Why the Banking System Is Breaking Up

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Hudson

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. ↑

The World Wants to Be Deceived

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

My title comes from a 19^th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:

There are great puddles of blood on the world
where’s it all going all this spilled blood
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
funny kind of drunkography then
so wise . . . so monotonous . . .
No the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons
rain . . . snow
hail . . . fair weather
never is it drunk
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It doesn’t give a damn
The earth

But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.

I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media. And the people who believe them.

It is not easy. No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.

When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down. And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs. This is the protection racket by omission and commission.

Maybe an anecdote would help. A week ago, I ran into an old friend at a coffee shop. Hersh’s article, aspects of which I question, had just come out and I asked him if he had seen it. He said he hadn’t but didn’t know anything about such pipelines being blown up. I was stunned. A devout consumer of mainstream media, yet he somehow missed this major September 2022 event in the U.S. war against Russia that was reported widely by the media he relies upon. Those media went on to suggest that Russia blew up its own pipelines, a claim beyond ridicule but one that was part of its war propaganda narrative. My friend is a guy who has strong opinions about everything and finds NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, etc. to be credible news sources. How could he have missed one of the major stories of 2022, one that The New York Times, etc. was reporting on into December, still suggesting that Russia did the deed? How could he have missed the pipeline story whose reverberations spread through all aspects of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine when it was referenced in so many reports of gas and oil prices, a cold winter for Europe, and so many other issues? Its ramifications are manifold and have been reported as such, but he had never heard of it. I was stunned.

I wanted to quote him Dylan’s facetious words from “The Ballad of the Thin Man”: “’Cause something is happening/And you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” But I did not.

I have spent a week wondering how it is possible that he didn’t know anything about the pipeline explosions. I am sure he wasn’t lying to me. So how explain it?

In the interim, as I have been trying to comprehend these matters, the Super Bowl with its mesmeric half-time spectacle replete with crotch grabbing has come and gone, and I have read an interesting article by Ethan Strauss, a sports journalist, “Why America Needs Football. Even its Brutality” that raises important questions.

Much has been written about football’s violence and the injuries it causes, the most recent example being the near fatal injury to Damar Hamlin of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills that garnered headlines for weeks (even though why he suffered cardiac arrest has been left unanswered since that would raise the COVID vaccine problem, which is also taboo). Strauss notes the many arguments calling for the banning of football – the war game – because of its violence. He notes that it is very true that football is very violent but that this is part of its great appeal. He writes:

And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.

Today, at 6:30 p.m., eastern time, begins the biggest spectacle of them all: the Super Bowl, where we channel those ancient animal spirits into a highly commercialized event that ends with fireworks and a shiny trophy.

We should celebrate that.

He doesn’t argue for the celebration of war, which he opposes, but for the war-like game of football. To Malcolm Gladwell’s statement in support of the banning of football as “a moral abomination” – “This is a sport that is living in the past that has no connection to the realities to the game right now and no connection to American society.” – he responds quite rightly that Gladwell is wrong:

In 2022, 82 of the top 100 TV shows in America were NFL games, and the top 50 most viewed sporting events were football games or events that immediately followed football games. By contrast, in 2016, only 33 of the top 50 were football-related. The country has lost interest in so much else, but football remains a huge draw and, in fact, is gaining relative market share.

Americans love violence, not just the military propaganda that precedes the Super Bowl game, but the smashing hits that players make and take in the games. It is hard to deny. Strauss goes on to show how over ninety percent of former NFL players who suffer from daily lifelong pain say they would do it again. The violence is intoxicating and Americans get drunk on it. It is the American Way.

I don’t agree with all of Strauss’s points or assumptions, especially his imperative that “we have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage,” but he clearly is right that despite all the rhetoric about how terrible violence is, there is something about it that Americans love. D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. But essentially it is one massive deception.

There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe. This is so even as the propagandists’ trial balloons are popped in the society of the comedic spectacle.

But back to my friend I mentioned earlier. He hates violence in all its forms, is strongly opposed to war, and has a most compassionate heart, yet he remains devoted to the media that have lied us – and continue to do so – into war after war, a media that clearly fronts for the warfare state. I still can’t explain how he knew nothing about the pipeline explosions. Nor can I explain his allegiance to the media that lie to him daily.

Even as his government, led by that very media, leads the world toward nuclear annihilation, he remains true to his media informants.

I am stunned.

In the Blood

Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth
I grew to adulthood half-crazed
With fear and numbed wonder.

I always wished to believe otherwise,
That people were good at heart,
Wanted to live in mutual peace
And tend the green earth as if
It were a garden
As if pity vivified all living things.

Somehow the blood that was in me
Said otherwise,
Spoke truth to the power
Of my wish,
While everywhere around me lay the lie.

But my blood, this blood that became me
While millions were being butchered
And Bing Crosby crooned I’m dreaming
Of a white Christmas,
This red blood said otherwise.

Do not accept the way they say
“Good Morning”
And the way they nod as they pass,
As though they didn’t want to kill
Each other.

Do not believe their eyes
And the way they pray to the skies
To save them.
Do not believe their beliefs,
All lies woven to deceive.
For at heart they truly hate
The green earth.

Do not believe the way they say
“Good Evening”
For they wish the darkest night
To descend upon us,
The nothingness of their knowledge
To swallow all.

That is what will release them,
That is all.

Thus my blood spoke to me,
A child of a sanguine century,
Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth.

And despite all appearances,
I have never believed them.
Never. Not at all.

In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Reid Mukai

One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US officials find a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the New York Times.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.

“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)

When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”

It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.

Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.

By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “that there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.

In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.

Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.

As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”

With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.

The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.

As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.

Scholz's visit underscored that US media is state media. No joint presser, for obvious reasons: they can't risk a question from a German reporter about Sy Hersh's Nord Stream scoop.

Everyone here got the memo: no US outlet covering Scholz's visit even mentioned Hersh's story. pic.twitter.com/9xeBJMtc38
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 6, 2023

US media outlets got the memo: in a sit-down interview with Scholz, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did not find the time to mention Hersh’s reporting. In covering the German Chancellor’s visit, US media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar vow of silence.

Not one question from Fareed Zakaria about Nord Stream as German Cuckmeister Olaf Scholz rambles on about his country's supposed energy independence

Fareed intervenes only to push Scholz to commit more money to Ukraine's military – and therefore less to German social welfare pic.twitter.com/GQJxK27pis
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 6, 2023

Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.

Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.

Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.

In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.

In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.

In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).

That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.

The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.

The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.

Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

The Hunter Biden / Ihor Kolomoïsky affair

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

The Biden Administration is finally reacting to the scandals that have arisen from the computer of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This loser, whose only known activities are those of a junkie and a pimp, managed to become the director of a large gas company; a job he knows nothing about. A man of straw, he signed all sorts of big contracts, in different countries, where he travelled -without right- in official US planes. His father is now launching an operation to cover up his affairs, which has led him to clean up the Ukrainian government.

As time goes on, American voters are turning away from President Joe Biden. Many of those who say they voted for him tell pollsters they regret it. Some say that if they had known about the Hunter Biden affair beforehand, they would never have trusted his father as president.

During the presidential election campaign, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission because the social networks Twitter and Facebook censored thousands of accounts that relayed the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s computer [1]. The seizure was dismissed, but the Twitter Files, revealed by Elon Musk, attest in detail that the FBI and an intelligence agency (probably the CIA) had intervened with Twitter and Facebook to censor this information.

I was astonished that in the United States, the son of a vice-president, then president, could travel in official planes to the four corners of the world, giving the impression of being an official personality when he was only a junkie [2]. This abuse was, in my opinion, a sign of the decadence of the US Empire.

However, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives intends to carry out various investigations, notably on Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s dirty dealings. If these investigations were to succeed, they could call into question the independence of the President of the United States and therefore lead to his impeachment.

It should be remembered that when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, 7 million dollars in bribes were paid to the Attorney General of Ukraine to keep his nose out of Burisma’s affairs. Later, this same prosecutor, who had become too greedy, was ousted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) under pressure from the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, which wanted to save the owner of Burisma and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko at a lower price.

In a puritanical country like the United States, public opinion first focused on Hunter Biden’s frequent use of prostitutes and his drug use before it became clear that his financial affairs were much more important.

Now the Hunter Biden affair, which had been covered up by very senior members of the intelligence community, for whom the whole saga was “Russian disinformation” [3], is likely to turn the tables. It is no longer appropriate to deny the facts, so much so that Harvard University has just announced that it is closing its Technology and Social Change Project, a structure that had been constantly assimilating the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Fake news [4].

Until now, the citizens who cared about this affair were only “conspiracy theorists”, “extreme right-wing” followers of President Trump and readers of the gutter press. On the contrary, almost the entire ruling class had “discerned” that it was just a popular rumor, Fake News. On the one hand, there were the readers of the New York Post, which had revealed the affair [5], on the other hand, those of the New York Times, which kept on denying it.

Among the many financial affairs of the president’s son, two stand out. The first concerns a Chinese spy. It could reveal influence peddling in the service of a foreign power. While the second concerns his activities in Ukraine and particularly his appointment and that of his friend Devon Archer (former roommate of Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son-in-law, during their university period) to the board of directors of the oil company Burisma. This is the group that President Vladimir Putin denounced as “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” [6] when he called on his armies to end the civil war in Ukraine under UN Security Council Resolution 2202.

This week two seemingly unrelated events have shaken things up. They were probably imagined by or with David Brock, the undisputed agitprop specialist on whom President Biden relied in 2016 against President Trump. Ill, he had disappeared, he is now back [7]

Hunter Biden has hired one of the most famous American lawyers, Abbe Lowell. He has requested a criminal investigation and sent letters to all the people who played a role in the disclosure of the contents of his client’s laptop, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He accused them of violating the privacy of his client, urged them to retract the conclusions they drew from the contents of the computer, and thus bury the case. At the same time, a delegation from the Departments of Defense and State, as well as USAID, went to Ukraine to advise the Zelensky government to clean up some of the mess [8]. Officially, it was only to ensure that the money offered at the expense of the US taxpayers was not misappropriated by corrupt officials. Unofficially, it was only a matter of eliminating the annoying pawns without touching the others. In two days, fourteen personalities resigned in a chain. Five regional governors (Valentin Reznichenko (Dnipropetrovsk), Oleksander Starukh (Zaporizhia), Dmytro Zhivytsky Surya), Yaroslav Yanshayevich (Kherson) and Oleksiy Kulba (Kiev)), four deputy ministers (including Viacheslav Shapovalov (Defense) and Vasyl Lozynsky (Infrastructure)) and two heads of a government agency left their posts, in addition to the deputy head of the presidential administration (Kyrylo Tymoshenko) and the deputy prosecutor general (Oleksiy Symonenko).

The Western media reported faithfully on this major sweep. But the most important thing happened on the 3rd day and very few people talked about it. SBU troops searched the home of oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, sponsor of both President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “integral nationalists”, but above all owner of… Burisma Holding, which he had bought from Mykola Zlochevskyi, in 2011, i.e. before Hunter Biden entered it. Of course the Anticorruption Action Center’s article on this change of ownership has long since been removed from its site [9].

Technically, Ihor Kolomoysky is not being prosecuted for the assassinations he ordered, but for rigging a gas lot auction involving two deputy energy ministers for nearly a million dollars.

Arresting mafia boss Ihor Kolomoysky removes the traces of many problems. He is the key witness to link President Volodymyr Zelensky with the “integral nationalists”, i.e. between a defender of democracy and anti-democrats, and between a Jewish personality and mass murderers of Jews. For the “President’s Men”, Kolomoysky is the main Ukrainian personality who can be held accountable for the corruption of Hunter Biden and, eventually, Joe Biden.

It will be remembered that in 2019 the US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry reportedly informed Rudy Giuliani about President Zelensky’s confidences during his inauguration ceremony about Hunter Biden [10]. President Donald Trump then asked the Ukrainians for information about their investigations. But the affair was leaked, President Trump was accused of acting out of revenge, and a new impeachment procedure was launched against him.

The Hunter Biden affair has many facets. One thing is to erase his role in Burisma, another is to erase his role in the activities of US military laboratories in Ukraine. These activities were carried out through Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), one of his companies that he created with Christopher Heinz, son-in-law of the special presidential envoy for the climate John Kerry, who joined him on the board of Burisma [11].

[1] «Republican National Committe Letter to the Federal Election Commission», Octobrer 16, 2020.

[2] « La décadence de l’Empire états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 6 septembre 2022.

[3] “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails”, Voltaire Network, 19 October 2020.

[4] «Harvard pulls the plug on disinformation research project led by Hunter Biden laptop skeptic», Yael Halon, Fox News, February 3, 2023. «Harvard shuts down ’misinformation’ research program and cuts ties with director who was skeptical of Hunter Biden laptop story (but claims it was for ’bureaucratic reasons’)», Will Potter, Daily Mail, February 3, 2023.

[5] “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”, Emma-Jo Morris & Gabrielle Fonrouge ; “WH press secretary locked out of Twitter for sharing Post’s Hunter Biden story” , Steven Nelson, New York Post, October 14, 2020.

[6] “A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.

[7] “David Brock, Clintons agitprop man, zeroes in to rescue the Bidens”, Voltaire Network, 2 December 2022.

[8] «Defense, State, and USAID Inspectors General Visit Kyiv», Department of Defense Office of Inspector Genral, January 31, 2023.

[9] « Kings of Ukrainian Gas », Anticorruption Action Center, 26 août 2012.

[10] “WSJ News Exclusive“, Timothy Puko & Rebecca Ballhaus, October 16, 2019, Wall Street Journal.

[11] «Hunter Biden Bio Firm Partnered With Ukrainian Researchers ‘Isolating Deadly Pathogens’ Using Funds From Obama’s Defense Department», Natalie Winters & Raheem J. Kassam, The National Pulse, March 24, 2022.

Nord Stream Sabotage Backfires With Historic Demolition of U.S. Image and Lies Over Ukraine War

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Reid Mukai

Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.

This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.

There is no disputing that the damage was deliberate sabotage. The 1,222-kilometer undersea civilian infrastructure was the biggest of its kind in the world, involving a consortium of companies from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It took more than a decade to construct at an estimated cost of over €12 billion. The enormous loss of natural gas volumes from the explosion could also be monetized in billions of euros.

State-Sponsored Terrorism

So, without even attributing specific culpability, this sabotage constitutes an egregious act of state-sponsored terrorism that violates international law on numerous counts. And yet Western media have acted like the proverbial monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

At the time of the spectacular event, many critical observers immediately suspected foul play. In our Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial of September 30, the headline stated: “Blatantly Obvious Who Gains From Nord Stream Sabotage”.

We postulated back then only days after the incident that a plausible cause was “deliberate sabotage” by the United States and its NATO allies.

“If that’s the case, then it is an act of terrorism against civilian infrastructure and a grievous blow to Russia’s national interests. It could be construed as a criminal act of war,” we wrote.

Our editorial cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s own words of warning issued at a White House press conference when he spoke on February 7, 2022. Biden appeared to stray off script and cryptically asserted to reporters that the Nord Stream would be “brought to an end” if Russia were to intervene militarily in Ukraine, as Russia did two weeks later on February 24 (as a result of deadly NATO provocations, we should add).

“His [Biden’s] cryptic assertion, over-riding European governments, suggests that a contingency plan had already been authorized to take out the Nord Stream. And, it seems, the nefarious action duly went ahead this week,” we wrote.

(We modestly take pride in the objective perspicacity of our assessment. And yet this online journal is smeared and banned by the United States and European governments as a Russian propaganda tool.)

Seymour Hersh’s investigative report published last week corroborates what many observers had suspected at an early stage. The irrefutable fact is the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by U.S. military forces. Not only that, but the Americans were aided and abetted by NATO member Norway, and quite possibly by other NATO members including Poland, Denmark and Britain.

This is an earth-shattering scandal. The repercussions are going to keep cascading and cascading. Hersh has followed up with promises of more indicting details in forthcoming articles. Other journalists are now corroborating his details about U.S. navy divers planting explosives under the cover of NATO war games in the Baltic Sea last June. Hersh claims that some of the C4 bombs did not detonate as planned. That means there could still be evidence to be found on the seabed conclusively implicating the United States.

Then there was the earlier report by Swedish divers who had inspected the site in the aftermath of the explosions. Did they try to clean up the crime scene? The Swedish authorities have refused to disclose the contents of their report. They have a case to answer, as do the Danes, the Norwegians, the Brits and most of all the Americans.

Russia has called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to convene next week on the subject, based on the latest investigative report by Seymour Hersh. China has also called for an independent international commission to study the matter.

Questions are also urgently required from the German government on what it knew about the sabotage. As our columnist Martin Jay pointed out this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in the White House on February 7 last year when Biden made his clumsy threat to take out the Nord Stream. The implication is that Scholz knew in advance of the demolition plan.

Western Media’s Damning Silence

We are talking here about multiple malfeasance and cardinal crimes. Terrorism, destruction of sovereign property, aggression and incitement of war, treason and an orchestrated media cover-up involving supposed bastions of Western journalism. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that?

Internationally renowned legal expert Professor Francis Boyle has assessed (in email correspondence with SCF) that a prosecution case can be brought against the United States over the Nord Stream incident under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a signatory to the foundational Rome Statute but the incident occurred in territory belonging to European states that are. Whether such a prosecution proceeds and whether the UN Security Council takes action later this week are moot points. But at the very least, the whole scandal is blowing up in the court of international public opinion.

Seymour Hersh (now aged 85) is to be commended for his journalistic service. We may quibble about some details in his report. Has he covered the full picture of all the actors involved? Perhaps not. His report is not a geopolitical analysis and some of his premises suggest he is not critical of the U.S. or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. These reservations are relatively minor to his main point of understanding what actually took place.

Those caveats aside, however, one can say that Hersh’s report is a blockbuster. His lifetime work is impeccable. He uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 when hundreds of men, women and children were murdered gratuitously by American troops. Hersh also exposed in 2004 the torture practices by the US military in Iraq at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Historic Impact

Hersh’s reporting in the past has had a historic impact. It mobilized public understanding and opinion about the nefarious nature of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

As many analysts and our own weekly editorials at SCF have repeatedly pointed out, the war in Ukraine is a bigger geopolitical cause than the absurd narrative put out by Western governments and news media about “defending Ukraine and Western freedom from Russia aggression”. We have consistently analyzed that the expansion of NATO, the weaponization of Ukraine, and the current conflict are all about the American imperialist ambition for hegemonic control. Destroying normal relations between Europe and Russia and most especially destruction of the strategically important energy trade are all part of the objective. Pursuing that objective has created a most dangerous war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

As eminent American commentator Jeffrey Sachs has noted, the criminal conduct of Washington regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream is totally characteristic of U.S. criminal behavior that has been practiced over many decades since World War Two. The difference now is that this criminality directly impinges on many more people’s lives – from the danger of catastrophic war to the economic misery caused by wanton American aggression.

The Hersh article – despite the Western media shamefully ignoring it thereby exposing their own criminal complicity in U.S. terrorism – has made the world more aware than ever of the rogue state that is the United States and its capitalist, imperialist dynamics.

Inciting war in Europe, antagonizing a nuclear Russia with unprecedented aggression, inflicting mass poverty and hardship on European civilians, and lying about it all the time through its propaganda media. Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked several weeks ago, the historic situation is revolutionary.

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