After a hundred years of intense propaganda promoting the idea that diseases are everywhere, and each disease is caused by a single germ, which must be killed by a medical drug…
The fallout has been extreme, to say the least.
Let’s start here:
When will hysterical defenders of “science” face up to the destruction the US medical system is causing?
Millions of masked people, who border on hysteria, believe they know COVID science.
On closer examination, these people believe what their television sets tell them. They believe Fauci because he’s on television, and he’s talking from the White House, and he disagrees with Trump.
Of the millions who believe in Fauci television science, there are many who will say science is “studies.” They are quite sure these studies back up what Fauci and Redfield are spouting, and any contradictory studies would be artifacts dreamed up by secret minions of Trump.
COVID case numbers and death numbers are being fraudulently inflated to the skies. That’s an enormous crime, because the lockdowns and the economic devastation have been based on these data.
Now I want to apply that same direct analysis to the entire US medical system. In this instance…
True data are buried, hidden, and ignored.
What data? Actual numbers of deaths and maiming CAUSED by medical treatment.
When you see the dimensions of this crime and this mass human tragedy, you’ll also see further implications—titanic insurance fraud, tax fraud, and, indeed, millions upon millions of work-hours irretrievably lost to the nation’s economy.
Insurance companies are paying out billions of dollars for medical treatment that is destructive, not helpful.
Insurance companies are also paying billions in death benefits as a result of doctors, not diseases, killing people.
And all this medical destruction is being subsidized by the taxpayer.
No one has calculated the $$ cost. No one can calculate the tragic human cost.
Now here is the analysis. Understand that the vital data in these mainstream reports have been briefly revealed, then hidden.
ONE: “The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs.” The author is Donald Light, who teaches at Rowan University, and was the 2013 recipient of ASA’s [American Sociological Association’s] Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. Light is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He is a Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
Donald Light: “Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about 2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They [the drugs] cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations [6.6 million annually], as well as falls, road accidents, and [annually] about 80 million medically minor problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase these figures.” (ASA publication, “Footnotes,” November 2014)
TWO: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998: “Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients.”
The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals, or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate:
Every year, in the US, between 76,000 and 137,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs.
Beyond that, every year 2.2 million hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.
The authors write: “… Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and administered.”
So this study had nothing to do with doctor errors, nurse errors, or improper combining of drugs. And it only counted people killed or maimed who were admitted to hospitals. It didn’t begin to tally all the people taking pharmaceuticals who died as consequence of the drugs, at home.
THREE: July 26, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association ; author, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; “Is US health really the best in the world?”
Starfield reported that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans per year. 106,000 as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, and 119,000 as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. Extrapolate the numbers to a decade: that’s 2.25 million deaths. You might want to read that last number again.
I interviewed Starfield in 2009. I asked her whether she was aware of any overall effort by the US government to eliminate this holocaust. She answered a resounding NO. She also said her estimate of medically caused deaths in America was on the conservative side.
FOUR: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer. Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It [the Institute] calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.’”
The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”
The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”
Therefore, to say the FDA isn’t aware of this finding would be absurd. The FDA knows. The FDA knows and it isn’t saying anything about it, because the FDA certifies, as safe and effective, all the medical drugs that are routinely maiming and killing Americans. Every public health agency knows the truth.
FIVE: None of the above reports factor in death or injury by vaccine.
The US system for reporting severe adverse effects of vaccines is broken.
Barbara Loe Fisher, of the private National Vaccine Information Center, has put together a reasonable analysis:
“But how many children have [adverse] vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use. [See DA Kessler, ‘Introducing MEDWatch,’ JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]”
“There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.”
“Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS]; parents as well as doctors can make those reports. [See RT Chen, B. Hibbs, ‘Vaccine safety,’ Pediatric Annals, July 1998: 445-458]”
“However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events [per year]. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.”
Medical crimes.
Medically caused deaths of friends, family members, loved ones, who are buried along with the truth.
No criminal investigations, no prosecutions, no guilty verdicts, no prison sentences.
But of course, you can believe everything leading lights of the US medical system tell you about COVID.
You can believe everything the press—who buries the truth about this medical holocaust—tells you about COVID.
Given the reports on medically caused death and maiming I’ve just cited and described in this article, it’s obvious that…
Leading medical journals around the world, which routinely publish glowing accounts of clinical trials of medical drugs…
Are spilling over with rank fraud, on page after page.
Indeed, here is a stunning quote from a woman who has quite probably read and analyzed more medical-drug studies than any doctor in the world:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)
Compare that quote with one from “the father of COVID science,” Tony Fauci. In an interview with the National Geographic, Fauci stated: “Anybody can claim to be an expert even when they have no idea what they’re talking about… If something is published in places like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Cell, or JAMA—you know, generally that is quite well peer-reviewed because the editors and the editorial staff of those journals really take things very seriously.”
They take things so seriously, they routinely publish glowing studies of medical drugs that are killing people in great numbers.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Postreported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reportedThe Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” APnotes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
President-elect Joe Biden has a pony problem. During the primary, Joe Biden bizarrely responded to a woman who asked why voters should believe that he could win a national election by saying “You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.” That encounter came to mind when Biden this week mocked Fox reporter Peter Doocy, who violated the virtual news blackout on the Hunter Biden story by asking about the scandal. Biden immediately walked off stage and then stopped and said “Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you.”
It is just not working. The media openly worked to bury the Hunter Biden scandal before the election, but the ponies keep finding their way back. The problem is when you have one reporter like Doocy who refuses to be corralled and insists on an answer to a serious question.
The question yesterday was a good one. Doocy yelled out “Mr. President-elect, do you still think that the stories from the fall about your son Hunter were Russian disinformation and a smear campaign like you said?” Biden’s response of “yes, yes, yes” seemed to continue a discredited claim (indeed, “disinformation”) put out by figures like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff who assured the pubic that the allegations against “this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin.” Some 50 former intelligence officials, including Obama’s CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, also insisted the laptop story was likely the work of Russian intelligence. Cable hosts and journalists laughed at the laptop story as fake news to justify the blackout on coverage before the election.
Then the pony showed up again. After the election, it was confirmed (as some of us discussed in columns before the election) that Hunter Biden is under federal investigation. The laptop appears to be genuine. The emails appear to be genuine. And Doocy continued to ask the obvious questions.
Biden is still hoping that he can continue to mock and the media will continue to do the rest. One reporter yesterday did raise the scandal but only to ask if Biden discussed it with Attorney General candidates (the campaign already said that Biden was going to allow the Justice Department to reach its own conclusions). There are other obvious questions, including whether a key business associate of the Bidens, Anthony Bobulinski, is lying. Either Tony Bobulinski or Joe Biden is lying. Bobulinski is repeatedly praised by Hunter Biden in the emails and identified as the person in control of transactions for “the family.” He has directly contradicted Joe Biden’s denial of any knowledge or involvement in his son’s dubious dealings.
There is a reason why Biden may not want to answer that question. If he calls Bobulinski a liar, Biden would be hit with a defamation lawsuit within days. He would then be forced to go under oath. Such depositions present their own dangers. Just ask Bill Clinton. So it is not a pesky pony but a sworn deposition that Biden may be trying to avoid.
The same problem exists on other questions. For example, not only were Joe and Jill Biden included as “office mates” with controversial Chinese investor (and associate of Hunter) Gongwen Dong, but emails also refer to unsecured loans going to the Biden family and shares going to “the big guy.” The “big guy” appears to be Joe Biden. Moreover, Biden spent the election denying that his son did anything wrong and that he made no money from China. The question is when Biden learned of the federal investigation and whether he was aware of the dealings over multimillion dollar unsecured loans (as well as alleged gifts like a valuable diamond givento his son). Answering those questions falsely could trigger a congressional investigation and then more ponies would show up.
That is the problem with a bunker press strategy of denial and isolation. Like water, truth has a way of coming out. Clearly many in the media will continue to be in the bag for Biden. However, horses tend to gather where the water is found. First, there was one pony (Doocy). Then another showed up (Erickson). Before you know it, you have a herd and a threat of a stampede. Then it could be too late.
In the mocking comment to Doocy, Biden was clearly trying to say a “one-trick pony.” That trick however was once called “journalism” back in the day when reporters doggedly demanded answers, particularly on questions like influence peddling. So many of us still hoping for ponies – and even some answers – for Christmas.
Moscow is set for a showdown with Western judges and 1990s Russian oligarchs, over a new ruling enabling the country to refuse to pay what is considered to be the biggest legal settlement in history, over a collapsed oil empire.
The Constitutional Court, one of Russia’s highest judicial authorities, ruled on Friday that the decision of an international tribunal in the long-running dispute over the now-dissolved energy giant Yukos is incompatible with Russian law. The case has been heard by a court in The Hague, which claims jurisdiction under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, and awarded the company’s former shareholders a $50-billion payout from the Russian government earlier this year. Moscow claimed a win in November on the other side of the Atlantic, when a US court, which had been hearing the case simultaneously, decided to throw it out.
However, as Russia signed but never ratified the Treaty, which hands powers to international tribunals, the Constitutional Court has now determined it is not bound by the terms of The Hague judgement. The ruling states that, while the country’s government of the day began the process of signing up to the pact in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws inferior to international agreements, or to “challenge the competence” of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court’s demands would be “unconstitutional.”
The claimants in the case are oligarchs who lost cash when Yukos, once among Europe’s largest firms, collapsed. They say that a multi-billion dollar tax bill and the arrest of its CEO and founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges amounted to state ‘appropriation’ of its assets. However, Russian authorities insist that the shareholders cannot be considered “legitimate,” and that the Dutch judges had steamrolled over the country’s laws against corruption and fraud when ruling in their favour.
As far back as July 2014, The Hague ordered Moscow to cough up $50 billion to compensate the plaintiffs. After exhausting the appeals process in February this year, Russia’s lawyers asked the Dutch Supreme Court to consider the case and overrule the decision. However, at the start of December, it similarly backed the oligarchs.
Russia has insisted that the judgements are “politically motivated,” and in December the country’s Justice Minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, told journalists that the case was part of a “legal war that has been declared on Russia.” He added that “Russia must adequately defend itself and, sometimes, even attack back.”
Now standing at around $50 billion, around the same ballpark as Russia’s annual military budget, the colossal settlement is thought to be the largest award in history. If the country now rejects the bill, it would spark one of the most serious impasses in international legal history, and leave Western states deciding whether to respect Russia’s constitutional ruling, or to enforce the demands by confiscating assets.
Yukos’ former shareholders have already sought to have Western governments take control of Russian property overseas as an insurance policy in case Moscow refuses to pay up. However, in November, a judge in the simultaneous hearing in the US refused that request, saying that “the Russian Federation is a sovereign country with economic tendrils that cross the globe, not an insecure potential debtor that must be required to post security lest there be no assets to seize at a later date.”
Not all countries have taken the same approach, however, and in 2015 Russia’s diplomats slammed France and Belgium for confiscating state cash in overseas banks, and even buildings, to be held as collateral in the case. Moscow again rejected the court’s authority and said their move was “an openly hostile act.” Tim Osborne, a British lawyer representing the former shareholders, said at the time that such seizures were necessary because Russia “has no regard for international law or the rule of law.”
At its height, Yukos produced 20 per cent of Russia’s oil, placing it firmly among the ranks of the world’s most valuable enterprises. It had been formed by the privatization of former state assets after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Khodorkovsky acquiring the assets for a fraction of their worth at an auction that one economist, Andrey Illarionov, called “the swindle of the century.”
Khodorkovsky claims his arrest on fraud charges and the subsequent collapse of Yukos was tied to his political activism and his personal animosity towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, however, claims that the oligarch, once said to be Russia’s wealthiest man, had admitted his guilt to him privately in exchange for a pardon in 2013.
Khodorkovsky insists that he has renounced any claims to his former empire and that, should a settlement be reached in the Yukos case, he would not stand to benefit. However, Russian authorities are said to suspect that a number of claimants have close financial ties to the former oil magnate.
Indonesian Muslims protest outside the US ambassador’s office in Indonesia against US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Jakarta on December, 8, 2017 [Dasril Roszandi / Anadolu Agency]
Indonesia could see billions of dollars in additional funding from the US if it agreed to normalise ties with Israel, a US official has said.
Bloomberg quoted Chief Executive of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Adam Buehler, as saying that the agency could double its investments in Indonesia, which currently amount to about $1 billion, if Jakarta establishes diplomatic relations with Israel.
“We are talking to Indonesia about this … if they are ready for it, we will be happy to provide them with financial support that is greater than what we actually offer now.”
The US official said he would not be surprised if the aid provided by the agency to Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, increases by one or two billion dollars if Jakarta establishes diplomatic relations with Israel.
US and Israeli leaders say that they expect more countries to join the wave of normalisation which began in August with the announcement that the UAE had agreed to sign a peace deal with the occupation state. This was quickly followed by Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
The United States hopes that Oman and Saudi Arabia will sign similar deals in the future, although Buehler said it is not likely that USAID will provide assistance to the two countries because the rules do not allow the agency to invest in high-income countries.
Late last month Indonesia reaffirmed its firm support for Palestinian independence.
A non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Indonesia presents one of its main goals on the council as dealing with the Palestinian question. It has had no formal relations with the occupation state of Israel since it was formed on Palestinian land in 1948. In support of Palestine, Jakarta issued a tax exemption on Palestinian imports.
In turn, Israel has taken soft measures against Indonesia such as banning tourists from the country but has made overtures towards it in recent years in order to influence the process of normalisation.
The massive ‘Covid-19 relief plus’ bill passed by Congress is a slap in the face to Americans from politicians whose backhands never seem to tire. Is a single $600 payment the going price of a human soul these days?
At over 5,500 pages (around twice the length of the previous longest bill, passed in 1986), the bill has passed both House and Senate without being read by the vast majority of those voting in favor. Congressional leaders took the must-pass nature of the $900 billion package of long-overdue Covid-19 assistance as a green light to lard the attached $1.4 trillion ‘omnibus’ bill with controversial legislation that would never pass otherwise. Some of this has already been revealed, to the horror of the American people.
The spurious add-ons aren’t the typical harmless-yet-ridiculous pork one finds in some mega-bills, either. One disturbing section dramatically expands copyright law to the point that anyone caught in “unauthorized streaming” of copyrighted content more than once could face 10 years in prison – even if they didn’t know the content was protected.
In an unconscionable giveaway to major entertainment conglomerates, the bill creates a new “copyright claims court” to further skew copyright law against independent content creators, who already face frequent content takedowns on YouTube and other platforms for what is technically (and legally) “fair use.” This court will be staffed with taxpayer-funded attorneys, who – the bill specifies – can only be paid as much as the highest-paid senior federal employee. That’s a relief!
Coupled with last year’s dramatic expansion of what counts as ‘copyrighted material’ in Europe, which could potentially criminalize even reaction GIFs and memes, the move is an assault on artists and ordinary internet users alike at a time when people have been presented with no choice but to live their lives online.
Adding insult to injury, the bloated aid package will lavish Israel with a whopping $3.8 billion in grants and foreign aid – much of it earmarked for purchasing weapons frequently used to violate international law – and dump hundreds of millions more on such paragons of human rights as Egypt and Sudan.
Americans, meanwhile, get a pitiful $600 each as many states remain economically shut down with no end to the ‘new normal’ in sight. The eviction moratorium that was set to expire at the end of the month has been extended to the end of January, staving off the flood of destitute Americans into the streets for another month. While $25 billion has been set aside for rental assistance, that’s just over a third of what Americans owe, and the procedure for accessing that money is (perhaps deliberately) complex.
The porkstravaganza isn’t entirely evil, of course. Many of the provisions merely represent garden-variety greed and venality ($193.4 million for HIV/AIDS relief workers to buy and insure “official motor vehicles,” the foundation of a ‘Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority’) while others are just baffling (the creation of an educational campaign warning people not to store portable fuel containers near an open flame). There’s $325 billion in small business aid – for those businesses that haven’t closed their doors for good yet – and $15 billion for those cultural venues that have been lucky enough to hang on. But the overall tenor of the legislation is, as the hive-mind of Twitter put it earlier this week, “let them eat cake” – and the cake has already been left out in the sun for a few days.
Nevertheless, many Americans, driven to desperation by nearly 10 months of grinding government-enforced poverty, are willing to embrace the bill solely because of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it $600 payment. Worse, they’re attacking those few members of Congress who had the spine to vote against this phone-book-sized insult masquerading as a relief bill. Congress is supposed to have 72 hours to read any proposed legislation, a rule which was unsurprisingly waived as if the relief measures would simply evaporate if they weren’t passed immediately.
Americans – and the politicians who are supposed to represent them – shouldn’t be forced to choose between groveling for crumbs from the ruling class table and getting nothing at all. If the government and its corporate masters insist on keeping the economy shut down, it’s their responsibility to pay the people to sit on their hands, that is, unless they want those hands picking up pitchforks and torches instead.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
“We’re in the Money” was a popular tune that caught the spirit of the last century’s Roaring Twenties. Now, one hundred years later, environmental groups can sing the same song — thanks to Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world.
Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has announced that he is giving $793 million to 16 environmental groups to fight climate change and undertake other activities to save the planet. The largess comes from Bezos’s Earth Fund and is, he says, “just the beginning of my $10 billion commitment to fund scientists, activists, NGOs, and others.”
More than half of the donations are going to established, already well-funded green groups, with $100 million grants each going to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Groups purporting to be battling climate change aren’t the only ones getting the loot. Bezos is also turning his attention to “environmental justice,” and groups cashing in include the lesser-known Dream Corps’ Green for All, the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender and Justice, and the Solutions Project.
With natural gas having displaced coal as America’s leading source of electricity, environmentalists now plan to join hands with the incoming Biden administration to go after the fossil fuel, citing its alleged effect on the climate. And Bezos’s money will be used in a variety of projects to demonize natural gas. Manhattan-based EDF, whose annual budget is a stately $230 million, will pocket an additional $100 million from Bezos over the next three years. Most of that money will fund a satellite EDF plans to have put in orbit to monitor methane emissions.
“Thanks to this and other funding, we will cut methane pollution from the oil and gas industry by 45 percent by 2025, which will be the same 20-year benefit of closing a third of the world’s power plants,” longtime EDF head Fred Krupp assured the Washington Post (Nov.17). “Solving the climate crisis involves investments in a wide segment of solutions,” Krupp, whose organization would be a recipient of such investments, went on. “The obstacle isn’t finding solutions; it is securing the funding to scale solutions quickly. Our hope is that this gift encourages other philanthropists to support climate solutions on the scale needed.”
Washington, D.C.-based WWI is also getting into the satellite business. It plans to use its $100 million from Bezos to develop a satellite-powered land-use and carbon-emissions monitoring system that will focus on emissions’ impact on forests, grasslands, wetlands, and agriculture. WWI also wants to use some of the money to convert 450,000 school buses to all-electric power systems by 2030.
WWF, whose U.S. affiliate has an annual budget of about $300 million and whose global budget comes to $900 million a year, wants to use the Bezos cash to—raise more money. It plans to leverage its $100 million grant from Bezos to extract another $850 million from its “global partners,” including investors, foundations, and governments.
The Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, which will have to make do with a paltry $10 million, will use the money for a project to decarbonize buildings, with the goal of stopping the burning of natural gas in heaters, stoves, and boilers.
Other beneficiaries of Bezos’s Earth Fund include, according to the Post, the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, $43 million; ClimateWorks Foundation, $50 million; Eden Reforestation Projects, $5 million; Energy Foundation, $30 million; the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, $43 million; NDN Collective, $12 million; Salk Institute for Biological Studies, $30 million; the Solutions Project, $43 million; and the Union of Concerned Scientists, $15 million.
“We’ve Only Just Begun”
And remember: This is just the first tranche of Bezos’s donations to the greens. He has another $9.2 billion to pass out. With his fabulous wealth, Bezos has far eclipsed earlier celebrity benefactors of environmental causes such as CNN founder Ted Turner – once lovingly referred to by environmentalists as “Daddy Greenbucks” – and the late actor Paul Newman.
Many of the groups receiving Bezos’s money are little more than fronts for powerful corporate interests intent on profiting from the transformation from fossil-fuel-based energy to renewable energy. The Biden administration will use the climate to justify regulations on any activity deemed out of step with green orthodoxy. Flush with Bezos’s cash, environmental activists will make common cause with the Biden White House by launching lawsuits and disseminating propaganda to their hearts’ content.
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?
The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.
We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:
“Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crime, punishable by up to three years in prison.
Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”
So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevant copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns… it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been an FDA approved drug for over 65 years. It has been on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines since the list began in 1977. People have been safely treated with HCQ billions of times for malaria, lupus, HIV and rheumatoid arthritis. HCQ exerts both anti-inflammatory and antiviral effects.
Nevertheless, the FDA has caused many states to ban the use of HCQ to treat COVID-19 and made it very difficult to obtain a prescription elsewhere in the U.S. by foisting studies that greatly exaggerate a potential heart rhythm problem. In contrast, the CDC website says this about HCQ:
“With frequent dosing, rarely reported adverse events include cardiac arrhythmias in those with liver or kidney dysfunction … CDC has no limits on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of malaria … It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers … and children of all ages.”
On Nov. 19, Dr. George Fareed from California testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee about successfully treating over 1000 COVID patients with HCQ. On Dec. 10, Fareed responded as follows to follow-up questions from Senator Josh Hawley:
“The earlier the treatment can be started after the start of the infection, the better … Sadly, many infected people and primary care doctors and doctors in ERs follow the NIH and Dr. Fauci stipulations with no effective treatments offered. We need to have the NIH/FDA/CDC formally acknowledge the importance of early treatment with moderately acting, safe anti-virals [like HCQ] so readily available. When (if ever) that happens, everything would improve dramatically.”
At c19study.com is an up-to-date list of the countries successfully treating COVID with HCQ, mostly in combination with zinc and an anti-biotic (azithromycin or doxycycline): India, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Greece, Russia, U.A.E., Turkey and countries throughout Africa, South America and Central America.
Suppression of HCQ is a central factor in why the U.S. has among the very worst rates of illness and death from COVID-19.
For example, BBC News published an article titled “How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency”: “Chief doctor Nurettin Yiyit says it’s key to use hydroxychloroquine early. ‘We have no hesitation about this drug. We believe it’s effective because we get the results.’”
A study in India, where HCQ is being widely used as a prophylaxis (preventative medication), concluded that:
“The pivotal finding of our study was the noteworthy benefits of HCQ prophylaxis … [T]he National Task Force for COVID-19 in India recommended once a week maintenance dose for seven weeks …”
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., is a renowned Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications. This is how he describes the situation:
“There’s been a massive disinformation campaign that stretches from government to the media … The evidence in favor of hydroxychloroquine benefit in high-risk patients treated early as outpatients is stronger than anything else I’ve ever studied … The F.D.A. has relied on Dr. Fauci and his N.I.H. advisory groups to make a statement saying that there is no benefit of using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients … That’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug … People need to be writing or calling their congressmen and senators … [The] bureaucracy is in bed with other forces causing [it] to make decisions not based on the science …” (emphasis added)
HCQ is generic and costs a few dollars for an entire course.
As of the end May, there were over 150 million doses of HCQ in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). This stockpile is currently wasting away in government warehouses. On June 22, the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS) filed suit for an injunction against the March 28 order of the FDA that prohibits the use of this stockpile except for already-hospitalized COVID patients for whom it is too late. See aapsonline.org/hcqsuit
The only drug approved by the FDA for the outpatient treatment of COVID-19 is Remdesivir, a largely ineffective medicine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Gilead, that costs over $3000 for a course.
The immensely wealthy pharmaceutical industry which cannot profit from a cheap and available remedy like HCQ is largely responsible for its suppression through its influence upon government agencies and the media.
An illustration of how the system works is described by the editors-in-chief of the two most prestigious medical journals in the world, namely The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, who cite the “criminal” pressures put on them by pharmaceutical companies, thus explaining how a series of negative HCQ studies got published. In the words of the editor of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton:
“If this continues, we are not going to be able to publish any more clinical research data because pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful … Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
“Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies,” wrote Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Civil forfeiture is a massive unjustified threat to property and due process rights. As the third edition of Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture shows, most state laws still stack the deck against property owners and give law enforcement perverse financial incentives to pursue property over justice.
Proponents claim forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool, but new research finds otherwise: There was no increase in crime after New Mexico abolished civil forfeiture and the profit incentive in 2015. Strong forfeiture reform does not sacrifice public safety.
As states and Congress look for ways to create a fairer criminal justice system, one reform everyone should be able to agree on is ending civil forfeiture and the perverse profit incentive that fuels it.
By Jacob Sullum | From the January 2021 issue of reason
When cops invaded Ginnifer Hency’s home in Smiths Creek, Michigan, they seized TV sets, ladders, her children’s cellphones and iPads, even her vibrator. “They took everything,” she told state legislators a year later. The July 2014 raid turned up six ounces of marijuana.
Hency, a mother of four with multiple sclerosis, was using marijuana for pain relief based on her neurologist’s recommendation, as allowed by Michigan law at the time. … continue
United Airlines announced on Friday that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 would be returning to the skies beginning February 11, 2021. The aircraft was grounded worldwide in March 2019 following the twin crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
A 18 December report published by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation revealed that employees of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked together to manipulate recertification tests of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 following two fatal crashes that together killed a 346.
The 102-page report, which comes some 20 months after the aircraft was grounded, detailed that Boeing “inappropriately influenced FAA human factor simulator testing of pilot reaction times involving a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) failure.”
“Twenty months ago, the Commerce Committee launched an investigation into FAA safety oversight. We have received disclosures from more than 50 whistleblowers, conducted numerous FAA staff interviews, and reviewed over 15,000 pages of relevant documents,” Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, wrote in his news release.
“Our findings are troubling. The report details a number of significant examples of lapses in aviation safety oversight and failed leadership in the FAA. It is clear that the agency requires consistent oversight to ensure their work to protect the flying public is executed fully and correctly.”
The Senate committee also alleged that senior FAA managers have yet to be appropriately reprimanded or held accountable for the “failure to develop and deliver adequate training in flight standards, despite repeated findings of deficiencies over several decades.”
In addition, senior FAA leadership may have obstructed a review of the 737 MAX 8 crashes initiated by Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General.
“FAA and Boeing were attempting to cover up important information that may have contributed to the 737 MAX tragedies,” the report alleges.
On Friday, it was reported by United Airlines that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 will resume flights out of its Denver, Colorado, and Houston, Texas, facilities. Other aircraft will reportedly be made available for those travelers uneasy about boarding the ill-starred aircraft.
“We will be fully transparent with our customers and will communicate in advance when they are booked to fly on a Max aircraft,” United Airlines wrote in a Friday news release.
A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.
Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” When Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015, Bill Clinton, who as president signed Biden’s bill into law, told the NAACP: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Biden during a 2019 presidential debate: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.” Booker then said in an interview with The Huffington Post that that Biden’s “crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa,” also denouncing it for “overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now.”
In 2016, author and scholar Michele Alexander argued that Hillary did not deserve the votes of black people due to her and her husband’s support for numerous bills, including Biden’s 1994 crime bill, that led to the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Harvard’s Cornel West said in 2019: “When [Biden] says [the 1994 crime bill] didn’t contribute to mass incarceration, I tell him he has to get off his symbolic crack pipe.”
While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House — one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign — Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”
As first noted on Monday by former Sanders campaign organizer Ben Mora, Instagram publicly denounced as “False” a post on Sunday by the left-wing artist and frequent Biden critic Brad Troemel, who has more than 107,000 followers on that platform. Troemel’s post said nothing more than what Biden’s chosen running mate, Kamala Harris, has herself said, as well as numerous mainstream media outlets and countless criminal justice reform advocates have long maintained.
Troemel posted a 1994 photo of a smiling, mullet-sporting Biden standing next to then-President Bill Clinton. The photo contained this caption: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.” This was the same photo and caption which an anonymous Trump supporter under the name “realtina40” first posted back in June.
Shortly after Troemel posted this on Sunday, Instagram appended a note in red letters, with a warning sign that read: “Learn why fact-checkers have indicated that this is false.” That was followed by a note plastered over Troemel’s original post with the title: “False,” and which claimed “independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.” The same thing was done by Instagram to “realtina40” original June post.
This is not the first time Troemel has been censored by Instagram for posting criticisms of Biden. In response to questions, he told me he first earned the “false” label when posting a meme in April which he had created that mocked Biden’s campaign messaging. Instagram’s retaliation happened after the Biden campaign loudly complained about Troemel’s satirical ad. Biden campaign operatives falsely blamed the Trump campaign for having created it, and then induced Twitter to censor it.
As Troemel told me: “Here you can see Dems using the Russia-tinged cover of disinformation as a way to discredit any and all criticism of Biden found on social media.” When Troemel re-posted that meme last month with the clear notation that it was satirical, Instagram began “shadow banning” him: severely limiting the reach of his posts. It was those events — all involving Troemel’s criticisms of Biden from the left — that caused Instagram to heavily scrutinize his postings, culminating in its blurring of his latest post with a “False” label that contained these well-documented criticisms of Biden’s crime bill.
The only thing that is demonstrably “false” here is Instagram’s Biden-shielding assertion that there is a “fact-checking” consensus that this criticism of Biden’s 1994 crime bill is false. It is true that one media outlet, USA Today, fact-checked the identical claim posted back in June by the anonymous Instagram user and concluded that “our research finds that while the crime bill did increase the prison population in states, it did not bring about a mass incarceration relative to earlier years.” But that article so concluded even while admitting that Biden’s “crime bill did increase the prison population in states” and “any increase in the overall prison population would automatically translate into a larger number of Black inmates.” The article’s own premises thus bolster, not refute, the claim at issue.
But numerous other media outlets and fact-checking organizations — far more than just one — concluded the opposite: namely, that there is at least a reasonable and substantial basis for these claims about Biden’s bill:
PolitiFactrated as only “Half True” Biden’s claim that the 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting the bill provided funds to states on the condition that they force prisoners to serve longer sentences and that it bolstered the tough-on-crime climate that led to higher incarceration rates in the states (that was the same point Bill Clinton made to the NAACP: “the federal law set a trend…. [W]e had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long”);
The Washington Post’s designated fact-checker Glenn Kessler assigned two Pinocchios to Biden’s insistence that his crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting that “the bill encouraged states to build more prisons — with more money coming to them if they increased penalties.” Kessler cited a Brennan Center report that “the 1994 Crime Bill is justly criticized for encouraging states to build and fill new prisons.”The Post added: “There are many factors that contributed to the United States having such a high incarceration rate, but few dispute the crime bill was a contributor. Bill Clinton has acknowledged this.” The paper’s “two Pinocchio” rating means Biden’s denial contains “significant omissions and/or exaggerations…. Similar to ‘half true’”);
CNN purported to fact-check the same claims from Biden and found that Biden’s denial “misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money,” concluding that the view that the 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration was, at the very least, debatable.
The fact-check from NBC News flatly stated that “though the bill was not the root cause of ‘mass incarceration,’ it was ‘the most high-profile legislation to increase the number of people behind bars,’ according to a Brennan Center analysis in 2016.”
Fact-checking Sen. Booker’s accusations against Biden, The Atlantic said: “it is true that the bill—which extended the death penalty to 60 new crimes, stiffened sentences, offered states strong financial incentives for building new prisons, and banned a range of assault weapons—helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.” It added that “a 2016 analysis by the Brennan Center concluded that the 1994 bill contributed both to the subsequent decline in crime and to the doubling of the rate of imprisonment from 1994 to 2009.”
The New York Times’ fact-check of Biden’s denial rated it “Exaggerated,” quoting a criminologist to say that Biden’s bill “encouraged [states] to mass incarcerate further.”
Regarding Biden’s denial that his 1994 crime bill “led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans,” Vox pronounced: “The truth, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle,” noting that “the law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same” and also ensured “an escalation of the War on Drugs.”
One could spend literally all day listing media outlets, criminal justice experts, and politicians from both parties who have insisted that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, or that the assertion is at least reasonably debatable and grounded in empirical facts — exactly what Instagram has decided is out of bounds to state. It is axiomatically true, or at the very least logically reasonable, that if Biden’s crime bill led to more mass incarceration — and few doubt that it did — then the bill, in the words of the denounced Instagram post, “brought mass incarceration to black Americans.”
On Monday, The New York Postsought comment from Facebook about Instagram’s “False” label. The tech giant, in the words of that paper, said “that Instagram won’t end its censorship unless USA Today changes its assessment.” Yet the Post — long an advocate for tough-on-crime legislation — itself echoed virtually every other media outlet by noting that “whether Biden’s law contributed to mass incarceration is a matter of debate.”
Indeed, from what I can tell, USA Today is the only prominent media outlet of all the ones which fact-checked this issue to conclude that the claim about Biden’s bill is “false.” The overwhelming consensus of fact-checkers and experts is that the 1994 crime bill at the very least contributed to mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, and that the magnitude of that role is debatable.
But Instagram has closed this debate, at least on its platform. They have announced that the claims about Biden’s 1994 crime bill as expressed by not only Brad Troemel — but also Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, Cornel West, the Brennan Center and countless others — has been proven false.
This episode demonstrates two crucial facts. The first is that what is so often passed off as quasi-scientific, opinion-free “fact-checking” are instead extremely tendentious, subjective and highly debatable opinions. That’s how Instagram can cherry-pick the conclusions of USA Today and treat it as if it is Gospel even though numerous other outlets, mainstream politicians in Biden’s own party, and criminal justice experts reached a radically different conclusion. “Fact-checking” in theory has journalistic value, but it is often nothing more than a branding tactic for media outlets to disguise their highly subjective pronouncements as unchallengeable Truth.
The second, more important point is that Silicon Valley giants lack any competency to determine the truth or falsity of political claims even when they act with the best of motives. Who at Instagram decided to rely on the USA Today claims while ignoring all the conflicting conclusions from other outlets and experts, and who decided how to apply that conclusion to the post at issue? And why did USA Today randomly decide to subject an anti-Biden meme about his crime bill from the account of a relatively obscure, anonymous Trump supporter but ignore similar statements coming from Senators Harris and Booker and Bill Clinton, thus handing Instagram an excuse to label any similar views as “False” and without “any basis”? Why are tech companies trying to officiate political debates this way?
Recall that the censorship of Twitter and Facebook of The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was based at least in part on the claim that the documents were the by-product of hacking and “Russian disinformation” — claims that have “no basis in fact.” As Matt Taibbi put it last week when warning of the dangers of YouTube’s decision to ban from its platform any questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election while still allowing similar questioning of the 2016 election: “There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level.”
Moreover, the assumption that tech giants are acting with the best of intentions is completely unwarranted. Like every faction, these companies are awash with bias, partisanship, ideological dogma and self-interest. They overwhelmingly donated to the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Their executives are residing in virtually every sector of the Biden/Harris transition. Currying favor with the Biden administration — by, say, soft-censoring or discrediting harmful critiques of the President-elect — serves their corporate interests in multiple ways. And their overwhelmingly establishment-liberal employees are increasingly insistent that views they dislike should be censored off their platforms.
This is why it has been so dangerous, so misguided, to acquiesce to a campaign that is being led by corporate media outlets to insist that these tech giants abandon a belief in a free internet and instead censor more aggressively. That a person will now be declared by Facebook’s properties to be a disseminator of disinformation for voicing long-standing and well-documented criticisms of Joe Biden’s crime record is yet another bleak glimpse of a future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly setting the boundaries of acceptable debate.
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
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