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Report: Pentagon Orders Review of US Clandestine Ops After Social Media Takedowns of Fake Accounts

Samizdat – 19.09.2022

Internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory revealed in late August that over 150 false personas and media websites formed in the United States had been removed in recent years by Twitter and Facebook.

Major social media firms discovered and removed phony accounts believed to be operated by the US military in violation of the platforms’ policies, prompting the Pentagon to request a thorough examination of how it conducts clandestine information warfare, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

According to the report, after the White House and some federal agencies expressed growing concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences abroad, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, reportedly instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online last week to provide a complete accounting of their activities by next month.

The US Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of the agencies whose operations are under investigation, the undisclosed sources claimed, despite the fact that the researchers from Graphika and Stanford did not link the phony accounts to the military.

The takedowns of bogus accounts happened during the last two or three years, per the report. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns happened. They claimed several were recent and involved articles from the summer that promoted anti-Russian narratives by referencing the Kremlin’s “imperialist war” in Ukraine and announcing the conflict’s direct effects on Central Asian nations.

Importantly, they discovered that overt accounts actually drew more followers, and that false personas, which used strategies allegedly popular in nations like Russia and China, did not acquire much traction. With its headquarters in Tampa, CENTCOM oversees military operations in 21 Middle Eastern, North African, Central Asian and South Asian nations.

At a virtual meeting called by the National Security Council, Kahl reportedly announced his review and said he wanted to know what operations had been conducted, who they were targeting, what tools were being used, why military commanders had chosen those tactics, and how successful they had been, according to the report.

One defense official reportedly stated that essentially the message was: “You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things.”

However, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder is quoted in the report as saying that the military’s information operations “support our national security priorities,” and that they must be carried out in accordance with applicable laws and procedures.

“We are committed to enforcing those safeguards,” he added.

Inflammatory Posts From Fake Accounts That Violate Rules

The accounts that were deleted, per the report, included one for a fictitious Persian-language media outlet that disseminated posts that were copied from Radio Free Europe and Voice of America Farsi, which are supported by the US government. Another, it alleged, was connected to a Twitter account that previously claimed to operate from CENTCOM.

According to the article, one bogus account tweeted an emotional message saying relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had informed them that bodies had been returned from Iran with missing organs. The tweet reportedly contained a link to a video included in an article published on a website with ties to the US military.

While CENTCOM has not confirmed or denied the existence of such accounts under its control, according to a defense official, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices” if the tweet about organ harvesting is proven to be connected to the military.

Officials familiar with the situation indicated that Facebook disabled in 2020 fictitious personas purportedly developed by CENTCOM to combat “misinformation” spread by China that the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 was developed at a US Army lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The fake profiles were reportedly used to spread “truthful” information from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding the virus’ origin in China, according to the officials. They were active in Facebook groups where people conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

Despite being permitted by law and policy, the US government’s use of fictitious social media accounts has reportedly caused controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House urging the Pentagon to explain and defend its procedures.

Several US officials quoted in the report revealed that the White House and officials within the State and Defense departments are worried policies are too open-ended, and could allow for strategies that, even if they are used to spread accurate information, run the risk of undermining American credibility.

“Our adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” one of the sources said. “There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”

‘You Got Caught, That’s the Problem’

Pentagon doctrine and policy forbid the military from spreading lies, but there are purportedly no regulations requiring the use of accurate information in psychological operations. For instance, the military occasionally uses fiction and humor to persuade people, but normally communications are expected to stick to the facts, according to officials.

Officers from Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon in 2020 to voice their concerns about the fake accounts they were being forced to delete because they appeared to be connected to the military. That summer, Christopher Miller, the assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, who is in charge of overseeing influence operations policy, had a conversation with David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, in which the latter cautioned him that if Facebook could detect them, so could US adversaries.

“His point was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem,'” one of the sources said.

According to the report, Miller failed to take adequate action due to the fact that the Trump administration’s term was already approaching its end.

Kahl requested a study of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO — the Pentagon’s term for psychological operations — in response to concerns from the Biden White House. According to the report, a draft detailed that communication with other agencies, like the State Department and the CIA, needed to be strengthened, and that regulations, training, and monitoring all needed to be tightened.

The unnamed officials claimed that while there have been instances when the military has promoted false information, these were due to insufficient control over contractors and staff training rather than systemic issues. The same officials stated the Pentagon leadership did not do anything with the review before Graphika and Stanford released their findings on August 24.

Covert Psy Ops to Counter Washington’s Rivals

Military leaders have long sought to counter – including online – the rise of Russia and China as their strategic rivals. Congress has also agreed with that goal; in fact, congressional lawmakers passed legislation in late 2019 confirming the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the US and combat foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests.

This was done in response to frustration with what was perceived as legal barriers preventing the Defense Department from carrying out covert activities in cyberspace. The law, known as Section 1631, reduces some of the friction that previously prevented such operations by allowing the military to conduct covert psychologic operations without infringing on what the CIA claims to be their covert power.

“Combatant commanders got really excited,” one of the defense sources stated. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”

The insider added that military officers lacked necessary skills to supervise “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or coordinate such endeavors with other interested parties within the US government.

Moreover, an unnamed US diplomat told the Washington Post that the US “shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground.”

“We are a society that is built on a certain set of values,” they asserted. “We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”

Military psychological operations to advance American narratives abroad are surely nothing new, but the widespread use of Western social media has led to an expansion of strategies, including the employment of manufactured personalities and images often known as “deep fakes.”

According to the argument, opinions given by someone who looks like, for example, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student, may be more convincing than if the US government were overtly promoting them.

However, the majority of the military’s influence activities are open, supporting American policies in the Middle East, Asia, and other regions under its own name. Officials have noted there are legitimate reasons to employ covert methods, such as attempting to eavesdrop on a closed terrorist discussion group.

Is It Even Worth It?

Currently, determining whether the military’s clandestine influence efforts are producing outcomes is a critical concern for senior politicians.

“Is the juice worth the squeeze? one person reportedly said. “Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?”

According to the report by Graphika and Stanford, the covert operation had little effect. It stated that only 19% of the fabricated accounts had more than 1,000 followers, and that the “vast majority of posts and tweets” examined got “no more than a handful of likes or retweets.” The two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were accounts that openly declared a connection to the US military, according to the report.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

I just received a 30 day Facebook ban for this bit of satire

By Toby Rogers | September 18, 2022

Position switching” is the basis of empathy. So I’ve been trying to put myself in the shoes of our adversaries to understand their world view. But the more I do this, the more alarmed I become. The mainstream position on the pandemic and vaccines is literally insane.

So this morning I got up and tried to jot down The Official Narrative — from the perspective of the people who believe it. The more I wrote, the more absurd and untenable it became. I posted it to Facebook and was promptly banned for 30 days for “violating community standards.” Again.

I’m not sure what part the Stasi objected to. I did not use the word vaccine. I said that Pharma Loves Us(TM). Apparently the Stasi are feeling raw and triggered because they are always wrong about everything and their friends now all have myocarditis.

Here’s the offending post:


The Narrative(TM)

I want to make sure that I understand The Narrative(TM) correctly so that I can remain a Respectable Citizen(TM) in Good Standing(TM) with mainstream society:

1. The pharmaceutical industry is all-knowing. They are the source of all that is good and true in the world including life itself. The pharmaceutical industry is infallible.

2. The fact that all of the major pharmaceutical companies are in fact felons is unimportant. What? Did that even happen? I don’t know. Why are we even talking about this? What matters now is injecting as many of their products as possible.

3. The 30,935 reports of death after the thing are A Coincidence(TM). The HHS report showing that this system undercounts harms by a factor of 100 is… What? I never heard of that. I think I saw a warning label about that on social media. Pharma and the government Love You(TM) and Would Never Hurt You(TM). One. That’s how many people died after the thing. And that’s less than 1 in a million. Because.

4. The fact that Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Lancet Commission on the origins of Covid, after reviewing all of the available evidence, has come to the conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 came from a U.S. bioweapons lab is what? Why does anyone care where it came from? Everyone knows that the strange eating habits of the Chinese people are to blame. Nature: dangerous. Chinese peasants: guilty. Bioweapons labs: do they even exist? We need an international treaty to protect the pangolins or the bats or frozen food or whatever.

5. The first four xhots saved 20 million lives even though they have negative efficacy, fuel the evolution of variants, and cause antibody dependent enhancement that leaves one more vulnerable to infection. Miracles are like that — contradictory, paradoxical, and nonsensical. The important thing is just to believe.

6. Tony Fauci is perhaps the greatest American who ever lived — a cross between Jesus, the Buddha, and Einstein. The fact that he killed over 6 million people by funding gain-of-function research just proves his heroism.

7. During the AIDS epidemic, Fauci blocked access to Bactrim and funded the development of AZT that was expensive, toxic, and deadly. During Covid, Fauci blocked access to hcq and ivm and funded the development of Remdesivir and xhots that are expensive, toxic, and deadly. This proves that he loves us and is the world’s greatest scientist.

8. Authorizing the xhots for kids who already have natural immunity, are not at risk from the virus, and thus can only experience harms, is benevolent and kind. Why do kids exist? Do they even pay taxes? Robots could do a much better job. Dogs are so great. Do you follow my Instagram?

9. Bill Gates, who never finished college, once he acquired more money than he could ever spend in a lifetime, devoted his free time to hanging out with a pedophile sex trafficker. Clearly he is the best person to inform global health policy which is why he’s on CNN every Saturday night giving advice to an actual doctor, Sanjay Gupta.

10. The failures of the last two years are in fact an incredible success which is why the Biden administration is doubling down to create a Bioeconomy(TM) based on the failed genetic engineering strategies that caused the global pandemic. Only good things can come from this. We live in the best of all possible worlds.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 2 Comments

Federation of State Medical Boards Attacks Physicians Over COVID ‘Misinformation’ — Who’s Behind It?

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 14, 2022

The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) has taken a stand against what it refers to as “the dissemination of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and disinformation by physicians and other healthcare professionals on social media platforms, online and in the media,” going so far as to recommend disciplinary action and state policy changes.

In a July 2021 press release, the FSMB warned physicians they could risk “disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

And in a lengthier statement issued in April 2022, the nonprofit — which says it “serves as the voice for state medical boards” — appeared to advocate for laws like the one sitting on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk that would punish doctors who share COVID-19 “misinformation” with their patients, with language like this:

“Prohibitions on disseminating misinformation are already expressly written, or implied, in many state statutes regulating the practice of medicine. However, adopting a specific policy on misinformation is encouraged in light of the increased prevalence of, and harm caused by, physician-disseminated misinformation in this ongoing pandemic.”

In yet another show of support for cracking down on “misinformation,” FSMB President and CEO Dr. Humayun Chaudhry will speak next week on “Misinformation in Health Care: The Implications for Professionalism and the Public Trust” at the American Board of Medical Specialties annual conference.

In its July 2021 press release, the FSMB did not define what it meant by “misinformation or disinformation,” yet the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Family Medicine subsequently issued a joint statement supporting the FSMB’s position.

According to its website, the FSMB says it “supports its member boards as they fulfill their mandate of protecting the public’s health, safety and welfare through the proper licensing, disciplining, and regulation of physicians and, in most jurisdictions, other health care professionals.”

It also issues guidelines that serve as the basis for model policies with the stated goal of positively impacting the health and safety of patients and the medical regulatory system.

But some critics of the FSMB’s aggressive “misinformation” policy questioned where the organization derives its authority and who’s really behind it.

What is the FSMB — and who funds it?

Created in 1912 at a “small annual gathering of state board executive officers with no permanent staff or headquarters,” the FSMB today has almost 200 employees and two national headquarters — one in Texas and another in Washington, D.C.

The private tax-exempt 501(c)(6) trade association says it supports “America’s state medical boards in licensing, disciplining and regulating physicians and other healthcare professionals” and works to “keep patients safe.”

Since its inception, the FSMB has been staffed with members who presently or previously held positions with other medical governing bodies.

In fact, FSMB’s leadership — in conjunction with the U.S. government — in May 1994 spawned another medical authority agency — the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA).

According to IAMRA’s website, the IAMRA was formed when “FSMB, under contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), planned and hosted the 1st International Conference on Medical Regulation in Washington, D.C.”

FSMB and IAMRA share an office address in Texas. Their official phone numbers are nearly identical. And when a person calls the phone number listed on IAMRA’s website, the prerecorded welcome message tells the caller they’ve reached FSMB and IAMRA, in that order.

FSMB’s president and CEO, Chaudry, is also the secretary of the IAMRA. This overlapping of leadership positions extends beyond FSMB and IAMRA into medical councils in other countries.

For example, Dr. Emanuel Garcia, a psychiatrist living in New Zealand who publicly voiced concern about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, noted in an Aug. 22 article for Global Research that the chair-elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, “just happens” to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand.

Garcia, who questioned whether the FSMB and IAMRA’s true motivations were ensuring safe medical practices, said:

“In casting an eye over the years since the dramatic introduction of the COVID pandemic, the near total shutdown of the world, the immense transfer of wealth from the middle and poorer classes upwards, the universal imposition of an inadequately tested so-called vaccine, and the vehement suppression of critical early treatment, one cannot but conclude that there is indeed an agenda beyond health and welfare.

“The FSMB and the IAMRA have shown by their actions that they are tools whose task is to further this agenda, and that this agenda is both anti-medical and inhumane.”

In addition to contracting with the U.S. government and IAMRA, the FSMB runs its own foundation that functions as a separate 501(c)(3) organization but is supported by a “generous seed endowment” from the FSMB.

Last April, the FSMB foundation celebrated its 10-year anniversary by hosting its annual fundraising luncheon. Its annual highbrow luncheons have raised thousands of dollars to support the organization’s activities, including “the study of state responses to the COVID-10 pandemic.”

The FSMB foundation’s website does not disclose its donors.

Commenting on the FSMB’s July 2021 statement, “Spreading COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation May Put Medical License at Risk,” Garcia said, “The outstanding question remains: Where does the FSMB derive its authority to regulate United States medical boards and, through its apparent international partner, the IAMRA, direct medical councils around the world to discipline doctors?”

So many questions …

Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and biological warfare epidemiologist who had her medical license suspended in January for “spreading misinformation,” told The Defender the FSMB’s authoritative actions raise many questions.

Nass, a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, outlined the questions in an email:

  • Why would a nonprofit with no regulatory authority suddenly decide it was important to trash the First Amendment, the Nuremberg Code and other legal doctrines to push for punishing doctors who fail to tell the government’s story and use COVID-19 treatments the government doesn’t want used?
  • Why is the FSMB monitoring the states and collecting information on their attempts to investigate and/or punish doctors for doing their duty to act as  learned intermediaries to their patients?
  • Why did the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine, the American Medical Association and the American Association of Pediatrics push identical policies in lockstep in mid-2021 that would destroy physician autonomy, when physicians are, one would think, their clients?
  • Why did the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists push for experimental vaccinations during all trimesters of pregnancy?

Nass suggested all of these questions should be investigated.

A history of ties to Big Pharma

Historically, there is evidence of Big Pharma funneling money to the FSMB.

For example, a decade ago, MedPage Today broke the story on how the FSMB turned to a pharmaceutical company with a $3.1 million request to underwrite the cost of producing and distributing a book about its opioid prescribing policy.

After the FSMB’s guidelines for the use of opioids to treat chronic pain patients were adopted as a model policy, the organization asked Purdue Pharmaceuticals for $100,000 to help pay for printing and distributing the policy to 700,000 practicing doctors.

The initial $100,000 was just a small downpayment on the $3.1 million the FSMB’s foundation estimated it would cost for its campaign to get out the word about the “safe” use of opioid analgesics in the treatment of chronic pain, according to MedPage.

The FSMB also has a history of challenging and attacking non-pharmaceutical medical approaches used by integrative doctors as falling outside the “standard of care” as they define it.

Dr. Christiane Northrup, a former board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist with more than 30 years of experience, told The Defender she intuitively sensed the FSMB had questionable associations and chose not to renew her medical license when it came up for renewal in 2015.

Northrup, who had shifted her professional activities away from directly seeing patients, said she asked herself, “Do I need this for what I’m doing now?” and concluded, “Let’s not renew this.”

Northrup pointed out the historical connection between pharmaceutical companies and the FSMB. She told The Defender that “what we’re talking about is a very carefully orchestrated attempt to control doctors.”

Many people who have been taught that “the doctor knows best,” Northrup said, cannot comprehend the “horror” of the implications of the FSMB’s actions.

The Defender reached out to the FSMB and the IAMRA for comment, but neither had responded at the time of this writing.


Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 2 Comments

Sustainable Debt Slavery

BY IAIN DAVIS AND WHITNEY WEBB | UNLIMITED HANGOUT | SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

In this first instalment of a new series, Iain Davis and Whitney Webb explore how the UN’s “sustainable development” policies, the SDGs, do not promote “sustainability” as most conceive of it and instead utilise the same debt imperialism long used by the Anglo-American Empire to entrap nations in a new, equally predatory system of global financial governance.

The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is pitched as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” At the heart of this agenda are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.

Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.

This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.

Are their interests truly aligned with “sustainable development” and improving the state of the world for regular people, as they now claim?  Or do their interests lie where they always have, in a profit-driven economic model based on debt slavery and outright theft?

In this Unlimited Hangout investigative series, we will be exploring these questions and interrogating – not only the power structures behind the SDGs and related policies – but also their practical impacts.

In this first instalment, we will explore what actually underpins the majority of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, cutting through the flowery language to deliver the full picture of what the implementation of these policies means for the average person. Subsequent instalments will focus on case studies based on specific SDGs and their sector-specific impacts.

Overall, this series will offer a fact-based and objective look at how the motivation behind the SDGs and Agenda 2030 is about retooling the same economic imperialism used by the Anglo-American Empire in the post-World War II era for the purposes of the coming “multipolar world order” and efforts to enact a global neo-feudal model, perhaps best summarized as a model for “sustainable slavery.”

The SDG Word Salad

The UN educates young people in developing nations to welcome “Sustainable Development” without disclosing the impact it will have on their lives or national economy, Source: UNICEF

Most people are aware of the concept of “Sustainable Development” but, it is fair to say that the majority believe that SDGs are related to tackling problems allegedly wrought by climate disaster. However, the Agenda 2030 SDGs encompass every facet of our lives and only one, SDG 13, deals explicitly with climate.

From economic and food security to education, employment and all business activity; name any sphere of human activity, including the most personal, and there is an associated SDG designed to “transform” it. Yet, it is the SDG 17—Partnerships for Goals—through which we can start to identify who the beneficiaries of this system really are.

The stated UN SDG 17 aim is, in part, to:

Enhance global macroeconomic stability, including through policy coordination and policy coherence. [. . .] Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships [. . .] to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries. [. . .] Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.

From this, we can deduce that “multi-stakeholder partnerships” are supposed to work together to achieve “macroeconomic stability” in “all countries.” This will be accomplished by enforcing “policy coordination and policy coherence” constructed from the “knowledge” of “public, public-private and civil society partnerships.” These “partnerships” will deliver the SDGs.

This word-salad requires some untangling, because this is the framework that enables the implementation of every SDG “in all countries.”

Before we do, it is worth noting that the UN often refers to itself and its decisions using grandiose language. Even the most trivial of deliberations are treated as “historic” or “ground breaking,” etc. There is also a lot of fluff to wade through about transparency, accountability, sustainability and so on.

These are just words which require corresponding action in order to have contextual meaning. “Transparency” doesn’t mean much if crucial information is buried in endless reams of impenetrable bureaucratic waffle that isn’t reported to the public by anyone. “Accountability” is an anathema if even national governments lack the authority to exercise oversight over the UN; and when “sustainable” is used to mean “transformative,” it becomes an oxymoron.

Untangling the UN-G3P SDG Word Salad

The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) commissioned a paper which defines “multi-stakeholder partnerships” as:

[P]artnerships between business, NGOs, Governments, the United Nations and other actors.

These “multi-stakeholder partnerships” are supposedly working to create global “macroeconomic stability” as a prerequisite for the implementation of the SDGs. But, just like the term “intergovernmental organisation,” the meaning of “macroeconomic stability” has also been transformed by the UN and its specialised agencies.

While macroeconomic stability used to mean “full employment and stable economic growth, accompanied by low inflation,” the UN have announced that isn’t what it means today. Economic growth now has to be “smart” in order to meet SDG requirements.

Crucially, fiscal balance—the difference between a government’s revenue and expenditure—must accommodate “sustainable development” by creating “fiscal space.” This effectively disassociates the term “macroeconomic stability” from “real economic activity.”

Climate change is seen, not just as an environmental problem, but as a “serious financial, economic and social problem.” Therefore “fiscal space” must be engineered to finance the “policy coordination and policy coherence” needed to avert the prophesied disaster.

The UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) notes that “fiscal space” lacks a precise definition. While some economists define it simply as “the availability of budgetary room that allows a government to provide resources for a desired purpose,” others express “budgetary room” as a calculation based upon a countries debt-to-GDP ratio and “projected” growth.

UN-DESA suggests that “fiscal space” boils down to the estimated—or projected—“debt sustainability gap.” This is defined as “the difference between a country’s current debt level and its estimated sustainable debt level.”

No one knows what events may impact future economic growth. A pandemic or another war in Europe could severely restrict it, or cause a recession. The “debt sustainability gap” is a theoretical concept based upon little more than wishful thinking.

As such, this allows policy makers to adopt a malleable, and relatively arbitrary, interpretation of “fiscal space.” They can borrow to finance sustainable development spending, irrespective of real economic conditions.

The primary objective of fiscal policy used to be to maintain employment and price stability and encourage economic growth through the equitable distribution of wealth and resources. It has been transformed by sustainable development. Now it aims to achieve “sustainable trajectories for revenues, expenditures, and deficits” that emphasise “fiscal space.”

If this necessitates increased taxation and/or borrowing, so be it. Regardless of the impact this has on real economic activity, it’s all fine because, according to the World Bank:

Debt is a critical form of financing for the sustainable development goals.

Spending deficits and increasing debt are not a problem because “failure to achieve sustainable development goals” would be far more unacceptable and would increase debt even further. Any amount of sovereign debt can be heaped upon the taxpayer in order to protect us from the much more dangerous economic disaster that would allegedly befall us if the SDGs aren’t quickly implemented.

In other words, economic, financial and monetary crises will hardly be absent in the world of “sustainable development.” The rationale outlined above will likely be used to justify such crises. This is the model envisioned by the UN and its “multi-stakeholder partners.” For those behind the SDGs, the ends justify the means. Any travesty can be justified as long as it is committed in the name of “sustainability.”

We are faced with a global policy initiative, affecting every corner of our lives, based upon the logical fallacy of circular reasoning. The effective destruction of society is necessary in order to protect us from something that we are told is to be much worse.

Obedience is a virtue because, unless we adhere to the policy demands imposed upon us, and accept the costs, the climate disaster might come to pass.

Armed with this knowledge, it becomes much easier to translate the convoluted UN-G3P word-salad and figure out what the UN actually means by the term “Sustainable Development”:

Governments will tax their populations, increasing deficits and national debt where necessary, to create financial slush funds that private multinational corporations, philanthropic foundations and NGOs can access in order to distribute their SDG compliance-based products, services and policy agendas. The new SDG markets will be protected by government sustainability legislation, which is designed by the same “partners” who profit from and control the new global SDG-based economy.

“Green” Debt Traps

Debt is specifically identified as a key component of SDG implementation, particularly in the developing world. In a 2018 paper written by a joint World Bank-IMF team, it was noted on several occasions that “debt vulnerabilities” in developing economies are being addressed by those financial institutions “within the context of the global development agenda (e.g., SDGs).”

That same year, the World Bank and IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) became operational. Per the World Bank, the DSF “allows creditors to tailor their financing terms in anticipation of future risks and helps countries balance the need for funds with the ability to repay their debts.” It also “guides countries in supporting the SDGs, when their ability to service debt is limited.”

Expressed differently, if countries cannot pay the debt they incur through IMF loans and World Bank (and associated Multilateral Development Bank) financing, they will be offered options to “repay” their debt through implementing SDG-related policies. However, as future instalments of this series will show, many of these options supposedly tailored to SDG implementation actually follow the “debt for land swap” model (now re-tooled as “debt for conservation swaps” or “debt for climate swaps”) that precede the SDGs and Agenda 2030 by a number of years. This model essentially enables land grabs and land/natural resource theft on a scale never before seen in human history.

Since their creation in the aftermath of World War II, both the World Bank and IMF have historically used debt to force countries, mostly in the developing world, to adopt policies that favour the global power structure. This was made explicit in a leaked US Army document written in 2008, which states that these institutions are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war” and as “weapons” in terms of influencing “the policies and cooperation of state governments.” The document notes that these institutions in particular have a “long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”

The document further notes that these “financial weapons” can be used by the US military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels.” Further, these unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”

Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of US National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”

While they were once “financial weapons” to be wielded by the Anglo-American Empire, the current shifts in the “global governance system” also herald a shift in who is able to weaponize the World Bank and IMF for their explicit benefit. As the sun sets on the imperial, “unipolar” model and the dawn of a “multipolar” world order is upon us. The World Bank and IMF have already been brought under the control of a new international power structure following the creation of the UN-backed Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) in 2021.

At the COP26 conference that same year, GFANZ announced plans to overhaul the role of the World Bank and IMF specifically as part of a broader plan aimed at “transforming” the global financial system. This was made explicit by GFANZ principal and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink during a COP26 panel, where he specified the plan to overhaul these institutions, saying:

If we’re going to be serious about climate change in the emerging world, we’re going to have to really focus on the reimagination of the World Bank and the IMF.

GFANZ’s plans to “reimagine” these international financial institutions involve merging them with the private-banking interests that compose GFANZ; creating a new system of “global financial governance”; and eroding national sovereignty (particularly in the developing world) by forcing them to establish business environments deemed friendly to the interests of GFANZ members.

As noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout report, GFANZ seeks to use the World Bank and related institutions “to globally impose massive and extensive deregulation on developing countries by using the decarbonization push as justification. No longer must MDBs [multilateral development banks] entrap developing nations in debt to force policies that benefit foreign and multinational private-sector entities, as climate change-related justification can now be used for the same ends.”

GFANZ Progress Report, November 2021Download

Debt remains the main weapon in the arsenal of the World Bank and IMF, and will be used for the same “imperial” ends, only now with different benefactors and a different array of policies to impose on their prey – the SDGs.

The UN’s Quiet Revolution

GFANZ is a significant driver of “sustainable development.” It is, nonetheless, just one of many SDG related “public-private partnerships.” The GFANZ website states:

GFANZ provides a forum for leading financial institutions to accelerate the transition to a net-zero global economy. Our members currently include more than 450 member firms from across the global financial sector, representing more than $130 trillion in assets under management.

GFANZ is formed from a number of “alliances.” The banks, asset managers, asset owners, insurers, financial service providers and investment consultancies each have their own global partnership networks that collectively contribute to the GFANZ forum.

For example, the UN’s Net Zero Banking Alliance affords Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, HSBC and others the opportunity to pursue their ideas through the GFANZ forum. They are among the key “stakeholders” in the SDG transformation.

In order to “accelerate the transition,” the GFANZ forum’s “Call to Action” empowers these multinational corporations to stipulate specific policy requests. They have decided that governments should adopt “economy-wide net-zero targets.” Governments also need to:

[R]eform [. . . ] financial regulations to support the net zero transition; phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies; pric[e] carbon emissions; mandat[e] net zero transition plans and [set] climate reporting for public and private enterprises by 2024

All of this is necessary, we are told, to avert the “climate disaster” that might happen one day. Therefore, this “global financial governance” policy agenda is simply unavoidable and we should allow private (and historically predatory) financial institutions to create policy aimed at de-regulating the very markets in which they operate. After all, the “race to Net Zero” must happen at break-neck speed and, per GFANZ, the only way to “win” involves scaling “private capital flows to emerging and developing economies” like never before. Were the flow of this “private capital” to be impeded by existing regulations or other obstacles, it would surely spell planetary destruction.

King Charles III, explained the new global SDG economy that will relegate elected governments to “enabling partners.” Then titled Prince Charles, speaking at COP26, in preparation for the GFANZ announcement, he said:

My plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required. We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. We also know that countries, many of whom are burdened by growing levels of debt, simply cannot afford to go green. Here we need a vast military style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at its disposal far beyond global GDP, [. . .] beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders. It offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.

Just as the alleged urgency to implement the SDGs exonerates public policy makers, it also lets the private sector, that drives the antecedent policy agendas, off the hook. The fact that the debt they collectively create primarily benefits private capital is just a coincidence; an allegedly inescapable, consequence of creating the “fiscal space” needed to deliver “sustainable development.”

The UN’s increasing reliance upon these “multi-stakeholder partnerships” is the result of the “quiet revolution” that occurred in the UN during the 1990s. In 1998, then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, told the World Economic Forum’s Davos symposium:

The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world. [. . .] We also promote private sector development and foreign direct investment. We help countries to join the international trading system and enact business-friendly legislation.

Kofi Annan, Secretary-General, United Nations (1997 – 2006) is a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum and Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum on Africa. Here, he speaks at the Opening Plenary on Africa and the New Global Economy at the World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa, Source: WEF

The 2017 UN General Assembly Resolution 70/224 (A/Res/70/224) decreed that the UN would work “tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda [Agenda 2030]” through the global dissemination of “concrete policies and actions.”

In keeping with Annan’s admission, these enacted policies and actions are designed, via “global financial governance,” to be “business-friendly.”

A/Res/70/224 added that the UN would maintain:

The strong political commitment to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development. [. . .] [P]articularly with regard to developing partnerships through the provision of greater opportunities to the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society in general [. . .], in particular in the pursuit of sustainable development [SDGs].

This “enabling environment” is synonymous with the “fiscal space” demanded by the World Bank and other UN specialised agencies. The term also makes an appearance in the GFANZ progress report, which states that the World Bank and Multilateral Development Banks should be used to prompt developing nations “to create the right high-level, cross-cutting enabling environments” for alliance members’ investments in those nations.

This concept was firmly established in 2015 at the Adis Ababa Action Agenda conference on “financing for development.” The gathered delegates from 193 UN nation states committed their respective populations to an ambitious financial investment programme to pay for sustainable development.

They collectively agreed to create:

… an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development; [. . .] to further strengthen the framework to finance sustainable development.

The “enabling environment” is a government, and therefore taxpayer-funded commitment to SDGs. Annan’s successor and the 9th Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, authorised a 2017 report on A/Res/70/224 which read:

The United Nations must urgently rise to the challenge of unlocking the full potential of collaboration with the private sector and other partners. [. . .] [T]he United Nations system recognizes the need to further pivot towards partnerships that more effectively leverage private sector resources and expertise. The United Nations is also seeking to play a stronger catalytic role in sparking a new wave of financing and innovation needed to achieve the Goals [SDGs].

While called an intergovernmental organisation, the UN is not just a collaboration between governments. Some might reasonably argue that it never was.

The UN was created, in no small measure, thanks to the efforts of the private sector and the “philanthropic” arms of oligarchs. For instance, the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF’s) comprehensive financial and operational support for the Economic, Financial and Transit Department (EFTD) of the League of Nations (LoN), and its considerable influence upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), arguably made the RF the key player in the transition of the LoN into the UN.

In addition, the Rockefeller family, which has long promoted “internationalist” policies that expand and entrench global governance, donated the land on which the UN’s headquarters in New York sits, among other sizeable donations to the UN over the years. It should come as little surprise that the UN is particularly fond of one of their main donors and has long partnered with the RF and praised the organisation as a model for “global philanthropy.”

The UN was essentially founded upon a public-private partnership model. In 2000, the Executive Committee of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published Private Sector Involvement and Cooperation with the United Nations System:

The United Nations and the private sector have always had extensive commercial links through the procurement activities of the former. [. . .] The United Nations market provides a springboard for a company to introduce its goods and services to other countries and regions. [. . .] The private sector has also long participated, directly or indirectly, in the normative and standard-setting work of the United Nations.

Being able to influence, not only government procurement, but also the development of new global markets and the regulation of the same is, obviously, an extremely attractive proposition for multinational corporations and investors. Unsurprisingly, UN projects that utilise the “public-private” model are the favoured approach of the world’s leading capitalists. For instance, it has long been the favoured model of the Rockefeller family, who often finance such projects through their respective philanthropic foundations.

In the years since its inception, public-private partnerships have expanded to become dominant within the UN system, particularly with regard to “sustainable development.” Successive Secretary Generals have overseen the UN’s formal transition into the United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership (UN-G3P).

As a result of this transformation, the role of nation state governments at the UN has also changed dramatically. For instance, in 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO), another specialised agency of the UN, published a report on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare titled Connecting for Health. Speaking about how “stakeholders” could introduce ICT healthcare solutions globally, the WHO noted:

Governments can create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.

As King Charles III noted last year in Glasgow, governments of “democratic” nation have been given the role of “enabling” partners. Their job is to create the fiscal environment in which their private sector partners operate. Sustainability policies are developed by a global network comprised of governments, multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations and “other actors.”

The “other actors” are predominantly the philanthropic foundations of individual billionaires and immensely wealthy family dynasties, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates (BMGF) or the Rockefeller Foundations. Collectively, these “actors” constitute the “multi-stakeholder partnership.”

During the pseudopandemic, many came to acknowledge the influence of the BMGF over the WHO, but they are just one of many other private foundations that are also valued UN “stakeholders.”

The UN is, itself, a global collaboration between governments and a multinational infra-governmental network of private “stakeholders.” The foundations, NGOs, civil society organisations and global corporations represent an infra-governmental network of stakeholders, just as powerful, if not more so, than any power block of nation states.

Public-Private Partnership: An Ideology

In 2016, UN-DESA published a working paper investigating the value of public-private partnerships (G3Ps) for achieving the SDGs. The lead author, Jomo KS, was the Assistant Secretary General in the United Nations system responsible for economic research (2005-2015).

UN-DESA broadly found that G3Ps, in their current form, were not fit for purpose:

[C]laims of reduced cost and efficient delivery of services through [G3Ps] to save tax payers money and benefit consumers were mostly empty and [. . .] ideological assertions. [. . ] [G3P] projects were more costly to build and finance, provided poorer quality services and were less accessible [. . .] Moreover, many essential services were less accountable to citizens when private corporations were involved. [. . .] Investors in [G3Ps] face a relatively benign risk [. . .] penalty clauses for non-delivery by private partners are less than rigorous, the study questioned whether risk was really being transferred to the private partners in these projects. [. . .] [T]he evidence suggests that [G3Ps] have often tended to be more expensive than the alternative of public procurement while in a number of instances they have failed to deliver the envisaged gains in quality of service provision.

Citing the work of Whitfield (2010), which examined G3Ps in Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, China, India and Brazil, UN-DESA noted that these led to “the buying and selling schools and hospitals like commodities in a global supermarket.”

The UN-DESA reports also reminded the UN’s G3P enthusiasts that numerous intergovernmental organisations had found G3Ps wanting:

Evaluations done by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Investment Bank (EIB) – the organizations normally promoting [G3Ps] – have found a number of cases where [G3Ps] did not yield the expected outcome and resulted in a significant rise in government fiscal liabilities.

Little has changed since 2016 and yet the UN-G3P insist that public-private partnership is the only way to achieve SDGs. Ignoring the assessment from its own investigators, In General Assembly Resolution 74/2 (A/Res/74/2) the UN declared:

[UN member states] Recognize the need for strong global, regional and national partnerships for Sustainable Development Goals, which engage all relevant stakeholders to collaboratively support the efforts of Member States to achieve health-related Sustainable Development Goals, including universal health coverage [UHC2030] [. . .] the inclusion of all relevant stakeholders is one of the core components of health system governance. [. . . ] [We] Reaffirm General Assembly resolution 69/313 [. . .] to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development. [We will] provide [. . .] sustainable finances, while improving their effectiveness [. . .] through domestic, bilateral, regional and multilateral channels, including partnerships with the private sector and other relevant stakeholders.

This UN commitment to global public-private partnership is an “ideological assertion” and is not based upon the available evidence. In order for G3Ps to actually function as claimed, UN-DESA stipulated that a number of structural changes would need to be put in place first.

These included careful identification of where a G3P could work. UN-DESA found that G3Ps may be suited to some infrastructure projects but were damaging to projects dealing with public health, education or the environment.

The UN researchers stated that diligent oversight and regulation of pricing and the alleged transfer of risk would be required; comprehensive and transparent fiscal accounting systems were needed; better reporting standards should be developed and rigorous legal and regulatory safeguards were necessary.

None of the required structural or policy changes recommended in the UN-DESA 2016 report have been implemented.

Sustainability for whom?

Agenda 2030 marks the waypoint along the path to Agenda 21. Publicly launched at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Section 8 explained how “sustainable development” would be integrated into decision making:

The primary need is to integrate environmental and developmental decision-making processes. [. . .] Countries will develop their own priorities in accordance with their national plans, policies and programmes.

Sustainable development has been integrated with every policy decision. Not only does every country have a national sustainability plan, these have devolved to local government.

It is a global strategy to extend the reach of global financial institutions into every corner of the economy and society. Policy will be controlled by the bankers and the think-tanks that infiltrated the environmental movement decades ago.

No community is free of “global financial governance.”

Simply put, sustainable development supplants decision making at the national and local level with global governance. It is an ongoing, and thus far successful, global coup.

But more than this, it is a system for global control. Those of us who live in developed nations will have our behaviour changed as a psychological and economic war is waged against us to force our compliance.

Developing nations will be kept in penury as the fruits of modern industrial and technological development are denied to them. Instead they will be burdened with the debt foisted upon them by the global centres of financial power, their resources pillaged, their land stolen and their assets seized – all in the name of “sustainability.”

Yet it is perhaps the financialisation of nature, inherent to sustainable development, that is the greatest danger of all. The creation of natural asset classes, converting forests into carbon sequestration initiatives and water sources into human settlement services. As subsequent instalments of this series will show, several SDGs have financialising nature at their core.

As openly stated by the UN, “sustainable development” is all about transformation, not necessarily “sustainability” as most people conceive of it. It aims to transform the Earth and everything on it, including us, into commodities – the trading of which will form the basis of a new global economy. Though it is being sold to us as “sustainable,” the only thing this new global financial system will “sustain” is the power of a predatory financial elite.


Iain Davis is an independent investigative journalist, author and blogger from the UK. His focus is upon widening readers awareness of evidence that the so-called mainstream media won’t report. A frequent contributor to UK Column, Iain’s work has been featured by the OffGuardian, the Corbett Report, Technocracy News, Lew-Rockwell and other independent news outlets. You can read more of his work on his blog: – https://iaindavis.com

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

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September 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russian fertilizer offered for free to Africa

Samizdat | September 19, 2022

Russian producer of mineral and potash fertilizers, Uralchem, has decided to supply its products to Africa free of charge, the company’s chief executive Dmitry Konyaev announced on Monday.

“The situation in the world today is really bad. Africa has been starving and will continue to starve, unfortunately. We, as a company, even decided to supply fertilizers to Africa for free, just because we are part of this global chain when you need to produce food,” Konyaev said during his speech at the Innofood forum in Sochi.

The first batch of 25,000 tons of humanitarian cargo could reportedly be sent to the Republic of Togo.

According to Uralchem CEO, there are no problems with food security in Russia, since the country is fully provided with fertilizers and can send a significant quantity for export.

Earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin said at a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that the country is ready to transfer 300,000 tons of Russian fertilizers accumulated in EU ports due to Western sanctions to developing countries free of charge. While Putin welcomed the decision to allow Russian fertilizers into the EU, he criticized Brussels for only allowing the bloc’s member states to buy them.

In late July, Moscow and Kiev signed a deal unblocking Ukrainian grain exports via the Black Sea at UN-brokered talks in Istanbul. The agreement was also supposed to allow Russia to deliver fertilizers and food goods to global markets, which the Kremlin says has not happened.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics | | 1 Comment

Austrian citizens dissatisfied with anti-Russian measures

Protests against sanctions and gas prices are likely to increase in the entire European continent
By Lucas Leiroz | September 19, 2022

Protests against gas prices are rising in Europe. European citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with the directions taken by their countries and organize demonstrations to express their opinions against the EU and its sanctions. In Austria, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand political changes. However, the western media continues to ignore the protests.

On September 17th, the streets of Vienna and eight other major Austrian cities were taken over by tens of thousands of protesters furious at the uncontrolled rise in gas prices and living costs. Although local police declined to reveal their official estimates, sources claim that around 20,000 people attended the protests in Vienna, with around 10,000 others in the cities of Linz, Bruck an der Mur, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt St. Polten, Eisenstadt and Bregenz. 

The protests were organized by several different political groups, but the biggest one was the trade union federation OeGB. As seen recently in other parts of Europe, individuals of different political ideologies came together for a common cause: the improvement of people’s living conditions and the end of the disastrous economic policy that is currently being conducted. Austrian political leaders reported that the main objective of the protests is to put pressure on the governing alliance – formed by a conservative-green coalition -, which the OeGB considers guilty of “watching idly as life becomes unaffordable”.

In Vienna, where the protests were concentrated, a large rally was held by trade unionists. Many criticisms against the government, big companies, and the EU were made during the speeches. Such was the popular mobilization that the Austrian president himself expressed solidarity with the situation and communicated with his voters through his social networks in order to ease popular anger. He stated that he is in solidarity with the people at this time of economic difficulty but was not able to promise any real solution to the problem.

“This solidarity should not only be felt in the heart but, above all, in the wallet of those who are wondering how to pay for their shopping at the end of the month”, Alexander Van der Bellen emphasized when commenting on the protests in a social media publication.

Other local officials also made statements in the face of the protests. The mayor of Vienna, Michael Ludwig, for example, said that the recent growth in prices is a real challenge for a large part of the population and declared support for the demand of trade unionists for changes in economic policy and salary rises. However, like the president, Ludwig failed to criticize the real root of the problem, which is the adhesion of the European bloc to anti-Russian sanctions, which are generating the current energy crisis.

Most of the western media simply ignored the protests, refusing to report on the events. Another portion, however, reported it “softly”, declining to show the real demands of the Austrian workers. This has been a recurrent tactic on the part of the Western media when reporting the protests against anti-Russian sanctions in Europe: to show that workers are asking for a drop in gas prices, but avoid mentioning that they are aware that this increase is related to the irresponsible European policy of implementing coercive measures against Moscow.

A few days before the protests, in a survey carried out by the Austrian sociological institute Institut fur Demoskopie und Datenanalyse (IFDD) it was revealed that almost 80% of Austrian citizens feel affected by the sanctions on Russia. In the survey, 78% of the interviewees said they had suffered side effects from the sanctions. More than that, 31% of respondents even said they believe that the measures were actually directed against Austria itself rather than Russia, given the impact the country is suffering. In some recent surveys in other European countries, it is also possible to see that local citizens are seeing the sanctions in a similar way, believing that their countries are the real targets of the measures – which reveals how much the European population feels harmed by the attitudes of their own rulers. 

Indeed, European citizens are not wrong in their perception. Sanctions in fact affect Europe much more than Russia itself. More than that, they benefit the US, which has finally managed to destroy Russian-European energy cooperation. It is not by chance that it is Washington that plans and proposes such sanctions, which European leaders have subserviently adhered to, affecting their own interests. So, indeed, these sanctions are designed against Europe. And, knowing this, European governments need to immediately reverse these measures before winter comes and the crisis becomes a real social catastrophe.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, geopolitical consultant. 

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Russia Presents Evidence of US Ukraine-Based Military-Biological Activity to Geneva Convention

Samizdat – 19.09.2022

The Russian Defense Ministry has presented evidence of US military-biological activity in Ukraine to member states of the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, head of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense of the Russian Armed Forces, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, said.

The ministry’s representative said that member states’ delegations did not question the authenticity of the documents they were presented as proof of the US’ and Ukraine’s violation of articles I and IV of the Convention.

“The participants of the meeting received copies of real documents previously mentioned by the Ministry of Defense of Russia, as well as material evidence confirming the implementation of work on military-biological programs in Ukraine, for consideration,” Kirillov said.

The head of the RCBD of the Russian Armed Forces further pointed out that the US and Ukraine failed to present convincing evidence to the Convention’s members that would prove that the Pentagon’s cooperation with the Ukrainian laboratories benefited the epidemiological situation in the country. Kirillov said that the US Department of Defense only came up with a few photos of renovated laboratories, while the said epidemiological situation in Ukraine has been deteriorating for the past 15 years.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s representative further stated that the US admitted the fact that Ukraine exported biological pathogens and materials, as well as engaging in ethically questionable experiments – namely on the military and socially vulnerable groups of the Ukrainian population such as psychiatric ward patients. Kirillov slammed the US attempts to tone down the problem by using claims that it did not occur “often”.

Russia raised 20 questions regarding the illegal activities of Kiev and Washington that violate the provisions of the Convention with the BWC member states, Kirillov said. Among them are questions regarding the choice of pathogens for studies, which often included ones that have never been discovered in Ukraine.

The ministry’s representative also reiterated Russia’s previous statements regarding Ukraine seeking to procure drones from Turkey fit to disperse aerosols. The Turkish defense company refused to deliver the UAVs, which could have been used to spread harmful and potentially deadly pathogens.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

New Fakes about Russia-DPRK Military Cooperation

By Konstantin Asmolov – New Eastern Outlook – 19.09.2022 

More recently, the author analyzed misinformation that North Korean special forces were about to appear in the Donbass, but the global media soon encountered another misinformation launched from the West: it turned out that North Korea was preparing to supply Russia with shells and possibly military equipment on a massive scale. Or it is already supplying, but that is not certain.

It all started on September 5 with a New York Times article quoting “declassified intelligence reports” that “Russia is buying millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea, … a sign that global sanctions have severely restricted its supply chains and forced Moscow to turn to pariah states for military supplies.”

However, the newspaper immediately noted that there were few details about the exact weaponry, timing or size of the shipment, and generally, “there is no way yet to independently verify the sale”, but immediately went on to theorize as to why this was the case. It turns out that the Russian Federation now allegedly has no ability to buy advanced weapons or the electronics to produce them, as international sanctions on Moscow disrupt its supply chains, stocks of shells and missiles are running out and Russia is forced to look for suppliers. This, in particular, was stated by the quoted expert with the Ukrainian-speaking surname Kagan.

A little later, AP Agency gave some details and quotes, which, however, still did not clarify the situation. Brigadier General Pat Ryder, a Pentagon Press Secretary, said “the information that we have is that Russia has specifically asked for ammunition” but had no other details, including whether money changed hands and whether any deliveries were continuing.

Asked why this information was declassified, Ryder said it was important to illustrate the state of Russia’s ongoing military campaign in Ukraine. And, the author would add, against the backdrop of Ukraine’s attempted counter-offensive.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said there was no indication yet that the arms purchase had actually taken place or that any North Korean munitions had entered the battlefield in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the talks themselves are “just further evidence of how desperate Putin is becoming”, with US intelligence suggesting that Russia is buying millions of rounds of ammunition from the DPRK.

After that, the news spread around the world media and even reached South Korea, but discussion on the relatively objectivist website NKNews showed that assessments are directly dependent on both their bias and their distance from the Russian context.

For example, Jack Watling, Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, confidently stated that since February 2022 Moscow had been buying up stocks of 152mm and 122mm shells “in any way they can. And that includes North Korea.” All this is said to be common knowledge in intelligence circles, but the source of this information is not in the public domain, and he is personally unaware of specific deliveries from North Korea to Russia. However, Watlig’s level of knowledge is better described by another quote:  “Moscow had for some time pushed for Pyongyang to support its war effort,” which, he said, was not limited to supplying ammunitions.

For his part, Joost Oliemans, a specialist focused on DPRK military capabilities, expressed more restraint – Pyongyang certainly has a huge amount of old ammunition, and can produce new weapons for export, but “if this story is really true, we could expect to see video evidence of North Korean ammunition in Ukraine in the coming months.” In other words, he is not prepared to discuss the subject without evidence.

By the very next day on September 6, both Ryder and Kirby had already given up somewhat. The former said in a press briefing that “we do have indications that Russia has approached North Korea to request ammunition”, he could not provide more details, but in any case “it is indicative of the situation that Russia finds itself in, in terms of its logistics and sustainment capabilities.” And also that Moscow is asking for help precisely from those countries that the US has defined as “rogue”.

Kirby also conceded that the US doesn’t “have any indication that the purchase has actually occurred yet so it’s difficult to say what it’s actually going to end up looking like”, much less evidence that these weapons are being used in Ukraine.

The Russian side has also spoken out. According to Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council, Vasily Nebenzya, “I have not heard about it and I think it’s just another spreading fake news.”

On September 7, 2022, NKNews specifically updated its piece to clarify that “there is no evidence in the public domain of Russian efforts to procure North Korean arms since February 2022”. By this time, both Russian and unbiased Western experts had formulated a set of theses indicating that the hype news was nothing more than misinformation.

  1. The DPRK’s arms exports to Russia are a violation of UN Security Council resolutions, which prohibit that country from exporting or importing arms from other countries. Moreover, back in the day Vladimir Putin banned the supply of small arms and light weapons to North Korea as part of the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2270 of March 2, 2016. An overt violation of this kind undermines Russia’s status as a permanent member of the UNSC, and from the author’s perspective even the hypothetical arrival of North Korean construction workers in the DLPR (a far less overt violation) is at best discussed. Perhaps this disregard for sanctions will happen later on the backdrop of a further breakdown of the old world order, but that time has not yet come.
  2. It is not at all clear how sending such a volume of cargo is compatible with “emergency anti-epidemic measures” and border closures. Especially considering that there is only one railroad bridge between the Russian Federation and the DPRK, which has limited capacity. How exactly Moscow will pay is also a good question in view of the sanctions.
  3. A comparison of Russia’s and DPRK’s weapons production capabilities also leads to the question of whether Russia does not have its own military and industrial complex at all, and whether the start of the SMO has not affected the rate of ammunition production. And also regarding the volume of Russian military stockpiles: as even Oliemans pointed out, Moscow must have a huge amount of old Soviet ammunition, which is unlikely to run out anytime soon.
  4. All right, let’s say that “the Russians don’t want to go below a certain level of reserves in case they face other threats”, but the same logic is all the more applicable to the DPRK, which is constantly on alert against a superior enemy. By that logic, Pyongyang needs the shells and missiles itself.
  5. Most importantly, there is no idea how exactly US intelligence could have obtained such data. But misinformation fits in well with the West’s propaganda mindset that the successes of Russian SMO in Ukraine are about to come to an end. It is known that these successes are largely due to technical rather than numerical superiority, and therefore the argument “we’ll talk when the Russians run out of shells” is very popular in the pro-Ukrainian environment.

Of course, if one considers this misinformation as a kind of “mental exercise”, North Korean military equipment and ammunition might well come in handy. Russian military expert Vladimir Khrustalyov lists a whole range of DPRK military equipment capable of showing off in Donbass – the arsenal turns out to be quite impressive.

But talk of “what would have been” is beyond the scope of the article, and the author is far more interested in how the US intelligence community knew about the ominous “signs”. The author has two options and the first one is that this information is not intelligence but military-psychological. In other words, the news was simply made up for propaganda purposes to cradle the “desperate Putin is trying to find a million missiles” picture, which will leave a certain residue even after the falsity of the data comes to light.

The second option is more amusing and, alas, more realistic: the source of the sensational information could be such an anonymous and specific medium as Russian politicized Telegram channels, in which the SMO is constantly discussed. However, Telegram’s anonymity often makes it impossible to identify the channel’s real author. This means that any high-school student with a glib tongue can easily portray himself as an “expert from those very structures” involved in the “secrets of the Kremlin court”, even if the information has no real basis in fact.

For the author, the validity of such anonymous channels amounts to reports of “secret informants in the DPRK” who “know the local life” and “report the truth”, but non-core or engaged experts easily cite such sources in case they fit their point of view. In addition, even a broken clock is right twice a day. On this basis, it can be assumed that a Russian-speaking US military intelligence official subscribed to a similar channel that discussed the notion that Russia would soon run out of bombs and missiles and need to buy them somewhere, probably even from North Korea.

Perhaps the scout did not distinguish the ironic context from the dramatic one. It is even more likely that he did not realize that the alleged foreign intelligence general or presidential administration official describing the secret talks was typing on his smartphone in algebra class. But the information has gone up the chain of command and in one way or another has “come in handy”.

To conclude the conversation, it is worth noting how the propaganda image of the DPRK has changed: before the SMO, the Western media presented North Korea as a starving third-world country, but now it is a superpower providing Putin with builders, soldiers and now also ammunition. Therefore, the fake about millions of missiles is clearly not the latest fake about the “Jucheans in the Donbass”.

Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 2 Comments

‘LPR Referendum Will Turn Ukrainian Strikes Into Attacks Against Russia’

Samizdat – 19.09.2022

Sputnik’s Chief Editor Margarita Simonyan has commented on the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) Civic Chamber’s call to hold a referendum to join Russia, calling it an “all-in move” and a Crimean scenario. She noted that should the republic vote affirmatively, it will drastically change the nature of the conflict in Ukraine.

“Today it’s referendum, tomorrow – it’s recognition of LPR as a part of Russia. The day after that, the strikes on the Russian territory become an all-out war of Ukraine and NATO with Russia, which will untie Moscow’s hands in so many aspects,” Simonyan wrote in her Telegram channel.

Simonyan expressed the opinion that the LPR might soon be not the only ones to announce referendums to join Russia.

The head of the LPR Civic Chamber commented in the wake of the address to the republic’s authorities that the referendum on joining Russia is a “matter of more than one day”. He, however, expressed hope that the answer will be given soon.

The LPR declared its independence in 2014 in response to the West-backed coup in Kiev that brought nationalist politicians to power. Russia agreed to recognize the LPR’s statehood in February 2022, signing a treaty of friendship with the republic. Soon after, Moscow answered the call of LPR authorities to protect it against the attacks of the Ukrainian military, which have been going on with varying intensity over the past eight years.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

Expectedly, new Bucha-like narratives spring up in Kharkov region

By Drago Bosnic | September 19, 2022

After the late March/early April withdrawal of Russian troops from the northern and northeastern areas of Ukraine, Western state and corporate-run mainstream media immediately constructed the so-called “Bucha massacre” narrative with the aim of damaging Russia’s international standing. Western governments and the media were unanimous – Russian Armed Forces were the alleged “perpetrators of the Bucha massacre”, while some even called it “genocide”. The Kiev regime claimed that the Russian military killed at least 412 people. Expectedly, the claims were unsupported by any actual official investigation by a party neutral to the conflict. The Kiev regime and the political West flatly refused to allow an international investigation, while any claims contrary to the official narrative were immediately suppressed. If anyone dared to question the narrative, they would be labeled “conspiracy theorists”, “genocide deniers” and “Putin’s propagandists”.

Taking into account the “Bucha massacre”, we can only say the new “Izyum massacre” narrative is a predictable joint propaganda stunt of the Kiev regime and the political West. The pattern is virtually the same. In only a few days, Western and Kiev regime’s alleged “investigators” found “undeniable evidence” that the “evil Russian occupiers killed hundreds of innocent civilians.” On September 15, the Kiev regime media reported: “The terrible footage of the graves of the victims of the Rashist [Kiev regime pejorative wordplay term meaning ‘Russian fascist’) occupation on the outskirts of Izyum. There are almost no names on the plates anywhere. Apparently, bodies are buried here from under the rubble of bombed houses, which have yet to be identified.”

Exactly like in the case of the Bucha narrative, the Kiev regime reports made no mention of the fact that Izyum and the surrounding areas and settlements have been under near-constant heavy shelling by the Kiev regime forces. Their artillery has been firing at the area indiscriminately for nearly half a year. Still, the very next day, on September 16, the Kiev regime started the exhumation of bodies from the alleged mass graves. According to the Kiev regime, 400 bodies were allegedly found at several mass burial sites. In addition, the Neo-Nazi junta claims that the bodies of civilians and even children supposedly “show signs of torture.”

The new Bucha-like narrative came only a day after the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen visited Ukraine and stated that she wanted to “see Russian President Vladimir Putin face the International Criminal Court” over alleged “war crimes.” The official head of the Kiev regime Volodymyr Zelensky also stated that the Neo-Nazi junta is in talks with its G7 backers to set up a “war crimes tribunal” which would “investigate and punish Russia and its top officials and military leaders for war crimes.” Again, expectedly, the idea was actively supported by the political West. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stated that “the leadership of Russia and all those involved in this will be held accountable. The EU supports all efforts in this direction.” Earlier, Borrell has also called Russia a “fascist state”, which is quite ironic, given the openly Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev which the EU has been supporting for nearly a decade now.

Hundreds of Western reporters have already flooded Izyum and the surrounding areas. Some Kiev regime media claim that there are only civilians buried, but the photos which have been shared so far only show the bodies of men in military uniforms. This indicates that the bodies of conscripted soldiers, who have been used as cannon fodder by the Kiev regime forces, are now being used to stage another false flag with the goal of tarnishing Russia’s international reputation. After hundreds of (often forcibly) conscripted Ukrainians have been killed on the battlefield and abandoned by their military command, the Russian military buried their remains, because the Kiev regime refused to take them. As they remain unidentified, the Kiev regime accomplishes several goals – the military gets the chance to hide their real losses and also not pay money to the families of the dead, while the regime can use the soldiers’ remains to set up false flags and fake narratives which serve strategic propaganda purposes.

In addition, last week local sources reported that mercenaries and possibly the infamous Neo-Nazi units embedded with the Kiev regime forces have been deliberately targeting civilians in the Kharkov region. The head of Kharkov’s civil-military administration told TV Rossiya-24 that pro-Kiev regime forces fired on civilians during the so-called “counter-offensive” in the last few days. In addition to killings, the agents were also filming the events with the aim of spreading the videos and images on the internet claiming that the Russians were responsible. In addition, acts of torture were also taking place to make the allegations more gruesome, according to local administration.

If the false flag allegations prove to be true, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time the Kiev regime has used fakes to create a narrative that suits their interests. Back in late May and early June, Lyudmila Denisova, former Ukrainian Ombudsman for Human Rights, has been fired for spreading disturbing fake reports about perverted sex crimes against children, allegedly committed by Russian soldiers. Denisova’s reports were entirely fabricated, based on nothing but her twisted imagination and malicious desire to portray Russia as the virtual Mordor of our time. There is no reason to believe the Kiev regime and its backers from the West are doing anything different in this particular case.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Children among civilians killed in Ukrainian strike – authorities

Samizdat – September 19, 2022

At least 13 civilians have lost their lives in a Ukrainian artillery strike on the city of Donetsk, local authorities have said.

Donetsk city administration chief Alexey Kulemzin took to Telegram on Monday, writing: “according to preliminary information, 13 civilians are dead as a result of a punitive strike on Baku Commissars square.”

The official added that the exact number of those injured in the attack is not yet known.

Local media, citing eyewitnesses, has said an artillery shell hit a bus stop.

Speaking to Russia’s Rossiya 24 news channel later in the day, Kulemzin said: “two children are among the dead,” adding that it’s not the first case of minors being killed by Ukrainian strikes in that district.

The territorial defense of the Donetsk People’s Republic, in turn, posted a message on their own Telegram channel, alleging that the Ukrainian military used Western-supplied 155mm howitzers to shell residential areas of Donetsk.

The authorities said infrastructure and apartment blocks came under fire in one of the city’s districts. Local residents have been advised to stay indoors or move “to shelters if necessary.”

According to the Donetsk Territorial Defense, six more people were killed in shelling on Sunday through Monday morning.

September 19, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment