Tag Archives: Corporate Crime

Pfizer Hypocritically Calls Vaccine Skeptics “Criminals” While Ignoring Their Own Criminal Record

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

People who spread misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines are “criminals” and have cost “millions of lives,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a rather shocking interview on Tuesday. His comments are in line with a sentiment being pushed by the rabid mandatory vaccine crowd and sadly enough, they are being embraced by many.

Ironically enough, these comments were made to Frederick Kempe, the CEO of the Atlantic Council — you know, the NATO propaganda arm responsible for sewing wild conspiracy theories about “Russian meddling” and acting as the censorship arm for big tech — yeah, that group.

“Those people are criminals,” he told Kempe. “They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.”

During that same interview, Bourla also stated that they are “getting briefings from the CIA and FBI” — indicating just how deep their tentacles go into the federal government.

After Bourla called vaccine skeptics “criminals,” Kempe closed out the point, adding that “they should be treated like criminals as well.”

Take a second to think about what these two people just discussed. They are advocating for treating people like criminals for “spreading vaccine misinformation.” By these standards, Pfizer should turn themselves in.

As we reported last week, the British Medical Journal published an incendiary report exposing faked data, blind trial failures, poorly trained vaccinators, and a slow follow-up on adverse reactions in the phase-three trial of Pfizer’s Covid jab. Is that not misinformation? What about the CDC director stating that the vaccine is 100% effective? Or Fauci saying not to wear masks and then telling Americans to wear two masks?

Of course, none of that misinformation will ever be acknowledged by those who purvey it. In realty, the medical industrial complex, in coordination with the federal government is waging a massive campaign to control the narrative on the vaccine. Those who report being injured by the jab or who express legitimate concerns are censored into oblivion as the establishment keeps shifting goal posts with booster shots and even changing the definition of vaccination.

Misinformation is entirely subjective and as we’ve seen over the past two years, what is previously deemed misinformation and censored into the darkness, often turns out to be true down the road. Making posts skeptical of the vaccine online could easily be deemed misinformation and people could go to jail for their free speech if Bourla and Kempe have their way.

What’s more, as this Big Pharma shill refers to vaccine skeptics as criminals, he and his supporters are ignoring Pfizer’s actual criminal background.

As TFTP has reported, Pfizer has paid out billions in health care fraud fines and in fact was party to the largest health care fraud settlement in US history.

The pharmaceutical giant paid out $2.3 billion in 2009 to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products.

“Pfizer violated the law over an extensive time period. Furthermore, at the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct by its then newly acquired subsidiary, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws,” Mike Loucks, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts said at the time.

And these are the people calling you a criminal for vaccine skepticism.

But that was only a single case, this company has a track record dating back decades that includes everything from bribing government officials to illegally testing products on children to making false claims about drugs and illegally marketing them — leading to multiple deaths. Despite making the largest payout in history, Pfizer has continued to be called to the carpet since 2009 multiple times for misleading the public about their drugs — up to and including vaccines.

Nevertheless, many Americans have short memories and seemingly couldn’t care less about the criminal past of this company. Instead, those who ignore Pfizer’s criminal history, shout down others who are hesitant to take the jab and become useful idiots in shilling for a company they once looked at with scorn.

The Anonymous Executioners of the Corporate State

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Imprisoning the David to Chevron’s Goliath is the latest outrage by a US judiciary now engineered to always favor the interests of capital.

by Chris Hedges

By Chris Hedges

Source: Mint Press News

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only “crime” was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.

The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger’s immediate release.

Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge’s order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger’s appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska’s ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.

“What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule,” Donziger told me by phone on Monday. “If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law.”

Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a “B” misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigant in the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.

“No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement,” Donziger told the court. “I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can’t travel; can’t do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can’t see my clients in Ecuador; can’t visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution. In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron’s lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life’s savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That’s where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?”

Judge Preska was unmoved.

“Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system,” Preska said at his sentencing hearing. “Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose; she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.

When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.

Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the Hammond trial. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.

Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.

The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture, the refinement of torture as science. By the time a “terrorist” is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.

Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation’s attorneys and judges “lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel.” He notes that law school curriculums are “built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense.”

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis “changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret.” And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.

Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.

Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam’s Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices “speaking in tongues.” She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.

Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge, Barrett “faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations.”

The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation’s appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls “a corporation masquerading as a human being.” Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.

The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.

The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell’s 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place, he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.

The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.

“It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”

“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries,” Donziger told me. “That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”

Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.”

In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney’s office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.

Who Are The Biggest Criminals?

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By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

Everyone pretty much agrees that we have a major problem with crime in this nation.  But when we talk about “crime”, are we all talking about the same thing?  Normally, when most of us think about “crime” what comes to mind is the rampant violence in our city streets.  As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, the FBI just released the final numbers for 2020, and they showed that the murder rate was up about 29 percent.  That was the largest one year increase in U.S. history by a very wide margin, and law enforcement authorities are warning that the numbers for this year will show another huge jump.  With so much violence in our streets, it is only natural that when we think of “crime” that we tend to think of young men recklessly firing guns in the core urban areas of our major cites.  Here is one example that I just came across…

An intense wild west gunfight that played out on the streets of the Bronx was caught on camera in incredible new footage released by New York police.

The video begins by showing what appears to be seven gang members brandishing pistols, firing at an unidentified target across the street.

This is the latest in a string of high-profile incidents of violent crime that have become more common throughout the five boroughs in the last 18 months, during which New York City has seen a rise in the number of shootings, felony assaults, and hate crimes.

But do they represent the worst that our society has to offer?

Of course not.

Even worse are the people that choose to take guns into our schools and start shooting.  Sadly, we had another such incident on Wednesday…

An 18-year-old suspect was taken into custody Wednesday after four people were injured in a shooting at a Texas high school, authorities said. Three of the victims were hospitalized, with at least one requiring surgery.

Around 9:15 a.m., police responded to a call about a shooting on the second floor of Timberview High School in Arlington, according to Kevin Kolbye, the city’s assistant police chief. Two of the victims were shot but were expected to survive, Kolbye said.

There is no place for such violence in our society, and I don’t want to minimize the evil of such a crime one bit.

But there are even worse criminals.

You see, the truth is that the biggest criminals in our society can be found in corporate boardrooms and in our halls of power.  The wicked decisions that very powerful men and women make behind closed doors can result in the deaths of thousands or even millions of people.

Let me give you a few examples.  Merck just announced a new COVID “wonder drug”, and those running the company have decided to charge $712 for a treatment that only costs $17.74 to produce…

Merck’s new ‘not Ivermectin’ Covid-19 treatment, molnupiravir, costs $17.74 to produce – yet the company is charging the US government $712 for the treatment – a 40x markup, according to The Intercept, citing a report issued last week by the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London.

The pill, originally developed using US government funds as a possible treatment for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, cut the risk of hospitalization and death in half in a randomized trial of 775 adults with mild/moderate Covid who were considered at high risk for disease due to comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The trial was stopped early so the company could apply for and emergency use authorization (EUA). The drug did not benefit patients who were already hospitalized with severe disease.

Theoretically, this “wonder drug” could help millions upon millions of COVID victims all over the globe in the coming years if it was priced fairly.

But the vast majority of those potential patients will never see it because they simply will not be able to afford it.

Meanwhile, how many other inexpensive alternative treatments are being suppressed so that big pharma can rake in billions of dollars in profits?

Let’s take a look at another example.  A woman in Colorado is being denied a life-saving kidney transplant because she refuses to get the COVID vaccine…

A Colorado woman suffering from stage five renal failure was denied a new kidney because both she and her prospective donor were unvaccinated.

The University of Colorado Health hospital sent a letter to Leilani Lutali, 56, who was set to receive a kidney from Jaimee Fougner, 45, informing her that the procedure could not be done until both women were vaccinated against COVID-19.

‘I feel coerced. I feel like my life is being held in their hands in exchange for a shot, and the attitude is just take the shot,’ Lutali told Denver7.

They are fully prepared to let her die if she won’t get the shot.

You have to be a special kind of evil to be so absolutely heartless.

In our society, the level of wickedness tends to rise the higher up the food chain that you go.  And so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Washington D.C. is absolutely seething with evil.  When I worked there over a decade ago, you could literally feel it in the air.

Of course things have only gotten worse since that time, and right now the current resident of the White House is seeing his approval rating absolutely plummet because of all the nightmarish decisions that he has been making…

As his agenda flounders on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden’s popularity among everyday Americans is taking a beating.

Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. That’s down from 42% three weeks ago and from a high of 50% in mid-February.

Sadly, the truth is that the politicians in Washington D.C. are simply a reflection of who we have become as a nation.

And if the full extent of our national misdeeds is ever brought to light, we will become the most hated country on the entire planet and the rest of the world will turn on us with tremendous fury.

There is so much going on behind the scenes that most people don’t know about.  For example, a whistleblower just came forward and revealed some staggering information to Project Veritas.  If you have not seen that video yet, you can view it right here.

Of course the mainstream media will never report on this because they are evil too and this story would hurt the agendas that they are trying to push.

The biggest criminals get up in the morning and put on very expensive suits.  They are paid lots of money and they love fame and recognition.

But they are leading us down a path that leads to national suicide.

Unlike many of the violent criminals in our streets, most of the criminals in our boardrooms and in our halls of power will never go to prison for what they have done.

Instead, they will just keep laughing all the way to the bank as millions suffer and die.

We Are Human, We Are Free – Building Worldwide Nonviolent Resistance to the Great Reset

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By Anita McKone

In late 2020 Robert J. Burrowes and myself were asked by some Melbourne activists protesting against the lockdowns and Covid vaccinations to help them develop more effective strategy. Many of the protesters were new to activism, and those with an inclination towards following a nonviolent approach wanted education in this area.

In February, Robert and I ran two Introduction to Nonviolent Action workshops, and one Nonviolent Strategy weekend, and with the inspiration and input of this great group of participants, I have now put the basics of a worldwide nonviolent campaign strategy to defeat the Great Reset on a website. We have named this campaign We Are Human, We Are Free.

The website is designed as a resource that activists anywhere in the world can use to develop effective local nonviolent campaigns.

Here are some excerpts from the website:

We Are Human, We Are Free is a worldwide nonviolent resistance movement to free ourselves from Elite control and resist the forces of fear and dehumanisation.

Our aim is to build a mass civil resistance movement to undermine the power of the Global Elite to control us, and to regain the freedoms that make our lives worth living. Because we are human, we are free to make choices. The time has come to choose – are we on the side of love, life and freedom or fear, self-imprisonment and tyranny?…

What is happening in our world?

Do you have a gut feeling that there is something ‘wrong’ with the way this supposed pandemic is being presented, and with planetary wide lockdowns as a response? Are you being negatively impacted by lockdowns, or vaccines, in ways that make you feel the ‘cure’ is worse than the original ‘problem’? If what is going on doesn’t make sense to you, is there another, reasonable way to explain what is happening?…

The supposed pandemic and the planetary lockdown response are key tools in achieving the Global Elite’s aims – psychologically designed to dramatically increase people’s fear of the unknowable, and justify greater and greater loss of freedoms and human rights…

What is The Great Reset?

In brief, the Global Elite is in the process of establishing:

  • A Monopolised Corporate Dictatorship of the economy, including all natural, agricultural, human, technological and financial resources, destroying any attempt of ordinary people to achieve economic self-reliance through independent farming, small and medium sized business, organic food production or local trade. The full digitisation of money (the end of currency altogether), will leave people with no control over currencies they can use to trade in ways they see fit. The advent of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is expected to lead to at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans being replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025, leaving at least 30% of people permanently unemployed. In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.
  • A Medical Dictatorship by profit-driven pharmaceutical medicine and psychiatry for social control, that denies the true value of natural and holistic physical and mental health, disallows use of non-patented or previously patented medicines, and forces damaging and experimental medical treatments and procedures on people without informed consent. These include vaccines involving genetic engineering and nanotech which have the potential to fundamentally change the way we exist as independent biological entities.
  • National/State Government Dictatorships (intended to become a Global Government Dictatorship) controlled by elite ‘advice’ and interests, that destroy privacy through mass surveillance and restrict freedom of thought, speech, work, finances and movement.
  • A Monopolised Media Dictatorship that uses censorship and propaganda for social control.
  • A Technocratic Dictatorship run by pseudoscientific ‘experts’, involving the fourth industrial revolution (AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things); the surveillance, control and attempted ‘robotisation’ of our biological selves through nanotech implants and connection to AI through 5G technology; the control and destruction of the natural environment through technologies such as 5G and genetically modified crops; and the denigration of genuine scientific methods and principles, which are non-authoritarian by nature…

What can we do? Why choose nonviolent resistance?

We Are Human, We Are Free recognises that to defend our human needs and rights it is necessary to noncooperate with the forces of fear, and this involves many types of courageous and conscientious individual and collective action. While legal and political challenges within the system help raise awareness of the unhealthy nature of tyranny, we need to trust ourselves to make the final decisions about how to meet our own needs when existing political and legal systems are corrupted and fail. When we cannot defend ourselves according to legal or conventional political rules, we must step outside these rules and draw upon the more natural and fundamental powers of human solidarity, conscience and courage.

Some powerful acts of nonviolent noncooperation, such as boycotts, will remain legal and risk free. Increasingly, however, noncooperation will require civil disobedience, as the forces of fear attempt to reign us in ever more tightly. The Global Elite and their agents have already used arrests, fines, imprisonment, psychiatric committal, property seizure and direct violence against pro-freedom activists in different countries to try to intimidate us into giving up. They will continue to use violence against us. In these challenging circumstances, nonviolent processes and interactions provide the greatest degree of physical and psychological/emotional safety possible for activists and will help build the greatest number of participants in our growing movement…The Covid-19 Crisis: Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup

Everyone is Welcome

Everyone is welcome to take action under the We Are Human, We Are Free banner if they agree with the three fundamental points that unify this movement:

  1. That whatever the level of illness occurring in the community, and whatever its causes, there is no genuine evidence of the existence of a contagious pandemic that is killing statistically significant numbers of people, and therefore no justification for any of the measures which are supposedly a response to this ‘crisis’.
  2. That the false pandemic is one tool being used by the Global Elite to achieve The Great Reset, which is designed to gain total control over the world’s natural resources and the entire human population. The various elements of The Great Reset must be collectively resisted if we are to gain back the freedoms that make our lives worth living.
  3. All participants in this movement are willing to abide by the code of nonviolent discipline detailed on We Are Human, We Are Free in their campaigns.

We hope to build an easily recognisable worldwide movement against Elite dictatorship, which will unite us as we enact the many locally organised nonviolent campaigns necessary to win back our freedom.

Many nonviolent actions and campaigns are already occurring – we invite local campaigns to consider adding the We Are Human, We Are Free banner to their existing identities as a worldwide unifying element in their campaign…

What Sort of Actions Will Make a Real Difference to the Situation?

Public protests where we show our discontent and connect with the many others who feel as we do are a first step in addressing the problem. But effectively undermining attempted global dictatorship requires more than this – we need to take actions of strategic significance that transfer power from the hands of the Elite to ordinary people…

Choose messaging that clearly asks ordinary people to noncooperate in specific ways. For example “Choose Natural Health. Say No to Experimental Vaccines”; “Provide No Excuse for Lockdowns. Don’t Get Tested”; “Don’t Buy Censorship. Boycott Facebook”; “Use Your Own Eyes and Ears. Turn off Your TV”; “Don’t Buy 5G Upgrades”; “Don’t Feed the Monsters. Boycott Amazon…

And here are a few examples from the website of 29 ‘Strategic Goals’ which will contribute to achieving our overall purpose of defeating the Global Elite’s attempted takeover:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity.

Asking people and groups all around the world to wear an orange ribbon, wristband or armband showing their solidarity as part of this worldwide nonviolent movement is a key way to increase people’s courage to take action. Can you think of particular groups of people to whom you might make this suggestion, or ways in which you might spread this message to the general public?…

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to conscientiously refuse to submit to vaccination, which is likely to include nanotechnology that will subvert your individual identity, freedom, dignity, volition and privacy; including through a ‘digital vaccine passport’ (possibly delivered via a microneedle platform using fluorescent microparticles called ‘quantum dots’, which can deliver vaccines and at the same time invisibly encode vaccination history directly in the skin).

How can we best encourage people not to receive Covid vaccinations (experimental injectables), regardless of whether or not they are made legally mandatory by your national government? Can you organise picketing or boycotts of businesses that are coercing their workers into having vaccinations as a condition of employment?

Can you ask all air traffic controllers, and pilots and drivers of air, land and water transport (including military transport), and construction machinery such as cranes, to refuse to take vaccinations on account of the potentially catastrophic dangers to the community if they have a negative reaction to these experimental injectables while working?

Can you organise nonviolent protests or interventions at any education, healthcare (such as nursing homes) or travel related sites that have been targeted as priority vaccination sites to convince the management not to go ahead?

Can you organise a strike by workers at your workplace or in your industry in support of your right to choose not to be used as part of a medical experiment?

Can you organise a strike or ‘refusal to act on vaccine related punishment’ by public servants if they are ordered to cut off people’s government benefits for not taking a vaccine?

Can you ask GPs to resist performing Covid vaccinations by stating they are already overworked and have no further time for this ‘health’ campaign? Can you ask GPs to take positive responsibility for the health of their patients by presenting those patients who ask to be vaccinated with information regarding the exact contents of the vaccine and data regarding the known negative effects of the vaccine, and the data that is still unavailable because of its experimental nature, so that patients can make a genuinely informed choice?

(9) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in a collective event that conscientiously resists the Covid lockdowns.

This could be, for example, a cultural, religious or sporting event, a nonviolent action for another cause, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a celebration or a return to work.

This is all about showing its okay to live our normal lives. The more people involved in a mass ‘dispersed’ event, the less likely we are to be arrested or receive fines. If you are just organising locally, with a small number of people involved, police liaison is crucial for the best possible outcomes to occur. You must be prepared personally for the risk of arrest, and think about how you can make this process as dignified as possible to show your courage and commitment, and your willingness to engage with the police as individual human beings. Then, they may arrest you today, but decide that they don’t wish to do so tomorrow.

The 50,000 restaurants in Italy that opened in defiance of lockdown restrictions in January 2021 are a great example of a mass, dispersed action of noncompliance. Many religious services have been held in defiance of lockdowns. What cultural events matter most in your local community? Sport? Music? How about a ‘Football for Freedom’ match or a ‘Band Together for Freedom’ music event? You may be arrested before completing your event, but if you go with police with dignity, the absurdity of the police’s actions will be made all the more clear.

(10) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in events that conscientiously refuse to maintain social distance.

Are you a grandparent? Is it possible to organise ‘Grandparents for Freedom’ days, where grandparents visit their grandchildren against lockdown regulations, and take photos of themselves hugging and kissing their grandchildren to post online, or to print off and letterbox drop around their local community? This would work directly against the Elite narrative of having to ‘protect’ our older people by keeping them in isolation, showing that older people have courage and volition of their own.

To give people non-arrestable and arrestable options for showing their support for the campaign, public nonviolent actions could be organised where some of the group abides by social distancing and mask wearing (the masks could have a question mark drawn on them, or lips that appear to be speaking), and holds banners with clear messages encouraging acts of noncooperation, while others remove masks and hold hands or hug one another, accepting arrest in a dignified manner if the police decide to take that course. These actions will work best if you have done solid police liaison beforehand. To discourage use of water cannons and teargas to clear crowds, many smaller public actions could be organised around a city on a particular day, rather than one mass action in a centralised location.

(15) To cause people all around the world fined for breaking ‘pandemic’-related health laws or regulations (mask wearing, social distancing and lockdown restrictions, including curfews, local and wider travel restrictions, ‘non-essential’ work bans and business closures) to refuse to pay their fines and continue to conscientiously break these laws or regulations, accepting time in jail as a prisoner of conscience if necessary.

The legal system as it exists in any country does not have the resources to put large numbers of people through the court and prison system. If people refuse to pay fines, and do not deliver themselves up to the legal system voluntarily, it will take enormous resources to send police to locate and arrest all those with a warrant, put them in front of a magistrate, and then imprison them for a number of days, weeks or months in lieu of paying the fine. Already, in Victoria, Australia, for example, many unpaid fines have been withdrawn by the government, presumably for this reason, and the 50,000 restaurant owners in Italy who reopened against lockdown restrictions cannot possibly all be imprisoned for their actions.

It will be necessary to morally and practically support anyone who is targeted for prosecution as a ‘public example’ – if these people can be supported well through a prison experience, they can understand their important role in remaining courageous and patient for the benefit of the movement as a whole. The more of us who refuse to pay fines, the less chance there is of anyone being prosecuted, until the point where the authorities simply give up trying to enforce the laws or regulations.

(16) To cause the police to refuse to obey orders from the Global Elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of your country.

There are already some great nonviolent initiatives happening with the police, which you may like to copy in your local area. Check out Police for Freedom, for example. Talking to police at stations in your area, to get to know them as individuals, and when you are planning actions, is vital to the success of this movement. We need the police, security personnel and military personnel on our side and need to give them every opportunity to see us as people they respect and want to stand with. Obviously when people have had very bad experiences with police and other security forces, this can make it difficult for them to feel confident or willing to do this. Choose people who do have confidence to liaise with security forces, and work out ways to support and provide extra protection for those who have been previously abused.

We hope that the We Are Human, We Are Free website will provide a user friendly resource for developing a worldwide nonviolent campaign against the Global Elite’s Great Reset, encouraging many acts of noncooperation from ordinary, empowered people. We look forward to your participation!

Much love to you all from Victoria, Australia.

Anita McKone has been a nonviolent activist, educator and researcher since 1993. She has been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions for her activism. She has written many articles on different aspects of nonviolent activism, psychology and philosophy. Her website is at Songs of Nonviolence.

America Condemns One Violent Mob While Celebrating Another

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Tear gas being deployed outside the Capitol on January 6 as Trump supporters stormed the building. [Tyler Merbler / CC BY 2.0]

Where is the corporate media’s disgust for the courtesans of corporate destruction that wreak violence on Americans daily?

By Lee Camp

Source: ScheerPost.com

Most rational Americans have correctly criticized and denounced the violent insurrection in the Capitol last week. Those moments of attack by a racist, disgusting mob have not lacked for condemnation and denunciation. They were violent. They were reprehensible. They called for the killing of lawmakers, demanded the hanging of Congress members. The liberal media and even most of Fox News have not held their tongues when it comes to excoriating the morally bankrupt people who took part. And I agree with those thoughts.

BUT – why don’t we see an equal amount of disgust and condemnation for the violence done by our ruling class, the courtesans of corporate destruction?

Is allowing people to die or fall ill due to lead pipes in Flint, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and hundreds of other cities not violence?

Is allowing citizens to lose their lives to cancer from Teflon™ chemicals dumped in their water or preventable oil spills not violence?

Is allowing tens of thousands to die of preventable illnesses from our garbage healthcare system not violence?

Is allowing 15 million to lose their healthcare during a pandemic and therefore fear going to the hospital when they get sick not violence?

Is imprisoning millions of people for years for non-violent crimes not violence?

Is locking up political prisoners like Steven Donziger, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Reverend Pinkney, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Leonard Peltier not violence??

Is dropping a bomb every 12 minutes on innocent people in countries thousands of miles away not violence??

Is allowing millions in this country to go hungry while we throw out 40% of all food not violence?

Is arresting people who try to feed those who are starving not violence?

Is allowing hundreds of thousands to go homeless, living under bridges or on benches or squatting in collapsing structures while this country has trillions of dollars and millions of empty houses —is that not violence?

Is arresting, beating, and persecuting those who try to give those people houses not violence? And bulldozing the homes — is that not violence?

Is causing the sixth great extinction, the mass death of half the world’s wildlife, in pursuit of corporate profit not violence?

Is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans via economic warfare not violence?

Is creating an opioid epidemic by pushing pills on desperate people, ultimately leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands not violence?

And then arresting those who stand up and fight back against the pollution, against the pipelines, against the factory farming, against the war industry —IS—THAT—NOT—VIOLENCE?

Of course it is.

It’s violence on a breathtaking scale, far greater than what was done at the Capitol and far greater than any of us will witness in person. And yet large scale corporate-endorsed violence, death and destruction is not only allowable, it’s celebrated, it’s furthered, and promoted. Oil company documents show that they tell cities that oil spills are good for the economy. Other documents show that fossil fuel companies have known about the harm climate change would do since the 1970’s, but they simply saw it as the price of doing business. Corporate sacrifice zones like “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana are well known to be deadly to those who live there, yet it doesn’t matter to the corporations because their money will be green nonetheless. It doesn’t matter to the politicians because the poor who live in these sacrifice zones have no political power. The 40% of food that’s thrown out is not a secret. The subsidies paid to factory farms encourage them to produce heaping mountains of food and dairy and meat even if they can’t sell it all in our market economy. So they throw it out or bury it. Giving it to those in need would take too much time and effort.

Should the racist violent insurrectionists at the Capitol be punished? Absolutely. But so too should the bought-off politicians who do the bidding of our morally bankrupt corporate America. These politicians and the CEOs they serve are purveyors of violence. They trade in, produce, and reap violence. They sit on hordes of money—the obscene profit from feeding American lives into the death cult of unfettered capitalism.

Our mainstream media are blanketing the airwaves with talk of how the violent insurrectionists must be punished, and while they are not wrong, the criminal behavior those same talking heads and “reporters” ignore speaks volumes. All violence is not equal. Some of it is profitable and protected. Some of it is the American way.

Pfizer’s Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine—What You’re Not Being Told

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Pfizer’s long history of scandals, and the fact that they have never been held to account for their crimes, continues to be ignored by the media, even as its experimental mRNA vaccine candidate for Covid-19 draws ever closer to US government approval.

By Johnny Vedmore

Source: Unlimited Hangout

The vaccine information war has kicked up a gear, and the mainstream media vultures are circling to descend on any content that they can easily label and dismiss as misinformation. Laws will be passed throughout legislatures globally to criminalise anyone who publicly misunderstands any part of the complex biological processes involved in many of the new experimental vaccine technologies that are being used to produce Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

Even now, intelligence agencies and intelligence-backed tech companies are set to deploy sophisticated methods to censor content and deplatform news websites that they view as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as well as ‘vaccine misinformation’, particularly as a Covid-19 vaccine candidate lurches closer to approval.

It is expected that by month’s end the mRNA vaccine produced by the scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will be approved by the US government via an emergency-use authorization, with other countries expected to follow suit. Pfizer, in anticipation of the seemingly imminent and assured approval of their vaccine candidate, has already been manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses of its vaccine for weeks and has received praise from governments and mainstream media alike for its self-reported claims that its vaccine is 90 percent effective.

In particular, the success of the experimental mRNA mass vaccination program appears to hinge on the general population being unable to effectively articulate their concerns and objections. Whilst the mainstream media are quick to point out when somebody makes an error in how they believe the mRNA vaccine works, they don’t offer any further information than the official government line. Public distrust in vaccination programs is not the fault of those who don’t understand the way this brand-new technology works. Public distrust is all-pervasive because only one side of the argument is allowed to be heard. We do need to understand the technology involved, as there is a difference between mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines. Having a general understanding of the reason why someone should object to being given an experimental mRNA vaccine is necessary for creating a clear and coherent argument.

We are about to examine a subject that has been one of the most censored topics in the modern era. But now, more than ever before, we are in desperate need of the information that is being systematically hidden from the public. This article will be banned and attacked by those who believe we, the general public, shouldn’t know all the information about what they want to achieve from the coming mass global vaccinations. The reason for the current establishment’s unwillingness to speak about this subject leads to perhaps unnecessary suspicion. Such suspicions will never be dismissed via the currently employed tactic of smearing anyone who questions intentions. If governments worldwide want their populations to submit to these vaccinations, then they need to stop patronising people and speak honestly. However, since that is unheard of, they will continue to employ coercive tactics, as they will be trying out a never-before-approved experimental method to boost the immune system by manipulating the process our DNA uses to signal for the creation of certain proteins, and we have little idea of what the long-term impact this brand-new therapeutic technology could have on our health. No politician, medical expert, or pharmaceutical representative is willing to accept responsibility for challenges that might be around the corner.

Many of the pharmaceutical companies researching potential coronavirus vaccines are using old methods. They take a proverbial pinch of the virus and infect your immune system at a very low and slow rate, allowing your body the time it needs to build up a natural immunological resistance to the illness. But developing those types of vaccines is a slow and arduous process, and the current leaders in the race to mass global vaccination are pharmaceutical companies using a radical new method that has never been tried before.

‘They are going to hack the cells in your body in order to make them into drug factories’, says Nathan Vardi, a staff writer for Forbes, in a video titled Why Pfizer Is Betting Big on an Unproven Treatment for Covid-19, from March 2020. ‘The problem is with this approach’, Vardi admits, ‘is there’s never been an approved mRNA product’.

The various scientific explorations into the therapeutic applications of potential mRNA treatments are still in their infancy, but the method has been lauded as a potential solution to the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, for protein replacement, and for gene therapy.

In January 2020, the de facto leader in the mRNA field was the pharmaceutical company Moderna, but—in the wake of Covid-19—other major companies began to focus on the mRNA method. Moderna was able to pioneer that method several years ago, thanks to funding largely provided by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Now, as 2020 draws to a close, the race to develop the winning Covid-19 vaccine is in full swing, and another Big Pharma company has seemingly beaten Moderna to the development of a supposedly effective mRNA vaccine, thanks to Pfizer teaming up with BioNTech, a small German company, to pip Moderna to the post. But, in this race to ‘save humanity’, there are bound to be pitfalls, especially when introducing completely new health technologies into mainstream use. Has Pfizer rung the finishing bell in this global race to end the current pandemic, or, instead, is it hurtling towards a disaster of epic proportions?

There are very informative scientific papers available from just before the pandemic began that give us an insight into this new mRNA technology. So here I’ll examine the DNA manipulating method, the vaccine, the people behind the research and development at BioNTech, but most important, I’ll examine Pfizer, and look at how the company has avoided accountability when things go wrong—and things do go wrong at Pfizer.

mRNA Vaccine Technology and How It Works

The vital interaction that mRNA has with our DNA has made selling mRNA vaccine technology extremely difficult for those who believe it’s the future of human medicine. The fact that it will alter the function of your DNA in your body has made many people suspicious of what unexpected horrors could arise through mass use of this new and experimental technique.

Unsurprisingly, the people marketing the vaccines have tried to downplay the aggressive and genetically manipulative nature of the treatment. In fairness, trying to explain the workings of such a complex new technology in plain English is exceedingly difficult. This is apparent when one listens to representatives of the mainstream media, who are often mealy mouthed when describing the biological processes that will take place when you receive the mRNA vaccine. But inability to articulate the technology isn’t surprising when you consider that part of your DNA, after breaking in two through a natural process, will then be combined with the experimental mRNA in a way that seems esoteric to many of us. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a process taking place in one’s own vulnerable biological system, in one’s DNA, the most precious building blocks of life that define your very existence.

After a preprogrammed strand of mRNA has merged with a naturally severed part of your DNA, it will request the production of a protein that should help trigger your immune system. In theory, this should boost your immune system and aid in the mass production of the proteins necessary to successfully fight the specific illness. The inserted messenger-RNA (thus, mRNA) should be relatively easy to design and programme as long as the scientists involved have the genetic coding for the infection it is to fight. In this case, the necessary data was released in January 2020 by the Chinese. Mild side effects to this process should be expected.

Although no extreme side effects were reported by Pfizer during the stage 3 testing of their mRNA vaccine, nearly every participant suffered mild symptoms, including swelling of the arm, irritation of the skin, and headaches, to name just a few. But, as we shall see, the information that Pfizer releases about its clinical trials and what happens in reality can be quite different.

I have just described the basic information you require for understanding how the coming mRNA vaccine works, but what I can’t describe to you is what happens in the long term. This form of therapeutic alternative has never been allowed or sanctioned before, aside from small clinical trials. There has never been an FDA-approved clinical trial for mRNA medicine because its usage comes with an abundance of ethical and moral questions and unknown possibilities.

At the same time, the utilisation of the mRNA method could also be one of the biggest leaps forward in technology ever recorded in human history. If we give the technology the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has no negative long-term side effects, then it is a potential treatment for almost every human illness on earth. Opening this mRNA floodgate would mean normalising regular vaccinations for nearly every imaginable ailment. In the best-case scenario, you could be vaccinated against cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and any other human ailment that derives from a fault in your DNA. In the worst-case scenario, you could be left dead or crippled like Pfizer’s victims in its experiments on Nigerian children during the late 1990s.

All that being said, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has a major downside to it. Pfizer and Moderna have stated that their mRNA vaccines need to be kept at -70° C and -20° C, respectively, which is a significant logistical challenge. Without these extremely cold temperatures, the mRNA and combined nanoparticles will lose their integrity. There are no studies on the effect of poorly stored mRNA vaccines on the human body. In comparison, DNA vaccines are much easier to transport and store as they are much more stable molecules.

As we have seen, the potential for mRNA technology is boundless. If the vaccine is successful in normalising the process of gene editing for medicinal benefit, there will be pressure to continue editing genes in other ways. It isn’t hard to see that the technology could have cosmetic, medical, and military applications that could range from phosphorescent skin to military bioweapons beyond our imagination. That is the reason why the people behind this technology are reluctant to speak about its potential game-changing mRNA method, for it represents our first real steps into transhumanism.

Pfizer’s Profitable Partnership with Germany’s BioNTech

As we have seen, Pfizer wasn’t the primary company in the mRNA business at the turn of 2020, but its immediate partnership with BioNTech saw it beat its main competitor, Moderna, to the finish line. BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, is led by a husband and wife team and, prior to the partnership with Pfizer, was dedicated to mRNA-related cancer-treatment research.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the couple leading BioNTech, are of Turkish descent. Şahin’s family were from southern Turkey, and he studied for his doctorate in Cologne, whilst Türeci’s family came from Istanbul. The two met at the University of Hamburg.

BioNTech already had a collaboration agreement to develop mRNA‐based vaccines for prevention of influenza with Pfizer as far back as February 2019, and their commercial strategy of collaborating with selected partners paid off when the race to the coronavirus vaccine began. Since then, there has been global media interest in BioNTech, mainly in the form of puff pieces focussing on Şahin and Türeci’s romantic life. But BioNTech also has many links to other Big Pharma giants and some of the well-known movers and shakers in the medical world. As well as its partnership with Pfizer, in 2019 BioNTech also had partnership deals with Bayer, Genentech, Sanofi, Genmab, Eli Lilly, Roche, and of course they received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September 2019, just before the first people were infected with the new strain of SARS-CoV-2, the German news outlet Handelsblatt reported that ‘the Gates Foundation is investing around 50 million euros in the Mainz biotech company BioNTech. The money will be used to research HIV and tuberculosis vaccines’.

BioNTech has a small five-person management team and a four-person supervisory board. Şahin is the CEO of the company; he was also the head of the scientific advisory board of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG from 2008 until 2016, when the company was acquired by Astellas Pharma. BioNTech’s chief business officer, Sean Marett, previously worked in global strategic and regional marketing, and in sales at GlaxoSmithKline in the United States and at Pfizer Europe, as well as for Evotec and Lorantis. The company’s chief operating officer and CFO, Dr Sierk Poetting, joined BioNTech in September 2014 from Novartis. The chief strategy officer at BioNTech is Ryan Richardson, who had previously been an executive director of the global health-care investment-banking team at J. P. Morgan in London, where he advised companies in the biotech and life sciences industry on mergers and acquisitions, equity, and debt capital finances. The German BioNTech’s four-man supervisory board includes Ulrich Wandschneider, who is also a member of Trilantic Europe.

Pfizer: A Company Never Held to Account

If it were only BioNTech that was responsible for the creation of this futuristic vaccine technology, then maybe people would have more faith in the product. But Pfizer casts a dark shadow of conspiracy wherever it does business. Pfizer’s previous use of experimental drugs in secretive and scandalous studies has inspired Hollywood movies and court cases lasting over a decade, as it resulted in the death of many children. Yet, the media organisations touting its coronavirus vaccine as a heaven-sent miracle have provided little to no coverage of Pfizer’s previous experimental disasters.

Pfizer entered into the vaccine business in late 2006 by acquiring the British influenza-vaccine company PowderMed for an undisclosed fee. Pfizer was admittedly excited about the deal, stating that ‘PowderMed’s unique DNA vaccine technology is particularly promising’ and that ‘its pipeline of vaccine candidates for influenza and chronic viral diseases could have major potential’. In fact, beginning in autumn 2005, many Big Pharma companies had taken their first steps into the vaccine industry. Novartis entered the vaccine business by acquiring 56 percent of Chiron, whilst GlaxoSmithKline expanded its vaccine base by acquiring ID Biomedical of Canada. Competition was heating up among the big players, and the vaccine industry was seen as a safe bet, with reports of new vaccines selling for hundreds of dollars. But Pfizer’s reputation over the preceding decade had taken a severe knock due to the company’s disastrous experimental trials in Africa.

In 1996, an experimental trial took place in Nigeria. Under the cover of severe outbreaks of cholera, measles, and meningitis in northern Nigeria, Pfizer set up the secretive trials in Kano, the second largest city in Nigeria, to test its experimental antibiotic, Trovan (trovafloxacin). It tested the experimental drug on two hundred children. The children’s parents assumed that the children would receive the standard meningitis jab, but Pfizer staff instead set up two control groups. Half of the children were given the experimental Trovan, and the other hundred were given a reduced dosage of the leading meningitis equivalent. The lower dose was to help artificially skew the results in the favour of Trovan for marketing and competitive purposes.

In 2002, a group of Nigerian children and their legal guardians sued Pfizer in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In court documents, the plaintiffs alleged that five children who received Trovan and six children whom Pfizer had ‘low-dosed’ had died as a result, whilst others suffered paralysis, deafness and blindness. The alleged actual number of those who died due to their involvement in the trial, per Nigerian sources, is over fifty.

Pfizer was supposed to check the children’s blood samples five days into the trials to look for any abnormalities and then change their treatment to the full-strength leading meningitis drug if there were any problems. However, they failed to do so. Instead, the Pfizer team waited for the irreversible symptoms to manifest physically before switching the treatment for the study’s unwitting participants. After realising that they had just murdered and crippled these children, Pfizer, like any giant pharmaceutical corporation would, left the scene of the crime in a hurry, failing to do any further evaluation of the patients.

Pfizer spent the next ten years denying any responsibility for the disaster, eventually releasing a statement entitled ‘Trovan, Kano State Civil Case—Statement of Defense’, in which the pharmaceutical bigwig stated among other things ‘that mortality in the patients treated by Pfizer was lower than that observed historically in African meningitis epidemics, and that no unusual side effects, unrelated to meningitis, were observed after 4 weeks’.

Pfizer eventually settled the case for $75 million on condition that it would not be held responsible for its actions. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2011 that the first four settlements in the lengthy court battle had been given to the families of four of the children who were killed during the trial. In an unabashed attempt to make the court settlement of $175,000 harder for each of the surviving families to claim, the victims’ families were forced to provide DNA samples to prove they were actually related to the deceased. This tactic turned out to be very effective from the company’s perspective, as many of the families didn’t trust Pfizer, which led some to pull out and refuse the settlement because they thought the DNA samples were a ploy by Pfizer to commit further illegal secret experiments upon them, or worse.

The Nigerians were represented by two brave lawyers, a Nigerian lawyer named Etigwe Uwo and a Connecticut-based lawyer, Richard Altschuler. According to Altschuler, it was the story of Pfizer’s Kano coverup that prompted John le Carré to write the novel The Constant Gardener that was adapted in the feature film. Like the situation depicted in the movie, Pfizer used scare tactics and smear campaigns to try and hinder any investigation into the Kano incident.

In 2006, Pfizer cut its workforce by 20 percent, reducing the number of its US employees by 2,200 people. The Financial Times reported on 29 November 2020 that this was something that was happening in all of the major pharmaceutical firms stating, ‘Big pharma is rushing to restructure across its business from manufacturing to how it markets and sells its drugs’. But Pfizer was mainly concentrating on radical change to its drugs salesforce.

Pfizer was hit by further major scandals over the following year. One included the illegal premarketing of the HIV drug Maraviroc, which initially stalled the drug’s approval by the FDA. The scandal saw Pfizer publicly fire three of its top executives, including its assistant sales manager, Kelly Fitzgerald, (who returned to work for Pfizer and is currently their assistant sales director), HIV sales director, Art Rodriguez, now working for California’s Valued Trust, and the Mid-Atlantic director, Bob Mumford.

Get Your Facts Straight and Another Way Out

Whilst a DNA vaccine will change your DNA permanently, an mRNA vaccine will not permanently change your DNA. It takes one sentence to clear up that misunderstanding of the technology, and people should not be criminalised for such a simple misunderstanding. However, the mRNA vaccine does bind with part of your DNA to alter the proteins being produced. This is the very place where companies wish to trap opponents of their experimental vaccine campaigns. Just because someone doesn’t fully understand the process involved shouldn’t mean they should be demonised and forced into taking this experimental combination of nanoparticles. In fact, individuals should reject the vaccine until companies explain how it works and if there are any long-term side effects. You shouldn’t let anybody put anything into your body until they can tell you if any long-term consequences could occur. This is a basic principle of self-preservation that trumps any risk of a virus, especially a virus that has proven to be just a little bit more deadly than the common flu.

Our bodies should be the most important concern for us all. Fundamentally speaking, all our liberties and freedoms are of little concern if we’re dead or crippled. Don’t let them shame you into giving over your precious and delicate shell to medical scientific experimentation by companies that are incapable of taking accountability for their actions. This is the core argument that you need to keep at the forefront of any debate, rather than whether your DNA is permanently changed or whether its functions are just altered. If you’re going to get into the gutter to battle out the science then you must get your facts straight. They will use any potential misunderstanding you have to wipe your voice from the debate. It is they who bear the burden of articulating clearly why we should take the vaccine; it is your right to refuse.

However, there is something no one has mentioned so far about this new mRNA technology that could give those who oppose the vaccine another way out. Normally, to be effective, a vaccine must be given to as much of the population as possible. Mass vaccination has been used historically as a synthetic herd immunity to stop the spread of a virus to the vulnerable people in our society. But this technology is different, and its method of working means it is no longer necessary to use mass vaccination.

The whole point of why mRNA vaccines are more effective than our current vaccine technologies, per its proponents, is that it precisely targets the protein-production part of your DNA’s normal life cycle. This improves the response that an individual’s immune system will have when fighting a virus. It can be targeted socially in a similar way. If the majority of people who catch Covid-19 are asymptomatic, then it’s ridiculous to give them a vaccine. Because this vaccine protects individuals in their response, there is no good reason why everybody in our society should be forced to take it. It is used to increase specific protein production in someone who’s at severe risk—that’s how a medicine works normally. You don’t take HIV medication if you don’t have HIV. You shouldn’t be taking cancer drugs unless you have cancer. And you shouldn’t need to change your DNA’s production of specific proteins unless it’s personally necessary to do so.

The biggest lie being told to the people of the world is that everybody needs to take this vaccine. And ironically, the experimental mRNA technology that they’re desperate to use makes mass vaccination unnecessary.

HOW THEY’LL FAKE THE SUCCESS OF THE COVID VACCINE

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: Waking Times

I’ve described how the major clinical trials of the COVID vaccine are designed to prevent nothing more than a cough, or chills and fever [1] [2].

The whole plan to gain FDA approval of the vaccine is a stark fraud.

Now let’s move on to the next con: how to make it seem the vaccine is a roaring success.

Brief background: My readers know I’ve presented a complete case to show the SARS-CoV-2 virus was never proved to exist in the first place [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. So the whole idea of a vaccine is a non-sequitur, an absurdity. Likewise, the PCR test for “the virus” is a fraud on several levels [11]:

For example, the number of “cycles” for which the test is set is a key factor. Each cycle is a huge amplification of the tissue sample taken from the patient.

When you blow up that tissue sample above 34 cycles, you get gigantic numbers of false-positive results, even by the standards of the test. Fauci has admitted it. I’ve pointed out that FDA guidelines nevertheless recommend doing the test at up to 40 cycles. This alone explains reports of “rising COVID case numbers.”

Let’s say Pfizer and then Moderna win FDA approval to release their vaccines in the US. With the military doing the logistics of shipping, millions of doses move out, and soon, an extraordinary number of Americans are lining up to take the shot.

After a suitable period of time, the elite medical planners will change the way the PCR test is done. The number of cycles will be drastically reduced. That order will go out to labs in the US.

What does this mean? It means that far fewer positive test results will occur.

Therefore, the trend of “new COVID cases” will stop rising. It will level off, and then it will fall.

This rigging will be heralded as proof that that vaccine is producing a victory over the virus.

There is another strategy: change the definition of “a case of COVID.” Make the new definition, in terms of clinical symptoms, more restrictive. Something like this would do the trick: “The patient must exhibit a body temperature of at least 100 for 48 consecutive hours.”

That will automatically cause a significant drop in the number of cases. The drop will be attributed to the salutary effect of the vaccine.

For purposes of lockdowns and general clampdowns [12], to promote more fear and punish areas where the economy is “too open,” a reverse-technique can be applied:

Make PCR tests adjust their cycles UPWARD, thus producing huge numbers of positive results and “new cases.”

“Well, in South Dakota, we have to mandate at least 100,000 more vaccinations in each of the following ‘hot spots,’ where case numbers have suddenly escalated. And we must lock down those areas immediately…”

Needless to say, any and all serious harm and death caused by the vaccine anywhere will be attributed to “the pandemic disease.”

And there you have it. Simple, brutal, criminal, and controlled from the federal level. A strategy for making it seem the COVID vaccine is effective, and saved the day.

Here is a backgrounder I wrote on the subject of COVID vaccine fraud:

Making a vaccine look like it’s a champion isn’t difficult for public health agencies. There are a number of strategies.

Of course, these fraudulent strategies would be serious crimes. But when has that stopped the CDC or the World Health Organization?

In no particular order—-

ONE: Rework the definition of a “COVID case.” Presently, the CDC absurdly allows doctors to diagnose a person with COVID who has a cough, or chills and fever, and lives in an area where cases are being claimed. No test necessary.

So change this practice, once the vaccine is approved. Demand testing for a diagnosis. State that cough alone is not enough. Chills and fever must also be present. Require fever to be above 100.

These and other changes would automatically shrink the number of cases. The drop in numbers would be attributed to the vaccine.

This “definitional shrinking” was, in fact, deployed in the 1950s, after the introduction of the polio vaccine.

TWO: Order a change in the way the PCR diagnostic test is done. The practice of amplifying the original test sample from the patient occurs in cycles, or jumps. The greater the number of cycles, the more likely the test will result in a COVID diagnosis. Therefore, order a reduced number of cycles for all testing labs.

Outcome? Fewer COVID diagnoses. Fewer case numbers. “The vaccine is working.”

THREE: Quietly restrict the present hospital practice of arbitrarily writing “COVID” on patient case and death files.

FOUR: Cook up and publish false studies showing more and more people are developing immunity to the virus. Attribute this to the vaccine.

FIVE: Another type of false study—“the transmission of the virus from person to person is slowing, thanks to the vaccine.”

SIX: Pump up the success of issuing Immunity certificates after vaccination. “People are feeling safer now. More businesses are reopening…”

SEVEN: Using the compliant press, simply issue bald declarations that the vaccine is a success.

EIGHT: Hide the many instances of injury and death from the vaccine. When necessary, claim COVID was the cause.

NINE: Warn that the wonderful vaccine-derived immunity is not permanent, and frequent booster shots are necessary.

TEN: Rework the definition of “vaccine-acquired immunity.” Even a very weak antibody response from the shot would qualify as “protective immunity.”

ELEVEN: Huge numbers of people with ordinary flu-like illness, pneumonia, and other traditional lung infections are being called “COVID.” Change this practice. Go back to calling many of these people “flu,” “pneumonia,” etc. COVID case numbers will drop. Claim the drop is the effect of the vaccine.

TWELVE: Presently, millions of so-called COVID cases have “co-morbidities.” These are prior serious health conditions which are, in fact, the true causes of illnesses and death. Of course, this is denied. But after the vaccine is introduced… scale back the practice of counting all these ill and deceased co-morbid patients as “COVID.” Case and death numbers will drop. Claim the vaccine is the reason.

THIRTEEN: After the vaccine is introduced, slow down testing for a brief period. This will automatically reduce the rate of new cases. Attribute the decline to the vaccine.

Committing these crimes are a walk in the park for public health agencies.

And appointing official mouthpieces to carry lies to the public is as easy as training little Faucis to sit up and bark.

How Corporate Tyranny Works

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By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

Those, like environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable find the institutions of power unite to crucify them.

The persecution of the attorney Steven Donziger is a grim illustration of what happens when we confront the real centers of power, masked and unacknowledged by the divisive cant from the Trump White House or the sentimental drivel of the Democratic Party. Those, like Donziger, who name and fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable see the judiciary, the press and the institutions of government unite to crucify them.

“It’s been a long battle, 27 years,” Donziger said when I reached him by phone in his apartment in Manhattan.

Donziger, who has been fighting polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador, has been under house arrest in Manhattan for a year. He will go to trial in federal court in New York on September 9 on contempt of court charges, which could see him jailed for six months. Ever since he won a multibillion-dollar judgment in 2011 against the oil giant Chevron, the multinational has come after him personally through litigation that threatens to destroy him economically, professionally and personally.

“Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger,” Chevron wrote in an internal memo in 2009, as reviewed by Courthouse News.

It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other non-indigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”

“By the time I went down there in the early 1990s, many people had died, cancer rates were skyrocketing according to several independent health evaluations, people were really hurting. There was zero regard for the lives of the local people by Texaco. I was a very young lawyer back in 1993 when I first went to Ecuador. It was like looking at an apocalyptic scene. There was oil on the roads. People were living in abject poverty. They had no shoes. They would get oil on their feet when they walked along the roads. The oil pollution had permeated every aspect of daily life. It was in the food supply. It was in the water supply. It was in the air. The average person there would get exposed multiple times a day to very harmful, cancer-causing toxins, with foreseeable results.”

“I, with other lawyers, filed a lawsuit in New York against Texaco. The reason we filed in New York was because Texaco’s headquarters were in New York in 1993. The decisions to pollute in Ecuador, to play God to the people of Ecuador, were made in New York. We sued in New York. Texaco tried to get the case back to Ecuador where they had never been held accountable, where they knew the indigenous peoples had no money or resources to find lawyers.”

“They thought it would just go away,” said Donziger. “Over a 10-year period, we battled to get a jury trial in the United States. Ultimately, they won that part of the battle. It went down to Ecuador.”

“We started working with a team of Ecuadoran lawyers in the early 2000s. We went forward with the lawsuit. We produced voluminous scientific and testimonial evidence, showing that they caused probably the world’s worst oil pollution. It was called the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ by locals and experts. They dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic waste. They did it deliberately to save money. This was unlike the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which was a terrible accident, even though it was a product of horrendous negligence by BP. This was done by design to pollute, knowing that people would die, and that indigenous groups would be decimated, and that this beautiful part of the Amazon would be destroyed.”

The refusal to abide by even minimal environmental regulations saved Texaco an estimated $3 on every barrel of oil produced over 26 years (1964-1992), according to Amazon Watch, or an estimated extra $5 billion in revenue. The hundreds of waste pits the company eventually abandoned in Ecuador, on average, contain 200 times the contamination allowed by typical global standards.

“They tried to grind us down using classic corporate defense tactics,” Donziger said of the legal war. “They filed thousands of motions. We stood strong. We had a great legal team of Ecuadorian lawyers.”

In the end, they won a stunning victory, a rare moment of accountability for first-world conglomerates who rape the environment of developing nations by exploiting weak, corrupt governments.

“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries. That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”

Chevron, as the evidence mounted against it, sold their assets in Ecuador and left the country. The corporation threatened the plaintiffs with a “lifetime of litigation” if they attempted to collect, and, according to internal Chevron memos, launched a legal and media campaign that has cost an estimated $2 billion to prevent payment of the settlement and to demonize and destroy Donziger.

Donziger came to his epic battle against Chevron through journalism. “I was a journalist on my college newspaper,” he said of his time as a history major at American University. “My first job out of college was as a journalist with [United Press International]. I worked for UPI in Washington. They were strong in Latin America. I traveled to Managua in 1983 or 1984, I don’t remember exactly, and found work in the UPI bureau. I was 23 years old. I worked in the UPI bureau in Managua during the Sandinista era.”

He left UPI after a year in Managua but stayed on in Nicaragua to work as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as The Fort Lauderdale News, The Toronto Star and The Atlanta Constitution. He spent about three years as a reporter before going to Harvard Law School. When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, he worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C. He documented Iraqi civilian casualties in Iraq following the first Gulf War that became a report adopted by the United Nations.

A classmate at law school was from Ecuador. His classmate’s father organized a trip in April 1993 for lawyers and medical professionals to look at the contamination caused by the oil extraction in the Amazon. That trip, which Donziger joined, spawned the suit against Texaco. He would make more than 250 trips to Ecuador over the next two decades.

“Journalism significantly shaped my views and skill set,” he said. “It was vital to allowing my work to be successful. From the beginning this was a unique litigation, for many reasons, but one of the reasons was we, as a team, decided to work across multiple platforms. If we only saw this case as a lawsuit we would never win.”

“Chevron controlled the legal system in Ecuador with their influence. We needed to operate across different platforms, including engaging with the media and carrying out significant public education. Most Ecuadorians, other than those who lived in the region, knew nothing about the pollution that had been happening in their country. We carried out zealous advocacy in the public arena. We realized that the indigenous people would never get a fair trial in Ecuador if they did not illuminate what had happened to them and get public support.”

“The fact that I am detained shows how far we’ve come and how much risk Chevron feels. It’s not a sign we lost. It’s the opposite.”

Steven Donziger

Both the judge who oversaw its lawsuit against Donziger for “racketeering” and Chevron itself “claim that this type of activity is wrong,” he said. “The irony is that what we were doing is what the big oil companies have always done. They always operate in the public relations domain, lobbying Congress to pass legislation to extinguish various legal claims, meeting political leaders behind the scenes. They operate across every platform they can find to exercise their power. We were smart enough to meet them toe-to-toe wherever they were operating and neutralize their ability to undermine the fairness of the trial. That’s how they operate. They try to control court systems.”

“My journalism [experience] sensitized me to injustice. It allowed me to understand the media. I knew how to write press releases, which matters when you do a public case like this. I knew how to work across different platforms to mobilize positive energy around the case. Human rights work involves, first and foremost, justice for victims. But equally important is accountability for the perpetrators. The fact that I am detained shows how far we’ve come and how much risk Chevron feels. It’s not a sign we lost. It’s the opposite.”

Chevron, which had left Ecuador, went back to the New York court, where Donziger had originally filed the lawsuit before Chevron got a change of venue to Ecuador, and sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

In effect, “They sued me as a civil racketeer, under a civil RICO statute for $60 billion,” he said. “That was the largest amount of money an American individual ever had been sued for. This began a 10-year campaign to demonize me by Chevron and by its judicial allies.”

Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, has hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. The oil giant dropped its demand for financial damages weeks before the RICO trial, which would have necessitated a jury trial. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, decided the RICO case alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

“[Kaplan] wouldn’t allow me to bring in any environmental evidence that the Ecuadorian courts had used to find Chevron liable,” Donziger said. “He wouldn’t let me testify on my own behalf on direct. He allowed Chevron to use secret witnesses whose identities he wouldn’t reveal to me. He tried to treat it like a national-security kind of case to try to demonize me. Because Chevron’s whole strategy is to demonize [me] as a way to distract attention from its environmental crimes in Ecuador. And Judge Kaplan, who knows all the tricks in the books because he used to work for [tobacco company] Brown & Williamson, when he was [an attorney with the law firm of] Paul, Weiss. He knows the tobacco industry playbook that they used for years and years and continue to use. And he worked with the Chevron lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to implement them against me without a jury. And there was nothing I could do about it.”

(Paul, Weiss is a large law firm that currently advises Chevron on its $13 billion purchase of another energy company.)

John Keker, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.” In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud.

He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with criminal contempt for this principled stance, as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron.

When his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer were ignored by the U.S. attorney’s office for over five years, Judge Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Loretta Preska, a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, to hear the case. Chevron is a major donor to the Federalist Society. Preska, in a show of bias, already has said the charges against Donziger appear to be “very strong,” according to Courthouse News. In May, she disallowed him from having his charges heard by a jury.

“The last thing any of them wants is for a group of ordinary citizens to see what has happened to Steven Donziger,” Rick Friedman, one of Donziger’s attorneys, said of Chevron.

“The last thing any of them wants is for a group of ordinary citizens to see what has happened to Steven Donziger.”

Rick Friedman, attorney

Preska’s fealty to corporate power was previously on public display in 2013 when she imposed a 10-year sentence, the maximum allowed under a plea deal, on Jeremy Hammond, the activist who hacked into Stratfor, a private security firm. Hammond made public a barrage of damning internal emails and exposed the email address and password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Preska, despite the conflict of interest, refused to recuse herself. The 10-year sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking.

Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on a misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

Donziger is scheduled to go to trial without a jury on September 9 in New York City for contempt. Preska will preside over the trial. There has not been a criminal trial in Manhattan federal court since March because of the pandemic. Donziger’s trial would be the first, although hundreds of other defendants facing far more serious felony charges are waiting in jails, infested with COVID-19, for a trial date. Donziger’s four pro bono lawyers said they do not want to risk their lives by traveling to New York during the pandemic for what is a misdemeanor offense.

“The judgment against Chevron Corporation in Ecuador was the product of fraud, bribery and corruption,” Sean Comey, Senior Advisor – External Affairs Chevron Corporation said when I asked the corporation to comment on the case. “Steven Donziger is a proven liar and an adjudicated racketeer. He committed criminal acts in the U.S. and abroad in pursuit of his extortion scheme in the Ecuadorian courts. Donziger’s continuing lawlessness is now a matter for prosecutors and the U.S. courts to decide. Chevron is not involved in Donziger’s criminal prosecution.”

The flagrant corruption and misuse of the legal system to abjectly serve corporate interests in the Donziger case illustrates the deep decay within our judiciary and democratic institutions, one that was abetted by Democratic administrations that stacked the courts with corporate lawyers — Kaplan was appointed by Bill Clinton — and Donald Trump, who has elevated ideologues selected by the Federalist Society to the federal bench. Ruling after ruling in Donziger’s case has ignored or grossly distorted the law on behalf of Chevron to ensure that Donziger will be prosecuted, sent to prison and remain in debt for life — all while the $9.5 billion settlement is never paid to aid the people harmed in Ecuador.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the international committee of the National Lawyers Guild issued a letter signed by more than 70 organizations calling the persecution of Donziger an “attack on the rule of law.” The letter said his house arrest was “unprecedented” and charged that he was being targeted for what it called “one of the most important corporate accountability and human rights cases of our time.” The letter accused Kaplan of “violating basic notions of fairness in the judicial process that lie at the core of the rule of law.”

“We cannot allow the rule of law to be upended by corporate interests and a highly biased federal judge seeking to destroy the willpower of one lawyer who has already withstood decades of brutal litigation and scathing personal and professional attacks,” the letter read.

Chevron has also used its clout and advertising dollars to keep the story from being reported in numerous media outlets.

“Based on where this story is trending, we have launched a full offensive to kill it or redirect it,” an August 10, 2010 internal memo from Chevron reads concerning a potential report — on the case being done by the Fox News bureau in Miami.

“In addition to working through the Miami bureau, we have reached out to more senior news folks at Fox News, both in NY (through Dana) and in WDC (through Greg Mueller). So, we are trying to attack this story on multiple fronts. To this end, Kent is set to talk to John Stack and Sean Smith who both reside at Fox News in NY at 1:30 today. Finally, if need be, I think we may need to pull the JSW card with Roger Ailes. We have checked John’s availability to place a call to Roger, but his first availability is tomorrow afternoon.”

From 2010 to 2018, John S. Watson was the CEO and chairman of the Chevron Corporation.

The story was killed.

Another internal memo lays out the steps, also ultimately successful, to prevent a similar story from appearing in GQ magazine. The memo suggests that Chevron work …with the Columbia Journalism Review (that ran the rebuke of 60 minutes) and the Media Research Center to expose any degree of bias by GQ and raise alerts about the reporting techniques prior to the story’s publication.”

The memo recommends letting the magazine know that it will face legal action if the story runs and calls on Chevron investigators to “conduct further due diligence on reporter.” Chevron has also hired reporters to produce fake pieces of journalism that peddle the corporation’s propaganda on fake news sites it runs.

The New York Times magazine earlier this year considered a story about Donziger and then dropped it. The newspaper runs its own ad agency called T Brand Studio. Chevron is a major client, meaning The New York Times, through T Brand Studio, produces ads for Chevron.

Jake Silverstein, editor of the magazine, when asked to comment said by email: “It was one of several stories William [Langewiesche] considered writing for us in the past year, one that ultimately we decided not to assign. Many factors go into our decisions about what to assign, and none of them ever include who is or is not a client of T Brand Studio or any other part of the paper’s advertising business.”

Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor, said, when I reached him by email, that the idea that the magazine piece on Donziger was killed because Chevron is a major advertiser is “a ridiculous claim.” He added, “I didn’t even know Chevron worked with T Brand [Studio].”

But that Chevron has invested tremendous resources to kill stories about this case is indisputable given the detailed campaigns to block coverage outlined in its own internal memos.

“I’ve experienced this multiple times with media over the past 10 to 15 years,” Donziger said. “An entity will start writing the story, spend a lot of time on it, then the reporter disappears. The story doesn’t run.”

While The Nation, The Intercept and Courthouse News Service have reported on Donziger’s current legal battle, no major mainstream publication has touched it.

“Corporate influence over our federal judiciary has increased dramatically in recent years,” Donziger said. “This firm [Chevron] has captured an element of power from the government and deployed it against a human rights activist.”

Front Line Defenders issued a report in 2019 that found that 300 human rights activists had been murdered in 31 countries, more than two-thirds in Latin America. Of those killed, 40 percent fought for land rights, indigenous peoples and environmental justice.

“What’s shocking to a lot of people is that this is now happening in the United States,” Donziger said. “I don’t mean murder, but death by a thousand cuts. Chevron does not want me to be a lawyer anymore, at a minimum. They don’t want me advocating even as a non-lawyer. They want to silence me. They want to kill every story they can. They’d rather have no story about this case than even a positive story about their side. They don’t want people to know about it. They want to erase it from people’s thought process.

“I cannot get a fair trial with a judge appointed by Judge Kaplan rather than through the random assignment process,” he lamented. “I cannot get a fair trial with a prosecutor whose law firm [has worked] for Chevron. These are egregious conflicts of interest. Its misconduct on a grand scale. I’ve been locked up four times as long as the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer for criminal contempt in New York. Anyone who cares about the rule of law should be appalled.”