Thousands of workers are on strike right now in the United States, in what is being dubbed “Striketober”, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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It looked like something of an ambush, but a coterie of Australian journalists had their man where they wanted him. Between sessions at the G20 Summit in Rome, and French President Emmanuel Macron found himself blunter than usual. The sundering of the relationship between Australia and France over the new trilateral security relationship between Canberra, Washington and London, and, more importantly, the rescinding of the submarine contract with Australia, was playing on his mind. Did he think, came the question, whether he had been lied to by the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, about the intended scrapping of the Franco-Australian submarine deal with the creation of AUKUS? “I don’t think, I know,” came the definitive answer.
The response from Morrison was one of shameless dissembling. Making sure that Australian audiences and the news waves would only pick up select gobbets, he told the press that the French president had attacked, or “sledged” Australia and its good burghers. He expressed concern about “the statements that were made questioning Australia’s integrity and the slurs that have been placed on Australia”. He was “not going to cop sledging at Australia.”
A full reading of Macron’s words in the brief encounter suggests nothing of the sort. Australia and France were bound up in history and blood enriched ties going back to two world wars. “Your country was shoulder to shoulder with us during the wars. You had fighters with us when our freedom was at stake. We have, we do have the same values.” He respected “sovereign choices” but it was also vital to “respect allies and partners.” It was the conduct of the Australian government he had issue with, something that Macron thought “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”
Morrison’s defence proved shoddy, confusing the issue of having difficulties with the contractual relationship with France to build twelve diesel electric submarines with the issue of announcing an intended divorce. As with lovers who read off different relationship scripts, the Australian Prime Minister is convinced that Macron must have known when they met in June that something had soured. He had “made it very clear that a conventional diesel-powered submarine was not going to meet Australia’s strategic requirements. We discussed that candidly.” He did, however, say that alternatives were not discussed, they being “in confidence”.
The strategic environment, claimed Morrison with tediousness, had changed. There were also issues specific to the contract with the French defence firm Naval, including “following through with commitments on Australian industry content.” There were issues with delays; issues with cost. “These were matters that we raised quite regularly and indeed I raised with President Macron at each opportunity when we either spoke over the phone or we had our bilateral meetings going on for a number of years.”
Morrison’s mendacity is also pronounced in how he justifies pursuing the nuclear submarine option with the United States. Wishing to cuckold France, the Australian prime minister began to look around, with eyes firmly fastened on Washington’s formidable hardware. But, using the reasoning of any adulterer who is found out, it wasn’t a true relationship at that point; Washington and Canberra were dealing with “the nuclear stewardship issues”. “At the same time, we were working through in good faith with Naval to address the problems that we had in the contract.” Such a marriage; such a commitment.
In the Scotty from Advertising appraisal of the world, dissatisfaction can be retooled and packaged as separation and nullification. What Macron thought he heard or understood is less relevant than what Morrison thought he said. He might even believe it.
The Biden administration has also done its fair share of dissimulative manoeuvring in this affair. In his meeting with Macron at the Villa Bonaparte in Rome on October 29, President Joe Biden was fluffy and buttery. France, he assured the French President, was “the reason, in part, why we became an independent country.” Asked on whether the relationship between France and the US had been “repaired”, Biden was apologetic: “Well, the answer is: I think what happened [over the announcement of the submarines] – to use an English phrase, what we did was ‘clumsy’. It was not done with a lot of grace.”
This gave Biden the cue to place Morrison before an oncoming truck. “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened.” To clarify, he was “under the impression that France had been informed long before that the [French-Australian submarine] deal was not going through. I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”
What, then, had Morrison told Biden he was doing about the French and ending the conventional submarine affair? The Australian, equipped with a confidential document detailing a communications timeline on the new submarine nuclear announcement, suggests that Biden’s full grasp of the verity should also be questioned. The 15-page document, approved by officials of Biden’s National Security Council, makes the point that France would only be informed of the new arrangements on September 16.
Time was also spent in the Eisenhower Executive Office building pondering how Australia might best calm an indignant France. There was also concern expressed on how other powers might react. Little consideration was given to the fact that any anger might be directed against the US, least of all from France. Perhaps, suggests Greg Sheridan of the same newspaper with some charity, Biden has reached a point in his life where he can’t remember what he can’t remember.
The Morrison government has also taken to the distasteful practice of selective leaking in bolstering its quicksand position, a tactic which further suggests a diminution of an already less than impressive political office. A prodding text from Macron to Morrison, sent two days prior to the AUKUS announcement and the cancellation of the contract, involved a query as to whether good or bad news could be expected about the French submarines. The vulgar insinuation here is that Macron supposedly had an inkling that something was afoot from the Australian side, which hardly counts as fully informed awareness. Naturally, Morrison’s response is not noted. The Elysée further denies suggestions that Canberra made several warning efforts regarding the AUKUS announcement.
An Elysée official expressed bafflement at the tactic. “Disclosing a text message exchange between heads of state or government is a pretty crude and unconventional tactic.” It may be crude, and it may be unconventional, but this furnishes an apt summation of the Australian Prime Minister’s view of diplomacy.
The post Lies, Lies and Nuclear Submarines first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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To people in developing countries, it seems clear, the wealthy countries that caused most of the problem of climate change should pay the most to adapt to it and to solve the problem. But instead, countries like the United States lecture low low-emitting countries to do more while they extract their resources and destroy their forests.
For example, Nicaragua was an outspoken critic of the Paris climate talks because they did not go far enough. It is one of the countries most impacted by climate change, yet its own greenhouse gas footprint is one of the smallest. Nicaragua initially insisted that the Paris Accord did not reduce emissions enough (a position that was later adopted by a majority of countries and the IPCC). Dr. Paul Oquist, Nicaraguan Minister and envoy to the talks, insisted in Paris that developing countries should receive the billions of dollars promised by the big greenhouse gas emitters to pay for greenhouse gas mitigation programs.
The post Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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The they, of course, are the capitalists. The bankers. The mortgage companies. The housing agencies. The alphabet soup of agencies which will squeeze blood from turnips and your progeny’s progeny.
The media is the medium for their poison, all those tricks of the mind, subliminal and overt, messages that cause chaos, the mass hysteria, the constant fear, the rage against the ‘other.’ And, the other are our fellow citizens, victims, most of us, sliding and slipping and slurrying down the proverbial drain.
Housing management companies; i.e., apartment management companies, now property management companies. We are talking about putting people out on the streets management companies. Black Rock or Black Stone, or the top (largest) property management companies in USA are evil doers, in the words of the criminal, George W. Bush. Terrorists in our own land.
Here, The 7 Deadly Sins of Rental Property Management, all in black and white and color a la PDF.
Take a look at the number of “units” these thieves “own,”; i.e., manage! National Multifamily Housing Council — 50 Largest Apartment Managers
Again, the ‘they’ in the subheading are those who look at citizens as, well, semi-useless renters, eaters, drivers, patients, breathers, breeders. UNITS as in a person’s home, shelter, abode, gathering place, roof-running water-place-to-raise-a-life-or-a-family. In the hands of management companies, who are in Gucci suits and are beholding to the devils of capitalism: money schemers, bond holders, the top echelon of this Ponzi scheme. No national red alert state by state around eviction moratorium running out, or the exorbitant rents and sickening inflated cost of houses, new or preowned? Instead, this Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum Administration is saber-nuke rattling with China and Russia. Instead, this Brokeback Administration is pushing Jab of the Month on every living mammal in the USA. But real change, real safety, real social contracts? Never in the Art of the Deal shit-hole that is the Democratic and Republican mentality, which is for us, useful idiots, mental disease!
I have dealt with some of these property management (killer) outfits. Recently, with one of my clients — homeless veteran, diabetes, amputated leg from the knee down, other chronic illnesses — I went through email-telephone-snail mail hell. Zero response about his one apartment we landed that needed some ADA addition so he could get out of the bloody apartment in his wheelchair. I’ve written about Pinnacle (number three on that list above with 172,000 ‘units’). My client had a Rotary Club and Boy Scout unit and a construction company ready to put in a sound, safe, nice pathway so he could exit and enter his apartment.
Read: “Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!”
Nothing from Pinnacle after hours spent attempting a two-way communication with them. I did get an apartment manager, in the Portland apartment complex office, who was from Ukraine, and who was, again, in this shit-hole country, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of really helping me get to the top brass. Even the top brass, via email and snail mail, did not respond. You can’t even pull the old wounded military veteran with chronic illness card to get to their heart-strings, because, they have no heart — just a big set of investment-banking-real estate accounts.
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
― W.E.B. DuBoisMichael Hudson, again, explains how messed up we are in USA with this rentier system. This system of penury, three steps to poverty hustle. And Corporate/Mainstream Media are in with this scam. Don’t get confused with the title, Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson’s book. He goes to the heart of this USA scam:
So, I am talking about even redneck Texas, Dallas, where working class folk are seeing that $1,100 a month one bedroom apartment rent jump to $1,800 in November. Just like that, oh, that Lone Star Shit Hole State. But wait, that jump is happening all over the land. Every rotten governor who dares go on TV to express their Jab-Jab-Jabberwocky and their Unvaccinated-Going-to-get-sacked-turned-away-from-everywhere-no-medical-help-no-entitlements-no schooling sick fascist soft-shoe Vaudeville Big Pharma Blue Face bullshit, well, they are the Paper-Pharma Tigers, with state legislatures as pimped out by corporations and US Chamber of Commerce shits to the point of massive infrastructure failure, pot holes as big as DMZ craters, dirty water, dirty air, zero housing for the 80 percent, no bus drivers for the kiddos. This is America, the land of the Survival of the Fittest, of Richest, or Most Connected, or Most Sociopathic!
They are real overtly slimly too tall De Blasio’s! “Droves of city government retirees are preparing to pay thousands annually to keep their existing health insurance rather than taking a chance on a new cost-cutting plan.”
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This is what these whippersnappers in the Blue States and Red States do — privatize EVERYTHING, since we are almost useless eaters and useless breathers. Useful, to them, as they call us their “useful idiots.” Title any way you want to: “Retirees Flee City Medicare Program as Deadline Looms for Move to Private Health Plan” or, “New York City Retirees Refusing to Eat the Medicare Advantage Dogfood“
So, no rent control, no national housing plan, no holding the US Chamber of Commerce and the other 10,000 thuggery lobbying groups for the building and paving and clear-cutting industries to the people’s standards. And, yes, a few brethren send me link and story after story and link. It’s what I have been feeling and seeing since age 13. Yes, the ugly reality of kill squads, School of the Americas, in Central America. Yes, in Arizona, age 13, after years overseas, seeing the government, the administrations, and their policy of undocumented folk from US-spit upon countries and their death squads coming over the borderline, illegally. Imagine that, people as illegals, and worse, as aliens, from another planet! Media and the newspapers I worked for, I fought those terms — illegal alien. Sick sick roots of this slaver country. Look at this, 15 years ago, with the old web site, Dissident Voice: “This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens.”
Here, Ferlinghetti — from that little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art!
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pp.2-3
This headline, in the context of housing crisis, job crisis and, well, the supply chain made up crisis, which Michael Hudson talks about above with Blumenthal and Norton. “Biden says US will go to war with China to defend Taiwan”!
US President Biden bluntly declared at a Town Hall meeting on Thursday that the US was committed to going to war against China in defense of Taiwan. The statement is another provocative step that undermines the basis of US-China diplomatic relations and intensifies the already acute tensions between the two countries. (source)
These are not normal human beings, any of them in these dastardly administrations — Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden. Oh, historically, it gets much much worse. Just the health care crises after crises, and get some slice of the National Health Services in Britain which my aunts and cousins and uncles in the old days used as ways to be treated with dignity for medical ailments. It’s all gone the way of dog food, Reagan/Thatcher, on down the line, Blair/Clinton, Obama/Trump/Biden. More news and analyses coming from a hip-hop guy, than anything from the Fox-MSNBC-CNN-Et Al crap:
Speaking of those great health authorities, those alphabet soup acronym junk science folk from our own FDA, get a grip on this during the planned pandemic:
That FDA, even reported on brokeback NBC: ‘Even the website of the approved product, R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse, which offers “7 Bold Colors, 3 Premium Flavors, 3 Nicotine Levels” along with sleek accessories like pretty “racing wraps” and holsters, says on top: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” But the FDA claimed that with vaping, “the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” Apparently the argument is: It’s OK if young people get addicted to vaping nicotine because they will now be able to buy e-cigarettes to later quit.’
You know, the FDA in cahoots with the other great Pharma Folk, the self reporting Jewish Family, a la Sackler/Purdue:
Oh, it’s on Hulu, and it is a protracted, goofy drama of the St. Elsewhere kind. SO protracted, so long, but from Macy’s book. Oxycontin. Man, that dope in the white-blue-yellow-pink pill. Talk about emblematic of Pfizer/Merck/GSK/The Lot of them!
Curtis Wright was the FDA’s deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products during the time OxyContin was being approved. In this position, Wright played a key role in allowing the deceptive marketing that suggested OxyContin was non-addictive. Particular focus has fallen on a special label issued by the FDA specifically for OxyContin which read “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” As depicted in Dopesick, this label was used by sales representatives to sell OxyContin as a treatment for moderate pain to skeptical doctors like the one played by former Batman star Michael Keaton. However, Purdue had conducted no actual studies to support this claim and Wright knew it. In Dopesick, FDA employees also confirm the person who approved of this label was Curtis Wright. (source)
Nah, we can’t call these people evil. We can’t call their business dealings illegal. We can’t call into question their ethics. We can’t question where they developed such sick marketing. We can’t look at their origins, their friends, their rabbis, their associations with family lines that go way back. That, my kind reader, would be, well, in the words of racists and fascists, anti-Semitic?
Well, I guess I can leave the origins stories up to the, well,
“How the Sackler family built a pharma dynasty and fueled an American calamity”
In ‘Empire of Pain,’ Patrick Radden Keefe details the humble Jewish immigrant roots of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and how it is evading justice despite being behind the opioid crisis
In the 1960s, esteemed psychiatrist/genius ad man Dr. Arthur Sackler cemented his family’s massive fortune when his marketing strategy transformed diazepam, better known as Valium, from just another drug produced by his client Hoffman-La Roche into the top-selling “wonder” drug in the United States between 1968 and 1982.
Though the Jewish-American Sackler, whose parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe, initially encountered antisemitism, the wealth that he brought his family helped change all that.
Along with his psychiatrist brothers Mortimer and Raymond, Sackler would see enormous success marketing pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. The family delved into philanthropy in addition to pharma, and the name once snubbed by antisemites soon adorned prestigious educational and cultural institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Louvre.
Yet more stories coming from friends that define CAPITALISM, and that is the C which is the big Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous. That is the soft shoe here — the C-C-C-C-C-C-C of Capitalism, with those Seven Deadly Sinful C’s! And just to make a quick aside, sort of the Robin Leech, The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous detour, get a load of this set of seven deadly sinful C’s: Living: “The Super-Rich Are Forming a New Exclusive Club. For $180,000, a three-year membership includes investment opportunities, access to West Point generals, confidential support groups and private getaways.” (source, again, the 7 Sinful C’s Bloomberg News [sic])
Nah, never off with their heads!
[Tag: Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group. Courtesy of R360]
And these fella’s are controlling the narrative around 5/6G, Fake Green Capitalism, World Economic Forum’s “The Deplorables/Barely Useful Idiots Will Be Soylent Green” project of massive anal and biometric and cellular surveillance, and, then this bizarrely vapid story about “the only way to save the earth — read, saving/protecting/growing the billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth, power, ego, land, families — is with, err, the billionaires’ and millionaires’ great know-how and techie future.”
Oh, Canada, the tail and hind teat of USA: “Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis” by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, University of Winnipeg. I’ll quote her, and just the two paragraphs say it all for me, and alas, while I do come from academia, albeit remedial college courses, writing courses, a la adjunct/freeway flyer, I have to say that my dealings with sustainability and green pornography/greenwashing experts over the years (yes, I ‘graduated’ from the University of British Columbia’s Green/Sustainability Summer Institute mumbo-jumbo course) has pretty much gelled the reality: most academicians are very-very much corruptible and corrupting, back to the 7 Very Sinful C’s of Capitalism:
Diplomacy aside, it’s time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.
As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan’s thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal. (source)
It all comes down to reset after reset, the great openly brazen and powerful Very Seven Very Deadly Very Sinfully C ‘s of the Worst System for Humanity and Earth Ever Devised, Capitalism! Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous
So many truths, so many millions of stories, so many people dazed and confused. This is the trickster veil that the overlords of capitalism have dished out for the planet. The USA has taken it hook, line and sinker:
No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. (source)
There you have it, way before 10 a.m. PST, October 23, eight days before the CDC-Fauci-FDA approved Halloween, this blog to never end all blogs. Blots on us all, and, Plague Upon All Their Houses. Just reread, scroll back up, and you get the idea as to whose heads must roll. And it is just a short list. You’ve read about other heads that must roll in many other of my diatribes or rants. Righteous indignation? Nah, calm forward thinking starting 51 years ago when I was just a wee one.
Oh, shoot, back to the future, again:
Max Blumenthal question: “Are current politicians basing the corona measures on incorrectly established scientific principles?”
Mattias Desmet: I think so. Here, too, we see a kind of naïve belief in objectivity that turns into its opposite: a serious lack of objectivity with masses of errors and carelessness. Moreover, there is a sinister connection between the emergence of this kind of absolutist science and the process of manipulation and totalitarianisation of society. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt brilliantly describes how this process took place in Nazi Germany, among other places. For example, nascent totalitarian regimes typically fall back on a ‘scientific’ discourse. They show a great preference for figures and statistics, which quickly degenerate into pure propaganda, characterized by a radical “disregard for the facts”. For example, Nazism based its ideology on the superiority of the Aryan race. A whole series of so-called scientific data substantiated their theory. Today we know that this theory had no scientific validity, but scientists at the time used the media to defend the regime’s positions. Hannah Arendt describes how these scientists proclaimed questionable scientific credentials, and she uses the word “charlatans” to emphasize this. She also describes how the emergence of this kind of science and its industrial applications was accompanied by an inevitable social change. Classes disappeared and normal social ties deteriorated, with much indefinable fear, anxiety, frustration, and lack of meaning. It is under such circumstances that the masses develop very specific psychological qualities. All fears that haunt society become linked to one ‘object’ – for example, the Jews – so that the masses enter into a kind of energetic struggle with this object. And onto that process of social conditioning of the masses, a completely new political and constitutional organization subsequently grafts itself: the totalitarian state.
Today, one perceives a similar phenomenon. There is widespread psychological suffering, lack of meaning, and diminished social ties in society. Then a story comes along that points to a fear object, the virus, after which the population strongly links its fear and discomfort to this dreaded object. Meanwhile, there is a constant call in all media to collectively fight the murderous enemy. The scientists who bring the story to the population are rewarded with tremendous social power in return. Their psychological power is so great that, at their suggestion, the whole of society abruptly renounces a host of social customs and reorganises itself in ways that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought possible. (source)
Oh? So, this discussions can’t happen because the overlords, their masters, the Seven Sinful C’s of Capitalism, the planned resets, all of that trump us barely useful eaters, readers, watchers, walkers, drivers, patients, renters, dreamers, breathers, sleepers, consumers!
Max Blumenthal, “Foreign Agents #10 – Covid and Mass Hypnosis w/Dr. Mattias Desmet
The post Dog Food for Homo Sapiens: Rendered Road Kill for All first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the US elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden Administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump Administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time.
Hence, unsurprisingly, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, was among the first world leaders to most enthusiastically congratulate Biden. “I look forward to working with the President-elect and his administration to strengthen the Palestinian-American relations and to achieve freedom, independence, justice and dignity for our people,” Abbas said immediately after the results were announced.
Contrastingly, the then-Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, waited for a relatively long time to offer his congratulations, hoping, perhaps, that his close friend and staunch political ally, Trump, would succeed in reversing the outcome of the elections.
Nearly a year later, however, one struggles to understand the Palestinian euphoria of last year, and the absence of criticism of the current US administration for failing to reverse most of the pro-Israel decisions enacted by Trump. The latter’s unwarranted steps included the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, all in violation of international law and even the US’ own declared policies.
Considering all of this, why does the PA leadership remain largely silent regarding the fact that the Biden Administration, despite its rhetoric about peace and dialogue, maintains the same degree of commitment to Israel as Trump’s? The short answer is money.
Indeed, the only tangible step that the Biden Administration has taken in the last year has been the restoration of funds that Trump had withheld from Palestinians, thus reversing a nearly three-decade US policy of, along with other ‘donor countries’, bankrolling the PA.
In April, the White House declared its intentions to restore some, though not all, funds to the Palestinians. The amount of $235 million was to be paid in the form of $75m in economic and developmental assistance, $10m in ‘peacebuilding’ programs to be provided by the US agency, USAID, and the remaining in humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA.
The latter decision, however, did not come without caveats. On July 14, UNRWA reached an agreement with Washington regarding the use of these funds. The so-called Framework for Cooperation stipulated that “The US will not make any contributions to UNRWA, except on the condition that UNRWA takes all feasible measures to ensure that no part of the US contribution is used to assist any refugee receiving military training,” as part of any Palestinian resistance group. Under the agreement, which was strongly criticized by Palestinians, UNRWA will receive an additional $135 million from the US.
On the political front, however, there is little else to report. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington, although expected to be reopened by Biden after its abrupt closure by the Trump Administration in September 2018, remains closed.
Additionally, the US consulate in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, which was also shut down by a Trump decision, remains “a major point of contention” between Israel and the US, according to Axios.
As soon as the Biden Administration declared its intentions to reopen its mission in Palestine, top Israeli officials have poured into Washington to prevent even this symbolic Palestinian gain from taking place. Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, raised the issue with Biden during their White House meeting in August, requesting that he refrain from carrying out such a move, and opening the consulate in Ramallah, instead, the Times of Israel reported.
In September, Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, had warned Washington that restating the US mission in East Jerusalem was a “bad idea”, alluding that such a decision could force the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition.
The subject also topped the agenda of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lapid during their meeting in Washington in October. “I don’t know how to hold this coalition together if you reopen the consulate,” Lapid told Blinken, as conveyed by Israeli officials and reported by Axios.
To avoid a confrontation and to buy time for the Israeli government, Blinken proposed a committee made up of US and Israeli officials to “discuss the issue with maximum discretion.”
The Israeli government is using the current fractious ruling coalition as a pretense to defer the US decision on the consulate, hinting that if the US moves the embassy before the government budget passes in November, the government will dissolve, thus ushering in the ominous possibility of Netanyahu’s return.
It is expected that the joint US-Israeli committee will not be formed until the budget vote, and even then, it is unclear if Washington will succeed in persuading Israel to respect Biden’s decision.
Notably, while the matter of the consulate should concern Palestinians most, no Palestinian official will be included in the Blinken-Lapid exclusive and secretive talks. More bizarrely, the PA does not seem to mind, as we are yet to witness a public outcry by Abbas and his officials. This is, of course, typical PA behavior, for as long as US funds are, again, finding their way to PA coffers, all other issues seem of little or no urgency.
However, even if a political compromise is found, and an American consulate is finally reestablished, how will this alter the reality on the ground?
Since 1994, the US consulate has served a largely symbolic role, one that mattered most to the PA. It hardly altered the political equation on the ground in favor of Palestinians. In a telling and surreal reference to the consulate, Noga Tarnopolsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2019: “The consulate was known for hosting one of the liveliest parties on Jerusalem’s annual schedule, a July 4 gala held on the front lawn.”
A short distance away from the city’s “liveliest parties”, hundreds of Palestinian families are either being evicted or face the risk of evictions by the US-funded Israeli police and army and a bit further away is Israel’s apartheid wall that continues to segment occupied Palestine based on race, ethnicity and religion. One is justified, then, not to hold much hope that the reopening of the US mission will remotely change this horrific status quo.
The Biden Administration is proving to be but a soft facade to the same policies enacted by the Trump Administration. Only, this time, the Palestinian Authority, for self-serving reasons, does not seem to mind.
The post Jerusalem’s “Liveliest Parties”: Has Biden Proved Different from Trump on Palestine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The fact that the United States has committed an array of human rights abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples should be as uncontroversial as it is incontrovertible. There is widespread agreement that settler colonialists committed genocide and other crimes against the Indigenous populations while taking their lands. No one would disagree that enslaved Africans were forced to work the settler colonial lands for hundreds of years in subhuman conditions.
The historical record tells the story of additional human rights abuses committed against Mexicans and other groups as the US expanded West and colonized countries like Puerto Rico. No one doubts that Japanese were forced into concentration camps during World War II or that Blacks were lynched and brutalized during Jim Crow.
The post Verdict In The Case Of Black, Brown And Indigenous Peoples appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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Two recent articles have recently appeared in the Russian journal Strategic Culture that point to significant changes that are occurring among western nations toward Russia and China. These changes have been in the wind for some time but in recent months the tempo has accelerated. Both Russia and China are pointing the way to a new system, the ramifications of which will have extraordinary effects on the geopolitical world.
The first of these articles was written by Finian Cunningham and appeared in Strategic Culture on 13 October. The article “Veering to the Abyss … U.S. and Allies are Intellectually Comatose” is based on an interview that Mr Cunningham did with the American academic Professor Michael Brenner.
Professor Brenner commences his argument by pointing to what he calls an abject failure of political leadership and strategic thinking. This failure is most clearly seen with regard to Washington’s persistent antagonism towards China and its inability to conduct meaningful dialogue and diplomacy with Beijing for the purpose of resolving major issues.
The situation is so dire in Professor Brenner’s view that what he calls a lamentable lack of strategic and political thinking by the United States is driving the rest of the world to an abyss.
Brenner says that “any description of a coherent strategic design to the Biden administration is misplaced.” Rather, he sees Biden’s control over his national security team as tenuous. United States officials such as secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan as being unanimous in their view that China is a lethal threat to American dominance. These two see a confrontational approach as being the only logical response to China’s growth.
Washington thinks only in terms of a coercive mindset because that is the only concept that they are capable of. The only way this can be resolved is for the United States to take responsibility for the deteriorating relationship between the two countries.
Brenner points to the recent development of the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom and the United States) as a political gesture that is designed to achieve two ends: first, to place an immediate obstacle in the way of Sino-Australian relations, and second, to tighten the United States grasp on Canberra’s foreign policy options in the Asia Pacific region.
He describes the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as someone who is just posturing, Brenner is not the first person to point out that there will be economic losses as a consequence of Australia’s posture toward China. It is difficult to understand how Australia could, in fact, follow a foreign policy that is so detrimental to its economic relationship with China, which is far and away its biggest trading partner. One of the alarming features is that Morrison’s suicidal conduct toward trading relationships with China has had so little effect on his popularity. The Australian media has played a major role in not alerting the readership to the economic dangers of Australia’s blind adherence to American foreign policy wishes with regard to China.
An even more significant point than the deteriorating relationship between China and Australia is Brenner’s acknowledgement of the fundamental change in Japan’s relationship with China, that he describes as a 90° shift in its attitude. He referred to the recent meeting of the presidents of the two countries where they agreed to pursue “constructive and stable relations” based on an increased dialogue.
The second article worthy of mention is an editorial which appeared in Strategic Culture on 15 October entitled “Best Laid Plans… Washington’s Zero-Sum Mindset Alienates Allies.” The editors of Strategic Culture see the consequences of Washington’s Cold War style confrontational policy towards China as being responsible for an ever-growing rift with United States’ allies in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. This was evident during the G-20 and ASEAN discussions both held this week where numerous countries expressed their deep misgivings about Washington’s relentless push for divisive relationships with China.
These allies were caught totally unaware by the formation earlier this month of the new tripartite relationship between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS). This development completely blindsided the United States’ European allies.
It is not too difficult to see the reasons for Europe’s alarm over any deterioration in a relationship with China. China is now their most important trading partner, having recently overtaken the United States in that role. Germany, which is the most important economy in the European context, is now heavily dependent on China’s market. The Germans would clearly resist any attempts by the Americans to diminish China’s important role in their trading relationship.
The editorial also observes that many Asian nations have also become alarmed by Washington’s Cold War activism towards China. Although several of the ASEAN nations have a dispute with China over access to what they regarded as territorial waters, that is a dispute that is being resolved by consultations between the parties, which is a classic Asian means of resolving difficulties between parties.
In what has become a rather tiresome repetition, the United States talks about upholding what they are pleased to call the “rules based international order.” This is a particularly tiresome phrase for many countries who distinguish the so-called rules based international order from the long-standing and well-established system of international law. These countries correctly recognise the rules based international order as simply a device whereby the Americans and their allies impose their view of what they want to see happen upon the rest of the world. It is in short simply another means of seeking to maintain their dominance over others.
Strategic Culture concludes by saying that the world is ineluctably diverging from the United States and that is because the world is now finding that American power is the fundamental irreconcilable problem, rather than a solution.
These two articles are important because they highlight what is a fundamental trend in world geopolitics. That is that the world is moving away from a framework constructed by the United States and which dominated for much of the post-World War II period. As such it is a trend to be encouraged.
The post Significant Changes of Direction by the West in Relation to China first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In this era of police violence, pandemic worries, and economic crisis, it is no surprise that U.S. (and local) government agencies have a poor track record of sharing information honestly and directly—especially information about their own complicity in actions and policies that are undemocratic, militaristic, racist, sexist or otherwise oppressive.
Basic truths about the society we live in are actively suppressed and denied—including truths about the imprisonment of those whose political views and actions challenge the powers that be.
Though the growth of the prison industry has been well documented, there is virtually no documentation and even less news about the imprisonment of many who would be considered political prisoners by any international human rights standards.
The post International Tribunal Seeks To Charge US Government With Crimes Against Humanity appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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With the expulsion of half of Russian’s diplomatic delegation to NATO, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitry Peskov stated that “NATO is not an instrument of cooperation, not an instrument for interaction; it is a bloc that overall is anti-Russian in nature… These actions, of course, do not allow us to pretend there is a possibility of normalizing relations and resuming dialogue with NATO. Instead, these prospects are undermined almost completely.”
Unfortunately, with these and other belligerent actions which are propelling the world ever closer to WWIII, too many onlookers continue to see NATO as a purely American imperial institution without any regard for the actual center of global power that has sought to destroy not only Russia, but the United States itself since long before the Cold War ever began.
While this might appear paradoxical on the surface, the paradox can easily be resolved by recognizing that there have been since 1776, not one, but TWO opposing dynamics operating within America. Where only one is in alignment of the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of independence, the other is entirely in alignment with the ideals of the British Empire and hereditary institutions from which it supposedly broke away.
One America has been defended by great leaders who are too often identified by their untimely deaths while in office, who consistently advanced anti-colonial visions for a world of sovereign nations, win-win cooperation, and the extension of constitutional rights to all classes and races both within America and abroad. The other America has sought only to enmesh itself with the British Empire’s global regime of finance, exploitation, population control and never-ending wars.
Lord Lothian and the White Man’s Burden
These two Americas frustrated Round Table controller Sir Philip Kerr (later “Lord Lothian”) in 1918 who wrote to his fellow Round Tabler Lionel Curtis explaining the “American problem” with the following words:
There is a fundamentally different concept in regard to this question between Great Britain … and the United States …. as to the necessity of civilized control over politically backward peoples…. The inhabitants of Africa and parts of Asia have proved unable to govern themselves … because they were quite unable to withstand the demoralizing influences [i.e. their desire for modernization and independence–ed.] to which they were subjected in some civilized countries, so that the intervention of an European power is necessary in order to protect them from those influences. The American view… is quite different… The extent of this work after the war, sometimes known as the white man’s burden, will be so vast that it will never be accomplished at all unless it is shared… Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the problem but has been led to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism. They take an attitude towards the problem of world government exactly analogous to the one they [earlier] took toward the problem of the world war…. “If they are slow in learning we shall be condemned to a period … of strained relations between the various parts of the English-speaking world. [We must] get into the heads of Canadians and Americans that a share in the burden of world government is just as great and glorious a responsibility as participation in the war.”1
At the time of Kerr’s writing, the British Roundtable, led by Lord Milner had just orchestrated a British coup in 1916 ousting Labour’s Herbert Asquith in order to bring Milner’s Round Table group into dominance as a shaper of imperial foreign policy at a pivotal moment in history. This coup allowed this group to define the terms of the Post-war world at Versailles).
These imperialists were obsessed with ending the dangerous spread of anti-colonial feelings from India, Ireland, Africa and other nations who firmly believed their sacrifices in WWI merited their independence. Most dangerous of all was that their sentiments were very much shared by many leading members of the American government who rejected the evil philosophical roots of the “white man’s burden”.
Sir Philip Kerr (who later took on the name Lord Lothian before becoming ambassador to America during WWII) and his Round Table gang did everything they could to control the terms of Versailles in 1919 which involved the creation of the League of Nations as a new global political/military hegemon powerful enough to destroy sovereign nation states forever under a new British-run empire.
American resistance to this agenda was so strong that Lothian, Milner and the other leaders of the Round Table soon established a new organization called the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) in 1919 with branches soon set up across what later became the Five Eyes Anglo-Saxon nations. This network would coordinate and adapt 19th century British Imperial policy using new 20th century techniques.
In America, the Round Table decided that the name “American Institute for International Affairs” was a bit too conspicuous and chose instead the name “Council on Foreign Relations” (CFR) in 1921. Canadian, and Australian Institutes for International Affairs were created in 1928 and 1929 accordingly known as the CIIA and AIIA, but for all their efforts, the pro-nation state dynamic within America could not be broken, and the League of Nations soon collapsed along with its ambitions for a global military and banking monopoly (the latter attempt having been officially destroyed by FDR who sabotaged the London Economic Conference of 1933).
The rise of NATO in the wake of WWII and the death of anti-colonialist Franklin Roosevelt can only be understood by keeping this historical dynamic in mind.
NATO’s Birth was August 1947… NOT April 1949
It is popularly believed that NATO was set up on April 4, 1949 as a tool of the American colonialism. The truth is a bit different.
As Cynthia Chung reported in her recent paper “The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence”, 1947 was a very bad year for America as a new intelligence agency was created with the birth of the CIA, now purged of all pro-FDR influences who had formerly dominated the OSS. National Security Council paper 75 (NSC-75) was drafted calling for America to defend the possessions of the British Empire under the new Cold War operating system, leading to a new era of Anglo-American assassinations, wars and regime change.
On March 4th, 1947, the Anglo-French Treaty of Dunkirk established a collective defense pact extending itself the next year to include Belgium, France, Luxemourg and the Netherlands under the guise of the Brussels Pact. Both collective defense pacts operated outside of the UN structure but lacked the military teeth needed to give them meaning- all nations of the time having been crippled by the devastation of WWII. Only America had the military might to make this new alliance meaningful as global military force capable of subduing all resistance and usher in world government.
Escott Reid’s NATO Vision of 1947
In a memorandum called “The United States and the Soviet Union” written in August 1947, a highly influential Oxford Rhodes Scholar and radical promoter of global governance named Escott Reid, then Deputy Undersecretary of External Affairs of Canada “recommended that the countries of the North Atlantic band together, under the leadership of the United States, to form ‘a new regional security organization’ to deter Soviet expansion.”
The motive for this memorandum was to escape the Soviet Union’s veto power in the U.N. Security Council, which prevented the British Great Game from moving forward. The goal was to establish an instrument powerful enough to bring about an Anglo-American Empire as desired by Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill and which the League of Nations failed to accomplish.
Escott Reid extrapolated upon his thesis for the creation of such an institution at an August 13, 1947 Canadian Institute of Public Affairs 2 Conference at Lake Couchiching when he stated:
The states of the Western world are not…debarred by the Charter of the United Nations or by Soviet membership in the United Nations from creating new international political institutions to maintain peace. Nothing in the Charter precludes the existence of regional political arrangements or agencies provided that they are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations, and these regional agencies are entitled to take measures of collective self-defence against armed attack until the Security Council has acted.
This new anti-Soviet military organization would have the important feature of creating a binding military contract that would go into effect for all members should any individual member go to war. Reid described this intention as he wrote:
In such an organization each member state could accept a binding obligation to pool the whole of its economic and military resources with those of the other members if any power should be found to have committed aggression against any one of the members.
It was another year and a half before this structure gained the full support of External Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson, and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would be formed on April 4, 1949 with its headquarters on 13 Belgrave Square in London.
Escott Reid and Lester B. Pearson: Both Roundtable Oxford MenReid had made a name for himself serving as the first Permanent Secretary of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA), also known as the Canadian Branch of Chatham House/Roundtable Movement of Canada under the direction of CIIA controller Vincent Massey. Massey was the protégé of racist imperialist Lord Alfred Milner and the controller of the Rhodes Scholar groups of Canada throughout a career that saw him act as Canadian Ambassador to Washington (1926-1930), Liberal Party President (1930-1935), Ambassador to Britain (1935-1945) and Head of State (aka: Governor General of Canada (1952-1959). Reid himself was the founder of the self-professed “Canadian Fabian Society” alongside four other Rhodes scholars known as the eugenics-promoting technocratic League of Social Reconstruction (LSR) in 1932, whose name changed to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1933 and again later to the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961. 3
Reid spent years working closely with fellow Oxford Massey Scholar Lester B. Pearson, who himself was Vincent Massey’s assistant in London before becoming a controller of the Liberal Party of Canada.
The Racist Agenda Behind the Rhodes Trust
It is vital to remind ourselves that these networks were driven by the design outlined by genocidal diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, who wrote the purpose for the Scholarship that was to receive his name in his First Will (1877):
Why should we not form a secret society with but one object – the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…
Later in that will, Rhodes elaborated in greater detail upon the intention which was soon to become official British foreign policy.
The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy land, the valley of Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire. The consolidation of the whole empire, the inauguration of a system of colonial representation in the Imperial parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the empire.
The “recovery of the United States” should seriously resonate with anyone with doubts over the role of the British Empire’s ambition to undo the international effects of the American Revolution and should also cause honest citizens to reconsider what nationalist Presidents like John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle were actually struggling against when they stood up to the power structures of NATO and the Deep State. This should be kept in mind as one thinks of the British-steered networks that ran the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, as well as the effective color revolution that ousted Donald Trump in our modern day.
* All Reid quotes are taken from Escott Reid, Couchiching and the Birth of NATO by Cameron Campbell, published by the Atlantic Council of Canada.
- Lothian to Lionel Curtis, October 15, 1918, in Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 68-70.
- The Canadian Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) was created in 1935 as an affiliate to the Canadian Round Table in order to shape national internal policy while the CIIA focused upon Canada’s foreign policy. Original featured speakers were the CIIA’s Norman Mackenzie, and the eugenicist leader of the newly created CCF Party J.S. Woodsworth. It would be another 20 years before both organizations began to jointly host conferences together. Today, CIPA exists in the form of the Couchiching Conferences and their regular brainwashing seminars have been broadcast across the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for over 70 years.
- Reid’s other Rhodes Scholar co-founders of the LSR were Eugene Forsey, F.R. Scott, and David Lewis. Frank Underhill was a Fabian Society member. Rhodes Scholar F.R. Scott became a leading mentor of a young recruit of the Fabian Society named Pierre Elliot Trudeau upon the latter’s 1949 return from the London School of Economics in order to work in Ottawa’s Privy Council Office. This Trudeau went on to groom himself as a CCF member before being selected to take over the Liberal Party after the ouster of pro-nationalist forces who had led the Liberals from 1935-1958.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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3 Mins Read Next month, McDonald’s will start a small-scale test of its McPlant product, the plant-based burger the chain is co-developing with Beyond Meat. From November 3, the McPlant will be available for a limited time at eight US McDonald’s locations, according to an official announcement from McDonald’s Corporate. McDonald’s, which operates almost 40,000 locations worldwide, first […]
The post McDonald’s To Test McPlant Burger Made By Beyond Meat At 8 US Locations appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
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Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group examined alleged human rights abuses suffered by Yemenis whose basic rights to food, shelter, safety, health care and education were horribly violated, all while they were bludgeoned by Saudi and U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, and constant warfare since 2014.
“This is a major setback for all victims who have suffered serious violations during the armed conflict,” the GEE wrote in a statement the day after the U.N. Human Rights Council refused to extend a mandate for continuation of the group’s work. “The Council appears to be abandoning the people of Yemen,” the statement says, adding that “Victims of this tragic armed conflict should not be silenced by the decision of a few States.”
Prior to the vote, there were indications that Saudi Arabia and its allies, such as Bahrain (which sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council), had increased lobbying efforts worldwide in a bid to do away with the Group of Experts. Actions of the Saudi-led coalition waging war against Yemen had been examined and reported on by the Group of Experts. Last year, the Saudi bid for a seat on the Human Rights Council was rejected, but Bahrain serves as its proxy.
Bahrain is a notorious human rights violator and a staunch member of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-led coalition which buys billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States and other countries to bomb Yemen’s infrastructure, kill civilians, and displace millions of people.
The Group of Experts was mandated to investigate violations committed by all warring parties. So it’s possible that the Ansar Allah leadership, often known as the Houthis, also wished to avoid the group’s scrutiny. The Group of Experts’ mission has come to an end, but the fear and intimidation faced by Yemeni victims and witnesses continues.
Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization established in 2007, advocates for human rights by reporting on issues such as the torture of detainees, grossly unfair trials, patterns of injustice, and starvation by warfare through the destruction of farms and water sources. Mwatana had hoped the U.N. Human Rights Council would grant the Group of Experts a multi-year extension. Members of Mwatana fear their voice will be silenced within the United Nations if the Human Rights Council’s decision is an indicator of how much the council cares about Yemenis.
“The GEE is the only independent and impartial mechanism working to deter war crimes and other violations by all parties to the conflict,” said Radhya Almutawakel, Chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. She believes that doing away with this body will give a green light to continue violations that condemn millions in Yemen to “‘unremitting violence, death and constant fear.’”
The Yemen Data Project, founded in 2016, is an independent entity aiming to collect data on the conduct of the war in Yemen. Their most recent monthly report tallied the number of air raids in September, which had risen to the highest monthly rate since March.
Sirwah, a district in the Marib province, was—for the ninth consecutive month—the most heavily targeted district in Yemen, with twenty-nine air raids recorded throughout September. To get a sense of scale, imagine a district the size of three city neighborhoods being bombed twenty-nine times in one month.
Intensified fighting has led to large waves of displacement within the governorate, and sites populated by soaring numbers of refugees are routinely impacted by shelling and airstrikes. Pressing humanitarian needs include shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene, and medical care. Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy. This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.
In early 1995, I was among a group of activists who formed a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness to publicly defy economic sanctions against Iraq. Some of us had been in Iraq during the 1991 U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm invasion. The United Nations reported that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had already died and that the economic sanctions contributed to these deaths. We felt compelled to at least try to break the economic sanctions against Iraq by declaring our intent to bring medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals and families.
But to whom would we deliver these supplies?
Voices in the Wilderness founders agreed that we would start by contacting Iraqis in our neighborhoods and also try to connect with groups concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East. So I began asking Iraqi shopkeepers in my Chicago neighborhood for advice; they were understandably quite wary.
One day, as I walked away from a shopkeeper who had actually given me an extremely helpful phone number for a parish priest in Baghdad, I overheard another customer ask what that was all about. The shopkeeper replied: “Oh, they’re just a group of people trying to make a name for themselves.”
I felt crestfallen. Now, twenty-six years later, it’s easy for me to understand his reaction. Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?
No wonder I’ve felt high regard for the U.N. Group of Experts who went to bat for human rights groups struggling for “street cred” regarding Yemen.
When Yemeni human rights advocates try to sound the alarm about terrible abuses, they don’t just face hurt feelings when met with antagonism. Yemeni human rights activists have been jailed, tortured, and disappeared. Yemen’s civil society activists do need to make a name for themselves.
On October 7, the day the U.N. Human Rights Council voted not to continue the role of the Group of Experts with regard to Yemen, the United Nations agreed to set up an investigative group to monitor the Taliban. However, the agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.
Politicizing U.N. agencies and procedures makes it all the more difficult for people making inquiries to establish trusting relationships with people whose rights should be upheld by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.
When I was approaching shopkeepers for ideas about people we might contact in Iraq, I was just beginning to grapple with Professor Noam Chomsky’s essays about “worthy victims” and “unworthy victims.”
That second phrase seemed to me a terrible oxymoron. How could a victim of torture, bereavement, hunger, displacement, or disappearance be an “unworthy victim?” Over the next thirty years, I grew to understand the cruel distinction between worthy and unworthy victims.
A powerful country or group can use the plight of “worthy victims” to build support for war or military intervention. The “unworthy victims” also suffer, but because their stories could lead people to question the wisdom of a powerful country’s attacks on civilians, stories about those victims are likely to fade away.
Consider, in Afghanistan, the plight of those who survived an August 29 U.S. drone attack against the family of Zamari Ahmadi. Ten members of the family were killed. Seven were children. As of October 13, the family had not yet heard anything from the United States.
I greatly hope Mwatana, The Yemen Data Project, The Yemen Foundation, and all of the journalists and human rights activists passionately involved in opposing the war that rages in Yemen are recognized and become names that occasion respect, gratitude, and support. I hope they’ll continue documenting violations and abuse. But I know their work on the ground in Yemen will now be even more dangerous.
Meanwhile, the lobbyists who’ve served the Saudi government so well have certainly made a name for themselves in Washington, D.C., and beyond.
Grassroots activists committed to ending human rights abuses must uphold solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Yemen and Afghanistan. Governments waging war and protecting human rights abusers must immediately end their pernicious practices.
In the United States, peace activists must tell the military contractors, lobbyists, and elected representatives: “Not in our name!” With no strings attached, the U.S. government should be proactive and end war forever.
This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine
The post Abandoning Yemen? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Tower houses in Sanaa, August 15, 2013 (Rod Waddington)This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Time and time again, the left sites just keep pushing all those international stories, all those stories tied to this or that political party head, and while China is important, and while we know the dirty deeds of Blinken to Pompeo, all the way back, we still miss out on the common people, us, the little ones.
Sure, this is a trending story, in California, tied to the vaccine mandate, the hysteria, the fascism:
The University of California, Irvine has placed their Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, on ‘investigatory leave’ after he challenged the constitutionality of the UC’s vaccine mandate in regards to individuals who have recovered from Covid and have naturally-acquired immunity.
Last month Kheriaty, also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine, filed a suit in Federal court over the mandate.
“Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Kheriaty wrote in a Sep. 21 blog post.
“Expert witness declarations in support of our case include, among others, a declaration from distinguished UC School of Medicine faculty members from infectious disease, microbiology/immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB/Gyn, and psychiatry,” the post continues (click here to read the rest).
…there is now considerable evidence that Covid recovered individuals may be at higher risk of vaccine adverse effects compared to those not previously infected (as seen in studies here, here, and here, among others). -Dr. Aaron Kheriaty
This issue, though, is more important on a local level for schmucks like me, who are overeducated, aging in a hateful society, left of left in a centrist and capitalism hard left/right contradictory world. I am back at a job, and the pay is embarrassing, and the fact that I am in a rural county with rural thinkers and with a service economy tied to beach combing, fishing, crabbing and vacation rentals also contributes to precarity.
You think I am ready to leave to go somewhere else, to some big sophisticated city, some harbinger of high tech and military industrial complex to find more sustainable and lucrative work? Each day, my skill sets, my background, all the ground-truthing and other on the job training, all the travel, all those deep learning moments in my life in several fields, all of that is mush to the masters of academia, the masters of companies that are small and large, getting on the gravy train of city, county, state, national and international money. Tax cheats and welfare queens and kings are those in the complex, the big C for the CRC, Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment.
Yep, bad that an environmental lawyer was under ankle bracelet house arrest for more than two years and faces six months in jail for contempt as a lawyer who sued the pants off of Chevron for killing and polluting communities south of this border. Sure, the hellfire and brimstone of this rotting empire is addictive, with all these blogs and newsfeeds and whatnot tapping into the lizard part of the collective American brain.
Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.
Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”
Original illustration by Mr. Fish So, note the “proverbial two-by-four between the eyes” comment from this judicial devil . . . . From a multimillionaire “judge.” Imagine that! If I told a pig that exact same thing, after stopping me for a dangling mud flap on my minivan, just think what might happen to me. Or if I told that she needed a proverbial two by four between the eyes to a judge during my trial or someone else’s? Or, to the boss, uh? Or to the teacher if I was an 11th grader. Or, to the drill sergeant? Or the TSA guy smelling my feet at the airport.
This judge is human scum, and while this is of national and international importance, I have been in courtrooms (local, small and midsized town) where women lost their children, where drug addicted got the book thrown at them, where homeless rough sleepers were fined and incarcerated, where people more sane than this judge were committed to mental ward. This is the truth about systems of oppression, about modern white civilization, a fucked up rule of law lawlessness. This is it in our world. But it happens every day a few ten thousand times. To we the small ass people.
Now, multiple that by a factor a ten thousand — try suing Boeing, or Pfizer or FDA, or Ford, or General Mills, or Bayer, or Trump Towers or Bank of America, or Amazon, or Google, or the manufacturer of the air bag in the minivan or the pretzel maker your kid is choking on.
Now, bring it back to a real perspective. Local, where cities have no money for infrastructure, where medical systems are threadbare at least, or missing altogether. No country for old men, for young people, for the sick, disabled, poor, mentally challenged, psychiatrically impaired. This is a country for no regular people.
Yet, we will hear the media mental midgets yammer on and on about us bumkins, us flyover fucks, deplorables, or deploying any other laundry list of pejoratives or socio-psych mumbo jumbo for their elite brains to find more ways to subjugate the many in the name of profits, and in the words of their deep alter egos — “The world of elites and beautiful and worthy and good members of society have to deal with these useless breeders, breathers and eaters. Really, all we want is what’s best for the masses, for these misbegotten, less than high IQ, and multiple-dysfunctional people who in some cases, well, don’t mean to be useless eaters, breeders, breathers, existers. But we can corral them into good deeds, and we can make so much money from their faults, chronic illnesses, their low IQ’s, their inbreeding, their constant bad bad bad decisions in life. Their mistakes and pain and dysfunction are our opportunity to make society the way we want it designed, with a few trillion of profits in greenbacks to boot. But we would never say this outright to Anderson Cooper or Oprah or NPR or what not.”
But reality is always local, no matter how much bullshit college sports and pro football teams and idiotic Republican and Democrat lying and spewing interferes with their noggins. For example, the outfit I work with, as a social services guy, doesn’t ask our clients — developmental and intellectual disabled adults — if they have had “the jab,” but rather, they ask: “If an employer asks you to provide proof of vaccination, will that be a problem?”
That is the reality now — adults barely surviving, after their whole lives have been spent in special ed programs and being evaluated, separated, roomed, housed and institutionalized, and many coming from proverbial messed up families, dysfunction being the functional word — I have to navigate more of the same systems of oppression-poverty inducing-safety net fraying eating at our communities’ very souls. The chances of getting part-time work in a field tied to the five F’s (food, fur, factory, filth, foliage — restaurants, dog cleaning, warehouses, janitorial, and landscaping) are already slim, as so much is stacked against these folk. Think about the propaganda around “those with developmental disabilities are more vulnerable to the covid so they need to be vaxxed first” ideology.
Many clients were so scared that they were more or less forced into getting the Pfizer or J & J, both mRNA biomedical experimental treatments. Most live in supported housing, and most of these in group homes, sanctioned by the state, so the vaccine mandates are not just inferred, but demanded. Boosterism (booster x, y, z, omega) will continue to run rampant. More will be sick. Some will die, or course.
The reality is I know people who are losing jobs, and they are not sitting on piles of cash like a lot of professionals you might read about that are opting out of the forced chemical jabs. These people do not have the luxury of taking a stand with unlimited credit card limits, or fully owned homes, or hobby gardens out back with the swimming pool. These are people who read up about this planned pandemic, who take precautions, who listen to experts. Their choice is to not get jabbed.
Imagine, being a teacher, PhD in physics, after 20 years, and you have 130 accrued sick days (paid) and you refuse to do the jab but accept the draconian test and mask. You are still going to be fired, or put on unpaid leave, and those PTO days you have accrued, well, forget about them.
“LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH
The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.” (source)This is reality for one of my friends. Forget about the death proclamations of the Death Cult of Fauci. This guy is criminal, and he has sold millions a bill of goods. This bill of goods is dangerous, deadly, injurious.
A bill of goods, man, the lies, the continuing criminal enterprises, and then, remade, make overs, etc. Take these middle of the road news sites: Robert Scheer is not my favorite, but this takes the cake, no, as he appears as Mister New York Times and Most About USA is Good Scheer. So, no doubts about this fellow joining up with the CIA, and then now in Holly-Dirt?
This is the very celebrity culture that Chris Hedges rails against. This is a sick little blurb here promoting Scheer’s podcast of this criminal — CIA is a criminal outfit of the highest order.
A former CIA officer and Emmy award-winning creator of the hit FX series “The Americans” about two Soviet agents living secretly in Washington during the Cold War, Weisberg offers a refreshing perspective on the tense relationship between the two countries throughout his work. He joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his latest book, “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War,” in which he examines how he, like so many Americans, got Russia wrong.
The author tells Scheer about his childhood growing up in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, Ill. before studying Soviet politics at Yale University and joining the CIA, eager to do his “duty as an American” and fight what he considered then to be the “evil” Soviet empire. Now, after years of writing fiction about the Soviet Union in novels and TV scripts, Weisberg has decided to reflect on the historical events that he briefly played an active role in during his brief time at the CIA as the Soviet Union was collapsing through a more critical, factual lens. Based on both his personal experience as well as detailed research, Weisberg dispels common misconceptions about Russia that he once held to be true in “Russia Upside Down.”
Here we go: More meaningless Hollywood-CIA-millionaire stuff that the average Joe in Tucson or Portland, in Kansas or Utah has zero connection to. But we get he is Jewish (hmm, why this?) a Yale graduate (Yale being a CIA-Imperialist school), and lover of CIA and USA (when he was young — what puke). Fiction writer, and now a book writer and TV series producer, wow, what a radical. This is the upper echelons of America Putridity, and you couple that with his millions thrown at him as a Holly-Dirt thing, and we have the mini-Celebrity fawning.
Scheer Intelligence Is America’s View of ‘Evil’ Russia Merely Projection?
More TV junk! I was at a hospital two weeks ago, and the nurses must have thought I wasn’t awake (I never sleep in a hospital, in jail, or on a plane). They talked about the Samaritan Hospital system they work for introducing a “no vaccine, no medical service” protocol. They did not sound happy about it. And here we have it yesterday:
Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got the COVID-19 vaccine. Even though she has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) — source
A hell of a country, and a hell of a “follow the science” kind of messed up system, no? Idiots of the Biden-Obama variety, like Thom Hartman, are yammering on and on about how these hospitals have a right to refuse un-jabbed folk. This is it for the liberals — you eat junk food, you drink booze, you suck on fags, you drive recklessly, you think this or that anti-Democratic Party thought, then we, the good beautiful, Hillary-Obama-Harris have a right to cut you off, cut you down, chop you off at the knees!
Many people I speak with and communicate with are tired of the pro-pro-pro forced jab perspective we are getting from the leftist Counterpunch, and from St. Clair.
I am referencing “Roaming Charges,” Counterpunch, 10/8/2921, from the anti-science pro-some-science get-out-of-that-science’s way thinking coming from some of the articles posted on the site. Very sad in many ways, so sad that there is not a robust discussion of the vaccination that we see on Dissident Voice, even Mint Press, and especially Off–Guardian and Left Skeptics. Here, bullet points, direct quoting from “Roaming Charges”:
+ I’m against any exemptions (our social contract should require either all of us to get it or that the jab be completely voluntary ), but if there’s a religious exemption there should be one for philosophy, too. “Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s worried that people resisting COVID-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.”
+ Merck is selling its high-touted new Covid pill Molnupiravir, whose development was federally financed by NIH and the Department of Defense, back to the U.S. government for 40 times what it costs to make.
+ These people, if you want to call them that, seem to have taken their “tactics” from the Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church which used to (and I suppose still does) scream their godly obscenities at mourners during the funerals of people who died of AIDS.
+ Anti-vaxism is itself a kind of brain-eating virus…A Cumberland, Maryland man murdered his brother and sister-in-law in their Ellicott City home last week because his brother, a local pharmacist, had administered COVID-19 vaccines.
+ Cuba began vaccinating its population 150 days ago. In that time, it has administered 192 doses per 100 people. In contrast, the US began its vaccination program 297 days ago and has managed to administer only 119 doses per 100 people. The Covid death rate in Cuba is: 684 per million. The death rate in the US is: 2190 per million. This seems to provide pretty clear evidence that the embargo has been placed on the wrong country for the last 60 years. (end quote)
And therein lies the problem with fake leftists — attacking even doctors and virologists and journalists and educated/educators who have doubts about the entire pandemic and mRNA and coronavirus multiplicity of very pro-pro Capitalist and pro-pro Authoritarian and pro-pro Government Bureaucracy rhetoric. The reality is Cuba is not jabbing its people with mRNA: “All of Cuba’s vaccine candidates—Abdala, Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa, are subunit protein vaccines, like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially, the vaccines do not require extreme refrigeration, are cheap to produce, and are easy for the country to manufacture at scale. They are made by fermentation in mammalian cells, a process Cuba already uses for monoclonal antibodies.”
Now, we are worried about more of the celebrities, this time, a professor who was sacked —
Now, think about any criticism against any university, when you are employed by the institution. I was employed by the University of Texas at El Paso. I was an English Department faculty, part-time, a radical, and I fought like hell for adjuncts, for students, etc. I was part of a group of students as a faculty member who made a human chain to stop the group of overweight sheriff posse dudes dressed up as Conquistadors on horses strutting on campus. That was 1992, the 500th anniversary of that evil contact we call Columbus Day. The El Paso Times ran a front page photo of these undercover cops jumping out of the bushes, and wrangling students, clobbering male and female with forearms to the neck. I was right in the middle, and I had to answer for myself to the Provost and president.
This is what a university, then, in 1992, was encapsulated inside, under a rich white president, a campus that was and still is 80-plus percent Mexican-American, Latinx, now. You can’t protest without our permission and our approval of signs!
This was a campus that introduced a free speech zone out of the way of foot traffic. A state sponsored school, with a limited small postage stamp of land near dumpsters where people can gain the public square for protesting. And the campus Nazis demanded permission, permits, and full written details of the “protest” or “information gathering.” Now, sure, talk about Covid, about Nuremburg protocol, about mandates, about those who have the jab and those who do not. Talk about NIH and Fauci and the shadowy origins of the SARS-CoV2, or the doctors who have protocols to stop not only Covid patients getting on ventilators, but getting patients out of the hospital and back home in recovery zone. Not allowed.
These articles are verboten on campuses:
And, if I was still on that campus, how quickly would I be sacked for criticizing a campus– that pushes the Hispanic University of the World theme while colonizing Hispanics (mostly Mexican Americans) — for lock-step falling into the fold of the Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment? This campus is the whoring field of military, aerospace, drone and weapons makers, and even more nefarious. What ugly optics! Four Star Murder Bomber Air Force General all smiles and the PhD’s just lapping up the uniform!
So, back into that ground-truthing — try being a radical, a revolutionary, a critic of bureaucracies and corporate mandates and this sort of bullshit on a local level. UTEP is a sell-out, an embarrassment, but so are most all the colleges and universities in this shit hole. (Source) I have gone up against every single college and university I have taught in. EVERY ONE. Can you imagine bringing this into the classroom — anti-war, anti-military, anti-corporation discourse and readings and critical thinking debates? Shit! Then, this? Pfizer Exposed!
And while the big house is for us in the 80 percent, the ground-truthing in your neighborhood is littered with the poisons of that Complex, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise called capitalism.
[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
— Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 324 (source)
Finally, another point from a friend: “Fishy Felonious Fraudulent Fauci: Read Whitney Webb’s latest.”
During the panel, the moderator—Michael Specter of the New Yorker—asked the question: “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we just can’t turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say ‘Hey! everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet,’ but there must be some way.” Specter then mentioned how vaccine production is antiquated and asked how sufficient “disruption” could occur to prompt the modernization of the existing vaccination development and approval process. Hamburg responded first, saying that as a society we are behind where we need to be when it comes to moving toward a new, more technological approach and that it is now “time to act” to make that a reality.
Several minutes later, Anthony Fauci stated that the superior method of vaccine production involves “not growing the virus at all, but getting sequences, getting the appropriate protein and it sticking in on self-assembling nanoparticles,” essentially referring to mRNA vaccines. Fauci then stated: “The critical challenge . . . is that in order to make the transition from getting out of the tried and true egg-growing [method] . . . to something that has to be much better, you have to prove that this works and then you have got to go through all of the critical trials—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—and show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, is going to take a decade.” Fauci later stated that there is a need to alter the public’s perception that the flu is not a serious disease in order to increase urgency and that it would be “difficult” to alter that perception along with the existing vaccine development and approval process unless the existing system takes the posture that “I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem in a disruptive way and an iterative way.”
During the panel, Bright stated that “we need to move as quickly as possible and urgently as possible to get these technologies that address speed and effectiveness of the vaccine” before discussing how the White House Council of Economic Advisers had just issued a report emphasizing that prioritizing “fast” vaccines was paramount. Bright then added that a “mediocre and fast” vaccine was better than a “mediocre and slow” vaccine. He then said that we can make “better vaccines and make them faster” and that urgency and disruption were necessary to produce the targeted and accelerated development of one such vaccine. Later in the panel, Bright said the best way to “disrupt” the vaccine field in favor of “faster” vaccines would be the emergence of “an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” He later very directly said that by “faster” vaccines he meant mRNA vaccines.
The Bright-led BARDA and the Fauci-led NIAID in just a few months’ time became the biggest backers of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, investing billions and co-developing the vaccine with the company, respectively. As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the NIH to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as January 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval. (Watch the 2019 Universal Flu Vaccine event here.)
As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine. That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.
However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last – that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide. Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna – and its stakeholders – cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.
The post Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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How should the working class respond to a pandemic and protect workers’ interests at the same time? Malik Miah reports on the situation in the United States.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years.Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was specifically destined to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Two days later, the funding of the Iron Dome was reintroduced and, this time, it has successfully, and overwhelmingly, passed with a vote of 420 to 9, despite passionate pleas by Palestinian-American Representative, Rashida Tlaib.
In the second vote, only eight Democrats opposed the measure. The ninth opposing vote was cast by a member of the Republican party, Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
Though she was one of the voices that blocked the funding measure on September 21, Democratic Representative, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, switched her vote at the very last minute to “present”, creating confusion and generating anger among her supporters.
As for Massie, his defiance of the Republican consensus generated him the title of “Antisemite of the Week” by a notorious pro-Israel organization called ‘Stop Antisemitism’.
Despite the outcome of the tussle, the fact that such an episode has even taken place in Congress was a historic event requiring much reflection. It means that speaking out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine is no longer taboo among elected US politicians.
Once upon a time, speaking out against Israel in Congress generated a massive and well-organized backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that, in the past, ended promising political careers, even those of veteran politicians. A combination of media smear tactics, support of rivals and outright threats often sealed the fate of the few dissenting Congress members.
While AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to follow the same old tactic, the overall strategy is hardly as effective as it once was. Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite.
The fact that 420 members of the House voted to provide Israel with additional funds – to be added to the annual funds of $3.8 billion – reflects the same unfortunate reality of old, that, thanks to the relentless biased corporate media coverage, most American constituencies continue to support Israel.
However, the loosening grip of the lobby over the US Congress offers unique opportunities for the pro-Palestinian constituencies to finally place pressure on their Representatives, demanding accountability and balance. These opportunities are not only created by new, youthful voices in America’s democratic institutions, but by the rapidly shifting public opinion, as well.
For decades, the vast majority of Americans supported Israel. The reasons behind this support varied, depending on the political framing as communicated by US officials and media. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Tel Aviv was viewed as a stalwart ally of Washington against Communism. In later years, new narratives were fabricated to maintain Israel’s positive image in the eyes of ordinary Americans. The US so-called ‘war on terror’, declared in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for example, positioned Israel as an American ally against ‘Islamic extremism’, painting resisting Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, thus giving the Israeli occupation of Palestine a moral facade.
However, new factors have destabilized this paradigm. One is the fact that support for Israel has become a divisive issue in the US’ increasingly tumultuous and combative politics, where most Republicans support Israel and most Democrats don’t.
Moreover, as racial justice has grown to become one of the most defining and emotive subjects in American politics, many Americans began seeing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the prism of millions of Americans’ own fight for racial equality. The fact that the social media hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter continues to trend daily alongside the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter speaks of a success story where communal solidarity and intersectionality have prevailed over selfish politics, where only money matters.
Millions of young Americans now see the struggle in Palestine as integral to the anti-racist fight in America; no amount of pro-Israeli lobbying in Congress can possibly shift this unmistakable trend. There are plenty of numbers that attest to these claims. One of many examples is the University of Maryland’s public opinion poll in July, which showed that more than half of polled Americans disapproved of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israeli war on Gaza in May 2021, believing that he could have done more to stop the Israeli aggression.
Of course, courageous US politicians dared to speak out against Israel in the past. However, there is a marked difference between previous generations and the current one. In American politics today, there are politicians who are elected because of their strong stance for Palestine and, by deviating from their election promises, they risk the ire of the growing pro-Palestine constituency throughout the country. This changing reality is finally making it possible to nurture and sustain pro-Palestinian presence in US Congress.
In other words, speaking out for Palestine in America is no longer a charitable and rare occurrence. As the future will surely reveal, it is the “politically correct” thing to do.
The post Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Supporters of abortion rights turned out across the United States in protest against laws in Texas and Mississippi that effectively outlaw most abortions, reports Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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R&B singer R Kelly’s conviction on racketeering and sex trafficking is a victory for Black girls and women, who have not been listened to in sexual assault cases, writes Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Nearly 15,000 Haitian migrants camped on the Mexico-Texas border were rounded up by US border patrol agents on horseback, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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The competing systems of power in the United States are divided between oligarchy and autocracy. There are no other alternatives. Neither are pleasant. Each have peculiar and distasteful characteristics. Each pays lip service to the fictions of democracy and constitutional rights. And each exacerbates the widening social and political divide and the potential for violent conflict.
The oligarchs from the establishment Republican Party, figures such as Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, George and Jeb Bush and Bill Kristol, have joined forces with the oligarchs in the Democratic Party to defy the autocrats in the new Republican Party who have coalesced in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump or, if he does not run again for president, his inevitable Frankensteinian doppelgänger.
The post America’s Fate: Oligarchy Or Autocracy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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It was startling and even shocking. Away from the thrust and cut of domestic politics, not to mention noisy discord within his government’s ranks, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison could breathe a sign of relief. Perhaps no one would notice in Washington that Australia remains prehistoric in approaching climate change relative to its counterparts. Being known in his own country as “Scotty from Marketing”, he just might pull it off.
Besides, a security compact with the United States and the United Kingdom had just been cemented, one promising Canberra eight submarines with nuclear propulsion. That these promised to be eye-wateringly expensive and available sometime in the 2040s, were they to ever make it to water, was a point not even worth considering.
In the US press, Morrison was careful to toe the line of the partner made supplicant. On CBS’s Face the Nation, he was asked whether the US and its allies were moving towards conflict with Beijing. “I don’t think it’s inevitable at all,” he chirped, claiming that it was “in everybody’s interest” that we all co-exist. But this “happy co-existence” was premised on keeping China in the box or, as he preferred to put it, a committed role of “free nations like Australia” and others in the Indo-Pacific region to stay vigilant.
On climate change, he was also pressed on having not “given a timeline” on placing Australia on the path to net zero emissions. He admitted this to be the case and vacillated. Slipping back into advertising mode, Morrison said that “performance matters” for Australia. The net zero target was being pursued, and would be achieved “preferably by 2050.” The usual half-baked assurances followed: Australia’s record was “strong”. “We’ve already reduced emissions in Australia by over 20 percent since 2005. We committed to Kyoto. We met that target and beat that target.” As for the Paris target? Not an issue: Australia would romp it.
At that point, CBS’s Margaret Brennan could only observe that no country had actually delivered on such targets. Hardly a problem, came Morrison’s reply to the bubble’s bursting. “See, it’s one thing to have a commitment, but in Australia, you’re not taken seriously unless you’ve got a plan to achieve the commitment.” This was delightful coming from a Prime Minister who has no plans to speak off when it comes to dealing with climate change. In fact, Morrison’s tenure has been marked by an absence of plans on any major policy decision. When any have been proposed – the vaccine rollout being the conspicuous example – they have been spectacular failures.
In a press conference given on September 24, Morrison pursued his favourite theme in colouring Australia’s lamentable contribution to the global climate debate: technology. Australia is never the laggard in Morrison’s environmental cosmos. Developing countries, he insisted, should be the priority, which was another way of saying that they were the problem. “If we want to address climate change, then we need to address the change that is necessary in developing economies, so they can grow their economies, build their industries, make the things the world needs.” For any difference to be worthwhile, “we’ve got to make a difference everywhere”.
Such a slanted view found its mark. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was taken by a flight of fancy in thinking that Morrison was doing something special. In welcoming the Australia prime minister to the Capitol, Pelosi considered the AUKUS security pact “pretty exciting” and thanked Morrison for showing “leadership” on the issue of climate change.
The next day, Pelosi latched on to Morrison’s remarks about the Paris targets in her weekly press conference with candy-grabbing enthusiasm. Both the UK’s Boris Johnson and Morrison were “so exuberant about the urgency of addressing the climate issues.” But it was the Australian who impressed with his slogan “We Meet It and We Beat It.” That was enough for the Speaker: “they’re leading the way, and that’s what we all have to do” namely “meet our emissions responsibility and our financial responsibility to other countries so that when we leave COP26, having fulfilled our obligations to the Paris Accords, and then go further.”
Such glaringly superficial assessments can be put down to the fanfare that accompanies visiting dignitaries from freedom land’s outposts. Morrison was particularly fortunate on that score, winning over his hosts with a shameless slogan that sounded hopelessly electoral and starkly mendacious.
Which takes us to the next point: Pelosi and company have proved to be something of a sounding board for the next Australian federal election. Morrison’s action on climate change will be minimal, but that will be irrelevant in a number of electoral battlegrounds. Having a slogan, writes Sean Kelly, a former advisor to two previous Australian Labor Prime Ministers, will be acceptable to “a remarkable number of people, as an acceptable substitute for reality – just as it was in America last week.” The Australian Labor Party, still languishing in hopeless opposition, have every reason to be worried.
The post Our Man in Washington: Morrison’s Tour of Deception first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The new military alliance between the United States, Britain and Australia is aimed at China, and raises the threat of war, writes Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Which is the Canadian political party most likely to stand up to the world’s rich and powerful? Which is willing to help the poorest of the poor gain a semblance of dignity and respect? Which can proudly proclaim, we stand for what is right, not just what is easy and expedient?Unfortunately, the answer is not the Conservatives, Liberals or the NDP.
When it comes to Canada’s most flagrantly racist and colonial alliance NDP truly does stand for No Difference Party.
In response to a Canadian Foreign Policy Institute election questionnaire asking, “Does your party support ‘greater’, ‘same’, ‘less’ or ‘no’ focus on Haiti Core Group”? The NDP answered “same”. It’s a remarkable endorsement of imperialism, racism and Canadian policy in Haiti.
The Core Group is a coalition of foreign representatives (US, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, UN and OAS) that periodically releases collective statements on Haitian affairs. They also meet among themselves and with Haitian officials. Recently, the Core Group propped up an unpopular president and effectively appointed Haiti’s de-facto prime minister. On Thursday Madame Boukman-Justice 4 Haiti tweeted, “international law bars foreign embassies from meddling in the internal affairs of nations. But in Haiti, a group of ambassadors from the US, France, Canada, Spain, Germany, EU, UN, OAS formed a bloc called CORE GROUP that literally controls the country and chooses its leaders.”
The Core Group was officially established by a UN Security Council resolution on April 30, 2004. That resolution replaced the two-month-old Multinational Interim Force — created after US, Canadian and French troops invaded to overthrow the elected government — with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which occupied the country for 15 years. Point 5 of the resolution “supports the establishment of a Core Group chaired by the Special Representative and comprising also his/her Deputies, the Force Commander, representatives of OAS and CARICOM, other regional and sub-regional organizations, international financial institutions and other major stakeholders, in order to facilitate the implementation of MINUSTAH’s mandate, promote interaction with the Haitian authorities as partners, and to enhance the effectiveness of the international community’s response in Haiti.”
While it is specifically cited in the UN resolution, CARICOM (Caribbean Community) hasn’t played much of a role in the Core Group, John Reginald Dumas recently explained. He is a Trinidadian diplomat who was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Haiti at the time of the Core Group’s creation.
Unofficially, the Core Group traces its roots to the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” meeting. In a rare major media look at that private meeting, Radio Canada’s Enquête pointed out that the Core Group was spawned at the “Ottawa initiative on Haiti”. Held at the Meech Lake government resort on January 31 and February 1, 2003, no Haitian officials were invited to a gathering where US, French, OAS and Canadian officials discussed overthrowing Haiti’s elected government, putting the country under UN trusteeship and recreating the Haitian military, which largely transpired a year later.
The 2004 coup and UN occupation that spurred the Core Group has been an unmitigated disaster for most Haitians. An individual who had been living in Florida for 15 years, Gerard Latortue, was installed as prime minister for two years and thousands were killed by the post-coup regime. Besides their role in political repression, UN occupation forces disregard for Haitian life caused a major cholera outbreak, which left more than 10,000 dead and one million ill.
In a sign of the disintegration of Haitian political life under Core Group direction, two months ago the (de facto) president was assassinated in the middle of the night by other elements of the government. While there were thousands of elected officials before the overthrow of the elected government in 2004, today Haiti doesn’t have a single functioning elected body (10 senators mandates have not expired but it’s not enough for a quorum).
By basically any metric, 17 years of Core Group influence in Haiti has been a disaster. But even if that were not the case the NDP should oppose the nakedly imperialistic alliance on principle. Just imagine the Jamaican, Congolese, Guatemalan and Filipino ambassadors releasing a collective statement on who should be prime minister of Canada. How would Canadians feel about that?
Remarking on the racial dimension, Haitians on social media often contrast the skin tone of Core Group ambassadors to most Haitians. Above a video of the German ambassador speaking on behalf of the alliance, last week Madame Boukman noted on Twitter, “The media deceptively covers up Haiti’s reality as a modern colonial project, where a German ambassador can boldly announce the country’s future under the control of a CORE GROUP of white supremacist ambassadors from the US, Canada, France, Brazil, Spain, Germany, EU, UN & OAS.”
While the alliance may not be widely known in Canada, this country’s role in the Core Group has been publicly contested. Solidarity Québec Haiti has long criticized the Core Group. A February public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals, including NDP MPs Leah Gazan and Alexandre Boulerice, criticized the Core Group. I have written about the alliance on multiple occasions.
Every NDP member should be ashamed of their party’s endorsement of Canadian colonialism in Haiti.
Haitian Lives Matter!
The post Shame on NDP for supporting imperialism in Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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George W. Bush probably thought he was in for an easy night when he was invited to speak at a live event in Beverly Hills. But the former US president – best known for invading and destroying Iraq – wasn’t reckoning on an audience member named Mike Prysner.
Bush sounded relaxed until Prysner, who served with the US Army in Iraq, interrupted to demand an apology for the million Iraqis killed in the war.
Prysner also accused Bush of lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and made false claims about Iraqi involvement in 9/11 in order to support his calls for war.
As Prysner confronted Bush, two audience members tried vainly to wrestle the former corporal out of the room. However, they were quickly joined by security guards, who dragged Prysner the rest of the way out of the auditorium.
List of the dead
Speaking outside, Prysner said he had tried to read out a list of friends of his who died because of the war and Iraqis who had been killed during the occupation.
I tried to read the names but event runners immediately grabbed the list and tore it up. But I was able to shut it down for a little while. Right when Bush was getting into his first little cheesy story about his life and all that, trying to be funny…
Round Two?
A day later at a different event, Bush faced another barrage of criticism. Mint Press News, reported that researcher Jeb Sprague had also challenged the ex-president on Iraq. A Twitter video shows Bush smiling and laughing in response:
Last night researcher @JebSprague interrupted President George W. Bush in attempt to hold him accountable for his war crimes. This comes the day after @MikePrysner confronted him for his war crimes in Iraq.pic.twitter.com/SIW3wjREkN
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) September 22, 2021
Sprague later tweeted the full text of his intervention:
I just disrupted George Bush’s talk in Long Beach. I was briefly detained and then let go. Here is what I said:
— Jeb Sprague (@JebSprague) September 21, 2021
Sprague’s thread continued:
Your war destroyed my cousin’s life. Your war created a nightmare for my family. He’s a shell of his former self. Tens of thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis have died. You used white phosphorus a chemical weapon in Fallujah. Arrest this man. Arrest this war criminal.
No rest for the wicked
Sprague and Prysner’s efforts were commended on Twitter. And one user pointed out that Britain’s own war criminals should be called out as well:
What Every right thinking human should say to Blair, Bush, @campbellclaret and the rest of the bloodthirsty vampires who sent good people to kill good people! pic.twitter.com/N4vAdQ8bKd
— LongTimeLefty (@LongTimeLefty) September 22, 2021
A view which other Twitter users seemed to share:
Good for this #Iraq war veteran. Why are #Bush & #Blair not in jail for #CrimesAgainstHumanity? https://t.co/uG40Hduker
— Sabria Balland (@sabriaballand) September 20, 2021
None of the architects of the Iraq war have ever been brought to justice for their involvement in the disaster. And people like Mike Prysner are doing a public service by making sure the wicked don’t rest easy.
Featured images via YouTube – The Empire Files & Wikimedia Commons/Chris Greenberg
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Southeast Asian countries have raised concerns that Canberra’s decision to develop and procure eight nuclear-powered submarines under a trilateral security partnership with the United Kingdom and United States, announced on 15 September and collectively known as AUKUS, will spark a regional arms race. The nuclear submarine initiative signals an end to Australia’s contract with French […]
The post Regional countries react to AUKUS and Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine ambition appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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A mother’s determination, combined with the campaign for racial justice, scored an important victory on September 1, when three police officers and two paramedics were charged over the death of Elijah McClain in Colorado in 2019, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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The baby-boom generation is ending its lap in the human race, and the Fridays-for-future generation is beginning its run. Generational shifts of power are symbolized by the image of passing the torch, but now what the older has to pass on to the younger seems not a torch but a time bomb, a legacy of crises.To find a way out of the disaster, we need to look at how we got into it, the historical context. The economic and social system of capitalism shapes our times and shapes us. It is a system based on power, the ability of one group to dominate another – owners dominate workers, rich countries dominate poor countries. To understand the effects of this, let’s review a bit of history.
At the beginning of the 20th century Britain and France were the dominant powers, controlling colonies in Africa and Asia from which they extracted great wealth. Germany was becoming more powerful and also wanted colonies, but Britain and France were determined to keep them out. This conflict led to the First World War in which Germany was crushed.
During that time, people in the colonies and other poor countries were rebelling, trying to throw off domination. This movement was most advanced in Russia, where it was based on the principles of Marx and Lenin. In the chaos of the First World War, the Russian workers succeeded in overthrowing the government and creating the world’s first true socialist nation.
After the war, though, the capitalist powers tried to crush the revolution through invasion, sabotage, and economic warfare. These attacks weakened the revolution and gave Stalin the opportunity to seize dictatorial control of Russia. He distorted the democratic principles of Marx and Lenin into an oppressive, totalitarian regime. Then he and his followers shaped the communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Cuba in this dictatorial form. True socialism no longer existed and still doesn’t.
During and after the war, the revolutionary spirit spread to Germany. To squelch it, the German capitalists helped Hitler, a fanatical anti-communist and anti-Semite, seize control and become a dictator. He led Germany into the Second World War and murdered six million Jews plus other minorities.
The Jewish Holocaust set off a chain of ongoing tragedies. It led to the formation of Israel, which Britain and the USA supported primarily so they could have a base in the Mideast close to the energy reserves. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were pushed off their land, and they were outraged at being forced to pay for the crimes of the Germans. This generated violent Muslim fundamentalism and an ongoing war to get their homeland back. Due to global Muslim solidarity and their cultural need to avenge dishonor, their resistance has now spread worldwide. The West has responded with massive violence from Libya to the Philippines to stamp it out and maintain their access to the resources. US-NATO attacks on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and much of Africa have killed millions but have succeeded only in generating determined hatred in the survivors.
Ironically, the USA is fighting for oil, but the world’s single largest user of oil is the US military which is doing the fighting. All this contributes to the growing environmental disasters. Our poor planet is reeling under human assault. Our drive for consumption is reaching the point where we are consuming ourselves. The world is trapped in a ghastly dilemma.
That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news: History shows us 1) the cause of these calamities is capitalism 2) that system can be overthrown 3) the way to build a new society is by holding to the democratic principles of Marx and Lenin, avoiding both liberal reformism and Stalinist totalitarianism. The political party that I’ve found to have the best understanding of these principles is the Freedom Socialist Party. It offers a torch of knowledge worth passing on to the next generation.
The post Passing the Torch first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.
Actually, the answer is far more complex than that offered by Western officials and media, which ultimately – although inaccurately – conveyed the impression that NATO armies were in Afghanistan to safeguard human rights, to educate women and to bring civilization to a seemingly barbaric culture.
Though political dissent is a basic human right, there is a clear and definitive line between the legitimate right to challenge one’s government/regime and willingly collaborating with another – especially when that collaboration can have dire consequences on one’s own people.
In the United States and Europe, there are thousands of political dissidents from many parts of the world – from South America, the Middle East, East Asia, and others – who are, sadly, used as cheerleaders for political and military interventions, either directly by certain governments, or indirectly, through lobby and pressure groups, academic circles and mainstream media.
These individuals, often promoted as ‘experts’, appear and disappear whenever they are useful and when their usefulness expires. Some might even be sincere and well-intentioned when they speak out against, for example, human rights violations committed by certain regimes in their own home countries, but the outcome of their testimonies is almost always translated to self-serving policies.
Thousands of Afghans – political dissidents, NATO collaborators, students, athletes and workers seeking opportunities – have already arrived in various western capitals. Expectedly, many are being used by the media and various pressure groups to retrospectively justify the war on Afghanistan, as if it was a moral war. Desperate to live up to the expectations, Afghan ‘activists’ are already popping up on western political platforms, speaking about the Taliban’s dismal record of human rights and, especially, women’s rights.
But what is the point of appealing to the western moral consciousness after 20 years of a NATO-led deadly invasion that has cost Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of innocent people?
In Afghanistan, an alternative narrative is evolving.
On September 11, hundreds of Afghan women protested in Kabul University, not against the Taliban, but against other Afghan women who purport to speak from western capitals about all Afghan women.
“We are against those women who are protesting on the streets, claiming they are representative of women,” one of the speakers said, Agency France Press reported.
While AFP made a point of repeating that the women protesters have “pledged” their commitment to “all Taliban’s hardline policies on gender segregation”, emphasizing how they were all covered “head to toe,” the event was significant. Among many issues, it raises the question: who represents Afghan women, those who left or those who stayed?
A large banner held by the protesters in Kabul read: “Women who left Afghanistan cannot represent us.”
The truth is no one represents Afghan women except those who are democratically-elected by Afghan society to represent all sectors of that society, women included. Until real democracy is practiced in Afghanistan, the struggle will continue for real freedom, human rights, equality and, obviously, representation.
This fight can only take place within an organic, grassroots Afghan context – whether in Afghanistan or outside of the country – but certainly not through Fox News, the BBC or US Senate hearings.
The late Palestinian-American scholar, Professor Edward Said, had repeatedly warned of the pseudo reality painted by the ‘native informants’ – supposed political dissidents recruited by western governments to provide a convenient depiction of the reality in the Middle East and elsewhere, as a moral justification for war. The consequences, as the 2003 Iraq war and invasion have demonstrated, can be horrific.
Said challenged a particular ‘native informant’, the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese academic, whose ideas about the Iraqi enthusiasm for the US war, though proved disastrously wrong, were used by George W. Bush and others as proof that the impending war was destined to be a ‘cakewalk’.
Ajami’s ideas were long discredited, but the political machinations that still prefer ‘native informants’ to genuine human rights defenders and good scholarship remain in place. Many of the Afghan escapees are sure to be strategically placed through the same channels, which continue to promote interventions and sanctions as sound policies.
The war in Afghanistan has ended, hopefully for good, but the conflict on who represents the people of that war-torn country remains unresolved. It behooves the Taliban to deliver on its promises regarding equal representation and political plurality, otherwise there are many others abroad who will be ready to claim the role of legitimate representation.
In the Middle East, in particular, we have already witnessed this phenomenon of the west-based ‘legitimate’ democratic representations. Ultimately, these ‘governments-in-exile’ wrought nothing but further political deception, division, corruption, and continued war.
War-torn Afghanistan – exhausted, wounded and badly needing a respite – deserves better.
The post Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs “Native Informants” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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*Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*
You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.
As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .
Get this one here:
The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:
DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”
LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.
[An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]
LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.
So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.
Our tax dollars at this murderous work —
Read Alan MacLeod’s piece here — Havana Syndrome, Directed Energy Weapons, and the New Cold War
It’s the supplements, stupid!
So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:
Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —
Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.
Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.
So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:
Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.
If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.
“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.
It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid!
And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.
Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”
The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.
Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.
All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!
Check out more on Dag over at Consortium News —
Oh, the truths of the day, around 6 million people dead because of the War on Terror. Six million!
New Byline Times report which found that
“at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”
The post So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Australia has just caused surprise among its friends, concern among its neighbours, and an overtly hostile reaction from the Chinese with its announcement that it was scrapping the submarine deal it had signed with France and replacing it with a scheme, cooked together with British and American allies, to buy 8 nuclear powered submarines.
The scheme as announced was extraordinarily short on details. There is apparently at least 18 months of negotiating ahead before the contract is even signed. After that there will be a lengthy delay, estimated being at least 10 years in length, before the first submarine is ever delivered. By that time, who knows what the state of the world’s geopolitical system will be. One can be assured that the Chinese, against whom the plan is obviously directed, will have taken multiple steps to ensure its own safety.
The Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was not short of hyperbole in announcing the deal. He described the relationship with the United States as the “forever partnership”. As the old joke goes, there are only two forever’s, death and taxes. Morrison’s words are reflective of an unfortunate tendency among Australian politicians. They are inclined not to look at the map when making grand geopolitical statements.
Australia is a thinly populated European nation that sits at the southern end of the Asian landmass. In keeping with its geography, the bulk of Australian foreign trade is conducted with those same Asian neighbours. Ironically, China is by far Australia’s largest trading partner, followed by Japan.
The British are yesterday’s men when it comes to Asia having finally been forced to give up its holding in Hong Kong that they took by force from China in the 19th century. The United States likes to project itself is an important figure in the Asian scheme of things. As the recent debacle in Afghanistan showed, however, American influence in the region is marked by one rebuttal after another.
With the possible exception of Japan, United States influence in the region is rapidly fading, notwithstanding its provocative sailings in the South China Sea and its overt support for the island of Taiwan. It is conveniently forgotten by Western commentators that from 1949 to 1972 the island of Taiwan held China’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. There was no suggestion then that Taiwan was a separate country. It could hardly have claimed to be, yet retaining China’s seat on the Security Council.
Now, Taiwan is making noises about becoming an independent country, something that the Beijing government has declared to be totally unacceptable, and which they will prevent by the use of force if necessary. It would be very unwise for the West to ignore the determination of the People’s Republic of China to recapture its rebellious neighbour. It would be equally unwise for the Americans to underestimate the Chinese level of determination and attempt to defend Taiwan from returning to the control of the mainland.
It is into this fraught situation that the Australian government is being inexorably drawn by its latest agreement with the Americans. Although the Australian media are almost completely silent on the point, one of the consequences of this new agreement with the Americans will be an increase in the number of United States military holdings in Australia. They already control the operation of the spy base at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. It was former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam‘s intention to close the base that led to the coup against his government in November 1975.
The United States has operated a baleful influence upon Australian foreign policy ever since. There is absolutely nothing in the latest announcement of Australia buying United States designed nuclear powered ships that will do a single thing to reduce that influence. Quite the contrary.
The current posturing by the Australian Prime Minister will do nothing to alter that reality. Together with his defence minister, Peter Dutton, who has been a failure at each of his previous ministerial postings, they are both talking loudly about the wonderful future of Australia. They are either too vain or too stupid to see that this latest deal does more than any other single decision in recent years to entrap Australia in a subservient role to the United States.
As Scott Ritter writes in RT: “This is a story of geopolitically driven military procurement gone mad”,1, pointing out that this deal “further exacerbates the existing geopolitical crisis with China by injecting a military dimension that will never see the light of day.”
Ritter goes on to seek answers to problems he sees as being associated with the announced purchase; for instance, first of all, how much will it cost? Secondly, how will Australia operate advanced nuclear power systems when it has no indigenous nuclear experience to draw upon? And how does Australia plan to man a large nuclear submarine when it can barely field four crews for its existing Collins class fleet.
These are legitimate questions to ask, yet the timid Opposition Labor Party seems paralysed by them.
As Alan Gyngell points out2, the United States’ expectations of Australia’s support in almost anything going, whether it involves China or not (although that is the greatest danger) will grow. It represents an application of responsibility to ensure the ongoing welfare of the Australian people. By the time the submarines are delivered, if at all, the present generation of political leaders will be long gone. The damage they are doing will last a lot longer.
- US-UK-Australia Submarine Deal is a Dangerous Joke, 18 September 2021.
- “Australia Signs up for the Anglosphere“, September 19, 2021.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The recent outbreak of the Delta variant in China “shows that its strategy no longer fits. It is time for China to change tack.”
So declared a lead essay atop the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section on September 7 by Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Delta outbreak that “changed the game” in Huang’s words emerged after an outbreak at Nanjing international airport in July traced to a flight from Russia. Did this outbreak change anything, in fact?
Let’s do the numbers.
Let’s do something that Huang did not; let’s look at the numbers from July 1 until September 7, the date of the article, a period that brackets the Delta outbreak cited by Huang.
During that period China experienced 273 new cases, about 4 per day, and no new deaths. That hardly seems like a failure.
To get some perspective on these numbers, during that same July1-September 7 period, the US, a country one fourth China’s size, reported 6,560,588 new cases (96,479 per day) and 45,054 new deaths (662 per day).
The same contrast can be seen for the entire period of the pandemic. From the pandemic’s initial Wuhan outbreak in January, 2020, until September 7, 2021:
China had a sum total of 95,512 cases and 4,629 deaths;
The US had 40,196,953 cases and 648,146 deaths.
There have been two previous outbreaks of the Delta variant in China, one in Guangdong and another in Yunnan near the Myanmar border before the one arising in Nanjing. The Delta variant was contained in each case. None of the three has turned out to be a “game changer,” as Huang incorrectly maintains.
Perhaps it is the U.S. that needs “to change tack.”
To anticipate an objection that has largely faded but persists in some quarters, can we believe the case and mortality count China gives us? There are now many first-hand accounts of what life has been like in China these days that make the official tallies quite reasonable. And quantitative evidence supporting China’s data is available in a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious British Medical Journal; it is summarized and discussed here. Carried out by groups at Oxford University and China’s CDC, the study compares excess deaths in Wuhan and also in the rest of China during the period of the lockdown, and it finds that the official counts are remarkably accurate.
Do China’s life-saving measures imperil its economy?
China would need a very good reason to abandon its public health measures of massive, rapid testing, tracing and, where necessary, quarantining. Are there any such reasons? Mr. Huang states that the life-saving measures now “threaten overall economic growth in China”. Does this prognostication fit the facts?
China’s GDP grew more slowly in 2020, but still it grew by 2.27%, the only major economy in the world not to contract. In contrast the US economy contracted by 3.51%. (Even China’s slowed growth in 2020 matched the US economy in normal times, which grew at an average rate of 2.3% in the four pre-pandemic years, 2016-2019.)
What about the future? Economies are set to rebound in 2021 from their 2020 lows, with recent projections giving China an 8.4% bounce before settling in to an average growth of 6% over the following 5 years. For comparison the US jump in 2021 is estimated to be 6.4%, dropping to a 1.9% average over the following 5 years.
In terms of the economy present and future, China’s policies appear to be doing quite well, better, in fact, than any other major economy. Mr. Huang has advanced a thesis that is unencumbered by the facts.
Why is the media’s failure to report on China’s success a threat to our very lives?
At every step of the way, China’s successes with Covid-19 have been met in the U.S. media with silence, denigration or a prediction that the success cannot continue (FAIR provides a brief survey here). As a result, China’s measures are not widely known or understood.
China’s success with its public health measures is important for us now, because the pandemic is far from over. We don’t know what surprises viral evolution will have in store for us. If a new variant emerges that is resistant to existing vaccines, then we have only public health measures to protect us until we catch up. That is also true for future pandemics which will surely come our way. For us to be kept in ignorance of those measures or to have them dismissed, as Yanzhong Huang does, poses a threat to our very lives.
We might also wonder what would happen if the people of the West, including the U.S., understood clearly that measures were possible which could have protected us from the millions of deaths we have suffered. Governments have toppled from far less. Mr. Huang, the New York Times and the mass media, whatever else they are doing, are certainly protecting our Establishment from a rage that might have most unpleasant consequences.
The post New York Times Advises China on Covid-19: Abandon Success, Try Failure first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In a move that surprised many, leaders from Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States announced a new trilateral security partnership called “AUKUS” on 15 September, with the first initiative being an ambitious plan to co-develop a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for Australia. The nuclear submarine initiative signals an end to Australia’s contract with French shipbuilder […]
The post Australia scraps existing French submarine deal in favour of new nuclear-powered submarines appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
