The United States Does Not Have an Economy

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The US financial sector has long looted other countries.  A number of participants have described the process.  First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid.  Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population.  Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan.  Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.

As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation.  It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy.  If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.

Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary.  The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions.  Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.  

The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent.  Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments.  Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners.  The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values.  That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out.  When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.

The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors.  This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent.  Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown.  Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system.  The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation.  The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.

As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy.  A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt.  With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.

If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction.  The fact is that the United States does not have an economy.  Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.  

The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states.  While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders.  How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad?  How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?

You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse.  And what are the fools in Washington doing?  The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.  

Joe Biden’s Secret War in Ukraine

American soldiers are already “boots on the ground”

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia. Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of troops in Romania and bolster other deployments in the Baltic states. Also, the number of US troops in Europe, currently approaching 100,000, will be increased. Biden also was pleased to learn that Turkey had been enticed to drop its objection to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

On the way to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised that “By the end of the summit what you will see is a more robust, more effective, more combat credible, more capable and more determined force posture to take account of a more acute and aggravated Russian threat.” Presumably Sullivan was reading from a prepared script, but the objective surely seemed to be to heighten tension with Moscow rather than attempt to reduce it and come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also did his bit. In an astonishing display of derriere kissing, he responded that the new US force posture commitments were demonstrative of Biden’s strong leadership. What Stoltenberg did not mention was that Biden has been lying for some time about the presence of US military personnel in Ukraine. He let the cat out of the bag back in March, when he told troops belonging to the 82nd Airborne division in Poland that they would soon be going to Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see —” It was an admission that US forces are already in place inside Ukraine even though the White House quickly did damage control, asserting that the president continues to be opposed to American soldiers being directly engaged in the fighting. Biden also claimed that the US was working to “keep the massacre [of Ukrainians] from continuing.” Again, the language was hardly designed to make some room for a possible accommodation with Russia to negotiate an end to the fighting.

And now there is a New York Times report entitled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say: A secretive operation involving US Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.”

The article describes a more active US role in Ukraine than the Biden Administration has been willing to admit publicly. Back in February, before intervened in Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its own 150 military instructors, many of whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on newly acquired American produced weapons. However, some Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operatives and special ops troops continued their service in the country secretly, directing most of the intelligence flow the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces. In addition to that, special ops soldiers from Washington’s NATO allies have been managing the movement of weapons and equipment into Ukraine and providing some specialized training. It has also been reported that British SAS commandos are actually guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky. The NYT specifies, citing American and other Western officials, that the soldiers and CIA officers are currently not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops. Also according to the Times, even though the US and NATO member states have not acknowledged the presence of their paramilitaries soldiers in operational roles in Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence services around the world are aware of this.

The New York Times report appears to be generally correct, though it does omit some details, some of which I have been hearing from former colleagues in the intelligence services. There has been considerable overt training at the Grafenwoehr German army base as well as at the Ramstein US Air Base to familiarize the Ukrainians with the new weapons arriving. Other NATO countries are also participating in the training. Meanwhile, the cadres of special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel operating primarily in western Ukraine are not in uniform and many of them are working under various contrived cover designations, including sometimes loose affiliations with foreign embassies and NGOs. There are also a conventional CIA Station, a group from the National Security Agency and a Military Attache’s office in the recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.

All of the above means that Biden and other western leaders have been dissimulating regarding their active participation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Apart from his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit that there are American boots already on the ground, but they are there and are playing a major role in both logistics and intelligence sharing. The potential downside for the president could come when some of these soldiers in mufti get killed or, worse, captured and start to talk about their role.

Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, observes that deploying plausibly deniable non-uniformed personnel “is completely typical of the initial stages of a US-backed long war, and for long-term political manipulation of the target country. This is the future that neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and their British and European allies imagine for Ukraine. Rather than a negotiated conclusion, with a new Ukrainian role as a neutral and productive country, independent of both Russian and US political influences, the US government and CIA see Ukraine as an expendable yet useful satrap in its competition with the Russian Federation.”

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity in stark terms, while also commenting that the CIA has not won a semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty years. He observes that “Ukraine is a proxy; the West is trying to destroy Russia, it’s that simple. It would be one thing if Russia was the most evil, oppressive, authoritarian regime in the world. It’s nowhere even close. Even though the West keeps trying to portray Russia as such. The fact of the matter is, the West wants the resources that Russia has and it wants to control Russia. [But] Russia is not about to be controlled.”

In other words, Washington might be seeking an unending war entangling Russia and limiting its options globally. The Biden Administration has staked its reputation and possible political future on enabling Ukraine to survive without succumbing to Russian territorial demands. It is a risky and even dangerous policy, both in practical terms and politically. The persistence of the Ukrainians in their defense is largely a product of US and Western Europe guarantees that they will do all that is necessary to support Zelensky and his regime, which is already seeking $750 billion in aid for “reconstruction.” If western military casualties begin to surface, the political support for the Ukraine war will begin to fade in Washington and elsewhere and there will be consequences in the upcoming midterm US elections in November.

A final comment on the Times piece is in response to the question why it has appeared at all at the present time. The mainstream media has been a cheerleader for aggressive US support of Ukraine and Zelensky, but now it is beginning to step back from that position, as have also the Washington Post and other media outlets. Perhaps they are becoming convinced that the game plan being promoted by Washington and its European allies is unlikely to succeed at great cost to the respective economies. Larry Johnson puts it this way: “I think the purpose of this article coming out now is just to lay the groundwork for why we can’t put or shouldn’t put any more US military personnel or even CIA personnel inside Ukraine because continuing to put US personnel…inside Ukraine to train is becoming too risky because of Russia’s success on the battlefield.” One might also add that it is exceptionally dangerous. A misstep or even a deliberate false flag coming from either side could easily make the war go nuclear.

The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?

By Robert J. Burrowes

In 2020, under cover of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, the Global Elite launched its long-planned coup to capture total control of the human population.

Building on a history that dawned with human civilization some 5,000 years ago, and at least 50 years in the final planning, progressive efforts by elites in local, national and now the global context to kill off undesired populations and enslave those left alive are now culminating. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Unfortunately, however, awareness of what is really happening remains extraordinarily low, even among those who are resisting the ongoing destruction of our rights and freedom as well as the rapidly-mounting ‘vaccine’ death toll. See ‘Terrified of Freedom: Why Most Human Beings Are Embracing the Global Elite’s Technotyranny’.

So let me briefly explain, again, exactly what is happening and why the most popular responses – lobbying governments, contesting elections or forming new political parties, legal challenges and protests (in one form or another) – by those concerned cannot succeed. And what we must do, if we wish to defeat this coup.

What is Happening?

If one reads the website of the World Economic Forum as well as primary documents produced by that organization, and listens to the organization’s key spokespeople, such as Klaus Schwab – see ‘Now is the time for a “great reset”’ – and Yuval Noah Harari – see ‘Read Yuval Harari’s blistering warning to Davos in full’ – the elite agenda is quite clear.

Under the overall title of the ‘Great Reset’, the World Economic Forum has launched a series of deeply interrelated agendas which will impose substantial changes on 200 areas of human life for those left alive.

These interrelated agendas include implementation of the elite’s eugenics program – see ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’ – along with various programs in relation to the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism that will deliver them total control of the remaining transhuman population in a world run by technocrats. See ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future’.

These programs include efforts to develop and deploy relevant technologies – including those in relation to 5G (and, soon enough, 6G), military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], digital identity, big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], the Internet of Bodies [IoB], the Internet of Senses [IoS], quantum computing, surveillance and the metaverse – that will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. Among other adverse outcomes, these technologies will deprive us of control over our own banking and finances. See ‘Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup’.

To reiterate: The net outcome of these programs will be a substantial human depopulation of Earth and the transhuman enslavement and imprisonment of those left alive, primarily in their ‘smart cities’.

As Mark Steele concluded in his extensive expert report on 5G Directed Energy Radiation Emissions, ‘The prima facie evidence of this globalist depopulation agenda is unequivocal… This is the greatest crime ever to be perpetrated on mankind and all of God’s creation.’ See ‘Expert Report: Fifth Generation (5G) Directed Energy Radiation Emissions in the context of Nanometal-contaminated Vaccines that include Covid-19 with Graphite Ferrous Oxide Antennas’.

Obviously, this is being done without any consultation with those of us who would identify as ‘ordinary’ people.

Who is Orchestrating This?

The coup has been planned by the Global Elite and its primary agents. It is being implemented through elite control of key international organizations (such as the World Health Organization and United Nations), relevant corporations (including those in the technology, pharmaceutical and media industries) and national governments.

The first point to note is simply this: The Global Elite is too wealthy and powerful to bother participating personally in well-known fora such as the World Economic Forum or even those that are less well-known such as the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. The people who ‘front’ organizations of this nature are elite agents. Wealthy and powerful, at one level, and happy to be publicly identified, but not the masters shaping our destinies, even if they work out many of the details. For one discussion of this, see ‘What Is The “Council For Inclusive Capitalism?” It’s The New World Order’.

But because this Global Elite is both insane and criminal, its members have no concept of what it means to experience ‘ordinary’ human life, with its daily struggles and occasional triumphs, its routine fears and simple joys. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. There is more information in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So let me briefly explain, yet again, why governments, legal challenges and protests in their various guises cannot save us from what is happening, although the elite is delighted to have us waste our energy on such efforts, as they intend.

Constitutions, Governments and the Delusion of ‘Democracy’

While so-called democratic processes have long been a sham, even the sham elements of democracies – the constitutional separation of powers (the division of the legislative, executive and judicial functions of government supposedly to limit the possibility of arbitrary excesses by government), respect for human rights (including freedom of speech, assembly and movement), obedience of laws and adherence to legal process – have been ignored by virtually all governments (national, provincial and local) around the world as measures decided by the elite and promulgated through its international organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization have simply been implemented by governments despite violating constitutional provisions in various ways and without so much as a public (or, in many cases, even a parliamentary) debate.

To reiterate this point more bluntly: given the eminent roles being played by elite organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization in the past two-and-a-half years, do you have much sense that governments are adhering to national constitutions and making independent decisions? Or are they just following orders?

And despite supposedly having the right to ‘freedom of speech’, even dissenting politicians attempting to present an alternative view in any mainstream forum, and plenty of ‘progressive’ ones besides, leads to one of a range of outcomes such as, at their most benign, censorship – with corporate and major social media leading the way – or howls of accusation such as ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’ to discredit the dissenting voice.

This has happened, of course, because politicians are not beholden to voters, which is why lobbying politicians is a waste of time, unless the issue is of little significance geopolitically, militarily, economically and environmentally. As implied above, the elite controls the political fate of politicians, most of whom are well aware that their political survival has nothing to do with pleasing ordinary voters. Politicians are beholden to the elite that manipulates levers of power such as the corporate media and education systems, employs an army of lobbyists to ensure that elite preference is clearly understood (while using bribes where necessary), and has ready access to removal options such as, at its most basic, withdrawal of preselection endorsement.

Of course, the ultimate sanction, paid by five national presidents so far in this current context, is assassination. See ‘Five Presidents Who Opposed Covid Vaccines Have Conveniently Died, Been Replaced by Pro-Vaxxers’.

And Emanuel Pastreich makes a compelling argument that Shinzo Abe, the powerful immediate-past Prime Minister of Japan, suffered the same fate because of his ongoing resistance to fundamental elements of the Elite agenda. Moreover, there are other key political figures who are probably in this category, not to mention those sidelined rather than assassinated.

Abe was the highest ranking victim so far of the hidden cancer eating away at governance in nation states around the world, an institutional sickness that moves decision making away from national governments to a network of privately-held supercomputer banks, private equity groups, for-hire intelligence firms in Tel Aviv, London and Reston, and the strategic thinkers employed by the billionaires at the World Economic Forum, NATO, the World Bank and other such awesome institutions.

In parallel with the removal or sidelining of non-compliant leaders, elite wealth has long been deployed ‘to create invisible networks for secret global governance, best represented by the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program and the Schwarzman Scholars program. These rising figures in policy infiltrate the governments, the industries, and research institutions of nations to make sure that the globalist agenda goes forth unimpeded.’ See ‘The Assassination of Archduke Shinzo Abe: When the Globalists Crossed the Rubicon’.

As a result of formal political submission to the elite agenda, supposedly basic human rights – such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement – have been eviscerated under the various lockdown, curfew and martial law measures with many people attempting to exercise these rights quickly discovering that they no longer exist except, perhaps, in the very narrowest of circles or in particular contexts.

But perhaps constitutional lawyer John W. Whitehead, in collaboration with Nisha Whitehead, captures the true depth of what has transpired in these two paragraphs about the United States but equally applicable to other countries:

Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.

This past year under lockdown was a lesson in many things, but most of all, it was a lesson in how to indoctrinate a populace to love and obey Big Brother. See ‘After a Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive the Tyranny of COVID-19?’

But ‘Big Brother’ isn’t the government. It is those elite figures who are largely, or completely, hidden from public view and about whom you hear nothing of substance, if you hear anything at all.

Still, this doesn’t stop their agents, such as those in the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, from telling you what they are doing. It’s just that not many people are paying attention.

As noted by Brandon Smith: ‘Members of the CIC, including the head of Bank of America, openly suggest that they don’t actually need governments to cooperate in order to meet their goals. They say corporations can implement most social engineering without political aid. In other words, it is the very definition of “shadow government” – A massive corporate cabal that works in tandem to implement social changes without any oversight.’ See ‘What Is The “Council For Inclusive Capitalism?” It’s The New World Order’.

If you still believe that we can get out of this mess by lobbying governments or electing a different political party into government, you can read more on how the world really works in ‘Killing Democracy Once and for All: The Global Elite’s Coup d’état That Is Destroying Life as We Know It’.

Legal Challenges

While ‘the law’ and legal processes are shrouded in a delusion suggesting that they play a role in making societies ‘just’, in fact, it has long been known that elite control of governments ensures that laws are written to consolidate predatory corporate control and that elite control over legal systems ensures that they function to maintain elite power, corporate profit and the personal privilege of that tiny minority that benefits enormously from the global system of violence, exploitation and destruction.

In 1748, Baron de Montesquieu penned The Spirit of Laws in which he noted ‘There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.’ Since that time, a notable and diverse series of authors starting well over 100 years ago, including Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas K. Gandhi, have all written critiques exposing the injustice and violence of legal systems. Despite this, the delusion that the law is a neutral agency that delivers justice still widely prevails.

As a result, enormous time, energy and resources are wasted by fine, well-intentioned people who fail to make the distinction between what they have been led to believe and the truth: The legal system is designed to deliver an occasional win for justice in some relatively minor context in order to maintain the widespread popular delusion that ‘justice prevails’ while functioning to maintain elite social control over the population, oppress exploited constituencies and those who resist, and conceal and defend the vast network of elite and corporate criminality that pervades every facet of planetary life. This delusion is reinforced by films and television programs based on legal settings which often feature the ‘little person’ winning.

And this is why you have never heard the rallying cry ‘Fight for Justice: Abolish Legal Systems’.

If you think the law is really concerned with justice, then ask yourself why poverty and homelessness are not made illegal and those who suffer poverty and homelessness immediately provided with social housing and an adequate income. Of course, this would be easy if military budgets for killing were eliminated (and international conflicts were addressed meaningfully) or the estimated $US32 trillion of illegal wealth hidden in offshore tax havens was made available for the benefit of humanity. See ‘Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money’.

The bottom line is simple: The Global Elite operates beyond the rule of law. It will not be contained or held to account, in any way, by legal systems. Ever heard of a Rothschild, a Warburg, a Rockefeller or even a Windsor in court? Or organizations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations?

And while any investigation will quickly reveal that attempts are sometimes made to hold to account a corporation for some illegal activity in a national context, the record also shows that the predominant outcomes in court cases against corporations are protracted legal battles seeking ways out of, or long delays in, being held accountable, fines that are easily ‘written off’ as a cost of doing business – see ‘Pfizer’s History of Fraud, Corruption, and Using Nigerian Children as “Human Guinea Pigs”’ – as well as refusal to pay fines and/or retribution against complainants and/or their agents. See ‘How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything’.

Of course, there is no international legal infrastructure that can hold corporations or international organizations accountable in any meaningful way either.

If you want to read more about this subject, see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

Demonstrations, Blockades, Convoys and other Mass Mobilizations

If we do not thoroughly analyze a conflict, it is impossible to develop a sound strategy, which includes identifying the appropriate strategic foci for action, and then planning tactics that address each focus. This inevitably means that we are essentially guessing what to do, not knowing in advance, as we should, the nature of the strategic impact the action will have.

Moreover, guessing what action to take, usually on the basis of what is familiar or what feels good – perhaps because we get out with a bunch of ‘good people’ – virtually inevitably leads to poor choices like organizing a mass mobilization, in one form or another (whether with people, trucks, tractors…), focused on governments. And elite agents love ignoring these, as the long record demonstrates!

As former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood the importance of tactical choice. Most activists have no idea.

Which illustrates why demonstrations are notoriously ineffective, as world history’s largest demonstration on 15 February 2003 – involving demonstrations in more than 600 cities around the world, involving up to 30,000,000 people, against the imminent US-led war on Iraq – see ‘The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq’ – illustrated yet again.

The point is simple: Single actions and numbers are not determinative; strategy is determinative. Obviously, large gatherings, in whatever form they take, could be effective, if they were strategically focused – never on governments though. See ‘Why Activists Fail’.

In essence, if any gathering is to have any strategic value whatsoever, it must be used to raise awareness of strategic means of resistance.

So if we want to take action that will be strategically effective, we must identity an appropriate strategic goal for the context and then plan an action that will achieve that goal. Anything else is guesswork. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Resisting the Elite Agenda Effectively

If you have the thoughtful courage to strategically resist the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 17 languages (Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).

And if you want to organize a mass mobilization in some form, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

Finally, while the timeframe for this to make any difference is now in doubt, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

Conclusion

As the elite is well aware, critiques of what it is doing and advice regarding effective strategy to defeat it are not sought by those who aren’t interested in analysis, understanding and strategic impact. And this information is easily suppressed so that few of those who might be interested ever hear of it.

Hence, a primary challenge is getting relevant information to those keen to resist in ways that make a difference.

At the moment, virtually all effort being spent by those opposed to the various mandates and restrictions on our freedom and other rights is, strategically-speaking, wasted.

And the time to resist effectively is running out fast.

So I gently encourage all of you resisting to spend some time evaluating what you are doing and consider participating in the alternative offered just above.

If human beings are to have a future worth living, we must take on the Global Elite directly and undermine their power to impose their agenda upon us. No one else can save us.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Watch the new video for “We Are Human We Are Free“:

Vaccine Hesitancy in Haiti has led to the Lowest COVID-19 cases and Death Rates in the Western Hemisphere

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

The poorest country in the Caribbean has a problem according to Western governments and its global institutions.  That problem is with Haiti, a country that does not trust anything that comes out of the West including media propaganda and its experimental injections or what is known as the “Covid-19 vaccines.”  Haitians do not accept the West as a savior when it comes to their health or security, they don’t even trust their own government especially since most of them take orders from Washington and Paris.  The last president that the Haitian people supported overwhelmingly was ousted by a US-backed coup in 2004 and he was Jean Bertrand Aristide.  However, there is some positive news coming out of Haiti regarding Covid-19 and its experimental injections according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) own words:

In Haiti, from 3 January 2020 to 5:16pm CEST, 13 July 2022, there have been 31,980 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 837 deaths, reported to WHO. As of 8 July 2022, a total of 348,769 vaccine doses have been administered

It should not be a surprise that Haiti, a country with a population of more than 11 million people has a low vaccination rate since most Haitians do not want the experimental injections to begin with.  An article from a liberal website called Coda which you can find online under http://www.codastory.com published a propaganda piece from August 13th, 2021, titled ‘The origins of Haiti’s vaccine hesitancy’ by Erica Hellerstein on why the Haitian population refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccination shots which according to their logic, Haiti is listening to disinformation or conspiracy theories from Russia:    

Facebook unearthed a vast Russia-based anti-vaccine disinformation campaign this week. On Tuesday, the social media giant announced that it had removed 65 Facebook and 243 Instagram accounts amplifying anti-vaccine content. Investigators from the company linked the network to British marketing firm Fazze and operated from Russia. The campaign — dubbed a “disinformation laundromat” by Facebook — primarily targeted users in Latin America, India, and the U.S. through fake articles and petitions circulated on Medium, Reddit and Change.org, and then spread on social media via fake Facebook and Instagram accounts. One of the conspiracies, often accompanied in this campaign by images from the “Planet of the Apes” movies, is the claim that the AstraZeneca jab would turn people into chimpanzees – an old favorite of Russian state propaganda

Codastory.com is owned by Coda Media which is managed by a group of people who originally worked for the US mainstream-media such as Natalia Antelava, a former BBC correspondent who is the head of the organization and Ilan Greenberg who was a former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal is the publisher and editorial director of the news outlet which already shows you the bias reporting they hold against Russia.  Hellerstein mentioned Jean-Claude Louis who was speaking to an acquaintance working in the medical field about the Covid-19 vaccine, according to Hellerstein, the acquaintance told Louis, “I will never get the vaccine,” she continued “You don’t know what you’re getting.”  Jean-Claude Louis is a coordinator for the Panos Institute which is described as “a Haitian nonprofit that trains journalists and youth on media literacy and identifying disinformation,” The Panos Institute is a non-profit organization that was originally based in the UK is now operating worldwide.  Louis has obviously fallen for Western propaganda on the efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 experimental injections:  

Louis has been paying close attention to the vaccine myths circulating online and in-person. And he is worried about how much of it is spreading inside Haiti’s medical community. “The problem is there are so many false rumors about vaccines,” he added. “People are very hesitant about getting the vaccines”

Hellerstein said that “I approached Louis after coming across a dataset laying out vaccination rates for the Americas. Topping the list was Uruguay, where nearly 75% of the population has gotten at least one vaccine dose. All the way at the bottom was Haiti, with just 0.14% of the population inoculated against Covid-19.”  She also mentioned that Haiti was the last country in Latin America and the Caribbean to receive Covid-19 vaccines from the US and the United Nations (UN) through the COVAX program: 

Haiti was one of the last countries in the world –and the last in Latin America and the Caribbean –to begin distributing the shot. In fact, it hadn’t gotten any at all until last month. Then, on July 14, a shipment of 500,000 doses from the United States via the United Nations-backed COVAX program arrived in the country. The delivery came a week after Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was brazenly assassinated in his home, plunging the country into political crisis

According to Hellerstein’s assessment, Haiti’s distribution of the vaccine was a “Bright spot” during the country’s political upheavals, but there was a statistic that was troubling to her:

The vaccine rollout was hailed as a “bright spot” during an otherwise tumultuous moment in Haiti. But another statistic caught my eye: according to a June survey by UNICEF and the University of Haiti, just 22% of adults said they were interested in getting the shot. Compare that with this February survey of global vaccination attitudes, where 88% of Brazilian adults, 85% of Chinese and Mexican adults, and 80% of Spanish and Italian adults said they intended to get the Covid-19 jab. Even in Russia, where vaccine acceptance was the lowest of all countries polled, 42% of adults said they would get a shot if made available — nearly double Haiti’s openness rate

There was an ounce of truth exposed by the article when UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti where close to 10,000 people died from the outbreak:

Haitians have good reasons to distrust international institutions; after all, experts have determined that United Nations peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti, where at least 10,000 people died of the disease, despite years of vehement denial from U.N. officials

Distrust of the UN and its Western backers is a major issue for the Haitian people:

The incident has left many Haitians deeply distrustful of the very institutions leading the global vaccination drive through the COVAX program. As Brian Concannon, founder of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, a coalition of Haitian and U.S. human rights advocates, told me: “​​Basically the international community burned all its credibility on public health messaging by lying about cholera.”  He added: “They don’t trust the U.N., they don’t trust the government. The messenger is the problem”

On April 7th, 2021, Haiti has refused a donation of more than 756, 000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the WHO also through the COVAX program as reported by Spain’s EFE from a reliable source:

According to this source the Haitian Government refused to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured under license by “Serum Institute of India” because of “the global unrest surrounding this vaccine”, considering that the population of Haiti “would not accept it”

In an interesting turn of events The Haitian authorities have asked the WHO to send vaccines from other laboratories to Haiti, including the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson laboratories which requires only one injection and which can be stored at temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius.”  However, WHO officials are pushing back against Haiti’s demands since the Johnson & Johnson vaccine takes only one shot.  However, the J&J vaccine can be just as dangerous as Pfizer and Moderna’s experimental injections, but the idea is maybe that one shot is more convincing to the public than having multiple shots for the long-term, perhaps they just wanted to avoid pushing “forever boosters” on their population who are already skeptical on any vaccine produced by the West to fight Covid-19 or any other disease.

Whatever people say about Haiti and their reaction to Covid-19 in the West and elsewhere may be negative, but one thing is certain, anything to do with Western governments and their institutions such as the WHO or the CDC concerning Covid-19 or any other new disease whether they are promoting vaccines or facemasks have resulted in more deaths and injuries. 

Haiti’s example should be proof that whatever the “health authorities” such as the Anthony Fauci’s of the world and their institutions are suggesting have no credibility and whatever they are promoting should be taken with a grain of salt.   

Although this news video is typical US mainstream media propaganda, you can watch this video to get a different perspective on the attitude towards Covid-19 in Haiti:

U.S.-led Imperialism is the World’s Leading Purveyor of Chaos

The western capitalist axis of domination is responsible for most of the world’s crises. The crisis of legitimacy extends from the UK to Japan, and U.S. imperialism is involved in every new catastrophe.

By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

To say that the West, currently led by the dictates of U.S. imperialism, is in trouble would be an understatement. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned on July 7th amid an escalating political crisis of legitimacy . Three weeks before Johnson announced his departure, Emmanuel Macron’s so-called centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority in France. U.S. President Joe Biden continues to face his own crisis of legitimacy in the form of declining favorability ratings and public humiliation from Democratic loyalists such as Debra Messing . For the West, political crisis is undergirded by an unprecedented level of system chaos which has given the vast majority of workers and oppressed people little confidence in the future.

That chaos was compounded by the murder of Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe on July 7th. Abe was an imperialist, a neoliberal, and the highest expression of what it means to be a puppet of the American Empire . Abe’s so-called Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was a literal creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Other detestable qualities of Abe include his worship of Japan’s fascist war criminals, his membership in the fascist cult Nippon Kaigi, and his unapologetic defense of Japan’s history of brutalizing and super exploiting “comfort women” from its colonies. Most important to the United States, however, was Abe’s unquestionable loyalty to the New Cold War and the military encirclement of China.

Abe’s murder and the attendant political crises in the West are a clear demonstration that U.S.-led imperialism is the world’s leading purveyor of chaos in the world. At the economic base, the U.S. and the E.U. continue to prolong their proxy war with Russia through massive arms transfers and sanctions that have boomeranged back to spur shortages and inflation. Inflation has come with political costs. Already unpopular capitalist regimes in the West are finding themselves increasingly exposed as incapable of addressing the rising cost of living. It doesn’t help matters that the so-called military superiority of the United States and its imperialist partners is also being challenged by Russia’s successful special military operation in Ukraine.

Thanks to the U.S. obsession with NATO expansion, the future is bleak for Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup government established in 2014. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has made immense progress in the Donbass region. An already fragile and privatized vassal Ukrainian economy can only look forward to more pain once the U.S. and its junior partners in NATO come looking for repayment on its exorbitant aid packages. And Ukraine is just the beginning. The recent admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO is yet another declaration of war with Russia which opens the door to future conflicts even more destructive than the ongoing U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

It is an undeniable fact that chaos follows U.S. imperialism wherever it goes. In Latin America, stability exists only where leftist governments have secured sufficient sovereignty . In Africa, the spread of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has led to widespread destabilization and political insecurity in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO-AFRICOM invasion of Libya in 2011. In Asia, U.S. militarism has facilitated war in the West and attempted to organize a coalition of vassal states against China in the East. U.S. meddling in Taiwan has created a dumping ground for defense contractors and prompted Joe Biden to articulate on three occasions that the U.S. is willing to militarily intervene to “defend” the island , a guaranteed nuclear exchange scenario.

U.S. militarism is the principal barrier to political stability around the world which is a prerequisite to addressing global challenges such as climate change and poverty. U.S. and E.U. sanctions murder thousands of people in poorer, non-white countries. U.S.-sponsored color revolutions and “soft power” maneuvers are preludes to regime change. So-called U.S. “soft power” strengthens the most reactionary forces in the world. The far right and fascistic Contras in Latin and Central America ISIS in West Asia, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraine are all outgrowths of U.S. interference disguised as “soft power.”

A dialectical relationship exists between the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policy. U.S. imperialism is an advanced stage in the system of capitalism predicated upon slavery, colonialism, and racism. Jayland Walker’s brutal murder at the hands of Akron police is a near daily occurrence in the United States. Black Americans and Indigenous peoples have been subject to the cruelest forms of racist violence for centuries. The U.S.’s endless wars are an expression of this violence turned toward imperialist ends.

The chickens of chaos have come home to roost. The Euro-American imperialist world order is suffering from terminal contradictions. Political instability reigns supreme. Another economic crisis is said to be looming but is more than likely already here. Imperialist wars no longer hold any prospect for any real “victory” without serious consequences for the war-maker.

While material conditions are pregnant with possibilities, there is no organized and independent left challenge to the supremacy of U.S. capital and its armed guards of the state. That is the task ahead of the people’s movement residing in the belly of the imperialist beast. In the face of the unprecedented chaos produced by its leading purveyor, the United States, this is no doubt the most difficult one that the working class and oppressed in the long and storied history of resistance. But such a task is not a choice. It is forced upon us by the weight of imperialism bearing down on our necks.

We must not rest until we get the boot off by any means necessary.

Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and Telegram at The Haiphong Press. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link. You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com. 

NATO — The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet

Together We Are Wrong — by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia. 

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia. 

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.

“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.” 

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.

One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.

Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S. 

China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive  8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year.  By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.

NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.

China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor. 

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.

NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO. 

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.” 

The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond. 

“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.” 

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs. 

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war. 

“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.

The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.

Putin vs. Big Pharma: The ultimate smackdown

Is Putin plotting to purge the pill peddlers? If so, we have some suggestions

By Riley Waggaman

Source: Off-Guardian

Is Vladimir Putin preparing to cleanse Russia of Big Pharma shills (his entire cabinet)? Some seem to think so and there is certainly evidence that some kind of anti-shill crackdown is coming.

Let’s explore this intriguing news item together.

Take the wheel, TASS:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized foreign drug companies for pushing their products through local medical institutions and via doctors in Russia using their deep-pocketed resources.

“Unfortunately, foreign pharmaceutical companies attracted some heads of our medical institutions, and medical workers in 30 regions. And they pushed their medicines [on to the Russian market], paying quite a lot of money for it. We saw that under just one scheme they doled out 500 million [rubles],” he said at a meeting with Yury Chikhanchin, Head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service.

Putin noted that such practice also exists in the EU and worldwide.

“They do it everywhere. They do it in Europe and overseas too. This is how they operate,” he said.

Chikhanchin responded by saying his agency was working with the FSB to root out gratuitous Big Pharma grifting.

First of all: At the very least Putin deserves a golf clap for saying rude things about Big Pharma. No one loses points for doing that. So we salute you, Vladimir Putin. Keep it up.

At the same time: talk is cheap. If you’re going to launch a Novichok rocket at Big Pharma for “pushing their products through local medical institutions” (as TASS summarized) in 30 regions… this doesn’t exactly sound like the cleansing enema that Russia so desperately needs.

If Putin is sincere about expelling degenerate pill pushers from Russia, how far is he willing to go? Because in order to have a meaningful impact he’ll have to go pretty far. All the way, actually.

You need to cut the head off the snake. And the snake lives in Moscow. The snake has wrapped its slimly reptile-bod around various federal ministries. The snake is suffocating Russia at the highest levels of government.

That’s just a fact.

Maybe it’s time for a “performance review” at the Ministry of Health? (source)

If tomorrow the FSB announces it bagged the deputy director of a village clinic in Potato-Patch, Yakutia, this will not qualify as a successful crackdown on Big Pharma’s nefarious influence in Russia. It will qualify as a massive fail.

So which Big Pharma Strumpets should be Gitmo’d by the FSB? We’re so glad you asked.

All of the Important Russians who partied with Tedros and Big Pharma at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — straight to the gulag for some desperately needed rehabilitation.

And of course, no Big Pharma smackdown would be complete without frog-marching Madame Arbidol to the most remote Siberian penal colony. Sorry, we don’t make the rules.

Russia’s largest pharmaceutical firms also need to be put in the crosshairs. As we saw with Sputnik V, Russian drug companies enthusiastically collaborate with western pharmaceuticals to create horrific poisons for the masses. And the Russian government is invested in this gross cooperation — which is slightly discouraging?

Furthermore, the worst medicine-related grifting involves government contracts. And also: a lot of the pill peddling and unethical contracting is done legally.

As Tsargrad explained in an article unpacking Putin’s comments:

Putin demanded action against Western pharmaceutical companies that bribe our doctors. Tsargrad examined the problem and found out that this bribery is most often completely legal. To change the situation, you need to change the laws. […]

The peculiarity of Russia lies in the active participation of the state in the market of medical services. It is more profitable to get a big contract and relax than to work painstakingly with doctors, although this is not neglected either. Therefore, our “favorite” form of illegal cooperation of pharmaceutical companies with the heads of institutions and officials is to ensure victory in the auction.

So, for example, at the end of 2019, the head doctor of the republican oncological dispensary of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania was caught red-handed while receiving a bribe on an especially large scale. A few days before that, the head physician of the Penza Regional Oncology Center received a five-year sentence (as did the director of the pharmaceutical company who gave him the bribe). There are other precedents, many of them. […]

Of course, the problem raised by Chikhanchin and Putin concerns not only Western companies — the domestic pharmaceutical industry has adopted the worst habits of its “big brothers” and interacts with medical personnel no less successfully.

That sums up the situation pretty well, we think.

We welcome any and all efforts to make Russian healthcare less scammy and more healthy.

But let’s not forget that after two years of “public health measures” — two years of non-stop grifting and murderous lies — Russia now finds itself in a very, very deep hole — a hole dug by the Russian government. Go figure.

A population decline of more than 1 million people in 2021. The largest decline in decades. (source)

We should add that there are rumors on the Russian interwebz that several high ranking officials are under investigation as part of this alleged Big Pharma crackdown. We haven’t found anything substantial to support this claim but… fingers crossed?

Let’s see what the FSB cooks up. It’s 2022. Anything is possible.

Even atonement.

“I want to wish you success not only in the Russian market, but also in global markets, and express the hope that the new year will be favorable for your company and for solving the problems that we are now talking about,” Putin addressed the head of AstraZeneca.(source)
For those who don’t follow Riley on Telegram, he has recently been purged from PayPal – no doubt because he’s wrong about everything, and no threat to the establishment at all.
Riley Waggaman is your humble Moscow correspondent. He worked for RT, Press TV, Russia Insider, yadda yadda. In his youth, he attended a White House lawn party where he asked Barack Obama if imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning (Chelsea was still a boy back then) “had a good Easter.” Good times good times. You can subscribe to his Substack here, or follow him on twitter or Telegram.

The agony of the West

Like Rome, the Anglo-Saxon Empire is collapsing by its own decadence.

Sergey Lavrov used to compare the West to a wounded predator. According to him, it should not be provoked because it would be taken by madness and could break everything. It is better to accompany it to the graveyard. The West does not see it that way. Washington and London are leading a crusade against Moscow and Beijing. They roar and are ready for anything. But what can they really do?

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

The G7 summit in Bavaria and the Nato summit in Madrid were supposed to announce the West’s punishment of the Kremlin for its “special military operation in Ukraine”. But, if the image given was that of Western unity, the reality attests to their disconnection from reality, their loss of audience in the world and ultimately the end of their supremacy.

While the West is convinced that what is at stake is in Ukraine, the world sees it facing the “Thucydides trap” [1]. Will international relations continue to be organized around them or will they become multipolar? Will the peoples who have been subjugated until now break free and gain sovereignty? Will it be possible to think differently than in terms of global domination and to devote themselves to the development of each individual?

The West has devised a narrative of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine that overlooks their own actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They have forgotten their signing of the Charter for European Security (also known as the OSCE Istanbul Declaration) and the way they violated it by making almost all the former members of the Warsaw Pact and some of the new post-Soviet states join one by one. They have forgotten the way they changed the Ukrainian government in 2004 and the coup d’état by which they put Banderist nationalists in power in Kiev in 2014. Having made a clean sweep of the past, they blame Russia for all the ills. They refuse to question their own actions and consider, at the time, they were forced into power. For them, their victories make the Law.

To preserve this imaginary narrative, they have already silenced the Russian media at home.

No matter how much they claim to be “democrats”, it is better to censor dissenting voices before lying.

So they approach the Ukrainian conflict, without contradiction, by convincing themselves that they have the duty to judge alone, to condemn and sanction Russia. By blackmailing small states, they managed to obtain a text from the UN General Assembly that seems to prove them right. They now plan to dismantle Russia as they did in Yugoslavia and tried to do in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy).

To do this, they began to isolate Russia from world finance and trade. They cut off its access to the SWIFT system and Lloyds, preventing it from buying and selling as well as transferring goods. They thought this would cause its economic collapse. In fact, on June 27, 2022, Russia was unable to pay a debt of $100 million and the rating agency Mody’s declared it in default [2].

But this did not have the desired effect: everyone knows that the reserves of the Russian Central Bank are full of foreign currency and gold. The Kremlin paid the 100 million, but could not transfer it to the West because of Western sanctions. It has placed them in an escrow account where they await their debtors.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin, which is no longer paid by the West, has begun to sell its production, especially its hydrocarbons, to other buyers, particularly China. The exchanges that can no longer be made in dollars are made in other currencies. As a result, the dollars that their customers used to use are flowing back to the United States. This process had already begun several years ago. But Western unilateral sanctions have accelerated it sharply. The huge amount of dollars accumulating in the US is causing a massive price increase. The Federal Reserve is doing everything it can to share it with the eurozone. The price increase is spreading at high speed across the entire Western European continent.

The European Central Bank is not an economic development agency. Its main task is to manage inflation within the Union. it cannot slow down the sudden rise in prices at all, so it tries to use it to reduce its debt. The Member States of the Union are therefore invited to compensate for the drop in purchasing power of their “citizens” by lowering taxes and providing benefits. But this is a never-ending circle: by helping their citizens, they tie their hands and feet to the European Central Bank, they chain themselves a little more to the US debts and become even poorer.

There is no remedy for this inflation. This is the first time that the West has had to mop up the dollars that Washington has recklessly printed for years. The rise in prices in the West corresponds to the cost of imperial spending over the last thirty years. Today and only today is the West paying for its wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Until now, the United States killed anyone who threatened the supremacy of the dollar. It hanged President Saddam Hussein for refusing it and looted the Iraqi Central Bank. They tortured and lynched the leader Muamar el-Gaddafi who was preparing a new pan-African currency and looted the Libyan Central Bank. The gigantic sums amassed by these oil states disappeared without a trace. The only thing we saw was GI’s taking tens of billions of dollars wrapped in large garbage bags. By excluding Russia from dollar trade, Washington itself has brought about what it so feared: the dollar is no longer the international reference currency.

The majority of the rest of the world is not blind. It has understood what is happening and has rushed to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, then tried to register for the virtual Brics summit. They realize -a little late- that Russia launched the “Partnership of Greater Eurasia”, in 2016 and that its Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had solemnly announced it at the UN General Assembly, in September 2018 [3]. During four years, quantities of roads and railroads were built to integrate Russia into the networks of the new “Silk Roads”, land and sea, imagined by China. It was thus possible to shift the flow of goods within a few months.

The fall in the value of the dollar and the shift in the flow of goods are causing an even greater rise in energy prices. Russia, which is one of the world’s leading exporters of hydrocarbons, has seen its revenues increase considerably. Its currency, the ruble, has never been in better shape. In response, the G7 has set a price ceiling for Russian oil and gas. It ordered the “international community” not to pay more.

But Russia is obviously not going to let the West set the prices of its products. Those who do not want to pay market prices will not be able to buy them, and no customer intends to go without to please the West.

The G7 tries to organize, at least intellectually, its supremacy [4].. This no longer works. The wind has changed. The four centuries of Western domination are over.

In desperation, the G7 has committed itself to solving the global food crisis that its policies have caused. The countries concerned know what the G7 commitments mean. They are still waiting for the great African development plan and other smoke and mirrors. They know that the West cannot produce nitrogen fertilizers and that they prevent Russia from selling theirs. The G7 aid is only a band-aid to keep them waiting and not to question the sacred principles of free trade.

The only possible option for the rescue of Western domination is war. Nato must succeed in destroying Russia militarily as Rome once razed Carthage. But it’s too late: the Russian army has much more sophisticated weapons than the West. It has already experimented with them since 2014 in Syria. It can crush its enemies at any time. President Vladimir Putin exposed the staggering progress of its arsenal to his parliamentarians in 2018 [5]

The Nato summit in Madrid was a nice communication operation [6]. But it was only a swan song. The 32 member states proclaimed their unity with the despair of those who fear to die. As if nothing had happened, they first adopted a strategy to dominate the world for the next ten years, naming China’s “growth” as a concern [7]. In doing so, they admitted that their goal is not to ensure their own security, but to dominate the world. They then opened the accession process for Sweden and Finland and considered approaching China with, as a first step, the possible accession of Japan.

The only incident, which was quickly brought under control, was the Turkish pressure that forced Finland and Sweden to condemn the PKK [8]. Unable to resist, the United States dropped its allies, the Kurdish mercenaries in Syria and their leaders abroad.

With this, they decided to increase the NATO Rapid Reaction Force from 40,000 to 300,000 men, 7.5 times, and station it on the Russian border. In doing so, they have once again violated their own signature, that of the Charter for Security in Europe, by directly threatening Russia. Russia has no possibility to defend its huge borders and can only ensure its security by ensuring that no foreign force sets up a military base on its borders (scorched earth strategy). Already, the Pentagon is circulating prospective maps of the dismantling of Russia that it hopes to implement.

The former Russian ambassador to NATO and current director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, has responded by publishing on his Telegram account the coordinates of the NATO decision-making centers, including the Madrid summit room [9]. Russia has hypersonic launchers, for the moment impossible to intercept, which can carry a nuclear warhead in a few minutes to the NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Pentagon in Washington. To avoid any misunderstanding, Sergei Lavrov specified, alluding to the Straussians, that the martial decisions of the West were not taken by the military, but by the US State Department. It would be the first target.

So the question is: will the West play for all it’s worth? Will they take the risk of a Third World War, even though it has already been lost, just to avoid dying alone?

Translation
Roger Lagassé