The latest model of doom from Government advisory group SAGE appeared yesterday, predicting a ludicrous 10,000 hospital admissions a day in mid-July in a vaccinated population (nearly three times the January peak) because of the Indian variant – and that’s the central scenario. Furthermore, the researchers don’t even think the Indian variant is more deadly or particularly good at evading vaccines. So how do they conclude it will precipitate such a calamity?
The issue is that many people have a mental image that we’ve [already] had the biggest possible epidemic waves, whereas we’ve actually had ones that are relatively small compared to what could have happened without control measures in place. Because of these controls, only a fraction of the people who could have got infected in the past year or so have been infected, so they’re still out there. Of course, for many of these people vaccines have now decreased their risk substantially. But a very large number of infections that come with a very small individual level of risk can produce a similar outcome to a smaller epidemic that carries a larger individual level of risk.
Maths whizz Glen Bishop, writing for Lockdown Sceptics, has shown why SAGE’s assumptions are so unrealistic as to produce these highly implausible scenarios. In their central scenario, for example, they assume that around half of the UK will be simultaneously infected in one week in mid-July. This is despite the January peak only having around 2% of the population infected at one time, according to the ONS.
Another of the models’ big assumptions, prominent in what Prof Kucharski says above, is that lockdowns and social distancing have successfully suppressed the virus and that it is only because they continue in some form that the flood of infections, hospitalisations and deaths is held back. The latest modelling starkly shows how, even with a high vaccination coverage as in the UK, such an assumption can produce predictions so dire they send twitchy Governments reaching for the lockdown order.
As the SAGE briefing says:
At this point in the vaccine rollout, there are still too few adults vaccinated to prevent a significant resurgence that ultimately could put unsustainable pressure on the NHS, without non-pharmaceutical interventions. … It is a realistic possibility that this new variant of concern could be 50% more transmissible. If [the Indian variant] does have such a large transmission advantage, it is a realistic possibility that progressing with all roadmap steps would lead to a substantial resurgence of hospitalisations.
In fact, there is no evidence (outside models, which are not evidence) that lockdown measures or social distancing have any significant impact on reducing Covid infections or deaths. This is why the states in America which removed their restrictions in March (Texas) or last autumn (Florida) or never imposed them (South Dakota) are doing no worse, and often better, than many states which maintained strict restrictions throughout the winter (see the graph above). Sweden demonstrates a similar point in Europe.
The depressing truth, though, is that sceptics have largely failed to get this basic point across to those in charge and their scientific advisers. It’s not as though the evidence is not there. There are numerous peer-reviewed articles in leading journals that set out the evidence on this, and more keep appearing. Leading scientists have raised their heads to make the evidence-based case.
Graphs like the above, which should by themselves undermine the entire lockdown edifice, are easy to produce. Leading journalists such as Fraser Nelson, writing in one of the leading Tory newspapers, the Telegraph, has pointed repeatedly to the evidence on this. The data is plain for all to see and the voices highlighting it are not marginal or lacking in credibility.
Yet here we are again, with another model built on dubious assumptions and a presumption of lockdown efficacy once more imperilling our liberty. Freedom has never felt so fragile as in these past 14 months, when access to basic liberties has rested on the evidence-free assumptions made by a small group of mathematical modellers whose word seems to be taken as holy writ by those in charge.
Adam Kucharski is on Twitter. So why not ask him (politely!) why, if so many people remain so susceptible to this virus and its variants as to produce such dire predictions, Florida, Texas and South Dakota have fared no worse than places which have imposed or maintained restrictions? I’ve put the graph as the featured image to make it easy to share – just put a link to this article in the tweet and the graph should appear. If you get any answers from him, why not email them to us here.
At base, the markets are a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest mania. In this game, the suckers are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the smart money swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar. In this week’s edition of The Corbett Report, James Corbett pulls back the curtain on the Wall Street casino and reveals how the house always wins the rigged games.
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TRANSCRIPT
In December of 2020, video game retailer GameStop reported an operating loss of $63 million in the previous quarter on the back of an 11% reduction in the store base. The story—just one of dozens of such reports flooding the financial newswires—meant little to the general public and went largely unnoticed.
Two groups did show an interest in the news, however: the Wall Street vultures who see every faltering company as an easy source of money in the futures markets and a small band of retail investors who saw the potential for the floundering gaming franchise to turn things around.
Within a matter of weeks, these two groups would clash in one of the most spectacular stock market face offs in recent memory. Even the White House got drawn into the saga.
REPORTER: I was concerned about the stock market activity we’re seeing around GameStop and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever—the company that was . . . Blockbuster?—and have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
JEN PSAKI: Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her and often questions about market we’ll send to them. But our team is of course—our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others—are monitoring the situation.
The human drama in the story made it easily recognizable as a David vs. Goliath narrative. Here was a ragtag band of mom-and-pop—or, in this case, millennial—investors going up against the hudge fund billionaires. And, just as it seemed they may actually have an effect, the full power of the financial and political system seemed to swoop in to suppress them.
But the “revelation” that retail investors are fighting a rigged game against the Wall Street hedge fund behemoths is hardly a revelation at all. In fact, it is merely the latest example in a long series of events showing that the stock market was never meant to bring riches and fortune to the average investor.
Instead, when the story is told in its full context, there is only one obvious conclusion to be drawn:
The stock market is often portrayed in the financial media as a magical crystal ball that can not only tell us about what is happening in the economy, but predict geopolitical events, forecast elections, or even reveal to us the inner workings of the minds of men.
BECKY QUICK: Alright, so polls are one way of trying to figure out who’s going to win. Watching the markets are another. They’re pretty good at predicting elections sometimes, too.
LESLIE PICKER: Valuations on a price-to-earnings basis are below post-crisis averages leading some to believe that decent fundamentals could—emphasis on could—jumpstart the shares higher.
DOMINIC CHU: You’re telling me you don’t have a crystal ball . . .
PICKER: I don’t.
CHU: . . . And I don’t blame you.
PICKER: I don’t. But even I did I couldn’t say it here.
KRISTINA HOOPER: Well, we could very well see some gains, some pullbacks, more gains. Certainly animal spirits are alive and well, but I would argue it’s a very different spirit animal than last year. Since the start of February our spirit animal is probably the chihuahua.
But this is a lie. In reality, the markets are driven not by underlying economic fundamentals, as the public is asked to believe, but by the actions of the central banks.
This is not even a controversial point.
In 2014, the Bank for International Settlements warned that central banks were causing “elevated” asset prices.
A report from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum that same year warned that “Central banks around the world, including in Europe, are buying increasing volumes of equities” and “The same authorities that are responsible for maintaining financial stability are often the owners of the large funds that have the potential to cause problems.”
And in 2016—in the midst of the historic bull run that has seen the Dow Jones and S&P indexes reach all-time record high after all-time record high—economist Brian Barnier published a report documenting that between the beginning of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program in 2008 and the 1st quarter of 2015, the Fed was directly responsible for 93% of equity value growth in the US.
This modern era of central bank-dominated markets, however, is only the latest version of a game that is as old as the markets themselves. At base it’s a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest market mania. In this game, the “suckers” are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the “smart money” swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar.
The game was being played as far back as 1814 when a uniformed man posing as the aide-de-camp of Lord Cathcart landed in Dover spreading the false rumour that Napoleon had been killed by a detachment of Cossacks. When the rumours reached London later that day, three men dressed up as French officers in white Bourbon cockades were parading across Blackfriars bridge proclaiming the end of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. By the time the British government officially dispelled the rumour later that afternoon, an elaborate fraud had already played out in the London stock markets. The rumour had kicked off a buying frenzy and the perpetrators of what is now known as The Great Fraud of Cowley—the ones who had started the rumours and hired the actors to help spread them—had already sold 1.1 million pounds worth of government stock into the market peak.
Another bit of market manipulation centering around Napoleon’s military fortunes played out again the next year, in 1815. Nathan Rothschild of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty used the smuggling network that he and his brothers had built to funnel gold and silver to Wellington’s army to get news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo back to London 24 hours before the official word reached the British government. Although a fancified version of the story involving homing pigeons and Nathan’s acting abilities at the stock exchange are easily dismissed as anti-Semitic slurs by the mainstream press, even the official Rothschild Archive treatment of the incident admits that Nathan Rothschild did receive early warning of Wellington’s victory and he did profit from that foreknowledge in the stock market. Historian Niall Ferguson has written on the subject in detail in his authorized biography of the Rothschilds and even the BBC published a story in 1998 outlining how the conspiracy functioned and how the brothers communicated in secret by writing their letters in the Judendeutsch script they had learned in their childhood in the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto.
The stock market con game isn’t just an historical relic, though. Those with advance knowledge of world events continue to profit from their insider information, sometimes in the most macabre way imaginable.
ANTONIO MORA: What many Wall Street analysts believe is that the terrorists made bets that a number of stocks would see their prices fall. They did so by buying what they call ‘puts.’ If you bet right the rewards can be huge. The risks are also huge unless you know something bad is going to happen to the company you’re betting against.
DYLAN RATIGAN: This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
In the wake of 9/11, researchers began to uncover a money trail that proved those with advance knowledge of the attack had indeed used their insider information to profit from the events of that day.
In addition to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, the governments of Italy, Germany, Belgium and other countries began their own investigations into a series of trades betting against companies that were hurt by 9/11—like Boeing, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, Munich Re and others—and betting on companies that profited from the attacks—including a six-fold increase in call options on the stock of defense contractor Raytheon on September 10, 2001.
In subsequent years, not one, not two, but three separate, peer-reviewed papers concluded that the unusual trading in the weeks prior to 9/11 were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9/11 attacks.” But incredibly, the SEC investigation into this money trail was abruptly terminated and the records of that investigation were subsequently destroyed.
Why? Because, as researchers like Kevin Ryan, Michael Ruppert and others later discovered, the trail led them to the doorstep not of Al Qaeda, but well-connected American businessmen and intelligence officials.
MICHAEL C. RUPPERT: So right after the attacks of 9/11 the name Buzzy Krongard surfaced. It was instant research that revealed that Buzzy Krongard had been allegedly recruited by CIA Director George Tenet to become the Executive Director at CIA, which is the number three position, right before the attacks.
And Alex Brown was one of the many subsidiaries of Deutsche Bank, one of the primary vehicles or instruments that handled all of these criminal trades by people who obviously knew that the attacks were going to take place, where, how and involving specific airlines.
KEVIN RYAN: I came across this document that had been released: a memorandum for the record of the 9/11 Commission. It was prepared by a staff member of the 9/11 Commission. His name is Douglas Greenberg and he reviewed simply the FBI’s meetings on their communications related to this. This document identified a couple of companies that were flagged by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and one of them—this was September 21st just ten days after the attacks—one of these companies that was flagged was called Stratesec. And this is a very interesting company because it’s a security company that had contracts for the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport where one of the planes took off on 9/11, as well as United Airlines, which owned two of the other three planes. So this security company, Stratesec, was a very central player in in the events of 9/11, you could say, because they ran security for these different areas in the years leading up to 9/11.
So for them this company stopped to be flagged by the SEC was very compelling and when I looked at this document—prepared by the 9/11 Commission which wasn’t released until 2007—I noticed that the names had been redacted of the stock traders, but I could make out who they were. In particular, one of them was a director of the company Stratesec. He was also a director of a company in Oklahoma, an aviation company. He was also a director of a Washington, DC-based financial organization. With just that information you could tell very clearly that this man was Wirt Dexter Walker. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Stratesec and also a director there. His wife, Sally Walker, was also named in the flagging by the SEC. So I began looking into that.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said “Cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.”
JEREMY ROTHE KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well, his brother worked at the White House.
Horrific as these instances of insider trading are, an even deeper layer of the story lies in the fact that these trades—unlike the high-profile show trials of Martha Stewart and other stories-of-the-week—never result in prosecutions. The protection afforded the 9/11 inside traders speaks to an even deeper layer of the problem: the use of the markets to line the pockets of insiders and their political cronies is not a bug in the system, but a feature. In fact, the entire system has been designed to be manipulable, ensuring that the little guys never have a chance against the billionaire bankers and hedge funds.
A clue to this story goes back to the most well-known event in stock market history: the Great Crash of 1929. Even there, in the midst of one of the most devastating financial collapses in human history, there was money to be made by insiders who knew what was coming.
One such insider was Albert Henry Wiggin, Chairman of the Chase National Bank and the man who had been instrumental in attracting the Rockefeller family to begin their century-long involvement in Chase. When the market began plummeting on Black Thursday 1929, Wiggin and his fellow banking associates were lauded as heroes for their actions to restore order to the market, which culminated in New York Stock Exchange Vice President Richard Whitney stepping out on the floor of the Exchange and making a great commotion by yelling out orders for key stocks at above-market prices.
Wiggin knew he was covered no matter what happened. Shortly before the Crash, he shorted shares in his own bank by borrowing shares from various brokers at prices he anticipated would fall, at which time he would buy the shares in the market at lower prices and return them to the brokers, making money on the difference. When the Dow stood at 359 on September 23, 1929 (the market had topped out twenty days earlier at 381), he placed what would be a hugely profitable bet that Chase’s stock would fall.
[. . .]
Before shorting those shares, Wiggin executed another profitable and shady strategy, using his bank’s funds to plump the shares up. He placed $200 million of his depositors’ money into trusts that speculated in Chase stock, thus participating in the very pool operations that artificially boosted its price during the run-up to the Crash. He pocketed $10.4 million from these trades, including $4 million from shorting the shares he drove up (after he drove them up) during the two-week period preceding the Crash. His justification for selling his own shares while Chase Securities was pushing customers to buy them was that the price was “ridiculously high.” He had, in effect, bet against all the other Chase shareholders who had trusted in his hype about the firm.
Another person who profited greatly from the financial crash was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy. The famous story, likely apocryphal but parroted by NPR, The Washington Post, PBS and any number of mainstream outlets, is that Kennedy, a savvy stock trader, knew the market was overheated when a random shoeshine boy gave him stock tips.
If this story is to be believed, Joe’s random interaction with a shoeshine boy in 1929 was one of the most profitable conversations of his life. Not only did Kennedy sell off most of his stock holdings shortly before the crash, he aggressively shorted the markets, meaning that while most of America—and much of the world—was plunged into one of the deepest and most prolonged financial crises in the history of the country, the Kennedy family flourished. In 1977, eight years after Joe’s death, the New York Timesestimated the family fortune to be somewhere between $300 and $500 million.
There are more than enough reasons to doubt that it was actually a brief chat with a shoeshine boy that led to Kennedy’s remarkable good fortune, however. The patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty had a reputation as an unscrupulous businessman, including the persistent allegations that he made his fortune in bootlegging during the Prohibition era. And so it was a shock to the nation when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to head the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.
Even the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Historical Society struggles to explain the choice. “Kennedy had profited handsomely from financial manipulation,” their website frankly admits, “but he understood keenly the need to balance the interests of the people with the imperatives of the financial markets.” For his part, when asked why he had tapped a well-known scoundrel like Kennedy to head such an agency, President Roosevelt is said to have replied: “Takes one to catch one.”
That the SEC, the “independent federal agency” tasked with regulating the markets, should have an admitted market manipulator as its first chair should not be surprising when the agency’s track record is examined. Time and again, the SEC has not just allowed market manipulation to take place, but actively facilitated it.
When the largest Ponzi scheme in market history, Bernie Madoff’s unbelievable $64.8 billion investment fraud scam, came to a crashing halt with his arrest in December of 2008, attention turned to the SEC. How could the agency, which had investigated Madoff’s investment firm multiple times, not have halted the scam earlier?
A subsequent Inspector General report made the scope of this “failure” even more unbelievable, finding that “between June 1992 and December 2008 when Madoff confessed, the SEC received six substantive complaints that raised significant red flags concerning Madoff’s hedge fund operations and should have led to questions about whether Madoff was actually engaged in trading.” After excoriating the agency for its incompetence time and again over the course of two decades of failed opportunities, the report concludes:
As the foregoing demonstrates, despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madofi’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme. Had these efforts been made with appropriate follow-up at any time beginning in June of 1992 until December 2008, the SEC could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme well before Madoff confessed.
HARRY MARKOPOLOS: I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.
Similarly, when Enron shook the markets in 2001 by declaring the then-largest bankruptcy in history after its systemic accounting fraud was exposed, the question of the SEC’s role in the scandal arose. Why had the agency not caught on to the scam? A subsequent Senate Committee report excoriated the commission, noting that the “watchdog” had only opened one (unrelated) investigation into Enron in the past decade, that it repeatedly missed warning signs of corporate misconduct, that it granted the company unusual leeway in using mark-to-market accounting for its transactions and did not even seek to validate the models employed by the energy giant. In the end, the committee concluded that the entire affair represented a “systemic and catastrophic failure” of the SEC.
But the SEC did not use the lessons learned in these “systemic and catastrophic failures” to stop such fraud from taking place in the future. In fact, the Commission responded to these “failures” not by stringently cracking down on these scams, but by helping to facilitate new kinds of untraceable accounting trickery.
In the wake of the signal “failures” of SEC and other regulators to prevent the scandalous accounting fraud and subsequent catastrophic failures of Enron, Worldcom and Tyco, the US Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a federal law intended to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes.” The nature of those “other purposes” soon became apparent as the devil emerged from the details of the software that promised to streamline the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process for companies operating in the new regulatory environment.
One of these software solutions was EmailXtender, an email archiving program designed to help companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements. The program was supposed to create a permanent record of emails so that auditors would be able to access all communications in the future, but, according to Richard Grove, who was working as a software salesman selling the program to prospective corporate clients, the program actually provided companies with a way to permanently and untraceably delete those records.
RICHARD GROVE: So a few weeks later in August of 2003 I was at a client called the NASD— which later changed its name so it’s now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—and the NASD was looking at our product and they wanted to use it internally. And one of the guys across the table says to me, “Hey, wait a minute. This product has a back door! Because right here where you’re supposed to take this information and put it on the write-once-read-many storage, which is a type of permanent storage,” he said, “There’s this jar file and you can delete the jar file and then there’s no evidence of that transaction whatsoever.”
So he was showing me across a table that there’s a loophole, there’s a back door in a software that allows nefarious transactions to go on and subsequently they didn’t buy the software they’re like, “This is bullshit, this isn’t worth the money. This is not what it’s supposed to be and you should do something about that.” Now, I had management from my side in the meeting so I went to my managers afterwards and I’m like, “What’s this all about and why what’s going on with this?” and I was told not to talk about it.
Concerned with the possibility for mass financial fraud that was being enabled by this software, Grove took his concerns to the SEC. But instead of acting on this information to launch an investigation into the company and the software, the SEC not only dismissed Grove’s warning, but went out and bought that very software for their own use.
RICHARD GROVE: Right now the SEC reports to the President. So at the end of the day when the SEC was telling me they’re not interested, they’re telling me they’re not interested because I’m tying the Bush administration in with billionaire Richard Egan and his company that’s helping these companies do this. Of course they don’t want to sponsor that getting out to the public.
I filed a lawsuit, I represented myself in court against a multi-billion dollar international corporation and after three years—and after proving my case in court, including the fact that the SEC acted with complicity to protect the perpetrators—my case was dismissed on a technicality. Recognizing that the events I proved in court actually happened but were conveniently “outside the statute of limitations for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.”
And once I understood the purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations was to keep these companies from deleting files and that the back door in the software allow these companies to delete files— and more importantly the fact that someone outside of the company that’s not even associated with the company but has access to that software could launder money or steal money or just delete money from corporations and switch financial records all around without anyone, any investigator, any auditor being able to audit that—those things I thought were interesting. But when the SEC, after I told them, bought the software with the back door in it and started to use it for itself then I knew that the SEC was not there to regulate like I thought it was. They were also, “Hey, we can find a benefit from this back door in a software. We can delete files now. Now we’re above the law!”
But of all the various schemes for manipulating the markets, none have been quite so brazen as the Plunge Protection Team.
Formally known as the “Working Group on Financial Markets,” the Plunge Protection Team, or PPT, was born in the wake of another stock market crash: Black Monday of October 1987. Far from a “conspiracy theory” or “internet rumour,” the formation of the group was announced in the pages of the Federal Register on March 22, 1988, which contained, on page 9421, the text of Executive Order 12631, a seemingly mundane announcement signed by President Reagan on March 18, 1988.
The order, citing “the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987,” goes on to establish a working group of the treasury secretary, the Fed chair, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It empowers the group to “consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible” and to report back to the president.
Hidden behind this innocuous-sounding rhetoric is an organization that has been at work for the last three decades, quietly but documentably intervening to prop up the markets whenever they start plunging—or even sagging.
The name “Plunge Protection Team” comes from a Washington Post article that ran under that headline in February 1997. In that piece, staff writer Brett D. Fromson revealed how the Working Group on Financial Markets (like “defense planners in the Cold War period”) war-game various market cataclysms and their response to them. One scenario Fromson described involves a large sell-off on a Monday morning after a week of tanking markets.
“The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange has called the White House chief of staff and asked permission to close the world’s most important stock market. [. . .] In the Oval Office, the president confers with the members of his Working Group on Financial Markets—the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The officials conclude that a presidential order to close the NYSE would only add to the market’s panic, so they decide to ride out the storm. The Working Group struggles to keep financial markets open so that trading can continue. By the closing bell, a modest rally is underway.”
The article acknowledged that each of the Plunge Protection Team’s constituent agencies (the treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC) have a “confidential plan” on file to deal with a market meltdown. But aside from trivial details (the SEC’s plan is called the “red book,” for example, after the color of the document’s cover) nothing of substance is revealed. How, exactly, do the agencies plan to “keep financial markets open so that trading can continue”?
A major clue to the PPT manipulation puzzle came in the form of a 1989 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert Heller, who was at the time exiting a three-year stint as Federal Reserve System governor. Entitled “Have Fed Support Stock Market, Too,” Heller’s op-ed argued that the so-called “circuit breakers” set up after the Black Monday 1987 scare were not sufficient to prevent another recurrence of panic. “Instead,” he opined, “an appropriate institution should be charged with the job of preventing chaos in the market: the Federal Reserve.” In Heller’s vision, the Fed could prevent a market rout by stepping in to purchase stock futures contracts during sell-offs.
Rather than regarding Heller’s piece as a mere op-ed offering a proposal for something the Fed could do in the future, however, some reporters—like John Crudele, the man who drew attention to Heller’s “proposal” in the first place—have suggested that the Wall Street Journal piece was in fact a trial balloon, preparing the public for the eventual revelation that the Fed was already intervening in the markets.
If Heller’s op-ed was a trial balloon, the full truth was finally revealed to the public in the wake of “the day that changed everything.” After all, if the PPT was ever going to intervene to prop up the markets, the pandemonium of 9/11 and the ensuing market sell-off presented them with the perfect opportunity to do so.
And so it was that George Stephanopolous appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 17, 2001, to blithely announce to the American public that their markets were a sham:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS: What I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets. [. . .] The Fed in 1989 created what is called the ‘Plunge Protection Team’—which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges—and they have been meeting informally so far. And they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally . . . I don’t know if you remember, but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long-Term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader, and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And they have plans in place to consider [doing] that [again] if the markets start to fall.
And, just like when it was calmly admitted in 2016 that the “record bull run” since 2008 had been a Federal Reserve-created mirage, the public was flat-out told in 2001 that the Fed would coordinate with the banks to interfere in the markets as needed. And in both cases, these revelations were promptly memory-holed and ignored in all future reporting of the market’s gyrations.
So what do the manipulations of the Plunge Protection Team actually look like?
On Monday, February 5, 2018, things were playing out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange much like the “nightmare scenario” painted in the 1997 Washington Post article by Fromson. After a 666-point decline the previous Friday, the Dow Jones was down a further 1,600 points on the day, as big a decline as the index had ever seen. . . . And then, miraculously, late in the afternoon “[s]omeone arbitrarily and aggressively started buying stocks and halved the loss.”
As John Crudele, the journalist that has been covering the PPT and its machinations for decades now, observed at the time:
Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear picture.
That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped.
The action in stocks on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.
For decades now, a similar scene has played out on days of dramatic market plunges. After an initial sell off, a late afternoon rally by a mystery buyer would reassure the markets and claw back the loss. Sometimes, the manipulation was so obvious it left literal straight lines in the charts. But still, no official word ever came from the Plunge Protection Team itself.
. . . until December 2018, that is. Ten months after Crudele called out the PPT’s actions to prop up the Dow Jones after its 1600 point plunge, then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin openly announced that he was calling on the Plunge Protection Team to “assure normal market operations” during a December stock slide that was on track to be the worst December in the US markets since 1930. As Forbes put it in their headline about the move: “Mnuchin Calls Plunge Protection Team; Stocks Soar One Day Later.” In the article, Forbes writer Adam Sarhan noted of the events following Mnuchin’s open call to the PPT:
“The market was closed on Tuesday for Christmas but stocks soared 1,000 points (the largest gain since the last bear market during the financial crisis) on Wednesday. Literally, the first day after that call was made. I can’t make this up.”
With a gift for understatement, Sarhan concludes that: “One important lesson investors can learn from the market action over the past decade is that the government plays a very important role.”
From crooked regulators to outright manipulation, from “failed” investigations to insider trading windfalls, the markets have been one big con job on the American public, and the people of the world, since their inception. In fact, there are many more examples of fraud, deception and manipulation that could be documented.
There is, for example, the testimony of Bill Murphy to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during a hearing on suppression of precious metal prices.
BART CHILTON: But can you give the Commission some specific evidence, some specific examples of how you think that’s occurring, when you think that’s occurring?
BILL MURPHY: Yes I can and I had 11 years worth of evidence that all hangs together here. But somebody came to my attention two days ago of a whistleblower nature that we’re going to handle hand to the press afterwards and we think it’s very important for the American public and this hearing to have this information.
On March 23rd, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. McGuire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metal trader in London. He has been told first hand by traders working for JPMorgan Chase, that JPM manipulates the precious metals markets and they brag how they make money doing so.
In November 2009, he contacted the CFTC Enforcement Division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way JPM signals to the markets its intentions to take down the precious metals. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals alongside JPM. Maguire explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, non-farm payroll data releases, and COMEX contract rollover, as well as ad-hoc events.
On February 3 he gave two days’ advance warning by email to Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5. Then on February 5, as it played out exactly as predicted, further e-mails were sent to Ramirez while the manipulation was in progress.
It would not be possible to predict such a market move unless the market was manipulated.
In an email on that day, Mr. Maguire wrote: “It is common knowledge here in London amongst the metals traders that it is JPM’s intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in the loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC [allowing] by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”
Or there was the 2010 Flash Crash, the harrowing 35-minute window from 2:32 PM to 3:07 PM on May 6, 2010, when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points . . . and then gained most of it back. The incredible and unprecedented swing left traders and financial talking heads completely stymied, but after five years of relentless investigation, the Department of Justice presented the man that they framed as the arch-mastermind that set off the most alarming collapse-and-recovery in the history of the markets: a day trader living in his parent’s house in Hounslow.
NARRATOR: 15 minutes of chaos that shook the world’s biggest markets.
NEWS ANCHOR: What the heck is going on down there?
REPORTER: I don’t know. There is fear. This is capitulation, really.
LIAM VAUGHN: On May 6th, 2010, without warning, the U.S. stock market and futures markets just crashed.
REPORTER: It can’t be there. That is not a real price.
ANCHOR: The flash crash, which wiped a trillion dollars off the value of American companies in five minutes. . . .
LIAM VAUGHN: To look at a price chart, it looked like a kind of runaway elephant.
ANCHOR: It took authorities five years, guys, to track down this lone British trader, allegedly involved in a 2010 flash crash.
REPORTER: Navinder Singh Sarao, dubbed the hound of Hounslow, has been accused of manipulating the market.
REPORTER: U.S. regulators claim he made about $40 Million
Despite the fact that multipleprofessors, mainstream newspapers and even a former rogue trader himself all testified to the impossibility that the incredible rollercoaster of the Flash Crash was really caused by the “spoofing” antics of a lone trader, the story was effectively shelved and the underlying issue of the algorithmically-driven High Frequency Trading—which involves bots performing large numbers of orders in fractions of a second and requires traders to pay millions of dollars to co-locate their servers with the exchanges’ computers to give them a head start on their competitors that is measured in milliseconds—was never addressed.
Or there was the insider trading scandal of 2020, when multiple senators were probed for insider trading after being briefed by the senate’s health and foreign affairs committees about the likely effects of the coronavirus scare in the US.
JESSICA SMITH: Yeah, Adam, several senators are facing criticism this morning after reports that they sold stock after being briefed about the coronavirus. But before the market started tanking, four senators are said to have made trades. But two in particular are facing a lot of criticism.
The first is Senator Richard Burr. ProPublica reports on February 13th he sold between $628,000 to $1.7 million dollars worth of stock in 33 separate transactions. He is the chairman of the Senate Intel committee and he was getting daily briefings about the coronavirus at that time according to Reuters. So there are a lot of questions about why he made those trades.
In fact, there are many, many such examples of market rigging, insider trading and manipulation of stock and commodity prices for the benefit of the bankers and their political allies that could be detailed, not just in the US markets, but in markets around the world. But such an exhaustive list would be, by this point, unnecessary. The markets are rigged, and that rigging is pervasive and systemic.
So it should come as no surprise that the GameStop pandemonium began when it was observed that another common method of market manipulation was taking place on GameStop’s stock: naked shorting.
Naked shorting involves traders taking advantages of loopholes and discrepancies in paper and electronic trading systems to short shares that don’t even exist. In this case, hedge funds, convinced that the flailing gaming retailer was going to go the way of BlockBuster Video and seeing the December 2020 reports of operating losses, began aggressively shorting the stock. By the time the “wallstreetbets” community on reddit discovered the naked shorting operation, the hedge funds were already 140% short on shares of GameStop, meaning that 40% more stock was being sold short than even existed.
This led to the massive short squeeze in January, with redditors and other retail investors buying up shares in GameStop and running up the stock price, forcing the hedge funds to buy up stock to cover their shorts and exposing them to billions of dollars in losses.
But that was only the beginning of the revelations of market rigging in the GameStop saga. The remarkable squeeze was brought to an abrupt halt when Robinhood—the electronic trading platform that burst on the scene in 2014 promising to “democratize the stock market” with its zero-commission trading app—stopped trading on GameStop and other wallstreetbets-driven trades like AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry and Nokia. The official explanation for the trading halt—that Robinhood had to suspend trading in the stocks until it could increase its collateral with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—merely underlines the point that the average mom-and-pop investor will continue to be thwarted from trading while the massive hedge funds and market makers with direct access to the markets will always be able to cover their positions in the event of any popular, “democratic” market activity.
This point was further underlined when yet another aspect of the retail investing scam was revealed: payment for order flow, or PFOF, in which hedge funds pay retail brokerages for access to their customers’ trades. With this information, hedge funds can not only buy orders before they are processed and flip the trade back to the market, pocketing the spread between the buy and sell price, but they can front run orders, effectively cutting in front of the brokerages’ clients to buy hot stocks before the retail investors. As it turns out, Robinhood made nearly $700 million selling their clients’ trade data to the big hedge funds in 2020 alone.
Nor was it a surprise when it was learned that Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, was paid over $800,000 in speaking fees by Citadel LLC which operates both Citadel—a hedge fund that provided a $2 billion emergency backstop for GameStop short seller Melvin Capital—and Citadel Securities—”a market maker that handles about 40% of U.S. retail stock order flow, including from brokerages like free-trading app Robinhood.” When asked whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising the president on the GameStop situation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that she wouldn’t, saying that Yellen was an expert and that she deserved the money.
REPORTER: . . . And I had a follow-up on the markets and everything that’s happening with GameStop. You did mention, I believe yesterday, that the treasury secretary is monitoring the situation and she’s, kind of, on top of it. There have been some kind of concerns about her previous engagements with Citadel and speaking fees that she has received from Citadel. Are there any plans to have her recuse herself from advising the President on GameStop and the whole Robinhood situation?
PSAKI: Well, just to be clear, what I said was that we have—the treasury secretary is now confirmed. Obviously, we have a broad economic team. The SEC put out a statement yesterday that I referred to. But I don’t think I have anything more for you on it, other than to say, separate from the GameStop issue, the secretary of treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office.
The entire affair grew even more absurd when internet researchers discovered that Jen Psaki’s relative, Jeff Psaki, himself worked for Citadel. The “fact checkers” at Newsweek were quick to rule the story as false, however, not because Psaki’s relative did not in fact work for Citadel, but because “a source close to Jeff” told Newsweek that “Jen and Jeff Psaki are distant second cousins but have no relationship.”
Whatever further twists and turns the GameStop saga takes, the conclusion is foregone: the “little people” may be able to get one past the goalkeepers of the manipulated markets here and there, but those deviations from the standard will always return to the status quo. In the end, the hedge funds and their billions will be protected while the little guy will be misinformed, steered down blind alleys, panicked, tricked into investing in bubbles, and, ultimately, fleeced for the benefit of the financial vultures and their bought-and-paid-for politicians and regulatory friends.
At last the David and Goliath story that has been woven around the GameStop insurrection is revealed for what it is: a story, a fable, a convenient narrative to trick the public back into the phoney, manipulated markets to once again take their place at the casino table. It is designed to trick people into thinking that this time they’ll be able to win against the house. But that is not how a casino works. In the central-bank inflated, derivatives-laden mystery markets of Wall Street, the games are rigged, the dice is loaded, and the house always wins in the end.
None of this is surprising to those who have known for decades that the markets are rigged. But every generation needs to see the deception play out in real time to understand just how deep and pervasive the systemic rot is. From this point on, those who have experienced the effects of this deception only have to answer one question: Are you going to continue to play Wall Street’s rigged game, or are you going to take your chips off the table and invest in local businesses and projects with the people on Main Street?
If you were online last year around this time, your social media timeline was likely flooded with an endless stream of stories and memes featuring bats.
The coronavirus was just gaining steam back in January of 2020 and rumors were swirling that the virus started because Chinese people ate “bat soup.”
While most of the bat-themed stories and memes were outlandish, the Worldwide Health Organization (WHO) did admit that Covid-19 and bats are most likely ancestrally linked. However, that’s where they say the connection ends. WHO still claims the origins of Covid-19 remain a mystery.
Until now…
A bombshell investigative report from Fox News host Steve Hilton has shed all-new light on the origins of Covid-19, and according to the report, it has nothing to do with bat soup and everything to do with Dr. Fauci and ferrets.
Yes, ferrets.
Ferrets are those adorable-looking furry little weasels that many Americans keep as pets… and Dr. Fauci is that annoying little weasel Americans can’t get rid of.
And when these two weasels finally came together inside a research lab in Wuhan, China, something unthinkable occurred — a deadly and destructive pandemic was created and unleashed upon the world.
That’s what Steve Hilton is claiming in his new investigation into the origin of the Coronavirus pandemic.
However, the story of Covid-19 doesn’t start in Wuhan, China. It actually began about ten years ago in a Netherlands research lab.
An innovative epidemiological study took place at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. Researchers were looking to discover different ways respiratory viruses reacted in humans. Scientists used ferrets in their study because ferrets have similar pulmonary structures to humans, with well-developed respiratory bronchioles and submucosal glands.
Specifically, researchers wanted to know if a non-airborne virus could be mutated in order to become a contagious airborne disease.
So, in order to find this out, researchers injected the ferrets with a flu virus and after a series of tests, they discovered that yes, non-airborne viruses could be manipulated to become much stronger and spread via respiratory droplets.
The findings were groundbreaking and this study paved the way for an entirely new type of scientific genomics research called “gain-of-function.”
The point of gain-of-function research was to replicate in a lab what had been done with the ferrets in the Netherlands — to take a virus and manipulate and mutate it to make it “stronger” in order to see if it will “gain new function.”
On the surface, it sounds a bit ghoulish and almost “Frankenstein-like,” but imagine the advances medical research could make in the field of virus testing and vaccines simply by recreating these viruses in a lab.
Gain-of-function research was based on the philosophy, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
However, when you keep your enemies that close, you run the risk of getting burned.
Creating these ungodly strong and highly contagious viruses for research purposes could lead to an accidental or nefarious catastrophe of epic proportions.
But even so, and despite the danger, many in the scientific community believed the potential for progress outweighed the tremendous risks involved.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of those people.
The gain-of-function research quickly spread to labs all over the world and the money was flowing in from all corners of the globe, including the United States.
According to a Newsweek piece written in 2019, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Fauci-led National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), committed $3.7 million dollars to research bats and coronaviruses in China over a six-year period.
It’s worth noting that in the Newsweek piece US intelligence backtracked from their earlier claims that the coronavirus outbreak occurred “naturally,” and conceded that the pandemic “might” have started from a leak in the Wuhan lab.
But this new research wasn’t just about bats. It went deeper and darker than that. As a matter of fact, Dr. Fauci was among the first to fund the controversial gain-of-function ferret research in Wuhan, China. Fauci was so committed to the controversial work that back in 2011 he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, entitled, “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking,” where he vigorously defended gain-of-function research.
But something very interesting took place right before Obama’s moratorium on gain-of-function took effect.
Dr. Fauci had commissioned a study to assess the risk of new coronaviruses emerging from wild animals. Fauci wanted to see what viruses could infect animals and humans. The directive behind the research and written in the project summary was gain-of-function manipulation.
But the Obama admin was getting cold feet about the program.
While many in the scientific community (like Fauci) were very excited by gain-of-function research, the more popular it became, the more scrutiny it received, and significant security issues were being raised. Eventually, the controversy got to be too much and in 2014 the United States pulled the plug.
NPR reported that the Obama administration was concerned about any research that could make the viruses more dangerous, so they wanted to stop and review studies to see if they could make these germs capable of causing more disease or spreading easily through the air.
Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, thereby enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, informing public health and preparedness efforts, and furthering medical countermeasure development. Gain-of-function studies may entail biosafety and biosecurity risks; therefore, the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research must be evaluated, both in the context of recent U.S. biosafety incidents and to keep pace with new technological developments, in order to determine which types of studies should go forward and under what conditions.
In light of recent concerns regarding biosafety and biosecurity, effective immediately, the U.S. Government (USG) will pause new USG funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, MERS or SARS viruses, as defined below. This research funding pause will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new USG gain-of-function research policy 1 . Restrictions on new funding will apply as follows: New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity. [PHE.gov]
But Dr. Fauci didn’t stop funding gain-of-function.
That little weasel kept digging…
Fauci kept the research alive by cleverly subcontracting the work out to a New York group called Eco-Health Alliance, led by Zoologist Peter Daszak. Daszak’s claim to fame is discovering the link between bats and SARS.
Fauci paid the three-plus-million dollars to Eco-Health Alliance and the research continued.
But here’s the wildest part…
According to Steve Hilton’s bombshell report, Eco-Health then turned around and subcontracted the gain-of-function portion of Fauci’s research back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Hilton says the paperwork from Wuhan has a “reference number” attached that leads directly back to the funds Fauci paid to Eco-Health Alliance.
All roads lead back to Wuhan, and Fauci is driving the car.
It’s no secret that Fauci funded the Wuhan lab, there’s been a lot of reporting on his “general funding.” However, Steve Hilton’s bombshell report uncovered gory details about the specific work that was being done which nobody has reported on thus far.
According to the Wuhan paperwork that Mr. Hilton downloaded, the lab collected bat feces from a cave in China and discovered many cases of novel Coronavirus in the samples. Researchers analyzed and sequenced their genetic information, then built new viruses off of those samples and infected human cells with them. That research revealed that their man-made viruses could actually behave exactly like a natural virus.
But it’s what researchers unlocked that is the most terrifying of all.
According to the report, the lab’s creation and research of the virus unlocked a very specific “gateway” into the human body. And even more curious and creepy is that the Covid-19 virus that we’re dealing with today has those exact same gateway characteristics.
Do you believe in coincidences? I don’t…
The Covid-19 virus sticks to cells 10-20 times stronger than the SARS virus did, and this is what makes Covid-19 so incredibly contagious.
Take a look at what happens when Covid enters the body:
Coronavirus enters the body through the nose, mouth, or eyes. Once inside the body, it goes inside healthy cells and uses the machinery in those cells to make more virus particles. When the cell is full of viruses, it breaks open. This causes the cell to die and the virus particles can go on to infect more cells.
The viruses created during the Wuhan research are not exactly the same as the Covid-19 virus we’re dealing with today. However, as Mr. Hilton points out, the research that was done confirmed that Covid-19 could be manufactured in a lab using the same techniques that were developed in Dr. Fauci’s project.
In addition, Fauci’s project continued for another three years.
Today’s Covid virus is different than any other “natural” virus we’ve seen in the past. Natural viruses become more contagious over time as they naturally mutate, but today’s virus already had that feature “built-in” right out of the gate.
The paperwork from Dr. Fauci’s project explains how researchers swapped viruses from bats and other animals in order to make more infectious viruses to study.
And even more curious was what Chinese Virologisst Shi Zhengli said — she explained that the “backbone” of this Covid-19 virus matches other man-made viruses from the Wuhan lab library.
According to Steve Hilton, experts say that Covid-19 looks like two different strains from bats, and another unidentified animal… possibly the ferret again?
The question is this — can something like Covid-19 happen naturally? And if so, why does it look and act so similarly to man-made viruses from just a few years before, many of which are from Dr. Fauci’s personal disease vault?
More coincidences? They’re really piling up now.
I don’t believe in coincidences, but I also don’t know how Covid came to be or how it was unleashed on the world. But I do think that Steve Hilton’s investigation is the most in-depth and compelling that we’ve seen thus far. It definitely puts Fauci in the thick of things in a very precarious way, and it opens the door to a lot more questions.
Personally, I find it very hard to believe that all of this groundbreaking research was going on without Obama’s knowledge. He’s a man that loves to “weaponize” things. That’s what his entire legacy consists of — weaponized IRS, Intel, and media.
Was Dr. Fauci hiding the research from Obama, or were Obama and Dr. Fauci hiding the research from everyone else? And after all of this information we just digested, is it so far-fetched to ask if Dr. Fauci’s project and research were used later for something horribly nefarious in order to regain power?
Or was everything just one big coincidence?
All good questions and the American people deserve answers.
This is the video that outed Dr. Fauci’s gain-of-function research, and right now, everything he’s worked for hinges on whether or not Americans see this video and demand answers. If that happens, Fauci is likely done for.
ALL THE EVIDENCE.
FAUCI MONEY / ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE / GAIN OF FUNCTION VIRUS RESEARCH / WUHAN INSTITUTE.
All the cover ups, even the reason for the Mink cull. All here. Steve Hilton investigates origins of COVID-19, links to US commissioned research. https://t.co/xI7Gq7m6gG
It’s been an open secret, ever since Dr. Michael Mann used “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “hide the decline” by covering up some inconvenient tree ring data in the hockey stick climate graph, that climate alarmists will go to almost any length to only show the public the “crisis side” of climate data.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. However, after making that entire dataset public for decades, now, in a blatant act of cherry picking, NIFC “disappeared” a portion of it, and only show data from 1983. You can see it here.
Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and the entire dataset is preserved on the Internet Wayback machine and other places, despite NIFC’s ham-handed attempt to disappear the data.
Why would they do this you ask? The answer is simple; data prior to 1983 shows that U.S. wildfires were far worse both in frequency and total acreage burned. By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset, now all of the sudden we get a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperature, which is perfect for claiming “climate change is making wildfire worse.” See figure 1 below for a before and after comparison of what the data looks like when you plot it.
Figure 1: Comparison of the before and after erasure NIFC dataset showing acres burned. The blue trend line goes from a negative trend to a positive one when cherry picked data is used.
Clearly, wildfires were far worse in the past, and clearly, now the data tells an entirely different story when showing only data post-1983. The new story told by the sanitized data is in alignment with the irrational screeching of climate alarmists that “wildfires are driven by climate change”.
This wholesale erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s narrative control culture that wants to rid us of anything that might be inconvenient or doesn’t fit the “woke” narrative, it isn’t surprising.
Interestingly, the history on the Internet Wayback Machine shows how NIFC rationalized this erasure of important public data.
Back in June 2011 when this data was first presented by NIFC publicly, it was simply presented “as-is”. They say only this:
Figures prior to 1983 may be revised as NICC verifies historical data.
In 2018, they added a new caveat, saying this:
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
According to the Internet Wayback Machine, that caveat first appeared on the NIFC data page somewhere between January 14 and March 7 of 2018.
It seems they received some blowback from the idea that their data, when plotted, clearly showed wildfires to be far worse in the past, completely blowing the global-warming-climate-change-wildfire connection out of the water.
Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.
Not only is that a lie of omission, it is ridiculous. Their agenda seems very clear. When the data was first published, they only advised the public that some data prior to 1983 might be “… revised as NICC verifies historical data”.
There was no published concern that the data might be invalid, or that we shouldn’t use it. Besides, the data is very simple; a count of the number of fires and the number of acres burned. How hard is that to compile and verify as accurate?
What’s worse is that this data has been trusted for decades in almost every news story about any wildfire that ever occurred in the U.S. In virtually every news story about a wildfire, the number of acres burned it THE NUMBER the press uses in the story, without it, there is no scale of the severity of the fire. Similarly, for every story about “what a bad wildfire season we’ve had”, the press cites the number of fires as well as the acreage burned.
And now, after decades of that data being provided to the press and the public, and nearly a decade of NIFC making it publicly available on their website, they want us to believe that it is now unreliable data?
Seriously, just how hard is it to count the number of fires that have happened and the number of acres burned?
What NIFC is doing is essentially labeling every firefighter, every fire captain, every forester, and every smoke jumper who has fought wildfires for decades as being untrustworthy in their assessment and measurement of this critical, yet very simple fire data. I’ll take data from people on the fire scene over government bureaucratic doublespeak every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
This whole affair is outrageous. But what is even more outrageous is that NIFC isn’t at all transparent as to the reason for the change. They essentially say “The data prior to 1983 is no good, trust us”. There is no citation of a study, no methodology given, no rationale for the removal. That’s not science, that’s not statistics, that’s not even sensible, but that is what is happening.
Plotting the entire NIFC dataset (before it was partially disappeared) gives us some hints as to why this has been done, and how wildfire and weather patterns have been inextricably linked for decades. Note figure 2 below, combining the number of fires and number of acres burned. See the annotations that I have added.
Figure 2: Plot of the entire NIFC wildfire dataset, with acreage burned in amber, and total number of fires in a given year in blue. Annotations show major weather events in the U.S.
Clearly, what NIFC has done by saying data prior to 1983 is “unreliable” and disappearing it is not just hiding important fire history, but cherry picking a data starting point that is the lowest in the entire record to ensure that an upwards trend exists from that point.
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.
And by choosing the lowest point in the record for total fires, 1983, and making all data prior to that unavailable, NIFC ensures that any comparison between fires and climate change over the last 38 years always shows an upward trend and correlation with rising temperature.
It seems to me that NIFC very likely caved to pressure from climate activists to disappear this inconvenient data. By erasing the past data, NIFC has become untrustworthy. This erasure is not just unscientific, it’s dishonest and possibly fraudulent.
For posterity, the entire dataset from NIFC (including pre-1983) is available here in an Excel (.xlsx) file:
Big thanks to Geoffrey Kell who sent me this to share – four OUR CHILDREN.
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TIME after time, we hear the following lament from lockdown sceptics: ‘I’ve looked into data on Covid and the lockdown and it’s clear that government measures have been wildly disproportionate, but my relatives refuse to look at the data or listen to reasonable argument. Why?’
The answer seems to be partly temperament, partly historical.
The state and its proxies
As Gawain Towler reported in TCW yesterday, researchers discovered that lockdown sceptics are more likely to assess data critically, want to examine sources and are resistant to mass-media narratives. (Incidentally, the report writers considered these traits to be bad.) This tells us that the less inquisitive tend to accept arguments from authority with fewer (or no) doubts. Since 1945, with the comforting (or suffocating) mantra ‘from cradle to grave’, the British people have been lulled into complacency. They expected the state to educate, police, care for them, treat their health, pension them and bury them. Over decades, responding to the British state with such trust has been deleterious to the nation (as distinct from the state) by loosening bonds within nation, family and community, but it has not necessarily been dangerous to individuals. Today, under Covid lockdown, the state’s imposition of forced isolation and idleness – and its campaign of fearmongering – reveals the state’s reckless disregard for individuals’ welfare.
Exactly when the state transitioned from being essentially benign to mainly malign depends on your perspective. Peter Hitchens might state that it became irreversible in 1997 with the election of Blair’s Labour Party or with the adoption of progressivism by David Cameron around 2009. Perhaps the slippage towards serfdom was inherent in the Fabian principles of 1945. Regardless, years of Blair’s invasive paternalism and Tory reluctance to let go of the levers of nudge politics and social behaviourism paved the way for the hysterical safetyism of Covid lockdown.
Things change. The British state is not what it was; the BBC is no longer the respected broadcaster which attempted to be impartial and inclusive; the Sun and the Daily Telegraph cannot be described as politically or socially conservative – nor can the Anglican Church or the Conservative Party, complete with the globalist slogan of ‘build back better’. The frog has well and truly been boiled, incrementally. Supposed beacons of conservativism, tradition and neutrality have been in the hands of progressives and activists for some time now.
Where government ends and private corporations begin is unclear. The massive sums pumped into newspapers and broadcasters to advertise lockdown promulgations and spread fear propaganda has kept newspapers solvent. The press is now an arm of government, as seen in its near-universal support for the principles of lockdown and mask-wearing. Small firms were closed while giant ones stayed open; no one could buy shoes from a shop but they could order them via Amazon. Government-enforced suppression of market competition led to a massive wealth transfer to mega corporations. Meanwhile, Big Tech suppresses criticism of Covid measures.
Corporate partners do the bidding of the government not simply due to pressure or money: civil servants and corporate management share outlooks and goals. There is no conspiracy per se, just a convergence of interests and outlooks. The managerial elite of the civil service, police, judiciary, NHS, schools, universities, major political parties, the Church of England, mainstream press, NGOs and mega corporations see the British population as in need of their stewardship.
Lessons from behind the Iron Curtain
I lived in the territory of the former GDR and often talked to Germans about their experiences of communism. They told me there was an official culture (where everyone knew what the acceptable line was) and an informal culture (where one could tell the truth among friends). Of course, in a state riddled with informants, one could never be entirely sure of one’s safety, but the evident falsity of claims made by the state and the failure of socialism (except for the senior Party members) showed anyone who wanted to apply objectivity that they lived in a system that was both hostile and crumbling. They knew that schools and the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation were for the benefit not of children but of the Party. They understood that the state was lying to them and that the media could not be trusted.
Our sense of normality is established between the ages of 15 and 25. So if you ask someone in their 60s about the probity of the BBC, they will be reaching back to the 1970s or 1980s to recall not facts but how they felt. That BBC is long gone but it is painful to admit such a loss. In Britain, older people, authoritarian-inclined individuals and youngsters fired by idealism view the state and its adjuncts as essentially beneficial. To admit that, as in the GDR, the state works for its own interests above ours is a difficult pill to swallow. Many compatriots and family members close their eyes and ears in an attempt to deny the frightening possibility that authorities in which they have placed their faith do not care about their welfare and are prepared to impose arbitrary, ineffective and cruel policies.
We need to treat all arms of the British state with the suspicion that residents of the GDR had for their state. We must withhold our trust until it has been earned by anyone in a position of power.
To use an old cliché, “the cat is out of the bag.”
For perhaps the first time since the COVID Plandemic started at the beginning of 2020, Americans who get most of their information solely through the corporate media, which is heavily funded by Big Pharma, got a dose of reality on just what exactly has been going on for the past 16 months or so, thanks to Tucker Carlson, and his 45-minute interview with Dr. Peter McCullough last week on his “Tucker Carlson Today” show on Fox News.
Dr. Peter McCullough is well-known to most Health Impact News readers, as we have featured his testimony before the Texas Senate as well as the U.S. Congress in previous articles. See:
Viewers of this Fox Network program learned that there is, in fact, a worldwide conspiracy to suppress effective treatments for COVID patients in favor of experimental COVID injections.
To be sure, neither Tucker nor Dr. McCullough used the politically explosive term “conspiracy,” but they used other terms that communicate the exact same thing.
Dr. McCullough, for example, throughout the interview when referring to why other doctors and health agencies were not educating the public about effective early treatments that have been proven to save lives, used the term “group think,” and kept saying that “something is up” worldwide, to the point where Tucker kept pressing him to state why he thought this was happening.
Dr. McCullough eventually replied: “This is the goal of investigative reporters to figure out.”
Because to discuss the “why” this is happening was not the focus of this interview, and would have led to discussions about Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, their ties to eugenics and establishing a New World Order, etc. – topics beyond the expertise of Dr. McCullough.
To his credit, however, Dr. McCullough did allude to some of these things by bringing up the Nuremburg Code, and how doctors today are violating it.
But this interview was focused clearly on one single question: Why is nobody discussing COVID treatment protocols outside of the new experimental “vaccines”?
And Tucker was brilliant in this interview.
First, he chose the correct person to discuss this, Dr. Peter McCullough.
Dr. Peter McCullough is a consultant cardiologist and Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX. He is a Principal Faculty in internal medicine for the Texas A & M University Health Sciences Center.
Dr. McCullough is an internationally recognized authority on the role of chronic kidney disease as a cardiovascular risk state with over 1000 publications and over 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine.
He is the most published scientist in the history of his field.
Anyone in the corporate media who wants to now label Dr. McCullough as a “quack” will be basically shooting themselves in the foot.
Dr. McCullough is not anti-vaxx, and neither is Tucker Carlson.
When you watch this interview, you will see two people who have been educated to believe in the medical system, but who obviously see that something is not right with the way the entire world has responded to COVID, where hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have died needlessly, because they were told to go home with COVID-19, because there was no treatment for it, when in fact there were successful treatments.
That lie has now been exposed to MILLIONS of people worldwide, thanks to the audience of Tucker Carlson.
People have asked me why Tucker Carlson is all of a sudden telling the truth about the COVID Plandemic, and if he is “controlled opposition.”
I don’t think so, after watching this interview. I think he is like the many other honest doctors in the field of medicine, like Dr. McCullough, who although they believe in vaccines and pharmaceutical products, recognize that there are evil people with evil intentions running this COVID show, and their consciences will no longer allow them to be silent.
Tucker Carlson has one of the highest rated shows on Cable TV. He is obviously putting his own career on the line to expose this, choosing to follow the truth wherever it leads, no matter what it is going to cost him.
One of things that impressed me the most about this interview, was that even though Fox News is mostly a Right Wing/Conservative/Republican platform, partisan politics NEVER entered the discussion. Just good, solid journalism.
This is a NON-PARTISAN issue that affects EVERYONE!
Students looking forward to getting back to college are getting letters from 100 to 200 colleges notifying them of a new prerequisite: getting fully vaccinated against COVID-19. As one letter states, this is because of our “our continued desire to protect the health and safety of our community.” This includes high-risk individuals in the surrounding community or wherever the students go in the “mass migration” at the end of the semester, according to the American College Health Association (ACHA).
The main purpose of the requirement is not to protect the students themselves. Of all COVID deaths, only about 0.1% have been in 15-to-24-year-olds. Yet young people can suffer death or serious disability after getting the jab. (Authorities point out that it is not necessarily because of the jab.) According to a controversial independent analysis, the aggressive Israeli vaccination campaign killed more than 200 times as many young persons as the coronavirus itself could have killed during the same 35-week period.
One of the commenters on the ACHA’s recommendation wrote: “It is perfectly reasonable for a society to expect its members, *all* of its members, to take up such risks on behalf of everyone. Unless you plan on putting a bullet in your own head on your thirty ninth birthday, one day *you* will be that elderly person who benefits disproportionately from universal vaccination. To not accept that risk now, yet expect that protection later, would make you a hypocrite.”
So much for the parental instinct to protect children—instead of using or sacrificing them!
We do not know the precise number of post-vaccine “adverse events,” because of incomplete reporting, or the percentage that were caused by the jab and not coincidental. But one can see the number and types of events reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) or the more user-friendly British Yellow Card system. These include death, clotting or bleeding problems, paralysis, blindness, and miscarriages (213 in VAERS as of today).
The long-term adverse events cannot yet be known. The prospect of most concern to the young women calling our office is infertility. There is no evidence that the products currently available cause infertility. And also no evidence that they don’t. There are plausible reasons to worry. Viral spike protein has been found in placentas from mothers who gave birth after having COVID. And the spike protein itself, without any virus, can attach to the lining of blood vessels and many tissues, and even cross the blood-brain barrier, and wreak havoc.
Getting your own body to make spike protein is what these genetically engineered products do.
Concerning fertility, the one relevant animal experiment, in 1,273 Sprague-Dawley rats, showed a numerically lower pregnancy rate, but within the facility’s historical range. The rats were not injected in early pregnancy when organs are forming, to check for birth defects.
There are thousands of reports of menstrual irregularities, though these are not officially recognized as side effects, and many things including anxiety can affect the menstrual cycle. There are worries disseminated in social media but debunked by fact-checkers that menstrual problems and other effects can result from contacts with vaccinated persons.
The vaccine-induced spike proteins are supposed to stay attached to your cells and cause your body to make antibodies that will recognize the virus. Can they be shed into the environment and picked up by others by contact or inhalation? I don’t know of a mechanism. But it seems odd to me that the Pfizer experimental trials not only excluded women who were or might soon become pregnant, but also required men to abstain or use a condom for 28 days post injection. Just FDA bureaucracy and “abundance of caution”?
There is no abundance of caution in forcing this product onto students entering their prime reproductive years. No concern about “reproductive rights.”
It is unlawful to use coercion to gain acceptance of products available only through an Emergency Use Authorization, but colleges are confident of quick FDA approval, even though trials won’t be complete until 2022 or 2023.
So, what can students do? Be cheerful or reluctant participants in a massive uncontrolled experiment and hope for the best? Seek an exemption? Or pause their education plans—and outrageous tuition?
There are “help wanted” signs everywhere. For learning, there are libraries, and more on-line opportunities will spring up. A college degree may be unnecessary or can wait. The biological window for having a family will close. How much risk of infertility should young people take?
With the exception of the impending departure of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse. The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack. Blinken initiated the acrimonious exchange when he cited “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.” He then threatened “I said that the United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be” before adding “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re reengaged with our allies and partners. I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government is taking.”
The Chinese Foreign Minister responded sharply, rejecting U.S. suggestions that it has a right to interfere in another country’s domestic policies, “I think we thought too well of the United States, we thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols. The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image, and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.” Yi had a point. Ironically, most of the world believes that the U.S. represents a greater threat to genuine democracy than does either China or Russia.
In another more recent interview Blinken has accused the Chinese of acting “more aggressively abroad” while President Biden has claimed that Beijing has a plan to replace America as the world’s leading economic and military power. U.S. United Nations envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield has also delivered the same message that Washington is preparing to take no prisoners, pledging to push back against what she called China’s “authoritarian agenda” through the various agencies that make up the UN bureaucracy. Indeed, the United States seems trapped in its own rhetoric, finding itself in the middle of a situation with China and Taiwan where warnings that Beijing is preparing to use force to recover its former province leave Washington with few options to support a de facto ally. Peter Beinart in a recent op-ed observes how the White House has been incrementally increasing its diplomatic ties with Taiwan even as it both declares itself “rock solid” on defending while also maintaining “strategic ambiguity.”
China understands its interests while the U.S. continues to be bewildered by Beijing’s successful building of trade alliances worldwide. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, reputedly an excellent chess player, is able to think about genuine issues in three dimensions and is always at least four moves ahead of where Biden and his advisers are at any time. Biden public and video appearances frequently seem to be improvisations as he goes along guided by his teleprompter while Putin is able to explain issues clearly, apparently even in English.
A large part of Biden’s problem vis-à-vis both China and Russia is that he has inherited a U.S. Establishment view of foreign and national security policy options. It is based on three basic principles. First, that America is the only superpower and can either ignore or comfortably overcome the objections of other nations to what it is doing. Second, an all-powerful and fully resourced United States can apply “extreme pressure” to recalcitrant foreign governments and those regimes will eventually submit and comply with Washington’s wishes. And third, America has a widely accepted leadership role of the so-called “free world” which will mean that any decision made in Washington will immediately be endorsed by a large number of other nations, giving legitimacy to U.S. actions worldwide.
What Joe Biden actually thinks is, of course, unknown though he has a history of reflexively supporting an assertive and even belligerent foreign policy during his many years in Congress. Kamala Harris, who many believe will be succeeding Biden before too long, appears to have no definitive views at all beyond the usual Democratic Party cant of spreading “democracy” and being strong on Israel. That suggests that the real shaping of policy is coming from the apparatchik and donor levels in the party, to include the neocon-lite Zionist triumvirate at the State Department consisting of Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Kagan as well as the upper-level bureaucracies at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, which all support an assertive and also interventionist foreign policy to keep Americans “safe” while also increasing their budgets annually. Such thinking leaves little room for genuine national interests to surface.
Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken is, for example, the perfect conformist bureaucrat, shaping his own views around established thinking and creating caveats to provide the Democratic Party leadership with some, though limited, options. Witness for example the current White House attitude towards Iran, which is regarded, along with Russia, as a permanent enemy of the United States. President Biden has expressed his interest in renegotiating a non-nuclear proliferation treaty with the Iranians, now being discussed by diplomats without direct contact in Austria. But Blinken undercuts that intention by wrapping the talks in with other issues that are intended to satisfy the Israelis and their friends in Congress that will make progress unlikely if not impossible. They include eliminating Iran’s alleged role as a regional trouble maker and also ending the ballistic missile development programs currently engaged in by the regime. The downside to all of this is that having a multilateral agreement to limit Iranian enhancement of uranium up to a bomb-making level is very much in the U.S. interest, but it appears to be secondary to other politically motivated side discussions which will derail the process.
A foreign and national security policy based on political dogma rather than genuine interests can obviously generate some disconnects, unlike in Russia or China, where redlines and national interests are clearly understood and acted upon. To cite yet another dangerous example of playing with fire that one is witnessing in Eastern Europe, the simple understanding that for Russia Belarus and Ukraine are frontline states that could pose existential threats to Moscow if they were to move closer to the west and join NATO appears to be lacking. The U.S. prefers to stand the question on its head and claims that the real issue is “spreading democracy,” which it is not. Policy makers in Washington might consider what Washington would likely do if Mexico and Canada were to be threatened with foreign interference that might bring about their joining a military alliance hostile to the United States.
The American Establishment-driven foreign policy thinking clearly has trouble in accommodating the obvious understanding that the U.S. actually becomes more vulnerable every time it interferes in China’s trade practices or gives the green light for alliances like NATO to expand. Expansion of the national security policy components often brings in another client state that rarely has anything whatsoever to contribute and which, on the contrary, becomes a burden, relying for their own security on overstretched American military resources. In return, the expansion itself guarantees that a hostile and genuinely threatened Russia will take steps of its own to counter what it sees as a potential grave threat to its own security and national identity.
Quite simply, America’s national security should dictate that the United States treat China as a competitor rather than an enemy while also disengaging from support and encouragement of Ukraine’s irredentist ambitions as quickly as possible. A recent shipment of offensive weapons to Kiev should become the last such initiative and speeches by American politicians pledging “unwavering support” for Ukraine should be considered unacceptable. Washington should meanwhile reject any clandestine attempts to overthrow Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and make clear to Vladimir Putin that it will not support any NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, which admittedly was a pledge already made when the Soviet Union collapsed that was subsequently ignored by President Bill Clinton. Thanks to Bill, America is now obligated to defend not only Western Europe but also Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, the Baltic States and tiny little Montenegro.
In short, United States engagement in complicated overseas quarrels should be limited to areas where genuine vital interests are at stake. In fact, by that standard one should begin to emphasize the security impact of the crisis on America’s southern border, which has a completely different genesis and is being driven by politics. As British statesman Lord Palmerston said in 1848 “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The United States government would be very wise to be guided by that advice.
Western countries are developing rules without the consent of the rest of the international community, and are both undermining and circumventing the United Nations. That’s according to Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister.
Speaking on Wednesday at a joint press conference in Moscow with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Lavrov reiterated Russia’s support for the organization, and criticized those who take individual approaches, instead of using established collective decision-making mechanisms.
In particular, he noted that some countries engage in “illegitimate actions,” such as using force “without the approval by the UN Security Council,” as well as unilaterally imposing sanctions.
“We consider developing certain ‘rules’ behind the back of the greater part of the international community and then imposing them on others as universal norms unacceptable and dangerous practice,” Lavrov explained. “The ‘rules-based order’ concept promoted by our Western colleagues is unrelated to either law or universal morality.”
In his opinion, the idea of ‘rules’ causes damage to the coordinating role of the UN, and has caused an imbalance in the architecture of global governance.
The Foreign Minister also expressed his support for Guterres’ attempts to resolve crises by political and diplomatic means, including through mediation. The UN Secretary-General was visiting Moscow for his annual face-to-face discussions with Russian leadership.
Wednesday was not the first time Lavrov slammed the so-called ‘rules based order.’ Last week, Lavrov accused Western countries of imposing totalitarianism in international relations by forcing their political positions on other countries. In particular, he pointed the finger at the US and the EU, accusing them of turning away from the principles of democracy and multilateralism.
In February, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed the same sentiment, when she accused Western countries of resolving global problems in a private group without inviting both Russia and China.
“Our Western partners seek to resolve issues in a narrow circle and advance decisions that they are comfortable with, which will later be imposed on other members of the international community through the prism of the ‘rules-based world order’,” she said.
Western journalists, always mindful of the limits imposed by the ruling class, have a million ways of minimizing or mystifying Israeli brutality in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where several Palestinian families are set to be expelled to make way for Jewish settlers.
It’s not so simple as straight-up ethnic cleansing, they declare. There’s a convoluted history to consider, involving Israelis, Palestinians, Ottomans, Englishmen, and Jordanians. The Israeli courts, after all, examined the evidence and determined that the properties in question were Jewish. The Israelis aren’t seizing Palestinian homes at random; they’re engaged in a legal project of urban planning.
The apologists aren’t wrong. The seizures in Sheikh Jarrah, which have been ongoing for two decades, are ratified by the Israeli state. That’s exactly the problem. The Israeli state isn’t a neutral party proffering legal decisions according to impartial, humanistic criteria. The main purpose of the Zionist entity is to dispossess Palestinians. Certainly it has other reasons for being, but its primary function since being dreamed up by European fantasists at the end of the 19th century has been to maraud and plunder. The violence in Sheikh Jarrah isn’t exceptional. It is Zionism distilled to its purest expression.
Palestinians don’t need to respect the institutions of the Zionist state precisely because those institutions negate the Palestinians’ simplest political imperative: existence. Those institutions represent the machinery of colonization. All settler colonies come equipped with a legal apparatus to validate their cruelty. We cannot expect Western pundits and politicians to question the institutional logic so harmful to Palestinians, for their own legitimacy is contingent on the reproduction of state power.
Palestinians will never concede rights of habitation to Israeli courts. Those courts confer to themselves jurisdiction over Palestinian life, but Palestinian claims to life have a much stronger basis: an age-old history in the towns and neighborhoods they inhabit, a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land. Palestinians know full-well that they belong. Israeli courts produce delusional soliloquies.
The logic underlying land seizure in Sheikh Jarrah is nonsensical to the point of insanity. First of all, the logic tries to deplete observers of empathy. Families live in those homes, actual human beings with complex needs and aspirations. They will be made homeless. We’re asked not to care because those human beings are incidental to the more important project of colonial statecraft. The fate of those families is a nonstory; the settler colony’s wish fulfillment is the natural order of things.
More nonsensically, we’re asked to assign ethnic characteristics to abstractions and inanimate objects. The basis for Israel’s aggression in Sheikh Jarrah (as throughout all of historic Palestine) is repossession of so-called Jewish property. The property, in other words, doesn’t belong to people who happen to be Jewish. The property itself is Jewish—nobody can specify which denomination—and is therefore fit only for a certain kind of inhabitant. The property has some kind of innate disposition. It is apparently capable of worship. It becomes a crass approximation of humanity. Endowing housing units with confessional qualities exemplifies the problem of prioritizing property over sentient life: a dwelling has no utility beyond the project of demographic engineering. Under the Zionist regime, even brick and mortar are sectarian.
The land suffers a similar fate. Zionists conceptualize it as “Jewish,” rendering the natural world a topography of exclusion. In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity. Like all resources in the colonial economy, access is granted (or limited) according to discriminatory criteria, in this case religious identity, as defined by the government. There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics. Biology isn’t an impetus to kinship, but a pretext for segregation, rigid and permanent.
Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics. It doesn’t seem to bother the chattering classes in the United States that Israel’s sanctified self-image requires an aggressive military apparatus, that it comes to fruition only by tossing innocent people out of their homes and destroying the possibility of a functional civil society. Their own country, after all, was built on the same kind of racialized violence.
Palestinians do not adhere to the correct religion and so they become surplus. Displacement is their natural destiny. The soldiers arrive with batons and sound bombs, with tear gas and live ammunition. They wave court orders explaining that the neighborhood must host a different class of resident. The settlers accompanying the soldiers create a bloody ruckus. Together, soldier and settler unleash hell on people whose primary motivation is to exist. This is what colonizers like to call “democracy.”
The land is Jewish. The houses are Jewish, too. The Palestinians are merely human. There is no place for such creatures in an inhumane society.
This article was originally published in Arabic at Awan.
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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