News Articles | December 25, 2021
Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Teresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the Director General of the UK Security Service or MI5. READ MORE
Vladimir Putin is trying to accomplish two very dangerous tasks at once: the destruction of civil society in Russia, and the withering away of international support for a democratic Ukraine. The first will be more easily accomplished than the second.
The Assault on Civil Society
The imprisonment of Alexei Navalny has been followed by a systematic attack on other human rights advocates. Some of his associates have left the country; others have been silenced. READ MORE
Georgia’s 2021 municipal runoff elections saw dozens of progressives elected as new mayors, city council members and local officials in a wave that challenges the political narrative that only centrists can win in Southern battleground states, according to several organizers of voter outreach efforts.
“Last night proves two things,” said Ray McClendon, the Atlanta NAACP’s political action chair, speaking a day after the November 30 municipal runoff elections. “One, it proves the value of the grassroots relational organizing that we’re doing. And two, it explodes the myth of what the national narrative is about a progressive capacity for victories.” READ MORE
The Cold War was the greatest ideological propaganda campaign in modern world history. In that propaganda battle of more than 40 years, human rights and democracy were the two main battlefields. With the Summit for Democracy, President Biden reverts to Cold War rhetoric. Whoever had thought that world peace would be better served with Biden than with Trump might be disappointed.
On 9 and 10 December, Joe Biden organized a virtual summit for democracy. Representatives of 110 countries were invited to this summit. Among them were many Western heads of government.
The purpose is, so to speak, promoting “democracy” and “universal human rights” around the world. But if you zoom in on some of the invited countries, you will quickly see that a completely different agenda is at stake here. Some examples.... READ MORE
When midnight strikes on New Year’s Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it’ll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery — a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.
In the previous decades, storm surges will have swept away coastal barriers erected at enormous cost and rising seas will have flooded the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people. Relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world, putting villages, towns, and cities at risk. READ MORE
A 5 Gt (Gigaton [billion]) seafloor methane burst would double the methane in the atmosphere and could instantly raise CO₂e level to above 1200 ppm, thus triggering the cloud feedback (panel top right). Even with far less methane, levels of further pollutants could rise and feedbacks could strengthen, while sulfate cooling could end, and a 18.44°C rise (from pre-industrial) could occur by 2026 (left panel). Meanwhile, humans will likely go extinct with a 3°C rise, and a 5°C rise will likely end most life on Earth. READ MORE
Note: there is an estimated 1,000 Billion tons (1,000 Gigatons) of methane in the Arctic Ocean. The release of 50 Gt could destroy most of the life on Earth.
NOAA mean globally-averaged marine surface data show high increases in methane levels recently, which were used to generate the trends and curves to the year 2030 in above image.
NASA temperature data as adjusted by Sam Carana on the right show the potential for a mean temperature anomaly from pre-industrial of 3°C anomaly to occur late in 2022 (blue trend). By extension, a 4°C anomaly could occur in late 2023 and a 5°C anomaly in late 2024.
Above data was used to determine a trend line for exponentially increasing atmospheric methane increase, as well as where along the trend lines the surface atmospheric temperature anomalies would occur. READ MORE
The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here.
Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for the resources it contains. They are tiny cogs in a sprawling global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest—an area about the size of California—over the last 35 years, driving more than 10,000 plant and animal species toward extinction.
The Amazon is the biggest in a belt of forests that wraps the planet’s midsection. It is a jungle so hot and humid, it makes its own rain. Its web of rivers is the largest in the world and contains about one-sixth of the world’s fresh water.
The rainforest is home to more than 10 percent of all plant and animal species, with new ones being discovered, on average, every other day. Under its canopy, insects fly around, looking like Pixar characters; rare, tiny mammals with humanly earnest faces scamper along branches, bird song rings through the leaves. Everything is pulsing and oxygenated, cycling through life and death and back to life. READ MORE
As global capitalist economic growth accelerates planetary ecological collapse, this article, originally published on November 10, 2013, argues that – impossible as it may seem at present – only the most radical solution – the overthrow of global capitalism, the construction of a mostly publicly-owned and mostly planned eco-socialist economy based on global “contraction and convergence,” on substantial de-industrialization, on sharing, on much less work and much more play and on bottom-up democratic management – is, in fact, the only alternative to the collapse of civilization and ecological suicide.
When, on May 10, 2013, scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii announced that global CO2 emissions had crossed a threshold at 400 parts per million for the first time in millions of years, a sense of dread spread around the world – not only among climate scientists. READ MORE
New York, NY — Despite multiple claims from heads of state, mainstream media and other local government officials that US citizens would not be mandated to take the covid-19 vaccine, as 2021 unfolded, so did their web of lies. New York City become one of the first tyrannies to implement a requirement for citizens to “show their papers” and prove they took the jab before entering public places. And now, we are seeing the utterly despotic nature of such policies.
The city’s tyrannical requirement for indoor diners, gymgoers and people looking to enjoy entertainment to be vaccinated with at least one dose has been in place since September, with exceptions for kids under 12. READ MORE
I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank.
When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is one of the worst afflictions that poor nations suffer. As one critic quipped, foreign aid is money from governments, to governments, for governments. READ MORE
If there is one thing that history has shown us, it’s that to play games with tyrants is to place yourself in a losing position. The house always wins, and you’re playing against somebody who is more than willing to cheat with extra cards up his sleeves.
Consider that ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ has now turned into Year 2.
At first, people were told to not wear masks. A woman in Virginia at the 50,000-strong gun rally in Richmond was actually arrested for wearing a mask in January 2020. Then, just a few short months later, the public was now being arrested for not wearing a mask. READ MORE
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health since 1984, has been painted by the mainstream media as a scientific sage, almost a saint, devoted to saving the nation from the deadly COVID “pandemic”.
However, Fauci’s role has been profoundly criticized in several books, films, and videos. Yet, perhaps none has so thoroughly taken Fauci to task as The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health as the November 2021 book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At 450 pages, it is encyclopedic in its coverage. Yet, it ends with a QR-Code to allow people access to updates! The book has a 4.9 rating on Amazon with 2,494 reviews — getting about 100 a day now. READ MORE
The U.S. university, imbued with the ethos of managerialism, has increasingly become a corporate enterprise in the guise of an intellectual steward. The infiltration of the priorities of capital into college administrations, underway since the onset of the neoliberal era, has incentivized forbidding tuition rates and the cultivation of a precarious workforce, subjecting many of those who perform the actual labor of the academic profession to intolerable strain.
Here are some facts, much remarked-upon, that nonetheless bear repeating: U.S. student debt has reached inconceivably vast proportions. READ MORE
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going to war against gun manufacturers. Three months out from the recall campaign that he handily defeated, an emboldened Newsom is looking for creative ways to rein in an industry that dumps tens of millions of high-powered weapons onto the civilian population each year and then walks away from the body count left in its wake. Specifically, last week the governor asked state politicians to present him with legislation that he could sign deputizing private citizens to sue gun and ghost gun manufacturers (producers of untraceable guns that are built from kits rather than purchased fully assembled with serial numbers), as well as gun distributors, in the event their weapons are used in the commission of a crime. READ MORE
Thousands of previously hidden Pentagon documents show that the U.S. air wars in the Middle East have been marked by “deeply flawed intelligence” and have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, according to a shocking new report in The New York Times Saturday afternoon.
The 5-year Times investigation received more than 1,300 reports examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, more than 5,400 pages in all. None of these records show any findings of wrongdoing on the actions of the U.S. military. READ MORE
When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, they included a crucial exception clause that allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. This clause has resulted in the forced labor of millions of people in our prisons and jails since, and the first beneficiaries of this labor were private corporations.
The exception clause allowed states, often in the South, to pass Black Codes, laws that specifically criminalized Black life and filled jails with Black people. States then used “convict leasing” to rent incarcerated people to private individuals and corporations looking for cheap labor, often plantations. By the late 1800s, states like Alabama were deriving more than half of their revenue from “convict leasing.” READ MORE
The Arctic has long been portrayed as a distant end-of-the-Earth place, disconnected from everyday common experience. But as the planet rapidly warms, what happens in this icy region, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the globe, increasingly affects lives around the world.
On Dec. 14, 2021, a team of 111 scientists from 12 countries released the 16th annual Arctic Report Card, a yearly update on the state of the Arctic system. We are Arctic scientists and the editors of this peer-reviewed assessment. In the report, we take a diverse look across the region’s interconnected physical, ecological and human components. READ MORE
More damning information about last week's deadly workplace disaster at an Amazon building in Illinois emerged on Friday when a delivery driver shared records of a conversation she had with her boss, which revealed that the e-commerce giant threatened to fire her if she didn't keep delivering packages even as tornado sirens blared.
"Radio's been going off," the driver told her supervisor—less than an hour and a half before a twister hit one of Amazon's warehouses in Edwardsville—in a text message obtained by Bloomberg News.
"Keep delivering," her boss replied. "We can't just call people back for a warning unless Amazon tells us to." READ MORE
Multiple employees of the Mayfield, Kentucky candle factory that was leveled by a devastating tornado late Friday said that supervisors threatened firings if workers left their shifts early amid warnings of the impending storm, according to new reporting by NBC News.
Sharing the new reporting, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called the revelations "absolutely horrific."
"Workers may have lost their lives in Kentucky because the company refused to let them take shelter," Brown tweeted. "Corporations putting profit over people's lives should not be happening in America in 2021." READ MORE
Silicon Valley has become infamous for its role in the surveillance ecosystem, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bosses are increasingly using an array of tech industry tools to keep constant tabs on their employees working from home, despite statistics showing that those who work remotely are more productive than their counterparts toiling away in office buildings.
But one woman who worked for the tech industry’s biggest company is fighting back. Ashley Gjovik, a former Apple project manager who was fired in September after speaking out about workplace safety concerns, has asked labor regulators to rule that the company employs illegal surveillance tactics. In October, Gjovik filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Apple of a number of unfair labor practices, including keeping tabs on employees in a manner that prevents them from exercising their right to discuss working conditions. READ MORE
This is the most opportune time for millions of workers in Big Box retail stores and fast-food outlets to form unions. McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, and other giant chains are having trouble finding enough workers. Some of these companies are even paying signing bonuses and upping low pay.
Chalk it up to the pandemic’s dislocations when millions of workers left their jobs, and many have not yet returned. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) see the opportunity of a lifetime, but are they putting enough organizing resources into this effort? READ MORE
"Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun…" is the title of an article in the Atlantic, just out, by Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of many groundbreaking exposés. He describes the various maneuvers that Trump-driven Republican operatives and state legislators are developing to overturn elections whose voters elected Democrats from states with Republican governors and state legislatures. Georgia fit that profile in 2020—electing two Democratic senators in a state with a Republican legislature and governor. READ MORE
Rev. Dr. William Barber, the co-chair of the national Poor People's Campaign, lambasted Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday for endangering both the Build Back Better Act and voting rights legislation, two central elements of the Democratic Party's popular legislative agenda.
"Manchin's immoral, unmerciful, economically insane, and constitutionally inconsistent blocking of both Build Back Better and voting rights protections is at the heart of this havoc," Barber said in a statement as Senate Democrats scrambled to find a way forward for their flagship reconciliation package, which—thanks to Manchin's opposition—likely won't receive a vote in the upper chamber until next year, if at all. READ MORE
Wherever and whenever obscenely rich people existed, they always protected their wealth and the privileges that come with it from the majority of non-wealthy people working for them and around them. Emperors, kings, czars as well as masters of huge slave plantations, lords of big feudal manors, and major shareholders and top executives of capitalist megacorporations did so partly by the use of brute force, or through the exercise of power, and bribery. All of them also used ideological persuasion, but none more so than capitalists today. And while “the weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons,” according to Karl Marx, a critique of capitalism’s obscene wealth today and its ideological justifications is arguably much needed. READ MORE
Freud’s psychological discoveries begin with the human body. First question: how does the Israeli body politic treat the Palestinian body?
The impetus of this article is the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes and the highly publicized criticism of Israel for charging six human rights NGOs with terrorism. Six months prior to charging the NGOs, six other Palestinian and Israeli NGOs demanded that Israel provide Covid vaccines to Palestinians. This demand was about the health emergency due to Israel’s withholding vaccines from Palestinians. At the time Israel was also killing Palestinians with yet another massacre in Gaza, there was an upsurge of vigilante killing in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and all this killing was on top of Israel’s continuous covert ways of killing Palestinians (which Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls incremental genocide). The human rights situation in Israel is of course dire, but why so often has there not been comparable attention and unambiguous condemnation of Israel’s endemic killing, its entitlement to kill? READ MORE
Half a mile south of what’s left of the old Gold Rush-era town of Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. From the top of that grade, I’ve sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada range.
Today, stuck at the bottom thanks to endless road work, I try to remember what these hillsides looked like before the Dixie fire torched them in a furious 104-day climate-change-charged rampage across nearly one million acres, an area larger than the state of Delaware. They were so green then, pines, cedars, and graceful Douglas firs mixed with oaks pushing through the thick conifer foliage in a quest for light and life. Today, I see only slopes studded with charred stumps and burnt trees jackstrawed across the land like so many giant pick-up-sticks. READS MORE
In yet another case of reality being stranger than most writers of fiction would dare to think possible, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two investigative journalists. In true Cold War fashion, the prize was split between one journalist from Russia and one from the western orbit, in the neocolonial land of the death squads known as the Philippines. The prize might be inferred to be a statement about the importance of investigative journalism in countries where journalists are regularly killed by unaccountable, state-funded assassins.
Meanwhile, many of the same media outlets that were informing us about the Nobel ceremony made no mention whatsoever of the fact that a journalist imprisoned in London, England had just become one step closer to being extradited to the US, where he faces a potential 175-year prison sentence. READ MORE
Slow-motion execution of Julian Assange
On Contact | Chris Hedges | 29 Minutes Video
On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the torture of Julian Assange with his father, John Shipton.
Julian Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.
That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied with a lack of sunlight and exercise and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress. “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Moris said of the stroke.
His steady physical and psychological deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis. And, unless we mobilize to halt this judicial execution, it will be Assange’s fate as well.
ERIE, PA – As Christmas music blared over VFW Local 470’s loudspeaker, members of Ironworkers Local 851 hugged and high-fived. Family members nearby ate holiday cookies and celebrated the great news.
The night before the Erie Strayer ironworker’s union reached a tentative agreement that ended their 75 day-long strike.
The tentative agreement, which covers 40 unionized workers at the plant, gives workers a 3% wage increase and a dental plan for the first time in company history that could potentially save families thousands of dollars a year on out-of-pocket medical expenditures. The agreement, however, contained no concessions on health care or union rights. READ MORE
Folks,
Greetings from the Burgh, where Payday is getting ready to go on holiday vacation in three days, but the strikes don’t seem to be stopping as Payday Report’s Strike Tracker has recorded its 1,750th strike since the beginning of the pandemic.
Keep reading about the 1750th strike where 41 teachers at Olney Charter High School in Philadelphia walked off the job.
(Donate to our fund to keep covering workers striking during the holiday season.)
Following Student’s Death, Philly Charter School Teachers Walk Off the Job
At Olney Charter High School in Philadelphia, owned by Aspira, teachers have walked off the job following the death of 17-year-old honor student Alayna Thach who died from COVID-19.
Teachers at the school are now demanding penalties for those that don’t wear masks and social distancing in the school’s cafeteria, where students eat without masks. READ MORE
Folks,
Greetings from the Burgh, where we’re getting ready to travel to Erie and cover a special Christmas party for the children of the striking Strayer ironworkers.
Donate today to help us pay for gas and food on the trip.
A Quarter of Americans Quit Their Jobs in 2021
New statistics from the Washington Post show that 46 million Americans quit their jobs this year.
The U.S. is now on pace to have a quarter of all workers quit their jobs in 2021. This massive upheaval in the American workplace has led to gains for many.
The Washington Post has more:
The United States is on track to register 46 million resignations this year, suggesting more than a quarter of the workforce will turn over. But it remains challenging for low-wage workers to get ahead. READ MORE
Months ago this writer predicted that Senator Manchin would never support Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Bill and was simply engaging in ‘bad faith bargaining’ to string the Democrats along. Manchin’s goal was to get the Democrat leadership–Biden, Pelosi, Durbin, Shumer et. al.–to reduce their proposals, which they conveniently did, on repeated occasions.
But Manchin’s real objective has always been to shit can the bill, in order to prevent the necessity of raising taxes on corporations and investors in order to pay for it. To borrow a phrase: “It’s the Tax Cuts, Stupid!”. READ MORE
Article
After several childhood cancer cases at one school, parents question radiation from cell tower
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Sprint shut down a cellphone tower on the campus of a California elementary school after some parents said it may be linked to several recent cases of childhood cancer. Those families at Weston Elementary School in Ripon claim the tower could have exposed their kids to harmful radiation. Sprint said the tower is safe and has operated well below federal safety limits, but the company turned it off anyway and plans to move it to a new location.
Kellie Prime's son, Kyle, was just 10 years old when he was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2016.
"My son missed growing up with his friends. My son lost all of his hair," Prime said, choking up with emotion. "It's not something that I wish on anybody to watch their child go through what our children have gone through." READ MORE
The telecommunications industry and their experts have accused many scientists who have researched the effects of cell phone radiation of "fear mongering" over the advent of wireless technology's 5G. Since much of our research is publicly-funded, we believe it is our ethical responsibility to inform the public about what the peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us about the health risks from wireless radiation.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced through a press release that the commission will soon reaffirm the radio frequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits that the FCC adopted in the late 1990s. These limits are based upon a behavioral change in rats exposed to microwave radiation and were designed to protect us from short-term heating risks due to RFR exposure. READ MORE
EHT was just asked, ” What published research shows the low radiation levels from cell antennas could be harmful?” EHT decided to summarize a short list of studies and share our answer with the public. The studies on this page are just a small sample of the published literature. Peer Reviewed Published Science on Radiation from Wireless Antennas “Small cells” are microwave antennas (basically shorter cell towers) rapidly being installed in public areas on utility poles and street lights in front of homes, parks and schools. Just like cell towers, these wireless antennas generate and emit microwave radiofrequency (RF) radiation to transmit 2G, 3G and 4G network signals. Companies soon plan to add a new technology called 5G which will use current 4G technology plus even higher frequencies. The higher frequencies include millimeter-wave emissions that were not previously released into public areas. Companies state that these 4G and 5G antennas will increase the wireless radiation levels in the area so much that they are working to loosen several governments’ radiation limits in order to roll it out. More than 240 scientists published an appeal to the United Nations to reduce public exposure and called for a moratorium on 5G citing “established” adverse biological effects of RF radiation. READ MORE
JAIM TEIXEIRA SURVEYS his property near Trairão, Brazil from the back of a motorcycle, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved, sun-proof shirt to shield him from the jungle’s breathtaking heat. It’s the end of the dry season and, like everything and everyone in this part of the Amazon, the lean, 51-year-old rancher is covered in a fine brick-red dust.
Nearby, a plume of smoke rises at the edge of the jungle canopy, heading skyward until it blurs into an indistinct haze. Burning trees crackle and spit. One falls with a whack. Then another. Teixeira lit the blaze the previous day to clear grazing land for his cattle. Brazil’s ranchers and rainforest frontiersmen call this limpeza. Cleaning. It’s the most expedient way to tame a jungle that stretches for thousands of miles in every direction.
“I know it’s illegal,” he said, gesturing toward the smoke. “If I had a salary, I wouldn’t need to do it. But how else can I feed my family?”
No license allows a person to burn the Amazon’s ancient trees. “For virgin forest,” Teixeira said, “you have to do it illegally.”
So people do. READ MORE
In 2003, Bill Moyers, an American journalist, asked Bill Gates a question. Moyers wanted to know why he was so interested in reproductive issues? Gates considered. “But did you come to reproductive issues as an intellectual, philosophical pursuit?” Moyers insisted. “Or was there something that happened? Was there a revelation?”
“When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things,” Gates responded. “My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that. And so it’s fascinating.”
Excellent. If you’ve lived under a rock for the past few decades, Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion providers in the world. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation preserves the legacy of Bill Gates’ father. READ MORE
Nearly $100 billion has been stolen from pandemic relief funds, according to the Secret Service.
The stolen money was diverted from the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and a third program created to issue unemployment assistance funds, the agency said Tuesday, according to CNBC.
Over $2.3 billion has so far been recovered, and roughly 100 suspects, from individuals to groups, have been arrested.
The government has released roughly $3.5 trillion in COVID-19 relief money since the pandemic started in early 2020.
The Secret Service, in announcing the arrest and dollar amounts, also said a new national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator has been appointed to oversee agency investigations. READ MORE
The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.
In high school circa ’04 while the other kids managed their Xanga pages and MySpace Top 8’s (back when social media was all fun and games, before the MetaVerse threatened to digitally conquer the world), I watched Big Daddy Patriarch Bill O’Reilly.
Bill drove hard to the paint, especially that one time when he decided to DO IT LIVE! READ MORE
This is verbatim from the official report of the U.N. General Assembly plenary of Dec. 16:
“The Assembly next took up the report on ‘Elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,’ containing two draft resolutions.
“By a recorded vote of 130 in favour to 2 against (Ukraine, United States), with 49 abstentions, the Assembly then adopted draft resolution I, ‘Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’.” It goes on:
“By its terms, the Assembly expressed deep concern about the glorification of the Nazi movement, neo?Nazism and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials, holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, READ MORE
For months, The New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have insisted that it’s just Russian propaganda to say that a significant neo-Nazi presence exists inside Ukraine, but thousands of these “non-existent” neo-Nazis battled police on Tuesday outside the parliament building in Kiev demanding recognition of their Hitler-collaborating forebears.
The parliament, aware of the obvious public relations fiasco that would follow if it bowed to far-right demands to honor members of the Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UIA), defeated the proposal. That touched off riots by an estimated 8,000 protesters led by Ukraine’s right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor. READ MORE
After only three months in office, a prophetic President John F. Kennedy was fully aware at the time of dark forces swirling around him and our nation, firmly entrenched in power and posing an alarming threat to the safety and well-being of both America’s last great leader as well as our democratic way of life:
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. READ MORE
Vaccine injury is everywhere. The federal government collects reports of vaccine injury through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). The system is intentionally clunky and difficult to navigate.
So some warrior mamas created OpenVAERS that takes all of the federal reports and makes them easily searchable. Pharma and the bougie mainstream are terrified of OpenVAERS because by making the reports easily searchable it wakes lots of people up to the catastrophic harms from vaccines.
OpenVAERS started before COVID. But with the introduction of COVID vaccines, OpenVAERS has become even more important. OpenVAERS tracks COVID vaccine injuries every week through what has become known as the Red Box Summaries. The Red Box Summaries are so powerful that Facebook and Instagram have programmed their artificial intelligence to censor screenshots from OpenVAERS in order to protect the Pharma cartel. READ MORE
Important statement by Doctors for Covid Ethics (D4CE)
First published on 21 July 2021, several updates
Urgent Open Letter For The Information Of:
All Citizens Of The European Union (EU), The European Economic Area (EEA) And Switzerland
All Citizens Of The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland (UK)
All Citizens Of The United States Of America (USA)
To:
The European Medicines Agency (EMA)
The Medicines And Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)
The United States Food And Drug Administration (FDA)
The Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC)
From:
Doctors For Covid Ethics (D4CE)
21 July 2021
Dear Sirs/Mesdames, READ MORE
Both are alleging without providing a speck of evidence that 97% of Covid cases/hospitalizations/deaths are the unvaccinated. This is a total lie.
Information from every country shows that it is the vaccinated who are suffering injuries and deaths.
The “Omicron variant” is being used to create a new wave of public fear and government control over civil liberties and citizens’ bodies–essentially rape with a needle–despite the known fact that the variant is rarely harmful. Hospitals are falsely reported to be full of Omicron patients. The presstitute media stresses that the more or less harmless variant is highly contagious, and are creating fear out of the ease of catching it. People are urged to protect themselves by taking the jab even though it is a known fact that the Omicron variant is immune to the “vaccine.” READ MORE
Dear Readers, in a series of recent columns–Dec 13, Dec 14, two on Dec 16, Dec 20, Dec 21–I have informed you that there has been a massive change in the Kremlin’s approach to the West. The Russian leadership is no longer asking us to please consider their security concerns. The Kremlin has told us “you will consider our concerns or else.”
As I have predicted for some years, the Kremlin’s mild mannered response to US/NATO gratuitous provocations convinced Washington that Russia was not to be taken seriously. I said the result would be that the US would go too far and that Russia would have to put a strong foot down. That has now happened. READ MORE
You understand, of course, that Western Civ’s mass formation psychosis, like a horror movie franchise, requires the constant re-invention of its monsters and hobgoblins, and a constantly refreshed arsenal of weapons to defeat them. Covid is our mutating monster, but Big Pharma’s silver bullets and wooden stakes have proven quite lame. So, the resourceful superhero, Dr. Fauci (“The Science”), has induced his magic messenger, Santa Claus (a.k.a. the FDA), to deliver two brand-new light-sabers to humankind to keep millions of disordered minds churning with hope of slaying the object of their fear.
Enter stage-right-and-left: Paxlovid from Pfizer and Molnupiravir from Merck. The names alone sound like mysterious invocations from a druidical rite of redemption. How many times have you muttered Mol-Nu-Pir-a-Vir opening the fridge in hopes of finding at least one last beer tucked away behind the mayonnaise and miso? READ MORE
The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis. READ MORE - LISTEN
Economic Update | The Contradictions of 2021
Professor Richard D. Wolff | 30 Minute Video
On this week's show, Prof. Wolff presents updates on Columbia University grad student strike, the contradictions of 2021, Cuba's Covid vaccine, Trump clone and French politics' lesson, why US manufacturing jobs keep vanishing, why capital-labor struggles affect high and low-paid workers alike: the baseball lockout, and Mitt Romney's 100% hypocritical attack on Dalio's China investments.