Repackaging The Dispossessive Strategies Of Imperialism As ‘Feeding The World’

counterpunch  |  We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.

Failed Green Revolution

Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.

Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

In her latest report, ‘Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:

“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”

Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:

“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”

It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.

Only Bootlicking Parseltongues Even Pretend To Give A Fsck About Your "Ideas"...,

Fastcompany |  The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence government policy, corrodes democratic society.

Most of us will never grow our wealth by 56% in a year. But wealth begets wealth. The superrich have access to investments that yield higher returns, the corporations they run pay less and less corporate tax, and as individuals they pay less in income tax than the rest of us.

The barons’ financial advantage over the average person is extraordinary. While their median net worth is $90.2 billion, the net worth of the median white American household is $189,000, while that of Black American families is $24,000. In other words, the median Big Tech billionaire is more than 477,000 times wealthier than the median white American family, and more than 3.7 million times wealthier than the median Black family.

To get a further sense of scale, consider what these billionaires could achieve with their wealth if they decided to. Together, they could:

• End global hunger ($330 billion);
• Eradicate malaria from the face of the earth ($120 billion);
• End homelessness in America ($20 billion);
• Feed the hungry suffering in Yemen’s famine ($4 billion);
• Give everyone in the world access to clean water and sanitation for six years ($22 billion per year); and
• Vaccinate the world from COVID-19 ($25 billion).

With that done, they would still have enough for each of them to take home $2.6 billion. With their spare change, they could each afford to collect the 10 most expensive works of art in the world ($2.3 billion) or take on another pet project, such as saving 520,000 lives by providing critical vaccines to children across the world.

Some may find it unreasonable to ask the Big Tech barons to survive on just $2.6 billion each. After all, the thinking goes, the barons earned that money. But these billionaires could give away $144 billion—more than enough to eradicate malaria on our planet—and still be as rich as they were when the pandemic started in 2020.

While maintaining their 2020 level of wealth, these Big Tech billionaires could start a direct cash transfer campaign and send $1,100 checks to every American family. Or they could send $19 to every person in the world. (That would be far more impactful: 689 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day.) Jeff Bezos would still walk away with $113 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with $54.7 billion.

As long as the tech barons remain in possession of extraordinary concentrations of wealth, that inequity will continue to erode our society’s democracy. At a time when Congress, independent agencies, and state attorneys general are looking to rein in the power of Big Tech, the sheer wealth of these individuals makes it hard to hold them and their corporations accountable.

Maybe It's Time We Tried Democracy Instead?

jacobin |  The enterprise of big philanthropy ultimately benefits the wealthy a great deal. Though this news is something less than earth shattering, a newly published review of scholarship surrounding elite giving in the United States and UK makes the case with particular force. Jointly authored by four academics based at different universities in Britain, “Elite philanthropy in the United States and United Kingdom in the new age of inequalities” both lends weight to the existing critiques of big philanthropy and offers some useful theoretical foundations for critics moving forward.

Today’s elites practice charitable giving largely for personal benefit and because large-scale giving inevitably yields a kind of soft power. “Elite philanthropy,” the authors write,

is rarely a “pure gift” motivated solely by altruism; rather, it represents a means of converting surplus funds into prized alternative forms of capital. . . . On this analysis, elites are drawn to philanthropy not simply as a means of virtuously “giving back” to society, as is so often claimed, but also as an unimpeachable source of the complementary capitals needed to function effectively in the field of power.

Indeed, visit any hospital, museum, or university today and you’ll inevitably find the names of ultra-wealthy patrons emblazoned somewhere prominent for all to see. Scale this up to the commanding heights of big charity and you ultimately find figures like Bill Gates — who mysteriously increased his wealth by about 60 percent in roughly the decade and a half after pledging to give it all away. Gates’s giving may not have required much generosity on his part, but it certainly yielded big returns for his public reputation and, it would seem, for his own bottom line.

Elite philanthropy, far from being merely an inadequate solution to social problems, ultimately works to entrench and perpetuate them — offering a tiny handful of elites a useful vehicle for the purchase of virtue, and the soft power that comes with it, at the expense of the many.

 

Eric Schmidt And Bill Gates Exemplars Of American Fatal Synergy

charleshughsmith |  The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis threatening the system.

Here's an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly 15% of the nation's entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions. Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests."

This asymmetry cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.

In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for decades--a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop. So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers of the elected body.

An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism's essential organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential component/process.

Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system once they interact synergistically.

The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers, consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.

Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.

In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access to resources, capital and agency as "the natural order of things."

All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence until it explodes.

The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.

The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released. The system's essential subsystems may be destabilized--the equivalent of organ failure--and once destabilized, it's often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.

In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.

Eric Schmidt Bet The Future On Cuomo And Cuomo Fscked It Up Beyond All Recognition

Politico  |  Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, continuing an April tour of the state with another press-free press conference in Buffalo, got a vote of confidence Friday from one of the biggest names in tech: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Cuomo, who faces an impeachment inquiry and multiple investigations into allegations of misconduct, has been parading around the state in the days since he cut a deal with lawmakers on a state budget. 

As the governor signed one of the budget bills Friday, Schmidt joined Cuomo to help tout an effort to expand broadband access — and give the Democrat a public boost of confidence.

“Governor, your leadership in general over this pandemic has been extraordinary,” Schmidt said.

As with other events in recent weeks, Cuomo was flanked by supporters who praised his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

“I trust Gov. Cuomo’s leadership,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said. “I’ve worked with him long enough to know that he truly cares about our great city … Thank you for your vision and your bold leadership toward building back a better and stronger New York."

Key context: The purpose of Friday’s event was to sign the Education, Labor and Family Assistance portion of the budget, which Cuomo was due to act on by Monday.

The participants were focused on a portion of this budget bill that requires broadband companies to charge low-income families no more than $15 per month for access. A grant funded by Schmidt’s foundation will cover costs for 50,000 students.

Another closed press event: Cuomo stopped letting reporters attend these events in December, citing concern about the spread of Covid-19.

The Buffalo event was his fourth one this week. One closed press event held at an apple orchard on Tuesday was outside. On Wednesday, his schedule said the media was prohibited from an event at Belmont Park “due to COVID restrictions” — a few hours later, the governor announced that it is now safe for more than 20,000 spectators to attend races there.

 

Why New York Lost Its Mind - Eric Schmidt REDUX (Originally Posted 5/11/20)

Not even gonna lie, not an Eric Schmidt fan and never have been. 

theintercept |  For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.

I Got A Dollar That Says Cornpop Won't Stop Supplying Police With Military Equipment

What U.S. Elites Disdain Is What Their Sockpuppets Term "Divisive"

FAIR |  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (Twitter, 12/29/20) described a $2,000 Covid relief check as “divisive,” even though 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans) wanted the government to prioritize another universal payment. All too often, words such as “divisive,” “contentious” or “controversial” are used merely as media codewords meaning “ideas unpopular with the ruling elite”—what FAIR calls “not journalistically viable.”

Medicare for All is a prime example of this. At least since the issue began receiving national media attention as a result of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, a majority of Americans have supported some form of national, publicly funded healthcare system. Some polls have found nearly three in four support the idea, including a majority of Republican voters. Yet corporate media continue to disparage universal public health insurance, labeling it “divisive” (Axios, 2/14/20), “controversial” (Christian Science Monitor, 6/4/19; Time, 10/24/19; New York Times, 1/1/20) or “politically perilous” (Associated Press, 3/25/19).

In an article entitled “Medicare for All Is Divisive (in the Democratic Party),” the New York Times (3/18/19) described giving people free healthcare “immensely contentious,” framing it as a risky and enormously expensive gamble that centrists in swing districts could ill afford to take coming up to an election. The reality, of course, was the opposite: Every single Democratic incumbent in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it.

There can be few policies that would so directly and immediately benefit so many Americans as raising the minimum wage to $15 (though that’s still not enough to afford rent in most US states). Forty percent of the country told Reuters/Ipsos pollsters in February that they or someone close to them would be positively impacted by such a change. The same poll found that supporters of raising the minimum wage outnumbered opponents by 25 percentage points. Regardless, increasing it is often described as “divisive” (e.g., Bloomberg, 10/2/17; Politico, 3/16/21; Delaware News Journal, 3/10/21).

Cornpop's A Pathetic Mouthpiece For Elite U.S. Disdain For Russia

mtracey  |  Deliberately vague weasel-word terms like “election interference” and/or “influence” gained such purchase in the past four-to-five years for a simple reason: the deliberate vagueness allowed people in power — elected officials, pundits, Intelligence Community functionaries — to claim unspecified expertise on a supposedly emerging range of threats. 

The threats were portrayed as particularly scary because of their alleged potential to Undermine Our Democracy. Consequently, these power-wielding people acquired a potent tool in their arsenal to accuse political enemies, whether foreign or domestic, of contributing to the proliferation of new and scary threats. The accusations were so deliberately vague that it was almost impossible to ever rebut them; sometimes even retweeting a meme was sufficient to be implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the very foundations of America. If an act so trivial as clicking one’s mouse on a social media post could be spun as abetting a foreign-backed “interference” or “influence” scheme, then that created an endless number of booby-traps for you to walk into.

So there was nothing new about the suite of anti-Russia charges promulgated Thursday by the US federal government, and parroted as usual with maximum credulity across the US media ecosystem. The charges were again predicated on the idea that Russian “interference” and/or “influence” is an extremely foreboding test for the survival of US Democracy. Taking bold action, the Treasury Department levied sanctions against a bunch more Russians for their claimed nefarious behavior in carrying out this interference/influence — a fulfillment of Joe Biden’s oft-stated campaign pledge that under his watch, Russia would finally “pay a price” for allegedly engaging in such activities. Donald Trump, it was thought, had been appallingly lax in his resolve to confront this threat; now, a new sheriff is in town.

Leaving aside the question of whether it’s prudent to assume that Janet Yellen is suddenly in possession of a foolproof methodology for attributing the provenance of “cyber operations” to specific foreign individuals and nation-states, it’s worth emphasizing what exactly is being alleged in the statement. The Treasury Department document reads: “Outlets operated by Russian Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States, denigrate US political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading information.” 

Noting that these same characteristics could be just as easily applied to US corporate media outlets is so blindingly self-evident as to almost be redundant. Were there not “outlets” during the 2020 election that were “focused” on “denigrating” Donald Trump? Or for that matter, Joe Biden? Do “divisive issues” not tend to be “focused on” by these same outlets as a basic precept of their core business model? Controversy = clicks/views, which equals revenue. Everyone knows this. Yet when scary Russian outlets are said to employ this same logic in their own content-production enterprises, it magically becomes dangerous enough to justify all manner of punitive government and corporate action. Including but not limited to: censorship purges, tighter regulation of online speech, and, as Biden announced Thursday, sanctions and expulsion of diplomats. “Disseminating false and misleading information”? The entire US media just got caught “disseminating” a fake story about Russians putting bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. If you’re truly concerned about the dissemination of “false and misleading information” having deleterious effects on the health of US political culture, your first target should be CNN.

 

Solarwinds Hack: NPR Publishes Thousands Of Words, Gives No Evidence, Yet Blames Russia...,

npr |  "This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements."

The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed.

Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all the various components in a company's network. Customers simply had to log into the company's software development website, type a password and then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers.

The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine.

Hackers believed to be directed by the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, used that routine software update to slip malicious code into Orion's software and then used it as a vehicle for a massive cyberattack against America. 

"Eighteen thousand [customers] was our best estimate of who may have downloaded the code between March and June of 2020," Sudhakar Ramakrishna, SolarWinds president and CEO, told NPR. "If you then take 18,000 and start sifting through it, the actual number of impacted customers is far less. We don't know the exact numbers. We are still conducting the investigation."

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced a roster of tough sanctions against Russia as part of what it characterized as the "seen and unseen" response to the SolarWinds breach. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have to click through to NPR to read its TLDR chindribble agitprop and entirely evidence-free Russian attribution. However, what little we saw and could opine about wrt that event is compiled right'chere with Whitney Webb's vastly more persuaive and internally consistent attribution to the Israeli IT company acquired by Solarwinds in 2019 SAManage.

Ay-Oh-No, Maybe These Ukrainian Nazis Shouldn't Have Nuclear Weapons?

antiwar |  Today Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seconded a statement by Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili that “it is time for concrete proposals for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain a NATO MAP and a plan to join the EU.” The two countries have been paired as partners for future NATO membership, with both being promised membership in the global military bloc at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seconded Zelensky’s demand that NATO admit Ukraine as a full member, stating that only that move would prevent a Russian invasion: “The only possibility for this [to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a NATO member.” He also claimed that had his country been in NATO in 2014 the secession of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea would not have occurred; neither would the now seven-year was in the Donbass. He neglectd to state whether the U.S.-engineered uprising and overthrow of an internationally-recognized government would also have occurred. Most likely not, as the populations of NATO nationsare not allowed to elect, or if elect, keep any government Washington and Brussels view with disapprobation.

The envoy then made this provocative statement:

“Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again. How else can we guarantee our defense?”

He also claimed there were 90,000 Russian military personnel deployed to the Donbass border and to Crimea; in his words, “We are dealing with the largest troop movement in Russia since the Second World War.” Which is arrant nonsense.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 a third of total Soviet nuclear weapons were in Ukraine; with 1,700 warheads in the country it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the U.S. and Russia. In 1994 Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon nation. It’s that decision the above-cited ambassador suggested be reversed. In fairness, this isn’t the first time the question of Ukraine developing its own nuclear weapons capacity has been broached. Over the past twenty years NATO-trained military leaders have raised the issue. But never before, and never during a crisis remotely comparable to the present one, has the issue been phrased so brutally: either place Ukraine under NATO Article 5 mutual military assistance status – and NATO acknowledges itself a nuclear alliance – or Ukraine will reassert itself as a nuclear power.

The shelling of the Donbass will be mild in comparison to what an armed conflict between a nuclear Ukraine and nuclear Russia would portend.

Imagine Mexico Be Like "Hey U.S. Withdraw Your Military From San Diego!"

thesaker  |  A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia's border with the Ukraine—or not—but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years—the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long!—this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare that has killed over ten thousand people. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.

But what's about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?

The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia's troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia's paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others' tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then is met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.

Is it different this time and is World War III is about to er upt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?  Fist tap Dale.

How Does A Jewish President Govern A Nakedly Nazi Ukraine?

forward |  The election of America’s first African-American president certainly didn’t end racism in the U.S. The same goes for Ukraine.

Poroshenko came to power as a result of an uprising that ousted his corrupt predecessor. Five years later, Zelensky was brought in as a rejection of Poroshenko. Zelensky, too, will soon be issued a verdict. And that can cut both ways.

It’s clear Zelensky must crack down on corruption, bringing much-needed justice to Ukraine. He’s already promised to work on steps such as stripping immunity from members of parliament. If he succeeds, an entire generation of Ukrainians will be raised under a Jewish president who finally managed to shed the country’s corrupt past, take it on a democratic Western trajectory, and deliver on the promises of Maidan. If he succeeds, it’ll be a tremendous victory for Ukraine and Judaism, especially at a time when anti-Semitism is surging globally.

The flip side is that Zelensky’s election will fuel Ukraine’s deepest anti-Semitic stereotype: the Jewish yoke.

The core tragedy of Ukraine, as seen by the darker strains of ultranationalism, is that it isn’t controlled y Ukrainians (i.e. ethnic Ukrainians). Instead, the country has always languished under the yoke of Poles, Russians, and especially Jews. This infestation is what prevented – and continues to prevent – the nation from achieving greatness. The solution is, of course, obvious.

Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi’s 1648 uprising led to the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the name of cleansing Ukraine. So did the uprising of nationalist Symon Petliura in the early 20th century. So did the campaigns of WWII-era paramilitaries who had collaborated with the Nazis as well as butchered Jews of their own accord.

Indeed, if you’re an American Jew with Ukrainian roots, chances are your ancestors fled to the U.S. on the heels of an initiative to ‘shed the Jewish yoke’.

Today, as Ukraine continues to suffer economic misery, talk of the yoke has risen.

In 2017, member of parliament Nadiya Savchenko exploded in anti-Semitic tirade on live television. “Good question,” replied Savchenko to a caller who asked about the yoke. “Yes, our government has non-Ukrainian blood, shall we say. What should be done about it? We must think and take action.”

In a follow-up interview, Savchenko claimed 80% of those running Ukraine are Jews.

Savchenko isn’t alone. There have been numerous instances of similar rhetoric hurled by politicians, especially since Groysman became prime minister.

Now, for better or worse, that blood-stained stereotype has gained some credibility. Ukraine is about to be run by Zelensky – a Jewish president backed by Jewish oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskyi – and Groysman, a Jewish prime minister. For ultranationalists, every failure can now be cast at the feet of the Jewish trio. As one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis pointed out, this could have dangerous repercussions.

It's That Pesky American Principle That "Property Rights Are Human Rights"

alt-market |  It might sound like “US exceptionalism” to point this out (…and how very dare I), but even if the globalist Reset is successful in every other nation on Earth, the globalists are still failures if they can’t secure and subjugate the American people. As I’ve noted many times in the past, most of the world has been sufficiently disarmed, and even though we are seeing resistance in multiple European nations against forced vaccination legislation and medical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will have the ability to actually repel a full on march into totalitarianism. Most of Asia, India and Australia are already well under control. Africa is almost an afterthought , considering Africa is where many suspect vaccines are tested.

America represents the only significant obstacle to the agenda.

Conservative Americans in particular have been a thorn in the side of the globalists for generations, and it really comes down to a simple matter of mutual exclusion: You cannot have an openly globalist society and conservative ideals at the same time in the same place. It is impossible.

Conservatives believe in limited government, true free markets, individual liberty, the value of life, freedom of speech, private property rights, the right to self defense, the right to self determination, freedom of religion, and the non-aggression principle (we won’t harm you unless you try to harm us). None of these ideals can exist in a globalist world because globalism is at its core the pursuit of a fully centralized tyranny.

There are people on this planet that are not satisfied to merely live their lives, take care of their families and make thei mark peacefully. They crave power over all else. They desperately want control over you, over me, over everything, and they will use any means at their disposal to get it. I would compare it to a kind of drug addiction; globalists are like crack addicts, they can never get enough power, there is always something more to take.

They tell themselves and others that they are “philanthropists”, that “they know what is best” for the rest of us. They believe themselves superior and therefore it is their “destiny” to dictate and micro-manage society for the “greater good” of us all. But really, when we witness their methods it becomes clear that they have no noble aspirations. They have no empathy or honor. They don’t care about the average human being, or the environment, or the economy or society in general. They only care about themselves and their delusions of grandeur. These people are a cancer on the rest of civilization.

They seem to be particularly obsessed with deconstructing and sabotaging America in the pursuit of their global Reset. Real philanthropists would not have a problem if someone didn’t want to accept their “charity”, but psychopaths cannot abide a group of people rejecting them and their ideology. You are not allowed to walk away from them. You are not allowed to do things your own way. You must be forced to comply. The agenda only works if EVERYONE submits.

Unfortunately for the globalists, the Reset is not working out for them everywhere. In the US, the agenda is failing miserably compared to Asia and parts of Europe.

As the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is so fond of reminding us, the Covid pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to push forward the globalist plans for a total Reset of human economy and society. To the globalists, the crisis is a panacea, a doorway to their version of a better world. They love the pandemic, they are not distressed by it.

The problem is, it’s not doing enough damage or terrifying enough people.

Why Wasn't The Ongoing Third Worldization Of America Simply Allowed To Play Out?

theorganicprepper |  Thirdworldization is a slow-burning SHTF for those living in developed countries, used to comfort, convenience, and security.

Thirdworldization is the gradual and inevitable impoverishment of a rich country. It is the visible effect of major crises hitting square on the population, institutions, corporations, and even the government. It spreads insidiously in every aspect of daily life and our small circles. 

Less growth means less wealth, less money circulating for everyone to take care of necessities and obligations. This shrinking economy brings all sorts of declines that affect services, infrastructure, the supply chain, institutions, and changing the population’s lives and routines.

The economy has a direct impact on the structure and foundation of social order. As an engineer, I tend to analyze structures and foundations by force of my work before assessing other factors. If those are in bad shape, the rest can’t be good. That holds true for a family, a company, a city, or a country.

The standard of living is dropping significantly everywhere

Even though the rich are getting richer, they will be affected by the destruction of the middle class and the poor becoming miserable. The wealthy don’t build their own houses, grow their own food, nor collect their own trash. But like rich countries and corporations, they’re much less affected because wealth can soften the blow and pay for a lot during hard times – or should I say, especially during hard times. 

For the rest (the great majority of society), there’s SHTF as the unfolding of the economic decline is reflected in various aspects as described below.

What Must Be Covered And What Must Be Revealed..,

sovereignman |  Even when we aren’t sick, we should cover our faces in public, just to make the mask-wearers feel better.

Masks Forever

“It no longer signals that a person is sick, or that a person is strange… It is no longer scary or felt to be an imposition on our rights. Mask-wearing can simply signal that we care about others’ health, and about our own.”

Let’s keep an uncomfortable, dehumanizing, air-restricting custom of masking in public, just as a little signal of our empathy. And conversely, if you aren’t willing to mask up for no good reason, you’re a selfish aggressor.

But there’s one more benefit that Dr. Ranney adds in case you’re not sold.

“[Masks have] become a form of self-expression or a marker of being part of the in-group.”

University locks students out for missing weekly Covid test

The University of Michigan announced to students that 718 of them would have their access cards deactivated for all non-residential campus buildings.

These students had failed to take the required WEEKLY Covid-19 test. So now they cannot access cafeterias, classrooms, gyms, and other campus amenities.

Evacuation from deadly volcano eruption is only for the vaccinated

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent ordered an emergency evacuation from areas of the Caribbean island last week as a deadly volcano began erupting.

Cruise ships responded to the emergency to help evacuate residents, and neighboring countries like St. Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados agreed to give shelter to those in need.

But according to the Prime Minister, there was one condition.

Only those already vaccinated against Covid-19 would be eligible for the emergency cruise ship evacuation, and relocation to other islands.

Australian government could require ID for social media use

The Australian parliament released a report called “Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence.”

In it, the government recommends forcing social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and even dating apps like Tinder to require government ID in order to use the services.

YouTube censors panel of medical experts over Covid-19 “misinformation”

The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis recently held a panel discussion to discuss recent research findings related to Covid-19.

The expert panel included four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities, who are all PhDs and experts in a field of disease research. And that just scratches the surface of their credentials relevant to being considered Covid-19 experts.

 And you can watch the follow up conference here (on YouTube alternative Rumble).

 

 

The Lies Are Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer...,

themostimportantnews |   Don’t you hate it when what you get turns out to be far different from what you were promised?  In this article, I am only going to share facts that have been documented by corporate media sources.  These facts are going to upset a lot of people, because they prove that much of what we had been promised didn’t turn out to be true.  So many people that I know were convinced that if they just got their two shots they would be 100 percent protected for the rest of their lives and they would never have to be concerned about getting COVID ever again.  In addition, most Americans still seem to believe that if a high enough percentage of the population gets their shots COVID will be defeated and the pandemic will be brought to an end.  Unfortunately, all of those assumptions have turned out to be dead wrong.

If you don’t want to believe me, perhaps you will believe the CEO of Pfizer.  This week, he admitted that “fully vaccinated” people will need a third shot of the vaccine within 12 months…

And of course lots of people are still getting sick after being fully vaccinated.  According to the CDC, so far there have been almost 6,000 documented cases of people being infected after getting two shots, and dozens of them have died…

At this point we just don’t know how effective the vaccines will be, but the New York Times is assuring us that we don’t have anything to be concerned about…

“I use the term ‘scariants,’” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., referring to much of the media coverage of the variants. “Even my wife was saying, ‘What about this double mutant?’ It drives me nuts. People are scared unnecessarily. If you’re fully vaccinated, two weeks post dose, you shouldn’t have to worry about variants at all.”  

 To me, Dr. Eric Topol’s statement was exceedingly irresponsible, especially considering some of the studies that have come out lately.  Here is just one example…

 In this article, I haven’t even discussed all of the side effects that we have been witnessing.  A few days ago, the FDA issued an unprecedented order regarding the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because it was causing blood clots in a number of cases…

I am glad that the FDA decided to step in, but the order came too late for this guy…

Kwestins About The Panic-demic Got Asked - But Went Entirely Unanswered

thewrap  |  On Tuesday, Tucker talked about what he argued has been a severe miscommunication problem from medical science leaders regarding the vaccines, in particular messaging that suggests people’s lives cannot meaningfully change even after they’ve received the vaccine — which actually we’ll concede is a good point. Tucker also brought up the pause in distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following a tiny fraction of people who developed a blood clot disorder after taking it.

This led him to say, “It is possible, in fact, that this vaccine is more dangerous than they’re indicating it is.”

And then later in the rant, he appeared to suggest that the vaccines may not work at all, and that it’s possible that a conspiracy of some sort might be covering that up. If you don’t believe us, here is what he said, verbatim:

“Experts say it is not entirely clear when it will be considered okay for people who are fully vaccinated to stop wearing masks. At some point, no one is asking this but everyone should be, what is this about? If vaccines work, why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives? Honestly, what’s the answer to that, it doesn’t make any sense at all. If the vaccine is effective there’s no reason for people who’ve received a vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. Well you’d hate to think that especially if you’ve gotten two shots but what’s the other potential explanation? We can’t think of one.”

Yes, Tucker actually said this. Perhaps it was just a rhetorical device, but if so, he didn’t say that was the case.

 

 

Representative Jim Jordan asked Dr. Fauci when the COVID mitigation would be considered successful? When exactly would Americans be permitted to recapture the rights the government has taken away? What exactly are the metrics that define success?…. 

 

 

Jordan continued to press him for a specific number. But, as Fauci started to give a response, the next committee member began to speak, thanking Clyburn. “I’d like my question answered!” Jordan shouted, in response to which Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) yelled: "You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth!”

 

WHO Finally Gave Up The Aerosol Transmission Booty - Will Truth Now Enter Permissible Discourse?

nature |  On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency.

The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says.

Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

A WHO spokesperson says the agency has mentioned the importance of ventilation since early in the pandemic.

Others say that the WHO’s position still doesn’t go far enough. “Airborne transmission is dominant,” says environmental epidemiologist Joseph Allen at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. That’s why building controls such as ventilation and air filtration make sense, he says.

The WHO and other health authorities have failed to clearly prioritise measures to improve indoor air quality to reduce the chance of catching COVID-19, says Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They don’t emphasize how important it is,” he says. What the WHO needs to say is “fact, it goes through the air,” says Jimenez, “we breathe it in.”

A stark message from the WHO would ensure that national health authorities take notice, says Jimenez. Australia, the Netherlands and some other nations still do not acknowledge in their public statements that airborne transmission has a significant role in spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

By the start of this year, concerns over ventilation had reached boiling point. Hundreds of health-care workers, scientists, engineers and occupational health-and-safety experts signed open letters calling on government officials in Canada, the United States, Australia, Colombia and the United Kingdom to address, among other things, poor indoor air quality. These concerted campaigns all urged local or national governments to take steps to reduce airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

One of the problems is that governments and businesses are still spending millions of dollars on surface disinfection, says Jimenez, despite evidence that it is rare for SARS-CoV-2 to pass from one person to another through contaminated surfaces. By contrast, few countries have invested in measures to improve indoor air quality.

 

mRNA Therapeutics Useless For Immunosuppressed Mubab (Biologics) Users

NYTimes |  For more than a year, Dr. Andrew Wollowitz has mostly been cloistered inside his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

As medical director of emergency medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Wollowitz, 63, was eager to help treat patients when the coronavirus began raging through the city last spring. But a cancer treatment in 2019 had obliterated his immune cells, leaving him defenseless against the virus, so he instead arranged to manage his staff via Zoom.

A year later, people in Dr. Wollowitz’s life are returning to some semblance of normalcy. His wife, a dancer and choreographer, is preparing to travel for work at Austria’s National Ballet Company. His vaccinated friends are getting together, but he sees them only when the weather is nice enough to sit in his backyard. “I spend very little time in public areas,” he said.

Like his friends, Dr. Wollowitz was vaccinated in January. But he did not produce any antibodies in response — nor did he expect to. He is one of millions of Americans who are immunocompromised, whose bodies cannot learn to deploy immune fighters against the virus.

Some immunocompromised people were born with absent or faulty immune systems, while others, like Dr. Wollowitz, have diseases or have received therapies that wiped out their immune defenses. Many of them produce few to no antibodies in response to a vaccine or an infection, leaving them susceptible to the virus. When they do become infected, they may suffer prolonged illness, with death rates as high as 55 percent.

Most people who have lived with immune deficiencies for a long time are likely to be aware of their vulnerability. But others have no idea that medications may have put them at risk.

“They’ll be walking around outside thinking they’re protected — but maybe they’re not,” said Dr. Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which funds research on blood cancers.

The only recourse for these patients — apart from sheltering in place until the virus has retreated — may be to receive regular infusions of monoclonal antibodies, which are mass-produced copies of antibodies obtained from people who have recovered from Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized several monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19, but now some are also being tested to prevent infections.