Category Archives: Geopolitics

Russiagate’s Last Gasp

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By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

On Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it.  The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile “paper of record” has earned a new moniker — Gray Lady of easy virtue.

Over the weekend, the Times’ dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans — which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s daily web piece, “The Morning” calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing “how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably.” The following is from Richardson’s newsletter on Friday:

— “On April 1 a Russian plane brought ventilators and other medical supplies to the United States … a propaganda coup for Russia;

— “On April 25 Trump raised eyebrows by issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin commemorating the 75th anniversary of the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops on the bridge of the Elbe River in Germany that signaled the final defeat of the Nazis;

— “On May 3, Trump called Putin and talked for an hour and a half, a discussion Trump called ‘very positive’;

— “On May 21, the U.S. sent a humanitarian aid package worth $5.6 million to Moscow to help fight coronavirus there.  The shipment included 50 ventilators, with another 150 promised for the next week; …

— “On June 15, news broke that Trump has ordered the removal of 9,500 troops from Germany, where they support NATO against Russian aggression. …”

Historian Richardson added:

“All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election and is doing so again in 2020.  But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. … this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers.”

Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks!

The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead U.S. Troops

Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump’s statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie.

Late last night the president tweeted: “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. …”

For those of us distrustful of the Times — with good reason — on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday:

“Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. …”

And who can forget how “successful” interrogators can be in getting desired answers.

Russia & Taliban React

The Kremlin called the Times reporting “nonsense … an unsophisticated plant,” and from Russia’s perspective the allegations make little sense; Moscow will see them for what they are — attempts to show that Trump is too “accommodating” to Russia.

A Taliban spokesman called the story “baseless,” adding with apparent pride that “we” have done “target killings” for years “on our own resources.”

Russia is no friend of the Taliban.  At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the U.S. would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan.  Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam.  Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support.

But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool’s errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved.  And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove U.S. forces out on their “own resources.” As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad.

Besides, the Russians knew painfully well — from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool’s errand would be for the U.S.  What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of?

CIA Disinformation; Casey at Bat

Former CIA Director William Casey said:  “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”

Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser.  Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public.

If Casey’s spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be.  But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge.  The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years.  This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times, to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend — the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding.

Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media.  No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven, with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7?

The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered “Intelligence Community” Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That “assessment” done by “hand-picked analysts” from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the “intelligence community”) reportedly is being given close scrutiny by U. S. Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate’s origins.

If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll.  That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us.

Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night — namely, the “intelligence” on the “bounties” was not deemed good enough to present to the president.

(As a preparer and briefer of The President’s Daily Brief  to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that — based on what has been revealed so far — the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.)

Rejecting Intelligence Assessments

Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration’s rejection of what the media is calling the “intelligence assessment” about Russia offering — as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday — “bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan.”

I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged — actually, well over the top.

The media asks, “Why does Trump continue to disrespect the assessments of the intelligence community?”  There he goes again — not believing our “intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin.”

In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood.  As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.”  Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”

“This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: “All roads lead to Putin.”  The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant.  She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too “accommodating” toward Russia.

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months — on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense.  Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself.

Vile

Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty:

“All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.”

Project Venezuela: Right-wing activists push Wikipedia to blacklist MintPress, other alternative media

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A group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets covering Venezuela, including MintPress News.

By Alan MacLeod

Source: Intrepid Report

Still unable to convince a sufficient number of their countryfolk to support them, the Venezuelan opposition has turned their efforts towards convincing an international audience—primarily Americans—to support their cause. Part of that is spending inordinate amounts of time online, arguing in English on social media, creating bot networks, and editing Wikipedia articles. Many Wikipedia articles on Venezuela are particularly biased towards the opposition, containing numerous inaccuracies, falsehoods and non-sequiturs.

Now, according to The Grayzone, a group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets that do not comport with their views. These include MintPress (already blackballed by Wikipedia), The Grayzone, and the much-lauded independent news site Venezuelanalysis, the most extensive English-language resource on the country available. One user in particular, ZiaLater, a member of a group called “Project Venezuela” who control and moderate content related to the country, was the catalyst for the banning of the sites taking an anti-imperialist stance. Some members of Project Venezuela spend long hours changing Venezuela-related pages so they are more critical of the government and sympathetic to the opposition.

Policing the narrative

Wikipedia suggests using corporate-funded mainstream sources who they feel are “generally reliable.” However, on Venezuela, these same outlets closely resemble and parrot U.S. regime change propaganda. For example, CNN, the BBC, and the Daily Telegraph all reported the blatant falsehood that the Venezuelan government burned aid trucks trying to enter the country last year. In reality, it was the opposition themselves that burned their own trucks, as immediately reported by The Grayzone, MintPress News, and other outlets who were actually there. Multiple well-circulated live streams also showed the event in real-time. However, that was all ignored. The New York Times, a site recommended by Wikipedia for citation, currently employs a journalist covering Venezuela who openly admitted to me on tape that he considers himself a “mercenary” and deliberately plants outrageously exaggerated stories into Western media to push his goals. Other journalists told me that their colleagues consider it their number one mission to overthrow the Maduro government.

In 2017, The Washington Post published an article openly calling for a violent coup in the country, and currently employs a Venezuelan journalist who resigned from The New York Times, saying, “Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism” that he “can’t possibly be neutral.” Meanwhile, The Guardian described Oscar Perez, a local ex-soldier who hijacked a helicopter and used it to bomb parliament buildings as a “patriot,” and even pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that Perez was a “government plant.” They have not retracted it, nor apologized. This is just a minor sampling of the opposition propaganda disguised as objective reporting pumped out constantly by corporate media.

“The media coverage of Venezuela is about as terrible as for any country in the world, except possibly for Palestine. It is utterly biased, misleading and distorted,” said Dan Beeton, an economist and Latin America specialist from the Center for Economic Policy Research. “The gap between the image and the reality of Venezuela,” said professor William I. Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “is so enormous that it is unfathomable.”

In contrast, MintPress has a number of experienced contributors based in Latin America, including Camila Escalante and Ollie Vargas. I myself have published a Ph.D., book, and five peer-reviewed studies in academic journals on the country and find myself in the mainstream of academic thought. Yet the chasm between how specialists see the country and how it is reported in media is so large that we appear ultra-partisan in comparison to the corporate monolith.

A tool to propagate the biases of the ruling elite

While the popular view of Wikipedia is that it is a collective public undertaking that anyone and everyone can add to, in reality, the online encyclopedia has come to mirror the inequalities present in society. The more edits you do, the more power, prestige and influence you accrue, allowing individuals to wield unreasonable power over the world’s 13th most visited website. A class of powerful editors has emerged, who spend hours every day editing and changing content how they see fit. There are strong suspicions that governments and other wealthy organizations are paying people—or teams of people using the same account—to moderate the site full-time, and these power users openly advertise their services to corporations or other groups who want to sanitize or promote their image by changing their pages. Because these users have climbed the Wikipedia hierarchy, their edits become law and are very difficult to overrule.

The CIA has been exposed changing the pages of politically sensitive topics, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, an FBI computer was spotted editing the entry on Guantanamo Bay, while the NYPD amended Eric Garner’s page and even tried to remove pages focussing on police brutality. Israeli groups are also active on the site, conducting an information war, trying to improve the country’s image. The Guardian revealed they even gave out awards and prizes like free balloon rides for those selected as the “best Zionist editor.”

Thus, the site has effectively been turned into “a tool to propagate the reigning ideology and biases of the ruling elites,” in the words of former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges. As Wikipedia has shown little interest in opposing the site being slowly taken over by organized groups, it is unlikely that the mass blacklisting will be overturned.

Globalists Reveal That The “Great Economic Reset” Is Coming In 2021

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

For those not familiar with the phrase “global economic reset”, it is one that has been used ever increasingly by elitists in the central banking world for several years. I first heard it referenced by Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF at the time, in 2014. The reset is often mentioned in the same breath as ideas like “the New Multilateralism” or “the Multipolar World Order” or “the New World Order”. All of these phrases mean essentially the same thing.

The reset is promoted as a solution to the ongoing economic crisis which was triggered in 2008. This same financial crash is still with us today, but now, after a decade of central bank money printing and debt creation, the bubble is even bigger than it was before. As always, the central bank “cure” is far worse than the disease, and the renewed crash we face today is far more deadly than what would have happened in 2008 if we had simply taken our medicine and refused to prop up weak parts of the economy artificially.

Many alternative economists often wrongly attribute the Fed’s habit of making things worse to “hubris” or “ignorance”. They think the Fed actually wants to save the financial system or “protect the golden goose”, but this is not reality. The truth is, the Fed is not a bumbling maintenance man, the Fed is a saboteur, a suicide bomber that is willing to destroy even itself as an institution in order to explode the US economy and clear the path for a new globally centralized one world system. Hence, the “Global Reset”.

In 2015 in my article ‘The Global Economic Reset Has Begun’, I stated:

“The global reset is not a “response” to the process of collapse we are trapped in today. No, the global reset as implemented by central banks and the BIS/IMF is the cause of the collapse. The collapse is a tool, a flamethrower burning a great hole in the forest to make way for the foundations of the globalist Ziggurat to be built….economic disaster serves the interests of elitists.”

Now in 2020 we see the globalist plan coming to fruition, with the elites revealing what appears to be their intent to launch their reset in 2021. The World Economic Forum officially announced the Great Reset initiative as part of their Covid Action Platform last week, and a summit is scheduled in January 2021 to discuss their plans more openly with the world and the mainstream media.

The WEF also posted a rather bizarre video on the Reset, which consists of a series of images of the world falling apart (and images of factories releasing harmless carbon emission into the air which I suppose is meant to scare us with notions of global warming). The destruction is then “reset” at the push of a button, with everything reversing back to a pristine human-less world of nature and the words “Join Us”.

The reset, according to discussions by the IMF, is basically the next stage in the formation of a one-world economic system and potential global government. This seems to fall in line with the solutions offered during the Event 201 pandemic simulation; a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic that was held by the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum only two months before the REAL THING happened at the beginning of 2020. Event 201 suggested that one of the top solutions to a pandemic would be the institution of a centralized global economic body that could handle the financial response to the coronavirus.

Is it not convenient that the events of the real coronavirus pandemic fall exactly in line with the Event 201 simulation, as well as directly in line with the global reset plans of the IMF and the World Economic Forum? As they say, let no crisis go to waste, or, as is the motto of the globalists “Order Out Of Chaos”.

With civil unrest about to become a way of life for many parts of the world including the US, and the pandemic set for a resurgence of infections after the “reopening”, creating a rationale for a second wave of lockdowns probably in July, the economy as we know it is being destroyed. The last vestiges of the system, hanging by a thin thread after the crash of 2008, are now being cut.

The goal is rather obvious – Terrify the population with poverty, internal conflicts and a broken supply chain until they lobby the establishment for help.  Then, offer the “solution” of medical tyranny, immunity passports, martial law, a global economic system based on a cashless digital society in which privacy in trade is erased, and then slowly but surely form a faceless “multilateral” global government which answers to no one and does whatever it pleases.

I remember back in 2014 when Christine Lagarde first began talking about the reset. That same year she also made a very strange speech to the National Press Club in which she started rambling gleefully about numerology and the “magic number 7”. Many within the club laughed, as there was apparently an inside joke that the rest of us were not privy to. Well, I would point out that the World Economic Forum meeting on the global reset in 2021 will be held exactly 7 years after Lagarde gave that speech. Just another interesting coincidence I suppose…

The new world order, the global reset, is a long running scheme to centralize power, but in a way that is meant to be sustained for centuries to come. The elites know that it is not enough to achieve global governance by force alone; such an attempt would only lead to resistance and eternal rebellion. No, what the elites want is for the public to ASK, even beg for global governance. If the public is tricked into demanding it as a way to save them from the horrors of global chaos, then they are far less likely to rebel against it later. Problem – reaction – solution.

The pandemic is not going away anytime soon. Everyone should expect that state governments and the federal government will call for renewed lockdowns. With these new lockdowns, the US economy in particular will be finished. With 40 million people losing their jobs during the last lockdowns, many states only partially reopened, and only 13% to 18% of small businesses receiving bailout loans to survive, the next two months are going to be a devastating wake-up call.

The real solution will be for people to form more self reliant communities free of the mainstream economy. The real solution should be decentralization and independence, not centralization and slavery. The globalists will seek to interfere with any effort to break from the program. That said, they can do very little if millions of people enact localization efforts at the same time. If people aren’t reliant on the system, then they cannot be controlled by the system.

The real test will come with the final collapse of the existing economy. When stagflation spikes even harder than it is right now and prices of necessities double or triple yet again, and joblessness skyrockets even further, how many people will clamor for the globalist solution and how many will build their own systems? How many will be bowing in submission and how many will be ready to fight back. It is a question I still don’t have an answer to even after 14 years of analysis on the issue.

What I suspect is that many people will fight back. Not as many as we might hope for, but enough to defend the cause of liberty. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but I believe the globalists are destined to lose this war in the long run.

To America, Black Lives Only Sometimes Matter

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

There is no doubt that colonialism and racism sit at the root of America’s domestic problems. The push to dominate others abroad is directly linked to the belief that those who are different at home should also be dominated.

There are still Americans alive today that remember segregation laws that denied black Americans their basic rights and dignity. Before that, there was outright slavery.

Even today, racism is still institutionalized. It also permeates American culture, laying just beneath a superficial layer of tolerance and equality.

This is not just about white people who remain racist against blacks and other minorities – a product of America’s terminally ill culture – it is also about fundamental racism that still very much sits at the heart of American foreign and domestic policy – against not only blacks, but virtually every race on the planet from Africans to Asians to even Slavs.

The US is a nation that encourages its people to hate entire groups of people abroad to help justify otherwise unjust wars. Arabs, Chinese people, Russians – are all vilified with bigotry and hatred sanctioned by mainstream American culture. It isn’t hard to see why in a nation like this, hatred for other groups is easily justified in the minds of racists and the unjust.

Not Just Police in America – Racism is a Key Feature of US Foreign Policy 

It was under US President Barack Obama that the US decimated the North African nation of Libya, deposing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi – a champion of African dignity and progress and the champion of tens of thousands of blacks from all over Africa who travelled to Libya to find work and a better life – work and a better life Gaddafi provided them until he was brutally murdered and his government replaced by heavily armed, racist terrorists backed by the US and its European allies.

US-backed militants in Libya would hunt down Libya’s black population, killing them, torturing them, and even enslaving them in open air slave markets – a spectacle one might have believed was unthinkable in the 21st century – but something made possible by America, its foreign policy, and its deeply rooted racism and sense of supremacy – despite having a “black” president at the time.

President Obama is hardly the only one to blame – he simply picked up where others left off – and his successor, US President Donald Trump is simply next in line to carry forward systemic US injustice worldwide. The fact that President Obama was black made no difference and simply helps illustrate how while superficial milestones are waved in America’s face – the fundamental rot of injustice, racism, and supremacist thinking persists.

When a nation is able to justify denying one group of people their dignity, worth, and rights as human beings it is a slippery slope that easily leads to other groups likewise being stripped of their humanity and abused.

If Black Lives Matter – They Must Always Matter, Everywhere, All the Time 

Any case of police brutality is tragic and needs to be addressed -a problem in its own right. If officers killed George Floyd because he was black, it represents an additional problem that must also be addressed.

If Americans genuinely believe black lives matter – then they need to commit to fighting injustice against them, and all other victims of American racism and supremacy. If they speak up only when it is popular and “trending” it’s as good as not speaking up at all.

If they are silent when America is mass murdering blacks overseas, killing brown people across the planet, or attempting to normalize racism against Asians – Chinese people in particular – they are complicit in the very sort of deeply rooted, institutionalized racism that underpins US foreign policy and the globe-spanning industrialized injustice it represents – and the very sort of racism that manifests itself as injustice against blacks at home.

America needs genuine opposition to racism. Not opportunistic posturing.

US politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pose as dedicated to racial equality and fighting racism – yet she regularly finds herself in support of US military aggression abroad which exclusively targets nations populated by black, brown, and Asian people.

Her most recent display of supreme hypocrisy was her support of US meddling in Hong Kong – an extension of the British Empire’s seizure from and subjugation of this Chinese territory.

The British Empire – of course – also pursued its foreign policy based entirely on the belief that white Westerners were superior to all others and that it was their right – even duty – to impose British “civilization” upon “heathen” races – China was no exception to this belief.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may or may not appreciate that her support for US meddling in Hong Kong helps continue this disgraceful tradition and agenda – believing instead that supporting “democracy” in Hong Kong is not simply the same brand of Anglo-American racism merely repackaged for more sensitive global audiences. But she is supporting racism, supremacy, and hegemony all the same.

Black lives will never matter as long as “Black Lives Matter” remains a hollow political slogan shouted by interests easily able to ignore or even support injustice purveyed by the US against others abroad – including blacks.

Deeply rooted racism in the US is just one of many symptoms of an overall desire for hegemony and the notions of racial, political, and cultural supremacy that underpin it. Until this is addressed, racism will continue, with only the most superficial and unsustainable efforts made to stop it.

As long as America believes it is better than all others abroad – able to justify exploitation, coercion, and even military aggression to assert itself and pursue its “interests” – racism and injustice will persist at home. The same corporate-financier interests driving US injustice abroad see the US population – white and black – as merely another market segment to use and abuse – to divide and conquer – to put under itself for its own benefit.

Black lives matter, whether they are being strangled by a racist white cop in America or being bombed by US warplanes in Libya. Once Americans can unite in both understanding and opposing this across-the-board racism and injustice, something might actually be done about it besides kicking the can down the road for a few more months until the next video of police abuse emerges online.

America will not heal its domestic hatred and divisions if it remains built entirely on projecting and profiting from hatred and division abroad. It was no coincidence that legendary champions for equality like Martin Luther King Jr. were both opposed to racism and injustice at home and ceaselessly opposed  to American aggression and hegemony abroad. The two are linked by the common thread of fundamental injustice. Until they are both exposed and smashed completely, they will both continue.

The Military Must be De-Funded Along with the Police

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By Dan Kovalik

Source: CounterPuch

As Vijay Prashad explains in his book, Red Star Over The Third World, domestic fascism in the West has reflected the West’s pre-existing colonial practices abroad. Citing Martinique communist Aimé Césaire, Prashad explains: “What had come to define fascism inside Europe through the experience of the Nazis – the jackboots and the gas chambers – were familiar already in the colonies. . . . [F]ascism was a political form of bourgeois rule in times when democracy threatened capitalism; colonialism, on the other hand, was naked power justified by racism to seize resources from people who were not willing to hand them over. Their form was different but their manners were identical.”

As Prashad and Césaire teach us, the fascist tactics used by our Western governments in the Global South will inevitably be brought home to be used against us. In the case of the US, these tactics have surely been introduced here, and we are now seeing this clearly as our police, sometimes backed by the military itself, are battling protestors in the streets in the same manner that a military force does as a foreign occupying power. Indeed, as a number of commentators have pointed out, the very tactic which killed George Floyd – the knee on the neck – was imported by the Israeli Defense Forces (themselves bankrolled by the US) who use this tactic against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and who are now training US police units, including the Minneapolis police force, to use it as well.

Moreover, the police are using not only the cruel military tactics used to oppress people abroad, they are also using the military’s very equipment to do so.

Democratic President Bill Clinton opened the door wide for this police militarization in the 1990s with the National Defense Authorization Act which created a program, the 1033 program, through which police departments are given surplus military equipment. As recently explained by Michael Shank in an article in The New York Review of Books, entitled “How Police Became Paramilitaries,” pursuant to this program, “local law enforcement began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments.”

And, once the police receive this equipment, they must use it. As Shank explains, the 1033 program “requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.”  In other words, the police are actually required to turn the military’s high-tech guns against their own people.

The militarization of the police, moreover, can be seen as a by-product of the US’s over-reliance on the use of military force and war to solve all of its problems, to the near exclusion of all other alternatives. Indeed, the US has given up on trying to lead the world through economic and technological prowess, or through moral suasion. Instead, our leaders have decided that brute military force alone will allow the US to dominate the planet, and our nation’s coffers are being looted to the tune of over $1 trillion a year to do so. The result is the starving of our educational system, our social safety net and our nation’s vital infrastructure. This, of course, then leads to mass deprivation and despair which then leads to mass unrest. And, just as it deals with the rest of the world, our rulers have decided to deal with the unrest at home, not by solving the social ills plaguing this nation, or by fixing a few bridges or dams, but by beating us down with military-style violence.

Military force, indeed, has become the only instrument in our government’s toolbox, as quite starkly illustrated recently by the White House’s decision to give our valuable medical workers military flyovers costing $60,000 an hour instead of providing these workers with the protective equipment they have been desperately demanding. As with all things, our government has money and resources for instruments of violence, but none for human needs. This is literally killing us, just as surely as it is killing hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all people of color, not coincidentally – in foreign lands. The fight against police brutality and racism must therefore be linked to the fight to de-fund our military and to the broader fight to de-militarize our very society and culture.

Are we about to see a Colour Revolution in the United States?

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The familiar tropes are out in force, Trump may not weather this storm.

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

It started with peaceful protests. It always does. Oppressed, poor or otherwise desperate people take to the streets because they don’t know what else to do. Because their neighbours are doing it. Because the world is unfair to so many people. Because attention should be paid.

The reasons don’t matter. The peacefulness does.

Nobody who is marching for justice and change really wants to burn down a bakery or steal some trainers from a Nike store.

But then it starts happening.

Windows are broken. Bricks are thrown. Civilians are sprayed with mace. Bystanders are caught up in the throng. People get hurt.

It doesn’t need to happen, but it does.

Sometimes police panic in the face of intimidating crowds. Sometimes protesters let their anger boil over. A small minority of people just enjoy violence and chaos. Others stand to benefit from it, they stoke conflict and spread blame.

Then the molotov cocktails are flying and the snipers are shooting people on both sides. There’s blood in the streets and barricades are going up and the whole thing has its own momentum.

And, through all this, the media is churning out the noise. Partisan and dehumanising. “criminals” on one side “Fascists” on the other. Both sides are called thugs. Fox News and CNN tell the same stories with reversed points of view, slashing society down the centre.

And the chaos builds. The President has to do something, so he calls in the army.

Now the press are calling him a fascist and a dictator. They say he’s violated his office and he has to resign or be removed or be arrested.

I’m not talking about the United States.

I’m talking about Ukraine in 2014. Or Egypt and Syria in 2011. Or Libya in 2010. Or Bolivia just last winter. Or Venezuela every year for decades.

If the events currently unfolding in cities across the United States were happening in any other country in the world, a lot of us would already have said that the US Deep State was behind it. All the hallmarks are there.

The constructed narratives. The handy props. The agents provocateur. The hysterical media. The stench of agenda.

Consider, for a moment, that what is happening in Minneapolis and New York and Los Angeles has been happening in Paris and a host of other French cities for nearly two years.

The Guardian never called Macron a fascist. CNN never had a live stream about that.

Compare the coverage of the Gilets Jaunes to Black Lives Matter, and then to the Maidan protests.

The rubber bullets and tear gas are the same. The headlines are not.

CNN has one host calling Trump a “thug” who’s “hiding in his bunker”, and another saying “Trump declared war on Americans”. Robert Reich, writing in the Guardian, says:

[Trump] is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

The Washington Post has an op-ed headlined:

Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

Slate magazine:

Remove Trump Now

The corporations are all on board. Every one of them releasing statements of solidarity and heartfelt Instagram posts and sending money to all the right places. Nike had their famous ad.

Because the same companies paying slave-wages to 10-year-old Indonesian kids in vast sweatshops just hate racism and inequality, honest.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Doesn’t this look like a play for an exchange of power? A colour revolution in the offing?

I suppose we should ask “why now?” Trump is up for re-election in just five months after all. Biden doesn’t really stand a chance, but they could have him suffer “ill health” and pull out, replace him with a Harris or a Warren or Michelle Obama. Hell, they could just rig it. They’ve done it before.

But then maybe it’s not about Trump per se, maybe it’s about the process of elections and the office of President in general. Maybe it’s about getting martial law in place well before the Covid19 backlash kicks in. Maybe there’s something else coming down the pipe that will make it clearer.

Supposing the plan is to get rid of Trump, what happens next?

Well, maybe one of a few things.

Firstly, it’s possible it all just dies down. But if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that the Deep State doesn’t fold a bad hand, they just up the ante and hope to bluff it out.

Second, there’s the possibility Trump introduces full-on martial law and becomes a quasi-dictator. While I’m sure he has no moral compunctions about that, it’s hard to see he would have the (vital) support of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in that endeavour. They’ve shown their colours throughout the last four years. However useful Trump has been, he is not an insider and he is entirely disposable.

Third, and final, Trump goes. Whether there’s an impeachment or a trial or an early election or a civil war…I don’t know. But it’s hard to see Trump weathering this storm.

If I had to guess, I’d say the protests and pressures mount until Trump does something stupid. If he makes any Yanukovych-style attempts at appeasement (he probably won’t), they will be ignored or minimised or the goalposts will be moved (we already saw that, when the arrest of Derek Chauvin went almost totally unnoticed).

If soldiers fire on civilians – whether Trump orders it or not, or whether mercenaries frame the army (like in Ukraine) – that will be it. The military will resign en masse, turn on Trump and he will be ousted.

From there could emerge an appointed “temporary” President, a middle-of-the-road type with support from both parties, whose job is to “unify the country” and “heal the divides”.

The emergence of a totally unelected President will, of course, be called something like “a triumph of the democratic spirit” in The Guardian.

The riots will be blamed for a constructed “second wave” of Covid19. Just in time for one of the new POTUS’ first announcements to be that “America will start taking Covid19 seriously”. Stronger lockdown rules, mandatory track-and-trace…the full Monty.

This will naturally earn him/her good-boy points all across the mainstream media, with the (totally accidental) bonus that anyone who dares protest the coup will be breaking the law, being selfish and risking lives (and probably a racist).

This is all just my supposition. I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong. But I can see it heading in that direction. And the idea should worry everyone. Not out of any latent concern for Donald Trump, obviously. Just for the stability of the world. Coups or impeachments or other non-democratic power-changes are not good. They don’t end well.

They don’t end well for the leaders being removed, who almost universally end up exiled or hanged or poisoned or shot. Sometimes worse.

More importantly, they don’t end well for the ordinary people, who always suffer when the Deep State turns society on its head.

And, in this instance, it may not end well for the world, which suddenly has a nuclear-armed superpower in a severe state of flux to worry about.

We should all be concerned.

There’s an old joke:

Q: Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?

A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.

It looks like maybe that no longer applies.

Why America’s “Revolution” Won’t be Televised. No one is Aiming at the Empire

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Protesters jump on a street sign near a burning barricade near the White House during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised because this is not a revolution. At least not yet. 

Burning and/or looting Target or Macy’s is a minor diversion. No one is aiming at the Pentagon (or even the shops at the Pentagon Mall). The FBI. The NY Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department. The CIA in Langley. Wall Street houses. 

The real looters – the ruling class – are comfortably surveying the show on their massive 4K Bravias, sipping single malt.

This is a class war much more than a race war and should be approached as such. Yet it was hijacked from the start to unfold as a mere color revolution.

US corporate media dropped their breathless Planet Lockdown coverage like a ton of – pre-arranged? – bricks to breathlessly cover en masse the new American “revolution.” Social distancing is not exactly conducive to a revolutionary spirit.

There’s no question the US is mired in a convoluted civil war in progress, as serious as what happened after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968.

Yet massive cognitive dissonance is the norm across the full “strategy of tension” spectrum. Powerful factions pull no punches to control the narrative. No one is able to fully identify all the shadowplay intricacies and inconsistencies.

Hardcore agendas mingle: an attempt at color revolution/regime change (blowback is a bitch) interacts with the Boogaloo Bois – arguably tactical allies of Black Lives Matter – while white supremacist “accelerationists” attempt to provoke a race war.

To quote the Temptations: it’s a ball of confusion.

Antifa is criminalized but the Boogaloo Bois get a pass (here is how Antifa’s main conceptualizer defends his ideas). Yet another tribal war, yet another – now domestic – color revolution under the sign of divide and rule, pitting Antifa anti-fascists vs. fascist white supremacists.

Meanwhile, the policy infrastructure necessary for enacting martial law has evolved as a bipartisan project.

We are in the middle of the proverbial, total fog of war. Those defending the US Army crushing “insurrectionists” in the streets advocate at the same time a swift ending to the American empire.

Amidst so much sound and fury signifying perplexity and paralysis, we may be reaching a supreme moment of historical irony, where US homeland (in)security is being boomerang-hit not only by one of the key artifacts of its own Deep State making – a color revolution – but by combined elements of a perfect blowback trifecta:  Operation Phoenix; Operation Jakarta; and Operation Gladio.

But the targets this time won’t be millions across the Global South. They will be American citizens.

Empire come home 

Quite a few progressives contend this is a spontaneous mass uprising against police repression and system oppression – and that would necessarily lead to a revolution, like the February 1917 revolution in Russia sprouting out of the scarcity of bread in Petrograd.

So the protests against endemic police brutality would be a prelude to a Levitate the Pentagon remix – with the interregnum soon entailing a possible face-off with the US military in the streets.

But we got a problem. The insurrection, so far purely emotional, has yielded no political structure and no credible leader to articulate myriad, complex grievances. As it stands, it amounts to an inchoate insurrection, under the sign of impoverishment and perpetual debt.

Adding to the perplexity, Americans are now confronted with what it feels like to be in Vietnam, El Salvador, the Pakistani tribal areas or Sadr City in Baghdad.

Iraq came to Washington DC in full regalia, with Pentagon Blackhawks doing “show of force” passes over protestors, the tried and tested dispersal technique applied in countless counter-insurgency ops across the Global South.

And then, the Elvis moment: General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, patrolling the streets of DC. The Raytheon lobbyist now heading the Pentagon, Mark Esper, called it “dominating the battlespace.”

Well, after they got their butts kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in Syria, full spectrum dominance must dominate somewhere. So why not back home?

Troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division and the 1st Infantry Division – who lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, Somalia – have been deployed to Andrews Airbase near Washington.

Super-hawk Tom Cotton even called, in a tweet, for the 82nd Airborne to do “whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters and looters.” These are certainly more amenable targets than the Russian, Chinese and Iranian militaries.

Milley’s performance reminds me of John McCain walking around in Baghdad in 2007, macho man-style, no helmet, to prove everything  was OK. Of course: he had a small army weaponized to the teeth watching his back.

And complementing the racism angle, it’s never enough to remember that both a white president and a black president signed off on drone attacks on wedding parties in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Esper spelled it out: an occupying army may soon be “dominating the battlespace” in the nation’s capital, and possibly elsewhere. What next? A Coalition Provisional Authority?

Compared to similar ops across the Global South, this will not only prevent regime change but also produce the desired effect for the ruling oligarchy: a neo-fascist turning of the screws. Proving once again that when you don’t have a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X to fight the power, then power crushes you whatever you do.

Inverted Totalitarianism

The late, great political theorist Sheldon Wolin had already nailed it in a book first published in 2008: this is all about Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin showed how “the cruder forms of control – from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass – will become a reality for all of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward.

“We are tolerated as citizens only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism,” he wrote.

Sinclair Lewis (who did not say that, “when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross”) actually wrote, in It Can’t Happen Here (1935), that American fascists would be those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty.”

So American fascism, when it happens, will walk and talk American.

George Floyd was the spark. In a Freudian twist, the return of the repressed came out swinging, laying bare multiple wounds: how the US political economy shattered the working classes; failed miserably on Covid-19; failed to provide affordable healthcare; profits a plutocracy; and thrives on a racialized labor market, a militarized police, multi-trillion-dollar imperial wars and serial bailouts of the too big to fail.

Instinctively at least, although in an inchoate manner, millions of Americans clearly see how, since Reaganism, the whole game is about an oligarchy/plutocracy weaponizing white supremacism for political power goals, with the extra bonus of a steady, massive, upwards transfer of wealth.

Slightly before the first, peaceful Minneapolis protests, I argued that the realpolitik perspectives post-lockdown were grim, privileging both restored neoliberalism – already in effect – and hybrid neofascism.

President Trump’s by now iconic Bible photo op in front of St John’s church – including a citizen tear-gassing preview – took it to a whole new level. Trump wanted to send a carefully choreographed signal to his evangelical base. Mission accomplished.

But arguably the most important (invisible) signal was the fourth man in one of the photos.

Giorgio Agamben has already proved beyond reasonable doubt that the state of siege is now totally normalized in the West. Attorney General William Barr now is aiming to institutionalize it in the US: he’s the man with the leeway to go all out for a permanent state of emergency, a Patriot Act on steroids, complete with “show of force” Blackhawk support.

The Giant Virus in the Room: Corporate Vaccine Makers Need More Pandemics, to Grow

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By Dady Chery

Source: News Junkie Post

As drug makers prepare to make a killing on supposed vaccines against COVID-19, it is important, particularly for those who consider vaccines to be a wise investment today, or those whose retirement savings might get invested in such vaccines without their knowledge, to reflect on the fact that corporations are themselves viruses that can only make money for their investors by growing. The way they will grow is by making more vaccines for yet more pandemics. The new pandemics might come of their own accord, or they might get a little nudge.

A road map from those in the shadows

The public has lately been assaulted with relentless announcements about this or that supposed vaccine going into phase I or II clinical trial and the promise that vaccines — if we would only let enough different ones get developed sufficiently rapidly and without oversight — will free us from masks and social distancing. According to an American Enterprise Institute “road map” by people that include former FDA commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, social distancing restrictions will only be lifted when tools to mitigate the risk of disease – including a vaccine — become available. There you have it. If you should ever want to stop cowering with a mask on your face, shake hands with a new acquaintance, dance with friends and strangers, blow a kiss or flirt more outrageously with somebody, you’ll need to get a vaccination license. The people who have mandated this aren’t even currently in government. They are private individuals who have retreated to think tanks from which to issue their decrees.

The global threat to health isn’t a coronavirus

The public health departments of cities, states, or countries have not been those to call for vaccines. Instead, global public health appears to have been hijacked by a supposed non-profit foundation called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), with the Orwellian motto, “New vaccines for a safer world.” One might well ask: “safer for whom?” CEPI was hatched in a one-hour discussion on the sidelines of Davos 2016 between Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust Foundation Director Jeremy Farrar, the CEOs of six major vaccine manufacturers (Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Takeda, and Pfizer), the Prime Minister of Norway, and supposedly 15 other individuals.

Representatives of Germany, India, and Japan are supposed to have attended that meeting, although Prime Minister Angela Merkel had declined the invitation that year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not there, nor was any Japanese head of state. The goal of this cabal, in which elected heads of states are obviously subordinate to Bill Gates and Big Pharma, is not merely to make vaccines and lots of money, but also to deregulate vaccine manufacture on a global scale and control the world by controlling global public health. In this scenario, the United Nations’ WHO, which receives 75 percent of its funds from big pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is merely the arm of CEPI that will tie vaccine adoption by developing countries to various kinds of Western aid. The WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanon, began to enjoy the Gates Foundation’s generosity when he was a Minister of Health in Ethiopia who embraced the foundation’s agenda. The WHO Assistant Director General, Bruce Aylward, who may be the real power in the organization, previously worked for Gates’ supposed polio eradication program. Make no mistake: CEPI intends to be to global health what the WTO is to global trade.

The agenda is military, and it is global

CEPI has already raised over $750 M: a sum that commands a lot of influence. It is well entwined with the militaries of various countries. For example CEPI’s CEO, Richard Hatchett, was the Director for Biodefense Policy on the White House Homeland Security Council in 2005-2006, Associate Director for Radiation Countermeasures Research and Emergency Preparedness at NIAID in 2005-2011; and Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2011-2016. BARDA is a division of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Several CEPI-financed vaccine projects enjoy support from BARDA, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), or the U.S. Military HIV Research Program.

In January 2020, CEPI announced that it would finance three consortiums to develop vaccines against COVID-19. Its alliance with these consortiums, however, predates this announcement in several cases. For example, as far back as April 2018, CEPI provided $56 M to a company called Inovio to get vaccine candidates against the SARS-Cov-2 relative, MERS-CoV, to Phase II trials; Inovio’s main collaborator is the Chinese company, Beijing Advaccine Technology. In January 2019, CEPI provided $10.6 M to a consortium involving the University of Queensland and public/private sector partners in Australia, the US, and Asia to develop a new approach called “molecular clamp” for designing vaccines. In Dec 2019, CEPI gave $8.4 M to Imperial College London, UK, to test an RNA vaccine in animals and also get it to Phase II trials. The researchers at Imperial College boast about the fact that they began to test their vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in animals in February 2020! Recall that the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence only became known on January 10, 2020. In this context, it is also interesting that Imperial College is the home of the fear mongering and disgraced Neil Ferguson, with the too pretty and too married social merging mistress.

The FDA’s vaccine fast track

The road to FDA approval has been smoothed for CEPI’s partners and, unsurprisingly, they have been first to move their putative vaccines to clinical trials. As a rule, the FDA has put the projects of CEPI’s pet companies on a “fast-track” designation, which allows them to be green-lighted to the next phase before they have even completed the preceding one. Consider for example the biotechnology company, Moderna. It has received an undefined sum from CEPI, plus around $483 M from BARDA, as well as funds from DARPA. The appeal of this company to pencil and paper want-to-be-scientists, like Bill Gates and various military types, is that its approach, or “platform,” for vaccine manufacturing could potentially be used to make many other vaccines. But this approach is also potentially dangerous, because it involves the introduction of viral mRNA into cells, and this alone might start an adverse immune reaction. The viral mRNA is then supposed to direct production of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on the surface of the vaccinated person’s cells for some undefined period of time. This kind of vaccine was not even tested in animals before Moderna was allowed to begin its phase I trial in mid-March with 45 healthy human volunteers. Even more extraordinary, six weeks later the company filed for permission to go on to a phase II trial with 600 volunteers. Its application was approved, even though the phase I trial requires months of follow up that are not yet done. The company’s stock has skyrocketed as it has made one promise after another of accelerated schedules and massive scale up of its vaccine production.

Inovio is on a similar trajectory. The phase I trials on its putative SARS-CoV-2 vaccine started on April 3. The company is injecting people with milligram amounts of DNA and then zapping them with a proprietary device, to get the DNA into their cells. It has not defined how the DNA carrying the spike protein information will be guided to the nucleus. If the DNA stays elsewhere in the cells, where it does not belong, it might be mistaken for a virus and start an adverse immune response. If it goes to the nucleus, it may integrate into the cells’ DNA in random places, potentially causing cancers.

The mainstream takes dictation

The mainstream media, which is as lazy as it is scientifically illiterate, has contented itself with the republication of gee-whiz, oh-wow press releases, and the publication of reports sometimes explicitly written by the vaccine manufacturers or their partner foundations. Such reports also appear, not as full-length peer-reviewed articles, but as short commentaries in the summary and editorial pages of serious science journals like Science and Nature. The association of those planted reports with prestigious journals gives them, not only a veneer of credibility but also an automatic amplification by popular science magazines. The reports have generally focused on the marvelous promise of the supposed vaccines and their inevitable manufacture in massive quantities. In fact, 18 years after the original SARS-CoV, which is the closest relative of the COVID-19 agent, no vaccine has successfully been developed against that virus, and many of these so-called new vaccine efforts are actually recycled failed SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV projects.

The real state of knowledge about the immune system

What the news media do not say, and probably could not say with any confidence, is that the mammalian immune system is still poorly understood. Had most media people attended a BIO101 class, there would be great skepticism in the news about the sudden proliferation of newfangled vaccines and the massive human experiment being organized to test them.

The following is a quote from a scholarly review published in Nature Immunology in December 2014:

“The only currently licensed and generally available vaccines against respiratory viruses are for influenza virus, and even these are suboptimal. The paucity of vaccines is due in part to the only limited understanding of immune responses that can provide protection against respiratory viral infection: in many cases, even fundamental correlates of protection have yet to be accurately defined, and the most appropriate antigens to which vaccines should be targeted remain unknown. Animal models are generally imperfect guides to human disease, and the populations at highest risk of severe infections (i.e., young children and elderly adults) are the most difficult to study. In addition, vaccines are often less effective in those with immature or senescent immune systems.”

The next quote is from a commentary on a peer-reviewed article published on May 13, 2020 in Nature 581: 316.

“This discovery elevates TASL to membership of an exclusive circle of… adaptor proteins… of which the other members are TRIF, MAVS, and STING. These four proteins together control the type I interferon response induced by nucleic-acid sensing, a picture that has now been completed with the discovery of TASL as the missing… adaptor of TLR7, TLR8 and TLR9 signaling.”

My translation: only this week, one of the four major players in the early human immune response was discovered! It is a newly characterized protein called TASL that becomes activated when an infected cell senses the presence of genetic material from a virus in a cellular compartment where it should not be. This helps to explain an important part of the immune response that until now has baffled scientists.

The early fight against an infection: a situation that can escalate

A reasonable analogy to a viral infection might be a Columbine-like threat, where a band of murderous fascists take over a high school. Let us say, for good measure, that this particular group wears a specific and recognizable kind of uniform and tattoo. The high school itself is automatically set up to detect the invasion and to call 911. Cells in the lung do the equivalent with proteins called Toll Like Receptors (TLR). These proteins sound the alarm when they recognize genetic material, like DNA or viral RNA, in compartments outside of the nucleus, where it is not supposed to be: a situation that indicates presence of a pathogen. In the cells, some of these compartments are called endosomes or endolysosomes. In our high school, the first responders would be the local police. In the lungs, which do contain their own local immune cells, this would be called the interferon or antiviral response. If this response is successful, as it often is in healthy people, nothing more needs to be done: end of story.

But suppose some of the fascists manage to evade the police and take over several other schools in the same area. The police might then call in SWAT teams with snipers, machine guns, and tear gas grenades; or even police units with bomb robots. The innate, or local, immune system has the equivalent of all of these. It involves SOS signals to the adaptor proteins noted in the above quotation, and the permission from each one for the next step in the escalation. The bomb robots in this case, would be analogous to an inflammation response that destroys not only the viruses but also much of the lung. Obviously, you would want to exhaust every option before using bomb robots in schools that have a few crazies and a lot of students. But suppose the crazies manage to block the police communication to the SWAT teams, then what do you do? Coronaviruses, including the agent of COVID-19, i.e. SARS-CoV-2, can achieve an analogous block of communication during exceptionally heavy initial infections, or infections of the elderly and people with other medical conditions like diabetes, respiratory problems, or cardiovascular disease. What I have just described, with a minimum of immunology jargon, is called the initial innate immune response. In this context, innate means local, i.e. in the lungs.

Vaccines are not the answer

The serum antibodies we all know about are produced as part of a later response, called the adaptive immune response. It happens in those who manage to keep intact and functional a sophisticated route of communication during the attack. The resulting counterattack is not only broad but also specifically tailored to neutralize the invading virus. Furthermore, we maintain a memory of the response. This would be the equivalent of an FBI database with detailed descriptions of the crazies and their tattoos so that they might immediately be recognized, should they appear again in months to years. The only problem is: they can change uniforms and tattoos. All vaccines are based on inducing this later response, which is supposed to prime an individual to resist an attack. But vaccines, however sophisticated the supposed approach or platform, are almost always designed to recognize only a single feature of the invading pathogen. As if one learns to recognize a tattoo on a fascist and nothing more. But suppose the tattoo is removed or changed? In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the target is the spike protein, or sometimes a piece of it. It so happens that the spike protein is also the most variable part of the virus.

Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of disease: A bon entendeur, salut!

A massive human experiment is underway to test potential vaccines. Nearly everything that can be put into a human will be injected into those volunteers who are more terrified of COVID-19 than the vaccine makers or the military. Their menu will include: the inactivated SARS-CoV-2; mutated, or attenuated, versions of SARS-CoV-2 (intra-nasally); SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein; pieces of the spike protein, large and small; harmless bacteria that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; harmless viruses that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; virus-like particles that can present the spike protein on their surface; circular DNA that codes for the spike protein; linear DNA that codes for the spike protein or part of it; mRNA that codes for the spike protein; modified mRNAs; and even an RNA that codes for the spike protein as well as another protein that will make more of the RNA and spike protein, ad infinitum. As a rule, the manufacturers have not even disclosed which exact version of the spike protein they plan to use for the vaccination attempts. Indeed, some companies have disclosed nothing but their intent to conduct clinical trials.

One possible result of attempted vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 that should give anyone pause is an Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) of disease. In other words, it is possible that attempted vaccinations might prime a previously healthy person for a life-threatening inflammation response on the next encounter with a coronavirus. So far, the only company that reports even having checked for ADE is Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company that is collaborating with a US partner on an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The phenomenon of ADE is well established as a possible outcome of attempted vaccination against viruses. A famous instance was a late 1960s vaccine trial in children using inactivated Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which resulted, not only in a failure to protect but also in 2 deaths, and a severe respiratory disease in 80 percent of the children that required hospitalization on their subsequent exposure to the virus. ADE has been observed in mice and other animals supposedly immunized against SARS-CoV with an inactivated virus. Recall that SARS-CoV is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, compared to the supposedly vaccinated people, it is highly possible that the unvaccinated or never previously exposed individuals will fare better in a subsequent coronavirus outbreak.

Hydroxychloroquine bites back

The new adaptor protein, called TASL, described for the first time this week, was discovered to bind to another protein called Solute Carrier 15A4 (SLC15A4). SLC15A4 has long been known to be necessary for lupus and other autoimmune diseases. Now we know that the reason for this is probably because the TASL-SLC15A4 interaction is the path that leads to inflammation. Remember the robot-bomb option in the previous section? That’s the one! As it happens, the reason hydroxychoroquine (HC) has worked for decades against lupus disease is because HC is known to interfere with inflammation, but the details were unknown. SLC15A4 is also important for maintaining the acidity of the endosome, which HC is known to de-acidify to some degree. The antibiotic azithromycin has also been reported to reduce the acidity of endosomes, thus compounding this effect of HC. As a result, when the virus goes to the endosome to develop, it finds that this compartment is insufficiently acidic; it gets stuck there and is ultimately destroyed. So hydroxychloroquine, an inexpensive and long-used drug, counters coronavirus infections in two crucial and quite general ways: it damages the virus and also keeps the immune response from going dangerously overboard. Given the connection of SLC15A4 to lupus disease, it is astonishing that the authors of the new paper did not test HC’s effect on their system containing TASL. But much is open to revision when one wants to publish in Nature. That piece of the puzzle will surely materialize. But timing is everything, and it’s no wonder that the vaccine makers are in such a rush.

For the record

The biggest populations of human subjects for vaccine trials have in the past been brown and black children from countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mexico, and Haiti. The scale of the current project is so massive, however, that even the citizens of Western countries must be preyed upon. In this regard, it certainly helps to keep everyone terrified. The biggest market for vaccines used to be the US Army, but that may change. Besides, a cowed and sick general public should be far more manageable, as climate change events exacerbate stressors like displacement and hunger. The greater the number of epidemics and vaccine-associated diseases, the greater the boon will be for pharmaceutical companies, and the faster they will grow. I write for the record. Those of you who participate in this enterprise or invest in it can no longer say that you did not know what was being done. The rest of you on the sidelines can still change this dystopian future, but the window of opportunity is narrowing fast.

Editor’s Notes: Dr. Dady Chery is an Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Editor-In-Chief of News Junkie Post, and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation.