OCEANSIDE, Calif. — The Oceanside company that makes the COVID-19 drug Remdesivir announced Monday the price for the drug moving forward.
Gilead Sciences said a single dose of Remdesivir will cost $390. A typical course of treatment requires six vials administered over five days in the intensive care unit of a hospital. That means a typical five-day treatment will cost $2,340 per patient. However that price is only available to the US government, which is handling distribution to hospitals temporarily due to the lack of availability. For patients covered by private insurance, the price will jump to $520 per vial, which adds up to $3,120 per patient — almost a thousand dollars more.
Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day issued a letter outlining the company’s decision. It reads in part, “As with all our actions on Remdesivir, we approached this with the aim of helping as many patients as possible, as quickly as possible and in the most responsible way. This has been our compass point throughout, from collaborating to find rapid answers on safety and efficacy, to scaling up manufacturing and donating our supply of Remdesivir through the end of June. In each case, we recognized the need to do things differently to reflect the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic. now, as we transition beyond the donation period and set a price for Remdesivir, the same principle applies.”
Remdesivir is approved only for patients who are severely sick. It is administered intravenously, and it is the only drug that has an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Adminisration to treat coronavirus infections.
According to experts in this field, the price set by Gilead is comparable with the cost of other ICU drugs. However, compared to the cheap and widely available corticosteroid dexamethasone, which costs a few dollars a day and is showing just as much promise for COVID treatment, Remdesivir is a lot more expensive.
The Trump administration has stockpiled half a million courses of Remdesivir treatment for distribution to hospitals around the country.
The twin temptations of American liberalism are to radical excess and conservative stasis. Because liberalism is a practical philosophy of government, given its most comprehensive expression in the Democratic party, it sometimes lists left and other times right. The Minneapolis moment is different in that it sees liberalism lean in two directions at once and get it wrong on both counts.
Scenes of rioting, looting and the firebombing of a police station bring out the Rousseauean id of the liberal psyche and a righteous impatience to burn it all to the ground and start over. (‘Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death/ The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies/ We, the people, must redeem…/ And make America again!’) The drift towards radicalism on the center-left did not begin with the killing of George Floyd. Some American progressives are done with America, as the New York Times’s flawed, fervently defended and Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project illustrates. The taking of another black life has poured accelerant on this process.
The creeping of nihilism into the mainstream American left has brought with it a decadent attitude towards mob violence. If the mob believes it is justified, anything it does is justifiable. Commenting on the riots, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of the 1619 Project) says: ‘Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence… When we have people who say people should respect the law — they’re not respecting the law because the law’s not respecting them. You can’t say that regular citizens should play by all of the rules when agents of the state clearly are not.’ We are so accustomed to being told speech is violence that it hardly fazes us to hear that violence is not.
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo monologues: ‘Too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets, persistent, and poisonous inequities and justice. Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.’ That would be the First Amendment, adopted, in part, to protect ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’. CNN’s primetime line-up: the last line of defense between Donald Trump and the Constitution they haven’t read.
Steven Thrasher, assistant professor in journalism at Northwestern University, writes in Slate:
‘As any military tactician or social justice organizer can tell you, direct action gets the goods. The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we’ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory.’
Thrasher may believe that re-enacting the plot of Assault on Precinct 13 is a legitimate response to what he calls ‘the lynching of George Floyd’, but what is a liberal magazine like Slate doing publishing his manifesto?
Liberals have leapt on a leftwards-zipping conveyor belt that will carry them far from the philosophy that has until now defined them and defined American progress. They will have to accede to the slander that America is at root a racist enterprise systemically geared towards white supremacy. They will have to declare the rule of law illegitimate and the rule of the mob the path to justice. They will have to embrace racial division rather than work to overcome it. They will have, in short, to stop being liberals.
Radicalism might burn with a virtuous fury but it harbors its own prejudices, as rioters’ attacks on synagogues in Los Angeles and Richmond underline. Liberals should resolve to remain liberals, but that does not mean standing still. This is a moment to reassess American liberalism’s surrender to conservatism on criminal justice, traceable to the 1994 Crime Bill drafted by Joe Biden and signed by Bill Clinton. The Marshall Project best sums up this bloated sack of good intentions, bad intentions and terrible policies: ‘The crime bill did not inaugurate the era of mass incarceration, but it certainly escalated the scale of its impact.’ What it also did was cement a bipartisan consensus that to be ‘tough on crime’ meant more cops with bigger guns enforcing more laws with harsher penalties. Police, as the frontline of this authoritarian spasm, were transformed into civilian soldiers and symbols of fear for citizens, not least minorities.
In the roll call of black men killed by police, George Floyd is another name to be forgotten. Michael Stewart (Brooklyn; 1983; blunt force trauma; all officers acquitted) was meant to stick in the public consciousness, as were Amadou Diallo (Bronx; 1999; 19 gunshot wounds; all officers acquitted) and Samuel DuBose (Cincinnati; 2015; gunshot wound to the head; mistrial, hung jury, charges dismissed). Time isn’t a healer, it’s an accomplice. We don’t know if George Floyd was killed because he was black but we do know he was killed by a cop. For eight minutes and 46 seconds, an officer’s knee pressed down on his neck, all the while he pleaded: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That is not police brutality; that is sadism.
This is an immediate policy problem liberals can direct their energies to. Start by removing the roadblock to reform: police unions. Restrict collective bargaining to salary and benefits so that police commissioners and oversight bodies, not union negotiators, determine internal disciplinary regimes. Legislate mandatory 360-degree bodycams for all patrol officers and demilitarize the police by limiting procurement of armored personnel carriers, riot equipment, and military-grade weapons. (Between 2006 and 2016 US police forces acquired more than 83,000 M16s, an assault rifle favored by the Kurdish Peshmerga.) The next step up involves stripping police of the qualified immunity that makes it perversely difficult to bring civil rights suits against excessive force or racial discrimination.
Overpolicing is only one dysfunction in a multi-dysfunctional criminal justice system. 55.7 percent of state prisoners (and only 7.8 percent of federal prisoners) are serving time for a violent offense and, while black prisoner numbers are falling, black male incarceration is still 5.8 times that of whites. Sentencing reform aimed at minimizing custodial terms for non-violent crimes should be a lively liberal cause.
The failed war on drugs has destroyed too many lives and too many families. Getting government out of the prohibition business would remove more than a quarter-million inmates from US prisons, 80,000 of them black. Liberals should also revive their opposition to the death penalty. For all the other arguments against capital punishment, racial bias should particularly trouble liberals: Black Americans constitute 13.4 percent of the general population but account for 42 percent of death row inmates. Democrats fearful of the electoral consequences of adopting a reform agenda should know they have Republican allies in organizations like Right on Crime and Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
The cry ‘no justice, no peace’ is in the air but without peace there can be no justice. Revolution and reaction can deliver one or the other but only liberalism promises both.
This article was originally published onThe Spectator’s UK website.
By Michael Pollan The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2020
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.
When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.
Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.
The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.
Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6
Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.
Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.
Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society.
So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic—or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year?
The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.
The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9
Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10
A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant.
But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
1
This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. 135–138. ↩
2
See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. ↩
3
See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. ↩
4
See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. FERN has covered this story extensively and compiled statistics. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. Civil Eats, FERN, and Mother Jones have done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. ↩
5
See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
6
See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
7
It’s worth remembering that the federal government actively promotes meat consumption in myriad ways, from USDA advertising campaigns—“Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner”—to exempting feedlots from provisions of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, to the dietary guidelines it issues and the heavy subsidies it gives for animal feed. ↩
8
See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. ↩
9
See Shikha Garg et al., “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69, No. 15 (April 17, 2020). ↩
10
See Xiaomin Luo et al., “Prognostic Value of C-Reactive Protein in Patients with COVID-19,” medRxiv, March 23, 2020. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed. ↩
“Within the next 5–10 years,we have to end (the debt and government promises. What I mean by government promises are)…pensions and healthcare benefits.”–Brace Yourself For ‘The Great Reset’,
Make no mistake, this will be absolute tyranny on a global scale. The mainstream media is silent as the elitists who want power over every human on Earth plan to meet in a Swiss town to discuss “the Great Reset,” a push to a one-world currency – one in which they have ultimate control.
The plan is to make sure a “post-COVID” world is built the way they want it. Slavery and totalitarian control. If you haven’t figured out now that the system was put there to protect them, not you, line up for the Bill Gates sponsored vaccine. Things are going to get much uglier, and quick. The objective of this meeting is the “rebuilding” of the world’s economic and social system in order to make it more “sustainable.”
It sounds good, right? But, by more sustainable, they mean more enslaveable.
“Nothing will ever be the same again.” It was the mantra that we heard in many countries at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It came with a warning that a “new normal” would replace the existing order. Easy travel, interpersonal relations, large gatherings, even things like shaking hands would have to give way to long-term social distancing, drastic rules, and surveillance. But these changes on the personal level are only a part of the picture. The World Economic Forum, together with Prince Charles of England and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has launched an initiative revealingly dubbed “The Great Reset,” with the objective of “rebuilding” the world’s economic and social system in order to make it more “sustainable.” –Life Site News
If you cannot be bothered to understand that the best way to protect yourself is to remove yourself from the system of slavery that was already set up, that they are desperately trying to keep you in, then you’re going to likely get caught up in this mess.
The idea of a “Great Reset” has received the full support of the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, former president of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. Is anyone surprised? The reset has been planned for a long time:
It was already being talked about before the Chinese coronavirus was moving out of Wuhan. On December 30, 2019, for instance, the Financial Times published a YouTube presentation under the title
“Why capitalism needs to be reset in 2020.” (As if any country has capitalism anymore. Most, and yes, even the United States, are now at the very least, corporatocracies – the merging of governments and corporations, masquerading as crony corporatism.) But the globalists are pushing a theme that capitalism (which means no interference in the market/economy) is the problem, even though literally everything is centralized. The recurring theme is “stakeholder capitalism,” by which “a company’s approach to people, the planet, and innovation — including how it protects and applies the value-added of its data — must figure more prominently in capital-allocation decisions” (as the WEForum site explains).
Prepare by refusing to accept their new one-world currency. Stock up on precious metals, gold, silver, and lead.
A ten-count indictment has been filed against Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci charging him with crimes allegedly committed in the independence war of the late-1990s, including murder and torture.
Hashim Thaci in Pristina, Kosovo, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/VALDRIN XHEMAJ
The Hague-based Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, SPO, according to a press statement on Wednesday, has filed a ten-count indictment with the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, KSC, charging Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, the Kosovo politician Kadri Veseli, and others with a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.
“The indictment alleges that Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, and the other charged suspects are criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders. The crimes alleged in the indictment involve hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents,” the press release said.
A Specialist Chambers Pre-Trial Judge is currently reviewing the indictment to decide on whether to confirm the charges.
According to the press release, the Specialist Prosecutor deemed it necessary to issue this public notice because of repeated efforts by Thaci and Veseli to obstruct and undermine the work of the KSC.
“Mr Thaci and Mr Veseli are believed to have carried out a secret campaign to overturn the law creating the Court and otherwise obstruct the work of the Court in an attempt to ensure that they do not face justice.
“By taking these actions, Mr Thaci and Mr Veseli have put their personal interests ahead of the victims of their crimes, the rule of law, and all people of Kosovo,” the statement reads.
Over the past year, more than 100 people, mostly former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, have been summoned for questioning by the Specialist Prosecution as suspects or witnesses in relation to crimes allegedly committed during Kosovo’s war of independence from Serbia between January 1, 1998 and December 31, 1999 in Kosovo.
Those questioned included former KLA guerrilla fighters who have become high-profile politicians, such as Ramush Haradinaj, who resigned as prime minister of Kosovo after being summoned.
The Specialist Chambers will hear cases arising from an EU task force report which said that unnamed KLA officials could face indictments for a “campaign of persecution” against Serbs, Roma and Kosovo Albanians during the war. The alleged crimes include killings, abductions, illegal detentions and sexual violence.
The report was commissioned after the Council of Europe published an inquiry in 2011, which alleged that some senior Kosovo officials, including Thaci, were responsible for various human rights abuses. Thaci has strongly denied the allegations.
The negotiations to establish the court lasted from 2011 until 2015. International judges and prosecutors staff the new court, although it operates under Kosovo’s laws.
Since the Kosovo war ended, the international community has been overseeing the justice system in Kosovo whose results in prosecuting war crimes have been poor – fewer than 20 final verdicts in war crimes cases.
It was believed that the Kosovo prosecution couldn’t handle the political pressure in sensitive cases concerning senior officials, which was one reason why the international community decided to establish the new court.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” – George Orwell, “1984”
When I saw people painting over the mural of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo last week, I felt a lot of different emotions. Anger, mostly, at the destruction of a tribute to a man who, although imperfect, devoted his life to the city of his birth. A man who integrated the police force. Who was beloved of many in the black communities he helped keep safe from the drug scourge. A man who made enemies, and friends who’d take a bullet for him.
The anger was accompanied by bemusement at the foolishness of the act, one that was as unnecessary as it was futile. Erasing Rizzo’s face, or tearing down his massive metal effigy, will not remove him from our collective institutional memory. To tell us not to remember, to look away, is a guarantee that we will seek out that memory in defiance.
But the most visceral emotion was fear, tied to the increasingly successful efforts to turn George Orwell’s prophecy into our current reality.
People on the left have been quite busy these days downplaying the significance of what is happening. To them, fascism can only be experienced on the right, and takes the shape and form of a president who fires tear gas into a crowd of “peaceful protesters.”
But as Orwell expressed so well, fascism is not a partisan phenomenon, and can exist wherever and whenever a society decides to exert dominion over its citizens by usurping the one true thing that sets them apart as human: their independent minds.
Taking hold of a man’s mind by denying him access to the truth can turn him into something less than human. It makes him into an unthinking, unquestioning half-creature that might breathe and eat and walk and work and even love, but who is a simple cog in the wheel of the state machine.
When I saw the aftermath of the Rizzo mural’s destruction, a chill took over me. There was a blank place where there used to be color, where there was life and history. Drained from that wall was the figure of a man who represented not only himself, but generations of Italians and their pride. That empty space was more upsetting than the graffiti on the Rizzo statue, because it was a first successful result of what I call the Crusade to Erase.
The irony is that the mural was on private property, and I’ve been told that the owner would have left it up but for the threats he started receiving. Other businesses in the neighborhood demonstrated their cowardice by signing a letter agreeing to have the mural destroyed. But in good Orwellian style, they will insist it was an effort to honor black lives. This will be the new normal: Honor one culture by insulting another.
Now they say they are coming for Christopher Columbus, who has been caricatured as the great genocidal Satan. They are trying to teach our children that he was an evil man, crushing context, creating facts, conning the naive. Orwell knew the playbook and blueprint intimately, and wrote it down for us.
I have represented asylees and refugees from totalitarian states. They understand what it is to live in countries where society, either directly through the government or by the intimidation of special interest groups, tells you what to think. They fled their own private dark places to escape, to find freedom.
I am horrified to have them see those tragic histories repeat themselves here.
And so, I will not say the appropriate things. I will not apologize for a guilt I do not bear. I will not engage in pithy, socially woke slogans. I will not grovel, bend the knee or worry that my words might get me ostracized, unemployed or even killed.
I choose to follow Orwell’s warning. I hope I’ll have company.
It began with Confederate generals and quickly escalated to Columbus and former US presidents; now the monument-removal crusade has come for Jesus, with racial activist Shaun King insisting the depictions are ‘racist propaganda.’
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” King tweeted on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”
He also argued that all “murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down,” calling them “a gross form [of] white supremacy… tools of oppression [and] Racist propaganda.”
Sorry, there’s this thing called freedom of religion in US. Easier solution to your neuroses Shaun: just start your own new church and make your own artistic representations. This could actually be a viable career option for you.
King is no fringe figure, either – the well-known racial justice activist rose to prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement and most recently served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who sought the Democrat presidential nomination.
His tweets came just a day after conservative pundits predicted the statue-smashing spree would come after Jesus.
Statues of Jesus are next. It won’t end. Pray for the USA
For several weeks now, protesters across the US have targeted “racist” statues – starting with generals who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, but quickly moving onto Christopher Columbus, President Ulysses S. Grant, and others, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two of the Founding Fathers of the US.
Not even the monument to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry – an African-American regiment that fought in the Civil War – was spared vandalism. Meanwhile, the Natural History Museum in New York has decided to remove the statue of 26th US President Theodore Roosevelt, saying that its depictions of Native Americans and Africans made it a “hurtful symbol of systemic racism.”
King’s tweet amounted to inciting federal hate crimes, argued conservative filmmaker Mike Cernovich, comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan’s terror campaign against churches.
The KKK would burn down churches in acts of domestic terrorism.Shaun King is carrying on the tradition of Democrat violence against churches, as he is incites federal hate crimes on Twitter.https://t.co/Xs224ig8OGpic.twitter.com/tOnDgLEWoI
— Ramon Berenguer IV (@ComteBerenguer) June 22, 2020
This would not be King’s first controversy. In 2019, he falsely claimed the killing of a 7-year-old black girl in Houston was a racially motivated hate crime. In 2018, he falsely accused a Texas state trooper of rape. He has also been accused by other Black Lives Matter activists of embezzling or misusing donations sent his way.
Ten years ago a model of how states fail predicted that political instability in the US would “peak in the years around 2020”. Its authors say it’s now pointing to “civil war”. Image: Getty
In the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton was in the White House and the United States looked unshakeable, the administration appointed Jack Goldstone to study how states fail. They meant other states; not the US. Few expected that his model would later predict their country’s collapse.
In an unpublished paper submitted for peer review, Professor Goldstone, who is a sociologist, and Peter Turchin, an expert on the mathematical modelling of historical societies, have concluded that the US is “headed for another civil war”.
The conditions for civil violence, they say, are the worst since the 19th century — in particular the years leading up to the start of the American Civil War in 1861.
The reason for this are trends that began in the 1980s, “with regard to inequality, selfish elites, and polarisation that have crippled the ability of the US government to mount an effective response to the pandemic disease,” they write.
This has also “hampered our ability to deliver an inclusive economic relief policy, and exacerbated the tensions over racial injustice.”
Professor Goldstone is a leading authority on the study of revolutions and long-term social change at George Mason University. The model developed by him and Peter Turchin tracks such data as the ratio of median workers’ wages to GDP per capita, life expectancy, average heights, and the number of new millionaires. It also measures political polarisation or the degree of overlap between the parties.
Applied to US history, it ‘predicts’ the 1861 Civil War and the unrest of the 1930s — a time of Jim Crow segregation, Gilded Age inequality, and fascism.
Ten years ago, Professor Turchin pointed his model towards the future, and made an uncannily accurate prediction. Just like in the 1850s, crisis indicators were rising, he wrote in the journal Nature. They could be a reliable indicator of looming instability and “look set to peak in the years around 2020,” he wrote.
link
The Political Stress Index combines three crisis indicators: declining living standards, increasing intra-elite competition/conflict, and the weakening of the state. Growing PSI indicates likelihood of political violence. The Well-being Index indicates greater equality, greater elite consensus, and a stronger, more legitimate state.
Image:
Supplied: Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin
Speaking from his home in Virginia on Monday — the day before a member of an armed militia shot a protester beneath a statue of a conquistador in New Mexico — Professor Goldstone described these predictions as “scary as hell”.
“The general feeling is horror,” he said.
‘Collapse happens slowly and then very suddenly’
In fact, the present disorder was forecast as far back as 1991. In the book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, Professor Goldstone used an early version of his model to predict the rise of a leader similar to President Trump.
It came down to population changes, Professor Goldstone argued. The American population surged after World War II — the Boomer generation born in a time of relative peace and plenty. As this massive cohort aged and accrued wealth, they could make the country vulnerable to political crisis. But this would only happen, he wrote, if the elites did three things: tighten up the path to mobility to favour themselves and their children (like increasing the cost of university); dampen wage growth and claim a greater share of economic gains for themselves; and resist taxation so that government is starved of needed revenues.
As it turned out, this is exactly what would happen over the following three decades.
President Trump near the White House on June 1, 2020.
Image:
Getty
At the non-profit Fund for Peace in Washington DC, the Fragile States Index tracks data such as the state of public services and income inequality and assigns countries a score indicating its resilience or ability to cope with shocks. It’s been running the index since 2000, and in the last few years the US’s position has steadily worsened. Charles Fiertz, a programs manager at the fund, told Hack that, although the index was not designed to make predictions, he had noticed some interesting correlations.
“In 2016, when the Trump election and the Brexit referendum happened, we looked back and found that the US, along with the UK, was actually one of the most worsened countries in the world over the preceding several years in the indicators of group grievance and factionalised elites,” he said.
These trends in the indicators have continued in recent years, Mr Fiertz says. Looking at other countries that have collapsed, he sees a pattern of several indicators steadily worsening before a sudden shock “overwhelms the system”.
“It could be a pandemic or a loss in a war or perceived abuse by public security forces,” he said.
“And normally, prior to this worsening process, a country would be able to adapt to, to deal with that. But because of this long-term buildup of vulnerabilities, it cannot.”
“It happens slowly and then very suddenly.”
Whichever side loses could dispute election outcome
Professor Goldstone predicts the real problems will begin after July 31, when Americans’ $600 a week COVID-19 unemployment welfare expires.
“Social tensions likely continue to grow as we move to November,” he said.
“The risks of violence in November are very high.”
November is the US presidential election — now less than five months away. As the big date nears, the tone of predictions are darkening. Both Republicans and Democrats see a loss as a cataclysm — not just a setback, but the end of America. Four more years of Trump would ‘destroy democracy’, one side says. The other claims that Biden would destroy the economy as well as ‘law and order’. The Trump campaign has launched an ‘Army for Trump’ website to “recruit and mobilise Americans … committed to fighting to re-elect President Trump.”
“There’s a real risk that, if the election is close, whichever side loses will be strongly motivated to mobilise people to challenge the result,” Professor Goldstone said.
A police officers pepper spray a woman on May 30, 2020 in Denver, Colorado.
There’s another scenario: The protests calm down, Biden wins easily in November, Trump accepts the result, as do his supporters, and the country makes a peaceful transition to Democratic Party leadership. Unfortunately, this is “low probability”, Professor Goldstone says. The chances of violence are higher.
“The fissures in our society that led to the last outpouring of protest are deep-rooted and have been around for a long time,” he said.
“The concerns about racial injustice, gender discrimination, and severe economic and material inequality have been building for many decades.
“COVID-19 like the 2009 housing crisis has exacerbated these differences.”
Could this mean a revolution? No, he says. The population of the United States is relatively aged and unlikely to be carried away by ideological fervour. Enough people would prefer to have leadership settled by election results rather than battles in the street. There’s a chance, he says, of something like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2004, after an election perceived to be marred by fraud and corruption, huge peaceful protests occupied central areas of the major cities and demanded a revote. When this took place, and the election was declared fair and free, the bloodless revolution was over.
This has never happened in the US. A presidential election has never been re-run.
“If we see an upsurge of violent protest and the election results are disputed the Democratic and Republican congressional leaders may try and get together across the party lines and maybe even justices of the Supreme Court,” Professor Goldstone said.
“They’ll say that, ‘We feel that we need to stop a popular battle in the streets over who will lead our third branch — the Executive — and we need to have a new election to satisfy everyone that the government is legitimate.’
“Then they’d schedule an election in January.”
Can it be turned around?
Some fragile states are able to turn themselves around, Charles Fiertz says.
“It requires a lot of investment over a long time and across a whole bunch of different areas, but it can be done,” he said.
Professor Goldstone points to the 1930s, when President Herbert Hoover was leading the US at a time of growing fascism and democratic failure around the world. In the midst of the Great Depression, he was succeeded by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tilted the economic balance away from the corporations and the wealthy.
“It wasn’t easy and it didn’t all magically go away in one term,” Professor Gladstone said.
The professor, who grew up in the 1950s, in the shadow of Roosevelt’s achievement, sees a “new wave of progressivism” in the mass peaceful protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. He believes the present has also brought out the best in some Americans.
“There’s something good in America that’s still very much alive,” he said.
“There’s good as well as bad going on at the same time — and we always hope the good will win.”
BETHEL, Ohio – Donna Henson sat on her front porch last weekend, as she always does when the weather is nice, and watched dozens of her neighbors walk by with bats in their hands or guns strapped to their sides.
They were married couples, friends and relatives, young people and old. All heading up Union Street, toward the center of town.
Henson, 78, figured they’d heard the same rumors she had, the ones about busloads of people coming to her town to join small Black Lives Matter protests on Sunday and Monday. Word was hundreds could arrive from Cincinnati or Columbus or Detroit.
Henson was afraid, and she guessed her neighbors were, too. If they didn’t do something, if they didn’t show up armed and ready, the unrest they’d seen on TV for weeks on far off American streets could come to Bethel, a village of 2,800.
“Everybody had a gun,” Henson said Tuesday, recalling the scene. “Like a cowboy show.”
A movement that had swept into many of the nation’s big cities was about to reach a small town, a rural enclave where the message from demonstrators would be heard not as a wake-up call or a rallying cry but as a challenge to a way of life.
In Bethel, peaceful protesters would be seen by some as no different from looters and rioters. They represented chaos, the problems of other people from other places.
The protesters call for police reform, decry racism and criticize President Donald Trump. Many from Bethel support the police, say racism isn’t a problem here and fly “Trump 2020” flags in their front yards.
“We just want it to stop,” said Brad McCall, a carpenter and longtime resident who joined counter protesters. “We got a peaceful town. We don’t want our town destroyed.”
As it turned out, there were no busloads of protesters, there was no invasion by outsiders. Police estimated 80 to 100 people showed up to support Black Lives Matter, including the organizer, a 36-year-old substitute teacher from Bethel who makes arts and crafts.
Some yelled at the protesters to leave, blocked their way when they were marching and pushed and shoved them to the ground. A man with a Confederate flag covering his face ripped up one of the protesters’ signs while the crowd cheered.
“I felt like we were walking a gantlet,” said Lois Dennis, 63, who attended the demonstration with her daughter.
Suddenly, tiny Bethel was another act in an unfolding national drama. Critics called the town a racist backwater. Supporters praised residents for standing up to ignorant protesters. Townspeople, for the most part, were stunned by all the attention.
Bethel is 97% white, according to the U.S. Census, and almost 0.5% of the population identifies as Black.
“Why bring it to Bethel?” McCall said. “Why not go to Chicago? Look how many Black people are getting killed in Chicago. Black people are not getting killed in Bethel.”
‘They don’t want change’
Sharon Middleton listened Tuesday afternoon as McCall spoke in a parking lot not far from the site of the protests the previous days. Middleton was born and raised in Bethel and still lives in the house she grew up in.
She said the demonstrations were a mistake but not for the same reason McCall did.
“It’s not a tolerant community,” she said.
Middleton, who is white, has been living for years with Jon Richardson, an African American man. She said most people don’t give her trouble about it, but some do, including her mother, who hasn’t spoken to her in months.
When she read about the Black Lives Matter protest on Facebook, Middleton figured the protest organizers didn’t know her town as well as she did. “They were naïve,” she said. “They think they can put their Black Lives Matter signs up and change people’s minds.”
Richardson said he went to the protest and took some photos, but he said he wasn’t going to carry a sign. Since only a handful of the protesters were people of color, Richardson said, he would’ve stood out and been an easy target if things got ugly.
“I live here,” he said.
Richardson said he saw neighbors who never carry guns carrying them for the first time at the protest. “A lot of it is foolishness,” he said.
For Middleton, the guns and the anger are all about the fear of change. She said Bethel hasn’t changed much in her lifetime and that’s fine with most of its residents. “They don’t want change,” she said.
Richardson put his arm around Middleton and kissed her cheek.
“People are just people,” she said. “He just has a little more melanin in his skin.”
‘A sad day for Bethel’
Chris Karnes hasn’t lived in Bethel as long as Middleton, but he said he’s more hopeful the town’s residents can find common ground.
He moved here with his wife, a native, about 10 years ago, and he likes the place. He said his neighbors are friendly, even if they don’t share his more liberal politics. “It’s Trump country,” he said Tuesday. “You have to learn to live with people’s differences.”
Karnes wasn’t encouraged by the response to the protests. He saw people he knew, some better than others, swearing at protesters and trying to intimidate them. He saw punches thrown at a man who did nothing but carry a sign.
“You live in a small community like this, you get to know a lot of people,” he said. “I don’t know. It was a sad day for Bethel.”
As he spoke, Wayne Sulken, who’s lived in Bethel for almost 30 years, parked his pickup and got out. He listened to Karnes for a few minutes before speaking.
“I know it got ugly,” he said. “But there were thugs on both sides.”
Sulken said he went to the protests Sunday and Monday, bringing his pistol Monday, not to cause trouble but to keep the peace. He said that’s why most residents showed up: They had heard outsiders were coming to stir things up.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Sulken said. “Are our homes going to get burned down? Are our stores going to get looted? We heard the rumors they were going to bus them in.”
Sulken told Karnes he thought outsiders were behind the protests, namely antifa, a loose-knit anti-fascist group Trump has blamed for protests and unrest. Whoever was behind it, Sulken said, Bethel residents didn’t want any part of it.
Karnes and Sulken were on opposite sides of the protest, but they agreed on one thing Tuesday afternoon. Sort of.
“The worst thing is the impression the world is getting from Bethel,” Karnes said. “I’d say it was the actions of a few violent individuals.”
“On both sides,” Sulken said.
“Ahhhhh,” Karnes said, shaking his head. “I thought you might say that.”
Before parting ways, the two men shook hands. Karnes walked toward his home a few blocks away and Sulken climbed back into his pickup.
Hope for more conversations, less anger
As evening approached Tuesday, Bethel Police Chief Steve Teague responded to a noise complaint about a man with a bullhorn across the street from the Grant Memorial building, where protesters had gathered on previous days.
He found an African American man shouting, “Black lives matter” on the sidewalk. He told him about the complaint and asked him to stop.
Then the two sat down on the steps with a few other Bethel residents and talked about what was happening.
“Everybody was respectful,” Teague said. “We welcome all of them, as long as they’re peaceful.”
He said most have been. Despite the images circulating on social media, Teague said, most interactions were nonviolent and only a few counterprotesters got physical with demonstrators.
Teague, a former jet engine designer at GE, has been chief in Bethel for a year. The past few days are unlike anything he’s faced on the job, and he knows it doesn’t look good for the town he’s called home for the past six years.
“Those people have a 15-second clip, and they’re judging our entire town,” Teague said. “That’s just not right.”
A few blocks away, Donna Henson was on her front porch again, watching evening fall on an empty Union Street. It was another beautiful afternoon.
She sat next to her boyfriend, Mike Luck, surrounded by flower boxes and an American flag flapping in the breeze. Her dog, a Pekingese named Goldie, roamed the porch.
Henson said she’s watched the protests on TV for weeks and struggles to understand why everyone has been so upset for so long. She’s lived in Clermont County her whole life and, until now, the protests and unrest had seemed distant, like someone else’s problem.
“I’ve never been around Black people,” she said. “I just wish everybody could get along.”
She said she was appalled by the video of George Floyd’s death, but she wants the protests to end. She wants her town to get back to normal, back to the way it’s always been.
A federal moratorium on evictions — which only applies to the 1 in 4 rental units that are backed by the government — expires in a matter of weeks.
Public housing in Brooklyn, New York. A temporary ban on evictions for rentals backed by the government is set to expire in a matter of weeks. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A new tremor is threatening to shake minority communities as protests over racial injustice sweep the country: A wave of evictions as a federal moratorium on kicking people out of their rental units expires.
The ban on evictions — which applies to rentals that are backed by the government — expires in a matter of weeks. On top of that, the federal boost to unemployment benefits that many laid-off workers have used to pay their rent is set to end July 31.
The moratorium covers evictions, not rent payments, and nearly 26 million people will have trouble coming up with the rent by September amid the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, according to Zach Neumann of the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project. Forty-four percent of black tenants said they have little or no confidence they would be able to meet their next rent payment, according to the latest snapshot from the census, conducted the last week of May.
That and rising black unemployment could make for a combustible mix on the streets. The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of cops has sparked protests in cities around the country. Mass evictions this summer would almost surely fuel additional unrest.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told housing advocates on a call last week that the furor over Floyd’s death had brought new urgency to discussions of the racial disparities endemic in American life.
“One knee to the neck just explode[d] a tinderbox of other injustices that we must address, and one of them is housing,” Pelosi said. “Housing security is a matter of justice, as structural racism puts communities of color unfairly at risk of being rent-burdened or homeless.”
The congressionally mandated eviction plan applies to tenants in buildings with federally backed mortgages — covering just over 12 million of the nearly 44 million rental units in the country. Others may be covered by a patchwork of state and local moratoriums, but those are also starting to expire. Twelve states ended eviction protections in May, and the 8.2 million renters in New York will see their protections start to lapse on Aug. 20.
That gives a large advantage to white people: While about 74 percent of white households live in homes they own, only about 44 percent of black households and 49 percent of Latino households do, according to census data.
Black and Latino households also pay a higher share of their income on rent in most major metropolitan areas, according to a Zillow analysis.
House Democrats have passed sweeping legislation that would replace the current eviction ban on federally backed properties with a 12-month expanded moratorium on evictions for all tenants. It would also give tenants $100 billion in rental assistance to prevent falling behind on payments and getting hit with a massive bill when moratoriums end.
It’s not just Democrats who are worried about a potential rash of evictions, though. Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) said this week that policymakers need to figure out “what else can be done for the renters to ensure that they’re not put in a situation of potential eviction once the grace periods might end.”
But Senate Republicans are pumping the brakes on pouring more stimulus into the economy before the last relief package is exhausted, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floating August as a timeline for the next round.
Key Republicans also oppose continuing to provide expanded unemployment benefits, arguing that the enhanced payments are discouraging recipients from returning to lower-paying jobs.
Pelosi told housing advocates that delaying negotiations is a nonstarter. “We do not have time for Mitch McConnell’s ‘pause,’” she said. “This is a lot of money that we’re talking about, but it’s only going to cost more the longer we go.”
Housing advocates warn that landlords around the country are already preparing eviction proceedings to file the moment they’re allowed to proceed, even as more than 20 million Americans — including more than 1 in 6 black workers — remain out of work.
“Unless Congress intervenes soon, the coming tsunami of evictions and homelessness will disproportionately harm black and brown people,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
About 40 percent of homeless people in the U.S. and over half of homeless families with children are black, even though just 13 percent of the population is black.
Rice said Floyd’s death was “just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and that decades of redlining — the government practice of blocking off black neighborhoods on official maps to discourage mortgage lending — was one of the main underlying contributors to the current unrest.
“It’s all connected — when you really pull back the layers of the onion, the root cause is residential segregation and systemic structural racism,” she said. “I think making sure we don’t have massive wholesale evictions is a sort of a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but ultimately we’re going to have to get to the root causes.”
More than 40 million people lost their jobs in the last few months, in the fastest and deepest economic slowdown ever recorded. More than half of all households with low incomes in the United States have experienced a loss of earnings, as have a quarter of all adults. The numbers are grim — but as bad as things look today, they’re on track to get much, much worse.
The US economy right now is like a jumbo jet that’s in a steady glide after both its engines flamed out. In about six weeks, it will likely crash into the side of a mountain.
What’s kept us in the air so far is an extraordinary government relief effort. In most states, evictions have been temporarily banned, preventing a mass homelessness crisis. Most federal student loan payments have been put on hold, removing one of the largest recurring monthly expenses that millions of people face. Banks were ordered to give their customers a six-month break on mortgage payments if requested.
Most importantly, and counterintuitively, household income sharply increased in April as hundreds of billions of dollars in lost wages were replaced by trillions in government spending. The government sent out more than 159 million stimulus payments of up to $1,200 per adult (more if you have kids), and more than 20 million unemployed people became eligible for an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits. The result, according to Bloomberg, was the largest monthly increase in household income ever recorded.
This happened in April, when there were far fewer things to spend your money on; shops and restaurants were closed, nobody went to the ball game or took the kids to a theme park, and a shaggy nation longed for a haircut. Meanwhile, the prospect of a massive economic crash meant that Americans who were still on the job were more likely to tuck money away that they might otherwise have spent. So the national savings rate — the share of people’s income that is saved rather than spent — hit 33%, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, also the highest level ever recorded. In the same month that we reached the worst mass unemployment in living memory, Americans saved a total of $6.15 trillion — up by $4 trillion from the month prior.
The massive interventions that made all this possible will soon come to an end — but the unemployment won’t.
On July 31, the $600 federal unemployment payments going to unemployed people every week will end, and there’s no sign they’ll be replaced with anything nearly as generous. In fact, many Republicans want to replace them with nothing at all — and there’s also little sign that another round of one-time stimulus checks will get mailed out. So income for tens of millions of households is likely to nose-dive in August.
That will coincide with evictions returning after being put on hold for months. This month, about one-third of renters were unable to pay their rent in full or at all, despite all the stimulus money. A federal law that bans evictions in any properties financed by federally backed mortgages — more than a quarter of all households, according to one estimate — expires on July 25, just a week before millions of people’s main economic lifeline is pulled away. Unless they are extended, statewide orders banning all evictions in places that have been hardest hit by the unemployment crisis will also expire around then: Florida’s on July 1, California’s on July 28, and New York’s on Aug. 20.
As millions of people experience a sudden collapse of their income at the very moment their landlords are allowed to start kicking them out, other bills will also come due. Payments on millions of paused student loans will begin again at the beginning of October; the more than 4 million homeowners who received a six-month pause on their mortgage after April’s mass layoffs will need to start making payments again at the end of October.
Few seriously expect the US economy to recover as fast as those bills come due; the federal government’s own projections expect unemployment will remain frighteningly high well into next year, even as people return to work as the lockdowns are lifted. Many companies will only rehire workers as quickly as consumer demand returns, and in labor-heavy industries, such as restaurants, entertainment, and travel, nobody expects things to go back to normal anytime soon.
And across the economy, big employers will use this moment as a kind of workforce reset button — a chance to rethink how many workers they really want, outsource some jobs, offshore others, and eliminate some entirely. By some estimates, more than 40% of all the job losses of the last few months could be permanent, not temporary.
You might have noticed a few major things — like, well, the coronavirus pandemic — missing from this equation. If we’re really lucky, we won’t experience a nasty second wave of infections in the fall and early winter, spurring new rounds of attempted lockdowns shortly after the economic plane crashes into the mountain — lockdowns that will once again disproportionately affect Black people and people with low incomes who can’t safely work from home. Fingers crossed on that one.
And I didn’t mention the nationwide protest movement that shows no sign of slowing down, or the US election that will be overheating in the fall, involving a phenomenally unpopular and wildly divisive president whose passionate supporters tend to distrust the government.
These are all ingredients in what Adam Elkus memorably described recently as the “omni-crisis” that we’re currently stumbling our way through. “The omni-crisis has significantly enlarged the space of possible outcomes beyond that normally considered day-to-day by most Americans,” he wrote. “And it is not clear how many people in positions of influence and authority recognize this.”
That will become clearer in the next few weeks as Congress considers what comes next. So far, the Democrat-controlled House has passed an expansive new relief bill with trillions in new spending, which was declared dead on arrival by the Republican-controlled Senate — and Republicans don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to even begin negotiations. There are hints that our political leaders understand the gravity of the crisis, but they may be simply incapable of rising to the moment. ●
Tom Gara is the opinion editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
FILE PHOTO: Huawei Technologies Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou leaves her home to attend a court hearing in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada May 27, 2020. REUTERS/Jennifer Gauthier
TORONTO (Reuters) – Canada’s intelligence agency warned that arresting the daughter of billionaire Huawei founder Ren Zheng would set off global “shock waves” and seriously affect ties with China, just before her detention in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request, new court documents show.
Released on Friday, the documents show the involvement of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in the December 2018 arrest of Meng Wanzhou, which soured diplomatic ties between Ottawa and Beijing.
Meng is chief financial officer of China tech giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the company at the center of next generation 5G wireless technology and a long-running dispute the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
A CSIS report was disclosed in the court documents as part of Meng’s extradition proceedings. In a redacted Dec. 1, 2018 memo, CSIS said it was advised by the U.S. FBI of plans to arrest Meng when she arrived on a flight to Vancouver International Airport later that same day.
“The arrest is likely to send shockwaves around the world,” CSIS said. “The planned event will be of great consequence internationally and bilaterally,” the report said.
Huawei lawyers called the documents proof that authorities had conspired against Meng.
Meng is accused by U.S. authorities of bank fraud for misleading HSBC (HSBA.L) about Huawei’s relationship with a company operating in Iran, putting HSBC at risk of fines and penalties for breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran.
Meng’s lawyers have argued the case should be thrown out because Canada did not have sanctions against Iran. Meng says she is innocent. Last month, a Canadian judge allowed the case to continue, rejecting defense arguments that the U.S. charges against Meng do not constitute crimes in Canada.
The new court documents show the CSIS was concerned about when Meng’s arrest might become public. Her lawyers noted the point was of particular interest, since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were attending the G20 summit in Argentina and dining together on the evening of Dec. 1.
Many Americans are now at risk of being evicted from their homes. John M Lund Photography Inc / Getty Images
At least 44 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past three months as the coronavirus pandemic devastated industries such as retail and hospitality.
Many who lost jobs were unable to pay their rent or utilities, prompting state and federal governments to issue a temporary ban on evictions.
But those bans are set to expire this summer, leaving many people at risk of losing their homes.
The United States is preparing to deal with yet another crisis: an eviction crisis.
On Thursday, Business Insider’s Carmen Reinicke reported that 44 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last 12 weeks. The mass layoffs and cratering industries have left many unable to pay their rent or utilities due to the lack of income.
Because of the financial crisis, the pandemic has caused, the federal government put a temporary ban on evictions in federally assisted properties, set to last until July 25. Individual states — like Michigan, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania — had their own eviction moratoriums. But those have expired or are set to expire soon, with no extensions in place: Michigan’s moratorium expired on June 11, while Louisiana’s and Pennsylvania’s are expected to expire on June 15 and July 10 respectively.
This is the money that has been allowing people who lost their jobs to continue paying their rent, CNBC’s Alicia Adamczyk reports. The loss of extra income, in conjunction with the end of eviction moratoriums, may cause a nationwide eviction crisis — or worse. Aaron Carr, founder and executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative, told CNBC that evicting people right now, during an ongoing pandemic, could turn “a catastrophe into an apocalypse.”
Homeless shelters in the United States are not set up for social distancing
The pandemic has had a devastating impact on renters since the outbreak and subsequent lockdown measures first began in the US in March.
Between March 25 and April 10, the Urban Institute found that almost half of the renters between the ages of 18 and 64 had trouble paying their rent or utilities, were food insecure, or couldn’t afford necessary medical care. And this issue was far more pronounced in some communities than others: In May, the institute found that 25% of Black and Latino renters deferred or could not pay their rent, compared to just 14% of white renters.
Now, Axios, citing the weekly US Census survey which measures the impact the pandemic has had on Americans, reported that one-fifth of adults said in May that they were unsure whether they’d be able to pay their rent or mortgage in June.
As Carr told CNBC, evicting people from their homes could lead them into homelessness or unstable housing, which could raise their risk of catching COVID-19.
Mass evictions could also create a mental health crisis, causing an emotional and mental strain on those who lost their shelter, and who could end up food insecure. Evicting people also generally ruins credit, which may make it harder to find new housing, especially during a pandemic.
All of these factors could result in an “eviction apocalypse,” with widespread evictions leading to a surge in homelessness and rising COVID-19 infections throughout the country.
Even though activists have been pushing for reforms on rental assistance and cancellation, states have been slow to adopt such measures. A glimmer of hope could be the HEROES Act, which has an extension of the nationwide moratorium on evictions that would last 12 months. The bill was passed by the House in May but has stalled in the Senate.
“AstraZeneca recognises that the vaccine may not work but is committed to progressing the clinical program with speed and scaling up manufacturing at risk.”
nonetheless:
“AstraZeneca’s enormous manufacturing and distribution layout represents the single largest effort so far to pump hundreds of millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine hopeful onto the market before the end of 2020. “
AstraZeneca said its total capacity for COVID-19 vaccine production has exceeded 2 billion doses per year. (Pixabay)
British drugmaker AstraZeneca has made clear its intent to rapidly scale production of the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine hopeful despite a dearth of clinical data to support its use. Now, with an eye-popping deal worth three-quarters of a billion dollars, AstraZeneca is putting its money where its mouth is.
The British pharma has inked a $750 million deal with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to manufacture and distribute 300 million doses of Oxford’s adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, the drugmaker said Thursday.
AZ also agreed to a licensing deal with the Serum Institute of India to provide 1 billion doses of the vaccine to low- and middle-income countries, with the goal of 400 million produced by year’s end.
In total, the deals will bring AstraZeneca’s overall supply capacity for Oxford’s vaccine candidate to more than 2 billion doses per year, the drugmaker said. The agreement will task CEPI with manufacturing the vaccine, while Gavi will handle procurement.
AstraZeneca’s enormous manufacturing and distribution layout represents the single largest effort so far to pump hundreds of millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine hopeful onto the market before the end of 2020.
AstraZeneca reached an agreement with Oxford in April to manufacture and commercialize hundreds of millions of doses of its COVID-19 vaccine as health regulators around the world scrambled to meet what will likely be global demand.
The vaccine, dubbed AZD1222, contains the genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It isn’t replicating, so it can’t cause an ongoing infection in recipients, AZ says. The company hopes the vaccine can deliver a strong immune response from one dose by triggering the body to produce the spike protein and attack the novel coronavirus upon infection.
In late May, AstraZeneca scored a $1.2 billion contribution from the U.S. for development, production and delivery of its potential shot starting this fall.
The company has signed up to deliver 400 million doses through its initial supply agreements, including a 300-million-dose work order for the U.S. and 100 million doses for the U.K.
In a more minor move last week, AstraZeneca and Oxford BioMedica inked a one-year deal covering “multiple batches” of the vaccine.
As part of the agreement, AstraZeneca will have access to Oxford BioMedica’s 84,000-square-foot OxBox commercial manufacturing center in Oxford, England. The agreement will turn out most of the clinical and commercial supply in 2020 with the possibility of expansion in the future, Oxford BioMedica said in a release.
AstraZeneca’s massive supply commitments will depend on results from an ongoing phase 2/3 trial of the vaccine that hopes to enroll 10,260 people in the U.K. The study aims to generate results to support the first shipments to customers in September. A 1,000-patient phase 1 trial hasn’t yet turned out top-line data.
The phase 2 test will relax exclusion criteria used in phase 1, notably by enrolling a small number of children ages 5 to 12 and adults age 56 and older. One cohort will enroll adults over 70, a demographic that is particularly at risk from the coronavirus. By expanding the age range, the researchers aim to understand how immune response varies across demographic groups.
Once the vaccine moves into phase 3, the researchers will limit enrollment to people age 18 and older. Adult participants in the phase 2 and 3 trials will be randomized to receive one or two doses of AZD1222 or a vaccine against meningococcal bacteria that will serve as the control.
Mass protests in the US and elsewhere over racist killings of Black males like George Floyd aren’t good enough.
They divert attention from an array of core issues ignored by officialdom and establishment media.
Justice won’t be served unless they’re all addressed and corrected, systemic change that requires longterm struggle.
Days, weeks, even a few months of street protests alone will fail like always before, especially if pacified by cosmetic changes alone.
Tinkering around the edges alone assures status quo forever wars, inequity and injustice for ordinary people while privileged ones enjoy gravy train benefits.
That’s the American way that’s replicated throughout the West and elsewhere worldwide — governance of, by, and for special interests at the expense of the exploited vast majority.
All lives matter, those most disadvantaged harmed most by institutionalized fantasy democracy, racism, inequity and injustice in the US and worldwide.
Systemic change that’s needed demands going for the following — without compromise:
Money power put back in public hands where it belongs, in the US by abolishing the Wall Street owned Fed and giving back to Congress what’s constitutionally mandated.
Break up and prohibit too-big-to-fail banks, including an end to allowing commercial and investment banking combinations, along with letting them own insurance companies.
End countless billions of dollars of corporate handouts and bailouts.
Rescind the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that greatly contributed to speculative excess, including no regulartory oversight of derivatives and leveraging that turned Wall Street more than ever into a casino
Enact progressive policies, eliminating neoliberal ones, including force-fed austerity on ordinary people, the nation’s wealth used for everyone, not just the privileged few.
Mandate social justice in the US by constitutional amendment, including universal healthcare, public education to the highest levels, along with human, civil and organized labor rights, what was omitted in the US founding document.
Breaking up and banning corporate monopolies and oligopolies.
Getting money entirely out of politics.
Changing rigged elections to free, fair and open ones.
In the US, ending one-party rule with two right wings, fostering a climate that encourages parties independent from the current system.
Mandate ecosanity over raping and plundering the earth for maximum profits.
Reestablish and strengthen the vanishing middle class.
Reinstate progressive taxes, requiring the wealthy and business to pay their fair share.
Slash military spending, declaring a new era or peace and stability by beating swords into plowshares, using the revenue for rebuilding US infrastructure and enhancing social programs.
End corporate personhood, the US gulag prison system, capital punishment, and unrestrained predatory capitalist practices.
The difference between the latter and my decades of experience in small family business is worlds apart — public service v. big business rapaciousness for maximum profits in cahoots with big government, an unholy alliance against peace, equity and justice.
Todays America is the product of its founders — a men-only Wall Street crowd equivalent, given their economic status and prominence.
Designers of the nation’s founding document were bankers, merchants, lawyers, politicians, judges, and other wheeler-dealers.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights five years later served their interests, not the general welfare — notably not African Americans considered property, not people.
Not women at the time, considered child-rearers and homemakers alone, not decision-makers, not independent from their husbands.
The general welfare was off the table, special interests alone served, not ordinary America — fantasy democracy institutionalized from inception.
In his last State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights, economic ones, because original ones in the Constitution’s first 10 amendments “proved inadequate to assure us equality…”
FDR didn’t live long enough to push for what he proposed to become the law of the land post-WW II.
Economic rights he proposed are more greatly needed now, what should be core demands of protesters on US streets. They included the following:
Full employment with a guaranteed living wage adjusted to the real cost of living the way it was calculated pre-1990.
Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies.
Ending homelessness by assuring housing for all.
Universal healthcare and public education to the highest levels.
Enhanced social security beyond what New Deal legislation provided — that’s greatly eroded today.
All of the above and more are needed for egalitarian rule over governance serving privileged interests alone like now.
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, his economic bill of rights along with him.
The vast majority of protesters on US streets know nothing about it, along with little about the nation’s dark history from before its inception to the present day.
Ending institutionalized racism and police brutality are vital objectives.
It’s not enough. Key is ending all forms of inequity and injustice along with forever wars on humanity at home and abroad.
These are goals to pursue by committed longterm struggle.
Achieving them won’t come any other way.
Iconoclast muckraking journalist IF Stone once explained the following:
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins…”
That’s what longterm struggle is all about — fighting the good fight for peace, equity and justice so one day what’s now unattainable is possible.
Iam not trying to be cute and play with words. That title is meant to convey what it says, so let me explain.
The people who own the United States and their allies around the world have a plan. It is so simple that it is extremely devious.
Their plan has been in operation for many years. It has most people bamboozled because it is Janus-faced by design, overt one day, covert the next, but both faces operate under one controlling head. Some call this head the Deep-State. Even the Deep-State calls itself the Deep-State in a double fake. It is meant to make people schizoid, which it has.
The so-called Deep-State has been given many names over the years. I will not bore you with them, except to say that it was once called the power elite. They are the upper classes, the super wealthy who control the financial institutions, Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the corporate media, the internet, the military, and the politicians. They are multinational.
They are the wealthy nihilists who care not one jot for the rest of the world. They operate in secret, yet also run above-ground organizations such as the World Bank (WB), the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), etc. Their bloodstream runs on war, the preparations for war, and economic exploitation of the world.
All wealthy people are not party to their machinations, but they are almost always complicit in profiting from their crimes, unless they are very stupid. Or play stupid. Since I am talking about a great confidence game, that is quite common.
Other people, all other classes, the poor, middle-classes, even a portion of the upper middle classes mean nothing to the power elite unless they can serve their interests. They are always waging class warfare to maintain their domination and control. Their recent version of this class war is underway in the United States and in many other countries.
As of today, they are using race fears to create chaos and outrage to disguise their class warfare that is leading to the imposition of martial law. Soon they will shift back to the coronavirus fraud. Back and forth, in and out, now you see it, now you don’t.
By shutting down the world’s economy, they have destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people and are creating poverty on a vast scale. Much famine and death will follow. In the United States alone, 40-45 million people have applied for unemployment insurance and job loss is the greatest since the Great Depression. The reason: a massive propaganda campaign created around Covid-19 fear porn.
This class war is not new, but it is conducted today at warp speed since these people control the technology that has allowed them vastly increased power.
In the USA, it is conducted as usual under the guise of Republicans versus Democrats, the two representative political factions that are the faces of the controlled “opposition,” who are actually allies in the larger confidence game. Keeping “hope” alive is central to their strategy. Mind control is what they do. Speed is their greatest ally. Race is central to their game plan. They always say they are protecting us.
It is all a lie. A show. Nothing but a spectacle for the gullible. A shadow play.
The current president, Donald Trump, is the choice of one faction of these psychopaths. This year, Joseph Biden, is the shaky presumptive choice of the other. Both are deranged puppets. Regular people fight over who is better or worse because they are living inside what Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring a trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, long ago called “the doll’s house.”
It is a place where illusions and delusions replace reality. It is 24/7 propaganda. It keeps people engaged. It gives them something to argue about, one team to root for. It’s a sport. It is similar to Plato’s Cave. Fire has been replaced with electronic lighting and screens, but little has changed.
The sick system of exploitation is oiled and greased with the tantalizing bait of hope dangled for the masses. Shit slogans like “We are all in this together.”
But there is no hope for this system.
But when the propaganda is so slick that it creates a double-bind, people grasp at any neurotic “solution” out of frustration. As I write, huge angry crowds are out in the streets protesting the sick murder of a black man, George Floyd, by a white cop. Police infiltrators have started violent looting. Chaos reigns, as planned.
Such killings are routine, but someone turned a switch for this one when just yesterday operation corona lockdown with its fear and fake statistics had everyone cowering behind masks at home as the economic lives of vast numbers were destroyed in a flash.
For today, the masquerade is in the streets. Many good people are caught up in it. In a few days the scene will shift and we can expect another “bombshell.”
These surprises will keep happening one after another for the foreseeable future. Shock and Awe for the home crowd. The war come home. The controllers know you can’t wage war against the rest of the world unless you do so at home as well.
When one group within the deep-state won the internecine battle in 2016 and “shocked” the country with the election of the comical Trump, the other deep-state group called the Democrats, immediately set in motion a plan to try to oust him or to make it seem as if they were trying to do so.
The naïve thought this may happen, and their deluded yearning has been stretched until the 2020 presidential election, although some probably think Trump might go before then. He won’t.
So many people have destroyed their minds and relationships because they can’t see through the fraud.
Early in 2017, as the outgoing front man for the CIA/warfare/Wall St. state, Barack Obama, left his time bombs for the future. The pink pussy hats were sent out marching to open the show. Russia-gate was launched; eventually impeachment was tried. The Democrats. with their media allies, went on a non-stop attack.
It was all so obvious, so shallow in its intent, as it was meant to be. But millions who were in the doll house were outraged, obsessed, frantic with rage. They bought the con-game. Both those who hate Trump and those that love him have spent almost four years foaming at the mouth, breathless.
Trump was cast as the personification of evil. A relentless attack on Trump began and has continued all this time. It is pure theater. Trump remains at the helm, as planned, holding the Bible aloft in a style reminiscent of a Bible thumping Klansman from The Birth of a Nation. Only the ignorant thought it might have been different.
He knows how to perform his role. He is a fine actor. He outrages, spews idiocies, as he is supposed to do. That Mussolini style stance, that absurd hair, the pout. Just perfect for an arch-villain. It’s so obvious that it isn’t. Herein lies the trick.
And who profits from his policies? The super-rich, of course, the power-elite.
Who just stole 6-10 trillion dollars of public money under the hilariously named Cares Act? The super-rich, of course, the deep-state.
It was a bi-partisan bank robbery from the public treasury carried out under the shadow of Covid-19, whose phony hyped up numbers were used to frighten the populace into lockdown mode as the Republican and Democratic bank robbers smiled in unison and announced forcefully, “We care!” We are here to protect you.
Remember how Barack Obama “saved” us by bailing out Wall St. and the big banks to the tune of trillions in early 2009. Then waged unending wars. Left black Americans bereft. He cared, too, didn’t he. Our leaders always care.
Obama was the black guy in the white hat. Trump is the white guy in the black hat. Hollywood on the Potomac, as Gary Wills called it when Ronald Reagan was the acting-president.
Now Obama’s war-loving side-kick, the pale-faced, twisted talking Biden is seriously offered as an alternative to the Elvis impersonator in the White House. This is the false left/right dichotomy that has the residents of the doll’s house in its grip.
If you can’t see what’s coming, you might want to break out of the house, take off your mask, go for a walk, and take some deep breaths. The walls are closing in.
Knees will be on everyone’s necks in the months ahead.
President Trump has directed the Department of Defense to send 9,500 troops home from Germany, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, which would bring the total stationed there down to 25,000.
A defense official told the Journal the plan, which was ordered by national security adviser Robert O’Brien, has been underway since September and is not related to rising tensions between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who also served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, has advocated for the reduction of troops in Germany and pushed for Berlin to spend more on its own defense.
When asked, National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot did not confirm the move to The Hill, but said Trump “continually reassesses the best posture for the United States military forces and our presence overseas.”
“The United States remains committed to working with our strong ally Germany to ensure our mutual defense, as well as on many other important issues,” Ullyot said.
The Hill has reached out to the Department of Defense and the White House for further comment.
The Journal noted under current conditions, there can be up to 52,000 U.S. troops in Germany at a time as units rotate in and out or take part in training exercises.
The troop reduction will reportedly take place by September.
Trump has pushed for fewer U.S. service members to be deployed overseas, including in Afghanistan, the site of America’s longest military conflict.
Precisely as I reported, Minnesota police received Israeli training. The knee-on-neck is an Israeli restraint hold that Israeli forces use for breaking Palestinian necks. I doubt the Minneapolis cop intended to kill Floyd. He probably thought he was just using a restraint technique. In so many of the cases of police-inflicted death and injury there is no need for restraint. People are not resisting. Maybe the cops just want to practice their training.
Another main cause of police-inflicted death and injury are the middle of the night home invasions, sanctioned by courts and local authorities. There is absolutely no reason for these invasions. They are nothing but murder weapons.
The real murderers of George Floyd were the Israelis who taught the Minnesota cops the knee-on-neck restraint technique. The irresponsible court rulings that permit unannounced home invasions have also killed a lot of people. The police have been turned into killers by their absurd and inappropriate training. The cop will pay the price for his wrongful training just as did George Floyd.
It is pure idiocy to let those responsible for these practices off the hook and to run around shouting “racism.” Knee-on-neck is a restraint technique taught to the police. It is not racism. The technique should not have been taught to American police, and people who are not resisting should not be restrained. George Floyd died because of wrongful police training, not because of racism.
Over 100 Minnesota law enforcement officers attended a 2012 conference organized by the Israeli consulate in which Israeli police trained them. Israeli forces often use the knee-on-neck restraint on Palestinians. (Meanwhile, Congress is poised to pass a bipartisan $38 billion package to Israel)… Read two reports below:
By Jon Collins, reposted from the UK Morning Star newspaper (embedded links added by IAK)
Officers from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.
Mr Floyd’s death in custody last Monday, the latest in a succession of police killings of African Americans, has sparked continuing protests and rioting in US cities.
At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.
There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.
The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli claimed that the half-day session brought “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police” to share knowledge with their US counterparts.
It is unclear whether any of the officers involved in the incident in which Mr Floyd was killed attended the conference.
It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.
Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.
There was little good in the stunt.
While no one should ever condone the violence, vandalism, and looting that has exploded across our city streets, neither should anyone lose sight of the larger and deeper concerns about institutional racism that have ignited this rage.
As a white man, I cannot claim perfect understanding of the fear and anger that African Americans feel today. But as someone who has been around for a while, I know enough—and I’ve seen enough—to understand that those feelings are real and that they are all too painfully founded.
We must, as citizens, address head-on the issue of police brutality and sustained injustices against the African American community. We must, as citizens, support and defend the right—indeed, the solemn obligation—to peacefully assemble and to be heard. These are not mutually exclusive pursuits.
And neither of these pursuits will be made easier or safer by an overly aggressive use of our military, active duty or National Guard. The United States has a long and, to be fair, sometimes troubled history of using the armed forces to enforce domestic laws. The issue for us today is not whether this authority exists, but whether it will be wisely administered.I remain confident in the professionalism of our men and women in uniform. They will serve with skill and with compassion. They will obey lawful orders. But I am less confident in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief, and I am not convinced that the conditions on our streets, as bad as they are, have risen to the level that justifies a heavy reliance on military troops. Certainly, we have not crossed the threshold that would make it appropriate to invoke the provisions of the Insurrection Act.
Furthermore, I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes.
Even in the midst of the carnage we are witnessing, we must endeavor to see American cities and towns as our homes and our neighborhoods. They are not “battle spaces” to be dominated, and must never become so.
We must ensure that African Americans—indeed, all Americans—are given the same rights under the Constitution, the same justice under the law, and the same consideration we give to members of our own family. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.
Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarized; too many military missions have become politicized.
This is not the time for stunts. This is the time for leadership.
We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency. In a matter of hours, after the video of Floyd began circulating the internet, militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to Minnesota to aid Black Lives Matter rioters. Law enforcement and even the state National Guard have struggled to respond in Minnesota.
Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta are just some of the other cities waking up and finding smoldering ruins where businesses once operated. Nearly 30 other cities experienced some form of mass protest or violent rioting. At least three people have been killed so far.
Armed in Philadelphia and calling for more mayhem.
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Antifa, the extreme anarchist-communist movement, has rioting down to an art. The first broken window is the blood in the water for looters to move in. When the looting is done, those carrying flammable chemicals start fires to finish the job. Footage recorded in Minneapolis and other cities show militants dressed in black bloc ~ the antifa uniform ~ wielding weapons like hammers or sticks to smash windows. You see their graffiti daubed on smashed up buildings: FTP means ‘Fuck the Police’; ACAB stands for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’; 1312 is the numerical code for ACAB.
People in riot-targeted areas found pallets of bricks stacked around their areas. No construction going on, just piles of bricks. Everywhere there were riots.
Last night, rioters reached the gates of the White House, possibly the most secure location on Earth. There, they chipped away at the barriers piece-by-piece while law enforcement struggled to respond. One Secret Service officer reportedly had a brick thrown at his head. Footage recorded at the scene showed him blood-soaked. Police were eventually able to repel masked rioters by using pepper spray and tear gas. That worked, for now.
.
The militants uprising across the country want a revolution and they don’t care who or what has to be destroyed in the process. If their comrades die, they are elevated as martyrs in propaganda. Death is celebrated.
At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and
Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa has partnered with Black Lives Matter, for now, to help accelerate the breakdown of society.
The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.
ED Noor: Lest ye forget, boys and girls!
The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s Going Down, one of the most popular antifa blogs in North America, tweeted on Friday:
’10 years from now, people won’t look back and ask: “Why did it explode in 2020?” Massive unemployment while the rich rake in billions from tax-cuts + bailouts, the earth on the brink of collapse + police murdering people daily. Instead they’ll ask: “Why didn’t it happen sooner?”‘
Antifa are taking actions considered extreme even among their own ranks. On Thursday night in Portland, rioters surrounded a vehicle filled with passengers and shot at it, hitting one person inside. The driver was able to escape but the injured passenger had to go to hospital for treatment. In Oakland, two federal police officers guarding a government building were shot in an ambush drive-by. One was killed and the other has critical injuries. The following day in Seattle, masked antifa militants stole a rifle from a police vehicle before setting it ablaze.
Media, politicians, the public ~ all of us ~ have underestimated the training and capability of left-wing extremists, who are united in purpose. All the parts of rioting serve a purpose. Looting and fires destroy local economies. Riots can overwhelm the police and even the military. All of this leads to a destabilized state.
America is brave and beautiful. She is not invincible.
Earlier, two American media outlets reported that several tankers carrying Iranian fuel to Venezuela were forced to turn around as Washington placed pressure on the ships’ owners.
The last Iranian tanker carrying fuel and components for its production has docked at a Venezuelan port after entering the country’s waters on 31 May. The vessel called Clavel arrived just three days after the previous tanker, Faxon, brought its much-needed cargo to the Latin American state.
Three other tankers, Fortune, Forest, and Petunia arrived earlier, with Forest having already unloaded its shipment of fuel, which was urgently needed in Venezuela, and left for an unknown destination. The shipping of the fuel to the country thus successfully concluded despite reported attempts of the US to thwart the transaction between Caracas and Tehran, both of which suffer from American sanctions.
Workers of the state-oil company Pdvsa holding Iranian and Venezuelan flags greet during the arrival of the Iranian tanker ship “Fortune” at El Palito refinery in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela May 25, 2020
Last week, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News reported that Washington had pressured the Greek owners of two tankers, purportedly carrying Iranian oil towards Venezuela, to turn their vessels around under threat of sanctions.
Venezuela has been experiencing harsh fuel shortages lately despite possessing among the biggest oil reserves in the world. The crude extracted in the country is extremely heavy and requires sophisticated equipment to refine it into fuel. Caracas mostly lost access to such equipment after Washington imposed sanctions against the country’s oil industry in an attempt to topple its elected President Nicolas Maduro – an endeavour which the US has failed to carry out, despite making several attempts.
Iran pledged to help its Latin American partner, condemning American attempts to “destroy” the Venezuelan economy. The US Special Representative for Venezuela, in turn, slammed the two countries’ cooperation, claiming that Maduro is using Venezuelan gold reserves to pay Iran back.
“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”—John Lennon
Brace yourselves.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
What is unfolding before us is not a revolution.
The looting, the burning, the rioting, the violence: this is an anti-revolution.
The protesters are playing right into the government’s hands, because the powers-that-be want this. They want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law. They want a reason to make the police state stronger.
It’s happening faster than we can keep up.
The Justice Department is deploying federal prison riot teams to various cities. More than half of the nation’s governors are calling on the National Guard to quell civil unrest. Growing numbers of cities, having just barely emerged from a coronavirus lockdown, are once again being locked down, this time in response to the growing upheaval.
This is how it begins.
It’s that dystopian 2030 Pentagon training video all over again, which anticipates the need for the government to institute martial law (use armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in order to navigate a world bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
We’re way ahead of schedule.
The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.
This way lies certain tyranny.
For just one fleeting moment, “we the people” seemed united in our outrage over this latest killing of an unarmed man by a cop hyped up on his own authority and the power of his uniform.
That unity didn’t last.
Indeed, it didn’t take long—no surprise there—for us to quickly become divided again, polarized by the misguided fury and senseless violence of mobs taking to the streets, reeking of madness and mayhem.
Deliberately or not, the rioters have directed our attention away from the government’s crimes and onto their own.
This is a distraction.
Don’t allow yourself to be so distracted.
Let’s not lose sight of what started all of this in the first place: the U.S. government.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government constitutes a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
Case in point: George Floyd died at the hands of the American police state.
Floyd is yet another victim of a broken system of policing that has placed “we the people” at the mercy of militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
Daily, Americans are being shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, challenge an order or just exist.
I’m talking about the growing numbers of unarmed people are who being shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.
Now you can make all kinds of excuses to justify these shootings, and in fact that’s exactly what you’ll hear from politicians, police unions, law enforcement officials and individuals who are more than happy to march in lockstep with the police. However, as these incidents make clear, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.
Sad, isn’t it, how quickly we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat us all like suspects and criminals?
This is not how you keep the peace.
This is not justice. This is not even law and order.
This is certainly not freedom. This is the illusion of freedom.
Unfortunately, we are now being ruled by a government of psychopaths, scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.
We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers—a standing army. While Americans are being made to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to exercise their Second Amendment right to own a gun, the government is arming its own civilian employees to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorizing them to make arrests, and training them in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances. Clearly, the government is preparing for war—and a civil war, at that—and “we the people” are the perceived enemy.
We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. American satirist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps rather than hinders the plight of the American citizen.
We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”
We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, aided by its corporate allies, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”
We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have been repeatedly sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs, domestic extremism, pandemics and civil unrest, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have subjected all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have turned communities into warzones.
We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity.
And we’re being forced to live in a perpetual state of emergency. From 9/11 through the COVID-19 lockdowns and now the threat of martial law in the face of growing civil unrest, we have witnessed the rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.
When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.
The penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, there’s a pretty good chance you will go to jail.
For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now extreme. We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.
We have suffered.
How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.
America’s founders provided us with a very specific explanation about the purpose of government and a roadmap for what to do when the government abuses its authority, ignores our objections, and establishes itself as a tyrant.
We must choose between peaceful slavery (in other words, maintaining the status quo in servitude to the police state) and dangerous freedom. That will mean carving out a path in which we begin to take ownership of our government, starting at the local level, challenging the status quo, and raising hell—nonviolently—whenever a government official steps out of line.
We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.
Jonathon James. Vodafone sources say he was hired for a sales position in 2014 and left after a year. Photograph: YouTube
A recording spread around the world at the end of March, purportedly featuring a former Vodafone executive claiming to let the public in on a secret that the coronavirus pandemic is cover for a global plot to install 5G mobile phone masts, track the world’s population through vaccines, and then destroy human society as we know it.
In reality, the Guardian can reveal, the voice on the tape making the baseless claims is an evangelical pastor from Luton who recently tried to convince Zimbabweans to use cryptocurrency in their economy.
Jonathon James, who regularly preached at churches in Bedfordshire, is the previously unidentified individual who reached millions of people with his detailed but nonsense claims that Covid-19 is a fake disease covering for the impact of 5G.
“It has nothing to do with biological warfare but is our bodies reacting to radiofrequency radiation,” he told listeners to the 38-minute recording, claiming the real cause of global deaths was new mobile technology causing cell poisoning. “They are using coronavirus to try to hide the fact that people are dying from the 5G frequency.”
Although James was not the first individual to attempt to connect the pandemic and 5G, the popularity of his recording grew at the end of last month, just as people believing the conspiracy theory began to burn down phone equipment and harass telecoms engineers.
In the recording he suggests that Bill Gates is involved in a plot to produce coronavirus vaccinations that will contain computer chips to track individuals, a move he claims will ultimately herald the destruction of society.
“The coronavirus is not what’s killing people, it is clearly, categorically, unequivocally proven that the radio frequencies we are being exposed to are killing the people,” he told his audience without any evidence. “God has blessed me with the ability to bring disparate pieces of information together that puts the puzzle together and makes sense of it.”
Although many copies of the recording have been deleted by YouTube for breaching its policy on dangerous disinformation, new uploads continue to be available. Delivered in the form of a sermon, it has also racked up millions of views across other networks and continues to circulate on WhatsApp. But until now the originator’s identity has been unknown.
Much of the audio clip’s claims to credibility rely on James’s assertion that he is the former head of the largest business unit at Vodafone, supposedly giving him the inside track on new technologies at one of the world’s biggest telecoms companies.
Vodafone insiders told the Guardian that while James had worked for the company, he was hired for a sales position in 2014 at a time when 5G was not a priority for the company and was unlikely to be in his remit. They said he ultimately left Vodafone after less than a year.
International radiation watchdogs have cleared 5G as safe, while NHS bosses have called on people to stop spreading rumours linking the pandemic to 5G and threatening vital infrastructure.
James’s identity was ultimately pieced together by researchers at the fact-checking startup Logically, working in conjunction with the Guardian. When the preacher was contacted he said he “was absolutely shocked that [a] somewhat ‘private message’ to a dedicated small community went viral and [was] ubiquitously covered [on] various social media platforms”.
The preacher, whose WhatsApp profile picture shows him relaxing on a private jet wearing a monogrammed shirt, said: “For the record, I certainly wasn’t trying to vilify, incriminate or implicate any mobile network operator for their commercial endeavours to roll out their unified telecoms and next generation of mobile topologies in this regard.
“Had I known my voice note would have gone to a wider audience I certainly would have contextualised my thoughts, been more specific on what I was sharing citing references, and far less explicit. I was simply trying to summarise what the ‘perceived truth’ was behind this bizarre pandemic in the interest of serving my community.”
James, who regularly preaches at the Light City Christian Ministries in Luton, has apparently had a varied career since his time at Vodafone. He claims to have at one point advised central bankers in “the Congo” and Bangladesh on cryptocurrencies and he has posed with the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa. In 2018 he was working as an economic adviser for a Zimbabwean opposition party, urging it to save the economy using Bitcoin-type products pegged to diamond deposits through blockchain technology.
Asked if he had any final comment, James said he was unable to reply as he “had some rather pressing head of state engagement necessitating my full attention and time [for the] last 48 hours”.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced the decision to relieve Conrad during a Monday afternoon press conference, where the deceased was identified as David McAtee. Conrad was set to retire later this month.
“David was a friend to many, a well known barbecue man that nurtured so many people in their bellies and their hearts before,” Fischer said of the victim. “And for him to be caught up in this, for him to not be here with us is a tragedy. It’s just hard to put into words.”
The two officers involved, who were either not wearing or did not have their cameras activated, have been placed on administrative leave. It’s unclear whether the fatal shot was fired by law enforcement or a separate individual, active Chief Rob Schroeder said Monday.
“We are working diligently to determine what happened, the community has a lot of questions and we share those same questions,” Schroeder said.
Other audio and video from the incident will be released, officials said.
Louisville officers and the National Guard were sent to a parking lot to break up a crowd at around around 12:15 a.m., according to a statement Conrad gave earlier Monday. He said officers were “shot at” at some point while trying to clear the area and returned fire, leaving one person dead.
Security Police Officers with the Air National Guard stand with Louisville Metro Police officers during a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 31, 2020.Bryan Woolston / Reuters
In a statement Monday morning, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said “LMPD and the Kentucky National Guard returned fire resulting in death” and said he has asked the Kentucky State Police to independently investigate the shooting.
Officers were required to wear active body cameras following the death of Breonna Taylor, 26, a black woman killed in her home in March by Louisville police while they served a “no-knock” warrant against the couple in an alleged drug case. Taylor’s family claimed in a wrongful death lawsuit that Taylor and her boyfriend believed their home was being broken into and shot at officers because they did not identify themselves.
Taylor’s death has been a catalyst for protests in Louisville, demonstrations that over the weekend were reignited by the death of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man who died last week after a police officer kept a knee on his neck for over eight minutes.
More than 40 people were arrested Sunday night, the city’s fourth consecutive night of demonstrations, according to NBC Louisville affiliate WAVE.
Last Thursday, seven people were shot in the city during protests that turned violent. Officers were not involved in the Thursday shootings, Police Sgt. Lamont Washington said at the time.
Kaitlin Rust, a reporter for WAVE, was on air Friday when she yelled and said she was “getting shot” by rubber bullets or pepper bullets.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
Louisville authorities did not specify who fired the fatal shot, and authorities have not released information about the victim
The Army National Guard and Louisville Metro Police block a street during a protest in Kentucky on May 31, 2020.Bryan Woolston / Reuters
By Ben Kesslen
A man was shot dead in Louisville after police officers and the Kentucky National Guard “returned fire” while clearing a large crowd early Monday.
Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad said in a statement that at around 12:15 a.m. his officers and the National Guard were sent to a parking lot to break up a crowd.
“Officers and soldiers began to clear the lot and at some point were shot at,” Conrad said in a statement. “Both LMPD and National Guard members returned fire, we have one man dead at scene”
In a statement Monday morning, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said “LMPD and the Kentucky National Guard returned fire resulting in death” and said he has asked the Kentucky State Police to independently investigate the shooting. The governor’s office did not immediately return NBC News’ request for further clarification on who fired the fatal shot.
— Governor Andy Beshear (@GovAndyBeshear) June 1, 2020
Louisville police say they are interviewing “several persons of interests” and collecting video. The city was under a “dusk to dawn” curfew on Sunday night into Monday, beginning at 9 p.m.
Louisville has seen a weekend of protests, as the city mourns Breonna Taylor, 26, a black woman killed in her home in March by Louisville police who were executing a “no-knock” warrant targeting her former boyfriend. More than 40 people were arrested Sunday night, the city’s fourth consecutive night of demonstrations, according to NBC Louisville affiliate WAVE.
Last Thursday, seven people were shot in the city during protests that turned violent. Officers were not involved in the Thursday shootings, Police Sgt. Lamont Washington said at the time.
Kaitlin Rust, a reporter for WAVE, was on air on Friday when she yelled and said she was “getting shot” by rubber bullets or pepper bullets.
[This should be the focus of all protests and resistance against the fleecing of America by the very wealthiest minority. Distractions from this vital national focus, such as mixing-up protests against the police state with anti-vax protests or any-other-anti-protest, shatter that single-minded focus, risking the entire effort. Make this clear…IT IS THE POLICE STATE that is killing black folks, and NOT JUST INDIVIDUAL COP RACISTS.
The timely piece below identifies this problem and highlights some of the difficulties we will inflict upon ourselves in the near future, as the protests/resistance grow larger with each new wave of America’s dispossessed, growing homeless, unemployed, the starving and the just plain pissed-off. What we see taking place today in America’s cities is likely to spread to rural areas in the near future, especially when the money and the stimulus checks run out and starving becomes a personal issue. When the rioting and the looting become overwhelming, we will see an American civil war for survival, UNLESS national leaders act now, to avoid this coming nightmare.–Peter]
Personal safety & security are quickly becoming more important in this era of growing social rage
by Chris Martenson
Friday, May 29, 2020, 6:35 PM
Decades of unfairness are now boiling over in the United States in the form of protests, riots, burning buildings and violence.
Minneapolis is on fire – literally – and the unrest has spread to numerous other major cities.
Last year (2019) The Yellow Vest protesters in France dealt with enormous amount of police violence and intimidation as they put life and limb on the line to try and wrest better economic and living conditions for themselves.
The people of Hong Kong are back out in force again now that the Coronavirus threat has abated, seeking greater autonomy and control over their own lives. Last year (2019) Chileans also protested, seeking better wages and living conditions.
While the specific demands of each of these movements are unique, they all share common causes.
Our analysis at Peak Prosperity is this: the days of constant exponential growth on a finite planet are drawing to a close. All of the systems that govern the sharing of resources among humans – political, economic and especially financial – are designed to concentrate, not share, wealth.
Taken together, we have an economic pie that is no longer growing but is subject to a set of laws and financial predation that guarantee the wealthy get more than their fair share of what remains.
This leads to increasingly visible, palpable unfairness.
Primates hate that:
In today’s world, it’s grapes for the elites and cucumbers for the rest of us (if we’re even that lucky).
That’s been the model for a long time, but lately it’s been both accelerating and exposed for all to see.
Team Elite™ is busy gorging on grapes. It has granted itself $trillions of freshly printed dollars from the US Federal Reserve in order to prop up ‘their fair share of things’ like bonds, stocks, and derivatives.
That leads to these sorts of jarring headline juxtapositions:
Without any question whatsoever, the Federal Reserve has been printing up money like crazy and stuffing it into every crevice of the US financial markets in a bid to…well, drive up financial asset prices.
They’ve been extremely tone deaf the entire way while pretending that their aim isn’t to make the rich richer, or deliver fatter profits to banks. Of course, both of those things are indeed happening as a direct result of the Fed’s policies and anybody with eyes can see that — yet the media refuses to acknowledge this.
Really, it’s extremely easy to identify. Here’s what ‘grapes for the wealthy!’ looks like — see that $3 trillion spike since April?
All of that printing leads to some stocks now being at their priciest ratio to earnings ever:
We also see the same price-goosing with bonds. Corporate bonds are now once again approaching historically low yields which means, in the see-saw language of bonds, they are almost as pricey as they’ve ever been. In history:
Who received the benefits of that gigantic cluster of grapes that the Fed has lavished upon the bond markets?
Well, the owners of all those bonds of course, and the major corporations now able to borrow at rock bottom costs even as small and medium sized enterprises are being wiped out.
As I often say, the Fed doesn’t actually create wealth, it redistributes wealth. While doing that it is both directly and indirectly picking winners and losers.
The above chart of corporate bond yields says the Fed is picking large corporations and the wealthy elite over small companies and Main Street folks.
Of course, there are no grapes quite as sweet as the ‘special interest’ varietals that are served to only the wealthiest of real estate investors:
The only thing that could make this worse would be for some White House official to condescendingly insult all us regular people by referring to us in non-human terms.
I have dozens more such examples. But I trust you get the point: the vast unfairness of the US system is now exposed for all to see. And that inequity has become even more predatory in our hour of need during the Covid-19 pandemic. Which is why social frustration and angst are now in the process of boiling over.
The reason why is as old as civilization itself, showing up ever since the first group of humans organized themselves into a cultural pyramid:
People often ask me why I shake my angry monkey-fist at the Federal Reserve so often. It’s because of the above quote. I’m the sort that prefers to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering. The Federal Reserve seems to be institutionally ignorant of the above fatal ailment.
What the Fed is doing is wholly unnecessary and manifestly unfair. It will lead to tears yet, regrettably, it is completely avoidable. Grapes for Wall Street, and cucumbers (or worse) for everyone else. It’s just how they’re wired. They literally cannot help themselves,. So things are certain to get worse before they get better.
It All Boils Over
The institutional failures of the Federal Reserve aside, there are also the obvious failures of management (I can’t bring myself to call them ‘leadership’ anymore) at our major health institutions, politicians who are far quicker to the rescue of major corporations than constituents, politicized and even falsified ‘science’ coming from formerly respected institutions, the list goes on and on.
Every one of these breaches of public trust undermines our collective safety and security. Beyond some incalculable level the foundation gives way.
The lowest level of management in this story are the police. For decades many police departments have been heavily militarized and trained often by Israelis who’ve done a remarkable job embedding the mindset of occupying forces into US policing.
Toss in some unresolved racial biases and animosity, civil asset forfeiture, no-knock raids for petty reasons that routinely result in innocent lives being violently taken, and you’ve got a tinder pile waiting for a spark.
George Floyd was that spark. A particularly callous officer with a long string of unpunished claims of excessive force and violence lodged against him, knelt on George’s neck until he was dead while 3 other officers stood by and casually watched. Against the backdrop outlined above, this was one flagrant abuse too many.
Editorially, the person now being vetted as a possible VP for the Biden campaign, Amy Klobuchar was the prosecutor in Minneapolis for many years who could have delivered justice to the lower classes. Let’s check her record:
Sadly, this is a record that can be found in hundreds of other cities. It’s neither an uncommon nor a defensible record. As a reminder, in the aftermath of the Michael Brown killing and riots in Ferguson MO (2014) the justice department came in and discovered that in a city of 20,000 mostly poor people there were 16,000 outstanding arrest warrants. Think about that for a second.
Many for infractions like ‘impeding pedestrian flow’ (a.k.a. standing on the sidewalk). The humans were little more that ATM livestock for the police and court machinery to exploit.
And so, with the killing of George Floyd, Minneapolis exploded.
There’s More Unrest On The Way. Get Prepared.
Welcome everyone to these turbulent times.
We all want to live in a just, fair, and safe world. Some people are born into peaceful times. Others aren’t so lucky. History goes through its turnings.
Well, here we are, smack in the middle of a whopper of a fourth turning. So let’s make the most of it.
I take the safety and security of myself and the people around me very seriously. Because it’s my responsibility I train, and I plan, and I think things through.
My home is in a town I judge to be very safe, and I’m not the fearful sort, so I really have to push myself to prioritize the other steps. Which I am doing because it has to be done.
The calm days are over. There’s a new future coming, one that promises to be a lot more interesting as the old Chinese saying goes.
I wish I believed that the worst of the social unrest was behind us. I don’t. Given the actions of the Fed and Plutarch’s quote, and the total lack of any pushback from the media on these matters, I am anticipating grapes for the elites and worse-than-cucumbers for everyone else for many years to come.
Which means it’s time for you to more seriously consider your approach to personal security, especially if you live in or near a city. I certainly am.
As a true mark of the turning, a growing number of my friends who would never have considered owning a gun before are now thinking about doing so. All sorts of formerly ‘hard’ decisions suddenly become up for grabs when folks start feeling more physically vulnerable.
But personal security is far more than ‘owning a gun.’ It’s a mindset as well as a behavior set. And above all, it’s about avoiding trouble in the first place.
It includes taking sensible steps to protect your home from being an easy target for crime. It means having a plan and well-practiced skills in place to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from violence. It means aligning with neighbors to watch each others’ backs. It means practicing with whatever tools or systems you adopt so that they are second nature to you if you ever have to use them.
For those without extensive experience and training (which I assume is just about everyone reading this), the best presentation I’ve ever seen covering the practical essentials you need to know to maximize your odds of staying safe is this videofrom Peak Prosperity member Tom C., a 19-year veteran inner city police sergeant, given at our most recent annual seminar:
Here’s a brief 3-minute clip from it in which Tom is fielding Q&A on the audience’s top concerns:
Tom’s full seminar presentation is 48 minutes long and addresses key safety & security issues including how to reduce your threat risk profile, situational awareness, what to do (both mindset and actions) if in danger, how to create “layers” of defenses, as well as good home security options. Peak Prosperity’s premium members can watch it in full here.
On the printout of people qualified to discuss urban violence, I’m pretty far down the list. My encounters with the police have all been negative, but that’s the nature of the beast. No officer is going to stop me and tell me I have fabulous hair (OK, that happened just once, but it’s uncommon). They’re just going to give me a ticket for not coming to a full stop. They’re enforcers.
In fact, my most negative police encounter was at my own home. An officer showed up, very soon after I moved into my house, and said my dog wasn’t licensed by the city. My dog (a half chow, half golden named Chelsea, a painting of whom hangs in my office) started barking at this intruder, and the officer drew his gun and pointed it at Chelsea, screaming how I have to get my dog under control.
After finding out the unlicensed dog in question was actually the dog of the guy who used to live there, not me, I was supremely pissed, so I called the police to tell what had happened. Shortly thereafter, a sergeant brought the officer to my front door and, hanging his head, he apologized for his behavior.
So that’s about as close as I’ve come to a bad police encounter.
What’s happening across the country right now is a few orders of magnitude different. I see that there are plans for riots (oh, sorry, “protests“) in 50 different U.S. cities on Saturday night.
This is a perfect recipe for such chaos. You’ve got an unemployed population who has been under house arrest for months, with the widest wealth divide in history, and an environment of racism and violence. I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen non-stop, even without anyone being killed by having their neck squished.
I was particularly struck by this image below, which is sort of an upside-down version of Kristallnacht, 82 years later.
You’ve got to feel for the poor souls whose job it is to attract conventions and tourists to this place. Their website is unintentionally drenched with irony these days.
And here’s Exhibit B:
Of course, this isn’t confined to Minneapolis. Perhaps you’ve heard that, for whatever reason, someone thought it would be a good idea to dress up a bunch of little kids in military garb, hand them weapons, and send them off to counter-protests in Georgia. (This will clear up any confusion as to why “Hitler Youth” was a top trending term on Twitter today).
The billionaires couldn’t be happier. The highest echelons in this country have two gargantuan advantages working in their favor:
A nonstop circus of distractions, so that no one has a chance to see how, over the past 50 years, they have absolutely taken over everything, and they’re going to wind up with everything, absolutely everything, for themselves;
They’ve got a bureaucratic whore by the name of Jerome Powell who is absolutely thrilled to be stealing trillions of dollars from future generations to create the most overvalued stock market in human history during one of the most economic periods the country has ever witnessed. Honest to God, people. Wake up.
Since I’m watching from a safe distance, I don’t have a problem with all the mayhem, although I think it’s misdirected. These angry hordes are destroying their local Target store (where are you going to get your Charmin now, pal?) instead of, oh, let’s just say, the Federal Reserve located right in downtown Minneapolis:
Although some of these rioters are starting to wise up, such as this chap from the Los Angeles chaos:
So, to be quite honest, I’d much rather see them emptying the Louis Vuitton store (as they did a few hours ago) than Target, for God’s sake. Or, even worse, destroying a police precinct.
The shame of it is that these people have every right to be boiling mad, but stealing underwear from Target or setting fire to a local bar isn’t going to do a goddamned thing. If these people had a clue – – even a clue – – about what the likes of Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, Lloyd Blankfein, Steve Mnuchin, and Larry Fink had done to them, they would be dragging THEM by their necks down the street and beating them with clubs. Not wrecking the local grocery store. They could even put the Mnuchin Beating on pay-per-view. I’ve got my credit card ready.
But these people have no clue. Zero. They couldn’t tell you what the Federal Reserve does. Or what fractional banking is. Or who Larry Fink is. Those $1200 checks were enough to keep the sheep in line, although that money has long been spent. The powers that be are going to have to keep throwing free cash at people to keep them shut up and feeble. As of now, the gravy train ends on July 31st.
We’re getting a sneak preview of this autumn, as these tweets strongly confirm:
The most vicious dogs. The most ominous weapons. Just waiting for action. Anyone else get the feeling he’s really getting off on the prospect of violence? I sure do. Thus, can you imagine what he’s going to be tweeting if he loses? Or, better yet, what if we get a second wave of Covid PLUS civil war, created by angry tweets?
But there’s one man who has declared himself innocent, and it’s this son of a bitch:
We live in a time which is nothing less than appalling. Lies. Cheating. Stealing. Deception. Theft. All for the benefit of the richest. Every bit of it. And these ignorant lunatics shrieking and smashing glass are destroying the businesses that serve their “community” while leaving the billionaires alone, laughing their asses off. Jeff Bezos has never had it so good.
The human race has a long history. This is not the end of time. The age of revenge is only just beginning, and we all have a responsibility to our families to try our best to keep them safe.
The storm brewing out there is no anomaly. What we are witnessing this very weekend is, I believe, just an appetizer in an all-you-can-eat buffet of pandemonium on its way. Powell and his completely fake stock market won’t change that.
A protester holding a sign that says justice for George Floyd as he marched down Second Street Sunday evening.
A protester holding a sign with Black Lives Matter written on it outside the Portsmouth Police Department.
By Darian Gillette |PDT
Portsmouth PD takes a knee during a protest Sunday evening in downtown Portsmouth.
By Darian Gillette |PDT
PORTSMOUTH — Residents of Scioto County marched down Second Street chanting “We united. We want peace,” to spread a positive message about the social climate between communities and police.
On Sunday, area residents peacefully marched down the streets of Portsmouth and gathered outside of the Portsmouth Police Department and Municipal Building. Community members came out to show their support and hopefully send a message to end police brutality in response to the recent events between a police officer and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“We created a group called We United,” Organizer Datoine Robinson said. “Once that George Floyd incident happened, everybody separated, and it became a black versus white versus cop thing, and I wanted to have something where everyone came back together.”
Residents of all races attended the protest, which marched from Spartan Stadium to the Portsmouth Police Department. Demonstrators chanted and talked with Portsmouth police peacefully. Along the route, residents came out of their homes and cheered.
“Even though we are angry, it’s important that we’re not separating ourselves,” Robinson said. “I believe that can change the world.”
Protests have been taking place across the nation in support of George Floyd, many turning violent. In Columbus, riots have taken place for the past three nights, causing Ohio Governor, Mike DeWine to mobilize the National Guard and set a 10 p.m. curfew.
“Thank you to all the people who kept it peaceful,” Robinson said. “I knew everybody’s intentions and everybody’s hearts, and we did have those people online saying it wasn’t going to be, but maybe they can see this and know they can come and be a part of the change.”
In a Facebook group called We United, Robinson stated several times the protest was to be peaceful and that he has been in contact with the Portsmouth Police Department. As the protesters made their way to the Police Department, they were welcomed and embraced by the Portsmouth Police.
“I totally understand why they want to do this,” Portsmouth Police Chief Debbie Brewer said. “I personally don’t feel what happened was correct. I believe what the officer did was improper, so I support their efforts to change that.”
Robinson, along with Brewer, spoke to the crowd at the police department, spreading the message of peace and justice. As Robinson asked the group to take a knee, he asked members of the department to join them. Without hesitation, the department knelt in solidarity and to remember those who have been lost due to police brutality.
“This was very peaceful and I’m very pleased with that,” Brewer said. “We have had community members come up and thank us and share their concerns, and we want them to know we are here and willing to listen.”
During a speech to the crowd, Brewer shared that she has heard the phrase “there are bad apples everywhere,” but Brewer assured the community that if she found out about a “bad apple,” they would not be working for the department.
“Peaceful protesting is their constitutional right. We will not take that away,” Brewer said. “This is the way to have your voice heard. Be peaceful, interact with people, don’t try to hurt each other.”
Austin Spears also shared that he wanted to do his part to bring peace and justice to the community.
“We can’t rest unless our brother and sisters can rest,” Spears said. “We can be leaders here, in small communities like Portsmouth. We can hold the light for other communities to see and pass that touch to them.”
Spears said he hopes that the peaceful protest in Portsmouth will be followed around the nation and that they will inspire change.
“We can’t drown everything out with hate. We have to drown it out with love and peace,” Spears said. “Now is the time to stand up and rise up and hold hands with our brothers and sister and get stuff accomplished.”
Reach Adam Black at (740) 353-3101 ext. 1927, or by email at ablack@aimmediamidwest.com.
FILE PHOTO: Huawei Technologies Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou leaves her home to attend a court hearing in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada May 27, 2020. REUTERS/Jennifer Gauthier
Israeli police detain a Palestinian protestor on March 12, 2019, with the same knee-to-neck move that killed George Floyd.
Armed in Philadelphia and calling for more mayhem.
The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.
ED Noor: Lest ye forget, boys and girls!
Media, politicians, the public ~ all of us ~ have underestimated the training and capability of left-wing extremists, who are united in purpose. All the parts of rioting serve a purpose. Looting and fires destroy local economies. Riots can overwhelm the police and even the military. All of this leads to a destabilized state.
© Photo : 
ThereAreNoSunglasses 