Dmitry Orlov

‘Tis election season in the DSA (the Disunited States of America, that is) and, since I happen to be a Russian, it behooves me to engage in our traditional national sport — American election meddling. It is a good, clean sport in which the stakes are purely symbolic and wagering would be pointless. You see, the DSA is not a democracy and it does not matter who is president: the whole place is being flushed down the same golden toilet no matter who gets to sit on it. I have been consistently maintaining that this is the case for many years now and it is indeed the case now more than ever, though less than it will be tomorrow or the next day, so please continue to pay close attention.

What is Joe Biden? He is a vacant cipher of a man backed by a crack team of mostly Jewish neocons. He recently took a vacation from his vacation to give a campaign speech in which he read some lines from two teleprompters, one to the left of him, one to the right, swiveling from one to the other between sentences. Then his microphone was turned off. This was a sensible precaution, given that Biden likes to ad lib — and when he ad libs he confabulates most preposterously. Nobody needs to hear his spontaneous soliloquies — he was “a po’ black chile growin’ up in Mississippi when his momma tole ‘im…” or some such, so microphone off and loud music as soon as the prepared speech is over is now standard procedure. As to the speech itself, that’s best left to an AI program: just give it a word count and tell it to riff on the subject of “Orange Man bad” (Orange Man being Donald Trump).

Meanwhile, the Orange Man is not a vacant cipher at all. Although he does repeat himself (a sign of his advanced age) he is still full of verve, vim and vigor. What’s more, he knows exactly what’s going on: he recently wished that the American economy would collapse sooner rather than later because he does not wish to be another Herbert Hoover, whose bad luck was to hold the great office during the onset of the Great Depression. Instead, he wants to be inaugurated in time to pick up the pieces while blaming the inevitable disaster on his awful predecessor. But that’s where Trump’s thinking goes off the rails, letting his boisterous, crowd-loving personality get the better of him, for if he were able to reflect on the situation in a detached and dispassionate way he would realize that there is no America to be made great again and that nobody in their right mind should want to be its president.

I believe that the Disunited States of America will devolve into a disordered heap of squabbling, disrupted, destitute states and counties, warring urban ghettos and a whole lot of wrecked, pockmarked, toxic wasteland. Right now, it is barely able to persist thanks to a bag of hot air known as the federal debt which is growing ever huger and ever hotter. The debt is in a runaway mode, rolling over into shorter-term and higher interest rate paper until… poof! Past that final “poof!” the federal government stops functioning; game over. Bureaucracies are very durable things, growing ever larger, more powerful and more bureaucratic, and America’s federal bureaucracies are no exception, but the Achilles’ heel of all bureaucracies is their budget: stab them in the budget and they shrivel up and blow away, leaving behind abandoned hulks of vacant office buildings.

Some people still choose to comfort themselves with the idea that the mighty US dollar is still mighty because so many people have so much of it. Well, I have quite a lot of delicious Olivier salad still sitting in my fridge, left over from the New Year celebration a dozen days ago. It is very rich, full of the nutritious goodness of ham, vegetables and mayonnaise; perhaps I should claim it as an asset and add it to my net worth? It is delicious, I tell you! Some people also choose to comfort themselves with the idea that the mighty US dollar is still mighty because it is still being used to settle some large, though shrinking, percentage of international trade. Well, people do tend to show a great interest in the chips of any given casino as long as there remains the possibility of exchanging them for some real money. Once that possibility goes away, all they remain good for is playing tiddly-winks with the kindergartners.

On purely humanitarian grounds, I want to spare Trump the pain and agony of discovering in the course his very first cabinet briefing once elected that the mighty federal bureaucracy over which he was elected to preside has gone “poof!” Let him enter his dotage (he is old, you know) while persisting in his comfortable and inspirational fiction that if only he were allowed to run things again, America would be made Great Again. And it appears that the only way to make that happen is to give Biden another term. And… I have what I believe is a really good, workable plan on how to make that happen.

The first thing to observe is that very few people, sane or (more likely) otherwise, would want to vote for a near-cadaver like Biden. Some of the sanest and most clueful ones might even be paying attention to the unspeakable atrocities Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians, somehow relate this to the fact that Biden’s cabinet is stocked with Jews who are, in a knee-jerk sort of way, pro-Israel, and propagandize this fact among numerous members of the general populace, conditioning them to imagine piles of dead Palestinian babies and to projectile-vomit at the very mention of Biden’s name. Then, were an actual election to be held, in spite of a record-low turnout (many voters have been pre-conditioned to projectile-vomit at the very mention of Trump’s name), Trump would sail into the White House and into history as The Last US President, stealing Biden’s laurels. Thus, it is essential to prevent an actual election from being held, just like the last time.

Like the last time, the proven and efficacious way of doing this is by means of a man-made virus. To this end, we should consult Shí Zhènglì (石正丽), a.k.a. “The Bat Woman of Wuhan” and see what other viruses she has up her… test tube. The ideal virus would be none too lethal but quite contagious and somehow spectacular. Perhaps this one would make people break out in spots and, obviously, require wearing masks in public to cover up said spots. Thinking of the overall viral ad campaign, it would make sense to introduce some fashion elements: revive the fashion of wearing artificial beauty spots — little black circles, to cover up the spots, used as part of makeup, pioneered by Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1623–1673, which she used to hide her persistent zits. It would also help to introduce a new dance craze to hint at the sudden lethality of the new virus: called “The Plank,” it would include some of the usual gyrations, but in addition periodically half the dance floor would go stiff as a plank and do a trust fall, with the other half catching them; after that the usual gyrations would resume.

In order for this plan to work smoothly, it will be essential to discretely clue in the Chinese and the Russians. The Chinese would automatically be in the loop since the virus would be, once again, from Wuhan, but the Russians should get a free sample of the virus, conveyed in secret to Alexander Ginzburg, director of N. F. Gamaleya Federal Research Center for Epidemiology & Microbiology in Moscow, giving the center enough time to develop a vaccine, perhaps to be named Gopnik-V, which would then be sold to dozens of countries around the world, earning Russia billions of dollars just as it did with the 91.6% effective Sputnik-V. The Chinese and the Russians would then be fine with this plan, treating as a profitable opportunity and an entirely internal American political matter.

With the new virus spreading and lavishly propagandized and with people breaking out in spots all over the country, it would be possible to accomplish two important things. First, it would provide the rationale to throw caution to the wind and to fire up the dollar printing press again, emitting into circulation tens, then hundreds, then thousands of trillions of dollars of “helicopter money,” flooding the economy with free, though increasingly worthless, digital currency, thus masking the unfolding financial and economic collapse until after the election in November. Second, it would necessitate bringing back lockdowns, school shutdowns and working from home, paving the way to… electronic voting via smartphones. In the midst of a pandemic, you see, it would be inexcusable to allow anyone to vote in person.

The voting would be via a smartphone app and an internet server located in Wuhan, China. Why China? That’s so that anybody who brings up this scandalous fact could be labeled a conspiracy theorist and, if necessary, charged with sedition and imprisoned. The server should be pre-installed with a secret AI module that seemingly randomly converts Trump votes into Biden votes often enough to ensure a Biden victory while leaving no verifiable audit trail. Anybody with a US IP address should be able to vote, citizenship be damned, since that’s the trend anyway. Oh, and any foreigner smart enough to fake a US IP address using a VPN should definitely be allowed to vote, being so much smarter than the average US voter.

With these measures in place, Biden would sail to an easy election victory and a second term in office even while mouldering in his basement throughout the election campaign just like he did the last time. But then what if Biden croaks? Apparently, senile presidents are by now allowed to remain in office, but is having a dead president in office still a bridge too far?

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/965537b3-fa0e-4631-afdf-c39b41e431ab

By Josh Christenson

New York Post

Dr. Anthony Fauci confessed to lawmakers Tuesday that guidelines to keep six feet of separation — ostensibly to limit the spread of COVID-19 — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input.

Fauci, 83, revealed to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the “six feet apart” recommendation championed by him and other US public health officials was “likely not based on scientific data,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician.

Schools nationwide remained closed well into the second year of the pandemic as a result of the social distancing guidelines, which were disputed by both research studies and other health officials.

“It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health who served as President Biden’s COVID response coordinator for 15 months, told the New York Times in March 2021.

“I wish the CDC would just come out and say this is not a major issue.”

Asked about a study in Massachusetts schools that found just three feet of distance between students resulted in “similar” COVID case rates, Fauci said the same month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “very carefully” reviewing the data and would “likely” update them.

A top White House adviser to two presidential administrations, Fauci’s transcribed interview before the House COVID panel “revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority,” according to Wenstrup.

Those “failures” included foisting vaccination mandates on schools and businesses.

“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come,” Wenstrup said.

“It is clear that dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely. Should a future pandemic arise, America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data.”

Wenstrup also said committee members “remain frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s inability to recollect COVID-19 information that is important for our investigation,” while “others we have spoken to do recall the facts.”

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), who sits on the panel, said Tuesday night that Fauci had shown an “amazing ability to either forget what happened or then to find ways to shirk any sort of responsibility for the influence that was had,” during the two-day affair.

​​“They wash their hands of any sort of responsibility, saying, ‘Oh, those decisions were made by school districts.’ But the school districts know, if you don’t follow the guidance that’s coming out of the federal government, you open yourselves up to lawsuits,” Cloud said of Fauci and other US pandemic response officials.
Wenstrup also said committee members “remain frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s inability to recollect COVID-19 information that is important for our investigation.” Getty Images

“He says he’s still not convinced that there was learning loss — that in his view, that’s still really open for discussion,” Cloud also told The Post.

“I think [if] you ask any parent, they’ll tell you it was a major hit on their child’s development.”

Republican staff members said the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director also “admitted that America’s vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future” but that he advised US colleges “to impose vaccine mandates on their students” during the pandemic.

In 2021, Fauci had also said it was “proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls–t, and they get vaccinated.”

The COVID select subcommittee will hear further testimony from Fauci in a public hearing later this year.

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), a doctor and the top Democrat on the subcommittee, dismissed the majority’s interview with Fauci in a statement as an “extreme fishing expedition,” calling on Republicans “to make the full transcript” available to the public.

The ranking member did not attend Monday’s transcribed interview with Fauci but showed up for the second day of questioning.

Wenstrup told reporters that the full transcripts of the interview with Fauci will be released once they are reviewed by majority and minority staff.

[…]

Via https://nypost.com/2024/01/10/news/fauci-admits-to-congress-that-certain-covid-social-distancing-guidelines-lacked-scientific-basis-sort-of-just-appeared/

Episode 6: Political Awakening of 1789

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

Louis XVI’s 1788 decision to call an Estates General to address France’s massive public debt reopened the possibility of power sharing between an absolute monarch and the nobility for the first time in over a century.

Mechanics of Choosing Deputies

Each of the three estates (clergy, nobility and everyone else) met in local assemblies to draw up a list of grievances and chose electors to select deputies to represent them at the Estates General. Although the king agreed to allot Third Estate commoners twice as many deputies as the other two estates, each estate had a single vote on the final proposal they sent the king.

In local assemblies, all men over 25 who paid taxes were allowed to vote on a list of  grievances. Except for actors, services and the bankrupt, all adult men were allowed. to vote for deputies. The only women allowed a vote were nuns belonging to the First Estate.

In Paris the Third Estate held their local assembly at the Palais Royal, a shopping arcade belonging to the duke Louis Philippe.* In rural areas, local assemblies met in parish halls and in cities they met in guild halls. Royal censorship had collapsed in 1788 and as the popular assemblies met, thousands of pamphlets were printed to sway popular opinion.

The Grievances

Altogether the three estates came up with 60,000 grievances. The top three were demands 1) for a constitutional monarchy, 2) for the Estates General to meet regularly and 3) for the clergy and nobility to pay more taxes in exchange for return for an advisory role in a representative body.*

The main Third Estate grievances were for 1) a reduction in seigneurial dues, church tithes and royal taxes, equal access (regardless of birth) to professions, an end to the nobility’s monopoly on hunting and fishing, free access to common lands, a reform of the seigneurial courts, an end to the salt tax and end to crop decimation by rabbits and birds owned by feudal lords 2) an increase in midwives and primary schools, 3) a standardization of weights and measures, 4) more uniform and fair systems of justice and taxation and 5) the removal of the toll gates around Paris.

Some Third Estate commoners had competing demands. The guilds wanted an end to guild monopolies to free up commerce. Female flower sellers wanted their guild reinstated to protect their meager earnings.

The Estates General Meets (January 1789)

There were 2000 spectators at the opening meeting at the king’s palace at Versailles on May 4, 1789. The king opened the Estates General but didn’t attend after the first day. The First and Second Estate met behind closed doors but the Third Estate opened proceedings to spectators.

Deadlocked over the first procedure (verifying membership), nothing happened for weeks. After persuading poor parish priests to leave the First Estate and join them, Third Estate deputies voted to rename themselves the National Assembly. After rejecting this demand, the king locked them out and they reconvened in an an indoor tennis court. There they committed to draft a constitution creating a constitutional monarchy.

While tacitly agreeing to a new system of consultation, the king simultaneously deployed royal troops on the outskirts of Versailles. In response more clergy and “liberal” nobles joined the National Assembly and refused to disband. As bread riots broke out in Paris and Lyons (France’s second largest city), on June 27th Louis XVI capitulated and directed the other two other estates to join the National Assembly.

*Some of the nobility saw the Estates General to gain back privileges they had lost to an absolute.

**The king’s cousin, Louis Phillipe renounced his title after the revolution.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/149323/149335

By Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com

• Dr Fauci said social distancing ‘six foot rule’ was not based on scientific data
• Despite efforts to silence lab leak theorists, Fauci admitted it is not a conspiracy
• READ MORE:  Fauci flip flops during first 7-hour session of grilling before House

Fauci, 83, sat before the House coronavirus subcommittee for a second seven-hour stretch of questioning on Tuesday about the pandemic response that he oversaw and its myriad flaws.

The infectious disease expert said that data did not support recommendations to keep six feet of distance from another person and that vaccine mandates he personally advised likely increased vaccine hesitancy.

Fauci also U-turned on his views of President Donald Trump’s 2020 orders to restrict incoming travelers from China.

He told Congress yesterday that he supported the ban – despite publicly criticizing the move in 2020.

The former President moved to restrict travel from China in January 2020 soon after Chinese officials identified around 10,000 cases of the novel virus.

Leading political figures on the left including President Joe Biden calling the then-President’s travel restrictions ‘hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.’

Dr Fauci, once seen as an ‘adult in the room’ amid a chaotic and confusing government response to the initial 2020 outbreak, has seen his sparkling public image take a hit in recent years.

He flip-flopped on crucial Covid safety information including masks and worked to silence scientists with views that differed from the mainstream.

The full extent of Dr Fauci’s testimony over the two days will be released after lawyers review their content to make sure no restricted information will be made public, though it’s not clear when that will be.

The snippets were revealed by Republicans on the committee, who laid out the key takeaways on a lengthy Twitter (X) thread.

Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, who heads up the subcommittee for the pandemic response, said Tuesday: ‘Dr Fauci’s transcribed interview revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority.

‘While we remain frustrated with Dr Fauci’s inability to recollect Covid-19 information that is important for our investigation, others we have spoken to do recall the facts.’

Newly released highlights from the second day’s hearing revealed that the committee honed in on the issues of social distancing, mandatory vaccinations, early travel bans, and the now-infamous paper that called the lab leak a conspiracy.

Dr Fauci told the committee that scientific data was not a driver of the blanket six-feet-distance recommendation to reduce the spread of the virus, saying that the rule ‘just sort of appeared.’

He also said that vaccine mandates, which split the nation in 2021, likely reinforced a general sense of distrust in the government with more and more people questioning its motives.

Republicans on the House committee said that Dr Fauci ‘advised American universities to impose vaccine mandates on their students.’

While it is not clear exactly how Dr Fauci engaged with university leaders to install vaccine requirements, it is well known that he supported such mandates on university campuses as well as primary and high schools.

Mandates also sparked outrage about what millions of Americans perceived as government infringement on their personal freedoms.

Many chose to eschew the vaccines to, in their view, preserve their own autonomy despite mandates for attending university, going work, or taking public transit.

Rep Wenstrup told the Washington Examiner: ‘I can’t get into his mind, but I think he felt it was the right thing to do because he thought it would save lives… but he basically was saying the lesson learned [was it] didn’t get into the psyche of America.’

Dr Fauci was also said to have ‘played semantics’ with the definition of the lab leak theory, which maintains that the coronavirus that started sweeping the globe in early 2020 emerged from a Chinese lab where researchers tinker with viruses to make them more transmissible and/or virulent.

He was specifically speaking about the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020. The paper argued that Covid had most likely evolved naturally after spilling over from animal reservoirs, rather than being engineered by scientists.

Dr Fauci was not an author of the paper, but he has come under fire for his role in commissioning it.

A House investigation later reported that Dr Fauci, along with former National Institutes of Health head Dr Francis Collins, orchestrated a conference call before the paper would be published, during which time they allegedly strong-armed scientists into publishing the natural origin theory.

But Dr Krisian Andersen, a co-author of the Proximal Origins paper who initially believed the virus showed signs of being genetically manipulated in a lab, told Congress last year, ‘there was no ‘prompting’ to disprove, or dismiss, a potential ‘lab leak.’

‘Although Drs. Fauci and Collins were on emails containing documents that would eventually help form the basis of the Proximal Origin paper, they were not sent drafts or final versions of the paper for ‘editing and approval’, nor did they, or any other NIH official, provide any edits or suggestions on the paper.’

Still, emails from Dr Andersen included language that Fauci ‘prompted’ him to write the paper with the goal of ‘disproving’ the lab leak theory, Dr Andersen told Congress that the statements they highlighted ‘are false and based on selective quote-mining of private emails, misrepresenting what was said.’

Recently-published internal communications among the scientists painted a picture of internal efforts to quash dissenting voices on more than just the issue of covid origins.

A petition written by who Dr Collins called ‘fringe epidemiologists’ Martin Kulldorff at Harvardi University, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya railed against blanket pandemic lockdowns, arguing for focusing instead on isolating people most susceptible to severe illness.

Dr Collins told Fauci: ‘There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.’

Dr Fauci assured him that a take down was in fact, underway.

Rep Wenstrup said on Tuesday: ‘He testified that the lab leak hypothesis — which was often suppressed — was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory.’

The Republican added that Dr Fauci, during his testimony, was not as staunchly against Trump Administration-era travel bans on arrivals from China, a policy that was painted as xenophobic at the time.

During Monday’s hearing, Dr Fauci had backtracked on his earlier claims that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases never allocated government money to gain of function research.

He had insisted to Senators last summer that his former department ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’

Yet, recently publicized emails dated February 1, 2020 showed Fauci acknowledged that ‘scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.’

While video recordings and text have not been made publicly available, Rep Wenstrup told reporters after Monday’s first stretch of testimony that it was ‘pretty congenial’ but added there are ‘a lot of things that we’re learning’ about how Dr Fauci’s definition of risky ‘gain of function’ experiments on viruses and his role in dispersing grant money to fund such research.

[…]

Via https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12947075/Fauci-FINALLY-coughs-Covid-failures-admitting-lab-leak-credible-praising-Trump-China-revealing-told-schools-impose-vaccine-mandates.html

People crushed by poverty and war are slowly waking up and starting to organize themselves for their everyday interests…

Author assembly.org.ua

While Western countries were celebrating the 105th anniversary of the end of the First World War, another trench meat grinder is leading to an increase in protest activity in Ukraine. The Assembly’s recent overview of combative sabotage in recent months is available in a separate canvas, now let’s talk about less disruptive things.

On October 27, in Kyiv, Odessa, Poltava and 10 other cities of the country, rallies were held by female relatives of mobilized soldiers demanding their demobilization. Most of these servicemen have been at the front since the start of hostilities in February 2022 and are in poor physical and moral condition. The title photo shows this event in Kyiv (Kiev) on the central Independence Square. On November 12, the same actions were announced already in 20 cities and towns of Ukraine; our correspondent exclusively covered it in Kharkov. However, many of those who do not want to fight are in no hurry to support these actions, fearing that the need to replace soldiers sent home will provide another reason for increasing conscription. The issue is now under consideration by the authorities.

Residents of Sosnivka in the Lviv region spoke out against the decision to send criminal prisoners to work at the coal mine located on the territory of this town. “The absurdity of this question is that miners who have a specialty, who have experience working in mines, are not exempt from mobilization, they are sent to the trenches. And these are strangers, convicted people. We don’t know under what articles they were convicted. We don’t know what to expect from those people,” said Vera Bogdanova from Sosnivka. The mine employs 300 people, 87 of them directly extract coal. Three dozen miners were mobilized. The enterprise decided to employ 10 convicts to work night shifts. In mid-October, residents of the town came to express their protest at the Chervonograd City Council. They prepared a draft decision: to contact the government and the president to check the legality of the prisoners’ stay at the mine. However, there were not enough votes at the session.

On October 14, dozens of residents of the Ovruch territorial community (Zhitomir region) gathered at an unauthorized rally in front of the city council, demanding an explanation from the local authorities regarding the cancellation of payments that are due to victims of the Chernobyl accident. Authorities banned the protest, citing martial law. However, people came to the administrative building (photo below) demanding assurances that the payments would be included in the state budget and an explanation of what would be done to prevent the cancellation of these payments. The mayor of Ovruch said that an extraordinary session of the city council was held and there is a corresponding response from the deputies of the Zhytomyr region, there are appeals that will be considered during the budget commissions meeting.

On the evening of November 29, in the Luzanovka neighbourhood of Odessa, residents protested due to the lack of heat and light in their houses for four days. They blocked the street, but then dispersed due to an air alert. The cops have arrived.

In the second half of November, students of the National Aviation University in Kyiv organized spontaneous meetings due to the absence of heating in the educational buildings.

“On November 20, the heating was turned on, before that it was freezing in the premises. When the heating was turned on, most of the buildings remained just as cold, because the system is old, there are leaks in many places. They also turned on the heating itself, that the radiators are barely warm, it feels like that’s just to prevent the pipe from bursting,” a student named Maxim told us.

A new rally was held on November 21. According to the administration, they already were resolving the issue, but the university’s debts complicate the process.

Bolt Food delivery service couriers go on strike every Friday. They are seeking to determine the minimum guaranteed wage, raise rates by 70% and unblock unjustly blocked colleagues.

More details about this struggle you can find in the article from CRAS-AIT, the photo below was taken in Kyiv on October 20 during a picket of this company’s office. On that day, approximately 70% of restaurants on the left bank of the capital underwent a shutdown due to a strike!

Also at the end of October, a scandal erupted across the country with a Bolt taxi driver in Kyiv, who was banned for life from this application for dropping off two aggressive passengers who demanded to speak with them exclusively in Ukrainian. Our magazine supported the call to boycott this company, which spontaneously arose on its Instagram page. Bolt in Ukraine is known much more as a taxi than as a delivery service, so one can hope that this campaign will not only be a response to the violation of human dignity and labor rights of the driver, but will also help support the strike of couriers.

In frontline Lisichansk (a part of the Lugansk region occupied by Russia since last year), water utility workers on September 2 reportedly went on strike due to many months of salary arrears. The 80th anniversary of liberation from the Nazis was celebrated there at that time along with City Day. In early October it became known that they had been paid. Also at the end of September, it was reported about a protest by water utility workers in neighboring Rubezhnoye (Rubizhne), but we did not manage to find out the exact details: perhaps the strike was prevented by promises to pay off debts; according to another version, those who gathered for the protest dispersed after seeing a group of armed people. One way or another, at the time of our report about these conflicts, we received evidence that debts were being repaid.

And finally, an example of individual rebellion. In the same Kyiv, an unemployed drunk man smashed the screen of a PrivatBank terminal because it mistakenly transferred his money, which he wanted to send to his acquaintance, to help the army. This happened back on July 11, but the verdict became public only recently. The court fined him 51 hryvnia under the administrative article of petty hooliganism. Hooliganism is really petty, but last year it was hard to imagine such an act!

Meanwhile, at yesterday’s forum, representatives of all factions and deputy associations of the Ukrainian parliament adopted a joint declaration on the refusal of elections in Ukraine until the end of martial law. According to the Odessa historian of anarchism Vyacheslav Azarov, this will destroy the hopes of the Western allies to get a less corrupt, more transparent and accommodating government here.

And now they have only two options: pour billions into supporting the Ukrainian rear and the Ukrainian Armed Forces until the latter reach the promised borders of 1991, or strangle the government by cutting funding and military supplies until they agree to negotiations or a new Maidan breaks out. The first option threatens years of weapons and financial costs that are unaffordable for the allies. The second is not only food riots in the Ukrainian rear, but also a more serious threat that the enemy will take advantage of the unrest and weakening of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, overthrow the defenses and seize a number of other regions, which threatens the ruling cabinets of the Western coalition countries with defeat in the elections. The “suitcase without a handle” dilemma…

[…]

Via https://libcom.org/article/autumn-rise-social-struggle-across-ukraine

Kit Klarenberg

Internationalist 360°

At the start of January, South Africa instigated proceedings of the gravest kind against Israel in the International Court of Justice for the crime of committing genocide in Gaza. The indictment is highly detailed, supporting the charge with a wide-ranging welter of evidence, the most compelling of which may be public statements by Israeli officials in their assorted proclamations on and offline since the twenty-first-century Holocaust commenced on October 8.

Almost immediately, media reports indicated Benjamin Netanyahu’s government favored prominent U.S. lawyer and veteran Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to lead their ICJ defense. As a hardcore, committed Zionist who has authored multiple apologetic books minimizing or outright whitewashing Tel Aviv’s heinous crimes against Palestinians since 1948 – his most recent being “Defending Israel: Against Hamas and its Radical Left Enablers” – he was no doubt an eager candidate. Yet, within days, he was quietly dropped from the running.

No explanation was forthcoming for this abrupt volte-face. Yet, the rationale is obvious – concurrent unsealing of wide-ranging documentation on official police investigations into, and civil lawsuits leveled against, Jeffrey Epstein.

These disclosures shed fresh light on the billionaire pedophile’s life and crimes, in particular, those among his extensive assortment of celebrity friends, associates, and colleagues who were “clients” – paying customers for sex with underage women procured by the reclusive mogul. Principal among them was none other than Dershowitz.

Allegations of pedophilic abuse have dogged Dershowitz – who defended notorious serial rapist Harvey Weinstein in court and, in an amazing conflict of interest, negotiated Epstein’s extraordinary 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement – for many years. Since the releases began, he has openly boasted about his name appearing 137 times in the documents dropped to date, claiming the contents fully exonerate him of any sexual wrongdoing. As we shall see, this is deeply divorced from the truth.

‘PUBLIC MEDIA ASSAULT’

Alan Dershowitz has long-loomed large among Epstein’s suspected pedophile confederates, and with good reason. On top of a proudly admitted personal relationship with Epstein and his long-time partner – or “madam” – Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of famed Mossad operative Robert Maxwell, in December 2014, Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts) sued him. She claimed Epstein arranged for Dershowitz to rape her at least six times, starting from when she was just 16.

The legal action dragged on until November 2022, when Giuffre abruptly dropped the suit, claiming she “may have made a mistake in identifying” Dershowitz as her rapist. By contrast, in the intervening time, parallel suits she brought against Maxwell, and British Royal Prince Andrew, who also allegedly raped her, were settled in Giuffre’s favor to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Several newly released files cover Giuffre’s jettisoned legal action. Among the most intriguing – and damning – excerpts detail how in January 2015, her pro bono lawyers, Bradley Edwards and Paul G Cassell, sued Dershowitz for defamation in Florida state court. This was prompted by the Harvard professor moving to have them disbarred for representing Giuffre while launching a “massive public media assault on [their] reputation and character.”

For example, he told CNN at one stage: “They’re prepared to lie, cheat, and steal. These are unethical lawyers… They can’t be allowed to have a bar card to victimize more innocent people.”

Curiously, the unsealed documents record how, in September 2015, Dershowitz argued in court submissions that in suing him for defamation, Cassell and Edwards “somehow waived” Giuffre’s attorney-client privilege. As a result, he filed a motion to compel them “to produce documents” and any material in their possession related to Giuffre. In other words, Dershowitz wanted to get his hands on sensitive, private information and communications related to his accuser, typically impervious to legal disclosure.

Three months later, the presiding judge rubbished Dershowitz’s demand and supporting arguments in a comprehensive and withering decision. The judge’s disbelief and disgust at the cynical attempt to undermine one of the “oldest recognized privileges” in U.S. law in this manner, particularly given Giuffre was neither “at issue” nor a named party in the defamation case, is palpable.

It is entirely unclear why Dershowitz sought this information, but he was determined to get it. As the defamation action ground on, he subpoenaed Giuffre to give a deposition, whereupon she was endlessly bombarded with questions intended to compel her to reveal information protected by attorney-client privilege and invited her to waive her rights under that principle. She declined. The case was eventually settled for an undisclosed sum in April 2016.

‘PROTECTION FOR HIMSELF’

Dershowitz was also thrust into legal hot water due to his role in securing Epstein’s 2008 NPA. Under its terms, Epstein was granted immunity from all federal criminal charges, as were four of Epstein’s named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” The granting of such sweeping, blanket protection from justice to anyone, let alone a potentially infinite number of people, is wholly unprecedented in the U.S. annals of American jurisprudence.

In return for this stunning leniency, Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court to just two felony prostitution charges, registered as a sex offender, paid modest restitution to three dozen victims identified by U.S. authorities, and served a mere 13 months in a luxury Palm Beach jail, with daily work release. No doubt to the accused’s supreme relief. Agreeing to the NPA moreover shut down ongoing parallel Florida police and FBI probes into his countless crimes.

At Dershowitz’s direct behest, then-Florida District Attorney Alexander Acosta agreed to keep the deal’s terms secret from Epstein’s victims despite this being an egregious and clear breach of the U.S. Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA).

In February 2019, a federal judge ruled this to have been improper and illegal due to a lawsuit brought by Giuffre over a decade earlier. The unsealed files contain numerous references to that action.

One notes wider allegations of sexual abuse against Dershowitz “were relevant to at least eight separate issues in the CVRA case.” It then lists “some of the evidence supporting the allegations” against him, including:

Sworn testimony from [one] of Epstein’s household employees that Dershowitz was present alone at the home of Epstein, without his family, in the presence of young girls; invocations of Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent by three of Epstein’s identified co-conspirators…when asked questions about whether Dershowitz had been involved with massages by young girls; refusals by Jeffrey Epstein to discuss Dershowitz’s involvement but instead to invoke his Fifth Amendment right.”

In this context, Dershowitz’s aggressive attempts to uncover what Giuffre may have known and discussed with her lawyers are rendered all the more perverse and suspect. Particularly given that the unsealed files show Ghislaine Maxwell herself invoked attorney-client privilege to refuse demands from Giuffre’s lawyers that she hand over any material relevant to her legal relationship with Dershowitz. They sought to determine whether the pair had entered a Joint Defense Agreement at any point since 1999.

These legal covenants permit “parties sharing a common interest in defeating a mutual legal opponent to freely share information with each other without the worry of waiving attorney-client privilege.” This would certainly be apposite for Dershowitz and Maxwell, given they have both been accused by the same women of collaboration and active involvement in Epstein’s pedophilic abuse over many years.

The stated timeframe of Giuffre’s lawyers’ requests could explain why when Maxwell was charged with enticement of minors, child sex trafficking, and perjury, among other federal crimes, in July 2022, the allegations related strictly to 1994 – 1997. The NPA may have covered any horrors she perpetrated after that. As Dershowitz revealed in an apologetic op-ed for The Spectator after Maxwell’s arrest, “Epstein’s original plea deal…expressly included Maxwell as someone who received immunity.”

As Dershowitz personally orchestrated the NPA, he was well-placed to know “who received immunity” under its auspices. Shockingly, he may have been among them. A freshly unsealed December 2014 court filing, in which victims of Epstein not party to Giuffre’s CVRA suit attempted to join her action, accuses him of “[negotiating] an agreement with a provision that provided protection for himself against criminal prosecution in Florida,” for sexually abusing victim “Jane Doe #3”:

Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions while she was a minor, not only in Florida but also on private planes, in New York, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In addition to being a participant in the abuse of Jane Doe #3 and other minors, Dershowitz was an eyewitness to the sexual abuse of many other minors by Epstein and several of Epstein’s co-conspirators.”

‘BIGGER AND BIGGER’

Per the unsealed documents, Jane Doe #3’s sexual exploitation began in 1999. Aged just 15, Maxwell invited her to perform a massage on Epstein at his Florida mansion, which quickly mutated into a “sexual encounter.” The pair then “converted her into…a sex slave” before she “managed to escape to a foreign country and hide out from Epstein and his co-conspirators for years” from 2002 onwards. One file states:

[Epstein made] her available for sex to politically-connected and financially-powerful people…to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information.”

Women with identical stories were in no short supply once Palm Beach police first began investigating Epstein in March 2005, after a parent reported the financier sexually abused their 14-year-old daughter. When police searched Epstein’s home in October that year, 21 possible victims had been identified. By the time the suspect was subsequently arrested for sex abuse, authorities had identified three dozen potential underage victims and were in the process of tracking down more. A Palm Beach detective recalled in 2018:

I was surprised at how quickly it snowballed. I thought at some point there would be a last interview, but the next victim would supply me with three or four more names and the next one had three or four names and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Before his arrest, Epstein learned some of his victims had spoken to police. His immediate reaction was to enlist Dershowitz’s legal services. Epstein also hired private investigators to conduct interviews with his victims while posing as law enforcement, pick through Palm Beach police officers’ trash for discrediting dirt, and follow his accusers and their families. In one instance, a victim’s father was run off the road by one of Epstein’s goons.

Furthermore, several victims were intimidated by Epstein and Sarah Kellen, his personal assistant and massage scheduler, and warned not to talk to the police.

Meanwhile, Dershowitz met privately with then-Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer, engaging in “shenanigans” that investigating officers had “never seen or heard of before.” Among them, providing dossiers on Epstein’s accusers, including photos of them drinking beer while underage, among other trivial “personal peccadilloes.”

Nonetheless, Dershowitz was seemingly decisive in convincing Floridian authorities to abandon all hope of holding Epstein to full account for his heinous acts. Shortly thereafter, a Palm Beach detective has alleged, “It became clear things had changed, from Krischer saying, ‘we’ll put this guy away for life,’ to ‘these are all the reasons why we aren’t going to prosecute this.”

The unsealed documents provide further detail on Dershowitz’s sabotage. A July 2006 report filed by an investigating detective mentions how the professor mailed him a letter with accompanying screengrabs of two victims’ MySpace profiles. In one, a victim stated her “interests” included “weed (marijuana).” Another featured a blog post in which she “describes using marijuana with her boyfriend.” Elsewhere in the lawyer’s letter:

[Dershowitz] advised he was looking into the allegation that one of the private investigators used by the private attorneys of Epstein, attempted to impersonate or state that they were police officers from Palm Beach. Mr. Dershowitz advised that the investigators used to interview [redacted] had ‘quite a distinct speech impediment,’ did not claim to be nor did they impersonate themselves as a police officer.”

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/why-israel-dumped-accused-pedophile-alan-dershowitz/

A girl mourns the death of her relatives, killed by Israeli bombardment, at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 31 December 2023 (AFP)

Jonathan Cook

Internationalist 360°

Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms.

Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The court is being asked by Pretoria to issue an immediate injunction ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the tiny enclave, to avoid further casualties.

Some 28,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, a majority of them women and children, and many thousands more are believed to be lying under the rubble. Tens of thousands are seriously wounded. A majority of the population have lost their homes to the three-month bombing campaign.

Israel has intensively and repeatedly targeted the supposedly “safe zones” to which it has ordered Palestinian civilians to flee.

It has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and is blocking most aid from reaching the enclave. Famine and disease are likely to rapidly increase the death toll.

South Africa’s 84-page brief argues that Israel’s bombing campaign and siege breaches the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.

Israel hopes that, given the difficulties of making a legal case in defence of its actions, diplomatic and political pressure on the court’s justices will win the day instead.

According to a cable from the Israeli foreign ministry, leaked to the Axios website, Israel hopes that, given the difficulties of making a legal case in defence of its actions, diplomatic and political pressure on the court’s justices will win the day instead.

The Biden administration led the way late last week in dismissing South Africa’s detailed legal brief as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.

That would sound patently ridiculous to western audiences had they been provided with serious coverage of Gaza. But Israel has been heavily restricting access to the enclave, while killing Palestinian journalists there at an unprecedented rate to stop their reporting.

In addition, western media are willingly – and secretly – submitting to an onerous Israeli censorship regime.

Incitement to genocide

Israel’s “strategic goal” at the court, according to the leaked cable, is to dissuade the judges from making a determination that it is committing genocide. But more pressing is Israel’s need to prevent the Hague court from ordering an interim halt to the attack.

Israeli officials will argue, Axios reports, that its sustained assault on Gaza fails to reach the threshold of genocide, which requires “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population, together with the intent to annihilate it”.

Israel will try to convince the judges that it has been seeking to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza and minimise the toll on civilians.

Its argument flies in the face of the evidence South Africa has amassed.

Its brief contains nine pages of declarations by Israeli leaders showing clear genocidal intent, including statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior figures in the cabinet, President Isaac Herzog and many serving and former Israeli military commanders.

Giora Eiland, an adviser to war council minister, Benny Gantz, has called Israel’s goal the creation of “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable”. An Israeli military spokesman stated from the outset that the aim was to inflict “maximum damage” on Gaza.

Herzog suggests the entire civilian population is a legitimate military target, while Netanyahu refers to the Palestinians as “Amalek”, a biblical enemy. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to annihilate the Amalekites, putting “to death men and women, children and infants”.

One of the provisions of the Genocide Convention is an absolute prohibition on incitement to genocide. Israel’s most senior politicians and military commanders have indisputably breached that section of the convention.

A letter to Israel’s attorney general last week from a group of Israeli academics, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists underscored that point. They warned that incitement to genocide had become “an everyday matter in Israel”.

The letter added: “Normalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers [in Gaza] conduct themselves.”

Taking the gloves off

But dehumanisation – the precursor to genocide – is not the only problem.

Israel’s prosecution of what it terms a “war to eradicate Hamas” has fully met its own definition of genocide. “Conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population” were already being created long before the onslaught Israel unleashed immediately after Hamas broke out from Gaza on 7 October. Some 1,140 Israelis and other nationals were killed in the ensuing carnage.

Mostly forgotten in the back and forth about what is unfolding in the enclave is the context: United Nations officials warned nearly a decade ago that Israel’s siege of Gaza – now 17 years in duration – was designed to make the enclave “uninhabitable”.

In other words, Israel was precisely “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.

Even before its current, extended assault, Israel had placed severe restrictions on access to water for the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants. As a direct result, overstretched aquifers under Gaza were allowing in seawater, making the enclave’s drinking water unfit for human consumption.

Food was similarly in short supply. Back in 2012, Israeli human rights groups managed to make public a secret document showing that the army had been tightly controlling food going into Gaza from 2008 onwards. As a result, two-thirds of the population was food insecure, and every 10th child was stunted by malnutrition. The aim was to induce long-term food poverty, effectively putting the population on a starvation diet.

Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the past 15 years – what Israel calls “mowing the grass” – destroyed many of its homes and much of the infrastructure, creating ever greater overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.

Israel’s repeated bombing of Gaza’s only power station, and its chokehold on supplying additional energy, limited electricity to a few hours a day.

The Israeli siege blocked medicines and medical equipment from entering the enclave, often making serious health conditions difficult or impossible to treat. And given the Israeli-imposed restrictions of goods in and out of Gaza, the economy was already in ruins, with nearly half the population unemployed.

Long ago, back in 2016, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Herzi Halevi, warned that the catastrophe Israel was engineering in Gaza could blow up in its face – as indeed it did on 7 October.

Israel’s three-month rampage has simply accelerated and intensified all the genocidal policies that had long been established. Hamas’s break-out simply gave Israel licence to take the gloves off.

Gaza ‘uninhabitable’

This is why the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, declared last week that Gaza had reached the point where it was indeed “uninhabitable”.

He added: “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

With the vast majority of the population homeless and most hospitals no longer functioning, infectious disease was spreading.

Israel’s “complete siege” policy meant aid could not get in. According to Griffiths, Israel had destroyed roads, blocked communication systems, and was shooting at UN trucks and killing aid workers.Returning from a visit to the border crossing with Egypt, two US senators observed at the weekend that Israel had imposed unreasonable conditions creating endless delays that prevented aid from reaching the people of Gaza.

In other words, Israel has now successfully “created conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.

The aim of the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted in the immediate wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, was not simply to punish those who carry out genocides.

Perversely, Israel is reversing the very international safeguards put in place to stop a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust

It was designed to help identify a genocide in its early stages, and create a mechanism – through the rulings of the International Court of Justice – by which it could be halted.

In other words, the purpose of South Africa’s case is not to arbitrate what happens once Israel has annihilated the Palestinians of Gaza, as far too many observers appear to imagine. It is to stop Israel from annihilating the people of Gaza before it is too late.

Based on strange logic, Israel’s supporters imply that the genocide charge is unwarranted because the real aim is not to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza but to induce them to flee.

Israeli leaders have encouraged this assumption. In an interview on Sunday, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, noted of Gaza’s population that – after being bombed, made homeless, starved and left vulnerable to disease – “hundreds of thousands will leave now”. Duplicitiously, he termed this a “voluntary” mass emigration.

But such an outcome – itself a crime against humanity – entirely depends on Egypt opening its borders to allow Palestinians to flee the killing fields. If Cairo refuses to submit to Israel’s violent blackmail, it will be Israel’s bombs, the famine it inflicted, and the lethal diseases it unleashed that decimate Gaza’s population.

The International Court of Justice must not adopt a wait-and-see approach, pondering whether Israel’s bombing campaign and siege lead to extermination or “only” ethnic cleansing. That would strip international humanitarian law of all relevance.

Line in the sand

If Israel and its western allies fail to bludgeon the court into submission, and South Africa’s case is accepted, it will not only be Israel in legal difficulties.

A genocide ruling from the court will impose obligations on other states: both to refuse to assist in Israel’s genocide, such as by providing arms and diplomatic cover, and to sanction Israel should it fail to comply.

An interim order halting Israel’s attack will serve as a line in the sand. Once made, any state that fails to act on the injunction risks becoming complicit in genocide.

That will put the West in a serious legal bind. After all, it has not just been turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza; it has been actively cheering it on and colluding in it.

Leaders in the UK such as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer have steadfastly opposed a ceasefire and thrown their weight behind a central pillar of Israel’s genocidal policy: the “complete siege” of Gaza that has left the population starving and facing lethal epidemics.

The British and US governments have rejected all calls to stop the flow of arms. The Biden administration has even bypassed Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that are laying waste to civilian areas.

Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has regularly been featured by British media making genocidal statements. Just last week, when an interviewer noted that she appeared to be calling for the destruction of the whole of Gaza – every school, mosque and home – she answered: “Do you have another solution?”

British and US media have given airtime to Israeli officials who openly incite genocide.

All that would have to stop immediately after a ruling. The police in western nations would be expected to investigate and the courts prosecute those inciting genocide or providing a platform for incitement.

States would be expected to deny Israel weapons and impose economic sanctions on Israel – as well as on any states that collude in the genocide.

Israeli officials would risk arrest for travelling to western countries.

Double standards

In practice, of course, none of that is likely to happen. Israel is far too important to the West – as a projection of its power into the oil-rich Middle East – to be sacrificed.

Any effort to enforce a genocide ruling through the UN Security Council will be blocked by the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, the UK, along with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, have already demonstrated how unabashed they are about their own double standards.

In its Nov. 30, 2023 statement, the subcommittee said it had previously “revealed evidence that Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of the now infamous ‘Proximal Origin’ publication to disprove the lab-leak theory. Fauci then cited the paper from the White House podium without disclosing his involvement in prompting the publication.

“Further, the Select Subcommittee revealed that Dr. Fauci was aware of dangerous gain-of-function research occurring in Wuhan, China prior to the emergence of COVID-19, but remained curiously silent to the public,” the statement read.

Following Monday’s interview, Wenstrup said that Fauci’s responses indicated there were “some tremendous flaws in our system” concerning issuing grants.

“Dr. Fauci signed off on all domestic and foreign research grants without reviewing the proposals and admitted that he was unaware if NIAID conducted oversight of the laboratories they fund,” Wenstrup said in the subcommittee statement.

“Clearly, the American people and the United States government are operating with completely different expectations about the responsibilities of our public health leaders and the accountability of our public health agencies,” he added.

But Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) defended Fauci’s responses on this issue, saying “I think it’s probably pretty political that we’re here to begin with. But I think they’re asking questions and he is being very specific in answering.”

She added that the closed-door nature of the interview afforded Fauci the opportunity to “clarify a lot of political points people have tried to make,” without “playing to the cameras.”

Fauci’s testimony was scheduled to continue today, with further questions about the “Proximal Origin” paper and COVID-19 countermeasures.

“I look forward to asking Dr. Fauci further questions about mandates, his role in prompting the ‘Proximal Origin’ publication, and his policy positions related to masks and lockdowns,” Wenstrup said in Monday’s statement.

“Tomorrow’s testimony will continue the Select Subcommittee’s effort to deliver the answers Americans demand and deserve.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/anthony-fauci-pandemic-house-interview/?utm_id=20240109

DC anti-war protest via Flickr

By  Linda Bilmes / Just Security

Prior to 2001, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different.

The post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were enabled by a historically unprecedented combination of budgetary procedures and financing methods. Unlike all previous U.S. wars, the post-9/11 wars were funded without higher taxes or non-war budget cuts, and through a separate budget. This set of circumstances – one that I have termed the “Ghost Budget” – enabled successive administrations to prosecute the wars with limited congressional oversight and minimal transparency and public debate. I adopted the name “Ghost Budget” because the term “ghost” appeared frequently in post-9/11 government reports in reference to funds allocated to people, places, or projects that turned out to be phantoms.

The Ghost Budget was the result of an interplay between changes in the U.S. budgetary process, a more assertive military establishment, and the conditions in global capital markets. It has had far-reaching implications for the conduct and course of the post-9/11 wars and for defense policy today.

Funding the Post-9/11 Wars

The “Ghost Budget” was the biggest budgetary anomaly in U.S. history. Prior to 9/11, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. One third of the costs of World War I and half the costs of World War II were met through higher taxes. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described paying taxes as a “patriotic duty” as he raised taxes on business, imposed a “wealth tax,” raised inheritance taxes, and expanded the number of income taxpayers to roughly 80 percent of the workforce by 1945. Wars in Korea and Vietnam largely followed a similar pattern, with President Harry Truman pledging to make the country “pay as you go” for the Korean War. War funding was also a central issue in the Vietnam War, which ended when Congress refused to appropriate money for the South Vietnamese military.

The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War, war costs were covered almost entirely by debt. There were no wartime tax increases or cuts in spending. Quite the reverse: far from demanding sacrifices, President George W. Bush slashed federal taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, just as the United States invaded Iraq. President Donald Trump reduced taxes further in 2017. Overall, federal taxes declined from 18.8 percent of GDP in 2001 to 16.2 percent by the start of 2020. In the same period, outstanding federal debt held by the public rose from $3.5 trillion to $20 trillion. War spending contributed at least $2.2 trillion to this increase.

Not only was the financing strategy unprecedented, but the budgetary mechanism used to approve the vast post-9/11 wartime spending also diverged radically from the past. In all previous conflicts, the United States paid for wars as part of its regular defense appropriations (the defense “base budget”), after the initial period (1-2 years) of supplemental “emergency” funding bills. By contrast, for the entire decade from FY 2001 to FY 2011, Congress paid for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as “emergencies,” devoid of serious legislative or executive oversight.

By statute, emergency spending is defined as “unanticipated…sudden…urgent…unforeseen…and temporary” and is typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Such emergency spending measures are exempt from regular procedural rules in Congress because the intent is to disburse money quickly in situations where delay would be harmful.

Congress continued to enact “emergency supplemental” funding even as the war effort expanded. The United States sent 130,000 military personnel into Iraq in 2003 (alongside troops from more than 30 countries). By 2009, there were 187,200 U.S. “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported by a similar number of military contractors, with nearly 500 U.S. military bases set up across Iraq, but the conflict was still being paid for as an “emergency.” In FY 2012, President Obama renamed the “Global War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) but the war continued to be funded using money that – although not designated as “emergency” – was explicitly exempted from regular spending limits on other government spending programs.

How We Got Here

There were three primary drivers of the Ghost Budget: unusual economic conditions, congressional budget dysfunction, and military assertiveness.

Economic Conditions: Unlike earlier wars, the post 9/11 conflicts took place in an era of free-flowing international capital markets. That provided the U.S. Treasury with access to a deep and global pool of capital, making it easy to borrow large amounts without negatively affecting the cost. It was also a period of historically low interest rates. Real interest rates (nominal rate minus inflation) on 10-year Treasury bonds fell from 3.4% at the start of 2001 to negative (-0.4%) by early 2021 — a 40-year low. Consequently, the Treasury was able to borrow trillions of dollars to pay for the wars, and simultaneously finance the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 without having any material effect on the amount of debt service being repaid through the annual budget. By FY 2017, total public debt had more than tripled, but debt service payments as a percentage of annual budget outlays had decreased to 6.6 percent, compared to 8.5 percent of federal budget outlays in FY 2002. In terms of cash outlays, this meant that the United States paid only slightly more in interest payments in FY 2017 than it had in FY 2002 ($268 billion versus $232 billion in 2018 dollars). Borrowing seemed virtually painless.

Budget Dysfunction: For several decades, the federal budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional. This breakdown may be traced to the post-Watergate budget reforms enacted in 1974, which shifted power away from the President and to the Congress. Most budget experts from both parties agree that the reforms made the budget process weaker, less predictable, less capable of reconciling competing demands, and more prone to fiscal crises. Prior to 1974, the federal government had never ceased operations for lack of funding. Since then, it has “shut down” 22 times, completely or partially. There have been only four years in which Congress passed its annual appropriations bills on time, and a series of near-defaults and other fiscal crises. In the absence of reliable budgets, Congress has enacted hundreds of short-term stopgap “continuing resolutions” to pay the bills. In this context, it was convenient for all the stakeholders to fund the wars as an“emergency” outside the regular process. The President was able to exclude war funding from his annual defense budget request to Congress, thus presenting an artificially low number for the federal budget deficit. This helped the Bush administration sustain the pretense that the wars would be short, while pursuing its political agenda of cutting taxes. Meanwhile, Congress was freed from the need to find politically painful spending cuts elsewhere to pay for the war, and the Pentagon was able to prosecute the wars without worrying about whether Congress would pass the defense appropriations bills on time.

Military Assertiveness: In 2001, the Pentagon was actively seeking to increase its budget after a decade of post-cold war budget cuts. The Afghanistan and Iraq conflict not only reversed the downward trend in military spending, but opened the floodgates to a spending bonanza due to the nature of emergency and OCO appropriations. Unlike the regular defense base budget, the wartime supplemental money was easier to secure, had few restrictions on how it could be spent, and avoided the lengthy internal Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process (PPBE) budget justification process. Consequently, the Defense Department was able to shift war funding into other categories to obtain items on its long-time “wish list” that were only tangentially (or not at all) related to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed this a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon.

By 2009, war spending accounted for almost one quarter of the total military budget; the Pentagon budget had grown to its highest level since the Second World War, and military spending had rebounded from 2.9% of GDP in FY 2001 to above 4% of GDP, where it remained through FY 2019. The OCO budget had evolved into a second defense budget that was largely untethered from the wars, and protected the military from congressional budget volatility.

Implications for Perpetual War

The Ghost Budget provided the ability to keep borrowing and spending in an almost unconstrained manner for more than two decades. The absence of new taxes insulated the public from the mounting cost of the wars and broke the expectation that wars would inevitably involve higher taxes. The OCO budget extended far beyond the immediate operational needs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perpetuating military actions throughout the region. As Immanuel Kant predicted in Perpetual Peace (1795), the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.

The Ghost Budget also weakened the main lever through which Congress maintains control of a war, namely its control of the purse. The combination of deferred spending, weak oversight, broadening definition of war costs, and readily available supplemental funding relaxed the pressure to maintain budget discipline over military spending. Congress held fewer hearings and presidents made fewer public speeches about the war compared to previous conflicts. And the ready availability of funds for new defense programs encouraged successive administrations to see the world through a “Pentagon lens,” which views military intervention as the default foreign policy option.

The legacy of the Ghost Budget is that money is no longer a serious deterrent to war. To date, 99% of US assistance to Ukraine has been funded by supplemental emergency funds – which means that this spending is in addition to the $840 billion regular defense budget. The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve another $106 billion in emergency funding for the Middle East, Ukraine, and other regions. Regardless of the merits of any particular endeavor, the use of Ghost Budgets makes it far easier to prolong the fighting at any cost.

[…]

Via https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/08/the-ghost-budget-how-america-pays-for-endless-war/