Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
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…
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.”
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)
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.
Weeks ago they submitted formal arguments to the International Court of Justice that Myanmar was committing genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group. Their central argument was that the Rohingya were being subjected “to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement”.
But none of these western states is backing South Africa’s genocide submission to the same court – even though conditions in Gaza engineered by Israel are even worse.
Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed more than 100 times that he did not remember details about the pandemic response and origins during a House interview Monday regarding COVID-19 policies and funding decisions.
On the first day of a two-day closed-door interview before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), frequently evaded questions about gain-of-function research and the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), in a statement following Monday’s interview, said, “Dr. Fauci’s testimony today uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems” and that Fauci “had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID.”
According to The Hill, Fauci offered “his expertise on preparing for potential outbreaks in the future.” But according to The Washington Times, he “couldn’t remember many details about his advocacy of lockdowns, his flip-flopping on mask mandates and his decision to allow government funding of gain-of-function research in China that might have led to the pandemic.”
Fauci “claimed he ‘did not recall’ pertinent COVID-19 information or conversations more than 100 times,” and “profusely defended his previous congressional testimony where he stated the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” according to the subcommittee statement.
Fauci also “repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function in an attempt to avoid conceding that NIH funded potentially dangerous research in China,” the subcommittee stated.
Responding to Monday’s testimony, Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a frequent critic of gain-of-function research, told The Defender:
“Fauci repeatedly and flagrantly violated U.S. government policies implemented to protect the public from lab-generated pandemics. He lied — brazenly — to Congress about his policy violations in three Senate hearings in 2021-2022. He lied — brazenly — to Congress about his policy violations again yesterday.”
Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, who has documented attempts by Fauci and other government officials, federal agencies and leading scientists to cover up the U.S. government’s role in funding gain-of-function research in China, told The Defender he was not surprised by Fauci’s stance.
“As I documented over two years ago, Anthony Fauci has lied about funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. That’s fine. People in Washington lie all the time,” Thacker said.
“But when he lied during a congressional hearing, wagging his finger at Senator [Rand] Paul … I knew immediately he had broken the law. His lies about this pandemic have been documented in multiple media outlets and I hope he is eventually prosecuted,” he added.
“Fauci knew exactly what was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4] and the University of North Carolina BSL3 — he was paying for it,” Boyle said. “He has repeatedly perjured himself in testimony before Congress. This is just more of the same.”
Boyle said Wenstrup should follow Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) example and refer Fauci to the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution for perjury. “Maybe we will get some action there now that the Wuhan cover-up is unfolding, as detailed in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, ‘The Wuhan Cover-Up,’” he added.
The seven-hour meeting was Fauci’s first appearance in the House since retiring from public office in December 2022. He was accompanied by two of his attorneys and two government attorneys, according to The Hill.
The closed-door testimony was first announced by Wenstrup on Nov. 30, 2023. In the same announcement, Wenstrup revealed that Fauci will sit before the subcommittee as part of a public hearing later in 2024. That meeting has not yet been scheduled.
In his statement about Moday’s interview, Wenstrup said it was “concerning that the face of our nation’s response to the world’s worst public health crisis ‘does not recall’ key details about COVID-19 origins and pandemic-era policies. Nearly 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to a potentially preventable pandemic,” he added.
Fauci ‘repeatedly and fragrantly violated’ gain-of-function research definitions
According to The Washington Times, lawmakers prepared 200 pages of questions for Fauci. In remarks quoted by The New York Post, Wenstrup said Fauci’s testimony “will shed light on topics that no Committee member, nor news outlet has ever inquired about before.”
Fauci took several breaks during the interview, but the meeting had a “respectful” and “cooperative” tone. Fauci did not take questions from reporters.
Yet, despite the reported tone, Fauci was evasive on key issues, such as gain-of-function research.
Regarding Fauci’s apparently poor recall, Wenstrup said, “That just means that maybe we have to find the people that do recall.”
Wenstrup remarked on Fauci’s “new … operational definition” of gain-of-function. “I don’t know that every scientist that deals with this type of viral research understands his definition.”
According to Ebright:
“Fauci’s attempt to deny he violated U.S. government policies by claiming he uses different definitions of ‘gain-of-function research’ and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research is equivalent — exactly equivalent — to a terrorist attempting to deny he violated federal laws by claiming he uses different definitions of ‘terrorism.’
“Fauci was not empowered to replace definitions in U.S. government policies with his own personal definitions.”
Based on those definitions, Ebright said Fauci “repeatedly and fragrantly violated” the guidelines for both types of research.
According to Newsweek, “Fauci has previously denied in testimony to Congress that the National Institutes of Health, of which he was a member between 1984 and 2022, had funded risky ‘gain-of-function’ research.”
A Jan. 6 report by U.S. Right to Know said that “scientists at the center of the ‘lab leak’ controversy” visited Fauci’s NIAID in 2017 to discuss their research — “just months before NIH lifted a pause on high-risk virology, and two years before a novel coronavirus emerged near their lab in Wuhan.”
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) defended Fauci after Monday’s interview:
“A lot of our GOP colleagues have failed to recognize the operative, regulatory definition [of] gain-of-function that was instituted in 2017 was operative at the time the COVID pandemic came along. And the concern over EcoHealth Alliance … Dr. Fauci was able to clarify that today.”
Wenstrup said the subcommittee planned to question Fauci further regarding gain-of-function research today.
Fauci unable to confirm NIAID had any oversight of U.S.-funded foreign labs
Monday’s interview also addressed government grants for gain-of-function research and foreign laboratories, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
According to the subcommittee, Fauci “testified that he signed off on every foreign and domestic NIAID grant without reviewing the proposals” but “was unable to confirm if NIAID has ANY mechanisms to conduct oversight of the foreign laboratories they fund.”
“A 2020 email, previously released by the Select Subcommittee, proved Dr. Fauci was aware of dangerous gain-of-function research occurring in Wuhan, China. Today, he backtracked by arguing he should not have stated that as ‘fact,’” the subcommittee added.
🚨BREAKING🚨
New emails reveal that Dr. Fauci was aware of risky gain-of-function research occurring in Wuhan, China prior to the emergence of COVID-19.
“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.”
One of the most extraordinary economic marvels of the past decade is the astounding 50% leap in corporate profits, from $2.4 trillion (pre-tax) pre-pandemic lockdown to $3.6 trillion (pre-tax) in the years since the lockdown ended.
Strangely, few seem to ask the source of this astounding 50% leap. Wall Street has certainly cheered this vast increase, but few analysts ponder the source, or ask if the source is a net plus for the economy and nation.
As shockingly heretical as it sounds, the interests of corporate America often diverge from the interests of the citizenry, overall economy and the nation. For example, the wholesale gutting of the US industrial base in the mad rush to lower costs and quality by shipping entire supply chains to China.
As I’ve often pointed out, the meagre savings that trickled down to the consumer were more than offset by the collapse of quality and durability in the globalized goods that now line the shelves of every retailer in the US.
Corporate PR and its well-paid army of toady analysts and pundits would have us believe this is “capitalism” busily at work as pent-up consumer demand naturally pushed prices higher, and corporations were–sadly–forced to pass along these higher costs to consumers.
Recall that “higher costs” don’t show up as higher profits. If the “cost of goods” is $1, and I charge the consumer $2, I reap $1 profit. If my costs double to $2 and I charge the consumer $3, I reap the same $1 profit as I did before the cost spike pushed my production costs up.
The higher corporate profits are the direct result of profiteering and price-gouging. Oh boo-hoo, our costs went up and we were forced to pass them along was simply the cover story. If the cost of a $1 item went up $1 to $2, Corporate America merrily doubled its profit margin from $1 to $2.
This is what happens when you allow your economy to be dominated by quasi-monopolies and cartels. They all raise prices and diminish quality as a unified concentration of financial and political power.
The other source of sharply higher corporate profits is shrinkflation, the relentless reduction in the quantity of product in the packaging. One wonders how thin the can of tuna will eventually be–the thickness of a pancake? Or how thin can they make the box of cereal before the container can no longer stand upright?
The reduction of the quality of goods and services, a.k.a. crapification, is a key source of soaring corporate profits. As the unhappy buyer of three replacement appliances this year alone, all replacements for failed name-brand appliances that lasted 7 years or less–I can attest that crapification / planned obsolescence is a core source of higher profits.
Design the product to fail, or default to the lowest cost components, i.e. failure by default, and consumers are forced to replace appliances every few years that once routinely lasted decades. This conveyor belt of products to the Landfill is highly profitable.
Lastly, there’s the immiseration of services, making standard service so miserable that consumers are forced to either endure wretched, incompetent, unreliable service, or pay extra for a “premium” service which is actually of poorer quality than the old standard of service.
We’re adding adverts to all the films and TV programs you’re already paying for. If you want to watch ad-free content, that will now cost you another $2.99 a month.
As Darth Vader would summarize this immiseration: “Pray I don’t alter the deal any further.” No wonder Corporate America added $1.2 trillion in profits to be distributed to the elites of America: everything is diminished, stripped of quality and rendered miserable. Too bad there’s no real competition left in the US economy.
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.
The push by the US government, the wind industry and the news media to build industrial wind projects proven to kill whales is the biggest environmental scandal in the world, says Michael Shellenberger.
Last year, Public released its documentary ‘Thrown to the Wind’ which exposed the price the world is actually paying for the industrialisation of our oceans by offshore wind corporations: the killing of whales and the potential extinction of an entire cetacean species.
Yesterday, Public released a follow-up documentary, ‘Thrown to the Wind, Part 2’, which provides more hard evidence that the wind industry is harming whales.
“We won a big victory last year, in helping to halt a wind project off the coast of New Jersey,” Shellenberger says. Unfortunately, plans are moving forward on the wind projects along the rest of the East Coast. “If they go forward, they will make the North Atlantic right whale extinct.”
The wind industry is not killing endangered whales off the East Coast, say government agencies and the news media.
But it is. Before 2016, when the wind industry’s increased boat traffic, sonar mapping, and construction began, eight humpback whales were found dead per year between Virginia and Maine. Since 2016, an average of 25 humpbacks were found dead annually. And last year, there were a record 83 whales found dead.
And yet the Associated Press insisted last month that “there’s no evidence that limited wind farm construction on the Atlantic Coast has directly resulted in any whale deaths.” [Emphasis added.]
That’s true. But there’s also no evidence that smoking directly causes cancer. Nor is there evidence that more carbon dioxide directly warms the planet. AP is playing the exact same, deliberately misleading, game that it accuses the tobacco and fossil fuels industries of playing.
This is disturbing because the US government and media are blaming the spike in whale deaths on climate change, which is far less direct than the wind industry’s huge increase in boat traffic in previously untrafficked sea lanes, its high-decibel sonar, and its high-decibel pile driving.
Linowes tracked whale deaths within the same timeframe and location as offshore wind sonar surveys. “As the amount of offshore wind activity increased within an area,” she notes, “so did whale deaths.”
In last year’s “Thrown to the Wind” documentary, Rand documented illegally high levels of whale-harming sonar noise by the wind industry.
And now, in a sequel, “Thrown to the Wind, Part 2,” filmmaker Jonah Markowitz documents Rand measuring illegal levels of noise from pile-driving by the wind industry off of Martha’s Vineyard.
The boat crew can hear the noise through the air. “That’s loud to hear from here,” says one of the men. “And I got my ear muffs on and everything.”
It’s so loud that Rand has to adjust his equipment. “I am overloading,” he says. “I need to change my gain.”
Says one sailor, “Sounds like a noise from a horror movie.”
“Sounds like thunder coming in,” says another. “It’s insane.”
The sound is equivalent to the blast from a 155-millimeter Howitzer.
The environmental groups and Democratic governors championing the illegal pile-driving off the East Coast are the same groups that fought oil drilling there just a few years ago, claiming it would be too noisy.
It is illegal to harm or kill endangered species. The North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals in the species left.
The push by the US government, the wind industry, and the news media to build industrial wind projects proven to kill whales is the biggest environmental scandal in the world.
A handful of honest conservationists are fighting billions in wind industry/taxpayer money. That money has financially corrupted the politicians, the regulatory agencies, and the news media through political donations and advertisements.
The money has even corrupted the people who do the autopsies of the whales.
We won a big victory last year, in helping to halt a wind project off the coast of New Jersey.
Unfortunately, the US government and wind industry are moving forward with plans to build wind projects along the rest of the East Coast. If they go forward, they will make the North Atlantic right whale extinct.
Episode 5: American Revolution and the Economic Crisis
Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon
Dr Suzanne M Desan
Film Review
Desan begins this lecture by highlighting Benjamin Franklin’s role in winning over French public opinion for the military support Louis XVI provided the colonies in US War of Independence. Franklin, who was 70, already had a strong reputation as an enlightenment philosopher and scientist. During his stay in France, he was invited to speak in salons, academies and masonic lodges. As he refused to wear a powdered wig or silken clothes like European intellectuals, his rough coonskin cap and farmer’s coat were emblematic of the system of natural law French Enlightenment philosophers were promoting. Franklin was so popular, enterprising merchants used his face to decorate dishes, snuff boxes, clothes, handkerchiefs.
Ben Franklin snuff box
Deeply in debt from the Seven Years War, Louis XVI was reluctant to send military aid until the Americans proved their military prowess by defeating the British at Saratoga. Although he committed no troops, the French king provided naval support (the American navy was extremely limited) as well as 90% of the colonists’ gunpowder. The total cost of this support was 1-1.3 billion livres (roughly 2 billion euros in modern currency).
The king had to borrow this money and owing to his government’s mounting debt, had to pay his bankers twice as much interest (roughly 6%) as other countries. By 1787, an economic downturn meant that half of all tax revenue went to pay this interest. Hoping to make borrowing easier, his finance minister encouraged conspicuous consumption by the royal family, as well as increased (deficit) spending on public infrastructure.
France’s declining economy related in part to poor harvests and in part to the devastation their textile industry experienced after the king signed a free trade agreement with Britain. Following the 1775 publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth ofNations, both countries felt pressures to repeal their protective tariffs (Smith excessive government regulation as “mercantilism”). Britain, whose textile industry was more industrialized, flooded the French market with cheap cloth – leading to the layoff of more than 50% of the textile workers in northern France.
In 1787 finance minister Charles-Alexandre de Calonne called an assembly of nobles to discuss implementation of a single land tax on all property owners (including nobles and clergy) and a stamp tax on all commerce. After Marie Antoinette and other family members vetoed this proposal, Calonne was fired and hounded out of France. Instead the assembly of nobles recommended that the king call an Estates General (the French kings had stopped calling them at the beginning of the 17th century.
*The Estates-General, created in 1302, was an advisory body that met only occasionally. A meeting of elected representatives of the three estates (clergy, nobility, commoners), it met when summoned by the king, who called it only when he needed extraordinary income or special support (most recently in 1484, 1560, 1576, and 1588; the last three because of the Wars of Religion). Governments were reluctant to convoke an Estates-General because of the fear that it might become a regularly meeting body with well-defined powers. Prior to 1789, it had last met in 1614.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton (who goes by “Kelly”) on Oct. 30 lost her license to practice medicine in New York for writing eight vaccine exemptions in California between 2016 and 2018. New York was the third state to enforce this penalty, after Massachusetts and California. Sutton is now no longer able to practice medicine anywhere in the U.S.
Both the New York and Massachusetts medical boards adjudicated Sutton’s case on the basis of “reciprocal discipline,” rubber-stamping the Medical Board of California’s 2021 decision without allowing her to challenge the validity of the original findings.
Reciprocal discipline avoids the time and costs of relitigating. Therefore, like the Massachusetts Board of Medicine hearing last July, the October hearing in New York was just theater and the board never intended to allow Sutton to defend herself.
Instead, the New York board maintained that the purpose of the hearing was limited to determining what penalty should apply to Sutton’s state license in light of the findings already established in California.
Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law
Sutton, an integrative medicine physician practicing since the early 1970s, told The Defender that the Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law when it determined she violated “standards of care” when writing the vaccine exemptions.
Those exemption-specific standards — which came into effect in 2016 via Senate Bill (SB) 277, a California bill that stripped parents of the personal belief exemption for rejecting vaccines for their children — only stated it was up to the physician to decide on a medical exemption based on the needs of the child.
However, in 2019, California passed two more bills — SB 276 and SB 714 — designed to make vaccine exemptions even more difficult to acquire.
Specifically, when a doctor writes more than five medical exemptions per year (as of Jan. 1, 2020) or a school’s immunization rate falls below 95%, the California Department of Public Health (CPDH) has the right to review the medical exemptions.
Sutton claimed the Medical Board of California applied its own definition of “standards of care,” in direct contravention to the standard established by SB 277.
“In California, any time a standard of care is written into statutory law, it is more preeminent than a community standard of care that is just held among the general opinion of doctors in practice,” she said.
Sutton believes the Medical Board of California was also applying laws derived from SB 276 and SB 714 that went into effect well after the date she wrote the exemptions.
The CDC’s and ACIP’s vaccine recommendations do not constitute mandates or requirements. According to Sutton, during the lobbying phase of SB 277, a doctor called ACIP and asked whether its recommendations should be considered mandates, and was told that they were only guidelines.
The ACIP guidelines do not mention the word “exemption,” according to Sutton, nor were the guidelines mentioned in SB 277.
Dissecting the California case
The California board revoked Sutton’s license for “gross negligence” and “repeated negligent acts” in issuing permanent vaccine exemptions for eight pediatric patients, saying the exemptions did not comply with standards of care and vaccine guidelines at the time.
The board’s sole expert witness, Dr. Deborah Lehman, infectious disease physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, dismissed Sutton’s claim that SB 277 clearly articulated standards of care regarding exemptions, saying those were not the “community standard of care,” Sutton recounted.
Sutton explained:
“SB 277 was brief and direct to the point. It said that if a child who is required to have vaccines receives a note from a physician stating that it is in the child’s best interests to not be vaccinated, then that suffices to fulfill the requirement and the child can go to school without having the required vaccines. The deciding factor is the physician’s discretion.”
“If the parent or guardian files with the governing authority a written statement by a licensed physician to the effect that the physical condition of the child is such, or medical circumstances relating to the child are such, that immunization is not considered safe, indicating the specific nature and probable duration of the medical condition or circumstances, including, but not limited to, family medical history, for which the physician does not recommend immunization, that child shall be exempt from the requirements.”
Lehman said doctors must only grant an exemption when there is a contraindication to a vaccine and at no other time.
Lehman claimed the standard of care was determined by whether another physician would treat the medical issue the same or similarly. However, according to Sutton, she omitted the all-important phrase “in the same community.”
In the integrative medicine community in which Sutton practices, it is common for patients to receive more individualized treatments rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
“It was kind of a force-of-personality situation that was successful in the setting of the courtroom hearing at the administrative level,” Sutton said. “And the board witness prevailed upon the judge to believe that the law had no meaning and that community opinion was higher.”
The California board also questioned Sutton’s decision not to request patients’ medical files or perform physicals in the cases for which she wrote exemptions.
“If I required a physical exam for every vaccine exemption, I could be accused of ‘padding the bill’ because the physical exam contributes nothing to the decision about the risk for a vaccine injury,” Sutton said.
Instead, Sutton’s process was primarily to review patient histories to understand if the child or a family member had suffered a negative reaction to vaccines.
She said:
“From my understanding and from the group of physicians that I worked with at the time — Physicians for Informed Consent — the risk factors for vaccine injury lie completely in the story of what’s happened to the child when they have had vaccines and what has happened to their blood relatives when those people had vaccines.”
After the passage of SB 277, Sutton said there was “a great deal of conversation” among doctors about how the law could be read and interpreted and how exemptions could be constructed rationally based on the scientific literature.
That literature showed several different areas of concern around vaccinations, including “The aluminum contained in vaccines can trigger neurologic issues and autoimmune disease,” Sutton said, adding, “There is the question of regression after vaccines and neurodevelopmental delays such as autism.”
“There’s also a higher risk of allergies, and then there’s the immediate reactions where a person collapses or has a seizure after a vaccine,” she said.
“A doctor has to make an extra effort in order to understand the historical pattern of vaccine reactions that would indicate risk of vaccine injury, or how to diagnose mitochondrial dysfunction,” Sutton said.
During the California hearing, Sutton shared extensive scientific citations supporting her medical decision-making, including research by Dr. Chris Exley on the dangers of aluminum in vaccines.
She told the board that it was neither intelligent nor humane to force a family to continue to vaccinate after one of their children had already died or been injured by a vaccine, and shared her clinical observation that unvaccinated patients are healthier than those who are vaccinated.
The California board also claimed Sutton neglected to provide informed consent to her patients requesting vaccine exemptions.
Sutton was uncertain exactly what the board meant here but surmised it was saying she did not adequately highlight the diseases that could develop if the parents failed to vaccinate their children.
Deeming the real issue with informed consent to be advising patients about the potential harms of vaccination, Sutton said, “I don’t think I repeated the CDC bylines.” Instead, she believed the parents who came to her for exemptions were already “more than aware” of the risks of childhood diseases.
From her point of view, there was already enough vaccine promotion happening with mainstream media and schools “echoing over and over” how “vastly dangerous chickenpox” and the other childhood diseases were.
The California board’s concern about Sutton not requesting previous medical records is based on the notion of “Don’t trust a single word the patient says,” Sutton said, an attitude that necessitates getting “every documentation” about adverse vaccine reactions before making a decision.
“That’s not the way medicine works,” Sutton said. “But that’s what was expected in terms of a medical exemption interview. It’s like building a legal case instead of a medical case.”
Further wrongdoing was implied by the California board in pointing out that a number of the exemptions Sutton wrote were for patients for whom she was not the primary care provider.
“That is implying that the primary care doctor knows the patient best,” Sutton said. “And that is good in a lot of ways, but it can be a problem for the patient if it’s a large practice that has been forbidden to give vaccine exemptions.”
Sutton said that if a patient’s need cannot be addressed by that group, even if it’s their primary care group, then it is akin to patient abandonment.
SB 277, the law in effect during the period Sutton wrote the exemptions, never had a requirement that exemptions be written by the primary care physician, or even by a pediatrician or pediatric infectious disease expert, according to Sutton.
“So their [Medical Board of California’s] statements were beyond the law and that’s what they were enforcing against doctors,” she said.
Although the board improperly focused on laws that went into effect in 2019 and later, Sutton said, “That very argument could not be persuasively made by the attorneys at the time.”
Board expert: ‘Science has been decided’ on vaccine risks
The Medical Board of California conducted a three-day “trial” for Sutton in June 2021 in an administrative court with a single judge and no right to a jury.
Three experts spoke on behalf of Sutton, while Lehman, the board’s single expert, testified against her.
Lehman lacked basic knowledge of vaccine risks and stated that all doctors should follow the CDC’s vaccine schedule.
When asked to quantify the risk of vaccine injuries, Lehman said, “I don’t need to cite articles in my report, because the science has been decided … If you want answers to these questions, I would refer you to the CDC.”
After denying any knowledge of Dr. Peter Aaby’s more than 400 articles on PubMed analyzing vaccine dangers, Lehman characterized the journal as “low impact” and Aaby as “anti-vax.”
They skillfully articulated the heterodox perspectives on vaccine dangers and referenced a number of recent studies on vaccine adverse effects, while noting the lack of data on vaccine safety or government studies comparing health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.
“And on this very little evidence, people like the board expert are proclaiming to the high heavens these are safe and effective,” Sutton said. “All of these other concerns are irrelevant.
[…]
“So the board expert could say there’s no evidence that an adverse event is related to vaccines, which is not accurate because the evidence is there — but it’s not in the evidence that the CDC accepts,” Sutton said.
[…]
‘The whole storm is not finished’
Sutton has exhausted or curtailed her administrative appeals with the states that have removed her license to practice medicine.
However, she and several doctors are planning to file a collective action in federal court in the spring. They are being supported by the nonprofit Physicians & Patients Reclaiming Medicine, where Sutton’s story is currently featured.
This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group
There has been a lot of buzz lately about a recently released film by Netflix titled ‘Leave The World Behind’ based on a novel by the same name. The plot revolves around a catastrophic collapse in the US triggered by a cyber attack (and mass drone attack) that shuts down the internet and disrupts the global economy, leading to questions of who might have been behind the sabotage?
The most interesting aspect of the film is not so much the story (which is lackluster at best), but the fact that Barack Obama was so deeply involved in the making of the film as executive producer and as adviser on the script. This has led many people to suggest the movie is actually predictive programming – Propaganda designed to acclimate the masses to the idea of an event that is planned to happen in the near future.
Similar concerns were raised back in 2021 when the World Economic Forum oversaw a “war game” called Cyberpolygon, an event meant to simulate a massive cyber attack on the vulnerable functions of the world-wide web. The reason Cyberpolygon raised so many eyebrows was perfectly understandable; the WEF had also hosted another simulation at the end of 2019 called Event 201. The game, which included the CEOs of some of the most powerful health and media corporations in the world along with numerous government officials, “coincidentally” focused on the outbreak of a global coronavirus pandemic, and it was held only a couple of months before the real thing happened.
In other words, it was as if the globalists at the WEF knew that covid was about to strike.
While Hollywood interpretations of cyber attacks are usually exaggerated in terms of the true effects, there is a very real and considerable threat associated with such a disaster. So-called “experts” in the tech field often dismiss the wider dangers to the internet itself because they have been indoctrinated into believing that the design of the web has too many redundancies. In other words, they act as if it is invincible.
This is not really the case. Though data loss can be prevented through cloud storage, the internet as a mechanism can still be shut down or taken down deliberately for long periods of time.
In the past I have written about a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.” In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.
A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up the what is known as the “backbone” of the internet.
Fastly identified and fixed the problem within two hours and continues to claim the outage had nothing to do with a cyber attack. However, a huge vulnerability for the internet (a center of structural support Carl von Clausewitz would’ve called a “schwerpunkt”) was revealed to the public. A sizable portion of the web is dependent on only a handful of CDN companies, including Fastly.
It is also through collusion with these companies that governments are able to implement an “internet kill switch” in the face of possible civil unrest. A cyber attack would simply remove the government as the arbiter (or act as a false flag scapegoat so the government can avoid blame). But what would really happen if we lost the internet for a week, or a month or a year? In the US the result would be calamity because our economy has become far too dependent on digitization.
Around 10% of US GDP is directly tied to online commerce. This doesn’t seem like much, but a loss of that GDP would send the US into immediate and steep recession. Around 17 million jobs in the US are generated by commercial internet enterprises, and around 38% of these workers are employed by small businesses. According to surveys 70% of American workers say they cannot do their jobs effectively without internet access.
Keep in mind, if the trend of “work from home” during the covid lockdowns had stuck, an even bigger piece of the economy would be dependent on the health of the web.
The five industries considered most vulnerable to cyber attack are public administration, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, finance and insurance, education and retail. That is to say, these are the industries that are attacked most often. Attacks on vital utilities are usually the favorite set pieces for disasters portrayed in fiction and film, but these are actually far less worrisome. The real danger is the potential for an attack on the internet as a system. All it would take is for a couple CDNs or more to be hit simultaneously to cause vast online blackouts.
Most important of all are the ways in which international banking and finance utilize online networks to maintain the flow money. Without the web, trade velocity dies immediately and building it back from implosion could take years.
But who would benefit from such an attack? Certainly, foreign powers might see the crippling of America’s digital infrastructure as a way to severely damage the country without having to fight directly and militarily. However, there are also a number of benefits to the globalists.
For example, one of the biggest obstacles for the elites during their attempt to institute medical tyranny and the ‘Great Reset’ during covid was the proliferation of factual data that debunked the pandemic narrative. American conservatives represented a serious barrier to their success with tens of millions of gun owning patriots refusing to comply. The harder they pushed, the greater the chance of an armed insurgency.
Even though the establishment had every single Big Tech conglomerate on their side when it came to mass censorship of contrary information, they still failed to stop the spread of the truth – Covid was nowhere near the threat they hyped it up to be and the public was quickly made aware of this by the alternative media. The elites did not have as much control over the web as they thought they did.
In the event of a large scale cyberattack, the internet could be shut down completely, leaving only corporate media sources to filter information and control the narrative. The alternative media would be silenced and the public would be left in confusion, desperately searching for answers. Interestingly, this is a core theme of Obama’s ‘Leave The World Behind’ – The idea of a population utterly cut off from reliable information and scrambling to figure out who is attacking them.
The internet has become an integral pillar of western economies to the point that a majority of people would not know how to live without it should it disappear. This is the disturbing reality we face in the midst of a growing series of geopolitical conflicts and more oppressive governments. It would seem it’s only a matter of time before there’s a major disruption.
The solution is pretty straightforward – Localization of trade and production is the way to prevent full spectrum collapse, and alternative communication networks such as ham radio networks can prevent information silence. There is no reason why Americans should have to become subservient to the whims of globalism, the interdependent supply chain or digitization; they can and should create their own backup plan. Getting people to realize this and implement basic local measures is where we run into difficulties. Sadly, a lot of first-world citizens assume that the system will always be there for them when they need it, and they don’t actively seek out solutions until disaster is at their doorstep.
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)
DC anti-war protest via Flickr
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