The Lords of Chaos

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Reid Mukai

The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq.

“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”

Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine.

“I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal and murderous, but in terms of a body count, we far outstripped his killings, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country, devastated its modern infrastructure, wiped out its thriving and educated middle class, gave birth to rogue militias and installed a kleptocracy that uses the country’s oil revenues to enrich itself. Ordinary Iraqis are impoverished. Hundreds of Iraqis protesting in the streets against the kleptocracy have been gunned down by police. There are frequent power outages. The Shi’ite majority, closely allied with Iran, dominates the country.

The occupation of Iraq, beginning 20 years ago today, turned the Muslim world and the Global South against us. The enduring images we left behind from two decades of war include President Bush standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier barely one month after he invaded Iraq, the bodies of Iraqis in Fallujah that were burned with white phosphorus and the photos of torture by U.S. soldiers.

The U.S. is desperately attempting to use Ukraine to repair its image. But the rank hypocrisy of calling for “a rules-based international order” to justify the $113 billion in arms and other aid that the U.S. has committed to send to Ukraine, won’t work. It ignores what we did. We might forget, but the victims do not. The only redemptive path is charging Bush, Cheney and the other architects of the wars in the Middle East, including Joe Biden, as war criminals in the International Criminal Court. Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him.

Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi civil service and army were not disbanded after the U.S. invaded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the U.S. could be the sole major power in a unipolar world. They ignore the massive military expenditures spent annually to achieve this fantasy. They ignore that the war in Iraq was only an episode in this demented quest.

A national reckoning with the military fiascos in the Middle East would expose the self-delusion of the ruling class. But this reckoning is not taking place. We are trying to wish the nightmares we perpetuated in the Middle East away, burying them in a collective amnesia. “World War III Begins With Forgetting,” warns Stephen Wertheim.

The celebration of our national “virtue” by pumping weapons into Ukraine, by sustaining at least 750 military bases in more than 70 countries and by expanding our naval presence in the South China Sea, is meant to fuel this dream of global dominance.

What the mandarins in Washington fail to grasp is that most of the globe does not believe the lie of American benevolence or support its justifications for U.S. interventions. China and Russia, rather than passively accepting U.S. hegemony, are building up their militaries and strategic alliances. China, last week, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish relations after seven years of hostility, something once expected of U.S. diplomats. The rising influence of China creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who call for war with Russia and China, one that will have consequences far more catastrophic than those in the Middle East.

There is a national weariness with permanent war, especially with inflation ravaging family incomes and 57 percent of Americans unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party, who peddled the lies about Iraq, are war parties. Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat. The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.

The pimps of war, leaping from fiasco to fiasco, cling to the chimera of U.S. global supremacy. The dance macabre will not stop until we publicly hold them accountable for their crimes, ask those we have wronged for forgiveness and give up our lust for uncontested global power. The day of reckoning, vital if we are to protect what is left of our anemic democracy and curb the appetites of the war machine, will only come when we build mass anti-war organizations that demand an end to the imperial folly threatening to extinguish life on the planet.

The U.S. empire is collapsing.

Posted on March 21, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The U.S. empire was initiated, on 25 July 1945, by U.S. President Harry Truman, upon the advice of his hero Dwight Eisenhower, but the U.S. empire — the only empire that remained after WW II — has been successfully hidden from its publics, never self-acknowledged, despite now having 900 foreign U.S. military bases in its colonies (‘allies’) around the world, and despite having become, by now, by far and overwhelmingly, the largest empire that has ever existed, in all of world history. (And those 900 foreign military bases are in addition to America’s 749 domestic U.S. military bases.)

But, now, this largest-ever empire in world history is finally in the process of collapsing. This collapse will be documented here, first of all by documenting how extreme the lies by the empire’s rulers (“The Emperor has no clothes” that are true — that actually exist) have become, and the desperateness of those persons’ fabrications of ‘news’, and consequently of ‘history’, because it is by means of their lies that we can truthfully understand whom and what they actually are.

On 9 December 2016, the great independent war journalist, Eva Bartlett, addressed the U.N., representing only herself as an independent journalist who had been to Syria many times, not representing any of the war’s combatants. And here was her 19-minute presentation, which is stunning to watch, and which is 100% true (as I know it to be, on the basis of my own independent sources):

“Western media lies about Syria exposed (Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett)”

VIDEO, 19 mins., Eva Bartlett, 10 December 2016, U.N., NYC

That’s an archived youtube, not the original youtube, because youtube had forced its uploader/owner to remove it from each one of its postings at youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20170428135437/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M Saved in archive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=g1VNQGsiP8M FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20211225000619/https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=g1VNQGsiP8M Saved in archive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20221030031919/https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M Saved in archive.

The site’s owner explained, on 1 February 2023, that he had been forced by youtube to cancel his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JYWDjmnMxM; so, I several times archived his explanation, in case youtube will force that video (his explanation) to become removed, too: https://web.archive.org/web/20230304172339/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JYWDjmnMxM.

(I have previously explained some of the techniques that the U.S. Government and its allies have employed in order to reduce the size of my own audience.)

There’s lots more about the U.N.’s knowledge that the U.S. Government has been hiring proxy-forces to destroy Syria unless the U.S. Government will succeed in placing the Saud family into control over Syria. And even when the U.N. was presented conclusive evidence that the U.S. had suborned perjury to declare Syria’s Government a violator of chemical-weapons bans, that evidence was simply ignored by U.N. officials.

And the war in Ukraine is at least as much lied-about by the U.S. Government and its colonies (colonies other than the post-2013 U.S.-coup-controlled Ukraine itself, which the U.S. Government is using as the main battleground for its war since 1945 to conquer Russia). And, of course, the U.S. Government is calling “fiction” American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report on how the U.S. President Joe Biden ordered and (in coordination with Norway’s Government) blew up and destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines of Russian gas into Germany.

And, also, America’s entirely lie-based war against Iraq in 2003 was another example of the U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media constantly lying to and treating with unlimited contempt its own population.

There are so many other similar examples, such as the U.S. Government’s having signed to agreements with China’s Government that Taiwan is a part of China, versus the same U.S. Government sending weapons and troops to Taiwan in order to encourage that Chinese province’s local government to declare itself NOT to be a part of China.

There is apparently no limit to the absurdity and profusion of U.S. Government (and its ‘news’-media’s) lies, which are its war against the global public. This is how desperate they now are. Are they desperate enough to launch a nuclear war against Russia and/or China on the basis of their lies? That is the question.

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates@stavroulapabst and @MaxBlumenthal cover the surge of antiwar activity across the continent over the past year, from Athens to Prague to London to Berlin to Paris and beyondhttps://t.co/At63ggS8M4
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) February 27, 2023

As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

The mass media are not telling the public about the many well documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.

There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement

"The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we're talking about a conflict that can kill billions."https://t.co/eMXpSNBuLH
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 27, 2023

The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.

For instance, an animal welfare bill introduced in the Florida state legislature would ban the sale of rabbits in March and April, prohibit cat owners from declawing their pets, make it illegal for dogs to stick their heads out of car windows, force owners to place dogs in a harness or in a pet seatbelt when traveling in a car, and require police to create a public list of convicted animal abusers.

A Massachusetts law prohibits drivers from letting their cars idle for more than five minutes on penalty of a $100 fine ($500 for repeat offenders), even in the winter. You can also be fined $20 or a month in jail for scaring pigeons.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

Consider, for example, that businesses in California were ordered to designate an area of the children’s toy aisle “gender-neutral” or face a fine, whether or not the toys sold are traditionally marketed to girls or boys such as Barbies and Hot Wheels. California schools are prohibited from allowing students to access websites, novels or religious works that reflect negatively on gays. And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.

It’s getting worse.

Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control, whether you’re talking about aspiring “bakers, braiders, casket makers, florists, veterinary masseuses, tour guides, taxi drivers, eyebrow threaders, teeth whiteners, and more.”

For instance, whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

That explains how a fisherman can be saddled with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. Or why police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.

The laws can get downright silly. For instance, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

However, the consequences are all too serious for those whose lives become grist for the police state’s mill. A few years back, police raided barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants. All of this was purportedly done in an effort to make sure that the barbers’ licensing paperwork was up to snuff.

In this way, America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation. And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We increasingly find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:

One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

According to the Washington Post, these funds have been used to buy guns, armored cars, electronic surveillance gear, “luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.” Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.

In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture, Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars. Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.

One small Florida town, population 8,000, generates a million dollars a year in fines from these cameras. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

The problem with these devil’s bargains is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”

Showdown in Ukraine

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Reid Mukai

Hobbled US Turns to War to Preserve its Waning Primacy

By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

The future of humanity will be decided on a battlefield in Ukraine. That’s no exaggeration. The conflict between the United States and Russia will determine whether global economic integration will expand within an evolving multi-polar system or if the “rules-based order” will succeed in crushing any opponent to its Western-centric model. This is what’s taking place in Ukraine today, in fact, all of the recent government-prepared documents related to national security identify Russia and China as the greatest threats to US hegemony. For example, take a look at this brief clip from the 2021 Congressional Research Service Report titled Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress:

The U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia… is a policy choice reflecting two judgments: (1) that given the amount of people, resources, and economic activity in Eurasia, a regional hegemon in Eurasia would represent a concentration of power large enough to be able to threaten vital U.S. interests….

From a U.S. perspective on grand strategy and geopolitics, it can be noted that most of the world’s people, resources, and economic activity are located not in the Western Hemisphere, but in the other hemisphere, particularly Eurasia. In response to this basic feature of world geography, U.S. policymakers for the last several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia.” (“Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress”, US Congress)

That sums up US foreign policy in a nutshell; “prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon” at all cost. Now check out this summary of the 2022 US National Defense Strategy by Andre Damon at the World Socialist Web Site:

These documents, which were not seriously discussed in the US media, make clear the fundamental falsehood that the massive US military buildup this year is a response to “Russian aggression.” In reality, in the thinking of the White House and Pentagon war planners, the massive increases in military spending and plans for war with China are created by “dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment.”

These documents make clear that the United States sees the economic rise of China as an existential threat, to be responded to with the threat of military force. The United States sees the subjugation of Russia as a critical stepping stone toward the conflict with China.” (“Pentagon national strategy document targets China”, Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site)

These two excerpts are by no means a comprehensive summary of US foreign policy objectives, but they are a pretty effective thumbnail sketch. Bottom line: The war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine. America’s clearly articulated strategic objectives are as follows: To weaken Russia, topple its leader, take control of its vast natural resources and move on to containing China. Simply put, Washington’s escalating aggression in Ukraine is a Hail Mary pass aimed at containing emerging centers of economic power in order to preserve its waning position in the global order.

This is the geopolitical chess match that is being played behind the cover of “a war against Russia’s unprovoked aggression.” People should not be hoodwinked by that absurd deception. This war was concocted as a desperate attempt for the United States to defend its flickering global hegemony. That’s what Ukraine is really all about. It’s a clash between the warmongering western oligarchs who have a stranglehold on the US media and political establishment and the emerging economies that are using the market system to link their resources and manufactured goods to countries around the world through “high-speed” infrastructure and cooperative development.

So, the question everyone must ask themselves is this: Do you want to see more economic integration, lower prices, more shared prosperity and less war or another 80 years of onerous and arbitrary sanctions, color-coded revolutions, regime change operations, genocidal interventions and bioweapon warfare (Covid-19)? Which do you want?

Perhaps, you are one of the millions of Americans who believe that China is an enemy of the United States. Perhaps, you are also unaware of the role the US played in creating modern China. Here’s a question for you: Did the US and western corporations move their operations en masse to China to escape the high costs of production in the US?

answer– Yes, they did.

And, did they betray US workers because they didn’t want a fair wage to interfere with their excessive profit-making?

answer– Yep.

And, did they offshore their businesses, outsource their product manufacturing and do everything in their power to make themselves winners while robbing American workers of the opportunity of making a decent wage so they could put food on the table?

answer– They sure did.

Then who is actually responsible for the rise of China?

answer– Western corporations are responsible. If Americans want to blame someone, blame them!

But now the corporate mandarins and other elites are unhappy with China because China will not allow them to take control over their markets, financial system and currency as they have in America. So now these same cutthroat corporations want us to fight a war with the monster that they created?

Can you see that? Can you see that the relentless provocations against China have nothing to do with US national security or US interests. We are being led by the nose to fight and die for the cadres of voracious western oligarchs who have settled on China as the next target of their grand looting operation.

But let’s forget the past for a minute and focus on the future, after all, that’s what really matters, right?

Well then, which country has a more “positive vision” for the future: China or the United States?

Have you ever heard of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the massive, multi trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that is the centerpiece of China’s foreign policy? It is the biggest infrastructure program in history and more 150 countries have invested in the plan already. It is a development-oriented project aimed at increasing connectivity through high-speed rail, shipping lanes and ports, skyscrapers, railroads, roads, bridges, airports, dams, power stations, and railroad tunnels. By increasing the speed of travel, China’s products and merchandise will get to markets faster generating greater prosperity for itself and for the other countries involved. And, keep in mind, the BRI will link countries around the world in a high-speed system that will not require its participants to follow a specific economic model dictated by Beijing. In other words, the Belt and Road Initiative is free market economics without the politics. It’s a “win-win” situation for everyone, a guarantee of mutual prosperity absent political manipulation, coercion or exploitation.

The venal oligarchs that run the US can’t even imagine a project of this scale or potential. In fact, they can’t even pony-up enough money to keep the trains on the rails in America. The profits these billionaire parasites extract from their activities invariably come from stock buybacks, tax evasion, and other sleight-of-hand, debt-layering ponzi-scams that benefit no one and merely shift more of the nation’s wealth into their own bulging bank accounts. Of course, ripping off the country would be bad enough, but now we see how this same class of miscreants have settled on public health as a means for amplifying their political power so they can impose repressive, police-state measures that greatly curtail the freedom of the entire population. In short, they want absolute social control and they aren’t going to let-up until they get it.

Where is the “positive vision” in this behavior?

There isn’t one. America used to be a country of ideas, ideals and vision. Now it is an oligarch-run detension center in which all hope for the future has been ruthlessly extinguished by a handful of mercenary billionaires.

At least, in the case of China, we can imagine a better, more prosperous world that is interconnected and more accessible to everyone. But what about the United States? Are we supposed to believe that fighting a war in eastern Europe is going to improve our lives? Are we supposed to believe that the only way “we can stay on top” is by pushing everyone else down? Are we expected to hate China and Russia even while our own government demonizes 80 million of us for voting for the wrong presidential candidate or for not supporting the terrorists who burn and loot our cities or for believing that the people in East Palestine are more deserving of our support and assistance than the Nazi stormtroopers in Kiev?

The fact is, our leaders cannot imagine devoting public resources to a giant interconnected infrastructure project like BRI, because that would mean less lucre for themselves. So, they’ve decided to destroy it just like they destroyed Nord Stream. Just read the press reviews on this groundbreaking project. Western journalists can’t find a ‘good word’ to say about it. A vast area in the center of America was fiendishly nuked with vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate and isobutylene, but the western media would rather criticize China’s ambitious BRI project than hold their paymasters accountable. Go figure.

The same rule applies to Russia. The Biden team and their wealthy allies don’t want closer relations between Germany and Russia because closer relations mean more prosperity for both countries, and Washington can’t have that, which is why they blew up the pipeline that was Germany’s lifeline to cheap fuel. That’s how Washington solved the problem. It pushed Germany and Russia down so the US could remain on top. Who doesn’t see this?

In contrast, the Belt and Road Initiative provides a positive vision for the future, which is an idea that the majority of the world supports. It puts us on a path to an interconnected world in which people can raise their standards of living, make a meaningful contribution to their communities, and enjoy their own culture and traditions without fear of being sanctioned, incarcerated or bombed to death. This is an excerpt from China’s Global Times:

The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has already become a well-received international public good and an important platform for international cooperation…

“BRI transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games, and created a new model of international cooperation. It is not an exclusive group that excludes other participants but an open and inclusive cooperation platform. It is not just China’s solo effort, but a symphony performed by all participating countries….

Since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was proposed in 2013, the initiative has always been development-oriented, and consistent efforts have been made to ensure that it is high-standard, sustainable and people-centered….

By August, China’s goods trade with countries participating in the BRI had reached around $12 trillion and the country’s non-financial direct investment in those countries surpassed $140 billion. … By the end of 2021, Chinese enterprises had invested $43 billion in the construction of economic and trade cooperation zones in BRI countries, creating more than 340,000 local jobs, official data showed…

China is open to other countries’ and regions’ participation in the BRI and is considering connecting with infrastructure initiatives proposed by other nations to provide more good-quality public goods for the world…. China hopes to join hands with all partners to advance the high-quality development … stressing that China aims to strive for global connection rather than fragmentation, for mutual opening-up rather than shutting doors, for mutual integration rather than zero-sum games. (“BRI remains open, inclusive for all, transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games“, Global Times)

What is the American-led project that rivals the Belt and Road Initiative?

There isn’t one. The US allocates over $1 trillion per year for lethal weaponry and war-making, and trillions more to bail out the Wall Street banksters, and trillions more to shut down all the businesses across the country that were forced to comply with the diktats of billionaire elites who wanted to inject the population with their toxic slurry, but zero for any global infrastructure project that would peacefully bring the world’s people closer together through commerce and recreation.

No one is saying that China is perfect, at least, I’m not. Nor do I want to live in China. I don’t. I’m an American and I plan to die here.

But I’m not blind. It’s easy to see that this war with Russia has nothing to do with “unprovoked aggression.” That is merely a smokescreen that’s being used to conceal the real objective, which is to preserve America’s global hegemony. What we need to do now, is honestly analyze ‘what is happening’; try to understand ‘why it is happening’, and, then, figure out what the outcome will be if the United States prevails. In other words, do we want to perpetuate an oligarch-controlled system that crushes Russia, contains China, starves Europe of the energy it needs, sabotages the Belt and Road infrastructure plan and reinforces the same failed policies that brought us Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq?

Do we want that? Do YOU want that?

The American people want their government to cooperate with other nations in order to create a more prosperous and peaceful world. They don’t want a new world order and they certainly don’t want a Third World War.

Why the Banking System Is Breaking Up

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Hudson

Source: The Unz Review

The collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse of supporting shelving is the rising temperature of interest rates, which spiked last Thursday and Friday to close at 4.60 percent for the U.S. Treasury’s two-year bonds. Bank depositors meanwhile were still being paid only 0.2 percent on their deposits. That has led to a steady withdrawal of funds from banks – and a corresponding decline in commercial bank balances with the Federal Reserve.

Most media reports reflect a prayer that the bank runs will be localized, as if there is no context or environmental cause. There is general embarrassment to explain how the breakup of banks that is now gaining momentum is the result of the way that the Obama Administration bailed out the banks in 2008 with fifteen years of Quantitative Easing to re-inflate prices for packaged bank mortgages – and with them, housing prices, along with stock and bond prices.

The Fed’s $9 trillion of QE (not counted as part of the budget deficit) fueled an asset-price inflation that made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets – the One Percent with a generous spillover effect for the remaining members of the top Ten Percent. The cost of home ownership soared by capitalizing mortgages at falling interest rates into more highly debt-leveraged property. The U.S. economy experienced the largest bond-market boom in history as interest rates fell below 1 percent. The economy polarized between the creditor positive-net-worth class and the rest of the economy – whose analogy to environmental pollution and global warming was debt pollution.

But in serving the banks and the financial ownership class, the Fed painted itself into a corner: What would happen if and when interest rates finally rose?

In Killing the Host I wrote about what seemed obvious enough. Rising interest rates cause the prices of bonds already issued to fall – along with real estate and stock prices. That is what has been happening under the Fed’s fight against “inflation,” its euphemism for opposing rising employment and wage levels. Prices are plunging for bonds, and also for the capitalized value of packaged mortgages and other securities in which banks hold their assets on their balance sheet to back their deposits.

The result threatens to push down bank assets below their deposit liabilities, wiping out their net worth – their stockholder equity. This is what was threatened in 2008. It is what occurred in a more extreme way with S&Ls and savings banks in the 1980s, leading to their demise. These “financial intermediaries” did not create credit as commercial banks can do, but lent deposits out in the form of long-term mortgages at fixed interest rates, often for 30 years. But in the wake of the Volcker spike in interest rates that inaugurated the 1980s, the overall level of interest rates remained higher than the interest rates that S&Ls and savings banks were receiving. Depositors began to withdraw their money to get higher returns elsewhere, because S&Ls and savings banks could not pay higher their depositors higher rates out of the revenue coming in from their mortgages fixed at lower rates. So even without fraud Keating-style, the mismatch between short-term liabilities and long-term interest rates ended their business plan.

The S&Ls owed money to depositors short-term, but were locked into long-term assets at falling prices. Of course, S&L mortgages were much longer-term than was the case for commercial banks. But the effect of rising interest rates has the same effect on bank assets that it has on all financial assets. Just as the QE interest-rate decline aimed to bolster the banks, its reversal today must have the opposite effect. And if banks have made bad derivatives trades, they’re in trouble.

Any bank has a problem of keeping its asset valuations higher than its deposit liabilities. When the Fed raises interest rates sharply enough to crash bond prices, the banking system’s asset structure weakens. That is the corner into which the Fed has painted the economy by QE.

The Fed recognizes this inherent problem, of course. That is why it avoided raising interest rates for so long – until the wage-earning bottom 99 Percent began to benefit by the recovery in employment. When wages began to recover, the Fed could not resist fighting the usual class war against labor. But in doing so, its policy has turned into a war against the banking system as well.

Silvergate was the first to go, but it was a special case. It had sought to ride the cryptocurrency wave by serving as a bank for various currencies. After SBF’s vast fraud was exposed, there was a run on cryptocurrencies. Investor/gamblers jumped ship. The crypto-managers had to pay by drawing down the deposits they had at Silvergate. It went under.

Silvergate’s failure destroyed the great illusion of cryptocurrency deposits. The popular impression was that crypto provided an alternative to commercial banks and “fiat currency.” But what could crypto funds invest in to back their coin purchases, if not bank deposits and government securities or private stocks and bonds? What is crypto, ultimately, if not simply a mutual fund with secrecy of ownership to protect money launderers?

Silicon Valley Bank also is in many ways a special case, given its specialized lending to IT startups. New Republic bank also has suffered a run, and it too is specialized, lending to wealthy depositors in the San Francisco and northern California area. But a bank run was being talked up last week, and financial markets were shaken up as bond prices declined when Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that he actually planned to raise interest rates even more than he earlier had targeted, in view of the rising employment making wage earners more uppity in their demands to at least keep up with the inflation caused by the U.S. sanctions against Russian energy and food and the actions by monopolies to raise prices “to anticipate the coming inflation.” Wages have not kept pace with the resulting high inflation rates.

It looks like Silicon Valley Bank will have to liquidate its securities at a loss. Probably it will be taken over by a larger bank, but the entire financial system is being squeezed. Reuters reported on Friday that bank reserves at the Fed were plunging. That hardly is surprising, as banks are paying about 0.2 percent on deposits, while depositors can withdraw their money to buy two-year U.S. Treasury notes yielding 3.8 or almost 4 percent. No wonder well-to-do investors are running from the banks.

The obvious question is why the Fed doesn’t simply bail out banks in SVB’s position. The answer is that the lower prices for financial assets looks like the New Normal. For banks with negative equity, how can solvency be resolved without sharply reducing interest rates to restore the 15-year Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP)?

There is an even larger elephant in the room: derivatives. Volatility increased last Thursday and Friday. The turmoil has reached vast magnitudes beyond what characterized the 2008 crash of AIG and other speculators. Today, JP Morgan Chase and other New York banks have tens of trillions of dollar valuations of derivatives – casino bets on which way interest rates, bond prices, stock prices and other measures will change.

For every winning guess, there is a loser. When trillions of dollars are bet on, some bank trader is bound to wind up with a loss that can easily wipe out the bank’s entire net equity.

There is now a flight to “cash,” to a safe haven – something even better than cash: U.S. Treasury securities. Despite the talk of Republicans refusing to raise the debt ceiling, the Treasury can always print the money to pay its bondholders. It looks like the Treasury will become the new depository of choice for those who have the financial resources. Bank deposits will fall. And with them, bank holdings of reserves at the Fed.

So far, the stock market has resisted following the plunge in bond prices. My guess is that we will now see the Great Unwinding of the great Fictitious Capital boom of 2008-2015. So the chickens are coming hope to roost – with the “chicken” being, perhaps, the elephantine overhang of derivatives fueled by the post-2008 loosening of financial regulation and risk analysis.

The MSM Never Was Objective—and It Never Questioned Power, Either

Posted on March 14, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Iain Davis

Source: The Disillusioned Blogger

In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.

As Corbett points out:

As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.

But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.

The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”

In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.

Journalism Is Story Telling

Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.

Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”

While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.

It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.

Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.

Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.

The MSM Was Never Objective

One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.

There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.

This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.

It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.

Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”

Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.

The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.

https://odysee.com/$/download/Skripal-Salisbury-Chemical-Weapons-Attack-2018/890ead50a0e7139bbcca98425260c767e938590e

The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.

The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.

State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:

— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.

— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”

— The Mockingbird Operation PBSuccess employed public relations guru Edward Bernays to use the media to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company in 1954.

While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.

State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”

When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.

We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?

The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.

The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”

There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.

The MSM Has Never Questioned Power

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) goal is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.

At one point the KCNL noted:

As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.

Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”

We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.

The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged legal “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:

Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. It is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.

Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.

All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.

We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power of their behalf.

This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.

The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.

We Are the Problem and the Solution

Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.

Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.

There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.

We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?

The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.

Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. Our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.

We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.

In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.

If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.

Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:

Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.

Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”

Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?

KCNL tell us:

There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.

Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.

To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”

It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.

Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.

The “alternative” media outlet UK Column sums up this point nicely. It asks:

Why should I trust the UK Column? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.

It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.

In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:

Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
What language is being used to frame the issue?
What does the report make us believe about the world?
Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?

Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.

Treat those two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.

Was the Pentagon and CIA Behind the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Souce: Covert Action

Bioterrorism expert and whistleblower alleges that CIA secretly collaborated in supporting unethical gain of function research that resulted in the manufacture of the COVID-19 virus, which was then leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Andrew G. Huff is an Iraq War veteran and infectious disease epidemiologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota who, in September 2014, went to work for EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO that received over $118 million in grants from federal agencies whose mission was to protect the public from infectious diseases.

In a new book, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2022), Huff claims that his boss at EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, was working with the CIA and that beginning in 2012, he oversaw the development of the biological agent known as SARS-CoV-2 that results in the disease COVID-19.

The development occurred through gain-of-function research funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).^[1]

According to Huff, Dr. Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in December 2022, along with other colleagues, “behaved like a pseudoscience mafia entrenched in the halls of the medical military industrial complex.”^[2]

They not only engineered the COVID-19 pandemic but “criminally conspired to smear” anyone who did not support their narrative—including Huff who was subjected to a campaign of FBI surveillance and harassment that nearly resulted in his death.

Engineering a Deadly Virus—and a Vaccine to Allegedly Combat It

One of the first tasks that Dr. Huff undertook while working at EcoHealth Alliance was to review an NIH proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” written by Dr. Daszak with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and some other scientists.

The study had the support of “the grandfather of Gain-of-Function research,” Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health, which ranks third in NIH funding. (According to Huff, “Fauci has been [the school’s] de facto Don for decades.”^{^[3]})

The proposal advocated for studying people in rural China who may have come into contact with bats that spread the Coronavirus among humans and to screen for the virus with the goal of being able to better predict Coronavirus transmission. It further aimed to develop new Coronavirus strains and perform experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering.^[4]

This study fit the definition of Gain-of-Function research, whose aim is to “purposefully enhance the pathogenicity, infectivity, virulence, survivability or transmissibility of an infectious agent,” as Huff defines it, or put more simply, “make an infectious agent more dangerous.”^[5]

On October 17, 2014, the Obama administration declared a moratorium on Gain-of-Function research related to influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) after an accident at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Fauci subsequently outsourced the Gain-of-Function research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving U.S. government funding. The moratorium on Gain-of-Function research was lifted by the Trump administration in December 2017, and Dr. Fauci sent $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to restart the coronavirus bat project.

By trying to make bats capable of infecting human cells, Huff came to believe that his employer was involved not only in unethical Gain-of-Function but also bioweapons research. Its end result was “the creation of SARS-CoV-2,” which “causes the disease known as COVID-19.”^{^[6]}

According to Huff, the infectious agent SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine—which Huff characterizes as gene therapy—were co-developed under the same research program.^[7]

Huff writes that EcoHealth Alliance used Dr. Baric’s work for testing experimental vaccines, treatments and therapeutics against the newly engineered SARS-CoV-2 strain years before COVID-19 was known to the public to determine which countermeasures would be most effective at mitigating the disease in humanized mice.^[8]

EcoHealth Alliance Rebuttal

Upon publication of The Truth About Wuhan, EcoHealth Alliance issued a statement asserting that “Andrew Huff is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” According to EcoHealth Alliance, the actual truth about Wuhan is:

1) Mr. Huff was employed by the EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016. However, reports that he worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology during that time are untrue. He was assigned to a completely different project working on computer-based algorithms to assess emerging disease threats.

2) Mr. Huff alleges that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in Gain-of-Function research to create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true.

3) Mr. Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.

4) Mr. Huff claims that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology based on research conducted there on bat coronaviruses and, further, that this research was related to U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. This is not true.

The EcoHealth Alliance statement went on to quote from Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, who said in December 2021 that “analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

The EcoHealth Alliance statement continued: “The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.”

Higher Hand?

A key qualifier in this latter statement is “most,” which leaves the possibility that some assessed otherwise. In a one page summary, the intelligence community, which was asked to assess the origins of COVID-19 by the Biden administration, made clear that it could not rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) emerged from a laboratory.

Sampling by Chinese authorities of animals in Wuhan wet markets and in the wild significantly found not a single wild animal harboring the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with Wuhan being 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic.

A small group of virologists queried by the NIH in February, 2020 told the NIH leadership that SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from laboratory research, noting that the virus has “unusual features that virologists in the U.S. have been using in experiments for years–often with support from the NIH.”

These unusual features include a sequence of eight amino acids identical to those found in cells that line human airways, according to Columbia University Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison, indicating that the virus could have been genetically manufactured from humans in a laboratory.

Suspiciously, Huff discovered that someone edited the NIH proposal after it was submitted on April 15, 2014; he also observed heavy micromanagement of the project by USAID personnel, U.S. Embassy staff, and other employees of the State Department.^[9]

A leading subcontractor was Metabiota, which was partially owned by Rosemont Seneca, a venture capital firm partially owned by Hunter Biden and the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which invests in companies that make technology of national security interest.^[10]

Huff concluded that EcoHeath Alliance was in the business of collecting intelligence on foreign laboratories and personnel while involved in the development of the Coronavirus. Dr. Daszak even told him that the CIA had approached him and was interested in “the places we’re working, the people that we are working with, and the data that we are collecting.”^[11]

The CIA had in the past been involved in cultivating deadly viruses as bioweapons at the secret U.S. Army facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and history appeared to be repeating itself.

EcoHealth Alliance Executive Vice President William Karesh was linked directly to the top of the U.S. bio-defense establishment as a member of an Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) blue-ribbon panel on bio-defense.^[12]

Huff points out that, traditionally, bioweapons are released to demoralize, incapacitate or force the use of vast medical resources in treating the wounded, and this all could be a motive for the alleged leak of the coronavirus after its manufacture at the Wuhan lab.

According to Huff, Pfizer and Moderna could make billions of dollars from the vaccine, and the global economic and political elite could advance their idea of the “Great Reset” in which they would further empower large corporations in an environment where the public was too bewildered to fight back.

COVID as Global Coup d’État

The latter is the scenario advanced by Michel Chossudovsky in his new book, The Worldwide Corona Crisis: Global Coup D’état Against Humanity: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression (Montreal, Canada: Global Research Publishers, 2022).

An economist at the University of Ottawa, Chossudovsky is President and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), which runs the website globalresearch.ca that has published important cutting edge articles challenging the official narrative about COVID-19.

According to Chossudovsky, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a de facto coup d’état by the billionaire class, which spread panic among the population so they would suspend rational judgment and sign away their civil liberties with the imposition of medically unnecessary lockdowns, distancing and masking requirements, and vaccine passports.

Chossudovsky writes that “the Coronavirus provides a pretext and justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire world into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair…Entire national economies have been placed in jeopardy, martial law was declared in some cases, and all aspects of love and life were banned.”

According to Chossudovsky, the manufactured fear campaign was very similar to those adopted by the ruling class to obtain public support for illegal overseas military interventions.

Like with war dissenters, those who opposed the lockdowns were publicly ostracized, fired from their jobs, banned from social media, or branded as psychopaths.

In France, a doctor and retired university professor who opposed the vaccines, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan was arrested and placed in solitary confinement and in the psychiatric hospital of Uzes. And in Maine, Dr. Meryl Nass had to undergo a psychological exam before she was allowed a hearing with the state’s medical board to challenge the removal of her medical license after forty years on spurious grounds.^[13]

According to Chossudovsky, the evidence amply documented is that the mRNA vaccine has not curtailed the spread of COVID-19—a Harvard study looking at COVID-19 in 68 countries and 2,947 U.S. counties in August and September 2022 found that the countries and counties with the highest vaccination rates had higher rates of new COVID-19 cases per one million people.^[14]

Other studies detailed how the mRNA vaccine has resulted in an upward trend in mortality and morbidity, with the highest excess of deaths above normal being experienced by teenagers. A European mortality monitoring organization reported shocking increases in deaths of children under 14 after the vaccine was introduced. According to data from EuroMOMO, excess deaths among children in Europe surged 554% in 2021 following the European Medicines Agency’s approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children.^[15]

A cheaper and more effective way of treating COVID-19 patients is with hydroxychloroquine, which Dr. Fauci made sure would not be widely distributed.

In July 2020, Dr. Marcus Zervos, the chief epidemiologist in the Henry Ford Medical System and a board certified infectious disease specialist, conducted a study that found that COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine within twenty-four hours of admission to the hospital reduced risk of death by about half.^[16]

Nass also points to the effectiveness of Ivermectin, an off-patent drug from which Big Pharma could not make a profit. Dr. Fauci branded it as a “horse medicine,” even though two scientists who developed it, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 for developing a therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites.^[17]

Scare Tactics and Lies

The deceit by America’s scientific establishment was apparent in the fact that, according to Chossudovsky, a secret Pfizer report detailed that Pfizer, previously convicted of “fraudulent marketing” of another product, received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by its vaccine between mid-December 2020 and the end of February 2021.

There were also tens of thousands of reports of “adverse events,” including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.

According to Chossudovsky, a flawed Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test was established by national governments to generate fake data with a view to justifying excessive and socially repressive policy mandates.

The RT-PCR test produces a high volume of false positives, with the test having been set up to detect a small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus—not necessarily the COVID-19 one or any other specific viruses, according to Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR technique, who said this about the tests before he died in August 2019.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 have co-morbidities, or deaths due to other causes. In only 6% of deaths was COVID-19 the only cause mentioned.

According to Chossudovsky, had the CDC used criteria in its Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting, COVID-19 fatalities would have been 90.2% lower than the officially reported totals.^[18]

On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a worldwide pandemic, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside China was of the order of 44,279, with 1,440 deaths.

The use of scare tactics had been previewed during the phony H1N1 “swine flu” scare of 2009-2010—one of the “greatest medical scandals of the century,” according to Wolfgang Wodarg, then head of health at the European Council—where billions of vaccines were ordered by national governments but then destroyed.

Wodarg is currently involved with Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer Vice President, in the campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines, whose rushed introduction without proper testing was criminally negligent in their view.^{^[19]}

The main drivers of governmental policy have been corporate foundations like the Rockefeller, Soros, Ford and Gates Foundations.^[20]

Their goal was to a) boost the profits of pharmaceutical companies in which they had investments; b) establish more authoritarian forms of global governance and a digital tyranny; and c) advance the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Great Reset, whose aim is to restructure the global economy in the interests of select corporate monopolies by effectively shutting down huge sectors of the pre-COVID economy and driving certain older enterprises into bankruptcy.^[21]

A War and Not Health Response—With the Usual Gamut of Corruption and Lies

Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical executive, has exposed that the Pentagon, which controlled the COVID-19 program from the beginning, adopted shady contracting practices while shielding Big Pharma from liability.

The latter benefited from changes in informed consent rules under the Obama administration to carry out unethical human experimentation and introduce vaccines that were never properly tested or regulated—and which Latypova describes as bio-weapons that “behave like shrapnel in the body; causing recipient cells to inadvertently destroy themselves.”

Latypova explained that the U.S. National Security Council is responsible for COVID-19 policy. This department represents defense and intelligence, and has no health representation. Health and Human Services are managing information but not setting policy, and Latypova concludes that consecutive U.S. governments have therefore treated COVID-19 as a war response, not a health response, whilst deliberately deceiving the public.

The planning for this started as early as 2012, as evidenced by a “pandemic enterprise”, which she describes as a public-private partnership involving ten heads of federal agencies. Secret meetings have been held between these leaders to discuss pandemic countermeasures, and how to maintain utmost secrecy and confidentiality of discussions and plans. Latypova questions why an alleged health event needs to be kept secret from the public.

According to Latypova, the pharmaceutical industry and “investor world” have been taken over by the Pentagon and military intelligence agencies. “A lot of money [pretends] to be venture funds while actually being funded by CIA,” Latypova says.

More Suggestions of Foreknowledge

The discovery of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense to Labyrinth Global Health for “COVID-19 Research” in November 2019 has raised further suspicion about government foreknowledge of the novel coronavirus.

The contract was part of a larger project for a “Biological threat reduction program in Ukraine,” suggesting that elements in the U.S. Government was at the very least aware of the alleged virus before it spread through Wuhan, China in December 2019, or had a hand in its creation through lab based Gain-of-Function research, as Andrew G. Huff suggests.

How else would they have known the name of the novel coronavirus disease three months prior to the WHO officially naming it Covid-19 in February 2020. And it may also explain why Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID had a confidentiality agreement for an mRNA Coronavirus vaccine candidate in early December 2019, which was developed and jointly owned by Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID.

Coordinated Propaganda Effort

According to Dr. Robert W. Malone, an expert in bio-defense and vaccinology, the Gates Foundation—which was granted a non-exclusive license to the Moderna mRNA Covid-19 injection, and therefore profited from its use—paid more than $319 million to control the mainstream media narrative about COVID-19.

The Department of Health and Human Services and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) paid more than one billion to control the media narrative.^[22]

Even late night comedians have been enlisted in the propaganda campaign: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel called for denying ICU beds to unvaccinated people.^[23]

In 2021, a Facebook whistleblower revealed that Facebook censors vaccine-related content based on a secret “vaccine hesitancy” algorithm, which determines whether and to what extent the content (even if completely accurate) could induce vaccine hesitancy in viewers.^{^[24]}

Dr. Malone believes that British intelligence assets have been involved in smearing medical professionals like him who question the dominant COVID-19 narrative on Wikipedia, and that the “five eyes” spy alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and U.S.) has been exploited during the COVID-19 crisis to enable reciprocal domestic propaganda activities by participant states against the citizens of other member states that otherwise forbid their intelligence agencies from domestic propaganda activities.^{^[25]}

The coordinated propaganda effort and repressive political climate is reminiscent of the World War I era when the Wilson administration set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to sell U.S. military intervention in Europe at a time when anti-war dissenters were being spied upon, demonized and jailed.^{^[26]}

In his book, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, Dr. Malone emphasizes how the “cancel culture” encourages censorship as does the prevalence of tribal tendencies and a cognitive dissonance where people have trouble accepting viewpoints that differ from their entrenched beliefs and reject those willing to speak out against inconvenient truths.

These trends, are behind what amounts to a modern-day witch-hunt that threatens to stifle the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge and has given a criminal elite free reign to carry out nefarious social experiments that have altered human life as we know it.

Science for Hire

Dr. Malone and Michel Chossudovsky’s analysis is reinforced in a new documentary, Science for Hire, produced by WBAI radio host Gary Null, which exposes the corruption of America’s scientific elite.

Null concurs with Huff’s assessment that, in supporting Gain-of-Function research, Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were “fooling with mother nature;” creating super-viruses so that pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer could emerge as heroes for developing vaccines that made them billions of dollars in profits.

COVID-19, however, was more like a seasonal flu so hospital administrators had to manipulate data to give the impression of a mass pandemic that required everyone to be vaccinated. Hospice patients with terminal illnesses like end-stage renal failure and congestive heart failure were put on the COVID death list to pad the numbers.^[27]

COVID-19 patients at the same time were sent home without treatment because of the reliance on vaccines that yielded unreported adverse health effects, such as a rise in myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, and heart attacks among healthy young people.

According to Null, Dr. Fauci was following the playbook of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in the 1980s where a fear campaign he presided over was followed up by the introduction of untested drugs such as AZT that wound up killing tens of thousands of gay men.

cientists who challenged the dominant paradigm were deprived of NIH funding that Fauci controlled, and marginalized with the advent of a “Medical McCarthyism” reflective of the societal slide toward corporate autocracy.

The only way to overcome the latter is to build a worldwide movement against Corona tyranny that outlaws Gain-of-Function research and would restore the integrity of science and real democracy through a socialist transformation.

Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022), 190. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 191. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 137. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 177; Fred Guterl, “Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab With U.S. Dollars For Risky Coronovirus Research,” Newsweek, April 28, 2020. By identifying unknown viruses before they spilled into humans, or “finding them before they find us,” Shi Zhengli claimed that “researchers could hope to find an early-warning system. Columbia professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison point out that “the precise nature of the experiments that were conducted [in Wuhan], including the full array of viruses collected from the field and the subsequent sequencing and manipulation of those viruses, remains unknown.” Sharon Lerner, “Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of COVID-19,” The Intercept, May 19, 2022.
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 94. Dr. Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers quoted as an expert in a Newsweek article on the topic, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of Gain-of-Function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab. Dr. Fauci, however, has expressed belief that “determining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” and that “decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 95, 178, 179; Christina Lin, “Why U.S. Outsourced Bat Virus Research to Wuhan,” April 22, 2020. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 178, 185. Gene therapy is a technique where doctors alter someone’s genes to help treat them for a disease. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 182, 185. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. Huff believes that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in irregular financial transactions regarding U.S. government grants, specifically time-card fraud. He observed what appeared to be double dipping on contracts, or material support, between government organizations and private donors (e.g., Skoll Foundation, Google Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Welcome Trust). ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 142. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 187. ↑
On the latter case, see Dr. Robert Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (New York: Skyhorse, 2022), ch. 3. Nass is a former contributor to CovertAction Information Bulletin [predecessor to CovertAction Magazine] who documented the Southern Rhodesian government’s use of biological warfare against the Black population in modern Zimbabwe during its liberation war. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 116. ↑
See also Ed Dowd, with foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. “Cause Unknown:” The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 (New York: Skyhorse, 2023), which points out that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, coinciding with a period of mass vaccination, death in people of working age (18–64) was 40 percent higher than it was before the pandemic, with the majority of deaths not attributed to COVID. ↑
Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 152. See also Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 70. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 117. The drug has been made available to poor people around the globe for pennies per dose. ↑
See also Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, which presents similar data, including a study which found that, even among hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were 90 years or older, nearly 90% survived. Most COVID deaths were of the very elderly—in Canada, the total was around 70%. In Italy, 100 percent of COVID deaths had another fatal condition whereas in South Korea as many as 99 percent of active COVID-19 cases in the general population did not require any medical treatment. A study of 3,300 inmates in U.S. state prisons found that 96% who tested positive for COVID-19 had no symptoms. See also Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal, foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. (White River Junction Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021), 56 which emphasizes that many alleged COVID deaths died actually from medical errors, including in parts of New York that were designated as being at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. ↑
Dr. Yeadon initially raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause fertility issues in young women. ↑
The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations have long and deep connections to the CIA. ↑
The plan is for the jobless to be placed on a universal basic income. Some have suggested that another goal is depopulation because of concern about overpopulation and a belief in an extreme Social Darwinian philosophy (“survival of the fittest”) and eugenics by Gates and others. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 42. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 113. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 170. Facebook openly states that it blocks content “which public health experts have advised us could lead to COVID-19 vaccine rejection.” ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 279. ↑
Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 53. ↑
In 2020, CDC director Robert Redfield admitted that hospital incentives likely elevated hospitalization rates and death toll statistics around the U.S. In Mercola and Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19, 57. ↑

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