News Articles | June 5, 2022
Article | Audio or Text
Empire Solves Ukraine’s Nazi Problem With A Logo Change
AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
Ahh, that’s much better. Problem solved.
British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).
“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”
Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change. READ MORE or LISTEN
Article | Audio or Text
The US Empire Will Be Defeated By The US Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
Empire managers: Putin invaded Ukraine!
Public: Oh no! What should we do about it?
Empire managers: Greatly increase military spending, work to weaken Russia, and censor dissenting opinions.
Public: Wait, aren’t those things you’ve always wanted to do anyway?
Empire managers: Hush.
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Russian propaganda poses a much smaller threat to the western world than the various government agendas that are being rolled out under the justification of fighting Russian propaganda.
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Fuel prices are soaring in part because of an economic war the US empire willfully initiated in response to a proxy war the US empire deliberately provoked and westerners are being trained to look at their shrinking bank accounts and yell “Damn you, Putin!” READ MORE or LISTEN
We are supposed to believe that what we are witnessing is just one “tragic accident” after another. We aren’t supposed to see any sort of a pattern, and we aren’t supposed to ask any questions. Last month, I wrote an article about 16 mysterious fires that have happened at important food industry facilities in the United States since the start of 2022. Unfortunately, this trend has continued since that time. In fact, there have been more “accidental fires” in recent days, and I believe that the American people deserve some answers.
On Saturday night, a “massive” fire erupted at a commercial egg farm in Minnesota.
We are being told that the structure that burned down contained “tens of thousands of chickens”…
Massive flames burned down a barn with tens of thousands of chickens in Wright County.
The fire started late Saturday night at Forsman Farms in Howard Lake, causing major damage.
There is more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere than at any time in the past four million years, as the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels keeps humanity hurtling toward a "global catastrophe," officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned on Friday.
NOAA reports its Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii measured CO2 levels averaging 420.99 parts per million (ppm) in May, an increase of 1.8 ppm over levels at this time last year, while scientists at the San Diego-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which also tracks atmospheric CO2, calculated a monthly average of 420.78 ppm.
"The science is irrefutable: humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement. "We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day." READ MORE
Sen. Bernie Sanders suggested Friday that instead of bringing the weight of the criminal justice system down on marijuana users, the United States should use its resources to crack down on corporate crime as prosecutions of law-breaking businesses and white-collar offenders remain at record lows.
Noting that a disproportionate number of those arrested for marijuana possession are poor people and people of color, Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in an email to supporters that the Justice Department must "start prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street for laundering money from drug cartels, suspected terrorists, and corrupt foreign officials."
Additionally, the Vermont senator called on Congress to finally legalize marijuana at the federal level, arguing it is an issue of both criminal and economic justice.
"When you fill out an application for a job, one of the first questions you are asked is whether or not you have a criminal record," Sanders wrote. "It is extremely unfair for people to be denied jobs because they were once arrested for smoking marijuana. Enough is enough." READ MORE
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Friday a Senate hearing next week focused on expanding Social Security as he and other defenders countered false and repeated Republican claims that popular program is headed toward insolvency.
While a report released Thursday by the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds showed that Social Security has a surplus of $2.85 trillion, the independent senator from Vermont said benefits should be increased for retirees—an expansion that could easily be paid for with by raising the cap on payments into SSI by wealthy Americans who contribute at a disproportionately low rate compared to most.
"Our job is to save and expand Social Security by making the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share of taxes," said Sanders. "In the richest country in the history of the world, no senior should live in poverty and every American should be able to retire in dignity after a lifetime of hard work. This is not a radical idea."
An estimated 50% of Americans aged 55 and older are living without retirement savings, the Senate Budget Committee reported—a crisis stemming from stagnant wages, a widening gap between CEO and worker pay, and rising costs of living. READ MORE
Two and a half years removed from his campaign trail vow to make Saudi Arabia's leaders "pay the price" for their role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, U.S. President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to visit Riyadh in the coming days as part of the White House's effort to shore up ties with the oil-rich kingdom as Russia's war on Ukraine roils global energy markets.
The timing of the trip has not yet been finalized, but the New York Times reported Thursday that Biden intends to add the Riyadh visit to his planned visit to Israel and Europe later this month.
Saudi Arabia is the third-largest oil producer in the world behind the U.S. and Russia, and the kingdom has previously resisted the Biden administration's calls to pump more oil amid surging gas prices. But more recently, the Saudi kingdom has indicated a willingness to ramp up production if Russia's output tanks due to the West's sanctions regime.
According to the Washington Post, for which Khashoggi worked as a columnist, Biden administration officials have come to view a presidential visit to Saudi Arabia "as a necessary act of realpolitik to lower energy prices and inflation, despite a campaign promise to further isolate Riyadh." READ MORE
In a major walkback from his campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for human rights abuses like the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, President Biden will reportedly visit Riyadh with the goal of persuading Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to help the US alliance win its economic war against Russia.
The Guardian tells us the trip “suggests Biden has prioritized his need to bring oil prices down and thereby punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, over his stand on human rights.”
So in order to punish Vladimir Putin for his war crimes and his assault on freedom and democracy, Biden will be courting a tyrannical war criminal whose country has no freedom or democracy.
Washington will be ending its brief diplomatic dry spell with a government that has been waging a horrific war against Yemen while suppressing any semblance of human rights at home in order to more effectively punish Putin for waging a horrific war against Ukraine which we’re told threatens freedom and democracy throughout the western world.
I am not the first to note the risible irony of this development. READ MORE
A new report out Friday from the OECD warns that the amount of plastic waste worldwide is likely to nearly triple over the next four decades, leaving the world with a terrible fate by 2060 if "radical action" is not taken to curb the level of pollution.
The report—titled "Global Plastics Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060"—predicts that nearly two-thirds of the estimated plastic waste polluting the environment by 2060 will be come from short-lived and single-use products such as packaging, cheap toys, consumer goods, household items, and textiles.
The report lays out projections of future plastic productions and consumption as well as a set of policy scenarios that, if enacted, could drastically reduce the scale of the crisis humanity has created with its over-reliance on cheap plastics derived largely from fossil fuels.
"If we want a world that is free of plastic pollution, in line with the ambitions of the United Nations Environment Assembly, we will need to take much more stringent and globally co-ordinated action," Secretary-General Mathias Cormann, who heads the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. "This report proposes concrete policies that can be implemented along the lifecycle of plastics that could significantly curb—and even eliminate—plastic leakage into the environment." READ MORE
A trio of Democrats from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday accused Amazon of "obstructing" its investigation into the December 2021 collapse of a warehouse in Illinois that killed six employees.
The collapse resulting from tornado damage at the Amazon fulfillment center in Edwardsville has heightened scrutiny of the e-commerce giant's labor practices. In late March, the House committee requested documents from the company related to the event, internal reviews of it, and broader extreme weather policies.
The panel's chair, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), joined with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) for a Thursday letter to Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy highlighting that the company "has failed to meaningfully comply with the committee's requests."
"These documents were due on April 14, 2022," the letter states. "Amazon still has not produced any of the key categories of documents identified by committee staff, let alone the full set of materials the committee requested." READ MORE
Tucker Carlson and Fox "News," rightwing billionaires, a bought-off Supreme Court, polluting industries, and the politicians they all own have screwed up America so bad that Canada—Canada, for G-d's sake!—is worrying about us.
Until about eight months ago, Vincent Rigby was the National Security and Intelligence Advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Now, instead of just warning PM Trudeau, he's joined a top-shelf group of national security experts to warn all of Canada.
He's warning them about us.
In a new report prepared for both the Canadian public and national security and police officials across the country, Rigby and his colleagues argue that if Donald Trump (or, presumably, somebody similar to him) becomes president of the US in the 2024 election, all bets are off. READ MORE
Four dozen U.S. House lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a War Powers Resolution to end "unauthorized" United States military involvement in a Saudi-led coalition's war on Yemen.
The bipartisan House effort is led by Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will introduce a companion version when the Senate reconvenes, according to the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).
The long-awaited introduction of House Joint Resolution 87 was welcomed by 104 advocacy groups, which collectively called on all federal lawmakers to co-sponsor the measure, "push for prompt floor action, and vote yes to adopt this bill in Congress."
The legislation—which DeFazio and Jayapal previewed earlier this year—directs "the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress." READ MORE
Climate campaigners and progressive U.S. lawmakers reacted with disdain and derision Thursday to news that House Republicans would put forth a purported climate strategy that calls for increased fossil fuel production and sets no targets for reducing planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Politico reports the "energy, climate, and conservation task force" created last year by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will release a six-point strategy that recommends increasing all types of energy production with the goal of reducing record-high fuel and other energy costs, and with an eye on the 2022 midterm elections.
The plan—which would also boost gas exports while easing the permitting process for fossil fuel infrastructure—contains six elements: "Unlock America's Resources," "Beat China and Russia," "Let America Build," "Build Resilient Communities," "American Innovation," and "Conservation with a Purpose." READ MORE
Fourteen young people on Wednesday filed a groundbreaking constitutional climate lawsuit against the Hawaii Department of Transportation and its director, Jade Butay; Hawaii Gov. David Ige; and the State of Hawaii.
In Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation—the world's first constitutional climate lawsuit focused exclusively on combating transportation-related pollution—the youth plaintiffs argue that their state DOT's promotion of a system that produces high levels of greenhouse gas emissions harms their communities, infringes upon their constitutional rights, and jeopardizes their ability to "live healthful lives in Hawaii now and into the future."
"I want the defendants to understand that climate change is not an impending doom, but a preventable crisis that is currently harming Hawaii's youth," plaintiff Mesina D.-R. said in a statement. READ MORE
Organizers with the Debt Collective are planning a rapid response demonstration at the White House Friday following reports that President Joe Biden has reached a decision to cancel $10,000 of student debt for some borrowers—a plan that doesn't go as far as his campaign promise, which critics had already denounced as inadequate.
"$10K, no way," tweeted the Debt Collective, the nation's first union of people who owe debt. "Don't go small, cancel it all!"
While campaigning for the presidency in 2020, Biden said he would cancel "a minimum of $10,000" in debt for every federal student loan borrower. More than 43 million Americans owe an average of more than $37,000 for their education. READ MORE
Guernica (Gernikara in Basque) is a city of 17,000 located in the province of Biscay (Vizcaya) in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain. It has a recorded history that goes back almost a thousand years and for centuries has been at the center of Basque culture and politics. The Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau based some of his ideas about direct democracy and the “general will” upon public assemblies held beneath the renowned Tree of Guernica. But the town is best known because of Picasso. When people today speak of Guernica, they see it through the lens of Picasso’s Guernica.
In 1937, the most famous artist in the world – a Spaniard from Málaga — made a mural sized painting depicting the recent destruction of Guernica by German Luftwaffe bombers. The painting was controversial. The Communists thought it too abstract; they wanted socialist realism. The liberals thought it was too political; they wanted beauty. The fascists and Nazis thought it was degenerate; they wanted it burned. But following its initial exhibition at the Spanish pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, the picture’s stature and renown grew. READ MORE
The news that the Mexican government had shut down operations of the elite DEA team in the country – the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) – provoked an avalanche of articles in the press, most of them defending the DEA in order to criticize the president. Hardly any of them spoke about the disastrous history of the Unit, much less about the perverse history and actions of the DEA in Mexico –and in all of Latin America. The agency has left a bloody trail of failures, incompliance with regulations, complicities and corruption in its mission to export the war on drugs as an instrument of social control and U.S. hegemony.
Goodbye to the SIU
Despite the fact that the decision to expel the Unit was made and executed more than a year ago, neither of the two governments announced the measure publicly and it was not until April of this year that the Reuters news agency published an article confirming, through anonymous sources, the Mexican government’s decision. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed and justified the news in his morning press conference April 21, saying, “We maintain cooperation between national agencies in charge of security, but they must respect our sovereignty, and before they came in and out of the country at will, and they made the rules, they did what they wanted, they even fabricated crimes. So, we’re putting the situation in order.” READ MORE
Seven days in the drought (the “worst the West has seen in 1200 years”) -, war-, and inflation-plagued month of May 2022 were emblematic of US-American fascitization – the self-described “world’s greatest democracy’s” creeping descent into a fascist white and Christian nationalist state beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law.
May 2: “Literal Enslavement” and “The Carnage the Supreme Court is About to Unleash”
First came the May 2nd leak of a draft decision penned by one of the nation’s five woman-hating Republifascist Supreme Court Justices and backed by each of those judges. Sam Alito’s draft majority opinion reversing the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and thereby overturning woman’s half century right to an abortion was an open revanchist assault on liberal, humanist, and social-democratic precedent. Alito cited alleged authorities from the 17th and even the 13th Centuries to defend his determination to re-impose the physical bondage of forced motherhood. It suggested that there is no sound constitutional basis for a vast swath of basic human, civil, personal, labor, environmental, and broadly human rights. READ MORE
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed entitled, “Why Does the Pentagon Give a Helping Hand to Films Like ‘Top Gun’?” by Roger Stahl, a communication studies professor at the University of Georgia and director of the documentary film “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood.”
The op-ed pointed out that if a proposed film does not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA, it will probably not get made. Moreover, according to 30,000 documents from the Department of Defense that Stahl and his team of researchers secured under the Freedom of Information Act, “the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows.”
There is one film from the early 1960s that did not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA that was nevertheless put into production. That film was entitled Seven Days in May and starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, and Frederic March. You can watch a trailer for the movie here.
The movie is based on the overwhelming power of the U.S. national-security establishment within America’s federal governmental structure. America’s military generals decide that the president is leading America to doom and decide that they have no choice but to remove him from office in order to save the country. The president gets wind of the scheme and moves to foil it. READ MORE
When Navajo activist Larry Casuse kidnapped Emmet Garcia, mayor of Gallup, New Mexico in March 1973, he certainly knew he could die. And he soon did. After police shot Casuse, they posed grinning over his body, displaying their guns, like big game hunters. This would not have surprised Casuse, well versed, as he was, in white barbarity toward Natives and indifference to their suffering. In fact, he resorted to kidnapping the mayor, because he had exhausted all other remedies to solve a fatal problem for his fellow Diné (Navajos): Besides being mayor, Garcia co-owned a bar, the Navajo Inn, frequented by indigenous people. Drunk, they died in droves of exposure in winter on the long stagger back to the reservation. Or they meandered out onto the road and got smashed up and killed by cars. The bar caused many Native deaths, regularly. But Mayor Garcia wouldn’t close it, despite Larry Casuse’s nonstop efforts to get him to. READ MORE
I grew up in rural upstate New York, where life was difficult and often isolating. Folks in our community were very poor, but we took care of one another. Neighbors lavished affection and support on my family.
Still, there was a deep undercurrent of abandonment and anger.
Far from the South, Confederate flags pierced the landscape. And at church, there was often little help for people struggling to overcome isolation, daily struggles, or poverty. Instead, the focus of church life for many people around me was the sin of sex — especially homosexuality.
Now, my dad was a minister, and my mom and grandma were hard-working union organizers. So even at age 9, this hyperfocus on homosexuality made no sense to me. People didn’t have heat in the ice-cold New York winter. But instead of trying to change this, the church focused on sex?
Instead of directing people’s anger at our unequal political system, the church directed this rage at love: men loving men, women loving women. And at people realizing that they had a different gender from the one assigned to them at birth. READ MORE
Joe Biden wants to declare war on white supremacy or at least so he claims. “White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison… running through our body politic.” He forcefully declared at a recent PR junket following one of the seemingly endless active shooter tragedies that have sadly come to define Middle America in the last decade. Silence is complicity, our cognitively challenged commander-in-chief told a live studio audience in what came dangerously close to seeming like a rare moment of lucidity. “We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.” He reiterated, pounding the message home, and after tragedies like the massacre in Buffalo, it’s hard for any reasonable human being to disagree with that sentiment.
Ten people were slaughtered in cold blood, and another three were grievously wounded on the linoleum battlefield of an urban supermarket specifically selected on a map for its proximity to a predominantly Black community. An 18-year-old white kid, a fucking child, traveled 200 miles and three and a half hours from his predominantly white small town on the Pennsylvania border, armed with an AR-15 littered with racist graffiti, just to kill people he never met because he was terrified that somehow, they would replace him in America’s twisted caste system. READ MORE
The past month has seen blows against freedom of speech for independent news outlets and, indeed, for all Americans. I’m not being hyperbolic here. There are real threats to our freedom of speech against which we ought to mobilize.
First, the Biden administration named something called a “Disinformation Governance Board,” housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose job will supposedly be to “standardize the treatment of disinformation by the agencies it oversees.” That means that the government will be the final arbiter of what disinformation is. It will decide what we can and can’t read. At least that’s the plan. (It is now on hold after an angry backlash.)
Republicans were furious with the announcement, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) telling Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at a Senate hearing last month, “This is an awful idea, and you ought to disband it.”
Twenty state attorneys general have already threatened to sue the Biden administration and are calling for it to “immediately disband” the board and to “cease all efforts to police Americans’ protected speech.” READ MORE
Problem solved.
British empire rag The Times has an article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).
“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”
Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change. READ MORE
The comments on Peter Oborne’s excellent article on Julian Assange in The Guardian on May 20 are a damning indictment of the media’s ability to instill near universal acceptance of “facts” which are easily proven lies.
The Guardian chose a comment full of these entirely untrue assertions as its “Guardian pick” to head the section:
If you look through all the comments, they repeat again and again that Wikileaks published un-redacted documents, including names of U.S. agents, which put lives at risk. The entire basis of most of the comments is simply untrue – and none of the readers seems to have any information to contradict them. READ MORE
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city’s moneyed elites. She and the SA have adopted a series of unorthodox methods to fight the ruling oligarchs and, in that confrontation, exposed the Democratic Party leadership as craven tools of the billionaire class. Her success is one that should be closely studied and replicated in city after city if we are to dismantle corporate tyranny.
Sawant, who lives on $40,000 of her $140,000 salary and places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns, helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 an hour minimum wage.
Following a three-year struggle against Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $231 million a year. READ MORE
Watching President Joe Biden’s stunningly clumsy performance in Tokyo last week, during which he committed the U.S. to defending Taiwan militarily, my mind went to the old adage, “All politics is local.” I am sure it is, but we are called upon to extend the thought: “All foreign policy is local” is our late-imperial reality.
The rest of the world is mere proscenium for our purported leaders, to put this point another way. No one with a hand in American foreign policy, so far as I can make out, is the slightest bit interested in the one thing, above all others, that the 21st century requires of competent statecraft. This is the desire and ability to understand the perspectives of others.
Have you ever heard anyone in the Washington policy cliques state, or even wonder, what China’s legitimate interests are in East Asia, first of all on the question of sovereignty over Taiwan? I haven’t either.
You can run a foreign policy in this manner, but any successes it achieves will be sheer happenstance. In the Taiwan case, these people can’t even count on a fluke. READ MORE
As the western proxy war with Russia in Ukraine begins turning in favor of the Donetsk & Lugansk Peoples Republics [01], the western cartel (i.e.; the U.S., E.U., U.K. & Commonwealth nations ++) are continuing to ramp up their war rhetoric and economic sanctions on Russia while sending vast amounts of military weapons to the Ukrainian military.
Meanwhile, every single government that continues to support the illegitimate evolved western backed coup government in Ukraine and their all-out sanctions war on Russia, now have bigger things to worry about which comes at the expense of their own economies as panic ensues regarding the fallout of their supply lines, food, energy, security, and runaway inflation that is gathering momentum while they blame Russia for their own short sightedness. (See Here [02], Here [03], Here [04], Here [05] and Here [06])
I suppose its easier to blame Russia than to shoulder the blame on themselves, considering that rising public discontent due to these economic realities will eventually come back to bite them in the a$$. And yes, the thought of economic uprisings throughout the European Union is not far from reality as we continue down the road of high energy costs and inflation. READ MORE
The following video interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky pertains to the Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure.
The report is a bombshell. The vaccine was launched in mid-December 2020. By the end of February 2021, “Pfizer had already received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by the vaccine and tens of thousands of reported adverse events, including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.”
This Confidential Pfizer Report provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months).
What is contained in Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media. READ MORE
Article | Audio | Video
The Coming Food Apocalypse, and the Global Attempt at a Take-Over
By Michael Welch and Kit Knightly
A major global food shortage is looming.
Director-General Qu Donyu of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) presented Securing Food Security in Times of Crisis at the Meeting of the G7 Ministers of Agriculture. The FAO’s Food Price Index in March reached 160 points – the highest since its inception in 1990!
The report notes that Russia and Ukraine are “important players in global commodity markets” particularly wheat, maize and oilseed. And this uncertainty comes on top of “already high prices driven by robust demand and high input costs as a result of COVID-19 recovery.”
A number of countries, including Turkey and Egypt, Sub-Saharan African countries like Eritrea, Somalia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Congo and Namibia, will be highly impacted by the shortfalls in wheat from Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The food crises in Yemen and Ethiopia in particular would likewise suffer a blow.
According to a recent CNBC article, fertilizer shortage – a shortage of fertilizer is exacerbating the situation. Russia, together with Belarus, is responsible for 40 percent of potash exports. According to Morgan Stanley, Russia also exports 11 percent of urea, 48 percent of Ammonium nitrate and combined with Ukraine collectively exports 28 percent of fertilizers made with nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as potassium. So farmers abroad will have to make do with lesser or more expensive crops. READ MORE
In May 2021, the HBO television network aired a new two-part documentary exploring America’s ongoing opioid epidemic entitled The Crime of the Century. The first episode summarized the role of the pharmaceutical industry in the crisis, specifically that of Sackler family drugmaker Purdue Pharma and its deadly prescription painkiller, OxyContin.
Part one also thoroughly investigates the complicity of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the deceptive marketing by the drug company to obtain U.S. government approval for oxycodone despite its high risk of abuse and dependency, just as the pharmaceutical lobby bribes lawmakers in Washington.
Later, the second half of the series charts the current rising use of even more powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl. During COVID-19, the number of fatal overdoses have reportedly spiked in an epidemic already estimated to be taking nearly 50,000 lives per year. The HBO production is one of a slew of recent films such as Netflix’s The Pharmacist and The Young Turks’ The Oxy Kingpins which highlight the responsibility of the pharmaceutical industry but omit discussion of a related issue that has become taboo for media to even mention. While the film’s scathing indictment of Big Pharma is certainly relevant, it unfortunately neglects to address another enormous but lesser-known factor in America’s escalating drug problem. READ MORE
The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.
In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan.
Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes.
The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.
Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in “counternarcotics programs”. Operation Enduring Freedom — along with the “liberation” of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono? READ MORE
The article below was first published in 2005. Below is a detailed update followed by the original 2005 article.
Author’s Note and Update
The US opioid crisis broadly defined bears a relationship to the export of heroin out of Afghanistan.
How will this multibillion trade (which until recently was protected by US forces) be affected by the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Private mercenary companies are also involved in supporting the opium trade.
The US withdrawal has been the object of extensive negotiations between US-NATO and the Taliban. A deal was signed in Doha in late February 2020.
Did the U.S. reach a “secret agreement” with the Taliban regarding the opium trade?
Restoration of the Drug Trade. Did the Invasion of Afghanistan Contribute to the Increase in Heroin Addiction
What is important to understand is that one of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below) READ MORE
When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead, he didn’t mean it literally, as that would have been impossible. He meant that God’s creatures have so failed to acknowledge Him and relate to Him, it is as if He decided to end His own existence.
Stated differently, Nietzsche recognized that Christianity had ceased to be influential in contemporary life. Though properly rejected as a madman, he reminded the world that the loss of virtue can only be sustained from the bottom up, not from the top down.
He meant that, for all the power the financial and governmental elites have, none of their valueless impulses would prevail were they not accepted by the majority or a determined minority.
He made these observations in 1886, during a time of relative peace but little freedom in Europe. His sentiments are just as valid in America today, where there is neither peace nor freedom. READ MORE
The Biden administration is being blackmailed by the present Israeli government and pro-Israel US legislators and lobbyists who oppose US reentry into the 2015 agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions. “Blackmail” is the appropriate term in this case because it is clear that the administration needs the votes of Israeli-aligned US lawmakers pass legislation.
Instead of promptly honouring his election campaign pledge to return to the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), President Joe Biden has made demands unacceptable to Iran as the price of UN compliance, stalling negotiations for months and putting the JCPOA at risk. Consequently, he has come under pressure from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and, to a lesser extent, China to quit stalling and return to the moribund JCPOA before it dies of neglect.
Having reached accommodation on nearly all issues, returning to the JCPOA has been threatened by an issue outside its purview: Biden’s refusal to lift the “terrorist” designation imposed on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, that country’s armed forces. The 2019 designation and the 2018 US withdrawal from the JCPOA and legacies of the Trump administration. Unfortunately, on policies impacting this region Biden has been wedded to Donald Trump’s malign handiwork concerning Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. READ MORE
Texas Senator Ted Cruz was asked on Thursday by as reporter from Sky News why mass shootings only happen in America. He couldn’t answer the question. The slovenly and disheveled Senator went into a hissy fit, and tried to reframe the question. It looked very bad, and certainly feeds into the leftist narrative about the need for gun control.
I don’t expect Ted Cruz to ever say anything that I care about in any situation, but here’s the thing: it’s a good question.
Why do these shootings only happen in America?
If you don’t answer the question, you are left effectively capitulating to the leftist narrative that “it is because guns exist.”
In fact, guns exist in most countries.
Here’s the map of civilian gun ownership worldwide:
The first Eurasia Economic Forum, held last week in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, should be regarded as a milestone in setting the parameters for the geoeconomic integration of the Eurasian heartland.
Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), is coordinating the drive to design an alternative monetary-financial system – a de facto post-Bretton Woods III – in cooperation with China.
According to Glazyev, the forum “discussed the model of a new global settlement currency pegged to baskets of national currencies and commodities. The introduction of this currency instrument in Eurasia will entail the collapse of the dollar system and the final undermining of the US military and political power. It is necessary to start negotiations on signing an appropriate international treaty within the framework of the SCO.”
Glazyev described the initiative to upend the western global financial system in more detail during an exclusive interview with The Cradle in April.
It’s particularly relevant to understand how Glazyev interconnects the EAEU’s drive with the increasing geopolitical and geoeconomic role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which unites at the same table key Eurasian powers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Iran. READ MORE
One of the grand parts of American mythology revolves around what is called “America’s Love Affair With the Automobile”, presented as an exciting if a bit quirky personal expression of independent and freedom-loving America, where inexpensive mass transportation failed to evolve due to Americans’ individuality and desire for freedom. But this historical narrative is wrong. Today’s US ‘car culture’ was the result of a massive conspiracy contrived by the auto and oil oligarchs and, like the consumer society, imposed on an unsuspecting nation through deceit and propaganda. Most of the truth has been deleted from the historical record and replaced with a ‘feel-good’ fairytale. After trashing the mass transit systems, the automakers led by GM produced a wide array of mythical narratives to justify and praise the transportation system they had created.
Some Background
This story begins, as do many others similar, in the early 1900s, when the US was busy industrialising, when mass public transportation consisting of trains and trams was filling much of the nation’s needs. READ MORE
Last week, the Biden administration quietly reaffirmed its decision to enact the highest Medicare premium hikes in history right before this year’s midterm elections. At the same time, President Joe Biden is endorsing a plan to funnel significantly more Medicare money to insurance companies and further privatize the government insurance program for older Americans and those with disabilities.
In effect, the higher premium increases will subsidize the larger payments to — and profits for — private insurance corporations. This comes after Biden raked in roughly $47 million from health care industry executives during his 2020 campaign.
The Biden administration announced on May 27 that due to “legal and operational hurdles,” Medicare recipients won’t see their premiums lowered this year, even though that rate was originally hiked last November in large part due to the projected costs of paying for a controversial Alzheimer’s drug that Medicare now says it generally will not cover. READ MORE
Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.
Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.
As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.
Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.” READ MORE
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”— David C. Unger, The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
America, meet your new dictator-in-chief.
As the New York Times reports, “Newly disclosed documents have shed a crack of light on secret executive branch plans for apocalyptic scenarios—like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—when the president may activate wartime powers for national security emergencies.”
The problem, of course, is that we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.
Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security. READ MORE
Previously classified files obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice reveal that the 2004 George W. Bush administration conducted a holistic review of the president’s emergency powers, with the goal of modernizing a set of secret plans for continuity-of-government in a nuclear war.
The George W. Bush Presidential Library turned over 500 out of 6,000 pages of the documents, known as “presidential emergency action documents” (PEADs), which “shed troubling new light on the powers that modern presidents claim they possess in moments of crisis,” according to the Brennan Center, which obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. READ MORE
DuckDuckGo, the search engine which claims to offer “real privacy” because it doesn’t track searches or store users’ history, has come under fire after a security researcher discovered that the mobile DuckDuckGo browser app contains a third-party tracker from Microsoft.
Researcher Zach Edwards found that while Google and Facebook’s trackers are blocked, trackers related to bing.com and linkedin.com were also being allowed through.
In response to the revelation, CEO Gabriel Weinberg essentially shrugged – telling BleepingComputer that the company offers “above-and-beyond protection” that other browsers don’t, but that he “never promised” anonymity when browsing.
“We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer,” he said.
“When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection, they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft. What we’re talking about here is an above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do — that is, blocking third-party tracking scripts before they load on 3rd party websites,” he continued. READ MORE
America was founded by rebels, by spiritual warriors. They were not perfect people, but they risked their lives for freedom and to bequeath us the enduring principles they encoded in The Bill of Rights. It continues to inspire the world over 200 years later. In 1775, Patrick Henry declared “Give me liberty or give me death!” All the US Founding Fathers knew when they signed The Declaration of Independence that they were signing their death warrants if the 13 colonies lost the war with Britain. Yet, John Hancock wrote his name so large that it is now synonymous with “signature”. In effect, they were all saying to the mighty British Empire, “You know where to find us — and we are not afraid”.
August Landmesser was a German who refused to do the “Sieg Heil” salute during a Nazi rally at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg on June 13, 1936. When all the Germans around him saluted Hitler, Landmesser stood alone in his refusal to follow the crowd. READ MORE
Since 2017 doctors and scientists have asked for 5G moratoriums on Earth and in space (see 1, 2) due to biological and environmental risks, and the majority of scientists oppose deployment. Since 2018 there have been reports of people and animals experiencing symptoms and illnesses after it was activated (see 1, 2, 3, 4). In 2019, telecom executives testified that they had NO scientific evidence that 5G is safe. Some researchers have suggested that deployment may also be contributing to COVID-19 infections while others say it’s not. Regardless, there are health risks associated with 5G exposure (see 1, 2,) as well as exposure to 4G and other sources of wireless Wi-Fi radiation (see 1, 2) and Electromagnetic Fields (aka “Electrosmog”).
This being the case, worldwide opposition to 5G has been ongoing for years due to health risks as well as other various significant issues that have been identified with the technology (see 1, 2, 3). This has limited, slowed, and/or stopped deployment in some places, but not the UK which led to a group filing a lawsuit against the government. READ MORE
The U.S. economy is slowing down more quickly than almost all of the experts had anticipated. As I detailed yesterday, U.S. consumers have been getting hit extremely hard by this economic slowdown, and at this point most Americans believe that a recession is coming. But could it be possible that a recession has already begun? As you will see below, the numbers seem to indicate that such a scenario is quite likely. But whether we are already officially in a recession or not, the truth is that whatever we are experiencing now is nothing compared to the pain that is eventually coming down the road.
Do you remember how painful it was for our society when the first housing bubble spectacularly imploded back in 2008? READ MORE
AS THE PANDEMIC was setting in during summer 2020, Justin Lee Littledog called his mom to tell her he was moving from Texas back home to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana with his girlfriend, stepson, and son.
They moved in with his mom, Marla Ollinger, on a 300-acre ranch on the rolling prairie outside Browning and had what Ollinger remembers as the best summer of her life. “That was the first time I’ve gotten to meet Arlin, my first grandson,” Ollinger said. Another grandson was soon born, and Littledog found maintenance work at the casino in Browning to support his growing family.
But things began to unravel over the next year and a half. Friends and relatives saw Littledog’s six-year-old stepson walking around town alone. One day, Ollinger received a call from her youngest son as one of Littledog’s children cried in the background. He was briefly unable to wake Littledog’s girlfriend. READ MORE
The Biden administration recently signed off on a generous $65 billion in public money for “more accessible and affordable internet” to “close the digital divide”:
“The law allocates approximately $42 billion for high-speed broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas. It also provides roughly $14 billion for a $30-per-month Affordable Connectivity Program to help ensure low-income communities can afford broadband access.”
Biden’s handlers frequently work the internet-for-all talking point into his public utterances, as they did for the April 21st press conference in Oregon.
Free internet for all!
What benevolent governance!
You might not be able to buy groceries or gas (no policy solutions on those fronts) – but you’ll get connected to the internet. Who needs nutrition when you have government-moderated Reddit?
Let them eat… you know the thing.
The question is: Why the massive government investment in getting everyone online? READ MORE
Article
Recent Events Only Reinforce Our Need for Gun Rights and Community Militias
By Brandon Smith
I want to stress a very important point first and foremost, because I don’t think the political left and the average gun grabber understands the gravity of the situation and they need to be educated:
Liberty advocates will NEVER give up their guns. It’s not going to happen. We have drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the 2nd Amendment and we are not going to move, not even an inch. It does not matter what legislation or executive orders Joe Biden promotes, and it does not matter if there are future criminal events involving firearms. There is no scenario in which we are going to hand over our ability to defend ourselves and rely on the government alone. All the indignant wailing and preaching from anti-gun leftists is for naught; they will get nothing.
Gun rights are integral to a free society because they act as a deterrent to potential government over-reach and authoritarianism. Tyrants might infiltrate politics and take over governments, and they might even THINK they have the ability to oppress the public, but they will never be quite sure they can get away with it as long as the public has the means to “reach out and touch them” from a distance. They will always have doubts and this is vital for freedom – When tyrants have doubts, liberty prevails.
I covered the issue of incoming gun bans in the latest issue of my newsletter, The Wild Bunch Dispatch, but I wanted to examine here the wider implications of disarmament; including what the consequences will be if we were to comply, and what the establishment should fear when most of us don’t. READ MORE
The world’s ruling elite will meet in secret this week. No press will be allowed in, no one will be interviewed about it, and Bilderberg will not even register as a blip within the mainstream media’s radar. As the media hypes gun control and abortion debates, bankers, politicians, military leaders, and information controllers will be discussing their plans for the world behind closed doors and with zero transparency.
The 68th annual Bilderberg Meeting, which has been held in locations around the world throughout the years, kicked off on Thursday in Washington D.C. with absolutely no press coverage at all and is set to end on Sunday June 5. Despite a prestigious guest list of around 120 attendees — who will arguably have more of a global influence than any elected officials — the meeting will escape any scrutiny in the mainstream media.
The reason this meeting of the global elite manages to remain free from any mainstream media coverage is no accident. This group of elite power brokers owns the media, they own the politicians, and, arguably, they own the world.
The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about the world. Whether you call it propaganda, psyops, perception management or public relations, it's a real thing that happens constantly, and it happens to all of us.
And its consequences shape our entire world.
This should be at the forefront of our attention when examining news, trends and ideas, but it hardly ever gets mentioned. This is because the mass-scale psychological manipulation is succeeding. Propaganda only works if you don't know it's happening.
To be clear, I am not talking about some kind of wacky unsubstantiated conspiracy theory here. I am talking about a conspiracy fact. That we are propagandized by people with authority over us is not seriously in dispute by any well-informed good faith actor and has been extensively described and documented for many years. READ MORE
Regular Winter Oak readers will already be well aware of the World Economic Forum, particularly if they have ploughed through our October 2020 analysis of its vile aims as revealed in three books by its boss Klaus Schwab.
So it will have come as no surprise to hear Schwab opening the 2022 WEF gathering at Davos in Switzerland with talk of “the global agenda” and “our global system”, spouting forth about improving “the state of the world” when he actually means imposing one.
For those who have followed our various revelations about the close relationship between the intersectional social-impact “left” and the financial mafia behind the Great Reset, his mention of the presence at Davos of a younger generation of “social entrepreneurs” will be self-explanatory.
Schwab described the WEF as “the international organization for public-private co-operation”. READ MORE
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Article | Video
"Let Your Village Burn!" - Racism, Violence Abound In Israeli Nationalists' Jerusalem March
In the latest iteration of an incendiary tradition, thousands of nationalist Israelis marched through the Muslim Old City quarter of Jerusalem on Sunday. Along the way, the mostly young, orthodox Jewish throng chanted racist, genocidal slogans and attacked Palestinians and their property.
"Police cleared Palestinians out of the area, which is normally a bustling Palestinian thoroughfare," reported Associated Press. Meanwhile, Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank were dispersed with force that ranged from stun grenades to rubber-coated steel bullets and even live rounds.
According to Middle East Eye: READ MORE
Article
Russia Threatens To 'Strike The West' If US-Supplied Rockets Hit Its Territory
Following on the heels of the Biden administration announcing it would send longer range rocket systems to Ukraine, the Kremlin has issued a veiled threat that if it's territory is hit it could strike back directly at the West.
"One of President Putin’s closest allies has warned that Moscow could target western cities if Ukraine uses rocket systems supplied by the United States to carry out strikes on Russian territory," the UK Times is reporting. The dire warning was given by close top Putin ally and former president Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as the Russian security council deputy chairman.
"If, God forbid, these weapons are used against Russian territory then our armed forces will have no other choice but to strike decision-making centers," Medvedev warned in the new statements.
That's when he suggested the following for the first time, marking a severe escalation of rhetoric:
"Of course, it needs to be understood that the final decision-making centers in this case, unfortunately, are not located on the territory of Kyiv" - with the suggesting being that those Western capitals supplying the advanced arms could come under attack in response.
Previously Russia has threatened to hit "decision-making centers" within Ukraine, such as Kiev and Lviv. These cities have been targeted on occasion, but rarely, throughout the war now in its fourth month.
The US confirmed this past week that Ukraine would receive M142 high-mobility artillery rocket systems, which are medium-ranged, capable of striking targets some 50 miles away. READ MORE
Over the decades many films have been made on the health effects of cell phones, cell towers and wireless. The investigative film Generation Zapped, for example, has been screened across the United States in schools and libraries and it is a great introductory film for your community, along with the Burt Wolf Series. We hope you will plan a film series at your local library or community center as a way to raise awareness.
These films are not in any order and each one is a must watch. We will continue to add new films so please come back later.
If we missed a documentary or film you recommend, please let us know at info@ehtrust.org. We will continue to add to this list.
Support us here at Environmental Health Trust. Some links go to the full video online and others are affiliate links. EHT will receive a commission which will go towards our non profit organization.
CHECK OUT THE VIDEOS
Over the last week or two, my newspapers have been running front-page stories declaring that our country’s Covid fatalities had reached the million mark, and as usual, their facts were wrong.
Anyone who bothers consulting the official CDC website could quickly determine that since Covid reached our shores two years ago, our country has already suffered around 1.3 million “excess deaths,” nearly all of which were either directly or indirectly due to the disease outbreak that began in Wuhan in late 2019. These fatalities total more than twenty times America’s losses in the Vietnam War and triple our World War II deaths, representing by far the largest death toll for any event in our entire national history.
Meanwhile, according to the most recent report of the World Health Organization, excess deaths worldwide over the last couple of years have now nearly reached fifteen million, exceeding the four-year total of the First World War.
During the two decades since the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War, I have been scathing in my criticism of our mainstream news media, and the many dozens of articles in my harshly critical American Pravda series on that subject now totals over 400,000 words. But even by the degraded standards I have condemned, the American media coverage of why so many Americans have now died has been astonishing to me.
Noam Chomsky: Ukraine and Beyond
11,366 views | Streamed live on May 26, 2022 | 1 Hour 27 Minutes
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