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Pharma War on Public Health

By Stephen Lendman | February 8, 2021

Big Pharma prioritizes maximum profits no matter the cost to human health they’re indifferent toward.

They spend billions of dollars advertising their products annually — heavily on television, influencing naive consumers, unaware of risks to human health powerful drugs pose.

Pharma does what it pleases because lobbyists representing their interests control congressional lawmakers and others abroad.

In the last decade, mergers and acquisitions consolidated the industry from 60 international firms to 10.

Greater consolidation increased Pharma power to raise prices exponentially to gouge consumers unchallenged because governments in Washington and elsewhere in the West do nothing to constrain them.

Greater consolidation also kills innovation. It’s mostly done by smaller firms, international drug companies buying them at favorable prices.

Like other corporate predators, maximum profitmaking is the be all and end all of Pharma’s operating strategy.

According to a report by Rep. Katie Porter, “(i)t’s time that we reevaluate the standards for approving (Pharma) mergers.”

“It’s time we pass legislation to lower drug prices.”

“And it’s time we rethink the structure of leadership at big pharmaceutical companies.”

“In 2018, the year (of) Trump’s tax giveaway to” corporate predators and America’s super-rich, “12 of the biggest pharmaceutical companies spent more money on stock buybacks than on research and development.”

Pharma executives defy reality by falsely claiming that consolidation increases operational efficiency (sic).”

It increases profitability through greater market share and other anti-consumer practices.

Mergers and acquisitions boost stock prices by reducing marketplace competition and acquiring “blockbuster” drugs with enormous “revenue stream” potential.

“Instead of spending on innovation, Big Pharma is hoarding its money for salaries and dividends, all while swallowing smaller companies, thus making the marketplace far less competitive,” Porter explained.

Separately, she tweeted the following:

“For years, Big Pharma has gobbled up small biotech firms that might otherwise force them to compete.”

“As soon as these companies are acquired, innovation stops.”

“The culture of creativity is killed. The small firm’s vision is lost, and the big firm’s profits become priority.”

Longtime biotech/Pharma official Peter O’Brien said that “gobbling up early phase biotechs (enables Pharma to) quash creativity in the discovery space…”

Porter’s report called mergers and acquisitions “the tip of the iceberg of pharmaceutical companies’ anti-competitive, profit-driven” practices.

Big Pharma prioritizes executive pay and bonuses, enriching shareholders, and consolidating to greater size to “eliminate competition.”

These firms “are not responsible for most major breakthroughs in new drugs.”

“Rather, innovation is driven in small firms, which are often spun off of taxpayer-funded academic research.”

“These small labs are then purchased by giant firms after they’ve assumed the risk needed to develop a blockbuster drug.”

Instead of R&D in search of breakthrough drugs for disease fighting, Pharma focuses on “incremental changes to existing drugs in order to kill off generic threats to their government-granted monopoly patents.”

Mergers and acquisitions stifle innovation.

Porter’s report recommended the following:

Remove incentives that benefit investors and Wall Street over patients’ health, lives, and well-being.

Reevaluate and alter Federal Trade Commission standards for approving healthcare mergers.

Halt exponential increases in drug prices. Act to make them more affordable by lowering prices.

Enact consumer-friendly legislation to halt Pharma abuses.

It’s time to rein in predatory practices by which Pharma consolidates market power that enables greater price-gouging of consumers.

A Final Comment

According to Gallup research, Pharma “is now the most poorly regarded industry in Americans’ eyes, ranking last on a list of 25 industries that Gallup tests annually.”

“Americans are more than twice as likely to rate the pharmaceutical industry negatively (58%) as positively (27%), giving it a net-positive score of -31.”

February 8, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Shafting The Poor

By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | February 5, 2021

Let me start with a couple of the most callous and heartless quotes that I know of. Here’s a description from Politico of the first one:

President Barack Obama’s Energy secretary unwittingly created a durable GOP talking point in September 2008 when he talked to The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of having gasoline prices rise over 15 years to encourage energy efficiency.

“Somehow,” Chu said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

And here’s the second quote, from President Obama:

“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases”

In agreement with the beliefs of President Obama and Secretary Chu, and a vain attempt to fight the imaginary menace of CO2, the countries of Europe have driven up the price of energy. This is supposed to make people use less of it, and thus reduce CO2 emissions.

As a result of the European policies, the current energy price situation looks like this:

Not a pretty picture …

So consider the effect of this on the poor. To begin with, the poor spend a much larger part of their income on energy than do the rich.

Now, the energy prices in Europe are more than twice what they are in the US. So if the US doubled to match the fantasies of Secretary Chu and President Obama, the richest fifth of the nation would only be paying 10% of their income for energy … but the poorest fifth of the nation would be paying close to half of their income for energy. And as I pointed out about the poorest of the poor in my post “We Have Met The 1% And He Is Us“,

Those people have no slack. They have no extra room in their budgets. They have no ability to absorb increases in their cost of living, particularly their energy spending. They have no credit cards, no credit, and almost no assets. They have no health insurance. They are not prepared for emergencies. They have no money in the bank. They have no reserve, no cushion, no extra clothing, no stored food in the basement, no basement for that matter, no fat around their waist, no backups, no extras of any description. They are not ready for a hike in the price of energy or anything else.

The result of all of these factors is what is called “energy poverty”. That’s where you don’t have enough energy to keep your home warm. That’s where you’re a single mom with three kids and your old car you need to get to work drinks gas faster than your ex-husband drank whiskey … so if gas prices double your kids will do without something important. That’s where you and your family sit in the cold and the dark and shiver because you can’t pay your energy bills.

And that’s where a study from the Jacque Delors Institute says (emphasis mine):

During this winter of 2020-2021, hundreds of millions of Europeans are constrained to stay at home because of lockdowns and curfews instituted to contain the propagation of COVID19. For millions of them, this means staying in poorly heated houses, which causes both discomfort and a threat to their own health.

This policy paper gives an overview of the state of energy poverty in the European Union (EU) and the way this issue is currently addressed by Member States and by the EU. While it appears that energy poverty has generally been decreasing over the last years, in 2019 there were still over 30 million Europeans who claimed to be unable to heat their home adequately in the winter.

Thirty million Europeans, many of them pensioners, many of them kids, all of them poor, sitting in unheated houses … that’s about the population of California. Or for the folks across the pond, it’s about the population of Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic combined. Again per the report, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus are the countries with the highest share of the population who are unable to heat their homes.

Now, there’s an old saying, “No pain, no gain.” Me, I think that’s crazy because I’ve had lots of painless gains. But if there is pain, well, there should at least be some gain to go along with it. So … shall we take a look at the purported gain in the question of CO2 emissions?

I mean, all those countries signed on to the Paris Climate Discord, they all have followed President Obama’s and Secretary Chu’s theories and drove their energy prices through the roof to reduce greenhouse gases, so now at the end of the day there must be some real gains in per capita CO2 emissions, right?

Here you go:

Thirty million Europeans are freezing in the winter, unable to heat their homes, and for what?

For nothing. Zip. Niets. Diddley-squat. Ingenting. Zero. Nada. Rien. Nichts. Not one thing.

Despite Europe creating widespread energy poverty, despite the US not being in the Paris Agreement, the US has reduced emissions more than any of the countries shown above. Europe is condemning old people and children to shiver in the dark and cold, and for absolutely no gain at all.

Look, I don’t think CO2 is the secret knob that controls the climate. I think that’s a simplistic scientific misrepresentation of a very complex system. As a result, I think that the “War On CO2” is a destructive, costly, and meaningless endeavor.

However, perhaps you do think that the climate, one of the more complex systems we’ve ever tried to analyze, is ruled by just one of the hundreds of different factors affecting the system. If so, I presume you think the European actions are justified because you believe you will be helping the poor people in the year 2050 or 2100.

So … if those are your motives I ask you, I beg you, I implore you, don’t wage your war on CO2 by screwing today’s poor to the floor! 

Because I can assure you, possibly helping tomorrow’s poor by actually hurting today’s poor is a crime against humanity, one you absolutely don’t want to have on your conscience.

My best to all, regardless of your views regarding the climate control knob,

w.

February 6, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

‘CBD supports the immune system’: Austrian clinic reports promising results from cannabis trial on Covid-19 ICU patients

RT | February 4, 2021

Researchers in Austria’s Klagenfurt Clinic are reporting promising results from CBD trials on Covid-19 ICU patients that show reduced inflammation and quicker recovery times.

Cannabidiol or CBD oil was used as part of the overall course of treatment for Covid-19 patients in the hospital’s ICU over the course of three weeks.

Rudolf Likar, head of intensive care medicine at the clinic, started by administering a dose of 200 milligrams of CBD per day which later increased to 300 milligrams.

“We have seen that the inflammation parameters in the blood go down and people leave the hospital faster than the comparison group,” Likar said. “CBD supports the immune system.”

CBD oil’s anti-inflammatory effects reportedly surpass those of other widely used drugs because cannabidiol crosses the blood-brain barrier and staves off some of the dramatic neurological damage associated with so-called “long Covid.”

According to reports in Austrian media, Likar suspects the cannabidiol in CBD oil blocks the ACE2 receptor through which the SARS-CoV-2 virus gains access to human cells and begins self-replicating, with dire consequences for human health.

A study of the anti-inflammatory effects of CBD oil is ongoing at the Klagenfurt Clinic, but the results so far look promising.

“We are now evaluating the data and the data is looking relatively good. We’ll probably use this routinely now because it doesn’t have any side effects,” Likar said, adding that similar research into the efficacy of CBD oil in helping to treat Covid-19 is underway in Israel.

February 4, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Russia ramps up natural gas supplies to China via Power of Siberia mega-pipeline

RT | February 1, 2021

Russian energy major Gazprom pumped more gas to China in January via the Power of Siberia pipeline than it had initially planned, boosting daily supplies by as much as 2.5 percent.

“The export of gas to China through the Power of Siberia gas pipeline continues to grow. Supplies regularly exceed Gazprom’s daily contractual obligations,” the company said in a statement, adding that the volume of gas delivery last month “was 2.9 times higher than in January 2020.”

The 3,000km (1864 mile) cross-border pipeline started official deliveries of Russian natural gas to China in 2019. The so-called eastern route’s capacity is 61 billion cubic meters of gas per year, including 38 billion cubic meters for export.

The agreement on gas supplies via the Power of Siberia pipeline was reached in 2014, with Russia’s energy giant Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) inking a 30-year contract. It is Gazprom’s biggest-ever agreement and the first natural gas pipeline between Russia and China.

Gazprom exported some 2.3 billion cubic meters of gas along the route during the first eight months of 2020. It plans to boost exports by an additional six billion cubic meters.

Russia is set to further increase supplies of piped gas to China, including via the Power of Siberia 2 project. The latter pipeline entered the design stage last year, and will be capable of delivering as much as 50 billion cubic meters of gas once finished.

Gazprom intends to become China’s biggest supplier, making up more than 25 percent of gas imports by 2035.

February 1, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Bright Green Impossibilities

By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | January 27, 2021

After reading some information at Friends of Science, I got to thinking about how impossible it will be for us to do what so many people are demanding that we do. This is to go to zero CO2 emissions by 2050 by getting off of fossil fuels.

So let’s take a look at the size of the problem. People generally have little idea just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. Figure 1 shows the global annual total and fossil energy consumption from 1880 to 2019, and extensions of both trends to the year 2050. I note that my rough estimate of 2050 total annual energy consumption (241 petawatt-hrs/year) is quite close to the World Energy Organization’s business-as-usual 2050 estimate of 244 PWhr/yr.

Figure 1. Primary energy consumption, 1880-2019 and extrapolation to 2050. A “petawatt-hour” is 1015 watt-hours

So if we are going to zero emissions by 2050, we will need to replace about 193 petawatt-hours (1015 watt-hours) of fossil fuel energy per year. Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity.

Starting from today, January 25, 2021, there are 10,568 days until January 1, 2050. So we need to install, test, commission, and add to the grid about 22 TW / 10568 days ≈ 2.1 gigawatts/day (GW/day, or 109 watts/day) of generating capacity each and every day from now until 2050.

We can do that in a couple of ways. We could go all nuclear. In that case, we’d need to build, commission, and bring on-line a brand-new 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every single day from now until 2050. Easy, right? …

Don’t like nukes? Well, we could use wind power. Now, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Typical wind “capacity factor”, the percentage of actual energy generated compared to the nameplate capacity, is about 35%. So we’d have to build, install, commission and bring online just under 3,000 medium-sized (2 megawatt, MW = 106 watts) wind turbines every single day from now until 2050. No problemo, right? …

Don’t like wind? Well, we could use solar. Per the NREL, actual delivery from grid-scale solar panel installations on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 8.3 watts per square metre depending on location. So we’d have to cover ≈ 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) with solar panels, wire them up, test them, and connect them to the grid every single day from now until 2050. Child’s play, right? …

Of course, if we go with wind or solar, they are highly intermittent sources. So we’d still need somewhere between 50% – 90% of the total generating capacity in nuclear, for the all-too-frequent times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

To summarize: to get the world to zero emissions by 2050, our options are to build, commission, and bring on-line either:

• One 2.1 gigawatt (GW, 109 watts) nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, OR

• 3000 two-megawatt (MW, 106 watts) wind turbines each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming there’s not one turbine failure for any reason, OR

• 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) of solar panels each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming not one of the panels fails or is destroyed by hail or wind.

I sincerely hope that everyone can see that any of those alternatives are not just impossible. They are pie-in-the-sky, flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible.

Finally, the US consumes about one-sixth of the total global fossil energy. So for the US to get to zero fossil fuel by 2050, just divide all the above figures by six … and they are still flying unicorn, bull-goose looney impossible.

Math. Don’t leave home without it.

My very best wishes to everyone, stay safe in these parlous times,

w.

PS—As always, to avoid misunderstandings I request that when you comment, you quote the exact words that you are discussing so we can all be clear about who and what you are referring to.

Technical Note: These figures are conservative because they do not include the energy required to build the reactors, wind turbines, or solar panels. This is relatively small per GW of generation for nuclear reactors but is much larger for wind and solar.

They also don’t include the fact that wind turbines have about a 20-year lifespan, so after 20 years we’ll have to double the turbine construction per day. And with solar the lifespan is about 25 years, so for the last five years, we’ll have to double the solar construction per day. And then we will have to decommission and dispose of hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and square miles of solar panels …

The figures also don’t include the fact that if we go to an all-electric economy we will have to completely revamp, extend, and upgrade our existing electrical grid, which will require a huge investment of time, money, and energy.

They also don’t include the cost. The nuclear plants alone will cost on the order of US$170 trillion at current prices. And wind or solar plus 75% nuclear will be on the order of US275 trillion, plus decomissioning and disposal costs for wind turbines and solar panels.

So it is even more impossible … speaking of which, is it possible to be more impossible?

Because if it is possible … this is it.

January 28, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

A trillion-pound dawk klunk

Climate Discussion Nexus | January 27, 2021

Speaking of the obvious and logical, it somehow badly embarrassed the British government this week that they were ordered to release their calculations of the cost of achieving net zero by 2050. Not because the cost is large, though it certainly is. Nor because the calculations might well have shown the costs vastly to exceed the benefits, had there been any calculations. But because behind all the ponderous fog about ‘experts say’, ‘following the science’ and so forth, it seems it may well have been just a wild guess someone stuffed into an email on the fly.

The starting point to this multi-layered embarrassment is that two years ago a warning from then Chancellor of the Exchequer to then PM Theresa May said net zero by 2050 would cost over a trillion pounds. Which is a lot even for a wealthy society such as Britain, whose pre-pandemic GDP was nearly £3 trillion per year, and also embarrassing, though only because a lot of fools were going about saying fossil fuels really weren’t much good anyway and chucking them would probably make us all richer. We’d all just switch to high-paying, high-tech, high-virtue-signalling jobs in the green energy sector or possibly government PR departments.

People are still making such claims, of course, with as little foundation in economics as in science. And as an aside we think it is not a clever PR strategy because once they are in a position to attempt to implement their plans, which Boris Johnson is, along with Justin Trudeau and now Joe Biden, people will quickly discover that they were fools, rogues or both to say abandoning the energy foundations of our civilization would actually make us richer, and being unmasked as a knave or a dunce is a damaging blow to your credibility.

Speaking of dunces, the looming embarrassment in the UK now is that the calculations themselves were apparently done on a napkin or a Post-it… if even that. We have yet to acquire the actual scrap of paper, digital or otherwise. But evidently the Treasury initially refused to release them on the grounds that they were “internal communications”, which sounds like an evasion since it is very hard to understand what else a discussion within a government branch might be. And it has now been backed into confessing that “communications” wasn’t quite the right word since there was just one email. Not a big long study or discussions back and forth. Someone just guessed and fired it off.

This happy-go-lucky approach is especially awkward because governments in the free world have a habit of justifying any policy or reversal of same, and shaming dissenters into the bargain, by insisting that they were following the science, a variant of the “experts say” meme news organizations now plaster on anything they want you to swallow whole. These politicians don’t tell you what the science said or which science said it, and in many cases their high school transcript would not justify faith in their capacity to understand anything science did say. They rarely even tell you who the scientists are beyond one convenient figurehead gifted with charisma or incomprehensibility.

We don’t only mean on climate, or the pandemic. When it comes to “economic science” their general tone is that a laboratory full of people running a computer that makes Deep Thought look like an abacus did a simulation you chumps couldn’t begin to understand that proves that whatever we were planning to do anyway is a brilliant idea.

Government budgets typically now run to hundreds of pages, full of charts and projections as well as electioneering prose, all of it designed to dazzle and intimidate. You are meant to think it was all done with careful attention to counterfactuals, margins of error, limitations on data, uncertainty about external shocks and so on. But it wasn’t. They had the verdict in hand before they began the trial. No government ever went to the boffins and said analyze our plan and were told it’s no good and put that verdict in the document. And on climate economics, the British government apparently deep-sixed the vital “Social Cost of Carbon” because it was too low to justify going nuts on emissions which, characteristically, the government had decided to do before looking at the science, so it then demanded science to justify a decision that, if it is not based on science, is very hard to see what it is based on.

So there’s something fishy about the expertise even when it’s real. But what if it’s not? What if there was no science or in this case no economic science? If it turns out the UK gambled its future on a few scribbles instead of a massive, dense wall of functions, it will cause red faces.

Of course no such thing could happen here in Canada. But only because no government would ever be forced to disclose the basis of its calculations, on the off chance there even were any.

January 28, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

#TheGreatReopening – #SolutionsWatch

Corbett • 01/27/2021

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Yes, #TheGreatReopening is happening as we speak. No, it will not be televised (or even YouTubed). Find out the details as James highlights the resistance movements that are rising up around the world on this week’s edition of #SolutionsWatch.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES

The Uprising Has Begun (New World Next Week)

30,000 Italian Restaurants Defy Lockdown Rules / Hugo talks #lockdown

100’s Of Polish Business’s To DEFY Lockdown / Hugo Talks #lockdown

“BURN IT DOWN!” – Anti-Lockdown RIOTS Lead To Covid Testing Facility Being TORCHED In Netherlands!

#TheGreatReopening

Ontario barbershop reopens despite provincial lockdown using loophole

Unmasked COVID protesters try, fail to place Canadian mayor under citizen’s arrest

What You Need to Know About Making a Citizen’s Arrest

Baraga County Manifesto

Taking a Stand: Sheriffs, Local Officials, and Rule of Law VS. Covid Dictators

Solutions: The Thick Red Line

Left, Khaps, Gender, Caste: The solidarities propping up the farmers’ protest

Freedom Airway – #SolutionsWatch

Fact check: PCR testing and viral genetic sequencing serve different purposes

I’m Blocked From Uploading to GooTube (and Other News)

The Future of Vaccines

January 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Solidarity and Activism, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Iran-Turkey railway aims for 1M tons of cargo in 2021

MEMO | January 27, 2021

Roughly 1 million tons of cargo are to be transported via rail between Turkey and Iran this year, Turkish authorities said Tuesday, reports Anadolu Agency.

The Transport and Infrastructure Ministry said in a statement that a recent memorandum of understanding signed in a gathering of railway representatives in Turkey’s capital Ankara on January 12-13 would open a new era for the transit railway.

Despite the novel coronavirus pandemic, three train services were run daily between Turkey and Iran in 2020, transporting 564,000 tons of cargo, according to the statement.

The statement also announced that freight trains would also run between Turkey and Pakistan via Iran on a common tariff between the three countries. It added that talks are still ongoing to set this tariff.

With a recently completed railway between Iran and Afghanistan, it will now also be possible to transport freight between Turkey and Afghanistan.

“After the railway connection between Iran and Afghanistan was completed on December 10, 2020, it became possible for a wagon loaded in Turkey to transit Iran to Afghanistan.”

The railway administrations of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan will come together in the coming months to set a course for rail transport between Turkey and Afghanistan.

The statement added that efforts were underway for a cargo transportation corridor through Iran between Europe and China.

January 27, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

In non-binding resolution, EU parliament calls for new anti-Russia sanctions to stop Nord Stream 2 over Navalny’s arrest

RT | January 21, 2021

An EU parliament resolution, backed by 581 MEPs out of 675 present, directs members to ramp up sanctions against Russia to stop the Nord Stream 2 project “once and for all,” linking it to opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s arrest.

The EU member states should take “an active stance” on Navalny’s 30-day arrest in Russia. This is according to a non-binding resolution adopted on Thursday, with 581 votes in favor, 50 against and 44 abstentions.

The list of “significantly tighter” restrictions the European nations are encouraged to impose against Moscow includes personal sanctions against anyone involved “in the decision to arrest and imprison” the opposition figure, who returned to Russia on January 17 following an almost six-month-long treatment in Germany after an apparent poisoning during a trip to Siberia.

The resolution went further, suggesting EU states should target Russian “oligarchs,” members of President Vladimir Putin’s “inner circle” and “Russian media propagandists” as well. “Additional restrictive measures could also be taken under the new EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime,” a statement published by the EU parliament says.

Another step suggested by the MEPs is putting a stop to the Russian gas pipeline project Nord Stream 2 “once and for all.” The multinational project, which would deliver Russian gas to Europe and particularly to Germany, is currently under construction despite fierce opposition from Washington, which calls it a threat to America’s and Europe’s security interests.

Now, a day after new US President Joe Biden has been sworn into office, the EU parliament resolution calls on the bloc’s member states to “immediately stop the completion of the controversial pipeline.” It would be an ideal moment to “strengthen transatlantic unity in protecting democracy and fundamental values against authoritarian regimes,” the text asserts.

Several European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have repeatedly criticized the US pressure, arguing that Washington is interfering in Europe’s internal affairs to advance its own interests, namely to sell its own liquefied natural gas.

Earlier this week, Russian energy giant Gazprom informed Nord Stream 2 investors that the project could be suspended, even cancelled, after the US told Germany it was imposing new measures based on the CAATSA law (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act).

Berlin said it could tax American gas imports in response to Washington’s move.

As for the “immediate release” of Navalny – another demand put forward by the EU parliament – it is unlikely to have any effect, since Moscow has already said it would not heed outside calls for the opposition figure’s release.

Navalny is currently accused of violating the terms of a suspended sentence. The opposition figure is facing charges over violation of probation terms related to a previous criminal case. In 2014, he received a three-and-a-half-year sentence, suspended for five years, for embezzling 30 million rubles ($400,000) from two companies, including French cosmetics brand Yves Rocher.

His sentence was then extended for another year and was due to expire in late December 2020 but he missed a scheduled check-in with a probation office in Russia while he was in Germany earlier the same month. The Russian penal service then demanded his arrest, arguing the move was deliberate as Navalny’s medical papers from Germany showed he had already recovered by that time.

Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s official spokesman, said earlier that the case is a matter for the Russian prison service and does not require any special intervention from the government.

January 21, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Biden’s Attack on the Keystone XL Pipeline Is Politics, Not Policy

By Steve Milloy | InsideSources | January 19, 2021 

Joe Biden plans to make good on his promise to phase-out fossil fuels. Reportedly, he will cancel the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day as president.

The proposed pipeline would be an additional conduit for as much as 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta’s oils sands into the U. S. and down to Gulf Coast refineries. The pipeline would be 1,700 miles long and cross six states. It would also transport oil from North Dakota for processing on the Gulf Coast.

Although the pipeline passed muster under conventional environmental considerations in 2010, its permit was denied in 2015 by the Obama administration, citing the then-novel excuse of climate change.

The pipeline was approved in 2017 by the Trump administration, but then blocked by a federal judge in 2018 to allow more time for environment review – even though the Keystone XL pipeline was first proposed in 2008.

The irony is that Keystone XL is much ado about nothing.

Oil from Alberta has already been flowing through the existing Keystone Pipeline since 2010. The Biden administration has so far not announced any action against that pipeline.

Oil that the Keystone Pipeline can’t handle is now transported into the U. S. by rail. The Biden administration is not likely to take any action against that, especially since some of the trains are owned by billionaire and Biden-supporter Warren Buffett.

So, that Canadian oil is coming anyway and pipelines are safer than rail–even Buffett admits this–but none of this reality apparently matters to the incoming Biden administration.

Will the cancellation accomplish anything for the environment?

There are already hundreds of thousands of miles of underground pipelines carrying petroleum products in the U. S.–millions of miles if you include natural gas pipelines.

What’s an additional 1,700 miles of pipeline?

The Biden administration’s main reasons for revoking the Keystone XL permit is climate. Is this reasonable?

The Obama EPA estimated that the oil flowing through Keystone XL would result in an extra 18.7 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere versus conventional oil.  That may sound like a lot of CO2, but it’s not.

According to the most recent United Nations report on emissions, man-made emissions of greenhouse gases equated to 59.1 billion tons of CO2 in 2019. So according to the Obama EPA’s estimates, the oil flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline would increase global emissions of CO2 by about 0.03 percent (i.e., 18.7 million tons divided by 59.1 billion tons).

Even if you believe U. N. climate models predicting global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, a 0.03 percent increase in emissions is insignificant.

But the benefits of the pipeline aren’t insignificant. According to the U. S . Chamber of Commerce, the Keystone XL will:

  • Produce 20,000 well-paying jobs during manufacturing and construction;
  • Increase personal income for all America workers by $6.5 billion during the lifetime of the project.
  • Generate an estimated $138.4 million in annual property tax revenue for state governments and local entities where the pipeline is located;
  • Create $585 million in new taxes for communities among the pipeline route;
  • Create more than $5.2 billion in property taxes during the lifetime of the pipeline.
  • Generate additional private sector investment of around $20 billion on food, lodging, fuel, vehicles, equipment, construction supplies and services.

As will be the case with everything the Biden administration tries to do on climate, the revocation of the Keystone XL permit will be the exaltation of imaginary global climate benefits over real ones to U. S. workers and communities.

This is especially true since Canada is committed to developing the Alberta tar sands. The oil is going to be produced, transported and burned somewhere. The U.S. will just miss out on its benefits.

Steven Milloy is a recognized leader in the fight against junk science with more than 25 years of accomplishment and experience.

January 19, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Without Democracy in the U.S., Can the Simulacra of Democracy Survive Elsewhere?

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 17, 2021

The ‘Ides of March’, they came early this year – on 6 January, at least for one current U.S. ‘Caesar’. What happened; how it happened; who concocted the Capitol events, will be long debated. However, the daggers had long been sharpened for Caesar, well before the invasion of the Capitol. In a sense, the stage was already set – Trump walked into the DC ‘Forum’, and ended ‘stabbed to death’, as had Julius. It has been truly Shakespearean.

It was well-known that Trump might well reject the election results, because of postal ballot potential fraud (as postal ballots assumed their disproportionate 2020 electoral predominance). The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) precisely (purposefully?) had taunted Trump last June with its forecast of a contested election in which Trump would lose – after “all of the mail-in ballots had been tallied”. The TIP then had turned to the prospective tactics and tasks for forcefully ousting a President-in-denial from the White House. (The media and ‘platforms’ had been participants in this early war-gaming of how to deal with a Trump, who contested the election result, and questioned the legality and authenticity of postal ballots).

It needn’t have been this way – but no compromise on rules on postal balloting was attempted (rather, the reverse). In any event, the Capitol invasion now stands as a major psychic event (the “Insurrection”) searing the American consciousness. Apart from unnerving the legislators, unused to experiencing a sudden loss of security, the invasion has become the sacrilege to a ‘sacred space’ (with all the additional connotations of America’s exceptional, divine mission). The daggers were gleefully plunged in – Trump is impeached again; he is to be tried in the Senate after the Biden inauguration; and he and his family, may expect the legal dismemberment that will follow.

The ‘Blue State’ has – from Trump’s first election – been determined to crush him. That is underway. And somehow sychronistically, we now have the Tech digital deletion of Red America from social platforms, with talk of a ‘purge’ and cultural ‘re-education’ for his supporters (and their children), as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President (and the Capitol now has taken the air of a theatre of war, with troops and weapons strewn about its corridors): “Trump”, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy, from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack”.

Here is the key first implication to that ‘psychic event’ – not just for Americans, but for the world spectating the unfolding events: Biden has called for measures against “domestic terrorism”, and used language that is usually reserved for combat with an external enemy state – language such as accompanies major wars. This is ‘revenge cycle’ material. In the case of two nations, literally at war, they do do this. This is a part of it. They hope to resolve their conflict through humiliation, repression and the forced submission of the other (i.e. Japan after WW2). But America is, at least nominally, one nation. What happens when a single nation splits, with one turning the ‘seditious’ elements into an ‘alien other’?

We do not know. But hatred is intense, both toward Trump and the ‘deplorables’. And now, these sentiments are reciprocated in the wake of the President’s humiliation, at a contents-free impeachment, reached in few hours. What seems certain is that the course of events likely will lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of ever greater polarisation.

The rise of Trumpism has created a new radical Manicheanism amongst the liberal élite. Tech, with its algos feeding like-minded material to the like-minded, has a lot to do with this digital and ideological divide. But the bottom line is that this divide is (falsely) cast as a death-struggle now underway between a monolithic liberalism and a monolithic illiberalism.

This carries a huge message for Russia, Iran and China (and others) – the U.S. is deeply divided, but its ‘new mission’ will be a ‘moral high-ground’ war against illiberalism – at home, firstly – and then overseas.

Yet of greater – and wider – significance is that the ‘noble lie’ – the mask concealing the cynical arrangement that is American ‘democracy’ – has been stripped away. The crucial import was underlined by the German FM, Heiko Maas, when he observed: “Without democracy in the U.S., [there is] no democracy in Europe”.

What might have Maas meant? Possibly, he was referring to the angry 75 millions of Red America that have now grasped the shocking magnitude of the fraud played on them. By fraud here is not a reference to the particular claims about 3 November, but to the much bigger fraud of a system rigged in the interests of the Establishment. This has been one of the basic props to the engineered consent upon which public order and social stability in America and Europe has rested for decades: the naïve belief in the democratic essence of the system.

This prop is being overturned by the ‘Blue State’ precisely in order to savour a sweet revenge on Trump for pulling aside the mask on so much else of ‘Establishment America’. Trump laid bare how corrupt the ‘swamp’ had become, and he articulated Red America’s deepest concerns and frustrations about off-shored jobs, economic precarity and ‘forever wars’. They, in turn, had projected their exasperation, bitterness, and illusions back onto him, turning him, by default, into their standard-bearer.

Yet – astonishingly – this toppling of the pillar of an engineered ‘noble lie’ is being done precisely by those (the Establishment), who one might have thought, had the most interest in keeping it intact. But they cannot resist it. They just cannot forgive ‘outsider’ Trump’s intrusion into their neatly constructed illusions: trashing their elaborate ‘construct’ of reality, simply by magicking up new ‘facts’ to contest their ‘science’.

Isn’t this what is so frightening for Merkel and Maas? The EU has its own, more fragile, ‘noble lie’. It is this: States – by relinquishing a portion of their sovereignty – might hope to participate in a ‘greater sovereignty’ (i.e. the European Project), and still believe that it is ‘democratic’.

This cynical European arrangement only stands if Merkel and Macron can hold up American ‘democracy’ as the guiding principle to the European Project (however misleading that may be). But now, with the ‘lights going out’ in the ‘City on the Hill’, and with only a broken democracy ideal under which EU leaders may shelter, how will the dreary formula of a diluted sovereignty, with no real democracy; with no roots in the ground below; with the EU moving to ever closer oligarchy, and led by an unaccountable, and secretive ‘politburo’, survive?

The point is that European ‘democracy’ is also rigged towards Germany and the élites. And ordinary Europeans have noticed, (especially when only one part of the community bears a disproportionate burden of the Covid economic pain). The élites fear Trump: he may lay it all bare, for all to see.

Some EU leaders may hope that Trumpism will be so completely crushed, and its voice silenced, that Europe’s own fracturing engineered public consent can be contained. Yet they must know, in their hearts, that recourse to identity and gender ideology (as pretext for greater state-ism), will only armour-plate the bubbles and divisions because they prevent people from hearing each other. It is the post-persuasion, post-argument politics of polarisation.

For sure, the rest of the world are taking close note. They will not be accepting moral lectures from Europe in the future (though undoubtedly, they will still get them), and states will look to build ‘public consent’ around quite different ‘poles’ – loose concerts of states, traditional culture and the historic narratives of their communities.

January 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , | Leave a comment

Iraq grants $20bn projects to Chinese companies

MEMO | January 17, 2021

Iraq has given construction projects worth $20 billion in the southern province of al-Muthanna to a consortium of Chinese companies, an Iraqi official said on Sunday, Anadolu Agency reports.

“The projects include the construction of a power station and a factory for floors and porcelain with a production capacity of 32,000 m2 per day, and a factory for ceramic walls and façades with a capacity of 36,000 m2 per day,” Adel Al-Yasiri, the head of the al-Muthanna Investment Authority, said in a statement.

He added that an initial approval has been granted to establish the projects.

“The first phase of the projects amounts to $2 billion where two sites have been prepared near the Samawah refinery for the companies to complete the remaining procedures,” he said.

Other projects include the construction of a sanitary ware factory with a capacity of 360 m3 per day, a ceramic factory for accessories with a capacity of 108,000 m2 per month, and a factory for papers and 125 million cardboards per month.

January 17, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

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