Category Archives: State Crime

The American Kleptocracy: A Government of Liars, Thieves and Lawbreakers

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H. L. Mencken

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Think about it.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

For instance, the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.

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

This certainly isn’t a constitutional republic, however.

Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the government’s law enforcement agency—also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.

The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. 

In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.

Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

Make Sure You Download the Latest Ministry of Propaganda Updates

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It’s time once again to check for Ministry of Propaganda updates, which like Windows and iOS is constantly being updated to counter new threats and enhance the user experience (heh).

Much like the other operating systems that underpin our daily lives, the core functions of the MoP don’t change much. My chart from 2007 remains an instructive summary of MoP operations, with the only changes being Mr. Buffett is now buying oil companies and social media corporations are now major media players.

The core mission of the Ministry of Propaganda isn’t just to push a desirable narrative–it’s to mystify the underlying dynamics of a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many by promoting a self-serving worldview (weltanschauung) that explains how the world works in a way that protects the interests of those in power.

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick explains in the quote below, the MoP narrative isn’t just a cloak thrown over the underlying dynamics, it’s the creation of an entire universe / worldview, including contexts for understanding what’s going on, establishing what’s valuable and what isn’t, and what behaviors enhance status and which ones marginalize us.

The Ministry of Propaganda isn’t monolithic: various factions compete to push their self-serving narratives. As Dick noted, this includes governments, corporations, religious and political groups, each of which understands that once the populace accepts their worldview, their power is cemented in realms far above mere force.

A key mechanism in establishing a dominant worldview is the think-tank or equivalent self-serving body claiming authority over what’s true / false and important / unimportant. This can be authority over the “correct” interpretation of spiritual texts, economic policies, healthcare “standards of care,” geopolitical goals, etc.

Since humans are innately social, status-striving beings, hierarchies of authority and power are the air we breathe. Those who establish themselves as authorities don’t just gain power, they cement their power on the basis of their authority rather than on loyalty or competence.

The enormous powers of social media and traditional media to promote claims of authority have generated a deranging snarl of conflicting agendas and narratives. Various centers of power collaborate on pushing worldviews that benefit their interests, but this isn’t entirely coherent. The one thing all participants in the Ministry of Propaganda agree on is our power is deserved and must be defended against all threats, which includes hostile entities inside and outside the national borders.

This fragmented, constantly shifting cacophony of competing authorities is destabilizing. As the tectonic plates of worldviews collide, the edges crumble and people naturally seek the safety of some core set of beliefs, in effect “circling the wagons” in an attempt to restore some internal stability.

We see this in the intense political polarization of this era (see chart below). To make sense of the competing claims of authority, we reduce the perimeter of what’s defendable, putting more of the world into “outside enemies” (them) and reserving the “safe, trusted place” for fewer of “us.”

With so many competing factions in the Ministry of Propaganda, there’s a proliferation of propaganda such that there is literally nothing left but PR. In a universe constructed of nothing but agit-prop and PR, we all have our favorites examples. James Bond picks up his Nokia phone. Even though nobody’s seen a Nokia phone in ages, if you want to be cool like Bond, go buy a Nokia phone.

Marketing is the MoP’s entire universe. Everybody’s selling something to gain or maintain power, status, mindshare or the ultimate prize, the dominant worldview.

To ease the confusion, please download the latest updates from the Ministry. These updates replace all that misinformation, misdirection, and blatant marketing with the, ahem, facts, or the correct interpretation of the facts. (We had to destroy the village in order to save it. OK, got it.)

While it’s fun to sort all the propaganda into various boxes, we would do well to look for what all the marketers / MoP players seek to mystify. In my analysis, what must be mystified at all costs boils down to the unsustainability of 1) the current consumption of resources, 2) the current method of creating capital so the few can buy up the planet’s most valuable assets, 3) neocolonialism, the modern replacement for the old model of occupation and exploitation by force, and 4) neofeudalism, the economic / social /political arrangement in which the majority of the populace are modern-day serfs with extremely limited agency and power which they are told is limitless.

“You can be anything you choose to be!” Or at least your digital avatar can do so, and that’s practically as good as actually having agency and power in the real world. Or so we’re told, mindlessly, endlessly without pause or respite.

More on these topics in the coming weeks.

Ukraine: Somewhere between Afghanization and Syrianization

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Ukraine is finished as a nation – neither side will rest in this war. The only question is whether it will be an Afghan or Syrian style finale.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Cradle

One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul – and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass – there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the ‘Afghanization’ of Ukraine.

With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine’s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.

Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the “tasks” of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads all the way to Odessa.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow’s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a ‘Syrianization’ process.

Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle – contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.

Let’s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib – and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory – are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.

The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they’re in Ukrainian territory – with plenty of success – is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.

Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.

So the battle will go on, destroying what’s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what’s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure.

What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.

Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds, the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism – conducted by Bandera worshippers – will continue to be the new normal in the capital.

The Kazakh double game

By now it’s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It’s certainly part of a War of Economic Corridors – as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia’s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).

Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.

The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it’s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That’s still far from “task” fulfillment – and it’s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.

It’s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.

The Telegram channel Rybar (with over 640k followers) and hacker group Beregini revealed in an investigation that Kazakhstan was selling weapons to Ukraine, which translates as de facto treason against their own Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Consider too that Kazakhstan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the EAEU, the two hubs of the Eurasian-led multipolar order.

As a consequence of the scandal, Kazakhstan was forced to officially announce the suspension of all weapons exports until the end of 2023.

It began with hackers unveiling how Technoexport – a Kazakh company – was selling armed personnel carriers, anti-tank systems and munitions to Kiev via Jordanian intermediaries, under the orders of the United Kingdom. The deal itself was supervised by the British military attaché in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital.

Nur-Sultan predictably tried to dismiss the allegations, arguing that Technoexport had not asked for export licenses. That was essentially false: the Rybar team discovered that Technoexport instead used Blue Water Supplies, a Jordanian firm, for those. And the story gets even juicier. All the contract documents ended up being found in the computers of Ukrainian intel.

Moreover, the hackers found out about another deal involving Kazspetsexport, via a Bulgarian buyer, for the sale of Kazakh Su-27s, airplane turbines and Mi-24 helicopters. These would have been delivered to the US, but their final destination was Ukraine.

The icing on this Central Asian cake is that Kazakhstan also sells significant amounts of Russian – not Kazakh – oil to Kiev.

So it seems that Nur-Sultan, perhaps unofficially, somehow contributes to the ‘Afghanization’ in the war in Ukraine. No diplomatic leaks confirm it, of course, but bets can be made Putin had a few things to say about that to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in their recent – cordial – meeting.

The Sultan’s balancing act

Turkey is a way more complex case. Ankara is not a member of the SCO, the CSTO or the EAEU. It is still hedging its bets, calculating on which terms it will join the high-speed rail of Eurasian integration. And yet, via several schemes, Ankara allows Moscow to evade the avalanche of western sanctions and embargoes.

Turkish businesses – literally all of them with close connections to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) – are making a killing, and relishing their new role as crossroads warehouse between Russia and the west. It’s an open boast in Istanbul that what Russia cannot buy from Germany or France they buy “from us.” And in fact several EU companies are in on it.

Ankara’s balancing act is as sweet as a good baklava. It gathers    economic support from a very important partner right in the middle of the endless, very serious Turkish economic debacle. They agree on nearly everything: Russian gas, S-400 missile systems, the building of the Russian nuclear power plant, tourism – Istanbul is crammed with Russians – Turkish fruits and vegetables.

Ankara-Moscow employ sound textbook geopolitics. They play it openly, in full transparence. That does not mean they are allies. It’s just pragmatic business between states. For instance, an economic response may alleviate a geopolitical problem, and vice-versa.

Obviously the collective west has completely forgotten how that normal state-to-state behavior works. It’s pathetic. Turkey gets “denounced” by the west as traitorous – as much as China.

Of course Erdogan also needs to play to the galleries, so every once in a while he says that Crimea should be retaken by Kiev. After all, his companies also do business with Ukraine – Bayraktar drones and otherwise.

And then there’s proselytizing: Crimea remains theoretically ripe for Turkish influence, where Ankara may exploit the notions of pan-Islamism and mostly pan-Turkism, capitalizing on the historical relations between the peninsula and the Ottoman Empire.

Is Moscow worried? Not really. As for those Bayraktar TB2s sold to Kiev, they will continue to be relentlessly reduced to ashes. Nothing personal. Just business.

Europe Commits Suicide-By-Sanctions

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Relentless Ukraine reporting helps conceal other conflicts

By Ron Paul

Source: Eurasia Review

A Swiss billboard is making the rounds on social media depicting a young woman on the telephone. The caption reads, “Does the neighbor heat the apartment to over 19 degrees (66F)? Please inform us.” While the Swiss government has dismissed the poster as a fake, the penalties Swiss citizens face for daring to warm their homes are very real. According to the Swiss newspaper Blick, those who violate the 66 degree heating limit could face as many as three years in prison!

Prison time for heating your home? In the “free” world? How is it possible in 2022, when Switzerland and the rest of the political west have achieved the greatest economic success in history, that the European continent faces a winter like something out of the dark ages?

Sanctions.

While long promoted – often by those opposed to war – as a less destructive alternative to war, sanctions are in reality acts of war. And as we know with interventionism and war, the result is often unintended consequences and even blowback.

European sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year will likely go down in history as a prime example of how sanctions can result in unintended consequences. While seeking to punish Russia by cutting off gas and oil imports, European Union politicians forgot that Europe is completely dependent on Russian energy supplies and that the only people to suffer if those imports are shut down are the Europeans themselves.

The Russians simply pivoted to the south and east and found plenty of new buyers in China, India, and elsewhere. In fact, Russia’s state-run Gazprom energy company has reported that its profits have increased by 100 percent in the first half of this year.

Russia is getting rich while Europeans are facing a freezing winter and economic collapse. All because of the false belief that sanctions are a cost-free way to force other countries to do what you want them to do.

What happens when the people see dumb government policies making energy bills skyrocket as the economy grounds to a halt? They become desperate and take to the streets in protest.

This weekend thousands of Austrians took to the streets in a “Freedom Rally” to demand an end to sanctions and the opening of Nord Stream II, the gas pipeline on the verge of opening earlier this year. Last week an estimated 100,000 Czechs took to the streets of Prague to protest NATO and EU policy. In France, the “Yellow Vests” are back in the streets protesting the destruction of their economy in the name of “defeating” Russia in Ukraine. In Germany, Serbia, and elsewhere, protests are gearing up.

Even the Washington Post was forced to admit that sanctions on Russia are not having the intended effect. In an article yesterday, the paper worries that sanctions are inflicting “collateral damage in Russia and beyond, potentially even hurting the very countries that impose them. Some even worried that the sanctions intended to deter and weaken Putin could end up emboldening and strengthening him.”

This is all predictable. Sanctions kill. Sometimes they kill innocents in the country targeted for destruction and sometimes they kill innocents in the country imposing them. The solution, as always, is non-intervention. No sanctions, no “color revolutions,” no meddling. It’s really that simple.

CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen’s Evolved Position on Masking Children

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Dr. Leana Wen was a vocal proponent of lockdowns, including mandatory masking of children in schools. Now she advocates choice. What happened?

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyHammond.com

Among the more notorious advocates of authoritarian lockdown measures during the COVID‑19 pandemic has been Dr. Leana Wen, a medical doctor, former Baltimore health commissioner, contributing writer for the Washington Post, and CNN medical analyst.

She gained notoriety for explicitly advocating social punishment of unvaccinated people as a means of coercing them into getting vaccinated, even if they chose to remain unvaccinated because they had already acquired superior natural immunity. She based her position at the time on the false claim that the fCOVID‑19 vaccines would stop transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes the disease.

I discussed this in my article “The Official Ignorance of Natural Immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2”, which was the second installment of my multi-part series exposing how the “public health” and mainstream media establishments were systematically deceiving the public about natural immunity versus the effectiveness of vaccines to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.

In that article, I documented how on March 12, 2021, Leana Wen declared on CNN that, for people who hadn’t been persuaded yet to accept vaccination, “we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life.”

Dr. Wen expressed deep concern that, with states already having begun to drop lockdown measures and open society up, “the window to do that”—meaning to coerce people into getting vaccinated—“is really narrowing”. As she elucidated (emphasis added):

We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all the freedoms that you have.” Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.

You can watch her advocate the systematic violation of individuals’ right to informed consent in the video embedded in this tweet of hers:

The premise of her argument that people should be coerced into getting vaccinated was the falsehood that the vaccines would prevent transmission. This misinformation was also propagated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As I also document in that article, the message that the vaccines would prevent transmission was implicitly communicated to the public with the CDC’s declaration on March 8, 2021, that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear a mask or maintain social distancing in public or in private gatherings.

The message that natural immunity offered no protection against infection and transmission was also implicitly communicated by the CDC’s refusal to inform people who had already recovered from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection that they had acquired immunity and therefore were at far lower risk of becoming infected and transmitting the virus.

A New York Times headline celebrated the discrimination against unvaccinated people, including the naturally immune, with the headline “Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin”! The article quoted CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky telling the public that “a growing body of evidence” told us that fully vaccinated people could resume normal activities “at low risk to themselves”, saying nothing about people who’d already recovered from infection being able to do so.

Dr. Wen’s comment on March 12 advocating coerced vaccination was part of a criticism of the CDC’s policy update telling fully vaccinated people they no longer had to wear masks. Her concern was that unvaccinated people—including the naturally immune—would just act like they were vaccinated to be able to participate normally in society.

The CDC expanded its discrimination against other unvaccinated people on May 13, telling the public that once you’ve been fully vaccinated, “you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.” The message to unvaccinated people with natural immunity, by contrast, was to “find a vaccine.”

In a Twitter post announcing the updated policy guidance, Walensky stated, “If you are fully vaccinated against #COVID19, you can now start doing things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. You can participate in indoor and outdoor activities – large or small – without wearing a mask or physically distancing.”

President Joseph R. Biden also took to Twitter to threaten, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.” That order went for naturally immune people, too.

Neither the CDC nor Biden were extreme enough in their efforts to systematically violate the right of individuals to informed consent with policy measures to coerce people into getting vaccinated, in Dr. Wen’s view.

The extremity of Leana Wen’s authoritarian position extended to her views on the masking of children.

On Twitter on May 28, 2021, Wen advocated mandatory masking of unvaccinated children—including those with natural immunity—at summer camp.

The same day, she criticized the governor of Georgia for prohibiting schools from making mask use mandatory for children.

On June 14, she made a display of her son Eli “practicing his mask-wearing” at home in anticipation of his first day of summer camp. (Note in the photo that the mask is not properly fitted, leaving large gaps at the side.)

On July 9, she praised the CDC for recommending mandatory masking of unvaccinated children. “I am really glad that they have said that masks are going to be required for unvaccinated children over the age of two”, she said, describing mandatory masking as “essential”.

But then, within four months since telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask, the CDC’s own data established that outbreaks could occur among fully vaccinated people. By the end of July 2021, it was already apparent that the emerging data were falsifying the repeatedly communicated message from the entire “public health” establishment that the vaccines would provide durable protection against infection and transmission.

That month, CDC researchers learned of a large outbreak in Massachusetts in which 74 percent of COVID‑19 cases were in fully vaccinated people. Furthermore, they observed that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as with the unvaccinated, implying equal contagiousness.

This finding prompted to CDC at the end of July to flip-flop and return to advising fully vaccinated people to start masking up once again.

Leana Wen took to the media to criticize the CDC again, this time for conveying what she felt was a confusing message by reversing its guidance. In a Washington Post article on July 29, Wen acknowledged the CDC’s “research showing that vaccinated people who become infected with the delta variant carry a similar amount of virus to those who are unvaccinated and infected”, which “suggests that vaccinated people could be carriers and therefore capable of spreading the coronavirus to family members”.

Her concern nevertheless remained “that the unvaccinated could be a danger” to her and her family. By her dizzying reasoning, it was only because of “unvaccinated” people that she, a fully vaccinated person, “could contract the coronavirus and bring it back to my vulnerable family members.”

On Twitter, she summarized her criticism by describing the CDC’s reversal as “confusing” and “muddled”, curiously arguing despite her acknowledgment of the data showing that fully vaccinated people were spreading the virus that indoor mask mandates were needed “not because the vaccinated are suddenly a problem, but because we don’t trust the unvaccinated to voluntarily do the right thing.”

She did not explain how it could logically be the case that only unvaccinated people posed that risk to her given that vaccination did not work to stop transmission.

While acknowledgment of cellular immunity, as distinct from the humoral immunity provided by antibodies, had been practically nonexistent in the public messaging of the “public health” establishment until then, suddenly, in August 2021, the CDC and other “authorities” appeared to discover that, even if someone’s antibody levels waned and failed to protect them against infection, they would still be protected against severe disease and death due to cellular immune responses!

Curiously, that never crossed their mind when the public message was that natural immunity must be weak and short-lived since antibodies were observed to rapidly wane from peak levels seen post-infection.

It also never crossed their minds to inform the public that this rapid decline is normal and expected after recovery from acute infection. As I cover in great detail in my series on the superiority of natural immunity, the claims of short-lived natural immunity, propagated by the CDC and others, were falsified by studies demonstrating natural immunity to be robust, broad, and durable, with the induction of immunological memory capable of rapidly churning out antibodies as necessary in the event of reexposure.

The public messaging shifted from telling everyone to get vaccinated as a selfless social duty to protect others by preventing the spread of the virus to telling everyone get vaccinated to protect themselves against severe disease.

On CNN on August, 2021, Walensky reassured that the data continued to indicate that being fully vaccinated was protective against severe illness and death from the then-predominant Delta variant of SARS‑CoV‑2. “But what they can’t do anymore”, Walensky said, “is prevent transmission.”

That was disingenuous. By saying “anymore”, she was implying that the loss of sterilizing immunity, meaning protection against infection and transmission (as distinct from protection against disease), was a function of the newly predominant Delta variant, but it was primarily a function of the vaccine and their inability to induce durable sterilizing immunity regardless of the variant.

Meanwhile, on major social media platforms, it remained prohibited to tell the truth. For example, Google continued its policy whereby YouTube videos saying that “that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19” were subject to deletion and the users to deplatforming. (YouTube quietly dropped this and other prohibitions of truth-telling earlier this year.)

Leana Wen continued her advocacy of masking of children.

On August 10, she quoted a New York Times article saying, “If we send children to school without masks, we increased their risk of acquiring #covid19. Some could suffer illness or die. If we close schools, millions of children will suffer learning loss….” Her comment was, “Hence the solution: Keep schools open, with masking.”

Six days later, she argued in favor of masking children in “all schools in this country”. On August 16, she argued on Twitter that “Masking in schools reduces #covid19 transmission” and suggested that parents whose children go to schools that “do not require masking” should organize to make mask-wearing “the norm”.

On August 21, expressing agreement with a comment by former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, she said that it was “Exactly right” to equate being “anti-mask”—a euphemism inclusive of anyone opposed to mandatory masking of children—with being “anti-science” and “basically pro-virus and anti-child.”

Fast forward to March 2020. By this time, Leana Wen had surrendered to the reality that the vaccines do not prevent transmission and that people needed to start getting back to living their lives normally anyway. On March 22, she said on Twitter, “For those who don’t agree that the vaccinated can return to pre-pandemic normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual masking? Forever not dining out, avoiding large weddings & indoor gatherings, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.”

Now, recall that the CDC had been recommending that people wear cloth or surgical facemasks to protect themselves and others. The CDC had specifically told people not to wear an N95 mask in order to preserve them for health care workers. The CDC only stopped recommending the use of cloth masks in favor of surgical or N95 masks in January 2022.

Leana Wen bluntly alluded to the rationale for this change in a tweet on March 23, stating that “simple cloth masks are little more than facial decorations” and “have no place against extremely contagious variants”. People should “ideally” opt for an N95, instead, she suggested.

This was not because “the science” on masks had “changed”. It was what many people were saying from the start. It was what many people on social media were banned for saying, just as many were banned for pointing out that the claims by “public health” officials that the vaccines would provide durable protection and stop transmission were unsupported by scientific evidence. To oppose the CDC’s recommendation for children in school to wear a cloth mask was “anti-science”, “pro-virus”, and “anti-child”, Wen had previously suggested.

Now she was admitting that simple cloth masks do practically nothing to protect the wearer or stop the wearer from spreading the virus to others. Her evolving position on mask use didn’t stop there. She also came around to acknowledging another truth that opponents of the policies she advocated were banned from saying on social media: that forcing children to wear masks can harm them.

On August 23, the Washington Post published an article by Wen under the headline: “I’m a doctor. Here’s why my kids won’t wear masks this school year.”

She stated, “It became clear that the goal I’d hoped for—containment of covid‑19—was not reachable. This coronavirus is here to stay.” Her “benefit-risk calculus” for her own children had changed. “I was willing to limit my children’s activities for a year or two but not for their entire childhood.”

That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated. It was the central message of The Great Barrington Declaration, whose scientifically credentialed authors experienced censorship for speaking out against the authoritarian lockdowns.

Wen listed a number of ostensible rationalizations for her change of view on the masking of her own children. It was the Omicron variant now, which was more contagious and caused milder illness. Most people, including most children, had already been infected with the coronavirus. Her children were now fully vaccinated.

She continued:

Now that they are full vaccinated, we do not plan to limit their activities, and—like most parents in their school—will not be masking them in the classroom.

I accept the risk that my kids will probably contract covid‑19 this school year, just as they could contract the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other contagious diseases.

Then she disclosed another reason why she would no longer be forcing her own kids to wear a mask:

Masking has harmed our son’s language development, and limiting both kids’ extracurriculars and social interactions would negatively affect their childhood and hinder my and my husband’s ability to work.

While she had previously dismissed anyone who opposed the policies she advocated as not just “anti-mask” but “anti-science” and “anti-child”, she added: “To be clear, my family’s decision not to mask our kids should not be mislabeled as being antimask; we would never stigmatize other parents and caregivers for the difficult choices they must make.”

That, of course, was a bald-faced lie. She had in fact stigmatized other parents for the difficult choices they must make about what is in the best interests of their children’s health, calling them insulting names and advocating policies specifically to penalize them for making choices that were different from hers.

She closed by saying that her changed approach “reflects the evolution of the pandemic and the acknowledgment that avoiding covid-19 cannot be the singular metric of people’s overall health and well-being.”

That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated.

Yet here now we have this prominent advocate of mandatory masking of children in schools disclosing that her own child had been harmed from having to wear a mask all the time.

She disclosed additional details on Twitter. “In my case,” she shared on August 24, “I have the ‘before’ and ‘after’. After my son’s school went mask optional, there was a profound change in speech and social development after he (& nearly all of his class, including his teacher) took off masks.”

(Note that she observed this in reply to a comment criticizing that personal anecdotes do not establish causation, with the specific example cited of the belief of many parents that vaccination is what caused their child’s autism. Wen’s appropriate point about gaslighting equally applies to parents of autistic children who likewise saw the “before” and “after”.)

She added, “Yes, this is anecdote. But it feels like gaslighting when others are telling parents that we don’t know what’s causing problems for our kids, when we have seen it for ourselves. Recognizing that masks COULD have harm for SOME is all that a lot of parents are asking for.”

(Following up on the point about autism, note that then CDC Director Julie Gerberding admitted on CNN in 2008 that vaccination can cause encephalopathy manifesting as symptoms of autism. She was referring to the case of a girl named Hannah Poling, who had been developing normally but regressed into diagnosed autism after receiving nine vaccine doses at once at nineteen months of age. The long-time director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, Dr. Frank DeStefano, acknowledged in an interview in 2018 that “it’s a possibility” that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible individuals, but that the problem is it’s “hard to predict who those children might be”, and research designed to identify underlying cofactors that place certain children at greater risk of vaccine injury is “very difficult to do”.)

The same day, former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams took to Twitter to deny that masks can harm children. “I’m saying, after 2 years and millions masked, show me the data that says it delays speech. Because I can’t find it.”

Of course, it is easy to say that evidence does not exist that forcing masks on children causes harm when policymakers forced masks on children in the absence of studies to determine the benefits versus risks.

In response to Adams, Wen retorted, “Those data don’t exist yet. Neither do data that school mask mandates (especially w/cloth masks), in a time of omicron, saves lives. That’s why where the US has landed—allowing individual choice—is sensible. Allow parents to decide what’s best for their kids, masks on or not.”

Of course, that forcing children to wear masks could harm some of them was precisely what many people she had previously dismissed as “anti-child” were saying from the start. It is among the concerns that social media companies prohibited people from expressing, citing the policy recommendations that Leana Wen advocated as the basis for their censorship.

To cite YouTube again as an example, the Google-owned video platform had long prohibited “Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects.” This is among the prohibitions that YouTube has since dropped from its community guidelines.

It is an encouraging sign that an extremist like Dr. Wen can come around to the view that risk-benefit assessments need to be individualized and mask use voluntary, and it is good to see her confronting Jerome Adams for trying to gaslight parents into disbelieving their own experiences and empirical evidence. It is just sad that her son, by her own account, became harmed by the very intervention she had so fervently argued should be forced upon school children.

An apology from Wen to other parents of children harmed by the policies she advocated has not, to my knowledge, been forthcoming. Her son has my sympathies.

THE WEST’S FALSE NARRATIVE ABOUT RUSSIA AND CHINA

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Vladimir Putin meets with Xi Jinping in Beijing just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. Photograph: SPUTNIK/Reuters

By Jeffrey Sachs

Source: New Cold War

The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.
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The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued US Dominance 

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.

We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.

The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.

Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.

Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.

Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.

Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.

The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.

US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.

It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.

In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.

Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.

It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.

Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.

Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.

Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.

This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.

Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.

This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.

The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.

Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.

Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.

The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.

Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.

It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.

This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.

The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.

The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.

Navdanya notes:

With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.

‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.

We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.

The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.

The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.

The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.

The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.

It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.

And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.

Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.

As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.

For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.

She Has an Opinion!

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Call-out the Thought Po-po

By Cindy Sheehan

Source: Cindy Sheehan Substack

Before President Orange Crush broke every liberal on the planet, it wasn’t considered so tragic to have an opinion that differed from the prevailing narrative: in fact, in some cases, differing opinions were welcomed and supported.

It’s not that I haven’t lost a lot of personal attachments since my son was killed: from former best-friends, to relatives, when I started speaking out against Bush and his wars, it just seems that some of those that rushed in to fill that void, are rushing out with the tide of corporate disinfo, and demonization, now.

I seem to recall, a time not of “good old days” because those are mostly a myth; Situationally, times can be good, or bad, depending on time, place, and/or circumstances. But I do remember times when we could disagree with someone, then lay out why we held our beliefs and resume normal relations whether agreement was reached, or not. No longer! Now, it’s “you don’t stand with Ukraine: BUZZ OFF!” Or, “you didn’t get the hokey-pokey—you’re not welcome at our event, home, or social media wall.” People have fallen for the Bush line, “you’re either with us, or against us.” This phenomenon is true, even if you agree with someone 90% of the time, if there’s that tiny 10%, you become the banned, the erased, the misleader, the pariah.

Growing up during the Vietnam War is what formed my basis for mistrusting government and media. The distrust I had for these rotting institutions was solidified after 9/11/01, where, it seemed to me, a mom in Southern California, that not one person was telling the truth. An icon like Phil Donahue was kicked of of MSNBCia for questioning the rush to war in Iraq.

My grandchildren’s generation will be formed by Covid and that angers me, as well. The always confusing, at times harmful, and mixed-messages we all received harmed our children, the most, I think. Along with the closure of their schools: the mental toll may never be able to be fully determined.

This reminds me of a time when my daughter was getting a few good friends together to meet at the local (closed) school to play kickball out in the fresh-air and sunshine. You might say these 3-4 families were in our “affinity” group. The children were running around, having fun, not hugging or spitting in each other’s mouths. The very next thing we knew, the school-district had plowed up the baseball diamond we used for this safe-recreation. The children witnessed that: sunshine, play, fresh-air, and good health were criminalized for a population that had very little risk, but paid a high-price.

As you may have surmised, by the time Covid-19 rolled around, I was hyper-critical of the prevailing narrative. My opinions were not formed by cable, or legacy media outlets like the WashedUp Post, or NY Slimes. By February 2020, I already had trusted friends, colleagues, comrades, and news sources and not one of them were corporate, or profited off of the lockdowns, or mandates.

Now, though, instead of honest debate, or democratization of information, we have the de-platform, or no-platform era. The evil nanny state has entered a new phase: one where we disobedient children cannot even be allowed to be exposed to information that is not sanitized, or scrubbed for our “protection,” This is what annoys the heck out of me. Technocrats and bureaucrats are conspiring against me to funnel me, and, us all into one big, miserable reality. I am not having any of it.

Meta (jackass) Corp (Facebook and Instagram) have scrubbed Robert Kennedy, Jr’s organization Children’s Health Defense from its platforms, and I am not okay with that, either. Even though I don’t agree 100% with everything they do, or say, I think they have important things to do, and say. In my opinion (oh dear), more people should be exposed to the information that CHD disseminates, not less.

So, since the CDC has quietly made lockdowns, masks, and mandates, disappear, finally catching up with CHD, does that mean that Meta (jackass) Corp will be taking down its pages, as well? Somehow, I doubt it.

I have never told anyone what to think, or not to think; and/or what to put in their body, or not—I always offer my own opinion and post what I am doing. People are free to do, or not do, what they want with one caveat: properly informed choices. As long as billionaires and bureaucrats prevent access to a wide variety of information, informed consent is not a possibility.

We still have a lot of work to do:

The harvest is great, the workers are few!