The CEO of a socialist themed vegan meat company pleaded with workers not to join a union, arguing that it would hamper the firm’s efforts to “change the world.” Because nothing seasons fake meat quite like a dollop of hypocrisy.
No Evil Foods offers a range of socialist-themed vegan meats with names like Comrade Cluck, the Pit Boss and El Zapatista, a chorizo substitute whose name is a nod to the anarcho-socialist militant group in southern Mexico.
While the company readily embraces left-wing ideals for marketing purposes, that appears to be as far as their values stretch. The boss of the company, Mike Woliansky, has been filmed urging workers not to join a union during a compulsory gathering of workers.
The meeting came as No Evil Foods was seeking to fend off a union drive at its plant in Weaverville, North Carolina, and video footage of Woliansky’s appeal was published by the Motherboard news outlet this week.
In the video, Woliansky repeatedly urges workers to vote “no” in the union election and makes the grandiose claim that a union would get in the way of the company’s ability to “save lives” and “change the world.”
The CEO said joining the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union was akin to “hitching your wagon to a huge organization with high-paid executives and a history of scandal and supporting slaughterhouses.”
“I sincerely believe that right now a union would be a terrible thing for you and for No Evil Foods,” Woliansky told workers during the meeting, which took place earlier this year. “A union contact would only serve to lessen our impact at a time when it’s so important in the world… If there’s an election here, I ask you to vote ‘no’ on a union.”
Following a series of mandatory meetings, No Evil Foods workers voted against joining the union in a landslide vote. The Appeal news outlet reports that the company fired several workers who led the union drive in recent weeks.
No Evil Foods sells its faux-meat products in 5,500 stores across the United States and online.
It’s nice that a group of 127 British politicians has discovered the as-yet unused tool for pressuring Israel: sanctions, the ‘S’ in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). They wrote a letter to Boris Johnson asking him to impose such sanctions if Israel annexes roughly half of the West Bank – which it just might do this summer.
Actually, many Palestinians believe annexation even of the entire West Bank would be a good thing insofar as it would make Israeli apartheid plain and visible to everybody. That would force world opinion to apply its anti-apartheid standards to historic Palestine and insist on equal rights for everybody between the river and the sea.
Even without this insight, however, the letter is milk toast. It latches onto only the most egregious of Israeli actions – de jure annexation of territory already de facto annexed. It leaves unchallenged countless Israeli actions such as mass murder in Gaza, home and village demolitions, discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel, and its defining itself in July 2018 as a racist state by means of the Nation State Basic Law. The list goes on and on.
The letter is a legalistic gripe that doesn’t mention history or basic ethics. Yes, it is true that “acquisition of territory through war is prohibited” and annexing such territory violates international law, but what about the annexation of Greater Jerusalem in 1967 or, for that matter, of the bulk of historic Palestine in 1948? What about absolute rule over the West Bank and the siege of Gaza without annexation?
The politicians’ main gripe, though, is that annexation would be “a mortal blow to… any viable two-state solution.” Beloved by all of the signees, that is the Zionist solution which leaves the Israeli apartheid state intact within the 1948-occupied territories. It also leaves the 7 million Palestinian refugees out in the cold.
Any two-state solution would be crassly unjust, but this group of British politicians thinks it would be great, and that its possibility be kept alive, because that is the only way to save Israel in the long run (albeit on only about 80% of Palestinian land). And these signees are allegedly the Palestinians’ friends.
Palestine’s So-called Friends
Their letter is actually a symptom of a deeper intellectual bankruptcy and of the impotence of the forces in political Britain claiming solidarity with Palestine. They all support the Zionist two-state solution.
The Parliamentary group ‘Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East’ (LFPME), for instance, “supports a two state solution that creates a viable and contiguous Palestinian state” – and that preserves the viable and contiguous Jewish state. It to be sure urges boycott of West Bank-settlement goods, but trips over itself in a rush to assure the public that this “is categorically not an anti-Israeli policy, but an anti-settlement policy” and that this should not be taken for support of BDS, “which is widely considered to be obstructive to the two state solution.”
91 MPs are members of LFPME, and 24 of them signed the letter. Not among them, curiously, is the Chair of LFPME, Lisa Nandy, who has herself taken incoherent positions on Palestine, describing herself at once as a Zionist but broadly supporting the Palestinians’ right of return. She clearly leans toward Israel, saying she was “honored” by the support of the rabidly pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement and that under Jeremy Corbyn, the most pro-Palestinian British politician ever, Labour “gave the green light to anti-Semites”.
Three of the signees against annexation are even members of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) – Lilian Greenwood, Peter Hain, and Margaret Hodge. On that group’s website, the headline reads ‘Working towards a Two-State Solution’. It “promotes a negotiated two state solution for two peoples; with Israel safe, secure and recognized within its borders living alongside a democratic, independent Palestinian state [and] seeks to strengthen relations between Britain and Israel.”
At first glance, it is astounding that of LFI’s 55 MP members, 24 of them are also members of LFPME! They include such well-known figures as Liam Byrne, Angela Eagle, Emily Thornberry, Liz Kendall, Wes Streeting, David Lammy, Jess Phillips, Chris Bryant, and Rosie Winterton. But astonishment vanishes when one realizes that the goal of the two groups is the same: Israel safe and secure in the Near East, legitimate for all time, ‘alongside’ a rump statelet they are cheeky enough to call ‘Palestine’.
LFI Chair Steve McCabe MP rides hard against a new category of racism: “anti-Zionist antisemitism”. In the Jewish Chronicle of 7 April 2020, he pledged to “vigorously oppose the divisive effort to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state led by the BDS movement.” Perhaps, were LFPME to endorse BDS in so many words – which to my knowledge it does not – MPs would see that they must choose between LFI and LFPME.
Corbyn as Labour leader from 2015-2020 not only unfailingly supported the two-state solution and Israel’s ‘right to exist’, but failed to deal with the Party’s phony, alleged ‘antisemitism crisis’. He did not make clear that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic because any settler-colonial state in Palestine – whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or British – would face the same fundamental criticism, namely that it by definition dispossesses the Palestinians.
Tragically, Corbyn also allowed anti-racist upholders of human rights such as Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson to be expelled from the Labour Party merely for making various factual comments, mostly about Zionism. Lacking any clear and principled ideology, Labour under Corbyn diminished and tainted the voices of many staunch pro-Palestinians.
What’s more, all the candidates to replace Corbyn – Keir Starmer, Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey, etc. – bent the knee to those who do have a coherent ideology and control the narrative in Britain: the Zionists. During the leadership campaign all of them endorsed the so-called “Ten pledges to end the antisemitism crisis” written by the Israel-lobby group Board of Deputies of British Jews. Two of the pledges are 1) to see to it that “Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker… will never be readmitted to membership” and 2) to “adopt the international definition of antisemitism without qualification”.
That definition of antisemitism is, of course, the notoriously illogical one put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It conflates politics and racism and includes amongst the “manifestations” of antisemitism the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”, and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
The Labour Party obeys the pro-Israel forces, but rest assured, things are no better within the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, nor at The Guardian or any other British newspaper. Truly, ‘with friends like these,…’ No, that’s not quite right. The Palestinians have no friends in British politics.
Why Such Weakness?
The question is Why? A big reason is that within Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity circles there is, in Britain, no coherent intellectual analysis of what is just or unjust, and no vision of a solution.
Nobody in political circles even talks about the three comprehensive demands of BDS (return, equality within Israel, and liberation for the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Talk is only of BDS tactics and its danger to Israel.
Instead, as with the anti-annexation letter, small skirmishes are fought within the Zionist two-state paradigm, symbolically making oppression a little more tolerable and in effect distracting from the fundamental issues that would make sense to the British public, if enunciated.
One ‘solidarity’ wing is Zionist: Israel has every right to continue as it is, as a discriminatory state on the 1967 borders. The perfect representative of this wing is the U.K.’s only Palestinian MP, Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, who wrote in the Guardian in 2019 of her fear of being called ‘antisemitic’ and who stressed that she “believes in Israel’s right to exist.” Also: “I believe in a two-state solution [which] is at best in stasis, at worst it is teetering on the brink of a precipice. It needs a lifeline.”
The other wing is BDS, which starts not with a position against Israel but rather for all the rights of all the Palestinians. Its three demands strictly imply Two Democratic States, and neither of them are Jewish or any other ethnocracy. (The two would undoubtedly merge, resulting in One Democratic State, but that is a separate topic.)
As Omar Barghouti, one of the main originators and propounders of BDS, said a few years ago, “A Jewish state in Palestine, in any shape or form, cannot but contradict the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population… No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
So the cat’s already out of the bag. What is now needed is for both Palestinians and their supporters to publicly and fearlessly embrace Barghouti’s clarity – to unabashedly say Yes, a racist, apartheid state should obviously be replaced by a normal, human rights-based, ethnicity-blind democracy. To boot, in my experience most people on the street understand this without any difficulty.
It would both constitute a clear intellectual narrative and enormously help campaigning in countries like the U.K. It is now impossible to explain to the public – or for that matter to MPs when one lobbies them – what solution would embody the fulfillment of Palestinians’ rights, or ‘what the Palestinians want’. By contrast, international supporters of the Black freedom struggle in South Africa were able to draw upon a clear vision while arguing the case in the West; Palestine activists lack any such inspiring vision, one which openly, in easy-to-understand terms, states the political goal.
But the BDS Call describing the rights to be fulfilled is kept at a flickering flame. Hardly anyone ventures outside the pro-Zionist framework of the parliamentary Friends of Palestine and, for that matter, the co-opted leaders of the Palestinian Authority. The best that well-meaning British politicians have to hold onto are sporadic, justified but non-essential incidents like the annexation of Area C in the West Bank.
Palestine’s supporters are waiting for open acknowledgment of the consequences of the BDS demands. Only that will enable a refutation of charges of antisemitism – because it would offer a clear, motivating, positive vision which doesn’t even have to mention the Jewishness of the present occupying state, Israel.
– Blake Alcott is an ecological economist and the director of One Democratic State in Palestine (England) Limited. The author welcomes any information on ODS or bi-nationalism activity sent to blakeley@bluewin.ch.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama is coming under increasing pressure, led by what President Donald Trump is calling “Obamagate.” This comes as Mexico has requested to finally clarify the affair with the secret sale of American weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Mexico is asking for the case to be clarified after almost ten years.
In this secret operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, weapons from the U.S. were sold to Mexican drug cartels. The U.S. claimed that about 2,000 automatic weapons were sold to Mexicans so that the Barack Obama administration could follow their path to the drug cartels. Instead, these weapons were used in massacres. Mexican authorities are now seeking answers from the United States.
In addition to selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels, Obama is responsible for a lot of global upheaval on the world stage – primarily the so-called “Arab Spring” that should be more accurately described as the “Arab Winter” as it brought death and destruction across the Arab world.
The sale of these weapons to Mexican drug cartels is another ugly legacy of Obama’s rule that liberals like to view as one of the best periods of American history. Let’s not forget that in 2009 Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his apparent “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”
The majority of U.S. media will most likely try and find appropriate excuses so they can minimize Obama’s role in these scandals. It is completely clear that the battle over who will be in the White House in the next four years is now taking focus on the Obama era as opposed to Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 80,000 Americans and infected more than 1.3 million people.
With endless tweets by Donald Trump dedicated to Obama over the past few days, it is as if the presidential battle in November will be fought between him and Obama, and not Democrat сandidate Joe Biden.
The reason for Trump’s many tweets against the former president was because of Obama’s private conversation that was leaked to the public in which he criticized the suspension of the investigation against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, while he called Trump’s fight against the coronavirus epidemic a “chaotic disaster.”
The American president started tweeting on the morning of May 10 and stopped late in the evening, making over a hundred tweets against Obama. This exchange between Obama and Trump is not common in American politics as former presidents usually do not interfere in the politics of their successors. However, there are suggestions that Obama still has connections to the deep state and is actively undermining Trump.
Obama, who openly admitted he would remain active in politics and wished he could contend for a third term, could be exerting influence through Hillary Clinton and Biden. It is likely Obama is becoming more public as Trump’s opponent Biden is proving inadequate and incapable of defeating Trump.
The battle between Obama and Trump started with the announcement that the Ministry of Justice is terminating the investigation against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn, who was probably the shortest-serving national security adviser in history, was sacked at the beginning of his term on charges of lying to Vice President Mike Pence about talks with the Russian ambassador to Washington. His removal triggered a chain of failed investigations and campaigns against Trump and his alleged links to Russian interference during the U.S. presidential election, which also ended in a failed impeachment.
In private conversations that leaked to the public, Obama described Flynn’s acquittal as a threat to the rule of law.
Trump also retweeted statements from CIA agent Buck Sexton, in which he accused Obama of sabotaging the Trump administration in the first days of his term. Sexton also called former FBI Director Andrew McCabe “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”
Trump then continued with accusations on Twitter and said that Obama committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far!” and ended briefly with “Obamagate.”
As for the affair with the secret operation of selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels, journalists of Forbes in 2011 wondered whether that operation would become Obama’s “Watergate,” and it appears that it very well could be. Obama’s attempts to smear Trump has not only backfired, but it could have very serious legal ramifications against him and others in his administration.
Over the last several months, Americans have witnessed an increase in media propaganda regarding the “dangers” of “anti-vaxxers,” the “proven science of vaccines,” and the “tragedies” that ensue from the failure to vaccinate. That propaganda blitz has resulted in massive hysteria stemming from similar levels of ignorance.
Also resulting from the push by Big Pharma-funded corporate media outlets is the emotional and panicked campaign of pro-vaxxers, vaccine pushers, and adherents to the relatively recent new religion of “scientism” – the religious belief in anything labeled as science or scientific, regardless of whether or not that concept directly contradicts observable reality and experience or even regardless of whether or not it is actually scientific.
The so-called vaccine debate – which is not truly a debate since a debate requires the participation of two opposing sides – is generally nothing more than a shouting and shaming campaign against parents who have come to the conclusion that vaccines are not safe, effective, or neither.
Indeed, it is the unbridled emotion of the pro-vaccine camp that has been provoked and subsequently harnessed into a powerhouse of vitriol and social pressure that is then presented as a public health crisis. The howling of the trendy masses, glued to their televisions, sitcoms, and NPR, is then presented as an organic public outcry in the media, resulting in the conveniently timed response of politicians and lawmakers.
Of course, with the creation of the false debate, there is also the political polarization of the issue – the left must be pitted against the right – in a typical but tried and true method of divide and conquer strategy.
Originally, holding questions regarding the safety or effectiveness of vaccinations was something that bridged political boundaries. Granted, the individuals who held these views were a minority. However, those numbers were growing and could be found in the midst of liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists, and even those completely unaligned to any ideology.
Now, however, that is beginning to change. The Big Pharma companies that fund the mainstream media and the political parasites infecting the federal and state capitols have managed to turn this debate into a partisan issue.
The propaganda campaign has been successful among members of all political denominations, but particularly so among the left. This is because the left is made up of a population that is well-trained to believe anything presented to them under the guise of science in much the same way as the right who are designed to believe anything presented in a religious context.
The result of this massive absorption of indoctrination is that we have the passage of bills mandating that children be vaccinated by force of law in California and even the attempt to force adults to be vaccinated as well.
With mandates coming out of California, North Carolina, and Vermont, clearly there is a nationwide agenda at foot.
But while those on the left continue to attack Koch Industries and ALEC for funding a number of horrific economic policies and divisive domestic campaigns, painting any idea they oppose coming from the Republican camps as a “Koch-funded” program (it often is), the reality is that the leftists are the biggest dupes in the vaccine game.
This is because, while leftists hawk vaccines and pride themselves on their obedience to doctors and “scientists,” they are doing nothing more than falling into line with a massive Koch-funded and ALEC-facilitated propaganda campaign.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
For those who may not be familiar with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the council is considered a “non-profit organization” made up of Conservative state legislators and corporate private sector “partners.” This mixture of government officials and corporate agents then meet regularly, replete with funding from major corporations all across the world to discuss, plan, write, and submit legislation that is beneficial to the corporations.
In one sense, ALEC is a massive corporate lobbying firm. In another, however, ALEC is much more, since much of the legislation submitted by the attentive congressman is actually written for the Senator or Representative by the agents of the organization. It is an organization that provides funding and direction (marching orders) for Congressmen, particularly those at the state level.
While slimy billionaires like George Soros act as the guiding force behind much of the American left, ALEC and KOCH Industries tend to fill the same void for the right; although, in truth, most of the corporations that make up ALEC are those who also fund Democratic candidates. Presentation, however, in a carefully crafted political theatre like the United States, is paramount.
For decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council has been a force in shaping conservative policies at the state level. Today, its impact is even more pervasive. Its legislative ideas are resonating in practically every area of state government, from education and health to energy, environment and tax policy. The group, which brings together legislators with representatives from corporations, think tanks and foundations to craft model bills, has rung up an impressive score. Roughly 1,000 bills based on ALEC language are introduced in an average year, with about 20 percent getting enacted.
For three decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the meeting’s host, has brought together corporations (including Pfizer (PFE), AT&T (T), and ExxonMobil (XOM)) and state legislators to write what it calls model bills—pieces of legislation the industries would like to become law. Often this means protecting favored tax treatment or keeping regulations at bay. ALEC has also approved model bills on social issues, including gun control and voter registration. The bills then get passed around among the 1,800 mostly Republican legislators who are ALEC members. They introduce the model bills about 1,000 times a year in state capitols around the country, the group says. About 200 become law. ALEC pays for the meetings through membership fees (called donations) that corporations pay. The legislators receive travel stipends (called scholarships) to attend the meetings. ALEC is registered with the IRS as a nonprofit that provides a public service, not as a lobbyist that seeks to influence.
This offers two benefits: Corporate members can deduct yearly dues, which run up to $25,000—more if they want to sponsor meetings; and ALEC doesn’t have to disclose the names of legislators and executives who attend. That’s important, because if ALEC operated with complete openness it would have difficulty operating at all. ALEC has attracted a wide and wealthy range of supporters in part because it’s done its work behind closed doors. Membership lists were secret. The origins of the model bills were secret. Part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work. If this were to become clear to everyone, there’d be no reason for corporations to use it.
While ALEC has pushed a number of bills regarding divisive wedge issues (it has to keep up its conservative veneer), it focuses mostly on economic issues promoting free market, Austrian school, deregulation, free trade, and other policies supported by major banks and corporations.
But ALEC is also a major pusher of laws regarding medical issues – not merely in the context of the American healthcare system, but also in the context of personal choice.
Despite all the rhetoric of ALEC and its puppets in Congress, the position of the organization and its puppets is not necessarily in favor of personal choice. This much has been made clear in the form of mandates and force of law, particularly in the area of vaccination.
Below are a very small few of pharmaceutical companies that are part of ALEC’s operations.
Astellas Pharma Inc.
Bayer
Dupont (Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals)
Eli Lilly
Endo Pharmaceuticals
Express Scripts
GlaxoSmithKline
Hoechst- Roussell Pharmaceutical Corporation
Hoffman La-Roche
Imperial Chemical Industries Pharmaceuticals
Johnson & Johnson
Mylan Pharmaceuticals
Novo Nordisk
Pharmacia and UpJohn
Purdue Pharma
Pfizer
Solvay Pharmaceutical
Takeda Pharmaceutical
TEVA Pharmaceuticals
TogetherRX Access (made up of ABBVIE, GSK, Janssen, Lifescan, Pfizer, Stiefel, Viiv Healthcare, Vistakon Pharmaceuticals)
The UpJohn Co.
These names are only a small few of the myriad of pharmaceutical companies, vaccine manufacturers, and other interested parties who are listed as members of ALEC. Many of these companies are concealed even further by a veil of umbrella “organizations” acting as front operations.
ALEC And Vaccines
With such a massive list of major pharmaceutical companies amidst ALEC’s ranks, it should come as no real surprise that ALEC would be one of the driving forces behind the recent spate of “mandatory vaccine bills” popping up all across the country. Indeed, its motto should be “Personal Choice For Corporations. Government Enforced Mandates For People.”
Remember, it was ALEC that crafted the “model” legislation “Immunization of Minors On TANF,” legislation that would have required parents on TANF assistance to require proof that their children were fully vaccinated according to the “recommended” levels. If those families did not show proof of their child’s vaccination, those families would lose their TANF benefits.
While exemptions were left intact in this “model” legislation, ALEC has stepped up its attack on parental rights by going after the exemption status in later bills.
For instance, consider the attempt to remove Vermont citizens’ rights to a philosophical exemption to vaccination known as SB 199, a bill that caught many in Vermont by complete surprise. Of course, when one takes a look at the key players and possible motivations, it becomes more obvious as to how this bill came to be and why.
S199 was introduced in the state Senate by Kevin Mullin, who is VT chair of the Pharma-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was introduced in the state House by Representative George Till, M.D., at the request of Harry Chen, M.D., Vermont’s Health Commissioner. Dr. Chen, who was a Vermont state representative and former chair of the Vermont House Health Care Committee for four years, has publicly downplayed vaccine risks.
S199 was supported by the VT Dept. of Health and state government supported institutions, such as the University of Vermont, as well as medical trade associations that receive money from pharmaceutical corporations selling vaccines in the U.S., including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), March of Dimes, Every Child by Two and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Other organizations endorsing elimination of the philosophical exemption included the Vermont Academy of Family Physicians, Fletcher Allen, Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, Voices for VT Children, Vermont Pharmacists Association, Rutland Medical Center, and Vermont Medical Society.
Here ALEC’s Vermont chairman, Republican Sen. Kevin Mullin, introduced S.199, a bill seeking to end the “philosophical exemption” in the childhood vaccine laws. A Republican introducing a health care bill, one that removes a parent’s rights, one that obliges all children to participate in a health care plan. … An ugly duckling if ever there was one! Just doesn’t look like all the rest.
The duckling looks even uglier in the light of Vermont’s exemplary health statistics. We rank right up there on general health, low incidence of infectious diseases, and low child mortality. What’s the problem, what motivates such a bill? Well, several corporations have recently publicly cut their ties with ALEC over ALEC’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, underscoring the reality that ALEC is funded by corporations, and we may guess has their interests at heart more than your child’s well-being.
One might be tempted to argue that the vaccine bill submitted in Vermont was merely an anomaly. That is, one would be tempted to make this argument if the Vermont bill was the only such bill submitted and supported by ALEC and its members.
In California, the infamous and fascist SB 277 which unfortunately became law was introduced by another vaccine fanatic and high priest of the religion of scientism, Richard Pan. Ben Allen, however, the second State Senator to introduce the legislation into the California state Senate is himself connected to ALEC. As Maureen Cruise of LA Progressive wrote in regards to Allen’s funding,
Among other wealthy conservative donors are William E. Oberndorf, a California billionaire investor who funds conservative causes such as the privatization of education which he promotes via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). He has contributed to the Karl Rove PAC and to Jeb Bush and the GW Bush Foundation. The Fisher Family of Gap and a dozen other corporations are fans of privatization of the public sector and charter schools.
Oberndorf, the ALEC big wig, is a major donor of Allen.
Cruise also points out that a sizable portion of Allen’s campaign contributions come directly from pharmaceutical interests.
A similar story is discovered in North Carolina, where notoriously arrogant and corrupt Senator Jeff Tarte – in between fits of whining and rage – introduced a bill that would have removed all vaccine exemption rights (except for medical exemptions) from parents and children, including homeschool children.
As if his last name did not accurately describe his disposition, Senator Tarte was one of the main sponsors of the NC bill SB 346, a bill that would have eliminated the “religious exemption” clause in the recommended vaccine schedule for children entering NC public schools. He was also a main contender for the title of worst public relations interaction with a constituent in the state of North Carolina in the last several years.
In keeping with the trend of recent events, however, Tarte is also a member of the ALEC organization, a feather in his cap that he was not shy in advertising in his weekly newsletter. Tarte not only is a member, but an active participant taking part in speaking events and even a seat on the ALEC Education Council.
Conclusion
The goal of forced vaccination has been in existence for quite some time, going back to a number of elite think tanks decades ago and the halls of pharmaceutical companies. Major pharmaceutical companies, for many obvious (or should be obvious ) reasons would also like to mandate vaccination. Increased profits from the vaccine sales and the treatment of resulting disease, as well as the cover-up of vaccine risks by a population free of a control group are but a few of the reasons such corporations are supporting the vaccine mandates.
After all, as Bertrand Russell stated as far back as 1953,
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. . . .
But, while the push to mandate vaccines for children and adults is by no means an ALEC-centric conspiracy, this recent push for such laws was indeed formulated in ALEC councils.
For this reason, it is highly ironic that the political left should be the half of the paradigm that takes up the charge for mandatory vaccination laws. After all, it is the left (at the lower levels) who seems to live by the motto “If ALEC supports it, we oppose it.” This time, all it took was some clever propaganda, trendy nudging, and social shaming and the left was marching right behind ALEC as militantly as if they were Republicans all along.
The entire vaccine debate can scarcely even be labeled a debate. It is an exercise in social shaming, shouting down opposing views, and religious devotion to television and anyone wearing a lab coat or claiming to be an expert.
With the culprit behind the recent mandatory vaccine/eliminate exemption push now revealed, it is time to begin working toward repealing these laws and making sure that no similar bill is ever politically viable.
CNN botched the ‘death’ of Kim Jong-un, covered up for Chris Cuomo after he broke quarantine, and published lies about Elon Musk, and that’s just in the past month, but now it’s here to tell you which news networks are credible!
This week Vanity Fair kicked up a flurry of controversy when after citing those pesky ‘anonymous sources,’ it claimed Donald Trump Jr secretly bought a stake in the right-leaning One America News Network. The owner of the network, Charles Herring, quickly jumped in to quash the claims and denied any such deal had gone through, as well as demanding that a retraction be made.
As of now, no retraction has yet been published, but CNN – ever the opportunist willing to engage in partisan shenanigans – jumped in to create even more controversy. In an article titled ‘Meet OAN, the little-watched right-wing news channel that Trump keeps promoting,’ the cable network boldly claims that OAN “arguably has more in common with a state-run propaganda network than a credible news organization.”
Without being too up to date with OAN’s brand of news and unable to speak on the quality of their reporting, one thing I do know for certain is that CNN is in absolutely no position to call another news agency ‘propaganda,’ or to question its credibility.
In 2017, three journalists resigned after a story falsely claimed Anthony Scaramucci was linked to a Russian investment fund. That same year, CNN pushed the narrative that Trump Jr received early access to WikiLeaks documents only for it to turn out they had the email dates wrong. Once again, keeping busy in 2017 it seems, the network stated the GOP was making rape pre-existing conditions in its healthcare alterations. A blatant falsehood that even fact-checking sites acknowledge as such.
None of that even begins to touch on the many such incidents before or since, let alone the ones at the top of this article. Let us also not forget Russiagate, the biggest conspiracy theory of our time, and something the network threw all its weight behind. Yet audaciously they write that two of OAN’s prominent personalities are “far-right agitators who have a history dabbling in conspiracy theories.”
Uh huh.
On the topic of ‘agitators,’ CNN’s Don Lemon showed his true colors when in January he broke into uncontrollable fits of laughter as panelists on his show mocked not just Trump, but a stereotypical southern bumpkin whom they see as the president’s voter base. They implied such people hate reading, spelling, and geography, all while Mr Lemon spilled his juice and snorted and chuckled along.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to most people reading this, but CNN is a hypocritical, bulls**t-spewing blight on the entire medium of news media as a whole. That it is considered the powerhouse that it is goes a long way towards showing that the average news watcher either doesn’t care about facts, or they’re too tied up in their own political biases to notice the snake oil being squirted into their eyes.
OANN is fake news, says the network that released a story 2 weeks ago that Kim Jong Un was dead https://t.co/S5EJrhgHA6
Speaking of looks, CNN took pettiness to a new level when it criticized OAN’s visual style, saying “it doesn’t even offer viewers compelling television with professional graphics.”
I guess they just expect everyone to have 3D holographic airplanes to pull out whenever a Malaysian flight goes missing. But at that point it’s not news, it’s just fancy and mindlessly hollow television. Something CNN excels at.
Sophia Narwitz is a writer and journalist from the US. Outside of her work on RT, she is a primary writer for Colin Moriarty’s Side Quest content, and she manages her own YouTube channel. Follow her on Twitter @SophNar0747
UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk’s criticism of the forthcoming US-Israeli annexation of more Palestinian land offers a good start to collective political action against Israel, if only the international community would show that it is willing. “The plan would crystallise a 21st century apartheid, leaving in its wake the demise of the Palestinian’s right to self-determination. Legally, morally, politically, this is entirely unacceptable,” declared Lynk.
The UN official described the repercussions of annexation as creating “a cascade of bad human rights consequences” and insisted that the international community can no longer play its acquiescent role to Israeli violations. “The looming annexation is a political litmus test for the international community. This annexation will not be reversed through rebukes, nor will the 53-year-old occupation die of old age,” he warned.
This is not the first time that Lynk has offered a harsher criticism of Israel than the appeasing commentary which is typical of UN officials and institutions. In the past, he recommended international sanctions against Israel and supported the International Criminal Court (ICC) in its investigation of Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Lynk’s words draw attention to the UN’s political flaws and the endorsement of human rights violations committed by its member states. As Israel moves towards annexation, the international community is unlikely to assess its own complicity. The US-Israeli annexation plans are built upon decades of international endorsement of Zionist colonisation. To oppose annexation – one of the last steps that Israel is embarking upon to complete its colonial project – is not enough. Diluting settler-colonisation to “53 years of occupation” is also inconsistent and a misrepresentation of the causes of Palestinian displacement.
The US may currently be playing a more prominent role, but the international community has magnified the US-Israeli relationship to deflect attention from the historical process leading to the current dynamic. The international community’s endorsement of the Israeli colonisation project is a major violation that remains overlooked. What the US and Israel have achieved under the Trump administration is a reflection of an ongoing cycle of intentional political oblivion at a global level.
Having shone the spotlight on the US-Israeli collusion, the international community has availed itself of a temporary lull in scrutiny of its action, particularly its inaction when it comes to the Palestinian people’s political rights. In truth, the international community’s action can be summed up in the 1947 Partition Plan, after which reliance on statements and condemnations became the diplomatically-accepted means of purportedly championing Palestinian rights. Lynk’s statements, albeit devoid of direct references to Israeli colonisation, point towards international culpability.
In recent years, the two-state compromise remains the most blatant evidence of international culpability in preventing Palestinian reclamation of their land and rights. Just as annexation has been declared in violation of international law, the two-state diplomacy must also be held accountable for paving the way to annexation. This necessitates a complete reversal of the politics that have sustained the UN so far. There cannot be a unified political front against Israel if two-state politics is not abandoned. Stopping annexation requires a reversal of Israeli colonisation; anything less is an affirmation of treason against the Palestinian people.
Iran is once again under siege from humanitarian imperialism. The United Nations (UN) has released multiple reports in recent weeks criticizing the Iranian government for supposed human rights violations in relation to the treatment of prisoners and its lockdown procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nazanin Boniadi, a board of director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, authored a piece in The Washington Post that exploits the pandemic to paint Iran as a human rights catastrophe. An examination of just one of Boniadi’s claims exposes how far the U.S. and its imperialist allies will go to build the case for regime change in Iran.
Boniadi claims that Iran’s failure to maintain a humane release policy of prisoners within the country has contributed to undue suffering from COVID-19. Yet the individual she chooses to defend all but reduces her credibility to zero. Boniadi claims that several prisoners have been returned to prison prematurely, and names Samaneh Norouz Moradi as a victim of this policy. Sameneh Norouz Moradi is a leading activist in the campaign to return Prince Reza Pehlavi to Iran. Prince Reza Pehlavi is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pehlavi, otherwise known as the Shah of Iran. This is indeed the same monarch that butchered Iranians in the tens of thousands to ensure the country’s assets remained the property of the West. In just one sentence, Nazanin Boniadi reveals that the purpose of her article and her struggle for human rights is to reinstall the U.S. and Western friendly puppet regime that once reigned over Iran.
The human rights industry offers lucrative careers for the likes of Boniadi. Boniadi is a Hollywood star and an Iranian exile with extensive experience in the human rights industry. She served as a spokesperson for Amnesty International for six years from 2009 to 2015. Her service to Amnesty International coincides with the organization’s outright support for U.S.-led regime change wars. The so-called “human rights” organization defended the overthrow of Libya in 2011 and the ongoing invasion of Syria led by the U.S. and its Israeli, Gulf, and Western allies.
It is no surprise, then, that Boniadi now serves on the board of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), a dubious human rights organization which fails to disclose its funding sources. A cursory look at Boniadi’s colleagues reveals how deeply the CHRI is embedded in the humanitarian imperialist agenda led by the United States. Chairwoman of the board Minky Worden is also the Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. Throughout the 1990s, Worden served as an adviser to Hong Kong’s Martin Lee, a staunch anti-China proxy who has called for the British to recolonize Hong Kong. Lee has given deep support to the rightwing movement currently waging a violent campaign to separate Hong Kong from China under the guise of “human rights.” The rest of the CHRI’s staff is a who’s who of former NED-funded functionaries such as executive director Hadi Ghaemi or advisers to U.S. government and private sector posts such as Michael Eisner.
Humanitarian imperialist think-tanks and NGOs such as CHRI are not interested in human rights in Iran or anywhere else. Their selective focus on nations under siege from the U.S. and its imperial allies reveal that so-called “human rights” organizations are nothing but proxies of regime change. The U.S. military state has viewed the spread of COVID-19 in Iran as an opportunity to build upon this long-standing geopolitical objective. CHRI’s clamor for Iran to correct its alleged human rights abuses comes as the U.S. has escalated its forty-plus year war on Iran. Since mid-March, the U.S. has intensified sanctions on Iran, threatened outright U.S. naval aggression, and reinforced an arms embargo outlined in the nuclear agreement that the U.S. exited in 2018. For the architects of regime change, COVID-19 represents nothing more than opportunity to strike when their target is weakest.
What humanitarian imperialists fail to mention is that Iran has waged a largely successful campaign to reduce the spread of COVID-19 despite the presence of crippling sanctions and the threat of a U.S.-led war. Iran temporarily released seventy-thousand prisoners to prevent the virus’ spread behind prison walls. The World Health Organization’s envoy to Iran praised the country’s initiatives for bringing down the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in a relatively short period. Such initiatives include mandatory social distancing, the redirection of production toward masks and testing kits, and detailed contact tracing to isolate infected individuals. COVID-19 deaths have declined by around seventy percent since it was announced in mid-March that one Iranian every ten minutes was dying from the virus.
If humanitarian imperialists cared about the Iranian people, then they wouldn’t attempt to use the spread of a deadly pandemic to achieve the U.S.’ geopolitical objective of overthrowing the Iranian government. Furthermore, targeting Iran at this vulnerable time only exposes the truly hypocritical “human rights” framework employed by NGOS such as the Center for Human Rights in Iran. The United States has failed to institute any significant release program for its 2.3 million prisoners. This has led to a countless number of deaths in prisons across the country. Furthermore, the U.S. currently leads the world in the number of deaths from COVID-19 and has allowed the virus to genocidally murder Black Americans at rates upward of three times their percentage of the general population in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
COVID-19 has exposed the United States as a human rights train wreck which has no right to tell nations such as Iran how to conduct its domestic affairs. The U.S. is an expert at mass murder for the sake of private profit and found itself unprepared when COVID-19 began to spread within its borders. Instead of fostering cooperation with China, Iran, and the rest of the world in the fight against COVID-19, the U.S. has pirated medical supplies, threatened Iran and Venezuela with outright war, and refused to heed the call of the United Nations for a global ceasefire. That there is no NGO to address the ongoing war crimes of the United States is a lesson into the function of the “human rights” industry. NGOs represent the public relations arm of humanitarian imperialism, which is why their work is most prominently featured in the corporate media when Washington is escalating wars of regime change abroad.
Police brutality, incarceration, and state repression are serious human rights issues. Many people are rightfully concerned about human rights as they witness the horrifying and needless consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The U.S. and West have demonstrated in their response to COVID-19 that their societies are organized to stifle human rights in order to maximize the profits of a tiny capitalist class and the hegemony of the military state that protects this class. Activists and journalists must reject the humanitarian imperialists currently politicizing trendy social justice issues to undermine the self-determination of nations such as Iran. Iran is under siege as it battles a pandemic, and peace and social justice-loving people in the U.S. should demand that their government stops making the situation worse.
During a conference call on Tuesday, Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for the presidential race, received a formal word of support from Hillary Clinton, yet another party member to wish the former vice president luck as he prepares to take on President Trump in November.
The former Senate staffer who is accusing Joe Biden of sexually abusing her in the 1990s has blasted Hillary Clinton’s endorsement of the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I voted for her in the primary. I’m a lifelong Democrat”, Biden accuser Tara Reade told Fox News, before continuing her rant:
“But yet, what I see now is someone enabling a sexual predator and it was my former boss, Joe Biden, who raped me”, Reade fumed.She addressed at length Hillary Clinton’s “history enabling powerful men to cover up their sexual predatory behaviours and their inappropriate sexual misconduct”, arguing that this is not “what this country needs”.
“We don’t need that for our new generation coming up that wants institutional rape culture to change”, she stressed.
Biden’s press service has continuously dismissed the sexual assault claims, with Kate Bedingfield, Mr Biden’s communications director, busting the claims straight away, inviting journalists to verify them first: “Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims. We encourage them to do so, because these accusations are false”, she said. Independently, the campaign released a statement from Marianne Baker, an executive assistant to Mr Biden from 1982 to 2000, who said: “In all my years working for Senator Biden, I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct, period. Not from Ms Reade, not from anyone”.
Biden received Clinton’s endorsement via livestream on Tuesday, as both Democrats are stuck at home due to the current coronavirus crisis-caused lockdowns and self-isolation measures.
Biden has received a flurry of endorsements from prominent party members including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday, and former President Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, another 2020 rival, earlier this month. Sanders, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, who was the last to give up the fight in the primary, also endorsed Biden seeking not to further split the party during a healthcare crisis.
However, amid all the endorsements, calls have been on a rise for the presumptive Dem nominee to personally respond to Reade’s claims, as she thundered the other day in comments to Fox:
“I will not be smeared, dismissed, or ignored. I stand in truth and I will keep speaking out”, Biden’s former employee said.Reports of ‘Prominent Senator’ Behaving Badly
A number of other persons who appear to corroborate her claims have recently made headlines, one of them being Reade’s former neighbour, who told Business Insider that she recalled hearing about the ex-Biden staffer’s alleged assault when Reade said the incident occurred – back in 1993.
“This happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it”, she shared with the publication.
Another individual, Lorraine Sanchez who worked with Reade in the mid 1990s, told the edition that she remembered Reade explaining her dismissal from her previous job by raising concerns about sexual harassment by her former boss.
The allegation surfaced after a clip came out that allegedly features the voice of Reade’s mother phoning into “Larry King Live” in 1993 and asking if her daughter should turn to the press about a “prominent senator” behaving inappropriately.
Reade, who was among the women who came out last year with stories about Biden being too handsy, claiming he “just had her up against the wall” in a Capitol Hill hallway in 1993, when Reade worked on his staff during his tenure as a senator for Delaware.
The same citizen virus-tracing corps the New York Times decried in China as Maoism incarnate is being tried in Massachusetts and San Francisco, and the outlet has decided that what’s bad for Beijing is good for democracies.
Massachusetts and San Francisco – as well as the Republic of Ireland – are deputizing citizens to track down contacts of people infected with coronavirus, the Timesreported on Thursday, describing the programs in glowing terms. After a blow-by-blow of a phone call between one of the newly-hired Massachusetts virus-trackers and her target, who gratefully gives up a file’s worth of data, we learn that the state plans to hire 1,000 caring professionals just like her to fill out its “fleet of contact tracers, charged with tracking down people who have been exposed to the coronavirus, as soon as possible, and warning them.”
The article emphasizes the bonds of “trust” between contract-tracer and coronavirus victim. There’s no talk of imprisoning people in their homes, of “keeping away outsiders” or of “arbitrary” enforcement. Indeed, one has to read to the end of the article to find out that the Massachusetts program was heavily informed by data from Wuhan and techniques from South Korea.
There is just one slight problem: the NYT had already described a similar program in an article from February saying that “Mao-Style Social Control” was “blanketing” China. That piece sketched out an oppressive world in which “battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives” conducted “one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.” The goal, as the outlet melodramatically put it back then, was “to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.”
Stripped of the linguistic fireworks, the story described Beijing deputizing citizens to enforce quarantines by (among other things) tracing who infected persons had been in contact with, in order to keep the infected separate from the rest of the population. Not a bad idea, given the unreliability of testing and the highly-infectious nature of the coronavirus. It’s not surprising it’s catching on in the West.
San Francisco is training an all-volunteer group of 150 contact tracers, while Ireland plans to repurpose 1,000 furloughed government workers to trace contacts. Former US Centers for Disease Control director Thomas Frieden has even recommended a national “army” of 300,000 contact tracers, while other public health experts have praised the idea. It’s difficult to see how – other than the shift in vocabulary – these incarnations of what Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization called “shoe-leather epidemiology” differ from what the Times described as “Mao-style social control” in China.
With the question of how to end lockdowns still unresolved in many ‘democracies,’ human contact-tracing may emerge as the “lesser evil” with regard to preserving individual rights. While Bill Gates touts his “digital certificates” and dubious vaccines, and Apple and Google collaborate on a digital contact-tracing platform – an approach laden with privacy pitfalls that has already been used in Singapore and South Korea – that ‘Mao-style social control’ is starting to look like the most freedom-friendly option.
There is certain wisdom to the statement that “no one is truly qualified to be President”. The leader of the United States (or any other country) should in theory have an expert level of knowledge in all the areas of society that the government is responsible for. This is a wide variety of issues from the military, to healthcare, to road infrastructure to agriculture. The leader with the veto hammer should know it all and not only that but be an incredible public speaker with a good sense of humor that works for a wide audience and be at least six feet tall. Although some leaders may come close, there are no such perfect people to vote for. Yes, no one is qualified to be the President, but when candidates can’t even manage their electoral campaigns which they directly control themselves it leads one to wonder about the quality of the people over the years who have had the nuclear suitcase resting against their leg while seated in the Oval Office.
Michael Bloomberg, despite being a massive media player, ran a shockingly boring campaign for the Democratic ticket and now it would seem that the workers who made the cogs in his dismal attempt turn are getting together to file a class-action lawsuit against him. Apparently Bloomberg made the common pledge to support his workers all the way till the end of a “best case scenario” campaign throughout 2020. Essentially win, lose or draw everyone would get paid till the end of the election cycle.
This did not happen, and the former mayor of New York City cut funding for his people the day he cut his campaign short. Impressively Bloomberg was able to spin this defeat as a victory for the greater good of destroying Trump. In his concession speech he said…
“I’ve always believed that defeating Donald Trump starts with uniting behind the candidate with the best shot to do it. After yesterday’s vote, it is clear that candidate is my friend and a great American, Joe Biden,”
Selling the complete and total failure of a campaign from a media billionaire with real political experience as a triumphant step to defeating the great evil of Trump takes a lot of nerve. It also took a lot of nerve for Bloomberg to refuse to pay any health benefits to his campaign workers as a Democrat.
Bloomberg preaches from on high while not paying those at the bottom
But this betrayal is actually by far not the first time candidates have put the screws to their own campaign workers. Bernie Sanders was unable to pay workers the cherished $15 per hour wage that he feels is almost a human right and has publically spoken for many times. Young volunteers were expecting Sanders-style Socialism but got treated to a big plate full of pragmatic Capitalism instead. Sanders may have officially been offering $15/hour for a 40 hour per work week schedule, but in reality many of this workers were putting in 60 hours a week with no hope of getting any overtime for it. Workers’ rights including things like paid overtime are issues at the core of Sanders’ message, sadly when push comes to shove he is unwilling to make his words match his deeds.
Hillary Clinton during the previous campaign cycle at least had the decency to pay her troops while she may have laundered $84 in illegal campaign contributions. Maybe Sanders should try looking for “alternative sources of funding” as well?
So what’s the big deal? Running a campaign is hard, there is chaos everywhere, the candidates are running all over the country, accidents and missteps are bound to happen right?
Running a presidential campaign is indeed a massive challenge that demands serious organizational skills, but compared to being the President of the United States it’s a walk in the park. Many of the very few people whom we can actually move towards a presidential run are too incompetent or corrupt to even run their campaigns properly.
Bloomberg was too cheap, bitter, distracted to bother fulfilling his promises to his staff that he could easily just write a check for. He could have left the campaign leaving good feelings and a good reputation but that could have cost a small percent of his yearly earnings so why bother?
Sanders managed to prove his anti-Socialist skeptics right by failing to put into practice even on a miniature scale the policies he wants for all American businesses across a massive nation.
And Clinton, well she does a great job of teaching us how much money you can make even as a destined loser.
There may be a tiny handful of people hiding somewhere across the American landscape who are capable of running a competent campaign and then ascending to the Oval Office. They may be out there but the options we are given to vote for in primaries are just pathetic. When people used to tell children “America’s great anyone can be President” that used to have a positive connotation. Now it seems like anyone no matter how dim their campaign is run could get the nomination given the right connections, cash, and the right look/message.
If someone is completely unable to run a campaign effectively they have no business being President of the United States of America.
The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal have written an open letter to the Chinese government urging it to reverse its “damaging and reckless” decision to expel their reporters amid a spiraling COVID epidemic.
The letter makes all the usual points about a “free flow of reliable news and information” in the middle of a growing international emergency. And however clichéd, such sentiments are correct since access to the broadest possible sources of information is indeed essential if the world is to make it through the crisis.
But the letter would have been a lot more convincing if the three papers had spoken up on Mar. 2 when the Trump administration moved to expel sixty Chinese journalists working for five news organizations that the White House regards as little more than state propaganda outfits.
Moreover, they’d be on even firmer footing if they had not actively cheered on the most dangerous anti-media effort of all, the U.S. crackdown on the TV news service RT, formerly known as Russia Today, that began in November 2017.
The crackdown on RT was in some ways even worse than McCarthyism since the latter was at least about something real and important, which is to say a Communist movement that controlled roughly forty percent of the global population and was pressing in on capitalism from every side. If the ruling class seemed spooked, it was facing a challenge of unprecedented dimensions.
But the threat this time around was about something entirely made up, i.e. the belief that Russia had supposedly used various dark arts to trick Americans into voting for Trump. The nonsense began in January 2017 when the CIA, NSA, and FBI “assessed” that Vladimir Putin had interfered in the previous year’s election in order “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability” and, in the process, boost Trump. The report was entirely devoid of evidence, yet the press took it as gospel. Even worse, the intelligence report included a seven-page annex accusing RT of engaging in “criticism of U.S. and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent,” running “numerous reports on alleged U.S. election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities,” contending that U.S. election results cannot be trusted and do not reflect the popular will,” and hosting third-party candidates who contend that “the U.S. two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’”
Imagine – a foreign news service daring to suggest that U.S. politics were flawed! If papers like the Times or Post had the slightest inkling of self-respect, they would have laughed themselves silly over such hyper-sensitivity and told the CIA to grow a thicker skin. But they didn’t. Instead, they worked themselves up into ever greater levels of indignation. Within a few months, the New York Times was warning that “if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin” and that, thanks to snazzy graphics and snappy repartee, the network had put together “the most effective propaganda operation of the 21st century so far, one that thrives in the feverish political climates that have descended on many Western publics.”
Of course, one might observe that outlets like CNN and MSNBC are characterized by a deep skepticism of Russian narratives, so what’s the difference? But that wouldn’t be fair since everyone knows that America is right and Russia wrong and that any comparison between the two is automatically invalid, isn’t it?
Not to be outdone, the Washington Post – official slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness” – ran not one but two op-eds (here and here) calling on the federal government to require RT to register as a foreign agent, a step the Trump administration would dutifully take just two months later.
So the big two turned out to be more aggressive than the Trump administration in reducing journalistic diversity and using the power of the state to undermine a foreign competitor. Finally, just a month ago, the Times ran a front-page article declaring – queue the ominous music – that Radio Sputnik, RT’s sister outlet, had begun “broadcasting on three Kansas City-area radio stations during prime drive time.” Horror of horrors, the station was bombarding Missourians with Russki propaganda criticizing impeachment, the media, and the U.S. political system in general and informing that, in the words of one Sputnik host, that “the masses of poor and working people don’t have access to even the most essential things.”
Where did Radio Sputnik come up with such a notion? Doesn’t everyone know that perfect equality reigns in the United States and that anyone who says otherwise must be working for a foreign power?
In fact, while America never tires of touting its devotion to the First Amendment, it loses control when a foreign news service turns tables by engaging in journalism that is cheeky and irreverent. It wants a free press, which is to say one that is free to repeat over and over again how perfectly wonderful America really is. But it does not believe in a free press that allows foreigners to say the contrary.
Famed author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb has trained his sights on billionaire Richard Branson, urging the UK government to let the airline owned by the “tax refugee” to go bankrupt.
Branson has had a torrid fortnight, drawing the ire of politicians of all stripes for putting all Virgin Atlantic staff on unpaid leave because the carrier has been walloped by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The tycoon has led the calls for a state-sponsored bailout of the aviation sector, but plans to use the funds to cover fixed costs, rather than pay its staff.
Taleb wrote The Black Swan, which is widely touted as one of the most influential books of the century. His writings give his words extra weight in the current global situation as they focus on the extraordinary impact of rare events.
The risk analyst has given short shrift to the suggestion of bailouts for airlines, saying that the industry was hugely influential in preventing governments from calling a halt to flights from China as the outbreak spread in the Asian country.
However, the author reserved his most scathing analysis for Branson, whom he dubbed a “tax refugee” who “walks around virtue-faking with [the] TED [and] Davos crowd.”
“He lives in the British Virgin Islands and since the UK has no worldwide taxation, [he] pays no taxes. Yet wants the UK taxpayer’s backstop,” Taleb said, in a blistering tweet. “Let him go bust. Planes will fly with new owners!”
Virgin Atlantic has been particularly badly hit by the Covid-19 crisis as it does not have the cash reserves of some of its larger competitors. It reportedly approached the UK government and the Rothschild investment bank, who are said to be handling negotiations, for a package worth hundreds of millions of pounds in loans and guarantees.
Instead of high-quality education, these institutions are fostering a global neo-feudal system reminiscent of the British Raj
By Dr. Mathew Maavak | RT | May 30, 2025
In a move that has ignited a global uproar, US President Donald Trump banned international students from Harvard University, citing “national security” and ideological infiltration. The decision, which has been widely condemned by academics and foreign governments alike, apparently threatens to undermine America’s “intellectual leadership and soft power.” At stake is not just Harvard’s global appeal, but the very premise of open academic exchange that has long defined elite higher education in the US.
But exactly how ‘open’ is Harvard’s admissions process? Every year, highly qualified students – many with top-tier SAT or GMAT test scores – are rejected, often with little explanation. Critics argue that behind the prestigious Ivy League brand lies an opaque system shaped by legacy preferences, DEI imperatives, geopolitical interests, and outright bribes. George Soros, for instance, once pledged $1 billion to open up elite university admissions to drones who would read from his Open Society script.
China’s swift condemnation of Trump’s policy added a layer of geopolitical irony to the debate. Why would Beijing feign concern for “America’s international standing” amid a bitter trade war? The international standing of US universities has long been tarnished by a woke psychosis which spread like cancer to all branches of the government.
So, what was behind China’s latest gripe? ... continue
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