Civil Liberties « Aletho News

Dr. Mercola Files Lawsuit Against US Sen. Elizabeth Warren

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 8, 2021

In early September 2021, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter¹ to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation,” stressing that Amazon’s sale of such books was “potentially unlawful.”^2,^3,⁴

Warren specifically singled out my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” co-written with Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), as a prime example of “highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wanted banned.

“Dr. Mercola has been described as ‘the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,” Warren wrote,⁵ adding: “Not only was this book the top result when searching either ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’ in the categories of ‘All Departments’ and ‘Books’; it was tagged as a ‘Best Seller’ by Amazon and the ‘#1 Best Seller’ in the ‘Political Freedom’ category.

The book perpetuates dangerous conspiracies about COVID-19 and false and misleading information about vaccines. It asserts that vitamin C, vitamin D and quercetin … can prevent COVID-19 infection … And the book contends that vaccines cannot be trusted …”

Warren Fancies Herself Above the Law

Warren should know that as a government official, it is illegal for her violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.

Since she willfully ignores the law, Cummins and I, along with our publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote our foreword, are suing Warren, both in her official and personal capacities, for violating our First Amendment rights. The federal lawsuit, in which Warren is listed as the sole defendant, was filed in the state of Washington. As noted in our complaint:

“Once upon a time, the First Amendment was understood to guarantee that books challenging governmental orthodoxy could be sold without fear of governmental intimidation or reprisal.

Almost sixty years ago, in Bantam Books v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963), the Supreme Court held that state officials violated the First Amendment by sending letters to booksellers warning that the sale of certain named books was potentially unlawful.

The ‘vice’ in such letters and in the ‘veiled threat’ of legal repercussions they communicated, explained the Court, is that they allow government to achieve censorship while doing an end-run around the judiciary, ‘provid[ing] no safeguards whatever against the suppression of … constitutionally protected’ speech, thus effecting an unconstitutional ‘prior restraint.’

It made no difference that the officials who sent the letter lacked the ‘power to apply formal legal sanctions’ — i.e., that the officials did not themselves have the power to sanction or prosecute the booksellers in any way. Indeed this fact made the unconstitutionality more apparent.

The officials ‘are not law enforcement officers; they do not pretend that they are qualified to give or that they attempt to give distributors only fair legal advice … [T]hey acted … not to advise but to suppress.’

It also made no difference, the Court expressly found, that the letters were framed as mere ‘exhort[ation]’ or that the booksellers were in theory ‘free’ to ignore the letters, because the officials had ‘deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’,’ and ‘people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.’

Today, certain members of the United States Congress have apparently forgotten, or think they are above, the law set forth in Bantam Books.”

Warren’s Attack on Constitutionally Protected Speech

There’s no doubt our book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” is constitutionally protected speech, and that Warren’s letter is calling on Amazon to suppress protected speech.

In our book, we share viewpoints, ideas, opinions, verifiable facts and factual hypotheses that our federal government just so happens to disfavor, as it counters their chosen narrative that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, cannot be prevented by any means other than experimental gene therapy, and cannot be treated by any other means than certain experimental and exorbitantly costly drugs.

Since the start of the pandemic, government has systematically sought to suppress the kind of information shared in our book, using the same tactic as Warren used against us here — warning Internet-based companies that if they don’t censor these views, the full weight of the government’s wrath will be turned against them. As explained in our complaint:

“The term ‘vaccine misinformation’ as Warren uses it is propagandistic and false. As she uses it, ‘vaccine misinformation’ refers to any speech challenging the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, even when that speech consists of factually accurate information or protected opinion …

On September 10, 2021, as a direct result of Warren’s letter, a major national bookseller chain, Barnes and Noble, notified the publisher of The Truth About COVID-19 by email that it would no longer sell the work as an e-book. Barnes and Noble has — for now — reversed that decision.

It is impossible for Plaintiffs to know with certainty whether, as a result of Warren’s letter, Amazon is now covertly demoting, downgrading, or otherwise suppressing The Truth About COVID-19 in numerous ways that would be hidden from view, but Plaintiffs believe that Amazon is in fact covertly taking such action.

Even if no bookseller in the country had yielded to Warren’s threats, her letter would still be actionable as a clear violation of the First Amendment.

In Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, 807 F.3d 229 (7th Cir. 2015) (Posner, J.), relying on Bantam Books, the Court held that a governmental official ‘violates a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights’ if by ‘threat’ or ‘intimidation’ the official attempts to induce ‘a third party’ to stop ‘publishing or otherwise disseminating the plaintiff’s message,’ and emphasized that ‘such a threat is actionable and thus can be enjoined even if it turns out to be empty — the victim ignores it, and the threatener folds his tent.’

Such threats go ‘by the name of ‘prior restraint,’ and a prior restraint is the quintessential first-amendment violation.’ Accordingly, Plaintiffs ask this Court to vindicate clearly established law, to vindicate Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, to vindicate the First Amendment itself, by declaring Warren’s conduct unconstitutional and by enjoining her from repeating such conduct in future.”

Warren Calls Out ‘Misinformation’ With Misinformation

In our complaint, we also emphasize the fact that Warren’s claims of misinformation are themselves misinformation. For example, Warren claims our book falsely “asserts that … vitamin D … can prevent COVID-19 infection.” According to Warren, this claim has no scientific basis. This is clearly and verifiably false as there are many studies, published in 2020 and 2021, supporting this claim.

For example, in May 2021, the National Institutes of Health’s website, PubMed.gov, published a Journal of Medical Virology article titled “Vitamin D Deficiency Is Associated With COVID-19 Positivity and Severity of the Disease.”⁶ Many other scientific articles have also linked vitamin D deficiency with a higher risk of COVID infection, more severe outcomes and increased rates of death.

Indeed, a recent systematic review⁷ of the literature, posted on the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is another National Institutes of Health website, concluded that “blood vitamin D status can determine the risk of being infected with COVID-19, seriousness of COVID-19, and mortality from COVID-19.

Therefore, maintaining appropriate levels of Vitamin D through supplementation or natural methods … is recommended for the public to be able to cope with the pandemic.” As noted in our complaint:

“Thus while Warren professes to champion true COVID information to save lives, she is purveying false information that could lead to COVID deaths. Warren is telling people that vitamin D levels don’t matter for COVID, when in fact — as readers would learn from The Truth About COVID-19 — correcting vitamin D deficiencies could save their lives.

By her own logic and according to her own demands, every major social media platform should have banned Warren’s letter as ‘COVID misinformation.’ But officials like Warren only denounce ‘COVID misinformation,’ demand its censorship, and threaten legal repercussions when the statements in question challenge the COVID narrative they support — not when they themselves are misrepresenting the truth about COVID-19.

Warren’s letter further accuses The Truth About COVID-19 of disseminating ‘false and misleading information about vaccines,’ including by (in Warren’s words) ‘contend[ing] that vaccines cannot be trusted.’

The book’s stated thesis about the COVID vaccines is that their effectiveness ‘has been wildly exaggerated and major safety questions have gone unanswered.’ This statement is accurate and well within the bounds of constitutionally protected opinion …

Warren’s letter further cites a June, 2021, review of The Truth About COVID-19 that purports to list examples of the book’s ‘misinformation,’ the first of which is the following: ‘the authors argue that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.’ It is true that The Truth About COVID-19 argues that that ‘the preponderance of evidence’ supports the lab-leak theory of the origins of the COVID virus.

But the claim that this position is ‘misinformation’ is, once again, itself misinformation. The lab-leak theory — long denounced as a ‘conspiracy theory’ by federal actors and suppressed on social media — is in fact supported by substantial and growing evidence. See, e.g., Wall St. Journal, ‘Science Closes In on Covid’s Origins: Four studies — including two from WHO — provide powerful evidence favoring the lab-leak theory,’ Oct. 5, 2021.⁸

The review’s next example of the supposed ‘misinformation’ in the The Truth About COVID-19 is this: the book ‘insists multiple times that the public health measures and restrictions will be permanent. Not true.

The CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans could resume activities without wearing masks or physically distancing, resume domestic travel, and refrain from quarantine even when following a known exposure to the virus if they remain symptom-free.’

This CDC announcement obviously proved to be false, while the prediction made in The Truth About COVID-19 that health restrictions would continue after vaccination has proved more accurate.

Moreover, it is not the case that the Truth About COVID-19 ‘insists’ that these restrictions will be permanent — it says that certain restrictions on our liberty, beginning in the pandemic, will ‘probably’ be permanent, reflecting a humility about the certainty of one’s assertions that Warren might have profited from.”

This Is Only the Beginning

As noted in a press release by Cummins, this lawsuit is just the beginning. OCA and I are launching a campaign to fight back against the censorship that is taking root. This includes unraveling the threads that lead back to the fake fact checkers and disinformation agents in the media, but all of this will take time, so be patient.

As explained by Cummins:

“OCA’s federal lawsuit, filed jointly with Dr. Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chelsea Green books is not just directed against Elizabeth Warren, but is intended to establish a legal precedent against the increasing censorship, slander, and intimidation coming from a wide variety of government, corporate, and media sources.

This Big Pharma/Big Media/Big Government Inquisition is fueled by disinformation and dark money coming from powerful international public relations firms such as the Publicis Groupe and front groups such as the so-called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

We are under attack, not because we are purveyors of dangerous disinformation and hate, as Warren and her Establishment cohorts allege, but rather because, in the midst of an international health, economic, and political crisis, we are trying to expose the truth about the lab origins of this catastrophe, and explain how preventive and natural medicine and health, healthy organic food, natural supplements, low-cost generic drugs, strong immune systems, and a healthy environment are our best defenses against chronic disease and engineered pathogens.

We are not anti-vaccine, but rather pro-vaccine safety. We are not purveyors of disinformation, but rather firm defenders of free speech, unobstructed scientific inquiry, and freedom of choice …

We are castigated as ‘conspiracy theorists’ for publicizing the behind-the- scenes machinations of billionaires like Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and their ‘Hall of Shame’ collaborators⁹ in the military-industrial complex.

We are under siege for exposing the existential risks of genetic engineering and lab manipulation, a mad science not only contaminating our food, seeds and animals, but essentially weaponizing pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and insects, part of a catastrophic biological and medical arms race that threatens us all.

We are saddened and alarmed by the now routine attacks on free speech, free association, and medical freedom of choice. We are troubled by the extreme polarization and anger poisoning the body politic, and the debilitating impact of fear-mongering and shaming on our children and the public at large.

We are alarmed by the collateral damage to our health, our psyches, and the entire social fabric by government authoritarianism, virologists and gene engineers playing God, and Big Pharma greed …

America, and the once-hoped-for community of nations, are accelerating toward self-destruction. The body politic is sick, frightened, angry, and divided. People have apparently forgotten how to talk to one another when we disagree on politics, COVID responses, vaccine safety, and a range of other polarizing government dictates.

Former friends and co-workers have become enemies. Meanwhile the forests are burning. Water resources are diminishing … Our children and the most vulnerable are forced to struggle harder than ever, just to survive and preserve their sanity, making it harder and harder maintain a positive outlook, enjoy every day life, much less achieve true happiness.

If COVID-19, the product of mad science and insatiable greed, has taught us anything, it’s that we must transform our food and farming systems and take control of our health.

We must acknowledge, prevent, and resolve the dietary, environmental, and public health-related comorbidities of our ailing population, strengthen our immune systems to fight off chronic disease and pathogens, and provide special protection for the most vulnerable.

We must bring profit-at-any-cost corporations, captured media and regulatory agencies, indentured politicians, Silicon Valley surveillance capitalists, out-of-control genetic engineers, virologists, and bioweapons profiteers to heel.”

Stop the Madness

To this end, OCA has launched a Stop the Mad Science campaign. This global grassroots campaign aims to ban the engineering of viruses, bacteria and all potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). Mounting evidence suggests COVID-19 was indeed the result of gain-of-function (GOF) research, paid for in part by U.S. taxpayers and carried out by U.S. and Chinese researchers.

Unless we put an end to this kind of dangerous research (and it goes on worldwide, not just in the U.S. and China), COVID won’t be the last manmade pandemic we’ll have to face. More than 65,000 people have already signed the petition in support of this effort. Please add your signature here if you haven’t done so already. As noted by Cummins:

“Current ongoing experiments, routinely funded with our tax dollars, that need to be stopped immediately include genetically engineering SARS-CoV-2 so that it can overcome or bypass natural immunity; combining the SARS-CoV-2 virus with deadly anthrax bacteria; engineering the bird flu and Ebola to be more transmissible; and other criminally insane experiments — hiding behind the excuse that lab and genetic engineering of pathogens are necessary for ‘biodefense’ and ‘biomedicine.’

Over the next six months we will begin to organize protests and picket lines outside the GoF labs and institutions where these dangerous experiments are being carried out. These street protests will be amplified by public education, petition gathering, litigation, and grassroots lobbying.”

Sources and References

November 9, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Elizabeth Warren, United States | Leave a comment

Same Old Same Old: Youngkin seeks the Jewish stamp of approval

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Every time one thinks that politicians in the United States might have actually have had a “come to Jesus” moment and will henceforth serve the people who pay to support them, something pops up to demonstrate that nothing has changed but the names of the folks who are selling most of us out. As a Loudoun County Virginia resident with children and grandchildren in the public school system who is active in the Fight for Schools movement, I was delighted when Glenn Youngkin defeated the truly despicable Terry McAuliffe to become the next governor of the state. McAuliffe not only engaged in constant race and class baiting in terms of how he couched his appeals to voters, confident that the fraud that he and his party-mates had engineered into the system disguised as “voting rights” would be enough to win the day in a state that has leaned Democratic in recent elections. So tone deaf to the voters was McAuliffe that he came out with “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” and two days before election day went off the deep end by telling his audience at a rally that Virginia just has too many school teachers who are white.

So goodbye McAuliffe, a man born to be forgotten even by his patrons the Clintons but for his improvised victory dance on the stage during one of his last appearances, a performance so appalling that his daughters were embarrassed to watch. So now we have Glenn Youngkin as governor-elect and a new day is dawning… or is it? Hopefully the new administration will kill Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of “equity” in the public schools, thereby returning academic standards to what they once were. And parents might actually be listened to over their concerns rather than being sent to jail for protesting. But what else will be in the package?

Well, it should surprise no one that the usual pander to America’s wealthy and powerful Jewish community has been going on behind the scenes. Media reporting dated the very day after Youngkin was elected revealed that “Glenn Youngkin today announced a plan to combat anti-Semitism in Virginia… one area of particular concern to Youngkin is the increasing number of crimes targeting Jews. That is why as governor he will form a Virginia Holocaust, Genocide and Anti-Semitism Advisory Commission and push the Virginia General Assembly to pass a state law adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism. ‘Virginia must take clear and concrete action to stop all forms of anti-Semitism, and when I’m governor, we will,’ said Youngkin. ‘I will push the General Assembly to pass a law adopting the internationally recognized definition of anti-Semitism, and I will form a commission to examine and address anti-Semitic incidents in Virginia. Our Jewish friends and neighbors must know that we stand with them against the tide of hate and discrimination…’”

Presumably Youngkin, who clearly was coached on his statement, is aware that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism includes criticism of Israel as an indication that one is an anti-Semite. For those of us who have always believed that Israel is a foreign nation with interests that differ from those of the United States and that it can be criticized just as one would any other country in the world, the state of Virginia will clearly be embracing a contrary view. And one can only look forward to the sanctions against anyone who dares to support boycotting Israel products or services, referred to as BDS, to put pressure on Jerusalem to begin treating the Palestinians humanely.

Ironically, Youngkin was labeled an anti-Semite during the campaign against McAuliffe, which should have alerted him to the danger inherent in special commissions set up at the behest of agenda-driven racial or ethnic groups. In a campaign rally, he named George Soros, who is Jewish, as the source of the money that was planting political activists in Virginia local governments and school boards, which is demonstrably true. One Virginia Democrat leader claimed that Youngkin had been “spouting off antisemitic tropes, just to fire up his base.”

Youngkin might consider that far from being the perpetual victim, American Jews are the wealthiest, best educated and politically most powerful demographic in the US, something that is true all across the country and even more so in Virginia near the seat of power in Washington where Jews are way over-represented. Their power enables the brutality of Israel in its occupation of historic Palestine, which includes shooting and imprisoning children, blowing up hospitals and apartment buildings, and engaging in acts of war against its neighbors Syria and Iran. Recently the Jewish state has announced a new wave of illegal “settlement” building on the occupied West Bank, a decision that even provoked the gutless Biden Administration to object mildly, while also describing a group of Palestinian charities and civic organizations as terrorists. Who is the victim Glenn?

There are roughly 70,000 Jews living in Virginia out of a total population of 8,670,000 and one would be hard pressed to find any overt instances of actual anti-Semitism. Jews in Virginia are privileged, just like they are nearly everywhere in the United States, and the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates is a Jewish woman, Eileen Filler-Corn. Of course, groups like the notoriously sensitive Anti-Defamation League (ADL) can always come up with what they claim to be anti-Semitic incidents when there are swastikas drawn on walls or doors or by citing the instances when a Jewish student feels uncomfortable at college because someone was holding up a sign saying “Free Palestine.” Sometimes the perpetrators of so-called anti-Semitic incidents have themselves been Jews.

Youngkin has apparently been briefed to believe that the state is overrunning with fanatical anti-Semites seeking to kill Jews and burn down synagogues so he is pledging “concrete action to stop all forms of anti-Semitism” which presumably will include restrictions on Freedom of Speech, for which appropriate “hate crime” laws will be drafted. This follows a pattern established in a number of other US states where local Jews are working hard to suppress any criticism of Israel.

Youngkin’s unneeded commission to support uniquely Jewish interests will, of course, cost the usual substantial dollop of unaccountable taxpayer money to support a demographic that is already rich and powerful. Israel and the Jewish community already get an enormous free ride from the state government. I have previously reported how Grant Smith, who heads the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP), has detailed how one such board that he has identified in Virginia is a unique example of a state’s economic policies being manipulated by a dedicated Israeli fifth column in government. It is named the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB).

The VIAB uniquely is actually part of the Virginia state government. It is funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia and is able to access funds from other government agencies to support Israeli businesses. It is staffed by Israelis and American Jews drawn from what has been described as the “Israel advocacy ecosystem” and is self-administered, appointing its own members and officers. Only Virginia has such a group actually sitting within the government itself though other states have similar advisory or “trade” commissions. VIAB is able to make secret preferential agreements, to arrange special concessions on taxes and to establish start-up subsidies for Israeli businesses. Israeli business projects have been, as a result, regularly funded using Virginia state resources with little accountability. It has been estimated that the cash flow in favor of Israel from Virginia alone has exceeded $500 million annually.

Smith has reported how VIAB is not just an economic mechanism. Its charter states that it was “created to foster closer economic integration between the United States and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda.” Smith also has observed that “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.” The board grew significantly under Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe’s administration (2014-2018). McAuliffe, regarded by many as the Clintons’ “bag man,” has received what are regarded as generous out-of-state campaign contributions from actively pro-Israeli billionaires Haim Saban and J.B. Pritzker, who are both affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Terry McAuliffe as governor met regularly in off-the-record “no press allowed” sessions with Israel advocacy groups and spoke about “the Virginia Advisory Board and its successes.” That was, of course, a self-serving lie by one of the slimiest of the Clinton unindicted criminals. In short, the VIAB is little more than a mechanism set up to carry out licensed robbery of Virginia state resources being run by a cabal of local American Jews and Israelis to benefit their co-religionists in Israel. As a side benefit to us Virginians, its reckless activities have led to numerous zoning and environmental violations.

So Glenn Youngkin I wish you well. I sure as hell voted for you given that you were running against Terry McAuliffe supported by folks named Biden, Harris, Obama and Abrams, but hey, if you truly have any integrity, it is past time to get your mind right on Israel and its supporters re the con-job they have been pulling on the American people for the past seventy-plus years. You are smart enough to know that but perhaps so ambitious that you will bury your conscience and go along with the bullshit. Anti-Semitism, such as it is, does not threaten our Republic but the continuous pandering to a specific special interest that already has money and power and is tied with a foreign government that wants us to go to war on its behalf is both unacceptable and dangerous. Please take the papers relating your planned anti-Semitism Advisory Commission, which will no doubt be generously compensated and staffed by the Chosen, and shove them into a file somewhere where they will never be seen again. You have more important things to do, believe me.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

November 9, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Iconic singer Van Morrison sued over Covid-19 comments

NO MORE LOCKDOWN, NO MORE FASCIST POLICE, NO MORE TAKING OF OUR FREEDOM AND OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS

AS I WALKED OUT

BORN TO BE FREE OF THE COVID SCAM

https://www.bitchute.com/video/4OPLfKgq9i3h/

RT | November 8, 2021

Northern Ireland’s health minister, Robin Swann, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Van Morrison after the rock and R&B legend labeled him “very dangerous” over Covid-19 restrictions during the pandemic.

Swan’s legal team believes Morrison’s repeated public statements harmed the minister’s reputation by implying he was unfit for his position during the health crisis. The statement of claim against the 76-year-old singer-songwriter was filed in September.

“Proceedings have been issued and are ongoing against Van Morrison. We are aiming for a trial in February,” Swann’s lawyer, Paul Tweed, told local media on Sunday.

Swann’s choice of legal representation signals his strong desire to win the case, as Tweed is known as a high-profile libel lawyer, who has previously represented the likes of Harrison Ford, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Lopez.

The fallout between the minister and musician occurred in June after Morrison’s gig in Belfast was canceled at the last moment due to coronavirus restrictions.

The singer still got on stage and told the audience: “Robin Swann has all the power. So I say Robin Swann is very dangerous.” He also tried to persuade the crowd to chant: “Robin Swann is very dangerous.” […]

Last year, Swann criticized Morrison over his songs about the coronavirus restrictions, including ‘Born to Be Free’, ‘As I Walked Out’, and ‘No More Lockdown’. … Full article

November 9, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

How Sweden swerved Covid disaster

By Johan Anderberg | UnHerd | November 8, 2021

A hundred years ago, in New York City, 20,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in protest against one of the greatest public health policy experiments in history. One of them was wearing a sign featuring an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” beside the slogan, “Wine was served.” There were posters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Another read: “Tyranny in the name of righteousness is the worst of all tyrannies.”

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t end because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

Johan Anderberg is a journalist and author of Flocken, a bestselling history of the Swedish experience during Covid-19.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

November 8, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Wanted US Capitol insurrectionist asks Belarus for asylum

RT | November 8, 2021

An American man wanted in the US on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds after taking part in the infamous January 6 riot in Washington is now in Belarus, and has asked Minsk to grant him asylum.

In an interview with Belarusian state media, Evan Neumann claimed that the accusations against him are “unfounded.”

Neumann is also charged with “assaulting, redirecting, or impeding” law enforcement officers and “knowingly entering or remaining in” a restricted building.

The American says he moved in March from California to Ukraine, where he stayed for four months. He claims that, after just two weeks, he saw Ukrainian Security Service officers following him, which eventually led to his decision to move to Belarus and seek asylum.

On his journey to Belarus, he trekked across swamps of northern Ukraine before reaching the border near Pinsk.

According to the FBI, Neumann was a part of the mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump that stormed the United States Capitol in Washington on January 6 this year. The attack, known commonly as ‘the insurrection’, sought to disrupt and delay the Electoral College vote count that would confirm Joe Biden’s election as the 46th US president. The rioting led directly to five deaths and has since been blamed for four police officers committing suicide.

Speaking to Belarusian TV, Neumann claimed that he was innocent.

“I’m charged, I believe, with six cases. And I think all of them are felonies. A felony is a very serious charge. It means you hurt somebody or something,” he explained. “I don’t think I committed any crime. One of the charges was very serious. The allegation is that I hit a police officer. It is completely unfounded.”

Neumann doesn’t deny that he was at the riot.

In the words of TV channel Belarus 1, Neumann “sought justice” and “asked uncomfortable questions,” and is now “being persecuted by the US government.”

According to Belarus’ Ministry of Internal Affairs, three US citizens have applied for refugee status, protection, or asylum in Belarus in 2021.

Neumann’s trek through Ukraine’s swampy forests wasn’t his first trip to the country. According to the FBI, he took part in the Western-backed Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005, which led to a pro-NATO/anti-Russian government in Kiev.

November 8, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | Belarus, FBI, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

The EU is proposing blatant mass surveillance of email and chat messages

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 8, 2021

A German member of the European Parliament is warning against EU plans to adopt new, wide-ranging mass surveillance rules that he says would seriously jeopardize citizens’ right to privacy by forcing tech companies to give access to encrypted messages to the authorities.

And that is what the laws now in the works in Brussels – that are supposed to replace temporary rules adopted in July – are designed to do, by ordering messaging and video chat providers like WhatsApp and Skype to put tech in place that would provide access to people’s private communications and, thanks to an automated system, monitor chats in real time and report suspicious content.

In a statement, MEP Patrick Breyer said that the EU commission must understand that it cannot give itself the right to intrusive surveillance of digital communication of every citizen, and do it without “specific suspicion.” He also believes EU’s policy on this issue is not only illegal and irresponsible – but also [in]effective.

As is often the case, the new intrusive regulation is being sold to the public as a way to combat sexual abuse of children, but the ramifications are much broader, while the idea of suspecting everyone in advance – making citizens “guilty until proven innocent” – doesn’t sit at all well with privacy advocates like Breyer.

Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld shed light on how dissenters on this issue are treated, revealing that they are made to feel like they are not committed to combating child abuse because they have questions critical of the proposed laws.

A number of other MEPs are opposed to the idea and speak about that openly, with some comparing the EU’s model of mass online surveillance to what is happening in China.

On his website, Breyer explained that what he refers to as “chatcontrol” is allowing the EU to have access to chats, messages and emails the providers scan in a way that is “general and indiscriminate.” He also said that building on the July regulation, the EU planned to already have expanded rules in place this fall, but that the date had to be postponed because of pushback from citizens and stakeholders.

November 8, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | European Union, Human rights | Leave a comment

Media outlets campaign to get Facebook to censor climate “misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 6, 2021

A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.

These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.

One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”

The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.

The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.

“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.

“The Real Facebook Oversight Board” crops up again in a Guardian article dedicated to the same issue, which reveals that a majority of the 195 Facebook pages the activist groups analyzed mostly share memes ridiculing some politicians’ focus on climate change as a policy issue.

Facebook is singled out as being “among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation,” while the giant’s perceived inaction in censoring content skeptical of climate change is seen as harmful to the “the battle” led by the elites who gathered in Glasgow for UN’s COP26 summit.

The BBC also covered the topic of the allegedly rampant climate misinformation on Facebook, choosing to cite a study which said only 8% of the 7,000 posts they consider misleading were labeled as misinformation.

November 6, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC, Human rights, The Guardian, The Verge | Leave a comment

The U.S. Moral Superiority Complex Is Accelerating Its Decline

By Laura Ruggeri | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 4, 2021

Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and Deep State insider, remarked “The reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden national security team that has rarely known personal failure (…) These are America’s best and brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.”

Though his criticism of the national security team is understandably guarded, anyone taking a dispassionate look at the establishment liberals who are deemed America’s “best and brightest” in Washington circles would reach the conclusion that they are stronger on slogans than substance, which leads to a disconnect between ideas and implementation, and lack overseas experience: there is only one career diplomat in a senior position on the National Security Council, the director for Africa.

Their ability to display ideological cohesion at the expense of a reflexive process of dialogical thinking is remarkable but not surprising: establishment liberals do see themselves as the centre of political enlightenment. If they appear vainglorious and self-righteous it is because they are part of a power structure that produces and perpetuates these character traits. Those who entertain the possibility of failure are side-lined as bearers of bad news, the centre-stage is reserved for those who project confidence and a sense of moral superiority. As to considering opposing viewpoints, that is entirely optional.

In the same Washington Post article Ignatius observed “Failure can shatter the trust and consensus of any team, and that’s a danger now for the Biden White House. This group has been extraordinarily close and congenial during Biden’s first seven months. But you can already see the first cracks in Fortress Biden.”

Are these the kind of cracks that appear when reality hits delusions, when ‘what is’ collides with ‘what ought to be’, when military logic makes a dent in the fairy tale of a benign power successfully exporting “freedom, democracy and human rights”?

Trained for hybrid warfare, Biden’s aides were suddenly dealing with a conventional military crisis and looked out of their depth. As we have seen, managing a retreat and putting a spin on it require a completely different set of skills.

There is no doubt that the optics of one of the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history damaged the reputation of the U.S. both at home and overseas and that’s why we should expect new and more aggressive initiatives to harden American soft power and tighten control of the narrative through underhand methods.

Carefully crafted narratives are crucial for the U.S. because it is selling the world a failed model of development. Trumpeting it as inclusive, gender equal, green and sustainable is like putting lipstick on a pig, it looks grotesque. Managing perceptions, denigrating alternative civilizational and economic models, and demonizing the competition is no longer working, an increasingly large segment of the world population is developing stronger antibodies to the virus of American propaganda. That’s why traditional soft-power tools — trade, legal standards, technology — are increasingly being used to coerce rather than convince.

After the Afghanistan disaster former French ambassador to Israel, UN and U.S. Gérard Araud shared his dismay on Twitter: “The absence of self-examination in the West is seen elsewhere with disbelief. Wars waged by the West have recently cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians for no result and we still lecture the world about values. Do you have any idea about how we are seen abroad?”

If even allies are growing tired of America’s preaching, guess how it is going down in the rest of the world.

At the end of August, when U.S. allies were weighing what the shambolic, badly-coordinated retreat means for Western power and influence, Biden delivered a speech in which he explained “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

His statement signalled the intention to extricate the U.S. army from a war that had exhausted itself, politically, militarily and epistemically, but didn’t suggest that the U.S. will renounce its imperialistic ambitions. In the last twenty years there have been tectonic shifts: cyber, biological, information, cognitive and economic warfare are changing the way wars are being fought. Putting boots on the ground is no longer the best nor the only option to subjugate an adversary.

The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape and rapidly changing power relations also required a reassessment of priorities. Now that all eyes are on the Asia-Pacific region the question is whether Biden’s team is the best fit for the challenges U.S. power is facing.

Biden’s closest aides never learned the fundamentals of realpolitik, they hold the belief that liberal values are universally valid and the use of force (rebranded “humanitarian interventionism”) morally motivated. They never doubted that the Western model would conquer the world because they grew up at the end of the Cold War, a time that was indeed characterized by a “unipolar moment”. This period is well and truly over and the Western liberal order in its present form is a fraying system.

While the U.S. allocated resources to the destruction and destabilization of sovereign countries, and ignored the widening income gap at home, their main competitor, China, lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and kept building state-of-the-art infrastructure at home and abroad, that is projects that make a tangible difference in people’s livelihoods. No wonder concealing the truth has become a matter of national security.

Democrats openly admit their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley to police political discourse and silence the bearers of inconvenient truths. They effectively sowed the seeds for a future where everything and everyone can be(come) a national-security threat. Glenn Greenwald revealed that Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. They explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not start censoring more. Pulling the plug on dissenting opinions and de-platforming people who challenge the dominant discourse makes a mockery of free speech, one of the rights that the U.S. claims to be defending when it selectively condemns alleged violations of human rights in other countries. Increasing censorship is also an indication that control of the narrative both at home and overseas has become vital for the U.S.

The conviction that “for America, our interests are our values and our values are our interests’’, one of the tenets of NeoCons, has been revamped by the liberal Left to aggressively promote a different kind of values and causes. A sort of symbolic capital that would allow the U.S. to maintain dominance as rights defender while its own constitutional rights are being eroded at home. Moral grandstanding can only compound the hypocrisy, but that is not stopping liberal totalitarians who are trading off freedom of speech for a child’s right to gender self-identification or for a binding gender or race quota on corporate boards.

History shows that declining empires tend to produce incompetent, self-delusional and divisive leaders who unwittingly accelerate the inevitable fall. That’s exactly what seems to be happening now. Not only the radical liberalism embraced by the Biden administration and Western elite has already antagonized millions of Americans leading to social and political polarization, it is also antagonizing foreign leaders, including the leaders of allied countries such as Hungary and Turkey who are being labelled as ‘authoritarian’. As the U.S. system of alliances is becoming increasingly fragile, dogmatic progressives in the current administration look more and more like Aesop’s donkey in a pottery shop, or a bull in a China shop, if you prefer.

The current National Security Council (NSC) is staffed with advisers who are the product of the kind of groupthink that has long been dominant in Anglo-American universities, those madrassas of the liberal Left where debate is stifled by ideological purges. The opinions and worldviews that are shaped and reinforced in these echo chambers are disseminated and amplified by the media and other industries. Countless careers depend on exporting simulacra of freedom, democracy and human rights, not only because these “experts” have internalized a conviction that these immaterial goods possess an intrinsic moral value, but also because the U.S. has little else to offer the world and leverage on, unless you count assured mutual destruction as leverage.

A case in point is The Summit for Democracy that Biden will convene in virtual mode on December 9–10, 2021, while a second meeting will take place a year later. The plan is to bring together over 100 leaders from selected governments (some of the choices have already stirred controversy among democracy advocates) plus various NGOs, activists (regime change actors) and corporations to “rally the nations of the world in defence of democracy globally” and “push back authoritarianism’s advance”, “address and fight corruption”, “advance respect for human rights”.

Though this initiative is mainly a way to strengthen ideological cohesion among allies by appealing to “common values” and conjuring up yet another global threat, namely “authoritarianism”, it effectively divides the international community into two Cold War-style blocks, friends and foes. On one side countries that earned a seal of approval for toeing the line and therefore deserve to be labelled “democratic”; on the other side a basket of deplorables that refuse to recognize the superiority of the U.S. model of governance and civilizing mission. Basically, the politically correct version of neocolonialism.

The Summit for Democracy will take place against the backdrop of AUKUS, the new Anglo-Saxon alliance that effectively joins NATO to the Asia-Pacific through Britain. What is clearly intended as an alliance against China severely damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and jeopardizes international efforts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

On one hand the U.S. is flexing its military muscle, on the other hand it is flexing the ideological muscle that, in the intentions of the Summit organizers, will provide the impetus to renew and strengthen the liberal international order that has served U.S. interests since the end of WW2.

The Summit for Democracy may have a higher profile convener than similar events held in the past but its premise sounds just as tone-deaf and over-ambitious. Take for example The Copenhagen Summit for Democracy that was organized in May by the “Alliance of Democracies”, a foundation set up by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2017. Its objective was to create a Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic Charter, having a Clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article 5, whereby “a state coming under economic attack or facing arbitrary detentions of its citizens due to its democratic or human rights stance could ask for unified support including retaliatory measures of fellow democracies.” This and other creative proposals included in the Copenhagen Charter will likely be rehashed at the Summit to be opened by Biden in December.

Rasmussen too can boast a spotless resume as cheerleader for U.S. global leadership, and that might explain why he seems trapped in a time warp and blind to the actual state of that leadership. If the reader needs further confirmation of Rasmussen’s complicated relationship with reality, here is an excerpt from an article titled ‘The Right Lessons From Afghanistan’ that he wrote for Foreign Affairs a few weeks after the Afghanistan fiasco, “The world should not draw the wrong lessons from Afghanistan. This fiasco was far from inevitable. It would also compound the folly if the world’s developed democracies stopped supporting the quest for freedom and democracy in authoritarian states and war-torn countries. That includes Afghanistan, where the United States and its partners should lend their support to the ongoing resistance efforts to oppose the Taliban.” We all know what happened to those “resistance efforts”, but Rasmussen won’t let reality get in the way of his illusions.

It is unlikely the Summit for Democracy will achieve the unspoken objective of creating an Alliance of Democracies that could bypass the UN Security Council. But it is undeniable that international law has long been under attack and is incrementally replaced with the Atlanticist concept of a “rules-based international system”, which does not have any specific rules but allows the West to violate international law under the pretext of advancing liberal ideals and exporting democracy.

It’s expected that USAID will be called to play a major role at the summit. USAID under Samantha Powers has a seat in the NSC and has been tasked with the mission to “modernize democracy assistance across the board”. This includes “supporting governments to strengthen their cybersecurity, counter disinformation and helping democratic actors defend themselves against digital surveillance, censorship, and repression.” In typical Orwellian doublespeak the U.S. is seeking help by claiming to help. With a military budget already stretched over the limit, enlisting foreign actors (both state and non-state) to do its bidding in the information and cognitive warfare becomes imperative.

NED, USAID, USAGM, “philanthropic” organizations like Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar Network have long been grooming and bankrolling journalists, activists, politicians, various types of influencers and community leaders. Their job is to paint a negative picture of China, Russia and any country resisting U.S. diktats. In Africa, just to mention one of many examples, “independent” journalists are paid to investigate Chinese companies that are involved in mining, construction, energy, infrastructure, loans and environment and portray them as causing harm to communities, environment and workers.

At the beginning of October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new partnership with the OECD in Paris: the overt goal was to combat corruption and promote “high-quality” infrastructure. But the partnership is part of a broader effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The U.S. has also appealed to the G7 and QUAD to provide the financial muscle for its Build Back Better World initiative (BW3), a rehash of Trump’s Blue Dot Network. Since the U.S. and its partners cannot respond to BRI symmetrically — they are unable to match China dollar for dollar, project for project — they are relying on virtue-signalling both as a marketing and bullying tactic. According to this initiative, infrastructure building in developing countries should comply with a certification scheme and lending rules set by the U.S. and its partners, rules that are cloaked in the familiar jargon of social and environmental sustainability, gender equality, and anti-corruption.

In case the competition with China in Asia, Europe and Africa does turn into open confrontation, the U.S. could use the BW3 to increase pressure on investment funds, global financial institutions and insurance companies to discriminate against projects that don’t meet standards set by the U.S. in return for concessions and sweeteners. When Western companies cannot compete fairly with Chinese ones, they can always rely on friendly officials in Washington to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour.

American policymakers seem unable to abandon a Cold War mentality that is essentially utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in the demands it places on others, and self-righteous. Some analysts believe that the source of the problem might be the force of public opinion, deemed emotional, moralistic and binary, the old “Us vs Them.”

Classical international relations theorists have long held the assumption that American public opinion has moralistic tendencies: for liberal idealists the moral foundation of public opinion, mobilized by norm entrepreneurs, opens up the possibility of positive moral action, whereas for realists, the public’s moralism is one of the main reasons why foreign policymaking should be insulated from the pressures of public opinion.

However it is myopic to conceive of public opinion and policymaking as separate entities when in fact they are both shaped by the interests of powerful elites. Public opinion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is swayed by new and old media that are often controlled by the same interest groups and corporations that fund the think tanks and foundations influencing U.S. foreign policy.

For instance, not only was the collusion and revolving door between government and the tech industry a feature of the Obama administration, it characterizes the Biden administration as well. The transnational interests of these elite groups are usually cloaked in a progressive, inclusive, democratic rhetoric to make their narrow agenda appear big enough so that unsuspecting ordinary people may want to claim ownership and subscribe to it. Corporate interests and national interest are a tangled web no longer subjected to public scrutiny since national level democracy has been hollowed out. When the trilemma of democracy, state, and market becomes irreconcilable, global market players call the shots without democracy or state being able to control them, oversee unceasing technological innovation (including artificial intelligence) or curb the excessive financialization of the economy.

Though U.S. attempts at nation-building result in chaos and misery for local populations, Americans haven’t given up on trying to remake the world in their own distorted image by aggressively promoting their worldviews, exporting a simulacrum of democracy and politicizing human rights issues.

They reject true multilateralism by trying to dominate the international organizations that were created to further cooperation and harmonize national interests. For the corporate donors of both the Democratic and Republican Party other countries’ national interests are a relic of the past that should be done away with. And indeed national interests would hardly be compatible with a world order led by the U.S. in partnership with global stakeholders (global corporations, NGOs, think-tanks, governments, academic institutions, charities, etc.)

These global stakeholders and their political representatives effectively want to replace the modern international system of sovereign states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Under this system, commonly referred to as Westphalian system, states exist within recognised borders, their sovereignty is recognised by others and principles of non-interference are clearly spelled out. Since this model doesn’t allow the government of one nation to impose legislation in another, the U.S. loudly promotes the idea of global governance, under which a global public-private partnership is allowed to create policy initiatives that affect people in every country as national governments implement the recommended policies. Typically this occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such as the IMF, World Bank, WHO, but many international organizations now play a similar role.

In the Biden administration we see a dangerous convergence of the national security establishment and Silicon Valley tech giants. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both worked for WestExec, the consulting firm that Blinken cofounded with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defence under President Obama. Google hired WestExec to help them land Department of Defense contracts. Google’s former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense. Schmidt himself was appointed to lead a government panel on artificial intelligence. At least 16 foreign policy positions are occupied by CNAS alumni. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a bipartisan think tank that receives large contributions directly from defence contractors, Big Tech, U.S. finance giants.

These donors spend considerable resources shaping the intellectual environment, academic research and symposia in order to build consensus around their agenda. The Biden administration also features dozens of officials hailing from the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank set up by John Podesta, a longtime Clintonworld staple, with George Soros’ generous contribution. The ties between Open Society Foundations (OSF) and CAP are so strong that Patrick Gaspard, the former head of OSF, was nominated president and CEO of CAP.

When government becomes the expression of global corporate interests and channels the belief system of a small, privileged elite it can be hard to tell who is leading who, who is really making policy and setting national security strategies and goals.

Biden’s national security team is the product of this corrupt system. Its members may tone down the “freedom, democracy and human rights” rhetoric if it gets in the way of achieving a particular strategic goal, but they won’t abandon it because it has proven to be effective in providing a legitimating frame and moral justification to U.S. hegemony.

If we look at the Roman empire we see how one constant theme was “expand or die”. Expansion isn’t only to be intended as territorial or military. Expanding influence, alliances, the use of Latin, the spread of Roman laws, currency, standards, culture and religion all contributed to the cohesion of the Empire. Given the current constraints to U.S. ambitions — namely the strategic partnership between China and Russia, BRI, the more assertive role played by regional powers, nervousness and conflicting interests among U.S. allies and a large budget deficit — the room for expansion has been considerably reduced. Thus the U.S. is doubling its efforts in areas where it still has room for maneuver.

Biden’s slogan “America is Back” sought to reassure allies but cannot hide the fact that the emperor is naked. Advertisers, politicians and psyops planners are continuously manipulating people into changing their perceptions of reality and making choices that ultimately do not benefit them. But no matter how hard the power-knowledge regimes of Western intellectual production work to conceal the decline, the West no longer dominates the world and the values it advocates are not unanimous, far from it. Labelling governments that don’t embrace liberal values and U.S. standards as “autocratic regimes” is just foolish sloganeering and doesn’t take into account the changing balance of power on the ground. The world is evolving toward a multipolar system and the U.S. had better take notice of it. Those serving in the NSC are still imagining a world that no longer exists, one where America has the power to force other countries into doing its bidding. The current ideological approach blinds pragmatic thinking, thus impeding discussions and negotiations.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Someone should tell the Biden team.

November 5, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, Summit for Democracy, United States | Leave a comment

OSHA to Cover Up Vaccine Injuries by Preventing Workers’ Compensation Claims

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 3, 2021

As reported by Kim Iversen above, around the world people are gathering for massive protests against COVID shot mandates. In mid-September 2021, Italy became the first European country to announce the implementation of mandatory COVID-19 health passes (so-called “Green Pass”) for all workers, both public and private.

The Italian mandate took effect October 15, 2021. Residents have been protesting in the streets for months on end and there’s no sign of them letting up. Demonstrations are also taking place in The Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Australia and France.

Even in Israel, mass protests are now taking place as it was announced Israeli’s will lose their health pass privileges unless they get a third booster shot six months after their second dose. New York City has also seen large protests in the wake of its vaccine requirement for restaurants and other public venues.

Leaders Turn a Blind Eye

Yet, despite massive protests, the push for vaccine mandates and vaccine passports that will create a two-tier society continue unabated. With few exceptions, world leaders are simply turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the fact that their residents want nothing to do with their new world order.

At the same time, government agencies charged with keeping us safe are doing the complete opposite. That includes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which President Biden has placed in charge of enforcing his unconstitutional edict that private companies with 100 employees or more must make COVID “vaccination” a requirement for employment or face fines of as much as $700,000 per incidence.¹

OSHA will issue the mandate for employers as an emergency temporary standard (ETS), but as of this writing, no official mandate has actually been issued.

According to an October 18, 2021, report by PJ Media,² OSHA has sent a draft to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. Since it’s being issued as an ETS, there will be no public comment period.

Once the OMB review is finalized, the vaccination rule will be published. Only then will the mandate actually go into effect. That said, OSHA has already amended an already existing rule in a way that will hide the true extent of the damage that this mandate will have on the American workforce.

OSHA Rule Change Covers Up Vaccine Injuries

According to OSHA rules (29 CFR 1904³), employers must record and report work-related illnesses, injuries and fatalities, whether the employer was at fault or not. As reported on May 26, 2021, by employment law firm Ogletree Deakins,⁴ this recording requirement initially also applied to adverse reactions suffered by employees who had to get the COVID shot as a requirement for employment.

The original guidance stated that employers were required to record an employee’s adverse reaction to the COVID jab if the shot was a) work-related, 2) a new case under 29 C.F.R. 1904.6 and 3) met one or more OSHA general recording criteria set out in 29 C.F.R. 1904.7. OSHA specified that an adverse reaction to the jab would be considered “work-related” if the shot was required for employment.

Then, in late May 2021, OSHA suddenly revoked this guidance, saying it will not enforce the recording requirement if the injury or fatality involves the COVID jab, even if required for employment. The nonenforcement will remain in place through May 2022, at which time the agency will reevaluate its position.

Why would they remove the requirement to record and report vaccine injuries incurred as a result of a vaccine mandate? According to OSHA, the agency is “working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations,” “does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”^5,⁶ As reported by Ogletree Deakins:⁷

“There is no doubt that OSHA’s guidance created a disincentive for employers to mandate that their employees get vaccinated. With a mandatory vaccination policy, the guidance ensured that employees’ adverse reactions (with arguably little correlation to actual work-related injuries) could end up on a company’s OSHA recordkeeping logs — which could, in turn, negatively affect its insurance rates and, in some industries, its ability to bid for work.”

What Ogletree fails to address is that by not enforcing this recording requirement for COVID jab injuries, OSHA is intentionally covering up the ramifications these vaccine mandates might have on employees’ health. Meanwhile, employers are still required to record and report COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths among their employees.

Federal Employees Get Special Treatment

In related news, federal employees must be fully “vaccinated” by November 22, 2021, or face the unemployment line. While coercion of this nature is abhorrent under any circumstance, federal employees at least get special treatment if they’re injured by the required jab. As reported by Stacey Lennox for PJ Media:⁸

“… October 1, 2021, the Federal Employee’s Compensation Act (FECA) issued a bulletin regarding coverage for vaccine injuries.⁹ FECA did not traditionally cover preventative measures and any resulting illness or injury. As of September 9, 2021, when President Biden announced the federal mandate, adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination are covered.”

As indicated in FECA Bulletin No. 22-01, dated October 1, 2021:¹⁰

“… this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”

“This bulletin is an interesting turn of events given previous OSHA guidance to private employers,” Lennox writes.¹¹ Indeed, while OSHA is selectively choosing to hide the vaccine injuries of private employees, federal employees will have access to financial compensation for their vaccine injuries, over and above the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP).¹²

Who Will Pay for Private Employees Injured by the Jabs?

On the whole, it’s clear that private employees will be at a distinct disadvantage in terms of compensation. If their employer requires them to get the jab to keep their job, and they get injured by it, the only recourse they have is to file a CICP claim, which is near-impossible to get. By not requiring companies to record vaccine injuries, it effectively shuts down the path for an employee to seek worker’s compensation if they’re injured by a mandated COVID jab.

“While OSHA recordability does not govern worker’s compensation, after managing both for several employers, I have never seen a compensable injury that is not OSHA recordable,” Lennox writes.¹³

As for CICP, in its 15-year history, it has paid out fewer than 1 in 10 claims.^14,^15,¹⁶ It also offers rather limited help, as you first have to exhaust your personal insurance before it kicks in to pay the difference.

Even if they can get it, CICP awards are likely to be a drop in the bucket for most people. The average award is $200,000, and compensation for fatalities are capped at $370,376.¹⁷ Meanwhile, you can easily rack up a $1 million hospital bill if you suffer a serious thrombotic event.¹⁸

Perhaps most egregious of all, it’s your responsibility to prove your injury was the “direct result of the countermeasure’s administration based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence beyond mere temporal association.”

In other words, you basically have to prove what the vaccine developer itself has yet to ascertain, seeing how you are part of their still-ongoing study. You must also pay for your own legal help and any professional witnesses you may need to support your claim.

The fact that federal workers who are injured by the mandated COVID jabs will be covered by FICA now gives unionized employees a new bargaining chip though. As noted by Lennox:¹⁹

“Without the OSHA ETS, unions would have bargained about having a vaccine mandate as a term or condition of employment at all. Now, unions should still have an opportunity for effects bargaining to ensure their members are covered if they sustain a vaccine injury.”

Recordability Guidance Must Be Changed Back

As mentioned earlier, the OSHA requirement to record vaccine injuries was scrapped because it disincentivized employers to mandate the shot. Having large numbers of injury reports can raise a company’s insurance costs. However, if OSHA is now going to require all employers with 100 or more employees to implement vaccine mandates, then most companies will be in the same boat.

Since no employer will be at a particular disadvantage, OSHA really needs to change its recordability guidance back, Lennox says, adding:²⁰

“Private sector employees deserve the same protection as federal employees in the face of mandatory vaccines. The mandates will put a severe risk between them and their ability to earn a living for some people.

If they [employers] cave, they should be liable just as every taxpayer is now liable for a vaccine injury to a federal employee. If employers don’t want the liability, they should fight the mandate.”

Sources and References

¹ Reuters September 13, 2021
^2, ^8, ^11, ^13, ^19, ²⁰ PJ Media October 18, 2021
³ OSHA 29 CFR 1904
^4, ⁷ Ogletree.com May 26, 2021
⁵ OSHA FAQ Vaccine Related Questions
⁶ OSHA Protecting Workers, COVID-19
⁹ FECA Bulletin 2020-2024 (Archived)
¹⁰ FECA Bulletin No. 22-01 October 1, 2021
¹² Congressional Research Service Legal Sidebar CICP March 22, 2021 (PDF)
¹⁴ Life Site News June 15, 2021
¹⁵ Insurance Journal August 14, 2020
^16, ¹⁷ Insurance Journal December 29, 2020
¹⁸ The Defender June 2, 2021

November 5, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

White House Expands Vaccine Mandate To Cover 80 Million Workers

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 4, 2021

The White House has just released new policies requiring all companies – big and small – to coerce their workers into accepting the vaccine, or face termination, as the Biden Administration continues to up the pressure on all working Americans to get vaccinated before Jan. 4.

According to Axios, President Biden is planning to announce Thursday that employers with more than 100 workers on their payroll must guarantee that their workers are fully vaccinated, or tested weekly, by Jan. 4, 2022. If not, they could face federal fines starting at tens of thousands of dollars per offense.

What’s more, health-care workers will face even tougher restrictions which will effectively require every health-care worker in the country to be vaccinated, or lose their job, despite the fact that millions of health-care workers have already been infected with the virus by natural means.

To be sure, managing weekly testing programs for a minority of corporate employees will be extremely costly, and the ramifications of this new policy will essentially force employees for the biggest companies in the US to accept the vaccine.

Per Axios, the new rules – formally known as the COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard – will be enforced by OSHA. They will affect roughly two-thirds of America’s workforce, or roughly 80MM people. Many businesses and hospitals have already started to enforce vaccine mandates, and while Axios reports that they have seen “minimal” noncompliance, that doesn’t exactly square with the fact that less than 60% of the American population is fully vaccinated.

While corporations might be able to absorb some of these costs, small businesses will likely be left with some difficult decisions to make. However, there’s one important catch: OSHA will mostly rely on “complaints” to enforce the rule, meaning it will be up to American workers whether or not they want to hold their fellow workers accountable for defying the policy. This incentive to snitch out co-workers and neighbors has already elicited criticism from some, including Conservative Radio host Dan Bongino, who has pushed back against vaccine mandates in favor of bodily autonomy.

The strict mandate for health-care workers is already creating some problems because, while 40% of health-care businesses have purportedly already enforced the policy, the supposedly “minimal” level of noncompliance is reportedly exacerbating worker shortages at hospitals and other critical service providers.

In another indication of how companies are struggling with the mandate, some federal contractors had been expected to enforce the Biden Admin’s vaccine mandate by Dec. 8, but those expectations have now been pushed back to Jan. 4. When asked whether the pushback was due to worker shortages, or the timing of the holiday season, they refused to comment, saying only that the delay is meant to “align” with health-care facilities and US employers.

Perhaps President Biden (and VP/President-in-waiting Kamala Harris) have already forgotten the lessons of Tuesday’s “off-year” election?

November 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment

The EU is not revealing the details of its contracts with vaccine makers. Why?

By Robert Bridge | RT | November 3, 2021

As some Europeans continue to resist mandatory vaccine measures, a group of parliamentarians have upbraided the Commission for allowing pharmaceutical companies to ‘run roughshod over democracy.’

One of the most important lessons people learn early in life is to never plunk down hard-earned cash on a product before reading all of the fine print contained in the contract. ‘Caveat emptor,’ as every subject of the Roman Empire instinctively understood.

Yet, it seems that few bureaucrats in Brussels have purchased a new home, used car or some newfangled device lately, because that’s exactly what these bumbling fools have done. In an effort to ‘protect the health of their constituents,’ they bought millions of batches of Covid vaccines from various pharmaceutical companies without letting lawmakers sneak a peek at the contracts.

As it turns out, entire pages of these documents – the few that have been made public, that is – have been heavily redacted. This has raised more than one eyebrow in the European Union, and perhaps none more conspicuously than that of Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes.

At the weekend, Terhes appeared at a press conference in Brussels with several other EU lawmakers at this side, all visibly shaken by the news that they would be required to produce, starting on November 3, a digital ‘green pass’ to gain entry into Parliament. Like many EU citizens, these lawmakers have declined to get the vaccine not because they are ‘anti-vaxxers’ but because they have been denied critical information regarding the product and procedures. Now they will be refused entry into Parliament, the place where the will of their people is (supposedly) represented.

Terhes revealed that, back in January, EU lawmakers were demanding “full access to the contracts signed between these companies that produce the vaccines and the European Union.” To say the parliamentarians were disappointed would be a gross understatement.

The Romanian MEP, who represents the Christian-Democratic National Peasants Party, quoted from a Euractiv article that reported: “The contract, signed between pharmaceutical company CureVac and the European Commission in November, was made available to MEPs [on January 12, 2021] in a redacted format after the company agreed to open the contract up to scrutiny.”

That is really putting the cart before the horse, for how can something that has been so grossly redacted be opened up to scrutiny? Terhes railed that Brussels is “imposing a medical product on European citizens without them knowing what’s in these contracts.” That’s simply inexcusable and should be easily struck down by even a third-rate lawyer.

More astonishing is that not even the EU members of Parliament know the details of the agreements.

To prove his point, the Romanian MEP held up individual pages of the CureVac contract, each one heavily redacted like some kind of imitation of artist Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square.’ It doesn’t get any less concerning when we drill down to which parts of the contract were blacked out. According to an analysis conducted by Euractiv, “4.22% of the liability section and 15.38% of the indemnification section was found to be redacted, while 0% of the section on the processing of personal data was redacted.”

Meanwhile, the contract’s annexes, which delve into the nitty-gritty details of the agreement, were redacted by some 61%. In total, almost 24% of the contract was hidden. Now ask yourself this simple question: Would you sign up for a home mortgage if it was discovered that one-quarter of the agreement was missing? I’ll crawl out on a limb and guess ‘no.’ Nor would anyone think you were ‘anti-mortgage’ or ‘mortgage hesitant’ if you did so.

The truth is that you, and millions of other rational people exactly like you, are simply ‘pro-transparency.’ Yet these medical consumers are being treated like second-class citizens for simply wanting more information before they agree to be injected with something. ‘My body, my choice’ is a battle cry that no longer applies, as millions of people are quickly discovering, in the current authoritarian climate.

Keep in mind that it is on the basis of these contracts that Europeans must come to a decision, based on “informed consent,” that they will ‘voluntarily’ take the jab so as not to be ostracized from polite society. Unless they agree to take one of the available vaccines, citizens of the EU face potentially being denied the right to work, enter a store, buy medicine, take their children to school and freely travel from one country to another.

Naturally, this makes the stakes for not taking the jab incredibly high, but that only makes it worse that details are being deliberately withheld from the public. It is no secret that the pharmaceutical giants enjoy full indemnity in the event that an individual suffers death or injury after receiving a Covid shot. And although such unfortunate occurrences appear to be rare, even Pfizer-BioNTech, which has been granted approval to extend vaccinations to 12 to 15-year-olds in the EU, seems uncertain as to what the long-term effects of the vaccines may be.

“Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine,” it clearly states on its website.

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a damning report on Pfizer, saying negotiators for the drug company had behaved in a “bullying” manner with several Latin American countries. In Argentina they demanded “additional indemnity” against civilians seeking legal compensation after suffering adverse effects from their vaccines. In the agreements, Pfizer takes great care to ensure that all financial responsibility for compensating citizens injured from the inoculations is that of the respective government.

The company also enjoys the protection of non-disclosure agreements with many of its nation clients, including the European Commission and the US government. With regards to the EU, Brussels is forbidden from disclosing information that would be “material to Pfizer without the consent of Pfizer,” Public Citizen reported.

In fact, CureVac was being quite generous with the EU Commission, considering it was the only pharmaceutical company that agreed to release its contract to the light of day. Of course there wasn’t much to inspect with all of the redactions, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?

In light of the steady pressure bearing down on Brussels, much of it happening behind closed doors, the European Commission has obliquely admitted – almost one year too late, and after the rights and freedoms of European citizens have been crushed underfoot – that they failed to use good judgment when ramming through these emergency vaccines.

Last week, in an overwhelmingly passed resolution (458 in favor, 149 against and 86 abstaining), the EU Parliament demanded legislation that would make “the process of researching, purchasing and distributing Covid-19 vaccines more transparent, stating:

“This would enable MEPs to effectively scrutinize EU vaccine policies. At the same time, the Commission should be discussing these policies more openly with citizens.”

This shocking statement by the EU Parliament shows how little respect Brussels had for democratic principles when it was negotiating with the vaccine makers, who have, incidentally, reaped a windfall from the pandemic. The parliamentarians, who are coming under fire at home, demanded that “the Commission discloses who negotiates vaccine purchases on its behalf. It should publish purchase agreements made with vaccine suppliers, including details of public investments and vaccine costs, and publicise any potential breaches of contract.”

Then, in what comes off as the understatement of the century, the MEPs are of the opinion that “more information could help counter vaccine hesitancy and disinformation, and pharmaceutical companies should also release extensive clinical trial data and reports.”

Oh, you think so?

The following question is not an idle one: Why are MEPs ONLY NOW talking about the total lack of transparency and democracy that occurred between the EU Commission and Big Pharma? A more cynical person would be tempted to say it’s because the draconian vaccine mandates have finally reached the very door of Parliament, where the power brokers find themselves locked out of their offices, much like thousands of people on the street. Welcome to the club.

In any case, the fact that Brussels has withheld the details of its agreements with the vaccine makers for almost a year, while at the same time casually destroying the civil liberties of its citizens, totally disqualifies them from punishing those people who are ‘hesitant’ about receiving the vaccine. ‘Informed consent’ is essential to any functioning democracy, and Europeans were clearly denied that right. Do the right thing, Brussels, and release these heavy chains from your people. The world is watching.

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.

November 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, Human rights | Leave a comment

FDA approves Pfizer jab for kids, but even they don’t seem sure it’s safe

By Helen Buyniski | RT | November 1, 2021

American children have no choice but to act as experimental test subjects for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to determine the jab’s safety, the Food and Drug Administration has apparently concluded. Good luck, kids!

“We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it,” editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard adjunct professor Eric Rubin argued last week, his words buried within the eight-hour barrage of presentations and discussions that swirled around the FDA advisory panel’s approval of the mRNA jab for children aged five to 11.

The FDA followed up on the advisory panel’s 17-0 recommendation with approval, as it typically does, on Friday. If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention follows suit, some 28 million American children will be quickly served up as fresh-faced fodder for a smaller dose of the Covid-19 vaccine already poised to inject some 100 million American adults. That is, as soon as President Joe Biden is able to whip up a legally-binding demand he can submit to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Friday’s FDA approval means only the CDC stands between American children and a warp-speed rollout of the Pfizer jab. However, the rush to approval doesn’t necessarily mean there are no concerns. A disturbingly large portion of the FDA committee’s members are connected to Pfizer in some way or another, leading vaccine skeptics to cry foul. Meanwhile, a growing portion of the country continues to denounce the mandates in general, insisting everyone should be able to make their own decision regarding whether or not they wish to get injected.

Echoing the newly-reanimated pro-choice slogan, mandate protesters recently swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge declaring ‘My body, my choice’ as New York City employees faced the potential loss of their jobs as firefighters, police officers, sanitation handlers, and corrections officers due to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s insistence that all municipal employees get vaxxed or be relegated to the purgatory of open-ended unpaid leave.

The FDA’s effort to put the cart so far in front of the horse mirrored the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the congressional tug-of-war over Obamacare in 2010. Faced with a phonebook-sized, dubiously-legal bill unlike anything Congress had passed before and no realistic timeframe to wrangle with the details, Pelosi suggested Congress would have to “pass the bill to find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.”

Since then, legislation by brute force has only grown as the means by which laws are passed in the US, as ever-more-polarized parties refuse to give an inch and betray the appearance of weakness. Allowing the ‘other side’ to be seen as achieving even the slightest victory is unconscionable, and that framework remains in place in the vaccination arena – where it makes less sense than anywhere else.

After all, it was former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed that brought the world the Pfizer shot, even if the jab itself wasn’t rolled out until shortly (some would say deliberately) after the 2020 election and vaccine mandates have since become a cause celebre of the Democratic Party.

With half the US up in arms about the other half’s supposed refusal to roll up its sleeves and submit to an intensely politicized needle, anyone who hesitates is denounced posthaste in a 21st-century witch hunt – to be fired, if not set on fire; outfitted with the scarlet A for anti-vaxxer, not adulteress; and otherwise chased out of the public square – deplatformed from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, if not chased physically with pitchforks and torches. Similar divisions have erupted across Europe, and countries like Italy and France have pushed the issue even further, barring the unvaccinated from so much as entering grocery stores to buy food.

While the US study of the Pfizer vaccine’s effects on children five to 11 failed to turn up any deadly side effects, critics argued its population size was too small to be effective for such a purpose. Parents of some jab recipients have observed disturbing symptoms in their offspring in the hours and days following the shots and filmed heartbreaking testimonials describing their downfall from healthy children to pain-wracked perma-patients experiencing near-constant seizures, facial distortions, debilitating heart problems, or other dire health issues.

Another doctor on the FDA committee, Michael Kurilla of the National Institutes of Health, abstained from voting on recommending Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine entirely, citing a lack of evidence that all children need the shot, and while Kurilla, an infectious disease and pathology expert, was the only panel member to abstain from voting, he was not the only member to openly express misgivings about doling out the jab to young Americans. His colleague, Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts University, suggested that it would be an “error” to mandate the jab for children to return to school until there was more hard data.

“We simply don’t know what the side effects are going to be,” he said, acknowledging the shot – like its adult equivalent – probably wouldn’t prevent transmission of the virus. While he was not opposed to administering the shot to certain vulnerable subgroups inside the 5-11 age group, Meissner was concerned approving the shot for everyone in that category would lead to a heavy-handed mandate the likes of which is currently being wielded against American adults.

Children who receive the Pfizer-BioNTech jab may actually get less immunity and face more risk than supplied by getting and recovering from a current strain of Covid-19, Kurilla told the Daily Mail, referring to the Delta variant and other current strains of Covid-19 circulating among the population. “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?” he asked rhetorically during the FDA committee meeting. He would have voted ‘yes’ if the FDA had merely proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a ‘subset’ of those ages five to 11, but he disagreed with administering it to all children within that age group.

Two other panel members voted to approve despite their misgivings. Meissner argued that a “very small percent of otherwise healthy six-to-11-year-old children…might derive some benefit,” while President and CEO of Meharry Medical College James Hildreth agreed that “vaccinating all of the children…seems a bit much for me,” pointing to the relatively low risk of hospitalization and near-zero risk of death by Covid-19 for children.

Speaking up against the jab, even circumstantially, has become the kiss of death in the medical community, with even medical rock stars like Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA as a drug, cast into the dustbin of history for expressing skepticism that his invention was being incorrectly used to deliver the Covid-19 vaccine.

However, governments worldwide are setting themselves up for civil war as populations are forced to choose one ‘side’ or another. Even many of the vaccinated have acknowledged that the jab should not be forced on anyone, while entire industries like shipping, air travel, defense, and the like grind to a halt as mandates run up against the stubborn will of their employees. Southwest Airlines was allegedly forced to cancel thousands of flights earlier this month, due to a reported mass ‘sickout’ by air traffic controllers unwilling to get vaxxed, though the airline itself has denied this, and rumors of trucker strikes from Australia to America have food sellers panicking at the thought of empty shelves.

As it stands, parents who were willing to submit themselves to experimental shots in the name of convenience and retaining employment may not be so willing to offer up their children as sacrifices to a company once denounced by the US Justice Department as the worst fraudster in the pharmaceutical industry.

Governments that have shown themselves as profoundly untrustworthy throughout the Covid-19 pandemic are unlikely to change their behavior at the last minute, and parents are wise to take care in where they place their trust.

November 2, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion

By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019

Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.

Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue

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