Bulletin N° 1098
“The instinct of workmanship, and
the state of industrial arts”
https://archive.org/details/instinctworkman00veblgoog/page/n12/mode/2up
by Veblen, Thorstein, 1857-1929
Subject: The Past, The Present,
and The Future and how they interface.
Grenoble
April 10, 2023
Dear Colleagues and Friends of
CEIMSA,
As a college friend once told me,
if you realize how much you are oppressed, suppressed, and repressed there is
much you can do to change the world. It just requires focused attention and the
will to act. Perhaps he oversimplified, but there is a grain of truth in what
he said. Thorstein Veblen
seems to have drawn the same conclusion in his 1914 book:
The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the
Industrial Arts
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
Introductory…………………………………………..……………………………………..………………... i
CHAPTER II
Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology ………………………………………. 38
CHAPTER III
The Savage State of the Industrial Arts ………………………………………………………… 103
CHAPTER IV
The Technology of the Predatory Culture …………………………….……………………… 138
CHAPTER V
Ownership and the Competitive System ………………………………………………….. 187
CHAPTER VI
The Era of Handicraft …………………………………………………………………………...… 231
CHAPTER VII
The Machine Industry …………………………………………………………………………….. 299
In chapter 4, “The Technology
of the Predatory Culture,” Veblen writes: “The members of the community come to work each for
his own interest in severalty, rather than for an undivided interest in the
common lot. . . . The sentiment of
common interest, itself in good part a diffuse working-out of the parental
instinct, comes at the best to converge upon the glory of the flag instead of
the fullness of life of the community at large, or more commonly it comes to be
centered in loyalty, that is to say in subservience, to the common war-chief
and his dynastic successors.”(p.161)
This notion of “the contamination
of instincts” through contact with various institutions in “a predatory society”
driven by a system of “pecuniary interests” is developed in chapter
5, “Ownership and the Competitive System,” beginning on page 204.
The Competitive System
Dominated by the tradition handed down from the beginning of the nineteenth
century, current
economic theory has habitually made much of accumulated goods
as the prime requisite of industry. In industrial enterprise as it was then
carried on the prevailing unit of organisation was
the private firm, with partnership concerns making up a secondary and less
commonplace element in the business community. Ordinarily and typically these
private firms and partnerships owned a certain
material equipment employed in industry and they took the initiative in
industrial enterprise on the ground of this ownership; hiring the workmen,
buying materials and supplies, and selling the products of the establishment.
Credit relations, such as go to the creation and conduct of a modern
corporation, were still of secondary consequence, being resorted to rather as
an expedient in emergencies than as the initial move and the substantial ground
of business organisation; the measure of the
concern's magnitude and consequence was still (typically) its unencumbered
ownership of the material equipment, the size of the plant and the numbers of
its hired workmen. It follows by easy consequence that in the practical
business conceptions of that time the equipment of material means, which
embodies the concern's assets and affords the ground of its initiative and its
rating in the business community, should commonly be rated as the prime mover
in industry and the chief productive factor. So, also, the theoretical
speculation that drew on that business traffic for its working concepts came
unavoidably to accept these tangible assets, the community's material
equipment,—implements, livestock, raw materials, means of subsistence,—as the
prime agency in the community's economic life. As is true for the working
conceptions and principles of industrial business, so also in the theoretical
formulations of the economists, the community's immaterial equipment of
technological proficiency is taken for granted as a circumstance of the
environment conditioning the community's economic life,—the state of the
industrial arts and the current workmanlike aptitudes and efficiency.
This is good, homely, traditional common
sense; it reflects the habitual practical run of affairs in the Industrial
community of that recent past. Such was the attitude of practical men toward
industrial matters at the time when the current economic situation took its
rise. But such a conception is no longer so true to the practical exigencies of
the immediate present, nor do the men of affairs to-day habitually see these
matters in just this light; although the principles of the law that govern
industrial enterprise still continue to embody these time-worn conceptions, to
which the economists also continue to yield allegiance. Like other elements of
habitual knowledge this conception of things is drawn from past
experience—chiefly from a past not too remote for ready comprehension—and it
carries over the frame of mind out of which it arose.
Among the assumptions of a hundred years
ago was the premise, self-evident to that generation of thoughtful men, that
the phase of commercialised economic life then
prevailing was the immutably normal order of things. And the assumptions
surrounding that preconception were good and competent for a formulation of
economic theory that takes such an institutional situation for granted and
assumes it to be unchanging, or to be a terminus ad quem.
But for anything like a genetic account of economic life, early or late,
capitalistic or otherwise, such assumptions and the theoretical propositions
and analyses that follow from them are defective in that they take for granted
what requires to be accounted for. Theoretical speculation that presupposes the
(somewhat old-fashioned) institutions formerly governing ownership and business
traffic, and assumes them to have the immutable character and indefeasible
force de facto which is assigned them de jure, and that likewise
assumes as immutable a passing phase in the "state of the industrial
arts," may serve passably for a theory of how business affairs should
properly arrange themselves to fit the conditions so assumed; and such, indeed,
has commonly been the character of theoretical formulations touching industry
and business. And as should fairly be expected, in the speculations of the
economists, these theoretical formulations have also commonly been accompanied
by a parallel line of remedial advice designed to show what preventive measures
should be applied to prevent the run of business practice from doing violence
to these assumed conditions that are held to be immutably normal and
indefeasibly right.
It is only during the nineteenth century that this doctrine of pecuniary
productivity has been worked out into finished shape and has found secure
lodgment in the systematic structure of economic theory—in the current theory
of "the Function of the Entrepreneur;" but it is also only during
this period that business enterprise (pecuniary management) has come to dominate
the economic situation in a substantially unmitigated degree, so that the
material fortunes of the community have come to depend on these pecuniary
negotiations into which its "captains of industry" enter for their
own gain. In the sense that no other line of activity stands in anything Hke an equally decisive relation of initiative or
discretion to the industrial process, or bears with a like weight on the
material welfare of the community, these business negotiations in ownership are
unquestionably the prime factor in modern industry. But that such is the case
is due to the peculiar institutions of modern times and to the peculiar current
state of the industrial arts ; and the former of these
peculiar circumstances is conditioned by the latter.
The habitual outlook and the bias given by the handicraft system are of a
twofold character—technological and pecuniary. The craftsman was an artificer
engaged in mechanical operations, working with tools of which he had the
mastery, and employing mechanical processes the mysteries of which were
familiar to his everyday habits of thought; but from the beginning of the era
of handicraft and throughout his industrial life he was also more or less of a
trader. He stood in close relation with some form of market, and his
proficiency as a craftsman was brought to a daily practical test in the sale of
his wares or services, no less than in the workmanlike fashioning of them.
Also, the price as well as the workmanlike quality of the goods presently
became subject of regulation under the rules of the crafts; and the petty trade
which grew up as an occupation accessory to the handicraft industry was itself organised on lines analogous to the crafts proper and was
regulated by similar principles; the trader's work being accounted serviceable,
or productive, in the same general sense as that of anyother
craftsman and being recognised as equitably entitling
those who pursued it to a fair livelihood.
The handicraft system was an organised and regulated
system of workmanship and self-help; and under the conditions imposed by its
technology proficiency in the latter respect was no less indispensable and no
less to the purpose than in the former. Both counted equally and in combination
toward the successful working of the system, which is a practicable plan of
economic life only so long as the craftsmen combine both of these capacities in
good force and only so long as the technological exigencies admit the exercise
of both in conjunction. The system broke down so soon
as the state of the industrial arts no longer enabled the workmen to acquire
the necessary technological proficiency and do the required work at the same
time that they each and several were able to oversee and pursue their
individual pecuniary interests. With the coming on of
a wider and more extensively differentiated technological scheme, and with
wider and remoter market relations, due in the main to increased facilities of
transportation, these necessary conditions of a practicable handicraft economy
gradually failed, and the practice of industrial investments and
the larger commerce then gradually supplanted it.
The discipline of everyday Hfe under the handicraft economy was a discipline in
pecuniary self-help as well as in workmanship. In the popular ideal as well as
in point of practical fact the complete craftsman stood shrewdly on his
individual proficiency in maintaining his own pecuniary advantage, as well as
on his trained workmanship; and the gilds were organised
to maintain the craft's advantages in the market, as well as to regulate the
quality of the output. The craft rules governing the quality of the output of
goods were in the main enforced with a view to the maintenance of price, and so
with a view to securing an adequate livelihood for the craftsmen. Efficiency in
the crafts came in this way presently to be counted very much as the modern
"efficiency engineers" would count it, —proximately in terms of
mechanical performance, ultimately in terms of price, and more particularly in
terms of net gain. So that the habits of life ingrained in the gildsman, and in the community at large where the gild
system prevailed, comprised as a main fact a meticulous regard for details of
ownership and for pecuniary claims and obligations. It is out of this
insistent, pervasive, and minutely concrete discipline in the practice and
logic of pecuniary detail that there have arisen those "natural
rights" of property and those "business principles" that have
been taken over by the later era of the machine industry and capitalistic
investment.
Presently, as the technological situation gradually changed its character
through extensions and specialisation in appliances
and processes—perhaps especially through changes in the means of communication
and in the density of population—the handicraft system with its petty trade
outgrew itself and broke down in a new phase of the pecuniary culture. The
increasingly wide differentiation between workmanship and salesmanship grew
into a “division of labour" between industry and
business, between industrial and pecuniary occupations, a disjunction of
ownership and its peculiar cares, privileges and proficiency from workmanship.
By this division of labour, or divergence of
function, a fraction of the community came to specialise
in ownership and pecuniary traffic, and so came to constitute a business
community occupied with pecuniary affairs, running along beside the industrial
community proper, with a development of practices and usages peculiar to its
own needs and bearing only indirectly on the further development of the industrial system
or on the state of the industrial arts.
Master-workmen with means would employ
other workmen without means, and might or might not themselves continue to work
at the trade. Petty traders or hucksters, nominally members of some craft gild,
would grow wealthy with the increasing volume of traffic and would organise a more and more extensive household (sweatshop)
industry to meet the increasing demands of their market; or they might become
jobbers, carry on more far-reaching trade operations over a longer term, withdraw
more distantly from the actual work of the craft, and in the course of a
generation or two (as, e. g., the Fuggers) would grow
into merchant princes and financiers who maintained but a remote and impersonal
relation to the crafts. Or, again, the associated merchants (as, e. g., those
of the Hansa) would establish depots and agents,
''factories," that would gradually assemble something of a working force
of craftsmen to sort, warehouse and finish the products which they handled, at the
same time that they would exercise an increasingly close and extensive
oversight of the industries from which these products were derived; until these
depots, under the management of the factors, in some cases grew into factories
in somewhat the modern acceptance of the term. In one v/ay and another this
trading or huckstering traffic, which had been intimately associated with the
handicraft industry and gild life, branched off in
the course of time as the industries advanced to a larger scale and a more
extensive specialisation; and this increasing
"division of labour" between workmanship
and salesmanship led presently to such a segregation of the traders out of the
body of craftsmen as to give rise to a business community devoted to pecuniary
management alone.
But the principles on which the new and larger business was conducted were the
same as those on which the earlier petty trade had been carried on, and
therefore the same in point of derivation and tenor as had been worked out by
long experience within the handicraft system proper. Business traffic was an
outgrowth of the handicraft system, and it was in as secure a position in respect
of legitimacy and legal and customary guaranty as the industrial system from
which its principles were derived and from which its gains were drawn.
The source from which the new line of businessmen drew the accumulations of
wealth by force of which they were enabled to do business is somewhat in
dispute; but however interesting a question that may be in its own right, it
does not particularly concern the present inquiry, and the Hke
is true for the still more interesting and spectacular phenomena that marked
the growth and decline of that early business era that ran its course within
the life-history of the handicraft system. Throughout that great period of
business activity on the continent of Europe that gathered head in the
sixteenth century and that closed in decay and collapse in the seventeenth, the
principles (habits of thought) which underlay, authenticated and animated the
business community and its pecuniary traffic continued to be much the same as
animated the body of craftsmen in their pecuniary relations from the beginning
of the era of handicraft to its close. Such, in its turn, was also the case
with the later business era that set in with the great industrial advance of
England in the Eighteenth Century, and such continued to be the case through
the greater part of its life-history in the Nineteenth Century. Of the latterday and latest developments in business practice and
principles the like cannot unhesitatingly be said, but this too is a matter
that does not immediately concern the inquiry at this point. But the principles
of the new and larger business were the same as had been slowly worked out
under the system of petty trade. These business principles have proved to be
very tenacious and stable, even in the face of apparently adverse technological
circumstances, coming as they do out of a long and rigorous habituation of very
wide sweep and having acquired the authenticity due to formal recognition in
legal decisions and to the painstaking definition given them in the course of a
protracted and exacting struggle against the institutional remnants of the
feudal system. These circumstances attending the genesis and growth of modern
business principles have led to their being formulated in a well-defined
conceptual scheme of customary right and also to their embodiment in statutory
form. To this, perhaps, they owe much of their tenacious resistance to latterday exigencies that have tended to modify or abrogate
them. In their elements, of course, these business principles are even older
than the era of handicraft, being substantially of the same nature as that
sentimental impulse to self-aggrandisement that lies
at the root of the predatory culture and so makes the substantial core of all
pecuniary civilisations.
The view here spoken for, that the modern businessman is necessarily out of
effectual touch with the affairs of technology as such and incompetent to
exercise an effectual surveillance of the processes of industry, is not a
matter of bias or of vague opinion; it has in fact become a matter of
statistical demonstration. Even a cursory survey of the current achievements of
these great modern industries as managed by businessmen, taken in contrast with
the opportunities offered them, should convince anyone of the technological
unfitness of this business management of industry. Indeed, the captains of
industry have themselves latterly begun to recognise
their own inefficiency in this respect, and even to appreciate that a
businessman's management of industrial processes is not good even for the
business purpose—the net pecuniary gain. And it is all the more ineffectual for
the purposes of workmanship as distinct from the businessmen's gains. So, a
professional class of "efficiency engineers" is coming into action,
whose duty it is to take invoice of the preventable wastes and inefficiencies
due to the business management of industry and to present the case in such
concrete and obvious terms of price and percentage as the businessmen in charge
will be able to comprehend. These men, in a way, take over the functions
assigned in economic theory to the "entrepreneur;" in that they are
men of general technological training and insight, who go into their inquiry on
the ground of workmanship, take their data in terms of workmanship and convert
them into terms of business expediency, somewhat to the same purpose as the
like work of conversion was done by the owner-employers under that small-scale
system of industrial enterprise from which the current theoretical concept of
the "entrepreneur" was derived. It is then the duty of these
efficiency engineers to present the results so obtained, for the conviction and
guidance of the businessmen in charge, who thereupon, if their business
training has left them enough of a sense of workmanship, will give permissive
instructions to the expert workmen in direct charge of the industrial processes
to put these statistically indicated changes into effect. It is the testimony of
these efficiency engineers that relatively few pecuniary captains in command of
industrial enterprises have a sufficient comprehension of the technological
facts to understand and accept the findings of the technological experts who so
argue for the elimination of preventable wastes, even when the issue is
presented statistically in terms of price. These men go about their work of
ascertaining the efficiency, actual and potential, of any given plant, process,
working force, or parcel of material resources, by the methods of precise
physical measurement familiar to mechanical engineers, and as an outcome they
have no hesitation in speaking of preventable wastes amounting to ten, twenty,
fifty, or even ninety per-cent, in the common run of American industries. The
work of the efficiency engineers being always done in the service of business
and with a view to business expediency, their findings
bear directly on the business exigencies of the case alone, and give definitive
results only in terms of price and profits. How much greater the ascertained
discrepancies in the case would appear if these findings could be reduced to
terms of serviceability to the community at large, there is no means of forming
a secure conjecture. That the discrepancy would in such case prove to be
appreciably greater than that shown by the price rating is not doubtful. Under
such an appraisal, where the given industrial enterprises would be brought to
the test of net serviceability to the community instead of the net gain of the
interested businessmen, many industrial enterprises would doubtless show a
waste of appreciably more than one hundred per cent of their current output,
being rather disserviceable to the community's material welfare than otherwise.
That the business community is so permeated with incapacity and lack of insight
in technological matters is doubtless due proximately to the fact that their
attention is habitually directed to the pecuniary issue of industrial
enterprise; but more fundamentally and unavoidably it is due to the large
volume and intricate complications of the current technological scheme, which
will not permit any man to become a competent specialist in an alien and
exacting field of endeavour, such as business
enterprise, and still acquire and maintain an effectual working acquaintance
with the state of the industrial arts. The current technological scheme cannot
be mastered as a matter of commonplace information or a by-occupation
Incidental to another pursuit. The same advance to a large and exhaustive
technological system, in the machine industry, that has thrown the direction of
industrial affairs into the hands of men primarily occupied with pecuniary
management has also made it impossible for men so circumstanced at all
adequately to exercise the oversight and direction of industry thereby required
at their hands. And the ancient principles of self-help and pecuniary gain by
virtue of which these men are held to their work of business enterprise make it
also impossible for them adequately to surrender the discretionary care of the
industrial processes to other hands or to permit the management of industry to
proceed on other than these same business principles.
Probably, also, no class of men have ever bent more
unremittingly to their work than the modern business community. Within the
business community there is properly speaking no leisure class, or at least no
idle class. In this respect there is a notable contrast between the business
community and the landed interest. What there is to be found in this modern
culture in the way of an idle class, considered as an institution, runs back
for its origins and its specific traits to a more archaic cultural scheme; it
is a survival from an earlier (predatory) phase of the pecuniary culture. In
the nature of things an idle life of fashion is an affair of the nobility
(gentry), of predatory antecedents and, under current conditions, of
predatory-parasitic habits; and as regards those modern rich men who withdraw
from the business community and fall into a state of otium
cum dignitate, it is commonly their fortune to be
assimilated by a more or less ceremonial induction into the body of this
quasi-predatory gentry or nobility and so assume an imitative colouring of archaism.
The business community is hard at work,
and there is no place in it for anyone who is unable or unwilling to work at
the high tension of the average; and since this close application to pecuniary
work is of a competitive nature it leaves no chance for any of the competitors
to apply himself at all effectually to other than pecuniary work. This high
tension of work is felt to be very meritorious in all modern communities,
somewhat in proportion as they are modern; as is necessarily the case in any
work that is substantially of an emulative character. It spends itself on
salesmanship, not on workmanship in the naive sense; although the all-pervading
preoccupation with pecuniary matters in modern times has led to its being
accounted the type of workmanlike endeavour. It
concerns itself ultimately with the pecuniary manipulation of the material
equipment of industry, though there is much of it that does not bear
immediately on that point. The exceptions under this broad proposition are more
apparent than real, although there doubtless are exceptions actual as well as
apparent. In such a case the business transactions in question are likely to
bear on the ownership of certain specific elements of the immaterial
technological equipment, as e. g., habits of thought covered by parent-right or
mechanical expedients covered by franchise. Beyond these there are elements of
"good-will" that are subject of traffic and that consist in
preferential advantages in respect of purely pecuniary transactions having to
do not with the material equipment but with the right to deal with it and its
management, as e. g., in banking, underwriting, insurance, and the phenomena of
the money market at large.
But the mature business situation as it runs today is a complex affair, large
and intricate, wherein the effective relations in which business traffic stands
to workmanship and to the community's immaterial equipment of technological
knowledge at large are greatly obscured by their own convolutions and by the
institutional arrangements and convictions to which this traffic has given rise.
So that the matter is best approached by way of a genetic exposition that shall
take as its point of departure that simpler business enterprise of early modern
times out of which the larger development of the present has grown by
insensible accretions and displacements.
Business enterprise came in the course of time to take over the affairs of
industry and so to withdraw these affairs from the tutelage of the gilds. This
shifting of the effectual discretion in the management of industrial affairs
came on gradually and in varying fashion and degree over a considerable
interval of time. But the decisive general circumstance that enforced this move
into the modern way of doing was an advance in the scope and method of
workmanship. What threw the fortunes of the industrial community into the hands
of the owners of accumulated wealth was essentially a technological change, or
rather a complex of technological changes, which so enlarged the requirements
in respect of material equipment that the impecunious workmen could no longer
carry on their trade except by a working arrangement with the owners of this
equipment; whereby the discretionary control of industry was shifted from the
craftsmen's technological mastery of the ways of industry to the owner's
pecuniary mastery of the material means. In the change that so took place to a
larger technological scale much was doubtless due to the extension of trade,
itself in great part an outcome of technological changes, directly and
indirectly. For the craftsmen and their work the outcome was that recourse must
be had to the material equipment owned by those who owned it, and on such terms
as would content the owners; whereby the usufruct of the workmen's proficiency
and of the state of the industrial arts fell to the owners of the material
equipment, on such terms as might be had.** So it fell to these owners of the material
means and of the products of industry to turn this technological situation to
account for their own gain, with as little abatement as might be, and at the
same time it became incumbent on them each and several competitively to divert
as large
a share of the community's productive efficiency to his own profit as the
circumstances would permit.
**NOTE To complete the sketch at
this point, even in outline, it would be necessary to go extensively into the
relations of ownership and control (largely indirect) in which the owners of
land and natural resources, the Landed Interest, had stood to the industrial
community of craftsmen before this transition to the business era got under
way, as also into the further mutual relations subsisting between the landed
interest, the craftsmen and the business community during this transition to a
business regime. In the most summary terms the pertinent circumstances appear
to have been that from the beginning of its technological era the handicraft
community, with its workmanship and its technological attainments, was in an
uncertain measure at the discretionary call of the landed interest, largely in
an impersonal way through channels of trade and on the whole with decreasingly
exacting effect as time went on; and the industrial community at large had by
no means emancipated themselves from this control when the era of business
enterprise set in; for the landed interest continued to draw its livelihood
from the mixed agricultural and handicraft community, and the products of
handicraft still continued to go chiefly as supplies to the landed interest in
return for the means of subsistence controlled by the latter; and long after
the businessmen had taken over the direction of industry the claims of the
landed interest still continued paramount in the economic situation, and
industry still continued to be carried on largely with a view to meeting the
requirements of the landed interest.(pp.204-230)
The 22 + items below are articles
and essays taken from the Anglophone social media this week which reflect the
vital concerns of free citizens throughout the world. Any attempt to block such
conversations in a violation of human rights, no matter what degree of
sophisticated technology is applied. Indeed, the world is changing and so must
we. The International Workingmen's
Association (IWA), also known as the
First International (1864–1876), published as its first axiomatic the unequivocal
statement: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the
working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the
working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but
for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule”…. This
Association was eventually dissolved following the massacre by French troops of the Paris Commune in May
1871.
Together, we seem to be witnessing
today the end of an illusion: “Socialism in one country.”
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.
News from the Front Lines
“Switzerland stops the COVID vaccines, Spike protein kills brain
cells, AAPS updates, Twitter at war with Substack”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/news-from-the-front-lines?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
+
Possession Is Nine Tenths of Your
Soul
https://www.globalresearch.ca/possession-nine-tenths-your-soul/5815062
by Emanuel Pastreich
The entire Earth is haunted by a specter, the specter of the
complete possession of the human and the natural worlds by a band of
unaccountable overlords. Those self-appointed global rulers, the billionaires,
supported by the politicians and public intellectuals that they play with
for sport, have carved out for themselves a separate reality where within they make
up new rules for governance, local, national, and global, and then pass those
rules down to us.
Central to this project is the radical alteration of
the concept of possession.
Their audacious claim of possession of
everything has been successful because it appears to be supported by all
institutions of government, by universities and newspapers of repute, and other
prominent international organizations which previously had legitimacy.
The billionaires have systematically laid down the
foundations for this claim of ownership, using diverse tools, whether it be the
control of our minds through constant bombardment with advertisements, the
launch of natural assets companies (NAC) on Wall Street that claim private
ownership of the oceans and the land, of the water and the air, of every aspect
of the natural world, or the ownership of our bodies through the
patenting of DNA and the claim of the right to force citizens to accept
injections of privately-patented substances that alter the physical, genetic,
and psychological state of the individual.
Through some magic process at the World Economic
Forum the imperative to become modern and to be competitive as part of some
imagined fourth industrial revolution gives these unaccountable authorities
complete possession of all aspects of our existence.
Such a claim to unlimited possession of everything
only works if the concepts of possession that we have relied on from the
distant past are erased and the citizen loses all sense of affiliation with
local or national, ethnic or spiritual, roots that might offer an
alternative concept of ownership.
The billionaires, above all, do not want any concept
of ownership that is linked to a sense of belonging, or of participation. The concept that we own the land, the waters and the myriad plants
and animals only in that we belong to that land and to those waters, and we are
responsible to them, is a vision of our world with ancient roots which cannot
be tolerated by the high priests of the World Economic Forum.
Unlimited possession by multinational corporations,
and by the governments that they have taken over, can only be achieved if
all sense of belonging for people is torn to shreds, leaving behind no
organizations of substance that can oppose this takeover except for the toothless
controlled opposition that the global elite have prepared for us in advance–the
Jeffery Sachs and Warren Buffets of the world.
Belonging, after all, is the central concept of the
United States Constitution. Without the imperative that the citizen must belong
to the republic, the property rights defined by that document are reduced to a
travesty. Such was the intended consequence of corporations replacing the
citizen with the consumer and the Constitution with markets over the
past four decades.
Ultimately, the claim by the individual, the family,
or the community to possess a house, a river, or a mountain, to be entitled to
clean air or to healthy food that does not destroy the body, has been
undermined by multinational interests who isolate individual from friends and
family, from community members and like-minded people, thereby destroying any
trace of belonging and encouraging a one-way hypnotic relationship
with far off celebrities, cute pictures of fat cats, and glimpses of
fashion and food, pornography and violence.
Fashion magazines, TV dramas, movies, cartoon
characters, and video games induce an indulgent narcissistic cult of the self
within which the individual competes against everyone. Personal possessions,
not community solidarity, become the primary goal in life.
The ability of unaccountable multinational
corporations to own everything, from farmland to houses, from transportation
and phone lines, to the internet and media, is rarely questioned, and an
alternative system is never suggested by any public intellectual.
Gone from our society is sharing and cooperation,
serving those less fortunate, or for standing together for the common good
against the greedy few.
The battle ground was well prepared by the
corporate consulting firms before the first shot was fired, so as to facilitate
this horrific final takeover.
The disenfranchisement of entire populations is not
new in human history, but the current project is unprecedented in its scale and
in its speed. If we were to look for a parallel, the destruction of the
civilizations of North and South America by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the
French, and the English from the 16th century to the 19th century is most
apposite.
Just as was true then, this time a handful of
private interests (like Blackrock, the modern equivalent of the British East
India Company) have set out to destroy all customs, learning, institutions,
values, and concepts in the nations targeted. But this time it is not the
Aztecs and the Iroquois who are being targeted. This time, all civilizations on
the Earth are fair game in the radical shift of ownership being planned by
supercomputers.
The wild bid of the billionaires to buy up all
farmland in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, and most every
country, using the fake money cooked up by multinational investors using
the cover of the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, resembles the
process by which England and Spain claimed ownership of the “New World” by
magic, introducing the alien, and completely artificial, concept of real
estate.
They made up their own maps back in London or
Madrid, just as billionaires make up cryptocurrency
and derivatives in London and New York, and then used those maps to claim
ownership of vast swaths of forest and plains, mountains and bays. The key to
their success was the use of false authority, backed by pay-to-play public
intellectuals, to define who owned what.
It was a financial operation, and it was often a
military operation when force was needed to assure acceptance of the new order.
But above all, then and now, the takeover was an ideological operation, an
epistemological move whereby the concept of ownership, and of
nationhood, were violently, but silently, remade by the imperialists
sitting in their lavish parlors.
The first step toward taking possession of
everything today was for the billionaires to take control of money, and of the
institutions that defined its value: the Federal Reserve, the Department of
Treasury, departments of economics and business at universities, economic experts,
and the newspapers of repute that report on the economy.
+
"The World Economic Forum": Please Share
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-world-economic-forum-please-share?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert Malone MD, MS
Plus a link to the Updated WEF List…
Those of us in this movement sometimes forget that for most people, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is a meeting in Davos where the rich and famous like to hang out once a year. They have no idea of what the WEF truly is about and what it has accomplished over the course of the last 50 years. Even those of us who follow the WEF can forget what their true mission is, and how deeply they are involved in crafting the new world order, ergo: The Great Reset.
The is truth is that transnationalist companies want control of world governance. The Great Reset is a planned attempt to redistribute all the world’s wealth and power into the hands of corporations, billionaires, banks and and most of all, the World Economic Forum’ leadership. The “Great Reset” plans to use the fourth industrial revolution to further their own ambitious plans of world dominance.
Industry 4.0
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a term used to refer to the next generation of technological advances; where it is anticipated that the differences between physical, digital and biological technologies disappear. This is a world where machines and computers evolve independently, where new biological entities and evolutionary changes are being controlled by artificial intelligence, where brain waves can be manipulated. It is, quite literally, a brave new world.
It is a world where transhumanism has become a reality. The boundaries between man and machine are blurred. This is the world of nightmares, of a dystopian future of overloads and underlings; of the “technologically augmented” and the “normies.” Of physicals, virtuals, machines, and overlords.
What truly sets Industry 4.0 technologies apart is the novel way in which hardware, software and connectivity are being reconfigured and integrated to achieve ever-more ambitious goals, the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data, the seamless interaction between smart machines, and the blurring of the physical and virtual dimensions of production (Industry Analytics Platform).
===========
b.
Turning
Tides: The US Congress and Julian Assange
https://www.globalresearch.ca/turning-tides-us-congress-julian-assange/5814792
by Dr. Binoy
Kampmark
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say
should be believed.” — I.F.
Stone
The US Congress and Julian Assange,
the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be
regarded as a testy relationship. Its various members have advocated and
condoned his farcical prosecution, demanded his lifelong incarceration, even
assassination, taking issue with his appetite for publishing unsavoury, classified details about the US imperium. He who gives the game away on cant will be
punished.
One shrill voice, touching on delirium, was
Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Senate Homeland Security
Committee Chairman. His response to the Cablegate
release was more than a touch unhinged. “WikiLeaks’
deliberate disclosure of these diplomatic cables is nothing less than an attack
on the national security of the United States, as well as that of dozens of
other countries.”
Lieberman thought the disclosure of such State
Department treasure “an outrageous, reckless and despicable action that will
undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people
safe and to work together to defend our vital interests. Let there be no
doubt: the individuals responsible are going to have blood on their hands.”
On December 1, 2010, Rep. Candice Miller
(R-MI) was also
forthright before
fellow House Representatives in arguing that both WikiLeaks
and its founder “should be facing criminal charges; and his Web site, which he
uses to aid and abet our terrorist enemies, should be shut down to defend our
national security.” Showing an astonishing latitude of muddled
understanding, Miller urged the Obama administration to treat “WikiLeaks for what it is – a terrorist organization, whose
continued operation threatens our security.”
The previous day, Arizona Republican Rep. Trent
Franks bleated in the House that Assange had “provided a wealth of aid and comfort to groups
that are at war with the United States of America.” It was simply not
possible for Franks to envisage that Assange might
have engaged in an exercise of transparency. “The reality is that his
desire to promote himself has outweighed his concern for scores and perhaps
hundreds of innocent lives that he has endangered with his reckless publicity
in this kind of stunt in the guise of some greater cause.”
See, also: Australian PM Tells US to Drop
Charges Against Julian Assange
+
Rep. Rashida
Tlaib Calls for End of Julian Assange
Extradition
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/06/rep-rashida-tlaib-calls-for-end-of-julian-assange-extradition/
by Rep. Rashida
Tlaib
Rep. Rashida
Tlaib is collecting signatures from her colleagues in
the House for a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling for the
Department of Justice to drop the charges against Julian Assange.
The
Intercept obtained both the letter to House members and the letter addressed to
Garland. Both are printed below.
+
Watch “Congress Calls For Assange’s Freedom!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6uPzGHod9o
with Jimmy Dore
(18:33)
+
Row Breaks
Out Over Assange in Australian Senate
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/03/row-breaks-out-over-assange-in-australian-senate/
by Joe Lauria
(6:37)
Greens Party Senator David Shoebridge
asked the foreign minister a direct question in Parliament last Thursday: Did
the Australian prime minister raise the case of Julian Assange
with the president of the United States last month when they met and did he ask
for the charges against Assange to be dropped?
Wong did not answer the question. She said Australia
could not intervene in the legal process of another country and sarcastically
asked Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who spoke out, whether he wanted the
Australian military to intervene against a court.
In the face of Wong’s comments, Assange’s
father, John Shipton, and his wife, Stella Assange, have continuously argued that the case is
political and needs a political, and not a legal resolution.
Despite Wong’s statement, the Australian government
has through diplomatic intervention won the release of six Australian citizens
from foreign jails since 2007: David
Hicks
(U.S./Guantanamo), Melinda
Taylor (Libya), James Ricketson (Cambodia), Sean Turnell
(Myanmar), Kylie
Moore-Gilbert (Iran),
and Peter Greste (Egypt).
+
Craig
Murray: Evan Gershkovich & Julian Assange
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/05/craig-murray-evan-gershkovich-julian-assange/
by Craig Murray
Some of us have warned again and again that the
prosecution of the WikiLeaks publisher made
life more dangerous for journalists operating in difficult conditions
worldwide. We were ignored.
Russia should release Evan Gershkovich;
if as part of a prisoner swap it should be speedily concluded.
Gershkovich was arrested in Ekaterinburg while investigating the Wagner Group. Ekaterinburg is one of Russia’s grimmest, most
mafia-dominated and least open cities, which I have myself visited specifically
to investigate the murders of local Russian journalists.
That was dangerous enough without the complications
of a war and the fact Gershkovich was planning to
visit the location of a nearby tank factory (it is unclear whether he got to
carry out this plan).
I am not in the least surprised he was arrested, but
I would have hoped he would simply be deported, or have his visa
cancelled like Luke Harding. A journalist from a country openly supplying the enemy in an active war
could hardly complain if deported. It is part of the game.
Let us not forget that Russia is still allowing
Western journalists to operate inside Russia, while most countries in the West,
including the U.K., have closed
down all
Russian media outlets and canceled the visas of their journalists.
+
Video: “The Covid
Lockdown is an Act of Economic Warfare against Humanity”
with Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
(1:15:48)
===========
c.
The COVID Plandemic Politics: A History
“Covid’s
Third Birthday – A Retrospective Weekend”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/23/covids-third-birthday-a-retrospective-weekend/
by Catte Black
Recently, prominent “anti-vaxxer”
Michael Yeadon publicly stated he does not believe there was ever a new disease called “covid”.
This should not be regarded as a controversial position,
and the fact that it is seen as such only illustrates the amount of confusion
and bewilderment that most people still suffer when it comes to understanding
what the “covid” operation really was.
Once you look at the acknowledged facts – and I mean
the officially acknowledged facts – clearly and without pre-existing emotional
bias, the fact that “covid” never existed as anything
but a name becomes not simply obvious but unavoidable.
It’s right there. Written in the
hand of authority. Hiding in plain sight like one of those number tests
they use for diagnosing color blindness.
If you’re not “covid-blind”
you can read it right off the page in everything the UN, WHO, CDC and every
government agency has published.
Remember:
The PTB openly admit “covid”
symptoms are indistinguishable from flu.
They openly admit no test exists to specifically
identify or diagnose it.
Yet they ask you to believe they still somehow know
it exists.
And most people did & do believe it. In defiance of logic and basic common sense.
This is the state of derangement we are dealing with
and it remains highly concerning. Even those “awake” enough to question the
“vaccines” and oppose the lockdowns still seem to think the existence of the
disease per se is an
established fact.
And “disease” is the key word here. We’re not
talking about whether a specific virus exists, whether or not any viruses exist, or debating
terrain vs germ theory. These are interesting and
potentially valuable discussions, but not relevant to Covid,
as there is no point in debating a cause for something that does not exist.
The most important point – only important point – is that nobody was sick with anything new. It was usual symptoms
repackaged, usual sickness rebranded.
Because unless we comprehend what “covid” really was we will be powerless to grasp and combat
the ongoing agenda that this fake pandemic spearheaded, as it continues to roll
out.
So, to help spread a little more understanding we
are running a mini-retrospective this weekend – which marks three years since
the UK was first forced into a destructive and unnecessary lockdown – aimed at
reminding everyone of what “covid” was, and what it
was not.
Starting with an updated edition of our Covid Cribsheet, and including
new articles on the origins of Covid, the absurd
headlines we were expected to believe and revisiting the early days of the
roll-out.
+
“40 Facts You NEED to Know: The
REAL Story of ‘Covid’”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/24/40-facts-you-need-to-know-the-real-story-of-covid/
by Kit Knightly
We first published our hugely popular cribsheet in September of 2021 in response to dozens – even
hundreds – of reader requests for sources and data. It was intended as a
resource and link dump as much as an article, and intentionally free of
interpretation, editorialising or opinion.
The response was incredible, within weeks it became
our most-viewed article of all time, and it has maintained steady traffic ever
since.
But time moves on, and as new data was published and
new facts came to light, it became clear we needed to update the piece – not
just in terms of facts, but in terms of approach.
So, here are all the updated key facts and sources concerning the alleged “pandemic”, to help you get a grasp
on what has happened to the world since January 2020, and assist in the
enlightenment of any of your friends who might be still trapped in the New
Normal fog.
MENU
Symptoms – Diagnosis
& PCR Tests – “Cases”
& “Deaths” – Lockdowns – Ventilators – Masks – Vaccines – Mortality
Data – Planning
& Deception – Motives
& Profits – Conclusion
*
Part
I: Symptoms . . .
+
“Anti-Human Agenda”
with Meryl Nass
and James Corbett
(1:00:35)
“This is an anti-human agenda” — how
One Health efforts point to a deglobalization scheme,
with hosts Meryl Nass, M.D., and James Corbett. They
expose the corruption in the World Health Organization and pose their
perspectives on how Big Oil’s ties to climate affairs
are worth considering. Watch the exchange on ‘Good Morning CHD’!
+
“Wuhan’s ‘Mystery Illness’ is Covid’s Foundational Lie”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/30/wuhans-mystery-illness-is-covids-foundational-lie/
by Kite Knightly
Recently, while researching our updated edition of
40 Facts, I came across this article from Time magazine, one that I had apparently missed
when it was first published and that had somehow escaped my notice in the
following three Covid-centric years.
The article demonstrates how, from the very
beginning, the covid narrative was a psy-op construct, that never made
any internal sense.
It focuses on the work of Chinese virologist Dr
Zhang Yongzhen, and how he and his team (allegedly)
isolated the Sars-Cov-2 virus and sequenced its genome. The article frames
Zhang as a hero whose “bravery” alerted the world to a scary new threat.
It’s just a story, of course – a piece of narrative
fiction rather than journalism – but it does reveal a key facet of the pandemic
psy-op roll-out.
The foundational lie, the original sin: Covid’s “mysterious” origins.
Every psychological operation has one underlying
weakness – an uneven seam where the manufactured lie is forcibly joined to
inescapable reality.
For 9/11 this is simple physics – asymmetrical damage
cannot cause symmetrical collapse. For JFK it is the alleged number of bullets
causing a known number of wounds, alongside the president’s head going back
and to the left.
Oftentimes, the main thrust of any accompanying
propaganda is to distract from these irreconcilable ideas. Place a selective
distorting lens over certain hard-coded physical realities that forces people
to question things they would never usually question.
Those weren’t really explosions – they just
sounded like it.
His head didn’t really go backwards – it just
looked like it did.
…you get the idea.
For “covid”, this
fractured disconnect can be located very specifically to Wuhan in December
2019.
The alleged timeline of the “discovery” of Covid is pretty well known, but here is a quick recap:
·
In
mid-December 2019, 4 people were admitted to Wuhan hospital with pneumonia. By
the end of the month, that number had grown to 27.
·
One
unnamed doctor decides this pneumonia is “mysterious”, and sends one sample
from one patient to Dr Zhang of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center for
analysis.
·
Dr Zhang
tests this single sample, from just one of 27 alleged patients with pneumonia,
immediately finds a “new coronavirus”, and at once
decides it must be the cause of this “mystery”.
There are numerous problems with this story, and
indeed the timeline of events that speedily followed – from the sequencing to
the modelling to the development of testing assays.
But strangest of all is the question the official
narrative never even attempts to answer:
Why
were they looking at all?
That’s the break with reality.
Why did that doctor in that hospital suddenly decide
there was a mystery that needed an explanation?
What was there to mark out those few patients as
different from any of the other 450
million people who get pneumonia every year?
The Time article claims vaguely that this pneumonia
was “peculiar”, other contemporary publications called it “mystery pneumonia”. They never really explain the
nature of this “mystery”.
The WHO called it pneumonia of “unknown aetiology”, while the CDC said it was an “atypical
pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatments”.
But “the standard treatment” for pneumonia is
antibiotics if you think it’s bacterial, or bed rest and fluids if you think
it’s viral. The vast majority of the time it gets better on its own in a couple
of weeks…just like “Covid”.
Some articles remarked that the “mysterious
pneumonia” was symptomatically unique, without ever going into details. But we
now know that’s not true. “Covid” has never been
symptomatically different from the majority of common respiratory diseases.
The
WHO even said in their initial
press release, on January 8th 2020:
The symptoms reported among the patients are common
to several respiratory diseases, and pneumonia is common in the winter season;
That sentence is completely true…so-called “covid pneumonia” is just – pneumonia.
So why did the doctors in China ever consider it
worth a second look?
Why did anyone think this perfectly normal pneumonia
must have an abnormal cause?
None of this makes any sense. None of it ever
made any sense.
You can keep looking for the answer, keep asking “why
did they think this pneumonia was different?”, and find nothing but a
tangle of vague assertions that don’t hold up to any kind of analysis.
There was no reason for that doctor to
think those patients were suffering from anything other than a normal,
seasonal respiratory infection.
His alleged actions are not those of a rational
real-life person, they are the scripted behavior of an actor who needs to
perform a particular function for only one reason – so the rest of the movie
can happen.
We’re back to that one big lie, the invitation to
suspend disbelief and accept a contradiction in terms, just like 9/11 and JFK.
For the “pandemic” narrative it’s this: “Covid might look and feel and act like
the flu – but it’s actually special and different.”
That’s always going to be the faultline
when you simply make up a new disease.
What’s more, they clearly always knew this would be the
weak spot in their story, so they hurried through it. They needed to fast-track
their “new disease” into existence so they discovered it, named it, sequenced
it, published it, and could test for it…all in less than three
weeks.
It was fast, “very, very fast” Zhang
acknowledges in Time. Too fast, really. They spoiled
the ending, revealed the killer before the murder had even happened.
The world has moved pretty quickly in the last three
years, changed to the point of being almost unrecognisable,
and if you want to understand how it all started you have to travel back in
time. Past vaccines and ventilators. Past passports and PCRS.
Past Pfizer and Fauci and
flattened curves…back to the very beginning.
All the way back to Wuhan, China, December 2019.
Where, we are told, one doctor saw four cases of stereotypical pneumonia and
called it “mysterious”, and one virologist started
looking for something he had no reason to think even existed, and just so
happened to find it.
This
article is part of our “Covid –
Three Years On” series.
+
“Italy 2020: Inside Covid’s Ground Zero”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/11/italy-2020-inside-covids-ground-zero/
by Michael Bryant
On the third anniversary of the WHO declaring “Covid” a “pandemic”, we take a detailed look at how Italy
provided the perfect platform for creating, and then spreading, the Covid narrative.
Three years ago the Western World came to a
standstill. The official Covid-19 narrative depicted a strange
suddenly-super-spreading, deadlier-than-flu virus hailing from China that
landed in Northern Italy.
On February 20, 2020 the first alleged case of
Covid-19 was discovered in the West in the Lombardy town of Codogno,
Italy. Later that day the Italian government reported their first “Covid-19
death.”
Dramatic media reports emerging from Northern Italy
were hammered into and onto the Western psyche giving the impression there was
a mysterious “super spreading” and “super lethal” novel virus galloping
across the region infecting and killing scores of people.
Harrowing reports out of Bergamo, a city in the
alpine Lombardy region of Northern Italy, spoke of coffins stacked high, “covid-related deaths growing relentlessly” and the
alarming need for military assistance to remove the grim volume of dead
bodies piling up.
In early March 2020 hospitals in Northern Italy were
reporting a “tsunami of deaths” due to the Covid
crisis and overcrowded conditions due to “fighting the coronavirus
outbreak”, which
were pushing hospitals and staff to the breaking point as doctors were “taking the dead from morning until night.”
Using the entire machinery of the state, Italian
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte began issuing a rolling set of government decrees
culminating in Italy becoming the first country in the world to implement a
national lockdown. These mandates would set the stage for lockdowns throughout
the Western world.
Three years later a comprehensive evaluation of the
story about the alleged Italian medical emergency in Spring
2020, reveals a tale of the disturbing epidemiological history of Northern
Italy, mass media manipulation and deceptive reporting utilized to create the
illusion of a new epidemic.
A multitude of questions and inconsistencies
surrounding the Italian story soon surfaced. Ascribing this strange set of
convergent circumstances to a viral event strained
credulity.
Were these overcrowded conditions in Italian
hospitals genuinely the result of a unique viral pathogen or were there other
causal factors?
Were these anomalous spikes in excess deaths in
Northern Italy verifiably caused by the arrival and spread of a novel deadly
virus?
How was it that this virus spread across thousands
of kilometers within days and peaked synchronously in selected locations?
How was it that this virus was able to spread so
fast across thousands of kilometers, peaking at the same time in those selected
locations, yet wasn’t contagious enough to spread to nearby locations?
How was it that this virus waited for a government
decree and only then began to create excess death?
How was it possible that all countries in the West
and beyond adopted similar “health” measures as carried out in Italy, virtually
“overnight”, measures that resembled a de facto police state rather than
medical initiatives?
Why Italy?
A brief timeline of the series of events as they
unfolded in Northern Italy in Spring 2020:
·
January
31, 2020 – The Italian Council of Ministers declares a 6-month national emergency handing the coordination of the
COVID-19 emergency responses to the Head the Civil Protection Department,
following the detection of the first two COVID-19 positive people in Rome – two
Chinese tourists traveling from Wuhan;
·
February
20, 2020 — First Covid-19 case of Italian citizen diagnosed in Codogno. 78-year-old Adriano Trevisan, a retired
bricklayer from the village of Vo’ Euganeo
near Padua in the Veneto region became the first Covid
death of a European recorded. The deceased tested positive for the virus and
died in the hospital while being treated for pneumonia.
·
February
23, 2020 – The Italian government introduces the first movement and access/exit restrictions around hotspots, known as
‘lockdown red zones.’ On this same day the Italian Ministry of Health issued PCR testing guidance to 31 labs across Italy. Cases surge.
·
February
25, 2020 – Further restrictive measures introduced across Italy.
·
February
27, 2020 – A National Surveillance system, coordinated by the ISS (National
Institute of Health) is set up to oversee the collection and collation of daily
data.
·
March 1,
2020 – Creation of ‘lockdown red zones’ expands.
·
March 4,
2020 – Nationwide closure of schools and universities are declared in Italy.
·
March 8,
2020 – Decree Of The President Of The
Council Of Ministers expands
restrictions to all Lombardy and large areas of Northern Italy.
·
March 9,
2020 – The government of Italy under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte extends the lockdown to the whole of Italy restricting the movement of the
population except for necessity, work, and health circumstances.
·
March 11,
2020 – The World Health Organization declares the novel coronavirus
(COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. Italy declares closure of all restaurants, pubs, theaters and social
activities.
·
March 18,
2020 – European Central Bank announces huge money printing program to keep the financial system
functioning. 750 billion euro bailout given to financial sector to fight the “coronavirus crash.”
·
March 22,
2020 – Cessation of all non-essential productive
activities, complete
lockdown, factories are closed and all nonessential
production is halted across Italy.
·
March 25,
2020 – Further restrictions imposed to people’s movements
except for essential reasons (e.g. work, health and getting supplies).
·
March 27,
2020 – Peak in number of daily Covid deaths in
Italy.
·
April 9,
2020 – ‘Liquidità’ Decree goes into full effect, including
temporary measures to facilitate access to loans, support business continuity
and corporate liquidity and measures to support export, internationalization
and business investment.
·
May 4,
2020 – Reopening of most factories and various wholesale businesses,
within pre-set health safety protocols.
While such a chronology can serve to refresh our
memory and provide a coherent understanding of the sequence of events, it is
not a substitute for real history.
As they say – the devil is in the details.
The details in Northern Italy start with massive
pollution problems and the accompanying long-standing chronic health conditions
which have afflicted the region for years.
Pollution
and Chronic Illness
Everyday life in the Lombardy region is bedeviled
with dangerous living conditions and health challenges– numerous acute health
problems facing an aging population have been documented for a long period of time.
The Po River
Valley in Northern Italy is cited as having the worst air quality in all of Europe. The air quality in the region
has been deteriorating for many years. The cities in the Po River Valley are
cited as having the highest mortality burdens associated with air pollution in
all of Europe.
Along with the sheer volume of pollutants, the Po
River Valley is known for its unique characteristics of low winds and prolonged
episodes of climatic inversions turning it into a holding tank for atmospheric pollution.
The Lancet Planetary Health report from January 2021 estimated death
rates associated with fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide pollution in
1000 European cities. Brescia and Bergamo in the Lombardy region held the
morbid distinction of having the highest death rate from fine particulate
matter in Europe. Two other Northern Italian cities, Vicenza and Saronno placed fourth and eighth respectively, in the list
of top ten cities in this category.
These locations correspond precisely with the
highest incidents of upper respiratory infections occurring in Northern Italy
as reported in the official pandemic narrative.
Ongoing and accelerating “epidemics” of idiopathic
pulmonary fibrosis(a severe
and progressive lung disease), interstitial
lung disease and high
rates of bronchial and lung cancer were signature epidemiological
features of Northern Italy long before an alleged virus ventured onto the
scene.
In the Lombardy region there is also an ongoing
asbestos problem from occupational asbestos exposure in the 1960s and 1970s. A
2016 study, “Incidence of mesothelioma
in Lombardy, Italy: exposure to asbestos, time patterns and future projections”, predicted a rise of malignant mesothelioma (MM), an aggressive and deadly form of cancer
primarily impacting the linings of the chest and abdomen.
This study documented a high burden of MM in both
genders in the Lombardy Region, reflecting extensive occupational (mainly in
men) and non-occupational (mainly in women) exposure to asbestos in the past.
Incidence rates are still increasing; a downturn in occurrence of MM is
expected to occur after 2019.”
A further study, “Investigating the impact of
influenza on excess mortality in all ages in Italy during recent seasons
(2013/14–2016/17 seasons)”, reveals that rates of death due to the common
flu have increased markedly over the past decade. This study described a nearly fourfold increase in flu
mortality during the covered time period. By the 2016/17 season the totals
skyrocketed to 24,981 excess deaths attributable to flu epidemics.
Adding to the ongoing problems of air pollution,
residents in the Po River Valley are plagued by high levels of industrial
livestock runoff in rivers and tributaries.
+
AUDIO: “How “Covid”
turned hospitals into killing machines”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/01/audio-how-covid-turned-hospitals-into-killing-machines/
with Jesse Zurawell
and Michael Bryant
(55:44)
Independent journalist and researcher Michael Bryant
returns to Perspective to discuss a neglected aspect of the pandemic –
how hospitals abused DNR orders and ventilators to create “covid
deaths”, the legislation and guidelines that financially incentivised
the process.
Published as part of our Covid: Three Years On season. You can read our contemporary
piece on “Cash 4 Covid” practices here, and read Michael’s article on Italy’s role in establishing
the “pandemic” narrative here.
TNT Radio is a 24/7 internet radio
station, available here.
You can also listen to back-episodes of Perspective here and follow host Jesse Zurawell on
Telegram here.
+
The Pfizer Vaccine: A Tale of Two
Reports. “Money vs. Mortality”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pfizer-big-money-maker-have-a-look-at-their-report/5807009
by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
“Profits in the billions of dollars are the driving-force behind this
diabolical agenda. “Killing is Good for Business”.
What we are witnessing is a crime against humanity on an unprecedented
scale, affecting the lives of the entire population of our
planet”.
Introduction
This morning I received
an interesting document: Pfizer 2022 Full Year Financial Report, which
in my mind as an economist trained in correlation analysis
raises some important issues.
There
are two Pfizer reports
One deals with Money, the
other which is “confidential” deals with Mortality and Morbidity
resulting from the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19
Vaccine.
The Full Year Revenues
Report is a public document. It assesses Pfizer’s impressive “financial
performance”. It is also intended to be consulted by potential
investors, reported by financial analysts and the media.
The second is
Pfizer’s “Confidential” Report which gives you a glimpse of the
“performance” of Pfizers’s Covid-19 Vaccine: i.e.
mortality and morbidity. Released in October 2021
under Freedom of Information. You were not supposed to see
it. And it is not reported by the media.
It is nonetheless in the
public domaine.
Is there a causal
relationship between Pfizer’s record of $100.3 billion revenues (full
year 2022) and the mRNA vaccine’s upward trend in adverse events and
mortality Worldwide, affecting 8 billion people.
Is there a relationship?
Is there a correlation. It’s
statistics 101.
This upward trend in
mortality and morbidity is the source of tremendous profit resulting from the
enforcement of the mRNA vaccine by national governments all over the
World. The evidence is overwhelming. It is the largest vaccine program in
World history targeting the entire World population of 8 billion
people.
I.
II.
THE
MORTALITY AND MORBIDITY REPORT
+
No brakes
on Moscow’s biosecurity charade
Anna Popova and Tatyana Golikova, flanked by their army of insufferable masked
Virus Nannies. March 24, 2023.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/05/no-brakes-on-moscows-biosecurity-charade/
by Riley Waggaman
The masterminds behind Moscow’s Sanitary
Shield—a medley
of PCR testing facilities and “vaccine” development centers—met in late March
to review the progress of their not-fit-for-purpose biosecurity
Iron Curtain.
Anna Popova, head of Rospotrebnadzor—Russia’s federal agency for protecting
“human well-being”, and the country’s de facto COVID
Cops—told the
gathering of
public health bureaucrats that great strides had been made over the past two
years:
16 new reagents for diagnosing infections have been
developed, 153 PCR centers across the country have been equipped, equipment has
been purchased for 48 sequencing centers, and four platforms have been created
to quickly develop vaccines. The Perimeter epidemiological monitoring system
has been launched at more than 240 border crossing points.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova—who
is not only a selfless public servant, but also a seasoned “pandemic”
profiteer—said more
needed to be done to ensure the “epidemiological well-being of the population”:
In order to monitor the variability of pathogens of
infectious diseases, it is necessary to ensure the establishment of six new
sequencing centers this year. By the end of 2023, 54 such centers should be
operational. [We will also] increase the number of vaccine development
platforms to six, and develop 23 new test systems for diagnosing infections in
60 minutes; there will be a total of 39 test systems. [We will] provide 19
institutions of Rospotrebnadzor with nine new mobile
rapid response laboratories, and continue updating the national electronic
catalog of microorganisms. By 2025, it should contain more than 40 thousand
strains.
The ultimate goal, according to Russian President
Vladimir Putin, is to create an anti-virus “shield” that will be able to
“develop its own test systems within four days,” as well as “create an
effective domestic vaccine in the shortest possible time.”
In other words: Russia’s strategy to ward off
alleged biosecurity threats revolves around PCR
testing and the rapid deployment of “vaccines.”
+
Russians are also “dying suddenly”
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/russians-are-also-dying-suddenly?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Edward Slavsquat
Russian activists document "sudden deaths" among young athletes
Since the start of the global genetic injection campaign in 2021, media reports detailing the “sudden deaths” of athletes have gradually become part of the new normal.
It’s a worldwide phenomenon—and Russia is no exception, according to #HowManyMustDie, a collaborative project launched by STOPVACZISM, STOPPANIKA, and Anna Rudneva’s “Raising Awareness” channel.
On April 3, the group published a list of young Russian athletes who had “died suddenly”:
+
Køvíd & the decline of the West
by Edward Slavsquat
A
conversation with writer & journalist Modeste
Schwartz
+
“Ignorance is Bliss"
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/01/ignorance-is-bliss/
by Todd Hayen
+
John Pilger's
Tips For “Seeing Through Propaganda”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvF3d8hhoJo
with Katie Halper
(11:20)
Journalist John Pilger
explains how to see through propaganda, especially the most dangerous of all,
which is the propaganda that claims to be "objective reporting."
+
FLASHBACK: Meet Lee Harvey Oswald,
Sheep-Dipped Patsy (2013)
https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-278-meet-lee-harvey-oswald-sheep-dipped-patsy/
with James Corbett
(49:31)
+
“A State of Never-Ending Crisis:
The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria”
by John Whitehead
“This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown
since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to
shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. But I
don’t think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things—of responding
to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance.”
Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly
calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how
to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition
from the citizenry.
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
With alarming regularity, the nation is being
subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the
country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock
down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of
national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.
The 28-year-old shooter (a clearly troubled
transgender individual in possession of several military-style weapons) opened
fire in a Christian elementary school, killing three children and three adults.
Already, fingers are being pointed and battle lines
are being drawn.
Those who want safety at all costs are clamoring for
more gun control measures (if not at an
outright ban on assault weapons for non-military, non-police personnel),
widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat
assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial
recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at
turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body
imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police
empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and
disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of
what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend
their time.
This is all part of the Deep State’s master plan.
Ask yourselves: why are we being bombarded with
crises, distractions, fake news and reality TV politics? We’re being
conditioned like lab mice to subsist on a steady diet of bread-and-circus
politics and an endless spate of crises.
Caught up in this “crisis of the now,” the average
person has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,”
manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork in order to keep us
distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.
As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:
“This psychological bombardment is waged primarily
via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of
violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard
wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence,
mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled
into the never-ending ‘crisis of
the NOW’ from
which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or
historical context.”
Professor Jacques Ellul
studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of
propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old
facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.
All the while, the government continues to amass
more power and authority over the citizenry.
When we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news
coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay
focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by
the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.
Yet as John Lennon reminds us,
“nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.
In other words, it’s all fake, i.e., manufactured,
i.e., manipulated to distort reality.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s
1998 film The Truman
Show, in which
a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at
selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United
States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how
to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that
passes for politics today.
As long as we are distracted, entertained,
occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to
remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front
against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we
are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather
than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.
Reality and fiction merge as everything around us
becomes entertainment fodder.
We don’t even have to change the channel when the
subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the
programmers (the corporate media).
“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and
that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs
the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.
As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people
watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news
included—the more
difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully
crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans
spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re
watching more than
50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And
reality TV programming consistently captures the largest
percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift
through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the
issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or
foreign entities.
Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they
see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows
characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such
behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the
medium.
This holds true whether the reality programming is
about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in
the bedroom.
It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment”
A term coined
by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to
the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation,
suffering and pain.
“Humilitainment” largely
explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on
reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what
is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology,
entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality,
surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things
happening to other people.
The
ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and
self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
This is what
happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government
propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and
acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in
a language of force.
Ultimately,
the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the
militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to
keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role
in the business of self-government.
Look behind
the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand
distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and
you will find there is a method to the madness.
How do you
change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In
totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are
enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and
cannot be used.
In countries
where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as
tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to
conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
+
How Covid lockdowns primed the current financial crisis
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/15/covid-lockdowns-financial-crisis/
by Christian Parenti
The lockdowns
and the stimulus required to keep the economy alive
helped drive inflation. Then the Fed jacked up interest rates. And all hell
broke loose.
On Friday
March 10th, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) died of Covid.
Alright, it’s a little more complicated than that, but Covid
lockdowns followed by massive government stimulus were a critical – and
massively under-acknowledged – factor in propelling the bank’s demise.
At the heart
of the crisis is the gigantic pile of low-interest debt that was issued during
the height of the pandemic. While private-sector pandemic-era debt like
corporate bonds also soared, US government debt like Treasury bonds piled up.
In a
nutshell, during the pandemic the government issued enormous amounts of
extremely low interest government debt — about $4.2 trillion of it. But now
interest rates, including on government debt, are higher than they have been in
15 years and investors are dumping their old low-interest debt. As they dump,
the resale price of the old debt goes down. The more it declines, the more
investors want to dump. And thus, a panic is born.
To understand
the problem fully, the question of US government debt has to be put into its
larger context, which is: the pandemic response as a whole.
When news of
the Covid virus first broke in December 2019, the 2 Year
Treasury bond was being offered at 1.64% interest; the 10 year was at about
1.80%, and the resale value of such bonds on secondary markets was strong.
Then, in March 2020, as Covid cases and deaths
spiked, the US began to shutter its economy with panicked lockdowns that were
supposed to “flatten the curve” or slow the spread of the virus and thus
protect the hospitals. But Covid was politicized and
the lockdowns were extended.
As the
lockdowns dragged on, the US economy began to collapse, shrinking at a
record-shattering annualized rate of 31.4% during the
second quarter of fiscal year 2020.
To avoid
total economic devastation, the federal government began massive
debt-financed spending. In March 2020, Trump signed into law the $2.2 trillion
economic stimulus bill the CARES Act, or Coronavirus
Aid, Relief, and Economic Security. Then, in March 2021, Biden signed the
American Rescue Plan Act which contained $1.9 trillion more in Covid relief. Finally, in April 2021, another trillion or
so of Covid relief arrived in the Consolidated
Appropriations Act.
Thanks to
these laws, every industry and most people received public money. There was
increased and extended unemployment payments, as well as the so-called “stimmy checks” or stimulus payments to everyone earning
under $75,000 a year (about half the population). The Paycheck Protection
Program spent almost a trillion dollars. The Provider Relief Fund doled out
$178 billion to the healthcare system.
All this debt
spending kept millions of people in their homes, and helped feed, employ, and
care for millions more. The measures allowed hundreds of thousands of
businesses to stay afloat even as many thousands of others went under. The
impact of the spending on Americans’ well-being was generally positive. For a
moment, the US child poverty rate was cut in half, falling to 5.2%.
But the
economically destructive lockdowns were not necessary and did not work. Covid fanatics maintain that the lockdowns were unavoidable
because the virus is so deadly. That, however, is uninformed. Last year I
explained in detail how the Lockdown Left got the Covid crisis wrong. Not a single critic has challenged any
of the facts I presented so there is little point in rehashing them all
here.
Those who
advocated an alternative to ham-fisted lockdowns, like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which
called for “focused protection” of vulnerable groups like the elderly, were
viciously targeted in a reputation destruction campaign covertly
orchestrated by former NIH director Francis Collins and de facto Covid czar Anthony Fauci. Never
mind that the document’s authors were three eminently qualified scientists: Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at
Oxford University; Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford; and
Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine
and biostatistics at Harvard. They were portrayed as far-right cranks who were
almost eager to see millions die. But now, they have been vindicated.
Ultimately,
the federal government spent $4.2 trillion propping up the
economy that it was simultaneously choking to death with lockdowns. These two
contradictory pressures laid the groundwork for the recent bank failures.
Government mandated lockdowns hit the economy like a body blow. Factories
closed, small businesses went under, ports and logistic hubs reduced
operations, and about 2 million mostly older workers simply resigned. But at
the same time, the federal government injected vast amounts of purchasing power
into the economy, thus boosting consumption.
===========
d.
Voice of warning from the archives:
“DESTROYING EASTERN EUROPE and UKRAINE”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uu9jXJugTE&feature=youtu.be
with Michael Parenti – May 16, 1999
(1:15:30)
+
The Answer to
“Full Spectrum Dominance”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/04/the-answer-to-full-spectrum-dominance/
by Roger McKenzie
Imagine the uproar if China or Russia
— or any other country for that matter — said it aimed to exercise military
control over land, sea, air, and space to protect its interests and
investments.
This
amazingly has been the stated United States policy since 1997.
Full spectrum
dominance, as the doctrine is known, is the reason the United States behaves
the way that it does on the international stage.
The United
States demands that the world bow down to its leadership. A failure to do so is
met with the full force of the international military-industrial complex
controlled by the U.S. government.
Enforcement
has included everything from the funding of opposition forces in sovereign
nations, the removal or even assassination of political leaders who refuse to
toe the line, economic sanctions, and military intervention.
Of course,
there are choices to be made by the United States about which approach — or
combination of approaches — it might take. There are also decisions to be made
about the degree of action within each approach.
But
fundamentally the point is that Washington believes it has a right to inflict
on the rest of the world its interpretation of democracy — which seems to
essentially amount to agreeing with whatever course of action the United States
wants to take.
So, what is
full spectrum dominance really for?
There’s a
famous scene in the Oscar-winning film Reds where the great
revolutionary journalist and activist John Reed, played by Warren Beatty, was
asked at a dinner what the war in Mexico he had just returned from was all
about. Before sitting down he said just one word: “profits.”
The United
States is interested in safeguarding the profits of monopoly capital, which
carries politicians in Washington around in its pockets like loose change.
No Room for
Rivals
+
US Diplomacy
— War, Never Peace
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/04/us-diplomacy-war-never-peace/
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.
S. Davies
+
War
Mongering, CIA-Linked Think-Tank Calls For World War III
Hillary “the
hawk” Clinton at 2013 Atlantic Council awards ceremony. [Source: mronline.org]
https://covertactionmagazine.com/fr/2023/04/04/war-mongering-cia-connected-think-tank-calls-for-world-war-iii/?mc_cid=a804d1ea71&mc_eid=7ddd08c64d
by Valeriy Krylko
Fellows at
the Atlantic Council advocate bombing and confronting Russia, while eschewing
any opportunities for peace.
The Atlantic
Council is an American think tank, founded in 1961, which lies at the heart of
what 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern and whistleblower termed the
Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank
Complex (MICIMATTC).
Its close
ties to the CIA were evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon
Wilson, was appointed CEO of the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and
supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the
U.S. for regime change.
Former CIA
Director James Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic
Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates
and David Petraeus are also listed on its Board, along with
such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza
Rice.
Over the past
decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation
under President Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian
dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who called for more aggressive imperial intervention by
the U.S. in Belarusian politics.
One of its
fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an . He helps a neo-McCarthyite
website, PropOrNot that
promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable while attacking
independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly
advancing Russian propaganda.
In 2015,
the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for
arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank
missiles—the same year that it presented its
Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which
produces Javelin missiles and many other strategic weapon platforms.
+
“Rigorous” Maidan massacre exposé suppressed by top academic journal
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/12/academic-journal-maidan-massacre/
by Kit Klarenberg
A
peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic
journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation. Its author, one of the
world’s top scholars on Ukraine-related issues, had marshaled overwhelming
evidence to conclude Maidan protesters were killed by
pro-coup snipers.
The massacre
by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment
in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s
elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of
international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s
downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.
Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a
Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years,
he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not
affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings.
Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking work has been studiously
ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the
slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and
published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over
100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other
pieces of research, he was among the world’s most-referenced political
scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters.
In the final
months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new
investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent
social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor
revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively
praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was “exceptional
in many ways,” and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The
reviewers concurred with this judgment.
However, the
paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski
firmly believes to have been “political.” He filed an appeal, but to no avail.
+
Nordstream 2: Seymour Hersh feeds the
fake binary
https://off-guardian.org/2023/02/21/nordstream-2-seymour-hersh-feeds-the-fake-binary/
by Kit Knightly
Back in
October 2022, when the Nordstream 2 sabotage was
first hitting the headlines, I predicted the following:
The “official story” will never prove who bombed the pipeline one way or
the other and is not intended to. Resolution is not desired. Instead, Team A
will encourage us to blame Team B, and vice versa. The MSM will report evidence
implicating Russia, while other evidence suggesting NATO were responsible will
be “leaked”. Both narratives will be fed just enough to keep the argument going
for as long as required and in any direction chosen.”
Fast forward to now, and the big story over the last couple of days – at
least in alternate media circles – has been Seymour Hersh’s
publication of a new article for the first time in quite a while.
The article, based entirely on “leaked” information from one anonymous
“insider” source, claims that the United States military sabotaged the Nordstream 2
pipeline, and had been planning to do it since before the
Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Forgive me but, how is this news?
After all, Joe Biden said “if
Russia invades, there will be no Nordstream 2”.
Victoria Nuland, speaking more plainly, stated on January 27th:
If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not
move forward.”
The phrase “one way or another” is barely ambiguous there. Obviously, if
the pipe was sabotaged, the Americans did it. That was never in question,
really.
But that’s the real question isn’t? Was the pipe sabotaged?
Sure, both sides say the pipe was sabotaged. But both sides said
Covid was a real threat, and both sides said
masks worked, and both sides said their vaccines were safe.
All they’ve done, for the past 3 years, is lie. About
everything. Most importantly, both sides have told the exact same
lies.
So, why should we go back to reporting the news on their terms?
Let’s have a reality check, shall we? Here’s what we actually know
about the Nordstream 2 situation:
·
It is not currently transporting gas.
·
The “sabotage” has driven up the cost of energy all
across Europe.
·
Reducing the use and increasing the cost of fossil
fuels is a major part of the “Great Reset” agenda.
·
Both NATO and Russia are willful participants in that
agenda.
That’s it. That’s all we know. Based on that, we can’t rule out the
possibility Nordstream 2 was “sabotaged” in full
agreement from both sides.
We don’t even know it was “sabotaged” at all. Because all we’ve been
allowed to see is some bubbles. An image
you could create in a few seconds by going to OpenArt
and typing “bubbles on surface of ocean”.
Whatever actually happened, all we know is that it’s off, and our gas is
more expensive. Again.
Hersh’s story seems to be an exercise in a
special kind of journalism – telling people what they already know, or suspect,
under the guise of providing new information.
“Revelations” from “former” insiders that actually
reinforce the underlying assumptions of the mainstream narrative by supplying a
controlled “alternative” point of view.
The official mainstream position is that Russia blew up their own pipeline. There is no evidence to support this, it
is simply stated.
Now, Hersh has supplied the official alternative
position – that the US did it – with a narrative of their own.
There is no evidence to support this counter-narrative either, it is likewise
simply stated.
Say it with me: It’s a fake binary. One I actually exactly predicted back
in October.
Two apparently conflicting faith-based positions,
both built on scant drip-fed evidence and both selling the same line: That the
“sabotage” of Nordstream 2 was the result of
international conflicts which accidentally furthered the great reset
agenda.
But given what we’ve all seen over the last three years, isn’t the
alternative more likely? That it was an act designed to further the great
reset, camouflaged behind potentially performative
international conflict?
Arguing over whether Putin or Biden blew up Nordstream
2 is living in a fake reality built on false assumptions supplied by proven
liars.
The one silver lining of Covid is that it
forced so many people to wake up and live in the real world. Let’s go back
there, shall we?
+
UN Council Rejects Nord Stream Sabotage Probe
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/28/watch-un-council-rejects-nord-stream-sabotage-probe/
with Stefano Vaccara and Robert Wood
(48:40)
+
“Significant
Portion” of UK Lethal Aid for Ukraine Stays Secret
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/03/significant-portion-of-uk-lethal-aid-for-ukraine-secret/
by Matt Kennard
“A significant proportion of our lethal aid [for Ukraine]
is procured overseas
and for both operational and commercial reasons, the detail
of these contracts
will not be published,” the Ministry of Defence
(MoD) has told Parliament.
The
announcement raises suspicion that Britain is sending more controversial
weaponry to Ukraine that it does not want made public.
Declassified first reported last week that the U.K. was sending ammunition containing depleted
uranium to Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, responded by announcing he would station tactical nuclear
weapons in neighbouring Belarus.
The MoD said the only contracts it will publish will be those
with British companies for equipment replenishing existing stockpiles.
It is unclear
which foreign companies the government does not want to reveal its contracts
with — or what weapons systems they are for.
The U.K.
provided £2.4bn in
military equipment to Ukraine in 2022 — more than any country other than the
United States. It has committed to
providing the same amount in 2023.
The U.K.
has supplied 10,000
anti-tank weapons, including 5,500 NLAWs, which are designed by Saab in
Sweden and made by French arms manufacturer Thales in Belfast. The U.K. has
also provided Javelin
and Brimstone missiles.
U.K. lethal
aid to Ukraine has also included thousands
of surface-to-air missiles including Starstreak,
again produced by Thales.
“The U.K.
arms export regime is defined by a chronic lack of transparency,” Katie Fallon,
advocacy manager at Campaign Against the Arms Trade
(CAAT), told Declassified.
“That the
public might never know how a large part of the weaponry budgeted for Ukraine
is being spent, not only raises the risk of corruption, profiteering and
procurement of inappropriate equipment, but it also reduces the ability of the
U.K. public to provide badly needed scrutiny of government actions taken in
their name.”
Long-Range
+
Zelensky’s Latest Trip to Poland Was Super Significant
https://www.globalresearch.ca/zelensky-latest-trip-poland-was-super-significant/5815066
by Andrew Korybko
Zelensky’s visit is intended to shape the course of the
NATO-Russian proxy war over the next three months ahead of the bloc’s summit in
early July. Warsaw’s role in forthcoming events will powerfully influence what
Kiev does during this crucial moment in that conflict, hence the timing with
which the Ukrainian leader decided to meet with his counterpart. For as
carefully as Zelensky is planning everything,
however, he might still fail in reversing his side’s fortunes.
Symbolism
& Substance
Zelensky’s first state trip to Poland since the start of
Russia’s special operation last year took place earlier this
week, during which time he was awarded with his host country’s highest civilian
honor, the Order of the White Eagle. His visit occurred at a crucial moment in
the NATO-Russian proxy war, which adds an element of intrigue
to it, as does its symbolism. The present piece will thus analyze the aforesaid
in order to better understand the importance of Zelensky’s
latest trip.
The Latest
Military-Strategic Dynamics
To begin
with, the NATO chief declared in mid-February that his bloc is in a so-called “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia,
one which Moscow is winning as evidenced by its continued military resilience
and Zelensky’s remark late last month about running out of ammunition. Wagner founder Prigozhin also recently claimed victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk/“Bakhmut” after his group captured that city’s
administrative center, which prompted a policy reversal from the Ukrainian
leader.
+
Finland
Formally Joins NATO, Doubling Alliance's Border with Russia
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/05/finland-formally-joins-nato-doubling-alliances-border-with-russia/
by Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com
Finland
formally became the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, officially ending the
country’s post-World War II policy of neutrality and raising tensions between
Helsinki and Moscow.
“Finland has
today become a member of the defense alliance NATO. The era of military
non-alignment in our history has come to an end. A new era begins,” the Finnish presidency said in a statement.
The ascension
into NATO was completed during a ceremony attended by Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, Secretary of
State Antony Blinken, and NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg.
Finland
joining NATO more than doubles the alliance’s territory that borders Russia.
Moscow has said it will respond by beefing up its military presence in the
region and will take more measures if other NATO countries deploy military
assets to Finnish territory.
“The Kremlin
believes that this is another aggravation of the situation. The expansion
of NATO is an infringement on our security and Russia’s national
interests,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
said in response to the news.
A major
motive for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was
NATO’s post-Cold War expansion and the alliance’s cooperation with Kyiv
following the 2014 coup that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
At the
ceremony, Blinken appeared to say he was thankful
that Putin invaded Ukraine because it motivated Finland to apply for NATO
membership.
“I’m tempted
to say this is maybe the one thing that we can thank Mr. Putin for because he
once again here precipitated something he claims to want to prevent by Russia’s
aggression, causing many countries to believe that they have to do more to look
out for their own defense and to make sure that they can deter possible Russian
aggression going forward,” Blinken said.
+
A Look Back
at the American Experience in World War I Shows the Danger of Where We May Be
Headed
by Jeremy Kuzmarov
So far the
2020s have been a very bad time for American democracy, with the January 6,
2021, riots, censorship on Twitter, Facebook and in
the classrooms, rising anti-Russian fervor resulting from the conflict in
Ukraine, COVID-19 lockdowns, declining newspapers and marginalization of
anti-war voices.
Still, as
bleak as things are, they are not quite as bad as during World War I, as Adam Hochschild reminds us in his book, American Midnight:
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York:
Mariner Books, 2022).
Hochschild, a founder of Mother Jones magazine, has
written eleven books, including such classics as King Leopold’s Ghost
and To End All Wars (both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle
Award), which, respectively, explored the sadism of Belgian colonialism in
Central Africa and the folly of global leaders that provoked World War I.
American
Midnight follows up the latter very well in detailing what he
calls the “overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and
the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were
threatened by war, pandemic and violence fueled by battles over race,
immigration, and the rights of labor.”
The book
begins by spotlighting the experience of eleven members of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW) who had the audacity of trying to organize oil field
workers near the rugged oil boom city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, just after the Great
War had broken out.
The IWW was
the country’s most militant union, which advocated for worker-controlled
industry.
While playing
cards one night at the IWW local headquarters, the men were arrested, charged
and found guilty of vagrancy, and then taken to a railroad crossing where robed
members of the Knights of Liberty tied their hands with rope, stripped them of
their clothing, marched them at gunpoint and tied them to trees, whipped them
until their backs bled and then brushed hot tar on their backs and chests.
The
ringleader of the pogrom was thought to be city father W. Tate Brady—who also
coordinated Tulsa’s infamous 1921 race massacre. He announced that he was
carrying out the attack “in the name of the outraged women and children of
Belgium [which Germany had invaded in starting World War I].”
The Knights
of Liberty had the support of the Tulsa Daily World, the voice of the
state’s oil industry, which published an editorial the afternoon of the attack
stating: “The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the I.W.W.
Kill ’em, just as you would kill any other kind of a
snake….It is no time to waste money on trials and continuances and things like
that. All that is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.”
Irrational
Hysteria . . .
===========
e.
Germany
prosecutes citizen for condemning aid to Ukrainian Nazis
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/08/germany-prosecutes-aid-ukrainian-nazis/
with Max Bmumenthal and Hinrich Bücker, founder of
Berlin’s COOP Antiwar Cafe
(44:51)
+
“The New
Normal Left”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/04/the-new-normal-left/
by CJ Hopkins
+
WATCH:
“Finding Mental Health”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/03/watch-finding-mental-health-solutionswatch/
with James Corbett
(38:36)
+
Roger Waters
V. the Machine: Inside the Pink Floyd Frontman's
Battle For Free Speech in Germany
by Jessica Buxbaum
Roger Waters is facing pushback from Germany. City authorities have
canceled his upcoming concert over claims the Pink Floyd frontman
is anti-Semitic. Yet activists say his experience is not an isolated incident
when it comes to support for Palestine.
In February,
Frankfurt’s City Council canceled Waters’s concert
scheduled for May 28, stating in a press
release that the musician “is considered one of the most widely spread
anti-Semites in the world.” City officials cited Waters’ advocacy for a
cultural boycott of Israel as one of the reasons for his alleged anti-Semitism.
When reached for comment, Frankfurt City Council referred MintPress
News to its aforementioned press release.
Waters responded by pursuing
legal action against the city for his event cancellation. “My lawyers are
taking steps to ensure that my concerts in Munich and Frankfurt in May 2023
take place as contracted,” Waters said.
Munich had filed a motion to cancel his upcoming concert but voted
against the measure on March 22. In a statement to MintPress
News, the city council said canceling Waters’ concert “would be illegal and
would violate supreme court decisions.” A similar
motion was tabled in Cologne.
Waters also addressed the anti-Semitism allegations and his views on
Israel. In a statement, Waters said:
I want to state for the record and once and for all that I am not and
never have been antisemitic and nothing that anyone
can say or publish will alter that. My well-publicized views relate entirely to
the policies and actions of the Israeli government and not with the peoples of
Israel.”
In addition to Waters’ legal threats, more than 20,000 artists, writers,
and public figures have signed a petition demanding
Waters perform in Frankfurt.
“The officials vilifying Waters are engaging in a dangerous campaign that
purposely conflates criticism of Israel’s illegal and unjust policies with antisemitism,” the petition reads. “This conflation
perpetuates the antisemitic trope which presents Jews
as a monolith who blindly support Israel.”
===========
f.
Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and the Turkey-Syria
Earthquake: An Expert Investigation is Required
by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Destruction, social devastation and the loss of life. Our thoughts
are with the people of Turkey and Syria.
The latest
reports point to a death toll in Turkey and Syria well in excess of
50,000, more than half a million injured, tens of thousands of people missing.
The social devastation and destruction is beyond description. The first and
second earthquakes on February 6, 2023 in Kahramanmaras province in Southern Turkey were respectively
of the magnitude of 7.6 and 7.8 (Richter scale).
A third
earthquake of a magnitude of 6.3 was recorded on February 20th.
In Turkey,
some 530,000 people have been evacuated from the disaster area. Ankara confirms
that “173,000 buildings have so far been recorded as collapsed or severely
damaged, with more than 1.9 million people taking refuge in temporary
shelters or hotels and public facilities.”
In the words
of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: ““We
are living through the most painful days in our history”.
In Syria, the
earthquakes have largely affected the cities of Aleppo, Lattakia and Hama which are within proximity of
Syria’s Northwestern border with Turkey. The latest announced death toll in
Syria was 5,914, with 8.8 million people affected.
President Bachar Al Assad underscored that US-NATO
has been at war with Syria for almost 12 years, while emphasizing that “Syria
has not been an earthquake area for about two and a half centuries”.
In this
article, Part I will focus on the History of Earthquake Activity
in Turkey, while underscoring the fact that prior to the February 6, 2023
earthquake, there was no recent evidence or historical record of
“major earthquake” activity in Southern Anatolia.
Part II will provide a Review of Environmental
Modification Techniques (ENMOD).
Part III will focus on The Convention on the
Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification
Techniques, ratified
in 1977 by the UN General Assembly.
What is significant in regards to the
Turkey-Syria earthquake disaster is that the 1977 UN Convention (cited above)
contains provisions for the conduct of an investigation in regards to “destruction,
damage or injury” incurred by the “State Parties”, under
the auspices of a UN “Consultative Committee of Experts”.
There are also provisions in the
Convention for referral to the United Nations Security Council on behalf
of the “State Parties”. These issues are outlined
in Part IV.
+
US Occupiers
Lash Out as Syria War Draws to an End
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/28/us-occupiers-lash-out-as-syria-war-draws-to-an-end/
by M.K. Bhadrakumar
Washington is
worried about a peace between Damascus and its estranged Arab neighbors — as
well as Turkey — that is marginalizing the U.S. and its allies, writes M.K. Bhadrakumar.
===========
g.
The Macron
Decree That Ignited France
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/30/the-macron-decree-that-ignited-france/
by Muhammed Shabeer
When it bypassed
Parliament and forced through pension system changes, Macron’s government
exposed the anti-democratic deterioration in the Fifth Republic’s
dual-executive system, writes Muhammed Shabeer.
Over 2 million people hit the streets across France on Tuesday, denouncing
the controversial pension reforms pushed by President Emmanuel Macron’s
government.
The reforms
were forcibly passed in the National Assembly on March 16 using Article
49.3 to bypass the parliamentary vote. The move has
further weakened the legitimacy of the reforms, already detested by the
majority of the French working class.
While the
government, headed by Macron and Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, narrowly
survived a no-confidence vote on March 20, the approval rating of the president
has plummeted along with political good will for his neo-liberal Renaissance
(RE) Party, as anger against the anti-worker pension reforms rages across the
country.
The pension
reforms, proposed by the government on Jan. 10, increase the retirement age
from 62 to 64 and stipulate a mandatory 43 years of service for entitlement to
full pension and benefits.
The
groundbreaking mobilizations and work stoppages on Tuesday marked the 10th
major action since Jan. 19 and trade unions reiterated their demand for the
withdrawal of the reforms.
Left-wing
opposition groups are also gearing up toward a national referendum on the
issue. The coalition of trade unions has called for
larger mobilization and strikes on April 6 as well.
The
government has shown no leniency towards the protesters and unleashed security
forces to quell them.
Trade unions,
including the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), have condemned the
government’s insensitivity towards mediation with the unions, as well as
Macron’s outright refusal to roll back the reforms.
+
Police Violence. Has France become a Police State? Bastille 2.0?: 3.5 Million People Mobilize against Macron
by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Bastille 2.0?
The Storming
of the Bastille occurred in Paris on the afternoon of July 14, 1789. The
Bastille was a medieval armory, fortress, and political prison. It was the
symbol of Royal Authority under the reign of King Louis XVI.
The French
monarchy was obliged to accept the authority of the newly proclaimed National
Assembly as well as endorse the fundamental rights contained in the
“Declaration des Droits de l’Homme
et du Citoyen” (Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen), formulated in early August 1789.
More than 230
years later, these fundamental rights (Liberté,
Égalité, Fraternité)
are now being contravened by corrupt governments in France under Macron and
around the world on behalf of a totalitarian and illusive financial
establishment.
+
French
Governments Have a History of Bypassing Parliament
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/03/french-governments-have-a-history-of-bypassing-parliament/
by Mathias Bernard
Far from
constituting an exception, March 16 marks the 100th time under France’s Fifth
Republic that the executive has drawn on special powers to force
through an unpopular measure, writes Mathias Bernard.
Emboldened by united
trade unions, the tug of war between the
street and the government over Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform had mostly
taken on the form of strikes and demonstrations since mid-January.
However, the
government’s decision to bypass the lower chamber by invoking Article 49.3 of
the French constitution on March 16 has now sharply pitted Macron’s relative
majority against opposition parties. On March 20, it survived
a critical no-confidence vote by a mere nine votes, precipitating
the adoption of the bill and prompting thousands to pour into the streets in
spontaneous protests.
Meanwhile, an
ever-growing
majority of French people and protesters reject legislation
that would increase the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64.
Far from
constituting an exception, March 16 marks the 100th time under France’s Fifth
Republic that the executive chose to draw on special powers to force through an
unpopular measure. President Macron used the article once in his first term
(2017-2022), and 11 times since the start of his second term, in June 2022.
Introduced in
the Fifth Republic’s Constitution in 1958 authored by Michel Debré, Article 49 paragraph 3 of France’s Constitution –
known widely as “49.3” – was intended to “rationalise”
the parliamentary system and resolve crises and deadlocks by handing over the
reins to the executive.
Regardless of
their affiliation, successive French governments over the last 20 years
have almost systematically resorted to it to pass projects that profoundly
modify the country’s welfare system or labour regulations
— even if it means backing down afterwards under pressure from the street.
« Situation
sociale en France, divers »
Des manifestations sont, quoi qu'il en soit, prévus dans les jours qui viennent, notamment une grande au 6 avril.
La plupart de ces manifestations sont sur des mots d'ordres légitimes mais limités. Jamais les divers manifestations des mondialistes ne sont pas mise en cause : Big Pharma, Entrée en guerre contre la Russie, "climatisme", ...Les grands syndicats n'ont jamais soutenu les soignants suspendus, ni se sont opposés au PASS, ni s'opposent à l'engrenage dans la guerre ... et aucune vision critique sur le narratif climatique.
Des violences : des casseurs/bruleurs ici ou là. Souvent s'en prennent aux personnes comme vous ou moi. Cela ne dessert pas la cause des manifestants. Je me demande s'il ne sont pas manipulés par le pouvoir pour discréditer le mouvement. Avec pour but derrière donner un prétexte pour déclencher l'article 16 de la constitution.
https://www.vie-publique.fr/fiches/273931-les-pouvoirs-exceptionnels-definis-par-larticle-16-de-la-constitution
On peut y participer tout de même. et discuter ...
***************************************************************************
Voilà un excellent discours décrivant ce qui se passe dans la tête de macron. A ne pas rater 7'30'' seulement
Le mépris et le mensonge assumés : contre-discours du 22 mars 2023
https://crowdbunker.com/v/sUGaBG5bAA4
**************************************************************************
Manifestations les jours qui viennent
Un site où un grand nombre sont répertoriés, je ne les cite pas tous, mais vous pouvez consulter le lien.
https://38.demosphere.net/
Notamment
jeudi 6 avril 2023 à 14h Manifestation interprofesionnelle à Grenoble
Cours Jean Jaurès / Tram Alsace Lorraine - Retour place Verdun et prolongeons son occupation.
https://38.demosphere.net/rv/918
**************************************************************************
Qui attaque la France ? Le discours-choc d'Asselineau à l'occasion des 16 ans de l'UPR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDGwYAbY1Yo
***************************************************************************
La Bulgarie refuse d’envoyer des armes en Ukraine et rejoint la position neutre de la Hongrie et de l’Autriche
https://reseauinternational.net/la-bulgarie-refuse-denvoyer-des-armes-en-ukraine-et-rejoint-la-position-neutre-de-la-hongrie-et-de-lautriche/?fbclid=IwAR3nyPHhcZ8H6v9ihogfV-t2o0kvajghhgeAJG65tyZ_PmJ4VEmx3aKH4n4
**************************************************************************
Covid-19 : les soignants non vaccinés vont être réintégrés, confirme le ministère de la Santé
https://www.ouest-france.fr/sante/virus/coronavirus/covid-19-les-soignants-non-vaccines-vont-etre-reintegres-confirme-le-ministere-de-la-sante-adef5a90-cf13-11ed-bfa8-ac96e5e331e1
Mais cela semble traîner ... et on ne parle pas d'autres professions (pompiers, ...)
**************************************************************************
Communication Grelive
Bonjour à tous, nous organisons une soirée conférence le mardi 04 avril 2023 au 4, place Henri Chapays à Fontaine à partir de 18H30.
A 19h00, nous recevrons Jean François Guilhaudis, Professeur honoraire (relations internationales et droit international) de l'Université Grenoble Alpes, auteur, entre autres, de Relations internationales contemporaines (aux éditions Lexis Nexis).
Il dirige depuis 2014, avec le professeur Louis Balmond, PSEI (Paix et sécurité européenne et internationale), revue numérique en libre accès.
Il nous parlera de la question des armes biologiques qui font leur retour au premier plan des spécialistes en partie à cause de la crise covid.
L'exposé tentera d'expliquer les raisons de ce retour à "la une", les problèmes qui se posent, leur degré de gravité, les moyens dont on dispose ou manque, pour les traiter, et de faire le point de la situation en ce début 2023.
Mais ces points d'actualité, parfois techniques, ne peuvent être abordés valablement, qu'après que l'on ait situé les armes biologiques, parmi les armes de destruction massive, et exposé la manière dont armement et désarmement ont évolué, en ce qui les concerne, depuis la seconde guerre mondiale.
Après cette conférence, un repas sera proposé par Grégory ainsi que des rafraîchissements et des desserts.
De plus nous mettrons en vente une vingtaine de pains bio.
Cordialement.
************************************************************************
Files de gauche : bientôt interdites aux séniors !
https://www.autoplus.fr/actualite/files-de-gauche-bientot-interdites-aux-seniors-914668.html
Après avoir emm... les non-vaccinés, maintenant les vieux ...
************************************************************************
Vidéos du conseil scientifique indépendant (chaque jeudi) archivés ici
https://crowdbunker.com/@CSI
Les synthèses du CSI sont disponibles ici pour les pressés : (mais depuis quelque temps il n'y a pas eu de faites)
https://reinfocovid.fr/syntheses-des-live-du-csi
Derniers Conseils Scientifiques Indépendants
https://crowdbunker.com/v/AdLpvAVo
CSI N°95 16/03/2023
Invité : Annelise Bocquet, Docteur en Biologie-Santé.
Sujet : L'immunodéficience induite par la Spike.
Discutant : Dr Pascal Mensah, collaborateur en recherche sur immunothérapie low-dose.
https://crowdbunker.com/v/SwxXv4Mg
CSI n°96 23/03/2023
Invité : Damien Jeanne, historien
Sujet : Les semeurs de maladie en temps d'épidémie
Discutant : Dr Vincent Reliquet, médecin
https://crowdbunker.com/v/QMFcGwLg
CSI n°97 30/03/2023
Invité : Vincent PAVAN, Mathématicien
Sujet : 12 fois plus contagieux : histoire d'un indicateur truqué
Discutant : Dr Jerome Sainton
https://crowdbunker.com/v/wnR8ie9f
************************************************************************
Autres sources d'information :
Canal Telegram de RSA Grenoble
https://t.me/joinchat/LerguxxOjauEaLQjuz7OGw
Grelive
https://t.me/grelive1
Europeans United Francophones
https://t.me/joinchat/8JW7kBEUExk4Mjdk
REINFO COVID Officiel
https://t.me/reinfocovid_officiel
Anonyme Citoyen
https://t.me/AnonymeCitoyen
il y en a certainement d'autres :
Qui attaque la France ? Le discours-choc d'Asselineau à l'occasion des 16 ans de l'UPR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDGwYAbY1YO
+
“French Streets and American Sofas”
https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/30/patrick-lawrence-french-streets-and-american-sofas/
by Patrick Lawrence
You might be
Brazilian or Malian or Singaporean, it is remarkable the world over to watch
the French explode into the streets of dozens of cities and towns to protest
the imperial president residing in Élysée Palace. It
is altogether singular to follow the demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron as
an American. The French are still citoyens and
take to their streets and public squares. Americans long ago cashed in their
citizenship to live as consumers—and take to their sofas no matter how
abusively political elites treat them, no matter how many wars they start, no
matter how corrupt the financial system, no matter how many people live in
poverty, no matter how grotesque the “defense” budget, no matter how poisoned
the environment, no matter… let me not go on.
Please pass
the Fritos and turn on the big game.
They burned
city hall in Bordeaux last week. The Place de la Concorde, where the French
protested the monarchy in 1789, is again shoulder-to-shoulder every day and
night. Video footage records fires, barricades, appalling confrontations with
baton-wielding CRS, the French riot police. Uncollected garbage is everywhere
in the capital. The luxury shops along the grand boulevards have boarded up
their windows.
This started,
of course, as a protest against Macron’s plan to raise
the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 as part of a sweeping reform of the
pension system. I have heard many Americans ask, “Two years? What’s the big
deal?”
+
French Protesters STORM BlackRock’s Paris Headquarters!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqki_HI1ZRY&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(9:54)
+
“Macron &
Ursula, disaster trip to Beijing”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qQFRV_ijQ4
with Alex Christforou and Alexander Mercouris
(13:58)
+
EUROPE is being RIPPED APART
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnqjvYdoi9E
with Richard
Wolff
(8:11)
+
“Operation Choke Point 2.0”
https://www.corbettreport.com/chokepoint/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
with James Corbett
(41:33)
The specter
of Operation Choke Point 2.0 has just been raised in a recent House Financial
Services Committee meeting. But what was Operation Choke Point 1.0? And why
should we be concerned about this latest attempt to debank
"disfavoured individuals," anyway? Find out
all the details in this week's edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
===========
h.
Why Is Israel
Attacking Syria Nearly Everyday Now?
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/israel-attacking-syria-nearly-everyday/
by Robert Inlakesh
+
Why does
Israel get to do this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uieLCxfMXM&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(3:11)
+
Israel
crosses another red line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiahNP0ifYc
with Max
Blumenthal and Aaron Mate
(1:38:01)
+
The fight to Boycott is not over
https://electronicintifada.net/content/fight-boycott-not-over/37101
by Selma Dabbagh
+
Netanyahu’s
Power Grab Is Shattering the Myth of a United, Democratic Israel
by Miko Peled
A few observations on things surrounding the issue of Israel. For reasons
that are hard to understand at this point, the rapprochement between Iran and
Saudi Arabia has had very little mention in the Israeli press. Considering its
importance and potential impact on the region, it is difficult to see how
Israel is hardly moved by this development. There was an expectation that Saudi
Arabia would normalize relations with Israel. However, now the kingdom not only
has not done so, but they are also building bridges with Iran, Israel’s biggest
nemesis. It is a slap in the face of the U.S. and Israel and may soon be seen
as diplomatic and intelligence failures of epic proportions.
The American
attitude towards Israel has been consistently supportive, and of course, it is
expected that it will continue to be supportive in the foreseeable future. $3.8
billion goes to Israel uninterrupted, even though Amnesty International has
labeled it an apartheid regime. In fact, the U.S. support for Israel is not
just “aid”; it is complicity in crimes against humanity as Israel continues to
oppress the Palestinians.
Governments
around the world discuss recognizing Palestine within the borders of 1967 – and
some have already done so. However, the borders were created by Israel and have
nothing to do with Palestine. Recognizing Palestine within these borders only
legitimizes the Israeli crimes of 1948. There is one Palestine, and its borders
are clear: the Jordan River in the east and the Mediterranean in the west.
Palestine borders Syria and Lebanon in the north and the Gulf of Aqaba in the
South.
Any
recognition of a part of Palestine is really a recognition and legitimization
of the apartheid state of Israel. If the U.K. – or any other government – was
serious about supporting the Palestinian cause, they would recognize
+
More than
‘Democracy’ is at Stake in Israeli Protests
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/more-than-democracy-is-at-stake-in-israeli-protests-2/
by Richard Falk
There are two
interwoven conflicts currently playing out in Israel, but neither, despite the
Western liberal spin, relates to the threatened demise of Israeli democracy.
That concern presupposes that Israel had been a democracy until the recent wave
of extremism arising from the new Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s commitment
to ‘judicial reform.’ A euphemism hid the purpose of such an undertaking, which
was to limit judicial independence by endowing the Knesset with the powers to
impose the will of a parliamentary majority to override court decisions by a
simple majority and exercise greater control over the appointment of judges.
Certainly, these were moves toward institutionalizing a tighter autocracy in
Israel as it would modify some semblance of separation of powers, but not a
nullification of democracy as best expressed by guaranteeing the equal rights
of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religious persuasion.
To be a
Jewish State that confers by its own Basic Law of 2018 an exclusive right of
self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people and asserts supremacy at
the expense of the Palestinian minority of more than 1.7 million persons
undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy, at least with reference to the
citizenry as a whole. As well, Palestinians have long endured discriminatory
laws and practices on fundamental issues that over time have come to have its
government process widely identified as an apartheid regime that is operative
in both the Occupied Palestine Territories and Israel itself.
If language is stretched to its limits, it is possible to regard Israel as an
ethnic-democracy or theocratic democracy, but such terms are vivid
illustrations of political oxymorons.
Since its
establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has denied equal rights to its
Palestinian minority. It has even disallowed any right of return to the 750,000
Palestinians who were coerced to leave during the 1947 War, and are entitled by
international law to return home, at least after combat has ceased. The current
bitter fight between religious and secular Jews centering on the independence
of Israel’s judiciary is from most Palestinian points of view an intramural
squabble, as Israel’s highest courts through the years have overwhelmingly
supported the most internationally controversial moves ‘unlawfully’ restricting
Palestinians, including the establishment of settlements, denial of right of
return, separation wall, collective punishment, the annexation of East
Jerusalem, house demolitions, and prisoner abuse.
On a few
occasions, most notably with respect to reliance on torture techniques used
against Palestinian prisoners, the judiciary has shown slight glimmers of hope
that it might address Palestinian grievance in a balanced manner, but after
more than 75 years of Israel’s existence and 56 years of its occupation of
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, this hope has effectively
vanished.
Nevertheless,
Israel’s control of the political narrative that shaped public opinion allowed
the country be to be legitimized, even celebrated by hyperbolic rhetoric as
‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ and as such, the one country in the
Middle East with whom North America and Europe shared values alongside
interests. In essence, Biden reaffirmed this canard in the text of the
Jerusalem Declaration jointly signed with Yair Lapid, the Prime Minister at the time, during the American
president’s state visit last August. In its opening paragraph, these sentiments
are expressed: “The United States and Israel share is an unwavering commitment
to democracy…”
In the years
before Israel’s election last November resulted in a coalition government
regarded as the most right-wing in the country’s history, the U.S. government
and diaspora Jewry have been at pains to ignore the
devastating civil society consensus that Israel was guilty of inflicting an
apartheid regime to maintain its ethnic dominance was subjugating and exploited
Palestinians living in Occupied Palestine and Israel. Apartheid is outlawed by
international human rights law, and treated in international law as a crime
with a severity second only to genocide. Notable opponents of the extreme
racism of South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and John Dugard have each commented that Israeli apartheid treats
Palestinians worse than the cruelties that South Africa inflicted on their
African majority population, which was condemned at the UN and throughout the
world as internationally intolerable racism. Allegations of Israeli apartheid
have been documented in a series of authoritative reports: UN Economic and
Social Commission for West Asia (2017), Human Rights Watch (2021), B’Tselem (2021), and Amnesty International (2022). Despite
these condemnations, the U.S. Government and liberal pro-Israel NGOs have
avoided even the mention of the apartheid dimension of the Israeli state, not
daring to open the issue for debate by refuting the allegations. As Dugard pointed out when asked what was the greatest
difference between fighting apartheid in South Africa and Israel, he responded:
“..the weaponization of antisemitism.” This has been borne out in my own
experience. There was opposition to anti-apartheid militancy with respect to
South Africa but never the attempt to brand the militants as themselves
wrongdoers, even ‘criminals.’
From these
perspectives, what is at stake in the protests, is whether Israel is to be
treated as an illiberal democracy of the sort fashioned in Hungary by Viktor Orban, diluting the quality of the procedural democracy
that had been operative for Israeli Jews since 1948. The new turn in
Israel gestures toward the kind of majoritarian rule
that has prevailed for the last decade in Turkey, involving a slide toward an
outright intra-Jewish autocracy. Yet we should note that in neither Hungary nor
Turkey have governance structures of an apartheid character emerged, although
both countries have serious issues involving discrimination against minorities.
Turkey has for decades has rejected demands from its
Kurdish minority for equal rights and separate statehood, or at least a strong
version of autonomy. These instances of encroachment on basic human rights at
least have not occurred within a framework of settler colonialism that in
Israel has made Palestinians strangers, virtual aliens, in their own homeland
where they have resided for centuries. Racism is not the only reason to dissent
from the democracy-in-jeopardy discourse,
dispossession may be the more consequential one. If native people were to be
asked whether they worried about the erosion or even the abandonment of
democracy in such settler colonial ‘success stories’ as Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and the U.S. the question itself would have no current existential
relevance to their lives. Native peoples were never meant to be included in the
democratic mandate that these encroaching national cultures adopted so proudly.
Their tragic fate was sealed as soon as the colonial settlers arrived. It was
in each instance one of marginalization, dispossession, and suppression. This indigenous struggle for ‘bare survival’ as distinct peoples
with viable culture and ways of life of their own making. Its
destruction amounts to what Lawrence Davidson has called ‘cultural genocide” in
his pathbreaking book of 2012, which even then
included a chapter condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian society.
Underneath
the encounter among Israeli Jews, which allegedly discloses a chasm so deep as
to threaten civil war in Israel lies the future of the settler colonial project
in Israel. As those that have studied ethnic dispossession in other settler
colonial contexts have concluded, unless the settlers manage to stabilize their
own supremacy and limit international solidarity initiatives, they will
eventually lose control as happened in South Africa and Algeria under very
different schemes of settler domination. It is this sense that the Israel
protests going on need to be interpreted as a double confrontation. What is
explicitly at stake is a bitter encounter between secular and ultra-religious
Jews the outcome of which is relevant to what the Palestinians can expect to be
their fate going forward. There is also the implicit stake between those who
favor maintaining the existing apartheid arrangements resting on discriminatory
control but without necessarily insisting on territorial and demographic
adjustments and those who are intent on using violent means to extinguish the
Palestinian ‘presence’ as any sort of impediment to the further purification of
the Jewish state as incorporating the West Bank, and finally fulfilling the
vision of Israel as coterminous with the whole of the ‘the promised land’
asserted as a biblical entitlement of Jews as interpreted by way of a Zionist
optic.
It is a
mystery where Netanyahu, the pragmatic extremist, stands, and perhaps he has
yet to make up his mind. Thomas Friedman, the most reliable weathervane of
liberal Zionism weighs in with the claim that Netanyahu for the first time in
his long political career has become an ‘irrational’ leader that is no longer
trustworthy from the perspective of Washington because his tolerance of Jewish
extremism is putting at risk the vital relationship with the U.S. and
discrediting the illusion of reaching a peaceful resolution of the conflict by
of diplomacy and the two-state solution. Such tenets of a liberal approach have
long been rendered obsolete by Israeli settlements and land grabs beyond the
1948 green line.
Politically,
Netanyahu needed the support of Religious Zionism to regain power and obtain
support for judicial reform to evade being potentially held personally
accountable for fraud, corruption, and the betrayal of the public trust. Yet
ideologically, I suspect Netanyahu is not as uncomfortable with the scenario
favored by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benezel Smotrich as he pretends. It allows him to shift blame for
dirty deeds in dealing with the Palestinians. To avoid the dreaded South
African outcome, Netanyahu seems unlikely to oppose another final round of
dispossession and marginalization of the Palestinians while Israel completed a
maximal version of the Zionist Project. For now, Netanyahu seems to be riding
both horses, playing a moderating role with respect to the Jewish fight about
judicial reform, while winking slyly at those who make no secret of their
resolve to induce a second nakba (in Arabic,
‘catastrophe’), a term applied specifically to the 1948 expulsion. For many
Palestinians, the nakba is experienced
as an ongoing process rather than an event limited by time and place with highs
and lows.
My guess is
that Netanyahu, himself an extremist when addressing Israelis in Hebrew, has
still not decided whether he can continue to rise both
horses or must soon choose which to ride. Having appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to key
positions vesting control over Palestinians and as the chief regulators of
settler violence it is pure mystification to consider Netanyahu as going
through a political midlife crisis or finding himself a captive of his
coalition partners. What he is doing is letting it happen, blaming the
religious right for excesses, but not unhappy with their tactics of seeking a
victorious end of the Zionist Project.
Liberal
Zionists should be deeply concerned about the degree to which these
developments in Israel give rise to a new wave of real antisemitism,
which is the opposite of the weaponized kind that
Israel and its supporters around the world have been using as state propaganda
against critics of state policies and practices. These targeted critics of
Israel have no hostility whatsoever to Jews as a people and feel respectful
toward Judaism as a great world religion. Rather than respond substantively to
criticisms of its behavior, Israel has for more than a decade deflected
discussion of its wrongdoing by pointing a finger at its critics and some
institutions, especially the UN and International Criminal Court, where
allegations of Israeli racism and criminality have been made on the basis of
evidence and scrupulous adherence to existing standards of the rule of law.
Such an approach, emphasizing the implementation of international law,
contrasts with the irresponsible Israeli evasions of substantive allegations by
leveling attacks on critics rather than either complying with the applicable
norms or engaging substantively by insisting that their practices toward the
Palestinian people are reasonable in light of legitimate security concerns,
which was the principal tactic during the first decades of their existence.
+
Israel’s long
war between the generals and extremists is not going away
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57438.htm
by Jonathan
Cook
Israel edged
closer to civil war over the weekend than at any point in its history. By
Monday night, in a bid to avert chaos, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to
put a temporary halt to his plans
to neuter the Israeli courts.
By then, city centres had been brought to a
standstill by angry mass protests. The country’s attorney general had declared
Netanyahu to be acting illegally. Crowds had besieged the parliament building in
Jerusalem. Public institutions were shuttered, including Israel’s
international airport and its embassies abroad, in a
general strike. That was on top of a near-mutiny in recent weeks from elite
military groups, such as combat pilots and
reservists.
The crisis culminated with Netanyahu sacking his defence minister on Sunday evening after Yoav Gallant warned that the legislation was tearing apart
the military and threatening Israel’s combat readiness. Gallant’s dismissal
only intensified the fury.
The turmoil had been building for weeks as Netanyahu’s so-called “judicial overhaul” moved closer
to the statute books.
At the end of last week, he managed to pass a first measure, which
shields him from being declared unfit for office - a critical matter given that
the prime minister is in the midst of a corruption trial. But the rest of his
package has been put on pause. That includes provisions giving his government absolute control over the
appointment of senior judges and the power to override Supreme Court rulings
It is hard to see a simple way out of the impasse. Even as Netanyahu
bowed before the weight of the backlash on Monday, the pressure began mounting
on his own side.
+
Netanyahu surrounds himself with extremists promoting violence
by Michael F. Brown
+
The violent
nature of the new political concoction created by Netanyahu
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57446.htm
by Ramzy Baroud
By his own
admission, Israel’s new Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is a “fascist homophobe”. This declaration, which
he made on January
16, should be enough to accentuate the violent nature of the new political
concoction created by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last December.
Though Smotrich is not the only politician in Netanyahu’s cabinet
with a track record of violence, both real and rhetorical, he is a special case.
Unlike his boss, Smotrich does not feel the need for
doublespeak or occasional diplomacy.
In recent
months, Smotrich has become internationally famous,
not because of his financial genius that could resolve Israel’s impending financial problems as a result
of the weakening of the country’s legal system. Nor does the man have the
answers, or even interest, in confronting Israel’s inherent socio-economic
equality. None of this. Smotrich
is mostly popular for his racism.
In 2016, Smotrich made headlines
when he suggested that Jewish and Palestinian women should be separated in
maternity wards. His logic is as bigoted as it was foolish: “My wife really
isn’t a racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest and doesn’t want those
mass parties that are the norm among the families of Arab women after birth.”
At that time,
Smotrich was a Knesset member, representing the
Jewish Home party, before later joining the Union of Right-Wing Parties, Yamina, the Jewish Home and Yamina,
again, and, finally, his current Religious Zionist Party. This indicates that Smotrich, himself an illegal Jewish settler from Kedumim, near the Occupied West Bank city of Qalqiliya, found an ideological home in most of Israel’s
current rightwing political platforms.
In Israel’s
right-wing parties, racism is an important prerequisite to succeed in
politics. In fact, this is precisely how Itamar
Ben-Gvir rose from being a youth
leader of the extremist Kach party to becoming the
country’s national security minister. Now, both characters, Smotrich
and Ben-Gvir, hold the keys to the fate of many
Palestinian communities, and both are eager to expand illegal Jewish
settlements, regardless of the illegality of such action, and the bloodbath
resulting from it.
When hundreds
of illegal Israeli Jewish settlers torched the Palestinian village of Huwwara on February 26, burning many homes,
killing one Palestinian and wounding over 100 others, Smotrich,
now a minister, had something to say about the violence. He objected, not to
the pogrom against a peaceful Palestinian community, but because, in his view,
the village should have been “wiped out” by the Israeli army, not settlers.
Smotrich later explained his comments
as a “slip of the tongue in a storm of emotions”, but such an unconvincing
statement was a result of a compromise, due to practical concerns over Smotrich’s travel access to various western countries. When
mainstream western media quickly bypassed Smotrich’s
outright call for genocide in Huwwara, the man
returned to his old, racist language.
There is “no
such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian
people,” Smotrich preached to an
enthusiastic crowd of supporters on March 19, during a recent visit to France.
“The Palestinian people is an invention that is less
than 100 years old,” he added.
To make
matters worse, Smotrich was speaking from a podium
that featured a map of the so-called ‘Greater Israel’, which includes
modern-day Jordan and other Arab lands. Three days later, the Jordanian
Parliament voted in favor of
a resolution that recommends the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador in Amman.
But where is
Washington amid this Israeli political chaos? Following the Huwwara
comments, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price referred to Smotrich’s comments as “repugnant” and called on Netanyahu
to publicly disavow them. Of course, neither Netanyahu reined in Smotrich, nor did the US challenge Israel any further. Not
even official Israeli calls for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seem
to impact the ‘unbreakable bond’ between Washington and Tel Aviv.
But
throughout the discussion and rage over Smotrich’s
comments, many of us, wittingly or otherwise, ignored some fundamental facts
about racism in Israel and its founding Zionist ideology:
First, Smotrich is a high-ranking elected official and a member of
the most stable government in Israel in years. He is not an aberration. His
extremist ideology is now the mainstream thinking in Israel’s
“most rightwing government in history”.
Second, Smotrich’s call for the destruction of Huwwara
is not an alien position in Israel’s history of ethnic cleansing and “incremental genocide”. Aside from
the destruction and depopulation of over 500 villages and towns in historic
Palestine during the Nakba of 1947-48, Israel’s
colonial expansion in the Occupied Territory is a continuation of the same
violent legacy. Every illegal Israeli Jewish settlement in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem stands atop Palestinian land, be it the ruins of an ethnically
cleansed village, an orchard or a privately owned farm. Numerous Huwwaras had to be ‘wiped out’ for this colonial regime to
be sustained.
Third, the
map of the so-called “Greater Israel” is not a recent invention, neither by Smotrich, Ben-Gvir nor even Netanyahu
himself. In fact, it is older than the state of Israel, as it was adopted by
Zionist Revisionist groups, such as the and the Irgun, who played a critical role in the establishment of
Israel over the ruins of Palestine.
And, finally,
the racist notion that Palestinians do not exist, although functional in terms
of dehumanizing Palestinians, is also an old trope. It is directly linked to
the old Zionist slogan that Palestine was a “land without a people
for a people without a land”. Many derivatives of this racist colonial slogan
were uttered by Israeli politicians throughout the years, the most famous of
which being that of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in an interview with the
Sunday Times in 1969. “There were no such thing as Palestinians … They did not
exist,” she said.
Though the
world may have grown less tolerant of such racism, Israel itself remained the
same. Indeed, the Smotrich and Ben-Gvir generation is but the logical descendant of that of
David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. Therefore, condemning Smotrich’s
comments, while continuing to embrace Israel and celebrate Zionism is not only
hypocritical, but also useless.
Smotrich knows this well, thus his continued racism, desire for
colonial expansion, and outright call for the destruction of entire Palestinian
communities.
+
Israel
Assaults Worshippers In Al-Aqsa
Mosque, Threatens Multi-Front War
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/israel-assaults-al-aqsa-multi-front-war/
by Robert Inlakesh (April 5, 2023)
During the
early hours of Wednesday morning, Israeli occupation police forces raided the
al-Aqsa Mosque compound and severely beat a number of
worshippers at the site. The raid was carried out in order to prevent
Palestinian worshippers from remaining inside the Holy Site, at times when
extremist Israeli settlers planned to storm the area. The response to the
horrifying Israeli attack sparked instant Palestinian retaliation.
On Wednesday,
Israeli occupation forces raided the al-Aqsa Mosque
compound, the third Holiest site for Muslims, at around 12:00 am. Israeli
forces opened fire on worshippers, primarily in the Qibli
prayer hall area, shooting worshippers with rubber-coated steel bullets, tear
gas, and threw stun grenades. Videos quickly began to emerge from the scene of
the Israeli assault, showing occupation forces repeatedly beating defenseless
worshippers, already laying on the ground, who
attempted to use plastic chairs to defend against being beaten with batons.
Palestinian medical workers were, for hours, blocked from attending to the
injured, which included elderly men, Palestinian guards, and women. The Red Crescent reported that as many as 450 Palestinians had been
either injured, arrested, or both.
+
Face the
facts: Israel relies on settler violence
One of many cars destroyed by Israeli settlers during the Huwwara pogrom.
Shadi Jarar’ah APA images
https://electronicintifada.net/content/face-facts-israel-relies-settler-violence/37306
by Ahmed Abu Artema
+
Israel's protest
movement can't succeed without embracing Palestinian liberation
with Marc Steiner
(audio, 30:26)
+
“How Zionism
helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust”
https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-zionism-helped-nazis-perpetrate-holocaust/37326
by Asa Winstanley
+
Hopelessly
devoted to Israel
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/hopelessly-devoted-israel
by David Cronin
+
UK drowns
criticism of Netanyahu with trade deal
https://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-drowns-criticism-netanyahu-trade-deal/37396
by Tim Llewellyn
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in the UK this week on the first day of
Ramadan.
He is
guaranteed a warm welcome by the British government, whose job it is to see
that any criticism of his extremist, racist administration is drowned
in talk of a lucrative trade deal, the “malign
influence” of Iran and the “scourge of anti-Semitism.”
And he is
guaranteed a loud welcome by those who see Netanyahu for what he is: the prime
minister of an international law-breaking nation that intends to end the
struggle for Palestinian rights.
This is a
prime minister whose government includes senior ministers who recommend the
total removal of, or second-class status for, all Palestinians, from river to
sea. Netanyahu himself has been clear that Jews
have an “exclusive and indisputable right” to all historic Palestine, including
1967 occupied territory.
Obfuscation
is at the heart of British efforts to ignore all this and to disguise
Netanyahu’s visit as crowning a triumphant UK-Israel trade and cooperation
deal, signed on Tuesday, and estimated to be worth
more than $8.5 billion (we do not know how this is split), covering security,
technology and cybersecurity.
Political
emphasis in the agreement, dubbed the “2030 roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral
relations,” is on anti-Semitism and Iran.
The matter of
the rapid descent into killing
and chaos, exacerbated and prompted by the new Israeli power constellation of
Zionist settlers and religious extremists that Netanyahu oversees, will, it
appears, be a muted add-on. The document stresses only the need for “all
parties” to end the violence.
Nowhere in
this trade deal is there any hint that Israel is for the 56th year violating
international law in its occupation and oppression of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and what has become the de facto annexation of their lands (to which the
finance minister Bezalel Smotrich
has added Jordan).
There is no
vital requirement that any such agreement should carry with it severe and
practicable restrictions, at the very least on British trade with and
investment in Jewish settlement concerns on the West Bank.
It can all be
presented as business as normal, it appears, by trying to create significant
space between the Israeli prime minister and the extremists by his side in
cabinet. But this is as unreal as everything else that informs Britain’s policy
of privileging Israel despite the evidence: Netanyahu, after all, came to power
again by gaining the support of racist outliers.
+
For Israelis,
Ethnic Cleansing Palestinians is Fine, But Judicial
Reform is a Red Line
by Miko Peled
The
successful mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Israelis to stand up
against the Netanyahu government is proof of one thing: Israelis do not want to
end the oppression and killing of Palestinian people.
Israeli
society has never seen such ongoing massive anti-government protests. So it is
clear that had Israelis wanted to, they could have mobilized around lifting the
brutal and inhumane blockade Israel has imposed on Palestinians living in the
Gaza Strip, or the release of political prisoners or any of the myriad
mechanisms Israel uses to oppress and terrorize Palestinians.
+
Palestine
refugees from Syria lose hope in Gaza
https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-refugees-syria-lose-hope-gaza/37431
by Ruwaida Amer
Refugees from
Syria have been protesting in Gaza for better conditions.
Youssef Abu Watfa APA images
It was not
the way it was meant to be.
When Alaa Barakat came to Gaza from
Syria in 2012, he had hoped for a brighter future.
But going
from Syria’s conflict to Gaza turned out to be swapping one troubled place for
another.
“We lived a
very happy life in Syria [until the fighting started],” Barakat,
52, told The Electronic Intifada. “I had a job and a house. I provided my
children with everything they needed.”
According to
Gaza’s Department of Refugee Affairs, 365 Palestinian-Syrian families came to
Gaza in 2012-2013 to escape Syria’s fighting.
For many, the
choice of Gaza now feels like the wrong decision. Many wish they had tried to
go elsewhere.
Barakat is originally from Gaza and still has family there, but
he was born in Syria and is now assessing his options. He wants to save his
children from a difficult life in Gaza, but sees no easy way of securing this.
“My friend
returned to Syria with his disabled children because he felt he couldn’t raise
them [in Gaza]. He has found the conditions [in Syria] much worse.”
He and his
family’s constant homelessness is taking its toll, and refugee agencies,
whether UNRWA, the body specifically for Palestine refugees, or UNHCR, the body
that cares for all refugees, are of only limited help.
“Do you think
I can pay rent for a house and meet the expenses of five people by driving a
taxi?” Barakat, a father of four, said.
+
How Israeli
cyber weapons are taking over Latin America
https://www.mintpressnews.com/israeli-cyber-weapons-taking-latin-america/283926/
by Jessica Buxbaum
Salvadoran
police bought the cyber surveillance technology through EyeTech
Solutions, one of the main Israeli intermediaries selling spyware across Latin
America. The majority of the offensive cyber market’s transactions are executed
through intermediaries, who often receive a 12-15
percent commission. The Mexico-based Israeli firm is run by Yaniv
Zangilevitch, a former spy official in the Israeli army
and personal friend of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Often intermediaries establish contracts due to their connections with
government officials, as is the case of Samuel Weinberg. Weinberg’s
relationship with former Secretary of Public Security Genaro
García Luna helped him secure several business
agreements. García Luna was found guilty in the United
States last week for drug trafficking and organized crime. Now, the Mexican
Financial Intelligence Unit is investigating the Weinberg
family for their relationship with García Luna, as
well as their involvement with companies selling products involved in political
espionage scandals.The Weinbergs
could not be reached for comment.
+
Solar energy lights up Gaza
It’s estimated that at least a third of Gaza’s population and more than
50 percent of its businesses now use solar panels.
Ashraf Amra APA
images
https://electronicintifada.net/content/solar-energy-lights-gaza/37421
by Khuloud Rabah
Sulaiman and Rakan Abed
Ahmed al-Haj, the owner of al-Bahhar
seafood restaurant along the coast near Gaza City, uses solar energy to run his
restaurant and his nearby fish farm.
Fish farms
are electricity-intensive endeavors. Seawater must be regularly pumped into the
tanks, and water propellers must operate nonstop to provide a healthy
environment for the fish. Without electricity, the fish cannot thrive.
Before the
solar panels were installed in 2010, al-Haj was
paying nearly $42,000 in operating costs each year, the bulk of it going to
fuel to keep the electricity on.
His operating
costs had risen substantially when Israel imposed its siege on Gaza in 2007.
And al-Haj, like all other residents of Gaza, has
faced protracted power outages that reduce
the quality of living and make it near impossible to run a profitable business.
===========
i.
Do You Have
the JFK Secret Society Speech? - Questions For Corbett
#099
https://www.corbettreport.com/qfc-jfksecret/
with James
Corbett
(42:22)
Paul writes in to ask if I have the
full JFK "secret society" speech. Why, yes, I do! And guess what?
The full speech shows that those highly-edited two-minute YouTube
videos you saw back in the day were misleading at best and downright dishonest
at worst. Wait until you hear what JFK was actually saying.
Silence As
Ukraine/Israel Continue To Kill Abroad, Vinyl Chloride In Woman's Urine &
The MAGA Trap
with Ryan Cristián
(2:44:20)
===========
j.
“GMOs For Thee, Not For Me!”
https://www.corbettreport.com/nwnw515/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
with James Corbett and James Evens Pilato
(24:58)
+
What Trump’s
Indictment Means
https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-trumps-indictment-means/5814925
by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
President
Donald Trump is being arraigned on the basis
of sealed charges. It is unclear why the charges are sealed.
Imagine arresting someone on the basis of charges kept from the person.
It happens in America as it did in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Perhaps the
charges are kept secret so that the media can defame Trump by reporting that
his arrest is “related to his alleged involvement in a hush money payment and
subsequent cover-up involving a purported affair with adult film star Stormy
Daniels,” as Sputnik International reported this morning. Note that
Sputnik is a Russian news service and not part of the US media’s campaign
against President Trump. But as the charges are sealed, Sputnik only has the US
presstitutes’ account of the indictment. The
account is totally false.
Trump is not
arrested for paying extortion money to a porn star, who
saw her opportunity for extortion when Trump was announced as a presidential
candidate. No affair has been proven. It is ordinary for people
being extorted pay up in order to avoid controversy that presstitutes
would turn into fact.
+
“Banana
Republic”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/banana-republic?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone, MD, MS
To Jill and
Robert, It feels like an unraveling.
The
indictment of President Trump is making headlines across the world - everyone
has a strong opinion, from the state sponsored media lambasting Trump and any
MAGA protesters to the hysterics of the Twitteri
calling out the hypocrisy of the far-left prosecution.
Frankly, for
me - it just feels wrong on so many levels. Not having to do with guilt or
innocence of the individual, but what this prosecution says about our
government.
It has been
years since Trump was first investigated on these charges. Prosecutors have
looked at the case over the years and have decided that either there wasn’t
enough to move forward on or that the break in public trust wasn’t worth the
crimes committed. In either case, the US government has never indicted a
sitting or ex president.
Then there
are the charges - The indictment lists a total of 34 felony counts, with a
maximum of 134 years in prison. This seems rather extreme…
As primary
season is just getting started, it all feels like this is all about the 2024
election cycle.
Politics.
In life, we
all have choices to make. Sometimes we make the wrong choice. Right now, our
government is making a very wrong choice.
Because it
seems like everything in our government is about winning the next election. Not
about right and wrong. Let alone about good governance.
Which brings me to a related point. That is the use or overuse of
specific words to label anything not left, as “conservative” or “far-right”.
+
Trump
Derangement Syndrome Returns
https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump-derangement-syndrome-returns-0
by Margaret Kimberley
If democrats
were smart, Donald Trump would be a disgraced former president, forgotten by
all but his most ardent admirers. But they aren't smart and they may have given
him a political resurrection.
Donald Trump
is back in the news. He is facing a 34-count indictment for paying people to be
silent about his private life. What should be fodder for the gossip pages has
instead resulted in criminal charges, an
historic precedent for a former president. The amount of news coverage is
surpassed only by the level of glee created by scenes of his arrest.
Trump is
certainly a polarizing figure, more so perhaps than any other president. His
unexpected win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 resulted in trauma for millions of
people who have never recovered and they still allow the man they dislike to
live rent free in their heads.
As this
columnist has pointed out, neither
Trump nor any other president has ever faced consequences for their worst
offenses, crimes against humanity. George Bush invaded Iraq, Barack Obama
destroyed Libya. Both men enjoy popularity and have no reason to fear any kin of censure for killing thousands of people. Trump also
committed such crimes in office, such as killing up to 40,000 Venezuelans
through his sanctions regime, and assassinating Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. As with his
predecessors, those crimes go unpunished.
Trump’s
prosecution is obviously political. He is charged with falsifying business records , which can
be treated as a misdemeanor but Manhattan’s district attorney says he sought to
avoid taxes and influence an election, allowing him to charge Trump with
felonies. The Justice Department already declined to charge Trump with election
interference. It seems that District Attorney Alvin Bragg looked for something,
anything, that would rise to the level of a felony
charge. One doesn’t need to be a Trump supporter to conclude that thumbs were
on the scales of justice.
The arraignment was a typical media and political circus. Conservative
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene came to protest and proclaimed Trump’s
innocence, while Congressional Black Caucus member Jamaal Bowman showed up for
the purpose of shouting her down. Bowman yelled that Greene
should, “Take her ass back to Washington,” and added with rhetorical flourish,
“Do something about gun violence. Do something about affordable housing. Do
something about childhood poverty.” The same could be said of Bowman, who along
with his colleagues does nothing to address any of those issues, and who refuse
to confront Joe Biden who was marketed as “the most progressive president since
FDR,” while emergency SNAP nutritional
benefits end and millions may be thrown off of Medicaid , as the
pandemic era automatic enrollment ends.
Bowman and others of his ilk make far too much of the impact of the Trump
indictmentcalling it, “... one step toward accountability,” and
adding, “... America needs a reckoning and I think Trump is essential to that
reckoning, when you consider his rhetoric, his behavior and his policies.” This
country certainly needs a reckoning, for many reasons, but there is nothing
about Trump being criminally charged for offenses that had nothing to do with
his office, that addresses the terrible wrongs that are committed by this
system every day.
+
Lying about Lying: Why We Must Revisit the Definition of “Fake News”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/lying-lying-must-revisit-definition-fake-news/284239/
by Ramzy Baroud
The phrase
‘fake news’ continues to be deployed routinely in US politics. In a polarized
political atmosphere, both Republicans and Democrats distrust media
organizations affiliated with opposing parties. This means that most of what is
uttered or written by CNN is ‘fake news’ for Republicans, and much of what
appears in Republicans-affiliated media is ‘fake news’ for Democrats.
The phrase is
now so prevalent and has multiple meanings to the point that it is impossible
to agree on a common definition. Even ‘fact checking’ organizations or news
desks contribute to the troubling phenomenon of ‘fake news’ by selectively
fact-checking news and information affiliated with one side of the political
aisle while ignoring the other.
Some traced the ‘fake
news’ story to a small Eastern European town called Veles
in Macedonia. This particular claim is associated with Craig Silverman, a media
editor at Buzzfeed. “We ended up finding a small
cluster of news websites all registered in the same town,” Silverman was quoted by the BBC.
The objective of these websites seemed mostly financial, ‘clickbait’
as they are called, to lure in unsuspecting users to seemingly unlikely
headlines.
Later, the
term became very political. It was former US President Donald Trump who publicized
the term, transforming it into the major phenomenon seen today. Mike Wendling of the BBC, however, claimed that it was
Trump’s staunch rival in the 2016 US Presidential elections, Hillary Clinton,
who first used the term in a speech in December of the same year.
+
The Donald
Trump Problem
https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-the-donald-trump-problem/284183/
by Chris Hedges
Donald Trump
— facing four
government-run investigations, three criminal and one civil, targeting himself
and his business — is not being targeted because of his crimes. Nearly every
serious crime he is accused of carrying out has been committed by his political
rivals. He is being targeted because he is deemed dangerous for his willingness, at least
rhetorically, to reject the Washington Consensus regarding
neoliberal free-market and free-trade policies, as well as the idea that the
U.S. should oversee a global empire. He has not only belittled the ruling
ideology, but urged his supporters to attack the apparatus that maintains the
duopoly by declaring the 2020 election illegitimate.
The Donald
Trump problem is the same as the Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced
to resign under the threat of impeachment, it wasn’t for his involvement in war
crimes and crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal use of the
CIA and other federal agencies to spy upon, intimidate,
harass and destroy radicals,
dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down because he targeted other
members of the ruling political and economic establishment. Once Nixon, like
Trump, attacked the centers of power, the media was unleashed to expose abuses
and illegalities it had previously minimized or ignored.
Members of
Nixon’s re-election campaign illegally bugged the
headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office
building. They were caught after they broke back into
the offices to fix the listening devices. Nixon was implicated in both the
pre-election illegality, including spying on political opponents, as well as
attempting to use federal agencies to cover up the crime. His administration
maintained an “enemies list” that included well
known academics, actors, union leaders, journalists, businessmen and
politicians.
One 1971 internal White House memo entitled, “Dealing
with our Political Enemies” — drafted by White House Counsel John Dean, whose
job it was to advise the president on the law — described a project designed to
“use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
Nixon’s conduct, and that of his closest aides, was clearly illegal and
deserving of prosecution. There were 36 guilty verdicts or guilty pleas associated with
the Watergate scandal two years after the break-in. But it was not the crimes
Nixon committed abroad or against dissidents that secured his political
execution but the crimes he carried out against the Democratic Party and its
allies, including in the establishment press.
“The political center was subjected to an attack with techniques that are
usually reserved for those who depart from the norms of acceptable political
belief,” Noam Chomsky wrote in The
New York Review of Books in 1973, a year before Nixon’s resignation.
As Edward Herman and Chomsky point out in
their book, “Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media:”
The answer is clear and concise: powerful groups are capable of defending
themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when
their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities
and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or
dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed
on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether.
This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security
precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the
privileged.”
What led to the unraveling of Nixon’s government, and what lies at the
core of the attacks against Trump, is the fact that, like Nixon, Trump’s targets
included “the rich and respectable, spokesmen for official ideology, men who
are expected to share power, to design social policy, and to mold popular
opinion,” as Chomsky noted about
Nixon at the time. “Such people are not fair game for persecution at the hands
of the state.”
This is not to minimize Trump’s crimes. Trump — nearly even in the
polls with President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race — appears to have
committed several misdemeanors and serious felonies.
In November 2022, the Department of Justice appointed a
special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents at
his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and any potential
criminal liability resulting from that act, as well as any unlawful
interference with the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election.
Separately, a district attorney in Georgia is working with a special
purpose grand jury in
relation to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. A key piece
of evidence is the notorious phone call between
Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger,
in which the president kept insisting he needed more votes to be found. Charges
in this case could include conspiracy
to commit election fraud, racketeering and pressuring and/or threatening public
officials.
The Manhattan district attorney has been investigating the $130,000
Trump used to pay off the porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly
had a sexual relationship. This payment was misreported in the Trump
Organization’s records as a legal retainer in violatation
of campaign finance laws.
Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia
James is bringing a civil
lawsuit alleging the Trump Organization lied about its assets in order to
secure bank loans. If the attorney general’s lawsuit is successful, Trump and
other members of his family may be barred from doing business in New York,
including buying property there for five years.
Trump’s alleged offenses should
be investigated. Though, the cases involving Daniels and the retention of
classified documents seem relatively minor and similar to those committed by
Trump’s political opponents.
Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the DNC agreed to pay
a fine of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabelling a
$175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited
“Steele Dossier,” as “legal expenses.” The improper retention of classified
documents has typically resulted in a slap on the wrist when other powerful
politicians have been investigated. Clinton, for example, used private
email servers instead of a government email account when she was secretary of
state. The FBI concluded that she sent and received materials classified as top
secret on her private server. Ultimately, FBI director James Comey declined to
prosecute her. Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence and Biden also had
classified documents at their homes, though we are told this may have been
“inadvertent.” The discovery of these classified documents, rather than
triggering outrage in most of the media, initiated a conversation about “overclassification.” Former CIA director David Petraeus was given two
years probation and a $100,000 fine after he admitted to providing highly
classified “black books” that contained handwritten classified notes about
official meetings, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and the names of
covert officers to his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was
also writing a
fawning biography of Petraeus.
+
Trump’s Indictment and the Downfall of America
https://off-guardian.org/2023/04/04/trumps-indictment-and-the-downfall-of-america/
by Karen Hunt
+
“Now Do
Bush”: Trump Arraignment Contrasts Typical Immunity for US Leaders
by Jessica Corbett
+
How The Rich
Are Prepping For End Times, And Why
https://www.mintpressnews.com/how-the-rich-are-prepping-for-end-times-and-why/284215/
with Lee Camp
(12:42)
The ultrarich are prepping for doomsday right now. France is on
fire. The U.S. ruling elite and the mainstream media they own are avoiding
reporting on it. The American rich want to exploit the workers more and more,
and facing the wrath of the “common man and woman” is their greatest fear. So
they have been increasingly coming up with ways to avoid the guillotines.
The ruling
class knows what’s coming: social instability caused by a combination of the
climate crisis, banks failing, the soul-killing inequality of late-stage
capitalism, and the impending dilution of the petrodollar.
So what’s
going on here?
Think of it
this way – When you’re on a ship or in a building, and you see all the rats
running toward you, you know there’s some horrible shit behind them because
they’re the first ones to flee. You see rats running; you run with them! Well,
the rats of our society are beginning to flee. The richest of the rich are
making a run for it.
The rats, I
mean the rich, are fleeing to higher ground or
sometimes to multimillion-dollar underground bunkers.
The decline
of the petrodollar is a major factor driving their fear. The U.S. has been able
to control much of the world for close to a century because every country has
needed to hold dollars in order to buy crude oil. The petrodollar system
allowed the U.S. to create a virtually endless supply of dollars. They just
printed whatever they wanted. A trillion dollars a year for
the military? Easy. Trillion-dollar
subsidies for Big Oil? Cool! Four trillion dollars for
Wall Street crooks during the pandemic. Of course!
This didn’t
create cataclysmic inflation because no matter how much they printed, there
would always be demand for those dollars abroad. If almost any other country
printed that much money, their currency would have collapsed faster than Morgan
Spurlock’s career.
============
k.
Fascism
Denial American Style: Exceptionalism in the Ivory
Tower
by Anthony DiMaggio
It borders on
cliché the number of times historians lament how “fascism” is an over-used
term. But Sinclair Lewis, writing about the specter of fascism a century ago,
understood something most historians don’t – that U.S. intellectual culture is
loathe to acknowledge fascist undercurrents in this country. I attribute this
hostility to intellectuals’ belief that their nation is an exceptionalist
democracy – hence fascism “can’t happen here.”
Historian
Bruce Kuklick’s Fascism Comes to America is a
great example of an academic bemoaning the abuse of “fascism” in U.S.
discourse, despite the book refusing to engage with evidence that suggests the
opposite. One should read this review, not so much as an indictment of his
book, but as an indictment of a larger intellectual culture that’s elevating
this book to the status of a serious work of scholarship, while ignoring
critical scholarship that’s already been published on fascism in America.
Kuklick writes that he’s interested in “the spectacle of fascism
in the United States.” Which is to say he thinks it should be
understood as a concept that political thinkers and practitioners use time and
time again to further their own personal political agendas. He talks of
fascism as something that exists in “the imagination” of Americans – leaving
his readers with the distinct impression that there’s little substantive
meaning to the term outside of it being wielded as a weapon against one’s
opponents. Kuklick says as much multiple times in his
book, writing that fascism is one of those “political swear words” that people
use to malign others. Throughout our history, he argues, “people who did not
like someone else’s politics could always find in that politics enough to label
the other fellow a fascist.”
For Kuklick, fascism discourse is “a growth industry.” He cites
examples throughout modern history in film and other popular culture mediums,
including Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Philip Dick’s The Man in the
High Castle. Kuklick believes that discourses on
fascism are an American “obsession” – which would suggest a lack of rationality
in our political culture. He elaborates by saying about U.S. discourse that
“political talk” in America “is puzzling, artful distortion. Much of politics
is linguistic theater, the showy and indiscriminate ejaculation of words. The
evaluations of officials, entertainers, and pundits have a crooked relation to
reality, and the scholarly analysis of politics is conducted with these
evaluations.” This is not the sort of language used by someone who thinks the
U.S. is suffering from a threat of rising fascism today.
There are at
least three major problems with this book. First, the available evidence
pertaining to contemporary political discourse suggests the author is far off
base when he claims that fascism is an abused term and that it’s a massive
growth industry. Second, there’s little to no effort in this book to seriously
engage with recent scholars who argue, contrary to Kuklick,
that fascist politics are ascending in the era of Trump. By refusing to
adequately address these competing works (or address them at all), Kuklick fails to demonstrate why warnings about fascism
should classified as imagined, embellished, paranoid, or wrong. Third, the
author’s dismissal of a fascist threat speaks to his, and other privileged
academics’ disconnect from the struggles that repressed people face, as related
to white nationalism, rightwing demagoguery, and patriarchal-authoritarian
politics.
Marginal
Scholarship . . .
+
The Tragic
U.S. Choice to Prioritize War Over Peacemaking
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/the-tragic-u-s-choice-to-prioritize-war-over-peacemaking/
by Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J. S.
Davies
In a
brilliant Op-Ed published in
the New York Times, the Quincy Institute’s Trita
Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was
able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi
Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with
the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades.
The title of Parsi’s
article, “The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,” refers to former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s use of the term “indispensable nation”
to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world. The irony in Parsi’s use of Albright’s term is that she generally used
it to refer to U.S. war-making, not peacemaking.
In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to
rally support for President Clinton’s threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win
support in the Middle East, she was confronted by heckling
and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and
she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition
in a more controlled setting.
Albright claimed, “..if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other
countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that
the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for
freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”
Albright’s
readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already
got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, “What’s the
use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use
it?” Powell wrote in his memoirs, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”
But Powell
himself later caved to the neocons, or the “fucking crazies” as
he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to
justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February
2003.
For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the
“crazies” at every turn. Albright and the neocons’ exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S.
political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world,
in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side
of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United
States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.
Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the U.S. chose to join a
Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining
neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also
applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli
aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to
failure.
For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has
enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the
same applies to the African Union’s successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia,
and to Turkey’s promising mediation between
Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its
first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to
pressure and weaken Russia.
But neutrality has become anathema to U.S. policymakers. George W. Bush’s
threat, “You are either with us or against us,” has become an established, if
unspoken, core assumption of 21st century U.S. foreign policy.
The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between
our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding
with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can
range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First
attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade
ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not
our problem.
The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by
drastically reducing foreign news
coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by
pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of
us.
Most U.S. politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from
local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to
nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or
twelve packed into Albright’s vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom,
democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we
are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in
uniform, and “we have to use force.”
Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and
Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly
hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only
chaos and violence for 25 years.
All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of
Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world
that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal
inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must
cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.
It is no wonder that Americans think the world’s problems are insoluble
and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that
that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives,
as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a “peace club” of
peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers
new hope for peace.
+
Two Decades and $90 Billion US Dollars Later: Dissecting The Afghan Military's Total Collapse
https://www.mintpressnews.com/90-billion-us-dollars-sigar-report-afghanistan/284146/
by Kit Klarenberg
In February,
the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published
an extensive investigation into the
spectacular collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’
(ANDSF), which the U.S. spent two decades and $90 billion building. In common
with previous SIGAR reports, it offers a
remarkably uncompromising, no-punches-pulled assessment, exposing corruption,
incompetence, lies, and delusion every step of the way.
At the
report’s core is a highly detailed timeline of the ANDSF’s – and, therefore,
the Afghan government’s – disintegration. That SIGAR
was able to construct such a painstaking obituary is nothing short of
miraculous, for the Special Inspector General was stonewalled and obstructed at
every turn by the agencies it is officially charged with scrutinizing.
The Pentagon
and State Department rejected SIGAR’s jurisdiction over them, declined to
review interim drafts of the report, denied access to their staff, and “mostly”
refused to answer requests for information. “Very few” documents SIGAR asked
for were turned over, and material disclosed “was often not materially relevant
to our objectives.”
In lieu of
cooperation from the guilty parties, SIGAR conducted a
panoply of probing interviews with U.S. and Afghan officials. While
often unnamed, their admissions and analysis provide stunning insight into
conversations, deliberations, and machinations hidden from public view at the
time. Together, these accounts help explain how the ANDSF, much-vaunted by the White
House until its demise, failed so spectacularly.
It is a highly cinematic retelling that is part thriller, part farce.
Take, for example, a former “senior Afghan national security official”
recounting the morning of August 15, 2021, the day Kabul fell. As Americans
rushed to depart the country, en route to a meeting with President Ashraf Ghani, he was told by the
Presidential Protective Service chief that the Taliban, contrary to promises
not to enter the city, had done so.
In the president’s office, the pair scrambled to draft an official
statement to be transmitted domestically and internationally on the group’s
unwelcome arrival. A secretary was asked to request some green tea from
catering, as was customary in such meetings:
He went and brought the tray himself. Wait a minute, what happened to the
server? He said, there’s no one left. People in our
offices had abandoned and they had gone…[By around] 10
or 11, we no longer had a consolidated security force.”
This mass walkout was evident in every state apparatus. The president
contacted the head of the National Security Directorate, the Afghan
government’s primary intelligence service, which was created in the early 2000s
by the CIA, requesting he rally operatives “to keep order in Kabul.” The
Directorate chief regretfully informed him that the formerly 500-strong force
tasked with managing the city’s defense now numbered less than 20 people.
+
Profits of Doom: Military Contractors Rob Us
Daily
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/profits-of-doom-military-contractors-rob-us-daily/
by Tom H. Hastings
It’s Budget
Season in DC and the swamp is in full bloom.
Republicans
refuse to offer a budget. Why is that? After all, they are demanding that Biden
and his Democrats promise to make major cuts because Republicans are sooooo concerned about the debt ceiling, even though they
are largely responsible
for much of the massive national debt.
What the
Republicans don’t want to reveal is that their budget won’t cut the huge items
that do nothing for our communities. What the Rs want to cut are relatively
small budgets that actually help working Americans.
But again and
again they vow to “stay strong” on “national defense,” and will vote to
increase the DoD budget,
already the largest in the world by far,
eclipsing the combined total of all our adversaries plus a few of our allies.
Naturally,
Kevin McCarthy is pronouncing on the Biden budget as DOA and on what great
things his Republican budget will do, like cut Pentagon spending by…some amount
that changes every time he makes another hollow
promise. Other Rs have given him dire warnings against such pork trimming.
McCarthy himself says that
the areas to cut in the DoD
budget are anything that has any whiff of “wokeism,”
including all efforts to make the military, for once, a bit less of an environmental polluter and
consumer.
Meanwhile,
the rightwing media, including nouveau conservative Politico, frames this
debate as a country that should cut Social Security and Medicare but leave the
Pentagon budget alone. Indeed, they refer to those trust budgets as “drivers”
of the debt and the smaller food and housing assistance budgets as “entrenched,” as though
sensible working Americans would like to see them cut but the darn libs won’t yield.
Meanwhile,
the war profiteers are gobbling up big bites from your paychecks.
Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and other Pentagon contractors make
outrageous levels of profits, due to a number of corrupt practices that riddle
the military procurement practices, Congress, and the corporate benefactors.
One hundred percent of their profits are paid for with the taxes removed from
your pay, usually before you ever see it. Look at your pay information and
you’ll see why the Pentagon budget is a key factor in naming it a pay “stub.”
I mean, we
are still in a great deal of federal debt just for the illegal
Iraq invasion and occupation, accounting for some nine percent of the
debt. That was a Republican war, voted for and then voted for again and again
with “budget supplementals,” but those prudent Rs
somehow overlook that.
+
The
Pentagon's Budget from Hell
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57442.htm
by William D. Hartung
Somehow, when
it comes to Congress and the mainstream media, the true strangeness of the
Pentagon budget always is missing in action. Despite arguments about the small
things, just about everyone accepts that the United States must have a
monstrous, all-powerful military and a military budget beyond compare (beyond,
in fact, all comprehension). And nothing seems to truly dent that sensibility.
Somehow, the fact that the Pentagon has been utterly incapable of winning —
yes, actually winning! — a war that matters (or even
half matters) since World War II never fully seems to penetrate, not even on
the 20th anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, America’s
own Ukraine. (Only former president George W. Bush, who launched that invasion,
gets it, however subliminally.)
The lesson is all too clear: the more that’s spent on our military and
the more potentially destructive it gets, the less it’s actually able to
accomplish. Despite all but obliterating North Korea from the air, it couldn’t
beat that country’s military (aided by China’s) in the early 1950s; it lost
disastrously to distinctly under-armed rebels in Vietnam in the 1960s and early
1970s; and did so again more recently to the half-baked forces of the Taliban
in Afghanistan. The response of Congress to such disasters in this century:
rewarding the Pentagon with yet more barrels of money.
Think of it this way: in a world where billionaires are running rampant and grabbing ever more
wealth, the Pentagon is going to outdo them all and, if nothing changes in the
coming years, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung notes
today, become the world’s first trillionaire. Imagine
that! Something that might once have seemed inconceivable is now almost
unstoppable, a future trillion-dollar military budget. And with that in mind,
let Pentagon expert Hartung introduce you to that
imposing trillionaire-in-the-making that has had just
one great success in the twenty-first century: taking Congress captive. Tom
Feeley
“Congress Has Been Captured by the
Arms Industry, And We're Paying the Price (and What a
Price It Is!)” . . .
===========
l.
The Banking Crisis, Housing
Insecurity and Preparing for the Coming Economic Collapse
https://www.mintpressnews.com/banking-crisis-housing-economic-collapse-james-fauntleroy/284096/
with Lee Camp and James Fauntleroy
(1:00:27)
+
Professor
Richard Wolff: The Brink Of Economic Collapse and The
Path Forward
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57447.htm
with Kim Iversen and Richard Wolff
(1:10:31)
+
“Party Like It's 1907”
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/party-like-its-1907?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by James Corbett
Interview of James Corbett by Graham Smith
+
“Most U.S.
banks are technically near insolvency, and hundreds are already fully
insolvent”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57448.htm
by Nouriel Roubini
In January
2022, when yields on US 10-year Treasury bonds were still roughly 1% and those
on German Bunds were -0.5%, I warned that inflation would be bad for both
stocks and bonds. Higher inflation would lead to higher bond yields, which in
turn would hurt stocks as the discount factor for dividends rose. But, at the
same time, higher yields on “safe” bonds would imply a fall in their price,
too, owing to the inverse relationship between yields and bond prices.
This basic principle
– known as “duration risk” – seems to have been lost on many bankers,
fixed-income investors, and bank regulators. As rising inflation in 2022 led to
higher bond yields, ten-year Treasuries lost more value (-20%) than the S&P
500 (-15%), and anyone with long-duration fixed-income assets denominated in
dollars or euros was left holding the bag. The
consequences for these investors have been severe. By the end of 2022, US
banks’ unrealized losses on securities had reached US$620 billion, about 28% of
their total capital (US$2.2 trillion).
Making
matters worse, higher interest rates have reduced the market value of banks’
other assets as well. If you make a ten-year bank loan when long-term interest
rates are 1%, and those rates then rise to 3.5%, the true value of that loan
(what someone else in the market would pay you for it) will fall. Accounting
for this implies that US banks’ unrealized losses actually amount to US$1.75
trillion, or 80% of their capital.
The
“unrealized” nature of these losses is merely an artifact of the current
regulatory regime, which allows banks to value securities and loans at their
face value rather than at their true market value. In fact, judging by the
quality of their capital, most US banks are technically near insolvency, and
hundreds are already fully insolvent.
To be sure,
rising inflation reduces the true value of banks’ liabilities (deposits) by
increasing their “deposit franchise”, an asset that is not on their balance
sheet. Since banks still pay near 0% on most of their deposits, even though
overnight rates have risen to 4% or more, this asset’s value rises when
interest rates are higher. Indeed, some estimates suggest that rising interest
rates have increased US banks’ total deposit franchise value by about US$1.75
trillion.
But this
asset exists only if deposits remain with banks as rates rise, and we now know
from Silicon Valley Bank and the experience of other US regional banks that
such stickiness is far from assured. If depositors flee, the deposit franchise evaporates,
and the unrealized losses on securities become realized as banks sell them to
meet withdrawal demands. Bankruptcy then becomes unavoidable.
Moreover, the
“deposit-franchise” argument assumes that most depositors are dumb and will
keep their money in accounts bearing near 0% interest when they could be
earning 4% or more in totally safe money-market funds that invest in short-term
treasuries. But, again, we now know that depositors are not so complacent. The
current, apparently persistent flight of uninsured – and even insured –
deposits is probably being driven as much by depositors’ pursuit of higher
returns as by their concerns about the safety of their deposits.
In short,
after being a non-factor for the last 15 years – ever since policy and short-term
interest rates fell to near-zero following the 2008 global financial crisis –
the interest-rate sensitivity of deposits has returned to the fore. Banks
assumed a highly foreseeable duration risk because they wanted to fatten their
net-interest margins. They seized on the fact that while capital charges on
government-bond and mortgage-backed securities were zero, the losses on such
assets did not have to be marked to market. To add insult to injury, regulators
did not even subject banks to stress tests to see how they would fare in a
scenario of sharply rising interest rates
Now that this
house of cards is collapsing, the credit crunch caused by today’s banking
stress will create a harder landing for the real economy, owing to the key role
that regional banks play in financing small and medium-size enterprises and
households. Central banks therefore face not just a dilemma but a trilemma. Owing to recent negative aggregate supply shocks
– such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine – achieving price stability
through interest rate hikes was bound to raise the risk of a hard landing (a
recession and higher unemployment). But, as I have been arguing for over a
year, this vexing trade-off also features the additional risk of severe
financial instability.
Borrowers are
facing rising rates – and thus much higher capital costs – on new borrowing and
on existing liabilities that have matured and need to be rolled over. But the
increase in long-term rates is also leading to massive losses for creditors
holding long-duration assets. As a result, the economy is falling into a “debt
trap,” with high public deficits and debt causing “fiscal dominance” over
monetary policy, and high private debts causing “financial dominance” over
monetary and regulatory authorities.
+
“OPEC /
Russia, production cuts. Japan breaks oil ceiling”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DslDAziwpc&feature=youtu.be
with Alex Christforou and Alexander Mercouris
(19:53)
+
The Capital
of the Multipolar World: A Moscow Diary
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57444.htm
by Pepe Escobar
How sharp was
good ol’ Lenin, prime modernist, when he mused,
“there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades
happen”. This global nomad now addressing you has enjoyed the privilege of
spending four astonishing weeks in Moscow at the heart of an historical
crossroads – culminating with the Putin-Xi geopolitical game-changing summit at
the Kremlin.
To quote Xi,
“changes that haven’t been seen in 100 years” do have a knack of affecting us
all in more ways than one.
James Joyce,
another modernity icon, wrote that we spend our lives meeting average and/or
extraordinary people, on and on and on, but in the end we’re always meeting
ourselves. I have had the privilege of meeting an array of extraordinary people
in Moscow, guided by trusted friends or by auspicious coincidence: in the end
your soul tells you they enrich you and the overarching historical moment in
ways you can’t even begin to fathom.
Here are some
of them. The grandson of Boris Pasternak, a gifted young man
who teaches Ancient Greek at Moscow State University. A
historian with unmatched knowledge of Russian history and culture. The Tajik working class huddling together in a chaikhana
with the proper ambience of Dushanbe.
Chechens and Tuvans in awe doing the loop in the Big Central Line. A
lovely messenger sent by friends extremely careful about security matters to
discuss issues of common interest. Exceptionally accomplished
musicians performing underground in Mayakovskaya.
A stunning Siberian princess vibrant with unbounded energy, taking that motto
previously applied to the energy industry – Power of Siberia – to a whole new
level.
A dear friend
took me to Sunday service at the Devyati Muchenikov Kizicheskikh church,
the favorite of Peter the Great: the quintessential purity of Eastern
Orthodoxy. Afterwards the priests invited us for lunch in their communal table,
displaying not only their natural wisdom but also an uproarious sense of humor.
At a classic
Russian apartment crammed with 10,000 books and with a view to the Ministry of
Defense – plenty of jokes included – Father Michael, in charge if Orthodox
Christianity relations with the Kremlin, sang the Russian imperial anthem
after an indelible
night of religious and cultural discussions.
+
Syria war:
After Iran-Saudi deal, could China be the key to peace?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57450.htm
by Kamal Alam
Earlier this
month, China brokered a deal to restore
diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran for the first time since
2016, aiming to settle a longstanding bilateral dispute.
While it is
too early to determine whether this will lead to a complete thaw in the
four-decade rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran, an immediate beneficiary of the
Chinese-led initiative is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose diplomatic clout in the region has
been further strengthened.
Within days of the deal with Iran, the Saudis announced a
restoration of diplomatic ties with the Syrian government, and Assad took another trip to the UAE, following his visit to Oman a month
earlier. Indeed, Assad has slowly but surely re-emerged on the diplomatic
scene, despite US pressure on the
region to isolate Damascus.
Now, as China takes a more assertive economic diplomacy role in the
Middle East, Syria remains key to Saudi Arabia’s
desire to cool regional tensions.
Saudi Arabia presented the last obstacle to Syria’s return as a key
player in the Arab world - a thaw that began with a hug between the
Bahraini and Syrian foreign ministers at the United Nations in 2018.
While Riyadh has watched from the sidelines as other Arab countries
embraced Damascus, it has finally joined the fray, perhaps on the back of the
Chinese- and Russian-led realignment of the Middle East.
Two years ago, I wrote an article for Middle
East Eye about the history of Saudi-Syrian ties, and the centrality of this
relationship with regards to stabilising Lebanon. Despite
major differences, they have always managed to maintain an amicable working
relationship, which peaked during their anti-Saddam alliance in the first
Gulf War, and again when Riyadh welcomed Assad several
years after the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
The time has now come again for another warming in Saudi-Syrian
relations.
Flexing muscles . . .
+
Xi-Putin Summit: Strategy Meeting for the Coming East-West War?
“We got a pretty lady to shill it but they still don’t want it, boo-hoo” — FSB
https://www.globalresearch.ca/xi-putin-summit-strategy-meeting-coming-east-west-war/5814518
by Prof. Joseph H. Chung
The Xi-Putin
Summit (March 22-24) was a strategic summit of two “non-western” super powers.
The outcome of the summit will have far-reaching implications for the
future of mankind.
What the two
leaders decided upon will be a strategic factor in the choice between a unipolar world and a multipolar world.
The Western
media did not say much about the summit. This was to be expected. They seem to
believe that their god-given mission is to demonize China and Russia and other
nation states which are not Washington’s “vassal countries”.
The incessant
demonization of China and Russia “does not make the West an Angel”. One can
also demonize the West. There are several reasons for this.
It is about
time for the mainstream media to have some decency in informing people about
the truth so that humanity can choose the right kind of regime and leaders.
To be frank,
I am disappointed with the media, especially the leading TV stations and the so
called elite newspapers. I am sure that they knew what was going on during the
summit, but they did not share what they knew with the public.
In this
paper, I will be focussing on the following
questions:
·
Why the summit?
·
What was the nature of the agreement?
·
Is it feasible to create the multi-polar world?
Why the
Summit
===========
m.
Russians
outplay digital IDs, again
by Edward Slavsquat
A nationwide
boycott threatens another Kremlin-endorsed cattle tag
The Fan ID
system debuted during the 2017 Confederation Cup and 2018 World Cup, which were
hosted by Russia. Issued as laminated badges, Fan IDs served as visas for
foreign football enthusiasts, and granted free travel in public transport. The
ID was also deployed during the 2021 European Championship—St. Petersburg
hosted seven matches of the tournament.
After the
success of the World Cup, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for Fan ID
to become a permanent fixture of cultural and sporting events in the country.
Fan ID had a
clear benefit for foreign visitors to Russia, but its advantages were more
difficult to ascertain when it was retooled as a domestic ID for sports fans.
Alexander Dyukov, president of the Russian Football Union, said in
2019 that using Fan ID in the RPL would be expensive, pointless and inconvenient.
Besides, Russian stadiums were
equipped with sophisticated CCTV cameras and other fancy security gadgets. What
would be the point of forcing spectators to obtain a special ID just to watch
athletes kick a ball around?
Dyukov’s level-headed
approach to football security prevailed until November 2021—when 408 fans were
detained at VEB Arena stadium for participating in an unauthorized pyrotechnics
display.
Curiously, the stadium’s CCTV cameras
had been disabled, “forcing”
police to make indiscriminate arrests. State media claimed hackers were
responsible for the bizarre surveillance camera outage, but the incident was
never investigated.
Almost
overnight, Fan ID was back on the menu.
As Vedomosti reported:
“After this
incident, law enforcement agencies had an important trump card in their hands.
If cameras in stadiums fail, then Fan IDs could be an important tool for
identifying an individual and determining personal responsibility.”
The rest is
history . . .
+
“Russian
journalist targeted in Saint Petersburg café” & “Legally we took Bakhmut.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIjjVbWPezI
with Alex Chreistoforou and Alexander Mercouris
(29:24)
===========
n.
Filings Reveal Amazon Spent Over $14
Million to Bust Union in 2022 Alone
by Sharon Zhang
As Amazon
Labor Union’s groundbreaking labor movement gained momentum — and, in some
ways, faltered — in 2022, Amazon was busy shelling out millions of dollars to
anti-union consultants in order to ensure that the union movement would fail,
new filings show.
As first reported by HuffPost, new
financial disclosures filed on
Friday with the Department of Labor show that Amazon spent $14.2 million on
anti-union consultants. These consultants are hired by companies seeking to
bust union efforts, advising them on ways to skirt or violate federal
laws in order to crush labor organizing.
It is common
for union-busting companies to spend large sums of money to hire such
consultants, who help the company carry out classic anti-union moves like
holding mandatory anti-union meetings, which Amazon has done in droves; Labor
experts have estimated that union
busting is so widespread that it has created an anti-union industry that rakes in $430 million yearly.
Even in this context,
Amazon’s spending is astonishingly high.
+
In Defense of the LA
Education Workers’ Strike
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/in-defense-of-the-la-education-workers-strike/
by Glenn Sacks
The enemies
of labor unions and public education are unhappy, and I can’t say I blame them.
Service
Employees International Union Local 99 had been battling the Los Angeles
Unified School District for a decent contract for three years, but when they
struck–and when United Teachers Los Angeles struck in solidarity with them–SEIU
quickly won the contract they had long sought.
From the political
right there has been a predictable backlash against the 65,000 Los Angeles
education workers who struck March 21-23. What follows is a defense of our
unions and our strike against some of our opponents’ main accusations.
SEIU &
UTLA Are Greedy
For two+
years conservatives have correctly pointed to the ravages of inflation (“Bidenflation”) and its insidious assault on our living
standards. Yet, strangely, when it comes to the SEIU and UTLA, all this is
forgotten.
Witness these
comments on SEIU’s demand for a 30% salary increase:
+ SEIU
“walked off the job this week because they want a massive 30% pay hike.”
(Southern California News Group Editorial Board)
+ [SEIU
wants] “a whopping 30% across-the-board pay raise” (Aaron Withe,
CEO of the Freedom Foundation)
+ “SEIU Local
99 is demanding a whopping 30% increase in wages for school employees (Lance
Christensen, California Policy Center)
However, the
30% raise the SEIU sought covers four years–7.5% a year. This is hardly
unreasonable: according to the US Social Security Administration, prices rose
5.9% in 2021 and 8.7% in 2022. So far this year inflation is running at 6.2%.
Moreover, inflation impacts lower wage workers like those in SEIU more
heavily than people with higher wage jobs. It’s difficult for such workers to
handle inflation by cutting back their spending when they’re already spending
95% of their take-home pay on basic necessities.
ULTA’s demand for a 10% a year raise is also being panned.
+
Communism, Islam, & Serving Our Neighbors
https://www.blackagendareport.com/communism-islam-serving-our-neighbors
by D. Musa Springer
Ibn Umar reported: The Prophet,
peace and blessings be upon him, said:
“The
most beloved people to Allah are those who are most beneficial to people. The
most beloved deed to Allah is to make a Muslim happy, or remove one of his
troubles, or forgive his debt, or feed his hunger. That I walk with a
brother regarding a need is more beloved to me than that I seclude myself in
this mosque in Medina for a month. Whoever swallows his anger, then Allah will conceal his faults. Whoever suppresses his
rage, even though he could fulfill his anger if he wished, then Allah will
secure his heart on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever walks with his
brother regarding a need until he secures it for him, then Allah Almighty will
make his footing firm across the bridge on the day when the foundations are
shaken.”
+
The Happiness
of Others
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/05/patrick-lawrence-the-happiness-of-others/
by Patrick Lawrence
For
Americans, admitting that people in other parts of the world have and want
different things from what they have and want can, in its subtle way, be
devastating to their view of the world.
===========
o.
“Reclaiming Our Country”
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/05/chris-hedges-reclaiming-our-country/
by Chris Hedges
We are
undergoing the most vicious class war in U.S. history. Social inequality
has reached its
most extreme levels of disparity in over 200
years, surpassing the rapacious
greed of the era of the robber barons. The legislative, executive and judicial
branches of government, along with the media and universities, have been seized
by a tiny cabal of
billionaires and corporations who pass laws and legislation that consolidate
their power and obscene wealth at our expense. We are sacrificial victims,
whether on the left or the right, helpless before this modern incarnation of
the Biblical idol Moloch.
In 1928, the
top one percent held about 24 percent of
the nation’s income, a percentage that steadily declined until 1973. By the
early 1970s the oligarchy’s assault against workers was accelerated in response
to the rise of popular mass movements in the 1960s. The billionaire class and
corporations poured billions into political parties, academia, think-tanks and
the media. Critics of capitalism had difficulty finding a platform, including
on public broadcasting. Those who sang to the tune the billionaires played were
lavished with grants, book deals, tenured professorships, awards and permanent
megaphones in the commercial press. Wages stagnated. Income inequality grew to monstrous
proportions. Tax rates for corporations and the rich were slashed until
it culminated in a virtual tax boycott.
Today, the
top 10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the
country’s total wealth. The top 1 percent control 32
percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population hold 3 percent of all
U.S. wealth.
These ruling
oligarchs have us, not to mention the natural world, in a death grip. They have
mobilized the organs of state security, militarized the police, built the
largest prison system in the world and deformed the courts to criminalize
poverty. We are the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored
population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany.
When the corporate state watches you 24-hours a day you cannot use the word
liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave.
+
The Need for
Independent Left Leadership
Photo:
Communist Party USA Archives
https://www.blackagendareport.com/need-independent-left-leadership
by Sudip Bhattacharya
Leftists in
the U.S. must forge independent formations. Electoral politics are still a dead
end.
In March, it
was reported that the Biden administration is planning to re-introduce a
Trump-era measure on immigration detentionpolicy along
the U.S.-Mexico border. This policy would mean the detainment of families
crossing the border in overcrowded ICE detention facilities rather than the
current policy of allowing them to wait for their asylum trial while staying
with family and friends or in some other location, albeit wearing a monitor.
“Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents
immediately,” Biden had said when condemning the samehideous
policy when it had been introduced by the explicitly racist Trump
administration. Somehow, now, it’s okay to traumatize migrants fleeing from
countries ruined by far-right regimes our politicians have often propped up,
not to mention escaping from ruinous neoliberal policies that have spread to
all corners of the globe.
If this were to go through, this would be yet another broken promise by
Biden and his acolytes inside the White House. From increasing funding for the police, to ending a possible strikeamong railway
workers desperate for a day off, the Biden administration has been a laundry
list of failed stances on policies that would have improved the living and
working conditions of many of its alleged constituents.
“Election seasons are reality-creation festivals, during which the
two corporate parties pretend to put forward different visions of the national
and global destiny,” the imitable Glen Ford once wrote, “When, in fact, they
answer to the same master and must pursue the same general strategy.”
Grace Dean at
Bloomberg writes, “The financial-services sector gave $982.8
million in party-coded contributions across 2019 and 2020 through both individual
employee donations and PACs, the report said. Of this, 47% went to
Republicans and 53% went to Democrats.”
The GOP is the blunter interpretation of capitalist greed and id. It is a
party now of white nationalists, and nihilism to a
degree, a party of crass businessmen and white resentment that had been allowed
to fester since Reagan’s rise to political infamy. That said, the Democrat
party leadership itself, along with Biden, who has a long illustrious career of
being a conservative pro-segregation type, are beholden to financial and other
business interests. Because of such interests and their support for the party’s
top-tier, progressive policies on labor, on empire, on issues surrounding
migration and reproductive rights will never come about, let alone see the
light of day when it comes to some reform in Congress, the so-called house of
the people.
Massive changes in government policy won’t happen so long as the U.S.
left works within the party system, thus allowing the masses to do the same,
voting in candidates all the while private enterprise and industry amasses more
and more power for itself. Instead, if the left is serious about improving the
lives of the masses, especially black and brown, there is no other avenue
towards that end apart from disrupting the daily churn of major corporations
and businesses and those government agencies that prioritize their interests.
+
Finding Your Whiteness in a Time of Crisis: The Reeducation of Norman
Finkelstein
https://www.blackagendareport.com/finding-your-whiteness-time-crisis-reeducation-norman-finkelstein
by Jon Jeter
Norman
Finkelstein was a highly respected academic, but his latest book is a racist
"544-page temper tantrum."
Norman
Finkelstein first crossed my radar nearly 20 years ago, if memory serves, when
a Stanford University professor introduced me to his 2000 book, The
Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, which
contends that Elie Wiesel and his ilk have
appropriated the murder of six million Jews to extort Western support for the
Zionist project.
But if the
book was a revelation, so too was the author. Despite possessing a voice that
sounds approximately like two seals fornicating while dragging their claws
against a chalkboard, Finkelstein, the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors,
impressed me with his ferocious advocacy of Palestinians living under Israeli
occupation. My admiration only deepened in 2007 when the Harvard Law Professor
(and uber Zionist) Alan Dershowitz
pressured administrators at Depaul – a Jesuit
University in Chicago with a middling reputation– to deny tenure to
Finkelstein.
I recall
watching a televised interview with Finkelstein after he had reached a
settlement with the university, and although he was clearly still nursing deep
wounds from the ordeal, invoked his “hero” Paul Robeson, who had endured far
worse. I remember him taking a deep breath and concluding:
“So I’ll be
okay.”
It was a
statement of uncommon grace, and moved me visibly, so much in fact, that my
girlfriend at the time would accuse me of having a “man-crush” on Finkelstein.
I pleaded the
fifth.
+
Mexico's AMLO
Calls Out US 'Oligarchy' at Biden's Democracy Summit
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/03/mexicos-amlo-calls-out-us-oligarchy-at-bidens-democracy-summit/
by Ben Norton
Mexico’s
leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador used the US government’s “Summit for Democracy” to
indirectly call out Washington’s hypocrisy: “The oligarchy reigns with the
façade of democracy”, he said, calling for “greater equality” and “separation
of economic and political power."
+
The European
Union's Digital Trade Rules: Undermining European Policy to Rein in Big Tech
https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/31/the-european-unions-digital-trade-rules-undermining-european-policy-to-rein-in-big-tech/
by Deborah James / Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
Executive
Summary
This report
shows how Big Tech companies are working to constrain the ability of EU
democratic bodies to regulate their activities in the public interest through
“trade” agreements, which are binding and permanent.
Digitalization
is the defining economic transformation of our time. The benefits to society
are well-known, but the harms caused from the expansion of Big Tech’s are still
being understood. The EU has started to recognise the
urgent need rein in some of Big Tech’s most pernicious practices. The Digital
Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), along with the Data Act, the
Data Governance Act (DGA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) are
first steps towards ensuring that the digital sector of the economy operates
under the same framework of fair play and the public interest as the rest of
the economy.
The same EU
that is advancing new laws governing the digital economy is promoting a digital
trade policy that contradicts, and would severely constrain, current and future
public interest policymaking in the EU and beyond.
Through a
number of bilateral and regional trade agreements Big Tech is seeking to
maintain a policy environment which favors private control of technological
resources and practices, and data, for supernormal profit. Control over data –
and in particular, the ability to transfer data across borders – and keeping
their algorithms or source codes secret are the top goals of Big Tech in any
“digital trade” agreement.
===========
p.
The So Far
Non-Existent Vulkan Leaks
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/31/craig-murray-the-so-far-non-existent-vulkan-leaks/
by Craig Murray
Thirty named
journalists at three major papers are covering “bombshell” revelations about
Russian cyberattacks in a
manner worth examining.
The Guardian, The Washington Post and Der Spiegel have today published “bombshell” revelations about Russian cyber
warfare based on leaked documents, but have produced only one single, rather
innocuous leaked document between them (in The Washington Post), with zero links to any.
Where are these documents and what do they actually say? Der Spiegel tells us:
“This is all
chronicled in 1,000 secret documents that include 5,299 pages full of project
plans, instructions and internal emails from Vulkan
from the years 2016 to 2021. Despite being all in Russian and extremely
technical in nature, they provide unique insight into the depths of Russian cyberwarfare plans.”
Ok, So where are they?
The media
houses have cooperated on the leaks, and the articles have been produced by
large teams of journalists in each individual publication.
The Guardian article is by Luke Harding, Stilyana Simeonova, Manisha Ganguly and Dan Sabbagh. The Washington
Post Article is by Craig Timberg,
Ellen Nakashima, Hannes Munzinga
and Hakan Tanriverdi. Der Spiegel’s article is by 22 named
journalists!
So that is 30
named journalists, with each publication deploying a large team to produce its
own article.
And yet if
you read through those three articles, you cannot help but note they are (ahem)
remarkably similar.
From Der Spiegel:
“ ‘These
documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical infrastructure
and social media manipulation as one-and-the-same mission, which is essentially
an attack on the enemy’s will to fight,’ says John Hultquist,
a leading expert on Russian cyberwarfare and vice
president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, an IT
security company.”
From The
Washington Post:
“ ‘These
documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical infrastructure
and social media manipulation as one and the same mission, which is essentially
an attack on the enemy’s will to fight,’ said John Hultquist,
the vice president for intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity
firm Mandiant.”
From The
Guardian:
“John Hultquist, the vice-president of intelligence analysis at
the cybersecurity firm Mandiant,
which reviewed selections of the material at the request of the consortium,
said: ‘These documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical
infrastructure and social media manipulation as one and the same mission, which
is essentially an attack on the enemy’s will to fight.’ ”
Note that it
is not just the central Hultquist quote which is the
same. In each case the teams of 30 journalists have very slightly altered a
copy-and-pasted entire paragraph.
+
The ICC’s
Selective Prosecution
ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan during a
conversation in Brussels with E.U. foreign ministers that included the
investigation of war crimes in Ukraine. (Raoul
Somers/Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs,CC BY-SA
2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/29/the-iccs-selective-prosecution/
by Marjorie Cohn
On March 17,
a little more than one year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal
Court (ICC), announced that
the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) had issued an arrest warrant for Russian President
Vladimir Putin for the commission of war crimes in Ukraine. The PTC also issued
an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova,
commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the
Russian Federation, for the same war crimes.
While the
U.S. celebrates the arrest warrant against Putin, it has pressured the ICC to
refrain from prosecuting Israelis and Americans. There is a double standard in
the ICC’s treatment of the situations in Ukraine and Palestine. This is largely
due to political coercion by the United States, which isn’t even a party to the
ICC’s Rome Statute.
The PTC
confirmed that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Putin and Lvova-Belova unlawfully deported and transferred “at least
hundreds of” Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian
Federation, in violation of article 8(2)(a)(vii) and article 8(2)(b)(viii) of
the Rome Statute.
Khan had
opened an investigation into the situation in Ukraine on Feb. 28, 2022, finding
a “reasonable basis to believe that both alleged war
crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Ukraine.” The arrest
warrants were issued one year later — lightning speed for the ICC.
Contrast that with the ICC’s handling of the investigation of war crimes
in Palestine.
After Seven
Years, No Charges . . .
+
“The
crumbling of international law”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLUUpJ11PlE
with Rein Müllerson, Alexander Mercouris
and Glenn Diesen
(1:53:59)
===========
q.
China's Historical Destiny Is to
Stand With the Third World
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/02/chinas-historical-destiny-is-to-stand-with-the-third-world/
by Vijay Prashad / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
On 20 March
2023, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin spent over four hours in private conversation.
According to official statements after
the meeting, the two leaders talked about the increasing economic and strategic
partnership between China and Russia – including building the Power of Siberia
2 pipeline – and the Chinese peace initiative for the
war in Ukraine. Putin said that ‘many of the
provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian
approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when the
West and Kiev are ready for it’.
These steps towards peace
have not received a warm welcome in Washington. Ahead of Xi’s visit to Moscow,
John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US National Security Council, declared that
any ‘call for a ceasefire’ in Ukraine by China and Russia would be
‘unacceptable’. As details of the meeting emerged, US officials
reportedly expressed fear
that the world might embrace China and Russia’s efforts to secure a peaceful
resolution and end the war. The Atlantic powers are, in fact, redoubling their
efforts to prolong the conflict.
On the day of
the meeting between Xi and Putin, the United Kingdom’s minister of state at the
Ministry of Defence, Baroness Annabel Goldie, told the House of Lords
that ‘[a]longside our granting of a squadron of
Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition
including armour-piercing rounds which contain
depleted uranium’. Goldie’s statement came on the twentieth anniversary of the
US-UK invasion of Iraq, in which the West used depleted uranium on the Iraqi
population to deleterious effect.
In reference to the UK’s provision of depleted uranium to Ukrainian forces,
Putin said that ‘it seems that
the West really has decided to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian – no longer
in words, but in deeds’. In response, Putin said that Russia would
deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.
+
Milley Says the US
Should Attack Iran's IRGC Quds Force
Secretary of
Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley,
chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)
Michael J. McCord provide testimony at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget
hearing, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., March 28, 2023. (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/03/milley-says-the-us-should-attack-irans-irgc-quds-force/
by Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com
Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress on Wednesday that the US
should be targeting Iran’s Quds Force, a branch of
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), following a drone attack in Syria
that killed a US contractor.
“We do know
that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard [Corps], and specifically their Quds Force … that group there is what we need to be
targeting, and targeting them very harshly over time, and that’s exactly what
we plan on doing,” Milley said, according to Al-Monitor.
The Pentagon said the drone that hit a US base in Syria last week was of
“Iranian origin” but provided no evidence for the claim. President Biden
ordered airstrikes against facilities the Pentagon said were used by groups
affiliated with the IRGC, referring to Shia militias
that operate in Syria.
According
to Iranian media, Tehran
denies that the US targeted facilities aligned with Iran and says the
airstrikes hit a “rural development center and a grain center.” The Pentagon
later claimed the strikes targeted “two IRGC-Quds
Force targets” and estimated at least eight militants were killed in the
airstrikes, but said they weren’t Iranian. Other unconfirmed reports put the death toll at 19.
+
Watch “'I Don't
Believe You': Tom Cotton Accuses Sec. Lloyd Austin Of
Withholding Information”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UnrWkQCU_I&feature=youtu.be
with
(5:48)
+
Atlanta's
"Cop City" is a Blueprint for America's Future
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/03/atlantas-cop-city-is-a-blueprint-for-americas-future/
with Taya
Graham and Stephen Janis / The Real News Network
(1:27:27)
+
Sub-Imperialism
and Multipolarity: Brazil’s Dilemma
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/03/sub-imperialism-and-multipolarity-brazils-dilemma/
by Justin Podur
In the Open
Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano described
an 1870 genocidal war of regime change waged on Paraguay by a Triple Alliance
of its neighbors, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, on behalf of British
imperialism. The target, nationalist president Solano Lopez, died in battle.
The country lost 56,000 square miles of territory. Paraguay’s population was
reduced by 83.3 percent. By the end, Galeano wrote:
“Brazil had performed the role the British had assigned it.” Before the
intervention, “Paraguay had telegraphs, a railroad, and numerous factories
manufacturing construction materials, textiles, linens, ponchos, paper and ink,
crockery, and gunpowder… the Ibycui foundry made
guns, mortars, and ammunition of all calibers… the steel industry… belonged to
the state. The country had a merchant fleet… the state virtually monopolized
foreign trade; it supplied yerba mate and tobacco to the southern part of the
continent and exported valuable woods to Europe… With a strong and stable
currency, Paraguay was wealthy enough to carry out great public works without
recourse to foreign capital… Irrigation works, dams and canals, and new bridges
and roads substantially helped to raise agricultural production. The native
tradition of two crops a year, abandoned by the conquistadors, was revived.”
After the war: “it was not only the population and great chunks of territory
that disappeared, but customs tariffs, foundries, rivers closed to free trade,
and economic independence… Everything was looted and everything was sold: lands
and forests, mines, yerba mate farms, school buildings.”
Summarizing
all this, Galeano wrote: “Paraguay has the double
burden of imperialism and subimperialism.”
“Subimperialism,” Galeano
continued, “has a thousand faces.” Paraguayan soldiers joined an intervention
against the Dominican Republic in 1965, under the command of a Brazilian
general, Panasco Alvim.
Paraguay “gave Brazil an oil concession on its territory, but the fuel
distribution and petrochemical business [was] in U.S. hands.” The U.S. also
controlled the university, the army, and the black market as well, of which Galeano wrote: “Through open contraband channels, Brazilian
industrial products invade the Paraguayan market, but the Sao Paulo factories
that produce them have belonged to U.S. corporations since the denationalizing
avalanche of recent years.”
Elaborating
on Brazil’s sub-imperial function since 1964, Galeano
wrote: “A very influential military clique pictures the country as the great
administrator of U.S. interests in the region, and calls on Brazil to become
the same sort of boss over the south as the [U.S.] is over Brazil itself.”
Ruy Mauro Marini Analyzes the Phenomenon . . .
===========
r.
Boomerang –
Big Business Style
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/04/boomerang-big-business-style/
by Ralph Nader
One measure
of corporate power’s dominance is its 24/7 relentless, profit-driven capacity
to strike back and prevail over reforms or other efforts designed to give the people
voice and fairness.
Here are some
examples that should give us pause in touting civic victories:
A few years
ago, during lunch with the formidable, creative Brian Lamb – founder of C-Span,
I asked whether, after decades of blanket coverage of Congressional sessions,
accessible to millions of people, Congress was an improved institution. After
all, as Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
His reply: “No.” Such is the ever-growing grip of corporate lobbyists directly on
and inside Congress, compared to the unorganized sovereign people back home.
The massive
government investment in developing important pharmaceuticals over the decades,
followed by free giveaways of these discoveries to drug companies, was supposed
to reduce the corporate cost of discovering and testing new medicines and
thereby reduce what companies like Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly would charge
patients. No way – Americans, who paid for these discoveries, are charged
record-high prices for pharmaceuticals – higher than in any other country in
the world.
To add insult
to injury, American drug firms exported production of many of these medicines
to China and India for importing back to the U.S. for a greater profit than
might come from U.S. production. One result – the national security nightmare
of our country not producing any antibiotics here at home!
During the
second Bush Administration, Congress cut the tax rate sharply to induce U.S.
companies to bring home tens of billions of stored dollars in return for
businesses promising to invest this money in productive enterprise and wage
gains. Result – A double-cross. Instead, the companies bought back their own
stock, pumped up executive compensation and funded mergers.
Years ago,
Congress passed legislation allowing business corporations to deduct up to ten
percent of their taxable income for charitable contributions. The lawmakers
thought this would unleash large sums of money to help the needy in addition to
educational and civic initiatives.
Result: Only
a tiny number of major corporations exceed the one percent level of charitable
donations. Hugely profitable companies give to charitable activities at a
fraction of one percent. Apple is one of them, headed by CEO Tim Cook who makes
$833 A MINUTE!
The U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not require companies to disclose their
percentage of charitable contributions. Institutional and individual
shareholders should introduce resolutions to compel the top brass to do so.
Such resolutions should win a majority of votes and open the door to the shame
and embarrassment of stingy companies. In such a “soft area,” this may be
enough to spring tens of billions of dollars for “good works.” Wake up
perpetrators of “good works!” All you have to lose is your perennial red ink.
President
Bill Clinton produced another unintended boomerang when in 1993,
he got through Congress a revenue rule prohibiting deductibility for any
corporate boss who received annual compensation above $1 million a year.
However, the rule came with a giant “loophole.” As Sarah Anderson of the
Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a report you should read
(https://ips-dc.org/executive-excess-2016-wall-street-ceo-bonus-loophole/):
“So-called ‘performance’ pay, including stock options and certain bonuses,
would be exempted from the deductibility cap.”
Result:
Executive compensation via deviously calculated stock options and bonuses
skyrocketed, and, combined with a Reaganite
elimination of SEC restrictions over stock buybacks in 1982, led to the
gigantic waste of trillions of dollars of corporate profits poured (shareholder
money) into unproductive stock buybacks.
Corporate
bosses have a personal interest in stock buybacks. As Steve Clifford showed in
his book The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It, the bosses developed metrics for raising their pay that
just happened to coincide with the stock buyback and stock option racket.
The emergence
of the Pentagon-developed Internet was supposed to even a playing field between
the haves and the have-nots by making access, retrieval, and transfer of
knowledge and informed advocacy virtually free. It was supposed to give power
to the people.
Result:
Addictive trivia to the masses, information overload and the rise of the
Wardens of the Internet Gulag – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest
of these unregulated control freaks who distribute your personal information
anywhere in the world for big profits.
===========
s.
“Soviet-Chinese Style Censorship Happening In America!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uhugk9h5s4&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(12:13)
+
Watch
“Louisiana Sues Biden For Censoring Americans’ Free
Speech”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEKBOxGKqHE&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(12:24)
+
Jeremy Corbyn Leaves Labour Party, Will
Run As Independent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkHjxOJlcq8&feature=youtu.be
with Jimmy Dore
(6:42)
===========
t.
News
from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller
“In memory of those who "died
suddenly" in the United States and worldwide, March 27-April 3, 2023”
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-f45
by Mark Crispin Miller
+
“Another
Norfolk Southern train derails in Ohio”
by Mark Crispin Miller
You heard it
here first: All those "accidental" spills of toxic chemicals could
soon "explain" why millions of Americans have cancer (from their
"vaccinations")
Either
shipping personnel from coast to coast are SUDDENLY incompetent, or all such
"accidents" are quite on purpose, and in keeping with the globalist
campaign to kill us off, and end America
+
“Pope Francis
hospitalized with "heart problems" (and/or lung infection);
Berlusconi has leukemia; Labour MP Luke Pollard has
skin cancer; singer John Farnham has mouth cancer”
by Mark Crispin Miller
Spanish
footballer Sergio Aguero's arrhythmia during Twitch
stream, Juanfran Moreno's kidney failure; Aussie
footballer Jai Serong's "heart problems";
Brazilian footballer Zé Carlos falls ill mid-game
+
“New US Vit D research”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTyOkOhbtKE
with Dr. Joseph
Campbell
(18:04)
+
“Mass
Formation Psychosis?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2KI4JPc6C4
with Rising, The
Hill TV
(11:36)
Joe Rogan :
“Big Pharma BRAINWASHED The Left, Created MASS
FORMATION PSYCHOSIS.”
+
Archives
The Corbett
Report: Open Source Intelligence News
https://www.corbettreport.com/oswald?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by James Corbett
+
The Defender
– April 5, 2023
Children’s
Health Defense- News &Views
http://support.childrenshealthdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=5641&em_id=2601.0
+
The Defender
– April 7, 2023
Children’s
Health Defense- News &Views
http://support.childrenshealthdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=5781&em_id=2801.0
+
Children’s Health Ddefense, Live, Video, Audio
http://support.childrenshealthdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=5841&em_id=2841.0
===========
u.
“Russia is still complicit in the Great Reset”
by Edward Slavsquat
"Russia & the Great Reset - Resistance or Complicity?" — one year
later
+
“BRICS rising as neocons destroy the west”
https://www.youtube.com/live/BR4IErrOQhU?feature=share
with Alex Christforou,
Alexander Mercouris, and Jeffrey Sachs
(34:35)
===========
v.
Friday Funnies: “The True Nature of Government”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/friday-funnies-the-true-nature-of?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
by Robert W Malone MD, MS
"Mr" Conspiracy Theory is at it
again...