Bulletin N° 1085
Subject:
Dogs bark, pigs squeal, snakes hiss, and
donkeys bray: a signal is sent, but no message is received.
Grenoble
January 25, 2022
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The serendipitous discovery recently in a local secondhand store of a book that I once owned years ago - but had lost before reading - has led me belatedly to a more thorough appreciation of Chinese culture and a better understanding of the limitations of the peasant revolution of 1949. Jung Chang’s award-winning book, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China (1993), is best classified as a historical novel whose characters include the author’s great grandmother, Er-ya-tou (literally, “Number Two Girl”) (1888-1955); her grandmother, Yu-fang (1909-1969); her mother, BoaQin/De-hong (b.1931); and herself, Jung Chang (b.1952).
This book has been described as containing “mesmerizing stories of survival, no matter what tragedies and horrors are encountered along the way.” The poetic license for ascribing emotions and thoughts to people living under totalitarian conditions in a controlled environment is used liberally by the author, who was born in 1952. She occasionally shares her impressions from her early adolescent years, but the verisimilitude to contemporary patterns of mass conformity in late monopoly-capitalist political systems - used to govern western nations today - lends credibility to this “historic” account of China, which extends from 1909 to 1978.
Of particular interest is Chang’s account of Mao Zedong, at the time of The Great Leap Forward. In chapter 12, titled “Capable Women Can Make a Meal without Food (1958-1962)” the author recounts experiences in these years of almost unbelievable hardship.
In the summer of 1958, when I was six, I started going to
a primary school about twenty minutes’ walk from home, mostly along muddy
cobbled back alleys. Every day on my way to and from school, I screwed up my eyes
to search every inch of ground for broken nails, rusty cogs, and any other metal
objects that had been trodden into the mud between the cobbles. These were for
feeding into furnaces to produce steel, which was my major occupation. Yes, at
the age of six, I was involved in steel production, and had to compete with my
schoolmates at handing in the most scrap iron. All around me uplifting music
blared from loudspeakers, and there were banners, posters, and huge slogans
painted on the walls proclaiming ‘Long Live the Great Leap Forward!’ and
‘Everybody, Make Steel!’(p.291)
. . .
It was at this
time that Mao gave full vent to his half-baked dreams of turning China into a
first-class modern power. He called steel the ‘Marshal’ of industry, and
ordered steel output to be doubled in one year – from 5.35 million tons in 1957
to 10.7 million in 1958. But instead of trying to expand the proper steel
industry with skilled workers, he decided to get the whole population to take
part. There was a steel quota for every unit, and for months people stopped
their normal work in order to meet it. The country’s economic development was
reduced to a simplistic question of how many tons of steel could be produced,
and the entire nation was thrown into this single act. It was officially
estimated that nearly 100 million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work
and into steel production. They had been the labor force producing much of the
country’s food. Mountains were stripped bare of trees for fuel. But the output
of this mass production amounted only to what people called ‘cattle droppings’
(niu-shi-ge-da), meaning useless turds.
This absurd
situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also
an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting
in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another
matter. One of its main components was a deep-seated contempt of human life.
. . .
Mao’s
voluntarism had been fueled by his recent experience in Russia. Increasingly
disillusioned with Khrushchev after his denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Mao went
to Moscow in late 1957 to attend a world Communist summit. He returned convinced
that Russia and its allies were abandoning socialism and turning ‘revisionist.’
He saw China as the only true believer. It had to blaze a new path. Megalomania
and voluntarism meshed easily in Mao’s mind.
Mao’s fixation
on steel went largely unquestioned, as did his other obsessions.
. . .
There were
also fantastic economic goals. Mao claimed that China’s industrial output could
overtake that of the United States and Britain within fifteen years. For the
Chinese, these countries represented the capitalist world. Overtaking them
would be seen as a triumph over their enemies. This appealed to people’s pride,
and boosted their enthusiasm enormously. They had felt humiliated by the
refusal of the United States and most major Western countries to grant
diplomatic recognition, and were so keen to show the world that they could make
it on their own that they wanted to believe in miracles. Mao provided the inspiration.
The energy of the population had been eager to find an outlet. And here it was.
The gung-ho spirit overrode caution, as ignorance triumphed over reason.(p.293-294)
.
. .
That summer, all of China was
organized into these new units (called people’s communes’), each containing
between 2,000 and 20,000 households. One of the forerunners of this drive was
an area called Xushui, in Hebei province in North China, to which Mao took a
shine. In his eagerness to prove that they deserved Mao’s attention, the local
boss there claimed they were going to produce over ten times as much grain as
before. Mao smiled broadly and responded: ‘What are you going to do with all
that food? On second thought, it’s not too bad to have too much food,
really. The state doesn’t want it.
Everybody else has plenty of their own. But the farmers here can just eat and
eat. You can eat five meals a day!’ Mao was intoxicated, indulging in the eternal
dream of the Chinese peasants – surplus food. After these remarks, the
villagers further stoked the desires of the Great Leader by claiming that they
were producing more than a million pounds of potatoes per mu (one mu
is one-sixth of an acre), over 130,000 pounds of wheat per mu, and
cabbages weighing 500 pounds each.
It was a time when telling fantasies to
oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practiced to an incredible
degree. Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one plot to show Party
officials that they had produced a miracle harvest. Similar ‘Potemkin fields’
were shown off to gullible – or self-blinded – agricultural scientists,
reports, visitors from other regions, and foreigners. Although these crops
generally died within a few days because of untimely transplantation and
harmful density, the visitors did not know that, or did not want to know. A large part of the
population was swept into this confused crazy world. ‘Self-deception while
deceiving others’ (zi-qi-zi-ren) gripped the nation. Many people
–including agricultural scientists and senior Party leaders – said they saw the
miracles themselves. Those who failed to match other people’s fantastic claims
began to doubt and blame themselves. Under a dictatorship like Mao’s, where
information was withheld and fabricated, it was very difficult for ordinary
people to have confidence in their own experience or knowledge. Not to mention
that they were now facing a national wide tidal wave of fervor which promised
to swamp any individual coolheadedness. It was easy to start ignoring reality
and simply put one’s faith in Mao. To go along with the frenzy was by far the
easiest course. To pause and think and be circumspect meant trouble.
An official cartoon portrayed a mouselike scientist
whining, ‘A stove like yours can only boil water to make tea.’ Next to him
stood a giant worker, lifting a huge sluice gate releasing q flood of molten
steel, who retorted, ‘How much can you drink?’ Most who saw the absurdity of
the situation were too frightened to speak their minds, particularly after the
Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Those who did voice doubts were immediately
silenced, or sacked, which also meant discrimination against their family and a
bleak prospect for their children.
In many places, people who refused to boast of massive
increases in output were beaten up until they gave in. In Yigin, some leaders
of production units were trussed up with their arms behind their backs in the
village square while questions were hurled at them:
‘How much wheat can you
produce per mu?’
‘Four hundred jin’
(about 450 pounds – a realistic amount).
Then, beating him: ‘How much
wheat can you produce per mu?’
‘Eight hundred jin.’
Even this impossible figure was not enough. The
unfortunate man would
be beaten, or simply left hanging, until he finally said:
‘Ten thousand
jin.’ Sometimes the man died hanging there because
he refused to
increase the figure, or simply before he could raise the
figure high
enough.
Many grass-roots officials and peasants involved in
scenes like this did not believe in the ridiculous boasting, but fear of being
accused themselves drove them on. They were carrying out the orders of the
Party, and they were safe as long as they followed Mao. The totalitarian system
in which they had been immersed had sapped and warped their sense of
responsibility. Even doctors would boast about miraculously healing incurable
diseases.
Trucks used to
turn up at our compound carrying grinning peasants coming to report on some
fantastic, record-breaking achievement. One day it was a monster cucumber half
as long as the truck. Another time it was a tomato carried with difficulty by
two children. On another occasions there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck.
The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only
made of paper-maché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was
confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true?
People had leaned to defy reason and to live with acting.
The whole
nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality,
responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because
words had lost their meanings – and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.
This was
entrenched by the further regimentation of society. When he first set up the
communes, Mao said the main advantage was that ‘they are easy to control,’
because the peasants would now be in an organized system rather than being, to
a certain extent, left alone. They were given detailed orders from the very top
about how to till their land. Mao summed up the whole of agriculture in eight
characters: ‘soil, fertilizer, water, seeds, dense planting, protection,
tending, and technology.’ The Party central Committee in Peking was handing out
two-page instructions on how peasants all over China should improve their
fields, another page on how to use fertilizers, another on planting crops
densely. Their incredibly simplistic instructions had to be strictly followed:
the peasants were ordered to replant their corps more densely in one mini-campaign
after another.(pp.295-298)
. . .
Agriculture was also neglected because of the priority
given to steel. Many of the peasants were exhausted from having to spend long
hours finding fuel, scrap iron, and iron ore and keeping the furnaces going.
The fields were often left to the women and children, who had to do everything
by hand, as the animals were busy making their contribution to steel
production. When harvest time came in autumn 1958, few people were in the
fields.
The failure to
get in the harvest in 1958 flashed a warning that a food shortage was on its
way, even though official statistics showed a double-digit increase in
agricultural output. It was officially announced that in 1958 China’s wheat
output had overtaken that of the United States. The Party newspaper, the People’s
Daily, started a discussion on the topic ‘How do we cope with the problem
of producing too much food?’
My father’s
department was in charge of the press in Sichuan, which printed outlandish
claims, as did every publication in China.
The press was the voice of the Party, and when it came to party
policies, neither my father nor anyone else in the media had any say. They were
part of a huge conveyor belt. My father watched the turn of events with alarm.
His only option was to appeal to the top leaders.
At the end of
1958 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee in Peking stating that
producing steel like this was pointless and a waste of resources; the peasants
were exhausted, their labor was being squandered, and there was a food
shortage. He appealed for urgent action. He gave the letter to the governor to
pass on. The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the number-two man in the province. He
had given my father his first job when he had come to Chengdu for Yibin, and
treated him like a friend.
Governor Lee
told my father he was not going to forward the letter. Nothing in it was new,
he said. ‘The Party knows everything. Have faith in it.’ Mao had said that
under no circumstances must the people’s morale be dampened. The Great Leap Forward
had changed the psychological attitude of the Chinese from passivity to a
can-do, get-up-and-go spirit, he said, which must not be imperiled.
Governor Lee
also told my father that he had been given the dangerous nickname ‘Opposition’
among the provincial leaders, to whom he had voiced disagreements. It was only
because of his other qualities, his absolute loyalty to the Party and his stern
sense of discipline, that my father was still all right. ‘The good thing,’ the
governor said, ‘is that you only voiced your doubts to the Party, and not to
the public.’ He warned my father he could get into serious trouble if he
insisted on raising these concerns, as could his family and ‘others,’ clearly meaning
himself, my father’s friend. My father did not insist. He was half convinced by
the argument, and the stakes were too high. He had reached a stage where he was
not insusceptible to compromise.
But my father
and the people working in the departments of Public Affairs collected a great
number of complaints, as part of their jobs, and forwarded them to Peking.
There was general discontent among the people and officials alike. In fact, the
Great Leap Forward triggered off the most serious split in the leadership since
the communists had taken power a decade before. Mao had to step down from the
less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu
Shaoqi. Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a
fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.
The voices of dissent grew so strong that the Party had
to convene a special conference, which was held at the end of June 1959 in the mountain
resort of Lushan, in central China. At the conference the defense minister,
Marshal Peng Dehuai, wrote a letter to Mao criticizing what had happened in the
great Leap Forward and recommending a realistic approach to the economy.
. . .
Mao had had to
scheme hard to preserve his power. In this he was a supreme master. His
favorite reading, which he recommended to other Party leaders, was a classic
multi-volume collection about courtly power and intrigues. In fact, Mao’s rule
was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised
spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects. He was also a maestro at ‘divide and rule,’
and at manipulating men’s inclination to throw others to the wolves. In the
end, few top officials stood up for Marshal Peng, in spite of their private
disenchantment with Mao’s policies.(pp.299-302)
. . .
The purge of ‘rightist opportunists’ rocked
the Party once again, as a great many officials agreed with Peng. The lesson
was that Mao’s authority was unchallengeable – even though he” was clearly in
the wrong. Officials could see that no matter how high up you were – Peng after
all was the defense minister – and no matter what your standing – Peng had
reputedly been Mao’s favorite – if you offended Mao you would fall into
disgrace. They also knew that you could not speak your mind and resign, or even
resign quietly: resignation was seen as an unacceptable protest. There was no
opting out. The mouths of the Party as well as the people were now tightly
sealed. After this, the Great Leap Forward went into further, madder excesses.
More impossible economic goals were imposed from on high.
More peasants
were mobilized to make steel. And more arbitrary orders rained down, causing
chaos in the countryside.(pp.303-304)
As the sixties began, a great famine spread across the whole of China.
In
Chengdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced to 19 pounds of
rice, 3.5 ounces of cooking oil, and 3.5 ounces of meat, when there was any.
Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage. Many people were
afflicted by edema, a condition in which fluid accumulated under the skin
because of malnutrition. The patient turns yellow and swells up. The most
popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be rich in protein.
Chlorella fed on human urine, so people stopped going to the toilet and peed
into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seeds in; they grew into
something looking like green fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out
of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to eat,
but did reduce the swelling.
Like everybody
else, my father was entitled only to a limited food ration. But as a senior
official he had some privileges. In our compound there were two canteens, a
small one for departmental directors and their wives and children, and a big
one for everyone else, which included my grandmother, my aunt Jun-ying, and the
maid. Most of the time we collected pour food at the canteens and took it home
to eat. There was more food in the canteens than on the streets. The provincial
government had its own farm, and there were also ‘presents’ from country
governments. These valuable supplies were divided between the canteens, and the
small one got preferential treatment.
As Party
officials, my parents also had special food coupons. I used to go with my
grandmother to a special store outside the compound to buy food with them. My
mother’s coupons were blue. She was entitled to five eggs, almost an ounce of
soybeans, and the same amount of sugar per month. My father’s coupons were
yellow. He was entitled to twice as much as my mother because of his higher
rank. My family pooled the food from the canteens and the other sources and ate
together. The adults always gave the children more, so I did not go hungry. But
the adults all suffered from malnutrition, and my grandmother developed edema.
She grew chlorella at home, and I was aware that the adults were eating it,
although they would not tell me what it was for. Once I tried a little, and
immediately spat it out as it tasted revolting. I never had it again.
I had little
idea that famine was raging all around me. One day on my way to school, as I
was eating a small steamed roll, someone rushed up and snatched it from my
hands. As I was recovering from the shock; I caught a glimpse of a very thin,
dark back in shorts and bare feet running down the mud alley with his hand to
his mouth, devouring the roll. When I told my parents what had happened, my
father’s eyes grew terribly sad. He stroked my head and said, ‘You are lucky.
Other children like you are starving.’
I often had to
visit the hospital for my teeth at the time. Whenever I went there I had an
attack of nausea at the horrible sight of dozens of people with shiny, almost
transparent swollen limbs, as big as barrels. The patients were carried to the
hospital on flat carts, there were so many of them. When I asked my dentist
what was wrong with them, she said with a sigh, ‘Edema.’ I asked her what that meant,
and she mumbled something which I vaguely linked with food.
These people
with edema were mostly peasants. Starvation was much worse in the countryside
because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food
for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize grain from the
peasants by force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested
or beaten and tortured. Commune officials who were reluctant to take food from
the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some were physically
maltreated. As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in
the millions all over China.
I learned
later that several of my relatives from Sichuan to Manchuria had died in this
famine. Among them was my father’s retarded brother. His mother had died in
1958, and when the famine struck he was unable to cope as he would not listen
to anyone else’s advice. Rations were
allotted on a monthly basis, and he ate his within days, leaving nothing for
the rest of the month. He soon starved to death. My grandmother’s sister, Lan,
and her husband ‘Loyalty’ Pei-o, who had been sent to the inhospitable
countryside in the far north of Manchuria because of his old connections with
Kuomintang intelligence, both died too. As food began to run out, the village authorities
allocated supplies according to their own, unwritten priorities. Pei-o’s outcast
status meant that he and his wife were among the first to be denied food. Their
children survived because their parents gave their food to them. The father of
Yu-lin’s wife also died. At the end, he had eaten stuffing in the pillow and the
braids of garlic plants.
. . .
In 1989 an
official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that
the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This
would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted
estimate of the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.
On day in
1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying’s next-door neighbor in
Yibin went missing. A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in
the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter’s. She went up and examined
it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter’s. She reported this to
the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling
wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold
them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple was executed and the case
was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.
Years later I
met an old colleague of my father’s, a very kind and capable man, not given to
exaggeration. He told me with great emotion what he had seen during the famine
in one particular commune. Thirty-five percent of the peasants had died, in an
area where the harvest had been good – although little was collected, since the
men had been pulled out to produce steel, and the commune canteen had wasted a
large proportion of what there was. One day a peasant burst into his room and threw
himself on the floor, screaming that he had committed a terrible crime and begging
to be punished. Eventually it came out that he had killed his own baby and
eaten it. Hunger had been like an uncontrollable force driving him to take up
the knife. With tears rolling down his cheeks, the official ordered the peasant
to be arrested. Later he was shot as a warning to baby killers.
One official explanation
for the famine was that Khrushchev had suddenly forced China to pay back a large
debt it had incurred during the Korean War in order to come to the aid of North
Korea. The regime played on the experience of much of the population, who had
been landless peasants and could remember being hounded by heartless creditors
to pay rent and reimburse loans. By identifying the Soviet Union, Mao also
created an external enemy to take the blame and to rally the population.
Another cause
mentioned was ‘unprecedented natural calamities.’ China is a vast country, and
bad weather causes food shortage somewhere every year. No one but the highest leaders
had access to nationwide information about the weather. In fact, given the
immobility of the population; few knew what happened in the next region, or even
over the next mountain. Many thought then and still think today, that the
famine was caused by natural disasters. I have no full picture, but of all the
people I have talked to from different parts of China, few knew of nature
calamities in their regions. They only have stories to tell about deaths from
starvation.
At a
conference for 7,000 top-ranking officials at the beginning of 1962, Mao said
that the famine was caused 70 percent by natural disasters and 30 percent by
human error. President Liu Shaoqi chipped in, apparently on the spur of the
moment, that it was caused 30 percent by natural disaster and 70 percent by
human error. My father was at the conference, and when he returned he said to
my mother: ‘I fear Comrade Shaoqi is going to be in trouble.’
When the
speeches were relayed to lower-rank officials like my mother, President Liu’s
assessment was cut out. The population at large was not even told about Mao’s
figures. This concealing of information did help keep the people quiet, and
there were no audible complaints against the Communist Party. Quite apart from
the fact that most dissenters had been killed off or otherwise suppressed in
the past few years, whether the Communist Party was to blame was far from clear
to the general population. There was no corruption in the sense of officials
hoarding grain. Party officials were only marginally better off than the ordinary
people. In fact, in some villages they themselves starved first – and died
first. The famine was worse than anything under the Kuomintang, but it looked
different: in the Kuomintang days, starvation took place alongside blatant
unchecked extravagance.
Before the
famine, many Communist officials from landlords’ families had brought their
parents to stay with them in the cities. When the famine hit, the Party gave orders for the
elderly men and women to be sent back to their villages to share the hard life
– meaning starvation – with the local peasants. The idea was that Communist
officials should not be seen to be using their privileges to benefit their
‘class-enemy’ parents. Some grandparents of friends of mine had to leave
Chengdu and died in the famine.
Most peasants
lived in a world where they did not look much beyond the boundary of the village,
and they blamed the famine on their immediate bosses for giving them all the
catastrophic orders. There were popular rhymes to the effect that the Party leadership
was good, only the grass-roots officials were rotten.
The Great Leap
Forward and the appalling famine shook my parents deeply. Although they did not
have the full picture, they did not believe that ‘natural calamities’ were the
explanation. But their overwhelming feeling was one of guilt. Working in the
field of propaganda, they were right in the center of the misinformation machine.
To salve his conscience and to avoid the dishonest daily routine my father
volunteered to help with famine relief in the communes. This meant staying –and
starving – with the peasants. In doing so, he was ‘sharing weal and woe with
the masses,’ in line with Mao’s instructions, but it was resented by his staff.
They had to take turns going with him, which they hated, because it meant going
hungry.
From late 1959
to 1961, in the worst period of the famine, I seldom saw my father. In the countryside
he ate the leaves of sweet potatoes, herbs, and tree bark like the peasants.
One day he was walking along a bank between the paddy fields when he saw a
skeletal peasant moving extremely slowly, and with obvious difficulty, in the distance.
Then the man suddenly disappeared. When my father rushed over, he was lying in
the field, dead of starvation.
Every day my
father was devastated by what he saw, although he hardly saw the worst, because
in the customary manner local officials surrounded him everywhere he went. But
he suffered bad hepatomegaly and edema – and deep depression. Several times when
he came back from his trips he went straight into the hospital. In the summer
of 1961, he stayed there for months. He had changed. He was no longer the
assured puritan of yesteryear. The Party was not pleased with him. He was
criticized for ‘letting his revolutionary will wane’ and ordered out of the
hospital.(pp.306-313)
. . .
By the
beginning of 1961, tens of millions of deaths had finally forced Mao to give up
his economic policies. Reluctantly, he allowed the pragmatic President Liu and
Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the Party, more control over the country.
Mao was forced to make self-criticisms, but they were full of self-pity, and
were carrying the cross of incompetent officials all over China. He further
magnanimously instructed the Party to ‘draw lessons’ from the disastrous
experience, but what the lessons were was not left to the judgment of the lowly
officials: Mao told them they had become divorced from the people, and had made
decisions which did not reflect ordinary people’s feelings. Starting from Mao, the endless self-criticisms
masked the real responsibility, which no one pursued.
Nevertheless,
things began to improve. The pragmatists put through a succession of major
reforms. It was in this context that Den Xiaoping made the remark: ‘It doesn’t
matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.’ There
was to be no more mass production of steel. A stop was put to crazy economic
goals, and realistic policies were introduced. Public canteens were abolished,
and peasants’ income was now related to their work.
. . .
While all this
was going on I lived in a cocoon behind the high walls of the government
compound. I had no direct contact with tragedy. It was with these ‘noises off’
that I embarked on my teens.(p.316-317)
Jung Chang’s 700-page historical novel, Wild
Swans, Three Daughters of China, stands as an historical achievement, an attempt to recreate the atmosphere in
which a 20th-century social revolution was achieved, for better and
for worse.
She has posted her warnings are on the proverbial wall!
The 24+ items below include selected articles
and essays from the alternative Anglophone social media, which contain
controversial views on current events which will no doubt have major historical
consequences in these turbulent times of capitalist collapse. The question posed
by the sheer weight of events has never been more clearly framed: dictatorship
or democracy, and with what results?
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
___
Professeur honoraire
de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur des Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
What
is the Future of Food?
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/what-is-the-future-of-food
by
James Corbett
+
Who
is Behind the Great Food Reset?
by
James Corbett
===========
b.
Economists Radhika Desai &
Michael Hudson explain multipolarity, decline of US hegemony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6adqdNCSVhU
with Radhika Desai and Michael
Hudson
(57:35)
+
The End of the World Is Back: Frida
Berrigan on Nuclear Abolitionism
https://www.globalresearch.ca/end-world-back-frida-berrigan-nuclear-abolitionism/5805163
by Frida Berrigan
“As long as there are nuclear weapons, they are—like
Chekhov’s gun—waiting to go off.”
The tit-for-tat coded rhetorical threats would sound
fantastical and John le Carré-esque if they weren’t so real. In September 2022,
Russian President Vladimir Putin cited U.S. “precedent” in using nuclear
weapons in Japan and said Russia would “use all the means” at its
disposal to “defend” itself in its war against Ukraine. About two weeks
later, President Joe Biden said on CNN that the Pentagon did not need to be
directed to prepare for a nuclear confrontation and warned that even
accidental nuclear war could “end in Armageddon.”
The U.S. military also took the unusual step, in October, of
publicly disclosing the locations of its Ohio class submarines in the Arabian
Sea and the Atlantic — within range of Russia. Each can unleash 192 nuclear
missiles in one minute.
The Pentagon and the Kremlin
rattling rusty old nuclear-tipped sabers is scary enough; these two powers
possess more than 90% of all nuclear weapons between their two arsenals. But
the new phase of this three-quarter-of-a-century-old rivalry includes Russian
missile tests in April and October 2022, and a reported foray by the
nuclear-capable submarine USS Rhode
Island into the Mediterranean in November.
How likely is the use of nuclear
weapons in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Matthew Bunn, an analyst at Harvard,
puts it at 10% to 20%, based on Putin’s public statements and increasing
desperation after Russia’s military setbacks. Usually, those might be pretty
safe odds, but in the context of weapons far more powerful than the bombs that
leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 77 years ago and killed tens of thousands
of people in flashes of light, those odds are not nearly slim enough.
+
Russia Demands Tribunal for
Merkel and Hollande, Who Conspired to Undermine the 2015 Minsk Agreement
https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-demands-tribunal-merkel-hollande/5805245
by Kurt Nimmo
In the West, a plot to start
WWIII barely made the news.
«Such confessions made by the representative of the
Kyiv regime and former leaders of Germany and France should be used as an
evidence base for an international military tribunal»
+
Guido Goldman, the CFR and the
German Marshall Fund
by Johnny Vedmore
As Kissinger’s International Seminar
was revealed to be a CIA-funded program, the elites of the CFR hatched a plan
to create a new organization to train young global leaders. The Harvard-based
German Marshall Fund was created by a CIA-linked Kissinger protégé named Guido
Goldman. Their goal: The total capitulation of Russia.
Guido Goldman, the founder and
driving force behind the German Marshall Fund, was the son of Nahum
Goldmann, one of the most influential Zionist leaders in history who
was central to the creation of the modern state of Israel. While Guido Goldman
took great pains to distance himself publicly from his father’s legacy,
throughout the late-60s, events in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe led to
Goldman retreading in his father’s historical footsteps, helping to
significantly influence major geopolitical events. The German Marshall Fund (GMF), as well
as other powerful organizations Goldman has helped found, continue to wield
considerable power and influence on the global stage.
In this article, we will
investigate Guido Goldman’s German Marshall Fund and discover how one group of
Establishment men, almost all of them high ranking members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), created leadership programs, funded political propaganda for
broadcast on various forms of mainstream media, and infiltrated positions
within government.
+
US Announces Massive $2.5 Billion
Weapons Package for Ukraine
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-announces-massive-2-5-billion-weapons-package-ukraine/5805316
by Dave DeCamp
The US on Thursday
announced a new massive $2.5 billion arms package for Ukraine that includes Stryker armored combat vehicles for the
first time.
The tranche of weapons
includes 90 Strykers and 55 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which the US first
pledged to send to Ukraine as part of an over $3 billion arms package that was announced earlier this month.
The package also
includes munitions for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems
(NASAMS), Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs), and other
equipment.
The Strykers are made
by General Dynamics and are designed to transport troops with extra protection,
similar to the Bradleys. The Stryker is lighter and faster than the Bradleys
and is on wheels as opposed to tracks.
See, also: US Pledges New $600 Million Weapons Package for
Ukraine
+
‘Extremely Dangerous’: Russia
Reacts to US Plans to Help Attack Crimea
https://www.globalresearch.ca/extremely-dangerous-russia-reacts-us-plans-help-attack-crimea/5805322
by Dave DeCamp
Russian officials on
Thursday reacted to a report from The New York Times that said the US was warming to the idea of
helping Ukraine strike Crimea despite the risk of a Russian escalation.
When asked about the
report on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price didn’t deny its contents and said, “Crimea is
Ukraine,” as the US hasn’t recognized Crimea as Russian since Russia took
control of it in 2014.
Anatoly Antonov,
Russia’s ambassador to the US, responded to Price’s comments and the reports,
likening the plans to potential “terrorist attacks” and warning of escalation.
See, also:Russia Orders Troops to Target Ukraine’s
Western-Provided Long-Range Weapons
+
Russia Accused Of
"Supporting & Financing" Ukraine's Nazi Problem That Moments Ago
Did Not Exist
with Ryan Cristián
(1:34:26)
+
The U.S. Is Already Preparing for
the Next War
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-already-preparing-next-war/5805301
by Danny Haiphong
Russia’s military
operation in Ukraine is approaching its first birthday. Top military brass in
Russia have long declared that the conflict is not between Russia and Ukraine,
but rather Russia and NATO. Simply put, Ukraine is a pawn in another U.S. war.
Europe’s economy and military have been sacrificed on the altar of U.S.
warmongering toward Russia. Winter is here and Ukraine’s prospects for getting
out of the conflict with anything resembling “victory” have dissipated, if they
ever really existed at all.
Such has been admitted
by two of the foreign policy establishment’s most criminal members: Condoleezza
Rice and Robert Gates. In an op-ed with the Washington Post, Rice and Gates
argue that time is not on Ukraine’s side. The U.S. must act fast or watch Ukraine suffer
eventual defeat. Of course, for neocon hawks like Rice and Gates, a negotiated
settlement is simply out of the question. The only option for the U.S.
political and military establishment is to fortify Ukraine with the heaviest
military equipment such as armored tanks to ensure victory on the battlefield.
As geopolitical analyst
Brian Berletic notes, a major problem stands in the way of Rice and Gates’s
demand: NATO is running out of weapons. The U.S. produces about 30,000 rounds
per year for its 155 mm Howitzer long-range systems, a number that Ukraine uses
in just two weeks of fighting Russia on the front lines. Russian missile strikes have made quick work of
heavier equipment such as the vaunted HIMARS systems. Only larger NATO states
like the U.S. and Germany have anything left to provide. So when Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Congress begging for more weapons, he was
likely disappointed in Joe Biden’s remark that the U.S. was not going to make promises to arm
Ukraine with anything that could possibly lead to a World War III scenario
between NATO and Russia.
+
Here's the big deal with the
German-made Leopard tanks and why Ukraine desperately wants them
by Jake Epstein
Kyiv has pressed NATO
and other European partners for more heavy armor, including fighting vehicles
and tanks. A lot is on the way, but a couple of requests have hit roadblocks.
Ukraine is getting many
of the items on its wish list, but it hasn't been able to get its hands on the
German-made Leopard tanks it wants. And for the time being, that doesn't seem
likely to change.
Some countries with
Leopards have offered to send these tanks, but the problem is that sending them
technically requires Germany's approval. And despite mounting pressure on
Berlin to provide its own Leopards or at the very least allow others to send
them, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has not budged.
Poland, one NATO
country that has Leopards, indicated on Thursday that it could go rogue
and take matters into its own hands if Germany didn't authorize anything. The
country's president previously said he wanted to send the tanks to Ukraine as
part of an "international coalition."
===========
c.
Veterans Understand Martin Luther
King Jr's Powerful Demand for Peace
by James Rothenberg
+
Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is
Today and MLK Day
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/16/lucid-summations-when-tomorrow-is-today-and-mlk-day/
by Edward Curtin
“What
they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind
that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve
lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening
within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.”
--C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
+
Beyond Vietnam to Ukraine
https://www.globalresearch.ca/beyond-vietnam-ukraine/5804736
by Rick Sterling
In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an
eloquent and stirring denunciation of the Vietnam war and US militarism. The
speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” is relevant to today’s war in Ukraine.
In the speech at Riverside Church, King talked about how the
US had supported France in trying to re-colonize Vietnam. He noted, “Before the
end of the war we were meeting 80% of the French war costs.”
+
“It's over!” - NATO is making
Ukraine “weaker” by the minute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8N8dHfIdw&feature=youtu.be
with Clayton Morris and Scott
Ritter
(18:48)
+
Weapon addiction as Zelensky claims
Putin chroma key
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya0eWw3rvak&feature=youtu.be
with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(31:40)
+
What the West is getting wrong
about Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDjPMMD8qwA
with Marc Steiner and Lia
Tarachansky
(34:00)
While Ukrainians are suffering from
the hell of war that has followed the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, debates have
raged in the West over how the war started and who is responsible. But if
people in the US specifically and the West in general insist on putting
themselves at the center of this conflict—whether as the chief instigators or
the necessary saviors—they will continue to misunderstand what this war is
about and what its outcome will mean for Ukraine, Russia, and the larger
geopolitical realignment that is unfolding in real time. In this urgent,
unscheduled segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with journalist,
activist, and documentary filmmaker Lia Tarachansky about the West’s failure to
see Russian imperialism for what it is and to comprehend the reality of a world
moving beyond the bounds of Western hegemony.
Lia Tarachansky, born in Ukraine
when it was still part of the Soviet Union, is an Israeli-Canadian journalist,
documentary filmmaker, and multimedia artist. Tarachansky is TRNN’s former
Israel/Palestine correspondent and has directed a number of award-winning
feature films and shorts, including On the Side of the Road, Ethnocracy:
Israel’s African Refugees, and Ocean.
+
Ten Inconvenient Truths About
Ukraine Largely Ignored by the Media
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ten-inconvenient-truths-about-ukraine-largely-ignored-by-msm/5804973
by Dan Fournier
+
Watch "How will they spin
Soledar?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48x7ZPo6uB4&feature=youtu.be
with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(30:17)
+
The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine
and the crisis of media censorship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0H7PIJcEP0
with Chris Hedges and Patrick Lawrence
(36:00)
Throughout
the Ukraine war, Western news outlets have mindlessly parroted the opinions of
a ruling elite and overseen a public discourse that is often unhinged from the
real world.
+
Ukraine's Donbass defense system
collapsing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HolYxZ6s4tY
with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(36:32)
+
“Ukraine is throwing in troops to
face certain death defending Bakhmut”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts-BVW6ujT8
with George Galloway
(28:02)
+
Lavrov,
“War with west no longer hybrid, but almost real”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCBcbEA09vQ
with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(32:08)
===========
d.
Pharma Spends More Money
Increasing Shareholder Wealth Than It Does on Research and Development
by Paul Anthony Taylor
Ringing in the New Year
with price rises on more than 350 drugs they market in the United States, senior pharma
industry executives will have been busy rehearsing their well-worn claim that
such increases are necessary to support research and development costs.
Lowering drug prices, they argue, would reduce profits and stifle product
innovation. If we examine the evidence, however, the truth turns out to be
rather different. A recent study shows that between 2012 and 2021, major pharma companies in the United
States spent more money on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends than they
did on research and development.
Authored by economists
William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at the University of
Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University on Rhode
Island, the study describes how evidence strongly contradicts the pharma
industry’s assertion that it is necessary for drug prices to be unregulated in
order to generate profits for reinvestment in innovative new medicines. In
reality, rather than using profits to increase investment, pharma companies
focus instead on maintaining high drug prices so that, by making massive
distributions to shareholders, they can boost the yields on their publicly
traded shares.
See, also: Criticism of the Pharma Cartel and Its ‘Business with
Disease’ Is Becoming Mainstream
+
CDC Hides COVID Jab Stroke Risk
(And The Rest) & BBC Inadvertently Admits The #PandemicOfTheInjected
with Ryan Cristián
(2:56:17)
+
Program Created to Help Those
Hurt by Pandemic Treatments — but Not Many Want to Talk About It
It seems very few
people want to talk about the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or
CICP. It’s a federal program to compensate people hurt by a medicine or medical device used to fight a pandemic.
For Allen Storey, and
for more than half of the people who have filed claims with the CICP, that
countermeasure is the COVID-19 vaccine. “I was glad to get it,” recalled Allen
Storey about the vaccine. But then came an acute brain stem stroke and a series
of confusing medical diagnoses that left them financially and emotionally dazed
and confused.
Days after Allen
received his first vaccine dose, doctors thought he was experiencing vertigo.
His condition grew worse. He became non-responsive. His only way to communicate
was by squeezing his wife Beverly’s hand.
But instead of helping,
the CICP became one more challenge. Nearly two years later, Beverly still
hadn’t heard from anyone at the CICP. “You don’t get any answers. Nobody calls
back, nobody has sent anything in the mail,” Beverly told 11Alive exasperated.
Wisconsin Supreme Court
to Rule on Court-Ordered Ivermectin for COVID
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
+
Who is running the world?
by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
As the World Economic Forum (WEF) today wrapped up its weeklong annual meeting of
nearly 3,000 political, business, media and academic elites, mainstream media
largely continued to sing the meeting’s praises, while independent media
outlets took aim at the WEF’s agenda and its promoters.
The Associated Press (AP) described the meetings in Davos, Switzerland, as
taking on the “pressing global issues” while simultaneously being the “target
of bizarre claims from a growing chorus who believe it involves a group of
elites manipulating events for their own benefit.”
Among those critics was
Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet: “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world
government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”
Musk posted an online poll — that generated 2.42 million votes — where he asked whether “The
World Economic Forum should control the world.” Eighty-six percent of
respondents said “no.”
The Defender on
Wednesday reported on the first few days of meetings. This article lists eight key takeaways from Davos —
and why they matter.
+
The Davos "Debate" on
"Disinformation": The “Most Existential Problem” Facing the Planet
Today
by Jonathan Turley
There has been much coverage over the resurfacing of former CNN host Brian Stelter as the host for
a panel at the World Economic Forum on alleged disinformation and “hate speech.” Stelter
previously called for censorship under a “harm reduction model” and led a panel at a conference where Democrats discussed how to shape the news. He
was confronted over his own dissemination for false stories targeting
Republicans on CNN. Yet, I was most struck by a statement from New York Times
publisher A.G. Sulzberger who described “disinformation” as the “most
existential” problem the world is facing today. Sulzberger insisted that
disinformation is the reason why there is a loss of “trust” today. He ignores
his own history in eroding that trust in the media through flagrantly biased
decisions at the New York Times.
Former NYT editor
Jill Abramson also slammed the participation of Sulzberger and the New York Times at Davos, denouncing it as a
“corrupt circle-jerk” between media and business. She said that “the coverage
was a sweetener to flatter the CEOs by seeing their names in the NYT.”
The panel was titled,
“Clear & Present Danger of Disinformation” included panelists: New York
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Vice-President of the European Commission Vera
Jourová, CEO of Internews Jeanne Bourgault, and Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. The
entire conference was notable in its omission of free speech advocates while
inviting long advocates for censorship like Stelter.
Stelter asked his
panel, “How does this discussion of disinformation relate to everything else
happening today in Davos?”
Sulzberger responded:
“Well, first, thanks
for having me is as part of this conversation. As you can imagine, this is
something I really care deeply about. So, I think if you look at this question
of disinformation, I think it maps basically to every other major challenge
that we are grappling with as a society, and particularly the most existential
among them. So, disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation,
conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information
that’s corrupting information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you
see, trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so
you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately
undermines pluralism. And the undermining of pluralism is probably the most
dangerous thing that can happen to a democracy. So I really — I think if if
you’re spending this week thinking about the health of democracies and
democratic erosion, I think it’s really import to work your way back up to
where this starts.”
It was a telling
statement. Sulzberger suggested that allowing some opposing views undermines
“trust.” Indeed, allowing opposing views on Covid or election or global warming
does erode trust in the media and the government. Society would be so less
“fractured” if information is controlled and consistent.
See, also: The
West’s War on Free Speech
+
“Oh SH*T, something BIG is
happening at Davos as WEF blocks the media” – Jan. 15, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-boSpxmNUw
with Clayton Morris and Natali
Morris
(28:27)
Unelected global
leaders are gathering in Davos, Switzerland this week to discuss how to control
and create the world around us. Great! What will they be talking about? Well,
brain transparency for one. Sounds a lot like mind control, doesn't it? And
what about a new world order? No, the term for that is re-globalization. And
pandemics? Oh yes, they think that they can do a vaccine in 100 days. What do
you think about these topics? Is this appropriate skepticism or paranoia?
+
“A New System” – Inside the Davos
Summit 2023
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/15/a-new-system-inside-the-davos-summit-2023/
by OffGardian
WEF conference looks set to focus on
what the globalist elite can learn from the failures of their “pandemic”
narrative.
+
Pfizer CEO CONFRONTED On The
Streets Of Davos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igBNjOimmFc
with Jimmy Dore
(6:54)
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is used to
giving friendly interviews where he’s justified in expecting he’ll receive
little to no pushback against his assertions about the company’s vaccines,
profits, sales practices, political donations, etc. So it must have been quite
the surprise when two non-credentialed journalists approached him on the
streets of Davos during this year’s World Economic Forum and grilled him about
vaccine efficacy, Pfizer’s profits, and his personal culpability in spreading
misinformation about vaccines.
+
DIVIDE & RULE - THE PLAN OF THE
1% TO MAKE YOU DISPOSABLE
https://www.bitchute.com/video/K9WjrnuoVTpW/
with Vandana Shiva
(12:01)
Story
at-a-glance
- Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., details how the global cabal
intend to “divide and rule” in order to achieve their exploitative goals
- The world’s top 1% — the ultra-wealthy — and the modern
empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are responsible
for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and
health crises
- It’s an illusion that technology companies are
“creating” these systems that will supposedly make our world a better
place — they’re largely extracting, using data mining, including mining
your mind
- Divide and rule is a necessity for the 1% to continue
to hold on to power as protests and unrest increase
- Pay attention to the economic policies being pushed
while people are divided — that's really the agenda
The world's top 0.001% — the
ultra-wealthy— and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and
Big Ag — are not only responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of
humanity into financial and health crises, they're intent on attaining ultimate
control. If and when that happens, 99% of people will become disposable.
Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., founder of
Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India,
details how globalists are exploiting the masses in her book, "Oneness Vs.
the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom." In the video above by
After Skool, she expands on how the 0.001% intend to "divide and
rule" in order to achieve their exploitative goals.1
A
Lesson From Quantum Theory
Shiva is trained as a physicist and
initially planned to study atomic energy. But as she grasped the devastation it
had caused worldwide, she gave up her idea of being a nuclear physicist and
instead went looking for knowledge as a whole. She studied on her own, finding
quantum theory,2 which formed the basis of her life's work:3
"The way you design the world
in your mind is the way you relate to it. When you design it as dead matter
just to be exploited, you will exploit it. When you design it without any
understanding of limits, you will violate the planetary limits.
When you design it with deep
recognition of interconnectedness, you will nurture those relationships. And
this basic recognition is what I drew from my learnings in quantum theory —
that nonlocality, nonseparation, interconnectedness … is the nature of
reality."
However, she explains, within the
paradigm of mechanistic thought, there's a design that didn't evolve. As such,
mechanistic thought is based on the following assumptions:4
- We are separate from nature
- Nature is constituted of discrete particles separate
from each other, which can only relate through violence, force and action
by contact
But in the quantum world, Shiva
explains, "There is no separability. My thesis was on nonlocality in
quantum theory. Everything is interconnected. There are no fixed essentialized
qualities that have been built into the way people are looked at, nature is
looked at. Potential is the defining quality in the quantum world, and because
it's about potential, it's also about uncertainty."5
Shiva states that the mechanistic
world is based on a false illusion of determinateness, or a quality of being
highly predictable. "In the quantum world, we know we cannot get rid of
uncertainty," she says, citing the uncertainty principle created by German
physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927.
Referring to atoms and subatomic
particles, the uncertainty principle maintains that the position and velocity
of an object cannot be measured at the same time. "The very concepts of
exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in
nature," Britannica notes.6
Further, while in the mechanistic
world things are either/or — "you can either be a wave or a
particle," Shiva says — "in the quantum world, you have potential to
be both and they're complementary." She continues, "When you realize
that the world is one interconnected whole you also realize that what appears
different is actually different expressions of an interconnected reality."7
Billionaires'
Technology Has Become the New 'Mission'
We're at an unprecedented point in
history when the "civilizing mission for humanity" is technology —
technology owned by the 1%. It's an illusion, however, that technology
companies are "creating" or inventing these systems that will supposedly
make our world a better place.
"They extract," Shiva
says, "They don't create anything … software programmers create the
platforms that they use. Even Bill Gates didn't really write his basic program.
It was two math professors in Dartmouth College."8
She uses Gates' Ag One9 as an
example, which is basically the idea to make one type of agriculture for the
whole world, which will be owned and controlled by Gates from the top down.
It's headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in
2018,10 Bayer is also headquartered.
This includes digital farming, in
which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is
then repackaged and sold back to them. There are parallels throughout society.
Shiva explains:11
"We watched what's going on in
India and we pieced it together. So basically he's financing a lot of data
mining from farmers, which will then be packaged as Big Data and sold back to
farmers. This is exactly what happened in your 2016 elections. Facebook sold
data to Cambridge Analytica.
So when you think of, 'What are the
kind of leaders that we have getting created?' it's very important to remember
that in these 25 years of corporate deregulation of commerce you basically have
a lot of money in the hands of very few people.
And they then are the ones investing
in all the companies. The companies are not independent companies anymore.
They're basically billionaire money managed by the investment funds like
Blackrock and Vanguard."
Divide
and Rule Is the Plan
Protests and unrest are increasing
throughout the world as people grow tired of being controlled and downtrodden
by the 1%. Demands for change are surging, so the 1% has rolled out a plan to
overcome it — divide and rule.
Shiva believes the East India
Company in 1857 set the historic precedence. A revolt occurred that year
against oppressive company rule, and the company was taken over by the British
state. Up until that point, Hindus and Muslims in India had stood together to
defend their land, livelihoods and freedoms.
They identified primarily with their
occupations and communities; religion was secondary. But when the crown took
over, Shiva says, "They established a policy called divide and rule … it
took from about 1857 to about 1920" to essentially divide the population
against each other based on their religion. She explains:12
"That partition is still being
played out. It's an incomplete project. So, divide and rule becomes a necessity
for the 0.001% to continue to hold on to power. What are the economic policies
being pushed while people are divided? Because that's really the agenda."
The
Duty of Truth
The refusal to cooperate with unjust
law was termed a duty of truth by Gandhi. Shiva describes apartheid in 1906,
when the British attempted to turn Indians in South Africa into second-class
citizens. Indians had to register their race and carry identification. Police
officers could enter homes and demand papers, and people were restricted from
local trade and certain professions based on their race. "The people said
we would rather die," Shiva says.
Others inspired by Gandhi and the
duty of truth include Martin Luther King. "But … when King started to take
up economic justice and economic equality issues, that's when he was
assassinated," Shiva says, "because … you can talk in very sweet ways
about civil liberties but you don't touch economic justice and the
economy."13
The word economy comes from
oeconomia, or the art of living. But when this got changed into the art of
money-making, it brought on violence. "When you turn the art of living
into the art of money-making, which Aristotle called chrematistics, then you
have to practice violence against the Earth and violence against others —
destroy their livelihoods, destroy their freedoms, take away their
resources."14
Sowing
the Seeds of Earth Democracy
With the convergence of Big Tech and
artificial intelligence, Shiva fears mechanical work, from radiography to law,
will be made redundant, and 99% of people will become disposable. The solution
lies in activating our sense of oneness or interconnectedness with all life and
sowing the seeds of what Shiva calls Earth democracy:15
"You can either share this
beautiful planet with love and abundance and sustainability, or say it's all
mine — every bit of land, every seed, every mind. Because what's being mined is
our mind now, and if we don't defend the freedoms of all species and the
freedoms of all human beings we could see, within 20 to 30 years, a level of
disposability built into the structures that humanity will not be able to
respond to."
Currently, democracy has shifted to
being "of the corporations by the corporations for the corporations."
Earth democracy calls for a restoration of democracy "of the people by the
people for the people," not only for humans but also for nature.16 According
to the ancient Vedas, the universe is divine, and everything therein — even the
smallest grass — is an expression of the divine.
The universe exists for the
well-being of all, but her gifts must be enjoyed without greed. Taking more
than your share is theft, and will only backfire. The solution to true
sustainability doesn't lie with new technology but in relying on the natural
"technology" that is the universe.17 Shiva says:18
"This is the time to make
oneness and interconnectedness, as one humanity on one planet, the political
project of our time. We have to remember we are one humanity. We are part of
one Earth, and whatever we do we will not let this basic recognition divide us,
either from the Earth or from each other … together we are strong."
+
Hiding Wealth the Walton and
Getty Family Way
https://inequality.org/great-divide/getty-walton-dodge-taxes/
by Chuck Collins
Much of what we know
about the global hidden wealth system comes from leaks from within the wealth
defense industry, the wealth managers and tax attorneys that facilitate the
wealth vanishing act for their billionaire clients. As I wrote in my book, The
Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, this enabling class has helped sequester trillions
of dollars in trusts, anonymous shell companies, and offshore tax havens.
The 2016 Panama Papers and the 2021 Pandora Papers were both the result of massive data leaks from
inside wealth management firms, reported by the courageous global journalists
connected to the International Consortium of investigative journalists. And now, a new blockbuster investigation from The New Yorker traces the decision of a whistleblower — “a
disgruntled wealth manager” — to expose how the descendants of oil tycoon J.
Paul Getty use Nevada trusts to avoid California taxes.
The Getty disclosure
stems from a wrongful termination lawsuit, which along with divorce is one way
light occasionally shines onto this shadowy world. Wealth advisor Marlena Sonn
worked for several members of the Getty family for eight years, advising them
on socially responsible strategies for their investments. But she was troubled
by the Getty family’s use of Nevada-based trusts and a Reno-based family
office, to maintain the fiction that family members did not live in higher-tax
California. When she suggested they pay their California tax obligations, she
was fired. The full family gossip is well chronicled in The New Yorker piece.
+
Video: End Governance by Secrecy.
How to Take Down the Billionaires
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-end-governance-secrecy-how-take-down-billionaires/5805140
by Emanuel Pastreich
The takeover of our
society by the billionaires and their lackeys cannot be understood unless we
grasp how a veil of secrecy has been spread over most of the government and
over corporations for the last twenty years that makes it impossible for people
to even speak about the horrific crimes that are destroying our nation. It has
become common sense for most people in the upper middle class to simply assume
that there is a set of issues which are simply taboo, which cannot be brought
up in any context, ever.
President John F.
Kennedy addressed this crisis of governance by secrecy at the beginning in a
brave speech he delivered in April of 1961.
President Kennedy
spoke,
“The very word
‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people
inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to
secret proceedings.
We decided long ago
that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts
far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today, there is
little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its
arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the
survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is
very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized
upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official
censorship and concealment.”
A massive increase in
secrecy in the United States started after President Kennedy’s assassination
in1963, a blatant attempt by global finance to intimate all politicians that
was complemented by the expansion of classified status to cover any document
that revealed criminality in government. This move was combined with a purging
of committed and responsible individuals from the Department of Defense and
from intelligence.
That trend towards
secrecy went into an exponential upwards curve after the 9/11 attacks. Those
attacks involved massive conspiracies to destroy the functionality of
government, to mislead the public about fundamental policy decisions, and to
threaten, or suppress, opposition while launching endless foreign wars. Laws
were set in place, many of which remain illegal to even mention, that set stiff
punishments for the disclosure of the truth in any format, for any reason.
To this day, although
the contours of the fraudulent attacks on the World Trade Center are known to
many, the actual internal process by which it was planned, coordinated, and
implemented remains obscure.
There are three main
approaches to making secret the corruption and criminality that has spread
across government and corporations, and to punishing anyone so foolish as to
search for the truth: 1) the use of classifications (secret and top secret), 2)
the use of secret law, and 3) the use of non-disclosure agreements.
Rendering corporate and
government documents detailing institutional criminality as “secret” and “top
secret” and punishing anyone who refers to the criminal actions with massive
fines and jail terms for violating the conditions for security clearance, is an
old trick that has been radically expanded over the last decade. Numerous
whistle blowers have gone to jail and have been driven into bankruptcy, for
simply speaking the truth for the good of the nation. Many are subject to
courts agreements, to keep them out of jail, that bar them from even discussing
what was done to them illegally.
See, also: Video: The Key to Ending COVID-19 Is Buried in the WTC
Wreckage
+
Watch: “Real world leaders avoid
Davos WEF”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UUKKGgVbEU&feature=youtu.be
with Alex Christoforou and
Alexander Mercouris
(15:53)
+
“COVID-19 Blunder”
or
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/01/21/joe-rogan-and-bret-weinstein-covid-19-blunder/
with Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein
(1:59:09)
Story at-a-glance
·
Bret
Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist, discussed some of the most heavily
censored topics today on “The Joe Rogan Experience”
·
From the
initial allowance of gain-of-function research to the botched pandemic
response, Weinstein believes the COVID-19 pandemic is the largest blunder in
human history
·
Research
published in Science Immunology reveals a “mind blowing” finding that after
three doses of mRNA COVID-19 shots, your immune system may be triggered not to
fight
·
As SARS-CoV-2
spread through the population, fear was used to make the population compliant
·
Weinstein
explores the possibility that a select group may have had advance notice of the
impending pandemic and used that knowledge to position themselves for a
financial windfall
+
WATCH: “Truth Finds A Way”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/17/watch-truth-finds-a-way-solutionswatch/
with James Corbett
(14:41)
+
Cardiac Arrest and Death after
COVID-19 Vaccination:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/cardiac-arrest-death-after-covid-19-vaccination/5805344
by Dr. Peter McCullough
Virtually every day in
the news we hear about a young person, perfectly healthy, with no antecedent
illness drop dead without explanation. As the cases roll in it has been my
general observation that if the cardiac arrest is witnessed and there is prompt
defibrillation, as in the case with Demar Hamlin, then neurologic and overall
survival is possible.
Out of guilt, remorse,
shame and in the stupor of a COVID-19 vaccination trance, the victim and the
family usually make no statement about vaccination status—something that would
have been a proud point of a selfie or a tweet a few years ago. In a recent
paper by Li et al, the cellular basis for the wide range of mechanisms the lead
to cardiac arrest in a COVID-19 vaccinated person are described. I was alarmed
that the authors considered cardiac arrest and death “common” as listed in
Table 2.
+
Watch: “CDC Warns Of Stroke
Danger From New Bivalent COVID Booster!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ba171iTeY0
with Jimmy Dore
(4:17)
===========
e.
“Something Is Going To Happen
Soon” – Stella Assange on Julian Assange's Imprisonment
with Lee Camp
(52:25)
+
Stand-Up For Assange
with Stefania Maurizi
(3:43:20)
Live from the Tabard
Inn in Washington at 6 pm EST Thursday, an evening of music and comedy in
tribute to the late Tabard founder, Fritzi Cohen; preceded by a book
presentation by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, author of Secret Power:
WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, in conversation with philosopher Srecko Horvat. With
Anya Parampil, Max Blumenthal, John Kiriakou, Sam Husseini, Jesslyn Radack,
Jaffer Khan, John F. O’Donnell, Naomi Karavani and Margaret Kuntsler. MC:
Randy Credico.
+
The Belmarsh Tribunal D.C. — The
Case of Julian Assange
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QqpYATupw
with Amy Goodman and Srecko
Horvat
(2:39:05)
On January 20, 2023,
Democracy Now! is livestreaming the Belmarsh Tribunal from Washington, D.C. The
event will feature expert testimony from journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers,
publishers and parliamentarians on assaults to press freedom and the First
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman
and Srecko Horvat, the co-founder of DiEM25, will chair the tribunal, which is
being organized by Progressive International and the Wau Holland Foundation.
Members of the tribunal
include: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Noam Chomsky, linguist
and activist Jeremy Corbyn, member of U.K. Parliament and founder of the Peace
and Justice Project Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights &
Dissent Kevin Gosztola, managing editor of Shadowproof Margaret Kunstler, civil
rights attorney Stefania Maurizi, investigative journalist, Il Fatto Quotidiano
Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights attorney Ben Wizner, lead
attorney at ACLU of Edward Snowden Renata Ávila, human rights lawyer,
technology and society expert Jeffrey Sterling, lawyer and former CIA employee
Steven Donziger, human rights attorney Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief,
WikiLeaks Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation
Selay Ghaffar, spokesperson, Solidarity Party of Afghanistan Betty Medsger,
investigative reporter Suchitra Vijayan, writer, photrapher & activist
+
“Free Julian Assange: Noam
Chomsky, Dan Ellsberg & Jeremy Corbyn Lead Call at Belmarsh Tribunal”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRUyBv3LyYk
with Daniel Ellsberg, Jeremy
Corbyn, and Noam Chomsky
(46:52)
Former British Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed
linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the
Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop
charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for
close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing
extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian
Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act
for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Friday's event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy
Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the
proceedings.
+
Julian Assange and the war on
whistleblowers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOC-c0QdfEo
with Chris Hedges and Kevin
Gosztola
(32:36)
+
Saving Assange, Saving US Face
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/16/watch-cn-live-saving-assange-saving-us-face/
with Joe Lauria and Elizabeth Vos
(audio, 1:01:41)
Will Julian Assange be
released in two months, as an Australian Broadcasting Corporation senior
correspondent has predicted? CN Live! asks Greg Barns SC, an Assange campaign
counsel for 11 years, and former Australian Senator Christine Milne at noon EST
Monday.
As Julian Assange
awaits a decision by the High Court in London whether it will accept his appeal
against the home secretary’s decision to extradite him to the United States,
the focus of the story has shifted here to his native Australia, where the
prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has said for the first time that he has
discussed with the United States bringing Assange’s ordeal to a close.
A prominent television
journalist here, John Lyons, of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., shortly
afterward said he understood that Assange would be back home in Australia
within two months.
CN Live! traveled to
Hobart, the capital of the state of Tasmania, to discuss the latest
developments in the Assange case with Christine Milne, a former Senator in the
federal parliament and head of the Australian Green Party, who has been a vocal
advocate for the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher. And with Greg Barns, a senior
counsel and advisor to the Assange campaign. Interviewer: Joe Lauria. Producer:
Cathy Vogan.
+
“Dimming the Lights”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/09/patrick-lawrence-dimming-the-lights/
by Patrick Lawrence
Somewhere along the
line, the thought seems to have taken hold among the cliques who rule America
that an ignorant populace is more easily governed. Good old Bertie Russell made
this general point with an eloquence almost too piercing to take in “Free
Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture he delivered in London 101 years
ago:
“But the utility of
intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired
that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that
people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative
problems.”
You see the
consequences of this perverse belief every day in the mainstream press and
among the corporate-owned broadcasters. You can read headlines such as “10 Ways
to Be Happy in the New Year” or “Where Did All the Bargain Bourbon Go?”
But you are not going
to learn much from these media about the world in which you live. Your
intelligence will not be enhanced or elevated; insult is the norm.
But mass media are
merely mirrors reflecting the established ethos of the polity in which they operate.
They do their best to keep Americans ignorant, certainly. If the ruling cliques
wanted America to boast an intelligent populace, the press and broadcasters
would do their part — as Jefferson understood this part to be — to inform them.
No, even a press critic
as severe as your columnist must look further down in the factory to understand
where the process of manufacturing American ignorance truly begins. It begins
in our schools and universities, with the administrators, teachers, and
professors who run them.
+
Psychology of a Klansman
https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/22/the-chris-hedges-report-psychology-of-a-klansman/
by Chris Hedges
+
Record Police Killings in 2022
Show Need to Continue Organizing for Abolition
by Austin McCoy
+
What Price Is 'Defense?':
America's Costly, Dysfunctional Approach to Security Is Making Us Ever Less
Safe
by William D. Hartuhng
Late last month,
President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department
of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the
height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold
War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in
itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a
full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security,
including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly
exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already
dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the
Russian invasion of that country.
The assumption is that
when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is
always better.
There’s certainly no
question that one group will benefit in a major way from the new spending
surge: the weapons industry. If recent experience is any guide, more than half of that $858 billion will likely go to private firms.
The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General
Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile,
they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices.
Such “investments” are
perfectly designed to line the pockets of arms-industry executives and their
shareholders. However, they do little or nothing to help defend this country or
its allies.
f.
Stop
them before they “save the planet”!
by Mark Crispin Miller
Grandiose much? John Kerry hails
the crowd at Davos---"a select group of human beings"---for their
high altruism, calling it "almost extraterrestrial"
+
Global Parasites' New Climate Scam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9FrMBwyV0E
with RJ Eskow and Richard Wolff
(35:19)
+
WHY IS NO
ONE STOPPING THIS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05jhBs1ICE
with
Russell Brand
The Canadian government looks to be
redefining economic impact as “violence” to justify freezing protesters’ bank
accounts. Is this part of a wider trend of the powerful to reinterpret laws and
limit our freedoms?
+
Science! Blessed be Thy Name The
Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/16/science-blessed-be-thy-name/
byJordan Henderson
Freedom of Religion can no
longer bring about the freedom that it could have in past ages had it actually
been implemented; only a Freedom of Belief System could do that today. The
reason for this is straightforward; Freedom of Religion would have been a big
deal back when the dominant belief system was a religion; Freedom of Religion
would have meant the freedom not to have the dominant belief system imposed
upon you.
But Freedom of Religion can
no longer shield you from having the dominant belief system imposed upon you
because today the dominant belief system is The Science as dictated by the
state. The Science now serves the same role for rationalizing political power
that the church used to do.
I want to first illustrate
our new reality, through two written examples. The first example under the
subheading “A Little Chat About the Good News,” presents the dogmas of The
Science in satire through religious terminology.
The second example under
the subheading “Proof of Baptism Required,” is the reverse and asks us to
imagine what it would look like if governments were forcing religious dogmas and
rituals upon the population in place of scientific dogmas and rituals.
In other words the first
example asks us to imagine religious dogma swapped with science dogma. The
second example asks us to imagine the opposite scenario: science rituals and
dogma swapped with religious rituals and dogma.
+
Four Studies Add to Evidence of
Wireless Technology-Related Electromagnetic Radiation in Humans
by Dr.
Suzanne Burdick
New studies from Sweden,
China, Australia and the U.K. shed light on human exposure to electromagnetic
radiation from wireless technologies, but the authors of one study alleged
industry tried to censor their research, and in another case, critics accused
researchers of having conflicts of interest with the telecom industry.
In the first example, an
international peer-reviewed journal — Annals of Case Reports — on Jan. 10
published a Swedish case report showing 5G radiation causes symptoms indicative of “microwave syndrome.”
The report initially was
censored by the telecom industry, the study authors said.
Dr. Lennart Hardell, Ph.D,
retired professor of oncology at the Örebro University Hospital in Sweden, and
Mona Nilsson, managing director of the Swedish Radiation Protection
Foundation, co-authored the report.
Nilsson told The Defender,
“The telecom companies tried to censor the
article” in spring 2022 after the study
initially appeared in a Swedish medical magazine.
“A representative of the Ericsson company — the world leading 5G infrastructure provider — and the umbrella
organization for 1,200 tech companies, all the major telecom companies in
Sweden, wrote to the
editor of the Swedish magazine
and asked him to withdraw the article,” she explained.
“This is the first case
report of the microwave syndrome caused by 5G,” Hardell told The Defender, adding that “historically, many risk factors for human
health have first been identified by clinical observations.”
According to Nilsson, the
study — which examined the change in physical symptoms experienced by a
63-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman when a 5G cellular tower was installed
on the top of their apartment building — “confirms the concerns raised for
several years by hundreds of scientists and physicians about the dangers of
the 5G rollout.”
Nilsson pointed out that 5G
was rolled out “without any previous studies showing that 5G is safe for humans
or the environment.”
Nilsson continued:
“It is a scandal that this
industry, in spite of the complete lack of evidence showing that 5G is safe,
has obtained the right to expose people without their consent, in their own
homes to massively increasing levels of pulsed microwave radiation that have the capacity to rapidly destroy their health.”
“The telecom industry knows
about the effects on people’s health, but are doing all they can to cover up
the harms.”
Numerous people, she said,
contacted the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation with reports of their
health being destroyed by 5G equipment installed in their neighborhoods.
“Based on the measurements
of massively increased radiation from 5G and what we know this far,” Nilsson
said, “we can conclude that 5G is very dangerous and must be halted.”
Cellphone use linked to
brain cancer, Chinese study concludes . . . .
===========
g.
Ukraine is collapsing under the weight of Russian Offensives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5UQPjjRR-0&feature=youtu.be
with Douglas Macgregor
(20:11)
+
“2023 Outlook for Ukraine”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/11/scott-ritter-2023-outlook-for-ukraine/
by Scott Ritter
Given the duplicitous history of the Minsk Accords, it is
unlikely Russia can be diplomatically dissuaded from its military
offensive. As such, 2023 appears to be shaping up as a year of continued
violent confrontation.
+
Watch: “Russia's next move, keeps collective west guessing”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHdyf1dq8g
with Alex Christoforou and
Alexander Merouris
(36:29)
+
Russia deploys secret weapon in
war for financial sovereignty: “Central banking”
“Financial sovereignty”:
It’s what friendly banker-lady Christine Lagarde and Bank of Russia high
priestess Elvira Nabiullina crave!
by Edward Slavsquat
|
|
Russian
President Vladimir Putin has unveiled his ingenious plan for
securing Russia’s financial sovereignty. source: URA.ru “It is
necessary to strengthen the financial sovereignty of the
country, I count on the work of the Central Bank,” Putin said during a meeting
with government officials on Wednesday.
===========
h.
Book Review: “Cause Unknown,” by Ed
Dowd
by Mark Crispin Miller
A
book that tells the awful truth, and nothing but—and does it so compellingly
that "our free press" is, with few exceptions, NOT attacking it!
+
Shedding Innocence
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/shedding-innocence?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
(audio, 23:44)
Propaganda
and censorship in the garden of good and evil
As we move through January 2023, and additional details about the lies our governments have told us are revealed daily, I keep
getting questioned about how it feels to be vindicated. I wrote about this last year, at a time when the approved
narrative appeared to be failing, and my deep ambivalence remains. To my
surprise, governments, the World Health Organization (WHO), and various
non-governmental organizations (WEF, BMGF etc.) have managed to keep the
COVIDcrisis alive and weaponized to justify policies which do not advance public
health objectives, but which they use to advance their own political and
financial interests. Like tossing offal over the transom, “Never let a good
crisis go to waste” seems to have provoked a shark feeding frenzy which
humanity may require decades to recover from.
Assuming we ever do.
The apple of knowledge about the depths of what the US government, the
Uniparty, the “Administrative state” will do has been well and truly bitten
into now. None who are “awake” to the damage done (to individuals, families,
and communities) in the name of public health will ever be able to return to
what (in retrospect) seems like the Eden of our prior innocence.
Now we are finally seeing the patient council of Augustine of Hippo come
to pass — ‘The truth is like a lion;
you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.’ Like so many
others, I had naively assumed that this process would require months, not
years.
Just to make the point yet again, the COVIDcrisis was never really a
crisis in the way it was portrayed. It was always a house of cards built upon
(USA and CCP) government propaganda as well as grossly overstated
risk modeling and projections from the Imperial College, London developed by
the Neil Ferguson research group.
Layers and layers of propaganda. Deep, harmonized, simultaneous
collusion, enticement, censorship, malicious defamation and gaslighting across
all western political organizations and their paid toadies in corporate and
social media- propagated and coordinated by the UN, WHO, EU, USA, former
“British Empire” governments and the new wannabe corporatist world government
body known as the “World Economic Forum” (WEF).
A comprehensive, global “shock and awe” fifth generation warfare action the likes of which the
world has never seen before. All justified as necessary to protect us from a
pathogen which was never a threat in the sense of Ebola (for example) or even
the fentanyl flooding across the US southern border.
A pathogen which (current information suggests) many of these governments
had a hand in creating. A pre-planned (Event 201) authoritarian totalitarian
response resulting in a massive upwards transfer of wealth largely to those who
funded the planning (that being the WEF and Bill Gates). Was the over-reaction
and authoritarian mismanagement a psychological projection of their guilt about
having created and loosed this slouching beast on all of us? Or was the virus
just a strategy to enable a broader agenda? Or one of many possible strategies
developed and waiting to be deployed? I suspect that Dr. Anthony Fauci would
plead a failure of memory if asked to testify to those questions under
oath.
Or perhaps (just as internet haters are going to hate), authoritarians
and monopolists when given an opportunity will enable Totalitarian states and
Corporate monopolies.
It has been over three years now during which we have all been banished
to inhabit dark crevices and cracks in the garden of good and evil. Forced into
our homes and the fringes of society while psychopathic devils who normally
inhabit Dante’s nine circles of hell openly danced a global bacchanal of death,
destruction, and greed. And as they danced, they steadily advanced their long
anticipated “Great Reset”. (con’d). . .
.
+
Watch "The TRUTH about the Gates Family"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Q7mdbuu5Y
with ReallyGraceful
(1:34:37)
+
McCarthy Brought TO HIS KNEES As
GOP Holdouts Win Major Concessions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHlhH7sVWCM&feature=youtu.be
with Aaron Maté
(23:52)
+
FBI & CIA To Be INVESTIGATED
By Republican Congress!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cULjn0bDiuY
with Aaron Maté
(20:46)
+
Sam Pollard: The FBI’s Crusade
Against MLK Was Darker Than You Think
“Do Not Cross.” Artwork by Mr. Fish.
by Robert Sheer
“You are done. There is only one way
out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is
bared to the nation.” That’s the shocking ending to the infamous
letter Civil Rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received in 1964
essentially urging him to commit suicide. The letter and accompanying
package containing blackmail were sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
as King quickly caught on. While the full, unredacted letter was finally
published by the New York Times in 2014, the audio recordings of an extensive
FBI wiretapping operation targeting King have been sealed until 2027. With just
a few years left before they come to light, director Sam Pollard did a deep
dive into the FBI’s surveillance of MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover
in his documentary “MLK
/ FBI,” released by IFC Films earlier this month.
+
GOP Has Not Created a New Church
Committee
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/john-kiriakou-gop-has-not-created-a-new-church-committee/
by John Kiriakou
House Republicans last week
announced that they would quickly create a special committee that they referred
to as the Church Committee II. Formally, they named it the Select
Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The subcommittee was created on a straight party-line vote: All 221
Republicans voted in favor while all 211 Democrats were opposed.
It will be chaired by far-right Ohio
Congressman Jim Jordan, the former
wrestling coach at Ohio State University whom six former wrestlers
accused of doing nothing to help them, despite the fact that he knew they were
being molested by the team doctor. Jordan is also the incoming chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee; in one of life’s ironies, despite graduating
from an obscure law school in central Ohio, he never bothered to take the bar
exam.
House Republicans, upon creation of
the subcommittee, said that it would be responsible for a “wide-ranging
investigation into federal law enforcement and national security
agencies.” But in private conversations, these same Republicans said that
they would “use their new power in Congress to scrutinize what they said was a
concerted effort by the government to silence and punish conservatives at all
levels, from protestors at school board meetings to former President Donald J.
Trump,” according to The New York
Times.
+
How the war machine took over the
Democrats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b079rbpYIzU
with Chris Hedges and Dennis
Kucinich
(33:56)
There was once a wing of the
Democratic Party that stood up to the war industry. J. William Fulbright,
George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire, and, of course,
Dennis Kucinich. But that was largely decades ago. The new Democrats,
especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for
corporate America, but the arms industry. The massive military budget, $858
billion in military spending allocated for fiscal year 2023, is an increase of
$45 billion over the Biden administration's budget request, and nearly $80
billion more than the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal
year.
What happened to the Democratic
Party? Why has it become impossible to question war and the massive
expenditures on arms? Why is such questioning political suicide? Why can't a
Democrat ask, especially at a time of economic hardship and huge deficits, how
much we are going to divert to the war in Ukraine, which has already consumed
some $60 billion? Former presidential candidate and eight-term Congressperson
Dennis Kucinich joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the past half century
of the Democrats, and how the war machine conquered the party.
+
Watch “I’ll NEVER Cross The
Democratic Party!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmxexCixlrc&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(25:15)
During a recent Instagram Live chat,
New York Congresswoman and “Squad” member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained
why she and her colleagues refused to “Force the Vote” when Democrats took
control of the House in 2021, unlike what the Freedom Caucus did earlier this
month. Her response was enlightening, underscoring how AOC has become a
complete Democratic Party insider and wholly abandoned the “bring the ruckus”
persona that helped sweep her into office as an ostensible threat to the
Democratic Party power structure.
+
Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”
https://reclaimthenet.org/meta-gave-the-cdc-de-facto-power-to-police-covid-misinfo/
by Didi Rankovic
More email revelations.
+
“Right or Wrong, I am Sticking with What I Believe”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/14/right-or-wrong-i-am-sticking-with-what-i-believe/
by Todd Hayen
What is it with this oddly stoic response from the “sheep
side” of this debate? I am hearing more and more sentiments such as: “I don’t
care if you are right, I am sticking with my stance.” What is that all about?
Like a captain of a ship, defeated in battle, ship sinking,
standing at the bridge, sword drawn, “damn you bastards! I am going down with my
ship!” And sure enough he does. Shark food.
Everyone is a sore loser these days.
There used to be a time when defeat was part of life and a
person learned from their mistakes or failures. Now everyone gets a prize just
for participating. The jabbed want their prize, and damned if they are going to
back down until they get it. “I was loyal to the cause all the way to the end!”
Down they will go in their arrogance, ignorance, and
stubbornness. Too bad. As cliché as it is to say, we are indeed in this together.
The sheep are not the enemy. They may have had weaknesses that make them
responsible for this shite show, but they didn’t create it, and they got
nothing for being loyal to their puppet masters, that’s for sure.
These poor folks are our brothers and our sisters. We are
ready to welcome them back to the human race with open arms, but that is
impossible if they continue to swear their allegiance to the enemy.
They have to put their swords down at some point. It doesn’t
seem like they are all that willing to do that. At this point in the game we
have just been enjoying the halftime show. I think as the deeper winter sets
in, the real game will continue.
What is this odd sheep-psychology, though? —“I’m not giving
up no matter what.”
+
FBI Wants to Put Me On Trial for
Fighting for Black Freedom: Instead Put the Colonizer State on Trial!
by Omali Yeshitela
+
Jose Maria Sison, Revolutionary
Internationalist and Founder of ILPS
by Antonio Tujan Jr
We all mourn the passing of Jose Maria Sison, Chairman
Emeritus of the International League of Struggle since 2016. He is the
great leader and driving force in building a worldwide anti-imperialist front
led by the revolutionary proletarians to build socialism. He is ILPS
personified because he conceptualized, mobilized and organized the ILPS in 2000
and was its indefatigable chairman for ten years.
In the midst of US imperialist
triumphalism with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 and the end of the
Cold War, imperialism launched a political-ideological offensive exemplified by
Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of capitalism’s victory as the ‘end of history’
– that class struggle is passe replaced by identity politics, that communism
and militant struggle by the masses are passe.
Joma heralded the fightback,
releasing the article “Stand for socialism against modern revisionism”
clarifying that the path of the onward march for socialism has never been
clearer with capitalist restoration as a result of revisionism while the
worldwide crisis of monopoly capitalism further deepened. Amidst the
ensuing debate amongst revolutionary proletarian parties and organizations he
pushed many of them to take the forward path of anti-imperialist and democratic
struggle in their countries, and build international coordination of militant
mass struggles.
But launching ILPS was not an easy
task as the visionary goal of starting with the formation of ILPS as a
formation of mass movements and peoples’ organizations separate from political
parties met with another round of two years of debate. Its founding in
2000 has proven the timely but difficult work of struggling against the US
empire. But it has grown into the largest, most active and militant
international movement against imperialism and reaction worldwide.
As a Marxist, Joma has always
underscored the revolutionary cause and interest of the proletariat and the
masses of the people. Beyond the theoretical and ideological debates in
the international communist movement, Joma never lost sight of the focus of the
people’s struggles, the need to arouse, mobilize and organize the masses in
their millions to fight and end imperialism. ILPS has the urgent and
critical role to mobilize the mass struggles of the proletarian and
semi-proletarian masses, along with other middle forces of the peoples across
the world, especially in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries of the
imperialist periphery.
ILPS is key in building a broad
international anti-imperialist united front where mass organizations not only
express international solidarity to fight imperialism within different
countries but also collaborate internationally in different projects.
ILPS develops activities and programs for education and training to raise the
capacity of mass organizations in different countries, and advancing them to
develop and build their own proletarian revolutionary parties.
Joma has always been a hands-on
revolutionary. In ILPS he took charge in the whole process of founding
ILPS, seeing through the launch and first assembly, became chairman when Ka
Crispin Beltran took ill, and continued performing part of its work as Chairman
Emeritus in 2016. He was indefatigable – producing more than 200
statements per year, directed the preparation of meetings, monitored the
conduct and run of campaigns and ensured the trouble-shooting when problems
cropped up.
Of course, Joma is much more than
ILPS. Jose Maria Sison provided comprehensive leadership to the national
democratic revolution in the Philippines – the people’s war, the democratic
mass movement both rural and urban, the broad united front and the elections,
the peace talks, and the revolutionary movement of the overseas Filipinos. Joma
also was also heavily involved in the building of the international solidarity
movement overseas from inception, besides building proletarian internationalist
coordination leading to the formation of the ILPS and the broad international
antiimperialist united front. We all miss him – his leadership, wisdom, his
masterly grasp and wielding of the power of Marxism. He is unbelievable
and unparalleled in these times.
+
Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms
by John Whitehead
How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps
the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.
When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied,
beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished,
imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you
shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or
your freedoms.
Consider for yourself.
+
“What’s in
store for 2023”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/14/audio-kit-knightly-jesse-zurawell-on-whats-in-store-for-2023/
with Jesse
Zurawell and Kit Knightly
(audio, 55:15)
===========
i.
The Media: An Interview With James Corbett
https://www.bitchute.com/video/OIKJsfgxDehk/
(1:03:50)
+
“Hate Inc., Why Today's Media
Makes Us Despise One Another”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG1qJeDI9Ok&feature=youtu.be
with Matt Taibbi
(1:06:05)
+
Our Birthright: Freedom
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/our-birthright-freedom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
(6:50)
Another
example of how Fifth Generation Warfare methods are often used against us
+
The FBI and Personal Liberty
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fbi-personal-liberty/5805173
by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
Among the lesser-known holes in the
U.S Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the
“wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected
in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited
all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The
wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data
gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.
Those
of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been
warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the
feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy
to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.
Here
is the backstory . . . .
===========
j.
Kyiv Shows Signs of Desperation
Alexei Danilov with map of
potential demilitarized zone. [Source: johnhelmer.net]
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/13/kyiv-shows-signs-of-desperation/
by John Helmer
A leading
Ukrainian government official has admitted that a demilitarized zone to divide
the battlefield, protect the Russian east of the country from the U.S. and NATO
long-range assault, and partition Ukraine is in negotiation.
“’We are currently being offered the Korean scenario,”
Alexei Danilov announced on January
8.
Danilov, a native of Lugansk, is the deputy chairman of the
National Security and Defence Council, and second in rank to President Vladimir
Zelensky. “[This is] the so-called conditional ’38th parallel,’” he told local
reporters. “Here are Ukrainians, but there Ukrainians are not like
that. The Russians will now invent anything. I know for sure that one of the
options they can offer us is the ’38th parallel.’”
Danilov claimed one of the sources for the proposal is Dmitry Kozak.
Officially, he is a deputy head of the presidential staff. In 2020-21 he was
the Kremlin’s chief negotiator on the Minsk accords with the Kyiv regime and in
the Normandy format with Germany and France; for Kozak’s detailed record of
those negotiations, read this.
Danilov now says Kozak “meets with former politicians in
Europe and conveys through them the message that the Russians are ready to make
concessions in order to fix the current status quo and force Ukraine to a
truce.”
Danilov did not say that he, Zelensky and the Ukrainian-U.S.
general staff have rejected the idea.
Instead, he claimed the Korean DMZ has proven to be a
mistake: “Danilov said that during a recent meeting, Korean representatives
noted that establishing the division of the Korean peninsula into two parts
along the 38th parallel was a mistake as the concessions made in the 1950s
after the end of the war between North Korea and South Korea are currently
leading to problems.”
It is unclear what meeting Danilov was referring to, if any.
U.S. press reporting has identified the mistake of Vice President Kamala Harris
last September in misnaming
the “Republic of North Korea.”
Moscow sources suspect Danilov is attempting to relieve the
pressure now growing on the Ukrainian generals from the U.S. and the NATO
command to consider an armistice before the Russians launch their anticipated
general winter offensive.
By exposing and trying to sandbag the Americans, Danilov’s
remark is a signal that the real U.S. assessment is that a much bigger loss of
military capacity, territory and viable economy will be the outcome of the
Russian offensive—unless the Ukrainians buy time with a ceasefire and
protracted armistice talks to commence.
===========
k.
Poszar Was Right: Saudis Confirm
Non-Dollar Oil Trade Plans In Davos
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/poszar-was-right-saudis-admit-non-dollar-oil-trade-plans-davos
by Tyler Durden
Earlier this month, former NY Fed
repo guru Zoltan Pozsar wrote
one of his most important reports of 2022, in which
he described how Putin could unleash hell on the Western financial system by
demanding that instead of dollars, Russian oil exporters are paid in gold,
effectively pegging oil to gold and launching Petrogold.
+
Saudi Arabia continues to move
away from petrodollar"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYwVDwrkpJ8&feature=youtu.be
with Alex Christofrou and
Alexander Mercouris
(8:44)
+
US Treasury Hits Debt Ceiling,
Begins Using "Extraordinary Measures", Yellen Tells Congress
by Tyler Durden
One week ago we correct predicted
that the Treasury
would hit its debt ceiling today, and as expected, in
a letter to House speaker Kevin McCarthy, Yellen today wrote that "beginning on January 19, the
outstanding debt of the United States was projected to reach the statutory
limit" and that the "Treasury began using extraordinary
measures" today. Some more details from
the letter:
+
More Austerity Means More Protests
in 2023
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/17/more-austerity-means-more-protests-in-2023/
by Isabel Ortiz and Sara Burke
World leaders have begun meeting in Davos to
discuss cooperation to address multiple crises, from Covid-19 and escalating
inflation to slowing economic growth, debt distress and climate shocks.
Three months earlier, finance
ministers gathered in Washington,
D.C. for the same reason. The mood was grim. The need for
ambitious actions could not be greater; however, there were no
agreements, evidencing the fragility of multilateralism and
international cooperation.
Worse, policy makers — advised by
the International Monetary Fund — are resorting to old, failed and regressive
policies, such as austerity (now called “fiscal
restraint” or “fiscal consolidation”), instead of much needed
corporate/wealth taxation and debt reduction initiatives, to ensure an
equitable recovery for all.
A recent global
report alerts of the dangers of a post-pandemic wave of
austerity, far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global
financial crisis a decade ago.
While governments started cutting
public expenditures in 2021, a tsunami of budget cuts is expected in 143
countries in 2023, which will impact more than 6.7 billion people or 85 percent
of the world population.
Proven Harm
Analysis of the austerity
measures considered or already implemented by governments worldwide
shows their significant negative impacts on people, harming women in
particular.
+
Economic Update: “What's Wrong
with Capitalism?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg28P1uOrWU
with Richard Wolff
(29:25)
+
“What Is Wrong With
Globalization?” | Economics for People with Ha-Joon Chang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVGJDwEWIrI
with Ha-Joon Chang
(34:24)
Across the world we’re seeing governments
and popular movements come to power that are opposed to globalization. Why? In
this third lecture in INET’s “Economics For People” series, Ha-Joon Chang
explains the backlash to globalization.
+
Conceptualizing the Individual |
Economics for People with Ha-Joon Chang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYnFbzcWcGQ
with Ha-Joon Chang
(33:35)
+
Solving the Debt Crisis the
American Way
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/ellen-brown-solving-the-debt-crisis-the-american-way/
by Ellen Brown
Our forefathers turned their debts
into currency. That Constitutional approach could work today.
+
Inflation, Europe's energy crisis,
and the Fed with Richard Wolff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I43uC1mfHKc&feature=youtu.be
with Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff
(34:00)
+
Mass Protests Across France
Condemn Macron Attack on Pension System
https://www.commondreams.org/news/protests-france-macron-pensions
by Jake Johnson
"If there is no positive
response from the government, today is a first step, and there will be a second
step," said one union leader.
+
France Grinds To Halt Over
Nationwide Pension Strikes
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/france-grinds-halt-over-nationwide-pension-strikes
by Tyler
Durden
French refinery workers, teachers,
train drivers, and other critical industry employees walked off their jobs in a
nationwide day of strikes against President Emmanuel Macron's plan to increase
the retirement age by two years to 64. AP
News reported the strikes are "halting high-speed
trains, disrupting electricity supplies," and bringing major
transportation networks to a screeching halt.
Protests are underway in major
French metro areas, including Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Nantes, and Nice.
Transportation networks have ground to a halt. Many workers who hit the street
in protest of Macron's planned increase to the minimum retirement are in
sectors including railways, schools, hospitals, and air-traffic
controllers.
France's eight largest labor unions
coordinated today's massive labor action. The CGT union and the head of the
Communist party are expected to have at least a million workers protest
today.
===========
l.
Oxford Fights Climate Lockdowns
https://www.corbettreport.com/nwnw507/
with James Corbett
(26:15)
+
Tony Blair calls for WEF and WTO
to introduce “digital infrastructure” that monitors vaccination status
https://reclaimthenet.org/tony-blair-wef-wto-digital-infrastructure-vaccination-status/
by Tom Parker
"You need the data. You need
to know who's been vaccinated and who hasn't been."
+
Fear Is Pfizer's Financial
Fertilizer
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fear-pfizer-financial-fertilizer/5805080
by Dr. Joseph Mercola
+
Lessons from China and Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHIXuW4gxMY&feature=youtu.be
with Dr. John Campbell
(16:09)
+
Interesting long form interview
with Neil Oliver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVh1oPV5hjc
with Dr. John Campbell and Neil
Oliver
(1:18:16)
+
Increased risk of stroke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswaUoFEs8E
with Dr. John Campbell
(15:31)
+
Excess deaths in young adults,
2022 data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD0na_NZaLM
with Dr. John Campbell
(14:15)
+
In memory of the David Crosby who
once was, before "the virus" ate his brain
by Mark Crispin Miller
The aged rockers who have leapt
aboard the "vaccine" cattle cars, and jeered those who hung back,
were often very different people back before their hearts and minds were
steeped in deadly propaganda
+
In memory of those who "died
suddenly" in the United States and worldwide, January 9-January 16, 2023
by Mark Crispîn Miller
Musicians in the US (2), Canada (2),
Colombia, UK, Ireland, Germany, Thailand & Australia; politicians in the
US, Canada, Bahamas, UK, France (2) & Malaysia; 10 fatal vaxxidents; &
more
+
In memory
of those who “died suddenly” in Kazakhstan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, January
9-January 16, 2023
Indian cricketer
Sidharth Sharma (& a boy, 10, died in class); Thai singer Bai Khwan
Ratchaya; Singaporean actor Timothy Nga; Filipino journalist Elias Baquero;
Australian singer Renee Geyer; & more
===========
m.
CovertAction Bulletin: Protesters
Massacred in Peru After Far-Right Legislative Coup
by Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa
(audio, 50:22)
Peru
has been in a period of crisis since December 7, when the Peruvian far right
used their position in the country’s Parliament to illegally dismiss the
government of President Pedro Castillo. Since then, tens of thousands of people
from indigenous and peasant communities have taken to the streets to reject the
new government of Dina Boluarte and demand the democratically elected Castillo
be reinstated.
On
Monday, January 9, at least 17 protesters were killed by Peruvian security
forces while they brutally repressed an anti-government protest in Juliaca, and
at least 68 others were severely injured. The massacres have continued into
Tuesday, January 10th, now reaching a total of 46 dead.
To
discuss the growing violence and resistance in the streets we are joined by
Tatiana Bejar of Peru Libre.
+
Brazil divided. “Lula faces tough
road ahead as president”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5_N6vJ6JYI
with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(21:04)
+
Will Lula Go the Way of Peru’s Ousted Left Wing President
Pedro Castillo?
by Julian Cola
Danger lurks with election of large
number of pro-Bolsonaro governors and
radicalization of Bolsonaro’s supporters
who refuse to accept election results.
===========
n.
Night Raids: Victims of CIA-Backed
Afghan Death Squads Known as “Zero Units” Demand Accountability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8B8dDXfP-8
with Amy Goodman
(19:02)
We speak
with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how
CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable
for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The
Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared
throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending
upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before
disappearing. Families of victims continue to demand answers, but since the
operations were directed by the CIA rather than the military, there is almost
no oversight or disclosure when things go wrong. “Many people I spoke to feel
that these operations … were counterproductive and actually had turned their
families against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and against the U.S.,”
says Billing.
+
Tracking CIA-Backed ‘Zero Units’
in Afghanistan
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/12/tracking-cia-backed-zero-units-in-afghanistan/
by ProPublica
In 2019, reporter
Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her
mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote
reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night
raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological
impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.
So, Billing attempted to catalog the
scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as
the 02, over a four year period. The
resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be
able to do again. Here is what she found:
===========
o.
Netanyahu’s Claim of Jewish
Exclusivity in Palestine Must be Challenged
by Iqbal Jassat
The defiant declaration by Benjamin Netanyahu that
he is going to press ahead and complete Israel’s colonial project in Palestine
must be challenged by the world. Regardless of international law and
conventions, his government is going to continue to defy them.
Knowing
full well that Israel has America’s backing, and that western capitals are far
too scared to call him out, Netanyahu made the following brazen statement:
“These
are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people
have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.
The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of
Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
This
leaves no room for ambiguity. He has set out the outcome of his pact agreed
with the small far-right parties in what has been described as the “most
extreme” right-wing regime in Israeli history. The implications of this for the
Palestinians are dire; Netanyahu and his ghastly regime intend to ethnically
cleanse them.
His
categoric statement implies that Palestinians either do not exist or, if they
do, they have no right to continue living in Palestine, to which “the Jewish
people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas”. Netanyahu, of
course, uses the term “the Land of Israel”, but in case some apologists for apartheid Israel try to play down the enormity of Netanyahu’s
declaration by suggesting that he is referring to the 1949 Armistice (“Green”)
Line, do not be misled.
+
The “Brewing” Israeli Civil War – Does The US Have A Hand In Creating
It?
by Robert Inlakesh
As Israel’s far-right
fascist government ushers in a new era of hardship for the Palestinian people,
it’s also causing massive divisions in both Israel’s Jewish society and the
regime’s political & military leaderships. Such is the state of Israeli
politics that former minister of war, Benny Gantz, has warned of civil war.
An ongoing feud between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and both the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and former war
minister, Benny Gantz, is leading to concerns amongst Israelis that a civil-war
of words, could escalate into a real civil war between Israeli citizens in the
streets.
From the outset, Israeli PM Netanyahu has faced significant
pushback on two primary aspects of his extremist government; first, his
intention to overhaul the Israeli high court and introduce sweeping legislative
reforms; second, the issue of who is in control of Israeli “security”. In
response to the Israeli PM’s unapologetic rhetoric surrounding goals to push
through legal changes to the system and unsubstantiated claims of seeking to
gather a broad consensus for them, Benny Gantz said to
Netanyahu that
“If you continue on the path you are
on, the responsibility for starting the civil war brewing in Israeli society
will be on you.”
Israel’s former military chief, Aviv Kochavi, stated that the
Israeli coalition will not be able to achieve getting the Israeli military to
listen to extremist Religious Zionism party politicians. The two leading
figures of Religious Zionism; Bezalel Smotrich, the new finance minister, and
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, have been granted special
oversight into West Bank policy. Ben-Gvir specifically has been granted partial
control over the Israeli border police. The Israeli Knesset voted on a special
bill which gave him this authority and Smotrich was given authority to appoint
generals as the “hybrid civil-military Coordinator for Government Activities in
the Territories (COGAT)”, specifically designed to deal with West Bank policy.
It is clear that a segment of the Israeli political and
military elite are genuinely unhappy with the strategy of the extremists in
Netanyahu’s government, which threatens provoking a third Palestinian Intifada
(uprising) in the West Bank. Former Israeli PM, Yair Lapid, has even threatened
that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich could end up causing harm
to the seemingly unbreakable US-Israeli relationship, even on
the security level he stressed. Although the US Biden administration maintains
a strong bond with Benjamin Netanyahu, it is clear that Lapid was their
favorite in the lead up to Israel’s November election.
Just under
half of Israel’s population are allegedly worried that what
they call their “democracy” is in grave danger, due to the Netanyahu
government’s new hardline coalition and its policies. Coupled with this
reported worry has been a number of protests, one which numbered in the tens of
thousands just last week. In the demonstrations, it is notable that the
protesters were largely from the center right and center, politically speaking,
in addition to fringe groups from the Zionist left who participated, albeit in
smaller numbers. In response to a small number of these protesters having
raised Palestinian flags, they were condemned by the Israeli far-right and now
the Israeli national security minister has issued an order completely banning
the Palestinian flag as an alleged “terrorist symbol”. Itamar Ben-Gvir also
warned that anti-government protesters would be combated by water cannons,
signaling that heavy handed tactics will begin to be used for their peaceful
street protests.
Both sides of the aisle in Israeli politics argue that they
are fighting for Israeli democracy, which, according to both narratives, is
being threatened by the other side that seeks to undertake a coup. The
pro-government camp states that the people have spoken and that the opposition
wants to use protests to overthrow the democratic vote. On the opposition side
they are arguing that the dramatic legal reforms threaten to upend Israeli
democracy and that they must go to the streets to stop the government from
performing a coup to change the nature of Israeli liberal democracy. It is hard
to miss the overlaps with the current US political dynamic.
The opposition camp, however, seem to have the backing of
the United States government in its approach. It was clear when former PM Yair
Lapid was in office that he was growing closer with the Biden administration,
even speaking before the UN General Assembly and mentioning the two-state
solution as a possibility for the first time in around a decade. Although there
is no evidence on the record, regarding any US role in backing the Yair
Lapid-Benny Gantz alliance, it is clear that the White House is uncomfortable
with the trajectory of the new Israeli government and that the Gantz-Lapid
opposition aligns perfectly with the traditional US policy positions on Palestine-Israel.
Washington never truly stands up to Tel Aviv when it violates US policy — such
is the case when illegal settlements are expanded or warcrimes are committed —
but it seeks the veneer of respectability with which a Gantz or Lapid covers
their crimes.
+
Taking apartheid to new extremes
Israeli settlers, chanting against Palestinians, march through Damascus
gate into the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem during the an annual
Flag March, 29 May 2022. (Oren Ziv ActiveStills)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-apartheid-new-extremes/36986
by Maureen Clare Murphy
There is much liberal hand-wringing over the new
Israeli government’s shock-and-awe assault on the state’s judiciary and other
laws and mechanisms that safeguard democracy in the country, even if that
democracy was always for Jews only.
But for those who already know that Israel’s democracy is a violent lie, and
that it’s been a settler colony enterprise maintained through apartheid and
military rule from the
beginning, there is still plenty to be concerned about. Most obviously
for Palestinians, whose removal from their homeland so they may be replaced
with foreign Jewish settlers has always been the top priority for the state.
The previous government was dissolved, after all, in order
to prevent the
expiration of a temporary measure in place since 1967 applying Israeli
civil law to Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
By calling for new elections, those emergency regulations
were automatically extended, preserving the system of apartheid. And in the
fifth election in the space of three years, in November Israelis elected their
most openly
fascist and right-wing government yet.
The current Israeli government’s coalition agreements amount
to a declaration of intent to commit crimes under international law, according to Adalah, a
Palestinian human rights group.
The guiding principles of the new government begin with the
assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right
over all areas of the land of Israel.”
Adalah, which
advocates for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, says that the government’s
intent is “to deepen Jewish supremacy and racial segregation as the underlying
principles of the Israeli regime.”
The group is calling for urgent intervention by the International
Criminal Court and the International
Court of Justice and the reconstitution of the United Nations Special
Committee against Apartheid.
In a new position
paper, Adalah lays out how the Israeli government’s guiding
principles and coalition agreements explicitly deny the Palestinian people’s
right to self-determination.
The initiatives and policies of the government will result
in more brutality against Palestinians with even less judicial oversight and no
pretense of accountability.
+
New Democrats in Congress are enemies of Palestine cause
John Fetterman, a new US senator, has admitted that he is not
progressive on the question of Palestine. (Archie
Carpenter UPI)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/new-democrats-congress-are-enemies-palestine-cause/36996
by Michael Veronda Hazou
+
World Cup Racism, The Israel Lobby, and Jordan Peterson, with Smile 2
Jannah and David Miller
with Lowkey
(1:01:25)
The MintPress podcast, “The
Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely
examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know –
including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that
infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain
by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate
media.
In this week’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey begins
discussing how the mainstream media silences academics, musicians to
award-winning filmmakers, such as Ken Loach, for their outspoken stance on
Palestinian rights.
Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of
Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube
channel, Smile2Jannah. David, who was subjected to a coordinated
three-year campaign by the Zionist lobby, is a leading British scholarly critic
of Israel.
+
Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google,
Facebook and Microsoft
by Alan Macleod
A MintPress study has found that hundreds of former agents
of the notorious Israeli spying organization, Unit 8200, have attained
positions of influence in many of the world’s biggest tech companies, including
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Unit 8200 is infamous for
surveilling the indigenous Palestinian population, amassing kompromat on
individuals for the purposes of blackmail and extortion. Spying on the world’s
rich and famous, Unit 8200 hit the headlines last year, after the Pegasus
scandal broke. Former Unit 8200 officers designed and implemented
software that spied on tens of thousands of politicians and likely aided in the
killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
+
EU distorts history of how it helped weaponize anti-Semitism
Prominent EU official Katharina
von Schnurbein has made misleading comments about her work on anti-Semitism. (European Commission)
by David Cronin
Is it possible to disown your work yet still promote it at
every available opportunity?
A European Union body is attempting such a balancing act.
The main weapon used by Israel against the Palestine
solidarity movement in recent years has been a highly politicized definition of
anti-Semitism.
It was originally drawn up as part of an EU-sponsored
exercise before eventually being approved by a wider grouping of governments
called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Yet the history of the IHRA definition has actually been
rewritten in a most dishonest fashion.
A document obtained via a freedom of information request
shows that the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency prepared answers in 2018 to what
it called “critical questions.”
One of those questions notes that the Fundamental Rights
Agency now views the endorsement of the IHRA as positive. So why, the question
continued, had the same agency “infamously deleted that definition from its
website”?
The prepared reply – see below – reads that the IHRA
definition was “adopted in May 2016 and it was never deleted” from the agency’s
website.
The Fundamental Rights Agency is using the truth sparingly.
A nearly identical version of the same definition was indeed
erased from the
agency’s website a few years earlier.
The IHRA definition did not appear out of nowhere in May
2016. The definition was originally contained in a 2005 paper from the European
Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which is today called the
Fundamental Rights Agency.
The 2005 paper resulted from discussions
between the EU, the American Jewish Committee and some other pro-Israel lobby
groups. Rather than focusing on bigotry against Jews based on their religion or
ethnicity, it contended that denouncing Israel’s foundation as a “racist
endeavor” was an example of anti-Semitism.
Misleading
Despite trying to distance itself from the IHRA definition,
the Fundamental Rights Agency’s own work is guided by that definition.
The agency has connived in efforts to conflate anti-Jewish
bigotry with denunciations of Israeli apartheid.
That can be seen from a report it has
published on so-called anti-Semitic incidents from 2011 to 2021.
The section for Belgium claims that “ideological
anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents on the internet have accounted for the
largest proportions of reported incidents in most years.” Citing a Belgian
website, the report claims, too, that “ideological anti-Semitism often
translates into the expression of sentiments against Israel.”
Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s coordinator against
anti-Semitism, is an especially zealous promoter of the IHRA definition.
During November, she was involved in a public dispute about
the definition with Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special reporter for the
occupied West Bank and Gaza and a staunch defender of the right to criticize
Israel.
When Albanese asked on Twitter if the EU had scrutinized the
potential impact that the definition could have on human rights, von Schnurbein
replied “yes, we assessed.”
+
How Carrefour profits from Israel's war crimes
Labour unions and human rights groups are urging France-based global
retailer Carrefour to end its complicity in Israeli war crimes. (Sipa via AP Images)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-carrefour-profits-israels-war-crimes/36961
by Ali Abunimah
+
New Report Charges Major Corporations as Complicit in Israel's Water
Apartheid
https://www.mintpressnews.com/new-report-major-corporations-complicit-israel-water-apartheid/283271/
by Jessica Buxbaum
In December, the
Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, released a report accusing major corporations of maintaining Israel’s
water apartheid on Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
According to Al-Haq,
businesses are instrumental in helping Israel restrict water access to
Palestinians and destroy Palestinian water infrastructure. Additionally, foreign
companies profit from Israel’s system of water discrimination.
Al-Haq’s paper named
both Israeli and international companies as:
Complicit in the
violation of the Palestinian right to self-determination and permanent
sovereignty over natural resources, as well as the war crime of pillage and
inhumane acts of expropriation of natural resources amounting to the crime of
apartheid.”
The report detailed the
actions of Israeli water companies Mekorot and Hagihon but also included
outside firms TAHAL Group International B.V., Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC
Bamford Excavators Ltd. (JCB), and Volvo Car Group.
===========
p.
Geopolitical Games in the
Asia-Pacific Will Not be Allowed, Warns China
China will not let the Asia-Pacific region turn into a
hotspot for geopolitical conflict, and will defend its own sovereignty and
integrity, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson declared on Monday.
Media reports said:
Speaking at a press briefing, Wang
Wenbin responded to the news of a 10-member German delegation arriving on the self-governing
island of Taiwan. He stressed that “the Taiwan question is at the very core of
China’s interests” and urged Berlin to respect the One China Principle,
acknowledging that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the nation.
China considers any treatment of the
island as a sovereign nation, including formal visits by foreign officials, as
a direct affront to its sovereignty.
Wang said the “root cause” of
the historic tensions between Taiwan and China were “the law of the jungle,
hegemonism, colonialism and militarism” which had inflicted “deep suffering” on
China for many years.
“The Chinese people have been
committed to fighting imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism and upholding our
sovereignty, territorial integrity and national dignity. We will never allow
any force to turn the Asia-Pacific into an arena of geopolitical games once
again to maintain their dominance,” the diplomat warned.
Taiwan has never formally declared
independence from Beijing, but has been self-governed since the end of the Chinese
Civil War in 1949, when nationalists fighting under the Kuomintang were
defeated by communist forces and fled to the island.
While relations between Beijing and
Taipei have always been strained, tensions boiled over following the visit of
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island in August.
China has repeatedly warned that it
will use whatever means necessary to establish full control over the island,
but has insisted it will search for a diplomatic solution.
Beijing Deploys Troops Near Taiwan
Another media report said:
China has announced a military
exercise near Taiwan on the eve of visits by German and Lithuanian lawmakers to
the self-governed island. The drill has been described as countering
“separatist forces.”
The training exercise was announced
on Sunday by Colonel Shi Yi, the spokesman for the Eastern Theater Command of
the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He said it would involve sea and airspace
maneuvers around Taiwan, focusing on land strikes and amphibious assault
action.
The exercise was “designed to test
the joint combat capabilities of the troops and resolutely counteract the
provocative actions of external forces and ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists,”
a statement said.
+
Taiwan Defense Ministry Reveals
Rare Cooperation with NATO
https://www.asia-pacificresearch.com/taiwan-defense-ministry-reveals-rare-cooperation-nato/5631477
by Dave DeCamp
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry revealed on Wednesday that it has sent some of its military officers
to a NATO war college in Italy,
acknowledging cooperation with the Western military alliance that is sure to
anger China.
One Taiwanese air force officer, Lt.
Col. Wu Bong-yeng, told
reporters that he went to the NATO Defense College in Rome in 2021
for a six-month course and insisted the cooperation was purely academic.
“This was an academic exchange, not
a military exchange,” he said. “Of course, they were very curious about
Taiwan,” Wu said he studied the same curriculum as officers from NATO countries
did, and the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said other officers had been sent to
the college.
Taiwan is known to cooperate with
the US military, but interactions with other foreign militaries are much more
rare. The revelation comes after NATO said China poses “systemic challenges” to
the alliance in its new Strategic
Concept document that was issued in 2022.
NATO first made
clear it had its eye on China in 2020 and said at the time the alliance
would work to build stronger partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. Since then, some
NATO countries have joined the US in sending warships into sensitive waters
near China, including France, Germany, and Britain.
The US and its allies have been
taking steps to increase ties with Taiwan in recent years, which Beijing views
as an affront to the one-China policy. These policies have provoked
an increase in Chinese military activity around the island. This
week, a group of German lawmakers visited Taiwan, and a US trade delegation is
due to arrive on the island on Saturday.
===========
q.
Is New Zealand a Beta Test for
Western Governments Micromanaging the Populace?
by Zero Hedge
In the wake of the covid pandemic lockdowns and mandates,
many western nations and states in the US witnessed a new eye opening level of
government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens. Some, however,
dealt with worse scenarios than others.
New Zealand in particular has popped
up time and time again over the past couple of years with some of the most
draconian restrictions on the public, and sadly the trend has not stopped just
because the pandemic lockdowns stopped. The island nation seems to be
intent on setting the standard for authoritarian policies and government
micromanagement, and a series of recent laws are driving home the reality that
they do not intend to relent.
Flashback: In 2018, New Zealand
banned all offshore oil drilling exploration in the name of instituting a
“carbon neutral future”, meaning tight energy restrictions are forthcoming in
NZ as the decade progresses.
In 2019, NZ banned all
semi-automatic weapons after the Christchurch mosque shootings, punishing
millions of law abiding citizens for the crimes of one man. Video
evidence of the Christchurch shootings is suspiciously illegal in NZ, and
anyone caught viewing or downloading the event can be prosecuted. The gun
bans were enforced just in time for the pandemic lockdowns.
In 2020, the government introduced
internet censorship legislation which would give them the power to selectively
filter “dangerous content.” Most of the provisions were ultimately
scrapped after a public backlash, but future censorship remains a priority for
the government.
In 2021, New Zealand Prime Minister
and associate of the World Economic Forum, Jacinda Ardern, openly admitted to
constructing a two tier society in which the vaccinated enjoy normal access to
the economy, travel and social interaction while the unvaccinated would be
deliberately choked with restrictions until they “chose” to comply and accept
the mRNA jab.
+
From "Goldilocks" To
"Dreadlocks": 2023 Has Its Own Surprises For Us
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/goldilocks-dreadlocks-2023-has-its-own-surprises-us
by Michael Every
Surprise! New Zealand’s Prime Minister
Jacinta Ardern just quit. She “no longer has enough left in the tank to do the
job,” apparently, and will be gone after 7 February. There was no immediate
reaction in the NZD, and the Kiwis are hardly the mighty All Blacks on the
global stage, but it does show that 2023 can contain real surprises.
===========
r.
Andrew Cuomo BLACKMAILING Biden Over Classified Documents Scandal!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm79yEO7-Hk&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(8:09)
+
Hunter Biden Lived In Classified Doc House While Raking In Millions
Through Chinese Intelligence Ties
by Tyler Durden
National
security concerns over Joe Biden's classified document scandal just got worse,
as two reports have emerged which place Hunter Biden at the Bidens' Wilmington,
Delaware residence while he was raking in millions of dollars from CCP-linked
business dealings.
+
Report on the Biden Laptop (644 pages)
https://bidenlaptopreport.marcopolousa.org/report_viewer/index.html#p=1
by Marco Polo
Marco Polo
is a nonprofit research group exposing corruption and blackmail to drive an
American renaissance. Given the explicit nature of the content on the Biden
Laptop, this Report is for an adult readership. Errors are the fault of the
authors alone and, if identified, will be amended immediately. Please send all
inquiries and/or corrections to info@marcopolousa.org ISBN: 978-1-7371866-4-9
© 2022 by
ICU, LLC EIN: 61-1999941
===========
s.
The Keynes vs von Hayek Debate: A False Dualism with Malthusian
Characteristics
by Matthew Ehret
In my recent article ‘Steve Bannon
and China’s Deep State’, readers were introduced to several
operatives who are serving as controlled opposition with the intention of
corralling the conservative groups of the USA and Europe into a weaponized
anti-Chinese mob. This study took us into the corridors of the power within
forces of the black nobility representing ancient power structures that gave
rise to the Crusades, the synthetic cult known as the Jesuits and neo feudalist
aspirations for global governance.
Just as the anti-religious Bolshevik left vs Catholic
fascists of the Coudenhove-Kalergi Pan Europa right was orchestrated a century
ago by oligarchical grand strategists yearning to corral humankind into a neo-feudal
order, the same formula was used during the 20th century to create a
false dualism in the economic field which has served to undermine any authentic
anti imperial resistance to transhumanism – especially since World War II.
I am here referring to the pervasive influence of a
polarization launched in 1932 as a “debate” between two
London-based Malthusian economists.
One extreme that deeply sculpted the minds of “leftists” of
the Trans Atlantic world was top-down economist named John Maynard Keynes
(1883-1946) while the other extreme which went on to mold the thinking of the
“conservative right” during the Cold War was found in the “bottom up” advocate
of personal liberty, Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992).
. . .
The constants among both apparent opponents (who remained
friends throughout their lives) were that 1) neither believed that INTENTION or
MIND should govern economic policy (Keynes believed in arbitrary “make work”
which could not differentiate between the qualitative difference of a $100
paycheck to a digger of random holes vs $100 paycheck to an engineer building a
dam), and 2) both believed equally in the universal validity of Malthus’
population theories, and of Bernard Mandeville’s satanic belief that personal
vice creates public virtue. Both theories have underpinned British/Hapsburg
imperial grand strategy for over two centuries.
. . .
It is also important to hold in mind that the 1932 Keynes vs
Hayek debate emerged at a time that the world
government agenda driven by the Bank of England and League of Nations were on the
ascendency. This operation, in which both Keynes and von Hayek were thoroughly
enmeshed, demanded fascist regimes control the world under a “scientifically
managed” bankers’ dictatorship.
One month after the London
Times October 17, 1932 publication began
to print arguments from proponents of both schools of thought on how to best
end the depression, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the U.S. presidency.
As I outlined in How to Crush
a Bankers’ Dictatorship, with Roosevelt’s presidential
victory, a specific form of political economy was restored in the United States
that had nothing to do with either school of Keynes or Hayek and everything to
do with something uniquely embedded in the U.S. Constitutional
traditions that petrified the hereditary empires of Europe’s old nobility.
In the years leading up to his victory, FDR had worked
closely with a grouping of bipartisan American congressmen and senators to
revive a form of political economy which involved the paradoxical coexistence
of increased government involvement together with massive increase in
entrepreneurism, and private sector growth[1]. The fact that FDR is attacked by
communists for being a capitalist shill while being simultaneously attacked by
capitalists for being a communist shill to this very day is a sign of this
ongoing confusion and a testament to the effectiveness of British intelligence
propaganda.
The systemic inability for modern Americans to resolve the
‘FDR paradox’ today is due entirely to a sleight of hand pulled by the very
same imperial power that has never
forgiven the USA for declaring its independence in 1776.
Contradicting the popular mythology that “FDR was a
Keynesian”, US Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins recorded a 1934
interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her[2]:
“I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of
figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In
response Keynes, who was then trying to co-opt the intellectual narrative of
the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate,
economically speaking.”
Keynes the Fabian Eugenicist . . . .
+
Is the United States on the Verge of Civil War II?
https://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-c-koehler
by Robert C. Koehler
“Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has
about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to
use.”
The words — actually a 2019 Facebook post — are those of
then-Iowa Republican congressman Steve
King, loosing a puerile smirk as he stirred the pot of violence
on the American political right. The politics of stupid has intensified since
then, as white supremacy and fear of the Great Replacement Theory take over the
GOP.
Are we truly on the brink of a civil war? What, indeed, is a
civil war? When does violence move from being random and individual —
psychological — to strategic and political, which is to say, militarized? Can
this happen without a quasi-governmental entity emerging, officially declaring
“war” on the political establishment whose decisions it hates? Or is having 8
trillion bullets enough?
Resorting to violence — indeed, celebrating and honoring its
use for just and moral purposes — requires a surrender to the temptation of
force. No matter how disempowered you are, intellectually and spiritually,
force is always available as a means of making your presence felt, if not
actually getting your way. Force is a lost soul’s last resort. It often turns
into the first resort.
Say you’re a Republican and you lose an election. What a
nuisance! Consider the troubles faced by MAGA-T-shirt-wearing, would-be state
rep Solomon
Peńa, who ran for a New Mexico House seat in November, Yeah, he
lost, garnering only 26 percent of the vote, but refused to concede and
challenged the legitimacy of the election. That accomplished nothing, so . . .
what choice did he have? He allegedly hired some guys who drove past at least
four houses of local politicians — two state legislators and two county
commissioners — and fired bullets into walls and doors. He was arrested a few
days ago and charged in the shootings.
There was a time when this would have been seen, in most
respectable circles, as insanity. Now I fear it’s just one more example of
Republican fun and games, as the party members come to grips with their (is it
possible?) permanent minority status. Voter suppression is no longer adequate
to ensure victories. Donald Trump has given losing GOP candidates their mantra
du jour: The election was rigged.
And thus, as Stephen Marche wrote recently in The
Guardian: “The United States is a textbook example of a country
headed towards civil war. The trends increasingly point one way, and while
nobody knows the future, little — if anything — is being done, by anyone, to
try to prevent the collapse of the republic. Belief in democracy is ebbing. The
legitimacy of institutions is declining. America increasingly is entering a
state where its citizens don’t want to belong to the same country. These are
conditions ripe for political violence.”
The iconic specter of mainstream GOP violence was, of
course, the Jan. 6 insurgency, as thousands of angry white people, egged on by
their dear leader, broke into the capital as Congress was in the process of
transitioning to the Biden presidency, shouting things like “Hang Mike Pence!”
Since then, Republican outrage has morphed into such actions
as the break-in last October at Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home. “Where’s
Nancy?” the intruder shouted — alas, she wasn’t there — eventually attacking
her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, fracturing
his skull.
“But on the right, support for violence is no longer a
fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld points out at Politico. “. . .
This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to
defend their values, an extension of their political activity.”
===========
t.
The Supreme Court Is About to
Eviscerate the Right to Strike
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/the-supreme-court-is-about-to-eviscerate-the-right-to-strike/
by Marjorie Cohn
The court will likely rule in
“Glacier Northwest” that the union’s strike activity isn’t protected by federal
labor law.
+
Russell Banks, John Brown and the
American Soul
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/16/russell-banks-john-brown-and-the-american-soul/
by Chris Hedges
There are few contemporary novelists
who have explored the dark undercurrents of American society with more insight
and pathos than Russell Banks, who died earlier this month.
+
The War at Home
https://www.blackagendareport.com/paper-war-home-dc-scar-1991
by Black Agenda Review
Revisiting a 1991 statement against war from the D.C.
Student Coalition against Apartheid and Racism.
The grim anniversary of yet another
U.S. apocalypse has passed by with little notice and less mourning. January
16th, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, is the day that
unleashed hell on Iraq. Operation Desert Storm began on that day in 1991. Sold
as a just war for freedom, for democracy, and for the liberation of Kuwait, it
was soon revealed to be a cynical and bloody offensive for oil and empire
abroad, and against Black, Brown, and working-class people at home.
A 1991 position paper from the D.C.
Student Coalition against Apartheid and Racism (DC SCAR) makes that clear. DC
SCAR was made up of student organizers and organizations from Howard
University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, John Hopkins
University, and the University of Maryland at College Park, who came together
in the early 1980s to mobilize against Apartheid in
Southern Africa. From the mid- to -late 1980s, their activism also focused on
questions of racism, women’s and gay and lesbian rights, AIDS, the question of
Palestine, and the CIA and US policies in Central America. With the
announcement of war, of a US offensive against Iraq in 1991, DC SCAR used the
solidarity network they had built up over the past decade to mobilize part of national
and international protests against Desert Storm. Their position
paper, titled “The War is at Home,” is a succinct assessment of the political
economy of militarism. Their pointed critique, “The government claims it must
cut back on social programs, yet somewhere it will find the estimated $162
billion necessary to fuel this war…” is just as applicable for today, with the
US spending more than $110 billion to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine.
The paper is also clear in
denouncing the US war machine’s racist and class-based forms. It is a lucid and
still-relevant call for student protest for peace abroad, and for justice at
home. We reproduce DC SCAR’s “The War at Home” below.
+
The Liberal Contempt for Martin
Luther King’s Final Year
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/the-liberal-contempt-for-martin-luther-kings-final-year/
by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
The MLK tributes are sure to pour on
the anniversary of the civil rights hero's death, but don't expect them to
acknowledge his anti-militarist ideals.
+
University of Illinois Chicago
Faculty Strike After Contract Negotiations Fail
https://www.commondreams.org/news/uic-strike
by Brett Wilkins
Hundreds of University of Illinois
Chicago faculty members went on strike Tuesday after nine months of deadlocked
contract negotiations over pay and student mental health resources.
The approximately 900 members of
the UIC United Faculty union have been working without contracts since August.
In November, 97% of the 77% of faculty who voted opted to strike. The union
announced late Monday that its members would walk off the job the following day
after a marathon 12-hour negotiation session failed to produce a deal.
“We started bargaining this
contract back in April, and we've made some progress since then. But we have
not won yet," UIC United Faculty president Aaron Krall toldBlock Club Chicago.
+
What nurses and teachers won by
withholding their 'feminized labor'
https://therealnews.com/what-nurses-and-teachers-won-by-withholding-their-feminized-labor
by Amie Stager
Nurses at Children's Minnesota and
United Hospital in St. Paul were among some 15,000 nurses at 16 hospitals in
the Twin Cities and Twin Ports region who walked off the job Monday, Sept. 12,
2022. John Autey/MediaNews Group/St. Paul Pioneer Press via Getty Images
+
BAR Book Forum: Stacy J. Lettman’s
Book, “The Slave Sublime”
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-stacy-j-lettmans-book-slave-sublime
by Robertp Sirvant
===========
u.
Social Media Is Filled With
Spooks!
https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-is-filled-with-spooks-with-mike-papantonio/283323/
with Lee Camp and Mike Papantonio
(46:45)
+
Students Need Emotional and
Community Support, Not Cops in Schools
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/18/students-need-emotional-and-community-support-not-cops-in-schools/
by Eleanor Bader
Some schools that removed police on
campus following the 2020 uprisings are now asking for them to be reinstated.
+
The Ukrainian Solidarity Network:
The Highest Stage of White Western Social Imperialism
by Ajamu Baraka
The Ukraine conflict was caused by the U.S. backed right
wing coup in 2014 and the duplicity of Europeans who claimed to be working for
peace. Anyone who supports these actions but claims leftist credentials
must be challenged.
“It is urgent to end this war as soon as possible. This can
only be achieved through the success of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s
invasion. Ukraine is fighting a legitimate war of self-defense, indeed a war
for its survival as a nation. Calling for “peace” in the abstract is
meaningless in these circumstances.”(Ukrainian Solidarity Network )
“Social-imperialists,’ that is, socialists in words and
imperialists in deeds ( V.I. Lenin)
“The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted
to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called
the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and
whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be
considered part of the enemy.” (A.Baraka, The Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western
Bourgeoisie )
The clear implication from this
statement issued by the newly formed Ukrainian Solidarity Network is that
military victory is the only solution for resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
The fact that many of the individuals supporting this network self-identify as
leftists, represents a new, perhaps higher form of collaboration with Western
and U.S. imperialism that may have ever developed since the end of the second
imperialist war in 1945. I issued an excerpt of my statement in response
to the emergence of this network that caused a stir.
Here is my statement in full.
. . .
+
How Elon Musk Is Aiding the US
Empire's Regime Change Operation in Iran
https://www.mintpressnews.com/elon-musk-starlink-helping-us-iran-regime-change-operation/283293/
by Alan Macleod
Elon Musk has announced that he is
helping to smuggle hundreds of Starlink satellite communications devices into
Iran. The South African-born billionaire made the admission on December 26,
replying to a tweet lauding female Iranian protesters for refusing to cover
their hair. “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran”, he tweeted, clearly
implying a political motivation to his work.
That Musk is involved in
Washington’s attempts to weaken or overthrow the administration in Tehran has
been clear for some months now. In September – at the height of the
demonstrations following the suspicious death of 22-year-old Iranian woman
Mahsa Amini – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the U.S. was
“taking action” “to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information
for the Iranian people” and “to counter the Iranian government’s censorship,”
to which Musk replied,
“Activating Starlink…”
===========
v.
Keith Davis, Jr. and Black
Political Corruption
https://www.blackagendareport.com/keith-davis-jr-and-black-political-corruption
by Margaret Kimberley
Baltimore police continued to falsely accuse an
innocent man when they shot and nearly killed him after the Freddie Gray
uprisings. Prosecutors as always helped to carry out the dirty deeds. Having
Black officials in place does the people of Baltimore very little good when
corruption is rampant.
Keith Davis, Jr. is free
after an ordeal which began when he was shot by Baltimore, Maryland police on
June 7, 2015. The police claimed to be looking for a robbery suspect and chased
Davis into a garage where they fired 44 shots, three of which struck him. The
robbery victim testified that Davis was not the perpetrator who attacked him,
but the police charged Davis with another crime, a murder which took place in a
different part of the city. They did this despite evidence showing he was also
innocent of that charge as well. Five trials resulted in either hung juries or
judges overturning verdicts. Davis was scheduled to be tried yet again but
newly elected State Attorney Ivan Bates dropped all charges against him on
January 13, 2023.
No one knows how many Black men are
like Davis, charged and most often convicted wrongfully due to police and
prosecutorial misconduct. They languish in jail for years, sometimes dying in
jail while only a few such cases ever garner public attention.
+
Negroes Speak of War, Langston
Hughes, 1933
https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-negroes-speak-war-langston-hughes-1933
by Black Agenda Review
What benefits do Black folk get by endorsing or
participating in the white man’s war? Revisiting an anti-war statement by Langston
Hughes.
The legendary African-American poet
and novelist Langston Hughes was a radical. Despite oftentimes bizarre attempts
to lock him into a Black bourgeois liberal-imperialist project , Hughes
sided with the Black sufferers, the global
working classes , and the marginalized and dispossessed masses of any and
every race. A socialist and an internationalist
, Hughes wrote odes to Lenin , to the Russian Revolution, and to
the great Haitian marxist Jacques
Roumain . He wrote on the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys and penned
chants for May Day . Hughes’s
verse advocated for the Republican struggle in the Spanish
Civil War and celebrated anti-fascist
resistance across Asia and Europe. He wrote against class hierarchy in the United States and the imperialist expansion of Wall Street into the
Caribbean. And, in “Negroes Speaks of War,” Hughes wrote against war and
militarism and provided us with a remarkable Black call for peace.
A short piece that is half essay,
half poetic meditation, Hughes’ “Negroes Speaks of War” was published in
November, 1933. It appeared in the premier issue of Fight
Against War and Fascism , the monthly journal of the American
League Against War and Fascism , a coalition of radicals organized
“as a weapon in the struggle against the ruling class and their efforts to
involve the world in another slaughter match.” It was later reproduced in
August, 1934 in The Negro Worker , the
journal of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. The
breezy, whimsical tone of “Negroes Speak of War” contrasts starkly with casual
stunning, savage imagery of white violence and imperial conflict. Its
message? In short, Hughes asks his readers: what benefits do Black folk get by
endorsing or participating in the white man’s war? It is a message as relevant
now as it was in 1933, and a question that has the same answer now as in 1933:
that is, none.
We reproduce Langston Hughes’s
“Negroes Speak of War” below. . . .
===========
w.
Global Research, Selected
Articles – January 18, 2023
“A
Third Intifada and the Last War. Palestine and the Global South”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/third-intifada-last-war/5804728
by
Timothy Alexander Guzman
In 1969, Golda Meir, the first woman to become the Prime
Minister of Israel who oversaw a major conflict in the Yum Kippur War of 1973
once proclaimed that
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, it is not as
if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t
exist.”
Today, many Israelis believe what Golda Meir had said,
including Israel’s top cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir, a known far-right
extremist who basically wants to annex the rest of what was once known as
Palestine and expel the remaining Palestinians once and for all. It
should not be a surprise that the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu is
provoking another war against the Palestinian people when he allowed his
Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir to pay a visit to Jerusalem’s
Temple Mount which has created increased tensions with the real possibility
that a Third Intifada can be initiated by the Palestinian resistance including
Hamas, Fatah and others because this provocation has not only angered the
Palestinians, but it has angered all Muslims from around the world.
According to a Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) article based on
comments made by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah titled, ‘Hezbollah chief: Middle East could ‘explode,’ it reported that Nasrallah said that
“The desecration of the Muslim and Christian sanctities in
Palestine will not only explode the situation…but could actually cause an
explosion in the whole region,” and that “Our people will not accept such a
violation.”
He also called on Western countries to stop “crazy extremist
Israelis” if they do not want another war in the region.” Nasrallah continued
“We are awake, alert, and ready. We will not allow any change to the rules of
deterrence in Lebanon.” Haaretz published ‘Hamas Retaliation for Ben-Gvir’s Al-Aqsa Visit ‘Will Be the
Last War,’ Far-right MK Vows’
on the disturbing comment by a far-right Israeli lawmaker by the name of Zvika
Fogel who said that “Israel would “respond as I think we should, and yes it
would be worth it because this will be the last war and after that we can sit
and raise doves and all the other beautiful birds that exist.” Hamas has
called Itamar Ben-Gvirs provocations a “crime” and that Jerusalem’s Temple
Mount “will remain Palestinian, Arab, Islamic.” On January 3rd,
2023, Hamas Spokesperson Hazem Qassem said the following:
The extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s storming of the
Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard this morning is a crime that comes in the context of
the occupation’s continued aggression against the city of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa
Mosque with the aim of Judaizing it. This provocative behavior by the
right-wing government will open the door wide for real waves of escalation, all
of which will have repercussions for the entire region because Al-Aqsa Mosque
has its place among the Arab and Islamic peoples, our Palestinian people and
the resistance behind it will continue to defend the sanctities and will never
allow the occupation to pass the plan to Judaize Jerusalem or the blessed
Al-Aqsa Mosque
See, also: A World at War? Biden Lashes Out Against “Enemies” as Our
Country Declines
+
Consortium News Archives –
January 2023
+
“Emotional Independence”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/12/emotional-independence/
by Consortium News
We
live in a chilling era of herd politics and media driven by emotional
attachments to political party and nation.
+
Corbett Report Archives – January 2023
https://www.corbettreport.com/category/videos/
+
FLASHBACK: The 5th Annual Fake
News Awards! (2022)
https://www.corbettreport.com/flashback-fakenews5/
with James Corbett
(1:00:38)
+
Friday Funnies
“Oink, Oink: Fatback
synonym - University of Pennsylvania”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/friday-funnies-oink-oink?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
Sunday Strip
“People who Pay Attention ... are dying at lower rates.”
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
===========
x.
From: Cat McGuire <cat@catmcguire.com>
Date: Jan 22, 2023
Subject: WARNING - The State is using a harsh blacklist tool - the "Registry"
It would behoove people to listen to Tucker Carlson’s scary interview with Brandon Straka (4:26 min) about a ruthless “Registry” blacklist tool that effectively cripples a person’s ability to participate in society. It’s like a personal lockdown on steroids.
(4:26 min; backup link)
Straka was viciously witch-hunted by the government for the 8 minutes he peacefully stood outside the Capitol on January 6. Any citizen who is not in compliance (on anything really) risks being put in the state’s “Registry” crosshairs. First they came for the J6ers . . . .
BONUS – Hot off the press
Helen Buynisky, one of the best analysts around, wrote a superb commentary about the “Registry.” She has not yet published it to her Helen of desTroy substack, but she authorized me to share her draft version with my network (SEE BELOW). Also, do yourself a favor: read everything by Helen you can get your hands on.
___________
HELEN BUYNISKI COMMENTS ON THE “REGISTRY”
1/22/23
NOTE
This op-ed piece is a DRAFT by Helen Buyniski. She authorized me to share it with my network. Helen will soon be posting a polished final version on her substack page. https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/
Thanks, Cat McGuire
The Justice Department’s new “January 6th registry” should horrify anyone with a pulse. rather than prosecute any of the crimes that go down daily in the Capitol itself, they’re ramping up their crusade against dissent a bunch of nonviolent protesters whose brief disorderly interlude 2 years ago has already been milked to death by a war criminal’s daughter & an estrogen casualty with a cartoon dog fetish in Congress. it’s not enough to merely threaten them with steeper sentences than most people get for child pornography or rape - they’ll now be put on a REGISTRY to make it easier to cancel them completely.
Ever the handmaiden to atrocity, Google is helping elevate the registry to the top of search results for your name. forget about renting an apartment, getting a mortgage, or even keeping your PayPal account. doesn’t matter if you weren’t convicted of anything, or even if the government admitted it got too excited & dumped a bunch of bogus charges on you back in 2021 - an “insurrectionist” smear is forever, & they want to make sure you regret thinking for a second that this country was actually run by the people, for the people.
The primary aim of this terror campaign - because it is economic terrorism - is to dissuade anyone who might have been thinking of joining such a protest, or even making a public statement in defense of the January 6 defendants, from doing so. once permanent, easily searchable registries get involved, the reputational stakes of supporting a cause increase dramatically. those who were on the fence will think of their careers, their families, their rent - & there’s nothing dishonorable about those instincts - & quietly back away from taking a stand, perhaps even deleting tweets or pulling down blog posts to cover their tracks while the victims of this witch hunt are left flapping in the breeze.
We cannot hope to take back civilization from the ruling class if we can’t at least stick together in the face of baseless demonization campaigns like this. the idea of a registry to stop a bunch of people who put their feet up on congressmen’s desks when the Capitol was left unguarded from engaging in the basic acts of commerce underlying American society would be laughable if it wasn’t actually happening, and the official narrative in which the Stop the Steal protest & subsequent riot at the Capitol was some kind of Armed Insurrection™ remains a total farce. the majority of the people at the Capitol that day probably owned at least one gun of some sort - they must have felt so embarrassed they forgot to bring their arms to the armed rebellion! - & footage from that day shows that aside from a few Ray Eppses sent from the FBI/DHS/etc, the crowd was surprisingly docile for a bunch of people who believed American democracy was being snatched from their grasp (a belief the Biden administration has spent the last two years proving right).
For those who think the 2020 election was totally cool & normal, or wonder why they should care about a bunch of Trump voters, please don’t make me go all Niemoller on your ass. a) Not everyone there was a Trump voter b) We’ve had rampant election fraud at least as long as I’ve been voting, why would this one be different? c) Most of the January 6 defendants did nothing more than protest peacefully. do you really want that not only criminalized, but cause for un-personing? the spiral of silence effect this will have on other public shows of dissent will be incalculably huge. speak now or forever hold your pieces together.
+
Tribunal in Washington Calls on President Biden to End Prosecution of Julian Assange and to Defend Rights of Journalists and Whistleblowers
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/01/24/tribunal-in-washington-calls-on-president-biden-to-end-prosecution-of-julian-assange-and-to-defend-rights-of-journalists-and-whistleblowers/?mc_cid=9cea993763&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d
by Chris Garaffa
+
Rage Against the War Machine - #SolutionsWatch
https://www.corbettreport.com/solutionswatch-rageagainstwar/
with James Corbett
(28:35)
+
Mind Blowing: "CDC Forced to Tell How Deadly the COVID Jab Is"
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/01/23/cdc-aware-of-hundreds-of-safety-signals-for-covid-jab/comment-page-1/
by Dr. Joseph MercolaStory at-a-glance
- In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning
- The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis
- In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo
- The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines
- The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism
In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.
According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.
Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times' questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were "outside the agency's purview" and that no monitoring was being done by them.Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn't perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.
CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals
In reality, the CDC's PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell's palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6
"The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …
PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.
The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.
For many of the events, 'the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,' Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information."
Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem
One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.
The proportions of reported deaths was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines.
Josh Guetzkow, an Israeli professor trained in statistics at Princeton University told The Epoch Times:7
"We know that the signal for myocarditis is associated with something that is caused by the mRNA vaccines, so it's more than reasonable to say that anything with a signal larger than myocarditis/pericarditis should be taken seriously and investigated."
Guetzkow expanded on his commentary in a January 4, 2023, Substack article.8 Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the
CDC's PRR analysis. Guetzkow goes deeper in his article, so for more details, I suggest reading it in its entirety.
For even more analyses and commentary, see Fenton's Substack article, "The CDC's Data on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals."9 If you want to investigate the PRR data for yourself, you can download them from The Epoch Times' January 3, 2023, article.10 You can also find them here.11
In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we've seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.
The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).
Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.
The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 "If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference."
In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell's Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).
In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki's disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.
It's worth noting that the CDC didn't perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.
FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data
The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, "Just trust us. We're experts."
According to the FDA, the only potential signal they'd found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16
As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC's PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.
The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.
If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they'd found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?
Whatever the truth, it's clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they've hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.
CDC Has Ignored Clear 'Death' Signal
The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.
Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how "death" should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC's flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here's an excerpt:23
"The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a 'bad' vaccine with lots of adverse events will 'mask' large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows …
A 'safety signal' is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous 'and clause.' Here it is from the document:
Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word 'and' in the definition of a safety signal.Using 'and' means that if any one of the conditions isn't satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.
The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the 'safety signal' is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous."
A Fictitious Example
Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25"Suppose we have the world's most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.
That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let's look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.
Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very 'safe' using the PRR formula."
Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab
Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC's definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here's the formula as explained by Kirsch:26
"PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!
But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for 'death,' which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.
This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:
1. PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32
2. Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549
3. 3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3A safety signal should have been generated but wasn't. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It's been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don't know why the CDC doesn't use it."
The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, "cardiac failure acute," "cardiac failure," "infarction," "myocardial strain" and "myocardial fibrosis" are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they're all potential effects of myocarditis.
By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.
CDC Has No Reasonable Defense
The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there's no possible way they could ever say they didn't know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.
The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30
The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.
They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC's PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there's no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.
Help Spread the Word
Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC's safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:
- Write or call your members of Congress and ask them to investigate the CDC's safety monitoring — We cannot have a public safety agency that is incapable of monitoring safety and taking appropriate action when problems are found, be it correcting a flawed formula or announcing that a safety signal has been detected. Of course, they must also publish their findings once an investigation has been made.
- Contact your local newspaper and urge them to investigate and report on the CDC's failure to act on safety signals.
- Share the data on social media and ask why no one in the media, Congress, academia or medical community is investigating these matters.
- Share this information with your doctor and members of the medical community.
- Also share it with university administrators, and ask them to explain how and why, in light of these data, they are still mandating COVID shots.
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They have oligarchs. We have socially responsible entrepreneurs
“We’re not oligarchs. We’re good, hard-working, socially responsible entrepreneurs who
take care of the country and earn money doing responsible business.”
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/they-have-oligarchs-we-have-socially?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Edward SlavsquatThomas Röper's "war of the systems" seems a bit fishy