Global Research

Cyber ​​warfare is one of the main bellicose activities of contemporary times. Through technologically advanced and powerful weapons, the great world powers face each other on the international stage in an invisible field, far from media attention, where the most complex networks of information and state secrets circulate. The fundamental nature of the cyber field for modern warfare is currently undeniable. More and more cases of virtual clashes between world powers are confirmed, with secret cyber warfare units being revealed day after day. Now, this confrontation seems to have definitely come to rivalry between Iranians and Israelis in the Middle East.

On May 9, a major cyberattack was registered against Iran. The main victim of the operation was the network in the port area of ​​Bandar Abbás, in the south of the country. An unidentified source, who claims to be “an official of a foreign government”, said in an interview that the attack was “very accurate”, causing “total disorder” in Iranian authorities, with almost irreparable damage. He further claims that the damage was much greater than was officially reported by the Iranian government. It is possible that much information of precious strategic value was captured with this virtual attack.

Now, a recent article in The Washington Post, bringing together information from several sources – many of which are classified – states categorically that the attack was led by Israel, which reportedly carried out the operation as part of a cyberwarfare scheme.

“The attack, which snarled traffic around the port for days, was carried out by Israeli operatives, presumably in retaliation for an earlier attempt to penetrate computers that operate rural water distribution systems in Israel, according to intelligence and cybersecurity officials familiar with the matter”, writes the newspaper.

Israel recently formally accused Iran of being behind a series of “daily cyberattacks” against Tel Aviv. In his speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that such attacks occur on a daily basis and are constantly monitored and repelled by Israeli security forces. Tehran not only denies involvement in the case but claims to have no participation in cyber wars. The May 9 attack was supposed to have been a retaliation for these attacks against Israel.

The director of the Iranian Maritime and Port Organization, Mohammad Rastad, confirmed on May 10 that a recent cyberattack could “damage several private operating systems in ports”. Some foreign intelligence sources cited by The Washington Post on May 8 pointed out that Iran was linked to the April 24 cyberattack against at least two rural water distribution networks in Israel – part of the attacks mentioned in the previous paragraph.

In September last year, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohamad Yavad Zarif, said Iran is facing a cyberwar. The minister mentioned the so-called Operation Olympic Games, which the United States and Israel reportedly launched in 2006 against the Iranian nuclear program, and the acts of sabotage carried out with the cyber weapon “Stuxnet worm”. Identified in 2010, this virus is malicious code that attacks Windows operating system computers through various vulnerabilities. It was used in 2009 and 2010 to infect computers at various Iranian entities, including the Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr, and has been detected in other countries such as Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and the USA, and is apparently a cyberweapon in common use by various armed forces and intelligence agencies worldwide.

The most interesting and important of all this is not to identify who actually committed such attacks, but to recognize the problem of cyber wars in contemporary geopolitics. The current world cannot be understood by the simple duel of “visible” forces, as it was in the Cold War, where the nuclear race marked the struggle for power between nations. Today, most weapons are outside this scope of easy identification and great damage can be done to entire nations through absolutely invisible and immaterial attacks. This new reality raises the complexity of the debate about everything we know about international relations, geopolitics and international law to a new level and brings deep reflections on the world in which we live.

Apparently, the confrontation between Iranians and Israelis has reached a new stage, in which nations also face each other in cyber reality. And this will be a stage to which all armed confrontations and geopolitical rivalries on the planet will be elevated until there is a definitive international consensus on the nature of cyberspace. Perhaps, more than ever, it is necessary to think about the possibility of creating a “cyber nomos”, a legal status for cyberspace in international law, where specific limits on war, crimes, espionage and terrorism in cyberspace are established. Only then, cyberattacks can be combated with formal sanctions and condemnations, without rebuttal and without the perpetuation of the conflicts.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Federal, state and local agencies have teamed up to operate a warrantless cellphone tracking program to monitor compliance with COVID-19 social distancing requirements.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the program provides information on people’s movements in over 500 U.S. cities. According to the report, the CDC spearheads the program known as the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network with assistance from state and local governments. Tech companies and data providers have reportedly been cooperating with the effort.

This information has been fed to law enforcement agencies. For instance, according to a report from the Daily Mail, “one source shared that researchers learned that a huge number of New Yorkers had been visiting Brooklyn’s Prospect Part and handed the information over to authorities.”

Emergencies create the perfect excuse for government power to expand.

The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The spread of coronavirus and the fear generated has opened the door to all kinds of government actions that would be intolerable in normal times. Once established, these government powers never go away. In fact, the 9/11 emergency allowed the federal government to create the foundation for the surveillance state that exists today with the passage of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 “authorities.”

Since then, the federal government has been constructing an integrated national surveillance state with the cooperation of state and local agencies. The COVID-19 “emergency” provides an excuse to put that system to “good use.” it also sets the stage for further expansion and abuse of the system in the future.

Some have pushed back against further expansion of the surveillance state during the pandemic, recognizing the inherent danger of letting that particular cat out of the bag. The New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) released a statement opposing the expanded use of location data to track coronavirus.

“Even as we battle this unprecedented public health threat, we still have to uphold the Constitution. Warrantless cellphone location tracking has been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and this surveillance program poses dire consequences for Americans’ privacy. We are deeply concerned that this data was not only collected in secret, but that it’s apparently being shared with no protections against being used by police or even ICE. While it’s unclear if this sort of surveillance state helps prevent the spread of COVID-19, it’s quite clear that it undermines our most fundamental rights and risks driving countless Americans into the shadows.”

The COVID-19 tracking program reportedly strips records shared with government agencies of identifying information. But as a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out, it’s virtually impossible to truly anonymize location data.

Practically speaking, there is no way to deidentify individual location data. Information about where a person is and has been itself is usually enough to reidentify them. Someone who travels frequently between a given office building and a single-family home is probably unique in those habits and therefore identifiable from other readily identifiable sources. One widely cited study from 2013 even found that researchers could uniquely characterize 50 percent of people using only two randomly chosen time and location data points.

It is possible to aggregate data in a way that protects individual identities, but once the pandora’s box is open, how do you keep everything inside? By its nature, government pushes the boundaries. It’s only a matter of time before police agencies are using this information to identify individuals.

Other countries have already used location data to identify specific people. China was particularly aggressive in using mass surveillance of phones to classify individuals based on their health status and to then restrict their movements. Those who claim “that can’t happen here” are naive. In fact, police have already used mass location tracking to hunt down fugitives.

Judges across the U.S. are issuing search warrants that effectively authorize police to search broad geographical areas to determine who was near a given place at a given time. In practice, these warrants give police permission to use Google location data to engage in massive fishing expeditions and subject hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people to police location tracking.

In practice, “geofence” warrants authorize police to search Google’s massive location tracking database for all of the phones within a given geographical area during a specific timeframe. According to the New York Times, federal agents first utilized the practice in 2016.

According to the Times, these broadly construed warrants help police pinpoint possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Google employees said the company often responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.

North Carolina produced the first public reports of this investigative tactic last year after detectives obtained warrants to obtain location data for all the phones that were in the area of two shootings. According to WRAL, “On a satellite image, they drew shapes around the crime scenes, marking the coordinates on the map. Then they convinced a Wake County judge they had enough probable cause to order Google to hand over account identifiers on every single cell phone that crossed the digital cordon during certain times.”

Geofencing could also be accomplished in real-time using celt site simulators, commonly known as “stingrays.” These devices essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower. This allows law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

Some argue that this kind of mass surveillance is necessary to catch “bad guys.” But what happens when the government defines a person stopping at the gun store or attending a church a “bad guy?”

Government powers never shrink. They only expand. Each expansion begets new expansions. It is imperative to place absolute limits on surveillance. We can’t trust government agents to limit themselves. As Patrick Henry warned, “Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed in the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty.”

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Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is from the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky and currently resides in northern Florida.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

A Fundação Rockefeller apresentou o “Plano de Acção Nacional Covid-19”, indicando os “passos pragmáticos para reabrir os nossos locais de trabalho e a nossa comunidade”. No entanto, como aparece no título, não se trata apenas de medidas de saúde.

O Plano – para o qual contribuíram algumas das universidades de maior prestígio (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins e outros) – prefigura um verdadeiro modelo social hierárquico e militarizado.

No topo, o “Conselho de Controlo da Pandemia, análogo ao Conselho de Produção de Guerra que os Estados Unidos criaram na Segunda Guerra Mundial”. Seria composto pelos “‘leaders’ do mundo dos negócios, do governo e do mundo académico” (assim enumerados por ordem de importância, em primeiro lugar, não os representantes do governo, mas os das finanças e da economia).

Este Conselho Supremo teria o poder de decidir produções e serviços, com uma autoridade semelhante à conferida ao Presidente dos Estados Unidos em tempo de guerra pela Lei de Produção de Defesa.

O plano prevê que sejam submetidos semanalmente ao teste Covid-19,  3 milhões de cidadãos dos EUA e que esse número deve ser elevado a 30 milhões de testes por semana, dentro de seis meses. O objectivo, a ser alcançado dentro de um ano, é atingir a capacidade de testar Covid-19 em 30 milhões de pessoas por dia. Para cada teste, prevê-se “um reembolso adequado, ao preço do mercado, de 100 doláres”. Assim, serão necessários, em dinheiro do erário público, “biliões de dólares por mês”.

A Fundação Rockefeller e os seus parceiros financeiros ajudarão a criar uma rede para o fornecimento de garantias de crédito e a assinatura de contratos com fornecedores, ou seja, com grandes empresas produtoras de medicamentos e equipamentos médicos.

De acordo com o Plano, o “Conselho de Controlo de Pandemia” também está autorizado a criar um

“Corpo de Resposta à Pandemia”: uma força especial (não é por acaso que é denominada “Corpo” como o dos Marines/Fuzileiros Navais) com uma equipa de 100 a 300 mil componentes. Seriam recrutados entre os voluntários do Peace Corps e  dos Americacorps (oficialmente criados pelo Governo dos EUA para “ajudar os países em desenvolvimento”) e entre os militares da Guarda Nacional.(1)

Os membros do “Pandemic Response Corps” receberiam um salário bruto médio de 40.000 dólares/ano, para o qual está prevista uma despesa estatal de  4 a12 biliões de dólares por ano.

O “Corpo de Resposta à Pandemia” teria, sobretudo, a tarefa de controlar a população com técnicas do tipo militar, através de sistemas de rastreio e identificação digital, nos locais de trabalho e estudo, nos bairros residenciais, nos locais públicos e de deslocação. Sistemas deste tipo – recorda a Rockefeller Foundation – são fabricados pela Apple, Google e Facebook.

De acordo com o Plano, as informações sobre os indivíduos, relacionadas com o seu estado de saúde e com as suas actividades, permaneceriam confidenciais “na medida do possível”. No entanto, todas seriam centralizadas numa plataforma digital co-gerenciada pelo Estado Federal e por empresas privadas. Com base nos dados fornecidos pelo “Conselho do Controlo da Pandemia”, seria decidido, periodicamente, quais as áreas que estariam sujeitas a ‘lockdown’ e por quanto tempo. Este é, em resumo, o plano que a Fundação Rockefeller deseja concretizar nos Estados Unidos e não só.

Se fosse efectivado, ainda que parcialmente, haveria uma maior concentração do poder económico e político nas mãos de elites ainda mais reduzidas, em prejuízo de uma maioria crescente que seria privada dos direitos democráticos fundamentais. Operação realizada em nome do “controlo Covid-19”, cuja taxa de mortalidade, segundo dados oficiais, até agora tem sido inferior a 0,03% da população dos EUA.

No Plano da Fundação Rockefeller, o vírus é usado como uma arma real, mais perigosa do que o próprio Covid-19.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original em italiano :

Piano Usa: controllo militarizzato della popolazione

 

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos 

 

(1) Mencionado na pag. 17 do PDF da ‘The Rockefeeler Foundation’.

Every regional trade bloc could put this strategy into practice so that the final phase of this plan could see them all eventually opening up with one another. Be it the East African Community (EAC) or Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) in Africa, the EU, the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, South America’s Mercosur, South Asia’s SAARC, or North America’s USMCA (formerly NAFTA), among others, they can all come together within the next 1-2 years in order to return the world to its pre-COVID-19 status quo.

The “gate” suffix has been wearing thin since the break-in scandal that gave it its birth.  Since Watergate, virtually anything dubious and suggestive, and much more besides, is suffixed.  Which brings us to the issue of President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Finding himself in hot water (did he ever leave it?) Trump has been sowing the seeds of “Obamagate”, a fairly grotesque measure that serves to fill the shallow spaces of the social mediaverse. 

Obamagate is a show without much of a script, supported by the faintest of threads.  Supposedly, they revolve around the merrily murky former national security advisor Michael Flynn, a serial perjurer who was “unmasked” as an American talking to foreigners under the routinely engaged eyes of the intelligence community.  The revelations emerged from the declassification by acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell of unmasking requests made by the Obama administration in 2016.  The exercise raised eyebrows, at least among certain Trump critics who detected a heavy accent of politicisation. 

On the surface, the move was distractingly galvanic.  The declassified document listing officials keen to identify Trump associates and any relevant ties to Russia suggested that Trump was going to embark upon yet another one of his exercises in mass distraction.  The president duly hopped on the Twitter train to drive a narrative of criminality, making his Mother’s Day a special one.  126 tweets and retweets featured, making it the second most prolific single-day posting of the Trump presidency.  Interspersed in the scatter were a few favourites: the QAnon conspiracy theory on Democrats being tied to a paedophilia cult; punchy counterattacks on those critical of his coronavirus non-policy.  The retweets also featured monumental errors of judgment, including messages critical of the Trump administration.  But something new had emerged in the smoke, all shinily suffixed.

Obama had, supposedly, committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far”, one that made “Watergate look small-time.”  When pressed for details by such individuals as Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, Trump was not particularly forthcoming, suggesting it was patently obvious. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that is being released – and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning – some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.” 

Russia, yet again, features. But this is not Democratic demonization in the Hillary Clinton mould so much as a claim of Deep State antics gone awry.  Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists sees it as a ploy to seize the Russia narrative by the throat. “It is putting the spotlight on the investigators rather than the investigated.  It is saying what is irregular here is not the extraordinary contacts with the Russian government but the attempt to understand them.”  Obamagate has taken the place of “Crooked Hillary” as a call to arms.  As Fox News host Brian Kilmeade observed, reflecting on the November election, “it’s not gonna be Biden against Trump. It’s gonna be Obama against Trump.” 

Terms such as Obamagate only exist because thinking of it makes it so.  It is the conjuring trick of a few words, fed by supposition and even superstition.  It is the howl and bark of the social media echo chamber. In a sense, such terms do not matter, though they do exercise such individuals as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.  The “idea of Obamagate”, he writes despairingly, grew “in Trump’s diseased mind and springing like a virus to his compromised and unjust Justice Department, his propagandists on Fox News’ quasi-state-media, and millions of truth-decayed supporters”. 

As with so many assessments of Trump’s time in office, these are only some aspects of a broader, decaying Republic for which Trump’s opponents also have to answer for.  He is the excremental reminder of a state in ruins, of an imperium gasping on a respirator. Bunch gives Trump too much credit for killing “the very idea of objective truth”, suggesting a certain monopoly on criminality.  He even reserves some criticism for Obama, who he accused of being “too timid in looking into Trump and Russia.”  And there, the Russian bogeyman makes yet another appearance.

How catching will this noise prove to be?  Attention has turned to prosecutor John H. Durham, who examined the initial leak of information to the Washington Post on phone calls that took place between Flynn and the Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak to the United States in 2016.  The Grenell list could, in turn, be leaked.  A fittingly messy turn that would be.

A sense that this will go nowhere is already being floated by Trump’s most loyal of deputies, the Attorney General William Barr.  “As to President Obama and Vice-President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.”  There is still time, but Obamagate is already expiring.

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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]

Featured image is from The Ecologist

New 5G cellular wireless technology is already rolling out in some states. But as a country, there is little to no research on the health effects of the new technology. As one United States’ senator put it, we are “flying blindly” and a group of scientists agreed calling for an immediate moratorium on the installation of 5G until proper research on the health effects are conducted.

More than 250 scientists and medical doctors signed the 5G Appeal claiming that 5G, or 5th generation, wireless technology “will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF), that has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment,” the appeal reads.

“NUMEROUS RECENT SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS HAVE SHOWN THAT EMF AFFECTS LIVING ORGANISMS AT LEVELS WELL BELOW MOST INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL GUIDELINES. EFFECTS INCLUDE INCREASED CANCER RISK, CELLULAR STRESS, INCREASE IN HARMFUL FREE RADICALS, GENETIC DAMAGES, STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL CHANGES OF THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, LEARNING AND MEMORY DEFICITS, NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS, AND NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON GENERAL WELL-BEING IN HUMANS. DAMAGE GOES WELL BEYOND THE HUMAN RACE, AS THERE IS GROWING EVIDENCE OF HARMFUL EFFECTS TO BOTH PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE.”

— The International EMF Scientist Appeal,

While the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer labeled RFR as a possible carcinogen to humans in 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it would “soon reaffirm the RFR exposure limits that were adopted by the commission in the late 1990s,” Scientific American reported. But the FCC’s RFR exposure limits are based mostly off of research from the 1980s and only regulates the intensity of exposure and frequency of the carrier waves, yet dismisses the “signaling properties” of RFR, Scientific American reported. Signaling properties are important because they have an effect on the exposure, therefore, increasing the health impacts, scientists said.

In 2018, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) conducted a study that concluded that exposure to cell phone RFR over a two-year period had “increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes.” The FDA recently “concluded that no changes to the current standards are warranted at this time,” and the “NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phone usage.”

The new 5G cellular technology will use “millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been in use for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G,” Scientific American reported. The new technology will require “small cell” antennas every 300 to 600 feet because of the limited reach exposing even more people to radiation.

“THE WIRELESS TELECOM INDUSTRY INTEND TO OUTFIT NEARLY EVERY LAMP POST OR UTILITY POST AROUND THE COUNTRIES WITH THESE WIRELESS SMALL CELL ANTENNAS BEAMING HAZARDOUS RADIATION NEXT TO, OR INTO OUR HOMES, SCHOOLS, WORKINGPLACES AND EVERYWHERE, 24/7.”

—5G Appeal

According to a scientific paper published in 2017 by the Department of Electrical Engineering, Georgia Southern University:

“Our results show that 5G downlink RF fields generate significantly higher power density (PD) and specific absorption rate (SAR) than a current cellular system.”…Thus,when a larger phased antenna is used or when a user moves closer to the AP, the PD value becomes a major health concern which inevitably requires more research about health effects of 5G before it is deployed successfully by strictly following the RF emission standards.”

Not only is cancer an overall harmful risk, according to scientific evidence, RFR also causes many neurological disorders and reproductive harm. Scientists and doctors are now urging governments worldwide to put “safety guidelines” in place to protect the health of the people, not the industry.

“Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety,” Joel M. Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

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On April 21st the Washington Post savaged Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to begin opening his state after locking down for weeks. “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” sneered the headline.

The author, liberal pundit Dana Milbank, actually found the possibility of Georgians dying to be hilarious, suggesting that, “as a promotion, Georgia could offer ventilators to the first 100 hotel guests to register.”

Milbank, who is obviously still getting paid while millions are out of work, sees his job as pushing the mainstream narrative that we must remain in fear and never question what “experts” like Dr. Fauci tell us.

Well it’s been three weeks since Milbank’s attack on Georgia and its governor, predicting widespread death which he found humorous. His predictions are about as worthless as his character. Not only has Georgia not seen “coronavirus…burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” as Milbank laughed, but Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have seen a steep decline since the governor began opening the state.

Maybe getting out in the fresh air and sunshine should not have been prohibited in the first place!

In fact, as we now have much more data, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US states and the countries that locked down the tightest also suffered the highest death rates. Ultra locked-down Italy suffered 495 Covid deaths per million while relatively non-locked down South Korea suffered only five deaths per million. The same is true in the US, where non lockdown states like South Dakota were relatively untouched by the virus while authoritarian-led Michigan, New York, and California have been hardest hit.

In those hardest hit states, we are now seeing that most of the deaths occurred in senior care facilities – after the governors ordered patients sick with Covid to leave the hospitals and return to their facilities. There, they infected their fellow residents who were most likely to have the multiple co-morbidities and advanced age that turned the virus into a death sentence. Will these governors be made to answer for this callous disregard for life?

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar admitted the obvious: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases.” So why not open everything? Because these petty tyrants cannot stand the idea of losing the ability to push people around.

Shutting down the entire United States over a virus that looks to be less deadly than an average flu virus – particularly among those under 80 who are not already sick – has resulted in mass unemployment and economic destruction. More Americans may die from the wrong-headed efforts to fight the virus than from the virus itself.

Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny. This is no empty warning – it’s backed up by history. Time to stand up to all the petty tyrants from our hometowns to Washington DC. It is time to reclaim our freedom.

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Capitalism is a system to accumulate capital. People are only a commodity in this system. The Coronavirus crisis has enabled the capitalists to pay less for the healthy laborers to make more profit. The rest are left to their own demise. 

-Massoud Nayeri, May 19, 2020

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Chile’s economic crisis unleashed by President Sebastian Piñera’s neoliberal policies and exacerbated by the pandemic revived images that had not been seen in Chile since the time of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

Thousands of people living in poor neighborhoods eat every day thanks to the “common pots”, a solidarity mechanism that allows families to access some food.

Over the last weeks, this form of social organization has proliferated in the periphery of Santiago city where thousands of families have been left without income because of the closure of shops and the suspension of construction works.

“The most immediate memory of the common pots dates back to the crisis that hit the country in 1982,” the University of Chile professor Nicolas Angelcos said.

After 38 years, in Puente Alto, one of Santiago’s poorest communes, social leader Susana Castillo prepares 250 servings of rice with chicken.​​​​​​​

🔹 Efecto coronavirus: pobreza en Chile podría llegar a los dos dígitos durante este añohttps://t.co/BxwKyjf1du

— T13 (@T13) May 13, 2020

Coronavirus effect: poverty in Chile could reach double digits this year. The meme reads, “according to an ECLAC report, poverty will increase significantly in Latin America.”

“More families are coming, especially since the quarantine has been extended. There are more and more people who are losing their jobs,” she said at a site where the Puente Alto municipality delivers food to some 5,000 people.

“We lived on the salary of my partner, who was a merchant, and now we are left with nothing,” a mother of five children Guacolda Bueno said and added that the common pot has allowed her at least to “have lunch.”

by Massoud Nayeri

According to the Health Ministry, Puente Alto is the second Chilean neighborhood with the highest number of COVID-19 cases (1658), only behind Santiago downtown (1873).

In this South American country, unemployment increased to 8.2 percent in the first quarter of 2020 and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimates that the economy will fall by 4 percent and poverty could rise to 13.7 percent this year.​​​​​​​

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Featured image: Women prepare food for the people of the Los Troncos neighborhood, Chile, May 13, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @ComunOlla

Al Jazeera reports Monday: “Afghan intelligence officials killed in Taliban car bombing.”

He said today: “With the recent spate of attacks in Afghanistan, the so-called ‘peace agreement’ between the U.S. and the Taliban signed just a few weeks ago seems to be in tatters. The purported truce that was to be had went to shreds the moment the negotiations ended in some resolution. The only provision that seems to have been implemented is a prisoner exchange.

“After dragging its feet” in the prolonged war, the U.S. government “was now willing to meet the principal Taliban demand: withdrawal of all U.S. forces, gradually over the next fourteen months. However, the absence of, and indifference toward, the Afghan government itself was glaringly visible in these U.S.-Taliban peace talks.

“Observers now widely believe that an Afghan ‘puppet’ government, utterly reliant on U.S. protection, is outraged by these negotiations. President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, along with his close Indian allies, do not seem to be keen on any U.S. withdrawal that would almost certainly lead to the Taliban, or what is more appropriately considered the ethnic Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, to win over both more territory and loyalties from the other ethnic forces in the country. The latter has already begun to happen.

“The latest Taliban attack on Afghan intelligence personnel in the city of Ghazni rests upon a strong belief that the Afghan intelligence services, alongside their Indian counterparts, are engineering a number of spectacular attacks within the country precisely to prevent the Americans from considering to withdraw. All of the attacks are routinely condemned by the Afghan government as the work of the Taliban, who on the surface of it, would have no interest in breaking the truce and peace accord since the Americans agreed to their main demand.

“What began as a hopeful sign of the ending of the two-decade bloody American occupation of the country, torn by internecine warfare for four decades now, has now (re-)turned into a chaotic war zone where the geopolitics of the region, and outside actors, prevent any steps toward reconciliation and peace.”

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This article was originally published on the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Ahmad is director of the Center for Global Dialogue and professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Lahore, Pakistan. See his interviews on The Real News.

The following article published by the British Medical Journal provides a critical perspective on the health impacts and political implications of  the Lockdown. 

Lockdown is a crude instrument. On its own it can’t eliminate covid-19, but it buys a country time to prepare its health systems and to mount a public health response. Tragically, the UK government has squandered much of the precious eight weeks bought at such great social and economic cost. The question now is whether it is willing to admit mistakes and do what’s really needed to suppress the virus (See this).

It seems clear the UK locked down late and too gradually, that we lacked basic preparedness despite clear warnings of a likely future pandemic (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1879), and that our healthcare and public health systems were already reeling from lack of investment and the unnecessary disruptive reorganisations of the previous decade (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1284). In the past frantic few weeks the NHS has responded magnificently (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1444), but it has survived only by discharging people back into the community and by stopping everything other than covid related care. The resulting loss to health and life will become clear, as will the impact on staff who have shouldered the covid burden. Despite these exceptional efforts it is therefore wrong to say that the NHS has not been overwhelmed.

The government’s public health response has been exceptional in a far less glorious way. Especially shambolic has been its approach to testing and contact tracing. What little community testing had been achieved by mid-March was abandoned for lack of capacity. Failure to test patients transferred into the community fuelled the devastating outbreaks in care homes, and inability to test patients being admitted to hospital now makes it almost impossible to prevent hospital infection. While the tests themselves need to be interpreted with caution (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1808), and there is continuing uncertainty about how long a person remains infectious (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1724), lack of community testing makes it hard to estimate the true prevalence of the virus (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1891).

Much promised “ramping up” of testing has failed to deliver a workable system (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1922). Rules for who could be tested made no practical sense and, even with the help of misleading statistics (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1863), have failed to hide the extent of the gap between what was needed and what could be achieved. Rather than build on existing locally integrated systems, testing has been contracted out to four large private “Lighthouse” laboratories. GPs and emergency departments can’t order tests and don’t get sent the results (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1881). The top-down vertical system has been fraught with operational problems and delays. And that’s before we get onto the urgent need for contact tracing and isolation (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1859), without which we stand no chance of suppressing the virus sufficiently to safely exit lockdown (https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/01/we-urgently-need-to-start-contact-tracing-to-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19).

Many of these concerns have been raised in the first report of the independent scientific advisory group for emergencies (iSAGE) (doi:10.1136/bmj.m1917). It is well argued, wide ranging, and evidence based, and refreshing in its openness about uncertainties, disagreements, and debate on key issues. The government is buying more time with continued lockdown. It will be good for all of us if it spends some of that time absorbing and acting on this advice.

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There are two stories that seem to have been under-reported in the past couple of weeks. The first involves Michael Flynn’s dealings with the Russian United Nations Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. And the second describes yet another bit of espionage conducted by a foreign country directed against the United States. Both stories involve the State of Israel.

The bigger story is, of course, the dismissal by Attorney General William Barr of the criminal charges against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn based on malfeasance by the FBI investigators. The curious aspect of the story as it is being related by the mainstream media is that it repeatedly refers to Flynn as having unauthorized contacts with the Russian Ambassador and then having lied about it. The implication is that there was something decidedly shady about Flynn talking to the Russians and that the Russians were up to something.

In reality, the part left out of the story is that the phone call to Kislyak on December 22, 2016, was made by Flynn at the direction of Jared Kushner, who in turn had been approached by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had learned that the Obama Administrating was going to abstain on a United Nations vote condemning the Israeli settlements policy, meaning that for the first time in years a U.N. resolution critical of Israel would pass without drawing a U.S. veto. Kushner, acting for Netanyahu, asked Flynn to contact each delegate from the various countries on the Security Council to delay or kill the resolution. Flynn agreed to do so, which included a call to the Russians. Kislyak took the call but did not agree to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed unanimously on December 23^rd.

In taking the phone calls from a soon-to-be senior American official who would within weeks be part of a new administration in Washington, the Russians did nothing wrong, but the media is acting like there was some kind of Kremlin conspiracy seeking to undermine U.S. democracy. It would not be inappropriate to have some conversations with an incoming government team and Kislyak also did nothing that might be regarded as particularly responsive to Team Trump overtures since he voted contrary to Flynn’s request.

The phone call made at the request of Israel was neither benign or ethical as the Barack Administration was still in power and managing the nation’s foreign policy. At the time, son-in-law Jared Kushner was Trump’s point man on the Middle East. He and his family have extensive ties both to Israel and to Netanyahu personally, to include Netanyahu’s staying at the Kushner family home in New York. The Kushner Family Foundation has funded some of Israel’s illegal settlements and also a number of conservative political groups in that country. Jared has served as a director of that foundation and it is reported that he failed to disclose the relationship when he filled out his background investigation sheet for a security clearance. All of which suggests that if you are looking for possible foreign government collusion with the incoming Trumpsters, look no further.

And it should be observed that the Israelis were not exactly shy about their disapproval of Obama and their willingness to express their views to the incoming Trump. Kushner went far beyond merely disagreeing over an aspect of foreign policy as he was actively trying to clandestinely subvert and reverse a decision made by his own legally constituted government. His closeness to Netanyahu made him, in intelligence terms, a quite likely Israeli government agent of influence, even if he didn’t quite see himself that way.

Kushner’s actions, as well as those of Flynn, would most certainly have been covered by the Logan Act of 1799, which bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments on behalf of the United States and also could be construed as a “conspiracy against the United States.” But in spite of all that the investigation went after Flynn instead of Kushner. As Kushner is Jewish and certainly could be accused of dual loyalty in extremis, that part of the story obviously makes many in the U.S. Establishment and media uncomfortable, so it was and continues to be both ignored and expunged from the record as quickly as possible.

The second story, which has basically been made to disappear, relates to spying by Israel against critics in the United States. The revelation that Israel was again using its telecommunications skills to spy on foreigners came from an Oakland California federal court lawsuit initiated by Facebook (FB) against the Israeli surveillance technology company NSO Group. FB claimed that NSO has been using servers located in the United States to infect with spyware hundreds of smartphones being used by attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, critics of Israel and even of government officials. NSO allegedly used WhatsApp, a messaging app owned by FB, to hack into the phones and install malware that would enable the company to monitor what was going on with the devices. It did so by employing networks of remote servers located in California to enter the accounts.

NSO has inevitably claimed that they do indeed provide spyware, but that it is sold to clients who themselves operate it with the “advice and technical support to assist customers in setting up” but it also promotes its products as being “used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives.” It also asserts that its software cannot be used against U.S. phone numbers.

Facebook, which did its own extensive research into NSO activity, alleges that NSO rented a Los Angeles-based server from a U.S. company called QuadraNet that it then used to launch 720 hacks on smartphones and other devices. It further claims in the court filing that the company reverse-engineering WhatsApp, using an program that it developed to access WhatsApp’s servers and deploy “its spyware against approximately 1,400 targets” before “…covertly transmit[ting] malicious code through WhatsApp servers and inject[ing]” spyware into telephones without the knowledge of the owners.”

The filing goes on to assert that the “Defendants had no authority to access WhatsApp’s servers with an imposter program, manipulate network settings, and commandeer the servers to attack WhatsApp users. That invasion of WhatsApp’s servers and users’ devices constitutes unlawful computer hacking.”

NSO, which is largely staffed by former (sic) Israeli intelligence officers, had previously been in the news for its proprietary spyware known as Pegasus, which “can gather information about a mobile phone’s location, access its camera, microphone and internal hard drive, and covertly record emails, phone calls and text messages.” Pegasus was reportedly used in the killing of Saudi dissident journalist Adnan Kashoggi in Istanbul last year and it has more recently been suggested as a resource for tracking coronavirus distance violators. Outside experts have accused the company of selling its technology and expertise to countries that have used it to spy on dissidents, journalists and other critics.

Israel routinely exploits the access provided by its telecommunications industry to spy on the host countries where those companies operate. The companies themselves report regularly back to Mossad contacts and the technology they provide routinely has a “backdoor” for secretly accessing the information accessible through the software. In fact, Israel conducts espionage and influence operations both directly and through proxies against the United States more aggressively than any other “friendly” country, which once upon a time included being able to tap into the “secure” White House phones used by Bill Clinton to speak with Monica Lewinsky.

Last September, it was revealed that the placement of technical surveillance devices by Israel in Washington D.C. was clearly intended to target cellphone communications to and from the Trump White House. As the president frequently chats with top aides and friends on non-secure phones, the operation sought to pick up conversations involving Trump with the expectation that the security-averse president would say things off the record that might be considered top secret.

A Politico report detailed how “miniature surveillance devices” referred to as “Stingrays” were used to imitate regular cell phone towers to fool phones being used nearby into providing information on their locations and identities. According to the article, the devices are referred to by technicians as “international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.”

Over one year ago, government security agencies discovered the electronic footprints that indicated the presence of the surveillance devices near the White House. Forensic analysis involved dismantling the devices to let them “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” One source observed afterwards that “It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible.”

So two significant stories currently making the rounds have been bowdlerized and disappeared to make the Israeli role in manipulating and spying against the United States go away. They are only two of many stories framed by a Zionist dominated media to control the narrative in a way favorable to the Jewish state. One would think that having a president of the United States who is the most pro-Israel ever, which is saying a great deal in and of itself, would be enough, but unfortunately when dealing with folks like Benjamin Netanyahu there can never be any restraint when dealing with the “useful idiots” in Washington.

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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.

Featured image is from TUR

“Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny.” —Ron Paul

Donald Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”, but it’s much worse than that. The media is a national security threat. Just look at the way they’ve handled the coronavirus. The hysterical 24-7 coverage has people so terrified they’ve locked themselves in their homes inflicting catastrophic damage on the economy. That disaster never would’ve taken place if the media hadn’t focused all their energy on scaring people to death. Now the damage is done, millions of people have lost their jobs, tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses are facing bankruptcy, and the world’s biggest economy has been reduced to a smoldering wastelands. And what was gained? Nothing. Check out this excerpt from an article by economist Jack Ramsay:

“The magnitude and rapidity of the shutdown of the real economy in the US is unprecedented. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the contraction of the real economy occurred over a period of several years—not months….

…once the contraction in the real economy accelerates and deepens, it inevitably leads to defaults and bankruptcies…. The defaults and bankruptcies then provoke a financial crisis that feeds back on the real economy, causing it to deteriorate still further. Income losses by businesses, households and local government thereafter in turn cause a further decline. Once negative feedback effects within the economy begin, it matters little if the health crisis is soon abated. The economic dynamic has been set in motion. ….The Fed.. can make a mass of free money and cheap loans available, but businesses and households may be reluctant to borrow, preferring to hoard their cash—and the loans as well. In other words, the deeper and faster the contraction, the more difficult and slower the recovery” (“The Myth of V-Shape Economic Recovery“, Jack Rasmus)

Every sector of the economy is shrinking and shrinking fast. Oil prices have plunged, activity in all 50 states is slumping badly, business confidence is at record lows, personal spending continues to shrivel, consumer confidence is dropping sharply, the service sector is tanking, restaurant traffic, industrial production, manufacturing, corporate earnings, business investment, personal consumption, bank lending, imports-exports; are all down, down, down and down. There’s not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere. The economy is in freefall while people remain hunkered down inside their homes thinking they are stopping the spread of a deadly virus. But lockdowns don’t stop infections, at best they postpone them to a later date, and even that is doubtful.

The whole idea of isolating the healthy members of the population to counter the spread of a highly-contagious virus is delusional. There’s no historical precedent to the policy at all. There was no lockdown during the Spanish Flu in 1918 (when 50 million died), no lockdown during the Asian Flu in 1957, no lockdown during the Hong Kong Flu in 1969, no lockdown during SARS in 2002, no lockdown during the Swine Flu in 2009, no lockdown during MERS outbreak in 2012, and no lockdown during Ebola epidemic in 2014.

Get the picture? There was no lockdown, no time, NEVER.

But just ask someone about the lockdown today and they’ll announce with absolute certainty, “It’s the only way to beat this thing”. Right, by locking yourself indoors and waiting for the economy to crash, is that it?

Three bulletpoints you won’t see in the MSM:

1–There is no historical precedent for lockdowns

2–There is no scientific basis for lockdowns

3–A number of infectious disease experts, like Swedish Professor John Giesecke, believe that lockdowns are the wrong policy to contain the spread of the virus, they’re politically dangerous and they’ll be difficult to end. Here’s what he said:

“When you start looking around now at the measures that are being taken by different countries you find that very few of them have a shred of evidence-based [support] … border closures, school closures, social distancing – there’s almost no science behind most of these.”

Lockdowns are not science-based policy. They’re a faith-based catch-as-catch-can concoction that’s accepted as Holy Writ by the vast majority of Americans who are so terrified by the virus that they have allowed themselves to be duped by a manipulative, agenda-driven media that has convinced them that hibernating while the economy disintegrates is somehow performing their civic duty. But they’re wrong. One’s real civic duty is to engage their own critical thinking skills, skeptically analyze the idiocy that government passes off as social policy, and resist those directives that are clearly destructive to the interests of the American people and the country. Lockdowns certainly meet that criteria. Here’s a clip from Pepe Escobar’s latest article that helps to put things in perspective:

“The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.

Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation….

Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11…That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.

As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.

The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.” (“How Biosecurity Is Enabling Digital Neo-Feudalism” Unz Review)

So, there is no “medical justification, or leading epidemiological research” to support lockdowns. It’s all made-up out of whole cloth. Lockdowns are the result of political manipulation (of a public health crisis) intended to simulate martial law. “Go home and stay home,” that’s the message not “Go home and be healthy” . That doesn’t factor into the government’s calculus at all.

So on whose behalf are these lockdowns being imposed? Certainly not Trump who’s wanted to lift them from Day 1. No, it’s his surrounding cast, like the affable Dr Anthony Fauci who just recently appeared before the Senate and ominously cautioned them against lifting restrictions too soon. His warnings closely resembled those of his colleague and perhaps, benefactor, Bill Gates, whose tentacles are wrapped tightly around the global health network and who, many think, uses philanthropic initiatives as a vehicle for advancing his own malign vision of the future. As for the lockdowns, we’ll let Gates speak for himself:

“First, we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down. Despite urging from public health experts, some states and counties haven’t shut down completely. In some states, beaches are still open; in others, restaurants still serve sit-down meals….

The country’s leaders need to be clear: Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere. Until the case numbers start to go down across America — which could take 10 weeks or more — no one can continue business as usual or relax the shutdown. Any confusion about this point will only extend the economic pain, raise the odds that the virus will return, and cause more deaths….

To bring the disease to an end, we’ll need a safe and effective vaccine. If we do everything right, we could have one in less than 18 months — about the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed. But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses.” (“Bill Gates: Here’s how to make up for lost time on covid-19“, Washington Post)

Here’s one more from Gates in case there’s any doubts about his intentions:

“One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID–19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” (“Bill Gates — Gates Notes)

What the heck is he talking about? Gates isn’t a doctor, a scientist, an epidemiologist, or an elected official who sets policy. He’s a rich-guy dilettante who made zillions by ruthlessly dominating the software industry. That’s all. Does that make him an expert on infectious diseases? Does that give him the right to order the summary lockdown of 328 million Americans? No, it doesn’t, but Gates’s tentacles are also wrapped around the media (which helps him to shape public opinion) as this clip from an article at Lew Rockwell points out:

“The Gates Foundation gives grants in the hundreds of thousands and often millions to such media organizations as NBCUniversal, Al Jazeera, BBC, Viacom (CBS) and Participant Media …Both Gates and the Gates Foundation are sizable shareholders in Comcast,… as well as….MSNBC and NBC News…In 2009, the New York Times reported that the Gates Foundation was partnering with media companies to write and shape stories to ‘embed’ messages in primetime dramas:”

“’It [the Gates Foundation] is less well known as a behind-the-scenes influencer of public attitudes toward these issues by helping to shape story lines and insert messages into popular entertainment like the television shows ER, Law & Order: SVU and Private Practice…..

“His enormous wealth and the reach of media parent corporations seem to exempt Gates from routine disclosure requirements. …. He is given softball interviews in Comcast-backed Vox without disclosure that he’s a major Comcast investor. Because his stake in media companies is laundered enough times, it’s assumed not to merit mention.” (“Bill Gates, HR6666, Remdesivir, Deaths in Italy“, Lew Rockwell)

Bill Gates has critical contacts across the spectrum of media, global health care and politics. If he wants to his views widely disseminated, all he has to do is say the word. That said, we may never know if the lockdowns were his idea, but he certainly has the power to have them implemented if he so chooses. And for those who remain skeptical on this point, consider these words of warning from James Corbett’s excellent three-part video series on the Microsoft mucky-muck titled “Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid”:

“The takeover of public health that we have documented in How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health and the remarkably brazen push to vaccinate everyone on the planet that we have documented in Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World was not, at base, about money.

The unimaginable wealth that Gates has accrued is now being used to purchase something much more useful: control. Control not just of the global health bodies that can coordinate a worldwide vaccination program, or the governments that will mandate such an unprecedented campaign, but control over the global population itself.”(James Corbett, The Off-Guardian)

The lockdowns are all about power; raw, political power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable “do goodie” oligarchs who are determined to save humanity whether we like it or not.

God help us.

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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 Shutterstock

Following the demise of the communist regimes, and the collaboration of so many social-democratic parties in neoliberal, capitalist globalization, a strong anarchist sensibility emerged, quite understandably, on the radical left, and remained influential for a considerable period of time. From the continent-spanning anti-globalization protests at the turn of the millennium to the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street from New York to other US and international cities, the predominant mood reflected a widespread suspicion, if not disdain, for any political strategy that involved going into the state.

And then, rather suddenly, there seemed to be a widespread realization that you can protest until hell freezes over, but you won’t change the world that way. That realization came during the very short time bridging the occupations of the squares in Madrid and Athens and the rapid electoral breakthroughs of Syriza and Podemos. It also seeded the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies inside the dominant center-left parties of the United Kingdom and the United States.

John Holloway’s work Change the World Without Taking Power, inspired by the Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico, famously summed up the earlier mood on the Left. An important new book, inspired by a very different Latin American example, has captured today’s contrasting zeitgeist: Rebecca Tarlau’s Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers’ Movement Transformed Brazilian Education.

Tarlau is a DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) activist who teaches at Penn State and just happens to be the daughter of long-time CWA (Communications Workers of America) union leader Jimmy Tarlau. She presents the movement’s “long march through the institutions” of Brazil’s educational system in vivid detail, from grade schools to universities, and all the way from Rio Grande do Sul up to Pernambuco in the northeast, drawing even more upon her undergraduate training in anthropology at University of Michigan Ann Arbor than upon her graduate studies in education at UC Berkeley. The result is one of the most profound analyses ever written of what it means to be “in and against the state” as a strategic practice.

Forged in the crucible of struggle against the Brazilian military regime during the 1970s, the cadres of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) were closely aligned with those of the new Workers’ Party (PT). The PT’s distinctive strategic orientation at the time could be expressed as follows: “We are organizers. That’s what we’re good at. But we need to get into the state. Once we get into the state, we have to continue to be organizers. We have to use state resources to help organize those who remain unorganized.”

It was this orientation that inspired the famous Porto Alegre experiment in participatory budgeting, where a PT mayor had already been elected by the late 1980s. As I can personally attest, when activists attending the World Social Forums at the turn of the millennium heard about the achievements of this experiment, most of them returned from Porto Alegre sounding much like Lincoln Steffens after he went to the USSR in 1919 and came back declaring, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

In fact, the participatory-budget process was full of contradictions and limitations, as was already quite clear to those who had launched the experiment a decade before — not least in the sense that participants at the base never got to decide upon the most important strategic questions with which the local PT government had to deal. Yes, the representatives from the favelas were allowed to choose whether to put resources into building a sewer rather than a road, but they were never involved in addressing the strategic questions of how to deal with the landlords who were reclaiming the land once those roads and sewers were built. By contrast, the MST actively engaged in developing political and strategic capacities in its encampments and settlements (as well at its national cadre school just south of São Paulo). MST activists also devoted themselves, as Rebecca Tarlau shows so well, to fostering such capacities through the public-school system.

When the PT elected its first mayors in the late 1980s, the party discovered that it faced accusations of clientelism if it hired a bus to take demonstrators to Brasília to challenge the way federal state expenditure on services was being off-loaded onto the cities. Since party leaders had committed themselves to doing away with clientelist practices, they didn’t know how to answer that criticism, so they simply stopped doing it. The MST didn’t have to face the same political contradiction. But its own long march through the weak educational structures of clientelist state and municipal governments soon left those governments relying on the MST to help run the schools, even as the MST was able to radicalize many of the teachers who were initially suspicious of it.

What made the MST distinctive in this respect as a social movement was, and remains, its status as an explicit class movement — and, no less explicitly, a socialist movement. Most of the literature on social movements in recent decades took shape in hostility to class analysis, not to mention the “grand narrative” of replacing capitalism with socialism. Tarlau’s achievement is to turn social-movement analysis back toward class analysis. She also foregrounds the type of socialist strategy that involves working “in and against” the institutions of the state so as to transform them — rather than merely protesting outside of them, still less “smashing” them in the old insurrectionary sense.

Yet this remarkably sober book is by no means an exercise in cheerleading. Indeed, Tarlau’s close study of the MST’s involvement in “contentious co-governance” of Brazil’s educational institutions contrasts sharply with most of the existing literature on Brazil’s participatory-budgeting institutions, which so often presented them as “real utopias.” The MST has not transformed the whole of the Brazilian educational system. It has only changed those educational apparatuses in closest proximity to its own spaces of occupation and settlement, and those higher-education institutions directly involved in teacher training for rural areas. As Tarlau shows, the Ministry of Education itself has hardly changed at all.

This raises the further question of what it would mean to go beyond transforming state structures that are primarily involved in social reproduction, by bringing into question those institutions that are centrally involved in capitalist economic reproduction, like central banks and departments of finance or commerce. And insofar as this speaks to the very different experiences of the MST and PT in Brazil, it raises yet another question: Namely, what strategic capacities should a mass political party be trying to develop, if its aim is to occupy the whole terrain of the state in order to transform it? This is the key question facing the socialist left in our time. That Rebecca Tarlau’s important book induces us to ponder it is yet another of its considerable achievements.

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Leo Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the co-editor of the Socialist Register. His latest book, with Sam Gindin, is The Making of Global Capitalism.

Despite its peaceful reputation, Canada is not acting as a benevolent player on the international stage.

Rather, Canada ranks among the twelve largest arms exporters and its weapons have fueled conflicts across the globe, including the devastating war in Yemen.

In a disappointing move, Canada refused to join 122 countries represented at the 2017 UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination.

Ottawa has also been an aggressive proponent of the nuclear-armed NATO alliance, and currently leads coalition missions in Latvia and Iraq.

Echoing Trump’s foreign policy, Canada has backed reactionary forces in the Americas. The Trudeau government has led efforts to unseat Venezuela’s UN-recognized government, while propping up repressive, corrupt and illegitimate governments in Haiti and Honduras. Canada also lent its support to the economic elites and Christian extremists who recently overthrew the democratically elected indigenous president of Bolivia.

In the Middle East, Canada has sided with Israel on almost every issue of importance. Since coming to power the Trudeau government has voted against more than fifty UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights backed by the overwhelming majority of member states. The Canadian government has refused to abide by 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.” On the contrary, Ottawa extends economic and trade assistance to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise. Should it win a seat on the UNSC, Ottawa has stated that it will act as an “asset for Israel” on the Council.

Canadian mining companies are responsible for countless ecological and human rights abuses around the globe. Still, Ottawa defends the most controversial mining firms and refuses to restrict public support for companies responsible for abuses. The chair of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights criticized the Trudeau government for refusing to rein in mining abuses while the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes has decried the “double standard” applied to Canadian mining practices domestically versus internationally.

Falling short of its responsibilities as a global citizen, Canada continues to oppose the Basel Ban Amendment on the export of waste from rich to poor countries, which became binding in late 2019 after ratification by 97 countries. Ottawa also failed to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Ottawa has refused to ratify more than 50 International Labour Organization conventions. In November 2019, Canada once again refused to back a widely supported UN resolution on “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Violating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Trudeau government sent militarized police into unceded Wet’suwet’en Nation territory to push through a pipeline. The UN Human Rights Committee recently documented various ways Canada is failing to live up to its obligations towards indigenous people under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Ignoring front-line victims, Ottawa refuses to keep Canada’s dirty oil in the ground. Canada is on pace to emit significantly more greenhouse gases than it agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement and previous climate accords. Already among the world’s highest per capita emitters, the Canadian government is subsidizing further growth of heavy emitting tar sands, at the expense of impoverished nations who’ve contributed little to the climate crisis but bear the brunt of its impacts.

The international community should not reward bad behaviour. Please vote against Canada’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Signatories

David Suzuki, Award winning geneticist/broadcaster

Roger Waters, co-founder Pink Floyd

Noam Chomsky, linguist, author & social critic

Ellen Gabriel, artist and activist

Roméo Saganash, former MP Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou

Sid Ryan, former president of Ontario Federation of Labour and CUPE Ontario

Rawi Hage, novelist

Amir Khadir, former Quebec National Assembly member

Pam Palmater, Chair in Indigenous Governance, Ryerson

Judy Rebick, activist and author

Jord Samolesky, Propagandhi

Steve Ashton, long-serving member of the Manitoba legislature and cabinet minister

George Elliott Clarke, poet and professor

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize co-winner (1976)

Trevor Herriot, author and activist

John Clark, activist

Charles Demers, comedian & author

Alain Deneault, essayist and philosophy professor

Martin Duckworth, laureate of the 2015 Albert-Tessier Prix du Quebec for cinema

Cy Gonick, former Manitoba NDP MLA and founding editor of Canadian Dimension

John Greyson, film-maker & professor

Syed Hussan, Migrant Workers Alliance

El Jones, activist, educator, journalist and poet

Gordon Laxer, author/founding Director Parkland Institute

Monia Mazigh, PhD, author and activist

Jim Manly, Member of Parliament 1980-88

Kanahus Manuel, activist

Tim McCaskell, educator & activist

Sheelah Mclean, co-founder Idle No More organizer

Serge Mongeau, author & editor

Mike Palecek, former National President of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers

Dimitri Roussopoulos, author, and long-time peace movement activist

Clayton Thomas-Müller – Director, Author, Senior Campaign Specialist – 350.org

Rinaldo Walcott, professor

Ingrid Waldron, author & professor

Harsha Walia, author & activist

Antonia Zerbisias, journalist & activist

Greg Albo, Professor of Politics, York University

August Arnold, journalist and author

Antonio Artuso, Front uni contre le fascisme et la guerre

Corey Balsam, National Coordinator, Independent Jewish Voices Canada

Nik Barry-Shaw, author

Corey Balsam, National Coordinator, Independent Jewish Voices Canada

Susan Bazilli, PhD – Director, International Women’s Rights Project

Ron Benner, artist

Karl Beveridge, artist

Raul Burbano, activist

Nancy Brown, teacher/librarian, peace/human rights activist

David Camfield, activist and academic

Stefan Christoff, artist & activist

Carole Condé, artist

Gerry Condon, Veterans for Peace (US), former president

Deborah Cowen, Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Raju J Das, York University

Judith Deutsch, academic

Gord Doctorow, educator

Martine Eloy, antiwar and human rights activist

Darren Ell, Photographer

Gary Engler, author

Yves Engler, author & activist

Joe Emersberger, author

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law emeritus, Princeton University

Kiran Fatima, co-chair Toronto Association for Peace & Solidarity

Richard Fidler, Author and Activist

Miguel Figueroa, President, Canadian Peace Congress

Don Foreman, Canadian Union of Postal Workers

Alan Freeman, author & economist

Gavin Fridell, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in International Development Studies Saint Mary’s University

Dr. Todd Gordon, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University

Peter Gose, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Carleton University

Harry Glasbeek, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School

Tracy Glynn, activist and writer

Cory Greenlees, activist

Malcolm Guy, documentary film director/producer

Michael Harris, author

Jamelie Hassan, artist

David Heap, teacher-researcher; peace & human rights advocate

Evert Hoogers, CUPW (retired)

Pierre Jasmin, artiste pour la paix

Dru Jay, author & activist

David Kattenburg, University instructor & journalist

Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence (USA)

Gary Kinsman, activist and author

Harry Kopyto, legal activist

Jonathan Kuttab, International human rights lawyer

Dimitri Lascaris, lawyer/journalist/activist

Ed Lehman, Regina Peace Council

Raymond Legault, activist, Collectif Échec à la guerre

Tamara Lorincz, PhD candidate and member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace

Martin Lukacs, journalist

Eva Manly, retired filmmaker

Robin Mathews, author

Amy Miller, filmmaker

David Mivasair, retired rabbi

Bianca Mugyenyi, activist, former Co-ED The Leap

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Dr. Susan O’Donnell, researcher, writer and activist

Nino Pagliccia, activist and freelance writer

Dr. Idrisa Pandit, academic

Brent Patterson, activist

Justin Podur, author and professor

Judi Rever, journalist and author

Karen Rodman, human rights activist

Richard Roman, retired professor, writer

Reuben Roth, Professor

Herman Rosenfeld, Socialist Project

Grahame Russell, Co-Director – Rights Action

Joan Russow, activist

Cory Greenlees

Sakura Saunders, activist

Harold Shuster, Independent Jewish Voices-Winnipeg

Ken Stone, President – Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War

Donald Swartz, Carleton University

Koozma J. Tarasoff, peace activist

Marianne Vardalos, PhD Department of Sociology

Jay Watts, co-chair Toronto Association for Peace & Solidarity

Paul Weinberg, author

Barry Weisleder, federal secretary, Socialist Action

Elizabeth Whitmore, activist

Ellen Woodsworth, writer, organizer and former Vancouver City councillor

Dwyer Sullivan, board member – Conscience Canada

Dr. Thom Workman, professor, University of New Brunswick

Ann Wright, retired US Army Colonel and former US diplomat.

Organizations

Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) – Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain

Mining Watch

Independent Jewish Voices/ Voix juives indépendantes

Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix

Solidarité Québec-Haïti

Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War

Council of Canadians – London Chapter

Canada Palestine Association-Vancouver

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement pour une Paix Juste

Socialist Project

Canadian BDS Coalition

Socialist Action

Canadian Boat to Gaza,

Leap Montreal

CAIA Victoria

Freedom Flotilla Coalition

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Australia

Regina Peace Council

Al-Haadi Musalla

The petition will be delivered to UN member states prior to the vote for the security council seat in June.

If your group or organization would like to endorse the open letter, please write to us at [email protected].

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La Fondazione Rockefeller ha presentato il «Piano d’azione nazionale per il controllo del Covid-19», indicando i «passi pragmatici per riaprire i nostri luoghi di lavoro e le nostre comunità». Non si tratta però, come appare dal titolo, semplicemente di misure sanitarie.

Il Piano – cui hanno contribuito alcune delle più prestigiose università (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins e altre) – prefigura un vero e proprio modello sociale gerarchizzato e militarizzato.

Al vertice il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia, analogo al Consiglio di produzione di guerra che gli Stati uniti crearono nella Seconda guerra mondiale». Esso sarebbe composto da «leader del mondo degli affari, del governo e del mondo accademico» (così elencati in ordine di importanza, con al primo posto non i rappresentanti governativi ma quelli della finanza e dell’economia).

Questo Consiglio supremo avrebbe il potere di decidere produzioni e servizi, con una autorità analoga a quella conferita al presidente degli Stati uniti in tempo di guerra dalla Legge per la produzione della Difesa.

Il Piano prevede che occorre sottoporre al test Covid-19, settimanalmente, 3 milioni di cittadini statunitensi, e che il numero deve essere portato a 30 milioni alla settimana entro sei mesi. L’obiettivo, da realizzare entro un anno, è quello di raggiungere la capacità di sottoporre a test Covid-19 30 milioni di persone al giorno. Per ciascun test si prevede «un adeguato rimborso a prezzo di mercato di 100 dollari». Occorreranno quindi, con denaro pubblico, «miliardi di dollari al mese».

La Fondazione Rockefeller e i suoi partner finanziari contribuiranno a creare una rete per la fornitura di garanzie di credito e la stipula dei contratti con i fornitori, ossia con le grandi società produttrici di farmaci e attrezzature mediche.

Secondo il Piano, il «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia» viene anche autorizzato a creare un

«Corpo di risposta alla pandemia»: una forza speciale (non a caso denominata «Corpo» come quello dei Marines)  con un personale di 100-300 mila componenti.  Essi verrebbero reclutati tra i volontari dei Peace Corps e degli Americacorps (creati dal governo Usa ufficialmente per «aiutare i paesi in via di sviluppo»)  e tra i militari della Guardia Nazionale. (1)

I componenti del «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» riceverebbero un salario medio lordo di 40.000 dollari l’anno, per cui viene prevista una spesa statale di 4-12 miliardi di dollari annui.

Il «Corpo di risposta alla pandemia» avrebbe soprattutto il compito di controllare la popolazione con tecniche di tipo militare, attraverso sistemi digitali di tracciamento e identificazione,  nei luoghi di lavoro e di studio, nei quartieri residenziali, nei locali pubblici e negli spostamenti. Sistemi di questo tipo – ricorda la Fondazione Rockefeller – vengono realizzati da Apple, Google e Facebook.

Secondo il Piano, le informazioni sulle singole persone, relative al loro stato di salute e alle loro attività, resterebbero riservate «per quanto possibile». Sarebbero però tutte centralizzate in una piattaforma digitale cogestita dallo Stato Federale e da società private. In base ai dati forniti dal  «Consiglio di controllo della pandemia», verrebbe  deciso di volta in volta quali zone sarebbero sottoposte al lockdown e per quanto tempo. Questo, in sintesi, è il piano che la Fondazione Rockefeller vuole attuare negli Stati uniti e non solo.

Se venisse realizzato anche in parte, si produrrebbe una ulteriore concentrazione del potere economico e politico nelle mani di élite ancora più ristrette, a scapito di una crescente maggioranza che verrebbe privata dei fondamentali diritti democratici. Operazione condotta in nome del «controllo del Covid-19», il cui tasso di mortalità, secondo i dati ufficiali, è finora inferiore allo 0,03% della popolazione statunitense.

Nel Piano della Fondazione Rockefeller il virus viene usato come una vera e propria arma, più pericolosa dello stesso Covid-19.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Ok, let me be perfectly clear here. I know, from years of studying the real American history from writers like Parenti, Chomsky, Zinn, Chossudovsky, even Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik, that the fix has always been in. Meaning, that this Two Party/One Party political system has always done the bidding for the Uber Rich… Period!

As a socialist I have come to understand how this Military Industrial Empire operates for the continuance of corporate capitalism. I hold few illusions as to what the Democratic Party can actually do to help us working stiffs. Are we hopelessly held hostage, or is prisoner a better word, by the wizards behind that curtain called Democracy? Well, even prisoners, maybe not hostages, sometimes have a voice through mass protest.

Reminds me of a B- movie from the 1950s regarding working stiffs under the thumb of a corrupt union at the waterfront (No, NOT ‘On the Waterfront’ folks). In this film the union was controlled by a rich shipping magnate, a ‘Mr. Big’, from his penthouse uptown. The working stiffs had enough of the violence and threats from the union bosses, and did a massive ‘Wildcat Strike’. Along with a couple of old style muckraking reporters (this is a fictitious movie guys) the working stiffs closed down the entire pier and were out in the streets in force, demanding to the news cameras ‘Reform’! The next scene is from a penthouse apartment, with ‘Mr. Big’ watching the news coverage on his television. He quickly orders his butler to get the union boss on the phone. “Do you see what is on every local news channel? This is no good! Do what you can to get these people back to work! Give them something, anything, and get this thing to end! This is no good for my business… or for YOU!!”

The moral to this story is not so complex. Sometimes, when things just get so bad for us working stiffs, Frederick Douglass’s words ring out: “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has. It never will.” Well, forget the Democrats for a minute. What we have here in this, the middle of an ‘era changing’ pandemic, is the use of power by this administration and its Republican Party cohorts  going right off the radar screen! If this writer had a few hours to list all the terrible actions (or inactions) of Mr. Trump and his party, maybe then I could accomplish my task. Well, to condense things to a few major items:

A) They did nothing from November 2019 to well into this past March to meet this crisis head on. No, instead of that, all we need do is go to the news clips and videos of them calling this a ‘hoax’ and ‘it is well contained now’. NO moves by them to get us all into secure face masks, or enough ventilators and hand sanitizers, along with rules for social distancing. NO moves to give funds, early on into this pandemic, to the states to help provide the proper equipment for our brave and helpful first providers;

B) The right wing that runs our government, sometimes with ‘silent approval’ by the Dems, did not create enough money for us working stiffs and the sea of small businesses to stay afloat. Instead, most of the electronically created money went, as in 2008-09, to those who need it the least. If they really wanted to prop up this economy, they would have instituted what many (including former presidential candidate Andrew Wang) advocated, that being a Universal Basic Income of anywhere from $ 1000 and up per month for every citizen (and half for each child) TAX FREE. Talk about economic stimulus – put the money in the hands of 320+ million of us and see how all commerce would be stimulated!

C) This desperate president and his crew, as with most politicians, only care about being re-elected. Imagine if you time travelled into the future and studied this: Trump wants to allow electoral college electors to be able to use their own judgment during an election. Translated: They can vote for any candidate they choose, rather than honor their pledge to vote for the candidate they promised to vote for. This is right out of the textbook ‘Elections in Banana Republics.’ In addition to this Trump wants to do away with mail in voting… even though he himself does it! Obvious why he wants this done: If you make folks leave their homes to vote during a pandemic, many, especially the old and informed, WON’T! Pollsters know that higher voter turnout always favors the Democrats. Finally, his boy Kushner has been floating the idea out there NOW that if things are not improved by November, the election may have to be cancelled. Herr Hitler never cancelled elections, only all the opposing political parties. One surmises the Trump crew figured that would be too difficult to accomplish, so just don’t have any vote at all!

We are living in more than just a terrible pandemic. We are living in a culture that former progressive radio talk show host Jay D. has always said is influenced by the rise of right wing talk radio. In many locations throughout Amerika if you stroll the radio dial you may run into Limbaugh or Hannity and their ilk on a slew of stations… at the same time! Jay D. feels that the reality of Uber Rich right wing owned stations flooding our airwaves. along with the ending of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ (whereupon rebuttals by the target of a radio host’s attacks is given air time on that same station), has signaled the end of the ‘Good Old Days’ of balanced talk radio shows. Factor that with another sad reality of the Two Party/One Party System. That being one party, the Democrats, who would have been labeled ‘Moderate Republicans’ in the 60s and 70s. The other party, as this title alludes to, is so far right that it reeks of Proto Fascism, or perhaps something even more frightening than that.

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

MLB, the NBA, NFL, NHL, and NCAA tout the surreal idea of playing in empty stadiums.

The roar of the crowd for home teams is part of the game.

I don’t follow sports like I did long ago after my dad introduced me to MLB in 1945 — before WW II ended and many stars in the military returned to the game like Red Sox great Ted Williams, a fighter pilot during the war.

Half the fun of the game was cheering for the home team at Boston’s Fenway Park’s packed ballpark with other fans.

Later I enjoyed watching immovable object Celtics great Bill Russell match up against unstoppable force Wilt Chamberlain in the stands.

Without the roar of the crowd, games would be sterile, no interaction between players and fans that’s part of the game, no atmosphere the way games are supposed to be played, no authenticity, no fun fans in the stands enjoy, what I introduced my children to long ago.

At a time of highly infectious COVID-19 outbreaks, stadiums filled with fans would be petri dishes for spreading them more widely.

Filled stadiums account for a large percentage of team revenues, especially for MLB and the NBA with lengthy regular seasons and playoffs.

A reported MLB document titled “Economics of Playing Without Fans in Attendance” for half the 2020 season, beginning around July 4, would result in $4 billion of lost revenue.

The NY Yankees would lose about $312 million, $232 million for the LA Dodgers, the NY Mets $214 million, Chicago Cubs $199 billion, and Boston Red Sox $188 million.

These teams most often play to sellout crowds, not the case for many other teams.

On May 4, an ESPN reported Coronavirus Lockdown Fan Study conducted from April 17 – 20 showed around two-thirds of respondents favor resumption of sports even with no fans in the stands.

On April 10, Sports Illustrated (SI) magazine predicted no quick resumption of professional and college sports that draw large crowds under normal conditions.

SI downplayed the idea isolating players in a bubble in one or a few venues, saying:

“It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science,” adding:

Most ideas are “the same: The players live in quarantine, shuttling from the hotel to the stadium, for the duration of the season(s). They undergo daily COVID-19 tests.”

What sounds reasonable on paper may not work in reality.

Epidemiologist Zack Binney, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on NFL injuries, expressed a dim view, saying:

“We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine.”

Chances of developing a safe and effective one is highly unlikely to impossible without some sort of scientific breakthroughs never before achieved, none in prospect.

In February, a soccer match in Bergamo, Italy resulted in widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in the city.

What about resumption of sports in empty stadiums? According to Binney, the idea sounds good in theory.

“(I)t’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”

Players, coaches, trainers, the media, referees, and others entering stadiums would have to be initially tested and quarantined for two weeks to assure they’re virus free.

Thereafter, they’d have to be tested daily. When not playing games, they’d be quarantined in hotels or other accommodations — their food and whatever else they need brought to them.

The same goes for hotel and stadium employees. Along with players, they’d be away from families and friends under virtual house arrest.

It’s one thing for highly paid players putting up with these conditions, quite another for workers and most reporters, their pay a small fraction of what professional athletes make.

Would they put up with onerous conditions even with extra pay? Perhaps some would. Many others most likely would not.

Despite regular testing, if some players or others in contact with them become infected, it could spread to many others, especially in teams engaged in close contact football, basketball, and hockey.

Any player suffering an injury that requires outside medical treatment would have to self-quarantine for two weeks before returning to their team.

Another consideration is the value of league championships with an asterik under above conditions. They won’t likely be the same for players or fans.

If an emergency arises at home for players, requiring their return, they’d be self-quarantined again for 14 days before allowed to play.

MLB baseball with minimal contact would have the best chance of operating under the above conditions.

All players on all teams of all sports returning to action would have to agree to live under house arrest throughout their seasons — perhaps in 2021 as well.

Everything explained above working as planned would be a long shot at best.

Anyone becoming infected by COVID-19 with close contact to players could unravel the best laid plans — especially because sports seasons are months long and perfection isn’t a human attribute.

According to SI, even if this never before tried experiment begins, “we almost certainly can’t finish it.”

What can go wrong most likely will. Former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid administrator Andy Slavitt tweeted:

“I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”

According to SI, “(t)hey know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions.”

“They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.”

Even if tried that may happen, chances of failure are huge.

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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 by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.

Let’s start with the phrase social distancing, which has mutated into forced human separation. The first I had heard it was in the 2011 movie Contagion. The first time it appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:

If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.

Maybe you don’t remember that the avian flu of 2006 didn’t amount to much. It’s true, despite all the extreme warnings about its lethality, H5N1 didn’t turn into much at all. What it did do, however, was send the existing president, George W. Bush, to the library to read about the 1918 flu and its catastrophic results. He asked for some experts to submit some plans to him about what to do when the real thing comes along.

The New York Times (April 22, 2020) tells the story from there:

Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.

When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

It required the key proponents — Dr. Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician, and Dr. Hatchett, an oncologist turned White House adviser — to overcome intense initial opposition.

It brought their work together with that of a Defense Department team assigned to a similar task.

And it had some unexpected detours, including a deep dive into the history of the 1918 Spanish flu and an important discovery kicked off by a high school research project pursued by the daughter of a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories.

The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.

Notice that in the course of this planning, neither legal nor economic experts were brought in to consult and advise. Instead it fell to Mecher (formerly of Chicago and an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics) and the oncologist Hatchett.

But what is this mention of the high-school daughter of 14? Her name is Laura M. Glass, and she recently declined to be interviewed when the Albuquerque Journal did a deep dive of this history.

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation. That paper is Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006). It set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backwards in time to 1957. They conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly.

Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.

The primary author of this paper was Robert J. Glass, a complex-systems analyst with Sandia National Laboratories. He had no medical training, much less an expertise in immunology or epidemiology.

That explains why Dr. D.A. Henderson, “who had been the leader of the international effort to eradicate smallpox,” completely rejected the whole scheme.

Says the NYT:

Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop. Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat. Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.

The measures embraced by Drs. Mecher and Hatchett would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Dr. Henderson wrote in his own academic paper responding to their ideas.

The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back.

AIER’s Phil Magness got to work to find the literature responding to this 2006 and discovered: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. The authors included D.A. Henderson, along with three professors from Johns Hopkins: infectious disease specialist Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole.

Their paper is a remarkably readable refutation of the entire lock-down model.

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. … It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration…

Home quarantine also raises ethical questions. Implementation of home quarantine could result in healthy, uninfected people being placed at risk of infection from sick household members. Practices to reduce the chance of transmission (hand-washing, maintaining a distance of 3 feet from infected people, etc.) could be recommended, but a policy imposing home quarantine would preclude, for example, sending healthy children to stay with relatives when a family member becomes ill. Such a policy would also be particularly hard on and dangerous to people living in close quarters, where the risk of infection would be heightened….

Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective. The World Health Organization Writing Group concluded that “screening and quarantining entering travelers at international borders did not substantially delay virus introduction in past pandemics . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.”… It is reasonable to assume that the economic costs of shutting down air or train travel would be very high, and the societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme. …

During seasonal influenza epidemics, public events with an expected large attendance have sometimes been cancelled or postponed, the rationale being to decrease the number of contacts with those who might be contagious. There are, however, no certain indications that these actions have had any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic. Were consideration to be given to doing this on a more extensive scale and for an extended period, questions immediately arise as to how many such events would be affected. There are many social gatherings that involve close contacts among people, and this prohibition might include church services, athletic events, perhaps all meetings of more than 100 people. It might mean closing theaters, restaurants, malls, large stores, and bars. Implementing such measures would have seriously disruptive consequences…

Schools are often closed for 1–2 weeks early in the development of seasonal community outbreaks of influenza primarily because of high absentee rates, especially in elementary schools, and because of illness among teachers. This would seem reasonable on practical grounds. However, to close schools for longer periods is not only impracticable but carries the possibility of a serious adverse outcome….

Thus, cancelling or postponing large meetings would not be likely to have any significant effect on the development of the epidemic. While local concerns may result in the closure of particular events for logical reasons, a policy directing communitywide closure of public events seems inadvisable. Quarantine. As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable….

Finally, the remarkable conclusion:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Confronting a manageable epidemic and turning it into a catastrophe: that seems like a good description of everything that has happened in the COVID-19 crisis of 2020.

Thus did some of the most highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics warn with biting rhetoric against everything that the advocates of lockdown proposed. It was not even a real-world idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation. Again, the idea was born of a high-school science experiment using agent-based modelling techniques having nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine.

So the question becomes: how did the extreme view prevail?

The New York Times has the answer:

The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns — though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.

[Note: You can read the 2007 CDC paper here. It is arguable that this paper did not favor full lockdown. I’ve spoken to Ajeev Venkayya, MD, who assures me that they never envisioned this level of lockdown.]

The Times called one of the pro-lockdown researchers, Dr. Howard Markel, and asked what he thought of the lockdowns. His answer: he is glad that his work was used to “save lives” but added, “It is also horrifying.” “We always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.”

Ideas have consequences, as they say. Dream up an idea for a virus-controlling totalitarian society, one without an endgame and eschewing any experienced-based evidence that it would achieve the goal, and you might see it implemented someday. Lockdown might be the new orthodoxy but that doesn’t make it medically sound or morally correct. At least now we know that many great doctors and scholars in 2006 did their best to stop this nightmare from unfolding. Their mighty paper should serve as a blueprint for dealing with the next pandemic.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

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About 2 dozen Turkish-backed militants have been killed or wounded in a recent series of clashes in northern Syria. 14 of them were reportedly killed in a failed attack on positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near Kubrlik overnight on May 17 and up to 10 were killed or injured in clashes near Hazwan on May 15. Reacting to its own failures, Turkish-backed forces carried out a series of mortar and artillery strikes on SDF positions near Ayn Issa, Tall Tamr and Tall Unayb on May 16, May 17 and early on May 18.

Firefights and artillery duels between Turkish-backed forces and the SDF regularly erupt in this part of Syria. However, both sides do not conduct large-scale offensive operations against each other and despite the violations the ceasefire regime formally remains in force.

On May 17, seven former ISIS members fled the SDF-controlled camp of al-Hawl in the province of al-Hasakah, which holds a large number of the former ISIS fighters and their families. Following the incident, SDF security forces in the area were placed on a high alert. The search operation has been ongoing. Some pro-Kurdish sources claim that the fleeing terrorists have been already detained, but these calms remain unconfirmed. This is the second security incident in al-Hawl in less than 10 days. On May 13, SDF security forces foiled a plot of ISIS wives to set the camp on fire and flee to Turkey.

Early on May 18 reports appeared that a drone strike allegedly struck the area near a convoy of the Syrian Army in the district of Maadan in Raqqa province. Several Syrian Army soldiers were reportedly wounded. It remains unclear who was behind the attack, but the two main suspects are Turkey and the US-led coalition.

On May 17, US armoured vehicles chased in the province of al-Hasakah a Russian military convoy with 150 tones of humanitarian aid being sent to civilians in northeastern Syria, but were unable to stop it.

A firefight between the Syrian Army and ISIS members erupted near the town of al-Sukhna, on the Homs-Deir Ezzor highway. According to reports, ISIS cells tried to cut off the road, but were forced to retreat. Regular attacks by ISIS cells operating in the desert area remain a notable security threat for government forces.

At the same time, the situation in Greater Idlib once again de-escalated. After failing to capture Tanjarah in northwestern Hama last week, al-Qaeda-linked groups reduced their activity on the frontline. Despite this, it’s highly likely that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies will conduct more limited attempts to expand their zone of control in southern Idlib and western Hama in the coming weeks.

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How could the Great Patriotic War in which the Soviet people (including many members of my own family) lost at least 25 million lives, have anything in common with the latest outbreak of the novel coronavirus?

You think this is an absolutely insane question?

However, before you dismiss it, think twice. There are similarities how they are being portrayed. There is a dangerous, even deadly pattern.

The storylines of both monumental events have been shamelessly kidnapped, and perverted by Western propaganda!

Those people and countries that fought hard and heroically, have lost the narrative. At the same time, those who negotiated, to twist and to delay their involvement, have managed to re-write history and to even give themselves the credit for ‘saving the world’.

The greatest sacrifice in human history, that made by the Soviet people who fought for the survival of mankind, defeated Nazism, and later helped to de-colonize the world, has been belittled by the professional masters of disinformation in London, Paris and New York. The Soviet Union itself was first smeared, its history rewritten in hostile foreign countries (to the extent that even the Soviet people themselves began doubting their own past), its internationalist duty discounted and dragged through mud. In the end and mostly as a result of such intellectual aggressions, a tremendous country and the bulwark of anti-imperialism, suddenly collapsed.

No shots were fired, except in Afghanistan, which was virtually sacrificed by the West. It has been converted into a playground of radicals and religious fundamentalists. In the end it broke the spine of the Soviet Union, the country that had been skillfully maneuvered into the conflict by Washington, and which, against all practical sense, decided to rush to the rescue of the Afghan people.

This, last chapter of Soviet history, has been twisted and perverted, too, in Washington and London.

In fact, everything pure, heroic and positive that the Soviet Union represented, was spat on.

The anti-Soviet, and even anti-Russian narrative has become absolutely bulletproof.

Manipulative documentary films, books, school curriculums in Europe and North America; they all pass off as facts in simple propaganda gigs, without offering any evidence. Very often, they take historic events and data, twist them, turn them around, and repeat the consequent fabrications again, again and again.

There are thousands of mass media outlets participating in the project. It definitely works. Such an approach is effective. Deadly effective.

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China is now being beaten with the same stick as the Soviet Union, and Russia.

The most populous, successful, and enthusiastic Socialist country still does not fully comprehend, what is being done to it. China is trying to be a good world citizen. It does its best to show kindness and solidarity. And yet, the more positive its deeds, the more it gets antagonized, accused of selfishness and malignancy.

The Western propaganda apparatus is now determinedly smearing the Chinese revolution, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese system. Tiananmen Square ‘events’, which were invented by thoroughly hostile Western mass media outlets, are used as proof of China’s “evilness”. Present-day Hong Kong events, a direct attack on China and interference in its internal affairs, are turned upside down. Beijing is being portrayed as the aggressor, not as the victim!

Newspapers like The New York Times or The Independent have absolutely nothing good to say about the socially most successful country on Earth.

That is quite an impressive show of one-sidedness.

Then comes COVID-19.

Before Western propaganda got involved, kicking into top gear, people in all corners of the world were tremendously impressed with the rapid and determined response of the Chinese system. China isolated one province, quarantined it, and defeated the pandemic within a few weeks. Almost immediately, it began helping the rest of the world.

The Chinese government, Chinese scientists, and the Chinese population in general, had no idea what were they up against. They were all alone, facing the new virus. Intuitively, in a socialist way, they mobilized, won the battle and defeated the pandemic with minimum losses and in the shortest possible time.

While several Chinese officials and scientists believed that the virus was injected into China by the United States, Beijing decided to adopt a conciliatory tone, suggesting there should be cooperation, instead of confrontation.

That is the Chinese, but not Western way.

The Western approach towards the COVID-19; from Italy, UK, Spain to the United States across the Atlantic Ocean, has been grotesque, inconsistent, disorganized and for the common people, deadly. In short, it has been a total fiasco.

Therefore, using its traditional methods, Western propaganda system began doing what it does the best: attacking those who are fighting for the survival of the world. Attacking relentlessly, aggressively and often, vulgarly.

If the numbers were to be compared, the entire affair would look ridiculous, even grotesque. The West would soon run out of arguments. The same, if the Chinese and Western general approaches were placed next to each other and analyzed.

But they are not. What is done in Europe and North America is not really reporting or comparing facts. Instead, it is a constant flow of an ideological, propagandist narrative, of disinformation, full of sarcasm, double speak and mud.

The discourses of the U.S. politicians are increasingly racist, perverse and full of spite. When it comes to China, Western leaders lie, they present no proof, but in this ‘game’, all the above is obviously allowed. One after another, they get on the proverbial podium and spit at China: all of them do – Trump, Pompeo, Navarro, Rubio, and others.

The better China does, the more they shout and spit.

The better the Soviet Union did, the louder the accusations against it were, the more brutal the insults.

Now China says loudly and clearly: “We have pulled almost everyone out of poverty. We are a real Socialist country with Chinese characteristics, governed by the Communist Party of China. We are helping the struggling part of the world through the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). We fought hard and defeated the new and terrible pandemic.”

Western ideologues shout back: “No you are not helping anyone. You are selfish. You are not even socialist. You misinformed us about the pandemic.”

The problem is, the Western regime owns and controls incomparably more media outlets than do China and Russia combined. And both the Russian and Chinese media outlets, including this magazine – New Eastern Outlook – are constantly censored and blocked in the Western countries, on-line and otherwise. It goes without saying, that the Western propaganda is the biggest, and the mightiest disinformation system on the planet.

In the meantime, tens of thousands are dying from the COVID-19, but now especially from the economic and social manipulation, in Europe, North America and their client states in the poor parts of the world.

The contrast is tremendous, if one is allowed to the see that contrast.

It is obvious which system is better for humanity, but the more obvious it gets, the more disinformation blurs the picture; the compliments of the Western media outlets and ‘educational’ institutions.

While all this is going on, people in the West are increasingly complacent, sheepish, and indifferent.

In his recent interview for the RT, the legendary German film director, Werner Herzog, brought up some essential and relevant philosophical points:

“The atrocities carried out by the Nazis were the result of a lockstep narrative of “demonization” which replaced facts.”

“‘Industrialized mass murder’ only possible when people stop questioning narratives.”

“It is not so much what is factually happening, it’s who owns the narrative. And we have to be very, very careful and watchful about looking at the media. What are the media doing? Is there some sort of almost collective brainwashing going on or not? … [W]e have to be quite vigilant and we should think on our own.”

What we are witnessing or participating in, is a horrific, ideological battle. Not just for China, not just for Russia and for the memory of those who gave their lives for the survival of our human race.

Right now, everything is at stake. Perhaps the very essence of mankind.

It is still possible to win. Partially, because Western propaganda, while effective, is not necessarily innovative. It is relatively primitive. It can be exposed. While it repeats its lies, relentlessly and religiously, we have to repeat that the lies are lies, and offer proof.

Let us do it with determination, and in full voice.

Therefore:

“75 years ago, it was the Soviet Union which defeated Nazi Germany, and saved the world, at an unimaginably high cost!”

And:

“It was China, which was first hit by the novel coronavirus. And it was China, which defeated it rapidly and with tremendous socialist determination!”

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s the creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that has penned a number of books, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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When the Dodd Frank Act was passed in 2010, President Obama triumphantly declared, “No more bailouts!” But what the Act actually said was that the next time the banks failed, they would be subject to “bail ins” – the funds of their creditors, including their large depositors, would be tapped to cover their bad loans.

Then bail-ins were tried in Europe. The results were disastrous.

Many economists in the US and Europe argued that the next time the banks failed, they should be nationalized – taken over by the government as public utilities. But that opportunity was lost when, in September 2019 and again in March 2020, Wall Street banks were quietly bailed out from a liquidity crisis in the repo market that could otherwise have bankrupted them. There was no bail-in of private funds, no heated congressional debate, and no public vote. It was all done unilaterally by unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.

“The justification of private profit,” said President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1938 address, “is private risk.” Banking has now been made virtually risk-free, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States and its people. The American people are therefore entitled to share in the benefits and the profits. Banking needs to be made a public utility.

The Risky Business of Borrowing Short to Lend Long

Individual banks can go bankrupt from too many bad loans, but the crises that can trigger system-wide collapse are “liquidity crises.” Banks “borrow short to lend long.” They borrow from their depositors to make long-term loans or investments while promising the depositors that they can come for their money “on demand.” To pull off this sleight of hand, when the depositors and the borrowers want the money at the same time, the banks have to borrow from somewhere else. If they can’t find lenders on short notice, or if the price of borrowing suddenly becomes prohibitive, the result is a “liquidity crisis.”

Before 1933, when the government stepped in with FDIC deposit insurance, bank panics and bank runs were common. When people suspected a bank was in trouble, they would all rush to withdraw their funds at once, exposing the fact that the banks did not have the money they purported to have. During the Great Depression, more than one-third of all private US banks were closed due to bank runs.

But President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, was skeptical about insuring bank deposits. He warned,

“We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.”

The government had a viable public alternative, a US postal banking system established in 1911. Postal banks became especially popular during the Depression, because they were backed by the US government. But Roosevelt was pressured into signing the 1933 Banking Act, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that insured private banks with public funds.

Congress, however, was unwilling to insure more than $5,000 per depositor (about $100,000 today), a sum raised temporarily in 2008 and permanently in 2010 to $250,000. That meant large institutional investors (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds) had nowhere to park the millions of dollars they held between investments. They wanted a place to put their funds that was secure, provided them with some interest, and was liquid like a traditional deposit account, allowing quick withdrawal. They wanted the same “ironclad moneyback guarantee” provided by FDIC deposit insurance, with the ability to get their money back on demand.

It was largely in response to that need that the private repo market evolved. Repo trades, although technically “sales and repurchases” of collateral, are in effect secured short-term loans, usually repayable the next day or in two weeks. Repo replaces the security of deposit insurance with the security of highly liquid collateral, typically Treasury debt or mortgage-backed securities. Although the repo market evolved chiefly to satisfy the needs of the large institutional investors that were its chief lenders, it also served the interests of the banks, since it allowed them to get around the capital requirements imposed by regulators on the conventional banking system. Borrowing from the repo market became so popular that by 2008, it provided half the credit in the country. By 2020, this massive market had a turnover of $1 trillion a day.

Before 2008, banks also borrowed from each other in the fed funds market, allowing the Fed to manipulate interest rates by controlling the fed funds rate. But after 2008, banks were afraid to lend to each other for fear the borrowing banks might be insolvent and might not pay the loans back. Instead the lenders turned to the repo market, where loans were supposedly secured with collateral. The problem was that the collateral could be “rehypothecated,” or used for several loans at once; and by September 2019, the borrower side of the repo market had been taken over by hedge funds, which were notorious for risky rehypothecation. Many large institutional lenders therefore pulled out, driving the cost of borrowing at one point from 2% to 10%.

Rather than letting the banks fail and forcing a bail-in of private creditors’ funds, the Fed quietly stepped in and saved the banks by becoming the “repo lender of last resort.” But the liquidity crunch did not abate, and by March the Fed was making $1 trillion per day available in overnight loans. The central bank was backstopping the whole repo market, including the hedge funds, an untenable situation.

In March 2020, under cover of a national crisis, the Fed therefore flung the doors open to its discount window, where only banks could borrow. Previously, banks were reluctant to apply there because the interest was at a penalty rate and carried a stigma, signaling that the bank must be in distress. But that concern was eliminated when the Fed announced in a March 15 press release that the interest rate had been dropped to 0.25% (virtually zero). The reserve requirement was also eliminated, the capital requirement was relaxed, and all banks in good standing were offered loans of up to 90 days, “renewable on a daily basis.” The loans could be continually rolled over. And while the alleged intent was “to help meet demands for credit from households and businesses at this time,” no strings were attached to this interest-free money. There was no obligation to lend to small businesses, reduce credit card rates, or write down underwater mortgages.

The Fed’s scheme worked, and demand for repo loans plummeted. Even J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, has acknowledged borrowing at the Fed’s discount window for super cheap loans. But the windfall to Wall Street has not been shared with the public. In Canada, some of the biggest banks slashed their credit card interest rates in half, from 21 percent to 11 percent, to help relieve borrowers during the COVID-19 crisis. But US banks have felt no such compunction. US credit card rates dropped in April only by half a percentage point, to 20.15%. The giant Wall Street banks continue to favor their largest clients, doling out CARES Act benefits to them first, emptying the trough before many smaller businesses could drink there.

In 1969, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi nationalized 14 of India’s largest banks, not because they were bankrupt (the usual justification today) but to ensure that credit would be allocated according to planned priorities, including getting banks into rural areas and making cheap financing available to Indian farmers.  Congress could do the same today, but the odds are it won’t. As Sen. Dick Durbin said in 2009, “the banks … are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Time for the States to Step In

State and local governments could make cheap credit available to their communities, but today they too are second class citizens when it comes to borrowing. Unlike the banks, which can borrow virtually interest-free with no strings attached, states can sell their bonds to the Fed only at market rates of 3% or 4% or more plus a penalty. Why are elected local governments, which are required to serve the public, penalized for shortfalls in their budgets caused by a mandatory shutdown, when private banks that serve private stockholders are not?

States can borrow from the federal unemployment trust fund, as California just did for $348 million, but these loans too must be paid back with interest, and they must be used to cover soaring claims for state unemployment benefits. States remain desperately short of funds to repair holes in their budgets from lost revenues and increased costs due to the shutdown.

States are excellent credit risks – far better than banks would be without the life-support of the federal government. States have a tax base, they aren’t going anywhere, they are legally required to pay their bills, and they are forbidden to file for bankruptcy. Banks are considered better credit risks than states only because their deposits are insured by the federal government and they are gifted with routine bailouts from the Fed, without which they would have collapsed decades ago.

State and local governments with a mandate to serve the public interest deserve to be treated as well as private Wall Street banks that have repeatedly been found guilty of frauds on the public. How can states get parity with the banks? If Congress won’t address that need, states can borrow interest-free at the Fed’s discount window by forming their own publicly-owned banks. For more on that possibility, see my earlier article here.

As Buckminster Fuller said,

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, create a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

Post-COVID-19, the world will need to explore new models; and publicly-owned banks should be high on the list.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Web of Debt Blog.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Even though it’s being held on its home turf, Beijing will play second fiddle for the next week as thousands of delegates pour into the capital to debate, argue and socialize amid the “Two Sessions”.

The sessions, taking place after being postponed in March due to COVID-19, are the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body drawn from delegates representing a cross-section of society, including the arts, medicine, transport, construction, and the National People’s Congress, the top legislative body.

In reality, the NPC is an exercise in public relations, a supreme example of rubber-stamping. Nothing of any merit will be discussed openly. TV coverage will highlight the mass, synchronized applause of the 2,975 delegates, led by the People’s Liberation Army with the most delegates at 294, followed not by Beijing, or Shanghai but Shandong, the most populous province, with 173 delegates.

Obviously, the COVID-19 outbreak will be presented as a challenge that China met successfully. The catastrophic initial mistakes, the denials, the harassment of doctors trying to publicize its danger, the mass gathering in January that saw tens of thousands of people openly celebrate Chinese New Year in a huge square, will not be mentioned. But neither will there be a sense of triumphalism. The virus remains a concern and seems, at the moment, to be under control but everyone knows it is far too early to declare absolute victory.

The importance of the “Two Sessions” is that it allows leaders of the provincial parties to come to Beijing and discuss, privately, their concerns. China is a one-party state. Ultimate political authority, of course, rests with the Chinese Communist Party, whose Politburo Standing Committee, headed by President Xi Jinping, sets policy. So the NPC deputies to the congress will sit politely, row-upon-row in the Great Hall of the People and choreograph their applause. But in the corridors of power, restaurants and hotel lobbies, there will be forthright discussions on the faltering economy, anti-pollution efforts, international affairs, the Trump presidency and how to recalibrate China’s damaged position in the world.

But one other subject will be raised that makes this Two Sessions intriguing for the outside world is that for the first time since Mao passed away in 1976 China does not expect tomorrow to be better than today. The social contract, the implicit unwritten understanding between the party and the people – acceptance of the party’s political primacy in exchange for growing prosperity – is at risk of unraveling.

Most people in China believe that for this contract to be maintained economic growth would have to be in the region of 5-6 percent minimum per year. No one believes it is anywhere near that today. Even before COVID-19 it was probably around 5 percent. After the outbreak it is much less, probably around 2 percent. Unforeseen circumstances. Sure. But unforeseen circumstances can have unforeseen consequences. Beijing cannot turn on the export taps as it did before to get out of trouble because its major overseas markets are also on their knees. And China as a brand has been damaged. Long after this crisis is over there will be a residue of mistrust for things China. Even before COVID-19 there was a growing sense in the West that China, ironically a communist country once considered just a few years ago as the savior of Western capitalism, could not be trusted. Now there is almost unanimous certainty that it is beyond the pale. Frustration in Beijing at growing international isolation and a restive population demanding better living standards could prove to be a potent mix.

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Tom Clifford is a renowned journalist currently based in Beijing

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The anti-China campaign in the U.S. is nearing its climax. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn wrote a letter to colleagues calling for them to be careful when working with Chinese officials, or better, to avoid contact with them. Last week, Republican senators proposed a bill that would allow President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on China if there is no comprehensive review of China’s role in the spread of coronavirus. Lawmakers requested the investigation within 60 days, as well as confirm the closure of the so-called wet markets in China, in addition to the release of arrested Hong Kong rioters. They also propose to freeze Chinese assets in the U.S., impose travel bans, tighten visas, and restrict Chinese businesses from accessing U.S. banking and capital markets.

Washington continued its online visa war with China by limiting visas to Chinese journalists working in the U.S. for 90 days. Chinese media outlet Xinhua called the decision an unprecedented act of discrimination and pressure on Chinese journalists. This completely exposed the false pretence of the U.S. claims of “freedom of the press,” a spokesperson of the agency said.

Trump’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. could completely end its relationship with China due to the pandemic has seen China harshly reacting, with suggestions that itself might put sanctions on the U.S.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also called on alleged forces related to China to stop stealing coronavirus research data after the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made the accusation. It is likely however that Trump uses the charges against China primarily for his own political purposes as he lost complete control of the coronavirus that has seen over 1.5 million Americans infected and around 90,000 dead.

For the sake of winning the upcoming election he will continue to target China, but will unlikely break ties with Beijing because American businesses will lose a market of 1.4 billion people. The pandemic has shown that the U.S. has missed an opportunity to be a world leader which will now force Washington to rethink its position in the world.

The U.S. understand they have a long way to go before reaching the end of the pandemic. Meanwhile, China is approaching the end of it. Economically, China is winning which is why Washington is trying to curb China politically. It is for this reason Washington is now using the “Taiwanese card.”

Pompeo said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “chose not to invite Taiwan under pressure from the People’s Republic of China. The Director-General’s lack of independence deprives the Assembly of Taiwan’s renowned scientific expertise on pandemic disease, and further damages the WHO’s credibility and effectiveness at a time when the world needs it the most.”

Washington’s focus on China is a distraction, a relatively simple way to disguise their own faults, and the charges against the WHO serves the same purpose. It is passing on the blame of Trump’s inefficient handling of the pandemic just as we push closer to the next U.S. elections.

Member states of the Five Eyes intelligence structure, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada, or what should be more accurately called the Anglo Five, also contributed to the campaign against China. These countries support the U.S. call for an inquiry into the role of WHO and China in the fight against the pandemic, and some, despite Beijing’s strong opposition, have supported Taiwan’s invitation to join the World Health Assembly. According to Canadian radio company CBC that quoted a senior Canadian government official, French, German and Japanese ambassadors at the United Nations in Geneva, along with Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, British and the American ones at a meeting with senior WHO officials voiced support for inviting Taiwan to join this international organization

Despite the provocations and using Taiwan provocatively, the People’s Bank of China issued a license to Fitch Bohua, owned by U.S. company Fitch Raitings, to conduct business in the Chinese market, according to information released on May 14. The company is allowed to value some bonds in China’s interbank stock market. The acceptance of Fitch Raitings into the Chinese market is part of the first phase agreement of China-U.S. trade. In addition, as part of this transaction, the Chinese government today will cancel additional import duties on the second shipment from the U.S.

However, Chinese state-owned Global Times, considered an influential voice in Chinese policymaking, said Beijing is running out of patience. It appears China could be deliberately leaking information to the media and is planning serious sanctions, particularly against two organizations and several individuals who have sued China in U.S. courts. The Chinese outlet explained how to inflict the most painful economic damage on these American organizations and individuals, and urged Beijing to do this instead of making angry statements and symbolic gestures.

It is unlikely that China, or even the U.S., will sever relations or impose sanctions. Although the U.S. political class may be against China, for the billionaires and major business owners, anti-Chinese actions are against their own financial interests. For this fact, it is likely Trump is only using strong rhetoric in the lead up to the upcoming election to distract Americans from his own mishandling of the pandemic.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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Less than two weeks after an abortive mercenary invasion aimed at overthrowing Venezuela’s government and murdering its president that was hatched by the Trump White House, the US State Department on Wednesday renewed it classification of the country as “not fully cooperating” with Washington’s global war on terrorism.

Also added to the list was Cuba, whose embassy in Washington was targeted by a gunman armed with an automatic weapon on April 30, an act that elicited not a word of condemnation from the Trump administration.

This marked the first time that Cuba has been placed on the list since 2015, when it was removed as part of negotiations between US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro on the normalization of relations between the two countries. That move was backed by major American financial and corporate interests seeking to compete with the Chinese and Europeans in and for the Cuban market.

Prior to that, Cuba had been classified for 33 years as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The designation stemmed from Havana’s support for both Nicaragua, at the time under siege by the terrorist “contra” army organized by the CIA, and El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), carrying out an armed revolt against the murderous US-backed juntas that ruled El Salvador. Both the Sandinistas and the FMLN have since transformed themselves into bourgeois parties, leading right-wing governments in their respective countries.

The hypocrisy of Washington branding Venezuela and Cuba as complicit in terrorism is as brazen as it is boundless.

On the same day that the State Department released its list, Venezuela’s delegation to the United Nations filed formal charges with the Security Council and the Secretary General over the armed terrorist attacks carried out on the country’s northern coast on May 3 and 4 by mercenaries organized, trained and financed by the governments of the US and Colombia.

The Venezuelan government reported capturing 39 more armed men on its border with Colombia Thursday, bringing the number detained since the landings in the coastal towns of Macuto and Chuao in the north of Venezuela to 91.

Among those detained are two ex-US special forces operatives, Luke Alexander Denman, 34, and Airan Berry, 41, who have been formally charged with terrorism, facing sentences of between 25 and 30 years in prison.

The two ex-US soldiers were recruited for the operation by a US security contractor, Silvercorp, Inc., run by a former Green Beret, Jordan Goudreau, who was put into contact with Washington’s puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó by Trump’s longtime security chief.

A contract signed between the two of them, along with other members of Guaidó’s entourage, has been posted online, revealing that the US puppet had agreed to pay $212 million for an armed operation that, if successful, would have led to either the capture or murder of President Maduro, along with the killing of an unknown number of other Venezuelans, both civilian and military. Guaidó was named in the contract as the “commander in chief” of the mercenary operation.

While branding Caracas as “uncooperative” in the US war on terror, the Trump administration has shown no inclination to extradite Goudreau to face charges of terrorism in Venezuela. On the contrary, it has vowed to use “all tools” at its disposal to free the two US mercenaries caught red-handed on the beaches of Venezuela.

US terrorism against Venezuela did not begin with the landings on its northern coast earlier this month, but rather has been sustained through a “maximum pressure” regime of economic sanctions tantamount to a state of war, preventing the country from importing food and vital medical supplies in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Washington’s claim that Caracas is “uncooperative” in the so-called US war on terrorism is based on the claim that Maduro and other members of the Venezuelan government are involved in “narco-terrorism.” The Pentagon has deployed warships off the Venezuelan coast on this pretext, even as US intelligence officials acknowledge that the vast majority of drugs coming into the United States are passing through the territories of Washington’s closest allies in Colombia and Central America.

In Cuba’s case, the cynicism of the US decree is equally blatant. Its principal charge is that Havana failed to accede to the demands of Colombia’s right-wing President Iván Duque to extradite representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group, who had come to the Cuban capital as part of a series of peace negotiations that resulted in a settlement between the main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government.

For its part, Cuba has recorded the deaths of 3,478 of its citizens and the wounding of 2,099 as a result of terrorist operations launched from the US and with the aid and complicity of the US government.

Also included on the list of those not “cooperating fully” with Washington’s war on terror were Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Iran responded with a statement from Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi, who said,

“With a history of founding, funding & arming different terrorist groups, a record of state terrorism, and its outright support for another terrorist regime [Israel], US is not a good yardstick for measuring anti-terrorism efforts.”

In January of this year, Washington carried out an act of flagrant state terrorism with the drone missile assassination of one of Iran’s senior state officials, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, as he was making a state visit to Iraq for talks with the country’s prime minister.

As for Syria, the country has been the victim for nearly a decade of a US-organized war for regime change that has utilized Al Qaeda-linked militias as its main proxy ground troops.

US officials have told the media that Washington is preparing to return Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terrorism and to brand various elements of Venezuela’s security forces as terrorist entities. These measures would pave the way for redoubled US aggression against both countries.

While both the Maduro government in Venezuela and that headed by President Miguel Díaz-Canel in Cuba have sought to accommodate themselves to the interests of US and world imperialism, Washington has shown no inclination to compromise. The Trump administration, while currying favor with the right-wing Cuban and Venezuelan exile groups in Florida in advance of the 2020 election, is basing its policy on the drive by American imperialism to roll back the influence of Russia and China in the Western Hemisphere. The charges of failure to cooperate with the “war on terrorism” are being leveled to prepare for a global war that entails unimaginable terror for the population of the entire planet.

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The US White House has appointed a coronavirus “Vaccine Czar” from Big Pharma to oversee something dubbed Operation Warp Speed. The goal is to create and produce 300 million doses of a new vaccine to supposedly immunize the entire US population by year-end against COVID-19. To be sure that Big Pharma companies give their all to the medical Manhattan Project, they have been fully indemnified by the US government against liabilities should vaccine recipients die or develop serious disease as a result of the rushed vaccine. The FDA and NIH have waived standard pre-testing on animals in the situation. The US military, according to recent remarks by the US President, is being trained to administer the yet-to-be unveiled vaccine in record time. Surely nothing could go wrong here?

Warp speed is a term out of the sci-fi Star Trek media, defined as a speed faster than the speed of light. In recent weeks billions of dollars have been pledged from governments, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others to fast-track a vaccine as well as test medical treatments to combat the VODIV19 illness said to originate from a novel coronavirus first discovered late 2019 in Wuhan China. This rush to create a “miracle” vaccine is ominous and suggests some hidden agenda.

The Conflicted Czar

Washington’s Operation Warp Speed is reportedly the brainchild of Presidential Adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. It is being formally run by the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Defense Secretary Mark Esper who will work with a new Vaccine Czar. The Vaccine Czar selected for Kushner’s Operation Warp Speed is former GlaxoSmithKline Chairman of its Vaccines Division, Morrocan-born US citizen, Dr. Moncef Slaoui. From 2006 through 2017 Slaoui was Chairman of Global R&D and Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline and sat on the company’s Executive team and Board of Directors.

While at GSK Slaoui headed the development of Cervarix. Its Cervarix HPV cervical cancer vaccine was reported tied to multiple deaths or severe crippling effects in many recipients. A 2017 WHO monitoring report revealed that serious adverse effects from Moncef Slaoui’s HPV vaccine included complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) that “exceeds any other vaccine.” That is not reassuring in terms of the new Czar of a rushed coronavirus vaccine.

In 2015 the Indian Supreme Court investigated charges that young Indian village girls died after being given Cervarix from Slaoui’s GSK. It was done in illegal vaccine “human guinea pig” tests of the HPV vaccine where neither the girls nor their parents were told what it was. The study was reportedly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2012 while Slaoui headed GSK global R&D and vaccine development, and sat on the GSK board, the company was fined $3 billion by the US Department of Justice, the largest ever fine against a pharmaceutical company. Among the charges was that GlaxoSmithKline deliberately withheld alarming safety data for its major-selling diabetes drug, Advandia, from the US FDA. After Advandia quietly vanished from the product list of GSK.

Slaoui also has ties to the projects of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He sat on the board of the Gates-funded International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. The IAVI was initiated in 1994 at a Rockefeller Foundation conference and is backed among others by the Gates Foundation, by the US Department of Defense and by Tony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

At a May 15 White House press conference where the President introduced Slaoui as the head of the crash vaccine project, Slaoui stated,

“Mr. President, I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. These data make me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.”

Though he did not say, he was clearly referring to Moderna and its mRNA gene-edited vaccine, the first US vaccine authorized to enter Phase I human trials after the US government gave the company a staggering $483 million of funding to fast-track the COVID-19 vaccine.

Vaccine Czar Slaoui is well-placed with regard to Moderna. After leaving GSK from 2017 until he joined the Trump Operation Warp Speed, Slaoui was on the Moderna Board of Directors. He also still holds $10 million worth of Moderna stock options, options likely to soar in value as the Warp Speed zooms forward. This would suggest a glaring conflict of interest with Czar Slaoui, but that’s only the start of this saga, where millions of lives are potentially at threat from a novel inadequately-tested or proven genetically edited vaccine.

Moderna and Slaoui

At this point the leading US Government candidate for winning the “warp speed” race to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine is Slaoui’s Moderna Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s surely a coincidence?

Moderna claims that between January 11, when they got the DNA sequence of the virus from China, and January 13–in just two days–working together with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of NIH, they managed to finalize the sequence for mRNA1273 vaccine against the novel coronavirus. At that point Fauci announced unprecedented plans to run human Phase I trials of the vaccine without prior animal studies. The FDA waived animal pretest requirements. The Moderna mRNA1273 tests were funded by the Gates Foundation-funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

The focus by Fauci on Moderna’s mRNA experimental COVID-19 vaccine while Slaoui was heading its development at Moderna is impressive to say the least. The company states that on April 16, Moderna got an award from US government agency BARDA for $483 million to accelerate development of mRNA-1273. This award will fund the development of mRNA-1273 to FDA licensure and manufacturing process scale-up to enable large-scale production in 2020 for pandemic response. At that point the stock value of Slaoui’s Moderna stock options jumped 184%. Then, on May 1, Moderna and Lonza Group announced a worldwide strategic collaboration to manufacture mRNA-1273 at a planned 1 billion doses per year. This is no small deal.

On May 6, Moderna filed a Current Report on Form 8-K with the SEC, which included an interview published by National Geographic with Anthony S. Fauci, Director of NIAID, which described his assessment of the results of testing related to the ongoing Phase 1 clinical study of mRNA-1273. It was quite positive.

So, between January 13 and March 25, Slaoui and his team at Moderna were able to design the vaccine, and to produce it in such a way that it can be injected in humans, Slaoui told a Moroccan magazine, L’Economiste. While with Moderna, Slaoui was fully involved in the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

On May 7 just days before Slaoui became the Trump Vaccine Czar, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the gene-edited messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, mRNA1273, to go into a Phase II human trial in the summer. On May 12, the FDA gave Fast Track Designation for Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine. Warp Speed, you know.

The FDA with the backing of Tony Fauci’s NIAID in the NIH, granted unprecedented Phase I human trials of the never-before approved mRNA vaccine on April 27. They skipped normal animal, usually rat, testing, to go directly to human guinea pig tests. Moderna says Phase II trial will assess the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of two vaccinations of mRNA-1273 given 28 days apart. They will enroll 600 healthy adults for the experiment and supposedly follow their health for 12 months after the second vaccination. The plan is to begin human vaccinations by year end.

Dangers of mRNA?

All this, despite the evidence of extreme conflicts of interest between NIAID and other agencies of the US Government with Moderna and now-Vaccine Czar and former Moderna director Slaoui, might be treated more lightly, were it not for the fact that Moderna’s mRNA gene-edited vaccine technology is entirely experimental and never before approved for use as a vaccine. The company itself admits as much. It says, “mRNA is an emerging platform… we are still early in the story. Our most advanced vaccine program (CMV) is in Phase 2 clinical testing and we have no approved drugs to date.”

Moderna and others working with the experimental gene-edited mRNA vaccines claim they are safer than the admittedly unpredictable gene-edited DNA vaccines. DNA vaccine research is thirty years old but to date, has failed to produce a single licensed DNA vaccine. Moderna is only 11 years old and the CRISPR gene-editing technology it uses is barely 5 years old. We are told mRNA is completely different and safe.

However, numerous scientists warn that once inside the cell nucleus, mRNA vaccines have a risk of permanently changing a person’s DNA in unpredictable ways. Tony Faudi’s own NIH published a scientific paper regarding the new mRNA vaccine prospects. It read in part, “innate immune sensing of mRNA has also been associated with the inhibition of antigen expression and may negatively affect the immune response. Although the paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood, some progress has been made in recent years in elucidating these phenomena.” This is highly experimental science.

Another scientific paper funded by several Chinese universities and republished by the NIH in 2019, reviewing the development of the new messenger RNA technique for vaccines sounded some sober warnings. It noted that there were “Concerns with instability and low immunogenicity.” Further that, “mRNA vaccines are efficient at antigen expression, but sequence and secondary structures formed by mRNAs are recognized by a number of innate immune receptors, and this recognition can inhibit protein translation.” Not only that, but “…several of these delivery vehicles demonstrated toxicity in vivo, which may limit their use in humans.”(emphasis added). The authors concluded that “The immune response mechanism instigated by mRNA remains to be elucidated. The process of mRNA vaccine recognition by cellular sensors and the mechanism of sensor activation are still not clear.”

The US government, in a tight-knit circle all tied to Tony Fauci’s NIAID, the Gates Foundation, WHO are moving with not warp, but rather warped human priorities to deliver us a vaccine that no one can assure is in any way safe. Were Moderna so certain it is safe, they should offer to be legally liable for any mRNA damage. They don’t, nor do any vaccine companies. We need to decide if the scale of the worldwide deaths, inflated or not, alleged to be of COVID-19, warrant such a human experiment that could alter our genetics in unpredictable and possibly toxic ways.

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

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

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

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

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

Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, stating in January 2017 that there will be a “surprise outbreak” the coming administration will face.

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Apparently, Washington is helping to increase the violence in the Donbass. In the midst of a pandemic and the civil war at a softer stage, Kiev is promoting a gradual increase in the actions of pro-Maidan paramilitary groups in the region and receiving international support for this.

The United States has delivered more than $ 25 million worth of night vision devices, thermal cameras, portable communicators and medical equipment to Ukraine for use in the combat zone in Donbas, the US Embassy in Kiev reported.

In its account on a social network, the American Embassy to Kiev published the following note in English and Ukrainian:

“Despite COVID-19, our security assistance to Ukraine continues! This week, the Office of Defense Cooperation received more than $ 25 million in night vision devices, thermals, radios, and medical equipment for Ukraine to use in the JFO zone. The United States stands strongly with Ukraine in support of its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression”.

The US, according to the note, supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. As we know, since April 2014, Ukraine has carried out an operation against militias in the east of the country – Donbas region – where the popular republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were proclaimed in response to the violent change of government that took place in Kiev in February of the same year. However, the Minsk agreements, signed in September 2014 and February 2015, laid the foundation for a political solution to the conflict. Unfortunately, so far they have not led to a definitive cessation of violence, the outcome of which the UN estimates at around 13,000 deaths.

Despite not putting a real end to the confrontation, the Minsk agreements managed to establish some bases for a peaceful future, so that, since then, the war has reduced the intensity of the fighting and presented a drop in the number of victims. But, since then, Kiev has been constantly denounced for tightening its policies in the region again and promoting an escalation of violence, not only through direct confrontation with separatists, but also through terrorist attacks, secret missions and intelligence operations. In a sense, the Accords have changed the face of war, from being a direct confrontation conflict to becoming a scene of constant tensions and intermittent fighting.

A few weeks ago, the Ukrainian government announced that it will build a naval base in the Sea of Azov. Shortly before, a series of murders had been reported in the regions of the autonomous republics, including the systematic killing of several civil people not involved in the conflicts. Now, everything indicates that the situation will worsen and there will be, possibly, a return to direct war.

The timing of the announcement of the acquisition of new US equipment by Ukrainian forces is extremely strategic; after all, in the midst of a global pandemic that increasingly erodes the foundations of the capitalist system, who will care about an apparently “regional and peripheral” conflict like the Civil War in Donbass? However, we must divide our focus and pay more and more attention to the increase in violence and insecurity anywhere in the world.

In fact, the acquisition of this equipment by Ukraine indicates that Kiev plans to resume direct combat and, most likely, policies of political and ethnic persecution against Russian minorities and political groups opposing the regime established during the Euromaidan in 2014. Without drawing the attention of international society, the Ukrainian government, in international cooperation with the USA, plans a total war. Most likely, the United Nations will not comment on the case until something more serious happens – when, certainly, it will be too late.

It is worth remembering that, in February, the United States delivered tents worth US $ 1.5 million to Ukraine. In the meantime, attacks through explosions, shootings and systematic killings in the vicinity of Lugansk and Donetsk have become increasingly frequent and brutal. With the recent donation of equipment, American investments in the war have increased by tens of millions of dollars; so what’s next now? An even greater aggravation of the conflict with even more frequent attacks and murders of greater magnitude?

Ukraine expects a stance on the part of the rebels, which certainly will not happen. The greater Kiev’s aggression, the greater the rebellious response, with an increasingly strong resistance front. However, the rebel militias do not have much international support and world powers financing their actions and providing ultra-advanced war equipment, which means that, however much the rebel resistance strengthens, it is possible that there will be a major massacre in the Donbass. The faster the international society’s express condemnation to this escalation of violence, the lower the risk of genocide in eastern Ukraine. Coronavirus cannot be used as a smokescreen for international attacks.

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

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For many years, the situation of the South American integration project has been moving slowly and with strong signs of decay. The various political, economic and social changes that have taken place in recent years – marked by a strong neoliberal shift in South America – have contributed to the weakening of the bloc.

South American countries face enormous difficulties in several areas, such as health, security and the economy – especially now, with the global pandemic of the new coronavirus. The Mercosur Parliament seeks to find integrated solutions to the current problems, but internal differences can compromise not only the negotiations, but the very existence of the bloc.

The board of directors of the Mercosur Parliament met on May 12, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the integration of South American countries to combat COVID-19 and economic recovery being extremely important, the contradictions between the countries of the bloc threaten the future of all members, which is why the meeting was necessary. However, its result was not very promising, and the answers to the continent’s current demands were not found.

International Relations professor at ESPM-SP, Denilde Holzhacker, who is a specialist in politics in the Americas, explained that the recent meetings that have been held to expand democratic dialogue between members are insufficient, so it is “difficult to think about this moment that Parlasul can act in order to increase cooperation”. These are her words: “On the one hand, we have the weakening of cooperation instruments with Argentina’s decision to leave the negotiations in progress […], on the other hand, Parlasul itself has not yet had the nominations of parliaments from two countries. Last year there was a change in the form and nomination of parliamentarians and at that moment there are no representatives from Argentina and Uruguay”.

According to Holzhacker, the continuity of the bloc’s existence is currently uncertain. Argentina announced that it will renounce the bloc’s negotiations to focus on the recovery of its national economy, which makes the country an inactive member of Mercosur, making it even more difficult to resume cooperation that was practically paralyzed. For the specialist, there are clear signs that the bloc may have its activities officially closed.

“One of the actions discussed was the cooperation action, using one of the Mercosur funds to allocate to joint research, for actions aimed at raising awareness, working in the health area. So, they have some initiatives. Even so, they have low effectiveness, given the issues I raised earlier”.

The growing distance between Brazil and Argentina affects the attempt at integration and the cooperative dialogue between countries. This is a situation already well known, however, as highlighted by the expert:

“It comes from a process of distancing since the election of Alberto Fernández and that becomes even more acute at a time of differences between countries. Distancing not only in dialogue, but about a series of issues. (…) We have a situation of distancing between the two central countries in the region, which makes it more difficult to dialogue and build joint actions at this time”.

In fact, the future of the bloc is, like that of all countries, subordinated to the uncertainties of the pandemic. The speeches of the member countries, mainly Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, emphasize the progress of the trade agreements that were already under negotiation, but also seek to defend their domestic markets. In the case of Argentina, there is great concern in negotiating its foreign debt, “with a strong protectionist bias”. The pandemic came to hit these countries in a period of great fragility and economic crisis, which further hindered the negotiations and the possibility of Mercosur’s rebuilding.

Denilde Holzhacker does not believe that there will be an environment for commercial cooperation in Mercosur, considering the behavior of the member countries seen so far: “From what we have seen and observed in terms of the countries’ discourse, the emphasis is on domestic markets, building processes protection of their industries and markets, which makes it more difficult to advance these trade agreements “.

Everything seems to be heading towards a substantial decline in the development agenda of the South American States. The Argentine decision, however, is not reprehensible; on the contrary, it is the most sovereign decision ever made, prioritizing saving its own economy. However, this is not the case for all members and much less for other countries on the continent that relate to the bloc. South America is heading towards total poverty and towards the structural crisis of national economies. Brazil continues with a serious process of deindustrialization and strides towards social, political and economic chaos. The other countries are unable to play a decisive role in the bloc – which, at the mercy of Brazil and Argentina, is rapidly sinking.

The fall of Mercosur will be a political, economic and geopolitical tragedy; a real delay in the struggle for a multipolar world. However, it will be an opportunity to restart a stronger and more coherent project for the integration of the peoples of the South.

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

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Aided by establishment media fear-mongering, the public mind is being manipulated to support COVID-19 mass vaxxing as a way to protect against coronavirus infections.

Unmentioned is that all vaccines are toxic and hazardous to human health.

Taking them risks contracting the disease they’re supposed to protect against, along with developing other serious diseases later in life.

In other words, the promoted cure can be worse than the disease.

Rushing development of COVID-19 vaccines for mass vaxxing amounts to playing Russian roulette with human health.

Instead of warning the public of the dangers, establishment media are complicit in ignoring them.

On Tuesday, the NYT touted limited phase one tests of biotech company Moderna’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine, claiming results showed it was “safe and provoked a strong immune response.”

Eight test subjects were vaxxed, given two low doses in a test for “safety.”

Ignored by the Times and other media reports were potential longer-term adverse reactions and known hazards of all vaccines. Little is learned about experimental ones based on short-term results with a handful of subjects.

News about Moderna’s drug sent its stock price soaring about 25% on Monday.

After the market closed, the company announced a $1.25 billion public offering of its common shares. Their valuation slumped in after-hours trading.

Reportedly its CEO Stephane Bancel has been dumping large numbers of shares.

Moderna’s largest shareholder Flagship Pioneer has been doing the same thing — cashing in while the stock is hot, notably before it may cool down or crash if later experimental vaccine tests show negative results.

The Times also promoted the false promise of a “return to normal” ahead, claiming Monday’s strong market rally reflected the “prospect,” adding:

“Vaccines are now seen as the best and perhaps only hope of stopping or even slowing” COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths.

Monday’s rally was more about market manipulation than the prospect of restoration of economic health.

On the same day, Tass reported over “93,000 confirmed” COVID-19 cases worldwide in the last 24 hours, around 4,500 more deaths — showing no letup in the global public health problem.

Are vaccines to the rescue the solution? Despite years of research, no successful coronavirus vaccines were ever developed.

Is it likely that a never before achieved breakthrough will change things by yearend?

Is a miracle vaccine coming in the months ahead?

Weeks earlier, Nature magazine and other scientific journals explained warnings by researchers that rushing COVID-19 vaccine development for widespread use in the coming months could increase the risk of infection rather than protect against it.

Earlier research on coronavirus vaccines showed they risk vaccine enhancement, worsening infection if gotten, not protecting vaxxed individuals.

How this happens is yet to be understood. It’s a major stumbling block to developing coronavirus vaccines — what may never be achieved, notably because the virus mutates into many new forms, each different from others in characteristics.

On Tuesday, Thailand Medical News (TMN) reported that University of Hong Kong researchers found the following:

“(A)lthough individuals infected with either severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) or SARS-CoV-2 (that causes COVID-19) produce antibodies that bind to the other coronavirus, the cross-reactive antibodies are not cross protective, at least in cell-culture experiments.”

It suggests that developing coronavirus vaccines may not be possible — at least not unless or until there are research breakthroughs never achieved before.

According to Hong Kong University researcher Dr. Chris Mok:

“Since coronavirus outbreaks are likely to continue to pose global health risks in the future, the possibility of developing a cross-protective vaccine against multiple coronaviruses has been considered.”

“Our findings, albeit limited at present, would suggest that broadly cross-neutralizing antibodies to coronaviruses might not be commonly produced by the human immune repertoire.”

“Moving forward, monoclonal antibody discovery and characterization will be crucial to the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in the short-term, as well as a cross-protective coronavirus vaccine in the long term.”

No breakthroughs exist toward achieving these objectives — nor in developing a miracle COVID-19 cure.

The virus is likely to be around for a long time, maybe forever like season flu that results in millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths in the US annually.

It’s a forever epidemic and pandemic — unaccompanied by establishment media fear-mongering headlines, despite the global harm to countless millions annually like clockwork.

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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.

On Friday, Trump sacked State Department Inspector General Steve Linick — reportedly for launching an investigation into how Pompeo runs things.

A White House statement said Pompeo “recommended the move” — to quash an inquiry into his management of the department not explained.

Pompeo has 2024 presidential ambitions. He wants no potential dirty linen airing that could harm his chance to become a future GOP standard bearer.

The possibility should terrify everyone. His extremism makes Trump almost look mild by comparison.

According to Politico, Pompeo’s policies at State above all are “designed to bolster his…standing with the GOP base.”

Linick began investigating improper actions by him and his wife.

In response to his sacking, House Dems indicated they’ll open their own investigation into the issue.

By letter to the White House and State Department, they requested documents related to Linick’s sacking.

According to the US Hatch Act (1939), executive branch officials are prohibited from engaging in certain forms of political activity — the president, vice president, and designated members of their staff excluded.

Critics accused Pompeo of numerous violations, including involvement in partisan events.

In February, he addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference, a must venue for Republicans with presidential aspirations.

Like Mike Pence, Pompeo is an evangelical Christian. Time and again, both figures unacceptably cross the line between church and state by their rhetoric and actions.

Appointed State Department inspector general by Obama in 2013, Linick’s justifiable criticism of Hillary’s use of her private server for Foggy Bottom business aroused the ire of Dems.

In 2019, he criticized mistreatment of State Department staffers under Pompeo and his subordinates.

By letter to congressional leaders, Trump failed to state reasons for sacking Linick, saying only that he “no longer (has the) fullest confidence” in the inspector general.

He was involved in impeaching Trump by House Dems — by providing them with documents, not by testifying.

Other officials involved in the process were sacked by Trump.

They included former intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson, former Trump regime envoy to the UK Gordon Sondland, former National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and war department IG Glenn Fine.

Separately in early May, Trump nominated a replacement for HHS deputy inspector general Christi Grimm in response to her criticism of his mishandled COVID-19 outbreak response.

The surest way to be sacked by him is to serve the public interest responsibly over political interests.

Former White House director of government ethics Walter Shaub (2013 – 2017) called mass Trump regime IG firings a sign of “corruption-driven authoritarianism (and a) collapsing republic.”

State Department office of foreign missions head Stephen Akard is replacing Linick as department inspector general in June.

He formerly served as Indiana Economic Development Corporation chief of staff when Pence was governor.

According to the State Department, the office of inspector general is a nonpartisan position involved in “determin(ing) whether policy goals are being achieved and whether the interests of the United States are being represented and advanced effectively.”

The office is also mandated to investigate “instances of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that may constitute either criminal wrongdoing or violation of Department and USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) regulations.”

A politicized House Dem probe into Linick’s sacking will be conducted in the coming weeks.

It’s at a time when both wings of the one-party state should focus like a laser on improving public health, reviving the economy, and aiding growing millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans in need.

A Final Comment

Thomas Jefferson believed America’s founding document couldn’t stand the test of time.

He urged a new convention every 20 years to fix problems and make the Constitution relevant to the times.

Most important is obeying the core law of the land, its statutes, and international law — clearly not how its ruling authorities and lawmakers operate.

America’s deplorable state reflects Benjamin Franklin’s warning about “(a newly formed) republic, if you can keep it.”

He understood significant challenges ahead, likely never imagining how bad things would get.

The nation is on a slippery slope toward full-blown tyranny — compounded by its forever wars, at the expense of vital homeland needs gone begging.

It’s why the hardest of hard times in US history are unfolding in real time — a protracted public health crisis compounded by economic collapse, a perfect storm.

There’s a war going on by the nation’s ruling class against the vast majority of the people.

The extent of human pain and suffering will best be understood in the fullness of time.

No matter which right wing of the one-party state runs things, the nation’s privileged class benefits exclusively by exploiting most others at home and abroad.

That’s the disturbing truth about the dismal state of the nation with no prospect for relief ahead for the vast majority of Americans.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

In an interview with Mehr News Agency, Rabbi Weiss said the Israeli regime was established in Palestine by committing all kinds of crimes against its people, which is a violation of Jewish religious laws towards fellow human beings, adding that the anti-Zionist Jews support “the return of the entire land to the Palestinian people”

His interview was conducted on the occasion of the Nakba Day (the Day of Catastrophe) and on the eve of Quds Day when back in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their homeland and Israel proclaimed existence. The refugees were forced to seek refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, often without citizenship being granted.

Here is the full text of his interview:

Morteza Rahmani: 72 years have passed since the Israeli regime’s occupation of the Palestinian lands; where is the regime standing today in terms of identity as well as the political and social status?

Rabbi Weiss: Before I answer the question I’d like to state our viewpoint as traditionally Orthodox Jews. We oppose Zionism because it is an anti-Jewish philosophy of building a sovereign homeland for Jews while in a divinely decreed exile, which is forbidden by the Jewish religion. Also, this homeland was established in Palestine by committing all kinds of crimes against its people, which is a violation of Jewish religious laws towards fellow human beings.  We don’t support “two states for two peoples”; we support the return of the entire land to the Palestinian people. We believe that peaceful non-militant Jews will be able to live under a Palestinian state in peace.

During the 72 years of occupation, there have been different phases, from wars with neighboring countries to negotiations with Palestinians with the goal of a two-state solution (of course these negotiations were never meant to lead anywhere, and at the same time the Zionists built more and more settlements). With the future of two states completely undermined, we will be seeing more of a push for one democratic state, in which Jews will soon be a minority. The Israelis know this and that is why Netanyahu and his party have been passing laws to declare Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. Of course, this is ridiculous because he can’t claim to represent Judaism or the Jewish people, whether they reside in or out of their state.

MR: What do the current political crises and rifts among the Israeli authorities, as well as the regime’s undermined security, suggest?

RW: First let’s not forget what the Almighty states in the holy Torah: “Why do you transgress the word of the Almighty? It will not be successful!” (Numbers 14:41). Going against the Torah’s command by forming a Jewish state and/or oppressing others, will not succeed in the end.

Part of the rift in politics is over the drafting of religious Jews into the army. All the secular parties are determined to draft the religious; their dispute is over whether to do it by force or to “accustom” them to it slowly. The religious have always refused to serve in the army because they are opposed to the state and its wars.  There have been constant protests over this subject, and we have appealed to the UN.

As I said earlier, the Torah view is opposed to all the Israeli political parties and to the state as a whole. Our communities living in the Holy Land refuse to take any part in the State of Israel and constantly protest its illegal existence and the crimes it commits. We promote that the illegal occupation should be speedily and peacefully dismantled in its entirety.

MR: Based on the available data on the US and Britain’s arms and financial support to the Israelis, how do you see the role of Washington and London in the formation and realization of the Zionist regime?

RW: Unfortunately, the Zionists have succeeded in getting many countries to support them. They misused the Holocaust and the long history of anti-Jewish persecution to convince people that Jews need their own state. This is what gave them the ability to establish their state and keep it going with world support to this day while ignoring the position of authentic religious Jews in the Holy Land and around the world. We hope that this false narrative won’t be accepted much longer, but rather the world will see the truth and end the support for this unacceptable criminal State. This, with the help of the Almighty, will certainly help and accelerate the end of the occupation, speedily and peacefully.

MR: The Israeli regime has been struggling to repel the Palestinians’ and Lebanese’ resistance movement in the past years; have the Zionists been successful in this regard? And will these efforts help Tel Aviv survive?

RW: They have been unfortunately partially successful militarily, so to say, inflicting terrible casualties and damage. But they will never be able to stop the liberation of the Palestinian people and enjoy a truly successful occupation. They will never reach true success in their rebellion against the Almighty, as mentioned above.

Let us look at the recent history of the Palestinian people. What other people have been exiled for so long and still maintains refugee status, and (on the whole) refuses to accept citizenship or a comfortable life anywhere else? From a religious Jewish point of view, seeing the hand of the Almighty in world events, the Palestinian’s steadfast resolve shows that the Almighty is not letting the Zionists succeed. This is because of the same verse in the Torah I quoted earlier (question 2): rebellion against the Almighty will not succeed.

MR: The normalization process of Arab-Israeli ties has been accelerated in recent years, and they are not hiding it anymore; what are the main reasons behind such measures by the Israeli regime?

RW: We can’t comment, nor do we know, the Zionist political motives. But it is clear that one benefit to them is to make peace with one part of the Arab and Muslim world at a time so that they don’t have everyone against them at once.

MR: The US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem al-Quds in 2017; how much did this measure favor the legalization process of the Zionist regime?

RW: We feel that the moving of the embassy was a tragic move. It does give the Zionist regime a feeling of impunity that it can now proceed to annex more and more land and get the American rubber stamp. But many Americans are not happy with this and it can eventually be reversed if enough Americans become aware of the injustice.

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Featured image is from MNA

Fear and uncertainty have dominated the media coverage of the Covid-19 epidemic.

The novel coronavirus is depicted not as a pedestrian pathogen certain to be beaten into submission by the miracles of modern science any day now, but as an invisible evil lurking everywhere, formidable enough to inspire a respectful terror even in the leading lights of the medical establishment.

And in case Americans had any doubt about how they were supposed to regard this new viral threat, the establishment talking heads many rely upon for the self-assured delivery of their news have swapped their usual swagger for apprehension. Amid this ‘confidence vacuum,’ the popular response to the pandemic has taken on a religious cast. Protective measures like masks have taken on a talismanic quality, hand-washing has been elevated to a ritual performance, and a cult built on naming and shaming ‘heretics’ has seized the minds of many – while their rights are quietly stripped away and a paternalistic police state substituted in their place.

Unable to see the microscopic “enemy” they are told threatens the lives of them and their family and deprived of a scientifically proven cure, individuals seeking deliverance from Covid-19 are left with only their faith that the protective measures prescribed by health experts –our scientific priest class– can keep it at bay. If it ended there, the Corona Cult would merely be a curiosity – humans have turned to religion in troubled times since before written history began. But its dark side has already reared its ugly head – those who buck the new orthodoxy are already being blamed for the plague.

We’ve been here before. In the Middle Ages, pious peasants were kept in line by priests who told them God was watching their every move. When a plague appeared, it was interpreted as divine punishment, the wrath of God visited upon a sinful population. Those who wished to stand out as especially devout whipped themselves in public, or wore painful garments called “hair shirts” – in both cases with the aim of ‘mortifying the flesh,’ literally ‘putting to death’ their sinful natures.

It’s no coincidence that self-flagellation reached its height of popularity during the Black Plague. It was assumed by its practitioners that if they underwent penance by inflicting pain on themselves, they would be spared the God-given pain of the plague. Those who publicly refused to participate in the religious rituals of the day were called out as infidels, heretics, witches or other servants of the devil. They might be chased out of town; many were tortured and even killed, often in shockingly gruesome ways, as the centuries progressed and the Inquisition rose to power. The pious were regularly told their misfortunes were due to the presence of a satanic influence among them, with complex problems declared to be solved by simply casting out the offending presence.

While western society may tell itself it has left those Dark Ages far behind, the lure of simplistic explanations is as potent as ever.

Mask of the red death

Face masks have become both the visual symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic and the dominant religious fetish for the Cult of Corona. While cities from New York to Laredo, Texas have adopted regulations mandating them in public places and chain stores like Costco have barred unmasked customers from their premises, it’s hard not to notice those individuals so devoted to the mask-wearing ritual that they sport the face-coverings in their own cars (with the windows rolled up) and when running down epidemic-emptied streets. Poor messaging is partly to blame – the Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly changed its narrative on who should wear masks, from “sick people” to “only healthcare workers” to “everyone.” However, the Cult of Corona’s devotion to the mask extends far beyond following the recommendations of a mere public health agency.

The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found largely ineffective in protecting the uninfected from carriers in their surroundings, and the flimsy surgical masks that have become ubiquitous for sale on American street corners are next to worthless in stopping virus transmission. Indeed, some doctors have even warned that wearing a mask is counterproductive due to the false sense of security it creates. Yet it’s impossible to walk into a supermarket in many cities without something covering the mouth – even as one’s eyes remain unprotected and ready to receive whatever viral particles are lingering in the air. Mask requirements thus have nothing to do with health and everything to do with religious faith. They provide a way for the faithful to telegraph their virtue at a distance and recognize one another instantly, while flagging the non-compliant as infidels to be avoided.

In the same way that garlic and a cross were supposed to ward off vampires in times past, the face mask is supposed to fend off the “invisible enemy” lurking everywhere at once. One might feel a little silly driving around with a mask on (or stringing a clove of garlic above one’s window), but better safe than sorry – and if you haven’t been infected, or had any vampires show up at your bedside, who’s to say it isn’t working?

Ritual, snitchual

A bevy of rituals has sprung up among Corona Cultists, from the benign if eccentric (swabbing all exposed surfaces with Lysol wipes) to the sinister (reporting neighbors for perceived violations). Even the simplest, most scientifically-sound measures like hand-washing have taken on a ritualistic cast, as the virus-fearing infuse them with a terrified zeal. How else to explain the popularity of the dozens of “hand-washing apps” available for smartphones but that the shock of the epidemic has caused us to question that which we once took for granted? Just as peasants of a previous era might have been spooked into regular church attendance by the specter of the Black Death, their descendants pore over videos of hand-washing on YouTube, determined to live a “cleaner” life.

But another holdover from the Dark Ages has risen its ugly head. While our ancestors might have turned in their oddball neighbor as a “witch,” claiming to have seen the merry old spinster cavorting with Satan under the full moon, modern-day snitches are picking up their smartphones and dialing specially-designated lines to report violations of social distancing orders. These services are disturbingly popular – New Zealand’s snitch site crashed repeatedly within its first week in late March as over 4,000 people scrambled to turn in their neighbors for violating that nation’s harsh lockdown regulations, which separated people into “bubbles” based on their living arrangements and forbid them from interacting with those outside their “bubble.”

Snitches come in several stripes.

There have always been busybodies who call the police when their neighbor’s music is too loud rather than knocking on their door and politely asking to turn it down. But in the Cult of Corona, these miscreants are joined by those driven half-crazy with fear, convinced that the act of turning in rule breakers will somehow protect them from contracting the virus. They’d never say such a preposterous thing out loud, of course – if asked, they merely claim to be concerned for the community, or worried their victim’s irresponsible behavior is spreading Covid-19 willy-nilly, perhaps even stating that their decision to turn their neighbor in was “for their own good.” Just as the Inquisitor’s concern for those they tortured on the rack was supposedly for their victim’s “immortal soul,” so does the modern snitch rationalize their betrayal of their neighbors by reasoning that the virus police are concerned only for the health of the heretics they rat out – while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t the ones being tortured (or placed on a ventilator), this time. Following orders becomes a source of comfort for the snitch deprived of life’s normal pleasures by the lockdown – providing an avenue for transformation from victim to hero.

Fueling this schadenfreudisch frenzy are media headlines celebrating the karmic punishment of lockdown violators. Whether it’s spring-breakers testing positive for Covid-19 after throwing caution to the wind and partying down on the beach or social-media showoffs boasting about refusing to social-distance, the public smiting of heretics has been a popular topic among Corona Cultists isolated in their homes. John McDaniel, an Ohio man who criticized his governor for shutting down the state, reportedly died in April of coronavirus only for social media mobs to dance on his grave and use his death to attack other “doubters” (including Donald Trump, whose insufficient reverence at the altar of the virus continues to set zealots frothing with rage). CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed that “practically every day” he read about a corona doubter succumbing to the virus, blaming conservative media and politicians for their deaths – heresy, apparently, is as contagious as the virus. The New York Post, which ran a moralizing story free of any identifying details about a nameless Kingston, New York barber who’d caught the virus after supposedly flouting lockdown for several weeks to cut hair, also rushed to connect a spike in coronavirus cases in Kentucky with an anti-lockdown protest a few days earlier – even though the virus’ lengthy latency period (and the fact that a significant chunk of the new cases were in nursing homes) made it next to impossible the two events were linked. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most fanatical government figures in the US’ corona cult, implied in a press conference that protests were more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus than other forms of “congregating.”

UK PM Boris Johnson was perhaps the most public example of the “divine punishment” phenomenon – his conversion to the Corona Cult (after a few days of timidly suggesting herd immunity might be a better path to public health) came too late to keep him out of intensive care at the hands of the NHS his party has so ruthlessly sought to privatize. When actress Miriam Margolyes declared following his recovery that she had wanted to see BoJo dead, some in the media appeared to agree with her – while making a point of casting such agreement as gleefully subversive. Not only do Corona Cultists find a commonality in rooting for the virus against the dissidents who challenge their worldview, but their own adherence to an exhaustingly cognitively-dissonant dogma is affirmed as the correct path by the heretics’ misfortune. Enforced austerity tends to be unpopular with its victims, but when that privation is reframed as a noble sacrifice made by all [except the wealthy] for the common good, it becomes easier to bear the suffering – and much more difficult to tolerate those who refuse to go along.

The real danger comes when zealots feel compelled to “help” the virus smite the heretics (sure, I could wait for God to punish this evildoer in the afterlife, but why not take some of that work off His hands?). The Daily Mail cheered on an elderly woman who threatened to “kick the ass” of a stranger for merely calling the pandemic a “hoax.” A Brooklyn couple attempted to discipline a trio of Hasidic Jewish men for failure to maintain social distancing, supposedly blaming them for the spread of the virus – but instead of moving further apart, the men and their neighbors beat the couple up, sending them to the hospital (and slapping them with a hate-crime charge as insult added to injury). The violence need not be physical – a British woman told SkyNews she was “named and shamed” by neighbors on Facebook when she accidentally slept through her town’s weekly “clap for the NHS” ritual, in which participants lean out their windows and applaud at a fixed time every week in a choreographed celebration of the healthcare workers they believe protect them from the virus. Even viral videos of police abuses, which have been a dime a dozen during lockdowns that embolden the worst elements on the force, have been deluged with comments in support of the cops, charging the unarmed man/woman/child being arrested or brutalized “deserved it” because they were out without a mask/protesting/not standing 6 feet away from the nearest human. Never mind that the cops in the videos are almost never masked themselves, or that it’s impossible to maintain six feet of distance while making an arrest – certainly never mind the Kafkaesque paradox of arresting someone for not social-distancing, only to throw them in a jail cell with several other humans per square foot – these poor souls have sinned, and they must be punished. Don’t agree? You might end up in there with them.

Gotta have faith

For those whose faith is flagging after two months of lockdowns sapping both their bank accounts and health, polls are being churned out confirming upwards of 80% of Americans and nearly 9 out of 10 Britons support continuing the lockdowns, which combined with social media’s growing censorship of anti-lockdown speech gives the false impression of a universal public consensus that government policies are both popular and lifesaving. Fanatical religious adherence is required to enforce belief in such absurdity, given the appalling track records of the High Priests of Lockdown. Imperial College corona czar Neil Ferguson was caught gallivanting with his mistress in defiance of his own policies after two months lecturing Brits about the importance of staying home, but his wildly irresponsible disease model – produced using a defective computer program that was more glitch than code – lives on, haunting the minds of lockdown-lovers who screech BoJo is letting Brits leave home too soon. Indeed, based on his resumé, Ferguson never should have been allowed near public policy. His terrible miscalculations regarding foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 led to the unnecessary destruction of over 6.5 million livestock, decimating the nation’s farming industry, while a similar but fortunately unheeded prediction in 2002 that mad cow disease would kill as many as 150,000 Britons was shown up by the reality of 178 killed. As the years went on, his apocalyptic visions only intensified – in 2005, he declared bird flu would kill some 200 million people worldwide – when reality saw some 455 people, total, killed over the past 15 years according to the WHO. His hysterical 2009 prediction that 65,000 Brits would die of swine flu encouraged the government to embrace GlaxoSmithKline’s unsafe Pandemrix vaccine, which caused permanent brain damage in thousands of people (mostly children, plus a good deal of NHS workers conned into taking the jab with false claims of its safety and effectiveness) – quite a bit more than the 283 killed by the actual swine flu.

Not that the UK is alone in embracing faith-based “science” as health policy. Trump even appointed the man who led GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division during the Pandemrix debacle to lead “Operation Warp Speed,” his unhinged program to develop a vaccine by the end of 2020 (a process that normally takes five years being crammed into eight months). Like Ferguson, Anthony Fauci – the face of the US’ pandemic response – has decades of epidemic failures under his belt at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Starting with the thousands of otherwise-healthy HIV positive people who died in the 1980s thanks to Fauci’s shameless advocacy for AZT, which refashioned the toxic drug (too poisonous for terminal cancer patients) into a miracle pill for AIDS, and passing through at least one episode of perjury that saw him deny the existence of encephalitis as a possible side effect of the MMR vaccine (before remembering he was under oath and acknowledging it was “rare”), Fauci has displayed such breathtaking avarice and incompetence at the helm of the NIAID that the US life expectancy has actually declined noticeably under his watch for the first time in history. Yet like the followers of an end-times cult leader who remain loyal even as the appointed date for the end of the world comes and goes, devotees of these public health priests have not dared to learn their lesson. Instead, they ramp up their predictions of doom for heretical countries like Sweden and Belarus that have refused to fall in line with the universal lockdown doctrine.

One level above the public health priesthood is Microsoft billionaire and Pandemic Pope Bill Gates, whose lack of medical credentials or even a college diploma have not stopped the world from hailing him as a prophet based on his “prediction” of a pandemic in 2015 – and his claim to have both the answers and the ability to pay for them. Gates’ deep pockets – he’s the number-one funder of the WHO, ever since Trump pulled US support – have given him the power to almost singlehandedly direct global health policy, steering it into a pharmaceutical iceberg even as real doctors protest his many conflicts of interest. Since diving into the money-pit of “philanthropy,” Gates has more than doubled his fortune; his foundation is heavily invested in the drug companies that make the vaccines that other groups he funds purchase for poor countries. He’s also very, very generous with the media, buying the silence of establishment outlets around the world – big names like the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and National Public Radio – so their journalists don’t recoil when he can barely keep from gibbering and squealing while discussing the economic hurt his lockdown policies are inflicting on hapless populations – or research the trail of suffering his foundation has left through the Global South.

Yet even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex – vaccine advocates like Peter Hotez, the bowtie-sporting tropical disease specialist who was ubiquitous on TV during the 2018 “measles epidemic” attacking so-called “anti-vaxxers” – have expressed alarm at the decision to scrap the animal-testing phase for the Covid-19 vaccine that is supposed to save the world, noting that “there is a risk of immune enhancement” with vaccines for any coronavirus. During animal trials for an aborted SARS vaccine, mice who got the shot developed a severe version of the virus when exposed to it after they were inoculated, while ferrets similarly challenged post-vaccination with the virus suffered “enhanced liver damage.” Perhaps trying to get around these roadblocks, Moderna, the drugmaker currently leading the vaccine pack, is banking on a totally new kind of vaccine, one which, rather than lob a softball at the immune system in the form of a dead or weakened form of the virus, will attempt to reprogram our genetic material to create the pieces of the virus, so that the immune system can learn to fight them off. That’s how Gates himself describes this “promising” method, at least. Did we mention Moderna has never brought a vaccine to market before? What’s the matter – where’s your faith?

We may not be turning our eyes heavenward and praying for deliverance, but the leaders of the western world have declared society cannot fully return to normal until a magical perfect vaccine arrives from on high, an absurd one-stop solution that carries echoes of the “duck and cover”-type prescriptions for surviving a nuclear blast, drilled into people’s heads during the Cold War. The effect of instilling a powerful capacity for cognitive dissonance – teaching children to hide under their desks even as they were taught the laws of physics, i.e. an understanding that their desks couldn’t protect them – turned Americans into gold medalists in cognitive dissonance. Were it an Olympic sport, no one would even come close.

To be continued…

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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Global Research, Activist Post, Ghion Journal, and Progressive Radio Network. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://helenofdestroy.com or follow her on Twitter at @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

The ongoing global systemic transition is transforming international relations from its erstwhile unipolarity to what experts agree is either multipolarity or, less popularly, bipolarity. However one chooses to describe the present world order, it’s clear that the US and China are the main global players, which places Russia and India – decades-long strategic partners – in a junior position vis-a-vis both of them, especially their mutual Chinese neighbor with whom they share membership in BRICS and the SCO. The neorealist school of International Relations Theory preaches the need to pursue national interests, which sometimes align with others’, and it is argued in the article that it is with this idea in mind that both countries have a motivation to jointly improve their strategic positions relative to the People’s Republic, albeit in a non-hostile manner that avoids the risk of inadvertently triggering a security dilemma and reversing the recent gains made in Eurasian integration.

Two articles published by Russia’s Valdai Club in 2019 indicated the possibility of creating a new Non-Aligned Movement, with the most recent one proposing that it be jointly led by Russia and India in order to advance the aforementioned neo-realist objective of balancing China. This suggestion is very intriguing and deserves some further elaboration, to which end the present research was conducted in order to place the new Non-Aligned Movement proposal in a strategic context relevant to the ongoing global systemic transition. Nearly a dozen articles and reports by Russian experts were analyzed, resulting in the conclusion that the proposal is a promising one but requires much more research into its challenges and opportunities in order to become more than just a proposed concept. In the event that any tangible progress is made on it, however, it must be done so extremely carefully in order for China not to misunderstand its intentions.

Click here to read the full text.

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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.

If you cannot discover or create something, best steal it.  It has been the operating principle for everything from wealth to technology.  With the efforts to discover a vaccine to the novel coronavirus being all but bound by solidarity, the race on plundering secrets has already begun in earnest.  No one party can claim particular innocence in this endeavour.  All states engage in economic espionage and old-fashioned secret pinching to advance their interests.  Finding the building blocks for a COVID-19 vaccine is proving no different. 

As with such accusations, the cloak is procured with the dagger.  The case is probable, and plausible enough, but confirmation tends to come in rations.  In the business of hacking, what is acceptable in torrid love and hideous war tends to be a hard one to pin down. 

In 2015, the US and China reached an accord to, in the words of President Barack Obama, refrain from conducting or knowingly supporting “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage.”  At the time, an assessment by Wired came to the conclusion that the agreement did not prevent traditional, full blown espionage, focusing, instead, on such efforts as those to pinch company source codes for competitive advantage.  

In addition to Obama’s main point, Beijing and Washington agreed to furnish timely responses to requests for information and assistance dealing with malicious cyber activities; engage in “efforts to further identify and promote appropriate norms of state behaviour in cyberspace” and “establish a high-level joint dialogue mechanism on fighting cybercrime and related issues.”

In 2018, the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre (NCSC) reported that “the Intelligence Community and private sector security experts continue to identify ongoing Chinese cyber activity, although at lower volumes than existed before the bilateral September 2015 US-China cyber commitments.”  Not all bad then, especially given that cyber activity designed to pilfer intellectual property for other non-competitive purposes continued to be de rigueur.

During the pandemic crisis, the niggles and pinches caused by cyberactivity have reportedly increased in number.  Academic and research programs are being scrutinised.  The US Justice Department has taken a particular interest in the PRC-sponsored Thousand Talents program.  One of their latest targets is University of Arkansas’ professor of engineering, Simon Saw-Teong Ang, accused of concealing his ties to the Chinese government and universities while he worked on projects with NASA funding. 

The United States, while not exactly leading in its response to dealing with COVID-19, now claims that its efforts to identify treatments and a vaccines are being targeted by others, with the PRC leading (naturally), the keen pack.  “The PRC’s behaviour in cyberspace,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued in a statement last Thursday, “is an extension of its counterproductive actions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”  Senator Marco Rubio, one of the noisiest of China hawks, has also been squawking on what he claims is an adjustment in Chinese tactics.  “Beijing has shifted its recruitment efforts for the Thousand Talents Program online, and it has increased efforts to hack US medical research institutes for COVID-19 information.”

On May 13, a joint statement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was published.  It alleged “the compromise of US organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by PRC-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.”  Allegedly, such actors had “been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property (IP) and public health data related to vaccines, treatments, and testing from networks and personnel affiliated with COVID-19-related research.” 

The statement warned that organisations “conducting research in these areas” should “maintain dedicated cybersecurity and insider threat practices to prevent surreptitious review or theft of COVID-19-related material.”  Systems should be patched for “critical vulnerabilities”; web applications for authorised access should be actively sought out.  Users “exhibiting unusual activity” should be suspended.

The warning is skimpy in details, notably on the issue of how treatments will be hampered. Nor are many researchers blind about similar pinching efforts from the US side of the fence.  Jason Healey, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs makes a few valid points on this.  “If the US is wanting to argue for norms, I look forward to us doing it directly and saying here’s what we think the playing field lies, because certainly we’re being active in many of these areas as well.”

China has also been the subject of cyber interest in this particularly busy playing field.  In April, a Vietnamese hacking group known as APT32 is said to have taken interest in the PRC’s Ministry of Emergency Management and the government of Wuhan.  According to Ben Read of the cybersecurity firm FireEye, “These attacks speak to the virus being an intelligence priority – everyone is throwing everything they’ve got at it, and APT32 is what Vietnam has.”  Not a good time, it seems, to find a vaccine in solidarity.

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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]

Coercion: the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of threats or force.

Over the course of the Covid-19 ‘crisis’, scientific advice to the UK Government has been co-ordinated by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). SAGE is co-chaired by Sir Patrick Vallance (the Government Chief Science Advisor) and Professor Chris Whitty (the Chief Medical Officer).

We have already seen how SAGE has used external advisors to help direct the medical and social response. But the UK government also claims that “many issues around the coronavirus response relate to behaviour”.

SPI-B

During the 2009/10 ‘swine flu’ pandemic, SAGE received advice from a subgroup called the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour and Communications (SPI-B&C).

That group was reconvened on 13 February this year. This time, its remit was limited to behaviour and it was renamed the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour, or SPI-B.

SPI-B takes no part in discussion about which interventions are effective in dealing with the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, or their timing. The group is tasked with providing advice on how to ‘help’ people to adhere to the interventions which government demands.

By the beginning of March, there had been three meetings of SPI-B to discuss specific topics requested by SAGE: the risk of public disorder; the use of behavioural and social interventions; and how to give guidance to people who are asked to self-isolate.

Increasing the Public’s Compliance with Social Distancing

On 22 March, in preparation for a SAGE meeting to be held the following day, SPI-B published a document (pdf, mirrored here) entitled Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures.

“What are the options for increasing adherence to the social distancing measures?”, it asks.

It considers the two social distancing measure seen to be most important at that time: general social distancing by everyone, and shielding of vulnerable people for at least 12 weeks.

There are nine “broad ways” of achieving behaviour change, they write: Education, Persuasion, Incentivisation, Coercion, Enablement, Training, Restriction, Environmental restructuring, and Modelling.

Persuasion and Coercion

The advice given by SPI-B is immediately aggressive. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened,” they write. “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

In other words, SPI-B recommended to SAGE that levels of fear needed to be increased in order to bring levels of compliance with so-called ‘lockdown’ up to desirable levels.

“To be effective,” they continue, “this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”

Here, SPI-B is making it clear that it can’t be left to individuals to decide which actions are appropriate; they have to be told.

Another option for managing behaviour which SPI-B recommends is the harnessing of “social disapproval”.

“Social disapproval from one’s community,” they write, “can play an important role in preventing anti-social behaviour or discouraging failure to enact pro-social behaviour. However, this needs to be carefully managed to avoid victimisation, scapegoating and misdirected criticism. It needs to be accompanied by clear messaging and promotion of strong collective identity. Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval but with a strong caveat around unwanted negative consequences.”

There is a recognition here that following this approach could result in physical harm to individuals in a community who aren’t following the same behaviours as the community as a whole.

But it should be recognised that in order to make use of disapproval, government has to get into the community in question to stir up that disapproval.

This type of cynical breaking-up of communities is not a new technique to the UK government.

During the Foot and Mouth Disease ‘epidemic’ in 2001, when the UK government slaughtered millions of farm animals unnecessarily, it made sure to minimise any organised community opposition to the “slaughtered on suspicion” policy by only compensating some of the farmers in any community. This resulted in bitterness and envy within communities, and did permanent damage.

A free media is essential

Various government ministers have expressed the view that a free media is essential. A question which immediately springs to mind is, free to do what?

In this case, what ministers evidently mean is freedom to act as a conduit for government propaganda.

In an appendix to their main recommendation, SPI-B produced a table which they entitled APEASE (Acceptability, Practicability, Effectiveness, Affordability, Spill-over effects, Equity). They describe it as an “evaluation grid for options to rapidly increase general social distancing.”

Here, they make clear how they see the role of the media: not to hold government to account, but to act as a conduit for the ‘behavioural’ message (propaganda).

They recommend that the media is used:

• to increase sense of personal threat
• to increase sense of responsibility to others
• to promote positive messaging around actions

Everyone following mainstream media since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak must surely have noticed the inflammatory language used in the mainstream press, which can have only increased the sense of personal threat felt by the general public.

Articles from the BBC, such as To snitch or not to snitch — a discussion on the pros and cons of reporting your neighbour for breaking Covid-19 guidelines — fulfil that need to “increase a sense of responsibility to others”, otherwise known as ‘social disapproval’.

It is clear, therefore, that this SAGE advice has been taken.

Why would the media cooperate in this way?

It was announced on 17 April this year that the Government and the newspaper industry have formed a three-month advertising partnership called All in, all together to help “keep the public safe and the nation united” throughout the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’.

So news media have a commercial interest in providing a propaganda service to the UK government. Indeed, it has been noticed that the government is becoming the UK media’s most important client.

SPI-B methodology

The SPI-B report was “drafted by two members of the SPI-B panel and nine further members commented, following which the report was revised.”

They offer a caveat to that:

Much of the evidence that has been drawn on is very recent and has not been subject to peer review. In some cases, the source is a SPI-B paper that involves expert opinion. This report has been put together rapidly and been subject to limited scrutiny and review.

As a result of this level of work, the population of the UK has been kept in their homes and the whole of UK industry has been shut down, resulting in the worst economic decline in 300 years.

It is extremely difficult to see how this can be viewed as anything other than a direct psychological attack on the UK population. In light of clear signs of increasing mental illness, resulting in suicide and failure to seek timely medical help, it is also difficult to see how this attack can be anything other than criminal.

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Featured image is from UK Column

This article was originally published by The Aspen Times in 2011.

Eisenhower’s legendary warning that the industrial-military complex could engender a “disastrous rise of misplaced power” has obviously come true. Notably, in the same speech, Eisenhower also advised of “equal and opposite danger.” Back in the 1960s, Ike insisted “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” However, his second warning was hushed by the deafening silence of the mainstream media.

The following was spoken by David Rockefeller at the Bilderberger Meeting, Baden Germany, June 1991. Rockefeller has devoted his life to one world government, i.e. the New World Order (NWO). He founded the Trilateral Commission and is integral to the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

Later, he notes:

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure, one world if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

The primary obstacle blocking the “sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers” is a strong, democratic, sovereign America. Both cannot exist simultaneously. Therefore, our mortal enemy has been decimating America for decades, the battlefield littered with the middle class, dazed soldiers wandering in despair, jobs lost, pockets empty, homes foreclosed, dreams crushed and forced to bow to their oppressors if they travel by air. America is on the verge of losing our battle for freedom and has not yet even identified who the real enemy is.

The age-old dream of world domination is alive and well. Our real enemy are the globalists, scientific-technological elites who, as Eisenhower warned, are attempting to establish the NWO. Their primary weapons are perpetual war and central banks, i.e. the Fed which is a cartel of international bankers, including Rockefeller, who control our economy and, astoundingly, have not been audited during the 98 years they have systematically destroyed the dollar while becoming inconceivably powerful. Jefferson, Lincoln, Andrew Jackson – the list is long and distinguished – all scream as to the lethal danger of a central bank.

Never audited, until a few weeks ago, when a partial audit finally revealed some of their treachery. While America was held hostage by a phony debt ceiling debate that pretended to help resolve our annual $1.7 trillion deficit, we learned that the Fed secretly bestowed more than $16 trillion to American and foreign banks over the past three years. Two trillion dollars, more than our annual deficit, was dumped into the vaults of the Bank of America.

Ron Paul forced the audit and is the only presidential candidate campaigning against the Fed, international bankers and the NWO. Against those who are swiftly establishing and would be masters of “one world if you will.”

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The current pandemic is wreaking havoc with the US and global economy, accelerating and deepening the general economic crisis–and threatening to provoke a global financial crisis that will exacerbate the decline and usher in a great depression no doubt even worse than the 1930s. We are now somewhere between the Great Recession of 2008-09 and the depression in the 1930s in depth of contraction and duration. Today’s Great Recession 2.0 is no doubt already worse than 2008-09 and approaching (and in some already exceeding) the depression of the 1930s.

As 40 million plus of US workers find themselves unemployed and barely able to cover their rents, food and other bills, their ability to afford or even secure fundamental health care services is a growing problem. Most of the 40 million will lose their employer health insurance coverage. Millions more will be unable to afford it, or to acquire even minimal ACA or Medicaid health services.

This writer was asked the following questions by an International News Agency about what happens to health care services in the near future, given not only the health but the economic crisis.

Here’s the questions, followed by my commentary and analysis where US health care is likely going in the foreseeable future:

Question

“We’re discussing the US health insurance crisis. Millions of Americans have been hit by a double blow, being out of work and without health insurance if they get sick. Prior to the pandemic, 160 million Americans received their medical insurance through their job. The wave of layoffs triggered by quarantine measures now threatens that coverage for millions. Up to 7 million of those people are unlikely to find new insurance as poor economic conditions drag on, researchers at the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation think tanks predict. Such enormous insurance losses could dramatically alter America’s healthcare landscape, and will probably result in more deaths as people avoid unaffordable healthcare.

In this respect, we’d be happy if you could share your opinion in a short commentary on the pros and cons of Obamacare: 1. why the system failed to cope with multiple healthcare issues, 2. what prevented it from being as successful as was expected and 3. what do you think could have been an alternative, especially now, when the pandemic is ruining the already fragile healthcare system.”

My reply and commentary

Obamacare should be understood as a program that attempted to resolve the decades-long growing health care system crisis in America by means of privatization. In the early 1990s Bill Clinton’s effort to pass legislation to correct a national insurance program was defeated by massive lobbying by the healthcare industry (insurance companies, hospital chains, clinics, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, etc.). Clinton’s response was to pass what was called Health Maintenance organizations, or HMOs. But also part of his market solution was to allow insurance companies to merge with other financial institutions (previously prevented) and allow hospitals to acquire each other without anti-trust liabilities, which were exempted in this industry. A concentration of insurance and hospital chains followed. Concentration led to oligopoly and higher prices. In order to buy up each other, hospitals and insurers went to Wall St. for financing of the deals. Wall St. demanded higher profit margins, at least 22% of revenues, in order to provide the merger financing. That led to still further price increases after the mid-1990s, and insurers dropping from coverage households with pre-existing conditions. Prices rose and coverage (costs) fell. As insurance prices rose, companies providing health insurance shifted more and more of the rising cost burden to its workers in the form of higher monthly premiums, more co-pays, more deductibles. Big companies that used to provide retirement health care benefits to their workers (e.g. AT&T, IBM, etc.) began dropping those benefits. The courts supported them. Millions of retirees lost benefits, while for the still employed prices rose, as insurers expanded price increases while reducing coverage. BY 2000, 50m workers were without health insurance coverage; and those that still had it were paying higher prices for less coverage. In 2000, Clinton arbitrarily redefined what it meant to not have insurance coverage, reducing the total without health insurance from 50m to 40m. This was a repeat of what he had done to reduce poverty: he simply defined it lower, if not away.

The dynamic of health insurers and hospital chain concentration—driving oligopoly and inflation higher as coverage declined—continued in the 2000s decade under George W. Bush. More and more were dropped from coverage by insurance companies for dubious reasons like pre-existing conditions, in order to satisfy Wall St. they were attaining 22% margins as a qualification for getting loans to buy up their competitors. As insurers gouged the public and got away with it, other sectors of the health industry followed suit “to get their share” as they said. Hospitals raised prices. So then did doctors and clinics and medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

In 2005 the big pharma companies got a second boost from government policy. George W. Bush passed the addition to Medicare called ‘Part D’ that meant the government provided drug prescriptions in part to seniors on Medicare. The problem, however, was that the politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, did not pass any funding for Part D. The cost of the program was paid out of general tax revenues, not a specific addition to the payroll tax earmarked just for Part D. That would add $50b a year to the US budget deficit and debt every year thereafter. Big Pharma got $50B a year more customers. Big Pharma and health insurance companies are among the top 3 or 4 biggest campaign contributors and lobbyist spenders in Washington. Part D became a big subsidy program to the industry.

The economic crash of 2008-09 then exacerbated the problem of ever escalating health care costs amid falling affordability by households. On top the above secular trends driving up prices and the uninsured, cyclical collapse of the economy drove tens of millions more households into the ranks of the uninsured. A major healthcare reform package was proposed in 2010 to try to rectify this. It was called Obamacare, or officially the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.

It should be noted that the historic Democrat Party proposal for health care reform and accessibility to all since the 1930s, which was called Medicare, was not allowed even for discussion in the then Democrat controlled US House of Representatives and Senate. Medicare for seniors was passed in 1965 and the party’s platform always called for extending it to all,but when the opportunity came in 2010, Obama and his business advisers prevented it from even being discussed. Instead, Obama offered what was called the ‘public option’ in lieu of Medicare for All. The public option was simply to have the federal government offer its own competing health insurance to the private insurance companies. But the private insurance industry demanded Obama pull it from proposed legislation as a condition for their support for the legislation. Obama quickly then pulled the public option. There would be no government competitive offering—even if in the form of an insurance solution and not a Medicare for All solution. What resulted was an ACA (Obamacare) that was in effect a proposal to subsidize the health insurance industry to the tune of nearly $1 trillion a year more revenue by having the US government and states manage private health insurance offerings with certain restrictions concerning price changes and health coverage minima and guarantees. Under the ACA, pre-existing conditions requirements were ended. Students up to age 26 could now also get coverage under parents’ insurance plans. The big improvement under the ACA was expanded coverage for the working and non-working poor under the Medicaid (not Medicare) program. This is a bare bones minimal doctor and hospital access provided to the poor who could not afford an insurance plan. There are few doctors who will provide services to Medicaid patients (who are mostly single mothers with children, minorities households earning less than $20k a year, and homeless, and some students). Typically only one hospital in a county accepts Medicaid patients. But it was better than nothing. However, more than a dozen states, run by Republican governors or legislatures, refused to participate in the expansion of Medicaid benefits to the poor, mostly for ideological reasons. These were Trump ‘red states’ predominantly.

In terms of uninsured, the ACA was able to add fewer than 17m to the health coverage rolls, out of the 50 million previously uninsured. It cost the government $900B a year to add these. Not a very cost efficient solution, but one which the health insurance companies liked. As one nurse I spoke to described it, the ACA was not a health insurance reform program; it was a health insurance industry subsidy program.

The ACA was financed by an amalgam of measures that raised the money for the $900b. Among these included a tax on medical devices, a tax on private high cost and often union-negotiated health insurance plans with their employers, a 3.8% surtax on investors income, a mandate that non-insurance companies had to buy into the program if they didn’t have equivalent coverage already, a mandate that individuals had to buy into the government managed plans if they didn’t have employer coverage, and dozens of other money raising measures. Immediately, business interests opposed the taxation and mandates and organized against the ACA, not just lobbying but directly as well, including in the streets demonstrations, protests, etc. The growing right wing media, led by Fox News and right wing social media, launched a constant attack against the ACA. This was encouraged by the fact that Obama and the Democrats allowed four years of ‘commentary’ before the ACA actually took effect. Passed in 2010, the law would not become effective until 2014. In the meantime, a window was allowed for opposition to grow. Lobbyists also picked away and reduced the law as well. Over time, even after 2014, court challenges chipped away at the funding and financing of the ACA. Mandates disappeared, taxes were reduced or eliminated, and only half or so of the states actually joined up.

By the time Trump entered office, Obamacare was a shell of its even limited intent. Without a public option, private insurers could, and did, ‘game the system’. Health care coverage was reduced and, most importantly, the costs of monthly premia, co-pays, and deductibles were allowed to rise significantly. What exists today is high unaffordable private industry offerings, with extremely high deductibles. It amounts for most to only extreme disaster insurance. Those covered amount to no more than 10-15 million at best who were previously uninsured. There therefore remain at least 30 million still uninsured in the US, while the health insurance companies continue to reap at least a half trillion dollars in new revenues a year from the program.

The big failure of the ACA, as this writer forewarned back in 2010-11, was it would fail to control health care rising costs and declining coverage. And that is true as well to this day. The other problem was the willingness of Obama and corporate Democrats to scuttle the public option, and prevent any discussion of Medicare for All being far more cost efficient and beneficial to households.

Now in the wake of the near collapse and deep failure of Obamacare—which repeated the failure of all prior health care privatization solutions—overlaid on the US health care affordability and coverage (and quality of health care for most) crises is the Covid-19 health crisis. Now tens of millions more are losing their health coverage, as poor as it has proven. Mass industry layoffs will result in mass decline in health care services. And re-employment will not occur rapidly, as Trump and other media declare a V-Shape quick recovery. Job losses will continue for years. Only some will come back in 2020-21. Most won’t. Health coverage crisis will continue.

The left wing of the Democrat party has been proposing Medicare for All as the only cost effective and moral alternative solution. But corporate wing Democrats refuse to consider it. And Trumpublicans consider Medicare for All anathema and will vigorously oppose it, labeling all you advocate it as ‘socialists’. And soon the massive budget deficits now being run up to bail out businesses and investors ($3.7T this year and another $2.2T in i2021) will no doubt result after the November 2020 elections in a major drive b y business interests to cut Medicare and Medicaid in order to reduce the deficits caused by business bail outs and America’s current 2nd Great Recession underway at present.

In short, it is clear that US elites since Clinton have only envisioned private, market based solutions to the US growing and continuing health care affordability crisis. All such have failed to date, as will those that may come. Whomever wins in November—Trump or Biden—there will be no Medicare for All solution considered. (Biden, like Trump, has publicly rejected it). That means that tens of millions more American workers and families will be uninsured and do without fundamental health services as the pandemic continues in inevitable second and third waves in the coming months. Those disproportionately affected by loss of medical services, insured and not, are the working poor, single female heads of households, and black and Latino households. The ranks of the uninsured will almost certainly surge once again, and quickly, above 50m and most likely much higher. That means nothing has changed or improved for the last 25 years since Clinton’s abysmal failure at health care reform, through Obama’s failed ACA, through Trump’s virtual disregard for doing anything except to continue to ensure insurance companies are taken care of first and foremost.

Private market solutions to the healthcare crisis, past present and future, have not only failed. They are in effect a central cause of the crisis. The US spent more than $3.5 trillion a year on health care services even prior to the current pandemic. It’s now spending well over $4 trillion ! More than a $1 trillion a year was being paid to paper pushers and middlemen call the health insurance industry. Today at least $1.5T will be paid to the paper pushers who provide not one iota of health care services. The health insurance industry is giant rentier profits industry sucking money out of the economy on a massive scale. The big pharmaceuticals are a close second. They continue to do so because they continue to buy elected politicians and lobby them and the rest in between elections, in the era in America where Citizens United and other court decisions mean corporations are first class citizens and the rest of households are second class (and minority households third class). And nothing will change except for the worse after the November 2020 elections, regardless which candidate of either wing of the Corporate Party of America prevails in the election.

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The debate in the German Bundestag on the extension of the mandate of German Kosovo Force (KFOR) soldiers turned into a criticism of long-time Chancellor Angela Merkel and raised speculation that Berlin might adopt a different position on Kosovo. The opposition reminded Merkel that Germany participated in the war in Kosovo, and that KFOR, a multinational NATO “peacekeeping force” was on the same side as the terrorist “Kosovo Liberation Army.” Is Germany preparing for a big turn on the issue of Kosovo?

The topic was raised by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Anton Frizen and was surprisingly joined by Alexander Neu of the leftists Die Linke. They highlighted that the idea of ​​solving the Kosovo problem through the exchange of territories was supported by the U.S.

It is significant when the most right political party in the Bundestag is finding common ground with the most left political party, as they can coordinate pressures that could change Berlin’s course on Kosovo. Any change in major foreign policy in Germany ultimately influences the EU’s position. The main challenge is that the ruling coalition of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) is dominant in the German parliament and they rule Germany in an alliance with the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The AfD is the third strongest party in the Bundestag, and Dei Linke is in fifth place.

Merkel, who has a firm position on Kosovo will soon leave office and it is not yet known who will succeed her, and whether they want to change course on this issue. However, the last debate in Germany is an indicator that there has been a reconsideration, which is even being reflected on the global level, of policy on Kosovo. It is obvious that the failure of the project for an independent Kosovo from Serbia, considered the cultural, historical and religious heartland of the Serbs, shows that political public opinion is not only changing in the U.S., but also in Europe. It also shows how problematic this kind of Kosovo is for those who created it. We now have new actors and forces on the German political scene and in the Bundestag, who are critical of Germany’s previous behavior on the issue of Kosovo and demand reconsideration.

Since Kosovo made its illegal declaration of independence in 2008, it has become a ‘smugglers paradise’ for heroin and a hub for human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms trafficking, all under the watchful eye of KFOR. As of today, 15 countries have withdrawn their recognition of Kosovo as an independent country, meaning only 50% of countries in the world recognize the illegal entity.

This event in Germany is extremely important because it is a leading country that stands on a firm position that nothing will change on the Kosovo issue and pushes for Serbia to recognize the independence of Kosovo with the promise of EU membership. This debate in Germany now will certainly have an impact on Berlin’s policy, but not immediately – at least not while this ruling coalition, led by Merkel, is in power. Germany will take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union in July for a 6-month period and we can see how Merkel might navigate Kosovo considering the political climate is changing.

What is worth noting however is that Germany’s leftist parties, that are usually anti-American, are now closer to Washington’s proposals for Kosovo rather than Berlin’s.  But criticism of the government from both the left and the right will raise eyebrows when the Bundestag debates whether the extension of German soldiers in KFOR is necessary.

Ruling in Berlin are the parties that were in power during the 1990’s and were direct participants in everything that happened in Kosovo and supported the destruction of Yugoslavia. Therefore, it is logical that they have not given up their position. But pressure from the fringes of German politics, but who still wield massive influence, will certainly force a debate in Berlin about changing policy on Kosovo, especially as the breakaway province continues to lose legitimacy globally.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Over 86,500 people have reportedly died in the United States from the Coronavirus, and the fear generated by those deaths is driving the public policy debate. But that number is a dramatic overcount. Our metrics include deaths that have nothing to do with the virus. The problem is even worse as the Centers for Disease Control over counts even some of these cases and the government has created financial incentives for this misreporting. Relying on these flawed numbers is destroying businesses and jobs and costing lives.

“The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.”

Medical examiners in Michigan use the same definition. In Macomb and Oakland Counties, where most of the deaths occurred, medical examiners classify any deaths as Coronavirus deaths when the postmortem test is positive. Even people who died in suicides and automobile accidents meet that definition.

Still, these broad definitions are not due to a few rogue public health officials. The rules direct them to do this. Unlike other countries,

“if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” as Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, recently noted.

Classifications go beyond even these broad categories. New York is classifying cases as Coronavirus deaths even when postmortem tests have been negative. Despite negative tests, classifications are based on symptoms, even though the symptoms are often very similar to those of the seasonal flu. The Centers for Disease Control guidance explicitly acknowledges the uncertainty that doctors can face. When Coronavirus cases are “suspected,” they advise doctors that “it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate.”

That isn’t just a theoretical issue. On April 21st, when New York City’s death toll rose above 10,000, the New York Times reported that the city included “3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive” – a more than 50 percent increase in the number of cases.

But the problem is worse than this broad definition implies. Birx and others believe that the CDC is over counting cases. The Washington Post reports they are concerned that the CDC’s “antiquated” accounting system is double counting cases and inflating mortality and case counts “by as much as 25 percent.”

There are additional reasons for concern. Some doctors feel pressure from hospitals to list deaths as due to the Coronavirus, even when they don’t believe that is the case, “to make it look a little bit worse than it is.” There are financial incentives that might make a difference for hospitals and doctors. The CARES Act adds a 20 percent premium for COVID-19 Medicare patients.

Incentives matter. When the government increased the disability compensation for air traffic controllers, a lot more controllers suddenly started claiming to be disabled. When unemployment insurance payments increase, more people become unemployed and stay unemployed for longer periods. When the government offers flood insurance that charges everyone the same insurance premium regardless of the risk level in their area, more people build homes in frequently flooded areas.

The Washington Post and others claim that we are undercounting the true number of deaths. They reach that conclusion by showing the total number of deaths from all causes is greater than we would normally expect from March through early May, and that this excess is actually due to deaths not being accurately labeled as due to the Coronavirus. But these are simply not normal times. Lots of people with heart and other problems aren’t going to the hospital for fear of the virus. Surgeries for many serious conditions are being put off. The stress of the situation is increasing suicides and other illnesses.

Deaths that have absolutely nothing to do with the Coronavirus count as virus deaths. Add to that claims that the CDC is double counting some of these improperly identified cases and the perverse financial incentives created by the government, and you have a real mess when crucial decisions are being made based in large part on this data.

Erroneous data unduly scare people about the risks of the disease. It keeps the country locked down longer than necessary, which destroys peoples’ lives and livelihoods in many other ways. Exaggerated fears of the virus endanger lives by keeping people from obtaining treatment for other medical problems.  It also makes it impossible to accurately compare policies across countries.

It is hard to believe that we are basing such crucial decisions on such flawed data.

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 John R. Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Dr.Timothy Craig Allen is a Governor of the College of American Pathologists and Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is also on the Board of Directors and the Academic advisory board for the Crime Prevention Research Center. 

Featured image is from Flickr

Brexit is nothing if not exclusive and elitist. The government and Conservative party are united in contempt for the sovereignty of parliament, and the sovereignty of the people. The Remain campaign may have been one of the most vibrant and hopeful and articulate movements of recent political history but it has few friends in the establishment. And should Labour succeed in vetoing and tabling amendments to an erroneous and misguided agenda devised by the acolytes of May, the only thing we can look forward to with any certainty is that the country will be more bitterly and deeply polarised than before.

At risk of stating the obvious it is nevertheless worth reiterating that, whilst the public voted to give parliament a mandate to untether itself from the eu, nobody made an informed choice about on what terms and conditions this exit is to occur. One suspects that if all the truth were told beforehand, that the conservatives are pursuing a hard brexit that could penalise workers and small businesses, the margin of victory may have been smaller, nay, in favour of remain. Moreover, minds change. Opinion polls have repeatedly yielded results that prove people have changed their minds. People are beginning to realise a vote for brexit was not a vote against the establishment, it was only a vote of confidence in its lies.

The principle of sovereignty, in the context of parliamentary democracy, is that the government must be accountable to the representatives elected to serve the interests of the electorate. Which is precisely what is being jeopardised by the hackneyed manner in which brexit is being negotiated. As an intern for Unlock Democracy I came to understand that good policy is made when all relevant, affected parties are consulted on the content of the legislation. Bad policy is bludgeoned through before due scrutiny can be applied. Hard brexit is bad policy, and bad policy that hasn’t won a mandate in Parliament, and amongst the people.

The supreme court ruling that the government must have the approval of parliament to trigger article fifty has created an apoplectic, irrational rage from the right wing populist media, when in fact this ruling is what is needed to ensure we have a brexit that ensures people’s rights. Be not deceived in to thinking this is a transfer of power from the top down, the Conservatives will no doubt have a bonfire of legislation designed to protect workers, democracy and the environment, transferring more wealth and power upwards.

My tutor on constitutional politics replied to my observation that we aren’t a popular democracy by pointing out that people who think we are are definitely deluded. As much could be said of the press, who stoke the delusion that we are regaining popular sovereignty with Brexit. Parties may be keen to court public opinion and focus groups when they’re trying to look engaged to win a vote, but hard brexit is an exclusive, elitist brexit, which serves the establishment, and not the people.

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Have you experienced a sense of unease when witnessing a group of individuals wearing masks and/or keeping strictly two meters apart? If so, that’s good news, because it means you’re still sufficiently human to be able to respond to life’s deeper survival instincts. 

For those who don’t have an uneasy sense that something is wrong in this situation, I feel a genuine sense of concern and the strong hope that this will change – very soon. Here’s the reason why: you are being indoctrinated to allow a carefully constructed lie to direct your thinking, your behaviour and your individual powers of judgement.

For the purpose of this article, I am not going to repeat all the facts which make it quite plain to me  that the so called ‘pandemic’ given the name Coronavirus Covid-19, is most certainly not something to fear as a significant threat to health. And that the mask is a worse than useless piece of so called ‘protection’ which only serves to accentuate the fact that what it is supposed to protect against – doesn’t even exist in the form in which it is being described.

However, there is something about what this mask represents that should give rise to genuine alarm. That something, is the huge effort being made to turn what is essentially a corona virtual reality construction into a real life event. An event whose momentum is created by pressing down on the irrational fear button and keeping it down until the repetition of the preplanned indoctrination exercise has gone on long enough for the majority to believe that any other version of events must be ‘a conspiracy theory’.

This is basically where we are, ladies and gentlemen. Yet, in spite of the best efforts of our oppressors, the truth is coming out and awareness will follow-on not so far behind.  However, until such awareness forms the bedrock for a critical mass of humanity, we will go on witnessing the manifestation of the lie in all public places and in homes where individuals stick doggedly to the scripted formula they have been fed.

Here is where the uneasy feeling rises into something considerably more than just ‘uneasy’. Because what is on exhibit is an open admission of slavery to the unquestioned commands of ‘the leader of the day’; and what better symbol of such (typically unconscious) subservience than the wearing of the mask of the beast?

What better conformism to ‘the system’ is there than maintaining belief in the validity of ‘social distancing’ at two military paces from our collective brothers and sisters? What starker statement can one make concerning one’s loss of ability to recognise one is being deceived – than not to question being segmented into anti-humanitarian social isolation through a modern day act of apartheid?

If there is a pervasive sickness connected with the ‘grand covid pandemic’ it is this: the willingness of tens of millions of individuals to adopt that which is so far removed from the truth that not even those who are in charge of purveying it can make it sound like sense.

The British Prime Minister, recently attempting to explain the inexplicable rules he expects the population of Britain to conform to, sounded and looked like a man suffering from ‘cognitive dissonance’.

Think carefully about what this mask actually is. If it doesn’t have anything to do with health, what does it have something to do with?  If keeping two metres apart from fellow human beings also has nothing to do with health – and my research suggests that is indeed the case –  then what does ‘keeping distance’ actually stand for?

We know the answer, but perhaps as yet, not deeply enough to bring about the change that should result from such knowledge. So I am going to say it again, in the hopes that those who have not recognised the reality of the trick being perpetrated on us – hold onto this truth – and do not waver or fall due to the insidious levels of brainwashing being directed at dominating our psyches.

The mask is a statement. A statement of conformity. Conformity with a plan to destroy humanity – and by extension – the living environment and the overall aspiration to spiritual evolution which is innate in all life forms. Symbolically and actually, the covering of the nose and mouth with a mask is an expression of ‘secrecy’, ‘subversion’, ‘disguise’ and ‘undercover operations’.

The mass wearing of such masks (with the exception of doctors/medical practitioners) becomes a conformist identity symbol “I see, he/she is also wearing a mask, so they are one of us, we who agree to follow the regulations, to obey the rules and to behave in a politically correct manner. In this way we will be seen to be upstanding members of the community – and normal individuals.”

To be ‘normal’ is a treasured status within 21^st century urban/suburban communities and beyond. There is a terrible fear of being seen to be ‘different’ and thereby ‘not normal’.

But to fear being different more than to fear being a slave, is a truly terrible sickness. Far worse than that being framed as Coronavirus. One for which the only cure may be a bang on the door by the stasi police who have come to remove such a ‘normal individual’  from his/her home – with worse to follow – if that person still fails to raise a finger of self defence for fear of ‘disobeying the law’.

We must break the chains of such paralysing conformity. A conformity historically epitomised by mass obeisance to the Nazi regime in World War Two Germany. Stand up – anyone who fails to recognise that such a time bears a sinister similarity to the in-your- face rampant top-down usurpation of power going-on today, under the excuse that it is ‘necessary’ to prevent the spread of some sort of fake pandemic.

At a time like this, we must make visible statements of our belief in fundamental life values. Where there are occasions being advertised in which peaceful collective assembly in stated places/locations is the objective – be at those events – and demonstrate ‘en masse’ that it is we the people who rightfully hold the destiny of this planet in our hands and NOT the control system which has usurped those powers. Then go home and continue to act on your freshly resurrected sense of self belief.

Anyone still passively allowing the state/corporate alliance to manufacture their lives for them at this point in time – is not worthy of the title ‘human’.

Dear friends, let us rebel from our own susceptibility to fall prey to indoctrination, of any kind. Let us refuse to allow ourselves to take the easy way out! Let us disabuse ourselves of obeisance to the absurd social distancing commandments emanating from The World Health Organisation and passed down to us by a cohort of puppet dictators styling themselves as bona fide representatives of the Ministry of Truth.

Anyone who has warmth in their heart knows instinctively that people need each other and need to be close to each other – especially in times of stress and hardship. They know that to impose ‘distancing’ has nothing to do with preserving the health of the nation – and everything to do with preserving the top down divide and conquer programme of the fascist dream. 

This is where civil disobedience becomes our primary and most effective tool of resistance. Let us not delay putting it into effect.

Over the next few weeks, months and years, we are going participate in one of the most moving uprisings this world has ever known. Literally millions of us are going to step out of our psychological imprisonment and declare ourselves sovereign independent human beings who do not consent to a life of squalid serfdom.

So uplifting will this great rising be that deluded enforcement bodies – attempting to exercise some form of illegal arrest or restraining coercion upon us – will shrink back into the night from whence they came – and quite simply fail to achieve their sickly mission.

This is the future I clearly see ahead – and because I see it I believe you do too – and if you do, I do and we all do,it will happen. All it takes is a sprinkling of courage and a pinch of passion – stirred well into the natural heart led instinct that favours life over death – and we’re away – unstoppable forces for the great emancipation of humanity!

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Julian Rose is a writer, organic farmer, international activist and holistic practitioner/teacher. Two of Julian’s books ‘Creative Solutions to a World in Crisis’ and ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ are particularly prescient reading for this time. See www.julianrose.info for more information. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

US President Donald J. Trump took time from his domestic fight of battling COVID-19 single-handedly and with one arm tied behind his back to set fire to Syrian wheat fields in Hasakah governate. He performed the ritual of the double-war crime — torching farmland and illegal bombing of a foreign nation — on the Christian sabbath.

Deuteronomy 20:19 prohibits the destruction of that which yields food, even during times of war.

War against Syria has not been declared; Trump has engaged in a secular war crime and has spat upon a biblical commandment.

The Trump regime American illegals in the SAR dropped several incendiary bombs on the wheat farmlands “in the countryside of Shaddadi, south of Hasakah,” destroying more than 200 dunams (around 50 acres) of Syrian wheat crops, local sources told SANA reporter.

An illicit US Apache helicopter “flying close to the ground” dropped several thermal balloons onto the wheat fields. Despite its cute name, these are small bombs, equipped to function as large Molotov cocktails (those watching the success of Operation Mockingbird may notice that the joy of children playing with balloons has been put on the list of fun things to be expunged, because of environmental issues, yet those with their minds in chains do not notice demonic bombs used to destroy the sustenance of life — wheat fields — merrily get to use the word, “balloon.”

American Apache helicopter. Imagine a foreign military using their helicopters to destroy food. [Photo credit Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway.]

Trump illegals in their military aircraft have also engaged in psychological warfare operations against Syrian civilians and farmers in this region, sadistically and war criminally approaching people’s homes and farmlands, terrifying Syrian children, as part of a Satanic plot to ethnically cleanse this area of Syria, and replace indigenous Syrians with an assortment of Madman Erdogan mercenary terrorists, and Obama-created and Trump accelerated cannon fodder traitor separatists re-marketed as the SDF. The NATO klansmen running the United Nations — and their House Servants — are 100% on board with this ethnic cleansing, which is a war crime, using the coronavirus pandemic as “health terrorism” against the Syrian Arab Republic.

 

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Corporate media are laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check.

The Washington Post (4/23/20) ran an article by Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, the second sentence of which said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that, to a great degree, our very health is in Chinese hands; from medicines to masks, we are at Beijing’s mercy.” America, in this conception, is under Chinese domination, a tyranny that’s evidently imposed not only by the Chinese government, but by Chinese people generally.

Details like the US having more than 21 times as many nuclear warheads as China, or the fact that it’s the US dollar and not the Chinese yuan that underpins the global financial system, do not enter into consideration. Instead, because the US imports a great many goods made in China, Romney urged readers to understand China as Americans’ oppressors, who implicitly must be resisted.

Romney warned his audience that China has a “grand strategy for economic, military and geopolitical domination” and thus “The West” must “respon[d]” with “a unified strategy among free nations to counter China’s trade predation and its corruption of our mutual security.”

He said China is conducting an “alarming military build-up.” Sure, the available evidence indicates that the US spends almost three times what China does on its war apparatus, but “Americans should not take comfort in our disproportionately large military budget,” Romney cautioned, because, supposedly, “China’s annual procurement of military hardware is nearly identical to ours,” though few know about this “outside classified settings.”

Then he revealed China’s supposed threat to America’s “security”: “Because our military has missions around the world, this means that in the Pacific, where China concentrates its firepower, it will have military superiority.” In other words, China is a danger because it “concentrates its firepower” in the ocean nearest to it, while the US’s divine right to empirerequires that its military saturate the globe.

The senator argued that “action should be applied in national security sectors” such as phone technology and medicine, and that “the free nations must collectively agree that we will buy these products only from other free nations” as part of a plan to “protect…our security.”

The idea that China is a threat to Americans’ security is baseless: China hasn’t threatened to attack America, while the US has a massive military presence in the Asia/Pacific region. The Pentagon, with bipartisan support, wants to engorge that menace with a $20 billion budget increase, and with offensive weaponry such as land-based Tomahawk cruise missiles that had been banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty until the US abrogated the deal. China, meanwhile, has no military installations anywhere close to the United States.

Romney repeatedly called on “free nations,” a grouping in which he included the US, to take on China. In doing so, he cast the potential conflict as a civilizational battle between freedom and dictatorship—that the US has the highest prison population per capita on Earth does not trouble the senator’s framework.

Romney also referred to China or its economic practices as a “predator,” “predatory,” or “predation” eight times, making the US and its allies the supposed prey. “Today,” Romney wrote, “Beijing’s weapon of choice is economic: The tip of its spear is global industrial predation.” China is “a predator, unbound by the rules followed by its competitors,” so “when the immediate health crisis has passed, the United States should convene like-minded nations to develop a common strategy aimed at dissuading China from pursuing its predatory path.” Romney is propagating a timeworn worldview in which deceitful, barbaric Orientals take advantage of innocent, rule-abiding Americans whose businesses never break laws or do anything that could be viewed as predatory.

The Washington Post’s George Will (4/29/20) likewise said that it’s necessary to “stand up to China,” advocating that the US adopt “a policy of national strength” toward the country. This is the language of war, suggesting that China presents a danger to the US that has to be met with American might.

Will encouraged presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to “practice what he preaches about bipartisanship by associating himself” with far-right Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s “measured but insistent support for an investigation into the possible role of a Wuhan, China, research laboratory in the coronavirus outbreak.” By endorsing the racist, warmongering senator’s proposed inquiry, Will is mainstreaming an extremely dubious conspiracy theory (Grayzone, 4/20/20) alleging that Covid-19 is a Chinese biological weapon unleashed, perhaps unintentionally, from a research lab in Wuhan.

Will also seemed to endorse Cotton’s

question[ing] of the visas for people from China to pursue postgraduate studies here in advanced science and technology fields: If Chinese students want to study “Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”

At the very least, Will amplified and declined to question the notion that Chinese students doing graduate scientific research in America should be viewed with suspicion, implicitly because they might be engaged in piracy or espionage on behalf of the Chinese government, though no evidence is offered for this accusation. It’s a perspective that imagines that the wealthiest, most populous country on Earth might somehow be kept away from advanced technology—though in the long run, the US has more to gain from Chinese research than the other way around (CounterSpin, 5/24/19).

Canada’s Financial Post (5/4/20) went a step further, saying that “China Must Be Brought to Heel,” animalizing language that hearkens back to when Western powers actually did dominate China, and treated the nation to such delights as the Opium Wars (London Review of Books, 11/3/11).

A Fox News article (5/4/20) went full fire and brimstone, calling for the US “to avenge [the] deaths of hundreds of thousands” that have been caused by Covid-19. Another Fox article (5/4/20) said it’s necessary to “hold China accountable” for the harm the coronavirus has caused, applauding Missouri’s lawsuit against the country without noting one minor detail: US courts have no jurisdiction to sue China (Reuters, 4/21/20). Another notable barrier to US media revenge fantasies is that the US and China have the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship, something that the US is hardly in a position to break away from, with China’s economy mostly up and running and the US’s largely offline.

Similarly, the Boston Herald’s Joe Battenfeld (4/14/20) contended that “Trump[’s] Move to Hold China [and the] World Health Organization Accountable [Was] Long Overdue,” a reference to Trump suspending funding to the UN’s main infectious disease-fighting body. WHO gets 15% of its budget from the US; Battenfeld himself acknowledges that withdrawing this “could [incapacitate] the agency’s healthcare initiatives”; in other words, undermining global health during a worldwide pandemic is a good way to teach China a lesson.

The author also endorsed the US “impos[ing] sanctions on China for its role in the spread of the coronavirus,” the type of economic warfare the US is waging against several countries, causing untold death and misery (Jacobin, 3/26/20). Given the fact that China’s largely Covid-free economy is likely to be in far stronger shape than the US’s for the foreseeable future, however, it’s doubtful that Washington will be in any position to impose sanctions on Beijing.

Further problems abound with the idea that the Chinese bad guys have to be punished for Covid-19 by the American good guys. As historian Vijay Prashad (People’s Dispatch, 4/23/20) demonstrated, the narrative of a Chinese-WHO coronavirus cover-up is itself profoundly flawed. And it’s hard to see how China is to blame for the US’s dismal response to the pandemic, which has been characterized by moves like the rejection of a coronavirus test approved by the WHO in January in favor of a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that wasn’t dispatched until February, and some of which didn’t work properly once they were (Washington Post, 4/18/20).

Corporate media distortions and bombast are priming the American public to see China as a treacherous villain that has to be forcefully confronted, perhaps with violence. Presenting China—and Chinese people—as a threat to the United States and its people is that much more reckless at a moment when there is an “alarming surge in anti-Asian racism related to Covid-19” (NBC, 4/16/20). But such considerations don’t trouble those who are in the business of ginning up the hatred necessary for a new cold war.

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Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

Featured image is from FAIR/WaPo

While Western and Europeans and Asians race to find vaccines for coronavirus, Africa can no longer wait for that scientific discovery that experts have said it would, most probably, be ready in a year or two. Some experts have argued that coronavirus would never disappear, but rather becomes endemic.

Indeed, the crisis has put the global science to practical test. Every individual country is busy fighting the pandemic in its own way, trying to make sure that it gains from the crisis. As the virus persistently sweeps across the world, southern African island of Madagascar seems desirous with an initiative to tap into its local herbal science to produce COVID-Organics to save human lives.

Madagascar, a southern African island in the Indian Ocean, has found an alternative to fight the fast spreading coronavirus, beginning on experimental basis and with a rudimentary approach at home. With increasing number of coronavirus, Madagascar is steadily depending on its natural resources to help Africa. As a result of the island’s isolation, Madagascar is home to various unexploited plants found nowhere else on Earth. Many native plant species are used as herbal remedies for a variety of afflictions.

On April 21, the President of Madagascar Andry Rajoelina officially launched a local herbal remedy claimed to prevent and cure the novel coronavirus. The drink is simply called COVID-Organics and is derived from Artemisia – a plant with proven efficacy in malaria treatment.

During an African Union meeting late last month, he stressed the importance of the herbal cure – a variant of which prevents the virus, while another cures it. Speaking to colleague heads of state with a bottle of COVID-Organics on his table, he reiterated the viability of the herbal cure.

“There are two treatment protocols (curative and preventive). The state of health of COVID-19 patients who took Tambavy CVO CovidOrganics improved after 7 days and fully recovered after 10 days. These patients have taken no other product than COVID-Organics,” Rajoelina said.

In an exclusive interview with FRANCE 24 and RFI, Rajoelina defended his promotion of a controversial homegrown remedy for COVID-19, stressing that COVID-Organics works really well. He further claimed that if a European country had discovered the remedy, people would not be so skeptical.

“What if this remedy had been discovered by a European country, instead of Madagascar? Would people doubt it so much? I don’t think so,” the president told FRANCE 24’s Marc Perelman and RFI’s Christophe Boisbouvier.

“What is the problem with COVID-Organics, really? Could it be that this product comes from Africa? Could it be that it’s not OK for a country like Madagascar, which is the 63rd poorest country in the world… to have come up with (this formula) that can help save the world?” asked Rajoelina, who claims the infusion cures patients within ten days.

“No one will stop us from moving forward – not a country, not an organization,” Rajoelina said in response to the WHO’s concerns, and added the proof of the tonic’s efficacy was in the “healing” of “our patients”, calling it a “preventive and curative remedy,” according to the report.

In a similar argument, Dr. Charles Andrianjara, Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (IMRA) Director General pointed out straight “COVID-Organics will be used as prophylaxis that is for prevention, but clinical observations have shown a trend towards its effectiveness in curative treatment.”

In a response to an email media query, an official at the presidency wrote:

“We are committed to taking the traditional therapies through the same clinical trials as other medication. It’s about time to participate and not only observe. As the opportunity emerges, we have the resources to use as a remedy against coronavirus, and to save lives. We need to think how to use it productively and profitably now.”

The global scientific community has become curious. Scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in Potsdam are among a group of researchers from Germany and Denmark collaborating with the United States company, ArtemiLife, to explore whether the Artemisia plant can really be used against the coronavirus. “It is the first study in which scientists are investigating the function of these plant substances in connection with COVID-19,” the Head of the Study Group, Peter Seeberger, said in an interview with DW.

On April 28, while in a video conference with Foreign Ministers from Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa, the Indian Foreign Affairs Minister, Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar noted that the pandemic not only poses a great risk to the health and well-being of humanity but also severely impacts on the global economy.

According to Jaishankar, India is providing pharma assistance to nearly 85 countries, including many countries in Africa, to support their response to the pandemic, and emphasized the need to provide support to businesses, especially small and medium scale enterprises, and the efficacy of traditional medicine systems.

Chinese are highly sensitive to opportunities, leverage indiscriminately to almost all sectors in Africa. Now China is showing interest in adopting and collaborating with Madagascar’s herbal initiative. China has already promised to scale up its assistance to Africa by creating a health care initiative that allow African countries to access funds to address challenges in the healthcare delivery. It plans to build the headquarters of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

One area that presents the world with opportunity, and has be explored in the search for treatment is the field of herbal medicine. So far, many countries are adopting supportive care and non-specific treatment options to relieve patient symptoms. Chinese traditional medical practices in China and herbal preparation from Madagascar raise hopes for COVID-19. The potential here gives credence for consideration as traditional and herbal remedy for COVID- 19, argued Justice Ray Prah from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

Madagascar’s scientific initiative has drawn wide criticisms, instead of encouragement and support. The World Health Organization (WHO), established to monitor and tackle global health problems, research for innovative ways to ensure health of people, was rather the first to punch Madagascar. It warns on its website that there is “no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 can be prevented or treated with products made from Artemisia-based plant material.” The officials explained that the local African brew safety and effectiveness have not been assessed internationally, nor has any data from trials been published in peer-reviewed studies. Mainstream scientists have warned of the potential risk from consumption of untested herbal brews.

The African Union (AU), Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have also made similar claims and said they would only support and endorse products that proved effective through scientific study. But, the African Union, all African Governments and Regional Organizations have to get committed to taking “traditional therapies” through the same clinical trials as any other medication. It is worth to say that it is necessary to make collective or continental efforts toward finding a remedy against coronavirus.

African leaders have to understand that an effective COVID-19 vaccine, if it ever arrives, has to be treated as a public good for the whole of the global society, but at a cost not as a humanitarian aid. Acknowledging that profit-motivated global monopolies and market speculators in the health sector will nevertheless use the chance to their advantage. The combination of national self-interest and pressure for the pharmaceutical industry to make a profit is already triggering a geopolitical bust up over who actually gets access to the vaccine first.

Several media reports said an increasing number of African countries are opting for the COVID-Organics. About 10 African leaders have, already ordered for it since its launch in April. The countries include Chad, Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Togo and United Republic of Tanzania.

With COVID-19, Africa has to explore its own resources. African countries and the African Union (AU) have to reinforce scientific cooperation among its member states so that the continent can be ready for quick and concerted efforts to deal with unexpected health crises such as coronavirus, recently argued Dr Aminata Touré, former Prime Minister of Senegal and currently President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council in Dakar, Senegal.

It is certainly too soon to draw some lessons on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic since it continues to dramatically affect significant segments of the world population and still remains a puzzle, an enigma for the world scientific community. Some African governments, at different levels, have mobilized their resources and expertise, elaborated innovative strategies and carried out bold and strategies to contain the spread of the coronavirus, she explained.

“The African Union has to reinforce the scientific cooperation among its member states in order to ensure our common health sovereignty. This is urgent today, to put in place a genuine scientific partnership between our African universities so that we can identify anticipatory and preventive therapeutic and pharmaceutical solutions to human suffering. We must actively encourage the African scientific diaspora to build solid cooperation, exchange network systems with our counterparts from the continent in order to build African centers of research and laboratory excellence,” suggested Touré.

Touré explicitly concluded that only these would be capable of helping to inspire widely recognized African initiatives on the cutting edge of research and development for medicinal and vaccine cures. This is the true path to health sovereignty.

Nearly a quarter of a billion people across Africa will catch coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said in a new study published in the British Medical Journal. The study further warns that 190,000 Africans could die of COVID-19 in the first 12 months of the pandemic unless urgent action is taken.

According to the latest figures from the WHO, Africa has more than 60,000 cases of COVID-19, which implies that Africa has been spared the worst of the pandemic. Experts say that the low number of tests in Africa is certainly hiding the true scale of the crisis. The African countries most affected by the pandemic included South Africa and Maghreb countries of Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. Ghana and Nigeria have disturbing infected numbers in West Africa.

Thirty-five (35) African countries have each recorded less than a thousand cases. Eritrea is among a handful of African countries that have not recorded deaths as of May 15, others are Madagascar, Central Africa Republic, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, Lesotho, Rwanda and Uganda. Mauritius declared total recoveries (332) from coronavirus infections (332) as of May 11.

Madagascar reported no deaths. Out 238 cases, it claimed 126 active and 112 have recovered. Madagascar’s natural resources include a variety of agricultural and mineral products. Its major health infrastructure, in poor conditions, similar to many African countries. Madagascar, located in southern Africa, has 26.3 million population and belongs to the group of least developed countries, according to the United Nations. It is a member of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African Union (AU).

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There’s a growing consensus among Russia’s leading experts that International Relations are increasingly characterized by what they’ve termed the “new bipolarity” that’s emerging out of World War C, and it’s within this global context that the continued improvement of Russian-Pakistani relations can ensure that Moscow is able to fulfill its grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Eurasia.

Even during a major public health crisis compounded by economic collapse — a domestic perfect storm — the Trump regime continues waging war on China by other means, including its blame game, wanting Beijing held responsible for its own failures.

There’s no end of what’s going on in prospect. The harsher unacceptable US policies become, the greater the negative blowback.

Last May, the Trump regime blacklisted Chinese tech giant Huawei and its 70 affiliates from the US market on the phony pretext of preventing the company from “potentially undermin(ing) US national security.”

At stake is the race to roll out 5G technology in Western and world markets, Huawei way ahead of competitors.

Trillions of dollars of economic value are up for grabs. The Trump regime wants imports of Chinese tech products restricted or blocked.

Trump also banned US companies from using information and communications technology from any source his regime calls a threat to US national security.

US tech companies Intel, Google, Qualcomm and others suspended sales to Huawei.

Last year, Beijing warned US tech companies they’ll face “dire consequences” if they comply with the Trump regime’s ban to cut Huawei out of the global supply chain.

On Friday, Trump’s Commerce Department imposed further restrictions on the company, banning sales of US software and technology used to develop and produce semiconductors.

The new move aims to prevent Huawei from obtaining US technology from domestic and offshore sources that incorporate technology from US firms, wanting Huawei cut off from US high tech products to produce its own and compete with corporate America effectively.

Separately, Trump’s Commerce Department said it’ll extend a temporary license that lets US tech companies sell certain non-critical products to Huawei for another 90 days through late August — for the last time.

At the same time, the Trump regime has been pressuring other countries to cut off normal business relations with Huawei with limited results at best.

Germany, Britain and other nations value access to Huawei’s technology.

In response to the Trump regime’s tightened restrictions, China’s Foreign Ministry denounced what it called the destruction of “global manufacturing, supply and value chains,” adding:

Beijing “firmly uphold(s) Chinese firms’ legitimate and legal rights and interests.”

“We urge the US side to immediately stop its unreasonable suppression of Huawei and Chinese enterprises.”

The only language the US understands is toughness. Urging and diplomatic efforts accomplish nothing.

According to China’s Global Times, citing an unnamed government source, Beijing will target Apple, Qualcomm, Cisco and Boeing in retaliation against the latest hostile Trump regime action.

These and other US companies may be added to China’s “unreliable entity list,” their activities to be investigated, purchases of their products perhaps suspended, no action taken so far.

US war on China by other means risks rupturing relations if things go too far.

A far greater risk is direct confrontation between two nations able to smash each other destructively.

China seeks cooperative relations with other countries, confrontation with none.

If the US pushes things too far, Beijing will do whatever it takes to defend its sovereign rights and security.

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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 CGTN

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Guaido Was the ‘Commander in Chief’ of the Failed Mercenary Operation Against Venezuela

By Patricio Zamorano, May 18, 2020

This more complete document confirms what the mercenary and head of SilverCorp, Inc., Jordan Goudreau, had already revealed to the media: the agreement was aimed at “planning and executing an operation to capture/detain/remove Nicolas Maduro (heretoafter “Primary Objective”) remove the current Regime and install the recognized Venezuelan President Juan Guaido.”

Britain Warned Against ‘Coup-mongering’ in Venezuela After Embassy Discovery

By Steve Sweeney, May 18, 2020

Venezuela has warned Britain against “coup-mongering” after the discovery of a “Venezuelan reconstruction unit” in the Foreign Office.

Demanding an urgent explanation, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreeazalodged a formal complaint with ambassador Duncan Hill, who the minister said confirmed the existence of the unit and “tried to justify the unjustifiable.”

Ottawa’s Ties with Far Right Colombian President Undermines Human Rights Rhetoric Regarding Venezuela

By Yves Engler, May 18, 2020

Still, the leader of the invasion Jordan Goudreau, a veteran of the Canadian military and US special forces, has been remarkably forthright about the involvement of opposition figure Juan Guaidó. A leaked contract between Guaidó’s representative in Florida and Goudreau’s Silvercorp USA describes plans for a multi month occupation force, which after ousting Maduro would “convert to a National Asset Unit that will act under the direction of the [Guaidó] Administration to counter threats to government stability, terror threats and work closely” with other armed forces. Apparently, Goudreau was hoping for a big payday from Venezuela’s opposition. He also had his eyes on the $15 millionbounty Washington put up in March for Maduro’s capture as well as tens of millions dollars for other members of the government.

Canadians Must Ask Questions About the Mercenary Raid on Venezuela

By Nino Pagliccia, May 15, 2020

Details of the failed armed mercenary incursion on Venezuela are surfacing daily thanks to the prompt public information system from Venezuela and scant corporate media reports. The so-called Operation Gideon took off from Colombia on May 3 and was effectively disbanded a few hours later by the prompt action of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB) and the Bolivarian National Police’s Special Actions Force (FAES) with substantial help from the civilian population that helped in the capture of mercenaries. At this point about 46 mercenaries, out of an estimated total of 60, have been captured. The search for the others is ongoing.

Revealed: Secretive British Unit Planning for ‘Reconstruction’ of Venezuela

By John McEvoy, May 14, 2020

Over the past 16 months, the UK government has consistently supported Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó’s attempts to topple the elected government of president Nicolás Maduro.

In late January 2019, for example, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) urged the Bank of England to grant Guaidó access to £1.2bn of Venezuelan gold reserves.

The Department for International Development (DFID) has also pledged some £40m of ‘humanitarian assistance’ to Venezuela, but it has refused to reveal where this assistance is going.

US Imperialism’s Decomposition Accelerates: Outsourcing ‘Regime Change’. Mercenary Incursions into Venezuela

By Francisco Dominguez, May 14, 2020

The mercenaries received training in at least three camps in Riohacha, Colombia, had the full support of the Colombian government that has declared explicitly its desire to overthrow the government of President Maduro. All sorts of their logistical needs were resolved by well-known narco-trafficker and paramilitary, Elkin Javier López Torres, alias ‘Doble Rueda’¹, leading member of the La Guajira drug cartel, who offered his own ranch to host the mercenaries and financed all Gedeon’s preparation expenses. It would be impossible for Doble Rueda or any other Colombian drug kingpin to happily engage and participate in such a hefty political adventure without the Colombian government approving, supporting and collaborating with it. There is nothing surprising about this: It was the Colombian drug cartel Los Rastrojos who gave armed protection to Juan Guaidó after he illegally crossed the border to attend the Branson-led Cucuta concert in February 2020. After Los Rastrojos took pictures of themselves with Guaidó, handed him over to Colombia’s presidential guard who took him to the presidential helicopter who would fly him to the concert.

Canada and the Coup Attempt Against Venezuela

By Arnold August, May 14, 2020

One of the leaders of the failed coup attempt is Canadian-born Jordan Goudreau, a former US Marine who heads up a private Florida-based security firm called Silvercorps USA. While he did not participate directly in the raid, he did leave behind a video recorded in Colombia in which he and his Venezuelan military partner take credit for the attempted coup. The other two Americans captured also testified to their involvement. The confessions lead us through a labyrinth of corruption and shady deals, from Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó all the way up to Donald Trump.

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The misnamed Federal Reserve isn’t federal. It’s owned and controlled by major Wall Street banks.

It serves their interests at the expense of sound economic policy, ignoring its congressional mandate to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, (low inflation), and moderate long term interest rates.”

The Fed transformed monetary policy into a tool for elevating stock prices to more greatly enrich America’s privileged class at the expense of protracted Depression conditions, high unemployment, and far greater underemployment throughout most of the new millennium.

Its mismanagement is greatly exacerbated by the current economic collapse, a likely protracted economic death cycle for most Americans.

Tens of millions are unemployed. Millions with jobs are working reduced hours for poverty-level pay and few or no benefits.

Countless millions lost healthcare coverage at a time when it’s most needed.

GDP, retail sales, industrial production, unemployment, and other economic data plunged to record low levels while food prices are surging — risking a 2nd epidemic of hunger and malnutrition.

Real unemployment isn’t the phony Labor Department’s 14.7%.

When calculated according to its pre-1990 model, it’s 39.6% and rising, according to economist John Williams.

By comparison, unemployment during the depths of the Great Depression was around 25%.

Noted Wall Street analyst Jeremy Grantham earlier slammed what he called “ruinous” Fed policymaking, saying:

“If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its” wrongheaded policymaking, “limit(ing) its meddling to attempting to manage inflation,” adding:

“I would limit (Fed) activities to making sure that the economy had a suitable amount of liquidity to function normally – a Goldilocks formula, not too hot, not too cold, just right.”

“I would force it to swear off manipulating asset prices through artificially low rates and asymmetric promises of help in tough times” — the so-called Fed put, believing its policymaking will  reverse stock prices if fall too far.

The so-called Reagan era-established Plunge Protection Team operates by manipulating stock, bond, commodity, and currency markets.

There’s nothing random about market movements, one of many Wall Street myths.

Grantham also explained that abnormally low interest rates for protracted periods encourage destabilizing speculation, adding:

Fed governors know that “low rates and moral hazard encourage higher asset prices and increased speculation, heading, when unchecked, to bad endings,” small investors and ordinary people hurt most.

Policies of Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and now Powell elevated markets to unsustainable bubble levels.

Artificially low interest rates like now also transfer wealth from savers and retirees to corporate America and high-net-worth individuals.

Quantitative easing has nothing to do with reviving economic growth — everything to do with providing investors with low-cost or near-free money for speculation.

It lets corporations buy back shares to artificially elevate their valuations.

Despite decades of Fed policy errors, it failed to learn from its mistakes and correct them.

It’s more off-the-rails under Powell than his predecessors, handing trillions of dollars of virtual free money to Wall Street banks and other corporate favorites at a time when policymaking should focus like a laser on helping ordinary Americans by creating jobs and reviving economic growth.

Instead, neoliberal slow-motion train wreck Fed, White House, and congressional policies keep worsening conditions at a time when vital aid is needed for most Americans.

Instead of contributing to the solution, the Fed is a key part of the problem.

Even the late free market economist Milton Friedman called for abolishing the Fed, saying:

It has a “very poor record, and it’s done more harm than good” by creating financial crises.

“We don’t need the Fed,” he said, adding:

“I have for many years been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer (that) would print out a specified number of paper dollars” to augment the money supply — the “same number, month after month, week after week, year after year.”

“The Fed has had very few periods of relatively good performance. For most of its history, it’s been a loose cannon on the deck, and not a source of stability.”

“I do not believe the Fed ought to let its monetary policy be determined by the stock market.”

“The Fed ought to devote its attention solely to keeping a relatively stable price level of goods and services” and working for full employment.

Since established in 1913 by federal law at the behest of monied interests, time and again the Fed failed to achieve its mandated obligations.

Sunday on CBS News 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell was interviewed.

Instead of apologizing for failed policies and vowing to change his wasy for the betterment of the economy and ordinary Americans, he falsely blamed dire economic conditions on COVID-19.

He ignored the longtime house of cards US economy. If coronavirus didn’t trigger collapse, it would have been something else — notably because of Fed mismanagement.

He maintained the myth that “the the economy…can start getting better fairly soon,” ignoring its rotting underbelly because of wrongheaded Fed, congressional, and executive branch policymaking.

Rome burns while he, Trump, and congressional leaders pretend otherwise.

At the same time, Powell admitted that recovery “could stretch through the end of next year. We really don’t know.”

He failed to explain that since economic collapse began this year, over 100,000 US small and medium-sized business shut down permanently, millions of jobs gone, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.

He largely ignored record high plunges of key economic data, notably unemployment that way exceeds the worst of the Great Depression with no near-term prospect for turning things around.

If a second coronavirus outbreak occurs, all bets are off. It could be worse than what’s ongoing, perhaps lasting well into next year or longer — exacerbating a collapsed economy and human misery more greatly than already.

Throughout the 60 Minutes interview, Fed mismanagement was ignored, Powell’s feet not held to the fire.

Nor were the economically harmful policies of his most recent predecessors.

Instead of challenging Powell’s false claim that millions of Americans were only laid off “temporarily,” the deception wasn’t corrected.

Nor was his projected max 20 – 25% unemployment challenged when it’s already near-40%.

Powell also deceptively claimed that “we had a very healthy economy two months ago” — ignoring its house of cards status, a bubble economy burst by a public health crisis.

A litany of misinformation and disinformation was offered viewers throughout the interview.

At no time was Powell’s feet held to the fire.

Nor was anything said about how Wall Street manipulators transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket, facilitated by government collusion at the highest federal, state and local levels — at the expense of the general welfare.

Notably since the neoliberal 90s, ordinary Americans have been scammed of their savings, jobs, homes, and futures to let privileged elites get richer and more powerful.

Money power runs America and the world. The Wall Street owned Fed does it by controlling money, credit and debt, along with manipulating markets for corporate and private enrichment without oversight or supervision.

Fed money printing madness defrauds the public, instead of constructively sustaining prosperous, inflation-free, growth that colonial America enjoyed for a generation — long before the Fed existed.

Markets today work by manipulating them for special interests to profit hugely at the expense of an economy that works for all Americans.

None of the above was discussed during the CBS interview with Powell.

Like most everything aired and published by establishment media on major issues, Sunday’s broadcast was a exercise in mass deception.

Viewers were left uninformed about the economy’s dismal state that’s likely to sustain harder than ever harm times for the vast majority of Americans longterm.

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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.

More than 250 global artists and writers including rocker Peter Gabriel, director Ken Loach and actor Viggo Mortensen have appealed to Israel to stop the “siege” of Gaza.

The coronavirus epidemic could have a devastating effect in “the world’s largest open-air prison”, the artists said in an online letter.

“Long before the global outbreak of COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm the already devastated healthcare system in Gaza, the UN had predicted that the blockaded coastal strip would be unliveable by 2020,” the letter said.

“With the pandemic, Gaza’s almost two million inhabitants, predominantly refugees, face a mortal threat in the world’s largest open-air prison,” it added.

Other signatories included poet Taha Adnan, Canadian writer Naomi Klein and British group Massive Attack.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 when the Islamist movement Hamas took control of the enclave.

Israel argues the measures are necessary to isolate Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by most Western countries.

It says that restrictions on some imports to the coastal strip are designed to deny Hamas materials that could be used to enhance its fighting capabilities.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since the group took control of the enclave, but reached a tentative truce in late 2018 that was renewed after successive flare-ups last year.

The Gaza Strip also borders Egypt, which severely restricts movement in and out of the territory.

“Well before the ongoing crisis, Gaza’s hospitals were already stretched to breaking point through lack of essential resources denied by Israel’s siege. Its healthcare system could not cope with the thousands of gunshot wounds, leading to many amputations,“ the artists said.

“Reports of the first cases of coronavirus in densely-populated Gaza are therefore deeply disturbing,“ they said.

“We back Amnesty International’s call on all world governments to impose a military embargo on Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law.“

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Source is AFP

The national Covid strategy managed by the government is now in disarray. The mood in Tory HQ is migrating away from its beloved Brexit leader. The mainstream media are now causing confusion, the country is heading towards chaos.

What is the general public supposed to believe when one mainstream newspaper reports that Covid cases are plunging and another says it’s going in the opposite direction. Another says hospital cases (in the wards) are falling, another says the infection rate (testing) is rising. One reports that Britain is open for business, another reports the second wave will do just as much damage as the first?

The children’s commissioner says the unions should stop squabbling and teachers should get back to work, the British Medical Association has backed the unions and said it’s too dangerous.

All of this reporting is just one day on the front pages.

For the time being, the general public is on the side of the government. The latest voting intentions (CantarPublic) put the Tories at 51 per cent (down 3 points) and Labour at 32 per cent (plus 4 points). Saving jobs and businesses have been widely recognised that without government intervention, ten million people would now be fully unemployed and one million companies would have gone bankrupt. This is, in fact, the number of people out of work right now and the number of businesses that have applied for government loans to save them from collapse.

The entire railway in Britain system has been effectively nationalised. Transport for London has just gone bust and also been nationalised. I hear that members of the TFL board have even been removed and government officials are in charge. Sadiq Khan is blaming the government when in reality TFL was already in big trouble before the pandemic hit Britain.

We are told by the government that the peak of Covid infections and deaths in Britain has been reached and we’re on the way down. And yet, we now hear that the government is expecting a brutal second wave and ordered funeral directors to prepare for 100,000 dead in the autumn.

We are told that deaths from Covid are just over 30,000 when the evidence is there that over 60,000 (Financial Times) have died so far.

We are told by the government that arrivals to airports and ports in Britain will require a 14 day period of quarantine (BBC) – and then told that is not the case (BBC).

We are told the virus will be ‘wiped out’ within weeks in London (The Sun) and yet the infection rate will now increase within weeks (ITV).

Boris Johnson clearly stated to parliament that his government moved swiftly to protect the country’s vulnerable care homes, when, in fact, that did not happen at all (Reuters Exclusive).

This confusion is deliberate. It has been concocted to get the government out of the mess it finds itself in. It is largely the work of Dominic Cummings – a man who believes in chaos theory and that better things can be rebuilt from the rubble and ‘once in a lifetime opportunity”. The confusion allows the government to manoeuvre and provides cover from the evident tracks of failure. So far, the government has moved from blaming individuals to whole organisations. Strategically, the government has now shifted to blaming the entire country by allowing ‘common sense’ to prevail.

The overall strategy has been one of failure. This is because the government are working behind the evidence. They are relentlessly monitoring public opinion, using focus groups and blending societal wide data with aides receiving near-daily updates on the public mood. Instead of acting, the government is reacting.

The governments’ own 50-page Covid Recovery Strategy Document makes clear what actions are required. But the car-crash of chaos has happened.

This collision, of obsessive data tracking of public opinion, says a lot about a government that got into power by deceit but is now in a crisis it can’t manipulate.

It explains Johnson’s team approach and the U.K.’s response to the pandemic.

The car-crash has Tory principles of the free-market, of angry Tory donors and his own ranks banging the desk with clenched fists against what the science says and what a very hesitant public really thinks. Ending the lockdown is good for the backers of Boris but bad in the eyes of the public.

We’ve gone from the certainty of ‘Stay Home’ to the ambiguity of ‘Stay Alert.’ The clear first message has gone to confusion. Charlie Cooper from Politico reports that – “the phrase “Stay Alert’ itself did not emerge from a vacuum. The internal polling is pretty extensive every day,” (said the official). “We get an overnight breakdown of surveys of 2,000 adults. We get stats on how worried people are, people’s perceptions of risk, whether they feel they’re being served by government information, whether we’ve got the balance right between the economy and healthcare, polling on people’s finances, thoughts on the NHS, about social distancing, businesses, workplace, face masks.”

The Johnson government is more concerned about how many people have heard of ‘R’, if more of the public want to wear face coverings in shops; whether people are comfortable about relaxing the two-meter social distancing rule, or about sending their children back to school than they are about the actual science or recommendations from the scientific organisations set up to advise government officials.

The car-crash has revealed something else to the Johnson team of public relations. The general public is now moving to a stage where more than 50 per cent are now becoming traumatised by the knowledge that at least 40,000 people are to die in phase one of the pandemic and that phase two might be as bad.

There are some “libertarians in the party who want us to say that it must be up to any individual to decide their own risk and take part in the economy as they want,’” one influential backbencher and former Cabinet minister said. But “the bulk of the party recognizes the public has been through a very bitter experience and wouldn’t thank us if we relaxed too quickly.”

One senior Tory has said – “People have got to get their heads around the fact that the government is no longer going to be able to tell them exactly what to do. They are going to have to have agency and apply common sense. It stands to reason we’ve got to trust people.”

That’s all very well, but the thinking is that when 50,000 people are officially recorded as having died from Covid, public opinion will reverse, especially if the lockdown is proven to have been lifted to early.

The deliberate manufacture of confusion is no better explained than this. “The truth is that people really understand the message, people understand what ‘Stay Alert’ means.” This is what Health Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program last Tuesday. However, the government knew that only 30 per cent (govdocs pdf) of the public understood it.

Johnson, in his ‘Stay Alert’ speech on Sunday was explicit that it was in the hands of the people to bring the alert level down.  The message was reinforced by a graphic that was aired by every braodcaster in the land.  “As we go, everyone will have a role to play in keeping the R down. By staying alert and following the rules.”

The general public is to be blamed for the second wave death count, which may or may not be as bad as the first. That is what everyone is being prepared for. They are effectively being told to ‘take back control.’ In the meantime, Tory hardliners are getting fed up with Boris Johnson. There are rumours in the corridors of power that if things get any worse in the eyes of the public, they will wait and jettison a leader who would have failed when facing a convincing opposition figurehead in the shape of a forensic and intelligent new leader – Keir Starmer. Johnson’s lack of knowledge, dislike of detail, reluctance for hard work and lack of ability at the despatch box may have worked against Corbyn but it is now irritating senior Tories, big donors and people like Rupert Murdoch.

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Featured image is from TP

New information divulged this week reveals that Juan Guaidó was designated as “commander and chief” of the mercenary operation that completely unraveled on the shores of Venezuela. The 41 page contract that formed the basis of the already known eight page General Services Agreement was published by the Washington Post^[1] this week.

This more complete document confirms what the mercenary and head of SilverCorp, Inc., Jordan Goudreau, had already revealed to the media: the agreement was aimed at “planning and executing an operation to capture/detain/remove Nicolas Maduro (heretoafter “Primary Objective”) remove the current Regime and install the recognized Venezuelan President Juan Guaido.”

The document provides complete information about the money that would be invested (212 million dollars), and the payments and commissions that SilverCorp would receive from Guaidó’s team, which includes Juan José Rendón, Sergio Vergara and attorney Manuel Retureta.

The document also explains the promised retainer of 1.5 million dollars that Goudreau has been complaining about publicly since the failed operation last Sunday, May 3.

What has not been said: information about the operation was published two days before the attack

There is an important detail that the world press has not analysed. One AP article^[2] which details the preparations for the attack was published Friday May 1, two days before the attempt to invade Venezuela was launched from Colombia. The article  provides particulars on the presence of three paramilitary groups (deserters from the Venezuelan armed forces and police) in Colombia and explains how this operation had been foiled and aborted. It clearly names Jordan Goudreau, including a profile on the mercenary and many other details about the planned attack. No Colombian nor US authority mobilized to neutralize the illegal paramilitary camps.

This document also appears to confirm that Goudreau, despite the exposure of the planned incursion by the press, still proceeded with the attack, irresponsibly putting at risk the lives of those involved. It also shows that neither US intelligence agencies, nor the Colombian police, nor even Guaidó’s team took action to stop the attack.

One can extrapolate two possible reasons for this. Allowing the operation to move forward, without directly committing to SilverCorp, would show the actual consequences of the operation (whether a success or failure). The operation could also expose the government of Maduro to world criticism if it produced fatalities on one side or the other. What is certain is that all of these scenarios, “whether above or under the table” in the words of Rendón on CNN, were discussed extensively with Guaidó and his advisors with the aim of illegally overthrowing Maduro. Rendón told CNN in Spanish that “they analysed all of the scenarios; alliances with other countries, their own actions, uprisings of people from within, of the soldiers that are there, the eventual use of actors that are outside, retired soldiers. All these scenarios were produced, as the president said well, we are analysing things above and below the table.”^[3]

Guaidó was leader of the operations

The most important theme of this story, which the Washington Post does not even mention in its article, is what is described on page 39 of the contract.

Under the title “ATTACHMENT N: CHAIN OF COMMAND,” the document includes the following:

1. Commander in Chief – President Juan Guaidó
2. Overall Project Supervisor – Sergio Vergara
3. Chief Strategist: Juan Jose Rendon
4. On Site Commander – To be determined

The page is signed by Guaidó’s advisors and there is a large black box that surely hides compromising information about SilverCorp.

Denial is followed by selective recognition

The evidence is very clear that Guaidó’s team has decided to change its strategy. The first reaction of Guaidó was to deny that he was involved in the disastrous operation^[4] in the face of the cost of lives of eight mercenaries, former Venezuelan soldiers, and the capture of numerous paramilitaries, including two US former soldiers. Guaidó’s team  however,  publicly acknowledged this week their involvement, but they tried to discredit SilverCorp as if it had acted on its own. Nevertheless Rendón recognized that he had paid 50 thousand dollars to the mercenary company^[5] of Florida and that his signature on the document is legitimate.

The big question is what will be the response of the legal authorities in the US and Colombia. So far there has been no arrest, despite the fact that all of the details of the operation and the violations of law committed are clear and irrefutable.

In the coming days it will become evident whether the governments of Trump and Duque in Colombia opt for the strategy of impunity. This scandal without doubt weakens in an important way the illegal policy of sanctions and the dirty campaign supported by the hard-line Venezuelan opposition that has broken with the strategy of dialogue that other more moderate anti-Chavista sectors continue to advance in Caracas.

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Translation made from the original Spanish by Fred Mills, academic and Co-Director of COHA

Notes

^[1] “From a Miami condo to the Veenzuelan coast, how a plan to ‘capture’ Maduro went rogue”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/from-a-miami-condo-to-the-venezuelan-coast-how-a-plan-to-capture-maduro-went-rogue/2020/05/06/046222bc-8e4a-11ea-9322-a29e75effc93_story.html

^[2] “Ex-Green Beret led failed attempt to oust Venezuela’s Maduro”, https://apnews.com/79346b4e428676424c0e5669c80fc310

^[3] “J.J. Rendón habla sobre la Operación Gedeón en Conclusiones de CNN en Español”, https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/05/07/j-j-rendon-habla-sobre-la-operacion-gedeon-en-conclusiones-de-cnn-en-espanol/

^[4] “Guaidó niega vínculos con intento de invasión en Venezuela”, https://www.chicagotribune.com/espanol/sns-es-coronavirus-guaido-niega-vinculo-intento-invasion-venezuela-20200505-uiditc4i6nbdda3nyx24n26zee-story.html

^[5] “J.J. Rendón habla sobre la Operación Gedeón en Conclusiones de CNN en Español”, https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/05/07/j-j-rendon-habla-sobre-la-operacion-gedeon-en-conclusiones-de-cnn-en-espanol/

Venezuela has warned Britain against “coup-mongering” after the discovery of a “Venezuelan reconstruction unit” in the Foreign Office.

Demanding an urgent explanation, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreeaza lodged a formal complaint with ambassador Duncan Hill, who the minister said confirmed the existence of the unit and “tried to justify the unjustifiable.”

“We demand that [the UK] abandon Washington’s coup-mongering plans and any destabilising initiative. We demand respect for our sovereignty and the purposes and principle of the UN charter,” Mr Arreaza said.

The unit, headed by former UK ambassador to Venezuala John Saville, is believed to be part of plans to “rebuild” Venezuela and promote British interests after the removal of democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian government.

A botched coup attempt involving former US Green Berets working for US-based private security company Silvercorp was foiled at the beginning of May as they tried to enter Venezuela from neighbouring Colombia.

The contract, seen by the Morning Star, detailed plans to kidnap Mr Maduro and replace him with the opposition politician Juan Guaido, who is alleged to have funded the plot.

Mr Maduro insisted that the coup attempt was authorised by US President Donald Trump, who has previously refused to rule out military intervention to topple the Bolivarian leader.

Last month Washington placed a $15 million (£12.37m) bounty on Mr Maduro’s head and mobilised warships off the coast of Venezuela in scenes reminiscent of when former CIA asset General Manuel Noriega was removed from power in Panama in 1989.

Britain, which recognises Mr Guaido’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency, has a history of meddling in the country.

Last year the British government was forced to deny allegations that it was using a military base in Guyana to train armed militias to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

Questions were posed by the Morning Star after Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last August that dozens of Venezuelans had arrived at a clandestine British military base in Guyana.

She said they would “undergo training in reconnaissance and sabotage teams” and would “infiltrate Venezuela, destabilise the situation there and commit various acts, including extremist and terrorist attacks.”

A Freedom of Information request by the Star last year also exposed that the British government was funding opposition media organisations and “yellow unions” under the guise of supporting democracy.

The Foreign Office confirmed that it was bankrolling three “Freedom of Expression” projects in Venezuela – Consorcio Informativo (Information Collective), the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Prensa (National Union of Press Workers) and the Instituto Radiofonico Fe y Alegria (Radiophonic Institute of Faith and Joy).

All three are known opposition groups committed to the overthrow of the Venezuelan government and regularly produce anti-Maduro propaganda.

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Tehran ordered Shia factions to back the prime minister in return for Washington ‘looking the other way’ over release of assets targeted by sanctions, Iraqi officials tell MEE

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The nomination of Mustafa al-Kadhimi as Iraqi prime minister was the result of a horse trade between the US and Iran in which Tehran agreed to back the former intelligence chief in return for an unfreezing of some of its assets targeted by sanctions, senior Iraqi political sources have told Middle East Eye.

The US policy of exerting “maximum pressure” on Iran will not change, but the US agreed to de-escalate militarily in the Gulf and to “look the other way” if a third-party country in Europe released some of the Iranian money frozen when sanctions were applied, the Iraqi sources said.

As recently as 4 March, Kadhimi’s candidacy for the premiership was called a “declaration of war on the Iraqi people” by the top commander of the pro-Iranian Kataib Hezbollah militia, Abu Ali al-Askari.

Askari accused Kadhimi of involvement in the US drone strikes in January which killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and influential militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a charge explicitly denied by Iraq’s Intelligence Service (INIS).

Other Shia militia and political leaders also vociferously opposed Kadhimi’s nomination and yet last week his new government was installed with majority support in Iraq’s parliament.

Kataib Hezbollah continued to threaten Kadhimi personally but other Shia political factions influenced by Iran allowed his nomination to go ahead.

Iraqi sources say that a behind-the-scenes deal between Washington and Tehran explains the sudden U-turn, with Iran agreeing to lean on the Shia factions it influences in return for some relief from economically crippling US sanctions with the unfreezing of some assets in Europe.

Iraqi sources declined to say where Iranian assets would be unfrozen, but pointed to a decision last month by a court in Luxembourg to block a US request to transfer $1.6bn in Iranian assets to victims of the 9/11 attacks in a case dating back to 2012.

The Iranian assets are held by a Luxembourg-based clearing house, Clearstream, owned by Deutsche Boerse. The court decision was hailed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who said the country had won a legal victory over the assets that had long been frozen in Luxembourg at Washington’s request.

“The Americans managed to get their man, and the Iranians to get their money,” said one source with knowledge of the secret deal.

“The economic hardship that Iranians have faced, and all the difficulties they faced after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, has hit them hard. There were negotiations. The deal ended with the Iranians accepting this guy [Kadhimi] and they told their allies to vote for him.”

Easing of Gulf tensions

Kadhimi was asked in April to form the government after failed attempts to first install Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi and then Adnan al-Zurfi as prime minister, following the resignation of Adel Abdul Mahdi last November over the killing of protesters by Iraqi security forces.

In March, a senior source in Tehran told MEE that the US had agreed to grant waivers allowing some countries to release Iranian assets without facing punitive measures to help Iran to buy medical supplies to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

“The efforts of some countries have led to the release of some of the Iranian central bank’s money,” he said.

“Those countries will receive a sanctions waiver [for releasing Iran’s frozen assets], this has been granted and we are following this issue.”

He added:

“The unfreezing of Iranian central bank money will decrease pressure regarding the lack of foreign exchange for importing medication and life necessities.”

The Iranian source denied then that an official deal had been struck between Tehran and Washington. The report was also denied by the US State Department.

The Iraqi sources said that a precedent for the current agreement was set when Nouri al-Maliki was backed for a second term as prime minister by both Washington and Tehran, after nine months of political conflict following the victory of the al-Iraqqiya bloc in 2010 elections.

The sources said that the US’s withdrawal of Patriot missiles from Saudi Arabia last week and a lowering of military tensions in the Gulf was part of the deal with Tehran.

“As a consequence of this, to reduce the tension in the Gulf, there was a pullout of the Patriots. More importantly, the US agreed to give a green light to allow for Europe to release some of the frozen assets for the Iranians. The US will not object to the release of some of the frozen assets. They will look the other way,” the source said.

Track record

Kadhimi has a track record of working with US intelligence services, which dates back to his association with Ahmed Chalabi, the late Iraqi politician who provided US President George W. Bush with false reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A former journalist and editor with Al Monitor news website, whose real name is Mustafa Abd al-Latif, Kadhimi became head of intelligence services under the premiership of Haider al-Abadi.

Kadhimi (C), with Iraqi officials during a visit to Saudi Arabia in November 2018 (SPA)

In 2018, he attended a meeting in Washington with Mike Pompeo, who was then head of the CIA, and Khalid bin Ali al-Humaidan, the head of Saudi intelligence, to discuss measures to support the candidacy of Abadi and counter Iranian backed candidates. That effort failed.

MEE phoned Kadhimi’s office repeatedly for comment on this story but our calls went unanswered.

The possibility of a deal between the US and Iran over Kadhimi has been commented on in the Arab media.

The London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper said in an editorial that the Iraqi parliament’s approval for the new government was important, but that it was an Iranian-American deal which was the “decisive matter that opens the way for the parliamentarians’ agreement, and then the regional and world agreement”.

In The Arab newspaper, also published in London, Ibrahim al-Zubaidi wrote: ”As you saw and you see, [political currents] agreed to pass it in parliament, as if nothing had happened, only when the last orders and instructions were issued from the [Iranian] embassy in Baghdad, or from the embassy of Uncle Donald Trump. Theatrics you would not have believed.”

Kadhimi’s nomination has been publicly welcomed in both Washington and Tehran.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Iran would “be with the government with all our might to help it progress and establish stability”, according to a statement on the Iranian foreign affairs ministry website.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month announced details of a proposed strategic dialogue with the Iraqi government that is set to take place in June. Pompeo said that “all strategic issues” would be on the agenda at the talks.

Officials in Washington and Tehran played down reports of a deal over Iraq.

A State Department spokesperson dismissed the reports as “absurd”.

“We respect Iraq’s sovereignty and have consistently advocated for Iran to do so as well and end its interference in their internal matters,” the spokesperson told MEE.

The Iranian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment but an Iranian official approached by MEE said he had not heard of any deal, and described it as “unlikely”.

Significantly, the first call Kadhimi got after his nomination was from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who asked the new Iraqi prime minister to restart mediation with Iran, the sources said.

Although bin Salman will consider Kadhimi closer to him than any other candidates, the restart of a dialogue between Washington and Tehran is not strategically good news for Saudi Arabia. Secret negotiations by Oman to release an American prisoner in Iran ended up with the nuclear deal between Iran and the US under Barack Obama.

Along with the unilateral withdrawal of US-operated Patriot missiles, the crown prince is coming under fresh US pressure to end the three-year blockade on Qatar. To this end, the emir of Kuwait sent a minister to Qatar to reopen mediation efforts.

“While Trump will claim credit for his maximum pressure policies on Iran, the fact is US policy in the Gulf, the Saudi campaign in Yemen which it can no longer afford, and the pressures on Iran – all three powers are in trouble. And this is something for the Saudis to consider: the collapse of a US-based strategy to push back on Iran. Trump will not mind negotiating a new nuclear deal with Iran, just as long as it has got his name on it,” said one Iraqi official.

This may lead to negotiations resulting in further agreements between Washington and Tehran, the Iraqi official added.

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Featured image is from public domain

I refuse to describe Iran as a victim. It is not. It is one of the most influential and strong-minded nations on Earth.

When facing mortal danger, its people unite, harden themselves and get ready to face invaders, no matter how threatening they might be.

Iran is home to one of the oldest and deepest cultures in the world, and it’s precisely this culture that helps Iranian people to survive the most frightening moments.

And one such moment is sadly, right now.

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US battleships are sailing right next to the Iranian territorial waters. One mistake, one false move, and war could erupt, engulfing the entire region in flames. Iran is a proud nation, and it takes its independence extremely seriously.

Right now, the country is facing one of the most unjust embargos in human history. It is being punished for nothing; or more precisely, for sticking to all the points of the agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) also known as The Iran Nuclear Deal, which it signed in 2015 with China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany, and which the United States abandoned, without providing any logical explanation. While not particularly happy about the U.S. withdrawal; Germany, France and U.K. are doing all they can not to anger their senior partner, and its leaders in Washington.

Add COVID-19, and inability of the country, due to sanctions, to buy medical equipment, at least in the West, and you have the perfect scenario for a national calamity and even for imminent collapse.

Or more precisely, anywhere else this would be the case, but not in Iran!

After receiving terrible blows from the West, one after another, Iran has never fallen to its knees. It has never abandoned its internationalist and socialist course (socialist, with Iranian characteristics), and it has preserved its dignity.

What it has managed to achieve is amazing, nothing short of heroic, given the circumstances.

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If you look at the latest, 2019 HDI (Human Development Index, compiled and published by the UNDP), Iran is in the High Human Development bracket, and only 3 steps from the Highest Human Development group of countries. Which is thoroughly amazing, given the above-mentioned sanctions, embargos and constant military intimidations.

Whenever I visit Iran, I am astonished by its public spaces, cultural institutions, public transportation, fountains, comfortable trains… The country is functioning well, showing incredible grace under pressure. Its television channel – PressTV – is one of the most important anti-imperialist news outlets in the world. I don’t see extreme misery, or homelessness, there. Iranians are polite, well-educated and proud. They have to deal with complex exchange rates, which I do not understand. Whenever I pay in a café or taxi, I simply extend my hand full of local currency, and I never get cheated. Things are solid and reassuring there; I feel it and really appreciate it.

Iran is an internationalist country. Not unlike Cuba or Venezuela, who are its long-term allies. Even when injured, itself, it helps others, those who need solidarity even more. This can never be forgotten, particularly in places like Latin America, or Syria.

Hezbollah, Iran’s close ally in the Middle East, is fighting the most dangerous terrorist groups in Syria; those groups that have been injected there by the West, but also by Washington’s allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But Hezbollah is also essentially the only social net for the poor in Syria’s neighbor – Lebanon. And not only for the Shi’a Muslims, but also for the disadvantaged Sunni citizens, for the Christians, and non-believers. Whoever is destitute in Lebanon, comes to Hezbollah, for assistance. I was based in Beirut for five years, and I know what I am talking about. All this, while the Lebanese elites are burning money in Paris, in Nice, in the nightclubs of Beirut, driving their lavish cars through the slums. And the more Iran and Hezbollah help the region, the more frustrated, outraged and aggressive the West gets.

Look at Palestine. When it comes to the liberation of the Palestinian people from the long and brutal Israeli occupation, the Gulf countries just talk and talk. In the end, some of them side with the West and Israel. The closest, the most determined allies of the long-suffering Palestinian people in the region, are, without doubt, Iran and Syria. That, everybody in the Middle East, knows, and it is only “a secret” to Westerners.

In Afghanistan, particularly in Herat, I witnessed long lines of Afghan people in front of the Iranian consulate. Devastated by the NATO occupation, Afghanistan is in despair, rated as a country with the shortest life expectancy in Asia, and the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) on the Asian continent. Tens of thousands of the Afghan people have been travelling to Iran in search of jobs. Without Iran, Herat would most likely starve to death. And now, Iran is searching for ways, (together with China and Russia), how to help Afghanistan to find a political solution, and send the NATO forces packing.

For years, all the Socialist countries of Latin America, could always rely on Iran. Be it Bolivia, before the legitimate government of Evo Morales was overthrown, or Cuba and especially Venezuela. Iran has been building social housing, it was helping with oil technology, and with many other social essentials.

Iraq and Iran, two great nations, in the past brutally pitched against each other by Washington, are once again cooperating, working together. The Western occupation has already thoroughly ruined Iraq (as it has ruined Afghanistan), historically one of the richest countries in the region. However, more positively Iran gets involved in neighboring Iraq, the more aggressively the West behaves. It now habitually crosses all the lines of acceptable behavior. In January 2020, a U.S. drone strike murdered Iran’s national hero, General Quasem Soleimani, while he was travelling right near the Baghdad International Airport.

For years now, Iran has been standing shoulder to shoulder with Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba; the nations which are openly and bravely deterring the aggression and brutality of Western imperialism.

It seems that no matter what the West tries to do, Iran cannot be broken. Despite the embargos and sanctions, it demonstrates that it is capable of producing and shooting satellites into space, or of producing its own medical equipment to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While the nation creates its great scientific and technological achievements, Iranian filmmakers keep producing their cinematic masterpieces. What a nation!

Unfortunately, all this is hidden from the eyes and ears of the public, both in the West, and in the client states. There, Iran is portrayed as a “threat”.

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Look at this irony. On April 30, 2020, Reuters released a report about the German move to ban Hezbollah:

“Last December, Germany’s parliament approved a motion urging Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to ban all activities by Hezbollah on German soil, citing its “terrorist activities” especially in Syria.

On a trip to Berlin last year, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he hoped Germany would follow Britain in banning Hezbollah. Britain introduced legislation in February of last year that classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.”

When the West says “Terrorist activities, especially in Syria”, what it really means is “fighting the terrorism injected by the West and its allies, into Syria”. Everything is twisted, perverted and turned upside-down by the propaganda outlets operating out of the United States, Europe, Israel and the Gulf.

“Terrorist activities” outside Syria, also means supporting the Palestinian struggle for independence, as well as at least moral support for Syria, in its attempts to regain the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, an occupation which has never been recognized, even by the United Nations. It also means helping Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Latin American countries, which are brutalized (or should we say ‘terrorized’), relentlessly, by Washington and its allies.

This is precisely the logic and lexicon which was used by German propagandists during WWII, to describe resistance forces in its colonies. Freedom fighters and partisans were labeled as terrorists, in France, Yugoslavia, Ukraine.

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Even the otherwise mainstream newspaper – The Independent – published on May 1, 2020 a report critical of the bizarre US scheming against Iran:

“The United States is pushing ahead with a scheme to extend a United Nations arms embargo on Iran that is due to be lifted in October as part of the nuclear deal that Washington abandoned two years ago.

To force the extension, Washington will attempt to lobby the Security Council to continue the arms embargo, which bars weapons sales to or from Iran.

But it also is making what legal experts and diplomats describe as a convoluted argument that it is still part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action it left, and hence able to use one of its provisions to “snapback” the embargo.”

This weird political somersault has been, according to The Independent, criticized even by one of Washington’s allies, the French President Emmanuel Macron:

“China and Russia have already vowed to use any means to block the US plan. France’s Emmanuel Macron has been working behind the scenes to sabotage the Trump scheme because of what it sees as an attempt by the White House to destroy international legal norms, said a well-placed European diplomat.”

France, the UK, Germany and other EU countries are not necessarily happy with Washington’s foreign policy towards Iran, but their outrage is far from being moral indignation. Iran is big and it is far from being poor. European companies are losing billions of euros in trade, because of the sanctions. For instance, in the recent past, two Iranian airlines were ready to purchase large numbers of brand-new Airbus aircraft, in order to compete with Qatar Airways and the Emirates. Such plans collapsed, because of the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, and the almost immediate imposition of new, senseless but brutal sanctions against Teheran. Now even Mahan Air, a civilian airline, is facing sanctions, allegedly because of its flights to Venezuela, and to several Middle Eastern destinations.

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Now, many are perhaps wondering, what triggered, in the West, such hate towards Iran?

There is a well-hidden (again, in the West) secret regarding Iran: “It is a Socialist country. Socialist with Iranian characteristics.”

In his latest and by all means ground-breaking book about Iran (“Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism”), which our publishing house Badak Merah will be publishing later in May 2020, an Iranian author and the PressTV Paris chief correspondent, Ramin Mazaheri, passionately defends the Iranian socialist concept:

“I think that if open-minded leftists would simply become aware of the facts and… modern socialist interpretations of Iran’s policies – many of which I’m sure are being presented in English for the first time – I’m sure that they would not be waiting breathlessly for the collapse of the Middle East’s greatest bulwark against imperialism and capitalism.

It is urgent that Western leftists understand that the reversal of Iran’s popular, democratic revolution would have incredibly negative ramifications for the anti-imperialist movement in the Middle East, and thus the global anti-imperialist movement, and it certainly would be the cruelest loss for Islamic Socialism, which is taken quite seriously in the Muslim world even if atheistic Trotskyism cannot even discuss the concept without resorting to insults.

And, of course, a counter-revolution in Iran would be a major blow for global democracy, as there is no doubt that the Iranian People support their revolution, constitution and unique system in a democratic majority.”

Like Russia and China in Euro Asia and in Asia, like Venezuela, Cuba and before the coup, Bolivia, Iran is spreading hope and revolutionary optimism in its entire part of the world. And it is an extremely wounded part of the world, where hope is absent, but desperately needed.

Spreading hope – that is never forgiven by the Western empire, which, like some gigantic and sadistic prison warden, constantly demands submission, while spreading depression and fear.

In the entirety of modern history, Iran has never invaded, never attacked anyone. Iran is a peaceful nation. But at the same time, it is a powerful, brave and proud country.

The United States and its turbo-capitalist regime understand brutal force, only. They do not comprehend, do not appreciate cultural nuances, let alone depth. Pity! There is so much to learn from Iran and its culture.

Iran will not attack anyone, that is clear as is proven by history. But if physically confronted, it will defend itself, and its people. It will fight, well and bravely.

The West should know: if it triggers a war with Iran, the entire Middle East will be consumed by terrible fire.

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s the creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that has penned a number of books, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

“We were Hezbollah trainers. It is an organisation that learns quickly. The Hezbollah we met at the beginning (1982) is different from the one we left behind in 2000”. This is what the former Chief of Staff and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabi Ashkenazi, said twenty years after the Israeli unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon.

“For the first time we met a non-conventional army, but also an ideological organisation with deep faith: and this faith triumphed over us. We were more powerful, more technologically advanced and better armed but not possessing the fighting spirit …They were stronger than us”. This is what Brigadier General Effi Eitam, Commander of the 91^st Division in counter-guerrilla operation in south Lebanon said.

Alon Ben-David, senior defence correspondent for Israel’s Channel 13, specialised in defence and military issues, said: “Hezbollah stood up and defeated the powerful Israeli Army”.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the architect of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, said: “The withdrawal didn’t go as planned. The deterrence of Hezbollah and its capability increased greatly. We withdrew from a nightmare”. Barak meant he had planned to leave behind him a buffer zone under the control of his Israeli proxies led by the “South Lebanon Army” (SLA) commander Antoine Lahad. However, his plans were dismantled and the resistance forced Lahad’s men to run towards the borders, freeing the occupied buffer zone. As they left Lebanon, the Israeli soldiers said: “Thank God we are leaving: no one in Israel wants to return”.

In 1982, Israel believed the time had come to invade Lebanon and force it to sign a peace agreement after eliminating the various Palestinian organisations. These groups had deviated from the Palestinian compass and had become embroiled in sectarian conflict with the Lebanese Phalange, believing that “the road to Jerusalem passed through Jounieh” (the Maronite stronghold on Mt. Lebanon, northwest of Beirut, a slogan used by Abu Iyad). Israel intended Lebanon to become the domicile of its Palestinian conflict. It failed to realise that in so doing it was letting the Shiite genie out of the bottle. Signs of this genie began to appear after the arrival of Sayyed Musa al-Sadr in Lebanon and the return of students of Sayyed Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr from Najaf to their home country and residency in the Lebanese Bekaa. Also, the victory of Imam Khomeini and the “Islamic revolution” in Iran in 1979 was not taken into consideration by Israel, and the potential consequences for the Lebanese Shia were overlooked.

The 1982 Israeli invasion triggered the emergence of the “Islamic resistance in Lebanon”, which later became known as “Hezbollah”, and it forced Israel to leave Lebanon unconditionally in 2000. This made Lebanon the first country to humiliate the Israeli army. Following their victory over the Arabs in 1949, 1956, 1967 and 1973, Israeli officials had come to believe they could occupy any Arab country “with a brass band”.

Israeli soldiers exited through the “Fatima Gate” (on the Lebanese border, also known as Good Fence, HaGader HaTova) under the watchful eyes of Suzanne Goldenberg on the other side of the border. She wrote:

“After two decades and the loss of more than 1000 men, the chaotic Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon leaves its northern flank dangerously exposed, with Hezbollah guerrillas sitting directly on its border. The scale of the Israeli fiasco was beginning to unfold… After the Israelis pulled out of Bint Jubayl in the middle of the night, their SLA allies, already in a state of collapse in the centre of the strip, simply gave up. Branded collaborators, they and their families headed for exile. Behind them, they left tanks and other heavy equipment donated by their patrons. Shlomo Hayun, an Israeli farmer who lives on Shaar Yeshuv farm, said of the withdrawal, “This was the first time I have been ashamed to be Israeli. It was chaotic and disorganised.”

Israeli withdrawal (2000) crossing Fatima Gate.

What did Israel and its allies in the Middle East achieve?

In 1978, Israel occupied a part of southern Lebanon and in 1982, for the first time, it occupied an Arab capital, Beirut. During its presence as an occupation force, Israel was responsible for several massacres amounting to war crimes. In 1992, Israel thought that it could strike a death blow to Hezbollah by assassinating its leader, Sayyed Abbas Al-Mousawi. He was replaced by his student, the charismatic leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah has proved to be more truthful than the Israeli leaders, and thus capable of affecting the Israeli public through his speeches, as Israeli colonel Ronen, chief Intelligence officer for the Central Command of Israel Defence Forces, has said.

The new Hezbollah leader showed his potential for standing up to and confronting Israel through TV appearances. He mastered the psychological aspects of warfare, just as he mastered the art of guerrilla war. He leads a non-conventional but organised army of militants “stronger than several armies in the Middle East,” according to Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israeli Chief of Staff.

The Israeli doctrine relies on the principle of pre-emptively striking what is considered as a potential threat, in order to extinguish it in its cradle. Israel first annexed Jerusalem by declaring it in 1980 an integral part of the so-called “capital of the state of Israel”. In June 1981, it attacked and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor that France had helped build. In 2007, Israel struck a building in Deir Ezzor, Syria, before it was completed, claiming that the government had been building a nuclear reactor.

6 years after its withdrawal, Israel declared war on Lebanon in 2006, with the aim of eradicating Hezbollah from the south and destroying its military capacity. Avi Kober, a member of the department of political studies at Bar Ilan University and researcher at the Israeli BESA centre said:

“The war was conducted under unprecedented and favourable conditions the like which Israel has never enjoyed – internal consensus, broad international support (including tacit support on the part of moderate Arab States), and a sense of having almost unlimited time to achieve the war objectives. The IDF’s performance during this war was unsatisfactory, reflecting flawed military conceptions and poor professionalism and generalship. Not only the IDF fail in achieving battlefield decision against Hezbollah, that is, denying the enemy’s ability to carry on the fight, despite some tactical achievements, throughout the war, it played into Hizballah’s hands.”

“Soon we shall pray in Jerusalem” (Portray Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah).

Israel withdrew from the battle without achieving its goals: it was surprised by Hezbollah’s military equipment and fighting capabilities. Hezbollah had managed to hide its advanced weapons from the eyes of Israeli intelligence and its allies, who are present in every country including Lebanon. The result was 121 Israeli soldiers killed, 2,000 wounded, and the pride of the Israeli army and industry destroyed in the Merkava Cemetery in southern Lebanon where the Israeli advance into Wadi al-Hujeir was thwarted.

Hezbollah hit the most advanced class Israeli destroyer, the INS Spear saar-5, opposite the Lebanese coast. In the last 72 hours of the war, Israel fired 2.7 million bomblets, or cluster bombs, to cause long-term pain for Lebanon’s population, either through impeding their return or disrupting cultivation and harvest once they did return. “An unjustified degree of vindictiveness and an effort to punish the population as a whole”, said the report of the UN commission of inquiry conducted in November 2006 (Arkin M. W. (2007), Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, Air University Press, Alabama, pp 67-71).

The battle ended, Israel withdrew again, closed the doors behind its army, raised a fence on the Lebanese borders, and installed electronic devices and cameras to prevent any possible Hezbollah crossing into Palestine.

When Israel’s chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi said “Israel instructed Hezbollah in the art of war”, he was right. Hezbollah has learned from the wars that Israel has waged over the years. In every war, Hezbollah saw the necessity of developing its weapons and training to match and overcome the Israeli army (which is outnumbered) and which enjoys the tacit support of Middle Eastern regimes and the most powerful western countries. Hezbollah developed its special forces’ training and armed itself with precision missiles to impose new rules of engagement, posing a real threat to the continuity of the permanent Israeli violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

Today, Hezbollah has sophisticated weapons, including the armed drones that it used in Syria in its war against the Takfirists, and precision missiles that can reach every region, city and airport in Israel. It has anti-ship missiles to neutralize the Israeli navy in any future attack or war on Lebanon and to hit any harbour or oil platform. It is also equipped with missiles that prevent helicopters from being involved in any future battle. The balance of deterrence has been achieved. Hezbollah can take Israel back to the Stone Age just as easily as Israel envisages returning Lebanon to the Stone Age.

Hezbollah is Israel’s worse nightmare, and it was largely created by the Israeli attempt to overthrow the regime in Lebanon, occupy Lebanon, and impose an agreement that Israel could then mould to its own liking. But the tables were turned: a very small force emerged in Lebanon to become a regional power whose powerful support was then extended to the neighbouring countries of Syria and Iraq. The harvest journey has begun.

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All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated; featured image: A woman mocking an Israeli tank left behind when withdrawing from south of Lebanon in the year 2000, using its cannon as a hanger to dry cloths. Photo by @YounesZaatari

A week ago a former Canadian soldier instigated a harebrained bid to kidnap or kill Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Launched from Colombia, the plot failed spectacularly with most of the men captured or killed.

Still, the leader of the invasion Jordan Goudreau, a veteran of the Canadian military and US special forces, has been remarkably forthright about the involvement of opposition figure Juan Guaidó. A leaked contract between Guaidó’s representative in Florida and Goudreau’s Silvercorp USA describes plans for a multi month occupation force, which after ousting Maduro would “convert to a National Asset Unit that will act under the direction of the [Guaidó] Administration to counter threats to government stability, terror threats and work closely” with other armed forces. Apparently, Goudreau was hoping for a big payday from Venezuela’s opposition. He also had his eyes on the $15 million bounty Washington put up in March for Maduro’s capture as well as tens of millions dollars for other members of the government.

As the plot has unraveled, Ottawa has refused to directly criticize the invasion launched from Colombia. The military has also refused to release information regarding Goudreau’s time in the Canadian forces. What’s more, since the plot began Canada’s foreign affairs minister has reached out to regional opponents of Maduro and reasserted Ottawa’s backing for Guaidó. The PM also discussed Venezuela with his Colombian counterpart.

The Trudeau government’s reaction to recent events suggest the global pandemic has not deterred them from brazenly seeking to overthrow Venezuela’s government. In a bid to elicit “regime change”, over the past couple years Ottawa has worked to isolate Caracas, imposed illegal sanctions, took that government to the International Criminal Court, financed an often-unsavoury opposition and decided a marginal opposition politician was the legitimate president.

The day after the first phase of the invasion was foiled foreign minister François-Philippe Champagne spoke to his Colombian, Peruvian and Brazilian counterparts concerning the “Venezuela crisis and the humanitarian needs of Venezuelans.” Four days later Champagne tweeted,

“great call with Venezuela Interim President Juan Guaidó. Canada will always stand with the people of Venezuela in their desire to restore democracy and human rights in their country.”

On Monday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Colombian President Iván Duque Márque. According to the official release, they “discussed the crisis in Venezuela and its humanitarian impact in the region which is heightened by the pandemic. They underscored the need for continued close collaboration and a concerted international effort to address this challenging situation.” Over the past 18 months Trudeau has repeatedly discussed Venezuela with a Colombian president who has offered up his country to armed opponents of Maduro.

The Trudeau government has been chummy with Duque more generally. After he won a close election marred by fraud allegations then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland “congratulated” Duque and said, “Canada and Colombia share a commitment to democracy and human rights.” In August 2018 Trudeau tweeted,

“today, Colombia’s new President, Ivan Duque, took office and joins Swedish PM, Norway PM, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez, and others with a gender-equal cabinet. Iván, I look forward to working with you and your entire team.”

A month later he added,

“thanks to President Ivan Duque for a great first meeting at UNGA this afternoon, focused on growing our economies, addressing the crisis in Venezuela, and strengthening the friendship between Canada & Colombia.”

But, Duque is from the extreme right — “le champion du retour de la droite dure en Colombie”, according to a Le Soleil headline. The Colombian president has undercut the peace accord the previous (right, but not far right) government signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to end Colombia’s 50-year civil war, which left some 220,000 dead. Duque’s policies have increased violence towards the ex-rebels and social activists. Seventy-seven former FARC members were killed in 2019. Even more human rights defenders were murdered. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found that at least 107 Colombian, mostly Indigenous, rights defenders were killed in 2019.

Through the first part of this year the pace at which social leaders and demobilized FARC members have been killed has increased. According to the UN observer mission in Colombia, 24 demobilized guerrillas have already been assassinated and a recent Patriotic March report on the “The other pandemic lived in Colombia” details 95 social leaders, human rights defenders and former guerrillas killed in the first four months of 2020.

Trudeau’s dalliance with Duque is difficult to align with his stated concern for human rights in Venezuela.

The same can be said for Ottawa’s failure to condemn the recent invasion attempt. The Trudeau government should be questioned on whether it was involved or had foreknowledge of the recent plot to invade Venezuela.

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Featured image is from Presidencia de la República

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise” –Albert Camus

“The Plague”

Camus’ novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of death.

Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but which will almost certainly not work, They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money. At a time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits and unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.

Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound—3,800 mph—although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20—15,000 mph. They come in two basic varieties, one powered by a high-speed scramjet, the other –launched from a plane or missile—glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.

Currently there is a hypersonic arms race going on among China, Russia and the US, and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.

Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.

In the 1950s, it was the “bomber gap” between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s, it was the “missile gap” between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of national treasure were, nonetheless, poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very close to touching off a nuclear war.

In the current hypersonic arms race, “hype” is the operational word.

“The development of hypersonic weapons in the United States,” says physicist James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ”has been largely motivated by technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill.”

They have certainly been “useful” to Lockheed Martin, the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5 billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the scramjet- driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.

The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a missile said to be capable of Mach 20. China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of taking out aircraft carriers.

In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.

The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth orbit.

Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory, can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is much more difficult to spot or engage.

But that’s when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board stays on the drawing board.

Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere Even so, they are going to run very hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can’t carry a large payload they will have to very accurate, but as a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, that is “problematic.”

According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time “slowly tears itself apart during the flight.” The heat is so great it creates a “plasma” around the craft that makes it difficult “to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands.”

If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost impossible to alter the weapon’s flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In short, you can’t get from here to there.

Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter that simply doesn’t work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons system in US history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears itself apart, hardly a surprise.

The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful aircraft—the F-16 and the A-10—told defense analyst Andrew Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.

“I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they maneuvered unpredictably,” he told Cockburn. “More likely they were forced to fly a straight, predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional ballistic missiles.”

While Russia, China and the US lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain, France, India and Japan have joined the race.

Why is everyone building them?

At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the US anti-missile system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese would like to keep US aircraft carriers away from their shores. But anti-missile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic missiles can’t do what they are advertised to do.

For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don’t work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were deeply flawed.

The US has spent over $200 billion on anti-missile systems and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.

Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nick named the “Davy Crockett,” and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoilless rife with a range of 2.5 miles. Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction the Crockett cooked its three-man crew. It was only tested once and found to be “totally inaccurate.” So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in Europe.

While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all US defense related spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis, it would pay jobless Americans a salary.

Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that numerous small businesses—restaurants in particular—will never re-open, building and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the US—and other countries—cannot afford. In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.

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Featured image: Moscow’s breakthrough Avangard missile system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force in December 2019 (Indian Punchline)

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla discussed the April 30 attack on the country’s embassy in Washington with the press yesterday, stating: “Here is the attacker, an AK-47 rifle, 32 shell casings, 32 bullet holes and a statement – by the perpetrator – of his intention to attack and kill”

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Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, during an online press conference, yesterday May 12, to discuss the April 30 terrorist attack on the Cuban embassy in the United States, stated:

“Here is an attacker, an AK-47 rifle, 32 shell casings, 32 bullet holes and a statement – by the perpetrator – of his intention to attack and kill.”

From the U.S. government we have received only silence, a silence that we know well, one that has accompanied violence against Cuba by groups based in U.S. territory for years. Every wave of terror was preceded by rabid campaigns of hate, rancor, threats, and attempts to discredit Cuba’s work in the international arena, alongside tightening of the economic siege.

The deaths number 3,478, with 2,099 Cubans disabled, in addition to incalculable economic damage. Terrorism has cost the country, carried out with or without the support of the U.S. government, but always with its blessing, following CIA directives. Hundreds of terrorists groups have been created, financed and trained by the CIA, organizations that had in their ranks notorious killers like Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol, among others.

The Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), created in 1976, meant the integration of an international terrorist network, the first in history. “War on the roads of the world,” as they called it, did not respect borders or international law, and Cuban embassies were the preferred target.

More than 370 terrorist operations were carried out in those years; the atrocious bombing of a Cuban civilian airplane in mid-flight was the ultimate expression of this hatred, aggravated and protected by silence from the White House.

The perpetuator of the most recent attack on our embassy in Washington, Alexander Alazo Baró met with persons of known hostile behavior toward the Cuban Revolution, at a church called the Doral Jesus Worship Center. One of his “friends” at the religious center, Pastor Frank Lopez, maintains close relations with none other than Marco Rubio, Congressman Diaz-Balart and other persons with recognized extremist positions.

His behavior prior to the attack could not have been more obvious; he did not hide his hatred for the nation of his birth, or his delusions, be they real or fictitious; he was short of money, without a steady job, as his wife stated to several sources. Days earlier he had surveyed the site, planned every step of what he would do, all in the middle of Washington DC, just a few blocks from the White House, in a heavily guarded area. Ready for anything, at zero hour he drove miles with an AK-47, and fired on his target.

Cuba has every reason to demand an exhaustive investigation of the facts from the U.S. government, and that the necessary measures be adopted to prevent a return to times of spilled innocent blood, to put an end to the country’s hostile policy, verbal attacks, and actions that encourage such behavior.

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