Reid Sheftall MD – Comprehensively Decoding the Viral Issue, Pt 1 of 2
Ivor Cummins | December 11, 2020
Super-smart Reid Sheftall MD has worked it all out – period. Here is part 1 of our comprehensive conversation – no stones unturned!
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The Empire Doubles Down: Open Society Foundations Will Now Be Run by Lord Malloch Brown
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
The hubris of empire has always struck me with shock and awe.
I mean it really takes balls to get caught with a prostitute and instead of apologizing to your wife, to instead buy the hooker a new fur coat and parade her publicly at a public event.
Such has been the case with George Soros’ long time bosom buddy Lord Mark Malloch Brown who after being revealed as a leading force behind the software used by the infamous Dominion Voting systems via Smartmatic (which transferred its operating systems to Dominion via Sequoia Inc), has now been made the president of Soros’ global Open Society Foundations.
What is the logic behind such a decision?
Simple: If these characters were truly guilty of the crimes they are being accused of, then why would they behave so unapologetically in public? Surely to be so confident, they must be innocent of wrongdoing. It may sound overly simplistic, but this formula has proven most effective in recent years.
This is a lesson learned just a few months go by Sir Kim Darroch (former British Ambassador to the USA 2016-2019). After having failed in his mission to “flood the zone” with British intelligence operatives to influence Trump’s perception of reality, Sir Kim found himself honoured as a Lord and life peer for services rendered rather than face anything close to a reprimand for “exceeding the boundaries of his job description” as one would have expected.
The doubling down of those deep state operatives like Comey, Brennan and Clapper who after having been caught artificially pushing a contrived lie to de-legitimize the 2016 elections under RussiaGate, would become ever more crazed and loud in their advocacy of Trump’s allegiance to the Kremlin.
But this is an old formula that wasn’t invented with Trump. Caught laundering drug money HSBC? No worries. Pay a few dollars in fines, wait a bit, then do it again, but go bigger. Caught orchestrating a color revolution in Georgia? No problem. Just do another one in Ukraine. What happens when your Georgian color revolutionary puppet starts a war with Russia and has to flee his own nation to avoid imprisonment for corruption? Give him Ukrainian citizenship and install him as Governor of the Nazi-infested province of Odessa.
Back to the Soros-Brown Lovefest
Despite these truths, I must admit that the December 4 announcement of Lord Malloch Brown’s rise to the Presidency of Soros’ Open Society Foundations did surprise me.
Knowing that Dominion Voting systems shared its office space with Soros’ Tides Foundation in Toronto Canada was pretty bad. Knowing that Dominion executive Eric Koomer was caught on Soros-connected Antifa organizing zoom calls publicly announcing that he had ensured that Trump would not win was also bad. Seeing the integration of Dominion’s voting systems with a Soros operation known as the Clinton Foundation Delian Project didn’t look good.
When it came to Soros/Malloch Brown characters active in Biden’s aspiring administration, we find the likes of Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Peter Neffenger have found themselves enmeshed in the current coup operation serving as U.S. head of Smartmatic. Other Soros-Malloch Brown connected operatives include International Crisis Group member Jake Sullivan as Biden’s pick for National Security Advisor, Neera Tanden (head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress) who will head the White House Office of Management and Budget, and lest we forget Anthony Blinken – longtime friend of International Crisis Group President Robert Malley and son of Soros confidante Donald Blinken (whose Donald and Vera Blinken Open Society Archive in Hungary should serve as a constant reminder.)
Yet despite their decades of collaboration and devotion to the cause of destroying sovereign nation states as I outlined in my previous report, Soros and Malloch Brown didn’t make any effort to separate themselves amidst the current surge of U.S. color revolution controversies but have instead doubled down dramatically.
Announcing the transfer of power from Open Society President Patrick Gaspard to Brown, the Open Society website proclaimed:
“Patrick Gaspard has announced his decision to step down as president at the end of the year. During his three-year tenure, he confronted significant threats to open societies around the globe, including the rise of authoritarian regimes and the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Under his capable leadership, the Open Society Foundations have emerged stronger than ever.
Succeeding him as president will be Mark Malloch-Brown, the former UN deputy secretary‐general and UK minister, who currently serves on the Foundations’ Global Board. Malloch-Brown will take over effective January 1.”
Soros commented on Lord Malloch Brown’s presidency saying: “Mark is deeply familiar with Open Society’s work and shares my vision of a political philanthropy that is focused and prepared for the future.”
What these Globalists Fear
The real threats to their joint vision for an “open society” (code for “technocratic post-nation state world order run by a Malthusian master class”) were enumerated on multiple occasions by both Lord Malloch Brown and Soros. Since the current battle across the globe between Great Reset oligarchs and patriots has coincided with a spike in misinformation and psy ops which have attempted to pin the USA into a war posture with China, it is a good moment to be reminded of what those fears are.
In his June 2020 speech promoting world government, Lord Brown stated: “In the wider world a more authoritarian form of government is the new majority. It is not China alone. This “new majority” embraces leaders who come to power by the ballot box and those who didn’t, but who all share a preference for a nationalist foreign policy, the weakening of domestic institutions and the rule of law”.
At another event a few months later, Lord Malloch Brown warned that the United Nations had been infiltrated by authoritarian nation states like Russia, and China. His solution? Create new transnational operations which “bypass the UN security council”. Apparently, only open society-friendly NGOs are enlightened enough to dictate global policy.
Outlining his understanding of the two greatest threats to “open society”, George Soros had targeted two villains in his January 23, 2020 Davos speech: #1) Xi Jinping’s China and #2: Donald Trump’s USA.
At this speech, Soros stated: “regrettably, President Trump seems to be following a different course: Make concessions to China and declare victory while renewing his attacks on U.S. allies. This is liable to undermine the U.S. policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses.”
At the time Soros spoke, the U.S.-China trade deal had begun its first phase which aimed at ensuring China’s purchase of $200-$300 billion of U.S. manufactured goods. During these hopeful days of collaboration, President Trump understood much better than he does now that 10+ months of COVID insanity and anti-China psy war have flooded his support base, that the ultimate recovery of U.S. manufacturing was contingent upon good relations with China. Trump’s early words of support of Xi Jinping when COVID had newly emerged onto the scene calling the Chinese leader “my friend”, were truly prospects which scared the hell out of Soros, Malloch Brown (not to mention Soros’ right wing doppelganger Steve Bannon who has been set up as a false opposition over the past few years.)
USA-China Synergy is the greatest threat to a Bankers’ Dictatorship
The fact is that the vast markets being created by China’s Belt and Road Initiative provide important zones of demand for U.S. production and vital energy for long term big thinking unseen in the USA since the days of John F. Kennedy. China’s leadership in the multipolar alliance alongside Russia has not only created a foundation of serious resistance to the unipolar agenda, but has also re-awoken for the first time in decades, the multipolar foreign policy traditions that were once emblematic of the USA which I’ve written extensively about here and here and here and here.
This obvious synergy between the two “authoritarian” states of Xi’s China and Trump’s USA was, and continues to be, the greatest fear of those technocrats wishing to castrate nation states on the alter of green decarbonization schemes, world government and never-ending asymmetric wars to ensure that such inter-civilizational cooperative projects as the New Silk Road, be sabotaged under “divide and conquer” strategies. Sure these technocrats sometimes speak well of China, but I assure you that the only thing they admire are China’s centralized controls and surveillance infrastructure which they would love to have applied to control those democratically-minded nations of the west that they seek to dominate. Everything that China does that relates to poverty reduction, large scale infrastructure development, promotion of full spectrum economics abroad, win-win diplomacy, sovereign banking controls, mass education, and frontier creative leaps in science are considered deplorable and only worth destroying.
This is what makes the collapse of U.S. patriotic strategic thinking under an “anti-China” worldview so tragic and dangerous. For all of their courageous work exposing the election fraud and the ongoing 4 year coup attempt of Russia Gate, U.S. patriots like Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn and even Trump himself have demonstrated a tendency to fall for lines of simplistic reasoning that attempt to deflect the causal hand of British intelligence, and instead blame a combined assortment of secondary/tertiary reactive players like Iran and China as the ultimate villains of the story.
Perhaps if people would think a little more seriously about the CIA’s creation and protection of such Asian-scientology outfits like Falun Gong whose U.S.-based leader believes he is a messiah and which controls Epoch Times then they would be a little more weary about accepting every piece of information being slipping into their minds like mental trojan horses.
Perhaps these patriots would also recognize that Falun Gong’s expulsion from China in 1997 was due more to the outfit’s role in attempting to lead a color revolution akin to the Russian White Revolution of 2010 and not due to the CPC’s fear of the spread of “compassion, benevolence and kindness”. They might also realize that Soros/CIA Freedom House’s support for Falun Gong dovetails Bannon’s own collaboration with the same organization bringing both apparent “enemies” into direct synergy. Bannon’s calls for “uniting the global Christian right” under his Dignitas Humanitae Institute (connected to the highest echelons of the European black nobility) under a unified front to prepare for war with Chinese civilization and Islam is just a re-packaging of the neocon clash of civilizations doctrine that has played off of Soros’ anti-human brand of globalism for decades.
What is the carry away lesson from all of this?
Love your nation, and if you are American then defend the presidency from the likes of creeps like Soros, Mark Malloch Brown and Bannon. But keep in mind that the causal hand behind the subversion of the republic (or whatever nation state you might live in) is the same hand which desperately seeks to destroy China, and this same hand can only be chopped off once patriotic Americans and patriotic Chinese begin to work together.
There is no ‘Russian secret war’ on the US, but WaPo fantasy risks Biden starting a very real one
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 12, 2020
In a normal world, the Washington Post claiming the existence of a Russian ‘secret war’ against the US based on far-fetched conjecture and debunked conspiracy theories would be a laughing matter. We don’t live in such a world.
Democrat Joe Biden, anointed by the US mainstream media and Silicon Valley as the next president, “must call out Putin’s secret war against the United States” when he assumes office, the Post’s editorial board argued this week.
But this “secret war” exists only in their feverish imagination. Each and every one of the things they list as examples of it consists of assertions based on insinuation at best, or has otherwise been debunked as outright fake news.
Exhibit A is the “mysterious attacks” that supposedly “targeted” US diplomats and spies in Cuba, China, Australia and Taiwan. This ‘Havana Syndrome’ was blamed on Russia last week in a coordinated media campaign, but the “scientific” paper it was based on carefully avoids actual attribution, saying only that the vague symptoms were “consistent” with a posited microwave weapon.
This is an evolution of the original story, which claimed that Russia had used “sonic weapons,” not microwave ones. Even the New York Times later admitted that the headaches, sleep deprivation and other problems were more likely caused by the loud chirping of Cuban crickets.
Exhibit B is another doozy, the infamous “Russian bounties” story. The New York Times claimed in June that some money captured from local mobsters in Afghanistan was somehow proof that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill US soldiers – again, not on the basis of actual evidence, but on conjecture that this was “consistent” with what the CIA and US military said were Russian objectives.
Thing is, neither the US intelligence community nor the Pentagon were ever able to confirm the story, having investigated it for months. It just so happened that it was brought up just as the DC establishment sought to torpedo President Donald Trump’s plan to pull out of Afghanistan and end the 20-year war that has long since forgotten its purpose.
Exhibit C is the “looting of valuable hacking tools” from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, announced earlier this week. FireEye itself never named the culprit, with its CEO Kevin Mandia only saying it was “consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort.”
That didn’t stop the Post from claiming that “spies with Russia’s foreign intelligence service” are “believed” to have hacked FireEye, citing “people familiar with the matter.” Well there you go, anonymous and unverifiable sources asserted it, therefore it must be true!
Last but not least, Exhibit D is the assertion that the “Democratic National Committee’s computers were raided by Russian military intelligence to disrupt the 2016 election.” That is another assertion, based on allegations listed in indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller. As a federal judge helpfully reminded Mueller in another ‘Russiagate’ case, which the government later dropped, allegations made in indictments aren’t statements of fact.
If the phrase “consistent with” jumps out at you here, that’s no accident. Notice there is no actual evidence offered for any of these claims, only an insinuation that these alleged attacks would be “consistent” with what the US spies, anonymous sources and mainstream media think might be Russian objectives.
That’s exactly the claim made by the infamous January 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” which the media falsely attributed to “17 intelligence agencies” instead of a hand-picked team involved in spying on the Trump campaign at the time.
Keep in mind that these are the same spies and media that never saw the demise of the Soviet Union coming, and have been predicting Russia’s impending collapse any day now – for the past 20 years. So much for their actual knowledge of Russian goals or thinking.
Speaking of ‘Russiagate,’ the Post has been on the leading edge of that conspiracy theory from the start. It won Pulitzers for pushing it on the American public. It also played a key role in smearing Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, so he would be fired – and later cheered his railroading by Mueller. At least they’re consistent, so to speak.
Now, the Post editors may be privileged people, living comfortably off of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon fortune even as their country collapses under pandemic lockdowns. However, it would be a mistake to write off this editorial as a mere product of their vivid and feverish imaginations. After four years of Russiagate hysteria that even the Trump administration has internalized, this kind of rhetoric is actually dangerous.
That’s because the Post is literally in bed with what Trump called the Washington “swamp,” the entrenched US political establishment. What they print is what that establishment thinks and wants Americans to believe. With Joe Biden in the White House, the objectives of that establishment and the official US government would be, to use their own phrase, consistent.
Which is why the Post’s “secret war” fantasy is, shall we say, highly likely to become an actual shooting war with Moscow. As the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy the world several times over, that can’t possibly be good for Amazon’s bottom line. Someone ought to tell Bezos.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Virus Avoidance Is Not the Whole of Life
By Jenin Younes | American Institute of Economic Research | December 11, 2020
Lest you were hopeful that some semblance of normal life will return in 2021, either due to the development of vaccines or the pandemic fizzling out on its own, the New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever.
As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.
While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever. Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it.
One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.”
I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention. These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives.
This is a dogma that should be resoundingly rejected. As I (and many others) have written before, there is no reason to assign SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a killer virus, or to view it as significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).
Back to our 700 epidemiologists. Unfortunately, because of their profession – expertise in the incidence, distribution, and control of disease within a population– there is a danger that their ideas will be endowed with undeserved authority. Although not expressly stated, that is, presumably, the article’s objective: to encourage readers to conclude that, if this is what the experts are doing, perhaps I should, too. That is why the Times did not run an article about how 700 lawyers or baseball players or receptionists are living now.
I urge readers not to pay attention to the ideas propagated in that article. These epidemiologists are no better equipped to weigh the competing values that inform how one chooses to live during the coronavirus era than individuals are to make their own choices. To the contrary, we should entirely discount these epidemiologists’ opinions on the topic, as it appears that immersion in the world of infectious disease control has robbed them of perspective.
If you are under 70 and in reasonably good health, there is no reason to rearrange your existence and sacrifice activities that are crucial to your happiness and flourishing in the name of virus avoidance unless, perhaps, that was your lifestyle prior to 2020. And if the concern is others, one could devote resources to saving some of the twenty-five thousand people succumbing to starvation each day or the million children who die annually of malaria, with considerably less disruption to one’s life. It is puzzling that these epidemiologists, so concerned with the spread of coronavirus, have not chosen to devote their time and money to these causes.
Thankfully, more and more people appear to be reaching the same conclusion (including many of the politicians who have been exhorting people to stay home and shaming them for refusing to do so), as evidenced by the fact that only four percent fewer Americans traveled long distances for Thanksgiving than they did last year, and there has been increased resistance to illogical, disruptive measures such as closures of schools, playgrounds, and outdoor dining.
Of course, we are far from triumphing over the oppression inflicted upon us by politicians and so-called experts, but refusing to give into their absurd dictates is the only path to victory. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.
Jenin Younes is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law. Jenin currently works as an appellate public defender in New York City.
This green fantasy will bankrupt us
By Neil Collins | November 20, 2020
It’s 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office.
So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here’s a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a massive scale to get even halfway to the nirvana glimpsed by the prime minister this week. Today’s subsidy, of course, is tomorrow’s tax rise.
Home insulation? £2bn is barely enough to get some sort of programme started. The disruption from insulating your home will be enough to discourage us from taking up this offer, almost regardless of the accompanying bribe. As we saw with double glazing and solar panels, the cowboy installers and fraudsters will be the principal beneficiaries.
Windfarms? The easier sites are already filled up, driving development further offshore to have any chance of quadrupling today’s contribution. The bulk of new contracts are going to overseas manufacturers, while evidence of catastrophic damage to seabirds is growing, and nobody knows the long-term cost of maintaining this hi-tech engineering in a hostile environment.
Hydrogen home cooking? Hydrogen is much harder to handle than natural gas, and a compulsory conversion programme – the only practical way to exploit the existing pipework – would meet stiff resistance. Besides, like electricity, hydrogen is not a fuel but an energy transmission mechanism. Making it from actual fuel is like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Heat pumps? The capital cost typically runs into tens of thousands of pounds per dwelling, even where your garden is big enough to take one. They are also likely to be rather more expensive to maintain than your ‘fridge.
As for the electric car, despite subsidies of thousands of pounds per vehicle, with promises to spend billions more on sockets to charge them, motorists remain suspicious. After all, it is only a few short years since we were being urged to buy a diesel car, to make each barrel of oil go further. Now diesel is officially an evil producer of particulates that kill children.
Reconfiguring the electricity grid for electric vehicles will cost much more than the £2.5bn allocated in the government’s plan. Then there is the £40bn a year raised from fuel duties which will disappear if electricity takes over. It is almost a rounding error in the context of the hundreds of billions which the UK is going to waste with this week’s fashionable projects. They may indeed create thousands of jobs, but then so would digging large holes and filling them in again. Jobs that destroy wealth rather than creating it make us all poorer.
The government’s cheerleaders may argue that no price is too high to pay for “saving the planet”, but this week’s programme, if it is really implemented, will be ruinously expensive. After a year when the UK economy has shrunk by a tenth, we cannot afford more government repression, even cloaked in greenery. A smaller economy makes paying for the NHS, for example, much harder. Worse still, Britain’s self-harm makes almost no difference to global CO2 emissions, when China makes meaningless pledges of good behaviour while building two coal-fired power stations a week. How they must be laughing at us. … Full article
The Sixth Carbon Budget
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 10, 2020
The Committee on Climate Change, the quango headed up by our old friend John Gummer, has just published its latest cunning plan to bankrupt the UK. The Sixth Carbon Budget lays out how we should meet our decarbonisation targets, with specific emphasis on the period 2032-2037.
For the first time they have included estimates of what all of this might cost us in the 2030s. Dressed up in percentages of GDP, talk of green jobs and claims of the economic growth it will all spawn, the CCC have attempted to obscure how much we are all actually going to have to fork out.
They reckon that their plan will involve spending around £50bn annually by 2030, which equates to nearly £2000 for every home in the country. But, as we shall see, even that figure is based on some highly optimistic (some would argue unrealistically so) assumptions.
They say that the £50bn could be marginally offset by savings on electric cars. But it turns out that these are based on a combination of Enron style accounting, and absurdly fanciful assumptions about falling prices of electric cars.
There is, of course, much jam promised tomorrow, or more precisely 2050, when half of us will be dead. But it’s not what might happen in thirty years time that matters to people, it’s the here and now.
But what will all of this mean to the man in the street?
As we already know, the sale of conventional petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030. According to the CCC, Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) currently cost a third more than conventional cars, typically a premium of £6400.
However, the CCC grandly assume that by 2030 BEVs will cost no more; all of this on the basis that the cost of BEV batteries will drop by two thirds in the next ten years, for which there is not the slightest evidence. Of course, if BEVs do become a lot cheaper, drivers will be queuing up to buy them, and the government won’t need to ban conventional cars!
The CCC also dishonestly include something called “carbon costs” in their running costs for petrol/diesel cars, which amounts to £200 a year per car, or £7bn for the country as a whole. There is, of course, no such a thing as a “cost of carbon”, which is included only to make low carbon alternatives appear more competitive.
When these factors, along with doubts about the second hand value of BEVs, are taken into account, most of the CCC’s fictional savings disappear. All the more significant, because those drivers who are forced to use public chargers are already finding their cars to be dearer than petrol ones to run.
We then come to heating our homes, with proposals that sales of gas boilers are banned by 2033. For most homes this will mean replacement with air source heat pumps, which typically cost around £10,000 to install and require thousands more to be spent on insulation if they are to work effectively.
Quite where ordinary families are expected to get this money from is not explained! To make matters worse, because electricity costs five times as much as natural gas in terms of energy, householders will find that their heating bills double as well.
And if we choose to carry on using our old gas boilers? Simples – we will have a stonking carbon tax added to our gas bills instead.
Not only are we expected to pay thousands out to meet carbon targets, but we are also told we must eat a third less red meat and dairy produce, drive our cars less and take fewer flights. Not that we will be able to afford any of these pleasures after the CCC have done with us.
Eating less meat and dairy will of course cause great damage to British farming, as well as pushing up food bills for poorer families.
And how will we actually power all of these new electric cars and heat pumps? By 2035, we will need nearly twice as much electricity as now, two thirds of which will be coming from wind and solar power, according to the CCC. This is four times the amount of power they generate now.
And when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? We will have to fall back on gas power stations, with the proviso that they can capture and store the carbon dioxide produced, even though nowhere in the world has managed to do this at scale.
Central to the case for wind power, is that the cost of offshore wind has fallen so much that it is now competitive. However, independent experts, who have looked at the published accounts of companies building these wind farms, maintain that these so-called falling costs are illusory, and that the real costs could be triple those of conventional power generators. If they are right, this would add another £20bn a year to the CCC’s plan.
No longer are these plans decades in the future. Within the space of a very few years, people will begin to experience the financial pain inflicted on them by these proposals, if they are allowed to go ahead.
And all for what?
The UK only accounts for 1% of global emissions, so whatever we do will have no effect at all on the climate. Meanwhile, despite COVID, this year China has continued to build new coal power stations, increasing its generating capacity by 3%. In the last two year’s the rise in China’s emissions of carbon dioxide has exceeded our total emissions.
Pope Francis plans to ‘fix’ global capitalism – with the help of the Rothschilds, Rockerfellers and Mastercard
By Robert Bridge | RT | December 11, 2020
The Vatican has said it will partner with Fortune 500 companies to address various economic grievances, including inequality and environmental degradation. But is it really incumbent upon the Bishop of Rome to virtue-signal?
Anyone entertaining hopes that planet Earth might escape the insanity of 2020 without any more mind-blowing stories may wish to fasten their seatbelts for a hard landing.
At a time when a global pandemic has swept away millions of jobs, and transformed a handful of global capitalists from ‘merely wealthy’ to fantastically wealthy overnight, Pope Francis has decided to take sides in this epic battle. Any hunches what side that might be? Hint: much like the Vatican, it is immensely wealthy, influential, and acts like a government unto itself.
Yes, you guessed it. Instead of the poor and destitute – you know, ‘the meek who shall inherit the earth’ rigmarole – taking their rightful place alongside the Pope to fight against globalization on steroids, the Vatican has announced it will form a “historic partnership” with big business, known as the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. You can’t make this stuff up. And make no mistake: this is no mere talk shop, but rather a vast undertaking that involves “more than $10.5 trillion in assets under management, companies with over $2.1 trillion of market capitalization, and 200 million workers in more than 163 countries.”
“Capitalism has created enormous global prosperity, but it has also left too many people behind, led to the degradation of our planet, and is not widely trusted in society,” said Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Founder of the Council and Managing Partner of Inclusive Capital Partners. “This council will follow the warning from Pope Francis to listen to ‘the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor’ and answer society’s demands for a more equitable and sustainable model of growth.”
In other words, in an apparent act of divine intervention, the Rothschild family (whose wealth is estimated at $20 billion, although nobody really knows for sure), together with other famous brand names of globalization, such as the Rockefellers and Mastercard, will now take up the standard for the world’s downtrodden. Who will be the first one to hold their breath?
I tried to contain my skepticism, I really did, until I read a bit deeper into this contract between the Catholic Church and corporate power. Any guesses as to who will ensure the corporate chieftains live up to their end of the bargain?
Known as the Guardians for Inclusive Capitalism – I kid you not – these 27 devout and morally outstanding individuals all hail from the golden one percent. Let’s call them the Pope’s 27 billionaire disciples. Really outstanding people, such as President of the Rockefeller Foundation Rajiv Shah, CEO of Mastercard Ajay Banga, and CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff, will now behave like Good Samaritans, carrying out the will of the Holy See around a ravaged, lockdown-wearied planet. And here is the catch: there is not a single Vatican cardinal or even a deacon on the list of Guardians. So, who will guard over the guardians? Yes, the corporate elite themselves! They must have read Donald Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal’.
My initial skepticism shot into overdrive when it became clear what acts of charity the council would promote: “The Guardians will hold themselves accountable, committing to a list of intended actions involving environmental, social and governance matters,” Forbes reported. “The Guardians … have said they plan to hire and promote more women, increase diversity hires, commit to clean energy by purchasing 100% renewable electricity, reduce greenhouse gas emissions…” Yada, yada, yada.
Forgive me, Father, but that sounds an awful lot like the controversial progressive platform being touted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that has divided the United States down the middle. In other words, this unholy marriage has already alienated at least one half of the US population, who fear a Biden presidency will herald in an age of socialism in America. Meanwhile, it is hardly reassuring that these profit-driven individuals will be allowed to “hold themselves accountable” to take on unspecified “social and governance matters” and “other initiatives,” whatever those happen to be.
The reason for suspicion should be obvious. Aside from the absurdity of letting profit-driven corporations play guardian over themselves, we are now living in a time when these out-of-control behemoths are no longer content to just hawk their products to consumers; they have taken a serious stand on cultural and political issues, which many people find unacceptable yet must bear silently with a smile.
Using their profits from consumer spending, corporations such as Coca-Cola can run an extremely controversial Sprite advertisement campaign, for example, that promotes a transgender lifestyle and that will be seen by millions of impressionable children. Or how about Gillette’s massively disappointing (and disliked) commercial that took issue with so-called ‘toxic masculinity.’ Are these the “other initiatives” that corporations will be forcing on an unsuspecting public with the stamp of papal authority? Personally, I’ve never heard Pope Francis speak out against these extremely provocative ideas.
Perhaps even more worrying is that many companies, compelled to prove they are taking a stand on behalf of the latest cause célèbre, have enthusiastically jumped aboard the Black Lives Matter juggernaut, which critics – of which there is no shortage, even among the black American population – say works to the disadvantage of other races, not least white Americans, who have become the bane of Western civilization overnight.
Is this the sort of ‘equality’ big business will be promoting with the quiet blessing of the Vatican? In their woke bid to become more ‘equal and diverse,’ will corporations begin to promote particular groups of people at the expense of others? After all, the Trump administration was just forced to take executive action against ‘critical race theory’ inside the government, while academia is now rampant with lectures teaching the evils of the ignoble white man. Are we on the precipice of a new age of racism in the United States and elsewhere, where the historic tables are turned with the help of corporate America?
Although Pope Francis may have the best intentions at heart in promoting this sort of dialogue between the Vatican and the corporate world, unless there is real involvement by the Church to rein in corporate power, it will become a wasted opportunity in very short order.
The Council for Inclusive Capitalism is nothing more and nothing less than a cynical PR stunt for corporate power that allows their controversial initiatives, heavily steeped in the rapacious accumulation of profit, as well as the promotion of dangerous ‘woke’ values, to win the seal of approval from one of the most powerful religious authorities on the planet.
Such a program really amounts to an act of mindless virtue-signaling from the Catholic Church, which has fallen out of favor of late, and a cheap opportunity for the corporate world to conceal its behavior behind the shroud of morality and saintliness. It would have been far more effective and symbolic had Pope Francis committed himself to a contract with the people, with his true followers, in the fight against corporate power. Instead, he made a pact with the devil.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
Former Presidential Candidate Capriles Calls on US to End ‘Interim Presidency’
By Ricardo Vaz – Venezuelanalysis – December 11, 2020
Mérida – Former two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles has demanded a change of strategy for the Venezuelan opposition.
In an interview with the BBC, Capriles argued for a “reconstruction” of the opposition following last Sunday’s government victory in National Assembly (AN) elections. He claimed that the current plan led by US-backed Juan Guaido is “finished” and stressed that Washington’s stance will be “crucial.”
“The new [Prospective] administration has to understand that this plan has run its course and it cannot keep the status quo: the [Guaido] ‘interim presidency’,” Capriles said, adding that the opposition could “disappear as an alternative” if there is no change of course.
The December 6 elections delivered an overwhelming parliamentary majority for the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) and allies for the 2021-2025 term, but turnout stood only at 30.5 percent of the electoral roll after mainstream opposition parties boycotted the vote. The results were endorsed by an international observation mission.
Capriles, who served two terms as Miranda State governor, argued that the low turnout reflected the Venezuelan population’s “weariness” towards politicians and claimed the international community would not see the process as “legitimate.”
The veteran leader and allied figures had previously caused a rift within the opposition when they held talks with international brokers with a view towards taking part in the elections, but ultimately decided against it. However, the Justice First party founder insisted on the need to “align” the international community towards an “electoral calendar” featuring both presidential and parliamentary contests.
The former presidential candidate also voiced severe criticisms at former AN President Juan Guaido, though stressing it was “nothing personal.”
“When Guaido was the main figure, I backed him, but we can’t turn a blind eye to mistakes. Attempting to overthrow the government from the Altamira overpass, please!” he said in reference to the April 30, 2019 failed military putsch.
Opposition lawmaker Guaido proclaimed himself “interim president” in January 2019 and led several attempts to oust the government by force. In May 2020 he was alleged to have backed a failed paramilitary incursion featuring US mercenaries. His popularity and standing within the anti-government forces quickly eroded following a string of scandals.
Guaido and his associates rejected the recent parliamentary elections and vowed to “extend” the term of the outgoing National Assembly, with the newly elected one constitutionally mandated to take office on January 5, 2021.
The hardline opposition sectors have instead organized a “popular consultation,” asking backers whether they reject the recent elections, demanding an end to President Maduro’s “usurpation” and calling for action from the international community to oust the government.
The consultation has taken place via digital apps such as Telegram, with an in-person component scheduled for Saturday. Nevertheless, no details on audits or oversight surrounding the process have been detailed, while social media users have shown it is possible to vote from abroad or using Venezuelan identity cards found online.
Will Arce bring Cuban doctors back to Bolivia?
By Lucas Leiroz | December 12, 2020
For the supporters of Evo Morales and MAS, the election of Luis Arce in Bolivia was a great victory. But the challenges for the new president are enormous and opposition to his plans is strong. One of the most recent challenges is to decide about the future of medical cooperation between Bolivians and Cubans. Arce, in the midst of his country’s political chaos, must choose the future of Bolivian health cooperation with Cuba.
For 13 years, thousands of Cuban doctors have been in Bolivia and helped to make up for the shortage of health professionals in this South American country. Altogether, more than 70 million medical consultations were carried out by Cubans in Bolivia. A real dependency relationship was created. Without Cubans, thousands of Bolivians are unable to receive any medical treatment and entire regions of the country are excluded from the national health system, mainly the urban peripheries and rural zones. Even so, shortly after the coup that overthrew Morales, one of the first attitudes of the government of Jeanine Áñez was to expel the brigade of Cuban doctors from Bolivia, as part of the alignment measures with the US planned by the opponents of Morales.
Despite the undeniable benefits of the Cuban presence, Bolivia’s departmental medical schools vehemently reject the Cuban brigade’s presence in the national territory. According to representatives of such departments, the members of the Cuban medical brigades are “supposed doctors” who perform secret activities for the Communist government of Cuba. Another widely used argument is that Cubans “take jobs” that would be for Bolivian doctors. In this regard, the Doctors’ Union announced that health professionals will soon go on strike against the Arce government and that services will only resume if the president maintains the veto against Cubans.
In addition, the La Paz Faculty of Medicine recently stated that it sent a letter to the Ministry of Health addressing the issue of Cuban doctors. The Faculty, like the Union, is directly opposed to the presence of foreign doctors in the country, however, it assumes a more “peaceful” posture, trying to negotiate with the government instead of starting a national strike.
This rivalry between Bolivian and Cuban doctors is not new. During the government of Evo Morales, Bolivian doctors carried out repeated strikes, which lasted for months, resulting in leaving a large percentage of the population dependent on the public health system without an adequate care. There was no statistical study on the case, but it is known that many Bolivians became ill, died, or had serious consequences due to the resistance of doctors to assist them – which is a crime. That is precisely why Arce is acting so cautiously: his goal is to prevent further strikes in the midst of the pandemic.
However, the idea of replacing Cuban doctors with unemployed Bolivian professionals seems to be nonviable. At the time of the expulsion, the Áñez government had declared that it would immediately fill these positions with Bolivian doctors, which never really happened, showing that Bolivia really has no structure to supply the absence of Cuban doctors.
There are a number of factors that must be considered when analyzing this case. First, it deals with a question of quality over quantity. Regardless of the numbers and whether or not there are enough Bolivian doctors to replace the brigades, Cuban medical training is noticeably more appropriate, with the Caribbean country being recognized worldwide for its medical quality. During the pandemic, Cuba sent humanitarian aid to several countries, including developed nations, such as Italy. It is impossible to deny the ability of Cuban professionals – which is usually done only based on ideological assumptions. Still, the numbers of Cuban actions in Bolivia are impressive: more than 70 million consultations, 47,000 laboratory tests and 253,000 surgeries. The main merit of these professionals serving remote regions, where the Bolivian public system has difficulty reaching. Bolivia is a country marked by mountainous and desert regions, where access by health professionals is often difficult. Bolivian doctors most of the time do not arrive in such regions as large urban centers are treated with priority. Cooperation with Cuba met this need.
It is also important to demystify the discourse of Bolivian health professionals that Cubans are “taking their jobs”. This is not true. It is important to remember that Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with poor education conditions for most of the population. In general, Bolivians who graduate in medicine are part of the country’s economic elite and are, therefore, interested in guaranteeing their own interests, and not those of the population, when they criticize the government and promote strikes and stoppages.
Still, what to expect from professionals who refuse to treat their own countrymen, promoting stoppages of essential services only for political reasons? Apparently, the close links between the Bolivian opposition and the medical centers have reached intolerable levels. In any case, the scenario only tends to get worse.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.