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Category: Health/Medical

  • Racism in Food Systems and the Vegan Community

    Racism is one of the major social justice issues of the modern era. It can be seen in all corners of the globe, and in virtually every industry, negatively impacting minority communities and overall public health. The global food system is no exception.

    As a niche dietary movement, veganism is particularly problematic, with various news sources referring to the community as “elitist,” and even demonstrative of white privilege. To those social critics, the very idea of an individual choosing what he or she will (or won’t) eat is a virtual impossibility for impoverished minority populations.

    But it hasn’t always been this way.

    When you look at it from a global standpoint, in fact, veganism is primarily a product of non-white cultures. After all, India is home to more vegetarians than any other country on Earth, more than 400 million of them. While less popular, vegan diets are also common, primarily among the most devout practitioners of the country’s major religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. Both belief systems emphasize the practice of ahimsa or non-violence towards all beings. Accordingly, the consumption of animals does not align with ahimsa.

    It’s a different story in the U.S., where meat-eating is akin to a national pastime. Indeed, in 2018, Americans set a record for annual pounds of meat consumed, averaging a whopping 220 pounds per person. Conversely, only about 3% of the U.S. population considers themselves vegan, avoiding all food and ingredients that come from animals.

    Yet research indicates that veganism is on the rise across America, and African-Americans are the most frequent converts, at a rate of nearly 3-to-1. According to BBC News, many Black Americans view the vegan movement as a tool for both social change and improved health. And those beliefs aren’t simply wishful thinking: veganism and social justice often go hand-in-hand.

    Adopting a Vegan Lifestyle

    It’s important to note that, as a lifestyle, veganism encompasses much more than mindful dietary choices. Many of those who adopt a vegan diet also choose not to purchase and/or use items that are made from animals, from textiles to household goods and beyond.

    Unfortunately, however, the vegan community has been known to overlook humanity’s needs in favor of animals and the natural world itself. The primary tenets of veganism are advocating for animals that have no voice of their own, a mindset known as “speciesism,” as well as reducing the effects of climate change. In many vegan circles, the rights of animals are prioritized over that of people, especially those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

    Thus, with racial tensions nearing a breaking point across the U.S., it’s more important than ever for the vegan community, as well as the global food system, to shed their racist pasts. Accountability is a key factor in the push to end systemic racism within the food system, and various potential solutions exist. Let’s take a look at what’s at stake, how we got here, and how the vegan community can help create lasting social change.

    From the Environment to Public Health: Reasons to Go Vegan

    The rise of veganism in the 21st century is rooted in several beliefs and causes. Religious adherence and environmental concerns are among the most common reasons why people from all walks of life choose to consume a plant-based diet. Yet for many within the vegan community, the decision to stop eating meat comes down to basic knowledge: that of knowing where your food comes from.

    An unfortunate side effect of modern life is that most of us consume whatever types of food are available to us, no matter the source or nutritional value. Highly processed foods are ubiquitous within U.S. supermarkets and convenience stores, along with unhealthy ingredients including high-fructose corn syrup and chemical-based food dyes. Where meat, produce, and dairy products are concerned, you must also consider the impact of factory farming, in regards to both animal cruelty and racial inequality.

    Yet, for Americans living in marginalized communities and/or food deserts, the concept of choice doesn’t really factor into the equation. And therein lies one of the biggest pitfalls of modern veganism — it’s simply “not culturally adaptable or accessible for all people around the world,” writes Jenna Ruzekowicz for The Stanford Daily. What’s more, wealthier vegans often demonstrate a woeful lack of understanding of just how crucial meat is to many cultures.

    Food as a Social Justice Movement

    Make no mistake: cultural sensitivity is a necessary ingredient in the fight to quell systemic racism within the U.S. food system. Put simply, being culturally sensitive means that you make the effort to understand how an individual’s background forms the core of their beliefs, and influences thoughts, feelings, habits, and behaviors.

    When it comes to a particular individual’s dietary choices, the vegan community must therefore avoid gatekeeping and remain open-minded to the vast differences among people. For marginalized groups, there may be many barriers to adopting a vegan or plant-based diet, despite the inherent health benefits. The inaccessible high cost and potential unavailability of fresh, healthy foods are two of the most notable barriers.

    One’s occupational status may also be a huge factor in terms of dietary choices, as racism within the food system isn’t confined to the consumer level. Historically, farming has been confined to white America, at least where land ownership and profits are concerned. Only about 1.3% of U.S. farm owners or operators are Black, and they typically earn much less than their white counterparts. In comparison, more than 80% percent of farm laborers are non-white, BIPOC, reports Triple Pundit.

    This type of racial disparity is unfortunately rampant across all corners of the global food system. The good news is that there’s been plenty of pushback in recent years, wherein marginalized populations are taking greater control of their food choices.

    The Rise of the Plant-Based Diet in Minority Communities

    As more and more people learn about the potential upsides of a vegan lifestyle, the diet has breached all corners of society. Gardening has become somewhat of a guerrilla act in various urban settings, and may even serve to help marginalized populations heal from a long history of racism. Urban gardens provide access to healthy, fresh food, but they also strengthen communities and can improve public health overall.

    Wealthier BIPOC have also jumped on the vegan bandwagon. Notable Black athletes who reportedly eat a vegan diet include NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving, champion tennis player Venus Williams, and Colin Kaepernick, activist and former quarterback. By publicly touting the health and environmental benefits of plant-based diets, these public figures may just inspire regular citizens to follow suit.

    Especially in a society that’s saturated by social media, the endorsement of a celebrity to a particular cause, such as veganism, truly does have the power to change people’s minds. Where consumer behavior and corporate profits are concerned, various data supports the idea that celebrity endorsement works. To wit: “A celebrity endorsement increases a company’s sales an average of 4% relative to its competition,” according to USA Today. That influence effectively translates to social justice causes and lifestyle choices as well, including veganism.

    Tools for Systemic Change Within the Global Food System

    Yet true systemic change also requires real effort from the general public, not only celebrities. The vegan community and food distribution companies alike must strive for accountability, by acknowledging any harm they may have inflicted on BIPOC communities, and actively working to support those communities. Vegan BIPOC must be given a voice and the opportunity to bring the message of ahimsa to marginalized communities across the U.S.

    On an individual level, you can support BIPOC vegans by supporting minority-owned businesses, no matter the products or services provided. And as today’s gig workers are poised to become the leaders of tomorrow, the food industry must support every worker, regardless of race, class, or dietary habits. Resilience and adaptability come with the territory for many of America’s BIPOC, traits that are vital to future success, whether as a vegan business owner or environmental advocate.

    Those who adopt a vegan lifestyle don’t do so lightly. To the bulk of the community, veganism offers a tangible method towards systemic change and environmental stewardship. Yet veganism also has a problematic past, wherein minorities have been historically underrepresented. In our abundantly diverse world, cultural sensitivity and increased business opportunities for BIPOC hold the key to lasting change within the food system, as well as overall public health.

    Key Takeaways

    Ultimately, veganism comes down to the freedom and opportunity to make mindful choices about what you eat. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible for every American. BIPOC are especially underrepresented within the vegan community, although plant-based diets are historically rooted in Asia and the Middle East. It’s time to acknowledge the pervasive racism with the national food system and work to mitigate food deserts and inequality, while also advocating for more healthful eating on a national scale. Finally, we must leave racist ideals and systems behind for good, both for the health of the planet and people from all walks of life.

    Beau Peters is a freelance writer based out of Portland, OR. He has a particular interest in covering workers’ rights, social justice, and workplace issues and solutions. Read other articles by Beau.

    This article was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 11:15pm and is filed under and People of Color (BIPOC)., Animal Cruelty, Health/Medical, Life/Animal Rights, Racism, Speciesism, Vegetarians/Veganism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Racism in Food Systems and the Vegan Community

    Racism is one of the major social justice issues of the modern era. It can be seen in all corners of the globe, and in virtually every industry, negatively impacting minority communities and overall public health. The global food system is no exception.

    As a niche dietary movement, veganism is particularly problematic, with various news sources referring to the community as “elitist,” and even demonstrative of white privilege. To those social critics, the very idea of an individual choosing what he or she will (or won’t) eat is a virtual impossibility for impoverished minority populations.

    But it hasn’t always been this way.

    When you look at it from a global standpoint, in fact, veganism is primarily a product of non-white cultures. After all, India is home to more vegetarians than any other country on Earth, more than 400 million of them. While less popular, vegan diets are also common, primarily among the most devout practitioners of the country’s major religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. Both belief systems emphasize the practice of ahimsa or non-violence towards all beings. Accordingly, the consumption of animals does not align with ahimsa.

    It’s a different story in the U.S., where meat-eating is akin to a national pastime. Indeed, in 2018, Americans set a record for annual pounds of meat consumed, averaging a whopping 220 pounds per person. Conversely, only about 3% of the U.S. population considers themselves vegan, avoiding all food and ingredients that come from animals.

    Yet research indicates that veganism is on the rise across America, and African-Americans are the most frequent converts, at a rate of nearly 3-to-1. According to BBC News, many Black Americans view the vegan movement as a tool for both social change and improved health. And those beliefs aren’t simply wishful thinking: veganism and social justice often go hand-in-hand.

    Adopting a Vegan Lifestyle

    It’s important to note that, as a lifestyle, veganism encompasses much more than mindful dietary choices. Many of those who adopt a vegan diet also choose not to purchase and/or use items that are made from animals, from textiles to household goods and beyond.

    Unfortunately, however, the vegan community has been known to overlook humanity’s needs in favor of animals and the natural world itself. The primary tenets of veganism are advocating for animals that have no voice of their own, a mindset known as “speciesism,” as well as reducing the effects of climate change. In many vegan circles, the rights of animals are prioritized over that of people, especially those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

    Thus, with racial tensions nearing a breaking point across the U.S., it’s more important than ever for the vegan community, as well as the global food system, to shed their racist pasts. Accountability is a key factor in the push to end systemic racism within the food system, and various potential solutions exist. Let’s take a look at what’s at stake, how we got here, and how the vegan community can help create lasting social change.

    From the Environment to Public Health: Reasons to Go Vegan

    The rise of veganism in the 21st century is rooted in several beliefs and causes. Religious adherence and environmental concerns are among the most common reasons why people from all walks of life choose to consume a plant-based diet. Yet for many within the vegan community, the decision to stop eating meat comes down to basic knowledge: that of knowing where your food comes from.

    An unfortunate side effect of modern life is that most of us consume whatever types of food are available to us, no matter the source or nutritional value. Highly processed foods are ubiquitous within U.S. supermarkets and convenience stores, along with unhealthy ingredients including high-fructose corn syrup and chemical-based food dyes. Where meat, produce, and dairy products are concerned, you must also consider the impact of factory farming, in regards to both animal cruelty and racial inequality.

    Yet, for Americans living in marginalized communities and/or food deserts, the concept of choice doesn’t really factor into the equation. And therein lies one of the biggest pitfalls of modern veganism — it’s simply “not culturally adaptable or accessible for all people around the world,” writes Jenna Ruzekowicz for The Stanford Daily. What’s more, wealthier vegans often demonstrate a woeful lack of understanding of just how crucial meat is to many cultures.

    Food as a Social Justice Movement

    Make no mistake: cultural sensitivity is a necessary ingredient in the fight to quell systemic racism within the U.S. food system. Put simply, being culturally sensitive means that you make the effort to understand how an individual’s background forms the core of their beliefs, and influences thoughts, feelings, habits, and behaviors.

    When it comes to a particular individual’s dietary choices, the vegan community must therefore avoid gatekeeping and remain open-minded to the vast differences among people. For marginalized groups, there may be many barriers to adopting a vegan or plant-based diet, despite the inherent health benefits. The inaccessible high cost and potential unavailability of fresh, healthy foods are two of the most notable barriers.

    One’s occupational status may also be a huge factor in terms of dietary choices, as racism within the food system isn’t confined to the consumer level. Historically, farming has been confined to white America, at least where land ownership and profits are concerned. Only about 1.3% of U.S. farm owners or operators are Black, and they typically earn much less than their white counterparts. In comparison, more than 80% percent of farm laborers are non-white, BIPOC, reports Triple Pundit.

    This type of racial disparity is unfortunately rampant across all corners of the global food system. The good news is that there’s been plenty of pushback in recent years, wherein marginalized populations are taking greater control of their food choices.

    The Rise of the Plant-Based Diet in Minority Communities

    As more and more people learn about the potential upsides of a vegan lifestyle, the diet has breached all corners of society. Gardening has become somewhat of a guerrilla act in various urban settings, and may even serve to help marginalized populations heal from a long history of racism. Urban gardens provide access to healthy, fresh food, but they also strengthen communities and can improve public health overall.

    Wealthier BIPOC have also jumped on the vegan bandwagon. Notable Black athletes who reportedly eat a vegan diet include NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving, champion tennis player Venus Williams, and Colin Kaepernick, activist and former quarterback. By publicly touting the health and environmental benefits of plant-based diets, these public figures may just inspire regular citizens to follow suit.

    Especially in a society that’s saturated by social media, the endorsement of a celebrity to a particular cause, such as veganism, truly does have the power to change people’s minds. Where consumer behavior and corporate profits are concerned, various data supports the idea that celebrity endorsement works. To wit: “A celebrity endorsement increases a company’s sales an average of 4% relative to its competition,” according to USA Today. That influence effectively translates to social justice causes and lifestyle choices as well, including veganism.

    Tools for Systemic Change Within the Global Food System

    Yet true systemic change also requires real effort from the general public, not only celebrities. The vegan community and food distribution companies alike must strive for accountability, by acknowledging any harm they may have inflicted on BIPOC communities, and actively working to support those communities. Vegan BIPOC must be given a voice and the opportunity to bring the message of ahimsa to marginalized communities across the U.S.

    On an individual level, you can support BIPOC vegans by supporting minority-owned businesses, no matter the products or services provided. And as today’s gig workers are poised to become the leaders of tomorrow, the food industry must support every worker, regardless of race, class, or dietary habits. Resilience and adaptability come with the territory for many of America’s BIPOC, traits that are vital to future success, whether as a vegan business owner or environmental advocate.

    Those who adopt a vegan lifestyle don’t do so lightly. To the bulk of the community, veganism offers a tangible method towards systemic change and environmental stewardship. Yet veganism also has a problematic past, wherein minorities have been historically underrepresented. In our abundantly diverse world, cultural sensitivity and increased business opportunities for BIPOC hold the key to lasting change within the food system, as well as overall public health.

    Key Takeaways

    Ultimately, veganism comes down to the freedom and opportunity to make mindful choices about what you eat. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible for every American. BIPOC are especially underrepresented within the vegan community, although plant-based diets are historically rooted in Asia and the Middle East. It’s time to acknowledge the pervasive racism with the national food system and work to mitigate food deserts and inequality, while also advocating for more healthful eating on a national scale. Finally, we must leave racist ideals and systems behind for good, both for the health of the planet and people from all walks of life.

    The post Racism in Food Systems and the Vegan Community first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Single Payer: Which Way Forward?

    To say that there’s a political disconnect in the fight for a national single payer health care delivery system is to state the obvious. The struggle for M4ALL has grown due to decades of grassroots organizing alongside the gradual worsening of Americans’ health insurance coverage, with support now reaching 70% in the general public as reported by FOX News after the November elections.

    Yet now in the middle of a pandemic, where the USA accounts for a quarter of the world’s infections, and a third of the deaths, the USA’s for-profit healthcare system has no national plan or coordinated response. Instead, since so few Americans are going to the doctor this year, there is resounding joy in the industry as profits mount simultaneously with the despair of millions. The NYT reported an “embarrassment of profits” for some of the largest health insurance companies, a doubling of profits in the second quarter of 2020 compared to 2019. These obscene profits are coupled with staggering increases in wealth for billionaires in the healthcare sector. Their wealth has increased by 36.3% from 402.3 billion to $548 billion between April 7 and July 31, 2020. All this stands in sharp contrast to failing rural and inner city hospitals, smaller medical practices and the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths.

    For journalists and talking heads in the mainstream media, this dysfunctional monstrosity is just the acceptable reality of our healthcare system. Discussing any responsibility or alternatives are disregarded.

    With millions losing their job-based health coverage, millions more stuck with high insurance costs and lower benefits, Medicare for All is once again deemed off-the-table by all major politicians, including even its biggest proponents.

    This disconnect comes on top of a worsening economic crisis threatening to push millions out of their homes while half the population is living paycheck to paycheck, poverty rising and food insecurity is growing. On the other side of the class divide, trillions of dollars have been showered on the wealthy and corporations via the misnamed CARES ACT, and the world’s billionaires have increased their wealth 10.2 trillion during the COVID pandemic. If there’s ever a perfect storm of economic, social, and public health crises, it is now.

    The Republican leadership has taken advantage of this crisis and assigned blame to the largely unpopular ACA and fixated on its destruction. It has spent its political energy focusing on the high costs and other weaknesses of the ACA while never offering anything as a credible replacement.

    On the other end of the aisle, President Biden has clearly stated his opposition to M4ALL, promising to veto the bill if passed. Democrat House leader Nancy Pelosi is equally opposed, making the chances of a vote remote under the current leadership. The current Democrat platform focuses on “strengthening” the ACA, an easy attack vector for Republicans who are able to exploit the real failures of the ACA and continue to disorient the public.

    With these pitiful responses, disillusionment with the system is prevalent, and Americans are looking for alternatives.

    Controlled Opposition or Bottom Up Independent Movement?

    Which brings us to the nub of the issue. The M4ALL movement has grown, support is high and the need greater than ever. Grassroots organizing, the COVID-19 death spiral, combined with the continued deterioration of coverages and rising insurance costs has moved public support to a higher level despite a blizzard of attacks by opponents ranging from the insurance industry, media talking heads, politicians of both parties, unions, and liberals.

    As it currently stands, the public overwhelmingly favors M4ALL, and the main legislation, HR 1384, has over 100 cosponsors. Yet there’s no clear strategy or energy emerging to push the bill forward in Congress or mobilize public support at this crucial time.

    Despite an even deeper crisis than the 2008 recession, we are headed for a repeat of 2009, when the late John Conyers sponsored SP bill had more co-signers than any other healthcare legislation at the time, but was ditched by Democrats in favor of the ACA, a bill written by the insurance industry.

    Once again, Democrats are poised to join with Republicans to scuttle the immensely popular bill in favor of the insurance industry again, all under the meek disguise of “getting something accomplished”.

    Clearly, the M4All movement needs to rise to the occasion — or else risk jeopardizing its own credibility. Not only has public opinion overwhelmingly shifted in favor of M4All, but large numbers of Americans are ready to fight for it as well. The Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign drew huge amounts of activists out week after week for canvassing racked up a record number of donations.

    Now with the Sanders movement gone, and the pandemic exposing the injustices within the healthcare system, M4All supporters are looking for answers.

    The recent proposal by Jimmy Dore, YouTube political comedian, to force a vote on M4ALL in the House galvanized supporters, drawing tens of thousands to virtual town halls, but was overwhelmingly refuted by the officaldom of the Medicare for All movement. This has brought light on all the weaknesses of the present approach — an insider strategy that gives Congressional Democrats and the organizations that align with them too much power to unilaterally determine the direction of the struggle, while stifling voices in the grassroots. At this crucial moment, the strengthening of a popular movement is pushed aside for the sake of maintaining favorability within subsets of the Democratic party. In reality, grassroots energy is the real source of power. Rather than hitch their horses to insiders, movement leaders must drive the car, act and work in a non-partisan fashion to actually build real power.

    Where some critics of Dore agree with building a mass organizing force, they scoff at his proposal and instead say work must be confined within select electoral races tied to the Democratic party and insist congressional supporters like Jayapal and Ocasio Cortez are “allies” and should not be subject to criticism. Besides the “Squad”, there are already over 100 co-signers of HB1384. What is their role in strengthening the grassroots movement? Will they hold town hall meetings and build public coalitions in their district?

    Movement leaders must realize that the members of Congress must be dealt with from positions of principle and independence. Otherwise, the insider compromises progressive reps are subject to trickle down to the movement. If AOC says Medicare for All is off the table, the movement is weakened if there’s not leadership elsewhere standing up and pushing it forward. Public support is strong but we are up against an industry that is prepared to spend whatever is necessary to fight us at every turn — leadership is crucial.

    In the period ahead, the peoples expectations will grow and the need for M4ALL will become clearer but so will the power of corporate Democrats who now control all branches of government. They will muzzle any grassroots mass actions and push the insider strategy and demand obedience.

    Movement leaders should be wise to exploit a house vote, which would help many to understand the huge disconnect between Congress and the public. Actions like this can aid in forming a diverse coalition of labor, racial justice, and public health organizations to push for large demonstrations, public hearings, and petition drives. This is what we need to build towards: a united bloc of grassroots organizations and unions to push legislators to act.

    Labor Needs to Step Up and Fight

    However, labor and other organizations that should rise to the occasion and provide resources and independent leadership at this critical juncture are simply not capable, largely due to their deep ties to the Democratic party.

    Organized labor has been in a steady state of decline for the past few decades. Rather than use popular struggles such as M4A to try to gain back some ground, it has largely doubled down on the business union model of operation, which treats employers as “partners”, abandons the role of membership education, mobilization, and community outreach to increase union strength and the labor movement at-large.

    The lack of an organized independent current inside labor challenging the dead-end strategy of cooperation holds labor back. Witness labor’s silence over the past months on demanding wages be paid and healthcare for all workers during the pandemic, something almost all other developed countries have done. Despite hundreds of resolutions over the past decade supporting M4ALL at all levels of labor, real support is weak and ultimately folds when the Democrats give the orders. It has no real life or energy outside of a small handful of unions, and much of labor officialdom is indifferent or simply hostile to M4A, seeing brokered insurance plans as one of their last few selling points of a union to many workers, despite the share of unionized workers dropping yearly. This puts most of the top labor leadership at odds with both the growing mass of unorganized workers without unions and public opinion who are sympathetic to M4ALL and need real healthcare.

    In order to win M4A, other popular programs, and stave off its own decline, labor needs a mass upsurge against the corporate domination of society and its political allies. History shows that when labor engages its rank and file into popular action, it can sweep away major hurdles that seemed impossible to overcome. The passage of Social Security in the 1930’s is one such example.

    It needs an internal revitalization that advocates a fighting alternative program that mobilizes and puts people first instead of taking cues from “corporate partners” and Democratic politicians as to what is on and off the table. Building this necessary independent movement will ultimately clash with the party, and this is why Dore’s proposal has struck such a nerve. The multiple unfolding crises have put the need for a fundamental change in plain sight and progressives need to rise to the occasion.

    If our only hope for Medicare for All is phone banking for intermediate legislation deemed “on the table” by the progressive caucus and working to elect more progressive Democrats to Congress, the movement will never actually move forward. With an independent movement that doesn’t take cues from “allies” in Congress, but instead uses them to help move the agenda forward, we can reach a stage where it isn’t an isolated YouTube personality making such a suggestion but membership-led organizations, backed with the participation of ordinary people, who see themselves playing a real role in this fight.

    Ed Grystar is Chair of the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare. He has over thirty years experience in labor and health justice movements. Served as President of Butler County (PA) United Labor Council, AFL-CIO from 1987-2002, Western PA Labor coordinator for Jesse Jackson for President in 1988, PA coordinator for Dennis Kucinich for President in 2004. He has worked for a number of healthcare unions. Read other articles by Ed.

    This article was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2021 at 9:08am and is filed under Democrats, Health/Medical, Labor, Politics.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder

    Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades based on chemical- and proprietary-input-dependent agriculture which incurs massive externalised social, environmental and health costs.

    Reliance on commodity monocropping for global markets, long supply chains and dependency on external inputs for cultivation make the food system vulnerable to shocks, whether resulting from public health scares, oil price spikes (the global food system is fossil-fuel dependent) or conflict and war. An increasing number of countries are recognising the need to respond by becoming more food self-sufficient, preferably by securing control over their own food and reducing supply chain lengths.

    The various coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted many transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of the food system. If the current situation tells us anything, it is that structural solutions are needed to transform food production, not further strengthen the status quo.

    Agroecology

    In 2014, UN special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter’s report concluded that by applying agroecological principles to democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and poverty challenges. He argued that agroecological approaches could tackle food needs in critical regions and could double food production in 10 years.

    The 2009 IAASTD peer-reviewed report, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. And the recent UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

    Agroecology is based on traditional knowledge and modern agricultural research, utilising elements of contemporary ecology, soil biology and the biological control of pests. This system employs sound ecological management by using on-farm solutions to manage pests and disease without the use of agrochemicals and corporate seeds. It outperforms the prevailing industrial food system in terms of diversity of food output, nutrition per acre, soil health, water table stability and climate resilience.

    Academic Raj Patel outlines some of the basic practices of agroecology by saying that nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of using inorganic fertilizer, flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests and weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture: many crops are produced simultaneously, instead of just one.

    Much has been written about agroecology, its successes and the challenges it faces, not least in the 2017 book Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up, published by Food First. Agroecology can offer concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems. It challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system of industrial agriculture.

    By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in both richer and poorer countries, it can address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out offshored jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal, globalised capitalism that has hollowed out the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India.

    Agroecology is based on the principle of food sovereignty, which encompasses the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems. ‘Culturally appropriate’ is a nod to the foods people have traditionally produced and eaten as well as the associated socially embedded practices which underpin community and a sense of communality. But it goes beyond that.

    Modern food system

    People have a deep microbiological connection to soils, food processing practices and fermentation processes which affect the gut microbiome – up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes akin to human soil. And as with actual soil, the microbiome can become degraded according to what we ingest (or fail to ingest). Many nerve endings from major organs are located in the gut and the microbiome effectively nourishes them. There is ongoing research taking place into how the microbiome is disrupted by the modern globalised food production/processing system and the chemical bombardment it is subjected to.

    Capitalism colonises (and degrades) all aspects of life but is colonising the very essence of our being – even on a physiological level. With their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the human body. As soon as agri-food corporations undermined the capacity for eating locally grown, traditionally processed food, cultivated in healthy soils and began imposing long-line supply chains and food subjected to chemical-laden cultivation and processing activities, we not only lost our cultural connections to food production and the seasons, but we also lost our deep-rooted microbiological connection with our localities. Corporate chemicals and seeds and global food chains dominated by the likes of Monsanto (now Bayer), Nestle and Cargill took over.

    Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, neurotransmitters in the gut affect our moods and thinking. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinson’s Disease. In addition, increasing levels of obesity are associated with low bacterial richness in the gut. Indeed, it has been noted that tribes not exposed to the modern food system have richer microbiomes.

    To ensure genuine food security and good health, humanity must transition to a notion of food sovereignty based on optimal self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and local ownership and stewardship of common resources – land, water, soil, seeds, etc.

    However, what we are seeing is a trend towards genetically engineered and biosynthetic lab-based food controlled by corporations. The billionaire class who are pushing this agenda think they can own nature and all humans and can control both. As part of an economic, cultural and social ‘great reset’, they seek to impose their cold dystopian vision that wants to eradicate thousands of years of culture, tradition and farming practices virtually overnight.

    Consider that many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories and myths that helped them come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

    As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs. Freyfaxi marks the beginning of the harvest in Norse paganism, for example, while Lammas or Lughnasadh is the celebration of the first harvest/grain harvest in Paganism.

    Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. In addition to our physiological connection, our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.

    We need look no further than India to appreciate the important relationship between culture, agriculture and ecology, not least the vital importance of the monsoon and seasonal planting and harvesting. Rural-based beliefs and rituals steeped in nature persist, even among urban Indians. These are bound to traditional knowledge systems where livelihoods, the seasons, food, cooking, processing, seed exchange, healthcare and the passing on of knowledge are all inter-related and form the essence of cultural diversity within India itself.

    Although the industrial age resulted in a diminution of the connection between food and the natural environment as people moved to cities, traditional ‘food cultures’ – the practices, attitudes and beliefs surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of food – still thrive and highlight our ongoing connection to agriculture and nature.

    If we go back to the 1950s, it is interesting to note Union Carbide’s corporate narrative based on a series of images that depicted the company as a ‘hand of god’ coming out of the sky to ‘solve’ some of the issues facing humanity. One of the most famous images is of the hand pouring the firm’s agrochemicals on Indian soils as if traditional farming practices were somehow ‘backward’.

    Despite well-publicised claims to the contrary, this chemical-driven approach did not lead to higher food production according to the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” written by Prof Glenn Stone. However, it has had long-term devastating ecological, social and economic consequences as we saw in Vandana Shiva’s book The Violence of the Green Revolution and Bhaskar Save’s now famous and highly insightful open letter to Indian officials.

    In the book Food and Cultural Studies (Bob Ashley et al), we see how, some years ago, a Coca Cola TV ad campaign sold its product to an audience which associated modernity with a sugary drink and depicted ancient Aboriginal beliefs as harmful, ignorant and outdated. Coke and not rain became the giver of life to the parched. This type of ideology forms part of a wider strategy to discredit traditional cultures and portray them as being deficient and in need of assistance from ‘god-like’ corporations.

    Post-COVID plunder

    What we are seeing in 2020, is an acceleration of such processes. In terms of food and agriculture, traditional farming in places like India will be under increasing pressure from the big-tech giants and agribusiness to open up to lab-grown food, GMOs, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

    This vision includes farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. What will happen to the farmers?

    Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are tens of millions of smallholder farmers to be enticed from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

    Cut through the euphemisms and it is clear that Bill Gates – and the other incredibly rich individuals behind the great reset with their ‘white saviour’ mindset – is an old-fashioned colonialist who supports the time-honoured dispossessive strategies of imperialism, whether this involves mining, appropriating and commodifying farmer knowledge, accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations or facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

    In India – still an agrarian-based society – will the land of these already (prior to COVID) heavily indebted farmers then be handed over to the tech giants, the financial institutions and global agribusiness to churn out their high-tech industrial sludge?

    With the link completely severed between food production, nature and culturally embedded beliefs that give meaning and expression to life, we will be left with the individual human who exists on lab-based food, who is reliant on income from the state and who is stripped of satisfying productive endeavour and genuine self-fulfilment.

    Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined cultural diversity, meaningful social connections and agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined, for example, in the 2017 article “Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India” in the Journal of South Asian Studies.

    Such a pity that prominent commentators like George Monbiot, who writes for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, seems fully on board with this ‘great reset’. In his 2020 article ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, he sees farmerless farms and ‘fake’ food produced in giant industrial factories from microbes as a good thing.

    But Vandana Shiva says:

    The notion that high-tech ‘farm free’ lab food will save the planet is simply a continuation of the same mechanistic mindset which has brought us to where we are today – the idea that we are separate from and outside of nature… it is the basis of industrial agriculture which has destroyed the planet, farmers livelihoods and our health.

    She adds:

    Turning ‘water into food’ is an echo from the times of the second world war, when it was claimed that fossil-fuel-based chemical fertilisers would produce ‘Bread from Air’. Instead we have dead zones in the ocean, greenhouse gases – including nitrous oxide which is 300 times more damaging to the environment than CO2 – and desertified soils and land. We are part of nature, not separate from and outside of nature. Food is what connects us to the earth, its diverse beings, including the forests around us — through the trillions of microorganisms that are in our gut microbiome and which keep our bodies healthy, both inside and out.

    As an environmentalist, Monbiot supports lab-based food because he only sees a distorted method of industrial farming; he is blind to agroecological methods which do not have the disastrous environmental consequences of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture. Monbiot’s ‘solution’ is to replace one model of corporate controlled farming with another, thereby robbing us of our connection to the land, to each other and making us wholly dependent on profiteering, unscrupulous interests that have no time for concepts like food democracy or food sovereignty.

    Moreover, certain lab-engineered ‘food’ will require biomatter in the form of commodity crops. This in itself raises issues related to the colonisation of land in faraway countries and the implications for food security there. We may look no further to see the adverse health, social and environmental impacts of pesticide-dependent GMO seed monocropping in Argentina as it produces soy for the global market, not least for animal feed in Europe.

    Instead of pandering to the needs of corporations, prominent commentators would do better by getting behind initiatives like the anti-imperialist Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, produced by Nyeleni in 2015. It argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on genuine agroecological food production. It adds that agroecology requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

    It would mean that what ends up in our food and how it is grown is determined by the public good and not powerful private interests driven by patents, control and commercial gain and the compulsion to subjugate farmers, consumers and entire regions to their global supply chains and questionable products (whether unhealthy food or proprietary pesticides and seeds). For consumers, the public good includes more diverse diets leading to better nutrition and enhanced immunity when faced with any future pandemic.

    Across the world, decentralised, regional and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever. But there are major obstacles given the power of agrifood concerns whose business models are based on industrial farming and global chains with all the devastating consequences this entails.

    Following the devastation caused by coronavirus-related lockdowns, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet – on the condition that further neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.

    He says that countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong:

    For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

    For agriculture, this means the further opening of markets to benefit the richer nations. What journalists like George Monbiot fail to acknowledge is that emerging technology in agriculture (AI drones, gene-edited crops, synthetic food, etc) is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy to boost the bottom line of its agribusiness interests and their control over the global food chain.

    In the words of economics professor Michael Hudson:

    It is by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

    It is naïve to suggest that in the brave new world of farmerless farms and lab-based food, things would be different. In the face of economic crisis and stagnation at home, exacerbated by COVID lockdowns and restrictions, whether through new technologies or older Green Revolution methods, Western agricapital will seek to further entrench its position across the globe.

    The post Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Covid-19 under Apartheid: How Israel Manipulates Suffering of Palestinians   

    Israel’s decision to exclude Palestinians from its COVID-19 vaccination campaign may have surprised many. Even by Israel’s poor humanitarian standards, denying Palestinians access to life-saving medication seems extremely callous.

    Amnesty International, among many organizations, condemned the Israeli government’s decision to bar Palestinians from receiving the vaccine. The rights group described the Israeli action as evidence of the “institutionalized discrimination that defines the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinians.”

    The Palestinian Authority was not expecting Israel to supply Palestinian hospitals with millions of vaccines as it hopes to receive two million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in February. Instead, the request made by PA official, Hussein al-Sheikh, Coordinator of Palestinian affairs with Israel, was a meager 10,000 doses to help protect Palestinian frontline workers. Still, the Israeli Health Ministry rejected the request.

    According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, 1,629 Palestinians died and a total of 160,043 were infected with the deadly COVID-19 disease as of January 4. While such dismal numbers can also be found in many parts of the world, the Palestinian coronavirus crisis is compounded by the fact that Palestinians live under an Israeli military occupation, a state of apartheid and, as in the case of Gaza, an unrelenting siege.

    Worse still, starting early last year, the Israeli military conducted several operations in various parts of the occupied territories to crack down on Palestinian initiatives to provide free COVID-19 testing.  According to the Palestinian rights group, Al Haq, as early as March 2020, several field clinics were shut down and medical equipment confiscated in the Palestinian town of Khirbet Ibziq in the Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank. This pattern was repeated in East Jerusalem, Hebron and elsewhere in the following months.

    There is no legal or moral justification for Israel’s action. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 asserts that an Occupying Power has the “duty of ensuring and maintaining … the medical and hospital establishments and services” with “particular reference” on taking the “preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”

    Even the Oslo Accords, despite their failure to address many crucial topics pertaining to the freedom of the Palestinian people, oblige both sides “to cooperate in combating epidemics and to assist each other in times of emergency,” the New York Times reported.

    Not all Israeli officials deny that Israel is legally compelled to provide Palestinians with the help required to contain the rapid spread of the pandemic. This admission, however, comes with conditions. Former Israeli Ambassador, Alan Baker, told NYT that, while international law does “place an obligation on Israel” to help in the provision of vaccines to Palestinians, Palestinians must first release several Israeli soldiers who were captured in Gaza during and after the 2014 war.

    The irony in Baker’s logic is that Israel holds over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, hundreds of whom are imprisoned without trial or due process.

    The captured Israelis are held in Gaza as a bargaining chip, to be exchanged for the easing of Israel’s hermetic blockade on the densely populated Strip. One of the Palestinians’ main demands for the release of the soldiers is that Israel allows for the transfer of medical equipment and life-saving medication to the two million people of the Gaza Strip. International and Palestinian human rights groups have long reported on many unnecessary deaths among Palestinians in Gaza because Israel deliberately prevents Gazan hospitals from acquiring cancer medications.

    Long before the onset of the coronavirus, Israel has weaponized medicine, and Gaza’s dilapidated health sector is a standing testimony to this injustice.

    Perhaps, the overcrowded Israeli prisons remain the glaring testimony of Israel’s mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite repeated calls by the United Nations and, particularly, the World Health Organization, that states should take immediate measures to help ease the crisis in their prison systems, Israel has done little for Palestinian prisoners. Al Haq reported that Israel “has taken no adequate measures to improve provision of healthcare and hygiene for Palestinian prisoners” in line with the WHO “guidance for preventing COVID-19 outbreak in prisons.” The consequences were dire, as the spread of COVID among Palestinian prisoners continues to claim new victims at a much higher ratio compared with Israeli prisoners.

    Israel’s intentional hampering of Palestinian efforts to fight COVID is consistent with a trajectory of racism, where colonized Palestinians are exploited for their land, water and cheap labor, while never factoring as a priority on Israel’s checklist, even during the time of a deadly pandemic.  Israel is an Occupying Power that refuses to acknowledge or respect any of its basic obligations as an Occupying Power under international law.

    The Israeli attempt at manipulating Palestinian suffering as a result of the pandemic should also challenge our view of the fundamental relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Frequently we speak of Israel’s apartheid in Palestine, often illustrating that assertion referring to giant walls, fences and military checkpoints that cage in Palestinian communities and segregate them from one another.

    This, however, is merely the physical manifestation of Israeli colonialism and apartheid. In Israel, apartheid runs much deeper as it reaches almost every facet of society where Israeli Jews, including settlers, are treated as superior, while Palestinian Arabs, whether Christian or Muslims, are denied their most basic rights, including those guaranteed under international law.

    While Israel’s behavior is not entirely surprising, it being consistent with the sordid reality of military occupation and institutional racism, it is also self-defeating. Despite the obvious imbalance in the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, they are in constant contact, not as equals but as occupier and occupied. Since the coronavirus does not respect Israel’s matrix of control in Palestine, it will travel across all of the physical divides that Israel has created to ensure permanent oppression of Palestinians. Hence, there can be no containing of COVID-19 in Israel if it continues to spread among Palestinians.

    Long after the deadly pandemic is contained, the tragedy of occupied Palestine will, sadly, continue unhindered, until the day that Israel is forced to end its military occupation of Palestine and the Palestinians.

    The post Covid-19 under Apartheid: How Israel Manipulates Suffering of Palestinians    first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Proxy Jailor: Denying Assange Bail

    History, while not always a telling guide, can be useful.  But in moments of flushed confidence, it is not consulted and Cleo is forgotten.  A crisp new dawn can negate a glance to the past.  Having received the unexpected news that Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for charges of breaching the Espionage Act of 1917 and computer intrusion had been blocked by Justice Vanessa Baraitser, his legal team and supporters were confident. All that was left was to apply for bail, see Assange safely to the arms of his family, and await the next move by wounded US authorities.

    Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, human rights activist and veteran reporter on the Assange case, was initially buoyant in his column.  “I fully expect Julian will be released on bail this week, pending a possible US appeal against the blocking of his extradition.”  He further got “the strong impression that Baraitser was minded to grant bail and wanted the decision to be fireproof.”

    That fireproofing never came.  On Wednesday, January 6, the application for bail by Assange’s legal team was rejected.  Counsel for the US government, Clair Dobbin, built the prosecution’s case around the strong possibility that the publisher might flee the clutches of UK authorities even as the US was gathering its wits for an appeal to the High Court.  “His history shows he will go to any lengths to get away.”

    Forums would welcome this disreputable character: Mexico, for instance, had offered to “protect Assange with political asylum.”  The defence might well say that he would not flee due to poor health, but could they be sure?  A “flight risk” had little to do with mental wellbeing.  Remember, she pressed, what he did during the Swedish proceedings, how he “ruthlessly” breached the trust of those who fronted the bail money. Those who had offered surety for him, such as the Duchess of Beaufort, Tracy Worcester, had also failed in ensuring that Assange presented in court in 2012.  Beware, warned Dobbin, of sinister networks of operatives he could call upon to aid him vanish.  WikiLeaks had, after all, facilitated the escape of Edward Snowden.

    Dobbin’s tone and manner – gloomy and Presbyterian, as Murray described it – was all judgment.  She insisted to the court that, “any idea that moral or principled reasons would bear on Mr Assange’s conscience turned out to be ill-founded indeed.”  And she had much to go on, as Baraitser’s own judgment had essentially accepted virtually everything the prosecution had submitted bar grounds of mental health and the risk posed to him in US prison facilities.

    As for the basis of whether an appeal would succeed, Dobbin was convinced the prosecution were on to something.  The judge, she respectfully submitted, had erred on a point of law in applying the incorrect test on the prison conditions awaiting Assange.  The test was not whether measures taken by US prison authorities would make suicide impossible; the only issue was for authorities to put measures in place to lessen its prospects.  Reprising her role in attacking various defence witnesses who had put together a picture of grotesque danger awaiting Assange, including the ADX supermax prison in Colorado, Dobbin was convinced that the US system stood the test.

    Sidestepping the defence evidence on this, more thorough than anything supplied by the likes of US Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg during the trial, Dobbin argued that no thorough assessment of the facilities for treatment and prison conditions had taken place.

    Baraitser proved accommodating to Dobbin’s whipping submission.  “Notwithstanding the package offered by the defence, I am satisfied he might abscond.”  Having discharged Assange, she promptly repudiated her own ruling in a fit of Dickensian jurisprudence.  “The history of this case is well known…  Assange skipped bail and remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition to the US.”  Assange would remain in Belmarsh prison pending the US appeal.

    In her Monday judgment, Baraitser had acknowledged the signs of potential suicide shown by Assange during his stay in Belmarsh.  The prison adjudication report confirmed that, on May 5, 2019 “during a routine search of the cell solely occupied by Mr Assange, inside a cupboard and concealed under some underwear, a prison officer found ‘half a razor blade’.”  Baraitser even went so far as to accept, based on the assessment of defence witness Professor Michael Kopelman, that the finding of the razor was not merely a “disciplinary infraction” but one of the “very many factors indicating Mr Assange’s depression and risk of suicide.”

    On Wednesday, her tune was indifferent to the consequences of sending Assange back to a maximum security prison stocked with Britain’s most notorious inmates.  Continuing her long spell of denial on the seriousness of COVID-19 in the UK prison system, she swatted the submission by defence counsel Edward Fitzgerald QC that there had been 59 cases specific to Belmarsh before Christmas and that the prison remained locked down.  Dobbin demurred on this point, showing an email sent by prison authorities at 10.49 pm the previous night claiming that only 3 positive tests for COVID for Belmarsh had been returned.

    The result is that Assange continues to be punished, facing brutal carceral conditions while he awaits the next move by US prosecutors, despite having already served his sentence of skipping bail.  As a dejected Murray wrote, “Julian is living his life in conditions both torturous and tortuous.”

    Amidst the banal cruelties of Wednesday’s proceedings came a smidgen of hope for Assange.  G. Zachary Terwilliger, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia handling the prosecution, had to admit to being uncertain about what a Biden administration would do.  Speaking to NPR, Terwilliger suggested that any decision taken on Assange would “come down to resources and where you’re going to focus your energies.” But he is not waiting to find out: a position at the law firm Vinson & Elkins awaits.

    The UK, having adopted a position as Washington’s proxy jailor, is not about to quit its sordid role. Assange’s wellbeing and health continue to be jeopardised by his stay in Britain’s most notorious prison, where determined despair, as Baraitser herself has acknowledged, can take their toll.

    This article was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2021 at 1:19am and is filed under Belmarsh Prison, COVID-19, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, Extradiction, Health/Medical, Mental Health, Political Prisoners, The Old Bailey, UK Media, UK Politics, United Kingdom, US Prison System.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Social Issues and Homeownership for All

    Image source

    Homeownership is the traditional cornerstone of the American Dream. Yet for millions of people across the nation, who may have poor credit scores and earn less than a living wage, the possibility of homeownership has long been out of reach, even before the COVID pandemic. Today, with COVID serving as yet another barrier to homeownership in the U.S., especially among minority populations, the situation has become dire.

    In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that “an estimated 10 million adults are in a household that is not caught up in its mortgage payment.” Those vulnerable homeowners are at a high risk of losing their housing via bank foreclosure unless policies are enacted to protect them.

    In light of this sobering fact, we must ask ourselves whether the goal of homeownership is even possible under the threat of a global pandemic and subsequent economic insecurity. Is it time to reassess the general view in society that homeownership is the pinnacle of success? To answer those and similar questions, we need to take a look at the various legal, economic, generational, and political perspectives that surround homeownership in the 21st century.

    Social Justice, Public Health, and Housing

    Over the years, the federal government has implemented various policies and programs designed to facilitate homeownership for all. One notable example is the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, signed by then-President George W. Bush in 2003. The initiative framed the topic of homeownership in a social justice context, and for his part, President Bush reportedly believed that homeownership could help reduce racial inequality across the country.

    And various data supports the idea that housing insecurity is indeed a social justice issue. Among U.S. homeowners, minority populations are underrepresented. According to The White House archives, 74.3% of non-Hispanic whites own their own home, compared to 48% of African-Americans. These numbers are indicative of a larger, systemic problem wherein racial minorities are disproportionately devalued and oppressed.

    Housing inequality is just one of the long-standing systemic health and social inequities that are affecting modern society and negatively impacting public health. Minority populations are even at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19, in part due to practices in the realm of homeownership, including redlining and gentrification. In gentrified urban neighborhoods, people of color are frequently displaced, resulting in increased housing segregation and perpetuating the cycle of inequality.

    The Importance of Good Credit

    While gentrification isn’t necessarily indicative of bad intentions, the practice of redlining is much less innocuous. In New York City and numerous metro areas across the country, the effects of redlining lasted for decades, persisting to this day. Redlining refers to racist housing laws of the 20th century, wherein neighborhoods with large minority populations were labeled “red.” In those red-designated areas, it was much more difficult to obtain a mortgage loan, and property values were frequently undermined.

    Researchers have determined that redlining also negatively impacts homeownership rates and credit scores among residents of those “undesirable” neighborhoods. In regards to securing and maintaining equity, an individual’s credit score is of fundamental importance. A low credit score typically equates to higher interest rates or even the flat-out denial of a mortgage loan request.

    Situations such as foreclosure only serve to compound the issue of housing inequality and can significantly reduce an individual’s credit score. And make no mistake: repairing one’s credit following a foreclosure is typically an uphill battle for which there is no quick fix.

    Costs Related to Home Ownership

    To save on housing costs, even with less-than-perfect credit, many prospective homeowners seek creative solutions. Millennials, in particular, may opt to upgrade their existing home to better align with their personal ideals or choose to invest in a fixer-upper that’s priced to sell. But DIY housing repairs often come with their own set of challenges, including those related to personal safety.

    Older properties are especially problematic, as they were likely constructed with materials that today are considered harmful. For instance, asbestos was a common construction material in the past, used in various forms between the 1940s and 1970s. Asbestos exposure poses a significant health risk and has been linked to an aggressive form of cancer known as mesothelioma.

    Homeowners looking to renovate an older property may want to have the property checked for asbestos, mold, and other harmful substances before starting on the project. New York State homeowners may discover asbestos in various building materials and products, ranging from textured paint and vinyl floor tiles to insulation and roofing materials. Asbestos should only be removed by a licensed abatement contractor.

    Key Takeaways

    The question of fair and equitable homeownership is one of the most significant social justice issues of the 21st century. As we continue to adapt to a world forever changed by a pandemic, we must work to better understand the various nuances of homeownership. Further, we must promote economic policies that are designed to protect the millions of American homeowners who are under financial strain.

    Beau Peters is a freelance writer based out of Portland, OR. He has a particular interest in covering workers’ rights, social justice, and workplace issues and solutions. Read other articles by Beau.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2021 at 10:02am and is filed under Gentrification, Health/Medical, Homeownership, Housing/Homelessness, Social Justice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How my Recovering Crackhead, Harvard Business School Grad Roommate is Currently Helping the Community

    by Charles J. March III / January 3rd, 2021

    The somewhat mind-expanding origins of this story started on April 19th, otherwise known as “Bicycle Day.” It was on that date in 1943 when Albert Hoffman first discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD and, this year—the year of perfect vision—is when my roommate, Paul, discovered an ad by a philanthropic-based bike shop in San Juan Capistrano, CA, called Buy My Bikes, which is owned and operated by a friendly hippie named Jim. Once he saw it, he had an epiphany on how he could best help hundreds of people, including his family, friends, coworkers, and “clients” (patients) of the addiction/mental health treatment facility he started a handful of years ago called A Better Life Recovery, where I’ve been an employee since the early days of its inception. He figured buying a myriad of bikes for as many people as possible to get out and enjoy the great outdoors in this current quarantine culture was the best thing he could do—and it’s exactly what he did.

    Paul decided to start this quasi-biker gang after seeing the impact that COVID-19 was having on our clients. Many of them were getting overly stir-crazy and, sadly, some of them began leaving against medical advice.

    Most of them come to us under paranoid, hostile, suicidal, etc., circumstances as it is, and lockdown has only been exacerbating these presentations to an exponential degree. Traditionally, we regularly take the clients to the beach for experiential therapy purposes: fresh air, vitamin D, exercise, etc., but due to Orange County’s beaches being closed, opened, and closed again, Paul knew that was out of the question (especially due to the droves of non-social distancing people that showed up during the heatwave a couple weeks ago). Rather than work himself into a tizzy and protest with the rest of the disgruntled residents, he decided to take the road(s) less traveled: those being the local bike paths, horse trails, creek beds, mountain ridges, and other such bike conducive byways.

    I saw him in his hyper-focused element a few weeks ago in his room on Google Maps, printing out and plotting all kinds possible courses to take in the area. It was like watching Einstein draw up equations on a blackboard in a military command and control tower.

    Even after living and working in the area myself for the last five years, I’ve been more than pleasantly surprised at the glorious mini-ecosystems and such that we’ve been discovering on our excursions the last few weeks. The flora and fauna are absolutely breathtaking. The smell of the flowers, the sound of birds chirping, the feel of the sun, dirt, sand and aqua on our skin all work to create an ongoing visceral experience of nature as we pass from one tucked away community microcosm to the next. Needless to say, the overall effect has been tremendous for the mental health of all involved, especially for the clients, many of whom have never been to California. One of them said the other day with wonder while gazing about during a water break, “I can’t believe this is where I live now. I didn’t realize there was so much more to life than where and how I was living. ”

    It’s also been awesome to see all the graffiti and outsider art installations and such along the way that have been obscured by time and dilapidation. The clients have been getting really inspired by it, and we’ve commenced to do our own impromptu art therapy projects as we go.

    The clients have been so moved by Paul’s MC efforts that they have started referring to him as “General,” especially in regards to when he leads the charge through streams. Their growing confidence is palpable every time they plunge through another torrent, laughing and splashing as they go with child-like joy and abandon.

    And it’s not just the bike adventure blessings that Paul has recently been bestowing upon the community…

    We are very fortunate to live on a property that is owned by a botanical-garden business woman who went full Johnny Appleseed status a number of years ago by planting umpteen amounts of fruit trees, which left us with an ever producing selection of backyard produce. We usually donate the excess to Second Harvest Food Bank, but since they’re not taking individual donations right now due to COVID-19, we’ve had to improvise, adapt, and overcome in regards to alternative distribution methods.

    The other day, Paul barged into my room with what was basically a fruit picker basket pole battering ram and said, “C’mon, give me a hand. There are people to feed.”

    Besides giving the fruit to anyone we figure may be in need in the community, we load up bushels of it to take on our caravans and hand them out to any passerby we can (while taking the best possible precautions, of course), including the many mom & pop Mexican immigrant and Native American farms along the way to help further the community distribution. We also go to goat yoga pens and such to feed man and beast alike, to foster a happy-go-lucky pseudo-petting zoo experience, however we can. Paul makes sure to give each person on the journey an equal amount of fruit, so we can all have the experience of feeling like we’re giving back and making a difference.

    This is all in-line with his original divine inspiration start-up mission he had years ago before establishing the rehab. There were many obstacles along the way, and for a while it seemed like his calling to help others via his education and personal experience of overcoming addiction might not come to fruition, but his desire to serve never wavered, and he’s since helped thousands of people from all over the country to resume or begin happy and healthy lives, myself included.

    P.S. Paul has had an especially open-door policy as of late, offering asylum under “scholarship” circumstances to anyone who might need it, regardless of their financial/insurance situation, because—everyone deserves a better life.

    Charles J. March III is a person currently living in California. Works in/forthcoming from Evergreen Review, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, 3:AM Magazine, BlazeVOX, Expat Press, Points in Case, Sensitive Skin, Taco Bell Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Maudlin House, Misery Tourism, Litro, Otoliths, etc. More at at LinkedIn and SoundCloud Read other articles by Charles J..

    This article was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2021 at 4:41am and is filed under Activism, COVID-19, Environment, Health/Medical.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Prisons and Jails are COVID-19 Super-Spreaders

    San Quentin

    Inmates in federal prisons, state prisons and local jails should be in the first cohort of people to be offered COVID-19 vaccinations.

    One in five prisoners in the U.S. has been reported to have had COVID-19. That’s 20% of people behind bars. And that is likely a “vast undercount,” according to Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex.

    If compassion for prisoners does not move policy makers or the general public, then eyes should turn to a pair of recent studies, one by the Prison Policy Initiative and the other by the Marshall Project, focused on prisons and jails in the U.S. According to data in these two reports:

    • Prisons and jails are “super-spreaders” of the virus, not only among prisoners, but also among people in the communities where prisons and jails are located. It may be hard for a prisoner to break out of jail, but the virus gets out easily, hosted by guards, medical staff, maintenance staff, transportation workers, administrators and visitors.
    • Prisons and jails were responsible for over HALF A MILLION reported COVID-19 infections, 566,804 to be exact – in May, June and July alone. That was 13% of all new cases in the country during those months.
    • A big majority of those half-a-million-plus infections were among people who are NOT incarcerated, rather in the communities in which our prisons and jails are located.
    • If those 566,804 people were a country, that country would rank 5th in the world for reported COVID-19 infections for this period – right after the U.S., Brazil, India and Russia.
    • The state with the largest number of prison and jail related infections is California, with 113,969 cases – again, in May, June and July alone. The infection rate among prisoners in California is even higher than in the country as a whole – one in four, or 25%.
    • The community with the largest number of prison and jail related infections in the country is the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside area, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), with 94,221 cases during those three months.
    • The San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area, as defined by the BEA, ranked 17th in the nation with 5,298 prison and jail related infections.

    Are all you “free” men and women feeling safe right now?

    In August, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that Ralph Diaz, the former head of the California state prison system, would retire in October. Diaz had been the target of sharp criticisms for his approval of a transfer of 121 prisoners from the prison in Chino to San Quentin. This transfer, by all accounts, resulted in a massive COVID-19 outbreak in San Quentin, including 28 reported deaths, so far.

    Assemblyman Marc Levine, a Democrat whose district includes San Quentin, has been quoted saying that “The spread of COVID-19 at state prisons was a preventable public health disaster and a failure of CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] leadership at the highest level.”

    That “highest level” should include Newsom. It is hard to believe that Newsom was unaware of Diaz’ approval of the Chino transfer. Newsom has also done little in response to demands that the prison population be spread out and thinned out in order to prevent the “public health disaster” that our system of mass incarceration has spawned.

    The state of California’s conduct with regards to the pandemic and the prison population borders on genocide. Perhaps the biggest criminal in the state sits not in a prison cell, but in the Governor’s Office in Sacramento.

    The recent uproar over the COVID-19 outbreak at the federal women’s prison in Dublin, California, which has put further strain on the already crisis-ridden health care system in Alameda County, is only the tip of the iceberg, hidden not underwater but behind the walls of our prisons and jails.

    Despite all of this, the Tuskegee Experiment factor has to be addressed. The Tuskegee Experiment was a medical study of 399 Black men known to have syphilis, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service. These men were told that they were being treated for “bad blood.” Instead, they were given placebos so that the researchers could study the progression of the disease, including blindness, mental impairment and autopsies after they died. This experiment went on for 40 years before it finally ended in 1972.

    Given the racist history of the U.S. medical profession, of which the Tuskegee Experiment is only one grotesque example – and given the ongoing medical neglect and abuse of prisoners in general – it would hardly be surprising that some prisoners would refuse a COVID-19 vaccine shot, if given the choice. But a failure to offer prisoners the option of the vaccine is just as much medical abuse as the failure to provide penicillin to the victims of the Tuskegee Experiment.

    As we head into the new year, COVID-19 infections among prisoners show no sign of slowing down. In fact, last week the surge of new COVID-19 cases in U.S. prisons reached the highest level to date. We are all, prisoners and non-prisoners alike, suffering the consequences. This is very literally an example of the adage that an injury to one is an injury to all.

    The least Newsom could do is to arrange to offer the vaccine to state prisoners, for the safety of everybody.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jimmy Trending because AOC against Fighting for Medicare for All

    The post Jimmy Trending because AOC against Fighting for Medicare for All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • From TMAP to Warp Speed: How Big Pharma Algorithms Fast-Track Unapproved Drugs and Vaccines

    Five of the pharmaceutical companies developing COVID-19 vaccines through the USA’s Operation Warp Speed have paid out a total of nearly $6 billion to settle lawsuits charging them with fraud related to “off-label” marketing of atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants that were mandated through the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which evolved into President George W. Bush’s federal “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.” AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceutical, and Pfizer, which are currently funded with over $7 billion from Operation Warp Speed, financed the nationwide rollout of fraudulent TMAP algorithms in order to bilk Medicaid programs and other public revenues to pay for drugs like Risperdal, Seroquel, Geodon, Paxil, and Wellbutrin, causing serious side-effects, including death.

    These same pharma corporations are now involved in another algorithm project as they partner with the US federal government and an all-star team of Big Tech companies, including IBM, Amazon, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and Intel, which are leveraging Big Data to accelerate vaccine development through the White House’s public-private COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. With the help of artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer are boasting that their warp-speed trials have produced vaccines ranging from 70% to 95% effective. However, these companies have a history of exaggerating the efficacy of their products just like they did by bankrolling TMAP algorithms to embellish the efficacy of their new lines of “atypical” mental health drugs.

    Now that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are effectively calling for mandatory vaccination by pushing digital immunity passports, it is keen to highlight how Operation Warp Speed is headed by Moncef Slaoui, who is a former Chairman of Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline and a former Director of Moderna, while Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines are financed by the Gates Foundation, which is a member of the WEF along with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Dell, and Hewlett Packard. Just like Big Pharma pushed fraudulent TMAP algorithms to ram through new mental health drugs, it appears that this very same pharma cartel is now colluding with their Big Tech partners at the World Economic Forum, which is calling for a technocratic Great Reset, to hype COVID health dangers in order to ram through new experimental mRNA vaccines, DNA-plasmid vaccines, and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines that will jumpstart the “reset” for the Fourth Industrial Revolution of AI-driven biotech engineering.

    Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Government: Public-Private AI Bioengineering for Global Public Health

    The World Economic Forum reports that vaccines normally take anywhere from two to three years to be properly developed while other vaccines often take up to ten years to be developed. But now that the World Health Organization (WHO), which is financed by the Gates Foundation, has sounded the COVID pandemic alarm, normal US government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry is being laxed so that federal funds can pay Big Tech to utilize Big Data algorithms to simulate 3D AI models of the SARS-Cov-2 genetic structure in order to digitally manufacture RNA proteins and DNA plasmids that correspond immunologically to the pathogenic structures of the virtually modeled virus.

    Back on March 16th, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a “call to action” for “the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts” to follow the lead of the COVID-19 Open Research Database (CORD-19), developed by a public-private partnership between Microsoft, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Oren Etzioni’s Allen Institute for AI, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. According to the Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ Spectrum magazine, the White House-sponsored CORD-19 project data-mines over “130,000 scholarly articles on COVID-19 in machine-readable format.” Scanned with Google Cloud’s Kaggle “machine learning,” CORD-19’s dossier of scientific journals is scoured with AI algorithms in order to extrapolate predictive analytics from the medical literature on COVID-19. To further promote CORD-19’s AI analytics, Google’s Kaggle announced the Covid-19 Research Challenge on March 16th. In the meantime, the AlphaFold “neural network” of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence has been modeling “the three-dimensional shape of SARS-CoV-2 proteins based on the virus’s genetic sequence,” reports Spectrum.

    Shortly after the White House’s CORD-19 “call to action,” on March 23rd, the Office of Science and Technology Policy launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC): a public-private partnership between the US federal government, international universities, and Big Tech corporations, which are assigned the task of expediting research and development for a COVID-19 vaccine. The COVID HPC Consortium roster includes IBM; Microsoft; Google Cloud; Amazon Web Services; Dell Technologies; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Intel; NVIDIA; D. E. Shaw Research; NASA; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; the Texas Advanced Computing Center; the San Diego Supercomputer Center; the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute; the Ohio Supercomputer Center; the Open Science Grid; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; UK Digital Research Infrastructure; the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre; the Center for High Performance Computing at the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing; the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information; and Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science.

    In brief, the White House is pushing the CORD-19 database, the COVID HPC Consortium, and Operation Warp Speed in a combined effort to finance Big Pharma’s experimental vaccine research accelerated with Big Data programmed for 3D AI modeling of SARS-CoV-2 virus structures which can be targeted with bioengineered synthetic mRNA proteins and DNA plasmids manufactured through machine learning and other AI algorithms. Financed with federal tax dollars, Warp Speed pharma corporations, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Inovio are leveraging these public-private Big Databases in order to kickstart preliminary trial phases for mRNA vaccines, DNA plasmid vaccines, and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines that will usher in the World Economic Forum’s biotechnological Fourth Industrial Revolution managed by AI algorithms.

    Perhaps this great leap forward in vaccine biotech might sound like just the scientific breakthrough needed to combat COVID. However, it should be noted that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never before approved human use of a vaccine for any previous strain of coronavirus due largely to severe inflammatory autoimmune side-effects in animal trials. At the same time, neither mRNA vaccines, nor DNA plasmid vaccines, nor genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines have ever before been approved for human use in the United States. Obviously, this begs the question: how is it that these experimental vaccines, which have never been approved by the FDA, are suddenly becoming safe and effective for the first time in history under less rigorous conditions when standard testing protocols are being shortcut at emergency “warp speed”? How does rushing a vaccine to market at the fastest pace in history increase its safety and efficacy?

    To be sure, no amount of Big Data can close the margins of errors between the time-consuming procedures of standard testing protocols and the expedited procedures of emergency testing protocols, even when the fast-tracked protocols are buttressed by the most powerful supercomputers programmed with the most sophisticated AI algorithms.

    Warp Speed Pharma Corporations Pushed “Medication Algorithm Projects” to Defraud Medicaid

    Even if Big AI algorithms could potentially close these margins of errors between digital theory and the reality of clinical testing, it should be noted that most of the Warp Speed pharmaceutical corporations, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical, and Johnson & Johnson, have a history of pushing fraudulent “Medication Algorithm Projects” that boost stock prices by scamming Medicaid into paying for these companies’ antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, which resulted in serious side-effects, including death.

    The first of these algorithm projects to be bankrolled by Big Pharma was the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which was funded in large by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: the tax-exempt philanthropy of the Johnson & Johnson corporation. Bankrolled by the pharmaceutical industry, which is the most powerful lobby in the United States, TMAP was promoted as a model for other states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington D.C. According to a whistleblower from Pennsylvania’s Office of Inspector General, Allen Jones, “[t]he drug companies involved in financing and/or directly creating and marketing TMAP include: Janssen Pharmaceutical, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Austrazeneca [sic], Pfizer, Novartis, Janssen-Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyeth-Ayerst Forrest Laboratories and U.S. Pharmacopeia.” These companies effectively boosted TMAP to the national stage where it was repackaged as the federal “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health,” which was spearheaded by President George W. Bush, who championed TMAP as Governor of Texas.

    The goal of TMAP was to standardize prescription algorithms for public health services that would mandate mental health treatments requiring medications from the TMAP pharmaceutical cartel. When clinical trials failed to show that Big Pharma’s new lines of atypical antipsychotic drugs were superior to the older generic lines, TMAP’s pharma lobby paid a panel of doctors and psychiatrists, such as Jack Gorman of the New York Psychiatric Institute, to establish “Expert Consensus Guidelines,” which falsely promoted the use of Risperdal (Johnson & Johnson), Seroquel (AstraZeneca), Geodon (Pfizer), and other new drugs as “safer” and “more effective” than their older generic counterparts. In the meantime, TMAP’s pharma lobby bought off public health officials, such as Steven Karp and Steven Fiorello of the Pennsylvania Office of Mental Health, who installed similar Medication Algorithm Projects in their home states, setting up mental health programs that bilked Medicaid and other tax-funded social services to pay for atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants prescribed by Big Pharma-funded medication algorithms.

    When TMAP was morphed into President Bush’s New Freedom Commission through Executive Order 13623, which directs schools to “screen” students for “mental health” conditions that can be treated with TMAP drugs, 14 of the 22 commissioners had ties to TMAP and other state MAP projects. These commissioners include Charles Currie (Pennsylvania); Michael F. Hogan (Ohio); Stephen W. Mayberg (California); Henry Harbin (Maryland); Randolf Townsend (Nevada); Anil Godbole (Illinois); Robert Pasternak (New Mexico); Rodolfo Arredondo (Texas); Nancy Carter Speck (Texas); Deanna Yates (Texas); Patricia Carlile (Texas); Norwood Knight-Richardson (Texas); Robert Postlehwait (Eli Lilly); and Larke Nahme Huang (National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association). During Bush’s campaigns for US president, he raked in at least $709,440 from TMAP pharma companies, including Pfizer ($160,109), Eli Lilly ($239,331), GlaxoSmithKline ($10,000), and Johnson & Johnson ($300,000).

    As a result of TMAP pharma fraud, Johnson & Johnson paid out $158 million to settle a Texas lawsuit charging the company with defrauding the state’s Medicaid system through payments for “unapproved” or “off-label” Risperdal prescriptions. Similarly, AstraZeneca would end up paying $520 million to settle a lawsuit for its fraudulent marketing of off-label Seroquel prescriptions while Pfizer’s false claims about off-label Geodon prescriptions would go on to cost the company $2.3 billion in the largest healthcare fraud settlement ever prosecuted in the history of the US Justice Department. GlaxoSmithKline would wind up beating Pfizer’s record by paying $3 billion to for its fraudulent marketing of pediatric prescriptions for Paxil and Wellbutrin, which are also favored by TMAP algorithms. In sum, Warp Speed Pharma has a long track record of paying out billions of dollars to settle lawsuits for fraudulently bilking government agencies to foot the bill for its “algorithmically verified” drugs, which have resulted in serious side-effects, including death.

    To be sure, TMAP algorithms, which are basically flow charts for prescribing drugs based on questionable diagnostic criteria, are not as sophisticated as the Big AI algorithms wielded by IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other supercomputing institutions that are currently partnering with the pharmaceutical industry through Operation Warp Speed. Indeed, medication algorithms may have evolved far beyond the complexity of TMAP flow charts as Big Pharma and Big Data have been merging together through biotech partnerships between Pfizer and IBM Watson; AstraZeneca and BenevolentAI; Johnson & Johnson and BenevolentAI; and GlaxoSmithKline with Exscientia and Insilico. Nonetheless, just because Operation Warp Speed has access to bigger data and better algorithms through the CORD-19 database and the COVID HPC Consortium, it doesn’t change the modus operandi of these pharmaceutical giants which are prone to exaggerate the accuracy of their data analytics just like they embellished the accuracy of TMAP algorithms.

    AI-Engineered Biotech Vaccines Will Usher in a Transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution

    Only days after the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) became the first government agency in the world to authorize emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, the UK MHRA is already warning that people who have a history of allergic reactions should not take the mRNA “jab” despite Pfizer-BioNTech’s claim that the vaccine has a purported 95% efficacy rate. It was also revealed that two people, who participated in Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine trials, died after receiving doses of the experimental mRNA vaccine. These reports should come as no surprise since the pharmaceutical industry has spent the last decade struggling with failed attempts to get regulatory approval of mRNA vaccines. The only reason these biotech vaccines are now being approved, thanks to PR campaigns from the WHO and the WEF, is that public health officials have wagered that the threat of COVID-19 is greater than the dangers of experimental mRNA vaccines.

    Now that the global pharmaceutical cartel, which partners with the WEF, has capitalized on COVID panic in order to get their feet inside the doors for regulatory approval of mRNA vaccines, the commercial precedent has been set to open a pandora’s box of new mRNA “medicines” which, according to Elon Musk, can be engineered to genetically modify the human species. In fact, there is already talk of the potentials for mRNA vaccines that are bioengineered to prevent cancer in the near future while there are other prospects for mRNA technologies that manufacture stem cells. In the meantime, Musk’s Tesla corporation has developed a “bioreactor” that is an “RNA Printer” designed to advance CureVac’s development of an mRNA COVID vaccine. In brief, COVID fears are being exploited to fast-track Warp Speed mRNA vaccines, along with DNA plasmid vaccines and genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines, in order to jumpstart an experimental biotech industry that is primed to be a cornerstone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution which, according to Klaus Schwab of the WEF, will bring about a transhumanist “fusion of our physical, digital, and biological identity” through biogenetic engineering driven by artificial intelligence.

    It is no coincidence that Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and the Gates Foundation, which all seek to profit from bioengineered COVID vaccines, are all partnering with the World Economic Forum, which is urging that corporations and governments use COVID-19 as an “opportunity” to kickstart a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will be dominated by these Warp Speed Pharma companies and their Big Tech partners, including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Dell, and Hewlett Packard, which are likewise members of the WEF. These are glaring conflicts of interest akin to those that corrupted TMAP and the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. Just as TMAP Pharma bankrolled US government officials to fast-track state and federal funding for unapproved uses of new mental health drugs, which caused severe side-effects including deaths, it appears that Warp Speed Pharma is similarly partnering with the WEF to fast-track international funding for new biotech vaccines, which have never before been approved, in order to break open new bioengineering markets that will lay the groundwork for the World Economic Forum’s transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over seven years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to many newsletters. Read other articles by John.

    This article was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2020 at 10:21pm and is filed under COVID-19, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Health/Medical, Pharmaceuticals, Vaccines, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Julian Assange: Covid Risks and Campaigns for Pardon

    Before the January 4 ruling of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the extradition case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher will continue to endure the ordeal of cold prison facilities while being menaced by a COVID-19 outbreak.  From November 18, Assange, along with inmates in House Block 1 at Belmarsh prison in south-east London, were placed in lockdown conditions.  The measure was imposed after three COVID-19 cases were discovered.

    The response was even more draconian than usual.  Exercise was halted; showers prohibited.  Meals were to be provided directly to the prisoner’s cell.  Prison officials described the approach as a safety precaution.  “We’ve introduced further safety measures following a number of positive cases,” stated a Prison Service spokesperson.

    Assange’s time at Belmarsh is emblematic of a broadly grotesque approach which has been legitimised by the national security establishment.  The pandemic has presented another opportunity to knock him off, if only by less obvious means.  The refusal of Judge Baraitser to grant him bail, enabling him to prepare his case in conditions of guarded, if relative safety, typifies this approach.  “Every day that passes is a serious risk to Julian,” explains his partner, Stella Moris.  “Belmarsh is an extremely dangerous environment where murders and suicides are commonplace.”

    Belmarsh already presented itself as a risk to one’s mental bearings prior to the heralding of the novel coronavirus.  But galloping COVID-19 infections through Britain’s penal system have added another, potentially lethal consideration.  On November 24, Moris revealed that some 54 people in Assange’s house block had been infected with COVID-19.  These included inmates and prison staff.  “If my son dies from COVID-19,” concluded a distressed Christine Assange, “it will be murder.”

    The increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Belmarsh has angered the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer.  On December 7, ten years from the day of Assange’s first arrest, he spoke of concerns that 65 out of approximately 160 inmates had tested positive.  “The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence.” He was currently being “detained for exclusively preventive purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”

    The picture for the rapporteur is unmistakable, ominous and unspeakable.  The prolonged suffering of the Australian national, who already nurses pre-existing health conditions, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.  Imprisoning Assange was needlessly brutal.  “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”  Melzer suggested immediate decongestion measures for “all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary” especially those, “such as Mr Assange, who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.”

    Free speech advocates are also stoking the fire of interest ahead of Baraitser’s judgment.  In Salon, Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, penned a heartfelt piece wondering what had happened to the fourth estate.  “Where is the honest reporting that we all so desperately need, and upon which the very survival of democracy depends?”  Never one to beat about the bush, Waters suggested that it was “languishing in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.”  To extradite Assange would “set the dangerous precedent that journalists can be prosecuted merely for working with inside sources, or for publishing information the government deems harmful.”  The better alternative: to dismiss the charges against Assange “and cancel the extradition proceedings in the kangaroo court in London.”

    In the meantime, a vigorous campaign is being advanced from the barricades of Twitter to encourage President Donald Trump to pardon Assange.  Moris stole the lead with her appeal on Thanksgiving.  Pictures of sons Max and Gabriel were posted to tingle the commander-in-chief’s tear ducts.  “I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”

    Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has added her name to the Free Assange campaign, directing her pointed wishes to the White House.  “Since you’re giving pardons to people,” she declared, “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality in the deep state.”

    Pamela Anderson’s approach was somewhat different and, it should be said, raunchily attuned to her audience.  She made no qualms donning a bikini in trying to get the president’s attention.  “Bring Julian Assange Home Australia,” went her carried sign, tweeted with a message to Trump to pardon him.  Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept, proved more conventional, niggling Trump about matters of posterity.  “By far the most important blow Trump could strike against the abuse of power by CIA, FBI & the Deep State – as well as to impose transparency on them to prevent future abuses – is a pardon of @Snowden & Julian Assange, punished by those corrupt factions for exposing their abuses.”  Alan Rusbridger, formerly editor of The Guardian, agrees.

    While often coupled with Assange in the pardoning stakes, Edward Snowden has been clear about his wish to see the publisher freed.  “Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange.  You alone can save his life.”  As well meant as this is, Trump’s treasury of pardons is bound to be stocked by other options, not least for himself.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020 at 8:06pm and is filed under Belmarsh Prison, CIA, COVID-19, Deep State, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Exploitation, FBI, Health/Medical, Incarceration, Julian Assange, Lockdown, Media, NSA, Political Prisoners, Solidarity, Solitary confinement, Surveillance, United Kingdom, United States, US Prison System, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nuremberg Trial: 75 years Ago and What it Means Today

    On Saturday 21 November 2020 Russia celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials which started on 20 November 1945 and lasted almost a year, until 1 October 1946. The Tribunal was given the task of trying and judging 24 of the most atrocious political and military leaders of the Third Reich.

    For this unique celebration – so we shall never forget – Russian leaders and people of the Arts and History organized a Special Performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” at Moscow’s Helikon Opera Theatre. Daniel Hawkins, from RT, introduced this extraordinary event, as a journey through history, a journey through life and death, when some of – at that time – most genocidal people in history had to answer for their crimes.

    This opera event was prepared for more than a year and was first performed in January 2020 for the Holocaust victims and the victims of the Nazi concentration camps in Leningrad. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an International Military Tribunal. They resulted in 12 death sentences.

    The idea of the “Requiem” performance is “not just to appeal to emotions, but to reason. Because if we fail to learn from history, the tragedy could be repeated.”

    This is precisely what Sergei Novikov, head of the (Russian) presidential directorate for social projects, intimidated. He says, “Despite of what we have seen happening 75 years ago – we do not seem to have learned a lesson. Today we seem to go down the same road, which is frightening.”

    The musical performance interplays with theatrical realism – so memories are awake and moving – better than a museum. The educational impact of this celebration of remembrance is extremely important especially for the young people, who do not remember these events, but with this first-class performance, they may learn a crucial lesson,  a lesson hardly talked about in history books and even less so in the west.

    If we compare what has happened then – 75 years ago – actually the anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on 9 and 10 November 1938, effectively the beginning of WWII, and look at today’s extremism in Europe, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, we know that we are not far from a tyranny we knew as “Nationalsozialismus”, a political Nazi-concept of the late 1930s and up to mid-1940s, that today can best be compared with extreme neoliberalism and merciless oppression of peoples’ rights by police and military.

    In fact, we may be steps ahead of what Hitler and his crime and war cabinet had done, but again, today, like then, we are blind to it. There may be a time when we can no longer move, when we are in constant lockdown, masked with dismembered faces, so to speak, kept away from each other under the pretext of social distancing so that we cannot communicate with each other, all for reasons of public health, for the “good intentions” of our governments to protect us from an evil virus – the corona virus.

    Today, this oppression is the result of a long-term plan by a small elite to implement The Great Reset (Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020).

    *****

    There is, of course, a good reason, why Moscow wants the world to remember what WWII meant and how eventually Nazi-Germany was defeated – yes, largely if not solely by enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. Some 25 to 30 million USSR soldiers and Soviet citizens had left their lives for salvaging Europe – and possibly the world – from an all invading fascism.

    The United States, nominally an ally of the Soviet Union, had clandestinely funded the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union. One of the key purposes for the US getting “involved” in WWII, other than defeating the British Empire, was to defeat their arch-enemy, communist Soviet Union. The Rockefellers funded Hitler’s war machine by providing them with hydrocarbons, with petrol, the energy that drove the war.

    On the other hand, the Federal Reserve (FED), via the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) – the pyramid tower still omni-present in Basle, Switzerland, near the German border – transferred gigantic monetary resources to the Reichsbank (at that time Hitler’s equivalent of a German Central Bank)

    Verdi’s Requiem Performance in Moscow on 21 November is important to go back in history and open the “memory books” in front of our eyes. It is even more important, as we see the trend of fascism taking over the entire European continent and possibly also the United States.

    Europe basically ignores the importance of the 75th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials which still, as of this date, provides precedents for international war crimes – except, these precedents are miserably ignored.  If not, we would have multiple repeats of Nuremberg in our days and age with European and US leaders (sic) in “retirement’ but still with power. Our dystopian western world is beset by war criminals even to the point where they blackmail judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, not to touch their – the European and US – war crimes, or else…

    That’s where we have arrived.

    Since we are going back to the times when WWII and Nuremberg happened, we should take the opportunity to also look at the Big Picture, one that may be at the root of this new wave of fascism invading Europe. It is, in essence, a health dictatorship; it has become a Health Martial Law. Many countries have ratified, quietly, or rammed it through Parliament without the public at large noticing – a law allowing them switching from everyday life to an emergency situation; i.e., (health) Martial Law.

    The Big Picture, though, is a diabolical plan of eugenics. Yes, it’s a term nobody wants to use, but it must be said, because it’s one of the fundamental principles that lies in all that is planned, the 2010 Rockefeller Report and the extremely important WHO Report “A World at Risk” – Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies, by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – GPMB (September 2019).

    Key members of this Monitoring Board include the World Bank, IMF, CDC and many more influential players, who have been concocting the “Preparedness” for a new epidemic since at least 2016, when the World Bank set up a special “Health Emergency Fund” to face the “next pandemic”.

    Also, part of the SARS-Cov-2 preparedness and planned outbreak, was Event 201 (18 October 2019, NYC, sponsored by Gates, the WEF, and the Johns Hopkins School for Medicine (Rockefeller created and funded), which simulated the outbreak of a SARS-Cov-2 virus which curiously happened a few weeks later. The “outbreak” was actually officially announced on the dot of the beginning of the Decade 2020.

    The Big Picture scheme also includes as an aftermath to covid, The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020), a plan to implement the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enslavement of the remaining population. The Rockefellers and Bill Gates, Kissinger and many more  have nurtured the idea of massively reducing the world population for at least the last 70 years.

    Ever since the Rockefellers espoused the concept of the “Bilderberger Society” (a parallel organization to the WEF (World Economic Forum), with overlapping and an ever-moving memberships) their one and only continuous “project” was a selective population reduction. And they actually never made it a secret. See Bill Gates TedTalk in February 2010 – just about the time when the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, the one that has us now in “lockstep” following all the rules and regulations, issued by WHO and supported by the entire UN system .

    Why then was the eugenics agenda never seriously picked up by the mainstream, by the public at large? – Possibly, because nobody can even imagine people so evil – or allow me to call them non-humans – to actually want to make this reality. But these non-humanoids do exist. How they infiltrated themselves into human society is a mystery.

    By the way, have you ever seen Bill Gates – with his obnoxious grin – wearing a mask? Or the Rockefellers, Kissingers, et al?  How come they are always spared from this deadly virus, SARS-Cov-2?  How come they get very old, but appear to be always in good health? What kind of life elixir are they using?

    Back to the Eugenists. To implement such a massive plan on a worldwide scale, one needs a uniform approach to world health. In 1948, just a couple of years after the Nuremberg trials started, where war criminals like the Rockefellers should also have been indicted for supplying the enemy (German Nazis) with energy to drive their (anti-Soviet) war machine – back then, in 1948, Rockefeller created WHO, the World Health Organization.

    The philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation (RF) has marked the field of health like no other organization. The oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Hence, the RF created and provided the original funding to set up WHO in 1948. On 7 April 1948, WHO inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health Organization, which had been an agency of the League of Nations. Twenty-six (out of then 58) UN members ratified WHO as a UN agency under the UN Constitution.

    Once you have “Global Health” under one roof, the WHO, funded primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the pharmaceutical industries (predominantly GAVI – Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – also created by Bill Gates in 2000) and you also have the predominant donor, Bill Gates, an obsessed vaxxer (and eugenist) without any medical training, choose WHO’s Director General – Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a buddy of Gates and former Board Member of GAVI – it is relatively easy to make the foundation of WHO’s health policies based on vaccination.

    That’s what we see today. As we have heard from Gates’ TedTalk (2010 see above), vaccination seems to lend itself perfectly to reduce the world population. It has the further advantage, that if anything goes “wrong” – no vaccine company can be held responsible, let alone being sued. For example, if people get seriously ill or die from the vaccinations – which would not be a surprise, after the Covid-19 are planned to be administered in warp speed – the vaccine pharmaceuticals cannot be sued.

    In fact, vaccine companies do not bear any liability risk. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34), was signed into law by US President Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1986. NCVIA’s purpose was to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury, since lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the vaccines, a lame argument, but that shows once more the lobbying power the pharma industry commands.

    That’s where we stand today. Any sinister vaccination agenda, no matter how hurtful to the public, is home free. Today we are at this crucial point of massive forced vaccination. Many governments; i.e., UK’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Scott Morrison, have already advanced the idea of a vaccination-pass. Without it you are banned from flying and from just about every public event. That’s promising.

    And one might ask what does that have to with public health?  What is the real agenda behind it?

    Again, returning to the Nuremberg Trials, aren’t we in the midst of a world tyranny to which all 193 UN member countries subscribed, or were coerced into – a tyranny that has already been genocidal, in as much as it destroyed the world economy, creating countless bankruptcies, unemployment – untold poverty and misery and death, and now a potentially genocidal massive vaccination campaign, the effects of it might be death in the medium to long term, but “untraceable”, or too late by the time the cause is discovered.

    A world tyranny inflicted by all 193 UN member countries – whatever their motivation – all these governments and the heads of WHO and the entire UN system belongs before a new Nuremburg-type Tribunal – where the same legal principal would be applied as 75 years ago in 1945.

    Who says this will not happen? We can make it happen. We, the People, are the 99.99%.  They are only 0.01 %. We have the power to resist – and we will prevail.

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This article was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2020 at 10:39pm and is filed under Bill Gates, COVID-19, Economy/Economics, Eugenics, Germany, Health/Medical, Lies, Lockdown, Media, Militarism, Nuremberg Trials, Opinion, The Soviet Union, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States, Vaccines, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Trade Organization, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.