega-Machine, which belongs to artifical intelligence, this is already established. Only in the ”community” of the IoT as a machine are we something or somebody. We do not exist independently. In this way, we would no longer be considered free, souvereign and independent ”individuals”. (Strangely enough, some people call this ”socialism”).

Democracy and nature – technically obsolete? 

From this perspective we can see why democracy would no longer be necessary and can no longer exist, because the machine functions strictly hierarchically, solely according to ”practical constraints“ as part of the closed-loop control system. According to this definition no ethical or moral law can penetrate it.

Furthermore, in the Mega-Machine, sex, gender, parents, genealogy, or relatives no longer exist, since anything to be a fact of nature is no longer planned in the matrix.

The Mega-Machine itself is expression of a technology that transforms nature into machine and in thisprocess, destroys nature and afterwards allegedly ”substitutes” it (27).

So, we can see that the machine not only emerges from destruction but continues with destruction. In this way, everything becomes inverted – living matter turns into dead matter, society turns into prison, humans turn into something mechanical…

The trick is that all these new creations have to appear as something ”better” and according to Rifkin: ”must be presented and justified as continuation of natural principles and processes.” (28)

That is the reason why the machine-made, new creation is now considered to be ”green”. It is simply called green, because it aims at the ”green”, the living! In the inversion words have in many cases taken on the opposite meaning they had before. 

Mega-Machine – Weapon with ”Mind-Control”  

The Mega-Machine, like any machine is, by definition, totalitarian in character and it is actually a weapon. It consists of order and obedience. Whoever or whatever is not obedient, becomes harmful to him- or herself. S/he/ it cannot continue, ”crashes”, or, points are deducted because s/he no longer delivers information/data. It is simultaneously about ”surveillance and punishment” (Foucault); about total control of everything and about the ability to exert direct influence from the outside, possibly going as far as ”deletion”.

The chip, sensor or nanobot can be located and, via computer software, be fed with information. Such information, in the form of electromagnetic waves in various frequencies can be aimed at the brain, as a form of ”mind control” and induce certain feelings and behavior. This has been experimented with since decades (29). Furthermore, soon there will be widespread 5G, which will connect us to satellites and to an extensive, global electromagnetic-net or grid (project ”Starlink” (30)).

Then we will also be in a ”lockdown” from above and not only from below (31) and, it is unclear if and how we are going to survive this – maybe only as quasi machines.

However, what is talked about is concern for our ”health”. Even young children are intentionally burdened with a potential guilt, that is to say, of possibly being the cause of the death of their grandparents, which of course traumatizes them…

PLANdemic:  Orwell’s ”1984” and Huxley’s ”Brave New World” all in one

I am not saying that we are already at this point. But we are on a direct path towards it. For the last 40 years this path has beendiscussed in professional circles and it is in the process of being established. Hence, it is completely incomprehensible that to this day, there is no critical debate on this explosive topic. Nobody is discussing it.

This seems to be the path that will be followed on various levels during and after the pandemic, the ”PLANdemic”. To assume anything different would not only be naive, but also completely unrealistic.

The future task of medicine is to begin turning us into machine-humans or human-machines

The future task of medicine is to begin turning us into machine-humans or human machines and, according to AI-hero, Ray Kurzweil, by ”merging with the computer ”(32) thus contributing to the victory of ”transhumanism”. The ”beautiful new human”(33), who, so far exists only in the propaganda and the alchemical fantasy of the ”extropians” (those who advocate the end of ”humans”) is seen as the ”improved human” – by no longer being a human being.

It is a matter of scornful rupture from us, mammals, dinosaurs and the primordial jelly (34), of those who are still being born from a mother and who are allegedly long outdated by the ”evolution of intelligence” (35). The new god-like creators are greeting us, who, after the forceful destruction of matter and all its manifestations, believe they have arrived at the Big Bang again and hence, can re-create anything at will.

This truly is patriarchy, imagining being ”the fatherly source of life” as opposed to the common origins of life from the mother, trying to irrevocably establish itself today. (41)

Why does nobody read the works of the madmen in the AI, genetic engineering and the nano-tech scene? They have long since begun to put this into practice – because in this field, further billions of Dollarsare to be made!

The ”new evolution” – a ”eugenic civilization” with a ”synthetic human race” 

In the long run, the allegedly possible new evolution no longer counts with any human beings. Rather, it will be populated by the ”post”- human ”Homo Deus”. The god-human is supposed to be part of the ”god-machine”, the so-called ”Singularity”, which will have transcended thehuman being in the old understanding, and which is allegedly assuming leadership over the universe itself (36). Behold, Yuval Harari, the author of Homo Deus, is world-renowned and a favorite, second to none, of all those in power, from Obama to Merkel.

This is what the heros from the field of the new technologies are telling us. They openly propagate a ”eugenic civilization”, even a ”synthetic humanity” (37) and Bill Gates, following in his father’s footsteps, is determined to serve this purpose. It is not by chance that he intends to combine AI-technology with his vaccines and genetic engineering.

We know that he is interested in eugenics. He himself said so: vaccinations are and should continue to be used for the purpose of reducing the world’s popluation (38). In this eerie logic, de-population would be a topic for discussion. But even this, so far, is not the case.

Already a century ago, Rudolf Steiner cautioned us:

The soul will be eliminated via a medication. Based on a ‘reasonable perspective’ one will develop a vaccine, that will affect the organism, beginning in early youth, preferably at the moment of birth, so that this human body will not arrive at the thought: (that) there is a soul and a spirit. – The two worldviews will oppose each other in such fierce ways. One worldview will have to think about how to develop terms and concepts that will enable people to cope with the true reality of the soul and the spirit. The other one, the successors of today’s materialists, will search for the vaccine to make the body ‘healthy’, so that this body via its constitutional conditions will not speak of such foolish things as soul and spirit, but instead will speak in ‘healthy’ ways of the forces that live in machines and in chemistry, which constitute the planets and suns within the planetary nebula. This will be achieved through somatic procedures. It will be left to the materialistic physicians to eliminate the the soul from humankind.” (39)

In the course of time, the transformed ones will be considered the ”better ones.” However, the question is: how ”healthy”, in the broadest sense, these better ones might be? Either they will be lacking the orginal body and/or soul and spirit. A third category would remain made up of those who will have escaped such measures, the non-vaccinated ones – besides Mister Gates and his children, by the way. The debate about the exclusionof such disobedient ones has already begun. The ”great transformation” everybody talks about, is indeed on the way.

Farewell being human?

So, wasn´t he always ”evil”? And doesn’t that serve him right? By now, however, it is clear who the evil one is, and not only in trivial but in radical ways. The age of humankind, the Anthropocene, of which one is so proud in our times – will it be an age without human beings in the end? What would remain is ”post-humanism”, liberating us finally from this foolish ”life”…

Technological advancement is now showing its real face. It is the face of the holy ”productive forces.” But the ”Luddites“ as those who question machines were and still are taunted and ridiculed for being backward.

Today, we are paying for our obedience. It stands in the way of truly recognizing what has been and what is really going on, and what significance it bears. This failure is now coming home to us. Nobody is quite prepared for this. The debate is about nothing less than ”life” itself– not, however, the zombie-like ”life” of the machine, which saps our life force and thatof the planet.

The real issue is about our life and our living existence, that we now have to defend against the obscene new creations, against those who claim to possess the ability to improve life beyond the inherent abilities of our Planet Earth and Mother Nature.

Should we continue to believe in such claims? Now that it is first and foremost about us? Now that we have the opportunity to revoke this reversal of life into death and destruction instead of falling prey for good to the ”technotronic era”? (40)

What an embarrassment for the self-proclaimed ”resistance” if its protagonists still have not comprehended what this is all about today – beyond money and power.

At the same time, I see them everywhere, emerging from the bottom, many clear faces are appearing in the crowd and wonderful people are raising their voices. They see what needs to be done and they see the path that now needs to be taken. It is a true joy!

*

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This was originally published in German on www.pbme-online.org, May 14th 2020. Translation from German by M.L.Oberem.

Prof. Claudia Von Werlhof, is a distinguished author, professor of political science and women’s studies, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Notes

1. https://gedankenwelt.de/das-overton.fenster/;precisely: Werlhof, Claudia von, 2020: Wir sind Virus! Auf/ on pbme-online.org; also in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, /April 29th

2. https://norberthaering.de/die-regenten-der-welt/lock-step-rockefeller-stiftung/

3. Bammé, Arno et al., 1983: Maschinenmenschen-Menschmaschinen, Reinbek, Rowohlt

4. Schirrmacher, Frank, 2013: EGO. Das Spiel des Lebens, München, Karl Blessing

5. Mumford, Luis, 1977: Mythos der Maschine, Frankfurt, Fischer (orig. The Myth of the Machine 1964/66); Ullrich, Otto 1990: Technik und Herrschaft, Frankfurt, Fischer

6. Merchant, Carolyn, 1987: Der Tod der Natur, München, Beck (orig. The Death of Nature)

7. Schirrmacher, Frank (Hg.) 2001: Die Darwin AG. Wie Nanotechnologie, Biotechnologie und Computer den neuen Menschen träumen, Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch; Moravec, Hans, 1988: Mind Children. The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press; Kurzweil, Ray, 2016: Die Intelligenz der Evolution. Wenn Mensch und Computer verschmelzen, Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch (orig. The Age of Spiritual Machines); Preston, Christopher, 2019: Sind wir noch zu retten? Wie wir mit neuen Technologien die Natur verändern können, Berlin, Springer (orig. The Synthetic Age, Cambridge 2018, MIT Press); Rifkin, Jeremy, 2007: Das Biotechnische Zeitalter, Frankfurt a.M./New York, Campus (orig. The Biotech Century, New York 1998, Tarcher/Putnam); Sorgner, Stefan, 2016: Transhumanismus, Freiburg, Herder

8. Bell, Daniel, 2007: Cover, in Sitter-Liver, Beat (Hg.): Utopie Heute, I, Fribourg/Stuttgart, Academic Press/Kohlhammer

9. „Mega-Machine“ is a term by Lewis Mumford from ”The Myth of the Machine”, 1964/1966.With this term he identifies the organisation of the empire of the pharaos in Ancient Egypt, which long before industrialisation and ‘machinisation’ in the modern sense, showed traits of a mechanical organisation of society, in which humans themselves were the ”machine”, similarly to armies. Today, the term Mega-Machine can be taken up again in order to describe the literal ‘machinisation’ of society and the form of integrating its members, even transformating them into machines, i.e. becoming a part of the larger machinery. The machine always stands for a strict hierachical, even totalitarian context.

10. Fikentscher, Anneliese und Neumann, Andreas, 2020:Per Androhung des Grundrechtentzugs zur Zwangsimpfung? In:Neue Rheinische Zeitung. May, 8th

11. Frazer, Ian: http://blauerbote.com/2020/05/07/professor-ian-frazer-there-has-never-been-a-vaccine-for-coronavirus-and-unlikely-there-will-ever-be-one/; Prof. Ioannidis, John: https://www.achgut.com/artikel/wer_hat_angst_vor_Professor_Ioannidis

12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=251&v=WJTOTdd0F0E&feature=emb_logo, accessed May 13th, 2020

13. Bertell, Rosalie, 2018: Kriegswaffe Planet Erde, Gelnhausen, J. K. Fischer (orig. Planet Earth. The Latest Weapon of War, London 2000, The Womens´ Press): Freeland, Elana, 2018:Under an Ionized Sky. From Chemtrails to Space Fence Lockdown, Port Townsend, Feral House; Werlhof, Claudia von (Ed.), 2020: Global Warning! Geoengineering is Wrecking Our Planet, Dublin, Talma (forthcoming)

14. Wolff, Ernst, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYZ2gVs9U7o, accessed March 13th, 2020; Wolff, Ernst. 2014:Weltmacht IWF – Chronik eines Raubzugs, Marburg, Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag

15. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2019: Der Globale Green New Deal, Frankfurt a. M., Campus (orig. The Green New Deal, 2019)

16. Werlhof, Claudia von, 2019:Schöne „grüne“ Digi-Welt? Oder: Die neue „grüne Revolution“? in: Neue Rheinische Zeitung, (724, Köln. November 6th, 2019) Morningstar against  the „Deal for Nature“, à la Greta Thunberg and the „Green New Deal“: https://nodealfornature.org

17. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2019, s. (15), p. 14

18. Genth, Renate, 2002: Über Maschinisierung und Mimesis, Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang, pp. 110 ff.

19. Joy, Bill, 2001: Warum die Zukunft uns nicht braucht, in: Schirrmacher, Frank s. (7), pp. 31-71 (orig. Why the future does not need us)

20. Freeland, Elana, 2018, s. (12)

21. Koenig, Peter, 2020: The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is Agenda ID2020, on Global Research, March 12th, a.  https://www.nogeoingegneria.com/effetti/politicaeconomia/i-tentacoli-del-potere-dei-rockefeller-le-rivelazioni-di-aaron-russo/ 

22. The Children‘s Health Defense 2020: https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/covid-19-spearpoint-for-rolling-out-a-new-era-of-high-risk-genetically-engineered-vaccines/; Dr. Kaufman, Andrew, 2020: They Want to Genetically Modify Us with the COVID-19 Vaccine,  forbiddenknowledgetv.net, May 11th.Short version of Interview Spiro Skouras with Andrew Kaufman on May, 10th.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy5FD0XameI, accessed on May 13, 2020, May 11th, Interview Summary by Spiro Skouras with Andrew Kaufmann on May 10th, 2020 

23. Chargaff, Erwin, 1988:Unbegreifliches Geheimnis. Wissenschaft als Kampf für und gegen die Natur, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta

24. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2007, s. (7), p. 34

25. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2007, s. (7), pp. 41; 33

26. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 2005: The Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics, speech at the Nano-Ethics Conference, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 2.-5.3., Ecole Polytechnique, Paris und Stanford University, pp. 19 f.

27. Werlhof, Claudia von, 2011: Die Verkehrung, Wien, Promedia; dies. 2010a: Fortschritts-Glaube am Ende? In Werlhof, C. v..: West -End, Köln, PapyRossa, pp. 88-129; Werlhof, C. v. 2010b: Gentechnik, moderne Alchemie und Faschismus, in Werlhof, C. v.: Vom Diesseits der Utopie zum Jenseits der Gewalt, Freiburg, Centaurus, pp. 171-209

28. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2007, s. (7), p. 34

29. Begich, Nick und Manning, Jeanne, 2001: Löcher im Himmel, Peiting, Michaels Verlag (orig. Angels Don´t Play this HAARP); Bearden, Tom, 2012: Skalar Technologie, Peiting, Michaels Verlag (orig. Gravitobiology);Krishnan, Armin, 2017: Military Neuroscience and the Coming Age of Neurowarfare, New York, Routledge

30. Tung, Liam, 2020: Elon Musk’s SpaceX: Now 1 million Starlink user terminals OKed for US internet service. ZDNet, March 24th.

31. Freeland, Elana, s. (13)

32. Kurzweil, Ray 2016, Subtitle

33. Sorgner, Stefan, 2018: Schöner neuer Mensch, Berlin, Nicolai publishing

34. Minsky, Marvin, 1988, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT: Interview in the Documentary „Maschinenträume“ by Peter Krieg, s. Werlhof, Claudia von, 1991: Männliche Natur und Künstliches Geschlecht, Wien, Frauenverlag, pp. 54 f.

35. Kurzweil, Ray, 2016, s. (7); Moravec, Hans, 1988, s. (7)

36. Harari, Yuval, 2017: Homo Deus, München, Beck

37. Rifkin, Jeremy, 2007 s. (7); Preston, Christopher, 2019, s. (7)

38. Kennedy, Robert jr. against Gates: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-s-9ZiHOYP/, / accessed May 13th, 2020 ; s. a. Doktoren in Schwarz, Interview with Dr. Mikovits about Dr. Fauci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrPboi8FPU, accessed May 13th , 2020; Interview Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jUXxcaZegQ; Chossudovsky, Michel, 2020: After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program, on Global Research, appr. May 5th; Engdahl. William, 2020: The Warp Speed Push for Coronavirus Vaccines, on Global Research, appr. May 10th ; Dr. Kaufman, Andrew, 2020: Sie wollen uns mit dem COVID-19-Impfstoff genetisch verändern: https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/dr-andrew-kaufman-they-want-to-gentically-modify-ud-with-the-covid-19-vaccine/, accessed May,13th, 2020

39. Steiner, Rudolf, 1917:Vorträge in Dornach vom 29. September bis 28. Oktober 1917, Gesamtausgabe Band 177, pp. 97 f.

40. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1982: Between Two Ages: America´s Role in the Technotronic Age, New York, Viking Adult

41. For the English version a general reference to the „critical theory of patriarchy“:

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India, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, and Kenya after a second round, won the June 17 elections at the 74th United Nations Assembly for five non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council for a two-year term starting on January 1, 2021.

The biggest loser was Canada in its competition with Ireland and Norway for two seats available. A total of 128 votes were needed to secure a two-thirds majority. Norway secured 130 votes while Ireland got 128. Canada received just 108 votes. All efforts of phone calls by the Canadian officials to countries ambassadors to the UN did not help. This is the second loss following the one in 2010 under a Conservative government.

In the next few days we will read several analyses trying to ascertain why Canada lost what it considered a coveted position at the UN. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was campaigning for it since 2015. But the result was not totally unexpected as we suggested before the vote took place.

A very active campaign undertaken by Canadians asking the international community and Ambassadors at the UN not to vote for Canada had already laid out several reasons and may have had a small role in the outcome of the vote.

It is significant to note one of the most glaring contradictions or double standard. Ottawa professes to value the rule of law, however it can’t even abide by the resolutions of the same body it aspired to sit on UNSC. The Canadian government has refused to abide by the 2016 UN Security Council Resolution 2334, calling on member states to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied in 1967.” The resolution also urges “the intensification and acceleration of international and regional diplomatic efforts and support aimed at achieving, without delay a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East on the basis of the relevant United Nations resolutions”. On the contrary, Ottawa has stated that it will act as an asset for Israel” on the Council. Further, it has consistently voted against the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination together with the US, “Israel” and a handful of other countries.

The Canadian government continues to promote its long-gone value as a “peacekeeping” country. However, that may just be rhetoric or wishful thinking. Canadas political closeness to the war-prone US government leading to interventions in other countries is more the real image in the era of Hybrid Wars. The Liberal Trudeau government has also signed off on a $14 billion Light Armoured Vehicle sale to Saudi Arabia that was negotiated by the previous Conservative government.

Canada is aligned to most US foreign military incursions by ideology and by deed providing willingly its soft power in the guise of military and police training to countries with questionable records on human rights. In 2017-2018, the Canadian Directorate of Military Training and Cooperation delivered training to more than 1,500 candidates from 56 member countries across the globe. That may not be the offending part of it’s foreign policy as several countries provide similar service, but doing that while stating as part of its mission to “Promote Canadian democratic principles, the rule of law, and the protection of human rights in the international arena”, may well be seen as another contradiction.

Geopolitical reality seems to reveal Canada’s policy incongruity and UN member States may see through that pretentious presupposition. Canada’s silence about the military coup in Bolivia last November and its forceful determination to regime change in Venezuela against the legitimately elected government of Nicolas Maduro betray precisely a disregard for “democratic principles” and the “rule of law” in the international arena. The UN recognises the Venezuelan Ambassador appointed by the legitimate government of Venezuela.

Canada is not a peace-loving internationalist country anymore. It has lost the appeal that may have held in the past, and is criticised today for letting its mining corporations abuse the human rights and the environment in other – mostly – African countries.

At a time when the issue of racism managed to take over the world media stage over the killing of George Floyd in the US replacing the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been suggested that the block of black and brown countries” of Africa may have rejected Canada’s bid to the UNSC. When pressured to give his opinion on the anti-racism protests in the US at the beginning of June, Justin Trudeau avoided criticising Trumps administration and chose instead to recognise that there is “systemic discrimination” against racialised groups in Canada.

In concluding, the loss of the Canadian government on the international stage may be a victory for Canadians at home. Usually the Canadian public doesnt seem to care about foreign policy, which is never on the top 10 list of voter priorities. Only Canadians following regularly foreign policy would react to the news of a lost vote at the UN.

However, the campaign launched by Canadians questioning Canada’s bid to a UNSC seat perhaps shows that Canadians care about Canada’s international image and the possible links to domestic policy. They are willing to speak up and in fact, a new campaign has already being launched calling on the Prime Minister “to fundamentally reassess Canadian foreign policy.” This in itself is a victory.

The international community has not given a vote of confidence to Canada’s foreign policy by denying a seat to the UNSC. That’s all the international community can do. It is up to Canadians now to demand changes to the Canadian government.

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Nino Pagliccia is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Author’s Note: The following is the text of a speech delivered on June 19, 2010 on the 145th anniversary of Juneteenth. This address is being republished in honor of the 155th commemoration of Juneteenth in light of the resurgence of the anti-racist struggle in the United States and the international community. The event a decade ago was held at the offices of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) located in the Midtown District in Detroit.

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Today is the 145th anniversary of Juneteenth, a national holiday for the African American people who spent nearly 250 years enslaved inside the British colonies of North America and the eventual United States of America. The holiday represents the struggle of African people to end slavery, legalized segregation, lynching, wage discrimination and all other forms of exploitation and national oppression.

In a declaration issued by the Union Army after the conclusion of the Civil War with specific reference to the state of Texas said that:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” (U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, June 19, 1865, Source: Texas State Library)

Why was this statement so significant since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in August 1862 which became valid on January 1, 1863? (Celebrated as Emancipation Day)

The fact of the matter was that the ruling elites of the Confederacy were not about to abide by an executive order freeing their enslaved Africans from bondage. This was a proclamation that was imposed through the necessities of war in an effort to undermine the economic basis of Southern society and its way of life.

In 1860, Karl Marx wrote to Frederick Engels saying:

“In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.” (Chronicles of Black Protest, Edited by Bradford Chambers, 1968, p. 107)

Even though the Abolitionist movement had been in existence for decades and the increasingly rebellious character of the slaves became a serious factor during the late 1850s, the ruling class in the North and the South were not prepared for the emancipation of four million Africans inside the United States. Although Lincoln had previously said that he was anti-slavery, his inaugural address in 1861 left much to be desired for the Abolitionists.

According to Bradford Chambers in his book “Chronicles of Black Protest”, Frederick Douglass, the anti-slavery agitator and journalist, believed strongly in the inevitable emancipation of African people in the United States. Douglass had freed himself from slavery and would eventually travel to Ireland during the 1840s where he would gain international support from the Irish national movement for the cause of emancipation within the United States.

However, in 1861, Chambers recounts that “Douglass’ confidence that emancipation would come about fell precipitously in the months following Lincoln’s election as President. Disenchantment began with the inaugural address. In that address Lincoln announced his intention to keep out of the affairs of states that permitted slavery, although he had previously opposed the extension of slavery in the new states being formed in the West.” (Chronicles of Black Protest, Chambers, p.108)

With further reference to Douglass’ attitude towards the Lincoln administration in early 1861, Chambers notes:

“In his disillusionment Douglass wrote in his Monthly that he planned to visit Haiti to consider it as a haven for black Americans. Haiti—the only place in the New World where black slaves had successfully revolted and formed their own country. Douglass was scheduled to sail on April 25, 1861. Then on April 12 Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, and the Civil War began.”

Chambers continues by pointing out that: “Douglass and other black leaders immediately began a campaign to convince Lincoln that, in Douglass’ words, ‘the Union could never prosper until the war assumed an antislavery attitude, and the Negro was enlisted on the loyal side.’ Nonetheless, Lincoln continued to avoid the Abolitionists’ demands to end slavery until the middle of 1862 when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a last ditch effort to coerce the South to surrender in light of the threat to free the enslaved Africans.

Nonetheless, it was the objective conditions on the battlefield, the pressure from Radical Republicans in Congress such as Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who along with Douglass and other abolitionists demanded that Lincoln issue the order to end slavery, as well as the international shift in the balance of forces between Britain, France and Russia that led to a blockade of cotton exports to Europe, that eventually forced the Lincoln administration to declare an end to slavery and to enlist Africans in the Union Army.

According to Chambers,

“Fully as important was the international objective. By adding as an aim of the Civil War the abolition of slavery, the Proclamation swung international opinion against the South and crushed its hope—a very real hope—that Great Britain and France would intervene on their behalf. Manufacturing interests in both these countries, deprived of cotton imports by the Union blockade of Southern ports, were urging their governments to declare in favor of the South. The Proclamation of Emancipation rallied the workers in Britain and France in defense of the North. Czar Alexander of Russia sent his fleet across the sea to anchor off the coast of New York, ready to do battle if England and France tried to break the blockade of the South.” (Chambers, p. 110)

The Thirteenth Amendment and the Status of African People

Despite the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery did not end until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. However, the Thirteenth Amendment would not resolve the national oppression of the African people in the United States. The question of the economic, social and political status of the former slaves and their free counterparts was not solved with the conclusion of the War.

African American photo and graphic commemorating Juneteenth

In many areas where slavery was the most profitable in the South, Africans constituted a majority or a substantial section of population groups in the counties and regions of various states. This was the situation in areas of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and other states, where as a result of the systems of cotton and other agricultural commodities production, Africans outnumbered whites both slave owners and non-slave owners.

However, in Texas, where Maj. Gen. Granger’s order was declared some 145 years ago today, the demographic situation was different than in many other areas of the South. W.E.B. DuBois, in his study entitled “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880,” says that

“Texas had, in 1860, 182,921 Negroes and 420,891 whites, thus putting this state among those where the Negro population was a decided minority, and white immigration destined greatly to increase the preponderance of the whites.” (DuBois, p.552)

DuBois also notes that in Texas:

“The division of the planters and poor whites was less distinct in this state than in many others.” As a result of the Mexican-American War and the seizure of Texas by the white settlers and the United States Government there was much of what DuBois described as “plenty of rich land and the poorest white men could get a start; this increased demand for labor.” (DuBois, p.552)

The resistance to the emancipation of Africans was immediate and violent on the part of the Confederate soldiers and their supporters. DuBois recounts that:

“When the war neared its end, the Confederate troops in Texas got out of hand and began rebelling and looting. Towns like Houston were burned, and clothes and food of all sorts of goods stolen. The Texas Republican (newspaper) stressed ‘the ruinous effect of freeing four million ignorant and helpless blacks,’ and said that the people of the North would be glad to witness a return of slavery, because it would raise ‘larger crops and a richer market for Yankee manufacturers.’” (DuBois, p.553)

This pattern of destruction and looting was repeated in other cities in the South including Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate troops sought to burn down the city when the Union Troops arrived with a sizeable regiment of Black soldiers who liberated the city in April 1865.

The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was significant because it included a provision in Section II which declared: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The Radicals in Congress like Charles Sumner believed that this granted the power to enfranchise Africans. It must be kept in mind that at the end of the Civil War many of the southern states were under minority control with appointed military governors. The planters and their allies were adamantly against the granting of suffrage to the former slaves.

This controversy surrounding the interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment would continue with the adoption of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. There have been recent statements from politicians within the so-called Tea Party movement that have questioned the constitutionality of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

DuBois in Black Reconstruction points to this important debate that took place within Congress in 1865. After the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, a Civil Rights Bill was introduced that was met with skepticism and opposition.

DuBois notes that:

“The Civil Rights Bill was taken up on December 13, but Sherman of Ohio reminded the Senate that there was scarcely a state in the Union that did not make distinctions on account of color, and wished, therefore, to postpone action until the Thirteenth Amendment had been adopted. Saulsbury of Maryland called it ‘an insane effort to elevate the African to the dignity of the white race’, and claimed that the Thirteenth Amendment would carry no such power as Sherman assumed.” (DuBois, p. 271)

U.S. History and the Right of Self-Determination of Oppressed Peoples

Two recent political acts that have gained widespread publicity in the corporate media were the proclamation of Southern Heritage Month in the state of Virginia by Gov. Robert McDonell in April 2010 and the subsequent opinion piece by Prof. Henry Louis Gates of Harvard who questioned the legitimacy of the demand for reparations among African Americans in the United States. In previous articles, “Confederate Heritage and Distortion of History” and The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Rise of World Capitalism,” examined issues related to the responsibility for and the continuing social impact of slavery. (See this)

These ideological attacks from the right to full democracy and self-determination for the African American people and other oppressed national groups in the United States are coming at a time of profound economic restructuring and imperialist military expansion around the world. The apartheid bills enacted in Arizona that legalized racial profiling and outlaws ethnic studies, much be viewed within the context of the rapidly shifting demographic composition of the U.S. and the need on the part of the capitalist class to maximize profits amid economic decline.

The Tea Party movement represents such an ideological offensive aimed at dividing and weakening the struggle of the nationally oppressed and the working class as a whole. Yet the mass outpouring on May Day of over one million people who said no to anti-immigrant bigotry and yes to jobs, full-employment and legalizations for all, far outweighs the efforts of racists and chauvinists elements backed by the capitalist class. The burgeoning unity of African Americans, Latino/as, Arab Americans, Asians and other oppressed groups will be a key element in building the people’s movement that is needed to abolish capitalism and imperialism.

Major historical events of the 19th century: the large-scale removal of the Native people, the Mexican-American War and the Civil War that abolished African slavery, still remain unresolved today. The Native people of Arizona have spoken out forcefully against the apartheid laws now being imposed that target the Mexican people whose land was stolen at the same time that Africans were being enslaved inside the United States.

In 2010, the current economic crisis has most profoundly affected the African American and Latino/as people. A recent study conducted by the Center for Responsible Lending indicates that Latino/as and African Americans have the highest foreclosure rates in the country. Both groups also have the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. labor market.

Compounding these economic realities, African American and Latino/as are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system with incarceration rates that far outstrip their numbers within the general population. These rates of imprisonment are directly linked to racial profiling by law-enforcement and homeland security, which the passage of SB 1070 only reinforces. This is why efforts to pass such legislation in Michigan should be opposed by African Americans, Latino/as and all people of goodwill.

The struggle for genuine democracy and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations are principled questions within the socialist movement. V. I. Lenin, the leader and chief theoretician of the Russian Revolution, wrote his theses on “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” in early 1916 during World War I. Although the Bolshevik Party would not seize power until the following year in 1917, Lenin was adamant that both the struggle for full democracy and self-determination for oppressed nations were equally indispensable in the program of the revolutionary vanguard party.

Lenin said during this period:

“The socialist revolution is not a single act, it is not one battle on one front, but a whole epoch of acute class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., on all questions of economics and politics, battles that can only end in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a radical mistake to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practice full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-around, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.” (Lenin, Selected Writings on National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism, p. 111)

Lenin then goes on to state as well:

“It would be no less a mistake to remove one of the points of the democratic program, for example, the point on the self-determination of nations, on the grounds of it being ‘impracticable’ or ‘illusory’ under imperialism…. (Lenin, p. 111) Increased national oppression under imperialism does not mean that Social-Democracy should reject what the bourgeoisie call the ‘utopian’ struggle for the freedom of nations to secede but, on the contrary, it should make greater use of the conflicts that arise in this sphere, too, as grounds for mass action and for revolutionary attacks on the bourgeoisie.” (Lenin, p. 113)

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

Since 2011, the US and allies have promoted, trained and supplied militants trying to bring about “regime change” in Damascus. Having failed in that effort, they have tried to strangle Syria economically. The goal has always been the same: to force Syria to change politically. This month, June 2020, the aggression reaches a new level with extreme sanctions known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act.

The new law is fraudulent on two counts. It is called “Caesar” in reference to a 2014 propaganda stunt involving an anonymous Syrian who was alleged to be a military photographer. He claimed to have 55,000 photos showing about eleven thousand victims of Syrian government torture. As the Christian Science Monitor said at the time, the “Caesar” report was “A well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar.”  A 30 page analysis later confirmed that the “Caesar” report was a fraud with nearly half the photos showing the OPPOSITE of what was claimed: they documented dead Syrian soldiers and civilian victims of “rebel” car bombs and attacks.

The Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act is also fraudulent by claiming to “protect civilians”. In reality, it is punishes and hurts the vast majority of  17 million persons living in Syria. It will result in thousands of civilians suffering and dying needlessly.

Pre-Existing Sanctions

The US has been hostile to Syria for many decades. Unlike Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Syria under Hafez al Assad refused to make a peace treaty with Israel.  Syria was designated a “state sponsor of terrorism” and first sanctioned by the U.S. in 1979.

After the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, Syria accepted about one million Iraqi refugees and supported the Iraqi resistance in various ways.  In retaliation, the US escalated punishing sanctions in 2004.

In 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressured Syria to change their foreign policy and be more friendly to Israel. Syrian President Bashar al Assad pointedly declined.  Twelve months later, when protests and violence began in Syria in 2011, the US,  Europe and Gulf monarchies (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) quickly supported the opposition and imposed more sanctions.

In 2016, after five years of crisis and war, a report on the humanitarian impact of sanctions on Syria was prepared for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. It noted that “U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Syria are some of the most complicated and far-reaching sanctions regimes ever imposed.” The 30 page report went on document with case studies how humanitarian aid which is supposed to be permitted is effectively stopped. The sanction regulations, licenses, and penalties  make it so difficult and risky that humanitarian aid is effectively prevented. The report concluded with thirteen specific recommendations to allow humanitarian and development aid.

But there was not relaxation or changes in the maze of rules and sanctions to allow humanitarian relief.  On the contrary,  as the Syrian government was expelling terrorists from east Aleppo, southern  Damascus, and Deir Ezzor,  the US and EU  blocked all aid for reconstruction.  The US and allies were intent to NOT allow Syria to rebuild and reconstruct.

In 2018, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Idriss Jazairy, prepared a report on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights in Syria. He noted,

“Unilateral  coercive measures on agricultural inputs and outputs, medicines, on many dual use items related to water and sanitation, public electricity and transportation, and eventually on rebuilding schools, hospitals and other public buildings and services, are increasingly difficult to justify, if they ever were justifiable.” 

Before 2011, 90% of pharmaceutical needs were filled by Syrian factories.  Those factories which remain have trouble getting raw materials and cannot get replacement parts for equipment. For example an expensive dialysis machine or MRI machine from Siemens or General Electric is rendered useless because Syria cannot import the spare part of software. On paper, they can purchase this but in reality they cannot.

Over 500,000 civilians returned to Aleppo after the terrorists were expelled at end of 2016. But reconstruction aid is prohibited by US sanctions and UN rules.  They can receive “shelter kits” with plastic but rebuilding with glass and cement walls is not allowed because “reconstruction” is prohibited. This article describes numerous case examples from war torn Aleppo.

The author had a personal experience with the impact of sanctions. A Syrian friend could not get hearing aid batteries for a youth who was hard of hearing. Sanctions prevented him from being able to order the item because financial transactions and delivery is prohibited without a special license. A stockpile of the specialized batteries was easy to purchase in the USA but took almost a year to get to the destination in Syria.

US Economic Bullying and Terrorism

The Caesar Act extends the sanctions from applying to US nationals and companies to any individuals and corporations. It claims the supra-national prerogative to apply US laws to anyone. “Sanctions with respect to foreign persons” include blocking and seizing the property and assets of a person or company deemed to have violated the US law. This is compounded by a fiscal penalty which can be huge. In 2014, one of the largest international banks, BNP Paribas, was fined $9 Billion for violating US sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan.

The Caesar Act claims the Syria Central Bank is a “primary money laundering” institution and thus in a special category. It aims to make it impossible for Syrian companies to export and import from Lebanon. It will make it extremely difficult or impossible for Syrians abroad to transfer money to support family members in Syria.

In addition to these extraordinary attacks, the US is undermining and destabilizing the Syrian currency.  In October 2019, the Syrian currency was trading at about 650 Syrian pounds to one US dollar. Now, just 8 months later, the rate is 2600 to the US dollar.  Part of the reason is because of the threat of Caesar sanctions.

Another reason is because of US pressure on the main trading partner,  Lebanon.  Traditionally, Lebanon is the main partner for both imports and exports. In spring 2019 US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, threatened Lebanon if they did not change their policies. It was blatant interference in Lebanese internal affairs. In Fall 2019 street protests began, and the Lebanese and Syrian banking crisis also began.

With the devaluation of their currency, prices of many items has risen dramatically. Agricultural, medical, industrial and other raw materials and finished goods are almost impossible to acquire.

The shortage of  food is compounded because wheat fields in North East Syria, the bread basket of Syria, have been intentionally set on fire.  In the past week, sectarian groups in Lebanon have blocked World Food Program trucks carrying food aid to Syria. Meanwhile, in eastern Syria,  the US and its proxy militia control and profit from the oil fields while the Syrian government and civilians struggle with a severe shortage oil and gas.

James Jeffrey and US Policy

In a June 7 webinar, the Special Representative for Syria Engagement, Ambassador James Jeffrey, brazenly stated the US policy.  The US seeks to prevent Syria from rebuilding. He said “We threw everything but the kitchen sink …. into the Caesar Act.”

The exception to punishing sanctions are 1) Idlib province in the North West, controlled by Al Qaeda extremists and Turkish invading forces and 2) north east Syria controlled by US troops and the proxy separatists known as the “Syrian Democratic Forces”. The US has designated $50 million to support “humanitarian aid” to these areas. Other US allies will pump in hundreds of millions more in aid and “investments”.  US dollars and Turkish lira are being pumped into these areas in another tactic to undermine the Syrian currency and sovereignty.

In contrast, the vast majority of Syrians – about 17 million – are being suffocated and hurt by the extreme sanctions.

The US has multiple goals. One goal is to prevent Syria from recovering. Another goal is to prolong the conflict and damage those countries who have assisted Syria.  With consummate cynicism and amorality, the US Envoy for Syria James Jeffrey described his task: “My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians.” Evidently  there has been no significant change in foreign policy assumptions and goals since the US and Saudi Arabia began interfering in Afghanistan in 1979.

In his 2018 “End of Mission” statement, the United Nations Special Rapporteur was diplomatic but clear about the use of unilateral coercive sanctions against Syria:  “the use of such measures may be contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the UN Charter and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”

Caesar and the Democrats

The economic and other attacks on Syria have been promoted by right wing hawks, especially fervent supporters of Israel. Eliot Engel, chairman of the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, pushed to get the Caesar Act into law for years. This was finally done by embedding it in the humongous 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.

In a hopeful sign that times may be changing,  a progressive candidate named Jamaal Bowman  may unseat Engel as the Democratic candidate in the upcoming election. Eliot Engel is supported by Hillary Clinton and other foreign policy hawks.  Jamaal Bowman is supported by Bernie Sanders.

While this may offer hope for the future, the vast majority of Syrians continue as victims of US foreign policy delusions, hypocrisy, cynicism and cruelty.

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Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at [email protected]

A devastating trend of soaring inequality in the U.S. continues.

In their weekly analysis of wealth data Thursday, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) found that billionaires have seen their combined net worth grow by $584 billion in the three months since the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered much of the U.S. economy and threw more than 45 million people out of work.

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison—the five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—saw their collective riches grow by $101.7 billion between March 18 and June 17, according to the new report. A dozen other American billionaires saw their wealth more than double during that same period.

Frank Clemente, ATF executive director, said in a statement that over the past three months, “about 600 billionaires increased their wealth by far more than the nation’s governors say their states need in fiscal assistance to keep delivering services to 330 million residents.”

“Their wealth increased twice as much as the federal government paid out in one-time checks to more than 150 million Americans,” said Clemente. “This orgy of wealth shows how fundamentally flawed our economic system is.”

“If this pandemic reveals anything,” Clemente added, “it’s how unequal our society has become and how drastically it must change.”

IPS, a progressive think-tank, has been publishing annual analyses of billionaire wealth increases since 2015. But in May, IPS began releasing weekly reports documenting the steady surge in billionaire wealth amid the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic collapse—a phenomenon the group dubbed “pandemic profiteering.”

Since March 18, when social distancing measures and economic shutdowns were in place across the U.S., the combined wealth of America’s billionaires has grown from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, the latest report by IPS and ATF found.

“During the same approximate three-month period, nearly 2.1 million Americans fell ill with the virus and about 118,000 died from it,” the report notes. “Among other pandemic victims are 27 million Americans who may lose their employer-provided healthcare coverage. Low-wage workers, people of color, and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises.”

Chuck Collins, executive director of the IPS Program on Inequality, said in a statement that “the last thing U.S. society needs is more economic and racial polarization.”

“The surge in billionaire wealth and pandemic profiteering undermines the unity and solidarity that the American people will require to recover and grow together, not pull further apart,” said Collins.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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A newly-released 2017 internal review of security practices at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirms that the top secret agency had developed an arsenal of cyber espionage tools and would not have known about the massive “Vault 7” data hack of them had WikiLeaks not made it public.

Vault 7 is the name given to a trove of hacked documents from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) that were anonymously shared with WikiLeaks, which the online site began publishing information about on March 7, 2017. The hack obtained nearly the entire arsenal of espionage tools and the methods by which the CIA was conducting illegal electronic surveillance and cyber warfare around the world.

The internal report says that the CIA could not determine the precise scope of the data breach, “We assess that in spring 2016 a CIA employee stole at least 180 gigabytes to as much as 34 terabytes of information. This is roughly equivalent to 11.6 million to 2.2 billion pages in Microsoft Word.” It was the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the history of the CIA.

Significantly, the heavily redacted and partially released, “WikiLeaks Task Force Final Report” from October 17, 2017 says, “Because the stolen data resided on a mission system that lacked user activity monitoring and a robust server audit capability, we did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017. Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss—as would be true for the vast majority of data on Agency mission systems.”

The CIA report also says that WikiLeaks published primarily “user and training guides” from a collaboration and communication platform called Confluence along with “limited source code” from a repository called DevLan: Stash and that “All of the documents reveal, to varying degrees, CIA’s tradecraft in cyber operations.”

The task force report was initially provided to the Washington Post on Tuesday by the office of Democratic Party Senator from Oregon Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who obtained the incomplete document—pages 15 through 44 have been removed—from the Justice Department.

The same limited version of the report had been introduced as evidence in the trial of Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee who worked at CCI and has been accused of stealing the Vault 7 documents and handing them over to WikiLeaks. Schulte pled not guilty to eleven charges covered by the US Espionage Act and went to trial in early February.

The federal case ended in a hung jury in early March on the most serious eight charges against Schulte and convicted him only on the lesser charges of contempt of court and making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As the World Socialist Web Site explained at the time, the failure to convict Schulte of leaking the Vault 7 trove created a stumbling block for the US government in its attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, who is currently being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison in violation of his rights.

The mistrial in the case of Schulte has so far prevented the US from adding anything about the Vault 7 breach into the already trumped up US charges against Assange. However, Assistant US Attorney David Denton told a judge in the Southern District of New York on May 18 that the Department of Justice “does intend to retry Mr. Schulte on the espionage charges.”

The Vault 7 release by WikiLeaks exposed the CIA’s use of special software to take control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers, smartphones and personal computers for the purpose of spying on individuals and organizations. The exposure of the CIA’s cyber espionage and warfare repository yielded extensive information about these programs by their code names and what function they perform.

An example is a malware tool called Athena which was developed in conjunction with the release of Microsoft Windows operating system 10 in 2015. The Athena malware, which was jointly developed by the CIA and a New Hampshire software company called Siege Technologies, hijacks the Windows Remote Access services utility on Windows 10 computers, enabling an unauthorized user to gain access to the PC and steal and delete private data or install additional malicious software.

Another tool developed by the CIA called Scribbles is designed to track whistleblowers and journalists by embedding “web beacon” tags into classified documents in order to trace who leaked them. This tool was designed to interact with Microsoft Office documents whereby when any CIA watermarked document is opened, an invisible document hosted on the agency’s server is loaded into it, generating an HTTP request that gathers information about who is opening the file and where it is being opened.

It has been estimated that training and user information as well as the source code for as many as 91 such CIA tools were released in the Vault 7 breach.

The majority of corporate media coverage of the newly released document has focused on the vulnerability of the CIA servers and what the agency intends to do about it, the purpose of the Senate Intelligence Committee attempt to make the report public in the first place, to the exclusion of any mention of the tools that were being developed and the blatantly criminal activity of the CIA associated with them.

They have also not drawn attention to the fact that the CIA had, until the Schulte trial and release of the redacted review document, refused to officially acknowledge the existence of the cyber espionage and warfare tools. At the time of the WikiLeaks Vault 7 revelations, when asked about the authenticity of the trove, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, replied that the organization does “not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

The only other government official to mention the enormous hack of the CIA was President Donald Trump, who, on March 15, 2017, stated during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken.” In typical fashion, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, then the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a news release the next day that said, “In his effort to once again blame Obama, the President appeared to have discussed something that, if true and accurate, would otherwise be considered classified information.”

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Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology. She has been a freelance medical writer and journalist for twenty-two years, and is now an independent investigative journalist.

In the following interview with James Corbett, she explains that at the beginning of the declared pandemic in the UK, the “sniffles” were deemed sufficient to warrant a Covid diagnosis.

In Canada, the “sniffles and a cough” were sufficient.

Furthermore, if one person with one symptom was deemed to have Covid in a Long Term Care facility, then everyone in the facility (with similar symptomatology) was deemed to have it as well. These “broadened definitions” she argues, necessarily inflated “Covid” numbers.

Triage guidelines also changed. People in Long Term Care are not sent to the hospitals, which, presumably, are better equipped to deal with emergencies. This, too, would likely inflate “Covid” numbers, by reducing patient longevity.

Governing agencies also changed rules regarding Death Certificates and the removal and disposition of bodies.

Bodies are removed quickly, and this narrows the window for performing post mortems, since post mortems should be performed “in situ”. Death Certificates are now signed by Ontario’s Chief Coroner, Dr. Huyer, and not by an attending doctor or nurse practitioner familiar with the patient, which would normally be the case. Significantly, Dr. Dirk Huyer is now in charge of the expanding Covid-testing program in Ontario.

Frei suggests that drivers behind “pandemic guidelines”, and subsequent “excess deaths” include financial considerations. Older people are “expensive” and they contribute less to the tax base.

Corbett sees something else. Inflated Covid numbers “magnify the crisis” he says, and create a reservoir of people who will “line up” more readily for a vaccine.

This writer sees a governmental crime that needs to be investigated.

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Police Lessons from Cuba

June 22nd, 2020 by Reese Erlich

A group of muscular cops carrying semi-automatic pistols and batons slowly move through the crowd at the end of an outdoor salsa concert. My friends and I have a bottle of rum, and I think for sure the cops will confiscate it, and maybe even arrest us.

Instead, the cops motion for us to drink up, and we quickly comply. They confiscate the glass bottle so it can’t be broken and used as a weapon.

This incident took place in Havana some years ago, and it tells a lot about what constitutes good policing. The cops were interested in preventing crime, not compounding it.

Contrary to the image of brutal and “repressive communists”, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States.

Police live in the cities they patrol. They generally treat citizens with respect. As I documented in my book Dateline Havana, police beatings of criminals are rare and police murders are nonexistent. Cuba has one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.

The ongoing protests for Black lives in the United States have forced an unprecedented national debate about the role of policing. Should police departments be defunded and that money be diverted to help poor communities? Should the police be abolished altogether?

Cuba has wrestled with policing issues since the 1959 revolution. The government, while certainly having its share of failures, has created a system of community-police interaction that reduces crime without reliance on brute force.

Crime fighting in Cuba begins with a social safety net, which provides every Cuban with free education, free health care, and subsidized cultural events. Cuba doesn’t suffer from the scourges of homelessness and cartel-instigated drug addiction, despite traffickers’ regular attempts to smuggle drugs into Cuba from Florida.

The socialist economy means Cuba doesn’t have extremes of wealth and poverty. I’ve visited the homes of high-ranking government officials who live in middle-income neighborhoods. I have met police officers who lived in a modest apartment complex in the same neighborhood they patrolled.

Cuba uses community pressure to discourage crime. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) were originally set up in the early 1960s to root out U.S.-backed counter revolutionaries. Nowadays, the CDRs promote public health and act as neighborhood watch groups.

Humberto Carillo Ramirez, a national CDR leader, told me in a radio documentary that local residents often know who the criminals are.

“If a family isn’t sending their kids to school or if a young person isn’t working and is getting into trouble . . . we meet with them,” he says. “We live on [their] block . . . We explain why it’s bad for the country and we also explain the severe legal consequences for them.”

When residents are convicted of crimes, CDR members visit them in jail.

“We want to . . . reincorporate them in society after they get out,” Carillo says.

In the early 1990s. Cuba faced a massive economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and intensified by U.S. efforts to overthrow the government. Cubans faced severe shortages of gasoline, food, and electricity. Starting in 1996, the nation saw a sharp increase in home burglaries and street assaults; there was even an attempted armored car robbery.

By U.S. standards, crime in Cuba remained light, but it was more than Cubans were willing to accept. In 1999, the government passed a law that doubled some prison sentences. Judges also allowed fewer prisoners out on parole. Police were stationed on every corner in the tourist areas. The crackdown resulted in a 20 percent drop in crime, Supreme Court Justice Jorge Bodes Torres told me in an interview at the time.

He attributes the success to “law and order” measures and community organizing. “The majority of people are involved in fighting crime,” he says. “That’s the most important factor.”

Cuban political dissidents sharply disagree. They claim that police routinely beat and imprison government opponents. However, as I’ve documented, many of these dissidents are funded by Washington and regularly spread fake news, so their claims of systematic brutality lack credibility.

Some Cubans do have legitimate complaints. I’ve interviewed dozens of young Afro-Cuban men who have been stopped and questioned by police because they are Black.

Pablo Michel, a young Afro Cuban, tells me he was detained by police several times in the tourist areas of Havana. On one occasion, he drove two white women tourists to the Havana airport. Police stopped and questioned Michel, suspecting he was running an illegal taxi service. He says white Cubans taking foreigners to the airport “don’t have the same problems.”

Michel and others I interviewed say that police don’t conduct violent searches, and they don’t beat or shoot suspects. Nevertheless, too many police stereotype dark-skinned Cubans as thieves and hustlers, he says.

Late last year, the Cuban government announced a major anti-racism campaign. Officials plan to identify specific areas of discrimination, initiate a public debate, and educate the public.

“This is a real step forward, after we have fought for so many years,” Deyni Terri, founder of the Racial Unity Alliance in Havana, told Reuters last November. “It’s a good start.”

Obviously, institutions developed in Cuba can’t simply be transferred wholesale to the United States. But we can learn from the concept of community involvement, says Max Rameau, an organizer with the Washington, D.C.-based grassroots group Pan-African Community Action, who has studied Cuban police practices.

“We need different community entities for different tasks that are responsible for safety and wellbeing of the neighborhood,” he tells me in a phone interview. For instance, U.S. community groups can resolve mental health issues and family disputes without involving police.

But Rameau does not support getting rid of police altogether.

If a white supremacist attacks a Black church, as happened in South Carolina in 2015, he says,

“We want to make sure our community safety team can respond. In any society with different classes, you will have police. But we should have control over them.”

The U.S. debate about policing has shifted distinctly leftward. After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, politicians called for police to wear body cameras. Today, after the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis City Council has voted to dismantle the police force, although it’s still hashing out the specifics.

Anti-police-brutality groups have developed a variety of plans to decentralize police departments into community forces, governed by civilian boards.

For the first time in recent history, people of all backgrounds in the United States are seriously discussing how to fundamentally change the police forces. Cuba’s experiences should be part of that discussion.

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Reese Erlich’s nationally distributed column, Foreign Correspondent, appears every two weeks. Follow him on  Twitter, @ReeseErlich; friend him on Facebook; and visit his webpage.

Featured image: Brutal: A Minnesota police officer sprays protesters with pepper spray at the weekend (Source: Morning Star)

John Bolton, the Room Where It Happened

June 22nd, 2020 by Dr. Ludwig Watzal

The title of John Bolton‘s revenge insinuates highly explosive internal affairs by a guy who’s, besides the Chief of Staff, the most important person besides the President in the White House. John Bolton was President Donald Trump’s Adviser for National Security from 8 April 2018 until 10 September 2019, where Trump fired him. The question arises why Trump took Bolton in the first place.

When President-elect Donald Trump was in the process of forming his team, John Bolton also begged for a job. The reason why Trump didn’t want him was his Stalin-like mustache. There would have been a better reason why Trump should have dismissed Bolton. Everybody in Washington D. C. knew what kind of hawk Bolton was. Bolton stands for military strength and war to get America’s will.

Ideally, the National Security adviser serves as a go-between and honest broker of various policy options on national security for the President. Bolton, however, was an advocate of his political agenda. Several times, he thwarted and sabotaged Trump’s policy. Bolton derailed Trump’s rapprochement towards the North Korean Chairman Kim Yong-un by saying the “Libyan model” can be applied to North Korea, too. He opted for regime change in Venezuela. And together with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, he was for war with Iran.

What Iran was concerned about, Bolton was much closer to Netanyahu than his boss, who talks big but doesn’t want war, unlike his predecessors. In the Syrian case, Bolton, together with military hawks torpedoed Trump withdrawal from Syria, again with the support of Netanyahu. It seemed Bolton was more concerned about the security of Israel than of the United States of America.

Why Bolton got the job anyway, were his very close ties to the pro-Israel lobby, especially Sheldon Adelson, Casino magnate and Billionaire from Las Vegas. Adelson would not negotiate with Teheran but would threaten them with an atomic bomb.[1] Adelson donated over 20 Billion to the Trump campaign and bribed Bolton into the White House, according to Washington insiders.

Bolton presents a chaotic President who embraces America’s enemies and spurns friends and was deeply suspicious of his government. According to Bolton, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment. As a result, the US lost an opportunity to confront its deepening threats, and in cases like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea ended up in a more vulnerable place, writes Bolton.

Excerpts from the book were leaked to the press to boost the number of sales. Bolton pretends that Trump is easily influenced by foreign leaders, especially strongmen and presumed dictators. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, rebuked this claim by saying that Putin can’t play Trump “like a fiddle” and that the US President can’t be manipulated.

According to Bolton, Trump asked China’s President Xi Jinping to help his re-election chances by buying more American soybeans and wheat. Trump supposedly agreed to the establishment of concentration camps for Muslim minorities. In the bilateral discussion between the two leaders, only interpreters were present. So much for “The Room where it happened.”

The question arises why didn’t Bolton testified in the impeachment hearings and later criticized the Democrats for getting the impeachment wrong? Before the Senate, Bolton could have said that Trump is unfit for the job. But now, after he got fired, throwing dirt at Trump contradicts all rules of fairness.

The Trump administration wants to prevent the publication of the book due to national security reasons. Besides the legal battle, Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, hit out against Bolton. Pompeo called him a “traitor.” “I’ve not read the book, but from the excerpts I’ve seen published, John Bolton is spreading several lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods.” Pompeo’s reacted immediately because Bolton quotes Pompeo, had scribbled on a piece of paper that Trump “is full of shit.” Trump called Bolton a “washed-up guy” who broke the law.

The White House staff gave the book the go-ahead after having checked it of sensitive national security concerns. Perhaps Bolton thinks he can prevent Trump from winning a second term, but whether a book will make such a difference is somewhat questionable. As it seems, the book contains a lot of lies and many state secrets. The judge has to decide between the First Amendment and state secrets.

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Dr. Ludwig Watzal is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc

Featured image: U.S. National Security Advisor, Ambassador John Bolton meets The Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu for dinner at the Prime Minister’s Residence, in Jerusalem, August 2018. (U.S. Embassy/public domain)

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Massive Uprisings Confront White Supremacy

June 22nd, 2020 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

That’s not a chip on my shoulder.
That’s your foot on my neck.
– Malcolm X

On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer tortured George Floyd to death in what his brother, Philonise Floyd, called “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.” Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in all 50 states and Washington D.C.; the anti-racist uprisings continue.

Why do a majority of people in this country now support the Movement for Black Lives? Why have calls to defund and abolish the police entered the mainstream discourse? Why are people risking the deadly coronavirus to join the protests? And why are we seeing what may be the broadest popular movement in the history of the United States?

More than 400 years after the first Africans were kidnapped, forcibly brought to this country and enslaved, White supremacy continues to infect our society. Police murder Black people with impunity. Black people are incarcerated at an unprecedented rate. And White fragility keeps us in denial about our White skin privilege.

In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that racism must be exposed. He wrote,

“Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

When the shocking image of Officer Derek Chauvin choking the life out of Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds confronted us, we were forced to take sides. People of all races and ages were collectively enraged.

“People are marching as a way of screaming, a way of exhaling pain, as an enormous group catharsis,” Charles Blow wrote in The New York Times. “This isn’t only about the pain of police brutality, it’s about all the pain. This is about all the injustice and disrespect and oppression. This is about ancestry and progeny.”

The powerful video of Floyd’s lynching is reminiscent of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement. Televised images from Little Rock in 1957 “were so forceful that they told their own truths and needed virtually no narration,” David Halberstam wrote in The Fifties. “It was hard for people watching at home not to take sides: There they were, sitting in their living rooms in front of their own television sets watching orderly black children behaving with great dignity, trying to obtain nothing more than a decent education, the most elemental of American birthrights, yet being assaulted by a vicious mob of poor whites.”

Although white supremacy continues to permeate our society, Donald Trump has unleashed the dogs of racism in a frightening way. An early promoter of the Birther movement, Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. When he said there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, one side was the White supremacists.

In the face of massive protests throughout the country, Trump announced on June 1 that he had ordered federal troops to Washington, D.C., “to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.” This is evidence of what Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Operation Jackson, calls Trump’s “Brown Shirt Force.” In a reference that evokes Bull Connor’s 1963 threats against peaceful civil rights protesters with snarling dogs, Trump tweeted he would use “vicious dogs” against protesters who tried to breach the fence in front of the White House. “Negro Dogs” were used to catch runaway slaves and escaped prisoners during Jim Crow.

White supremacy is rooted in the belief that Black people are inferior to White people. In 1900, Charles Carroll, a polygenist minister in Missouri, wrote a rant opposing miscegenation called The Negro, a Beast; or, “In the Image of God.” In it, he portrays “The Negro, a beast, but created with articulate speech and hands, that he may be of service to his owner – the White Man.”

As revealed in my cousin Erika Cohn’s new documentary, Belly of the Beast, many people, particularly women of color, in California women’s prisons have been forcibly sterilized. Nineteen-year-old Kelli Dillon began her 15-year sentence for killing her husband who was trying to kill her. While undergoing a routine procedure, Dillon was sterilized against her will. During the 20th century, over 30 U.S. states passed laws allowing forced sterilization. After World War II, compulsory sterilizations primarily targeted non-white women. From 1909-1979, California forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 people, many labeled “defectives,” including people of color.

The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865, is widely regarded as abolishing slavery. It reads,

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added].

But Professor Dylan Rodriguez, writing in the Harvard Law Review, describes “the Thirteenth Amendment’s juridical translation of slavery from a racial chattel institution to a criminal justice function.” The amendment “in fact refurbished a fundamental (racial) power relation mediated by the racist state by recodifying the terms of bodily capture and subjection (that is, enslavement by a state).” We have what Rodriguez calls the “carceral-racial state.”

We Charge Genocide (WCG), the grassroots organization based in Chicago, disagrees with the notion that “police brutality” is exceptional rather than part and parcel of systemic racism suffered by Black and Brown people. WCG decries “systemic, institutionalized, juridically condoned police torture, cruelty, inhumane and degrading treatment, murder, harassment, and unjustified detention,” Rodriguez writes.

Floyd’s murder galvanized calls for reforms such as banning chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and the use of military weapons against protesters; ending qualified immunity for officers charged with using excessive force; mandating body-worn cameras, and the creation of a federal database of abusive officers.

In 2015, six cities including Minneapolis were part of Barack Obama’s Justice Department’s new form of policing program. But police brutality today is as brutal as ever.

Maria Nieto Senour resigned after serving for four years on the San Diego Community Review Board on Police Practices. “Unfortunately, there are members of the CRB who had such a pro-police bias that they did not represent the broader community,” she told Jurist. The board was provided with “a great deal of information from the police perspective and relatively little from the perspective of marginalized communities.” Senour said that much of what the police do “would be better done by mental health and/or social workers so funding should be shifted away from police budgets and assigned to other functions.”

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) supports 8 to Abolition’s demands to defund the police, demilitarize communities, remove police from schools, free people from prisons and jails, repeal laws that criminalize survival, invest in community self-governance, provide safe housing for everyone, and invest in care, not cops. The NLG also supports reparations for slavery and discrimination against Africans and African descendants.

Rodriguez calls abolition “a fundamentally creative force” in one of “those rare historical moments when definitive destruction of oppressive structures and power relations appears possible, practical, and capable of catalyzing a (potentially) radically different social form.” He advocates “a radical reconfiguration of justice.”

This transformational moment is becoming a transformational movement. The time to effect revolutionary change is now.

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This article was originally published on Jurist.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is by BruceEmmerling / Pixabay

Malcolm X Speech in Los Angeles on May 22, 1962

On April 27th 1962, two LAPD police officers instructed to closely monitor a mosque’s activities (Muslim Temple 27 in Los Angeles) saw Black men taking clothes out of the back of a car outside the mosque. They approached aggressively and soon got violent, and as Malcolm X puts it, “hell broke loose”. The situation ended with seven unarmed Black Muslims shot outside the mosque. Nation of Islam (NOI) member William X Rogers was shot in the back and paralyzed for life. Temple Secretary Ronald X Stokes, 29, was killed. “They’re going to pay for it”, Malcolm X declared, going to Los Angeles to eulogize Stokes at a funeral attended by 2,000 people.

Despite an autopsy that established Stokes was shot at close range and had been stomped, kicked and bludgeoned while dead or dying, an all-White coroner’s jury deliberating the Stokes’ killing, took 23 minutes to conclude it “justifiable homicide.” By contrast, 14 NOI members were indicted for assault in the incident and 11 were found guilty. Elijah Muhammad’s reluctance to aggressively retaliate to Stokes’ death and refusal to work with civil rights organizations, local Black politicians and religious groups, would be the first of a series of events, causing irreparable rifts between The Honorable Malcolm X and the so-called ‘Messenger of Allah’ Elijah Muhammad. And lead to his eventual departure from the Nation of Islam and embrace of traditional, Sunni Islam.

Full transcript below.

In the name of Allah,  the beneficent, the merciful to whom all praise is due, whom we forever thank for giving us the honorable Elijah Mohammad as our leader, teacher, and guide. And I specifically, ladies and gentleman, and brothers and sisters, open up like that because I  am a representative of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And were it not for him, you and I wouldn’t be here today.

In order for you and me to devise some kind of method or strategy to offset some of the events or the repetition of the events that have taken place here in Los Angeles recently, we have to go to the root. We have to go to the cause. Dealing with the condition itself is not enough. We have to get to the cause of it all. (crowd concurs) Or the root of it all. And it is because of our effort toward getting straight to the root that people oft times think  we’re dealing in hate.

But first I would like to congratulate and give praise to the Negro, so-called Negro leaders and so-called Negro organizations and, excuse me if I say so-called, it’s hard for me to just outright say Negro when I know what that word Negro really means. (thunderous applause)

The person whom you have come to know as Ronald Stokes, we know him as Brother Ron – one of the most religious persons to display the highest form of morals of any Black person  anywhere on this Earth. And as one of the previous speakers pointed out, who knew him, everyone who knew him had to give him credit for being a good man. A clean man, an intelligent man, and an innocent man when he was murdered.

d82cd329a75ef25a3c3d32f1cb5c14bdRonald Stokes

The Negro, so-called Negro, organizations and leaders should be given great credit for their failure or refusal to let the White man divide them and use them, one against the other, during this crisis. (thunderous applause) As Reverend [Walkard] Wilson pointed out, I think it was eight years ago today that the Supreme Court handed down the desegregation decision. And despite the fact that eight years have gone past, that decision hasn’t been implemented yet. (applause from audience)

I don’t have that much faith. I don’t have that much confidence. I don’t have that much patience. And I don’t have that much ignorance to… (thunderous applause) If the Supreme Court, which is the highest lawmaking body in the country, can pass a decision that can’t get even eight percent compliance within eight years, because it’s for Black people, then my patience has run out. (applause)

When Black people who are being oppressed become impatient, they say that’s emotional. (murmuring) Please… When Black people who are being deprived of their citizenship… not only of their civil rights, but their human rights, become impatient, become fed up, don’t wanna wait any longer, then they say that’s emotional. (laughter and applause)

The Negro, so-called Negro, leaders and organizations should be praised. They should be congratulated. They should be complimented because out of all of them combined, the White man has not yet found one who will play the role of Uncle Tom. (thunderous applause) But yet he has found no Tom, no puppet, no parrot, who is still dumb enough in 1962 to represent the injustices that he is inflicting against our people. (applause)

We don’t care what your religion is. We don’t care what organization you belong to. We don’t care how far in school you went or didn’t go. We don’t care what kind of job you have. We have to give you credit for shocking the White man by not letting him divide you  and use you one against the other. (applause)

In the past, the greatest weapon the White man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. As Jackie Robinson pointed out beautifully on the television last night, 4/5 of the world isn’t White. Isn’t that what Jackie said? (applause) And if 4/5 of the world is dark, how is it possible for 1/5 to rule, oppress, exploit, dominate, and brutalize the 4/5 who are in the majority? How did they do it? Divide and conquer.

If I take my hand and slap you, you don’t even feel it. It might sting you, because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together (and punch you). (applause) This is what the White man has done to you and me. He has divided us, and used us one against the other. But today, thanks to Allah… You can say thanks to God, or thanks to Jesus, or thanks to Jehovah – whatever you want. (applause) But as a follower of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, we have been taught to say thanks to Allah. And that’s what Jesus said. Jesus called on Allah. He said, “Allah! Allah! Allah [Inaudible]” I believe what’s good for Jesus is good for you. If Allah was good enough for Jesus to call upon, I think He should be good enough for you to call upon. (man: That’s right!)

Since the so-called Negro community has shocked the White man by resisting all efforts to divide us, I think that you and I should continue to shock him by singing and working together in unity. Despite religious, political, economic, or educational, or social differences, let us remember that we are not brutalized because we’re Baptists. We’re not brutalized  because we’re Methodists. We’re not brutalized because we’re Muslims. We’re not brutalized because we’re Catholics. We’re brutalized because because we are Black people in America. (applause)

Here your mother is being raped, and you’re not supposed to be emotional. Your women – please – your woman can’t walk the street without some cracker putting his hands on her, and you’re not supposed to be emotional! (applause) If you say that you’re fed up, if you teach the Negro… (film skips)

They don’t even know their own name (woman: That’s right!) Why? Because he took took it away from her. Please, please. 20 million Black people don’t even know their own language. Why? Because he took it away from us. 20 million Black people who don’t even know the history of their ancestors. Why? Because he took it away from us! And if you try and tell them how thoroughly and completely they’ve been robbed, he says you’re teaching hate. (applause) That’s something to think about.(murmuring)

Today we’re coming out of college, you’re coming out of the leading universities. You’re trying to go in a good direction. But you don’t know which direction to go in. And if somebody tries to take you right to the root of your problem they say that that man’s a hate teacher. If I ask why should the Senators in Washington… and, then again, if we tell you that Negroes are being hung on the tree, or being shot down illegally, unjustly… and those Negroes should do something to protect themselves, you say you’re advocating violence.

The White man is tricking you! He’s trapping you. He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in South Vietnam. (applause) Please, please, please! He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in Berlin. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, he didn’t say get non-violent. He said, “Praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition.” (applause) But when someone attacks you, when someone comes at you with a club, when someone comes you with a rope, when someone comes at you with a gun, despite the fact that you’ve done nothing he tells you, “Suffer peacefully.” (murmuring) “Pray for those who use you to spite me.” “Be long suffering.” And how long can you suffer after suffering for 400 years? (applause)

So I just wanna play up that little point right there because he said that we play on your emotions. And when you turn on your television tonight, or your radio, or read the newspaper, they’re gonna tell you in that paper that I was playing on your emotions. Imagine you, a second class citizen. That’s not getting emotional! It’s getting intelligent.

And as far as your mayor is concerned, I see… (I) should say their mayor. A man named Yorty, who has been slandering the Muslims, a professional liar… a professional liar. (applause) Who has mastered the art of using half truths. Put in the paper that they break into our religious place of worship and got records that they can use to prove that most of us have criminal records. You can’t be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record. (thunderous applause) Martin Luther King has been to jail. (applause) Please. James Farmer has been to jail. Why, you can’t name a Black man in this country who was sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail. Charged him with being seditious.

They put Moses in jail! (woman: Yeah!) They put Daniel in jail. (woman: Yeah!) Why, you haven’t got a man of God in the Bible that wasn’t put to jail when they started speaking up against  exploitation and oppression. (applause) They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn’t they do that? (crowd concurs) They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating  because he told his disciples, “Go not the way of the gentiles, but rather go to the lost sheep.” He discriminated! Don’t go near the gentiles, go to the lost sheep. Go to the oppressed. Go the downtrodden. Go to the exploited. Go the people who don’t know who they are, who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people! Go to the slaves. Go the second class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar’s brutality.

And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn’t be going to the White man. The White man is the oppressor! He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly. He would be going to the rejected and the despised. He would be going to the so-called American Negro. (applause)

To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace. I formally was a criminal. I formally was in prison. I’m not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head. And he’s using the wrong stick! I don’t feel that stick. (laughter and applause) I went to a prison because I believed in men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison because I  trusted men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison following the philosophy of men like Sam Yorty. But since I’ve been following the honorable Elijah Muhammad, I have been reformed  and that’s more… Please… That’s more than Sam Yorty and Chief Parker and all these other White politicians that have been able to do with the inmates in the prisons of this State. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit for reforming and rehabilitating men whom they have failed to reform and rehabilitate.(thunderous applause)

Mayor Yorty went forward to some press report that Mr. Muhammad had once been found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He failed to explain, purposely, that in 1934, the honorable Elijah Muhammad refused to send his children to White schools in Detroit, Michigan, that were teaching you about Little Black Sambo. That’s the minor that he contributed to the delinquency of. You see this vicious, fork-tongue  White man has been able to take lies and make you turn against those who want to help you and make others turn against you. This is the contributing to the delinquency of a minor that this mayor, or a man who calls himself mayor, is talking about.

Helen Bannerman - Little Black Sambo (1965, Vinyl) | Discogs

In the same article he said that the Muslims are the same people who rioted in the United Nations. Someone should pull his coat and let him know that at the present moment there’s six million dollars worth of suits [inaudible] levelled against two of New York’s leading newspapers  for making a mistake of charging the Muslims as being involved in those United Nations riots. We were not involved! And if this fork-tongued man who calls himself your mayor had taken the time to find that out, he wouldn’t be walking into the trap that he’s letting his ignorance lead him into!(applause) And if you take the time to read the Washington Post that came out the Sunday after that incident took place, the Washington Post pointed out on the front page that the Muslims had nothing to do with the UN riots and they quoted, in saying so, the person who was at that time the Commissioner of Police in New York City. See, it’s lies that the White man has spread about the Muslims to try and make you afraid of the Muslims, or to try and make you think that the Muslims were a criminal element, an uncouth element in things that you have not liked to be associated with.

Also, they say that… I’m just clearing these things up and then we’re going to get into what happened. They also say that the honorable Elijah Muhammad was draft dodger. No, he wasn’t. He just refused to go to the army because he was a man of peace. He was a minister of a religion of peace. He was teaching peace. So he outright refused to go to the army. That’s not draft dodging. That’s intelligence. (cheering)

Here, before the grand jury, because the coroner’s jury is stacked against Negros. (cheers and applause) The Grand Jury is stacked against Negros. The press, the radio, the television and the newspapers are stacked against Negros. (crowd concurs) But, please, the Los Angeles Police department is stacked against all Negroes, all except those he has appointed to high positions.

The controlled press, the White press inflames the White public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the White public think that 90%, or 99%, of the Negroes in the Negro community are criminals. And once the White public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro  community, exercising Gestapo tactics stopping any Black man who is in this… on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent. Whether he is well dressed or whether he is poorly dressed. Whether he is educated or whether he is dumb. Whether he’s a Christian or whether he’s a Muslim. As long as he is Black and a member of the Negro community, the White public thinks that the White policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights. (applause)

Once the police have convinced the White public that the so-called Negro community is a criminal element, they can go in and question, brutalize, murder, unarmed innocent Negroes and the White public is gullible enough to back them up. This makes the Negro community a police state. This makes the Negro neighborhood a police state. It’s the most heavily patrolled. It has more police in it than any other neighborhood, yet it has more crime in it than any other neighborhood. How can you have more cops and more crime? (laughter) It shows you that the cops must be in cahoots with the criminals. (laughter, applause)

(They hate) the texture of the hair that God… Please… That God gave them so much that they put lye on it.  (laughter) Do you realise… now, you know brother; lye will eat a hole in steel and you know your head is not that hard. (applause) Who taught you… Please. Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the White man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to? So much so that you don’t want to be around each other. You know, before you come asking Mr. Muhammed does he teach hate? You should ask who, yourself, who taught you to hate being what God gave you. (applause)

malcolm x conk

Malcolm X’s ‘conk’ during his delinquent youth, when he was nicknamed ‘Detroit Red’. Here is how he tells it in his Autobiography: « How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair nowlooking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room. I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years. This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are”inferior”-and white people”superior”- that they will even violate and mutilate their God-createdbodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards. »

We teach you to love the hair that God gave you. Here you, way out in the middle of the ocean, can’t swim and you worried about someone that’s in the bathtub and can’t swim. (laughter and applause) We don’t steal. We don’t gamble. We don’t lie, and we don’t cheat. And that also deprives the government of revenue (laughter)because you can’t get into a whiskey bottle without getting past the government seal. You can’t open a deck of cards without getting past the government seal. Hell, the White man makes the whiskey then puts you in jail for getting drunk. (cheering)He sells you the cards and the dice and puts you in jail when he catches you using ’em. So, he’s against us because we fix it where he can’t catch you anymore. We take the dice outta your hands and the cards out of your hands and the whiskey out of your head.

The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Mohammad teaches us to respect our women and to protect our women. And the only time a Muslim really gets real violent is when someone goes to molest his woman. (man: Right!) (applause) We will kill you for our woman. I’m making it plain. Yes. We will kill you for our woman. (applause) We believe that if the White man will do whatever is necessary to see that his woman gets respect and protection then you and I will never be recognised as men until we stand up like men and place the same penalty over the head of anyone who puts his filthy hands in the direction of our women. (thunderous applause)

We respect them, but we want them to respect us. We think that the law should respect the Negro community. The law should protect the Negro community. The law should approach the Negro community with intelligence if it expects the Negro community to react intelligently. So, the honorable Elijah Mohammed teaches us to always avoid anything that smacks of disrespect for the law. And if the police department tells the truth, they will have to admit that they have never had any, uh, experiences with Muslims that have ever been anything other than honorable unless they themselves come at us in a dishonorable way.

There’s no case against the Muslims. It has no case against these brothers whom they shot down. And because it has no case, it’s trying to create a case. It’s trying to manufacture a case. And therefore they set up a grand jury hearing of the case so that they could hear it behind closed doors, and after hearing what we have to say then they’ll… their particular strategy or defense against the actions that they committed on that April the 27th. So, at the advice of our attorneys, we purposefully, the victims, those who have been indicted, or rather those who have been arrested and are out on bond, have purposefully refrained and refused from making any statement whatsoever until after the case appears in court.

And when you hear their story it will be in a public trial. We have already been… had experience with these private hearings behind closed doors. Anything that the White man has to do to the Muslim, he has to do it in the open. He has to do it in public, or he has to put every single one of us behind bars for the rest our our lives. (applause)

When Mayor Yorty called for a government investigation of a religious group that have the highest moral standards of any group in the Negro community, Mayor Yorty was giving you an example of what Hitler did in Nazi Germany when he began to go on the rampage. (applause)

We feel, we have confidence that  the White public and the Black public, if they hear our case, if they hear and have access to the investigation, will never be fooled by this phony set up that’s stacked from the top all the way down. And if you doubt it, when you leave home tonight, when you go home tonight, look for the press. I’d like at this time to call forth these brothers who are under, uh, who were arrested. The brothers who were arrested. Come up here behind these chairs, please. (applause) They were suspects. (laughter) This wouldn’t happen in a White neighborhood. White man can walk down the street with packages on his head, packages under his arm and packages anywhere else and won’t anybody question his right to carry those packages. But a Negro is suspect because the press makes you suspect. Yes, the White press makes Negroes suspect. (murmuring) (video skips)

… all the information you need, Officer. And the Officer made one stay at the rear of the car and the other go to the front of the car, and while he was taking the one to the front of the car, the polite attitude, the humble if, the submissive, intelligent peaceful spirit that he uexpectedly found in this Negro infuriated him. And he began to… He told the brother; ‘Put down your hands.’ Brother was talking, he’s not a criminal. A man has a right on the sidewalk to talk with his hands. ‘Put down your hands, don’t talk with your hands.’ And when the brother continued to gesture with his hands the Officer grabbed his hand, twisted it around, ’round behind his back flung him up against the car and then that’s when hell broke loose. That was when hell broke loose. A struggle ensued, shots were fired by the police and by a Negro doorshaker. (laughter)

An alarm went out. When the alarm went out, instead of the police going to the place where the incident occurred, the police went one block away to the temple. When they arrived there, they got out of their cars with their guns smokin’. You woulda thought it was Wyatt… What’s his name? Wyatt Earp. I’m telling you, they came out of those cars, and we have enough witnesses to hang ’em. With their guns smokin’. Chief Parker knows this, Mayor Yorty knows this and every police official in the city knows that. They didn’t fire no warning shots in  the air they fired warning shots point blank at innocent, unarmed, defenseless Negroes. As I say, two of the brothers were shot in the back. Another was shot in the shoulder. Another was shot, two of them were shot, excuse the expression, through the penis. (murmuring) Another was shot in the hip and the bullet came out the other side. But Arthur here was shot 1/4 of an inch from his heart.

Let me tell you something, and I’ll tell you why you say ‘we hate White people’. We don’t hate anybody. We love our own people so much, they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them. (applause) (video skips)

… who has been shot, the bullet having passed a 1/4 of an inch through his heart. I’m not gonna let him talk, which I think you can understand why. You should listen to the conversation of the police officers while it was going on. Two of the brothers who had been shot, who were lying hand in hand, the officer said they were chanting a death chant. You read that. They were saying ‘Allahu Akbar’. What does that mean? It means that God is the greatest. It means that God is the greatest.(applause)

Understand what the White officer called a death chant was a prayer. They were praying when they were shot down. They were saying Allhu Akbar. And it shook the officer up that they haven’t heard Black people talk any kinda talk but what they taught ’em. And two of the brothers who were shot in the back were telling me that as they lay on the sidewalk, they were holding hands. They held hands with each other saying Allahu Akbar. And the blood was seeping out of them where the police bullets had torn into their insides. Still, they said Allahu Akbar and the police came and kicked them in the head. Police kicked them in the head telling them to shut up that noise while they were laying on the sidewalk in front of our temple. Kicked them in the head. Shut up that noise.

And one of them, when he was on his way to the police station in the ambulance, one of the ambulance attendants told the White cop, ‘Why don’t you kill the nigger?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell them that he tried to get away. Why don’t you kill the nigger? While you got a chance. I’ll swear that he tried to get away.’ If he didn’t say this, then I need to be put in jail, and I’ll gladly go. (applause)

One of them who was being taken to jail in a police car as the ambulance sirens were coming to the place, one of the policeman said to the other: ‘What are the ambulances rushing for? Nothing but some niggers.’ So, he looked then and saw the Muslim brothers sitting beside him  and he shut up. But after he got to the jail, the same officer that said this turned to the brother and said; ‘I hope that you didn’t get offended by what I said back there under the heat of emotion, because some of my best friends are colored.’ (roaring) That’s what he said. That’s his password: ‘Some of my best friends are colored.’

And I for one, as a Muslim, believe that the White man is intelligent enough, if he were made to realise how Black people really feel and how fed up we are without that whole compromising sweet talk. Why you’re the one that make it hard for yourself. The White man believes you when you go to him with that old sweet talk ’cause you been sweet talkin’ him ever since he brought you here. Stop sweet talking him. Tell him how you feel. Tell him how or what kinda hell you been catching and let him know that if he’s not ready to clean his house up, if hes not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down. (applause)

As Muslims, we identify ourselves with the dark world. So we’re not any minority. We’re a part of the majority and the White man is the minority. (applause) You have to know this to understand us: we don’t think any odds are against us. We don’t fight a battle like the odds are against us. Why, the whole dark world today is in unity. It’s one. If you don’t think so, look at the United Nations. When the dark world votes, they vote as one. They gettin’ the colonialists out of Africa, and out of Asia. Tellin’ them to get out. They don’t have any nuclear weapons but they got a solid, united voice and their unity alone is sufficient to drive the oppressor and exploiter of their people out of their own country.

You and I need to learn a lesson from that right there. In the UN, the dark world consists of Buddhist’s, Hindu’s, Shinto’s, Taoist’s, Christian’s, Muslims, everything. But they’re together. They forget their religious and political differences. They think as one. They move as one against a common enemy. And [the French occupier]of Algeria, he’s going, don’t think he’s not going, he’s going. (applause) They’re getting him out of Angola, out of Tanganyika, out of Uganda, out of Kenya. He’s going from South Africa, too. He hasn’t got long to be there. All over this earth, dark people who have been oppressed and exploited by those who are not their own kind, strangers, are coming together to get the oppressor off their back. You and I learn a lesson from that.

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We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied, not only civil rights, but even human rights. So, the only way we’re going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us, or aside from us is come together against the common enemy. (applause) When they sat down at the Bandung conference, everyone there had this in common: a dark skin. Some of those who were sitting there were socialists, some were communists, some where capitalists, some were Christian, some were Buddhist. They were everything! But all of ’em was dark skinned. And they looked at that dark skin and agreed that this is one thing they had in common.

Forget that you’re a Methodist, forget that you’re a Catholic, forget that you’re a Protestant, forget that you’re a Muslim. Remember that all of us are Black, and we’re catching h… [end of video].

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Details of China’s National Security Law Released

June 22nd, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Along with protecting China’s national security, its legitimate right, the new law aims to counter months of US orchestrated violence and vandalism in Hong Kong.

They were and continue to be led by 5th column elements that rocked the city last year, a scheme by US dark forces to destabilize and weaken China by attacking its soft underbelly.

From 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong was exploited as a British colony. The city is now Chinese territory.

Governed by Chinese laws, it enjoys a degree of local autonomy.

Britain and the US have no more say over how Hong Kong is governed than does Beijing have over how New York, London, or any other foreign cities are run.

They’re sovereign territory of their respective countries. China respects what the US and West reject.

Notably the US seeks control over all parts of the world not its own, what its global empire of bases is all about, platforms for endless preemptive wars of aggression.

US foreign policy reflects what the scourge of imperialism is all about — an unparalleled menace to everyone everywhere under both right wings of the its war party.

After being drafted last month during Beijing’s annual Central People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), adopted by the National People’s Congress (NPC), and sent to a Standing Committee for preparation in final form, details of the new law were released on Saturday.

As reported by Xinhua, it contains 66 articles in six chapters for safeguarding the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).

The law “requires the HKSAR to establish a commission of safeguarding national security which shall be supervised by and accountable to the Central People’s Government.”

It “establish(es) an office of safeguarding national security in the HKSAR.”

It covers duties of the HKSAR to safeguard national security with jurisdiction over related issues, and enforcement of the law’s provisions under continuation of a “one country, two systems” arrangement.

The Central People’s Government in Beijing has authority for national security overall, similar to how Western nations operate.

The US 10th Amendment states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” — local autonomy that doesn’t conflict with federal powers.

UK devolution law grants powers to the parliaments of London, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the central government having oversight authority.

Under China’s new national security law, “(t)he Central People’s Government shoulders the fundamental responsibility for national security affairs related to the HKSAR, while the HKSAR bears the constitutional responsibility of safeguarding national security,” Xinhua explained, adding:

“The executive organs, legislature and judiciary of the HKSAR shall, in accordance with relevant laws, effectively prevent, stop and punish acts and activities that endanger national security.”

“Safeguarding China’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity is the common obligation of all Chinese people, including Hong Kong.”

The HKSAR is responsible for acting against activities in the city that jeopardize national security.

Four categories of crimes are designated as national security threats: secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign or external forces.

The  HKSAR has jurisdiction over combatting them. A central government office charged with safeguarding national security throughout China is authorized to supervise and coordinate its activities with the HKSAR.

In some cases that threaten national security, what the law calls specific circumstances, central authorities in Beijing may exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed in Hong Kong or anywhere else in China.

If differences between the new national security law and local laws administered by the HKSAR, the NPC Standing Committee has final say.

China’s Global Times (GT) said the new national security law aims “to fix national security loopholes in Hong Kong, rather than depriving the city of its high degree of autonomy.”

Most, perhaps all nations, have laws to protect national security from internal and external threats.

Given Washington aim to transform China into a vassal state, wanting its development curbed, Beijing and the nation’s people are very much threatened.

The main responsibility of all ruling authorities is to protect the state from threats to its sovereignty.

The US poses an enormous threat to all countries unwilling to subordinate their rights to its interests.

China’s national security law is one more way for Beijing to protect the nation’s sovereign rights from foreign threats, notably by the US.

Overall, “(t)he central government’s direct jurisdiction over national security cases in (Hong Kong) will be very limited,” GT reported, adding:

“The protection of human rights and presumption of innocence before judicial conviction will be upheld.”

“The national security law for the HKSAR will not weaken the political rights of Hong Kong people, change the lives of local residents, or influence the implementation of Hong Kong’s common law.”

“It just clarifies the responsibility of the central government and the HKSAR over maintaining national security, drawing a bottom line that all Hongkongers should abide by in terms of national security while establishing a legal mechanism to carry out all these.”

“It is not meant to change operation of the city’s function, governance, or people’s way of work and life.”

It’s the responsibility of federal governments everywhere to enforce the rule of law nationwide.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the rule of law “the noblest of human productions.”

Grandson of a slave Justice Thurgood Marshall had a different view, saying:

“Do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”

The law should be all about serving and protecting everyone, assuring equity and justice for all — not just the privileged few as in the US, West and most other countries.

China’s national security law was established to counter foreign interference in its internal affairs, prohibited under international law.

The measure does not “extinguish challenges to (Beijing’s) power,” as the NYT falsely reported.

Nor does it “dismantle (Hong Kong’s) legal autonomy, as the Wall Street Journal claimed.

Or is it “the worst nightmare come true,” as a local official hostile to Beijing maintains, or the “death knell” for Hong Kong, as loose cannon Pompeo roared.

The new law will become effective on an unspecified date, most likely ahead of September 6 Hong Kong Legislative Council elections.

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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.

The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted. When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident police have been designed to uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional rights.

Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices and the structural problems in policing that are leading more people to conclude police must be completely transformed, if not abolished.

We advocate for democratic community control of the police as a starting point in addition to defunding the police and funding alternatives such as programs that provide mental health, public health, social work and conflict resolution services, and other nonviolent interventions. Funding is needed for the basic human needs of housing, education, employment, healthcare, and food especially in communities that have been neglected for years and whose low-wage labor has enriched the wealthy in this unequal society.

The Roots Of Policing Are Rotten

The needs of the wealthy have been the driving force for the creation of police. Policing developed to control workers, many who were Irish, Italian and other immigrants seeking fair wages in the North and African people who were enslaved in the South. Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D writes in “A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing” that “Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities.”

A. Southern Police Created to Protect Slavery

In the south, the driving force of the economy was slavery where people kidnapped in Africa were brought to the Americas as chattel slaves, workers who created wealth for their owners. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists 12.5 million Africans who were shipped to the Americas, 10.7 million of which survived the dreaded Middle Passage. Of that, 388,000 were brought to North America. African slaves were forced to reproduce for their owners and to sell.

From the start, African people revolted against slavery and fought to escape it. This 400 years legacy of racist injustice that helped form the United States is the history we must confront. The roots of policing in what became the Confederacy and later the sheriffs who enforced Jim Crow grew out of the containment of slaves, the most valuable ‘property’ in the nation.

Olivia Waxman describes this history writing that in the South, “the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered . . . on the preservation of the slavery system.” She describes “slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts” as one of the primary police institutions.

Gary Potter writes in “The History of Policing in the United States,” that “Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules.” The purpose of slave patrols was to protect the wealth of the white people who owned slaves.

Potter writes, “the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.”

Hundreds of laws were passed in the South around slavery and its enforcement but laws were also passed in northern colonies including Connecticut, New York, and others to control slaves. The US Congress passed fugitive Slave Laws allowing the detention and return of escaped slaves, in 1793 and 1850. Racist police made up the “kidnap gang” in New York City in 1830 who would capture Africans and bring them to a rubber stamp court that would send them to the South as captured slaves – often before their families knew they were arrested. Throughout this history, there were people who fought police violence and abuse as is discussed in The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence In The 1830s.

The history of racist policing did not end with the abolition of slavery. Police forces were involved in enforcing the racist Black Code, the Convict-Lease System, and JimCrow segregation. The terrorism of white supremacist groups like the KKK, the burning of black schools and churches and lynching became the common realities of the south. White police often did not stop, or seriously investigate these crimes; some even participated. In the era of Civil Rights, southern police used violence against nonviolent protesters – beatings, fire hoses and dogs.

This also occurred in the north. For example, Minnesota was infamous for arresting indigenous people on charges like vagrancy and forcing them to work for no pay.  This spurred the formation of the American Indian Movement. Dennis Banks describes, “The cops concentrated on the Indian bars. They would bring their paddy wagons around behind a bar and open the back doors. Then they would go around to the front and chase everybody toward the rear. ” They would be taken to stadiums and convention centers and forced to work for no pay. The police did not do this at white bars, only bars where Native Americans gathered.

The War on Drugs became the new disguise for police violence against black people. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” said President Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman to Harper’s Magazine. Mass incarceration of the 1980s, begun under President Reagan and continued under President Clinton with Joe Biden leading efforts in the Senate, disproportionately impacted black and brown people. Now slavery legally continues as prison labor.

AT&T workers on strike. From Socialist Worker.

B. Northern Police Protect Commercial Interests, Hold Down Wages

The history of policing in the northern colonies was also driven by economics. Commercial interests protected their property through an informal, private for-profit form of hiring people part-time. Towns relied on a “night-watch” to enforce laws. Boston started a night-watch in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.

As cities become more populated, the night-watch system was ineffective. Commercial interests needed more regular policing and so they hired people to protect their property and goods as they were transported from ports to other areas. Boston, a large shipping commercial center, became the first city to form a police force when merchants convinced the government that police were needed for the “collective good” thereby transferring the cost of maintaining a police force to the citizens.

A driving force for police expansion was workers, who were often immigrants, seeking better pay and working conditions. Abolishing The Police: A Radical Idea That’s Been Around For Over A Century, describes how the first state police force was formed in 1905 in Pennsylvania to combat workers forming unions. According to a study in 1969 by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the United States has the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.

Sam Mitrani, author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894, writes in In These Times that “as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class.”

Martha Grevatt points out that “Throughout labor history, one finds innumerable accounts of cops engaging in anti-union violence. Police viciously attacked unarmed pickets during the 1994 Staley strike in Decatur, Ill., as well as the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike, to name a few examples. They arrested and harassed UAW members during last year’s strike against GM.”

This is not only a time of growing protest against police violence but also against the mistreatment of workers. Over the last two years, there has been a record number of strikers not seen in 35 years. PayDay Report counts more than 500 strikes in the last three weeks with a peak number on Juneteenth at “29 ports across the West Coast” and the UAW stopping production on all assembly lines “for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor George Floyd.”  They have tracked more than 800 strikes since March.

Historic Time Of Uprising And Unrest Rattles The Police And Power Structure

The rebellion by workers and anti-racism activists is unprecedented in the lives of most people alive today. There is a nationwide uprising in every state and in thousands of cities and towns.  Repression by the power structure with militarized police and the National Guard has failed to stop the protests. Democrats have failed to divert the movement of the energy into the elections, as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have offered inadequate reforms such as more police training. Fundamental changes are needed.

Police will continue to make efforts to shut down the unrest. The FBI and local police have a long history of combatting movements. In addition to the violent response that has been well documented against the current rebellion, we should expect infiltration, surveillance, creation of internal divisions, and other tactics, even murder.

All of these acts against labor, civil rights, peace, environmental, and other movements have happened before and we should expect them again. Documents show a nationwide effort of police and the FBI to defeat the Occupy Movement that included entrapment of activists in crimes. There has also been aggressive police violence against people protesting pipelines and seeking climate justice.

Black activists continue to be a major focus of the FBI and law enforcement. Media Justice and the ACLU reported last week that one million pages of materials on FBI surveillance were discovered in a FOIA request showing widespread surveillance of black activists.

The small victories that have been won by the movement are already causing repercussions. Police are threatening to quit because they are being held accountable for violence, even though they remain protected by immunity from prosecution. A survey last week found 3 out of 4 Washington, DC police were ready to leave the force. CNN reported police in Minneapolis, Atlanta, South Florida, and Buffalo quitting. In Atlanta, police got the “flu” after felony murder charges were brought against the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks.

New York City police are planning a strike on the Fourth of July to show people what life would be like without police. However, this may backfire as during a 1997 slowdown and also during a 2014–2015 slowdown, crime did not spike, and may even have declined a bit. The nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Bob Barr threatened in December 2019 that if some communities don’t begin showing more respect to law enforcement, then they could potentially not be protected by police officers.

To Transform The Police, The Economy Must Be Transformed

The US Constitution, written by slaveholders and businessmen who profited from slave products, puts property rights ahead of individual rights. The Bill of Rights was an afterthought. The result of treating people as property, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and other racially unfair economic practices has left Black Americans with a $13 trillion dollar wealth gap.

Max Rameau told us in a recent podcast, To Deal With Police, We Must Understand Why They Even Exist, that when we understand the purpose of police is to protect property, it becomes more evident why they cannot be reformed. Unless we confront neoliberal capitalism that creates inequality and a hyper-class-based society, the wealthy will always find someone to pay to protect them.

In fact, the call to defund the police can be easily thrown off course by getting activists fighting for small gains of cuts to police budgets, while the police are increasing their funding from private corporations. Already, as reported by Eyes on the Ties, “Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight.” Their report documents support to police from Wall Street and finance, retail and food industries, Big Tech, fossil fuel corporations, sports, and universities.

It is fantasy to believe police exist for public safety. As Justin Podur writes, “Society doesn’t need a large group with a license to kill.” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report advocates for community control over police but he doesn’t stop there, writing “communities should control, not just the police, but much of the rest of their neighborhoods’ vital services and resources.”

As Richard Rubinstein writes in ThePolice May Pull the Trigger but it is the System That Kills, “Racism, police brutality, and economic injustice can be thought of as separate boxes, but they are part of one self-reinforcing system. And that system’s defining characteristic – the feature most resistant to change – is that it is based on the production of goods and services for profit, not to satisfy basic human needs.”

Like many conflicts in the United States, the problems of police violence comes down to corporate-capitalists vs. the people. Racial separation and inequality are ways the ownership class keeps people divided so the people can be controlled. This is the reality of the US political system and the reality of policing in the United States, but we can change that reality by continuing to organize, staying in the streets and building our power.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

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In what potentially could be a radical change in Washington’s policy towards Venezuela, U.S. president Donald Trump confessed that he has had doubts about his decision to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president of the South American country. Trump revealed in an interview with Axios in the Oval Office what he thinks about the self-proclaimed wannabe president of Venezuela, Guaidó, and even confessed that he “would maybe think” of meeting personally with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has already publicly expressed his willingness to talk with the American president.

“Maduro would like to meet. And I’m never opposed to meetings — you know, rarely opposed to meetings. I always say, you lose very little with meetings. But at this moment, I’ve turned them down,” Trump said.

In a preview of the interview published by Axios, Trump revealed how little confidence he has in Guaidó because the politician failed to take control of the Venezuelan government despite the strong support provided by the U.S. and another 60 countries that recognize him as the legitimate president.

Asked by Axios whether he regretted his decision on backing Guaidó on the advice of John Bolton, his former National Security Advisor, Trump initially said “not particularly,” but then went on to say, “I could have lived with it or without it, but I was very firmly against what’s going on in Venezuela.”

In another part of the interview, Trump speaks directly of the moment when he decided to recognize the opposition leader as president: “Guaidó was elected. I think that I wasn’t necessarily in favor, but I said — some people that liked it, some people didn’t. I was OK with it. I don’t think it was — you know, I don’t think it was very meaningful one way or the other.”

Also, in the preview, Axios quoted a fragment of Bolton’s upcoming book The Room Where It Happened, where he reveals some behind the scenes diplomacy of the Trump Administration and the private feelings the president has about Guaidó. Bolton says that Trump “thought Guaidó was ‘weak,’ as opposed to Maduro, who was ‘strong’” and that “Trump was calling Guaidó the ‘Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,’ hardly the sort of compliment an ally of the United States should expect.” O’Rourke, who was a Democratic Presidential Candidate and is one of Trump’s biggest critics, was called a “poor bastard” who “quit like a dog” by the American president, a demonstration of just how low Trump thinks of Guaidó.

Trump in the interview described Bolton as a “nutjob” who may be the “dumbest human being on Earth.” Trump could perhaps seek to slowly normalize relations with Maduro and move away from Guaidó, while placing the blame entirely on Bolton for the escalation of hostilities between Washington and Caracas.

In 2019, shocking events were triggered when Guaidó proclaimed himself president. An attempt to forcibly enter a shipment of “solidarity aid” into Venezuela from Colombia that likely had weapons was made; Venezuela suddenly was without electricity after a cyberattack; there was another coup attempt; and, many attacks on military barracks. Yet, Maduro survived the intense pressures from the U.S. and sixty of its allies.

The American President is known to admire authoritarianism and/or strong leaders. Despite sanctions, coup attempts and threats of military invasion, Maduro has not only survived the U.S.-led destabilization, but cemented his positions as leader of Venezuela. Although they may be adversaries, it would not be a wild claim to say that Trump admires Maduro’s strength and determination, especially as Guaidó utterly failed when he had every advantage afforded to him.

If someone had said in 2019 that just a year later Venezuela would not only be more stable than the U.S. when we consider the Black Lives Matter uprising in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, but would also achieve a seat in the UN Human Rights commission, no one would have believed it.

The U.S. could not allow 2019 to confirm the decline of its dominance over Latin America. With the defeat it suffered in Venezuela, the return of Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and the breakdown of neoliberal governments in the region, Washington had to resort to coups to protect its interests, as seen in Bolivia.

Venezuela now has a fragmented opposition to Maduro that is immersed in an internal war. At this point, Guaidó is not guaranteed to be re-elected as president of the National Assembly. For the U.S. however, it does not matter who occupies that position so long as they are serving Washington’s agenda. The so-called Deep State in the U.S. remains pitifully unchanged in their policy to destroy the existence of sovereign governments in the region. However, is Trump attempting to break free of such war hawks by expressing an openness to speak with Maduro? Although Trump may have individual opinions on not wanting to challenge Venezuela, despite public rhetoric, he will be restricted by the main power structures that exist in the U.S. and push for complete dominance no matter the administration in power and what they want to achieve.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

On June 1, in the midst of the turmoil created by the coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration quietly issued 12 fracking permits to Aera Energy, a joint venture owned by ExxonMobil and Shell.

Oil drilling in California has faced criticism for its disproportionately negative health impacts on Latino communities and other people of color. The 12 new permits will be for fracking in the Lost Hills Oil Field. The Kern County town of Lost Hills is more than 97 percent Latino, according to 2010 U.S. Census data.

The fracking permits are the latest example of California’s oil industry benefiting from regulatory or deregulatory action during the COVID-19 pandemic and came just months after the Newsom administration said it supported taking actions to “manage the decline of oil production and consumption in the state.” Aera, which also received 24 permits from the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) on April 3 during the early days of COVID-19, has well-connected lobbyists in its corner who work for the firm Axiom Advisors.

One of them, Jason Kinney, headed up Newsom’s 2018 transition team and formerly served as a senior advisor to Newsom while he was lieutenant governor. He is also a senior advisor to California’s Senate Democrats. The other, Kevin Schmidt, previously served as policy director for Newsom when the latter was lieutenant governor. Aera paid Axiom $110,000 for its lobbying work in 2019 and, so far in 2020, has paid $30,000, lobbying reports reveal.

Axiom’s lobbying disclosure records show both Kinney and Schmidt listed as lobbyists and Aera as one of the firm’s clients. Kinney’s wife, Mary Gonsalvez Kinney, was also the stylist for Newsom’s wife–Jennifer Siebel Newsom–dating back to their time spent living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kinney and Schmidt did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Calling the situation “unseemly,” Jamie Court, president for the Los Angeles-based group Consumer Watchdog, wrote via email that “Aera should not be able to buy the influence it apparently has over state oil and gas policy.” Last November, prior to the 24 permits issued in April, Newsom had declared a statewide fracking permit moratorium in response to a scandal involving a regulator for the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR). The regulator, who had been tasked with heading oversight issues on issuing permits, was revealed to have stock investments valued up to $100,000 in Aera Energy’s parent company, ExxonMobil. Newsom fired the head of DOGGR at the time, Ken Harris, and eventually renamed the agency CalGEM.

Kinney and Schmidt are not the only two with Newsom ties. Aera CEO Christina Sistrunk sits on the governor’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery, created to craft an economic recovery plan in response to the ongoing COVID-19 economic fallout.

Aera is one of the state’s top drillers and accounts for nearly 25 percent of California’s production, its website claims. Aera landed 490 drilling permits from CalGEM in the first quarter of 2020, according to data collected by FracTracker, and 651 permits in 2019.

Lost Hills

The town of Lost Hills has a population of about 2,500 people and its field ranks sixth in oil produced in the state. The field sits in close proximity to a residential neighborhood just west of Interstate Highway 5, close to both a middle school and public park.

Infrared camera footage from 2014, taken by the advocacy group Earthworks and the Clear Water Fund for a 2015 report they published, showed that the Lost Hills field emits prolific amounts of toxic chemicals into the air, including methane, acetone, dichlorodifluoromethane and acetaldehydes. High levels of isoprene and acetaldehydes can cause cancer, while the other substances can result in serious health damage, including heartbeat irregularities, headaches, nausea, vomiting, throat irritation, coughing and wheezing.

In a survey done for that same report of Lost Hills residents, respondents reported having “thyroid problems (7 percent), diabetes (7 percent), asthma (11 percent) and sinus infections (19 percent).”

“Of all respondents, 92.3 percent reported identifying odors in their homes and community,” it further detailed. “Odors were described as petroleum, burning oil, rotten eggs, chemicals, chlorine or bleach, a sweet smell, sewage, and ammonia. Participants reported that when odors were detected in the air, symptoms included headache (63 percent), nausea/dizziness (37 percent), burning or watery eyes (37 percent), and throat and nose irritation (18.5 percent).”

Methane is a climate change-causing greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A 20-year window falls within the 2030 deadline established by IPCC climate scientists in a 2018 report that concluded that, if bold action is not taken steadily until then, the world could face some of the most severe and irreversible impacts of climate change.

Setbacks

The new Lost Hills permits came as CalGEM completed its pre-rulemaking public hearings, on June 2, for regulations pertaining to distancing setbacks of oil wells from homes, schools, health clinics and public parks.

The rulemaking process also came as a direct result of the Newsom administration’s November fracking moratorium announcement, found within that same directive.

Last January, two months after the directive, new CalGEM head Uduak-Joe Ntuk, Newsom’s legislative affairs secretary Anthony Williams and Department of Conservation director David Shabazian all attended and spoke at a pro-industry hearing convened by the Kern County Board of Supervisors. They held the hearing in direct response to Newsom’s November announcement. Aera CEO Sistrunk spoke at that hearing and the company promoted it on its website.

The lobbying disclosure records also show Kinney and Schmidt’s firm represents Marathon Petroleum, which advocated against legislation that would mandate CalGEM to implement a setbacks rule by July 1, 2022. That bill, AB 345, had previously mandated that a setback rule be put into place by 2020.

But after receiving lobbying pressure from the Common Ground Alliance— which has united major labor groups with the oil industry, and which was incorporated by an attorney whose clients include Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP America and Western States Petroleum Association—Assembly Appropriations Chairwoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) made it a two-year bill during the 2019 legislative session. The “two-year” option for state legislators extends the lifeline of a bill for potential amendments and passage into the second year of every two-year legislative session. Gonzalez told Capital & Main the bill received two-year status due to its high implementation cost.

Aera’s parent company, ExxonMobil, has given Gonzalez $5,500 in campaign contributions since her first run for the Assembly in 2013. Aera also gave a $35,000 contribution to the California Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation during the first quarter of 2020, its lobbying disclosure form shows. Gonzalez is the chairwoman of the California Legislative Latino Caucus and the foundation is its nonprofit wing. And both Aera and the Common Ground Alliance share the same attorney, Steven Lucas, incorporation documents and disclosure forms show.

“The Governor has been clear about the need to strengthen oversight of oil and gas extraction in California and to update regulations to protect public health and safety for communities near oil and gas operations,” Vicky Waters, Newsom’s press secretary, told Capital & Main in an emailed statement.CalGEM has launched a rulemaking process to develop stronger regulations and will consider the best available science and data to inform new protective requirements.”

Waters did not respond to questions about Axiom Advisors and its personnel ties to Gov. Newsom.

“An Afterthought”

The permits handed to Aera coincide with the Newsom administration granting the industry a suite of regulatory relaxation measures during the COVID-19 era. These include a delay in implementing management plans for idle oil wells and cutting the hiring of 128 analysts, engineers and geologists to bolster the state’s regulatory efforts on oil wells—even though the industry was legally obligated to pay for it.

These measures came after San Francisco public radio station KQED reported that the oil industry’s top trade associations, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA), requested that CalGEM take such actions.

Aera’s general counsel, Lynne Carrithers, sits on the board for CIPA, while the company is also a WSPA dues-paying member.

In response to a question about the cancellation of hiring of 128 regulators, Teresa Schilling, a spokeswoman for the Department of Conservation—which oversees CalGEM—said by email that the “Administration had to revisit many proposals in the January budget as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fiscal challenges it created.”

“Significantly expanding a fee-based program in this time of belt-tightening would not be appropriate,” Schilling continued, speaking to the oil industry’s current financial travails. “However, CalGEM is committed to continuing its critical core enforcement and regulatory work with its current resources. Furthermore, all regulations remain in effect and operators are still accountable for meeting them.”

Schilling added that, with regards to the connections with Axiom Advisors, the administration works with “a variety of stakeholders on policy issues and budget decisions,” calling the latest budget proposal “consistent with Administration priorities.”

But Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network who lives near Lost Hills in Bakersfield, sees the situation differently.

“The Lost Hills community is already surrounded by extraction and the Newsom administration and CalGEM continue to show that they intend to put the environment and frontline communities as an afterthought,” he said, advocating for the passage of AB 345. “These actions show us that Californians can’t depend on empty political promises to protect public health.”

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Politico’s scandalous “report” alleging that Putin secretly supported and even possibly organized the left-wing terrorist activities of the “Baader-Meinhof Group” during his time with the KGB in East Germany is pure propaganda which is intended to serve the purpose of implying that Trump’s attempt to clinch a “New Detente” with his Russian counterpart over the past few years is akin to him hypocritically “colluding” with the man who’s now being portrayed as the “godfather” of his hated Antifa nemeses.

Is Right-Wing Putin Really A Left-Wing Terrorist?

Fake news is most effective whenever it mixes a bit of indisputable truth with scandalous speculation in order to craft an information product that appeals to the target audience’s confirmation bias, which is exactly the case with Politico’s propaganda piece alleging that Putin secretly supported the left-wing terrorist activities of the “Baader-Meinhof Group” during his time with the KGB in East Germany and might have even organized some of their attacks. Everyone knows about the Russian leader’s history of service with his country’s top intelligence service, but most had hitherto been under the impression that it was uneventful and full of boring bureaucratic duties like most Soviet government positions were during the end of the Old Cold War. Nevertheless, because President Putin is so politically polarizing as a result of the “deep state”-driven but ultimately debunked Russiagate impeachment scandal, there’s a sizeable number of people in the US who will believe any malicious gossip about him just because they think that it makes Trump look bad by association.

“Perfect Timing”

That’s precisely the modus operandi at play with Politico’s latest hit piece, which literally relies on a single unnamed “source” who “coincidentally” decided to surface at the “perfect moment” in the middle of Trump’s ongoing re-election campaign, which serves the purpose of implying that the President’s attempt to clinch a “New Detente” with his Russian counterpart over the past few years is akin to him hypocritically “colluding” with the man who’s now being portrayed as the “godfather” of his hated Antifa nemeses. The overarching narrative that the “deep state”-backed Democrats have constructed since even before Trump’s election is that he’s prone to “treason”, whether out of nefarious intentions or simply because he’s so unqualified for the presidency that he supposedly doesn’t know what he isn’t allowed to legally do. His political enemies have warned him against making any peaceful outreaches to Russia on the pretext that its leader is “the greatest threat to the West”, but Trump never believed this to be the case and thus continued to openly defy them.

“Deep State” Desperation

The “deep state” is therefore more desperate than ever to pressure Trump into reconsidering the wisdom of cooperating with Putin since they’re certain that he’ll go fully “rogue” if he wins re-election. This could predictably see him dedicate a substantial amount of his time into personally overseeing the evolution of the nascent “New Detente” into a series of “mutual compromises” across a vast array of issues intended to lay the basis for comprehensively “resetting” their relations so that the US can focus much more on “containing” China in the New Cold War. Considering the rising influence of Antifa as the “deep state’s” “useful idiots” of choice in waging the Hybrid War of Terror on America and Trump’s visceral hatred of this decentralized network of left-wing terrorists, there’s a certain logic involved in concocting a conspiracy theory at this precise moment implying that Putin is the “godfather” of this organization through his alleged support of a similarly notorious left-wing terrorist group during his service with the KGB in East Germany.

Triggering Trump With Antifa Allusions

The purpose of this latest salvo in the “deep state’s” information war against Trump is to trigger him into thinking that Putin is his ideological enemy just like he rightly regards them and their Democrat puppets as being. In the event that the reader isn’t familiar with the author’s prior work over the past month about the Hybrid War of Terror on America, which explains the domestic context of this latest foreign policy propaganda, here’s a list of his most relevant works that should be reviewed in case anyone questions why the “deep state” wants to imply an ideological and even operational connection between Putin and an Antifa-like terrorist organization at this specific moment in time:

As can be seen, there are plenty of reasons why Trump’s opponents might expect him to be triggered by the ridiculous accusation that Putin either supported or directly helped organize acts of left-wing terrorism in the West during the last decade of the Old Cold War. In the Hybrid War context, the “Baader-Meinhof Group” was just a smaller but more organized and well-known version of Antifa since both of them were/are fighting in support of ideological goals associated with the far left of the political spectrum. Connecting Putin to that, however feebly Politico attempted to do with just a single unnamed “source”, is wrongly thought to be like waving a red flag in front of a bull and thus triggering Trump to regard the Russian leader as his enemy.

Completing The Syncretic Conspiracy

The author argued in one of his above hyperlinked analyses that “The Syncretism Of Economic Leftism & Social Fascism Is The World’s New Danger”, which is fast becoming so difficult to deny that Trump’s “deep state” enemies predictably want to pin the blame for this trend on Russia, and specifically on President Putin. To be clear, it isn’t conspiratorial to make the objective observation that the author did upon closely studying the American Left’s de-facto employment of social fascist concepts such as the weaponization of race for anti-state destabilization purposes, but it’s definitely ridiculous to imply that President Putin might have been behind this. Politico doesn’t directly come out and say it, but they clearly hint at this possibility when they quote someone who claims that they were “one of Putin’s recruits in the Stasi” and says that “Putin’s activities included a role as the handler of a notorious neo-Nazi, Rainer Sonntag”. Some far-left economic forces (communists/anarchists/socialists/etc.) are indeed cooperating with some far-right social ones (racists), but neither Putin nor the country that he represents have anything to do with this “unholy alliance”.

The “Political Convenience” Of Propaganda

Nevertheless, it’s “politically convenient” to propagate this completely false innuendo since it plays into the equally false claim that Russia (which the target audience is always reminded is “run by former KGB agent Putin”) sows chaos around the world simply for chaos’ sake by supporting both sides in any given conflict. Variations of his weaponized narrative include the unsubstantiated accusation that Russia was responsible for the 2015 Migrant Crisis, the fake news that Russian trolls are supporting Democrat and Republican candidates on social media in order to further divide America, and now the equally absurd innuendo that Putin personally played a role in the syncretism between economic leftism and social fascism by simultaneously handling far-left and far-right terrorists during his time with the KGB in East Germany. Like the author wrote at the beginning of this analysis, fake news is most effective whenever it mixes a bit of indisputable truth with scandalous speculation in order to craft an information product that appeals to the target audience’s confirmation bias.

Concluding Thoughts

Politico is obviously desperate to push the false narrative that Putin has a history of supporting, if not outright involvement himself in, left-wing terrorism. Its hit piece against the Russian President relies on a single “source” whose claims are surrounded by a bunch of historical facts in order to craft the perception that Putin probably had some shadowy connections with such organizations, which preceded Antifa in their international notoriety and also emerged in the same country. It’s telling that not a single thing was ever said about this until Trump entered the middle of his re-election campaign and started showing some slight signs of success in clinching a “New Detente” with Putin. The so-called “source” could have come forward right when the Russian leader first entered office in 2000, but curiously chose not to until now. All of this proves that Politico’s report is nothing but pure propaganda intended to trigger Trump into regarding the Russian leader as his ideological enemy, as well as to make it seem like he’s been hypocritically “colluding” with the “godfather” of Antifa this entire time.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Selected Articles: US Sanctions on Syria

June 22nd, 2020 by Global Research News

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US Economic Embargo​​​​​​​ on Syria Is ‘Crime Against Humanity’

By Mark Taliano and Press TV, June 22, 2020

The new sanctions came into effect under the so-called Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act on June 17, targeting almost all Syrian economic and trade activities as well as the country’s government and business officials loyal to Damascus.

The restrictive measures, signed by US President Donald Trump last December, penalized 39 companies and individuals, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma — the first time she has been hit by US sanctions.

The US “Caesar’s Law” Sanctions Regime against Syria. How It Will Affect Lebanon: Israel Will be Targeted

By Elijah J. Magnier, June 19, 2020

The enactment of “Caesar’s Law” – the new US sanctions designed to “pursue individuals, groups, companies, and countries that deal with the Damascus government” – is apparently directed against Syria but in reality aims to subdue Lebanon and its population to accommodate Israel’s conditions. Lebanon’s “Axis of the Resistance” member, Hezbollah, has an open conflict with Israel.  Israel has a list of imposing demands: close off the flow of weapons via the Lebanese borders with Syria, disarm Hezbollah, impose its own terms on land and maritime borders, and push Lebanon to join other Middle Eastern countries in signing a peace deal- with Israel. But Hezbollah naturally has other plans- to enforce a new Rule of Engagement and take the attack initiative rather than opt for the defence response. This is similar to the Gaza deterrence policy of Hamas, another member of the “Axis of the Resistance”, that has been to hit targets in Israel if (and when) economic sanctions are imposed.

Why Is the US Still Sanctioning Syria? Beijing Pressures Washington

By Tony Cartalucci, June 19, 2020

China’s attempts to aid Syria economically and challenge American sanctions aimed at Damascus follows Russia’s open opposition to the US-led proxy war against the Syrian government which included Moscow’s direct military involvement in the conflict and Russia’s leading role in liquidating US-armed militant groups across the country.

“Main Victim of Caesar Act Is the Syrian Citizen.” Ambassador Bashar Al-Ja’fari

By Dr. Bachar al-Jaafari and The Syria Times, June 18, 2020

The unilateral coercive economic measures, mistakenly called sanctions, are based on a shared unethical principle by governments that impose such blockades, based on belief that whoever possesses economic, military and political influence is capable of imposing his own will, decisions and policies on any country in the world by just trapping them commercially, economically and impeding their banking system, while totally ignoring and condoning the fact that these measures are illegal according to international law and the Charter of the United Nations. With regard to the so-called “Caesar’s Act”, let me say that Syria has been subject to US sanctions for decades since 1979 under the pretext of supporting terrorism and threatening the security of Israel, but since the terrorist war on Syria began, the US government has issued eight executive orders to impose or tighten economic, commercial and banking unilateral measures on Syria. These punitive measures, which were accompanied by similar European ones, had and still have clear impact on the Syrian economy and on the Syrian citizen.

The US Admits They Are to Blame for Hunger in Syria

By Steven Sahiounie, June 12, 2020

United States Special Envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, announced on Sunday that Washington had offered Syria a proposal to end the US sanctions. The Foreign and Expatriates Ministry in Damascus said that the statements by James Jeffrey constitute a clear admission by the Trump administration of it being directly responsible for the suffering of Syrians. The Syrians see the increasing sanctions as economic-warfare after the US failure to bring about ‘regime change’, by using terrorists supported by the CIA. Damascus declares the sanctions violate human rights and international law as they affect the Syrian population.

Video: Hearing Is Not Like Seeing: NATO’s Terrorists Burning Syrian Wheat Crops

By Arabi Souri, June 12, 2020

A video clip shared by local farmers from Ras Al-Ayn showing an inferno burning their livelihood before their eyes, hundreds of acres of wheat on fire just as the crop is due to harvest.

We’ve been reporting about these fires in areas of operation of the NATO’s Turkish (Orwellian-named) ‘Spring of Peace’ military operation in northern, and especially in northeastern Syria regions as well as in areas where remnants and sleeper cells of NATO-sponsored terrorists of ISIS and its affiliates are active in the south of the country.

The US Supports New Kurdish Unity to Destabilize the Middle East

By Steven Sahiounie, June 20, 2020

The Kurdish National Unity Parties (PYNK), a newly-established umbrella group consisting of 25 parties, was formed on May 20 to support the Kurdish unity talks, which have resulted in a “common political vision” on governance and partnership following a series of US-backed talks.  The statement released on June 17 by all parties is the culmination of talks which first began in October 2019, and are based on the 2014 Duhok Agreement, in which the parties reached a power-sharing compromise, but the agreement was never implemented. Talks will continue until a final agreement on matters related to finance, administration, and the military is reached.

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Media Begging for a ‘Second Wave’

June 22nd, 2020 by Dr. Thomas Price

The media is churning out countless alarmist stories each day about the threat of COVID-19 and the dangers of societal reopening. “Risk of new lockdown rises with fear of second COVID-19 wave,” writes Reuters, as one example of the genre.

These stories generally incite, rather than inform. They cherry-pick facts and lack context. Only when the COVID picture is viewed in perspective are people able to make wise decisions about their actions. It should be safe for society to continue broadly reopening while directing resources to specific at-risk populations, such as nursing homes and prisons, which are more vulnerable.

The media has focused on increasing numbers of positive tests and hospitalizations in parts of the country to imply reopening is reckless. “Confirmed coronavirus cases have risen by double-digit percentages in 16 U.S. states that have gradually loosened restrictions since Memorial Day,” says Marketwatch.

Yet this perspective omits several essential facts. First, testing capacity has dramatically increased. The U.S. has tested 3.4 million people over the last week — about 40% more than the weekly numbers one month ago. It’s no surprise that positive cases have increased in some areas along with testing, especially since numerous antibody studies suggest that the disease is far more widespread than initially thought. We are witnessing a new infectious disease, and these case count ebbs and flows are to be expected.

In a country as vast and varied as the U.S., there will likely be COVID hotspots somewhere. Yet focusing on these in national news gives the impression that the country, or even individual states, are in far more danger than in reality. Even with a significant increase in testing, the number of new positive tests nationally has remained flattened as society has reopened.

Topline case counts overlook where outbreaks are occurring. Nearly half of COVID deaths have occurred in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. A sizeable portion of Arizona cases has occurred on Indian reservations. We’d prefer that at-risk populations didn’t bear the brunt of this disease, but these vulnerable groups tell us nothing about the relative safety of reopening Main Street. By lacking this context in their stories, the media is distorting with statistics.

Numerous news outlets are featuring rising COVID hospitalizations in some states to indicate a second wave. Admittedly, hospital admissions are a more objective measure of disease severity than positive tests. Often left unsaid, however, is that hospitalizations are falling in most states. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to cite these statistics in context?

Even in the states with rising hospitalizations, media stories about percentage increases often exaggerate the threat when increases occur from low baseline figures. For instance, numerous stories highlight how Arkansas’s COVID hospital admissions have increased by 121% since Memorial Day. Sounds bad, until you look at the raw numbers, which reveal that this increase only amounts to 111 patients.

Likely for political reasons, the media has identified Florida as the leading edge of a second wave. “Floridians flattened the COVID curve. Then, amid upbeat talk, the numbers began to rise,” reads a Miami Herald headline. Yet the data shows that new positive cases in Florida have tracked the increase in testing. Over the last month, hospitalizations have increased by about 50%, or just over 4,300 patients (in a state of 22 million people). Yet, the number of daily COVID deaths in the state has fallen considerably, by about one-third from May 10, using a seven-day rolling average.

This rise and fall in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths is precisely what one expects with a new infectious disease as we learn more and adjust. It’s part of “the dance” that we all knew was coming after the curve was flattened. It shouldn’t be used to justify pausing societal reopening, so long as appropriate precautions are encouraged and taken.

Reopening remains a success, with the positive case rate flattened, hospitalizations falling in most of the country, and deaths significantly reduced. That’s the positive story that the media should tell. Even if it won’t get as many clicks.

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Thomas Price M.D. is the former HHS Secretary and a senior healthcare fellow at the Job Creators Network.

C.L. Gray M.D. is the president and founder of Physicians for Reform and a partner of the Job Creators Network.

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This article was originally published in December 2015.

For the past 69 years, many of the most notorious U.S.-backed South American dictators, along with their secret police and torturers, have learned their dark arts from a secretive American training facility.

Located in Fort Benning, Georgia, the facility changed its name from “School of the Americas” to “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001. Human rights advocates say the change was purely cosmetic, a result of the increasing pressure the facility faced from activists and other critics. In November, thousands protested outside Fort Benning in what has become an annual occurrence.

Originally founded in 1946 and based in Panama, it was expelled from the nation in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. According to SOA Watch, a nonprofit which seeks the closure of the torture school, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, murdered or “disappeared” through the work of its 64,000 graduates.

It first became a target for activists over three decades ago, after repeated atrocities in El Salvador were linked to graduates of the school. In December of 1980, three Catholic nuns, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford, along with a Catholic lay missionary, Jean Donovan, were kidnapped by El Salvadoran soldiers who proceeded to torture, rape, and murder the four women under orders from the country’s military dictatorship in retaliation for their advocacy for the impoverished.

Protesters march to the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC).

Protesters march to the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC).

Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran-turned-Catholic priest and a friend of two of the victims, discovered their killers had graduated from SOA, leading him to found SOA Watch and become a major organizer of the massive protests at the gates of Fort Benning.

In a Dec. 7 appearance on “The Empire Files,” journalist Abby Martin’s weekly news program that tackles American imperialism on Telesur, Bourgeois said his time in El Salvador was more terrifying than anything he saw in Vietnam.

“I’ve never seen such abuse of power, such brutality by the military,” he told Martin, adding:

“How could they rape and kill nuns who were working with the poor? How could they assassinate a bishop in church who’s talking about the poor?”   

In March of 1980, Óscar Romero, a Catholic bishop, was shot by a sniper in the pulpit, moments after he finished a sermon in which he demanded better human rights for El Salvadorans. Soldiers attacked his funeral with sniper rifles and bombs as well, killing dozens in attendance. The deeper Bourgeois investigated the atrocities in the country, the more ties he found between the soldiers spreading chaos and death and the SOA training.

But that’s far from the only massacre linked to SOA graduates, and it’s not even the largest. On Dec. 11, 1981, the El Salvadoran army wiped out the village of El Mozote, killing 800 civilians — but only after systematically raping, torturing, and beating the men, women and children in groups. According to Martin’s report, of the 12 officers cited in the war crime by the United Nations, 10 were SOA graduates.

These photos from the U.S. backed dirty war in El Salvador were taken from the book “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers (1983)

These photos from the U.S. backed dirty war in El Mozote, El Salvador were taken from the book “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers (1983)

Freelance journalist Ramona Wadi, writing for MintPress News in April, noted that the torture school has trained thousands of soldiers for countries from Chile to Guatemala in the past 20 years, and it continues to be linked to serious human rights violations. She noted a 2014 analysis by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Colombia-Europe-U.S. Human Rights Observatory, which found that “out of 25 Colombian graduates from 2001 to 2003, 12 had either been charged with ‘a serious crime or commanded units whose members had reportedly committed multiple extrajudicial killings.’”

Although the school touts an eight-hour course in human rights that’s now mandatory for students, Wadi noted that despite years of protest and “beyond the cosmetic reforms” adopted by the government, it’s still supplying the torturers and killers that support U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

Watch “The U.S. School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads” from “The Empire Files with Abby Martin”:

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Featured image: A guest instructor debriefs students from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School after a field training exercise. (U.S. Navy photo)

U.S. Leads a Coalition of One Against China

June 22nd, 2020 by Ted Galen Carpenter

American diplomatic and military support for Taiwan has grown dramatically during the Trump years. The administration has taken steps to boost that support, but Congress also has pushed its own initiatives. One key measure was the passage of the Taiwan Travel Act in 2018, which not only authorized but encouraged high-level defense and foreign policy officials to interact with their Taiwanese counterparts. 

That was a dramatic change from the policy adopted when the United States shifted diplomatic relations from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979. U.S. policy thereafter had confined all contacts to low-level officials only. More recent congressional measures have sought to emphasize that the United States is firmly in Taiwan’s camp. The trend is not merely a matter of academic interest, since under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), the United States is obligated to regard any attempt by Beijing to coerce Taiwan as a “grave breach of the peace” in East Asia.

The U.S. determination to resist China’s attempts to exert its power in the Western Pacific has grown still stronger after Beijing imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong in May, greatly diluting (if not negating) that territory’s guaranteed political autonomy. The Trump administration, with bipartisan congressional support, rescinded Hong Kong’s special trade status and adopted other punitive measures.

U.S. leaders also sought solidarity from America’s allies in both Europe and East Asia for a joint statement of condemnation and the imposition of sanctions in response to the PRC’s erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy. The lack of support from European capitals creates serious doubts about how much assistance Washington could expect if a showdown with China emerges at some point over Taiwan’s de facto independence. Allied backing on the Hong Kong issue was tepid and grudging, at best.

Among the European powers, only Britain (Hong Kong’s former colonial ruler) joined the United States in embracing a hardline approach. Receptivity to a confrontational policy was noticeably lacking among Washington’s other European allies. The German government’s reaction was typical. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas contended that the best way for the European Union to influence China on the Hong Kong dispute was merely to maintain a dialogue with Beijing. That stance fell far short of being an endorsement of the U.S. strategy.

France appeared to be even less eager to join Washington in trying to pressure Beijing. The South China Morning Post reported that in a telephone call to PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Emmanuel Bonne, diplomatic counselor to French President Emmanuel Macron, stressed that France respected China’s national sovereignty and had no intention to interfere in its internal affairs about Hong Kong.

The European Union itself adopted an anemic response to the PRC’s passage of the national security law. Anxious not to become entangled in America’s escalating rivalry with China, EU foreign ministers on May 29 echoed Germany’s preference and emphasized the need for dialogue about Hong Kong. After a videoconference among the bloc’s 27 foreign ministers, EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell said that only one country bothered to raise the subject of sanctions. Borrell added that the EU was not planning even to cancel or postpone diplomatic meetings with China in the coming months. So much for Washington’s goal of a common diplomatic front by the Western allies against Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong.

Washington did receive one apparent endorsement of its effort to gain allied cooperation for a stronger stance against the PRC. In early June, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg insisted that alliance members needed to adopt a more global approach to security issues, unlike the Europe- and North America-centric tack that he contended had usually shaped the alliance’s agenda. With an implicit reference to China, Stoltenberg stated that “as we look to 2030, we need to work even more closely with like-minded countries, like Australia, Japan, New Zealand and [South] Korea, to defend the global rules and institutions that have kept us safe for decades.” Highlighting those nations for special mention was hardly coincidental. And in an unsubtle slap at Beijing, he contended that the greater cooperation with the noncommunist Pacific nations aimed to create an international environment based on “freedom and democracy, not on bullying and coercion.”

Stoltenberg is swimming upstream, given the strong indications from leaders of the EU and such key EU powers as France, Germany, and Italy that they have no wish to adopt a confrontational policy toward China. And even Stoltenberg emphasized that NATO cooperation with China’s East Asian neighbors would not be primarily military in nature. However, nonmilitary support will be of small comfort to the United States if a showdown over Taiwan materializes.

The reaction of key Asian allies to Beijing’s new restrictions on Hong Kong was not measurably better than the level of support Washington received from its European allies. Japan’s response likely disappointed Washington the most. After more than a week of internal debate, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government declined to join the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada in issuing a statement condemning the PRC’s actions in Hong Kong. Press reports indicated that the decision “dismayed” U.S. leaders. South Korea seemed even more determined than Japan to avoid taking sides in the dispute between the United States and China.

The bottom line was that with the exception of Australia, the United States could not count on its East Asian allies for even diplomatic and economic support against the PRC in response to its actions regarding Hong Kong. Such an outcome does not bode well if Washington seeks stronger backing—especially military backing—in the event of PRC aggression against Taiwan.

Unfortunately, the prospect of such aggression is increasing rapidly. Beijing has explicitly removed the word “peaceful” from its stated goal of inducing Taiwan to accept unification with the mainland. Equally troubling, PRC military exercises in and near the Taiwan Strait are becoming ever more numerous and menacing. On June 9, Chinese fighter planes once again violated Taiwan’s airspace, causing Taipei to send its own planes to intercept the intruders. The overall level of animosity and tension between Beijing and Taipei is at its worst level in decades.

Washington faces the prospect of being called upon to fulfill its implicit commitment under the TRA to defend Taiwan’s security. The trigger could come in the form of a PRC attack on some of Taipei’s small, outlying island holdings directly off of the mainland or in the South China Sea. Even a frontal assault on Taiwan itself cannot be ruled out. Such developments would immediately test the seriousness and credibility of the U.S. defense commitment.

Worse, the United States might well be waging the military struggle alone. The European allies almost certainly would not embroil themselves in a U.S.-China war. The reaction of Australia, South Korea, and Japan is somewhat less certain. PRC coercion against Taiwan would constitute a far more serious disruption of East Asia’s security environment than Beijing’s decision to tighten its grip on Hong Kong. All three countries would face an agonizing dilemma. If they joined a U.S.-led military defense of Taiwan, they would face severe retaliation. However, if they left the United States hanging, U.S. leaders, enraged at such a betrayal, would likely terminate Washington’s security alliances with those countries.

In any case, the United States cannot count on military support from its allies in a showdown with the PRC over Taiwan. It is yet another risk factor that Washington needs to take into account as it does a badly needed, long overdue, risk-benefit calculation regarding America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs. 

Featured image is from hyotographics/Shutterstock

The US economic embargo against Syria which doesn’t have the approval of the UN Security Council is a “crime against humanity,” a Canadian political commentator has said. 

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Mark Taliano added that the United States and its allies are supporting the harsh sanctions against the Arab country which are “cancer to the world.”

The new sanctions came into effect under the so-called Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act on June 17, targeting almost all Syrian economic and trade activities as well as the country’s government and business officials loyal to Damascus.

The restrictive measures, signed by US President Donald Trump last December, penalized 39 companies and individuals, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma — the first time she has been hit by US sanctions.

The US and European Union had already imposed sanctions on Syria, freezing the assets of the state and hundreds of firms and individuals.

But the new measures can freeze the assets of anyone dealing with the Syrian government, regardless of nationality, and target many more sectors.

“I don’t even call them sanctions because they’re entirely criminal. It’s an economic embargo. It doesn’t have the Security Council approval. These are high crimes. It’s collective punishment, crimes against humanity,” Taliano told Press TV in a phone interview on Friday.

“The US and its allies, including Canada, are rogue states. They are collectively punishing countries that insist on the rule of international law and nation-state sovereignty and self-determination. They are cancer to the world,” he added.

“They’re targeting everyday civilians and they are not targeting, in fact, they’re supporting al-Qaeda and ISIS as they have been doing for the last 10 years in Syria. It’s entirely diabolical.”

Taliano went on to say that the US and its allies are “guilty” of international war crimes and that their acts of invasion under the guise of humanitarian purposes enjoy support from the US intelligence agencies.

“What the mainstream doesn’t say is that the West is entirely guilty of supreme international war crimes, daily really. The entire regime-change wars have no basis in international law. They claim that it’s about humanitarianism but of course there’s nothing humanitarian about it,” the Canadian analyst said.

“The West does not now and never did wage wars for humanitarian purposes. The West is criminally occupying, looting petroleum resources… There’s nothing humanitarian about this,” Taliano added.

“The West supports all the terrorists and so I mean those of us who are aware of what’s going on are just totally disgusted at the criminality of our government, and the duplicity of our politicians, who do not represent us, and we denounce the censorship of the truth, and the negation of any and all forms of International Justice,” he underlined.

US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft said at a Security Council meeting on Tuesday that the sanctions are aimed to prevent Damascus from achieving victory in the fight against foreign-backed militants.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding the Takfiri terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in the country.

The government forces have already managed to undo militant gains across the country and bring back almost all of Syrian soil under government control.

The government gains in Syria have enraged the US, which has long been collaborating with anti-Damascus militants and stealing Syria’s crude resources.

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This video featuring Prof. Michel Chossudovsky was first released on April 20, 2020

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Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their lifelong savings. In developing countries, poverty and despair prevail. 

While the lockdown is presented to public opinion as  the sole means to resolving a global public health crisis, its devastating economic and social impacts are casually ignored.

What we are experiencing is a process of global impoverishment. The closure of the economy in a large number of countries has led to a dramatic loss of life. 

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of  mass unemployment, bankruptcy and extreme poverty. 

This is the true picture of what is happening. Poverty is Worldwide. 

The crisis has redefined the structure of the World economy.

It  precipitates entire sectors of the global economy including air travel, tourism, retail trade, manufacturing, etc. into bankruptcy.  The lockdown creates famine in developing countries. It has geopolitical implications.

This engineered crisis is unprecedented in world history. It is an act of war.

Curtailing economic activity Worldwide undermines the “reproduction of real life”. 

This not only pertains to the actual production of the “necessities of life” (food, health, education, housing) it also pertains to the “reproduction” of  social relations, political institutions, culture, the arts, sports events, national identity.

At the time of writing (early May 2020): Impossible to estimate or evaluate. Approximately half the global economy has been disrupted or is at a standstill?

 

The lockdown triggers a process of disengagement of human and material resources from the productive process.

The real economy in many sectors is brought to a standstill.

Billionaires, powerful banking and financial institutions (which are creditors of both governments and corporations) are waging an undeclared war against the real economy. Whereas the Big Money financial and banking establishment are “creditors”, the  corporate entities of the real economy which are being destabilized and driven into bankruptcy are “debtors”.

This diabolical process is not limited to wiping out small and medium sized enterprises. Big Money is also the creditor of  large corporations (including airlines, hotel chains, hi tech labs, retailers, import-export firms, etc.) which are now on the verge of bankruptcy.

In the US, numerous retailers, airlines, restaurant and hotel chains filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February. But this is just the beginning. The big gush of bankruptcies will occur in the wake of the lockdown (“The New Normal”). And at the time of writing (May 2020), the financial establishment is relentlessly pressuring (corrupt) national governments to postpone the lifting of the lockdown. And the governments are telling us that this is to “protect people against the virus”.

What these reports fail to mention are the unspoken causes: a fear campaign on behalf of the creditors, instructions by corrupt governments to close down the economy, allegedly to “save lives”, which is a big lie. Lives are not being saved, and they know it.

The coronavirus crisis “has ground U.S. business to a halt”. National economies are destabilized. The objective of Big Money is to weaken their competitors, “pick up the pieces” and eventually buy out or eliminate bankrupt corporations. And there are many to choose from.

Let’s be clear. This is an imperial agenda. What do the global financial elites want?

The tendency is towards the centralization and concentration of economic power.

Heavily indebted national governments are instruments of Big Money. They are proxies. Key political appointments are controlled by lobby groups representing Wall Street, The Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the Corporate Media and the Digital Communications Giants, etc.

Big Money in America and Europe (through Washington Lobby groups) seek to control national governments.

In what direction are we going? What is the future of humanity?


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In the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Towards A New World Order? The Global Debt Crisis and the Privatization of the State

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 12, 2020

 

Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 18, 2020

 

The Corona “Global False Alarm”, the Campaign against Racism and Neoliberalism

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 10, 2020

 


 

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The following is my opinion based on more than a decade and a half of research into ruling elites. Please be aware this sort of commentary is now considered domestic terrorism by the FBI, the national security state, and its propaganda media. 

I have decided to post my thoughts on the destruction of America (and Europe) before the election. If current polling is any indication, Donald Trump will not be re-elected. Joe Biden will be the establishment’s teleprompter reader. The Senate will swing over to Democrat control. Democrats and their “progressive” (corporate-financed) allies will go after anyone to the right or left of the establishment, with the exception of groups like Black Lives Matter, which now receive millions of dollars from the likes of Citibank and the Ford Foundation, the latter long known to be a front operation controlled by the CIA. 

“The Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy recently announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund [BLMF], a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition,” reports The Washington Times. 

The COVID virus is a biological weapon deliberately released in China and from there spread to much of the rest of the world. It did not escape from the Wuhan lab. It was released by the US military while participating in an athletic event in Wuhan. However, it is believed the virus was circulating in November of 2019, possibly earlier. 

In April, a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiviral Research (Vol. 16, April 2020) concluded the COVID virus contains features not present in other viruses. Moreover, the paper argued the virus has no known ancestry and contains elements present in MERS, which the authors say “was not observed in the lineage b of betacoronaviruses.” In other words, the virus is an engineered bioweapon and not a freak of nature. 

However, this military-industrial lab-created disease was not designed to kill millions and become the 21st century’s version of the Black Death. It is far more useful as a fear-inducing mechanism. 

Here is the game plan as I see it:   

1) bring down teetering fiat money and toxic asset driven economy and blame it on the virus.

2) destroy Main Street business in competition with corporate behemoths (recall John D. Rockefeller—his operating maxim was that competition is a sin). 

3) create massive and sustained unemployment.

4) normalize the idea of house arrest and the negation of core constitutional rights.

5) enhance already intrusive and unconstitutional surveillance with “contact tracing” via smartphone and Bluetooth technology (check out this article which details how Michigan authorities used contact tracing against anti-lockdown protesters). 

6) foment unrest and exacerbate social ills as a diversion from the planned globalist reformulation of the world economy and society (i.e., “global governance,” aka New World Order). 

7) direct the corporate propaganda media to obsessively dwell on irrational race- and gender-based ideology and conflict, thus widening an engineered political divide, creating social chaos and violence, and thus diverting and reducing the threat posed to the elite and the national security state apparatus. 

8) keep the narrative focused on Donald Trump; downplay the evolving economic depression, distract attention, and debate away from the elite’s endless wars and neoliberal predation (this was accomplished during the Obama regime). 

9) continue to manufacture foreign enemies—Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria—and crackdown on “domestic terrorists” and “conspiracy theorists” now conflated with ISIS.

After Democrats take back Congress and the White House, this last point will kick into overdrive. MAGA, already maligned as Nazis and white supremacists, will be investigated and supporters will be prosecuted and imprisoned. Ditto folks on the left, or those not associated and bankrolled by elite foundations and corporations. 

I am convinced the ruling and financial elite consider most of us useless eaters, cattle to be exploited. They have spent the last decade accruing vast wealth at the expense of the so-called 99%. They are responsible for endless wars—now largely irrelevant to the average American—and are responsible for the murder of millions of innocent civilians and igniting social and sectarian violence in the smoldering ruins left in their “creative destruction” wake. 

Finally, I sincerely doubt the American people are capable of confronting the elite and returning the nation to a sanity that has been missing for decades. First and foremost, they are unable to break free of the voodoo spell of relentless narrative propaganda. Millions view the left-right paradigm not as a cynically crafted ploy to divert them from the real problem—the theft of the future and present by psychopathic and misanthropic rulers, condemning billions of misery and privation—but rather as a political reality. 

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

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