It’s April 2020, and since March, the UK has swiftly commissioned and built vast, temporary, intensive care hospitals, in readiness for a predicted epidemic number of severe COVID-19 cases.

They are called NHS Nightingale Hospitals, and to date there are seven of them, either open or planned. The first one was announced on 24 March by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, and was opened almost immediately on 3 April at the London Excel Centre. It has a capacity of some 4,000 beds. The other temporary field hospital sites are in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate, and Washington.

Additionally, over the last month, some 8,000 beds in private hospitals have been re-assigned for Covid-19 use, along with other NHS beds in hospitals all over the UK. By the beginning of April, one third of all non-ICU NHS beds had been converted into potential ICU beds for possible Covid-19 patients. Yet, by 12 April, the London Nightingale had treated just 19 patients, and to date, only 41 patients have been treated.

This sudden blitz is both unusual and unprecedented. We regularly have seasonal infectious illnesses spread throughout the population; in fact in recent years, some of these epidemic diseases were also predicted well in advance. Yet no new mega-hospitals, temporary or otherwise, were ever built to cope with them, nor were they seen to be needed. Why now?

According to the King’s Fund, over the last thirty years, the number of ICU beds has declined, at a time when the population has risen. Over that period, around 34% of general and critical care beds in England have been lost.

Peter Donaghy, an independent data analyst, reports that the UK now comes near the bottom of the world league in the number of hospital beds per head of population: in 2019, and across the four UK nations, he found that there are about 5.7 ICU beds per 100,000 of the population [interpolation of his figures mine]. Cyprus has double that number, Germany has 29, the USA 34, and even Kazakhstan and Mongolia do better than the UK.

Bed shortages are not news, however. In 2008, it was revealed that 32,000 beds of all types had been cut in the decade since 1997, when, ironically, the Blair government came into power on a ticket of increasing the number of hospital beds.

Between 2010 and 2017 there were 70,000 fewer intensive care beds in the UK:

In 2016, the Royal College of Surgeons had complained of chronic bed shortages, so much so that the occupancy rates had gone beyond 89%, when 85% is considered the maximum safe level. This complaint was made just before the British Medical Association chimed in, reporting on the shortage of beds being more severe than in other Western countries, and that such overcrowding can lead to the spread of infections.

And in 2018, the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine (FICM) astonishingly reported that across the UK, 80% of intensive care units were sending patients to other hospitals, either because of a lack of beds or a shortage of staff, particularly nurses.

To cap things off, by 2019, it was being reported by the British Medical Association that ICU beds had begun to be used for patients recovering from routine operations, and that when more emergency beds were needed, a policy of “escalation beds” came into force. The BMA drily reported that there was “little sign of this practice ending”.

When one thinks of the NHS, intensive care is at the heart of most people’s perceptions of it. Yet the decline in the number of ICU beds over the last 30 years is so counterintuitive that it’s as if some monster deus ex machina has intervened and decided not only that the general numbers of hospital beds are of little import, but that intensive care beds are even more expendable. But whatever the case, in the event of a mass epidemic, the consequences of ICU bed shortages were indeed grim prior to 2020.

What official policies have the post-Blair governments been maintaining throughout this decline in the number of ICU beds?

To get a general feel, looking back to 2011, the government published the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy Paper, outlining what the official response to a hypothetical pandemic should be.

This paper appears to have been written largely in response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak. Its precautionary approach stresses that actions following the emergence of a pandemic, which could occur suddenly at any time:

  • must be evidence based
  • be proportional to the level of threat
  • be flexible
  • be based on ethical principles.
  • emergency powers must last no longer than 30 days

Significantly, it states that during any pandemic, it should be “business as usual” and notes that its recommendations are in line with an earlier, 2007, National Framework paper’s “defence in depth” approach to a pandemic.

The Pandemic Preparedness Strategy Paper also makes clear that military personnel are not to be redeployed during a pandemic, but must remain on their normal defence duties. So of course, this means that they were not to be used to help build vast temporary hospitals, transport patients, or manage the public.

Military convoy off the coast at Devonport on the morning of 23 March, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown

In fact, the paper is silent on any hospital bed policies; it takes it as read that there would be enough UK ICU beds for the treatment of pandemic disease patients – for in 2009’s H1N1 swine flu outbreak, generally, hospitals may have just coped with finding enough beds for acute H1N1 patients. There were 540,000 cases of swine flu in England, and 138 fatalities at the time, or 0.026% of those infected.

Exercise Cygnus

Following the publication of the 2011 preparedness paper, however, the number of ICU beds continued to fall. Then, five years later, government held an unusual and secretive event called Exercise Cygnus.

It involved all government departments, all local authorities, and the NHS, right across the UK. Its report has not been published for “national security reasons” and so as not to “frighten the public”. However, according to those with first-hand knowledge of the operation, Cygnus’ script contained a scenario of a patent lack of capacity in ICU beds and personal protective equipment.

Based on its given hypotheses, it predicted that thousands more critical care beds would be required, large parts of the NHS would need to be switched off to redeploy staff, frail patients would be denied care, and mortuaries would be overwhelmed.

Was this just an experiment to see how the public sector actors involved would react to each other, like some kind of Grand Guignol? Did the exercise take its inspiration from the memorably twisted 2012 London Olympics ceremony, in which rows of thousands of NHS patients in hospital beds, in a dark auditorium looking like a Nightingale Hospital, were danced around by strange beasts and actors wearing scrubs?

The modelling of Cygnus was done by Imperial College, London, under the aegis of Neil Ferguson, who is also now doing the modelling of Covid-19.

Tellingly, it is said that last month’s Coronavirus Act, the emergency legislation which underpins the lockdown, is based on his modelling in Exercise Cygnus. Ferguson’s involvement in the Coronavirus crisis does raise other questions – for further coverage see Vanessa Beeley’s article: Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?

Outside of the strange artificial world of Exercise Cygnus, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Surgeons continued to complain about bed shortages. So why was there no turnaround policy introduced at least by 2016 after these professional outcries?

The Health Secretary at the time was Jeremy Hunt. Simon Stevens was Chief of NHS England. Both had been involved in cutting bed numbers. Yet, since 2016, and prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, with Sir Simon Stevens still at the helm, there appears to have been no general improvement in ICU bed capacity.

Following Exercise Cygnus, in 2017, the NHS Board published a short internal paper called Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR). Its approach is centred on three Acts of Parliament: the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the NHS Act (2006), and the Health and Social Care Act (2012).

Drawn up by Director of Operations and Information for the NHS Board, Matthew Swindells (sic), it asks the Board to agree that progress had been made in EPRR over the last year, and that the NHS was in a state of pandemic readiness. EPRR was rubber stamped, but as we have seen above, the somewhat rosy, self-congratulatory picture that was approved by the NHS Board was shown to be completely incorrect by Statista in 2017, and later, by the Faculty of Intensive Care in 2018, the BMA in 2019, and Peter Donaghy in 2020.

Back to Exercise Cygnus. This was supposed to be merely a computer simulation. So why would it be an issue of “national security”? Why would it “frighten the public”? Perhaps because it was intended to change the real world into its simulated image?

It’s an uncanny coincidence that, after the Coronavirus pandemic was declared, it was announced that there were not enough ICU beds or personal protective equipment, that NHS staff have been redeployed to other areas, that hospitalised elderly patients have been denied care through the use of “Do Not Resuscitate” orders, and large, temporary, mortuaries have also been built up and down the country, just as in the simulation.

Temporary mortuary set up in Ernesettle Fort, Plymouth

Since the first reported UK Covid-19 case, there has been non-stop media coverage propagandising the numbers of cases and deaths, and its threat. All the while, there have been regular reports that many ICU beds are empty, that beds of other sorts are empty, and that although accident and emergency visits are down, people with serious conditions telephoning the NHS advice and triage number, are being told to “Stay at home – Save the NHS – Save Lives”. Many of these callers have then died for lack of care.

It has also emerged that standards in death registration have been lowered by the government, and that there has been encouragement to register anyone who dies, of any underlying condition, as a Covid-19 death. There need be no objective verification of the existence of Covid-19 to register a death as being caused by it.

Despite these efforts to inflate the death rate, actual mortality rates since the beginning of this crisis do not show that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and actual critical case numbers are not overwhelming the NHS’s depleted intensive care units. In that regard, Covid-19 is not mirroring Exercise Cygnus’ computer-generated scenario.

The government response, however, seems to match it exactly.

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All images in this article are from UK Column unless otherwise stated

Even as food banks nationwide are inundated with hungry Americans, many of the country’s farmers are dumping or destroying their harvests. Amidst a pandemic that has seen tens of millions of workers laid off, the nation’s food banks have struggled to cope with the surge in demand for their vital services.

In San Antonio, over 10,000 people lined up overnight in their vehicles in the hope of receiving a box of basic foods. “Needs have skyrocketed not just here but around the country,” one Washington, D.C. organizer told MintPress last week. Meanwhile, a veteran Louisiana food bank employee said the current situation is graver than it was after Hurricane Katrina. Food banks are going millions of dollars over budget trying to keep up with surging demand; one estimate suggests that one in three people seeking groceries at pantries last month had never done so before. Those who manage the facilities are worried that they will soon be completely drained of food.

Yet even as hunger rises, economics dictates that farmers across the country are dumping, discarding, or failing to harvest vital foods. Dairy farmers are pouring rivers of fresh milk down the drain every day. Pig farmers are slaughtering piglets en masse. Meanwhile, ripening fruits and vegetables are being left to wither and die on the vine or in the ground. The reason? “Demand” is falling greatly.

Of course, during a pandemic, the caloric needs of America are basically the same as before: we have all got to eat. The problem is that so much of the produce was predestined to be bought by businesses that have now closed due to the lockdown. Restaurants, universities, hotels, stadiums and many more popular eating locations are now shuttered, leading to a collapse in orders for many farmers. At the same time, there is an increased demand for supermarkets and food banks, leading to a situation where farms are full, but store shelves and bellies are increasingly empty. Re-routing interrupted supply chains is not easy, and many farms have not found new buyers willing to collect, transport and distribute their food.

A perfect encapsulation of this is an Idaho woman who went to her local farm yesterday and saw mountains of discarded potatoes, given away free to anyone who passed. Yet three days earlier she noted that her local food bank had fed more people in the last four weeks than it did in the whole of last year. Unfortunately, the current system is currently unable to make those ends meet.

Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and author of the influential book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, explained the situation to MintPress News:

Of all of the contradictions and deep flaws in our food system, none is a more poignant example of its lack of resiliency than food dumping in the face of long lines of cars waiting hours for food handouts. The last time we saw this was in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, the government stepped in with assistance programs for farmers and hungry people — that’s how the Food Stamp program (now SNAP) got started. But today’s government has done all it can to weaken SNAP and bailout funds largely go to Big Agriculture, not small farmers. The only hope is that public pressure will force the government to step in and intervene in some positive way. I see signs of useful actions — increased SNAP benefits, for example — but will they last? One can only hope.”

Some of the hotspots of the COVID-19 outbreak are also in areas of most pressing food insecurity. This is rarely a coincidence. The South Bronx, for example, is the most food insecure community of the United States: some 37 percent of residents regularly going hungry. Bronx residents are over twice as likely to contract coronavirus as their much wealthier Manhattan neighbors. Those who live in poverty often have neither the accommodation nor the economic means to shelter in place like others can. Furthermore, 32 percent of the Bronx works in education, healthcare or social assistance, meaning their jobs cannot be done from home.

The coronavirus pandemic is currently shaking America’s food supply and production system. And after only a few weeks, it appears much of it is failing the stress test.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingThe GuardianSalonThe GrayzoneJacobin MagazineCommon Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image: Discarded potatoes lay near an Idaho roadside, dumped by a farmer unable to sell them amid the coronavirus lockdown. Photo | Molly Page @idahomolly

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‘They Massage Horses Don’t They?’

April 26th, 2020 by Philip A Farruggio

It’s been over 25 years since that glorious warm, blue sky summer day at Belmont Park Racetrack. I not only remember it so well, but I can almost inhale that special racetrack smell, the combination of disinfectant merged with horse manure. The moment you walked into the place, open air as it was , you might have been on some livestock farm for that matter. But this was Elmont, Long Island, and this writer lived within one mile of the track. I had just finished up my sales rep phone calls by noon, and my wife allowed me to do what I always did on beautiful race days like this one: Go to the track. Well, not so fast. First I drove to Guido’s deli nearby our place and got my usual Salami and American cheese hero. At the track, wearing my usual racetrack wardrobe of baggy shorts, loose cotton shirt with giant pocket to hold my two Pilot pens and Te Amo cigars, I ventured up to the 3rd floor grandstand. This was my spot right on the finish line. The sandwich was devoured along with a cold draft beer (couldn’t beat the racetrack beer) and  I puffed on my cigar as I attacked the Daily Racing Form.

By a quarter to one I was joined by my two compatriots, jock’s room masseur Stevie Lee and loveable retiree Ira from Great Neck. We were all doping out the first race when greatness was being born right before our eyes. “You see that number 3 horse, Great All Over?” Stevie volunteered to us. “Well, I worked on him about an hour ago at the barn.” Ira and I both were startled to learn that our buddy did more than just massage humans.

Still, looking over the horse’s past performances I cracked “Yeah, I think God would have to work on this horse to  move him up!” Stevie countered “I know, I’m just saying that the trainer had me work on the horse for about 45 minutes before he brought him over. The horse was tight too.” I again looked at the horse’s past form and he wasn’t just bad… he was terrible! This was a cheap maiden claiming race, the bottom of the barrel in NY, and this horse sure was consistent: he finished up the track from gate to finish in every start.” This horse doesn’t need a massage… it needs a miracle!” Ira laughed, but very subtlety so as not to insult Stevie. “I like the number 4 horse, the second choice in the betting. I cannot see myself putting even a dime on that 3 horse. Sorry Stevie.” We all laughed. As the horses were approaching the gate, we all scurried up to get our bets in. I went with the 11 horse and threw out the favorite, who looked so good on paper that he was a candidate for a stiff job. Ira bet his 4 horse and Stevie passed on the race. Great All Over now had odds of 60-1 and rising.” Should be 160-1″ , Ira offered. “The horse has absolutely no form.”

The next two minutes proved fateful for me, and for Stevie Lee, massage therapist extraordinaire. No, Great All Over did not win the race at 75-1… that’s the stuff of a Walter Matthau film. I’ll tell you what he did do, however. He ran the race of his life! After being trapped on the rail in this 13 horse field, he weaved through horses down the stretch and lost the whole race by no more than a head! He finished third, beating 10 horses  and causing gasps from track announcer Tom Durkin. Stevie just sat there, perhaps even a bit shocked at what his work must have accomplished. Ira and I looked at each other, shaking our heads. “What did you actually do to that horse Stevie?” Ira asked. “Could you do the same thing for me… my wife would be grateful?”

Stevie was never asked back to massage Great All Over again. Why. “You see”, Stevie explained, “If the owner finds out that I improved his horse that much by massage, then it takes away from the trainer, and trainers usually have big egos in this business.”

A few months later, when a writer for a popular magazine found out about Stevie’s prowess, he arranged to do a story on massaging horses. Stevie asked a trainer friend of his if he had a horse Stevie could work on. Sure, said the trainer, come to my barn with the writer and work on my colt; The horse is scheduled to race in a few days and could use some loosening up. Stevie set it up and did his thing… not once but actually on two early AM occasions. The horse ran a few days later and won at 40-1 odds. The trainer never invited him back again. Such is the reason why Damon Runyon loved the racetrack experience. You never know what to expect!

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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, Cross Currents 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].

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What do we want to call the geopolitical operation of the “global elite” with its real “depopulation agenda” currently taking place before our very eyes?

The consequences of this gigantic, frightening swindle are being experienced by everyone personally at the moment.

Both the young and the old are deprived of their freedom and driven into despair, hopelessness and ultimately death. Is this geopolitical operation a “crime against humanity” as outlined under Nuremberg (1945/46 Trials) (1)

I hereby publicly denounce the “main actors” and institutions who know what they are doing (“J’accuse…!”)

It is also allowed to speak on behalf of all those who either do not have a public voice or who do not dare or are not (any longer) able to speak: For example, the countless old and elderly people who are cared for in their families or who are waiting to die as residents of old people’s homes; the inmates of prisons or psychiatric institutions who are not allowed to speak at all; the infants and students who are no longer allowed to move freely, who are sometimes deprived of their educational opportunities and are not yet able to articulate themselves; the many day laborers, workers and parents who do not know how life should go on and who do not even take the right to freedom of expression for granted.

The restrictions imposed by the governments on the officially guaranteed civil liberties in connection with the so-called  “Corona crisis” must be lifted in their entirety, because in the opinion of countless independent scientists who do not bow down to criminal policies, there are no convincing arguments for the current arbitrary restrictions!

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.

Note

(1) Arendt. H. (2013, 8th edition) Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Munich, p. 399

Many have expressed concerns that coronavirus will be used, as 9/11 and the hoax “war on terror” were, to further expand the American police state dystopia.  But we were doomed by the digital revolution to a controlled existence regardless of 9/11 and Covid-19.  

The digital revolution provides government and corporations with unlimited and unaccountable ability to spy and control populations.  Every word, deed, and movement of people can be tracked and a “social credit” dossier built for them.  China already has such a control system in place.  Those whose profiles are outside acceptable parameters are unable to function in normal society, being blocked from passports, driving licenses, employment, and activities reserved to those with acceptable social credit scores.

Technology is now available that permits videos to be created of people speaking words that they never spoke.  These can be used to ruin people on social media and to convict them falsely in trials.  Privacy no longer exists despite endless “privacy notices,” and people have no control over their persona. 

Even a person’s unspoken thoughts are under assault by mind-reading technologies. Once money has been reduced to digital money, a person’s access to his funds can be cut off at any time.  Financial independence ceases to exist for those who don’t comply. 

The outcome of the digital revolution is completely different from the naive belief that the Internet opened up communicative freedom that would ensure liberty.  What a joke this belief turned out to be.  The tech and social media firms themselves engage in censorship of explanations, called “conspiracy theories,” that differ from official or permissible explanations or use words found “offensive” by privileged groups.  Truth itself has become a “conspiracy theory.” Factual history is unacceptable to Identity Politics and is being replaced by fake history, such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

It is certainly true that indoctrination is part of enculturation, and every age has had to struggle for truth.  There have always been interests whose agendas are served by falsehood.  But for those determined, it was possible to challenge and to expose the falsehoods.  That possibility is what is extirpated by the digital revolution. 

The technology is already in advance of that portrayed in George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984. We await the coalescing of elite interests in a leadership agenda. All the tools Big Brother needs await his arrival.

The young born into the digital revoluton know no different. They are so taken with their electronic gadgets and indispensable apps and so content in their self-isolation in virtual reality that liberty means the ability to push buttons to call up images and entertainment. Liberty will not have to be taken from them.  It has already left them.  Indeed, they never knew it or its requirements.

The well-rewarded techies who created the instruments of oppression are proud of their contribution to the creation of a police state dystopia. These preening fools are the handmaidens of the police state. 

Years ago I read a science fiction short story about a father and mother who were concerned about their son as the age of testing approached.  They were members of a people that had somehow recovered from an enslaving technology. To prevent a reoccurence, testing of the young was instituted to weed out for extermination those whose intelligence and aptitude could bring back technological tyranny.  In their society, not all forms of human creativity were permissible.  A society so full of hubris that it played God was unacceptable.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from blogtrepreneur/Flickr

Suffering in Kashmir and Palestine

April 26th, 2020 by Robert Fantina

While the world is pre-occupied with coronavirus and its impact on lives and the international economy, one must not forget that suffering due to oppression knows no season and has no vaccine, but is not without a cure. Sadly, for years, and especially since August, the world has watched India increasingly pressure and repress the Kashmiri people, as India now embarks on a colonizing project on the model of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.

Let’s review the situation.

On August 5, 2019, the government of India revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, thus nullifying whatever autonomy Kashmir, long considered ‘disputed’ had. This was accompanied by a complete lockdown of Kashmir, in which no one, included journalists and diplomats, was allowed to enter or leave. Social media was also shut down, depriving the people of Kashmir from any contact with family and friends outside of the country. Additionally, the presence of Indian troops, already there in large numbers, was increased, with the ratio now of at least one security officer (police, member of the military) for every 30 residents, including men, women and children. This constitutes an extremely repressive police state.

One month after the revoking of Article 370, India’s consul-general to New York made the following comment: “I believe the security situation will improve, it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and you will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world. I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”

This has already begun, with the beginning of the construction of ‘outposts’ in Kashmir, which, like in Palestine, will soon become full-blown settlements.

Why is the world simply sitting back and allowing this to happen? There are several reasons:

  • The United Nations, in 1948, passed a resolution to resolve the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir. The resolution did not bind those nations to any legal action, but implied that it bound them ‘morally’.Activist Assata Shakur, formerly of the United States but a long-time resident of Cuba, once stated the following: ​ “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” Expecting India and Pakistan to be ‘morally’ bound to do the ‘right thing’ is the ultimate pipe dream, perhaps only matched by anyone’s expectation for Israel to feel a moral obligation to do what is right. The United Nations is also responsible for the 70+ year atrocity known as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But such wording gives the international community, hardly led by people of strong moral values, the ability to say there is nothing they can do.
  • A second, and perhaps even more significant reason for the world to ignore Kashmir, as it ignores Palestine, is because Kashmir, like Palestine, is a mostly Muslim nation. Throughout the west, Muslims have been vilified. In the United States, it is cliché to say that any crime committed by a white man indicates that he has emotional problems and needs assistance to be re-integrated into society; a crime by a Black man indicates that he is a criminal and should be shot on sight and, if not, should be incarcerated for life. And a crime committed by a Muslim is always an act of terrorism, deserving of the most stringent penalties, and requiring all Muslims everywhere to disavow the act, pledge their allegiance to the United States above anything else, and from then on keep out of sight as much as possible.

Over the course of nearly seventy-three years, Palestinians have watched the size of their nation shrink, due first to United Nations decree, and then to Israeli terrorism. The Kashmiri people, for basically the same length of time, have suffered cruel repression, and now Indian Prime Minister Modi has decided to emulate Israeli brutality against the Kashmiris.

What can the international community do for either Kashmir or Palestine? This is not a puzzling question, but one with obvious answers.

  1. Condemn in the strongest terms the repression of Kashmir by India, and Palestine by Israel. Do this constantly.
  2. Sanction India and Israel. The BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement has cost Israel dearly in terms of economic consequences, due to people around the world who will not buy its products, and reputationally, as academics and people from the entertainment world refuse to appear there. It is time for nations around the world to take their cue from their citizens, and cease all trade with India and Israel.
  3. Support the International Criminal Court first in its determination that it does, indeed, have jurisdiction over Palestine, and then on insisting that investigators be allowed into Gaza to perform their duties.
  4. Demand an end to the occupation of both nations, and of the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The similarities of the repression of Kashmir and Palestine are striking. And now, with the coronavirus on everyone’s mind, that repression is being even further ignored.

Governments have demonstrated that they will do nothing to further the human-rights of struggles of the Kashmiri and Palestinian people. Therefore, it is up to the people around the world to demand action. The barbaric cruelty of the Indian and Israeli governments cannot be allowed to continue. Today is it Palestine and Kashmir; tomorrow, it could be any country that a more powerful one decides it wants to colonize, and precedent for doing so is being established.

International crimes must be identified, prosecuted and punished as are individual crimes. And crimes against humanity, as perpetrated by India and Israel, should both shock and motivate the world. We who recognize these crimes must do all that is in our power to make our governments react appropriately.

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Featured image: A sign stating ‘Danger, demolition. Entry is prohibited’ was placed by Israeli authorities on top of the rubble of the Khalialehs’ houses (MEE\Sondus Ewies)

Neocon hardliner Haley is a “hawk” on the far-right fringe of US politics. She’s militantly hostile toward sovereign states on the US target list for regime change.

As former Trump regime UN envoy, she was an embarrassment to the position she held, using her platform to “tak(e) names” and urge retaliation against nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests.

Straightaway after assuming her post in 2017, she said “(y)ou’re going to see a change in the way we do business.”

Along with other hardliners in Washington from both right wings of the one-party state, her goal was and remains achieving US dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations — endless wars and other hostile actions their favored strategies.

Haley is back with a website called “Stop Communist China.” She’s part of a US hard right-wing cabal that’s aiming to “prevent China’s growing influence.”

Big Lies and deception about Beijing’s successful model and its ruling authorities are her featured tactics with remarks like the following:

“China’s Communist government needs to be held accountable for their role in lying about the coronavirus pandemic (sic), and the US Congress needs to respond – now.”

“Join us in our fight to stop China from gaining influence in America and around the world.”

Last July, capitalist to the bone Forbes magazine praised China’s development since the 1970s, saying the following:

“…China is the world’s leading export nation, ahead of the” US.

Its economic achievements are remarkable by any standard.

“(N)ever before in history have so many people escaped poverty in such a short time as in the past decades in China.”

“According to official World Bank figures, the percentage of extremely poor people in China in 1981 stood at 88.3%.”

“By 2015 only 0.7% of the Chinese population was living in extreme poverty.”

“In this period, the number of (extremely) poor people in China fell from 878 million to less than ten million.”

Whether these numbers are  accurate or not takes nothing away from China’s rapid rise on the world stage as a dominant economic power in a remarkably short period of time.

Forbes claims China’s success “provides clear evidence of the power of capitalism.”

China’s development is attributed to developing a successful economic model that’s different from and free from US control, not victimized by its exploitive practices.

Last August, Ellen Brown explained that US/Western-style neoliberalism “met its match in China.”

Over 80% of its banks are state owned and controlled, loans made to public and private businesses on favorable terms to stimulate longterm growth.

Brown:

If “businesses cannot repay the loans, neither the banks nor the businesses are put into bankruptcy, since that would mean losing jobs and factories.”

“(N)on-performing loans are just carried on the books or written off. No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government…”

China considers its system superior to the West that’s focused on short-term profits by private enterprises.

China’s successful model is superior to the West’s “unfair trade practices.”

US policymakers want China’s system replicating America’s. They want control over the country as a US vassal state.

Michael Hudson said the Trump regime “wants the Chinese to be as threatened and insecure as American workers.”

“They should get rid of their public transportation. They should get rid of their subsidies.”

“They should let a lot of their companies go bankrupt so that Americans can buy them” on the cheap.

“They should have the same kind of free market that has wrecked the US economy.”

Brown noted China’s impressive “long-term growth and development,” its success revealing superiority over the flawed US model.

Instead of pushing China to operate like America, its policymakers should adopt Beijing’s model.

Its success reflects the superiority of its system, not “the power of capitalism,” as Forbes claimed.

The magazine that calls itself a “capitalist tool” praised China’s impressive development that far exceeds anything in the West.

“Hundreds of millions of people in China are far better off today,” Forbes stressed.

The nation is an economic success story unmatched in the West, China heading one day for becoming the world’s leading economy.

It’s why US policymakers want its economic, industrial, and technological development undermined.

In cahoots with other US dark forces, that’s what Haley’s “Stop Communist China” campaign is all about — an agenda doomed to fail.

China and other nations are rising, the US and West declining.

Already thirdworldized for its ordinary people, the disparity between the rich and most others is widening, things heading toward getting worse, not better — notably in the US.

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, human deprivation, and police state control are growth industries in the world’s richest country.

Its fantasy democracy provides cover for steadily eroding human and civil rights, notably under current conditions.

COVID-19 and economic duress provide a pretext for convincing people to sacrifice personal freedoms for greater security, not realizing that both are being lost.

Endless wars on invented enemies and police state control in the US followed 9/11.

What’s ongoing now has the earmarks of 9/11 2.0 in new form.

What Pompeo called a “live exercise” in March (state-sponsored, not natural?) may make the US more unequal, unsafe and unfit to live in than before what’s happening emerged.

What most Americans haven’t grasped is what should concern them most — not coronavirus outbreaks that will pass.

A Final Comment

Haley has high-level political ambitions. She may seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Last year she was a Boeing board member, earning substantial six-figure compensation, perhaps more given her political connections.

In March, she resigned her board position, citing disagreement with bailing out the company.

Her memoir titled “With All Due Respect” was published to pursue her political ambitions, along with cashing in on her public persona.

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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.

State Health officials have acknowledged a bending of the “Covid Curve” seeing smaller spikes in positive cases, or rather, not as exponential of a jump as recorded weeks ago when virus testing capability was much lower.

Additionally, despite the additional virus-related deaths being reported everyday, Illinois Department of Public Health reports those numbers are decreasing too.

Still, the department’s Director, Dr. Ngozi Ezike used part of her time during Sunday’s health briefing to explain how the department determines if a death is related to Coronavirus.

Click here to watch the video.

Essentially, Dr. Ezike explained that anyone who passes away after testing positive for the virus is included in that category.

“If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID [“presumed” or “confirmed” with or without lab confirmation], that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who’s listed as a COVID death doesn’t mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death.” Dr. Ezike outlined.

She reiterated Illinois health officials will continue to work vigorously to protect the state’s most vulnerable populations.

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In a televised CBS interview with Anthony Mason on April 2nd, Bill Gates issued a few key words that have since become iconic in the world of mainstream media.  As has been the general trend whenever the famed co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation declares something that appears to implicate the personal lives of every other person on the planet, these words effectively set the tone for what would become an oft-repeated stanza across the globe. 

Essentially, Gates advised that life is not expected to get back to “normal” until a thorough, international vaccination infrastructure has been implemented.  On Fox News Sunday April 5th, Bill Gates specifically told host Chris Wallace that life “won’t get back to normal” until a vaccine is delivered to the “entire world.”

Within days of these rather bold prescriptions from the Microsoft founder, news headlines around the world were lit ablaze with the parroted advisory that life, as we know it, is “not expected to return to normal until a vaccine is available.”

Quoting directly from Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau during his nationwide address on April 8th,

“normality as it was before will not come back full-on until we get a vaccine for this…”

Similarly, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned the public that life cannot be expected to resume any sense of former stability until a vaccine becomes widely available.  While she was initially setting an optimistic (if you can call it that) timeline of the Fall of 2020, her predictions were cooled by the European Medicines Agency which suggested a more conservative arena of 12 to 18 months.

In the meantime, news media everywhere are essentially saying the same thing; life as we know it is not expected to return to normal until a vaccine program is in some kind of deliverable form for the entire world.  Gates himself offered 18 months as a reasonable time frame and, in the interim, his recommendations are fairly transparent.  As he explicitly stated during his CBS interview,

“the country’s leaders need to be clear: shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere.”

While these words were specifically addressed to the US, it is no mystery that the intentional audience here is humanity in general.

At any rate, the narrative has been set.  As news headlines everywhere have told us, things are expected to be upside down until we are vaccinated on a nearly worldwide scale.

In the meantime, society en masse has now been successfully programmed to quietly sit still and wait out the ensuing lockdowns so that, eventually, our collective discomfort from a bleeding economy and progressive intimacy-starvation leads us to such a state of prolonged desperation where we’re more than happy to bare our arms (and our children’s arms) to the awaiting syringe.

By that time, we will have also been more than sufficiently indoctrinated in the so-called dangers of COVID-19 where we will be ready and ripened for the ‘solution’ to everything that has fragmented our societies since “Wuhan” first became a household name.

In a sobering article recently published in MIT Technology Review, Gideon Lichfield discusses his views of why social life, on a global scale, may never return to us in quite the same way at all.  He warns that “as long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them.”

Lichfield then proceeds to outline some rather cold possibilities of what typical life may come to look like in the future, including cell-phone location data for tracking unwitting risk offenders.  He reports that this would not be for tracking merely the infected themselves, but ultimately for “people who’ve been in touch with known carriers of the virus”.  In other words, we’re talking government policies of keeping tabs on pretty much everybody through constant smart phone monitoring.

He also asserts that

“we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating – legally – against those who are.”

He suggests that possible methods may include universal screening of body temperature fluctuations, specific family size, and even annual income. While noting the very likely risk of creating even more social inequities, Lichfield’s concluding comments are simply that the onus will be on government officials to reflect on the propensity for increased social dysfunction and to work hard to guard against the exacerbation of it.

In the meantime, however, Lichfield makes a repeated point that the public, in response, will somehow learn to adapt to these changes and essentially move forward with whatever form life happens to take in the aftermath of these things. He writes that

“we’ll adapt to such measures, much as we’ve adapted to increasingly stringent airport security screenings in the wake of terrorist attacks.”

Furthermore,

“the intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.”

With these considerations in mind, he correctly points out that

“the true cost will be borne by the poorest and weakest” (MIT Technology Review, March 17/20).

Predictions such as these, in my mind, do not border in any way in the realm of science fiction.  In my opinion, Lichfield’s views appear to have a rather passive flair, particularly when it comes to the issue of widespread public acceptance of such Orwellian approaches to social management.  His repetition of terms like “acceptance,” and “adaptation” in the context of public response lend to an overall theme of involuntary submission; the picture of a society that essentially has no choice in the governance of their affairs and even their very personal lives.

But I suspect that content such as that covered in MIT Technology Review, while accurate on many counts, is nevertheless in the business of building one very specific thing: consumer adaptation to ideals and standards established by high-level and corporate interests.

Let us be clear.  The majority of information that has been given to the international public has been fed and filtered through a severely one-sided source.  It is also no secret that the vast majority of our mainstream media is owned by a literal handful of agencies who have much to gain by steering public perception.  This oligopoly, if you will, consists primarily of AT&T, Comcast, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom CBC, and the Fox Corporation.  Together, these and their subsidiary agencies are indeed very wise in their aims to cash in on the official story of the coronavirus pandemic, primarily since stories of fear tend to sell products of distraction.

While this article is not the place to examine the depth of research and analysis which rightfully questions the nature of our current pandemic, let me simply point out the fact that any self-respecting global citizen owes it themselves to look beyond the confines of the evening news (as well as seeing beyond the unquestioning mass obedience that has taken over our cities) and spend some time to at least review the rest of the information that experts, scientists and independent news producers are trying to share (that is, as long as the self-righteous techno oligarchs haven’t removed them from their hosting platforms yet).

The point is that our history has patiently demonstrated to us, time and time again, that society has often hindered itself by blindly adhering to the official narrative that some persons in power have fed to the overall population.  As Marshall McLuhan put it so succinctly, “all media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

More appropriately, then, the issue of collective values is where I want to dedicate the rest of my thoughts here.  Because, as we have experienced up until this point, it seems to me that we have allowed our shared values to become largely shaped by something most of us don’t even really understand properly.

All of a sudden it seems, we have found ourselves abiding by a set of social norms which, despite how bizarre they must appear to an outside observer, are nevertheless the root of much shaming and mutual policing – principally because there have been enough corporately-paid talking heads and ill-informed leaders who are telling us that social distancing is the “responsible” and “safe” thing to do.

Ridiculous public behavior aside, my graver concern lies in the fact that our worldwide public culture now appears to have been sufficiently neutered and primed for the next stage of this whole illegitimate process.  Specifically speaking, how many of us are actually going to resist the call to be vaccinated once it becomes publically available? Will the social pressure have evolved to such an established norm where resistance will result in serious ostracizing and rejection from our familiar locales and community hubs?  Will we be deemed “unsafe” and “irresponsible” for simply trying to preserve our personal morals of health and safety, in addition to those of our children?  Because let’s face it.  If we’re already heckling people for stepping within our six feet of personal space, then how will we treat those who are deemed guilty for questioning and resisting the very antidote to the thing that is widely-regarded as the very source of our problems to begin with?

My urge is that we remind ourselves of the fact that a collective human response to any manufactured phenomenon begins with the single individual.  I dare say we will not find opportunity to resist vaccination (or any other illegitimately-imposed custom) if we are silently waiting for others among us to step out of line first.  The fact is that our societies have, to a large extent, already been lined up outside the pharmacy.  Global leadership and popular media have made sure of that.  That pharmacy is soon to be opened up and the longer we wait in line then the harder it will be to actually step out of it.

Granted, I don’t know exactly how the rollout of such a vaccine in this instance will look like.  I don’t think many of us do, really.  In all reality, it may look simply like a mandatory thing for people working in certain sectors and with specific populations.  Alternatively, it will be widely promoted as the only reasonable thing to do and most will simply go along with it since too many people (at least up until now) have not bothered to ask the bigger questions about it.

With that in mind, I advise that we openly question the narrative that “life as we know it will not return to normal until we’re all vaccinated.”  After all, we’re the ones buying into that idea and our complicit acceptance of it is what necessarily gives it force.  We breathe life into this type of propaganda purely through our obedience to it and by failing to question the impulses and agendas that have gone into its design.

Let me take a final moment to clarify that I’m not proposing that what we previously enjoyed as our baseline “normal” is really the ideal either.  Far from it.  Pre-COVID ‘normal’ is not the gold standard in my opinion, nor do I imagine that it’s everybody else’s.  It was simply all we knew as a society.

In fact, one thing that our universal lockdown has served, in a positive sense, is to hopefully stimulate us on a deep, personal level to the point of re-evaluating the things in life that matter most.  Granted, some of us have resorted to binging on streaming media and mainstream news gospel (as Viacom would no doubt have intended in the first place).  So rather than launching our vision purely from a place of nostalgia for a perceived era of comfort and familiarity, my intention here is simply to underscore our critical importance as the ultimate deciders of our public fate.  It really comes down to what we are willing to go along with and, as far as I’m concerned, apathy is the most dangerous thing facing our future.

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, the choices we make in the dawn of a questionable vaccine will go a long way in determining our continued evolution as a society.  And while I am not here to criticize one’s personal choice for vaccination, I am nevertheless insisting that one have the right to that very prized principle itself – choice that is in fact personal.  Particularly, by blindly adhering to the official prescription for mass conduct in the meantime, we are letting powerful agencies know precisely which buttons need to be pushed in order to get our species moving and behaving in the most ‘desirable’ way.

So yes, we do have some say in all of this.

 

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Brett Jordan, BSW, MSW, RSW, is a Registered Social Worker who works in a hospital ER in Metro Vancouver.  He writes predominantly on issues of spiritual, emotional and social phenomena. 

Trump Regime Aims to Suppress Iranian Truth-Telling

April 26th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

US hostility toward Iran is all about its sovereign independence — free from US control.

It’s also because of its large hydrocarbon resources the US seeks control over, along with wanting Israel’s main rival neutralized.

Hostile US policy toward Iran reached a unprecedented level under Trump and hardliners surrounding him.

His regime is waging all-out war by other means on the Islamic Republic, a failed policy for over 40 years, yet continues without letup.

In January, Trump’s Treasury Department blocked the .com domain of Iran’s Fars News.

Fars News.ir in English is still available. The website’s valuable truth-telling information warrants following, why the Trump regime wants it silenced.

It targeted the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) the same way, blocking its website by seizing its domain. It’s still available in English at en.irna.ir.

It’s also available at irannewspaper.ir, legal action being taken by the news service to reverse the Trump regime’s illegal action.

On Sunday, IRNA said the hostile action occurred days earlier, adding:

“The name OFAC Holding has been registered in the owner section of the domain of the ‘Iran’ Newspaper website.”

OFAC operates extrajudicially against nations US ruling authorities want transformed into vassal states.

It’s a “financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the US Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of US” imperial interests, IRNA explained.

OFAC is one of numerous US tools used to wage political, economic, financial, and medical terrorism on targeted nations.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the latest Trump regime hostile act, saying the following:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran strongly condemns the decision by the US Treasury Department to block the domain of the Iranian media, which is contrary to the universal declaration of human rights and freedom of expression,” adding:

“The (Trump) regime’s new measure in silencing the media has (further) degraded the US into the main violator of the international legal order.”

Earlier the Obama regime falsely claimed that the US can “seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil.”

Cyberspace is the last frontier of press freedom. Without it, the Internet would be like cable TV, controlled by corporate giants.

Truth-telling would be marginalized and silenced, speech and press freedoms consigned to the dustbin of history — where things are heading without redoubtable resistance.

Republicans and Dems are hostile to free and open expression.

They consider truth-telling on vital issues indecent, obscene, hateful, terrorist-related, and harmful to the imperial state.

If speech, press, and academic freedoms are lost, elimination of other fundamental rights will likely follow.

In Texas v. Johnson, a landmark 1989 flag-burning case, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan  wrote the majority opinion, saying:

“(I)f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”

Thurgood Marshall added:

“Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression (regardless of its) ideas…subject matter (or) content.”

“Our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship.”

The same right applies to what’s published in cyberspace, a digital platform for free and open expression by everyone everywhere — not to be censored or otherwise suppressed by any government.

It’s standard practice by US ruling regimes, wanting the message controlled, conflicting views eliminated.

In response to the Trump regime’s action against IRNA, Iran’s Press TV reported that “Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (earlier) targeted Iranian accounts, including those belonging to broadcasters,” including English-language Press TV.

It’s hit or miss trying to access it online, at times accessible, at other times blocked by the US to silence its truth-telling information — part of the Trump regime’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

Other Iranian media have been targeted to silence them.

Along with US wars of aggression, state terrorism, and other hostile actions, controlling the message is what the scourge of imperialism abroad and totalitarian rule at home are all about.

The only solution is popular revolution. Without it, remaining fundamental rights are at risk of being lost, full-blown tyranny replacing them.

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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.

Back in November 2016, the Indian government decided to remove all 500- and 1000-rupee notes from circulation overnight without prior notice. This effectively removed 86% of cash in a country that was almost 90% cash reliant.  

The notes became worthless and people were asked to hand them in to banks. They would only receive what they had deposited in dribs and drabs over time in the form of new notes. The official reason for this was that the action would curtail the shadow economy and reduce the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activity and terrorism.  

Some who questioned the official narrative regarded this ‘demonetisation’ policy as a ploy to take money from the public and use it to inject much needed liquidity into the banking system that had been bled dry by the outflow of cheap money (and loan waivers) to large corporations which had been milking the well dry. 

The purpose of this article is not to explore the merits or otherwise of this claim or the official government narrative. The point here is to highlight how the policy (also) formed part of an ongoing global ‘war on cash’. In the discussion that follows, it will be shown that Bill Gates is a major player in trying to get the world to go digital and ditch cash, especially relevant given his role in the COVID-19 issue.

When we look beyond the mainstream narrative to gain an understanding of the current crisis, it doesn’t take long before the name of Bill Gates and his foundation appears. And this is no coincidence seeing that he has placed himself firmly in the limelight on prime time TV shows offering his opinion on COVID-19 and what he thinks should be done. He has mentioned the need for maintaining some form of lockdown until a vaccine is discovered.

Much has been written on the Gates Foundation’s close associations with the big vaccine manufacturers and its questionable practices and record in rolling out vaccines in places like Africa and India. US attorney Robert F Kennedy Jr says that top Trump advisor Anthony Fauci has made the reckless choice to fast track vaccines, partially funded by Gates, without critical animal studies. Gates is so worried about the danger of adverse events that he says vaccines shouldn’t be distributed until governments agree to indemnity against lawsuits.

But this should come as little surprise. The Gates Foundation and its global vaccine agenda already has much to answer for. Instead of prioritising projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases and improve health – clean water, hygiene, nutrition and economic development – Kennedy notes that the Gates Foundation spends only about $650 million of its $5 billion budget on these areas.

It is fair to say that the Gates Foundation has an agenda: it believes that many of its aims can be delivered via the barrel of a syringe. It has been well documented in recent weeks about how the Gates Foundation has spread its tentacles into every facet of global health policy. For instance, it is a major funder of the World Health Organization and donates to other pivotal players in the COVID-19 saga, not least Imperial College London whose Neil Ferguson produced hugely flawed data upon which the UK government implemented a lockdown, which entailed sanctioning draconian state powers and stripping of people’s basic rights via the Coronavirus Emergency Act. 

Although often alluded to, Gates’s push for cashless societies is given less attention in the current climate but is just as important. It is not only the major pharmaceutical corporations which the Gates Foundation is firmly in bed with (along with the big agri-food players), it is also embedded with Wall Street financial interests.

The global shift from cash towards digital transactions is being spearheaded by Bill Gates and US financial corporations who will profit from digital payments. At the same time, by controlling digital payments (and removing cash), you can control and monitor everything a country and its citizens do and pay for.

War on cash in India

In India, the informal workforce has been measured at around 85%By 2014, fewer than 35% of Indians above the age of 15 had used a bank account and under 10% had ever used any kind of non-cash payment instrument.  

Although some voices welcomed the 2016 demonetisation policy, as they believed it would push many Indians off cash and towards ‘financial inclusion’, it was, according to economist Norbert Haring, concocted in Washington, not for the benefit of Indians but in the interests of Western financial institutions who are pushing for a cashless world. For a lower income country such as India, which runs on cash, the outcomes were catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, especially those who did not have a bank account (almost half the population) or did not have easy access to a bank.

According to Haring, the global ‘war on cash’ has the backing of some heavy hitters: the major US banks and likes of PayPal, Visa and the Gates Foundation. Writing in 2017, he argued that the cooperation of the Gates Foundation and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been a very tight one. For example, Nachiket Mor, a banker, is director of the Gates Foundation India. He is also a board member of the RBI with responsibility for financial supervision.

Haring indicates that the demonetization policy was carried out on behalf of USAID, MasterCard, Visa and the people behind eBay and Citi, among others, with support from the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He adds that the start of direct cooperation of the Gates Foundation with the RBI on digital payments coincided with the work of the foundation in the President’s Global Development Council, which was to promote cooperation with foreign governments and the private sector with a view to securing US defence and commercial interests.

Bill Gates, Haring notes, gave an example of the link between worldwide digitalisation of payments (via the large US payment companies) and US security interests in a speech in 2015.

Gates said:

“If financial flows go into a digital system that the US is not connected to, it becomes much harder to find those transactions that you want to be aware of or you want to block.”

Demonetisation used the Indian population as a collective guinea pig to see how far the geostrategic interests of the US and those of Wall Street could be secured in a country of 1.3 billion people. The effects of people’s lives did not matter as long as the policy was pushed forward.

And this was carried out with reference to the usual corporate jargon of ‘financial inclusion’. Cash already provides financial inclusion. What does not lead to financial inclusion or any time of inclusion is a neoliberal system that imposes gross inequalities, austerity, joblessness, neocolonialism and the destruction of indigenous practices and cultures under the guise of ‘development’, the deliberate impoverishment of farmers in India, the twisting and writing of national and international laws, the destruction of rural communities or an unjust global food regime.

It is clear that ‘financial inclusion’ really means eliminating the main competitor of digital payments and finance sector profits – cash. In capitalism, every aspect of human life is to be commodified in the quest for fresh markets and profit – in this case, securing payments from payments.  

Norbert Haring quotes Dan Schulmann, CEO of PayPal, who has stated:

“The major competitor we have is cash. Right now, 85 percent of the world’s transactions are done in cash. That is really what we are trying to attack right now.”

He also quotes Strive Masiyiwa, chairman and founder of Econet, a large African mobile phone company with a payment platform:

“Our major competitor is cash. Cash is what we seek to eliminate.”

It seems ‘financial inclusion’ really means denying sections of society their preferred method of payment – cash – to benefit the bottom line of these corporations.

Did Gates and his associates succeed in pushing Indians off cash? By April 2018, the volume of digital payments had doubled. At the same time, however, at the end of May 2019, currency notes in circulation had increased by more than 22% over the pre-demonetisation level. The use of cash was expected to reach $2.45 trillion by 2021, up from $1.5 trillion in 2016, although demonetisation helped digital payments advance by three to four years.  

The 2016 policy adopted a callous and ill-thought-out blanket approach. And it was not as though Indians were clamouring for digital – it was imposed on them.

Under cover of COVID-19 lockdowns, can we expect to see cash being pushed right to the margins when countries emerge from the current crisis (for instance, in an ongoing pandemic culture of fear and paranoia, it would be easy to convince people that notes and coins are potential transmitters of disease, or with mass unemployment we may have universal basic income schemes linked to digital payment systems)? It can already be seen with large stores asking customers to pay by card whenever possible.

Many commentators have discussed how the current crisis has been used to remove basic rights and how vaccines and surveillance will be intensified. What could follow may also see our purchases and behaviour being monitored even further via digital payments. For instance, Haring notes that in Kenya Gates saw little wrong in compelling mobile phone providers to give the authorities the opportunity to monitor all phone calls and mobile payments by telling phone companies to let contracted (private) companies hook up to all routers. The plan was to monitor transactions and use the data to target people with advertising to make even more transactions, thereby driving consumption.

It doesn’t take a great leap of faith to appreciate how in a fully digital system, ‘financial flows’ could be blocked, as Gates implied back in 2015. This already happens in the dollar-centred monetary system. But when there is no cash to fall back on and every single transaction in a society is computerised and can be monitored by the state and private corporations, will the term ‘financial inclusion’ then sound so benign?

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Coronavirus Escalates a Pharmaceutical Arms Race

April 26th, 2020 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

In each era, it is possible to detect a central factor in the struggle for power between nations, which, when achieved, will enable the nation that conquered it to be at an advantageous stage in relation to all the others that have not yet obtained it. The Argentine scholar Marcelo Gullo called this factor a “threshold of power”. The first threshold would have been the National State, the second was the industrialization, the third was the acquisition of territories during the neocolonial period, the fourth was the atomic bomb and the fifth is not yet perfectly determined, but it is linked to the new technologies of the post-atomic age. In a world increasingly devastated by the effects of a global pandemic, where all countries invest everything they have in researching medicines and vaccines against the new coronavirus, we can reflect more deeply on what the new and current “threshold of power” would be.

In England, scientists started on April 23 the first clinical trials in humans of a new experimental vaccine. The information was confirmed by UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Wednesday. According to the secretary, the project is receiving state funding of £20 million. These are his words: “We will support them to the end and give them the resources they need to improve their chances of success”. According to infectologist Andrew Pollard, who leads the research project, the Oxford vaccine center will produce one million doses of the vaccine by September, even though it is in the period of clinical trials, which in itself already reveals how much the project is a bet by the United Kingdom. The English objective is to produce a vaccine before the deadline of one year as stipulated by the World Health Organization, which, undoubtedly, would put the British in an advantage over almost all nations.

Germany also hopes to take advantage on this race. The German government authorized the first clinical trials of a vaccine against the new coronavirus. Two hundred healthy people will participate in the first phase of the tests. Scientists are trying to verify the development of immunity and want to include more people in the tests in a second step of the experiments. But the president of the Vaccination Institute warned that the process will take months before any vaccine is approved and become available to the population at health centers in the country. Leading research to develop the vaccine in Germany are the pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer and the biotechnology company BioNTech SE. Both companies are also awaiting authorization to start clinical trials in the United States.

China, the first country to control the infection, has a position of relative advantage over the other countries, which were later affected. Beijing began clinical trials of an experimental vaccine in March, with doses administered to more than 100 volunteers between 18 and 60 years old in the city of Wuhan. For six months, the volunteers will be followed up, which is why there are no results yet identified regarding the vaccine’s effectiveness. Also in March, the United States began testing an experimental vaccine where the biotechnology company Moderna Therapeutics is conducting the research. Vaccinated volunteers will also be accompanied for the next months.

Russia has announced that it will be ready to start testing its experimental vaccines on humans from June. Rinat Maksiutov, who runs the Vektor state center, said that he plans to carry out the first phase of testing three vaccines on 180 volunteers from 29 June. “Volunteer groups have already been created. We received more than 300 applications”, explained Maksiutov. According to the director, scientists at his laboratory, located in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, developed the vaccine prototypes based on six different technological platforms. Currently, tests continue to be performed on animals. The most promising prototypes will be announced until April 30, when they will be sent for human testing.

There are still other different vaccine projects underway. As we can see, some of the most powerful nations of the world are in a notorious race to develop their own vaccine, which would represent for the respective State a true pharmaceutical autonomy and an extreme advantage in the era of epidemics. In fact, the new coronavirus has brought us a very significant change in the world order, even though we are still far from knowing its greatest effects: we are already in an age of epidemics and pandemics, and the nation that currently obtains pharmaceutical sovereignty will have reached the newest “threshold of power”.

During the Cold War, the atomic bomb represented the limit of national sovereignty. The Soviet Union and the USA competed with each other in a major arms race, in which the nations sought to gain an advantage through war superiority. Currently, in the context of hybrid war and possibly biological weapons, the most powerful nations cannot be content with nuclear power, but must be concerned with investing in biological and pharmaceutical research for defense purposes. Vaccine has become synonymous with power. What we are seeing now is a new arms race, where weapons are the instruments to combat deadly plagues, which will become more and more frequent in a context of globalization and massive circulation of people. We have entered the age of pandemics and the race for vaccines.

Still, the worst case scenario would be one in which private corporations control these vaccines, as this would put companies at an advantage over nation states. Interestingly, we are looking at this situation in most of the West.

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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.

“We’re all going to die!” This feeble appeal came in a Facebook phone call with B. Thapa from deep within Nepal’s eastern hills.

Our conversation was in early March when news headlines from Italy and the U.S. began to alarm Nepalis. With no information about the spread of the disease in his country, this schoolteacher presumed a bleak scenario. “If advanced European societies are swamped with this disease, unable to control it, what can we expect?”

Indeed. The country has a porous 1,000 mile border with India; it has no national health system and its Maoist/Communist-led government has promoted private clinics and hospitals over public healthcare; the prime minister, KP Sharma Oli, had a second kidney transplant without naming any surrogate leader to handle the crisis; there’s almost no medical equipment of the kind needed to test and treat Covid-19; hundreds of thousands of more than five million migrant workers abroad whose remittances keep Nepal economically afloat are now jobless and heading home, and Kathmandu’s swollen population, concerned about congestion in the city, is fleeing to their villages across the land, possibly carrying the virus with them.

Thapa’s fear is repeated by others I speak to. I know about his nation’s truly weak medical system; I agree that the administration is incompetent and deeply corrupt. Yet, I argue, “Nepal’s medics will ensure no one hides the facts. You have an aggressive free press now; it will expose details of any epidemic and force government action.”

Nepali Police Enforcing Quarantine

A month ago, Nepal had yet to report a single Covid-19 death, and only three infected individuals—all traced to Nepalis who’d arrived from abroad. No one believed those figures; the public’s experience on a host of past issues and endemic corruption results in widespread cynicism; the government cannot handle this crisis, they say.

Most Nepalis, like millions of people across the globe, depend on remittances from overseas workers, and food imports (since the outflow of labor leaves fields uncultivated). What options do Nepalis have to handle a looming epidemic?

Without warning, on March 24th the government imposed a countrywide lockdown. Everyone was to remain inside. Schools and businesses were ordered closed. The quarantine is as severe as anywhere in the world, perhaps with the exception of China. Only policemen are seen in the lanes and roads. A colleague in Lahan village in Janakpur near India exclaims that traveling by motorbike and cycle-rickshaws is prohibited. Shopping for food is restricted; inter-city buses are halted; remittance agencies and banks are closed. Police and special security forces are deployed to Nepal’s border with India to prevent migrant laborers from returning home, creating Nepali refugee camps inside India.

There was one announcement of medical supplies arriving by air from China (ordered by the U.N. Population Fund and various embassies). Otherwise thirty million Nepalis seem to be on their own.

Six weeks into the pandemic, one has to scroll far down the coronavirus world register (ranked by number of infections) –past New Zealand with 17 deaths, Japan (348), Singapore (12), Cuba (49), Ghana (10), Lebanon (22), etc. to find Nepal–with zero deaths and just 48 infections reported (as of April 25, 2020).

Many citizens simply don’t believe the government figures, arguing that it’s incapable of even registering cases. Some Nepali news outlets call out the administration’s incompetence. On the other hand, some citizens suggest that that low rate is indeed a result of their strict adherence to the lockdown and the police’s zero tolerance of noncompliance with the quarantine. Privately, people adopt simple home remedies and advice gleaned from the internet. Families remain especially attentive to the abundant deities they live with and worship. And traditional places of refuge—temples and ashrams whose custodians offer hospitality at any time—are expanding their capacity to feed the needy.

Today, criticism of Nepal’s passive administration is surprisingly tepid. For weeks, returning overseas migrant laborers languished at the border camps. Many jobless men were forced to walk 10-14 days from job-sites in distant parts of Nepal to reach their home village. The government seemed insensitive. (Finally, on April 17, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled that the government must provide transport to those walking from Kathmandu and other cities to their home destination.)

“We watch what’s happening overseas. Without the service infrastructure of other countries, we must adopt this strict regime,” another colleague insists. “We have no equipment, no medical facilities, no capable governmental services, and no real leadership.”

Nepal is not a country known for self-sufficiency and civic responsibility. Pampered for decades by an excess of foreign aid and favorable press, its people have customarily looked to outsiders for guidance and cash. This epidemic obliges them to find their own solution.

Another month will reveal a clearer picture of Nepal’s state of health. If they somehow escape a battering by this plague, Nepalis’ strict adherence to the simple formula of distancing and quarantine should bolster national confidence. It could lead to a needed move toward self-reliance.

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

Featured image: Nepal Kathmandu Feeding Center; all images in this article are from Nepali press sources (provided by the author)

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Sometimes it isn’t all that hard to predict the future. All you have to do is listen to what the social engineers are telling you they’re going to do.

For example, when the neocons tell you that we need a “new Pearl Harbor” to justify a transformation of America’s military, you can bet a new Pearl Harbor is going to arrive as soon as they get into office.

And now, after years of Bill Gates warning us that a pandemic was going to strike and utterly transform the world as we know it. He even went so far as to “simulate” the exact scenario we’re living through just before we started living through it.

So, you see my point. Sometimes seeing what’s coming next is just a question of listening to what the planners are telling us. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at four predictions for how the coronavirus crisis is likely to proceed from here.

1. The “Second Wave” Will Be Blamed on the Protesters

There is a second wave of Covid-19 coming in the next few months. We don’t have to speculate about this. Not only have we heard this from all manner of politicians and health “authorities” over the past few months, but it was an integral part of MIT Technology Review’s now-infamous “We’re not going back to normal” article, which revealed how the waves of lockdown and release were going to restructure our lives and condition us into the Corona World Order. And, lest there be any doubt that this is an important part of the plandemic narrative, Bill Gates just reaffirmed it in his latest “GatesNotes” on “The first modern pandemic.”

In fact, the pandemic planners have warned the public of a second (and third and fourth and fifth . . .) wave of this crisis so many times now that we can virtually guarantee that such a “second wave” will occur. Now, such a second wave of sickness could actually occur, if only because—as Dr. Dan Erickson notes in his recent Covid-19 briefing—people emerging from their lockdown isolation will have lowered immune systems and thus be more susceptible to pathogens of all kinds. But this dreaded “second wave” doesn’t even have to take place in reality; the statistical chicanery of the fraudsters can always be relied on to conjure up the impression of a fresh round of infections in the minds of the public. Heck, if the Japanese government can magically conjure a “surge” of SARS-CoV-2 infections into existence the very same day they announced the postponement of the 2020 Olympics (precisely as I predicted), you better believe governments around the world can deliver on the “second wave” narrative regardless of how many people may or may not be ill.

Here’s the rub: Whatever happens, the plandemic agenda-pushers are going to blame this second wave on those evil, dastardly protesters who complained about being put under house arrest. You know, those horrible, heartless grandma-killers who dared to oppose the orders to shutter the business they’ve spent their entire lifetime building up and those detestable, disgusting disease-spreaders who refused to meekly accept their sudden enforced unemployment.

You can see the outlines of this narrative already being planted in the type of coverage surrounding the growing lockdown protest movement. It’s those stupid, ignorant yokels who are out there protesting to “open Fuddruckers” who are putting the lives of those valiant medical heroes on the line by daring to exercise their right to peacefully assemble and demand a redress of their grievances!

So when things are opened up eventually (even just a little bit), you better believe that “second wave” is going to hit full force . . . at least in the media. And every single death in the daily death tally is going to be blamed on people who complained about their house imprisonment and forced unemployment.

2. The Alt Media Are Being Given the Rope to Hang Themselves

This next prediction is based on some observations:

  1. About a year ago, YouTube instituted a new system for displaying subscriber counts that corresponded with a flatlining in new subscribers for many alt media channels (including mine).
  2. Around the same time, they began implementing changes to the recommendation algorithm ensuring that “harmful content” (read: alt media) would not be recommended to viewers nearly as often.
  3. Around the time that the corona crisis really began to kick off six weeks ago, these restrictions seem to have been lifted, with my own channel’s subscriber count surging and my work being routinely recommended by the YouTube algorithm.

Now, I have no insider information about any of these changes here. I can only work with the observations that I (and some of the other alt media figures I’ve talked to) can confirm from my own experience. But there is no doubt in my mind that some of the filters that were artificially suppressing my channel and alt media content in general have been removed.

Yay! Score one for alt media truth, hey?

If only. No, I believe that what we are seeing is actually a push by YouTube and other tech companies to ensure widespread promotion of certain views questioning the official Covid-19 narrative precisely so that they will have the excuse to move ahead with the online purge, probably during that second (or third or fourth or fifth . . .) wave of the crisis. My theory is that we are being set up for a “deadly second wave” not only in the “viral pandemic” narrative, but also in the “deadly infodemic” narrative, and this sudden “flowering” of online conspiracy theorizing is going to be used as an excuse for purging any and all information that does not comport with the official government narrative of the pandemic.

Think of it as an information warfare false flag: push all sorts of “conspiracy” content—from the well-grounded to the utterly outrageous—so that it is a very visible presence in people’s online experience of this crisis. Then, as the pain deepens and things go south, the conspiracy theorists can be blamed (much like the lockdown protesters) for having muddied the waters with “misinformation.”

We’re already seeing the beginning of this narrative playing out. The social media giants have already committed to “combating fraud and misinformation” regarding Covid-19, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has just outlined exactly what they mean by “fraud and misinformation,” namely, anything that challenges the pronouncements of the World Health Organization.

Personally, I’m going to take advantage of this brief window of opportunity to reach as many new people as I possibly can, but I’m under no delusion that the promotion of truth-related information on the controlled Big Tech social media platforms will continue for very long. As I predicted back in New World Next Year 2020, this is likely to be the year that the internet as we’ve known it ends for good.

3. China Will Be Blamed

Isn’t it funny how just a few weeks ago it was a verboten thoughtcrime to suggest that this novel coronavirus could have anything whatsoever to do with the biosafety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan, and now such theories are mainstream headline fodder? Why do you think that is?

I’ll tell you why: It’s because this is World War III.

If that assertion sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly what I wrote in these pages last month. I know you’ve heard me say it before, but it bears repeating: Historians of a future age may just mark the great “coronavirus crisis” of 2020 as the first salvo in the Third World War.

As I’ve also said before, those historians would be wrong. At least, assuming they are writing about the surface-level 2D-chess version of “WWIII,” the one involving “China” vs the “US.” As I laid out here last month, the real World War III is already underway and it’s a war on free humanity by the oligarchs who seek to rule over us. But one can rest assured that if and when those oligarchs decide to truly plunge the world into chaos and let slip the dogs of war, the mis-leaders will use a “coronavirus-was-made-in-a-lab” narrative to justify that war.

The war of words is already underway. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has already raised the possibility that the US Army brought the virus to Wuhan during last October’s Military World Games. In return, Senator Tom Cotton is suggesting that the virus is a leaked Chinese bioweapon, a claim that is now being doggedly pursued in certain parts of the American mockingbird media.

Now, a number of lawsuits are proceeding on the theory that this is a Chinese biological weapon and that the Chinese government should be held liable for all damages caused by Covid-19 and the ensuing shutdown of the global economy (a cool $20 trillion in one suit’s estimation). Naturally, no one is expecting that Beijing would (or would be able to) fork over $20 trillion on a US judge’s order, but if such a ruling were ever made, one can bet that it would add significantly to the case of the China hawks dwelling in Trump’s swamp.

For the millionth time, let me hasten to add that any such China-US war that develops will be a contrived and manipulated conflict, much like the contrived and manipulated Soviet-US conflict of the 20th century. But the lives lost in such a squabble would be all too real.

Make no mistake, you have not heard the last of the squabble between Beijing and Washington over who is to blame for this mess.

5. The Real Bioweapons Are Waiting in the Wings

Speaking of bioweapons, let us not rule out the possibility that we aredealing with a bioweapon of some sort. In fact, there are compelling reasons to believe that, and the knee-jerk dismissal of the idea from the usual crowd is easily debunkable as unscientific claptrap.

Yet another interesting clue along that particular cookie-crumb trail is emerging in the work of Li Lanjuan at Zhejiang University, who is now reporting the discovery of 30 separate strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Some of these strains, including the one prevalent in parts of Europe and in New York City, are capable of producing 270 times the viral load of the weaker strains. The research also uncovered an unusual development in one of the patients studied:

The researchers also found three consecutive changes—known as tri-nucleotide mutations—in a 60-year-old patient, which was a rare event. Usually the genes mutated at one site at a time. This patient spent more than 50 days in hospital, much longer than other Covid-19 patients, and even his faeces were infectious with living viral strains.

Take this research—along with everything else we’re hearing about this virus—with a hefty grain of salt. But, if true, it certainly could add more weight to the theory that we are not dealing with a naturally occurring virus.

Whatever the case, we know that every major military power has spent vast amounts of money developing biological weapons of various sorts. Officially, these biological weapons programs are always done under the pretense that they are for “defensive” purposes. After all, if we don’t develop these weapons then how will we ever be able to defend ourselves against them . . . you know, if the enemy also develops them? (Don’t think about it too hard.)

Of course, Corbett Report listeners know better. The truth is that biological warfare programs are pursued for offensive purposes, too. The fact that the anthrax that terrorized America in the fall of 2001 came from Fort Detrick is just one indication that these programs exist. Heck, the Project For A New American Century even put race-specific bioweapons” on their wishlist in the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses document (see page 60).

The sad truth is that the possibility of a bioweapon being released—and, inevitably, used in a bioterror false flag event to blame on an enemy—has always been there. But now that we are transitioning from the “age of terror” into the “age of bioterror,” that possibility has become orders of magnitude more likely.

So, on that note, I leave you with this bone-chilling observation: Remember that latest “GatesNotes” that I mentioned way back up in Prediction #1? You know, “The first modern pandemic“? Well, here’s how Bill  Gates talks about this current crisis in his conclusion:

Melinda and I grew up learning that World War II was the defining moment of our parents’ generation. In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemic—the first modern pandemic—will define this era. No one who lives through Pandemic I will ever forget it. And it is impossible to overstate the pain that people are feeling now and will continue to feel for years to come.

Yes, not only does he liken this “fight” against the “invisible enemy” to World War II—as every politician and pundit seems to be doing these days—but he even goes so far as to call this Pandemic I. Yes, “Pandemic I.” As in part one. The obvious implication here is that, just like World War I was followed by World War II, so, too, will Pandemic I be followed by Pandemic II.

Kind of makes you wonder what else he has up his sleeve, doesn’t it?

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Trump’s Kool-Aid

April 26th, 2020 by Eric Margolis

‘Take an injection of a strong disinfectant like Dettol or Listerine and call me in the morning.”

President Donald Trump has clearly gone off the rails with his crazy suggestion that the public might try injecting potent disinfectants to combat COVID-19. He sounds increasingly like the late Rev. Jim Jones of toxic Kool-Aid fame and former TV evangelist Jim Baker who is now hawking his own miracle cure for COVID-19.

The difference is that Jim Baker’s nostrum is not lethal while Rev. Trump’s certainly is.

Where did the world’s most powerful elected official – who now threatens war against Iran and Venezuela – get this loopy notion? Likely via Fox News and from some of his circle of louche business cronies.

These cronies were also the likely source of Trump’s infatuation with the potent anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to fight COVID-19. He has been urging Americans to take this drug despite evidence that it does not work against the disease and may cause serious damage.

Senior French doctors have been warning of chloroquine’s dangers for the past month. They say it can provoke dangerous heart arrhythmias. It’s not even that effective against malaria.

Furthermore, this drug can induce seizures and psychotic episodes. I took chloroquine while in the bush country in southern Africa covering fighting between the South African military (SADF) and African National Congress fighters. After a few days I started to hallucinate and go paranoid. I avoided it thereafter.

Chloroquine was developed by German chemists as a direct descendant of quinine, which is derived from the bark of the Amazonian cinchona tree. Spanish conquistadors learned from native people to use cinchona bark to combat malaria. Mixed with gin, favored by the British, it became a West Indian afternoon staple – gin and tonic.

During World War II, American soldiers and marines were fed another cinchona offspring, atabrine, which made them sick from liver damage and turned some GI’S blue.

Vanity Fair magazine claims in its current issue that some of Trump’s business cronies had a plan to flood the greater New York City area with the two chloroquines after the president promoted its anti-COVID properties. This would not be surprising, given Trump’s use of his hotel and golf clubs for ‘official’ business.

On a curious sidebar, Trump’s biggest fan, Brazil’s loopy new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, is in hot water at home for dismissing COVID-19 as a ‘cold’, promoting quack remedies and opposing social distancing. His most respected minister was just fired for contradicting Bolsonaro’s health schemes. The same thing just happened in Washington, where the senior administration official in charge of vaccines, Dr. Rick Bright, was just fired for opposing Trump’s quack cures.

The only thing of possible merit being said by Trump is his claim that strong light may help fight COVID-19. In South Africa, Boer farmers told me they would get local farm workers who fell ill to go lie in the sun for hours to cure their ailments. It worked surprisingly well – or the workers were feigning illness. But injecting light into the body, as Trump suggested, is fantasy.

Trump’s wacky health panaceas won’t fool most educated Americans, but they are a danger to his many credulous supporters who see Queens New York property developer Trump as some sort of Christian holy prophet and follow his medical quackery.

Trump is a gifted politician and entertainer but he’s no saintly Albert Schweitzer. Alarmingly, this man’s finger is on the nuclear button. Now that’s a real worry.

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First published April 10.

Minnesota State Senator Scott Jensen appeared on a local news show to report that doctors were receiving instructions from the Minnesota Department of Health to report Covid19 as a cause of death, even if the patient was never tested.

Senator Jensen, who is also a practising physician, said he had never before in his thirty-five-year career received specific instructions on how to fill out a death certificate.

The apparent policy of Minnesota – to report any and all pneumonia or “flu-like illness” decedents as Covid19 cases, with or without a test – ties in with the US policy as described by the CDC’s official memos.

This is not new information, we covered the guidelines from the CDC, here.

In fact the governments of Italy, Germany, the UK and Austria all doing the same thing.

So, while Dr Jensen’s revelation isn’t as shocking as it would have been just 10 days ago, it does at least demonstrate that, within the medical world, these guidelines are not normal. In a separate interview with Lauran Ingraham, Jensen described the guidelines as “ridiculous”.

According to Jensen, citing a colleague, it is not usual practice to ever put “presumptions or probabilities” on a death certificate, but rather to “stick to the facts”.

The question still hangs in the air: Why do national and regional governments appear to be going out of their way to inflate the Covid19 death statistics?

Dr Jensen has his own idea:

Well, fear is a great way to control people, and I worry about that. I worry that sometimes we’re just so interested in jazzing up the fear factor, that…you know, sometimes people’s ability to think for themselves is paralyzed if they’re frightened enough.

Thoughts to consider.

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Video: Sweden: Europe’s Lockdown Exception

April 25th, 2020 by France 24

First published on April 3, 2020

Here is the link to a 3-minute video of Swedish life that should looks pretty good to everybody. This single example of a nation willing to be a “Control Group” to the massive experiment of locking-down entire nations that is unnecessarily destroying the global economy in favor of some New World Order that will surely emerge shortly.

As of March 31, 2020, out of a population of 9,800,000 there have been 4,605 cases that tested positive, a rate of .0047% of the Swedish population.

Of course nobody knows how many of the positive cases were because of false positive tests (be aware that patient with just a common cold can be tested positive for coronavirus because about ¼ of all common colds are caused by a coronavirus infection and there is also no published data that shows that the newest fast-tracked test kits can reliably differentiate those two possibilities).

91% of the Swedish cases were mild and 393 were serious or critical (9%).

There have been 239 “coronavirus-test-confirmed” deaths in Sweden so far, a mortality rate of 8.5%, although that is again an over-stated figure, since the vast majority of asymptomatic and mild cases and cases that didn’t have easy access to a testing facility were uncounted. The calculated incidence rate for coronavirus infections in Sweden per million population was 490, which means that 999,510 Swedes out of every million were never diagnosed with coronavirus illnesses.

Incidentally, the incidence rate for Americans with coronavirus diagnoses per million as of 3-31-2020 was 650, meaning that 999,350 Americans out of every million have not been affected. The coronavirus death rate for America was 15/1,000,000, meaning that 999,985 Americans out of every million have not died from the coronavirus “pandemic”.

The incidence rate per million Italians was 1,829 and the death rate was 218, meaning that 999,782 out of every 1,000,000 Italians did not die from the coronavirus infection. In Australia there have been 5100 cases with coronavirus infections and 23 deaths, which calculates to a death rate of 0.9 patients per million population. In Brazil there have been 6930 cases and 244 deaths, which calculated to I Brazilian dying per 1,000,000 populations.

Dr. Gary G. Kohls

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With billions across the world under lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, one country stands almost alone. In Sweden, daily life has been continuing largely as normal as authorities have taken a radically different approach to tackling the virus.

Though gatherings of more than 50 were banned on Sunday, down from 500 previously, restaurants, bars and shops are still serving customers.

And while high schools and universities have closed their doors, the country is one of the few places in western Europe where primary schools remain open.

Sweden has recorded more than 4,400 coronavirus cases and 180 deaths. But the government has asked only those who are sick or in at-risk groups to stay home

France 24

To Read Complete Commentary by France 24, Click Here

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Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career prior to his retirement in 2008, primarily helping patients who had become addicted to cocktails of psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His column often deals with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing food industry.

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national; https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/; and 

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

We publish this article largely to inform our readers what UNCTAD is proposing, in consultation with the World Bank and the IMF. The article also provides useful statistics.

UNCTAD does not propose a scheme to cancel the debt. The emphasis is on debt restructuring, which ultimately leads to escalation of the external debt. The debt stranglehold on developing countries is sustained.

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The UN trade and development body today set out urgent measures needed to head off a looming debt disaster in developing countries reeling from the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

UNCTAD released a report that calls for a global debt deal for the developing world. It underlines the vital need for decisive action to provide substantive debt relief to developing countries to free up sorely needed resources to respond to the raging pandemic.

On 30 March, UNCTAD called for a $2.5 trillion coronavirus crisis package for developing countries. Even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, many of these countries faced high and rising shares of their government revenues going to debt repayments, squeezing health and social expenditures.

“The international community should urgently take more steps to relieve the mounting financial pressure that debt payments are exerting on developing countries as they get to grips with the economic shock of COVID-19,” said UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi.

Unsustainable debt burdens

The coronavirus pandemic hits developing economies at a time when they had already been struggling with unsustainable debt burdens for many years, as well as with rising health and economic needs.

Figure 1: Ratio of debt service on public and publicly guaranteed external debt to government revenues, top 20 developing countries, 2018

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on World Development Indicators (WDI), IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO), Economic Intelligence Unit database (EUI) and World Bank Quarterly External Debt Statistics (QEDS).

According to the report, developing countries now face a wall of debt service repayments throughout the 2020s. In 2020 and 2021 alone, repayments on their public external debt are estimated at nearly $3.4 trillion – between $2 trillion and $2.3 trillion in high-income developing countries and between $666 billion and $1.06 trillion in middle- and low-income countries.

Figure 2: Redemption schedules for public external debt, bonds and loans, all developing countries, 2020 and 2021

(Trillions of current US dollars)

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on World Bank QEDS, IIF Global Debt Monitor, IMF Global Debt Database  and World Bank Development Indicators. Note: Data refer to sovereign debt for HICs and to public external debt for MICs and LICs.

The financial turmoil from the crisis has triggered record portfolio capital outflows from emerging economies and sharp currency devaluations in developing countries, making servicing their debts more onerous.

“Recent calls for international solidarity point in the right direction,” said Richard Kozul-Wright director of UNCTAD’s globalisation division that produced the report, “but have so far delivered little tangible support for developing countries as they tackle the immediate impacts of the pandemic and its economic repercussions.”

UNCTAD outlines three key steps to translate the calls into action:

Step 1: Automatic temporary standstills…

Such standstills would provide macroeconomic “breathing space” for all crisis-stricken developing countries requesting forbearance to free up resources, normally dedicated to servicing external sovereign debt.

The standstills, if long and comprehensive enough, would facilitate an effective response to the COVID-19 shock through increased health and social expenditure in the immediate future and allow for post-crisis economic recovery along sustainable growth, fiscal and trade balance trajectories.

Step 2: Debt relief and restructuring programmes …

The programmes would ensure the “breathing space” gained under the first step is used to reassess longer-term developing country debt sustainability, on a case-by-case basis.

On April 13, the IMF cancelled debt repayments due to it by the 25 poorest developing economies for the next six months. This debt cancellation is estimated at around $215 million.

On 15 April, leaders of the Group of 20 leading economies (G20) announced the suspension of debt service payments for 73 of the poorest countries from May to the end of this year.

However, more systematic, transparent and coordinated measures towards writing off developing country debt across the board are urgently needed, the report says. It suggests that a trillion dollar write-off would be closer to the figure needed to prevent economic disaster across the developing world.

Step 3: An international developing country debt authority …

To take the first two steps forward, the UNCTAD report proposes the establishment of an International Developing Country Debt Authority (IDCDA) to oversee their implementation and lay the institutional and regulatory foundations for a more permanent international framework to guide sovereign debt restructurings in future.

This could follow the path of setting up an autonomous international organisation by way of an international treaty between concerned states. Essential to any such international agreement would be the swift establishment of an advisory body of experts with entire independence of any creditor or debtor interests.

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The United States has launched a propaganda campaign by accusing Damascus of its inability to effectively combat the spread of COVID-19 in Syria, the Russian and Syrian coordination centres said in a joint statement.

According to the statement, the United States has influenced the development of a UN plan for sending a humanitarian medical mission to the camp.

“We believe that the document proposed by the UN was developed under the influence of the United States that had launched a propaganda campaign to accuse Damascus of its inability to effectively counter the spread of coronavirus in the [Syrian Arab] Republic. Obviously, the delivery of humanitarian aid to the [Rukban] camp is necessary for the US solely to achieve its goals..” the statement said.

According to the statement, the reception centre for people in the Al-Waha region is equipped with everything necessary to organise quarantine for Rukban residents before they are transported to temporary accommodation centres in the province of Homs.

Moreover, given the critical humanitarian situation in the Rukban refugee camp, and in order to study the real situation with the spread of COVID-19 there, the Syrian Foreign Ministry sent an official request to the UN to conduct an evaluation of medical mission in the camp.

Russia Blames OPCW for Sacrificing Reputation for West’s Ambition in Syria

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has sacrificed its reputation to serve the West’s geopolitical ambition in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

“The OPCW reputation as an authoritative expert body in the field of chemical disarmament has actually been sacrificed to the Middle East geopolitical ambitions of a small group of countries”, the Russian ministry said in a statement.

It argued that the investigative body had been set up in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Only the UN Security Council has the right to apportion blame for chemical attacks.

“[The] activity of this quasi-prosecutor structure, which is dominated by representatives of Western countries, encroaches on the exclusive powers of the UN Security Council and is aimed at the solution of odious political tasks to discredit legally elected authorities of Syria”, it said.

Russia sees the decisions to create the investigative team and fund it with money from the OPCW’s regular budget as illegitimate, the ministry said. It refuses to cooperate with the investigators or finance their activities.

The OPCW published the first report of its newly created investigation and identification team two weeks ago, blaming the 2017 chemical attacks in the Syrian town of Al Lataminah on the country’s government, which denied ever using chemical weapons.

Syrian Ceasefire Guarantors to Hold Ministerial Meeting Via Video Conference on Wednesday

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will discuss the latest developments in Syria in an online meeting with his Turkish and Iranian counterparts, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that the sides would hold the meeting in the Astana format.

The previous summit in this format was held in December when the three Syrian ceasefire guarantors reaffirmed the importance of preserving the country’s sovereignty and the implementation of the 1998 Adana agreement between Turkey and Syria, which allows Turkish troops to temporarily enter Syria as far as 5 kilometres (3 miles) to fight the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Another meeting in the Astana format was scheduled to be held in Iran in March, but it was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Zarif met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Monday and informed him that the trilateral talks would focus on Syria’s Constitutional Committee and the situation in the northwestern province of Idlib.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday said that tensions in Idlib were again on the rise, accusing the Syrian government of being behind it and warning of a potential military response to the developments.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee is a product of long-standing efforts by international mediators to reconcile the Syrian government and opposition. The 150-member body with equal representation of the government, opposition, and civil society was launched on 30 October to work toward drafting a new constitution.

The committee failed to reach a mutually beneficial solution to the Syrian crisis during the two sessions convened so far due to disagreements between various factions. A third round of talks is currently being planned.

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Featured image is from The Nation

A Canadian political analyst praised Iran’s improved military situation after the IRGC successfully launched the country’s first military satellite into the orbit, and said US will suffer heavy casualties in case of any war in the Persian Gulf.

***

“US Navy Commanders are probably aware that if there is war in the Persian Gulf, it will be bloody and they will suffer heavy casualties, so saner heads might prevail. Let’s hope so,” Mark Taliano told Tasnim.

Taliano is an author and independent investigative reporter who recently returned from a trip to Syria with the Third International Tour of Peace to Syria. In his new book titled “Voices from Syria”, he combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes mainstream media narratives about the dirty war on Syria.

Following is the full text of the interview.

Tasnim: US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’s instructed the US Navy to “shoot down and destroy” any Iranian gunboats “harassing” American ships, in the wake of a tense encounter in the Persian Gulf. “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” Trump tweeted. What is your take on this?

Taliano: Empire is crashing and desperate. It seeks to continue its policy of permanent warfare. But it is overextended. Its terrorist proxies in Syria and beyond are losing and will continue to lose. US Navy Commanders are probably aware that if there is war in the Persian Gulf, it will be bloody and they may suffer heavy casualties, so saner heads might prevail. Let’s hope so.

Tasnim: The threat came after Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) on Wednesday successfully launched and placed the country’s first military satellite into the orbit. Do you think Trump wants to undermine this? What are your thoughts on the launch?

Taliano: I applaud Iran’s improved defense situation. Strength against oppressors, particularly Empire, is the only road to peace and successful diplomacy

Tasnim: It seems he is trying to divert attention from his poor handling of the COVID-19 crisis. What do you think?

Taliano: The COVID-19 crisis is a manufactured crisis. The US economy is crashing and police state measures are ramping up. Poverty in the US is climbing exponentially. Trump appears to be trying to put people back to work, to lift the lockdown, but other forces are at play which are prolonging the crisis. Will he seek diversions?  Yes.  Will he blame other countries for the crisis?  Yes.

Tasnim: There are reports and concerns that China could win over the post-coronavirus world and leave the US behind. How this could happen?

Taliano: The COVID-19 crisis is undermining global economies, including China’s powerful economy. This is likely one of the goals behind the manufactured crisis. China does not have military bases all over the world, and it does not seek world domination, unlike Washington. So, I do not think that China seeks to “win over” the post-coronavirus world.  China is a trading nation and will continue to expand trade to benefit global economies. That being said, China will resist US military hegemony if necessary, and it is equipped to do so.

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This interview was originally published on Tasnim News Agency.

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.


Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

If several weeks of state-imposed house arrest and unemployment have maxed out your stress level, wait until you hear what the experts have in mind to “mitigate” a bad seasonal influenza. 

Here is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm, the former mayor of Chicago and a Clintonite: 

Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more. We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications,” he said. “I know that’s dreadful news to hear. How are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half? Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice.

You may remember Mr. Emanuel. He’s a “bioethicist” in favor of so-called death panels. He advocated denying medical assistance to old folks who are not “participating citizens,” that is to say sickly retired elders no longer working and paying mandatory financial tribute to the state and its corporate owners.

It probably shouldn’t be surprising a guy who believes dementia and elderly cancer patients must be left to die advocates a year and a half of a freeze-frame economy that will ultimately kill thousands, far more than a seasonal coronavirus. 

Meanwhile, New York governor Andrew Cuomo believes those demonstrating in opposition to mandated confinement and enforced unemployment and eventual impoverishment and homelessness are crybabies. 

This sort of contempt for the folks who pay Cuomo’s handsome salary is a common trait shared by psychopathic control freaks. It’s fair to say the gov doesn’t really care about New Yorkers who will end up destitute. He is solely focused on what appears to be a nasty influenza and an endless iron-fisted lockdown, never mind the death toll from a nearly moribund economy will far outpace anything produced by COVID-19 (or any other virus).

The political class and technocrats like Ezekiel Emanuel still have time to build fortresses between themselves and an outraged and violent hoi polloi. Maybe that’s why the National Guard and Army have been mobilized. In six months, will every American know who Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy is?

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Musicians Dig Their Own Grave

April 25th, 2020 by Ann Charles

Live music is illegal.

Anyone who has been self-employed understands how difficult it is to make a living do so, let alone as a musician. Lives of many musicians are being destroyed as a result of being banned from working and thus without income. 

One would hope that the music community would harbor a few free thinkers who might say, “Enough! Freedom is essential to the human spirit.” 

As I scour the internet for any sort of dissent coming from musicians regarding the government’s heavy authoritarian response to coronavirus, I am saddened and deeply disappointed. Most everyone is content to push for a government solution to a government-caused problem. I perked up momentarily when I saw an article about Christian McBride’s recent Civil Rights Suite, which pays homage to Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammed Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – brave people who risked and gave their lives for freedom! Alas, the interview was published in JazzTimes on March 16, just as “flattening the curve” was reaching fever pitch and local governments began shutting down businesses across the country. There was no mention of an impending nationwide loss of civil liberties – a poignant moment for jazz’s modern irrelevance. 

Instead of providing much-needed commentary or going on strike to protest ridiculous authoritarian measures imposed without discussion or evidence, musicians race to the bottom by streaming music out of their living rooms, obediently following “mass-telecommuting” orders from their governors and purchasing expensive new microphones and audio interfaces. Many consider themselves lucky that Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom are here to enable them to “connect” with fans in “this new reality”. Even the musicians who are “speaking out” about their plight and recognizing that streaming performances are not sustainable ultimately agree with the statists that the economy needed to be shut down. 

Everyone did such a good job towing the liberal line on Facebook all this time; now is not the time to speak out and ruin what fledgling career you might have left after coronavirus is over (as if it ever will be). Hopefully your live-streamed living room concert doesn’t contain anything that calls into question the state of emergency or the government’s response, since the same internet and media behemoths who trained society to replace open civilized debate with internet likes and comments are now happily charged with censorship. 

The media-hyped narrative surrounding coronavirus has intentionally induced mass hysteria instead of logical discourse and action. Since the controlled media dominates the narrative of holy essential workers fighting the invisible enemy while the rest of us howl in support, would-be dissenters feel pressured to stay silent. Artists are being punished in the same way as other “nonessential” workers, but are also expected to champion the lockdowns in order to stay in line with their “liberal” friends and fans, in direct conflict with their self-interest. 

Government and media are waging psychological and economical warfare against the public. Where are the minority and civil rights advocates who were once outspoken about the police state? Where are the choirs of virtue-signalers and women’s marchers that were “absolutely terrified” of a Trump presidency? Is anyone calling out or resisting the media’s psychological terror program? Now that all of our constitutional rights have been suspended and a lying authoritarian is in charge, the response from the creative left, other than digging their own grave, is crickets. 

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Ann has made a living as a pianist and music teacher for almost 15 years. She is passionate about collaborative live music, freedom, and peace.

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Washington’s Dr. Strangelove. The Disrupter in Chief

April 25th, 2020 by Global Research News

There are lots of choices for this dubious distinction from elements of both right wings of Washington’s one-party state.

As president and commander-in-chief with his finger on the nation’s nuclear trigger, Trump is most dangerous — notably because he’s easily manipulated by hardliners surrounding him.

Psychology Professor Ryne Sherman earlier said his “dark side (emerges) when he lets his guard down.”

He scores “low on interpersonal sensitivity…prudence, (and) doesn’t shy away from confrontation, or really care much about peoples’ feelings.”

Commenting on what he called “the strange case of Donald J. Trump,” Psychology Professor Dan McAdams said his persona “is much stranger than any diagnostic category can convey,” adding:

He and die hard supports view him “like a superhero, like a primal or mythic force, but less than a person…in that he is not held morally accountable in the same way (as) other persons” by his base or society.

He’s a “disrupter-in-chief…There is no narrative flow to (his) life…in his own head.”

“This is why he is able to lie with such shameless abandon, and why he is unpredictable from one moment to the next. All tactics, no strategy.”

He operates like dictatorial strongmen, yet “is still a one-off…not fully like other dictators.”

He’s “low on (intellectual curiosity/creative imagination) openness…medium on neuroticism.”

Based on judgments of over two dozen mental health experts, Psychology Today earlier said they observed “overwhelming evidence of profound sociopathic traits” and malignant narcissism in Trump’s persona.

Professor of Psychiatry and Law James Gilligan stressed that “(t)he issue here is not whether…Trump is mentally ill. It is whether he is dangerous,” adding:

“He publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged followers to beat up protesters.”

“He approves of torture. He has boasted of his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault.”

It’s “naive (to see) him (as) a ‘normal’ president. He is not, and it is our duty to say so.”

Does he combine traits of fictional former Nazi technocrat, deranged defense strategist who’s sexually aroused by the notion of nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove, and likewise deranged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark satire?

At his nationally televised Thursday COVID-19 briefing to the press, Trump defied medical science and common logic, suggesting use of disinfectant injections to kill the coronavirus in infected individuals, saying:

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?”

“Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Trump is a geopolitical, economic, medical science know-nothing.

His affairs of state knowledge comes largely from what regime neocon hardliners feed him and Fox News disinformation, his favorite TV channel.

His Thursday remark followed a scientific presentation that showed sunlight, humidity, isopropyl alcohol, and disinfectants like bleach with chlorine kill COVID-19 on surfaces quickly.

Clearly not intended for human consumption, they’re toxic and potentially lethal if ingested orally or by injection.

In response to Trump’s dangerous remark, the maker of Lysol stressed that its product and other disinfectants should never be administered “into the human body through injection, ingestion or any other route,” adding:

“Our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines.”

Toxicologist Rob Chilcott warned that “(i)nject(ing) bleach or disinfectant at the dose required to neutralize viruses in the circulating blood would likely result in significant, irreversible harm, and probably a very an unpleasant death.”

Pharmaceutical medicine Professor Penny Wood explained that “UV irradiation and high heat are known to kill virus particles on surfaces,” adding:

“(N)either sitting in the sun, nor heating, will kill a virus replicating in an individual patient’s internal organs.”

Committee to Protect Medicare executive director Dr. Rob Davidson issued the following statement in response to Trump’s dangerous remark, saying:

“Please do not ingest, inject, inhale, or otherwise use any disinfectant,” adding:

“And do not start using tanning beds or sunning without sunscreen.”

“If (Trump’s Thursday briefing) didn’t convince networks to stop broadcasting the pressers, nothing will.”

Former US Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub tweeted:

“As a public service, please stop airing these coronavirus briefings. They are endangering lives. And please do not drink or inject disinfectant.”

Injecting or otherwise ingesting toxins can kill or cause irreparable harm.

There are no known drugs or other ways to successfully treat COVID-19.

Individuals ill or with symptoms of the virus should seek and follow sound medical advice from their physician.

As for Trump’s bizarre daily press briefings, they’re exercises in electioneering and self-aggrandizement that can be harmful to human health and welfare.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
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TRASMESSO DA BYOBLU e PANDORATV

Sabato 25 Aprile 2020 DALLA ORE 15

In Diretta Streaming, 25 Aprile 2020

Click to VIEW at 15pm (Italia, CET), 9am (EST, USA, Canada)

April 25, 2020

https://www.byoblu.com

***

Il 25 aprile è una data importante nella storia dell’Italia. Commemora il 75 ° anniversario di Liberazione, che è anche l’anniversario della resistenza.

L’anno scorso ci siamo incontrati a Firenze il 7 aprile, in coincidenza con il 70 ° anniversario della fondazione della NATO.

Il tema della nostra conferenza dell’anno scorso era USCITA NATO. NATO EXIT

L’evento è stato organizzato dal Comitato italiano No Guerra, No NATO, in collaborazione con il Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

La Dichiarazione di Firenze è stata redatta dal Comitato italiano e dal CRG.

Il 25 aprile 2020, commemorando la liberazione dell’Italia. Esprimiamo la nostra solidarietà al popolo italiano. Allo stesso tempo, esprimiamo la nostra preoccupazione per le basi militari statunitensi stabilite in Italia, immediatamente istituite dopo la seconda guerra mondiale.

Dobbiamo riflettere sulla nostra storia. Era una liberazione o un’occupazione?

L’Unione europea è militarizzata. Il Pentagono è attivamente coinvolto sotto bandiera della NATO in Europa occidentale e orientale.

L’Italia come molti altri paesi sta attualmente attraversando una grave crisi. Quest’anno, il 25 aprile, che commemora la liberazione dell’Italia, non siamo in grado di incontrarci a Firenze per discutere e discutere della “crisi del coronavirus” che sta colpendo milioni di persone in tutto il mondo.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 25 aprile 2020

Andremo in onda online, accogliendo numerosi oratori.

Il tema della nostra conferenza online:

Liberiamoci del Virus della Guerra

L’anno scorso ci siamo incontrati a Firenze. Quest’anno a partire dalle 15:00 CET, 9:00 (EST).

***

The 25th of April is an important date in Italy’s history. It commemorates the 75th anniversary of  Liberation, which is also the Anniversary of the Resistance.

Last year we met in Florence on the 7th of April, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO.

The theme of our conference last year was NATO EXIT.  

The event was organized by Italy’s Comitato No Guerra, No NATO, in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The Florence Declaration was drafted by Italy’s Comitato and the CRG.

On April 25, 2020, Commemorating the Liberation of Italy. We express our solidarity with the people of Italy. At the same time we express our concern regarding the US military bases established in Italy immediately established after World WarII.  

We must reflect on our history. Was it a Liberation or an Occupation?  

The European Union is militarized. The Pentagon is actively involved under banner of NATO in both Western and Eastern Europe. 

Italy like many other countries is currently experiencing a major crisis. This year on the 25th of April which commemorates Italy’s Liberation, we are not able to meet in Firenze to debate and discuss the “coronavirus crisis” which is affecting millions of people Worldwide.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 25 April 2020

We will be airing online, welcoming numerous speakers.

The Theme of our online conference:

Lets Get Rid of the War Virus. Liberiamoci del Virus della Guerra

Last year we met in Florence. This year starting at 3pm CET, 9am (EST) 

TRASMESSO DA BYOBLU e PANDORATV

Sabato 25 Aprile 2020 DALLA ORE 15 In Diretta Streaming, 25 Aprile 2020

Click to VIEW on 15pm (Italia, CET), 9am (EST, USA, Canada)

https://www.byoblu.com

 

 

Questa crisi è un atto di guerra economica

C’è una grave crisi sanitaria che deve essere debitamente risolta. E questa è una priorità numero uno.

Ma c’è un’altra dimensione importante che deve essere affrontata.

Milioni di persone hanno perso il lavoro e i risparmi. Nei paesi in via di sviluppo prevalgono la povertà e la disperazione.

Mentre il blocco viene presentato all’opinione pubblica come unico mezzo per risolvere una crisi globale di salute pubblica, i suoi devastanti impatti economici e sociali vengono casualmente ignorati.

La verità non detta è che il romanzo coronavirus fornisce un pretesto a potenti interessi finanziari e politici corrotti per far precipitare il mondo intero in una spirale di disoccupazione di massa, bancarotta e povertà estrema.

L’anno scorso ci siamo incontrati a Firenze. Quest’anno a partire dalle 15:00 CET, 9:00 (EST), trasmetteremo online in diverse lingue.

***

This crisis is an act of economic warfare

There is a serious health crisis which must be duly resolved. And this is a number one priority.

But there is another important dimension which has to be addressed.

Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their savings. In developing countries, poverty and despair prevail.

While the lockdown is presented to public opinion as the sole means to resolving a global public health crisis, its devastating economic and social impacts are casually ignored.

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy and extreme poverty.

Last year we met in Florence. This year starting at 3pm CET, 9am (EST) we will be broadcasting online in several languages.

Below is the text of Florence Declaration

 

Text of The Florence Declaration

Adopted by more than 600 participants to the Florence No War No NATO Conference, April 7, 2019.

Original in Italian. Translations into English, French, Russian, Spanish. The debates and discussions were chaired by renowned author and geographer Manlio Dinucci.

The event was organized by Italy’s Comitato No Guerra, No NATO, in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The Florence Declaration was drafted by Italy’s Comitato and the CRG.

The risk of a vast war which, with the use of nuclear weapons, could mean the end of Humanity, is real and growing, even though it is not noticed by the general public, which is maintained in the ignorance of this imminent danger.

A strong engagement to find a way out of the war system is of vital importance. This raises the question of the affiliation of Italy and other European countries with NATO.

NATO is not an Alliance. It is an organisation under the command of the Pentagon, and its objective is the military control of Western and Eastern Europe.

US bases in the member countries of NATO serve to occupy these countries, by maintaining a permanent military presence which enables Washington to influence and control their policies and prevent genuine democratic choices.

NATO is a war machine which works for the interests of the United States, with the complicity of the major European power groups, staining itself with crimes against humanity.

The war of aggression waged by NATO in 1999 against Yugoslavia paved the way for the globalization of military interventions, with wars against Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and other countries, in complete violation of international law.

These wars are financed by the member countries, whose military budgets are increasing continually to the detriment of social expenditure, in order to support colossal military programmes like that of the US nuclear programme which costs 1,200 billion dollars.

In violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the USA is deploying nuclear weapons in five non-nuclear NATO States, under the false pretext of the ”Russian menace”. By doing so, they are risking the security of Europe.

To exit the war system which is causing more and more damage and exposing us to increasing dangers, we must leave NATO, affirming our rights as sovereign and neutral States.

In this way, it becomes possible to contribute to the dismantling of NATO and all other military alliances, to the reconfiguration of the structures of the whole European region, to the formation of a multipolar world where the aspirations of the People for liberty and social justice may be realised.

We propose the creation of a NATO EXIT International Front in all NATO member countries , by building an organisational network at a basic level strong enough to support the very difficult struggle we must face in order to attain this objective, which is vital for our future.

Video: 70 Years of NATO. The Florence Declaration Calls for NATO-Exit

Video:  70 Years of NATO; The Historical Significance. (Florence, April 7, 2019)

NATO: THE NEED TO EXIT “THE WAR SYSTEM”

 

 

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At President Trump’s April 18 press briefing on the Covid-19 Pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the US response to the outbreak, criticized China’s reports on the Covid-19 data.  

She did so by showing a chart with data from the following countries.  (I have updated the chart with data[1] from the New York Times of April 19, but the two data sets differ by only a small and negligible amount.)

.

Mortality, Deaths per 100,000 population

  • Belgium: 49.8
  • Spain: 43.8
  • Italy: 39.2
  • France: 29.4
  • UK: 24.2
  • Netherlands: 21.4
  • USA: 10.9
  • Iran: 6.3
  • Germany: 5.2
  • China: 0.3

Dr. Birx called China’s low number “unrealistic,” saying, “I put China on there so you could see how basically unrealistic this could be.”  That was after President Trump pointed at China’s number and interrupted Birx to ask rhetorically, “Excuse me. Does anybody really believe this number? Does anybody really believe this number?”  (Transcript here; see minute 37:08 and following.)

The argument that Blix and Trump were making was clear.  China’s number was way out of line with the others, lower by more than a factor of 10.  Therefore, China’s report was a lie.

But in her chart Dr. Birx omitted data coming from countries of East Asia and nearby which have been praised by the US media for their performance and whose data are unquestioned in the West.  Here are some relevant omitted data, taken again from the New York Times of April 19, with China included again for comparison

Deaths per 100,000 population

  • South Korea: 0.5
  • Japan: 0.5
  • Australia: 0.3
  • China: 0.3
  • Singapore: 0.2
  • Taiwan: <0.1
  • Hong Kong: <0.1

China’s number falls right into line with that of neighboring countries!  Birx’s exercise in fact is a classic example of lying by omission, a half truth being a full lie.

Either Dr. Birx was aware of this data and dishonestly withheld it, or she was not aware of it and she is incompetent.  Neither conclusion is very comforting.  Trump is to be criticized both for his jumping in to bash China and for tolerating someone like Birx with the direction of the government’s response to the pandemic.

These data make it quite clear that countries of East Asia and Australia have performed better than the US and Europe.  Why is this?  Two categories of explanation suggest themselves.  First different strains of the virus may differ in lethality. There is no proof for this, but there is some suggestion of it in laboratory tests.

A second reason for the better performance of East Asian countries and Australia is that they paid attention to what China was doing, perhaps because they are neighbors and better informed of what was going on in China.  Much news about China is simply not reported by the mainstream media in the US and among US “allies.”  In this case, however, concern about a developing pandemic right next door may have lofted news from China over information blockade.  These countries may have seen that China had accumulated considerable experience with the virus and at great cost in life and suffering was having success in stopping its spread.  As a result, they followed what China did in many respects.

But no matter the reason, China’s data fall right in line with many of its neighbors. That is the main point. The bottom line is that these data provide us with no reason to doubt China’s reporting. And the correspondence between the data China released and other regional data is consistent with the fact that China reported Covid-19 deaths accurately.

Since so much attention is devoted to fact checking Trump’s press conferences, I thought surely the press would have picked up on this obvious manipulation of data.  I checked on the fact check of the press conference by CNN, no friend of the Trump administration, and there was no mention of this lie by omission.  Next, I checked PBS, a pillar of probity and respectability and also no friend of Trump.  PBS does a brief online look at each press conference with anchor Hari Sreenivasan and Zachary Green.  They showed Birx’s chart and noted Trump’s comments but made no criticism of the omitted data.  A check of the NYT, another arch-foe of Trump, on the following day disclosed no mention of the Birx-Trump deceit.

How can this be explained?  One cannot help but feel that the idea of Chinese malfeasance in all things has become so deeply embedded in the body politic that to challenge charges made against China is now beyond the pale.  No charge, no matter how unfounded or contrary to actual fact, is too brazen to report without a moment’s consideration.  In fact, to tell the truth in such a situation may damage the career of a rising journalistic “star.”

Why are we to be concerned about this matter? Because China’s experience has had much to teach us.  And since China is now emerging from the recession caused by the pandemic, it may have more to teach us as we move to economic recovery.  For example, to get back to normalcy, China has now rolled out large scale testing on a territory roughly the size of the US.  How is that working and how might it be improved?  To ignore China’s experience without careful evaluation at a time like this could well end up as a self-destructive act.

But there is an even bigger danger here.  There has been a growing antagonism between China and the US since Obama’s ill-advised “Pivot” against China followed by Trump’s equally ill-advised trade war.  Now we find Trump and Biden competing to be the number one China basher.  The press conference of April 18 falls into this pattern, allowing Trump to parade as tough on China and escape from a thrashing by a China-hostile media for his earlier praise of Xi and China for their response to Covid-19. To take the route of hostility to China can lead to a clash between two economic giants and nuclear powers, which could lead to a disaster for all humanity.  As Henry Kissinger reminded us some time back, armed conflict between the two giants could bring the same level of devastation to all the world that WWI brought to Europe.  And that is likely to be an underestimate. Let us step back from this path before it is too late.

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John V. Walsh can be reached at [email protected]  He has written about issues of war, peace and empire, and about health care, for Antiwar.com, Consortium News, DissidentVoice, CounterPunch, The East Bay Times, The Mercury News and others. Now living in the East Bay, he was until recently Professor of Physiology and Cellular Neuroscience at a Massachusetts Medical School.

Note

[1] Data is taken from this site: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html  Data is refreshed several times daily so the latest data will be posted there.

Hold mouse arrow over the country and the deaths per 100,000 will appear.  Data is refreshed several times daily.

Four Dead in Ohio – “Feeding the Beast”…

April 25th, 2020 by Philip A Farruggio

Singer/Songwriter Neil Young wrote the song ‘Four Dead in Ohio’ for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young:

Four Dead In Ohio Lyrics

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are gunning us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.

It was a beautiful Spring day in May of 1970 when four Kent State University students, protesting the illegal bombing of Cambodia and the entire Vietnam (so called) War, were gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops, many the same age as them. The event made national headlines and ignited a mass of students from literally hundreds of universities to go on strike. This writer was in my third or fourth year at Brooklyn College, who remembers, and I finally became outraged. Up until then, at my own admission, I only cared about playing on our soon to be first year football team, and of course, chasing women. Oh yeah, and enjoying the pot that my friends and I smoked each  and every Friday and Saturday night. I was just 20 years of age and really ‘feeling my oats’. Yet, when the news made the daily headlines about those four kids, well, just like ME, I swayed over to the campus looking for action. A large group of us literally chased the military recruiters from our campus. No violence. Those guys probably knew deep down that the shit was gonna eventually hit the fan over this ongoing Amerikan tragedy.

The social shock from the dual killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy still filled many of our young minds two years after the fact… Or should I say facts? Two well respected leaders gunned down and by now, 1970, the conspiracy theories were holding lots of water.

I had already known about The Beast, ever since, believe it or not, I read the 1967 Playboy magazine interview with New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison about the JFK assassination. It opened my eyes to what probably happened, as compared to what my government was telling us. The more I read of that fateful day in November of ’63 the more I knew, intuitively, that The Beast was real. So, we closed down the campus, took over the school  president’s office, and waited for the cops to come. That event never occurred (to my satisfaction) and we ended the strike after a few days. There were some concessions made, nothing of major importance, but enough to make us say that ‘We Won!’. Those four kids at Kent State didn’t bask in our glory, did they? They say, from historians looking back , that President Nixon was affected enough to start realizing that he had to get out of this mess called Vietnam. Of course, when it comes to The Beast and how it operates, it only reacts when it already has the table turned. So, Nixon waited it out until he won re-election 30 months later to then slowly use the ‘Get out of jail free’ card beginning the process… of course his impeachment/resignation left it to another. Point is, the Kent State killings, coupled with the illegal bombing of another sovereign nation, slowly woke up our Moms and Dads to the truth of it all: This (so called) war was not worth it! I can recall, at an Easter dinner a few weeks earlier, with all my aunts and uncles present, the famous words of my father, who voted for Nixon in 1960, Goldwater in ’64 and Nixon again in ’68: “Let me make this clear. Before I see either of my two sons being sent to Vietnam, I’m gonna personally drive them to Canada!! And that’s that!”

Perhaps it was when a guy a few blocks away from me, Tommy L., joined the Marines and came home in a box. I didn’t know him well at all, but I knew his mom. She was our crossing guard on Ocean Ave, which was right by our church, St. Edmunds. Each Sunday after Mass we would see Mrs. L. as we crossed Ocean Ave. She always had this beautiful smile and greeted everyone with it. After her son died in the Nam, you could see how she now had what I always called ‘The Mona Lisa smile’ from that famous DaVinci portrait. It had that look, to me, of someone who was saying ‘If you only know what I am going through’. Then, a year later, another guy from our neighborhood, a Polish born son of my friend’s building superintendent, Vito P., was killed on some famous (for whom?) hill in Vietnam. The last time I saw Vito was, coincidentally, at Mass in St. Edmunds. He was home on leave from the Army, standing there in his Ranger uniform, replete with beret tucked onto his shoulder. Months later we got the word. I used to see his kid brother, who I knew adored Vito, at the school yard where we played softball. He would be hanging out with characters that I would always warn him against. He ignored me, and got into glue sniffing, Quaaludes and finally horse (heroin). Sometime later, maybe a few years after Vito’s death, his brother OD’d and died. What is it they say ‘When the war comes home’? Well in May of 1970 it had… and transformed me into the activist anti empire and anti war writer and street corner protestor  I have been since then.

And what about ‘Feeding the beast’? Well:

1933 Germany: Reichstag fire and Enabling Laws to snuff out political parties and dissent

1964 Amerika: Gulf of Tonkin resolution based upon imaginary attack by North Vietnam on our ship

1991: Saddam Hussein encouraged by US non commitment to Kuwait to invade Kuwait over oil drilling dispute. War on Iraq followed

2001, September 11th- Twin Towers and Pentagon attacked in highly suspicious manner, leading to the Patriot Act, increased military spending and 2nd war on Iraq to follow

March 19th , 2003 – Illegal and immoral war on Iraq over WMDs to this day never found. More increases in military spending along with occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and NATO servicemen dead or damaged for life.

2008-09 – Subprime scam costs taxpayers trillions of dollars to bail out failed Wall Street companies.

Meanwhile, health care system is still a joke as is the needs of infrastructure throughout Amerika.

2011 Libya- USA led NATO carpet bombing of Libya, causing death , destruction and refugee crisis that has still caused havoc throughout the region and Europe.

2020 Pandemic- Trump crew ignored the crisis for almost 2 months, even denying it as a HOAX. Our economy is teetering on default as the super rich get most of the bailout. Oh, but the increased military spending survives, eating up around HALF of our federal tax revenues.

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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, Cross Currents 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].

After weeks of dismissing it as a liberal “hoax” designed to unseat the president, brushing the virus off as no big deal and under control, the Trump administration is clearly floundering in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite weeks of warning where it could have taken precautionary steps, the United States currently has four times the confirmed cases and twice the deaths of any other country. At the same time, the countries it is currently placing under economic siege, totaling around a quarter of the world’s population, are faring far better and leading the global fight against the coronavirus.

China, for instance, the first epicenter of the outbreak, has managed to slow its new COVID-19 cases to a trickle, reopening for business after losing 4,632 people – a number that, in the context of a stark April reality, appears impressively low. Although much of the discourse in the West condemns the Chinese government’s supposedly incompetent or slow response to COVID-19, the reality is that Beijing alerted the World Health Organization on December 31, when just 27 cases (and no deaths) had been identified, with authorities not yet even aware that the condition was a coronavirus.

The country is at the forefront of the production and distribution of protective and medical equipment throughout the world and, along with Russia (another sanctioned state) is one of the few nations to fly medical personnel around the world to help other countries. Russia even sent a planeload of cargo to the United States, despite the American sanctions hurting its economy. While their actions have been presented in corporate media as cynically trying to “curry favor” abroad, the aid has been much appreciated in countries suffering under the pandemic. In contrast, the U.S. has led the world in stealing or requisitioning supplies destined for other nations.

Another sanctioned state exporting doctors across the world during the pandemic is Cuba, the island nation is sending medical staff to neighbors like Haiti, Venezuela, Suriname and Jamaica and also further afield to Italy. “This is a global battle and we have to fight it together,” said nurse Carlos Armando Garcia Hernandez, capturing the medical internationalist spirit of Cuban medicine pioneered by Che Guevara, who quipped that, “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.” A Cuban antiviral drug, Interferon Alpha 2b, has also proved successful in boosting patients’ immune systems, helping them fight off the coronavirus, and is now being used worldwide.

Venezuela, meanwhile, struggling under crippling U.S. sanctions that have claimed the lives of at least 100,000 people according to an American UN Special Rapporteur, has mobilized to fight the virus head on. The country has conducted twice as many tests as any other South American nation, but only 288 COVID-19 cases have been found, leading to only 10 deaths. Even before any cases were confirmed, President Maduro declared a health emergency, quickly closing public buildings like theaters and restaurants. His administration rapidly organized a huge online database where citizens could inform authorities of their symptoms. Medical professionals visited tens of thousands of people in their own homes, distributing test kits and advice. Maduro decreed the suspension of all rent and utility bills during the crisis, also banning the firing of workers.

A testament to the country’s efforts is that thousands of Venezuelan expats in the U.S., at least 92 percent of whom voted against Maduro in the 2013 elections, came back to the country during the pandemic, suggesting they are far more confident in Venezuela’s handling of the crisis.

Meanwhile, Vietnam, a country not currently sanctioned but having faced Washington’s wrath for decades, surely earns the top prize in handling the virus. Despite recording its first positive case just two days after the first American one, authorities have managed to limit the outbreak to just 268 cases and zero deaths. This is not because they are not testing, far from it. In fact, the country has designed, developed and mass produced multiple test kits all costing less than $20 each and giving dependable results in less than 90 minutes.

Those arriving from abroad are quarantined for two weeks while anyone coming to a major city or building has their temperature checked. Whole villages and towns have been fenced off due to one positive test. There is certainly an authoritarian element to their response; those lying about their past whereabouts or found to be spreading false information about the pandemic can face charges. However, the response has hinged upon the strong collective solidarity of the Vietnamese people, many of whom have likened the present events to the Tet Offensive, where millions united in secret to drive the American invaders back in a surprise attack.

In Iran, one of the first global hotspots and a country that planners in the U.S. were gleefully predicting would fall in on itself under the strain, has managed to get to grips with the pandemic. The number of new daily cases of COVID-19 has been falling day-on-day since March 30.

Ironically, Mohammad Morandi, a professor at the University of Tehran, claims the crippling sanctions that blocked Iranian oil exports have inadvertently better prepared them to deal with the total collapse in global oil prices than U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Qatar.

While the sanctioned countries vary greatly in their level of human development and the democratic credentials of their governments, they all share one thing in common: they have refused to buy into a U.S.-led neoliberal economic order that appears totally unprepared and unable to come to terms with a globalized pandemic. Countries that have been the most enthusiastic adopters of neoliberalism have, not coincidentally, found their individualistic ideology that promotes greed and discourages collective solutions sorely lacking in tackling a public health crisis that threatens the entire world.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingThe GuardianSalonThe GrayzoneJacobin MagazineCommon Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

First published on February 24, 2020 amidst the onslaught of the Financial Crisis and the “Economic War against China”

The Budget for the Future of America, presented by the US government, shows the priorities of the Trump Administration in the federal balance sheet for fiscal year 2021 (which begins on 1 October this year).

Above all, the intention is to reduce social spending – for example, the budget is cutting the allocation required by the Department of Health and Human Services by 10 %. While the same authorities tell us that in the USA, from October to February, approximately 10,000 deaths out of a population of 330 million were caused by colds. An information carefully gagged by the major medias, which launched a world alarm for the 770 deaths caused by the coronavirus in China, a country of 1,4 billion inhabitants which proved capable of deploying exceptional measures to limit the damage caused by the epidemic.

We cannot avoid suspicion about the real objectives of the invasive media campaign, which is spreading terror about everything Chinese, when, in the motivation of the US budget, we read that “America is facing a challenge from rival national states, particularly China and Russia”.

China is accused of “waging an economic war against the United States and their allies with cyber weapons” and “seeking to fashion in its own image the Indo-Pacific region, which is critical for the security and economic interests of the USA”. So that “the region may be free from the evil Chinese influence”, the US government is giving 30 million dollars to the “Global Engagement Centre, in order to block the propaganda and disinformation from China”. In the context of “growing strategic competition”, the US government declares that “the Budget’s priority is to finance programmes which increase our military advantage against China, Russia and all other adversaries”.

For this purpose, President Trump has announced that “in order to guarantee internal security and promote the interests of the USA on the exterior, my budget requires 740,5 billion dollars for national Defense” (while it requires only 94,5 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services).

The military allocation includes 69 billion dollars for war operations overseas, more than 19 billion for 10 war-ships and 15 billion for 115 F-35 fighters and other aircraft, plus 11 billion to potentialise ground-based weapons.

The Pentagon’s scientific and technological programmes need 14 billion dollars, destined for the development of hypersonic and directed energy weapons, spatial systems and the 5G network.

These are only a few of the items in a long list of expenses (from public money), which include all of the most advanced weapon systems, bringing colossal profits to Lockheed Martin and the other war industries.

To the Pentagon’s budget must be added various expenses of a military nature listed in the budgets of other departments. For fiscal year 2021, the Department of Energy will receive 27 billion dollars for the maintenance and modernisation of its nuclear arsenal. The Department of Homeland Security will receive 52 billion for its own secret service. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA) will receive 243 billion (10 % more than the budget for 2020) for retired military personnel.

Taking into account these posts and several others, military expenditure for the United States in 2021 will exceed 1,000 billion dollars. US military expenditure has a stimulating effect on that of other countries, which nonetheless remain at much lower levels. Even if we take into account only the Pentagon’s budget, US military spending is three or four times greater than that of China, and ten times superior to that of Russia. So “the Budget ensures US military domination in all sectors of war – aerial, ground-based, maritime, spatial and cyber-spatial”, declares the White House, announcing that the United States will shortly be able to produce 80 new nuclear warheads per year in two sites.

Does “The Future of America” mean “The End of the World”.

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This article appeared on the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto.

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

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Video- COVID-19: O Encerramento da Economia Não É a Solução

April 24th, 2020 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Milhões de pessoas perderam os seus empregos e as suas economias de toda a vida. Nos países em desenvolvimento, prevalece a pobreza e o desespero.

Embora o bloqueio seja apresentado à opinião pública como o único meio de resolver uma crise global de saúde pública, os seus impactos económicos e sociais devastadores são ignorados de modo irreflectido.

A verdade não dita é que o novo coronavírus fornece um pretexto para poderosos interesses financeiros e políticos corruptos, a fim de precipitar o mundo inteiro numa espiral de desemprego, falência e pobreza extrema maciça.

Esta é a verdadeira imagem do que está a acontecer.

Como é posto em prática? A campanha do medo desempenha um papel fundamental. O bloqueio é apresentado aos governos nacionais como sendo a única solução.

A economia é a base para a reprodução da vida real.

É também a base para sustentar os esforços da saúde pública.

Esta operação de encerramento afecta as linhas de produção e de fornecimento de bens e serviços, actividades de investimento, exportação e importação, comércio intermediário e retalhista, despesas dos consumidores, fecho das escolas, faculdades e universidades, instituições de pesquisa, etc.

Por sua vez, conduz quase imediatamente ao desemprego em massa, à falência de pequenas e médias empresas, ao colapso do poder de compra, à pobreza generalizada e à fome.

Video em inglês :

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Video: Fake COVID-19 Data, Erroneous Death Figures

April 24th, 2020 by Lesley Kushner

This incisive video by Lesley Kushner explains how the CDC COVID-19 figures are manipulated.

Presumptive vs. Confirmed Cases

According to the CDC the data presented for the United States include both “confirmed” and “presumptive” positive cases of COVID-19 reported to the CDC or tested at CDC labs.

The presumptive (PC) and confirmed cases (CC) are lumped together.  And the total number (PC + CC ) constitutes the basis for establishing the data for COVID-19 infection. It’s like adding apples and oranges. The total figure (PC+CC) categorized as “Total cases” is meaningless. And there often no lab report. The figures do not measure positive COVID-19 Infection. And among those “total cases” are “recovered cases”.

Fake Death Certificates. 

“Presumed” or “Contributed” is to be put on the Death Certificate, when there is absolutely no proof that COVID19 was the cause of death, nor was there a lab test indicating COVID-19 positive.  (M. Ch. Editor)

 

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Liberiamoci dal Virus della Guerra

April 24th, 2020 by Comitato No Nato No Guerra

Convegno internazionale nel 75° Anniversario della Liberazione

TRASMESSO DA BYOBLU e PANDORATV

Sabato 25 Aprile 2020 DALLA ORE 15

In Diretta Streaming, 25 Aprile 2020

Click to VIEW on

15pm (Italia, CET), 9am (EST, USA, Canada) 

 https://www.byoblu.com
 

 

 

 

In Diretta Streaming, 25 Aprile 2020

Click to VIEW on

15pm (Italia, CET), 9am (EST) 

 https://www.byoblu.com
 

 

Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), economista, direttore del Centro di ricerca sulla globalizzazione;

Peter Koenig (Svizzera), economista con lunga esperienza nella Banca Mondiale,;

Guido Grossi, già dirigente Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, ci diranno come potenti forze economiche e finanziarie sfruttano la crisi del coronavirus per impadronirsi dei nostri risparmi e soffocarci con la stretta del debito, e cosa dovremmo fare per risolvere tale situazione.

David Swanson (Stati Uniti), direttore di World Beyond War; Tim Anderson (Australia), docente di economia politica;

Giorgio Bianchi, fotogiornalista e filmmaker; Franco Cardini, storico e saggista, ci parleranno delle guerre in corso, funzionali agli interessi delle stesse potenti forze.

Vladimir Kozin (Russia), consigliere capo del Centro Studi Politico-Militari,

Diana Johnstone (Stati Uniti), saggista; Kate Hudson (Regno Unito), Segretaria Campagna per il Disarmo Nucleare, spiegheranno come e perché aumenta la probabilità di un catastrofico conflitto nucleare.

John Shipton (Australia), padre di Julian Assange,

Ann Wright (Stati Uniti), già colonnello US Army e funzionaria Dipartimento di Stato, ci parleranno delle condizioni disumane in cui è detenuto a Londra

Julian Assange, il giornalista fondatore di WikiLeaks, incarcerato per aver portato alla luce i crimini di guerra USA, che rischia di essere estradato da Londra negli Stati Uniti dove lo attende la pena dell’ergastolo o la pena di morte;

Giulietto Chiesa, giornalista, direttore di Pandora TV. ci parlerà della fondamentale battaglia per il diritto costituzionale di manifestare liberamente il proprio pensiero e per una informazione veritiera.

Conduce Manlio Dinucci, giornalista, analista geopolitico.

DURANTE IL CONVEGNO SARANNO TRASMESSI ALCUNI VIDEO DI INFORMAZIONE

Sarà in funzione una chat-line per domande e commenti.

Vi invitiamo a seguire il Convegno e a diffondere l’invito nella vostra rete di contatti.

 

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A woman who organized last weekend’s protest in downtown San Diego opposing stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus is facing arrest and possible misdemeanor charges that could result in 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine, the woman and her attorneys said Wednesday.

Naomi Israel, 27, was one of hundreds who demonstratively opposed California’s stay-at-home orders during a “Freedom Rally” Saturday afternoon in front of the Hall of Justice.

Israel is being represented by the Center for American Liberty, a nonprofit organization that has also challenged the state’s stay-at-home order on various fronts, including filing a lawsuit against Gov. Gavin Newsom last week for prohibiting in-person church services.

Israel took to Facebook on Wednesday to discuss the case, writing

“I will be arrested on Sunday for exercising my constitutional rights.”

The San Diego Police Department confirmed it has contacted the City Attorney’s Office “requesting their review to issue charges against the protest organizer for violating the county health order by organizing a gathering.”

The Center for American Liberty said it is not aware of any other protest participants facing potential criminal charges.

Following Saturday’s protest in San Diego and a related Sunday protest in Encinitas, many questioned why arrests or citations were not levied against the protesters for flouting public health orders prohibiting large public gatherings and asking people to stay six feet apart from one another.

Rev. Shane Harris, CEO of the People’s Alliance for Justice, asked San Diego officials to issue citations to those who gathered and questioned why churchgoers were not allowed to congregate in person without penalty, yet the protesters were.

“Are we protecting the constitutional rights of some while ordering the rights of others to be knocked down?” asked Harris, who also said the protests represented “racial entitlement” and that people of color would not be allowed to congregate in a similar fashion without legal repercussions.

In a joint statement issued Monday by the SDPD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the agencies said that although the events were allowed to go forward, legal consequences would still be in order.

“While no citations were issued at the protests, that does not mean prosecution will not be sought, especially to the organizers of these events,” the statement read.

Center for American Liberty CEO Harmeet K. Dhillon called the possible charges “outrageous.”

“Our client is being charged with a crime for participating in constitutionally protected activity. The right to assemble and to petition the government does not exist if there are topics that are off limits,” Dhillon said.

Dhillon disputed that protesters did not practice social distancing, saying Israel and others took part “in a responsible protest adhering to social distancing guidelines. She, along with other protesters, stood six feet apart on a public sidewalk.”

“We intend to fight San Diego’s punishment of our client if the authorities decide to proceed with this ill-advised attempt to chill the speech of Americans,” she said.

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Featured image is from CNS

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Israel and Hezbollah, Confirmation of Deterrence Policy

April 24th, 2020 by Elijah J. Magnier

The Israeli leadership has not tired of trying to change the Rules of Engagement (ROE) with Hezbollah since its defeat in the 2006 war, in the hope of eliminating the organisation that rose to state level in military capabilities (and medical skills, as it showed its preparations to confront the emerging COVID-19 virus). Israel has tried to hit targets inside Syria to stop convoys coming into Lebanon loaded with advanced weapons. However, Israel, after pursuing a non-provocation policy with Hezbollah for many years, decided to improvise and attempt a sneak attack on Beirut with drones, in the hope of introducing a new ROE and hitting Hezbollah targets. Hezbollah, however, returned the Israeli attempt by creating another balance of deterrence, embarrassing and ridiculing Israel and its army. But that, it seems, did not deter Israel, which was searching for methods to break the existing Rules of Engagement. The breach came on the northern border. Did the tension bring a large-scale escalation between Israel and Hezbollah any closer?

Since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011 and the participation of Hezbollah in this war throughout the entire Syrian geography since 2013, Israel has not hit any Hezbollah target causing casualties in its ranks, with two exceptions. The first was in 2015 when hitting two cars roaming in the Quneitra – the occupied Golan area- killing an Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer and the person responsible for protecting VIPs in “Hezbollah”, Jihad Imad Mughniyeh, and their companions. Hezbollah responded by striking an Israeli convoy in the Shebaa Farms area, killing an Israeli captain and sergeant and wounding 7 others. Tel Aviv accepted the tit-for-tat and refrained from responding further.

In the same year, Israel assassinated Samir al-Quntarin in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Al-Quntar was in charge of the organisation and recruitment among the Druse of Suweida and the occupied Golan. After these two incidents, whenever Israel wanted to hit a truck bound for Lebanon, it would bomb the road in front of the truck to force it to stop and give time for passengers to evacuate to a safe distance before striking the cargo. This introduced an acceptable ROE between Israel and Hezbollah, as there were no casualties but only equipment lost which was eventually replaced.

Israeli soldiers repairing a fence at the borders with Lebanon

Indeed, after his return from a visit to Washington, Israeli Defence Minister Naftali Bennett admitted that “Israel hits a Hezbollah truck loaded with weapons and leaves five trucks without intercepting them.” This indicates that Israel is aware it has failed to reduce the capabilities of Hezbollah and to prevent the supply of advanced weapons and precision missiles. Israel wishes to permanently eliminate Hezbollah and is still working hard to do so, but without finding a way to break the “deterrence equation” imposed on it by Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, and without triggering a wider conflict which Israel is not ready for.

The last attempt was in August last year when Israel sent suicide drones to the southern suburb of Beirut. One of the drones exploded and another failed and was captured. This unusual Israeli violation required the response of “Hezbollah”, as its Secretary General promised, in an unprecedented step, striking not only in the occupied Shebaa Farms, but along the 125 km Lebanese border.

This humiliated Israel and its strong army, which withdrew and evacuated its military and observation positions at a depth of 5 km along the borders. Not only that, but Israel provided Hezbollah with fake targets to end the “distress” of Tel Aviv and thereby put an end to the embarrassment that afflicted the political and military leadership of the Israeli entity.

A blue bag containing an old vacuum cleaner with visible cables to confuse the Israeli soldiers, thrown on the other side of the borders.

This created a balance which effectively deterred Israel: it would not dare to attack Hezbollah after such a harsh and humiliating experience. Hence, Hezbollah wanted to prevent the installation of a new equation, which Israel was seeking, namely to start operations piloted by drones against multiple targets. This new cycle was broken before becoming established.

Recently in Jdeidet Yabous inside Syrian territory, a Cherokee vehicle belonging to Hezbollah members whose unit operates in Quneitra stopped in front of Al-Haidari station. It is not excluded that Israel had hit the road in front of the car to warn passengers to leave. Another method Israel has used often has been to hack the mobile phones of the personnel inside the car and send a message in Arabic asking them to leave before the car was destroyed. The car was stopped in front of the station, and the passengers, who did not panic, got out because of their familiarity with the Israeli method used for years, which aims not to cause human losses so as to prevent a symmetrical response.

After the operator of the drone confirmed that all passengers had evacuated the vehicle and removed their personal belongings and individual weapons, it launched a missile that hit close to it, to destroy it. The missile did not hit the vehicle directly due to the strong winds that were blowing at this time in the border area between Syria and Lebanon.

One of the three locations on the Lebanese borders where the fence has been cut, indicating a possible crossing.

Hezbollah, which has not yet officially declared responsibility for the operation, refrained from commenting. However, the following day, Israel found three breaches of its border fence cut in three different locations that fall under the responsibility of three different Israeli battalions on the border with Lebanon. Also, three closed blue bags with electrical wires inside were left on the other side of the fences for the Israeli to find them.

The goal of the operation was not to make Israeli snipers shoot the bags (they turned out to contain an old vacuum cleaner, an empty box, and a bag of water). Nor was the objective to see robots and drones dealing with the suspicious bags.  Rather it was to tell Israel that the tunnels that it uncovered last year crossing the borders would be useless. Hezbollah showed that crossing of the border above ground is simple and easy in many locations under the nose of the electronic surveillance devices and sensitive cameras installed by Israel very close to the place of the breach.

The second message is clear: any act of provocation against Hezbollah will be met with a response inside what Hezbollah calls “occupied Palestine” and not only in the Lebanese occupied Shebaa Farms.

The fences were cut under the watchful control of the most sophisticated electronic cameras of the Israeli towers spread along the borders.

The third message is that any attempt to turn the threat into an opportunity to change the ROE will be answered with a direct response commensurate with the size of the Israeli strike. Furthermore, any future Israeli aggression will be followed by a possible attack on the nearby settlements, or adoption of other measures ready, planned and prepared within the bank of objectives Hezbollah has.

Hezbollah has demonstrated the existence of a loose flank that it has removed from its sleeve, indicating that it has many options available as an appropriate response to Israeli aggression. The price of the Cherokee car struck by Israel is about 4000 dollars, while the price of the missile fired and the measures it took to search for a possible breach is much higher.

The three different locations where the fence on the borders was breached via @imadovisky11

Does Israel really believe that it is a superpower that can deal with the Corona virus and its spread even while striking Syria, Lebanon and Iraq (during its internal crisis), while lacking preparedness on the internal domestic front, at the same time confronting the growing strength of Hezbollah’s experience and advanced capabilities? If so, Israel is mistaken.

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Britain’s NHS Using ‘Flawed’ COVID-19 Test

April 24th, 2020 by James Cusick

NHS laboratories are using a flawed test for coronavirus, according to a leaked Public Health England document seen by openDemocracy. Experts warn that the test fails to detect up to 25% of positive COVID-19 results.

Although the current test is known to be inconsistent, NHS labs are nonetheless being advised to continue using it, while an urgent “migration” or shift to a commercially available test takes place.

The leaked document from the National Infection Service (NIS) will put intense pressure on Health Secretary Matt Hancock to explain why the NHS has been using knowingly flawed tests for many weeks, as national death rates have spiralled.

Hancock – who promised 100,000 tests a week by the end of April – recently said that “no test is better than a bad test”. Yet the documents reveal that senior government advisers have known for some weeks that the UK’s critical coronavirus test was not entirely reliable.

Among the leading scientists who have seen the NIS document, the reaction has been one of outrage. One said: “There should be mass resignations, both at the top of PHE and in the government. We should expect better.”

Jon Ashworth, Labour’s shadow health secretary, said:

“Ministers boasted we were world leading in developing this test back in January. If there have been concerns about its accuracy, senior figures have a duty to be clear and transparent with the public. Given the Secretary of State has promised 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month we now need total clarity on what these tests are and who will be processing them.”

Throughout the pandemic, the government has regularly stated that at “all times” medical and scientific advice has been followed, and that the “right thing has been done at the right time”.

A testing ‘catastrophe’

Despite two months of reviewing the key test used in the UK to detect the virus – officially known as the ‘PHE SARS-CoV-2RdRp assay’ – no minister, leading scientific or medical adviser has publicly acknowledged that the test is not fully reliable.

Although a numerical evaluation of the test’s reliability is not included in the NIS document, openDemocracy has learned from a leading pathologist with knowledge of the NIS’s ongoing review that the test misses 25 percent of positive cases.

That, according to one leading epidemiologist, is a “catastrophe”. It means that those given a virus-free status in error since testing first began two months ago would not have known they were infected.

As such, they would have continued spreading the disease among their close family and – if they continued going to work or not practising social distancing – among the wider community.

The UK is currently projected to have one of the worst infection and death rates of any country in Europe.

The NIS document seen by openDemocracy is authorised by Dr Susan Hopkins, Professor Maria Zambon and Professor Andrew Mumford: all senior research directors who report to the chief executive of Public Health England, Duncan Selbie, and ultimately to Matt Hancock as Health Secretary.

UK ‘bottom of the queue’ for reliable tests

Evidence of “quality assurance difficulties” for key reagents – essentially the test’s chemical makeup – is quoted in the document as one of the contributing factors for the test’s unreliable performance.

The document says that Public Health England (PHE) has reviewed its own COVID-19 test and has agreed “immediate actions” to mitigate or rectify the problems. Among the advice given to laboratories using the PHE test is to be careful before “calling” a result negative, to “retest ambiguous samples”, and to move towards using commercial tests.

Private-sector tests are sold by major pharmaceutical firms such as Hoffmann-La Roche, Abbott Laboratories and others. Commercial laboratories and academic institutions, such as the Crick Institute in London, largely use commercially available tests and not the PHE test.

However due to the worldwide demand for COVID-19 testing, these commercially available tests are now in short supply. If all NHS labs were to suddenly be mandated to switch to commercial products, one leading professor said: “We would find ourselves simply at the bottom of a very large queue for these critical materials.”

The three advisers who authorised the document make it clear that use of the flawed PHE test cannot continue.

But, given the lack of an immediate alternative, they advise NHS labs in the meantime to take care in interpreting the results.

A “shortage of swabs” and the specialist fluid used to “transport” the swabs to laboratories are also identified in the documents as causing variations in the performance of the Public Health England SARS test in NHS laboratories.

The importance of accuracy in test results was emphasised late last month by Professor Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical officer. At a time when questions about the reliability of the PHE test would have been surfacing internally, Professor Whitty discussed the use of tests that might detect the presence of antibodies in those who had recovered from the virus.

He said tests needed to be “incredibly accurate,” adding: “If they are not accurate, we will not release any of them.”

Last month Health Secretary Matt Hancock authorised the purchase of £20m antibody tests from China. The tests were later found to be unreliable and effectively junked. It is understood the Chinese tests were 60 percent reliable.

You can read the full leaked document here

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For the first time in two months, South Korea’s new coronavirus cases have dropped to single digits. Seoul has not only demonstrated that it can contain the pandemic, but that it can safely hold elections, which last week led to a landslide victory for President Moon Jae-in’s party in the parliamentary elections. Having earned the trust of the South Korean public and the admiration of the global community, now is the time for Moon to claim leadership over another issue that the Trump administration has woefully mismanaged: relations with North Korea.

The Trump administration’s approach to North Korea has been characterized by the president developing a personal relationship with Kim Jong Un, while imposing ever-stricter sanctions and continuing to hold joint military exercises with South Korea. This has failed to move the needle on North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Pyongyang continues to test weapons — even in the midst of a global pandemic — and shows no signs of wanting to engage with Washington.

But the universal threat of the coronavirus has created a vastly different landscape for President Moon to make progress with North Korea. Moon has all the leverage he needs to resolve a 70-year-old conflict and create a model for peace and stability in Northeast Asia.

From the beginning of his presidency, Moon — a human rights lawyer and former soldier who served in the DMZ — has made more headway than past South Korean leaders in improving inter-Korean relations. Five months after signing the Panmunjom Declaration in April 2018, Moon and Kim met in Pyongyang for a second summit and signed an inter-Korean military agreement that set forth a demilitarization process, including disarming soldiers in the Joint Security Area and demining portions of the DMZ. South Korea took concrete steps to revive inter-Korean cooperation, such as establishing a diplomatic compound in Kaesong and seeking to link the inter-Korean railroad at Dorasan Station at the DMZ.

Unfortunately, Moon’s pro-peace diplomacy with North Korea fell victim to Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign on North Korea. In an October 2018 call to South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Hwa, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rebuked Seoul for moving too fast with Pyongyang and failing to move in lock step with Washington on denuclearization. When asked about South Korea’s possible lifting of sanctions on North Korea, President Trump told reporters,

“They won’t do that without our approval. They do nothing without our approval.”

Since Trump’s colossal failure to reach a deal with Kim in Hanoi last year, talks have frozen, not just between Washington and Pyongyang, but also between the two Koreas. Not only does Moon now have a clear mandate domestically, the global context has changed, paving the way for him to pursue his inter-Korean peace agenda, with or without Washington’s approval.

For one, South Korea doesn’t have to continue conducting military exercises with the United States, which has been the ire of the North Korean regime. On March 23, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire so that the world can address the pandemic. President Macron of France is pressing for the U.N. Security Council to back the Secretary-General’s call, securing the commitments of three of five permanent members: China, the United Kingdom and the United States. The American and South Korean militaries agreed to cancel this spring’s military exercises due to the pandemic; adhering to the global ceasefire gives President Moon cover to cancel them altogether.

In addition to the global ceasefire, there is growing consensus that sanctions must be lifted against particularly vulnerable countries such as North Korea. Michelle Bachelet, U.N. human rights chief and a physician, recently called for sectoral sanctions to “be eased or suspended” because they impede the delivery of vital medical and humanitarian aid. “In a context of global pandemic,” Bachelet explained, “impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us.”

With more than 2 million cases and nearly 150,000 deaths worldwide caused by COVID-19, the United States is acquiescing. On April 16, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions exemptions for humanitarian assistance to North Korea, including “testing kits, respiratory devices, personal protective equipment, and medicine used in the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and recovery from COVID-19.”

With two years left in his presidency — and the U.S. and North Korea now entering the 70th year of being locked in a technical state of war — Moon should take this opportunity to advance peace on the Korean Peninsula. The brokenness of the U.S. approach in resolving the North Korean conflict begs for leadership, which President Moon must claim for the future of regional and worldwide security.

After all, if there is one key lesson to be taken away from the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that South Korea can do some things better — much better — than the United States.

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Featured image: South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embrace each other after releasing a joint statement at the truce village of Panmunjeom, Friday. / Korea Summit Press Pool

Why Has the Price of Crude Oil Skydived?

April 24th, 2020 by Azhar Azam

On the back of the unprecedented supply glut, sapped demand and filled storage amid the coronavirus pandemic – for the first time in history, the prices of the US crude oil futures tanked to a negative territory, indicating the producers would pay traders for taking the oil off their hands.

Prices on the May contract expiring Tuesday for the US-benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), dipped 321% to -40.32/barrel while the global standard, Brent crude futures pared brief gains and edged about 9.5% lower at $25.41/barrel.

The June and July WTI contracts also dropped roughly 18% to $20.43/barrel and 11% to $26.18/barrel.

As the spread between May and June contracts, known as front and second month – is now the widest in the history, the downward trend for June and July contracts insinuated the mounting uncertainty and dying investors’ hopes about reopening of the US economy in near future.

Initially, it was disagreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia on production cuts at the OPEC+ forum that exacerbated tensions in the oil industry and stoked price and share war between them. By the time, the two energy rivals downplayed differences and signed an agreement; the Covid-19 went on the rampage to trigger abysmal anxieties in the US crude markets.

The ecstatic US President Donald Trump, claimed to have brokered the deal, popped up on twitter to thank Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz – terming the agreement “big” and “Great deal for all!” that “will save hundreds of thousands of energy jobs in the United States.”

But with the pandemic doling out a severe blow to major driver of the US economy, the settlement between Riyadh and Moscow looks antediluvian as the price setback coupled with shelved energy demand poses a significant threat to the jobs of more than 10 million workers associated with the oil industry. Many of whom are already being terminated or furloughed.

So even the historic deal – to steeply cut the oil production by 9.7 million barrels per day (mb/d) and backstop the value decline – did little to stabilize the markets and cannot prevent the WTI from a free fall. That’s because the reduction was not as per the expectations of the president himself and global analyst firms that believed it to be at least 20 mb/d to resuscitate the industry.

How Washington drove Saudi Arabia into the deal is controversial too. Trump’s push for a production cut was backed by a coalition of US Congressmen that in a threatening letter on April 8, sought the Kingdom “to do its part to bring stability – not further volatility – to global crude oil markets.”

The frictional tone citing threats of suspending the US-Saudi economic and military collaboration and recalling American support to counter “Iran’s malign activity” – emphasized the traditional pattern of Washington’s bulling behavior toward its allies to achieve its interests.

Additionally, the price at which the oil should be sold is vital for the US shale sellers. For the American oil companies, anything less than $40/barrel is perilous for their operations sustainability. If the price of the crude drops below that mark, some producers may decide to stop pumping and the firms may head for bankruptcy. That’s what is happening right now.

Head of shale research Artem Abramov at Rystad Energy says “$30 is already quite bad, but once you get to $20 or even $10, it’s a complete nightmare.” The comments pronounces how crucial it is for the US companies that oil remains at least around $40/barrel otherwise they won’t be able to survive and many of them could go bankrupt.

OPEC in its most recent monthly statement on April 16 said “The term structure of all three crude benchmarks – ICE Brent, NYMEX WTI and DME Oman – moved to a super contango in March.” Contago describes a situation that refers to oversupply and encourages traders to store oil to sell later on, hoping the crudes price to rally.

But with the wiping out US storage capacity, the traders won’t be any more able to buy more oil or even sell existing stocks in sharply condensing domestic oil market. The buyers of front month contracts would hence be forced to take physical delivery of the oil at the end of May that they can’t so they have to sell it now at any price.

Chief commodities analyst at leading Swedish SEB Group Bjarne Schieldrop confirmed the US storage issue referring “very front-loaded” contango, stating “The curves are saying we have a big problem with the storage of oil right now.”

Michael Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research also doubts the US storage capacity to endure the flooding oil and believes that could be full to brim. “The implication is that storage might be more full than thought, or that buyers expect it to be very soon.”

All the US key oil facilities, including its main storage hub and delivery point Cushing, Oklahoma, are weighed down with the excess barrels. Since the end of February, the stockpiles at the largest oil-storage tank farm in the world have increased by nearly 50% to 55 million barrels against its working storage capacity of 76 million barrels. If the critical facility is full, a trader said it would be a “disaster.”

The US needs the consumption to rebound in short term. If it doesn’t and the airlines keep on grounded, cars remain garaged and refineries stay idle for a longer period – there would be tremendous selling pressure on all the traders holding the contracts, adding more weight on the Trump administration to provide support and reopen economy amid pandemic.

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Azhar Azam works in a private organization as “Market & Business Analyst” and writes on geopolitical issues and regional conflicts.

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Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes by Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Forster published by the Proceedings of the  National Academy of Sciences of the United Sciences of America (PNAS) focuses on a study of the genomes of 160 covid-19 patients. 

As readers may know, viruses are RNA-based entities that periodically and regularly undergo mutations. One can study these mutations and almost like clockwork trace their evolution – i.e. their lineage and migration pattern.

The authors specifically employed a methodology known as “character-based phylogenetic networks”. The technique has been used as the “method of choice” to reconstruct prehistoric human population movements, language evolution, various ecological studies, and some 10,000 phylogenetic studies of diverse organisms – and now virology.

This is an early study – the sample size is only 160 humans – with 100 types. However, the results are stunning. Among the key conclusions:

  1. There are three major types of coronaviruses, A, B, and C, with type A being the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 in humans and showing 96.2% similarly to a particular strain of virus in bats.
  2. Most of the viruses in China and Wuhan are of type B while most of the viruses found in America, Europe and Australia are of type A and C. Type C is not found in Mainland China but is found in significant numbers in Hong Kong, S. Korea, and Taiwan.
  3. While Type B is found in large numbers across Mainland China (including Wuhan), it is not found in significant numbers around the rest of the world.
  4. The methodology used was successfully used to trace several clinically verified cases of virus travel from Wuhan out to various nations, including Brazil and Italy. As such, the authors concludes the “character-based phylogenetic networks” methodology was useful and appropriate for studying the spread and evolution of the coronavirus.
  5. Yet, according to the methodology, the earliest sample of virus studied – collected on December 24 2019 in Wuhan – WAS NOT close to being the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

According to the authors:

In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia. (To read the complete scientific report in pdf click here)

Some observations…

First, most of the viruses in the West do not seem to have arisen from China. The authors identified Type B as the main virus type found in Mainland China, with that Type mostly confined to Mainland China and Types A and C predominant outside China – including U.S., Europe and Australia.

Two reasons given for why Type B variants (“China’s virus,” if you must) did not expand much beyond Mainland China: one being “complex founder scenario” and second “the ancestral Wuhan B-type virus is immunologically or environmentally adapted to a large section of the East Asian population, and may need to mutate to overcome resistance outside East Asia.”

Since I have yet to see any reputable studies that shows any strains of the coronavirus having any affinity or dislike to any ethnicity of people, let’s focus on “complex founder scenario” and “environment” resistance.

The authors have noted many perplexities in the study. But if we consider the possibility that coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan, those perplexities all go away. More specifically, let’s presume a scenario where the virus was already circulating under the radar in the West and were carried to Wuhan in December or some time before, where it then spread locally within China.

Consider the fact that the authors had noted that Type B variants outside China did not show the “one-month” variations that would have been expected were Type B variants and descents to have traveled out of China to infect the rest of the world.

But if Type B variants – including Type C “descendants” – were already communally established and transmitted outside China, then this paradox easily goes away.

Assuming the virus to have been brought to Wuhan instead of originating from Wuhan would also constitute a “complex founding scenario” that the author hypothesized could solve the riddle.

This assumption also provides an explanation for the “environmental resistance” the author hypothesized. If the virus arrived in Wuhan with the Chinese authorities quickly closing down the city soon afterwards, the virus would not have had chance to spread to the rest of the world. The Chinese government’s shutting down of Wuhan in January could easily form the “environmental resistance” the authors hypothesized for the Type B virus.

Finally, it is important to note that in this study, of the 160 samples, most are from patients in China, only a few from outside Asia. In this study, the authors had tentatively labelled Type C as a descendant of Type B found in China. But while Type B is found mostly in Wuhan, it has also been found in significant numbers outside China. As more data from outside China comes live (one hopes soon), the same methodology will probably reveal that the predecessor to Type B and Type C arose outside not inside China. Type A and Type C thus all arose outside China and independently of China.

While the current study is China-centric (most data are from China), it already has established that the virus did not arise in Wuhan. The authors noted importantly in the data supplement section, “the oldest isolate from 24 December 2019 (brown node, week 0) lies diagonally opposite to the bat virus outgroup root.”

As we get more data, studies such as this will shed a lot of light on the origins of the coronavirus. It is really too bad, such a shame that the U.S. and Europe has missed such critical times testing and tracking the viral flow. It is worth noting that U.S. officials are blaming China for the virus. But even with limited data, the authors have been able draw some preliminary conclusions regarding the geographic origins of the virus.

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The title of the PNAS article is 

Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes (pdf)

authors: Peter Forster , Institute of Forensic Genetics, Münster, Germany, Lucy Forster, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Colin Renfrew, Fluxus Technology Limited, Colchester, UK, and Michael Forster, Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany

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As each day passes by data pours in revealing the immense economic damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Most politicians and economic pundits will put the blame for up the economic hurricane, blasting tens of millions into unemployment, on coronavirus lock downs. Fitch Ratings has given a brief snapshot of the unfolding economic catastrophe which it predicts will last well into the 2020s:

“World GDP is now expected to fall by 3.9% in 2020, a recession of unprecedented depth in the post-war period. This is twice as large as the decline anticipated in our early April GEO update and would be twice as severe as the 2009 recession.”

“The decline in GDP equates to a USD2.8 trillion fall in global income levels relative to 2019 and a loss of USD4.5 trillion relative to our pre-virus expectations of 2020 global GDP. Fitch expects eurozone GDP to decline by 7%, US GDP by 5.6%, and UK GDP by 6.3% in 2020.’’

Yet at the beginning of this year the financial media and political classes around the world were making rosy forecasts how we were going to experience moderate economic growth this year built upon solid economic foundations. There was no cause for worry or alarm just let global capital work its magic and trickle-down economics would ensure living standards would rise for all.

Fast forward 4 months and a global health pandemic has revealed how shallow, brittle and unstable were the economic foundations of global capitalism. These foundations were built upon infinitely low interest rates, an exponential rise in debt both public and private (sending global debt over the $250 trillion mark) and a massive increase in social and economic inequality.

The world economy was slowing down during 2019 and heading towards a global recession. Japan’s economy had already entered recession territory in the last quarter of 2019, meanwhile PMI data from China and Germany indicated that they were hovering just outside recession territory.

The global economy at the end of 2019 was teetering on the brink and just needed a catalyst or pin to pop the everything bubble which has seen massive inflation in the prices of paper assets across the globe ranging from stocks and bonds to derivatives such as collateralized loan obligations.

The anaemic economic growth experienced by global capitalism since the last financial crisis, which was a mere 12 years ago, has been based upon a gigantic expansion of the global money supply as central banks and governments mistakenly believe that the only way to sustain our debt fuelled economic system was to create ever more debt.

The last 12 years since the 2008 global financial crisis have witnessed an unparalleled wealth transfer from the working classes to the billionaire class which wields immense political influence over governments across the world. Central bank stimulus programs i.e. quantitative easing together with historically low interest rates fuelled a speculative bonanza which has pushed financial markets to all-time highs across the globe.

Meanwhile, governments across the world have sought to give the hard pressed billionaire class a helping hand by cutting capital gains, income and corporation taxes across the board. President Trump’s $1 trillion tax give away to the economic elites in 2017 is the most egregious example of this phenomena.

At the same time, wages for billions of ordinary people have stagnated or fallen whilst welfare benefits and health care have declined. We now have the utterly surreal situation whereby 26 billionaires control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity amounting to over 3.8 billion people.

The working classes and underemployed poor of the developing world were made to pay for the costs of the 2008 global economic crisis. Once the coronavirus pandemic has finally burned itself out the working people of this world will be confronted with an economic depression which will rival and indeed may exceed in severity that of the 1930s. Governments across the board will once again seek to make ordinary people pay for the cost of the gigantic debts incurred by government and centrla bank bailouts.

In a desperate effort to prop up their system and protect the interests of their own class central bankers and corporate politicians across the globe are presiding over yet another wealth transfer that benefits the richest 1% in society. Bloomberg has noted how over $8 trillion has been printed out of thin air by global central banks and governments to prop up the capitalist system. The bulk of this horde of fiat money has gone to service the needs of Wall Street and its counterparts in London, Paris Frankfurt, Shanghai et cetera. The Wall Street Journal has openly acknowledged this truth in an editorial:

“The Fed may feel all of this is essential to protect the financial system’s plumbing and reduce systemic risk until the virus crisis passes, but make no mistake the Fed is protecting Wall Street first. The goal seems to be to lift asset prices, as the Fed did after the financial panic, and hope that the wealth effect trickles down to the rest of the economy.”

During the 2020s ordinary people across the globe face a simple but very stark question: can we have faith in a system whose primary motive is to service and protect the interests of the 1%? Maybe, it is time to begin the struggle for an alternative society, based on socialist principles, to consign the attendant failures of capitalism to the dustbin of history.

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Introductory Note

The 25th of April is an important date in Italy’s history. It commemorates the 75th anniversary of  Liberation, which is also the Anniversary of the Resistance.

Last year we met in Florence on the 7th of April, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO.

The theme of our conference last year was NATO EXIT.  

The event was organized by Italy’s Comitato No Guerra, No NATO, in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The Florence Declaration was drafted by Italy’s Comitato and the CRG.

On April 25, 2020, Commemorating the Liberation of Italy. We express our solidarity with the people of Italy. At the same time we express our concern regarding the US military bases established in Italy immediately established after World WarII.  

We must reflect on our history. Was it a Liberation or an Occupation?  

The European Union is militarized. The Pentagon is actively involved under banner of NATO in both Western and Eastern Europe. 

Italy like many other countries is currently experiencing a major crisis. This year on the 25th of April which commemorates Italy’s Liberation, we are not able to meet in Firenze to debate and discuss the “coronavirus crisis” which is affecting millions of people Worldwide.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 25 April 2020

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Text of The Florence Declaration adopted by more than 600 participants to the Florence No War No NATO Conference, April 7, 2019.

Original in Italian. Translations into English, French, Russian, Spanish. The debates and discussions were chaired by renowned author and geographer Manlio Dinucci.

The event was organized by Italy’s Comitato No Guerra, No NATO, in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The Florence Declaration was drafted by Italy’s Comitato and the CRG.

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The risk of a vast war which, with the use of nuclear weapons, could mean the end of Humanity, is real and growing, even though it is not noticed by the general public, which is maintained in the ignorance of this imminent danger.

A strong engagement to find a way out of the war system is of vital importance. This raises the question of the affiliation of Italy and other European countries with NATO.

NATO is not an Alliance. It is an organisation under the command of the Pentagon, and its objective is the military control of Western and Eastern Europe.

US bases in the member countries of NATO serve to occupy these countries, by maintaining a permanent military presence which enables Washington to influence and control their policies and prevent genuine democratic choices.

NATO is a war machine which works for the interests of the United States, with the complicity of the major European power groups, staining itself with crimes against humanity.

The war of aggression waged by NATO in 1999 against Yugoslavia paved the way for the globalization of military interventions, with wars against Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and other countries, in complete violation of international law.

These wars are financed by the member countries, whose military budgets are increasing continually to the detriment of social expenditure, in order to support colossal military programmes like that of the US nuclear programme which costs 1,200 billion dollars.

In violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the USA is deploying nuclear weapons in five non-nuclear NATO States, under the false pretext of the ”Russian menace”. By doing so, they are risking the security of Europe.

To exit the war system which is causing more and more damage and exposing us to increasing dangers, we must leave NATO, affirming our rights as sovereign and neutral States.

In this way, it becomes possible to contribute to the dismantling of NATO and all other military alliances, to the reconfiguration of the structures of the whole European region, to the formation of a multipolar world where the aspirations of the People for liberty and social justice may be realised.

We propose the creation of a NATO EXIT International Front in all NATO member countries , by building an organisational network at a basic level strong enough to support the very difficult struggle we must face in order to attain this objective, which is vital for our future.

Florence, April 7, 2019

Manlio Dinucci from Italy

Michel Chossudovsky from Canada

 

Zivadin Jovanovic from Serbia

 

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On April 22, the 41st anniversary of the establishment of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), they launched the ‘Nour’ satellite, aboard the ‘Qased’ three-staged satellite launcher, during an operation located in the desert at Dasht-e Kavir.

IRGC commander General Salami said,

“Today, we gaze upon the Earth from skies. This honorable moment is the starting point of the establishment of new global power.” He added, “Today, the world’s powerful armies do not have a comprehensive defense plan without being in space, and achieving this superior technology that takes us into space and expands the realm of our abilities is a strategic achievement.”

His comments stressed the term ‘defense’ and described the multi-purpose satellite’s use in space in the realm of information technology and intelligence battles, including reconnaissance and safe communication capabilities.

The successful launch of the Nour gave the Iranian people a chance to feel pride and hope, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 5,290 people in Iran, with over 84,800 reported cases.  The satellite orbits 425 kilometers above Earth, while many around the globe are on stay-at-home orders, and dealing with the mental constraints of ‘cabin-fever’.  Iranians may see the satellite as a bit of good news despite the struggling economy and historically low oil prices.

Iran is now one of 15 countries that can put military satellites in space, and even though the US has placed the most severe sanctions in history upon Iran, still their engineers and scientists continue to produce technology “MADE IN IRAN”.  They have an advanced program that has launched satellites in the past, including joint research projects with other countries. ‘Omid’, was their first a domestically made satellite that was sent into orbit in 2009, and Iran launched imaging satellites in 2011 and 2012.

Tensions with the US

In 2018 President Trump pulled the US out of the international deal which the US was a partner to, designed to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon. Iran has continued to state they do not seek to create or use nuclear weapons. That action by Trump was the beginning of the tensions which are being felt in the Middle East today.

One of the main sources of tension between the Trump administration and Iran is the influence and pressure of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and some of the oil-rich ‘Arab Gulf’ countries, such as Saudi Arabia.  AIPAC and their Arab allies put pressure on Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, and they tried to push the US military into aggression against Iran.

Trump’s decision to withdraw set off a series of attacks and Trump ordered the assassination by a drone attack in January of the top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Iran answered back with ballistic missiles struck at US troops in Iraq.

The US says the satellite launch by Iran defies a UN Security Council resolution.

There is a political faction in the US, with close ties to Trump, who are pushing for a full-fledged war between the US and Iran. The two nearly went to war earlier this year after Trump ordered the assassination.  Experts have cautioned that a mistake or accident could plunge the region into a military conflict which could turn regional, if not global as allies of the US, and Iran would be forced to take sides.

The US Navy released a video last week which they claim shows Iranian speed-boats making harassing maneuvers close to US Navy warships in the North Arabian Sea, with one boat coming within yards of the US ship.  In the video, the Iranian-flagged boats are manned with a gun; however, the guns were never pointed at the US ship, which sounded its horn several times.

The IRGC acknowledged that events in the video happened; however, they downplayed the seriousness and felt the US was exaggerating.

“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” Trump wrote.

Trump is facing a tough election in November, and his supporters demand he maintains his hard-line stance against Iran.  His supporters have been mentally molded into an opinion pattern that AIPAC has invested in for years. The option of negotiation and peaceful resolution of the tensions between the US and Iran is never discussed.  Sanctions, threats, and attacks are in the Trump diplomatic tool-box.

Iraq’s Parliament responded to the Trump ordered assassination by passing an order for all US troops to leave the country. Secretary of State Pompeo has a meeting in June slated to discuss the withdrawal from Iraq.  Earlier this month, Trump claimed that Iran was planning an unprovoked attack on US troops in Iraq, and he threatened Iran would pay a heavy price if they did so.

While Iran was ruled by the US ‘puppet’, the Shah of Iran, there was no Sunni-Shia divide; however, once the 1979 Islamic revolution occurred in Iran, the US State Department, and the CIA, began fueling sectarian hatred between the Sunni and Shia in the Middle East.  Before 1979, Iran had been under the US sphere of influence, but once they lost Iran the US targeted them with a sophisticated propaganda program, which aimed at replacing Iran as the enemy of the Arabs, and not Israel. This propaganda campaign was so successful, that today we see the ‘Arab Gulf’ monarchies cooperating with ‘Israel’ on the economy, security, and political issues.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Iran to Retaliate Against US Aggression if Launched

April 24th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

The US under both right wings of its war party is an unprecedented bully on the world stage.

It’s ruling regimes represent an unparalleled threat to everyone everywhere.

The long aggressive arm of its military operates in parts of the world where it doesn’t belong — notably the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa.

Wherever US forces show up time and again mass slaughter, vast destruction, and/or human misery follow.

Nations the US doesn’t control are on its target list for regime change by aggression, war by other means, or old-fashioned coups — notably China, Russia and Iran.

The former two are unlikely to be attacked militarily because of their formidable retaliatory power, though it’s possible by accident or design.

The threat of nuclear war exists that’s able to kill us all if launched, a self-destructive act of madness if US dark forces go this far.

Do Trump regime hardliners consider Iran an easier target to attack militarily? Do they foolishly believe they can easily prevail in a war of aggression?

Pentagon commanders know otherwise. They understand war and risks of waging them, especially against nations with powerful militaries like Iran.

They know the US hasn’t won a war since WW II ended. While Iran can’t match US military power, it can and no doubt will retaliate strongly if aggressively attacked.

Though not nuclear armed and dangerous like the US, the IRGC had over 40 years to prepare for aggression by an adversary like the US and Israel.

Its weapons are sophisticated enough to hit back hard against an aggressor. It can likely inflict major damage on US regional assets if attacked.

The US has been unable to control Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen after years of endless wars — Iran a more formidable adversary than any of the above nations if aggressively attacked.

Going this far would be madness. In response to Trump’s hostile saber rattling, Iran’s IRGC commander General Hossein Salami said the following:

“I have ordered our naval forces to destroy any American naval force in the Persian Gulf that threatens the security of Iran’s military or non-military ships,”

“We (warn) the Americans that we are fully determined and serious in defending our national security, maritime borders, maritime interests, maritime security and security of our forces at sea and any (wrong) move (by to Trump regime) will meet our decisive, effective and prompt response.”

In response to Trump’s ordered assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani, the Pentagon saw the IRGC’s retaliatory capability firsthand.

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif slammed Trump’s saber rattling threats, tweeting:

“US military is hit by over 5000#Covid-19 infections. @realdonaldtrump should attend to their needs, not engage in threats cheered on by Saddam’s terrorists” (likely referring to anti-Iranian MKO elements).

“Also, US forces have no business 7,000 miles away from home, provoking our sailors off our OWN Persian Gulf shores.”

In July 2018, Iran’s Tasnim News cited documents released by the Trump regime’s justice department that showed “close ties between Donald Trump’s inner circle and Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO or MEK), an anti-Iran terrorist group which was taken off the US’ terrorist organization list in 2009,” adding:

US establishment media reported that then-Trump regime national security advisor John Bolton and DJT’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani “met at least five times with the MKO terrorists” in 2018.

“The NCRI is the political wing of the MKO, one of the oldest and bloodiest terror groups in the modern world.”

In 1986, its elements fled Iran for Iraq and sided with Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Republic during war throughout most of the decade.

They’ve been responsible for killing thousands of Iranians, “including by bombings in public places and targeted killings,” Tasnim News reported.

While the threat posed by the US to Iran can’t be underestimated, continued Trump regime war by other means is more likely than hot war.

At the same time, what’s unthinkable is possible because of US rage to replace all sovereign independent ruling authorities with pro-Western puppet rule it controls.

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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 OneWorld

The media’s incredibly irresponsible, “shock and awe” reporting on the coronavirus has created a monumental stampede of fear and panic which is a million times more damaging than the virus itself.

Here are two facts that says it all:

Fact #1. Deaths in the U.S. from influenza from 1950 to 2017 ranged from 13.5 to 53.7 per 100,000 (source statista.com).

Fact #2. Deaths in the U.S. (as of this writing) from the coronavirus is 14.9 per 100,000 (source worldmeters.info). Bear in mind that this number includes “probable” deaths as well as confirmed deaths from the coronavirus.

So to sum this up, the per capita deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus is lower than the per capita deaths from the flu in almost every year from 1950 to 2017. The highest number of deaths from the flu per capita was in 1960. Deaths that year was 53.7 per 100,000, well over three times as high as the coronavirus. These are the facts, not crazy media hype. Please check them out for yourself. Incidentally, the per capita death rate from what the hysterical media loves to call a, “global pandemic” is only 2.4 per 100,000. (See this)

The White House Coronavirus Task Force’s newest model predicts that coronavirus deaths could reach 60,000. It currently stands at 49,000. Even if that [estimate] number [which is manipulated] was to double to 98,000 it would still be much lower than all the per capita flu deaths from 1950 to 1998.

So in light of these facts, why is the media on what appears to be a crusade to spread fear and panic throughout the land? Their non-stop, 24/7 hysterical reporting has produced a tsunami of fear and panic creating a domino effect, – an avalanche of panic that has shut down hundreds of thousands of businesses, severely damaged our economy, closed our schools, closed our places of worship, and put 22 million Americans out of work. I’m not saying that the media is trying to destroy the country, but they certainly are behaving like that is their intention.

The fear mongers say that, “social distancing” (translation, – shutting down the country) is the way to fight the virus. We’ve never shut down our country in the past to fight a virus, even though the deaths rates were far higher that the coronavirus rate is now. We’ve always taken care of the sick, but continued to work. We’ve kept our country alive and vibrant. Viruses, illness, and death are a part of life, but life must go on.

There are other countries that are not shutting down their economies as a way to fight the coronavirus, for example Sweden. They have not closed their economy and they are fairing just as well or better than many of their European counterparts that have put severe restrictions on their people and their economies.

If we used, “social distancing” (shutting down the country) whenever a virus came around in the past, our country as we know it would not exist. We would have been reduced to the level of a very poor third world country long ago, and that will certainly happen if we shut down our country to fight every new virus that shows up in the future (as the fear pundits are already predicting).

Yes, the fear mongers are already saying that the coronavirus will make a return this winter. If it does are we going to respond the same way, – “shelter in place”, hide under the bed, and close down the country? If we continue to do this our country will surely be doomed.

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Leslie Taha is a freelance writer, author, artist, and former guest columnist for the Tacoma Tribune. [email protected]

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced plans on Friday, April 17, for a farm relief program. Funded largely through the CARES Act, the $19 billion package will be used to funnel funds to corporate farms while providing little assistance for the vast majority of small or working farmers.

Like other government programs to help farmers, most of this money will end up in the hands of agribusiness. The majority of farmland is owned by farms grossing over $500,000 in sales, a figure that demonstrates the demise of the American family farm. In total, $16 billion will be handed directly to farmers, of which $9.6 billion goes to the livestock industry. This funding will be given largely as reimbursements for “losses” and will not be contingent upon providing food to those in need.

The remaining $3 billion will be used to purchase $100 million each of produce, meat and dairy that will be distributed to food banks, nonprofits and community and faith organizations every month. This is a paltry sum, amounting to just 27 cents a day for every food insecure person, a figure that will only decline as America’s now 22 million unemployed seek assistance.

It will also provide funds to distribute 1,000,000 meals a week to children in “a limited number of rural schools.” How this would actually be done given the wide dispersion of such students, many of whom rode buses for an hour or more to reach their schools, is unclear.

This bailout is intended to offset financial losses from the collapse of distribution systems during the pandemic. While grocery stores are having difficulty keeping their shelves stocked, much of the food in the pipeline is packaged in bulk quantities for institutional buyers such as restaurants and schools.

The closure of restaurants, schools and other institutional buyers has resulted in farmers destroying millions of pounds of food as their distribution chains are disrupted. This is not because there is no demand, but because transitioning to retail packaging is too costly. It is cheaper to destroy food than to repackage it and send it elsewhere.

This mass destruction of crops and dairy products comes at a time when millions of Americans have lost their jobs and are now turning to food banks to feed their families. Some food banks are reporting an increase in demand as high as 300 percent. Lines of cars in the thousands have been reported queuing up at food banks across the country.

But even if all the available food was sent to food banks, they lack the necessary resources and equipment to handle such an expansion in supply. A study of food banks in San Diego County, California, found that in 2015 less than half of food banks had enough refrigerator space and only 54 percent had enough freezer space to service people in need. If food banks around the country did not have enough storage space before the pandemic, there is no reason to believe that they are prepared to handle a huge rise in demand or supply.

Feeding America, one of the largest organizations representing food banks, estimates that an additional $1.4 billion is needed to cover the increasing operating costs of food banks, an insignificant amount compared to the $2 trillion granted to bail out the banks and corporations.

Whether or not food banks and charities can handle a massive influx is not issue for the capitalist class and the state that protects it. They do not care whether people receive enough food, as long as the agricultural industry remains profitable and the pretense of aid is maintained.

There is not even mention in the legislation of providing agricultural and food processing workers with aid. Without proper protective equipment, these workers are at great risk, and migrant workers in particular are threatened with destitution without income support.

Farm laborers earn between $15,000 and $24,499 a year, according to official figures, with a quarter living below the poverty line. Already working and living in horrid conditions, these workers face privation during a global health crisis. Suffering similarly horrendous conditions, meat packing workers are kept on the job while the virus is allowed to tear through their plants. It has already taken several lives and infect ed hundreds of workers. These workers need aid far more than the capitalists who exploit them.

The ruling class has made it clear with this relief program that it only cares about protecting profits at the expense of workers. Kenneth Sullivan, CEO of the meatpacker Smithfield Foods, said, “We have to operate these processing plants even when we have COVID. If we don’t, we sadly won’t have food.”

This is a falsehood. Tens of millions of pounds of food are being destroyed while the USDA estimates that 2.4 billion pounds of meat sits in cold storage—enough to cease all meat packaging for several weeks until protective measures are put in place.

An estimated 3.7 million gallons of milk are dumped every day, enough to provide all 37 million food insecure people with two quarts a week. There is plenty of food to last while measures are taken to protect workers, both citizen and immigrant. The claim that workers must die to keep production flowing is a nefarious lie.

What the working class needs is not a haphazard dumping of goods into food banks and charities, but an adequate income so that all working people can afford to buy food, and an adequate supply so that the food is available to those who want it.

This should be combined with a coordinated effort to reorganize food supply chains to meet social needs. The vast resources of the state and private industry must be placed under the control of the working class, with a coordinated and scientific plan for the safe harvesting and distribution of agricultural goods.

The retooling of currently unused supply chains is a necessary and far from impossible task. Restaurants, schools and hotels must have their cold storage resources reconverted into temporary distribution centers for those in need. One restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, called La Cuchara, has already repurposed its supply chain to create a makeshift grocery store. The widespread capacity for converting existing resources is apparent.

But such changes must be made to feed the working class, not to benefit the capitalists who would sacrifice millions of workers to the virus to keep their profits flowing.

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In the second half of the week the military situation in Syria’s western Aleppo escalated.

On April 22, Turkish forces shelled positions of the Syrian Army in western Aleppo. Pro-Turkish sources claimed that this shelling was a response to Syrian Army strikes on positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda-linked groups near the villages of Kafr Amma, al-Qasr, Kafr Taal and Kafr Nouran. Pro-government sources described these strikes however as a defensive measure to counter regular ceasefire violations by Turkish-backed militants.

On April 23, the Syrian Army reinforced its positions east of Atraib by deploying additional troops and equipment there. If Turkish forces and Idlib militants continue attacks on Syrian Army positions in western Aleppo, open military hostilities could resume in the area.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham executed a 19-yo Syrian refugee deported from Turkey to Greater Idlib. Mohamad Aqib Hamam Tanu was killed on April 20 after militants found that SMS messages in his phone contained criticism of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Abu Mohamad al-Julani.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains the most powerful group in Greater Idlib and controls most of the militant-held area in the region, including Idlib city, the border with Turkey and key positions on the contact line with the Syrian Army. The Turkish leadership in fact provides direct support to the terrorist group by turning a blind eye to its crimes and protecting it from the Syrian Army.

More details appeared about the recent Israeli strike on Syria. According to fresh data, the Israeli strikes targeted a command center of Hezbollah near the town of al-Sukhnah, a training camp of the Iranian-backed Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade in the al-Tulilah reserve near Palmyra, and a base of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps within the Palmyra Air Base. Despite this, the only confirmed casualties resulting from the strike were 3 Syrian service members.

Pro-government locals intercepted another US military convoy in the province of al-Hasakah. On April 22, locals stopped the US convoy near the town of Farfarah, stoned it and forced US troops to retreat. The incident happened near a Syrian Army checkpoint.

The Asayish security unit of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces commented on the recent clashes with the pro-government National Defense Forces (NDF) in al-Qamishly city. The Kurdish force accused pro-government fighters of destabilizing the situation and threatened them with military action. In their turn, pro-NDF sources claim that the tensions in the city result from the violent behavior of Asayish personnel, who are putting pressure on and discriminating against Arab locals on ethnic grounds.

On April 22, US President Donald Trump said that he has given orders to attack and destroy any fast attack craft of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy that “harass” US warships. Encounters between the IRGC Navy and US warships erupt in the Persian Gulf on a regular basis. All these confrontations have a similar pattern: the US leadership sends warships, including aircraft carriers, to the Persian Gulf describing this as a show of force and a ‘strong message’ to Iran. IRGC fast attack craft deploy to track and monitor the US warships, as well as to prevent any attempts to enter Iranian waters. In response, the US accuses Iran of aggressive actions and provocations.

The most recent incident of this kind happened on April 15 when 11 IRGC Navy fast boats tracked 6 US warships: the USS Lewis B. Puller, USS Paul Hamilton, USS Firebolt, USS Sirocco, USCGC Wrangell and USCGC Maui.

Any US Navy attempts to attack IRGC Navy fast attack craft operating in Iranian or international waters in the Persian Gulf would immediately lead to a new round of military escalation in the region. Just recently, the Iranian military deployed additional coastal defense missile systems near the Straight of Hormuz.

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Despite the unprecedented damage global panic over coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has caused to nations around the world, so-called “pro-democracy” protesters have vowed to immediately resume street mobs as soon as emergency measures are lifted in Thailand.

The move will almost certainly contribute to socioeconomic instability and only compound the plight faced by average Thais whom these “student protesters” claim they represent.

The protesters, while claiming to fight for “democracy,” are actually supporters of corrupt nepotist billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, his now disbanded  “Future Forward Party,” and his sponsors including fugitive billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, his “Pheu Thai Party” (PTP) and a host of foreign interests including the US and British governments.

US and British support for these protesters and the political parties they back stems from their collective opposition to the current Thai government’s growing ties with nations like China and Russia who have helped to all but displace Western primacy over Asia Pacific.

The Nation in their article, “Students expected to continue democracy fight once virus situation abates,” claimed:

Students are expected to resume intense political activities after the Covid-19 situation normalises and the government eases its lockdown restrictions next month.

Before the spread of Covid-19, students in universities across the country and some high schools in Bangkok had organised flash mobs in February and March to express their demand for democracy, rewriting the Constitution and ending the current military-backed coalition government. 

Noteworthy is the students’ supposed demand for “democracy.”

The current government is in fact a result of democratic elections carried out in 2019, the ruling party Palang Pracharath having gained several million more votes that Thanathorn’s “Future Forward Party” and building a coalition government larger than that proposed by Pheu Thai of which Future Forward is merely a subsidiary.

Ironically, those currently undermining democracy now are the student protesters themselves and their sponsors, who collectively refuse to respect the results of the 2019 general elections, seeking to create social instability in a bid to coerce the majority into making concessions to them they failed to earn at the ballot box.

At a time when others are working to help the nation recover from the global Covid-19 panic, including helping medical workers, innovating, organizing charity for those in need, and those working to put the nation back on its feet economically, these “student protesters” seem only able to offer the promise of more disruptions and the predictable socioeconomic damage they will cause, in pursuit of a transparently self-serving bid for political power.

The same article in the Nation would also point out the to current activities pursued by these “student protesters” which included sitting at home at their computers creating Twitter hashtags complaining about the government’s performance during the Covid-19 outbreak.

The protesters, sponsored by foreign governments and in particularly the US and UK, and their plans to leverage the socioeconomic damage caused by Covid-19 to catch the government off balance at the end of emergency measures, may point to a much larger global strategy pursued by Washington and London to likewise target off-balanced governments around the world.

As nations around the globe face the health and economic threats Covid-19 poses, they should also be fully aware of and prepared for the geopolitical threat those seeking to take advantage of Covid-19 fallout to target their recovery efforts as US and British-backed protesters in Thailand appear poised to do.

For Thais themselves, they are once again reminded as to why they voted for the current government in power in Thailand in the first place, and not for Future Forward and its dishonest army of supporters, an army of supporters who seems only capable of condemning others and complicating the nation’s progress into the future rather than aiding it in any practical or pragmatic way.

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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

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U.S. Again Trying to Control Greenland to Dominate Arctic

April 24th, 2020 by Paul Antonopoulos

In the summer of 2020, the U.S. intends to open its consulate in Greenland, as well as allocate $12.1 million to strengthen its presence on this island. According to the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, the North American country will reopen a consulate in the capital city of Nuuk so it can “serve as our primary platform for increasing our daily interaction with the people of Greenland,” which is a territory of Denmark.

According to the State Department, the $12.1 million tranche is intended for financial aid to Greenland and is supposedly not related to the desire previously expressed by U.S. President Donald Trump to buy the territory. As stated in a Greenland Government (Naalakkersuisut) press release,

“the U.S. is focusing on sectors in Greenland that will benefit the economic development of Greenland, including the mineral industry, tourism and education.”

At the same time, the State Department said

“that the United States recognizes that Russia has legitimate Arctic interests. It’s an Arctic Council member. It’s cooperated with the United States and other Arctic states in a number of areas, including oil spill response, search and rescue, pollution issues. That work is continuing; it’s ongoing; it’s welcome. We have no concerns about it or no objections to it, and we want it to continue. But we also have concerns about Russia’s military build-up in the Arctic.”

The State Department spokesman also said that the United States does “not accept Beijing’s claims to be a near-Artic state” and that “its soft power tools generally have a sharp edge.”

Although the U.S. says it is concerned by Russia’s supposed military build-up in the Arctic, it is likely more concerned by China, a country 1,500 kilometers away from the Arctic but considers itself a “near Arctic” state. Washington cannot pass off Russia’s interests and legitimacy in the Arctic and is thus trying to a create a “us verse them” situation by highlighting to Moscow that China is not an Arctic state. Although Russia is a militarily powerful state, China is the true economic rival of the U.S., and this is of a greater immediate concern for Washington as there is little chance in the short and medium term of a war between Russia and the U.S. Although relations are hostile, they are not strong enough to eventuate in a military conflict.

However, as the U.S. attempts to use Greenland to counter China and Russian interests in the Arctic, it has not considered Denmark at all, with many political parties across the political spectrum denouncing Washington’s moves.

“The U.S. is clearly working to undermine the Kingdom of Denmark,” said Rasmus Jarlov, a centre-right MP and former minister. “In the end, they might not be present in Greenland at all if they come with this kind of agenda. It is totally unacceptable.”

Karsten Honge, a leftwing MP, accused the U.S. of trying to drive a wedge between Greenland and Denmark and urged Danish premier Mette Frederiksen to “draw a line in the ice cap.”

Since 2008, Greenland has enjoyed strong autonomy, all powers were transferred to Nuuk except foreign and financial policy, and security. The largest island on the planet has enormous geostrategic appeal, which the Trump Administration has desperately wanted to take advantage of. Washington is well aware of the great disadvantage it has in this geostrategic battle against Moscow. Russia not only controls much more Arctic territory than the U.S., it is also much better prepared to exploit and control the Arctic. Paul Zukunf, commander-in-chief of the US Coast Guard between 2014 and 2018, said in 2017 that it will take the U.S. “a generation” to reach Russia’s military capabilities in the Arctic.

The U.S., Russia and China are competing over the Arctic because as the icecaps melt, a new maritime route that is emerging will allow ships to pass through, considerably reducing journey times between Europe, North America and East Asia, propelling international trade. In addition, a 2008 study by the U.S. Geology Service indicated that the Arctic potentially has 22% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves, in addition to precious metals and minerals like gold, copper, bauxite, zinc and diamonds.

However, a U.S. control of Greenland will mean a considerable advantage against Russia to gain access to these precious resources and control maritime laneways. Greenland itself has large reserves of gas, oil and fresh water. It is for this reason that Trump believed the purchase of Greenland is a great real estate deal. But the battle goes beyond Greenland, and focuses on the Arctic.

Eight nations are within the Arctic Circle – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S., and all of them created in 1996 the Arctic Council, a forum in charge of promoting cooperation and coordination. China is however outside of this circle but will still force its way to try and influence the region. Although the U.S. is watchful and suspicious of Russia, a part of it is hoping that Moscow and Washington can coordinate against Chinese influence, while at the same time dominate the region for itself. It is however unlikely that Copenhagen will allow the U.S. to control and/or influence Greenland, despite its attempts, thus severely weakening American hegemony in the Arctic.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Dr. Dan Erickson of Accelerated Health Care talks about the impact of the coronavirus on Kern County.

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The ongoing economic collapse combined with a public health crisis is unprecedented in modern memory.

The human toll from both mounts daily worldwide — a second 9/11 in new form that’s likely to be far more devastating for ordinary people in the West and elsewhere than in 2001 or during the Great Depression.

During the 1930s in America, an alphabet soup of constructive federal programs aided ordinary people in need, notably by jobs creation — positive actions, though not enough to end hard times for lack of greater spending needed that began in the run-up to and during WW II.

The 9/11 state-sponsored event launched endless wars on humanity at home and abroad.

The US attacked one country after another threatening no one, invented enemies, not real ones.

Police state laws were enacted, human and civil rights suffering a major body blow.

The standard of living in the US and West fell from the ravages of neoliberal harshness.

What Obama called “shared sacrifice” was all about ordinary people sacrificing so privileged ones could share at their expense — the earlier new normal entering its likely more devastating phase now.

COVID-19 combined with economic collapse continue war on humanity where 9/11 left off.

Wall Street banks and other politically well-connected companies were handed trillions of dollars in free money.

Ordinary people are getting short-term peanuts, for many not enough to survive without food aid, medical help, and suspension of rent or mortgage payment obligations.

The public health crisis will pass in time, the human economic toll for countless millions in the US and West to continue longterm.

It’ll likely include greater widespread poverty, unemployment, underemployment, human deprivation, and totalitarian rule, the latter enforced by police state harshness — an unacceptable new normal arriving in stages.

Economic collapse with longterm adverse consequences for the majority in the West is most worrisome. More on this below.

While the highly contagious novel coronavirus is influenza in new form, much about it remains to be learned, including effective treatments that aren’t available so far.

Rushing vaccine development and promoting mass vaccination will do far more harm than good.

All vaccines have toxic ingredients that are harmful to human health. No successful coronavirus vaccine was ever developed.

Whatever emerges ahead for COVID-19 will most likely be ineffective because it’s “unlike any other virus known to mankind and it exhibits a wide range of anomalous characteristics compared to other viruses,” Thailand Medical News (TMN) reported, adding:

Vaccines won’t work because “(i)t  will not be one drug that can treat the COVID-19 disease but a combination of many.”

Unlike other viruses, “every (novel coronavirus) change on its genome as it passes from host to host” results in numerous mutations, treatment needing to address their individual characteristics.

Infected asymptomatic individuals and others who recovered from infection (developing positive antibodies) remain vulnerable to re-infection.

There’s risk of other diseases resulting from infection, including what one genomic expert calls “strange chronic conditions (and) accelerated cancers.”

According to TMN, COVID-19’s “ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated,” new mutations discovered not previously seen, some more serious than others.

Epidemiologist/hepatologist Dr Li Lanjuan discovered new mutations in patients infected with the virus.

Treatment for one may be inappropriate for others. Dr. Li and her research team discovered over 30 COVID-19 mutations.

Are there many more still unknown? She warned that “the true diversity of the viral strains is still largely under-appreciated.”

Much more research is needed for greater knowledge of the virus in its various forms before effective treatments can be developed.

Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics Professor Xuegong Zhang explained that “(o)ur understanding of the virus remains quite shallow. There are so many unanswered questions.”

The good news is that the vast majority of infected individuals will recover.

The bad news is that the virus in its numerous mutating strains will likely be around for a long time.

The worst news is that loss of fundamental rights and economic collapse will likely cause far greater harm to countless millions of people in the US, West and elsewhere than the human toll from coronavirus strains.

Economic collapse is happening at breathtaking speed. US unemployment is far higher than reported numbers — 26 million more Americans out of work in the last month alone, millions more awaiting their unemployment applications to be processed.

Perhaps nearly half of working-age Americans are unemployed. According to Shadowstats economist John Williams, true US unemployment in April will likely be “more than double anything seen post-WW II,” the worst by far since the Great Depression.

The US economy is cratering. March retail sales fell over 10%. Industrial production is lowest since WW II ended.

Depending on how long economic crisis conditions last, things could exceed the worst of the Great Depression.

US Q II GDP “will see the deepest drop in modern history,” said Williams. Year-over-year new claims for unemployment insurance increased by “1859%.”

The surge in new filings continues. Williams estimates true US unemployment for April at “around 38%” of the workforce and heading higher.

Prior to the last month, the highest number of US weekly unemployment filings was 695,800 in 1982.

In the past four weeks, it would way exceed the 26 million number reported if all claims were processed as received.

Current hard times for most Americans are far more severe than the 2008-09 Great Recession.

Along with millions of new unemployment filings, there’s a record number of continuing claims — both numbers likely to keep rising until economic recovery begins.

Economic activity in Europe is affected like the US because of lockdowns.

The longer they continue, the greater the economic damage to most people and countless numbers of small and medium-sized business that may be unable to survive.

Is that planned in the US and perhaps Europe?

Will dominant companies use economic crisis conditions to consolidate to greater size and market power by buying vulnerable businesses at fire sale prices while letting others fade away and die, reducing competition overall?

Will the legacy of what’s ongoing be greater power in the hands of dominant enterprises, institutions, and ruling hardliners at the expense of public health, social justice, fundamental freedoms, and nations in the West more unsafe and unfit to live in than ever before what’s going on began?

Is what’s happening long ago planned by dark forces for aims they seek to achieve, or are events unfolding naturally?

The fullness of time will tell what I suspect is more the former than the latter, ordinary people harmed so privileged ones can benefit.

9/11 was made-in-the-US state-sponsored terrorism, planned well in advance.

The same is perhaps true about a second 9/11 in new form that’s ravaging economies, public health and welfare of ordinary people worldwide.

A more dismal new normal likely awaits in the US and West, exacerbating the disturbing trend since the neoliberal 90s.

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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.

It is clear that we are heading for severe economic storms. Several scenarios are possible, one more optimistic than the other, but the whole system can also go bust. In any case, hard choices will have to be made.

According to the Financial Times chief economist “this is much the biggest crisis the world has confronted since the second world war and the biggest economic disaster since the Depression of the 1930s”.

The collapse of prices in the oil market betrays that the global economy is having a very rough time and that recovery is not going to happen soon. Oil demand is a good indicator of economic activity.[1] Globally, that demand has fallen by as much as a third.

The IMF has just published a report on that economic storm. In the most optimistic case, this year the global economy will be 6.3 percent smaller than was expected before the coronacrisis. Next year, growth would be 2.4 percent higher than expected. In that scenario, an estimated $ 3,400 billion will be lost due to this crisis[2]. That equals the GDP of all countries in South America and one and a half times that of Africa. That seems an awful lot, and it is, but this amount is only one-seventh or less of what is estimated to be parked in tax havens.

In case lockdowns in parts of the world last longer than until June, and if new lockdowns happen in 2021, the IMF estimates the loss at double that (-8% or $ 6.800 billion loss). In the less favorable – but more realistic scenario – government spending in the rich countries will increase by 10 percentage points of GDP and debt will increase by 20 percentage points.[3]

And this is all on the assumption that the entire system will survive. In another report the IMF warns:

“This crisis presents a very serious threat to the stability of the global financial system. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, financial conditions tightened at unprecedented speed, exposing some ‘cracks’ in global financial markets”.

The world’s total debt today has reached a record $ 253,000 billion. That is 322 percent of the world GDP. That’s a ticking time bomb. But what is even more worrying today are the risky credit market segments. This means junk bonds,[4] leveraged loans[5] and bespoke private credit. After the crisis of 2008, central banks pumped a lot of money into the financial markets (so-called “quantitative easing” or QE). This, together with extremely low interest rates, has led to a huge financial bubble and to the creation of today’s many zombie companies and banks[6].

According to the IMF the value of these junk credits has risen to an incredible $ 9,000 billion. If this starts to collapse and tops the loss of the other thousands of billions of dollars as a result of COVID-19, the 2008 crisis will be a snap in comparison. Not without reason the IMF says: “This crisis is like no other”.

So there are three scenarios: an optimistic (which actually boils down to a major depression), a less optimistic and a real crash. In each of those scenarios, a tremendous amount of money will be needed to stem the crisis and recover.

The key question is where this money should come from. Who will pay the bill? There is not much choice. Either the working population or the outrageously large fortunes. The former will lead to enormous impoverishment, with all possible political consequences, and will plunge the economy even deeper into the crisis due to the further decline in purchasing power.Editor in chief of The Financial Times Rana Foroohar focuses on the matter:

“If we want capitalism and liberal democracy to survive COVID-19, we cannot afford to repeat the mistaken ‘socialize the losses, privatize the gains’ approach of a decade ago”.

In other words, COVID-19 has thoroughly shaken up the balance of powers. The financial and economic elites are on the defensive. An economic model where profits take precedence over people’s well-being and health is no longer sustainable. The time is ripe for fundamental social changes for the benefit of the people who keep our society afloat during the corona crisis. Introducing a corona tax will be essential, but only just a beginning. Much more than that will be necessary. In any case, these are exciting times. Get ready.

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Notes

[1] The stock markets are not a good indicator at the moment because they are artificially boosted by the gigantic amount of money that central banks are pumping into the capital markets. This is one of the reasons why bond market interest rates are very low, leading speculators to turn to the stock market.

[2] For next year, growth is estimated to be 2.4 percent higher than normally expected. Together this will result in a loss of 3.9 percent. Out of a total of $ 87,000 billion, this equates to $ 3,400 billion.

[3] For example, instead of a government deficit of 3 percent of GDP, this will amount to 13 percent. Instead of debt of 100 percent of GDP, this becomes debt of 120 percent of GNP.

[4] In order to get money (for investing), a company can issue shares, borrow money from the bank or appeal directly to savers by issuing a bond (debt certificate). The buyers of that bond are, in effect, lending money to that company and are receiving interest in return. A junk bond is a risky bond. Interest is high, but so is the risk that the loan cannot be repaid.

[5] Leveraged loans are loans to companies or individuals who already have a lot of debts themselves. In a manner of speaking, they take out new loans to pay off their old ones. The new ones are a leverage for the old ones and therefore go on increasing the debt burden.

[6] Zombie companies are companies with no reserve. At the slightest problem, they get into trouble and bankruptcy threatens.

While philanthropy is considered noble, some philanthropists appear to be doing far more harm than good with their donated millions. Bill Gates, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, is perhaps one of the most dangerous philanthropists in modern history, having poured billions of dollars into global health initiatives that stand on shaky scientific and moral ground.

Gates’ answers to the problems of the world are consistently focused on building corporate profits through chemical agriculture and GMOs, or pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

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Global Research: Independent News in a Polarized World

April 23rd, 2020 by The Global Research Team

At Global Research, our mandate is to increase awareness on the broadest possible level while maintaining full independence in our reports and analyses. In an increasingly polarized world, independent news and analysis is a vital tool for examining issues from a non-partisan perspective.

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“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” US President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday in a startling threat that could trigger a catastrophic war throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The threat to launch a war 7,000 miles from US shores in the midst of coronavirus pandemic, whose death toll in the US is rapidly approaching 50,000, comes on the heels of Trump’s Monday night tweet announcing a suspension of all immigration into the United States, a transparent attempt to scapegoat immigrants for the ravages of the pandemic and the layoffs of tens of millions of workers.

There is in both of these actions an expression of desperation and a flailing about in the face of a national and global crisis for which the US ruling class has no viable solution. It is a crude attempt to change the subject and divert public attention from the catastrophic consequences of the criminal indifference of the government and the ruling oligarchy it represents to the lives and well-being of the vast majority of the population.

Pentagon officials reported Wednesday that they had received no prior notification of Trump’s tweet, much less any orders for a change in the rules of engagement in the Persian Gulf.

Nonetheless, the brutal and fascistic rhetoric of Trump reflects a drive to war by US imperialism that has not been tempered, but rather intensified, by the global pandemic.

Even as Trump issued his tweet, US warships were sailing toward a confrontation with China in the South China Sea. At the same time, the Pentagon was announcing a shift in its deployment of long-range, nuclear capable B-52 bombers to make their presence less predictable to Beijing and Moscow and thereby ratchet up tensions.

In recent days, the US has sharply escalated its air strikes against the impoverished African nation of Somalia, even as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to ravage its population. Escalating war threats continue against Venezuela, and the Pentagon continues to provide support for the near-genocidal Saudi-led war against the people of Yemen.

Nowhere does this war drive find more naked expression than in the massive government bailout that is being organized for the US arms industry. With tens of millions of workers unemployed, many facing hunger, and a drive by both the Trump administration and state governors to force a premature return to work, billions upon billions of dollars are being lavished upon military contractors to sustain their guaranteed profits and the obscene fortunes generated for their major shareholders.

The Pentagon’s top weapons procurer, Undersecretary of Defense Ellen Lord, told a press conference Monday that some $3 billion has already been funneled to the arms makers in the form of early payments for existing contracts, in addition to billions more approved by Congress in the first CARES Act, which pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets. She indicated that much more will be doled out once Congress passes another stimulus package.

Asked by a reporter how much would be need to insure Washington’s Merchants of Death from any losses due to the coronavirus pandemic, she replied, “We’re talking billions and billions on that one.” Lord added that the first priority for this aid program was the “modernization process of the nuclear triad.”

These industries are hardly the picture of the deserving poor. The fact that massive financial resources that are desperately needed to save lives and rescue millions of workers from poverty are instead being poured into their pockets is a crime.

In a conference call this week to inform Lockheed Martin shareholders of first-quarter earnings, the company’s CEO, Marilyn Hewson, boasted that the corporation’s “portfolio is broad and expanding” and its “cash generation” strong. She said the company looked forward to “supporting our warfighters’ needs.”

Indeed, Lockheed Martin pulled in $2.3 billion in cash during the single quarter and expects to top $7.6 billion—coronavirus effects notwithstanding—over the year. It has a $144 billion backlog in orders, an all-time high.

Asked whether she had any qualms about political fallout over completing a $1 billion stock buyback in the midst of the crisis, she replied, “We’re very different, I think, than those who have experienced a very significant impact to their demands.” Hewson announced that the company had set aside a grand total of $10 million for COVID-19-related relief and assistance.

The “very different” character of these companies was also noted in a financial column published in the New York Times for the benefit of its well-heeled readers, titled “Opportunity in the Military-Industrial Complex.”

Pointing to the projected $741 billion Pentagon budget for the coming year, the Times counsels: “That combination of federal dollars and corporate heft may represent an opportunity for investors who don’t mind profiting from warfare. A modest bet on a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that buys military contractors and aerospace companies may help buffer the deep recession brought on by the coronavirus.”

In short, one can reap substantial wealth from—and amid—mass death.

One of the principal concerns expressed by Undersecretary of Defense Lord as she spelled out plans for the multibillion-dollar bailout of the arms industry was the disruption of supply chains, particularly those originating in the maquiladora sweatshops just across the US border in Mexico. She also mentioned problems in India.

Thousands of Mexican workers have struck and protested against the deadly conditions inside these plants, conditions that are being prepared for workers throughout the planet as back-to-work orders are shoved through. At a plant in Ciudad Juárez owned by Michigan-based Lear Corporation, 16 workers have died from COIVD-19, while area hospitals are overflowing with victims of the virus.

The Pentagon and US Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau have intervened with the Mexican government, demanding that the maquiladoraworkers be forced back into the plants as “essential” to US imperialism’s war machine, just like their counterparts in the US. Lockheed relies on low-paid Mexican workers in Chihuahua, Mexico to produce electrical wiring for the US military’s Black Hawk and S-92 helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, while Boeing gets parts from a plant run by PCC Aerostructures in Monterrey. General Electric, Honeywell and other military contractors also profit off the labor of Mexican workers across the border.

Transmitting the dictates of the Pentagon in the language of contempt for human life that characterizes all of the policies of the Trump administration and the US ruling class, Ambassador Landau launched a Twitter campaign demanding that Mexican workers go back into the maquiladoras for the greater good of US imperialism. He enjoys the full collaboration of Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, promoted by the pseudo-left as a “progressive” and even “socialist,” who has prepared the country’s National Guard for deployment against strikers.

Warning that workers’ jobs are tied to supply chains linking them to US arms manufacturers, Ambassador Landau said, “if we do not coordinate our response, these chains can evaporate.”

He added, “There are risks everywhere, but we don’t all stay at home for fear we are going to get in a car accident. The destruction of the economy is also a health threat.”

These are the same reactionary, antiscientific and misanthropic arguments being made in the US and internationally in an attempt to force workers back into the factories and workplaces with the certainty that many will fall sick and die.

Workers in the arms industry in the US, like their counterparts in Mexico, have also struck and protested over being forced to work as part of the “critical infrastructure” of US imperialism. Workers at the Bath Iron Works in Maine and the BAE Systems shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, both run by General Dynamics, have struck over the failure of the employers to provide them with protection against infection and death. Similarly, workers at the GE Aviation plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, which produces engines for US Marine helicopters, picketed the plant over the lack of protective measures or any guarantee for workers who fall victim to COVID-19.

This resistance of the working class across national boundaries is directly opposed to the rabid nationalism and reaction that characterizes the response of the ruling classes, not only in the US, but in Europe and internationally, to the intensification of the capitalist crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. To defend their profit interests, they will condemn millions to sickness and death, even as they prepare for world war and fascist dictatorship. The only alternative is for the international working class to put an end to the profit system and rebuild society on socialist foundations.

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Featured image: B-52s lined up at Andersen Air Force Base (Source: WSWS)

Please pay attention to the following statistical facts that contradict what is being propagandized on every media outlet, including television, radio and national, regional and local print media:

As just one example, it must be noted that only a small fraction of one percent of the population of China ever got COVID, despite well-propagandized media reports that successfully made most of us think that the entire population of China was at risk. 

The assortment of statistics concerning the risks of actually getting COVID as of mid-April are far less that the 1 out of a 100 (as heralded by the media), which if true might even make me concerned. Hint: The risks are far, far less. 

1] The reported number of COVID infections (not all lab-confirmed!) in the US (as of today) is 564,000 cases. The US has a population of 330,000,000 (330 million), which, when divided into the 564,000 calculates out (at 0.0017) which represents a miniscule percentage chance of getting infected with COVID  (170 infections out of every 100,000 Americans).

2] The risk of dying of COVID in the US (23,000 deaths so far, again an inflated number, mainly because of the many false positive PCR tests and the actual over-counting “guesswork” involved in filling out the death certificates) is even more unlikely at 0.007% (23,000 divided by 330,000,000 equals 0.0000696, or 7 Americans dying from COVID out of every 100,000 Americans.

3] Most of this miniscule risk of dying, it must be emphasized, is borne by the frail, the chronically ill, the elderly, the malnourished, the over-medicated, the over-vaccinated, and the terminally ill patients that are vegetating, often bed-ridden, in nursing homes. etc. 

4] An important, but rarely mentioned statistic is the number of presumed COVID-19 deaths per million population [9which does not even prove COVID-19 infection] of any given nation. In the US, that number, as of mid-April is 15 (per million), meaning that only 15 Americans out of every 1,000,000 have died of COVID. That means that 999,985 out of every million Americans HAVE NOT DIED from COVID.

5] To put the US presumed COVID deaths per million into perspective, the number in the Scandinavian countries is in the high teens or twenties per million. Italy’s COVID deaths per million population is 218; Spain’s is 201; Germany’s is 11; Canada’s is 3; Israel’s is 3; China’s is 2 Brazil’s is 1; etc, etc!!)

6] Another important number to understand is the number of all cause deaths that occur each day in any given country, a number that has been averaged out over recent decades. As an example, 2,500 Germans die every day and 7,755 Americans die each day. Naturally, the vast majority of deaths occur in the elderly population that are mostly pre-terminally ill for one reason or another, including what happens during every one of the viral influenza pandemics that occur every year.

7] America’s All-cause Daily Death Number is 7,755 (= 2,830,690 deaths per year); India’s Daily deaths amount to 26,670 deaths; Japan’s is 3,630; Italy’s is 1,737; France’s is 1,647; Russia’s is 1,444; Canada’s is 780; Brazil’s is 920; Australia’s is 447; Sweden’s is 250; Israel’s is 122; etc, etc.

8] And, it is important to realize that the locations of deaths in America occur 60% of the time in a hospital, 20% in nursing homes and the other 20% occur at locations outside of institutions, usually at home.

9] For Minnesota (population 5,600,000), the risk of contracting COVID (total Minnesota cases, as of mid-April = 1621 cases) is a miniscule 0.00289% (1641 divided by 5,600,000 = 0.0000289). The vast majority of the cases are in high density metropolitan areas that are in the southern half of the state. 

10] My Duluth home is in St Louis County (population = 199,000). As of April 18, there are 52 cases with 8 deaths, which yields an incidence of 0.000026 (or 0.026 % chance of getting a COVID infection; that is, 26 people are infected out of every 100,000 county residents) and a death rate of 0.000042 (or a 0.004% chance of dying from COVID = 4 people dying out of every 100,000 county residents).

11] The risk of contracting COVID for those of us that live in the northern half of Minnesota is even tinier. There were zero cases Up North until mid-March, following which the numbers only gently trickled up from zero by a handful of cases each day.

12] One must keep in mind that the CDC’s Bureau of Statistics is strongly encouraging (actually ordering?) all American physicians to list “COVID” as the cause of death on discharge and death certificates of every patient that was either test-positive or simply suspected of having COVID during the hospitalization, illness or death at home or on the street. This is true even if the patient was actually a terminally-ill, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) elderly patient who would be expected to succumb to their pre-existent cardiac, pulmonary, renal, immunologic and/or hepatic diseases that were therefore also being “treated” with large numbers of potentially toxic prescription drugs.

13] Because of the significant incidence of faulty and unapproved PCR tests, it is important to be mindful that an unknown, but significant percentage of coronavirus test-positive cases are actually false positive cases and therefore patients with common colds (or even no symptoms at all) can easily be erroneously confirmed as COVID-19! There are also known to be a certain percentage of cases of benign coronavirus illnesses, including

  • A] cases of the common cold that can be caused by a coronavirus;
  • B] cases of MERS or SARS-type coronavirus infections; or
  • C] asymptomatic carriers of one of the many other non-COVID-19 strains of benign coronaviruses.

14] In Iceland’s extensive screening system, there is a 50% false positive rate in totally asymptomatic Icelanders that never developed any flu-like illnesses. Were these folks just on the verge of getting a common cold, carriers of a benign, non-COVID-19 coronavirus or was the test flawed?

15] So, I say to those of us who are fortunate enough to live in non-metropolitan areas like northern Minnesota, take a deep breath, take a walk, take a drive, go to the grocery store, exhale when passing someone on your un-masked walk, consider even giving a big hug to a fellow, un-infected, hug-compliant friend that has quarantined him- or herself for the past couple of weeks – and stop worrying so much.

Here are several important articles:

1] Peter Koenig’s powerful 3,500 word Global Research article on the COVID “crisis”.

2] Spiro Skouras’ powerful 45 minute video on the COVID “crisis” and the New World Orderand

3] Scott Tips’ powerful 6650 word article on the COVID “crisis”.

The text above is an edited version of a longer article sent by email to Dr. Kohl’s Readers. We are much indebted to Dr. Kohls

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Dr Kohls is a retired rural family physician from Duluth, Minnesota who has written a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine since his retirement in 2008. His column, titled Duty to Warn, is re-published around the world. 

He practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career prior to his retirement in 2008, primarily helping psychiatric patients who had become addicted to their cocktails of psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His Duty to Warn columns often deals with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing food industry. Those four entities can combine to even more adversely affect the physical, mental, spiritual and economic health of the recipients of the medical treatments and the eaters of the tasty and ubiquitous “FrankenFoods” – particularly when they are consumed in combinations, doses and potencies that have never been tested for safety or long-term effectiveness.

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns are archived at: 

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national; https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/; and 

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

Featured image is from caglecartoons.com

Africa Responds to the COVID-19 Pandemic

April 23rd, 2020 by Abayomi Azikiwe

There are 55 member-states within the African Union (AU) where 1.2 billion people reside.

Governments throughout the continent have taken initiatives to reduce the threat of COVID-19 cases which have been confirmed in a majority of countries.

The Republic of South Africa, the most industrialized state with a population of 60 million, has the second largest number of confirmed cases within the AU. President Cyril Ramaphosa during late March ordered a lockdown to prevent further community transmission of the virus.

On April 22, the Minister of Health, Dr. Zweli Mkhize, reported to the media that there are 3,635 confirmed cases inside the country resulting in 65 deaths. Mkhize said that 134,000 tests had been administered with nearly 6,900 carried out over a 24 hour period.

Ramaphosa has deployed 3,000 members of the South African National Defense Forces (SANDF) to assist medical and security personnel in the implementation of the lockdown. The government has established quarantine centers utilizing sports stadiums to contain people who may have violated the social distancing protocols placing themselves at risk for exposure and infection.

These measures have created additional problems both socially and economically.  Many people living in various areas of the country cannot shelter-in-place due to the necessities of earning a living. Others live in crowded households where there is not enough space to effectively minimize distancing.

Ramaphosa announced on April 22, that 73,000 SANDF troops were being placed on standby as he prepared to make announcements about the status of the COVID-19 prevention policies in effect now for four weeks. The escalation of military preparedness could be in response to the reports of attacks on delivery trucks carrying food and the unsuccessful attempt by some people to break into stores at a shopping mall in Mitchell Plains near Cape Town.

People who cannot work from their homes are suffering due to the lack of income. Desperation has increased for the marginalized sectors of the working class already subjected to an official unemployment rate of 29%.

South African Minister of Defense Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula commented on the decision to deploy and place on standby tens of thousands of troops, saying:

“If you look at the numbers and the rate at which the infection has gone up, you will realize that at some point we may actually need the kind of human deployment which has never been seen before.” (See this)

In light of the economic impact of the pandemic and the subsequent closing of the economy, Ramaphosa has announced the enactment of a stimulus package which could assist people in coping with the uncertainty. The package, worth $US26 billion, is designed to bolster businesses and provide income for three million workers.

Kenya Maintains Emergency Measures amid Pandemic

Kenya, the largest economy in East Africa, has been under a state of emergency for the last month. President Uhuru Kenyatta has addressed the country on a regular basis to encourage compliance with the restrictions on gatherings and movements. (See this)

The Kenyan Health Ministry is providing regular updates on the number of infections and deaths from the pandemic. The country which relies heavily on tourism, agricultural and light industrial production has experienced a rapid decline in its national income.

As of April 22, Kenya has confirmed over 300 cases among the 15,000 people tested. 14 people have died from COVID-19 and 83 reportedly have fully recovered.

South African soldiers enforce lockdown amid COVID-19 pandemic

Healthcare officials are concerned about the high rate of asymptomatic infections. A report in the Daily Nation noted this phenomenon in the case of one patient noting that:

“Mr. Kevin Aura, 26, is one of the patients considered to be asymptomatic, who now account for almost half of the confirmed cases in Kenya. As daily numbers of confirmed cases rise, the ministry says there is evidence of asymptomatic cases, sparking fear of unwitting community transmission.”

Nigeria Takes Action to Protect Africa’s Most Populous State

Lagos, the commercial capital of the West African state of Nigeria, whose national population is 206 million, has been under a lockdown since late March when President Muhammadu Buhari addressed the nation on the current impact of the virus on this oil-producing state.  Since the first case was detected on February 27, the federal government has halted all international and domestic passenger flights, shuttered educational institutions while expanding the lockdown to Abuja and Ogun states.

Buhari announced on March 29 that the country was working with the People’s Republic of China to develop measures for containing the spread of COVID-19 and the treatment of patients. The president emphasized the need to follow the guidelines developed by medical professionals in Nigeria.

In his speech on March 29 Buhari said:

“Indeed, the Director General of the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) was one of ten global health leaders invited by the World Health Organization to visit China and understudy their response approach. I am personally very proud of Dr. Ihekweazu for doing this on behalf of all Nigerians. Since his return, the NCDC has been implementing numerous strategies and programs in Nigeria to ensure that the adverse impact of this virus on our country is minimized. We ask all Nigerians to support the work the Federal Ministry of Health and NCDC are doing, led by the Presidential Task Force.” (See this)

As of April 20, Nigeria’s health authorities had confirmed 86 new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily increase since the outbreak bringing the total number of cases to 627. Statistics compiled by the NCDC illustrates that the epidemic is spreading at a more rapid rate over the last month.

Nigeria has confirmed 21 fatalities while 170 people have been released from hospitals after making a full recovery.

Egypt Confronts Pandemic and the Economic Impact

As of April 22, Egypt had the highest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent. The ministry of health reported 169 new coronavirus illnesses and 12 additional deaths.  These figures brought the number of confirmed coronavirus infections in Egypt to 3,659 while the number of deaths climbed to 276. The health ministry also announced that 935 people had recovered from the disease.

The pandemic has influenced the way in which the Egyptian parliament conducts its business. A session of the House of Representatives designed to enhance the authority of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi to take measures to stem the spread of COVID-19 was conducted with limits on the number of people present in the chambers.

Al-Ahram, the state-sponsored daily newspaper, reported on the amendments to several articles of the constitution, saying:

“The 17 new powers include the right to close schools and universities, shut down certain ministries, authorities and companies entirely or partially, postpone the payment of water, electricity and natural gas bills entirely or partially, and compel Egyptian expatriates returning home to undergo necessary health and quarantine measures.

The powers also give the president the authority to allocate cash and in-kind assistance to individuals and families, offer financial support for medical research, provide financial and in-kind support to damaged economic sectors, postpone the payment of certain taxes, and turn schools and youth centers into field hospitals.”

As Ramadan approaches, the way in which the Islamic season is celebrated has drastically changed in Egypt. Houses of worship have been ordered closed due to the pandemic and gathering of large numbers of people are prohibited.

AU Encourages Continental Effort to Eradicate Pandemic

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is the headquarters of the AU Commission which has been monitoring the spread of COVID-19 across the region. Figures published on the AU website indicate that 52 countries are reporting 21,096 infections and 1,055 deaths. Some 4,974 people have recovered from the disease.

Two AU member-states, the Union of Comoros and the Kingdom of Lesotho, have no confirmed cases. Lesotho has been under a lockdown for several weeks. The country is completely surrounded by South Africa, which has over 3,600 cases. Both Lesotho and the Union of Comoros are members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which is a regional affiliate of the AU.

Daily reports are being issued by the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention (ACDC), an agency within the AU. According to its website:

“Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) is a specialized technical institution of the African Union established to support public health initiatives of member states and strengthen the capacity of their public health institutions to detect, prevent, control and respond quickly and effectively to disease threats. Africa CDC supports African Union Member States in providing coordinated and integrated solutions to the inadequacies in their public health infrastructure, human resource capacity, disease surveillance, laboratory diagnostics, and preparedness and response to health emergencies and disasters.”

These objectives are closely linked to the social, political and economic capacity of AU member-states to address healthcare concerns on the continent. The AU Commission has acknowledged the economic impact of the pandemic on the various economies throughout the region.

A Voice of America (VOA) report noted in early April that:

“Researchers at the AU now believe the continent will slip into a recession this year due to the impact the coronavirus is currently having on trade, remittances, tourism and a huge fall in global oil prices.  An AU report seen by VOA estimates governments will lose around $270 billion from lost trade. The report, first published by Reuters, also says governments will need at least $130 billion in additional public spending to fight the virus.”

The advent of COVID-19 will surely bring into existence a deeper discussion on the future economic policies for AU member-states. Priorities related to centralized planning, the empowerment of working people, women, youth and farmers, the necessity for the training and retention of healthcare professionals, are all essential for the strengthening of Africa in order to confront the present crisis and those which will surface in the future.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

On April 21, clashes broke out in the city of Qamishly between the Kurdish Asayish, a security force of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and the pro-government National Defense Forces.

Local sources claim that NDF units tried to capture several Asayish positions in the city, but failed to do so. Both sides allegedly suffered no casualties. The situation de-escalated rapidly after the Russian Military Police deployed in a nearby area intervened .

On April 16, an Asayish checkpoint in the city was attacked with two hand grenades allegedly thrown by NDF members.

The current escalation is reportedly the result of disagreements between local NDF and Asayish commanders. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Qamishly city is infamous for regular clashes and tensions between the NDF and the SDF’s Asayish. The Kurdish group is trying to establish full control of the city and does not like the fact that the Damascus government has strong support there. In their turn NDF units seek to push back the creeping advance of the Kurdish force, which they see as a betrayer of Syrian national interests because of its open cooperation with foreign occupants – i.e.the United States.

The Russian Military Police and the Turkish Army held a limited joint patrol on the M4 highway in southern Idlib. From the Russian side the patrol involved two BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers and a Tiger armoured vehicle, while from the Turkish side four BMC Kirpi MRAPs took part. The movement of the Russian-Turkish convoy was monitored by unmanned aerial vehicles of the Russian Aerospace Forces.

This was the fifth limited Russian-Turkish patrol held in the framework of the Turkish-Russian Idlib agreement reached on March 5. The area of the patrols serves as a visual demonstration of the lack of progress made in the creation of the safe zone along the M4 highway in southern Idlib and in the removal of radical militants from it.

Later on the same day, the Syrian Army shelled positions of al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tharir al-Sham near the village of Tell Afis, located near the government-controlled town of Saraqib. Pro-government sources say that militants are concentrating forces there in preparation of an advance to capture Saraqib.

Late on April 20, the Israeli Air Force carried out airstrikes on several supposedly Iranian targets in the province of Homs.  Syrian Air Defence systems responded to the attack by intercepting several missiles. However, according to open data, at least 3 Syrian service members died as a result of the incident. So, at least some of the Israeli strikes hit their targets.

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Monitoring the Public After Coronavirus

April 23rd, 2020 by Philip Giraldi

It is too early to say when or even whether the siege initiated by the coronavirus will end, but many Americans and Europeans are speculating over what kind of countries will emerge on the other side. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed illegal spying on American citizens, recently predicted that there would be a “slide into a less liberal and less free world,” that the surveillance systems being created to monitor the spread of the disease would become an “architecture of oppression.” To be sure he has a point in that governments have historically used crises to expand their powers. After the crisis is over, the emergency power granted to manage the activity of the people tends to be retained.

Much depends on the lessons learned from what is being done to contain the virus currently. If testing and “keep your distance” does not succeed in checking the spread of the disease and restoring a version of what once was normal life, harsher and more permanent measures might prevail. Alexander Dugin foresees a “military-medical” dictatorship developing.

The rapid spread of the virus has also spawned some unusual conspiracy theories. One claims that the virus was actually developed in the United States, stolen from a lab by Chinese scientists and then released in China before being allowed to propagate worldwide as part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the economy and political system in the U.S. Another has cast Bill Gates as the villain, claiming that he had a hand in the appearance of the virus as part of a nefarious plot to take over global health care. The megalomaniacal Gates certainly is to blame for using his wealth and status to promote a universal “health” surveillance system for the post-coronavirus world, but that he might have been behind the appearance of the virus itself is certainly a bit of a stretch. Still other theories connect the appearance of coronavirus to 5G telecommunications technology.

The reality of to what degree the national security state that already exists tightens its grip based on a continuing medical emergency pretty much depends on how the virus itself reacts to summer heat and the measures being taken to contain it. Meanwhile, there have been some decidedly extreme proposals about what the United States and other nations might consider doing to seize and maintain the high ground in the battle against a still proliferating, highly contagious and lethal disease.

The key to stopping the spread of the virus, most authorities would agree, is to test and monitor nearly all the public, to force them if needs be to maintain distance from individuals who are already infected. There have been several proposals for how to do that ranging from testing nearly everyone and issuing health ID cards based on the results, with those individuals considered contagious or especially vulnerable being subject to quarantine or some form of further isolation. One over-the-top plan would make the health status of individuals recorded and updated on a chip readable by government scanners that would be permanently embedded in everyone’s body.

The plan that appears to have the best possibly of being adopted is being promoted in a joint venture by Apple and Google that appears to have White House support. Bloomberg reports that

“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”

The monitoring would be done by central computers and once the principle is established that phones can be manipulated there are no technical or practical limits to what other tasks could be included. That means that the observation made by protagonist Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984” has finally been realized. Smith was doing the mandatory half hour of exercise daily in front of his television, but when he began to slack off a voice from the tv set admonished him. He then accepted that in theory the government was actually capable of surveilling everyone all the time and might in fact be doing so. Well George and Winston, we have finally arrived at 1984.

Even if coronavirus fades into obscurity, government might plausibly exploit the fear created by it to push hard that a surveillance mechanism be continued and even expanded to prevent its recurrence or the development of future pandemics. That is what the “science” tells one is the right thing to do, at least according to some scientists, but it ignores individual liberty of association, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. The U.S. and other governments have long demonstrated that when it comes to individual freedom versus the ability of the state to impose a statist uniformity, the rules makers will always win out. 9/11, for example, produced the Patriot and Military Commission Acts that have considerably abridged personal liberty in America, even though the threat of terrorism was overstated at the time and has considerably receded ever since. Yet, unfathomably, the Patriot Act has survived and keeps getting renewed by Congress.

Predictably perhaps, presidential son-in-law and jack of all trades Jared Kushner, fresh from his failure to bring peace to the Middle East, has been placed in charge of a White House task force that will determine how and when to develop a pandemic surveillance system which will also link those ill to hospital centers for mandatory screening and treatment. The argument being made is that tracking nearly everyone would enable the identification and quarantining of those who are sick in nearly real time, controlling the spread of future viruses that has up until now been impossible. That the information would be collected into a national data base appears to be part of the program and it would, of course, include information on the patient’s location and activities.

As social media is already being manipulated and controlled by the government working hand-in-hand with the oligarchs who own and operate the sites, the ability to further isolate members of the public so as to preempt the development of any genuine resistance to state policies might well be seen as highly desirable. It would be a gift to a developing police state to be able to know where everyone is at any given time and be able to intuit what they might be doing. Real troublemakers could be further identified and singled out for special attention.

And one should note that it all comes at a time of great vulnerability to both revolution and repression, when representative government is under siege in many countries, unable to control the narrative as it once did. Donald Trump in a tweet barrage last Friday called on his followers to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia because he disapproved of the policies on coronavirus and gun control being advanced by their respective governors, all Democrats. Calling for the overthrow of state governments is illegal, a call to insurrection, but Trump apparently believes that having survived one impeachment attempt he is now untouchable. If many Americans begin to take Trump’s exhortations literally, it could be a sign that the admittedly dystopian political equilibrium in the U.S. is about to spin out of control.

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

Featured image is from kobini.com

Psychological Remarks on “Authority Obedience”. Say No!

April 23rd, 2020 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

What is happening in front of all our eyes at the moment is a huge scary dizziness. “Corona” is a geopolitical operation by the “global elite” and their “depopulation agenda” is real. Isolation imprisonment makes people sick and kills them. But most contemporaries are prevented from thinking and acting rationally by their sense of authority. This affects so-called “simple” people as well as intellectuals, doctors or politicians. There are hardly any real scientists left, only academics who are hiding. And the fellow citizens who have no possibility to obtain and acquire the necessary factual knowledge via alternative media are further manipulated via the mass media and kept in agonizing uncertainty. But if you try to take away the fear and panic of your fellow human beings and enlighten them, you will find that they are almost impossible to reach emotionally and intellectually. And this is because in this effort one naturally disagrees with the prevailing opinion of supposed authorities such as doctors and politicians. Many contemporaries seem to be impregnated by the sense of authority. They cannot or do not want to know anything about another opinion. But the human being is good, just irritated.

Roman Rolland’s Anti-war Novel “Clerambault”

The subject of Rolland’s book is not the First World War, although it overshadows it. His real subject is, as he says, “the sinking of the individual soul into the abyss of the mass soul”. This novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1915) was published exactly 100 years ago. It is worthwhile to read about that time and compare it with the present day. (1) In the introduction Rolland writes:

“Free souls, strong characters – that is what the world needs most today! (…) Every human being, if he is a true human being, must learn to stand alone within all, to think alone for all – if necessary, even against all! To think sincerely means to think for all, even if one thinks against all. Mankind needs those who offer it chess out of love and rebel against it when necessary! Not by falsifying your conscience and your thoughts for the sake of mankind do you serve mankind, but by defending its inviolability against social abuse of power; for they are organs of mankind. If you are unfaithful to yourselves, you are unfaithful to them.”(2)

In the second part of his novel Rolland describes the attempts of his Protagonist Agénor Clerambault, to talk to his fellow men in order to win them over to his anti-war ideas. The mechanisms of the partly unconscious resistance he described among his discussion partners are also experienced today by those who strive to win over their fellow human beings to rational thinking and action:

“Clerambault tried to speak to one or the other. Everywhere, however, he encountered the same mechanism of subterranean, semi-conscious resistance. They were all girded with the will not to understand, or in fact with a persistent counter-will. Their reason was as little affected by counter-arguments as a duck is by water. In general, people are equipped with a quite invaluable quality for the purpose of their comfort, for they can make themselves blind and deaf if they do not wish to see or hear something. And if, by some embarrassing coincidence, they have already noticed something that is annoying to them, they understand the art of forgetting it immediately. (…)

Others were eloquent speakers, who were not afraid of a Word Tournament and gladly took up the discussion in the hope of leading the stray sheep back to the flock. They did not discuss the opinion of Clerambault himself, but only whether it was up to date and appealed to his good spirit. ‘Certainly, certainly. In fact, you are right, in fact, I think quite like you, almost like you. Oh, I understand you, dear friend… But, dear friend, be careful, (…) One must not speak every truth, at least not immediately. Yours will be beautiful… in 50 years. One must not want to be hasty. One must wait until the time is ripe…’ (…) Wait? Wait for what? Until the appetites of the exploited or the stupidity of the exploited grow weary?”(3)

Authority obedience – No! 

“Authority” is the term for the possibility of a person, group or institution to exert influence on other persons and, if necessary, to enforce its own will against them, thus constituting a relationship of superiority and subordination. Authority is associated with claims to power, which are founded in different ways. In the Middle Ages it was the church that enforced these claims to power. Anyone who dared to deviate from its doctrine risked hell. Many religious and supposedly non-religious people still fear these consequences today.

The representatives of a state also enjoy a certain authority, a special reputation. They too want to exert influence on us citizens. And there would be nothing to prevent us from subordinating ourselves to them if the rulers were the best people, the most important, the most peaceful, the most decent and the most honest. But since this is not the case, never has been and never can be (Tolstoy), we should urgently refrain from considering rulers infallible and subordinate ourselves to them without criticism. We should have the courage to use our own intellect (Kant).

How to win our contemporaries for rational thinking and acting?

For a long time we have not lived in an open society in which every opinion is allowed to be expressed and has its place. Nowadays, dissenting opinions are completely prohibited and sanctioned. Even in families, we do not take the time to openly discuss with the children both their burning developmental issues and the family’s concerns. Often both spouses are working and exhausted in the evening.

This social pressure and lack of practice makes it almost impossible to win our fellow human beings – regardless of age – to rational thinking and acting. Nevertheless, we must never give it up. Never ever give up! The human being is good, just irritated. Our own honesty, openness, independence and transparency are prerequisites for our counterpart to start trusting us slowly and to dare, in very small steps, to enter the supposedly mined field. The other person must also have the secure feeling that he can learn something from me as a trustworthy, authentic person or as an expert with a certain standing (authority).

But that alone is not enough. The contemporary must also show a certain readiness to accept something from another, must possess a spiritual and mental openness. Why not even leave the well-trodden paths of the past – these familiar habits (“I can’t get out of my skin!”) – and check whether new and unfamiliar paths do not lead to truth and a life worth living.

Do not give up hope that the former people of poets and thinkers, as well as the other enslaved peoples, will wake up, find rational thought and action and be ready for civil disobedience. This time they will not give the emerging world fascism a chance.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) Reinbek near Hamburg (1988). Translated from French by Stefan Zweig. First published in 1920 by the Paris publisher Ollendorff. Original title “One against all” (1917)

(2) A.a.O., p. 12f.

(3) A.a.O., p.105f.

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Iran Harassing the US? Trump Threatens War?

April 23rd, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

The Iranian and US geopolitical agendas are world’s apart.

Iran hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, threatens none now. Claims otherwise turn truth on its head.

The US, in contrast, is at war on humanity at home and abroad — by hot and other means.

Iran respects international law, the sovereign rights of other nations, and seeks cooperative relations worldwide.

The US seeks unchallenged global dominance, demands other nations bend to its will, and targets ruling authorities unwilling to sacrifice the sovereign rights of their countries to US interests with regime change.

Iran is the region’s leading peace and stability proponent, the US the world’s main belligerent – perpetually at war on invented enemies, abhorring what just societies cherish.

Last week, the US navy falsely accused Iranian vessels of harassing Pentagon warships — near Iran’s waters in the Persian Gulf where they don’t belong, their presence highly provocative.

A Pentagon statement claimed Iranian “vessels repeatedly crossed the bows and sterns of the US vessels at extremely close range and high speeds,” adding:

“The US crews issued multiple warnings via bridge-to-bridge radio, five short blasts from the ships’ horns and long range acoustic noise maker devices, but received no response.”

Provocative US actions occur repeatedly in the Persian Gulf, South China Sea, enforcing an illegal blockade of Venezuela, and waters elsewhere worldwide — where the US presence is unwanted and reviled.

Iran harasses no other countries. Yet the Pentagon falsely accused its military of “dangerous and provocative actions,” ignoring its own real ones.

Iran’s IRGC dismissed what it called a “Hollywood-style” account of Iranian vessels in their own waters while US warships encroach on them provocatively.

An IRGC statement refuted the Pentagon’s claim, denouncing what it called “unprofessional” maneuvers by the “terrorist US naval forces” in the Persian Gulf,” adding:

In order to protect its coastline and waters from “illegal, unprofessional, dangerous and adventurist” moves by the US, Iranian naval vessels patrol the Persian Gulf.

The IRGC accused the Pentagon of putting out “false and fake stories.”

When a fleet of 11 Iranian vessels encountered US warships, their commanders ignored the IRGC’s warning to cease “unprofessional and provocative moves,” adding:

“The illegitimate presence of the terrorist US regime is the root cause of evil and insecurity in the region, and the only way to strengthen sustainable security in this strategic region is for the Americans to withdraw from West Asia.”

“They should be assured that the Revolutionary Guard navy and the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran see the dangerous actions of foreigners in the region as a threat to national security and its red line, and any error in calculation on their part will receive a decisive response.”

On Wednesday, Trump belligerently tweeted:

“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.”

After ordering the murder of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January, Trump falsely accused “Iran and/or its proxies (of) planning a sneak attack on US troops and/or assets in Iraq” in early April, adding:

“If this happens, Iran will pay a very heavy price, indeed!”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry slammed his hostile remark, saying it could lead to regional “instability and disaster,” calling for cessation of US “warmongering during coronavirus outbreaks.”

Trump is at it again. Along with falsely blaming China for COVID-19, encouraging lawsuits against the country and its leadership going nowhere, he escalated anti-Iran saber rattling, likely on Netanyahu’s urging.

DJT is a failed businessman, failed deal-maker, geopolitical know-nothing embarrassment to the office he holds.

Preemptive US aggression against Iran could explode the region in devastating conflict, Pentagon forces and Israel to pay a heavy price if things go this far.

Chickenhawk Trump knows nothing about war. Pentagon commanders know Iran would be a formidable adversary if attacked.

The US hasn’t won a war since WW II ended. It’s good at destroying things and making enemies, not winning over hearts and minds.

A Final Comment

On Wednesday, Press TV reported that Iran’s IRGC Aerospace Division “successfully launched and placed the country’s first military satellite into orbit,” adding:

Dubbed Nour (Light)-1, “(t)he satellite was placed into (an) orbit 425 kilometers above earth’s surface.”

IRGC General Hossein Salami called the successful launch a significant boost to Iran’s intelligence capabilities, adding:

“Today, we can observe the world from space, which means the expansion of the strategic data of the IRGC’s mighty defense power.”

The “IRGC is now a space force” — to Washington’s chagrin.

Iran can monitor US military movements from space for real time awareness of what it’s up to.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Detroit, COVID-19 and the Worsening Capitalist Crisis

April 23rd, 2020 by Abayomi Azikiwe

Detroit still remains at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic as infection rates continue at unacceptable levels amid the rapidly declining economic situation.

Although the rate of people entering hospitals suffering from the virus and the number of deaths are declining as of late April, thousands of people are sick and will face additional challenges as the future of their places of employment, housing and healthcare access are not assured.

One of the most egregious aspects in the current situation was the announcement recently that the largest hospital in the region, Beaumont, was closing its campus in Wayne, a municipality in the western region of the county. This same hospital along with other healthcare facilities, had said a week earlier that it would reduce its workforce due to the lack of elective procedures and routine medical evaluations as a result of the COVID-19 emergency.

Healthcare workers employed at Beaumont have suffered hundreds of lay-offs during this period of restructuring. Spokespersons for the nurses have indicated that they were not kept abreast of the management decisions being made in regard to the closing and reduction in staff.

Beaumont corporate officials say that the closure of the Wayne facility is temporary in order to shift its operations to other services since the COVID-19 admissions are ebbing across the metropolitan area. Nonetheless, there are daily news reports showing images of crowded hospital wards where there is a lack of personnel to provide quality care to patients.

According to an article published by Michigan Radio based upon a press conference with Beaumont CEO, John Fox, who said of the closure of the Wayne campus that:

“’It had been converted to take COVID-19 patients only. Since it appears the pandemic is leveling off, all the patients and staff were sent to other hospitals. ‘So, we did not need the Wayne 200 beds for that. And we’re now having it being sanitized and we’ll be on the process of converting it back,’ Fox said during an online news conference. He said it made more sense to put staff and resources to fight the COVID-19 in the health system’s other seven hospitals in the metro Detroit area. Sanitizing the Wayne hospital will take days. Then, Beaumont will  apply to the state to get approval to alter its use.”

However, throughout the entire Beaumont Hospital system some 2,475 people are being laid-off while 450 positions will be eliminated. Fox says that the job categories being removed are not related to providing healthcare to patients.

Another major hospital is the Detroit Medical Center (DMC) and its Sinai-Grace facility on the northwest side has been the scene of protests. One nurse was terminated at the hospital because she posted a seven second video on Facebook about precautions being taken in treating COVID-19 patients. Nurses have reported that there is a lack of staff to address the enormous problems at the facility while personal protection equipment (PPE) is in short supply.

Detroit nurse files suit for dismissal from Sinai-Grace Hospital amid pandemic

The nurse who was fired, Kenisa Barkai, has filed a lawsuit against Sinai-Grace. The company says that she violated the social media policy. Sinai-Grace was the scene of a sit-in during March to protest the conditions prevailing at the facility. The workers were told to go back to work or leave the hospital. They decided to leave and go home rather than work under such circumstances.

Barkai is taking legal action in response to the termination. The local NBC affiliate, WDIV, wrote in a report on April 21, saying:

“The lawsuit cites Michigan’s Whistle Blowers Protection Act, which states an ‘employer shall not discharge, threaten, or otherwise discriminate against an employee regarding the employee’s compensation, terms, conditions, location, or privileges of employment because the employee, or a person acting on behalf of the employee, reports or is about to report, verbally or in writing, a violation or a suspected violation of a law or regulation or rule promulgated pursuant law of this state.’ Sinai-Grace has repeatedly been the focus of media reports during the COVID-19 outbreak.” (See this)

The Plight of Senior Citizens in the State of Michigan

Nursing homes in the metropolitan Detroit area, similar to other parts of the United States, have been a center for COVID-19 infections and deaths. The outbreak which captured the attention of the U.S. public and raised awareness about the seriousness of the pandemic was the tragedy surrounding the nursing home just outside of Seattle, Washington during February and early March. Other convalescing and assisted-living facilities have met similar fates. In New Jersey, 17 bodies of former residents were uncovered at one nursing home.

In Detroit and the state of Michigan, the names and locations of nursing homes where COVID-19 infections were in existence, was being withheld from the public. These facilities were the scene of many fatalities in the battle against the virus. The state-controlled Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs reports that there are 292 homes for the aged and 4,211 adult foster care homes in Michigan with total bed capacity of more than 57,000.

As of April 21, the State of Michigan Health Department declared that it would report on the locations where COVID-19 cases were present. Agencies working in the areas of senior care welcomed this policy shift. The data coming out of the nursing homes will provide a more accurate picture of the degree to which the virus has spread throughout the state and the U.S. as a whole.

The Michigan-based Bridge Magazine has been investigating the conditions inside the nursing homes in the state. In an article the publication reviews recent events including:

“A Genesee County nursing home where 17 resident deaths were reported on Saturday (April 18), with an additional 24 residents testing positive, seven of whom were hospitalized. Twenty-six employees tested positive. That followed reports that 21 residents had died of COVID-19 at two Wayne County nursing homes, with 46 other residents with confirmed cases of the coronavirus. On Friday (April 17), an official at Hillsdale Hospital in rural southern Michigan reported that a county nursing home had 42 cases of COVID-19 among staff and residents, accounting for seven nursing home deaths among 10 total coronavirus deaths in the county.”

Mass Unemployment and the Need for a Program of Resistance

Since the declarations of emergencies in various states and the issuance of guidelines from the White House Task Force in mid-March, 22.3 million workers in the U.S. have applied for unemployment benefits. This represents 14 % of the workforce being rendered idle over a period of six weeks.

Nonetheless, these figures are undoubtedly undercounts since many workers claim that they cannot even gain access to the websites and phone centers where the filing are taking place. Many say that the websites are down and that phone numbers listed to call are constantly busy or there is no answer. Oftentimes workers are disconnected while waiting to file for benefits.

In states like Michigan and Pennsylvania the escalation in jobless claims account for 20% of the workforce. The stimulus checks sent out to taxpayers with documents are by no means adequate to sustain workers through this long term crisis. There is no economic relief for undocumented workers many of whom toil in what is described as the “essential” job categories.

Unprecedented levels of unemployment will only compound the dire conditions of working families particularly among African Americans and other oppressed groups. The people of color communities in cities such as Detroit, New York City, Newark, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, etc. are being disproportionately affected by the pandemic. One by-product of unemployment is the loss of healthcare insurance. This will of course adversely impact the medical system even further prompting additional lay-offs and the reduction in services during a period where just the opposite is required.

In Detroit, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition has launched a campaign to request the intervention of Cuban medical personnel in the city to address the shortages of healthcare personnel along with bringing a socialist perspective to the pandemic. With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting the potential for a “second wave” COVID-19 infections this coming Fall and Winter seasons, the capacity of the existing hospital systems, municipal structures and social services to maintain any semblance of effectiveness could very well be compromised.

Therefore, the burgeoning discontent among people suffering from job losses, inadequate healthcare, the lack of water, education and housing, requires a programmatic approach which is designed to address the crisis from the perspective of the working class and oppressed. Corporate-backed Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit has already announced a bank-driven austerity budget for the next two fiscal years absent of any debate or discussion with community organizations and labor.

Demonstrations occurring in the hospital system and the service industry could easily spill over into other sectors of the population. Low-wage workers employed by Target and Amazon say they will engage in a “sick-out” on May 1, International Workers Day, to highlight the deteriorating conditions under which they work.

USA Today carried a story on the upcoming May Day national actions noting:

“More than 350 Amazon warehouse workers in 50 locations pledged to call out from their jobs starting Tuesday, according to Athena, a coalition of local and national organizations representing workers.

Target workers are planning a mass sickout May 1, which is International Workers Day, said Adam Ryan, a liaison with Target Workers Unite, an employee activist group.”

Workers in other industries need to learn from these efforts as the political pressure by the capitalist ruling class on the White House to encourage people to go back to work increases. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has by no means run its course. Also millions of people are unemployed and are unable to resume normal economic activity.

As the crisis worsens an ideological struggle will intensify between forces on the Left against right-wing elements seeking to exploit the fear and uncertainty for the purposes of prompting a neo-fascist agenda. It will be important for progressive forces to take independent organizing initiatives to combat the further erosion of living standards inside the country.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author