The “New Normal” & the Civil Society Deception

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Reid Mukai

A global network of stakeholder capitalist partners are collaborating to usher in what they claim to be a new model of enhanced democratic accountability that includes “civil society”. However, beneath their deceptive use of the term civil society lies an ideology which offers this network an unprecedented degree of political control that threatens to extinguish representative democracy entirely.

By Iian Davis

Source: Unlimited Hangout

Representative democracy is quietly being phased out to be replaced with a “new normal.” This “new normal” is a nascent form of governance being referred to as “civil society.” It is founded upon the principles of communitarianism and it is being offered to us as an illusory replacement for representative democracy.

The Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P), who set the worldwide policy agenda, have long-seen the manipulation of the concept of civil society as a means to achieve their ambitions. This is at odds with how many emergent “civil society” groups understand their allocated roll.

Set against the background of a corporate, global state, in this article, we will explore the exploitation of communitarian civil society and consider the evidence that, despite possibly good intentions, civil society is very far from the system of increased democratic accountability that communitarians had hoped for. In the hands of the G3P, what they refer to as “civil society” is a tyranny.

Shaping the Global Public-Private Partnership

Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meeting in 1998, then United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan, described the transformation of the United Nations. He signalled the transition to the G3P model of global governance:

“The United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a ‘quiet revolution’ […] A fundamental shift has occurred. The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society […] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”

The WEF describes itself as the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” It represents the interests of more than 1000 global corporations and, in June 2019, it signed a Strategic Partnership Framework agreement with the United Nations. The WEF and the UN agreed to work together to “accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Agenda 2030 establishes the initial waypoints along the path to completion of the plan for the 21^st century, also known as Agenda 21. The policies required to achieve these goals will be developed by the multi-stakeholder partnership. The UN explain how this is envisaged to operate:

“Cross sectorial and innovative multi-stakeholder partnerships will play a crucial role for getting us to where we need by the year 2030. Partnerships for sustainable development are multi-stakeholder initiatives voluntarily undertaken by Governments, intergovernmental organizations, major groups and others stakeholders, which efforts are contributing to the implementation of inter-governmentally agreed development goals and commitments, as included in Agenda 21.”

For its part, the UN describes itself as the “place where the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems and find shared solutions.” Currently 193 sovereign states are signed up to the UN Charter.

National governments commit to abide by the principles of the Charter and the ruling arbitration of the International Court of Justice. While UN General Assembly recommendations are non-binding on member states, the UN provides a mechanism by which governments can take collective action.

With the Strategic Partnership in place, the WEF and the corporations they represent are now engaged in “effective collaboration” with the 193 national governments represented at the UN. They are directly partnering with government in the development of global policy agendas.

The partnership will guide the formation of policies and regulations related to international finance and the global financial system; the transition to a new, low carbon global economy; international public health policy, disaster preparedness and global health security; the technological development deemed necessary to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution; policies on diversity, inclusion and equality; oversight of the global education systems and more.

In an attempt to add a veneer of democratic accountability to this Strategic Partnership Framework, as the world uniformly moves towards Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN strongly advocates collaboration with “civil society.” Indeed, SDG 17 specifically refers to this arrangement: “Goal 17 further seek to encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships”

Civil society will be engaged by utilising the WEF concept of the “multistakeholder platform.” This is a core element of the WEF’s definition of stakeholder capitalism.

The communitarian model of civil society is based upon a triumvirate power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) However, the WEF’s interpretation of stakeholder capitalism assumes that the public-private partnership stakeholders (state-market) select the civil society communities (social or third sector) they wish to engage with.

Selection bias is a concern, as it obviously excludes the communities the public-private partnership does not wish to engage with. In part, this contradicts the communitarian view of civil society.

The WEF’s multistakeholder platform appears to exploit, rather than embrace, communitarian civil society. Understandably, the WEF’s partnership with the UN drew strong criticism from many civil society groups. The Transnational Institute (TNI) encapsulated their concerns as follows:

“This public-private partnership will permanently associate the UN with transnational corporations […] This is a form of corporate capture […] The provisions of the strategic partnership effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions […] The UN’s acceptance of this partnership agreement moves the world toward WEF’s aspirations for multistakeholderism becoming the effective replacement of multilateralism […] The goal was to weaken the role of states in global decision-making and to elevate the role of a new set of ‘stakeholders’, turning our multilateral system into a multistakeholder system, in which companies are part of the governing mechanisms. This would bring transnational corporations, selected civil society representatives, states and other non-state actors together to make global decisions, discarding or ignoring critical concerns around conflicts of interest, accountability and democracy.”

Less than six months after the Strategic Partnership Framework was signed the pseudopandemic allegedly began in Wuhan, China. Resulting world events have somewhat obscured the corporate capture of global governance from public attention, but it remains in place.

The Civil Society Tradition

Representative democracies have a long tradition of civil society. Between 1835 and 1840 the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote and published two volumes of “Democracy in America.” He noted that, for the representative democracy of the “new world,” the voluntary institutions of civil society promoted active engagement in decision making and acted as a bulwark against the excesses of centralised, governmental authority:

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds -religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books […] and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools […] they form a society.”

While he found that American civil society empowered the citizenry, de Tocqueville also identified some of the apparent risks:

“When several members of an aristocracy agree to combine, they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be very limited; and when the members of an association are limited in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand each other, and establish fixed regulations. The same opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the associated members must always be very numerous for their association to have any power.”

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with concept of civil society, but even in the 19th century the potential for it to be exploited by powerful interest groups was apparent.

Today, civil society is sold to us as a way to fix what many people see as the “democratic deficit”. First coined in the late 70’s by the Congress of Young European Federalists (JEF), the “deficit” was conceived to explain the observed failings in representative democracy.

The JEF held that the ponderous, centralised bureaucracy of national government was unable to adapt to rapidly changing economic and social conditions. Further, that the interdependent, international nature of modern, technologically advanced industrial societies created conditions that no single nation could address in isolation.

This left the electorate unable to affect the policy changes they needed, as government became unresponsive to social and economic realities. Civil society was suggested as a way to bridge the gap between governance, government and community. Unfortunately, the inherent credulity of the communitarian theory driving it rendered civil society vulnerable to manipulation by more Machiavellian global forces.

Communitarian Civil Society Model

In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the first edition of the Communist Manifesto. In it they criticised their intellectual forebears, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and others, for their utopian naivety. In particular they decried the “utopian socialist” rejection of the class struggle, pointing out that, in their opinion, the proletariat needed an independent political movement in order to overturn the rule of the bourgeoisie.

In 1841, John Goodwyn Barmby coined the term “communitarian.” He was among those who Marx would subsequently label as utopian socialists. Communitarianism elucidated their theory that individual identity was a product of familial, social and community interactions. Communitarianism wasn’t widely referenced until, in 1996, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor highlighted that a new form of political communitarianism was building in the US:

“The term has been taken up by a group under the leadership of Amitai Etzioni in the US. This group has a political agenda. One might say that they are concerned social democrats who are worried about the way that various forms of individualism are undermining the welfare state. They see the need for solidarity, and hence for ‘community’ on a number of levels, from the family to the state.”

Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American dual citizen, is the director of the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. A former advisor to the Carter administration, he formed an association of like minded sociologists and other scholars called the Communitarian Network.

In 1991, the Network produced its manifesto in the form of the Responsive Communitarian Platform. Etzioni et al. defined civil society as the moral and political space between community and state. They suggested that global problems could only be tackled with the participation of civil society:

“A communitarian perspective must be brought to bear on the great moral, legal and social issues of our time […] Moral voices achieve their effect mainly through education and persuasion, rather than through coercion […] they exhort, admonish, and appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature […] this important moral realm, which is neither one of random individual choice nor of government control, has been much neglected […] we see an urgent need for a communitarian social movement to accord these voices their essential place […] civil society is a constant, ongoing enterprise.”

Communitarianism is opposed to authoritarian control. It specifies “community” as representative of the people. Accordingly, in order for government to be genuinely responsive to the changing needs of the electorate, it must engage with communities:

“We seek to find ways to accord citizens more information, and more say, more often. We seek to curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government. Similarly, we ask how ‘private governments,’ whether corporations, labor unions, or voluntary associations, can become more responsive to their members and to the needs of the community.”

Etzioni and other communitarians, like the utopian socialists before them, believe that the community represents the individual. Therefore, the community can speak for the individual. Further, they believe that governments and “private governments” can engage with the people via consultation with the communities. In combination, these communities form civil society.

Communitarian Assumptions

In his 2000 commissioned treatise for the UK-based, privately funded think tank DEMOS, titled The Third Way To A Good Society, Etzioni argued that civil society could remedy public disillusionment in democratic institutions. He noted the dwindling public trust in government and increasing sense of disenfranchisement. The remedy he proposed for this democratic deficit has since proven disastrous:

“We aspire to a society that is not merely civil but is good […] When we bond with family, friends or community members we live up to the basic principle of the good society […] The good society is one that balances three often partially incompatible elements: the state, the market and the community. […] Communities, in my understanding, are based on two foundations […] First, communities provide bonds of affection that turn groups of people into social entities resembling extended families. Second, they transmit a shared moral culture (a set of shared social meanings and values that characterise what the community considers virtuous verses unacceptable behaviour) […] These traits differentiate communities from other social groups […] Contemporary communities evolve among members of one profession working for the same institution […] members of an ethnic or racial group even if dispersed among others; people who share a sexual orientation; or intellectuals of the same political or cultural feather […]Groups that merely share specific interests – to prevent the Internet from being taxed or to reduce the costs of postage – are solely an interest group or lobby. They lack the affective bonds and shared culture that make communities.”

For communitarians shared morality defines the “good society” which manifests in the exercise of power sharing between “the state, the market and the community.” Communities, as defined, stand apart from mere “interest groups” because they have “affective bonds” whereas interest groups don’t, in the communitarian’s view.

Community is, according to the communitarians, held together because people have affection for each other. They suggest that interest groups lack cohesion by comparison.

Community is “good” and therefore the power-sharing triangle is “good” for society. Certainly the vast majority of us want to live in a peaceful society, where families of every shape and size can thrive, where children have the opportunity to reach their full potential and conflict is resolved without resorting to violence. Nonetheless, communitarianism poses some questions.

Absent a shared “specific interest,” it is not easy to define community. Which “communities” will be chosen to form civil society, how is this decision made and who makes it? Who represents the local community? Is it the church, if so which church? Is it a local charity or an environmentalist group? Does the local cyclist community represent the interests of the local road hauliers community? What “good” values do these selected communities promote, who among us agree with them and how many of us share their aims and objectives?

Who is selected from each alleged community to represent the opinions of all of its constituent members? Do the community members share the views of their representatives? Are they happy for these community leaders to speak for them?

In the multistakeholder platform-based model of civil society it appears that these judgments fall to the public-private partnership. How confident can the rest of us be in their rationale? Even the notion of the local community is a nebulous concept. Where are the boundaries of local? Is it our street, our town, city or nation state? Does everyone who lives in whatever is prescribed as the local community agree? Do we all share the same opinions, do we even want to be part of a community?

Communitarians offer few, if any, answers to these questions. It is an implicit assumption of communitarianism that this thing they call community is capable of acting as a voice for the individual. This is not evident.

Communitarian “New Normal” Intolerance

An oft quoted sound-bite during the 2020 iteration of the pseudopandemic was the phrase the “new normal.” Many of us probably believed that the prospect of a new normal referred to little more than the introduction of stringent public health measures following an unprecedented global pandemic. However, this is not what “new normal” means.

While he was far from the first to use it, the “new normal” was a phrase offered by Amitai Etzioni in his 2011 book of the same name. He accompanied his book with an essay, titled The New Normal, also written in 2011. In both the book and the essay, Etzioni explored the communitarian view on the new, post global economic collapse world. The “new normal” was the name Etzioni gave to a society of “diminished economic condition.”

He suggested that people must accept that continual growth was unlikely and should, in any case, eschew consumerism as a measure of success. He welcomed this envisaged change to a society that valued relationships as well as emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth beyond material acquisition. He claimed that a reduction in consumption was required to save the planet. We all needed to reduce our carbon footprints, he asserted.

As people have come to question the often dispiriting pursuit of modern materialism, Etzioni’s perspective was welcome perhaps. However, it is in Etzioni’s exploration of the balance between individual rights and the “common good” where doubts arise. Etzioni, alongside most communitarians, considers that balance to be fluid. Neither individual rights nor the common good take precedent in a sociological concept Etzioni called “libertarian communitarianism.”

As new situations arise and technologies emerge, what is good for the community today may not be good for the community tomorrow. Therefore, the point at which the common good does override individual rights—as it must—is constantly shifting, according to libertarian communitarianism.

However, one value which communitarianism does not espouse is diversity of opinion. In the communitarian model, the power to define the common good is absolute. The traditional democratic values of freedom of speech and expression are distinctly unwelcome in communitarian philosophy. This is not admitted, but it is implicit to their theory. For communitarians, dissent from the community or disagreement with the stated “common good” is not tolerated.

For example, the Responsive Communitarian Platform states:

“We should not hesitate to speak up and express our moral concerns to others when it comes to issues we care about deeply […] Those who neglect these duties, should be explicitly considered poor members of the community […] A good citizen is involved in a community or communities. We know that enduring responsive communities cannot be created through fiat or coercion, but only through genuine public conviction […] Although it may seem utopian, we believe that in the multiplication of strongly democratic communities around the world lies our best hope for the emergence of a global community that can deal concertedly with matters of general concern to our species as a whole.”

Communitarians are ambitious. They see their civil society as a global project where everyone involved has a “genuine public conviction” to communitarian principles. This ambition is shared by the G3P, but for very different reasons.

What if we are not convinced? What if we believe individual sovereignty is sacrosanct and that freedom of speech and expression, of organic public protest and freedom of choice are more important than a commitment to any prescribed community or the community’s authorised version of the common good?

According to communitarians, like Etzioni, this makes us poor members of the community. We are not “good citizens” and they suggest how we should be dealt with:

“Responsibilities are anchored in community […] communities define what is expected of people; they educate their members to accept these values; and they praise them when they do and frown upon them when they do not […] Whenever individuals or members of a group are harassed, many non-legal measures are appropriate to express disapproval of hateful expressions and to promote tolerance among the members of the polity.”

This is community as a control mechanism, not as an extension of any egalitarian meritocracy where individuals can flourish. The community will define our responsibilities and spell out what is expected of us. The community will instill its values and we must agree with them. If we don’t, we will be “educated” to accept them.

If we strongly express disagreement with community values this could constitute “hate” and “harassment” of community members. Those of us outside of the community, for any reason, will be receive its disapproval and efforts will be made to make us more tolerant of the community’s beliefs. Whatever they may be.

Therefore, uniformity of opinion within these communities is enforced. Debate will be welcome as long as it doesn’t challenge the community’s precepts. These are off limits. Members will probably have to leave independent thought at the door before entering the community and certainly before being accepted by it.

There is a significant risk that groupthink will develop. The roots of communitarianism are in the utopian socialist view that identity is formed by the community. In turn, this also suggests that community identity becomes individual identity.

An individual suffering from groupthink possesses unquestioned certainty, intolerance for any opposing views and an inability to engage in logical discourse. Their critical thinking skills are impaired, because to question the community is to question their own identity.

Those who do not share the ordained group ethos, or those who question the evidence base underpinning the group’s certainty, are not part of the community. They are “other.”

Etzioni describes anyone who doesn’t embrace vaccine passports as Individual Rights Luddites. Having thought about vaccine passports, he concluded:

“These passports could enable scores of millions of people to leave their depressing quarantines, to go to work, to attend school, and to be socially active again, all of which would help revive the economy and reduce social tensions.”

He accepts that lockdowns and the closure of the global economy was an unavoidable response to a global pandemic and not a policy choice. He believes that school closures make sense and that the economy will be revived once the vaccine passport system is established. He believes that the mRNA and viral vector injections are vaccines and that they work as described by the manufacturers.

In other words Etzioni accepts a whole raft of assumptions. Based upon them, he insists that denying access to society to those who don’t want to be injected is not “discrimination” but rather “differentiation.” Applying his communitarian principles he wrote:

“Differentiation will exert some pressure on those who refuse to be vaccinated, as they will be unable to reap the benefits of the passports unless they reconsider their position.”

Etzioni has defined the common good. Or rather, he accepts the common good as defined for him. Freedom of choice or principles such as bodily autonomy are overridden by the “common good.”

Etzioni disagrees with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben who pointed out the horrific ramifications of a biosecurity state. This is fine, disagreement and debate are welcome in any free society.

Unfortunately, unlike Agamben, Etzioni doesn’t advocate a free society. He suggests a communitarian civil society based upon the consensus view of what does or does not constitute the common good. As did Hitler’s National Socialists in 1930s Germany, a society from which Etzioni fled as a child to what is now the state of Israel.

Communitarians oppose the abuse of power and it is unfair to describe them as fascists. Nonetheless, it is entirely reasonable to point out the parallels. Both political ideologies accept authoritarian diktat. That is what enforcement of the “common good” is.

However, this is not the most worrying aspect of the communitarianism. It is communitarians’ naive grasp of the global realpolitik, which renders communitarian civil society the perfect policy vehicle for the G3P. This is what should concern us most. Unlike communitarians, the G3P definitely wants to enforce dictatorial control.

The Political Class Embraces Communitarian Civil Society

In one sense, the global political class’ apparent enthusiasm for communitarian civil society seems surprising. It is unusual for them to seek ways to increase public scrutiny of state and corporate power or public involvement in their policy development.

While public consultation is nothing new, policy is typically designed via internal party political processes, set at party conferences and so-forth. The parties then produce manifestos that the people are invited to select in elections, once every 4 or 5 years.

Civil society, as envisioned by communitarians, suggests a permanent power sharing structure that affords individual voters “more say, more often” in an effort to “curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government.” It is rare that governments, and the political parties that form them, willingly diminish their own power and authority.

That this seeming diminution of party political power should be embraced both simultaneously and globally is unprecedented. Yet, that is what we have seen, as Western representative democracies have advocated, what appears to be, increasing political power for civil society groups.

The recent COP26 summit, which established the basis for action for the new global economy, invited representatives from “governments, businesses, NGOs, and civil society groups.” The US State Department brought together “leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector” for their Summit For Democracy to deliberate on US foreign policy.

The German government has appointed a National Civil Society Body to monitor the site selection for potential nuclear waste storage facilities. The UK government has created the Office for Civil Society within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. On the surface, it seems democracy is exploding everywhere.

Communitarian Civil Society Is A G3P Project

The Communitarian Network’s ideas certainly enthralled the western political class. During the 1990s, US president Clinton and then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder leading the mainland European charge, embraced what they called “the Third Way.”

In New Labour’s Third Way: pragmatism and governance, Dr. Michael Temple outlined how this new form of communitarianism was interpreted in the polity of the 1990s:

“Elements of both stakeholding and communitarianism can be found in the Third Way […] communitarian ideas have undoubtedly influenced New Labour [..] Outputs and not ideology are driving the new agenda of governance under New Labour. This is seen to have its roots in the new ways of working the party has embraced in local governance, where public–private partnerships have become the norm and a new ethos of public service has emerged.”

This transformation in governance was not solely a political shift of the “progressive left.” Following the demise of the UK Labour government, the Conservative-led coalition, under David Cameron, advocated the “Big Society.” Today, under another Conservative government, virtually no UK policy initiative or announcement is complete unless it speaks of engagement with “civil society.”

“Public-private partnerships” became prevalent in UK local government decision-making during the 1980s & 90s. This was an aspect of the forerunner of the Third Way, named by the UK Labour party as the “stakeholder society.”

The idea of the stakeholder society owed much to the reforms introduced by former UK Conservative Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher. Under her leadership in the 1980s the pursuit of “Reagonomics” led the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) for all local authority contracts.

Hitherto, standard local government practice had been to allocate infrastructure projects to private contractors while the regional government provided many local services. With CCT, all contracts were opened up to the private sector. This meant that multinational corporations had access to new taxpayer-funded markets.

Prof. Andrew Gamble and Gavin Kelly, who formed the Resolution Foundation policy think tank, welcomed Tony Blair’s 1996 speech in Singapore. They emphasised the stakeholder society as a crucial element of Blair’s vision of “one nation socialism”:

“The key idea behind one nation socialism is the stakeholder society, a society in which all individuals and interests have a stake through democratic representation, and through the adoption by political parties like the Labour Party of a conception of the public interest.”

However, the stakeholder society redefined who would determine the public interest? Traditionally, this had primarily been an undertaking for elected governments. They could be kicked out of office if the public disagreed with their policies. However, the stakeholder society gave a formal policymaking role to both the third (social) and the private sector. No one voted for them, nor could they be removed through any electoral process.

Nor was the Third Way simply a European project. In the US, the Third Way policy think tank was formed in Washington in 2005. Supposedly a think tank of the “progressive left”, the Third Way was heavily backed by global corporations and lobbied Congress intensively to adopt multinational trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Initially, it seems difficult to understand why global corporations and governments would be eager to promote an idea like the Third Way or civil society. For global corporations, the ability to focus their lobbying efforts on a handful of elected officials would appear preferable, and easier, than trying to influence the communities forming civil society. Centralised authority benefits them, so why would they seek to to dilute it?

The “key idea” of the stakeholder society did not originate in centre-left think tanks like the Resolution Foundation or the Third Way. It sprang from the heart of the global capitalist network forming the Global Public Private Partnership (G3P).

Stakeholder capitalism is supposedly a new model of so-called responsible capitalism which the founder and current executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, pioneered in the 1970s. The G3P he represents claims the right to act as trustees of society. In December 2019, Schwab wrote “What Kind of Capitalism Do We Want”, where he outlined the stakeholder capitalism concept:

“Stakeholder capitalism, a model I first proposed a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges.”

“Trustee” has a specific legal definition:

“The person appointed, or required by law, to execute a trust; one in whom an estate, interest, or power is vested, under an express or implied agreement to administer or exercise it for the benefit or to the use of another.”

The referenced “other” is us, the population. We all apparently agree that private corporations should be invested with the power to administer the global estate. Or at least that is the assumption at the heart of stakeholder capitalism.

Communitarianism and stakeholder capitalism merge to form what is now being referred to as “civil society.” This then is the proposed model of representative democracy that will ostensibly enable us to have a say in the policy formation process. If we examine this claim, however, it is resoundingly hollow.

In the hands of the global stakeholder capitalists, with the connivance of a power hungry “progressive” left, Etzioni’s dream of a communitarian civil society has metastasised into a global control mechanism for the G3P. Civil society, as the term is now being used, is a threat to every democratic principle we value.

The Tyranny of the New Normal Communitarian Civil Society

Etzioni, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and other proponents of communitarianism, who advocate local and national governance via civil society, offer a model ripe for exploitation. Governments across the world have enthusiastically seized the opportunity presented by this rendering of civil society, typically in the form of people’s or citizen’s assemblies.

Many assemblies have formed their consultative community through the drawing of lots. So-called sortition is a governance model that invites members of the local community to deliberate on important policy issues. For example, the UK Government commissioned the Climate Assembly to look at policy enabling the UK to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Selected delegates were able to debate what the net zero policy priorities should be. They considered how fast net zero policies should be implemented and looked at how net zero policies could impact their communities, considering what mitigation measures may be required. What they could not do is question net zero policy nor the underlying assumptions it is based upon.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) succinctly explains how they interpret the communitarian civil society:

“Civil society actors from a wide range of fields come together to collaborate with government and business leaders on finding and advocating solutions to global challenges. They also focus on how to best leverage the transformation brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and partner with industry, philanthropy, government and academia to take action and engage in the development, deployment, use and governance of technology. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labour and religious leaders, faith-based organizations and other civil society stakeholders are key members of the World Economic Forum’s multistakeholder platform.”

There is no questioning of either government or business. No opportunity is provided for the people, the subjects of the policy agenda under debate, to explore alternatives.

The necessity for the WEF model of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is assumed, as is the partnership with industry to achieve it. The problems are predetermined and the “solutions” have already been decided before civil society has the opportunity to “collaborate with government and business.”

The civil society stakeholders are chosen. Representatives from NGOs, religious communities, unions and philanthropic foundations are the selected stakeholders whose only role is to agree with the policies placed on the table by the public-private partnership. Their consent is deemed to be public consent.

As previously stated, the communitarian civil society creates a power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) It assumes that all three sectors are independent of each other and therefore governance, the setting of policy agendas, is achieved through equal compromise of all three parties.

This fatal naivety effectively extinguishes, rather than enhances, democratic accountability. In truth, the public and private sector are not independent of each other. They are working as equals in partnership.

Between them, they have all the money, all the legal authority, all the resources. Via the public sector (government), they also possess a monopoly on the use of force to compel communities to comply.

On the other side of the civil society equation sits some abstract form of “community” that is invited by the public-private partnership to collaborate. The public-private partnership selects the community or communities they want to rubber stamp their policies. The community has neither power, nor access to resources. Unlike their civil society “partners”, the community can’t force anyone to do anything.

The parameters of the alleged debate are set before the community joins and it will only be allowed to select from whatever “solutions” are put in front of it. All of this fulfills the immediate objectives of the G3P.

At the same time, this allows the G3P to address an issue that has plagued it for years: the democratic deficit or the public’s loss of trust in the institutions of government.

Within the G3P, governments don’t necessarily devise policy. Instead, their primary role is to market the policy and then enforce it.

Governments also provide the enabling environment for G3P policy agendas. They provide this environment both in terms of investment, via the taxpayer, and perhaps more importantly because the population is more likely to accept the rule of an allegedly democratic government rather than a dictatorship composed of a network of global corporations, NGOs and philanthropic foundations.

Consequently, a democratic deficit that erodes that trust is a problem. If you want to convert your policy agenda into legislation and regulation that impacts people’s lives, then you need to make them believe they still have some way of holding decision makers to account. Otherwise, they might resist your undemocratic rule.

The communitarian model of civil society is a gift for the G3P. Not only can they use it to continue maintaining the illusion of democracy, they can exploit claimed engagement with the community and build trust. Building trust is a current, major goal fo the G3P. For example, a “Crucial Year to Rebuild Trust” was the central theme of the 2021 Davos summit, hosted largely virtually by the WEF, and their planned theme for 2022 is “Working Together, Restoring Trust.”

Our continued “trust” in their institutions is vital for the G3P and the stability of their rule. The constant reference to civil society is intended to convince us that we too are stakeholders in the G3P’s multistakeholder platform. In reality, we aren’t. This is a deceit.

Instead, we are the subjects of the predetermined policy agendas that civil society will be invited to approve on our behalf. If we question the selected representative civil society groups, their communitarian beliefs or their assumed right to speak for us, we will be castigated as “bad citizens.”

Being in a community of like-minded souls, with whom we feel a bond, is nice but such a community has no chance against against a committed “interest group.” Such groups have a shared goal and often the will and the resources to attain it. Throughout history, communities have been ruthlessly oppressed by such “interest groups.”

Interest groups’ big advantage is that their members don’t have to feel any affection for each other or even agree on anything other than their objective. Its constituent members simply need to settle their purpose and they do so because each recognises how it benefits them. They are committed to the cause, not to each other.

In the case of the G3P, their cause is the creation and control of new markets and, in doing so, the establishment of a new global economic model. Civil society has helped to set this process in motion.

One of the G3P objectives is the global roll-out of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This offers the G3P the ability to individually monitor and control every financial transaction on Earth. We have every reason to fiercely oppose its introduction. It represents nothing less than absolute economic enslavement.

Yet, the civil society deception is being used to convince us that we are somehow stakeholders in its development. This will undoubtedly be exploited to persuade us to accept its imminent introduction.

The Bank of England (BoE), who claim they have yet to make a decisions on CBDC, has committed its CBDC Taskforce to “engage widely with stakeholders on the benefits, risks and practicalities.”

To this end, they have set up the CBDC Engagement Forum (EF). The BoE states that the EF will:

“Provide a forum to engage senior stakeholders and gather strategic input on all non-technology aspects of CBDC from a diverse cross-section of expertise and perspectives […] The EF will inform the Bank’s further exploration of the challenges and opportunities of potentially implementing CBDC […] Participation in the EF is at the invitation of the Bank and HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury.) Members will be drawn from the relevant range of CBDC stakeholders: from financial institutions, to civil society groups, to merchants, business users and consumers.”

Given that the introduction of CBDC will radically transform all our lives, it would be good to know who the civil society groups are that will supposedly be representing the public interest. The BoE explains that representatives will be invited to join, following their application, from any of the following organisations:

“Organisation active in retail or the digital economy, a university, a trade or consumer representative body, a think-tank, a registered charity or non-government organisation.”

It is not clear how any of these hand-picked delegates will actually advocate in the public’s interest. However, the BoE assures us that they will:

“On an individual level, the EF will be representative of the gender and ethnic diversity of the UK population, and seek to incorporate members of different backgrounds to support diversity of thought.”

This is what the BoE call engaging widely with stakeholders. In many respects, it is the epitome of communitarian ideology.

The community (in this case, the British public) will be represented because the EF will reflect the right gender and ethnic balance. This is appropriate, but it is missing one vital aspect of diversity: Class.

Just like the utopian socialists who inspired Etzioni and other communitarian thinkers, the BoE does not think that economic power matters when it comes to defining civil society. As long as they tick the right diversity boxes, class is not an issue. However, when they decide to introduce CBDC, it is the working and middle class who will suffer most as a result.

This may not be the model of civil society that the communitarians intended, but it is the model that the rest of us are going to get. A powerful interest group, the G3P, has seized upon the opportunity of communitarianism to construct a form of fake democratic accountability that consolidates their power and authority.

In one sense, it does fix the democratic deficit. By cutting out the electorate, the “new normal” communitarian civil society effectively ends representative democracy.

Why Don’t People “Trust The Science?” Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

Posted on January 11, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.

It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.

For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.

I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”

Not once.

This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.

Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.

In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.

Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:

Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?

This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.

That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted. The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all. Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.

The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.

Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…

GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train

The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?

Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?

Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.

Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.

There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.

Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.

If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to make sure GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.

I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as a pesticides).

There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.

The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.

Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science

I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.

The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.

In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.

There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.

Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.

The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?

I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.

What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.

These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci? Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.

And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).

The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible. These laws remained in effect well into the 13^th century. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.

It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.

Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.

Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.

Despotism Is the New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022

Posted on January 7, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Unfortunately, censorship is just the beginning. Once you allow the government and its corporate partners to determine who is worthy enough to participate in society, anything goes.

The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. Therein lies the danger of the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.

Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.

The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government—helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Bodily integrity. It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity on the altar of so-called safety and national security. This debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

Show Your Papers Society. With every passing day, more and more private businesses and government agencies on both the state and federal level are requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination in order for individuals to work, travel, shop, attend school, and generally participate in the life of the country. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason. Such tactics can quickly escalate into a power-grab that empowers government agents to force anyone and everyone to prove they are in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books.

Singularity. Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has announced his intentions of implanting brain chips in humans sometime in 2022. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.

Despotism. Even in the face of militarism, fascism, technotyranny, surveillance, etc., the gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

“We the people” are the hope for a better year.

Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In such a scenario, no one wins.

Crimes against Our Country

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

The year of sickening global psychosis ended with virologist and vaccine-uberspecialist Dr. Robert Malone truth-bombing the Internet with three hours of straight talk about the US health authorities’ campaign to destroy the lives of at least half a million US citizens (so far) and, leading by example, to harm multiples of that number of innocent people across all of Western Civilization. Podcaster Joe Rogan assisted skillfully in an interview that is finally rocking the world out of an epic consensus trance. (Listen.)

By health authorities I don’t just mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated National SARS-CoV-2 Coordinator, or his accomplices in the Dept. of Health and Human Services agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc., but also the purblind US medical establishment of actual doctors in clinical practice, researchers, hospital administrators, and pharma executives who acted with a collective stupid malevolence not seen since the crematory-stuffers of the Nazi bureaucracy carried out their final solution.

We know what you did. You engineered and patented a gain-of-function virus at the same time you conspired with pharma companies to devise and patent pseudo-vaccines, and then you loosed both of them on the public. You didn’t just fail to adequately test the “vaccines” cooked up by Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, but you deliberately botched the trails and lied about it. You created rich $$ incentives for hospitals to mis-treat Covid patients by failing to use known, safe, effective anti-virals. You conspired with social and news media to suppress information about those common anti-viral drugs that would have informed many patient’s decisions and saved thousands of lives. You treated late-stage patients dying of Covid-induced vascular disorder with the ineffective and toxic drug remdesivir that Dr. Fauci had developed unsuccessfully for an ebola outbreak years ago. (Nurses turned so cynical about the remdesivir protocol that they nicknamed it “run-death-is-near.”) You prompted government officials to lockdown society, force useless masking, and now to coerce “vaccination” by threatening to deprive citizens of their livelihoods.

The US Supreme Court will entertain arguments this Friday, January 7, to enjoin against “Joe Biden’s” mandates to coerce “vaccination” in companies that employ more than a hundred people and a separate mandate forcing vaxxes on staff at Medicare / Medicaid certified “providers” (meaning most hospitals and doctors’ offices). There’s a pretty good chance the court will decide against the mandates. They’re expected to rule Monday, January 10, the day that the mandates are supposed to take effect.

The government’s actions around the Covid-19 event look more and more to be deliberately and maliciously intended to harm lives and cause social and economic breakdown. In the last weeks of 2021, federal public health officers even blocked shipments of monoclonal antibodies around the country, despite their proven efficacy. The CDC scheduled the use of PCR tests for Covid-19 to end on December 31, after declaring them unreliable in August. Why the five-month lag? (To keep case numbers jacked up, that’s why.)

Every effort is being made to extend emergency use authorizations for unsafe and ineffective “vaccines” in order to sustain shields against liability for the benefit of their manufacturers. Pfizer refuses to release in the USA its FDA-approved comirnaty version of the EUA-protected BioNTech product for that reason. The Pentagon has lied and confabulated its use of the two Pfizer products in order to illegally force unapproved BioNTech vaccinations on enlisted men and women. Hospital directors, doctors, and their professional associations continue to persecute colleagues who speak publicly against the “vaccines.” The “vaccine” makers refuse to disclose the exact contents of their products, and were permitted to withhold data on safety trials until a half-century into the future. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t want the public to be informed about any of this. The net effect is that medicine in the USA has destroyed its own authority. Who can trust his doctor knowing that they’ve gone along with all this epic dishonesty?

The country is heading into an agonizing reality-test at a scale and speed never seen before in world history. You can already assume that government has lost control of the Covid-19 story. The Omicron scare is failing miserably. Lots of cases, few deaths, mild symptoms. Government’s credibility is shot. In the months ahead, we’ll learn just how harmful those “vaccines” were — especially among American children — as deaths mount from damage done to people’s organs and immune systems.

The perfidious news media is scrambling now to adjust its narratives, but they won’t escape the record of falsehood they’ve sedulously laid down. They can’t delete or rewrite every story in their archives, and many of these are printed out in hard-copy anyhow. Next, they’ll try apologizing. (“Sorry, but the pandemic drove us a little nuts.”) That’s hardly enough. They have to answer in courts of law — or else we must just declare the USA a lawless state.

The Covid-19 crimes against our fellow citizens amount to only one piece of a package of reality-tests coming our way in 2022. Do you think Special Counsel John Durham skulked off to drink pina coladas in oblivion after indicting a couple of errand boys (Danchenko and Sussman)? He is a hypersonic force orbiting over a well-known cast of political criminals who are headed for prosecution. Next up will be the train wreck of the US economy. Do you think the crimes around the 2020 national election are buried and forgotten? You’re in for some harsh surprises. Things have truly flipped. You just don’t realize it yet.

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.

Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress – or even the sitting President – from using their massive platforms is dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter's banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.https://t.co/zIT7l04hMW https://t.co/2BPFrgeZXv
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 2, 2022

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone

"Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse."https://t.co/WlDypacgmM
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 30, 2021

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

Citizens and Experts Call for a Halt to COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout in India

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Reid Mukai

“The Truth of COVID-19 – The India Statement”

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

The mass rollout of COVID-19 vaccines should be halted immediately. These experimental vaccines pose serious dangers. That is the message contained in a statement from concerned citizens soon to be forwarded to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The statement’s signatories include medical scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, civil servants, civil society organisations and “deeply concerned mothers, fathers, husbands and wives”.

Concerned citizens of India can sign on to the ‘The Truth of COVID-19 — The India Statement’ prior to its dispatch to the PM in the link provided at the end of this article.

Internationally renowned professionals in the field of medical science have also joined this effort by offering their expertise, including Dr Mike Yeadon, Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Pierre Kory, Dr Roger Hodkinson, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr Tess Lawrie.

The statement comprises two parts. Part one is a five-page summary of the main points and recommendations. This is supported by part two, a 62-page document which quotes the relevant literature and has dozens of references to back up the assertions made about the vaccines, COVID-19 and the vaccination programme.

Some of the key points and recommendations contained in part one are summarised below.

The statement begins by saying that a coronavirus vaccine has never before been used successfully. One problem has been the development of antibody disease enhancement (ADE). The vaccine produces antibodies, but sometimes this does not prevent disease – it instead makes the disease more serious and ADE can extend into the future (this has been seen before, for example regarding the rollout of a Dengue vaccine in Manila).

All the vaccines use the spike protein and this was thought to be a good idea at first because the virus uses its spike protein to attach to the host cells. But the statement notes this is a blunder and a major catastrophe. The spike protein is the toxic part of the virus that causes major (vascular) disease.

It is now confirmed that the synthetic spike protein of the vaccines is also toxic and is similarly causing the likes of clotting and bleeding disorders.

Many thousands of people taking the vaccine have died. The vaccine leaves the injection site in the arm and, contrary to what was assumed, and unexpectedly, travels into the bloodstream, spreading all over the body including with concentrations in the ovaries, bone marrow and lymph nodes.

Moreover, the mass rollout of the vaccines is putting selection pressure on the virus to evolve into strains that are resistant to the vaccine, like Delta and Omicron. This is well-known science that follows the same pattern as, for example, in anti-biotic resistance.

Dr Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the AIDs virus, has raised an urgent warning about this phenomenon. The statement notes that this process of new variants will not stop as more and more people get vaccinated.

Data from Israel (where the vast majority are vaccinated) show an increase in hospitalisations and deaths among the vaccinated. This is a repeated pattern occurring in other countries and was predicted by Dr Montagnier and other leading virologists.

The protective effect of the vaccines is also waning and is now below the required regulatory efficacy of at least 50%. The US health agencies are already advising a booster third dose. However, leading vaccine experts and immunologists and the vaccine manufacturers knew this all along. It was hidden though from the public.

It is clear that people who recover from Covid-19 develop natural immunity, which is long-lasting with antibodies that are effective against several viruses or variants. A large percentage of the Indian population, around 70% or more, already have this natural immunity. The statement concludes that vaccines are therefore not required.

As the vaccines can produce antibodies to a protein, syncytin, which, in the future, may cause abortions in women, the assertion is that women of child-bearing age (50 and below) should not be given the vaccines.

The statement notes that children have not had much problem with Covid, but some doctors are suggesting that a third wave will affect them. This is based on speculation, not science. Moreover, the long-term impacts of these vaccines and in particular the toxic spike protein are unknown. It would thus be quite unconscionable to risk the future of children. Given the data, it is clear that the risks of Covid-19 vaccines far outweigh the benefits for children.

India has a major disease burden in terms of communicable diseases, (TB, diarrhoeal, etc) and children are seriously impacted (more than 2,000 children die every day). On the other hand, the incidence and deaths due to COVID-19 are negligible. Children are not impacted by this disease.

In India, levels of serious malnutrition are worrying (and the COVID-related lockdown of the country can only have exacerbated this).

According to the statement, stopping unneeded vaccinations would release the huge sum of Rs 35,000 crores (almost 4.1 billion euros) for a public health system in dire need of resources to deal with killer childhood diseases and for improving the health of the population.

The statement notes that at the very heart of the problem of unsafe vaccines is the endemic conflict of interest that engulfs the institutions of health worldwide, not least in the US (NIA/FDA/CDC) the UK (MHRA) and the WHO.

It is for all the reasons mentioned above that vaccine manufacturers demand to be indemnified from any harm their vaccines may cause. Pfizer and Israel have made an agreement to hide Covid-19 vaccine adverse reactions for 10 years. Yet, these adverse effects are key to understanding vaccine science.

The statement also says that routine RT-PCR testing as presently conducted, including on asymptomatic cases, should be discontinued. PCR-driven ‘cases’ mislead the public on Covid infections. Furthermore, it is clear that the vaccines have failed to provide immunity and also fail to stop transmission from those vaccinated. India has acquired ‘herd immunity’ and does not need these vaccines. Medical science therefore does not support their continued rollout.

The statement concludes:

India must stop the vaccines with immediate effect… Preventive measures, early treatment and treatment protocols through all the stages of the diseases with Ivermectin and other off-label drugs are proven… very early on, India took exemplary action with regard to the ICMR [Indian Council of Medical Research] guideline on HDQ (hydroxychloroquine) and UP state with its public health measure of dispensing Ivermectin, which was an acknowledged success. We need to widen these measures across India. Both are ‘repurposed’ drugs, are medically proven and safe solutions, and there are others in our toolkit of medical products, along with vitamins (D, C and zinc).”

The PM will be urged to implement the recommendations set out in the statement and these will be at a fraction of the cost of vaccines. The funds released will allow the government to invest in overall health infrastructure (children’s health in particular), the economy, farmers and agriculture and the environment.

Concerned citizens of India can sign on to the statement here, where links to both parts of the statement are provided.

Resolution for 2022: Dare to Build Your Own Opinions and Then Defend Them!

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Alfred De Zayas

Source: CounterPunch

– Sapere aude!, Horace

Anyone who has followed the political culture in the US, Canada, UK, EU over the past twenty years must have realized that a war on epistemology, on truth, on semantics is going on. We witness the hijacking of concepts like democracy, freedom, peace, patriotism, human rights — and their instrumentalization for domestic and geopolitical purposes. We observe a process of language destruction not unlike what Orwell foresaw in his sadly visionary book 1984. “Newspeak” is not the future, it is now, hic et nunc. We recognize it in the jargon of political correctness, the language and practice of the “cancel culture”.

The military-industrial-financial complex in the US, Canada, UK, EU is hell bent on full spectrum cognitive control and inundates the population with plausible “narratives” based on fake news, fake history, fake law, fake diplomacy and fake democracy. We are literally swimming in an ocean of lies – but, remarkably, most people are not conscious of the fact that they are systematically manipulated by governments, corporate media, compliant think tanks and universities. The power of “political correctness” surrounds us in direct and subliminal ways. Most accept it as the “new normal”, as long as they continue having Hollywood entertainment and lots of sports on television. The classical panem et circensis (Juvenal).

A particularly worrisome phenomenon is the gradual emergence of a “human rights industry” that systematically subverts and weaponizes human rights. The holistic approach to civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights advocated by Eleanor Roosevelt has been quietly denatured, dismantled, discarded. We see how the “industry” transforms the individual and collective entitlement to assistance, protection, respect and solidarity — based on our common human dignity — into a hostile arsenal to target competitors and political adversaries.

In the stockpile of weaponized human rights, the technique of “naming and shaming” has become a sort of ubiquitous Kalashnikov. Yet, experience shows that naming and shaming fails to alleviate the suffering of victims and only satisfies the strategic aims of certain governments, non-governmental organizations and of a burgeoning clique of human rights operatives in government, academia and even in international organizations. Allegations of real and putative human rights violations have proven politically very useful to destabilize rivals, denouncing and demonizing them. To this end the deliberate use of double-standards, the maximation of human rights violations by a targeted country and the negation or suppression of evidence of violations by our own governments or by our allies, prepares the population to accept patently unjust and illegal actions to prepare “regime change” elsewhere. Precisely this kind of indoctrination of the population through evidence-free allegations and hyperbole paves the way to barbarism e.g. the aggression against Iraq in 2003 and against Libya in 2011, to name only two emblematic examples.

The Iraq invasion, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan repeatedly called an “illegal war” found the support of a “coalition of the willing” – 43 States that turned their backs on the UN Charter and on international law, with the support of many university pundits and the corporate media. One could affirm without fear of contradiction that the Iraq war constituted an international revolt, an assault on the international order established under the UN Charter and a negation of the Nuremberg Principles.

The Iraq war was preceded by a public relations and disinformation scheme of “naming and shaming”, a concerted campaign about the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, about the extraordinary criminality of Saddam Hussein, who a few years earlier had done the Pentagon’s bidding in the US proxy war against Iran. Barely eight years later, in 2011, alleged human rights violations were again invoked to denounce Muammar al-Gaddafi for the sole purpose of destabilizing Libya, imposing undemocratic “regime change” and facilitating the looting of Libya’s natural resources. This occurred in flagrant violation of the customary international law principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign States, also contained in treaties and stipulated in the 1986 Judgment of the International Court of Justice in the Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua case[1].

Many rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council, European Commission and Inter-American commission also make use of “naming and shaming”, a strategy that rests on the false premise that the “namer” somehow possesses moral authority and that the “named” will recognize this moral superiority and act accordingly. Theoretically this could function if the “namer” were to practice “naming and shaming” uniformly, in a non-selective manner. Alas, the technique frequently backfires, because the “namer” has many skeletons in the closet and engages in blatant double-standards. Such intellectual dishonesty usually stiffens the resistance of the “named” party, who will be even less inclined to take any measures to remedy the alleged violations.

Another technique of norm-warfare is what is termed “lawfare”, whereby the apparatus of the administration of justice, both civil and criminal, is complicit in the subversion of the rule of law. We witness how domestic and international criminal law are instrumentalized to demonize certain persons and not others. A self-respecting judge would not betray the profession by playing this kind of game — but some do – as we have seen in the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador in the Julian Assange case. The book by UN Rapporteur on Torture Professor Nils Melzer (Switzerland), originally published in German and now being released in English translation (by the author himself) The Trial of Julian Assange (Verso, New York 2022)[2] reveals the breakdown of the rule of law in the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador – a tour de force, far more serious than Emile Zola’s J’accuse in 1898 during the Dreyfus Affaire in France. Instead of safeguarding the ethos of the rule of law, these political judges corrupt it (remember Roland Freisler in Hitler’s infamous Volksgerichtshof!) thus undermining the credibility of the entire system. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Juvenal). This is a crucial question of constitutional law. Who will guard over the guardians? The corruption of the rule of law by those courts that engage in “lawfare” is far more serious than many will admit, because it is precisely the administration of justice that must be the gatekeeper of truth and equity, the defender of the weak and most vulnerable. The deliberate corruption of the administration of justice to target political or economic rivals leaves us powerless against tyranny.

Under certain conditions, “naming and shaming” as we know it from politicians, rapporteurs and the media, raise issues of additionalviolations of human rights and the rule of law, contravening Arts. 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and could reach the threshold of what is termed “hate speech” under Art. 20 ICCPR.

Experience shows that “naming and shaming” is an ineffective instrument of change. States and ngo’s would do well to revisit Matthew VII, 3-5 and replace the obsolete “naming and shaming” technique by good faith proposals and constructive recommendations, accompanied by the offer of advisory services and technical assistance so as to concretely help the victims on the ground. Sowing honesty and friendship is necessary if we expect to reap cooperation and progress in human rights terms. What is most needed today is mature diplomacy, result-oriented negotiations, a culture of dialogue and mediation, instead of a petulant culture of posturing, grandstanding, intransigence and holier-than-thou pretence.

The arsenal of weaponized human rights also includes non-conventional wars such as economic wars and sanctions regimes, ostensibly justified because of the alleged human rights violations of the targeted State. The result is that, far from helping the victims, entire populations are held hostage –victims not only of violations by their own governments, but also of “collective punishment” by the sanctioning State(s). This can entail crimes against humanity under article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, when as a consequence food security is impacted, medicines and medical equipment are rendered scarce or are available only at exorbitant prices. Demonstrably, economic sanctions kill[3]. It is particularly disgraceful how several non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have preferred to focus on real and alleged violations of civil and political rights by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and forgotten the fundamental human rights of the Venezuelan people and the fact that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have already perished as a direct result of illegal unilateral coercive measures and financial blockades, as we know from independent reports, including the 2019 report “Collective Punishment” by Professor Jeffrey Sachs (Colombia) and Mark Weisbrot (Center for Economic and Policy Research)[4] .

Another grotesque example of weaponization of human rights principles is reflected in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 concerning humanitarian assistance to the Libyan population. This resolution was promptly hijacked by NATO to wage an all-out war on Libya, leading to the assassination of Libya’s head of State, Muammar Gadaffi in 2011. Ten years later the country is still in civil war and chaos, but the natural resources are safely in the hands of Western economic interests. More recently, in February 2019, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy organized “humanitarian assistance” for Venezuela and placed an impostor with no constitutional legitimacy, the pretender Juan Guaidó, as the leader who would bring this humanitarian assistance to Venezuela. The operation failed. This was followed by a real coup d’état attempt in April 2019, which again failed, and yet another attempt in May 2020, the Operation Gideon, which similarly failed. The violations by the US and accomplices of fundamental norms of international law – and common decency – were breathtaking. And yet, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox, etc. whitewashed these operations and sided with the putschists – invoking “principles” such as “democracy”, “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect”. Hypocrisy had indeed come a long way.

Yet another form of weaponizing values is the grotesque undermining of peace and human rights by Committees that award such prizes. A notorious disgrace is the undermining of the last will and testament of Alfred Nobel, who genuinely wanted to promote peace and human rights. If one regards the laureates over the past years, we realize that most of them do not come within the testamentary purpose. These days the laureates are not genuine pacifists like Henri Dunant or Bertha von Suttner. They are chosen for purely political purposes – not to advance peace and dialogue, but to denounce certain governments (in 2021 the Philippines and Russia) and to promote a geopolitical model over another. This is totally against the letter and spirit the Nobel Peace Prize. The best book on the subject is by the Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl, The Nobel Peace Prize – What Nobel really wanted.

And let us not forget the politicization and weaponization of sports. We are being manipulated into thinking that boycotting the Beijing Olympics is a good and honourable thing. It is not. It is an oxymoron, a public relations stunt.

What can we average citizens do? First and foremost we must know the facts. And because the corporate media lies to us, we must pro-actively get the information. Thanks to the internet, it is still possible to access information that we do not get in the New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”), Washington Post, CNN and Fox. We must demand transparency and accountability from our democratically elected leaders, when instead of formulating constructive solutions to problems they engage in confrontational politics. We must demand that our elected officials learn the habits of collaboration and compromise, enable true competition by guaranteeing a level playing field for everyone, both domestically and internationally. Our politicians, the media and the university pundits should embrace a new paradigm: competition in solidarity. I incorporate these thoughts into my 25 Principles of International Order,presented to the UN Human Rights Council in 2018.[5]

Here our New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Sapere aude (Horace). Get the facts and act thereon.
2. Pushback against the hybrid war being waged by governments and the media. Demand truth from the government and the private sector. Only on the basis of correct information can the citizen exercise his democratic rights.
3. Pushback against the war being waged against whistleblowers, true human rights defenders. Demand the immediate release of Julian Assange. Recognize the contribution of Edward Snowden to the survival of true American values.
4. Pushback against Orwellian newspeak and “political correctness”. Refuse to retreat into self-censorship.
5. Pushback against the military-industrial-financial complex

In 2022 let us commit to listen more to others, practice self-criticism and intellectual honesty, stop instrumentalizing values for short-term political gain.

Let us reject the weaponization of everything.

Notes.

[1] https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/70/judgments

[2] https://www.transcend.org/tms/2021/11/the-trial-of-julian-assange-a-book-by-nils-melzer/

[3] https://undocs.org/A/HRC/39/47/Add.1

[4] https://cepr.net/report/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela/

[5] https://www.claritypress.com/product/building-a-just-world-order/

Poking the Russian Bear: US-NATO Aggression and Russia’s Red Line

Posted on December 29, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Following the Taliban’s victory over US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington is walking into another death trap, but this time on Russia’s borders with the neighboring Ukraine. So now, Washington’s non-partisan bureaucrats and the Military-Industrial Complex are calling for ways to fight “Russian aggression”. On November 30^th, a report published by Reuters ‘Putin warns Russia will act if NATO crosses its red lines in Ukraine’ said that Putin mentioned what is at stake if NATO expands eastward while they deployed the Aegis Ashore missile defense systems in Poland and Romania:

The Russian leader, who questioned why NATO had ignored repeated Russian warnings and expanded its military infrastructure eastwards, singled out the deployment in Poland and Romania of the Aegis Ashore missile defence system. He made it clear he did not want to see the same launch MK41 systems, which Russia has long complained can be used to also launch offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles, in Ukraine.

“Creating such threats (in Ukraine) would be red lines for us. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that a sense of common sense, responsibility for both our countries and the world community will prevail,” said Putin

To make matters worse, US senators from the Republican party submitted a bill that calls for $450 million in military aid to the Ukraine with new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project. The bill will also label Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” according to a December 18^th report from rt.com, ‘Russia reacts to US ‘state sponsor of terrorism threat’:

On Wednesday, eight American Republican party senators submitted a bill, speculatively titled the ‘GUARD Act’, containing a range of measures designed to support Kiev. The proposed legislation would authorize an additional $450 million in military aid and impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the recently constructed pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe through the Baltic Sea, which Ukraine and the US have strongly opposed.

The bill would also officially designate Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” if Moscow advances militarily on its eastern European neighbor. In recent weeks, American and Ukrainian intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of “aggressive actions” on the border with Ukraine, including troop buildup, and said they suspected a Russian invasion could be in the works

Another important article from rt.com ‘China & Russia are ready to end US dominance of global finance’ said that Russia and China are on the way to bypass the US dollar:

A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value

Russia and China has also been working on alternatives to the SWIFT system:

The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.

China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further

The US wants its dollar to remain king by any means necessary. One of the main reasons Washington went to war with Iraq was not only about oil, it was because Saddam Hussein had switched from selling oil in US dollars to accepting payments in Euros as retribution for US sanctions. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered by US-backed forces because he was creating an alternative currency which was a gold-backed African dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros in the African continent.

A recent press conference, the US president and liberal war hawk, Joe Biden was asked about what consequences Russia would face if they invaded Ukraine’s territory. The liberal cheerleaders for war at CNN have been reporting what US and European leaders have been up to in regards to planning harsh sanctions on Russia because it’s President, Vladimir Putin is misbehaving, therefore punishment must be served by the American empire, So how dare you Vlad for wanting to protect your country!, “the kinds of costs the US and European allies are discussing for Russia are “designed to be implemented very, very fast,” the official said, without detailing what those measures would be. “That is partly why we have chosen the measures that we are working on.” One of their actions is most likely to cut Russia off the Swift payment system since the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency for the moment. “The Biden administration has repeatedly said there will be severe economic consequences. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan also made clear last week there will be further US defensive military support for Ukraine as well as US support for NATO countries on the eastern flank of Russia invades Ukraine”, continued:

I’ve made it absolutely clear to President Putin,” Biden said. “If he moves on Ukraine, the economic consequences for his economy are going to be devastating. Devastating, number one. Number two, we will find it required that we’ll have to send more American and NATO troops into the Eastern Flank, the (Bucharest) 9, all those NATO countries where we have a sacred obligation to defend them against any attack by Russia. And number three, the impact of all of that on Russia and his attitude, the rest of the world, his view of Russia would change markedly. He’ll pay a terrible price

In early December, rt.com also has been documenting what’s been happening with the Ukraine’s decision to recklessly build-up its troop levels in the Donbass region which is a clear threat to Russia’s security concerns:

Ukraine has now stationed well over 100,000 troops and large quantities of hardware in the war-torn Donbass region, the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged on Wednesday morning, amid rising tensions. Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that “the Armed Forces of Ukraine are increasing [their] military force, pulling heavy equipment and personnel.”

“According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said. Zakharova also condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for submitting a bill to the national parliament that would allow units from foreign armed forces to enter the country as part of multinational exercises next year. According to her, such a move directly contradicts the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 in a bid to end the fighting between Kiev’s forces and troops loyal to two self-declared breakaway republics

What’s even more dangerous is the talk of a first-strike option with nuclear weapons against Russia by Mississippi’s high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker as reported by FOX news:

Sen. Wicker made the startling comment during an on-air interview where he was asked about the escalating situation abroad. Wicker, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he is ruling nothing out as a potential response to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground,” Wicker said, adding, that “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action”

Let’s make something clear, if the US and Europe are considering a war against Russia through Ukraine, it can escalate into another nuclear standoff reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.

Russia is well-prepared for an all-out war with the west because they know that the American empire will not quit until they submit to Washington’s demands. Russia is ready, they learned a long-time ago when they were the former Soviet Union during World War II when more than 27 million Russian civilians and soldiers lost their lives fighting Nazi Germany within their borders. Washington is backing Ukraine’s aggressive behavior which will bring them closer to war with Russia. Although I believe cooler heads will prevail, anything at this point in time can happen with an out of control empire worried about losing their control over the planet. The US has its back against the wall, the question is what will they do knowing that Russia and China have the military capabilities including their new hypersonic missiles that can hit the US mainland at anytime.

The US-NATO forces would not prevail on a multi-front war with Russia and China, they should have learned a lesson in Afghanistan with the Taliban who had by far, a less-developed fighting force than Russia or China but had managed to defeat US-NATO forces after 20 years of conflict. Washington and the Pentagon knows deep down that defeating Russia, China and the rest of their adversaries will be a difficult mission, but it seems that the psychopaths in Washington and Brussels live in a fantasy land and believe they can win this coming war. Let’s hope it don’t get that far because it would be disastrous for the entire world.

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Category Archives: Deep State

Poking the Russian Bear: US-NATO Aggression and Russia’s Red Line