Opaque, Unaccountable: Dangers of the New COVID Bio-Security Complex
By Patrick Henningsen | 21st Century Wire | October 13, 2020
Seven months into this crisis, it can’t be any clearer. Just as they did following 9/11, western governments are using the COVID ‘pandemic’ crisis as a pretext to usher in whole new layer of security state bureaucracy, and one which has the power to penetrate more deeply into our lives.
For those who are old enough to remember, prior to September 11, 2001, there was no such thing as a Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and yet in a matter of a few years, this federal department quickly grew into one of the largest federal agencies taking in tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year ever since. In fact, the term Homeland didn’t even exist in America before that. But it was the perceived threat which provided it’s raison d’etre – buttressed by an incessant barrage of propaganda by the state and its media adjuncts, which made this new paradigm a reality. Soon, all of these new state apparatuses and security initiatives were all nestled neatly under the new banner of the Global War on Terror.
In 2020, this exact process has been repeated, only this time the threat isn’t the spectre of radical Islamist terror coming from foreign lands, but something much closer to home.
According to our governments, the new threat is your neighbour, your teacher, the shopkeeper, and even your family members.
And you are a threat to each of them.
And everyone is a threat to each other.
I described this dialectic in the recent special edition of New Dawn Magazine. Here’s a brief passage from my article entitled, “THE GREAT RESET: A Global Flu d’Etat”:
From the onset, computer-modeled predictions wildly overestimated death tolls in key countries. This was not by accident as the initial political and mass media campaign of shock and awe placed populations in an applied cognitive framework of helplessness and dependency.
The same psychological levers were activated in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Psychologically traumatised western electorates not only accepted any level of state and corporate security, infringement of civil liberties and invasion of privacy, many even demanded their governments prosecute overseas wars to eliminate the perceived threat, at that time, of al Qaeda and international terrorism. Subsequently, a new normal was rolled-out globally, a series of endless wars and a leviathan of ‘anti-terror’ measures and digital surveillance at home.
Despite efforts to try and convince the public that everyone is a potential terrorist, the climate of fear was difficult to maintain. The genius of the COVID crisis is that the Establishment has now managed to convince us that everyone is a potential carrier of a deadly pathogen and that anyone who so much as sneezes in the vicinity of any- one else could not only kill them but also trigger a deadly ‘second wave’ of the pandemic.
Phase one of The Great Reset.
This week, the UK Government announced its latest round of emergency measure and regional lockdowns, supposedly for fighting the coronavirus.
Their new “Tier Three” lockdown system will determine whether towns or cities will be allowed to keep pubs, gyms and other leisure facilities open, for up to a further six months. But who knows when it will end. This has prompted concerned members of public, along with a few brave officials, to ask who exactly is setting this new Three-Tier system?
According to government officials, the new system will classify regions as either ‘medium’, ‘high’ or ‘very high’ levels, with high and above triggering new local lockdowns.
Welcome to thin end of the state’s bio-surveillance wedge. Similar protocols are being rolled out in Five Eyes Alliance nations the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Just as with the global war on terror, governments have now erected an entirely new level within the ever-expanding national security state. In the UK, it’s called the Joint Bio Security Centre (JBC), formed in July, and already a £9 billion operation. Expect that number to grow substantially as the security complex discovers new and more complex systems required to keep pace with a new global bio surveillance and biological arms race.
“Led by a senior spy, the JBC does not publish details of its deliberations, the sources of its evidence or its key personnel. Nevertheless, its advice to ministers is understood to have guided recent decisions on where to enforce the local lockdowns affecting millions of people across the country,” said The Telegraph.
Is COVID really so deadly that the state needs to reconfigure all of its public health agencies under a new command and control hierarchy? Indeed, many asked the same question about al-Qaeda 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, few officials are demanding any answers or calling for accountability. There is only one such inquisitive public servant so far, Dr Greg Clark MP, Chairman of Science and Technology Committee, who believes that the British public are owed some answers as to who is in this opaque group, and which person(s) is making the final decisions for these rather arbitrary ‘alert levels’ being issued by the government.
Exactly what is the remit of this new JBC? According to the Institute for Government:
The centre will have two main jobs. The first is as an independent analytical function to provide real-time analysis about infection outbreaks. It will look in detail to identify and respond to outbreaks of Covid-19 as they arise. The centre will collect data about the prevalence of the disease and analyse that data to understand infection rates across the country.
Its second job is to advise on how the government should respond to spikes in infections – for example by closing schools or workplaces in local areas where infection levels have risen. Should UK government ministers decide to impose different restrictions in different areas and regions across England, it will be on the advice of the JBC.
And just as we suspected, here’s the salient point:
The JBC looks to be based on the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC). JTAC analyses intelligence related to terrorism and sets threat levels, which in turn inform ministers’ decisions on protecting the public and operational deployments by the police and other agencies.
The current Three-Tier alert system was based on the following framework devised for the JBC in determining new Covid-19 alert levels:
- Level 1: Covid-19 is not known to be present in the UK
- Level 2: Covid-19 is present in the UK, but the number of cases and transmission is low
- Level 3: a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation
- Level 4: a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially
- Level 5: as level 4 and there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed.
If it looks and sounds like a military operation, that’s because it is. This is the first time that the science of epidemiology has been brushed aside in favour of a one-size-fits-all, military-style approach to mitigating a viral pandemic.
The JBC insists that they are only providing recommendations “informed by the data collected and analysed by the JBC.” It is therefore up to Downing Street and its chief medical officer to issue the final alert level. Presumably they will be processing testing data, along with NHS Track and Trace, as well as data from the Office of National Statistics, and Public Health England (if it still exists).
We’re told that the JBC is being headed by an intelligence chief from GCHQ, cybersecurity director Dr Clare Gardiner. According to her biography, she’s a “qualified epidemiologist, medical researcher, and cybersecurity director.”
The Telegraph adds, “She reports to Baroness Dido Harding, the chief of NHS Test and Trace, while the entire JBC organisation falls under the control of the Department of Health, which answers to the Mr Hancock. Government sources insisted the body was largely staffed by civil servants meaning it was “not appropriate” to release their identities.”
Lockdowns are no trivial matter and deeply impact the lives of millions of people, and carry with them the most grave economic and social consequences. They also cost lives. Hence, the concern here is one of transparency, and it is unknown if this new ‘bio-intelligence’ agency will be engaging with independent scientists, or will it merely collate data and liase with government-appoint science advisors. It seems odd to be blending the civil service and signals intelligence with the science departments. From a political and bureaucratic point of view, it’s certainly convenient for politicians to have yet another compartment to whom they can ‘pass the buck’ and use plausible deniability for obfuscation purposes. If nothing else, it gives Ministers yet another panel of ‘experts’ to defer to – the familiar illusion of impressive depth and deep considerations supposedly informing the Ministers’ final assessments – when in reality, it just becomes more convoluted. Drowning in unaccountable bureaucracy. That’s where the epic mistakes are usual made.
Just as with the disastrous War on Terror, there is a serious danger that an entirely new division of security state technocracy will inevitably become a money sink, operating in its own bubble within an already knotted civil service, and propelled by endless feedback loops – creating more problems than were there to begin with.
It’s important to point out that such historic and sweeping changes in government can only be achieved amid a climate of fear. Since the beginning of this crisis, the mainstream media have been dedicated to delivering that fear. During the War on Terror, the media scooped up whatever government and the intelligence community were serving, and just ran with it. Without them, the government could never have realised any of its newfound powers. It’s the same now with COVID. You need only to replace the anti-terror mavens in intelligence community with The Science committees. This is precisely ‘the intellectual artillery’ of government joined-up with the media, which Spengler warned about almost a century ago in his treatise, The Decline of the West.
Make no mistake about it – freedom and democracy are under attack from a new and revitalised, COVID-inspired security industrial complex.
Judging by the lack of tenacity by media in being willing to hold any of the Five Eyes government to account for their horrendous performances thus far, it seems unlikely that the media will challenge this new bio-security arm that much.
One can only hope the penny drops much sooner with this leviathan, than it has with previous security state paradigm shifts.
***
Footnotes:
1 Decline of The West, Volumes I & II: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283129/page/n471/mode/2up
***
Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq. See his archive here.
Dying Alone: When We Stopped Caring for Palestinian Prisoners
By Ramzy Baroud | Dissident Voice | October 12, 2020
“No one cares about the prisoners.” Over the past few years, I have heard this phrase — or some variation of it — uttered many times by freed Palestinian prisoners and their families. Whenever I conduct an interview regarding this crucial and highly sensitive topic, I am told, repeatedly, that ‘no one cares.’
But is this really the case? Are Palestinian prisoners so abandoned to the extent that their freedom, life and death are of no consequence?
The subject, and the claim, resurfaces every time a Palestinian prisoner launches a hunger strike or undergoes extreme hardship and torture, which is leaked outside Israeli prisons through lawyers or human rights organizations. This year, five Palestinian prisoners died in prison as a result of alleged medical negligence, or worse, torture.
Even international humanitarian aid workers, like Mohammed el-Halabi, are not immune to degrading treatment. Arrested in August 2016, el-Halabi is yet to be charged for any wrongdoing. News of his plight, which originally received some media attention — due to his work with a US-based organization – is now merely confined to Facebook posts by his father, Khalil.
As of October 1, el-Halabi has been paraded before 151 military trials, yet unaware what the charges are. The cherished Palestinian man, who has played a major role in providing cancer medicine to dying children in Gaza, now holds the record of the longest military trial ever carried out by the Israeli occupation.
Desperate for some attention, and fed up with cliches about their ‘centrality in the Palestinian struggle’, many prisoners, whether individually or collectively, launch hunger strikes under the slogan: ‘freedom or death’. Those who are held under the draconian and illegal ‘administrative detention’ policy, demand their freedom, while ‘security prisoners’, who are held in degrading conditions, merely ask for family visitations or food that is suitable for human consumption.
Health complications resulting from hunger strikes often linger long after the physical ordeal is over. I have interviewed families of Palestinians who were freed from Israeli prisons, only to die in a matter of months, or live a life of endless pain and constant ailments for years following their release.
According to some estimates, over 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned in Israeli jails since the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967.
Maher al-Akhras is currently writing the latest chapter in this tragic narrative. At the time of writing this article, he has just concluded 77 days of uninterrupted hunger strike. No medical opinion is necessary to tell us that al-Akhras could die any moment. A recent video released of al-Akhras on his Israeli hospital bed conveyed a glimpse of the man’s unbearable suffering.
With a barely audible voice, the gaunt, exhausted-looking man said that he is left with only two options: either his immediate freedom or death within the confines of Israel’s “phony justice system.”
On October 7, his wife, Taghrid, launched her own hunger strike to protest the fact that “no one cares about” her husband.
Once again, the lack of concern for the plight of prisoners, even dying ones, imposes itself on the Palestinian political discourse. So, why is this the case?
The idea that Palestinian prisoners are all alone in the fight for freedom began in the early 1990s. It was during this period that the various Oslo Accords were signed, dividing the Occupied Territories into zones governed by some strange Kafkaesque military system, one that did not end the Israeli occupation, but, rather, cemented it.
Largely dropped from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations agenda at the time, but permanently, eventually, were several pressing issues fundamental to Palestinian rights and freedom. One of these issues was Israel’s brutal system of incarceration and imprisonment without trial.
Certainly, some Palestinian prisoners were released in small batches occasionally, as ‘gestures of goodwill’; but the system, itself, which gave Israel the right to arrest, detain and sentence Palestinians, remained intact.
To date, the freedom of Palestinian prisoners — nearly 5,000 of them are still held in Israel, with new prisoners added daily — is not part of the Palestinian leadership political agenda, itself subsumed by self-interests, factional fights and other trivial matters.
Being removed from the realm of politics, the plight of prisoners has, over the years, been reduced to a mere humanitarian subject — as if these men and women are no longer political agents and a direct expression of Palestinian resistance, on the one hand, and Israel’s military occupation and violence, on the other.
There are ample references to Palestinian prisoners in everyday language. Not a single press release drafted by the Palestinian Authority, its main Fatah faction or any other Palestinian group fails to renew the pledge to free the prisoners, while constantly glorifying their sacrifices. Unsurprisingly, empty language never produces concrete results.
There are two exceptions to the above maxim. The first is prisoner exchanges, like the one that took place in October 2011, resulting in the freedom of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. And, second, the prisoners’ own hunger strikes, which are incremental in their achievements, but have, lately, become the main channel of resistance.
Sadly, even solidarity with hunger strikers is often factional, as each Palestinian political group often places disproportionate focus on their own striking prisoners and, largely ignores others. Not only has the issue of prisoners become depoliticized, it has also fallen victim to Palestine’s unfortunate disunity.
While it is untrue that ‘no one cares about Palestinian prisoners’, thousands of Palestinian families are justified to hold this opinion. For the freedom of prisoners to take center stage within the larger Palestinian struggle for freedom, the issue must be placed at the top of Palestine’s political agenda, by Palestinians themselves and by Palestinian solidarity networks everywhere.
Maher al-Akhras, and thousands like him, should not risk their lives to obtain basic human rights, which should, in theory, be guaranteed under international law. Equally important, Palestinian prisoners should not be left alone, paying a price for daring to stand up for justice, fairness and for their people’s freedom.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press). Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs, Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). Read other articles by Ramzy, or visit Ramzy’s website.
The United States and Human Trafficking
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2020
In the beginning of October, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order about imposing sanctions on countries that, in Washington’s opinion, “do not put forth sufficient efforts to combat human trafficking”. The list of countries put together by Washington specifically includes Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and the DPRK. In addition, US representatives in the IMF and multilateral banks have been ordered to vote against certain projects in which funds will be provided to Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Syria, and several other countries.
However, it must be noted that recently in the US, debate over the topic of human trafficking by other countries has taken the shape of a national epidemic, even though in the US itself, according to some specialists, 300,000 children and teenagers are affected by this kind of danger each year. The US State Department prepares voluminous annual reports on this issue, the latest of which was published on June 25th this year. The last report, in particular, analyzed the situation in 188 countries and subnational entities around the world, and pointed to a significant number of people prosecuted for human trafficking in various countries, but not one word was mentioned about any similar penalties meted out in the United States. During the virtual presentation of this report, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, US Ambassador-at-Large John Richmond, and US presidential adviser Ivanka Trump even highlighted the tireless efforts of ten people in different countries who were recognized this year as heroes in the fight against human trafficking.
Addressing the ceremony’s participants on June 25th, the head of the State Department stated that today there are 25 million adults and children in the world who have become the victims of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual and labor exploitation. “The United States throughout our history has stood in defense of human rights like no other nation,” said the Secretary of State. “America was founded on a promise: a promise to uphold unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the Trump administration’s work to end human trafficking is an important part of that noble tradition”. Along with that, the US Secretary of State stressed that if certain governments in the world do not take sufficient measures against human trafficking, then the United States will not stand on the sidelines.
However, the so-called “ratings” that are given by the US State Department are done so rather arbitrarily, proceeding from criteria that are spelled out in US laws to protect the victims of human trafficking. But along with that the fact that in the United States itself, even according to official statistics by the US Department of Justice, over the past two years quite a few thousand cases of “trafficking” have been identified, with thousands of those cases concerning human trafficking that have involved children, is conveniently ignored. The propagandistic “humanitarian and human rights” crux of these reports is dissolved in slogans and labels, which are apparently very necessary in Washington for its political PR and attacks on countries that are adversaries.
It is also noteworthy that, despite the stirring rhetoric by the US Secretary of State in public on June 25th that “if certain governments in the world do not take sufficient measures against human trafficking, then the United States will not stand on the sidelines”, its own political elite, which according to repeated publications in various media participates in human trafficking, continues to remain outside the jurisdiction of US society, the international community, and the voluminous documents put out by the US Department of State.
For example, just recently the American publication National Review accused the family of Trump’s main rival in the November election – and the leader of those fighting against Russiagate – Joe Biden of actively participating in human trafficking. Specifically, the publication indicated that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, received a total of more than $4 million USD following “dubious financial transactions” with foreigners that have extensive political connections. He transferred funds to foreign nationals living in the United States who were “allegedly associated with an Eastern European network of prostitution and human trafficking”.
Another U.S. publication, the New York Post, also shared information with readers regarding a September 23rd US Senate report that links Hunter Biden to “prostitution and human trafficking”, and that he allegedly transferred “thousands of dollars” to people who appear to have something to do with the sex industry. According to the publication, these allegations are contained in a footnote in one section of the report, which provides details of the likely “criminal activities and threats of extortion” that involved Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family. At the same time, the publication notes that this Senate report also contains links to “numerous publications that talk about the likely complicity of Hunter Biden in the sex trade.”
In the conditions stated above, it seems worthwhile to submit that the US Department of State, instead of publishing politically biased reports on alleged human trafficking by other countries and imposing U.S. sanctions on them, should first deal with the problem in its own country, and impose sanctions on US citizens convicted of these kinds of crimes. As, by extension, of the murder of innocent civilians in the Middle East and in the other zones with armed conflicts unleashed by Washington. Although, is it really possible to hope for fair punishment for these offenses in the United States, when the country is cutting off its relations with the International Criminal Court in The Hague to help prevent the international conviction of American criminals? Or, when the United States itself commutes the sentences of its citizens who have already been proven of committing wrongdoing, as occurred in 2019 in particular when a court in Washington reviewed the verdict against three former employees with the private security company Blackwater in a case involving the murder of Iraqi civilians in 2007, and cut their sentences by almost half?
Increased Police Killings Linked to Departments Acquiring Pentagon Equipment – Report
By Evan Craighead . Sputnik . 10.10.2020
US police departments taking advantage of the ability to acquire Washington’s surplus military equipment could very well be contributing to unrest and violence in the same communities they are sworn to protect, according to a new analysis.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed on Thursday that data from the US military and police departments nationwide presented a disturbing relationship between police killings and the US Department of Defense’s 1033 program – an initiative that allows everyday law enforcement to acquire surplus equipment designed for war.
“The results paint a troubling picture: The more equipment a department receives, the more people are shot and killed, even after accounting for violent crime, race, income, drug use and population,” wrote AJC’s Chris Joyner and Nick Thieme.
For example, AJC found that in the US state of Georgia, a mere 7% of law enforcement agencies received the free 1033 gear over a 10-year period. At the same time, 17% of the 261 individuals shot and killed by authorities in that time were traced back to those 1033-equipped departments.
“The statistical correlation doesn’t prove that 1033 gear in a police department causes more fatal police shootings, or that those shootings were unjustified, only that there is a strong relationship between the two,” Joyner and Thieme detailed. “The analysis also doesn’t suggest that every department in the 1033 program displays a strong relationship between the number of people killed and the amount of 1033 funding accepted.”
“The cost that we are dealing with now is a highly militarized police force that is no longer looking like police but [is] looking like they are patrolling a hostile foreign nation,” remarked Wayne McElrath, a senior investigative adviser for the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, DC.
McElrath, experienced in both US law enforcement and the US military, argued that government initiatives such as the 1033 program propagate toxic policing practices that are rooted in war-fighting, rather than public safety.
“They are changing the culture,” he said. “But we are beginning to accept that it is the norm.”Similar research was carried out in 2018 by University of South Carolina professor Edward Lawson and published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Political Research Quarterly.
Lawson, who also serves as a data consultant with the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, examined two years’ worth of nationwide data and found the same relationship between 1033 equipment and police killings.
The professor told AJC that department culture, leadership and related factors add a psychological element to the equation.
“You’re not just police officers, you’re soldiers and you’re fighting this war on drugs, war on crime, and eventually the war on terror,” he expressed. “If all of your leaders are telling you that you’re fighting this war, and you’re on the front lines of it, that has to have a psychological effect.”
“Drawing a direct connection from equipment to killings doesn’t make sense, in part because most officers never get to use any of that stuff anyway,” Lawson argued. “But if the agency as a whole is more psychologically militarized, that agency will pursue more military equipment and will also kill more civilians.”
Two Types of Terror in Michigan
By James Bovard | American Institute for Economic Research | October 9, 2020
#StopTrumpsTerror is one of the hottest trending topics on Twitter, with more than 90,000 tweets. Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of six people in a plot (perhaps government-hatched) to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason for destroying the state’s economy with the lockdowns she imposed. Seven other individuals were arrested and charged with violating Michigan’s anti-terrorism law.
Trump had no connection to the plot, and at least one of the alleged plotters denounced Trump as a “tyrant” and “the enemy.” But Trump’s condemnations of lockdowns was enough for Gov. Whitmer to denounce Trump yesterday as “complicit” with the plotters. She derided Trump for spending “the past 7 months denying science, ignoring his own health experts, stoking distrust, fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.” Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC that Donald Trump should be investigated for “aiding and abetting” the Michigan plot.
Whitmer, one of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s favorite governors, enraged many Michiganders by locking down the state after the outbreak of Covid-19. Whitmer placed almost the entire state under house arrest, dictating a $1,000 fine for anyone who left their home to visit family or friends. Business owners faced up to three years in prison for refusing to close their operations. Whitmer severely restricted what stores could sell and prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity.) Though Covid infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, Whitmer shut down the entire state — including northern counties with few cases, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. In a tweet yesterday, Trump said Whitmer “has done a terrible job. She locked down her state for everyone, except her husband’s boating activities.”
Whitmer’s actions infuriated many Michiganders and no informants were necessary to spur much of the anti-government rhetoric recited in the federal indictment yesterday. Plenty of hotheads say things online or in allegedly encrypted messages that look menacing or idiotic in cold print afterwards. Threatening violence against government officials – or anyone else – is reprehensible. But how far did those guys move to actually carrying out their plot? Last month, some of the conspirators “drove to the area surrounding the [Whitmer vacation] residence and discussed detonating explosives to divert police — even checking the underside of a bridge for spots to place a charge,” as the Washington Post summarized the indictment.
The FBI admits that it paid one informant $8,600, and there may be other payments that are revealed in the coming days or weeks. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations in recent decades. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1% of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. The bureau’s informant program extends far beyond Muslims. It bankrolled an extremist right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years before his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. A long-term FBI informant organized the Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2017.
The alleged Michigan plot is almost too idiotic to believe. The alleged conspirators purportedly planned to kidnap Gov. Whitmer and take her to Wisconsin for a private trial. This is on par with the 2006 FBI-fabricated terror plot of the Liberty City Seven, where an informant swayed a bunch of dimwits to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade.
The Michigan conspirators are receiving vastly more coverage than a recent Michigan Supreme Court decision, which effectively labeled Whitmer a lawless dictator who had extended a “state of emergency” far beyond what an unconstitutional state law allowed. Instead of obeying the ruling of the highest state court, Whitmer responded by having the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issue “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted.
Four months earlier, the Michigan Court of Claims condemned Whitmer for contorting a Michigan workplace safety law to unjustifiably inflict additional penalties on businesses and individuals who failed to submit to her pandemic commands.
But, according to the media, locking down Michigan isn’t tyranny – it is public service.
Anyone who protests or heartily condemns lockdowns will also be presumed collectively guilty with the Michigan plotters. The same media moral framework will likely be used to exonerate new lockdowns that may be imposed in the name of curbing Covid-19. Earlier this week, many pundits denounced Trump as a would-be Mussolini for his statement on the White House balcony after he returned from Walter Reed Hospital. Commentators were horrified that Trump, who was standing outside not close to anyone, removed his facemask.
If Biden is elected president and fulfills his promise to impose a national facemask mandate or dictates a national shutdown of the economy, such actions will be portrayed as benevolence at its best, rather than the most foolhardy federal interventions since the 55 mile per hour speed limit.
Will the Michigan plot be touted by the media to valorize every government official who placed any American under house arrest in response to the pandemic? It is possible to heartily condemn both nitwit conspirators and oppressive politicians. Unfortunately, the media will likely pay far more attention to the bluster of boneheads than to actual devastation produced by unjustified shutdowns.
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American
Saudi regime forces detain activist during raid against Shia-populated Qatif region
Press TV – October 8, 2020
Saudi regime forces have reportedly arrested a young man in the kingdom’s Shia-populated and oil-rich Eastern Province as the Riyadh regime presses ahead with its brutal clampdown against members of the religious community.
The London-based and Arabic-language Nabaa television news network, citing local sources, reported that Saudi troops arrested Ali al-Awami after they raided Deira neighborhood in the Umm al-Hamam village of Qatif region, located more than 420 kilometers (260 miles) east of the capital, Riyadh, on Thursday.
The report added that regime military vehicles rolled into Umm al-Hamam on Wednesday morning, and imposed a tight cordon on Deira neighborhood without any reasons.
Last month, security forces besieged Umm al-Hamam for three days, carried out raids and arrested a number of young men there.
Activists said at the time that trumped-up charges were leveled against those arrested as part of the Riyadh regime’s scenarios of abuse, marginalization and discrimination against the Eastern Province population.
Eastern Province has been the scene of peaceful demonstrations since February 2011. Protesters have been demanding reforms, freedom of expression, the release of political prisoners, and an end to economic and religious discrimination against the oil-rich region.
The protests have been met with a heavy-handed crackdown by the regime. Security forces have increased security measures across the province.
In January 2016, Saudi authorities executed Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, who was an outspoken critic of the policies of the Riyadh regime. Nimr had been arrested in Qatif in 2012.
Ever since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader in 2017, the kingdom has arrested dozens of activists, bloggers, intellectuals and others perceived as political opponents, showing almost zero tolerance for dissent even in the face of international condemnations of the crackdown.
Muslim scholars have been executed, women’s rights campaigners – including Loujain al-Hathloul – have been put behind bars and tortured, and freedom of expression, association and belief continue to be denied.
Marseille to set up own Covid scientific council in a protest over ‘dependency’ on Paris scientists
RT | October 6, 2020
The French city of Marseille has adopted a proposal to form its own scientific council to assess Covid statistics and develop more informed local policies, as it battles against “unjust” lockdown rules imposed by the government.
The proposal was adopted on Monday, having been put forward by outspoken former French senator Samia Ghali, the current second-in-command of the city administration.
The move will see Marseille take a leading role in the assessment of its own health situation and provide the mayor, Michèle Rubirola, and city leaders with the necessary information to manage their own policies on Covid restrictions, Ghali said.
“The mayor must chair a scientific council … to see what the deficiencies are, and so we have a perspective and no longer depend on certain Parisian scientists, but also so we, ourselves, have the capacity to say what is going and what is not, and no longer suffer the thunderbolt of Paris.”
Ghali has been particularly vocal in her criticism of Parisian lawmakers in recent weeks, following the imposition of new Covid restrictions in Marseille and neighboring Aix-en-Provence. The government decreed in September that the southern city would become a ‘maximum alert zone’, causing the closure of all restaurants and bars for 15 days, which was seen by many in Marseille as unjustified. The restaurants were eventually allowed to reopen from Monday under certain conditions, which prompted Ghali to say the earlier strictures were “unfair and therefore not sustainable.”
Paris escaped fresh restrictions in September, leading many elected officials in Marseille to suggest France’s second city was not treated in the same way as the capital. Rubirola had previously shared her disapproval on Twitter, claiming “The announcements of Olivier Véran confirm this evening the unequal treatment suffered by Marseille. Inconsistent and unfair.” Restrictions were eventually introduced in Paris on Monday.
However, the announcement of a scientific council for Marseille has been met with criticism by some political leaders. The president of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Renaud Muselier, said there are already 10 existing and competent health bodies at national and regional level. “In this crisis, each of these structures has its own expertise and role to play. Adding a purely Marseille thing to it can only add confusion and cacophony to an already disturbing disorder,” he noted.
Round up the ‘anti-vaxxers’? Enlist religious leaders? Bill Gates warns US needs to brainstorm ways to reduce ‘vaccine hesitancy’
RT | October 6, 2020
Billionaire software tycoon Bill Gates has urged the US to prepare for a Covid-19 vaccine rollout by deputizing trusted community leaders to “reduce vaccine hesitancy,” bemoaning the rapid spread of “conspiracy theories” online.
The Microsoft founder-turned-vaccine-evangelist painted a mostly rosy picture of a vaccine rollout getting “rich countries” back to normal by the end of 2021 in an interview during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday.
However, with less than half of Americans saying they’d get a Covid jab – even if paid $100 for it – in a recent survey, Gates then focused his talk on enlisting the nation’s “trust network” to overcome the skeptics.
Lamenting that “vaccine hesitancy is in all countries and predates the pandemic,” Gates suggested American health officials start “thinking about which voices will help reduce the hesitancy, so we can get a level of vaccination that really has a chance of stopping” the virus.
Gates provided the example of challenges the polio vaccine faced in some countries – and the cunning lengths some were willing to go to get their populations jabbed.
“In places like Nigeria we had to go to the religious leaders, talk to them, have them speak out, you know, vaccinate their children. So [it is about] understanding the trust network – who is it that you view as an expert. Very few people can look at the formulation or data directly.”
Coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci hinted back in June that he was already on the task, revealing the government had a PR blitz planned in which “people [vaccine-hesitant Americans] can relate to in the community – sports figures, community heroes, people that they look up to” – will spread the pro-vaccine gospel.
Gates had typically harsh words for both conspiracy theorists and the social media platforms he believes enable them, complaining that “very titillating things” like the notion that “somebody intentionally made this virus, or that there’s some conspiracy” spread online “so much faster than the truth, which is that it comes from a bat.” Gates called on social media to “slow down or annotate things that actually cause huge damage, like not wearing masks or not being willing to take the vaccine if it proves that it is this key tool to getting back to normal.”
While he stressed he wasn’t suggesting Facebook and its peers go for “the Chinese solution” of telling companies what they must censor, the billionaire has previously called conspiracy theories about his funding of global vaccination schemes “a big problem,” and on Tuesday he slammed platforms for the absence of “smart solutions” to that problem.
Gates saved some barbs for the Trump administration, disparaging the government’s preparation for and response to the pandemic, accusing it of creating a “vacuum of leadership” by pulling out of the World Health Organization. Among other failings, “we didn’t do [pandemic] simulations” like some countries, he complained, referencing his now-famous 2015 TED Talk about the importance of comprehensive state-level planning for epidemics.
However, his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation actually staged one of the best-known pandemic simulations, Event 201, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in New York last October. The barely-fictional scenario involved a deadly coronavirus originating in geese spreading around the world, devastating economies and triggering the imposition of strict behavioral controls while leaving a trail of 65 million bodies in its wake. The narrative was so close to the subsequent outbreak of the novel coronavirus that Johns Hopkins was forced to include a disclaimer on the event website.
Indeed, the US government has run several such simulations in conjunction with representatives of local governments, hospitals, and various other private sector interests over the years. “Crimson Contagion,” one such exercise held from January to August last year, predicted the US would respond in a chaotic and disorganized fashion to an outbreak, exposing weaknesses that were apparently not remedied in time for Covid-19. A 2017 Pentagon report similarly warned that a “novel respiratory disease” emanating from, among other places, a Chinese wet market could spread throughout the world, hurting the military’s readiness and national security for as long as two years and prescribing correctives – which apparently fell on deaf ears.
Gates has previously warned that the “final hurdle” to a vaccine-fueled return to normalcy is convincing the population to actually roll up their sleeves and take the jab(s), and the World Health Organization – of which his foundation is the single largest funder, following the US’ departure – declared “vaccine hesitancy” one of the biggest threats to world health last year. The billionaire has stated he hopes to have seven billion humans vaccinated with whatever formula proves safe and effective, but has suggested a mandate would be counterproductive and actually increase resistance to vaccines.
Gates is far from the only voice urging governments to soft-pedal their inoculation demands. Noting that a straight-up mandate would probably be challenged and nullified in court, a paper published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine instead suggested at-risk populations be threatened with “penalties” like job loss for failure to get vaccinated. Australian PM Scott Morrison similarly had to walk back comments that vaccination should be “as mandatory as possible” after intense public outcry, and US President Donald Trump has promised the shot will be optional even as he tasked the military with delivering it.
Gates is funding the development of six leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates, and told the conference Phase III clinical trial data would be in before the year’s end. Acknowledging “we still don’t know whether these vaccines will succeed,” he nevertheless pooh-poohed Russian and Chinese vaccine development efforts, predicting that once ‘his’ – the Western – jabs were widely available at low cost, “I doubt there will be a lot of Russian or Chinese vaccine going outside these countries.”
New ‘Licence to Kill’ bill shows UK is happy to let its spies break the law – while lecturing other countries how to behave
By Tom Fowdy | RT | October 6, 2020
A bill giving Britain’s security services the green light to break the law is passing through parliament. It’s another abuse of government power that a compliant media is unwilling to question.
The British Parliament is in the process of pushing through a new law, with the consent of the Labour Party leadership. Perfectly normal, right? Except that this legislation has quite huge implications.
Titled the ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill,’ its purpose is to “authorise conduct by officials and agents of the security and intelligence services, law enforcement, and certain other public authorities, which would otherwise constitute criminality.”
That’s right, the security services of the United Kingdom are being given the green light to break the law, reducing the power of oversight and accountability behind what are already highly secret activities.
The mainstream media are not drawing serious attention to it, nor are they giving the bill any scrutiny. Although Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party agreed to pass the bill, he faced a rebellion from a cohort of 19 MPs, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who voted against it, arguing it is an abuse of government power and inherently dangerous.
MP for Coventry South Zarah Sultana stated: “I can’t support legislation that could give undercover state agents the licence to murder, torture and commit sexual violence.”
The bill marks the second time the Conservative government has sought to exonerate abuse of power from authorities with Labour’s support, with a bill legalising UK war crimes also passing through the House of Commons.
Once again, the United Kingdom believes that it is a law unto itself, which is hardly surprising coming from a government that believes Britannia still rules the waves. On one hand, it preaches the virtues of a democratic and open society, pointing fingers at countries implementing basic national security provisions and preaching ‘the rule of law,’ such as when addressing the situation in Hong Kong. But at the same time, it advocates a subtle mindset that its own actions in any capacity, even when much more questionable, are simply untouchable.
The latest act of parliament is simply the legal consolidation of a long established mentality that means the security establishment cannot truly be held to account, and it is best the public do not know about its activities.
Even before this new legislation, Britain’s intelligence services have long exempted themselves from meaningful scrutiny of their actions. The Five Eyes“PRISM” program, shared with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, is designed to counteract local privacy laws and legal constraints on government power by simply coordinating espionage activities and sharing the information.
Although defenders of this bill and the programme say it constitutes a common good – in terms of counter-terrorism, for example – they cannot say with absolute certainty that there will be no abuses of power, or more ‘political’ activities taking place.
The same people are equally likely to say that the ‘national security’ and ‘intelligence’ activities of countries such as China are always malign, oppressive and out of control, but is that the case at home too?
One of the most defining sagas of our time which suggests such is the fate of Julian Assange. Currently facing hearings over his extradition to America, his ‘crime’ is having revealed information about the activities of the US and Five Eyes intelligence around the world.
If he were Chinese or Russian, he would be heralded as a hero and glorified as a martyr. But for challenging the Western security establishment and their crimes, he’s merely considered a criminal and the Western media at large make a point of ignoring it, just as they do with this new bill authorizing criminal activity by the British security establishment.
In essence, the virtues of Western democracy do not appear to extend to challenging and scrutinizing covert, secret activities. Where is the transparency for MI5 and MI6? There is none.
And most unfortunate of all is the Labour Party leadership’s willingness to kowtow to this agenda. Under Sir Keir Starmer, the party is moving back towards the political centre and is eager to completely disregard the anti-establishment, anti-war and anti-imperialist policies of Jeremy Corbyn.
In a manner very similar to Tony Blair, he is reintegrating the party back into the core of the Western security establishment and supporting the government’s positions on these matters. This has caused many within the party to lambast the leadership as a ‘controlled opposition’ – one similar to the Democrats in the United States, which does not oppose the government’s foreign policy or national security agenda whatsoever. Such bipartisanship ultimately serves to protect the agenda of the ‘deep state,’ as it is sometimes described, from any serious public scrutiny, buffered by mainstream media complicity.
In this case, Britannia is a law unto itself. The government is securing the absolute power and untouchability of the security services beyond the rule of law, and bar a few Labour MPs and followers on social media, there is not a whimper about it.
For a country that prides itself on such deep moral and political superiority over others, it is simply not open to serious discussion, spotlighting or scrutiny of its activities in a way its values endeavour to profess. One rule for me, another for thee.
Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.
‘False’ positive Covid-19 tests saw non-contagious people counted as fresh infections & triggered 2nd wave alarm – Belgian media
RT | October 5, 2020
Over a half of coronavirus infections revealed this summer by one of Belgium’s biggest labs were old and no longer contagious, but were still reported as new cases, local media discovered.
Belgian daily newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws examined the tests carried out by AZ Delta, one of the largest labs in the country, and made a stunning discovery. Almost half of all positive cases reported throughout June, July and August were actually people with an old infection.
The problem, it turns out, lies in the PCR Covid-19 tests. The paper reports that scientific data reveals virus particles can be detected up to 83 days after the actual infection. This led to instances where people were no longer contagious, but were still registered as positive cases. According to HLN, all of these people had to be quarantined.
Belgian experts sounded the alarm in mid-July, when coronavirus numbers spiked after a relief in June, and even insisted that the second wave had already begun for the country.
“We may have had to deal with old infections largely in the summer months,” the lab’s clinical biologist Frederik Van Hoecke told the paper.
Covid experts: there is another way
Three eminent epidemiologists met in Massachusetts to plan a better response to the pandemic
By Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff | UnHerd | October 5, 2020
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical, and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
“This is the saner approach, the more scientific approach,” the authors tell Freddie Sayers
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 4th October 2020
To sign the declaration, follow this link (will be live later today): www.GBdeclaration.org
Dr Sunetra Gupta is a professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases
Dr Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
Dr Kulldorff is a Professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
History as Warfare: The ‘1619 Project’ and the Plot to Destroy the Republic
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2020
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”
– Marquis St. Evrémonde (from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities)
A major cultural fight has broken out between Donald Trump’s recently announced 1776 Commission and the NY Times’ 1619 Project.
While Trump’s commission designed to “promote patriotic history” naively paints over some glaring hypocrisies of American history by placing figures like Hamilton, Jackson, Jefferson and Lincoln in the same boat (thus keeping a bit too much bathwater along with the baby), it does represent an important major cultural battle over the soul of America which is now sitting precariously upon a new civil war, military coup threat and total disintegration.
In his recent Sept. 17 speech attacking the 1619 Project and announcing his 1776 Commission, Trump said quite rightfully:
“Whether it is the mob on the street, or the “cancel culture” in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their way of life.
“We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.
“The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we come from, and what we believe…. The left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”
Attacking the underpinnings of Critical Race theory which attempts to assert that belief in rational thought, hard work and the nuclear family were the result of “whiteness”, Trump invoked Martin Luther King saying:
“where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history, are toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
What is the 1619 Project?
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which was unveiled in June 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones, attempts to smear the entirety of American history as simply a slave-promoting fraud from the moment the first slave arrived in Jonestown in 1619.
During its short existence, this “project” has quickly won over thousands of academics, and in spite of its proven fallacies (which it had to secretly cover up in Orwellian fashion), Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer Prize legitimizing the fraud in the minds of countless school administrators, policy-makers and academics.
If one truly accepts the claims of the 1619 Project which have become turned into a Pulitzer curriculum and already embedded in 4500 U.S. schools, then America’s dissolution would be no great loss to the world. In fact, one would have to conclude that since the republic was always built upon the defense of slavery (going so far as to paint the British Empire as an anti-slavery bastion which the founding fathers broke away from only due to their fear of having their slaves removed), then America was always… evil.
The First Paradox
If it were true that the creation of the American republic was just driven by a desire to protect the institution of slavery from the abolition-loving British then it should be asked: why did every American state shut down the African slave trade by 1793??”
Don’t believe me? Let the facts speak for themselves.
By 1784, six states in the new nation had voted to totally abolish slavery (Rhode Island in 1774, Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784), while the importation of all new slaves was banned by every other state by 1793. The important Northwest Ordinances passed in the 1787 Continental Congress ensured that no slavery would be permitted in the immense North West Territories (giving rise to the later addition of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin as free states). This agreement was established during the 1774 Continental Congress where a non-importation act was signed by all colonies stating: “That we will neither import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”
Another Paradox
If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery? Rather than oppose slavery, the British Royal Africa Company, under the direction of the Privy Council, and Board of Trade enforced the mass important of 8 million African slaves into the Americas during the 18th century alone! These same organizations constantly strove to destroy all efforts to establish manufacturing within the colonies from 1630-1765 which everyone knew was the only effective pathway to liberating a society from reliance on slave labor.
Additionally, IF it were true that the 1776 revolution were driven by the intent to protect the slave economy from the freedom-loving British Empire, then why did England only ban slavery in 1807 and why did they wait until 1833 to begin extending this ban across their colonies?? Did the founding fathers have a crystal ball and act on events that would occur only 65 years in the future? If the British truly hated slavery so much, then why did the empire maintain a global system of subjugation, famine and exploitation across Asia, Ireland and beyond for so many generations?
So what happened? Was the British Empire seriously pushing an anti-slavery agenda? Why did America’s anti-slave trajectory fall apart so soon after the revolution and why did the rot spread to the point of necessitating a Civil War by 1861?
How to proceed with a serious investigation?
The Matter of Money
Since one of the most effective keys to understanding history starts with the question of “who controls the money”, economics is a good place to start.
Approaching the matter this way will cause the inquiring mind to confront the battle between two opposing paradigms of statecraft which defined the world in which the American revolution arose as part of an international phenomenon involving leaders from Russia, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, India and Morocco.
The battle over what sort of system of economics would govern America after political independence was achieved in 1783 will here become a very valuable question.
Where certain players of that age believed that “value” should be locked into rules of money-worship and profit (which all people desired since money bought pleasure and helped us avoid pain), others disagreed and believed value should be looked for elsewhere. These others believed that value transcended matters of pleasure/pain and touched upon something less transient and more universal… but what?
Introducing Ben Franklin
During the 18th century, these latter forces centered themselves around the figure of America’s “father of founding fathers” Benjamin Franklin who drafted some of the most important policies that led to the sovereign control over currency from his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency, onwards. Franklin used his powerful printing presses to spread both sovereign banking and anti-slavery pamphlets, books and treatises for decades before the revolution itself was declared in 1775. One of the most powerful anti-slavery books printed by Franklin was the influential 1737 ‘All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage’ by Benjamin Lay which argued that any Christian keeping slaves was an offense against God.
Lay wrote: “No greater sin Hell can invent than to prophane and blaspheme the pure and Holy Truth, which is God all in all, and remove God’s creatures made after his own image, from all the comforts of life and their country… and bring them into all the miseries that dragons, serpents, devils and hypocrites can procure and think of”.
In the mind of Franklin and his co-thinkers these issues (economics and slavery) represented two sides of the same fight.
Franklin argued in his many writings that “value” originated in what you create that satisfies the needs of humanity, and not what “things” you possess or wish to consume. Since a society of creators/producers requires sovereign manufacturing to generate real wealth and constant internal improvements of infrastructure to coordinate the development of all parts of a nation under a unified intention, Franklin recognized clearly that the production generated by “slave labor” is a chimera and actually represented a form of “anti-value”. Like heroine consumption today, anti-value simply means any form of “momentary profits” that might even be measurable as GDP and generate money flows, but actually represents a destruction of that society’s ability to sustain its own existence over time. (1)
The reason for this is simple.
Slavery destroys the creative powers of mentation in both the laboring slave who is valued only for their animal labor, and also the decadent slave master who’s potential for creativity becomes narrowly defined by ways to keep the slave under control.
It is thus no coincidence that Franklin also created the anti-slavery alliance in the 1760s and later founded the 1785 Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves” alongside several of his devoted proteges. These proteges included the figures of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouvernor Morris who all happened to become the creators and leaders of the “American System of political economy” premised on the use of a national bank, productive credit, protective tariffs, and large scale manufacturing to promote the economic sovereignty of the new nation. I introduced some of this in my recent essay How to Save a Dying Republic: Hamilton’s Genius.
When Jefferson took control of the Presidency from 1801-1809, a major victory was won for the pro-slavery oligarchs of America who saw immense profits to be gained by spreading their peculiar form of society under a perverse form of Manifest Destiny.
Admittedly, these oligarchs would have been much happier with the victory of Aaron Burr to the presidency in 1801 since an immediate dissolution of the union would have occurred between slave and free states as early as 1804 (to be discussed in a future essay). Unlike Burr, Jefferson was at least against breaking up the Union into northern and southern confederacies (with the free states merging with Canada and the slave states becoming their own nation), and that is why Hamilton (Jefferson’s political nemesis) ironically organized aggressively for his victory winning the fatal ire of Burr.
Sadly, Jefferson’s devout belief in agrarianism, hate for manufacturing, love of slavery, and British enlightenment thinking still made him an instrument for the slave power’s cancerous growth during his terms in office.
The British Empire’s Global Game
By destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century, the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufactures which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labor. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation and drugs.
By 1840 over 20% of the British population was employed in textiles under such anti-human conditions that Charles Dickens described in his Tale of Two Cities and other writings.
The Best of Times and Worst of Times
With the 1804 murder of Hamilton, and undermining of America’s national credit system between 1804-1836, British free trade grew as protective tariffs were taken down, and credit towards infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, roads, rail, etc shriveled up. Speculation ran rampant whenever this monetarist system was unleashed driven by booms and busts and the rise of “state-rights” programs that superseded all national initiatives. This process was taken directly from classic divide to conquer tactics which I outlined in my last essay Lincoln and the Greenbacks.
An astute Whig economist looking upon this bipolar process in America (while comparing it to the depressingly stagnant Canadian economic situation of 1791-1850) stated in 1853:
“Though the ratio of the increase of the population has been greater in Canada than in the United States, yet their increase of wealth has barely kept pace with the population, and they are as poor as they were half a century since. They have enjoyed the blessings of Free Trade with England all the time, we have only a part of the time. Whenever we have attempted to supply ourselves by our own industry, with the comforts and necessaries of life, we have improved our condition as a people; and during the intervals of Free Trade and large importations of foreign goods, we have relapsed again into a condition bordering on bankruptcy; while the Canadians have been constantly exhausted, and kept so poor by Free Trade, as to be unable to get sufficient credit to have even the ups and downs of prosperity and bankruptcy in succession.” (2)
The Slave Power Spreads
By 1836, the 2nd National Bank was officially killed after a mass propaganda campaign convinced a duped mob that it was an instrument of tyranny in America, and over the coming 6 decades, the only five presidents who would make any serious effort towards reviving America’s nationalist system would end up dead while in office (Harrison in 1841, Taylor in 1850, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1880, and McKinley in 1901). The man who is today celebrated for having “killed the bank” and “paying Americas debts” was in reality a force of pure destruction. Jackson “paid the debt” by cutting all infrastructure projects and unleashing mass speculation which resulted in a devastating 1837 bank panic that drove the nation into discord and depression. An unrepentant racist, Jackson also gave enormous assistance to the slavocracy by emptying the southern lands of Cherokee in the genocidal “Trail of Tears” and giving the land over to cotton planting oligarchs loyal only to their profits, “way of life” and the British Empire.
This story is told in all of its ugly detail in historian Michael Kirsch’s groundbreaking 2012 study “How Andrew Jackson Destroyed the United States”.
Between 1801 to 1840, southern cotton exports exploded from 100,000 bales/year to 1 million bales/year with 80% of the exports going to Britain. The City of London-Wall Street-New Orleans triangle dominated the world system with New Orleans representing over 12% of all U.S. banking capital. The southern slave states grew to represent the world’s fourth biggest economy through the support of the British Empire both financially and also in the logistical support needed to import mass slavery into the Americas. This degeneration proceeded slowly until the presidencies of Jackson and his handler Martin van Buren, but after this, cotton exports increased to 4 million bales/year by 1860 and the slave power grew immensely under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that ensured the spread of slavery west of Mississippi.
While many radical abolitionists in the USA and British Canada then advocated the dissolution of the union as an alternative to civil war, stronger souls like Frederick Douglass recognized the higher historic fight at hand. As a lesson to modern anarchists who believe in the 1619 Project and feel no sorrow at the burning of America under a new civil war today, Douglass took the time to research history, and broke with William Lloyd Garrison (the leader of the abolitionist movement) defending the Constitution in 1852:
“I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory… In that instrument [the U.S. Constitution] I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it”.
This higher understanding of history and the principles of the Constitution caused Douglass to ally himself with Lincoln where he worked with all his might to recruit 200,000 black soldiers to the cause. Later in life, Douglass attacked British free trade and “cheap labor” in defense of the Nationalist system writing in 1871:
“Cheap Labor, is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many. When we inquire who are the men that are continually vociferating for cheap labor, we find not the poor, the simple, and the lowly; not the class who dig and toil for their daily bread; not the landless, feeble, and defenseless portion of society, but the rich and powerful, the crafty and scheming, those who live by the sweat of other men’s faces.”
The British Hand Behind the Civil War
During the entirety of the Civil War, the British Empire’s guiding hand could always be felt, from supplying the south with battle ships, weapons and finances to providing logistic and diplomatic support internationally. Even British Canada was given over to the Confederacy’s intelligence headquarters which deployed spying, money laundering, and terrorist operations against the Union during the entire war.
Speaking to the British Parliament, Lord Robert Cecil (Marquis of Salisbury) expressed Britain’s logic succinctly when he said in 1861:
“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…. With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.”
A future installment will tackle the role of British operations in Canada that organized the murder of Lincoln, sabotaged the industrial reconstruction of the South, and undid the internationalization of Lincoln’s system around the world during the 19-20th centuries. This sabotage of potential created the foundations for the creature embedded within America now organizing a new Civil War and dissolution of the republic once and for all.
The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
(1) In the minds of those dirigistes like Franklin (including the Colbertist school of France, and its international leaders like Jonathon Swift, Daniel Dafoe, and Cotton Mathers in America who all wrote pamphlets supporting manufacturing over slave labor), a machine produced by the creative mind of man can accomplish the work of 100 laborers- thus liberating those laborers from the demands of the material forces of nature and freeing them to develop their powers of mind.
(2) Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations (1853), p. 599
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The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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