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All posts for the day June 17th, 2021
While the working class suffered its worst year in more than a century, the wealth of the ruling class soared to ever greater heights. The annus horribilis for the masses was an annus mirabilis for the rich. The COVID-19 death chart and wealth chart soared in tandem.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/12/pers-j12.html
June 12, 2021
Over the last year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 people in the United States, the highest death toll in the world. Approximately 400 people continue to die every day.
While the working class suffered its worst year in more than a century, the wealth of the ruling class soared to ever greater heights. The annus horribilis for the masses was an annus mirabilis for the rich. The COVID-19 death chart and wealth chart soared in tandem.
The New York Times published a report on Friday under the headline, “Meager Rewards for Workers, Exceptionally Rich Pay for CEOs.” The Times called 2020 a “blowout year” for executive pay based on a survey of the 200 highest-paid executives carried out by executive compensation consultant Equilar.
Eight CEOs, the highest number on record, each brought in more than $100 million in pay last year. Overall, pay for the 200 top CEOs rose 14.1 percent, compared to just 1.9 percent for the median worker. All told, CEOs were paid 274 times more than the median worker, up from 245 in 2019.
The top paid CEO was Alex Karp of analytics software company Palantir, a major government contractor, who received a payout of $1.1 billion, one of the largest pay packages in history. He was followed by Tony Xu of DoorDash, a food delivery app, who pulled in $414 million. And close behind was Eric Wu of OpenDoor, an online service which flips real estate, who received a compensation of $370 million.
While all three companies reported major losses last year, their lucrative CEO compensation packages were triggered by corporate stock performance and revenues. Despite a sharp decline in March last year as the pandemic began to be felt around the world, the stock market quickly reversed course and has hit record highs. Financial assets have been propped up by the corporate bailout in the CARES Act and the infusion of limitless cash by the Federal Reserve. The Dow Jones has risen by more than 50 percent since its lowest point last year.
After a year and a half of death and devastation, the pandemic profiteers have amassed wealth beyond imagination. The wealth controlled by the world’s billionaires exploded by 60 percent in the first year of the pandemic, rising from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion.
Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is approaching a net worth of $200 billion dollars, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk has seen his wealth more than double from $68 billion in September to $151 billion today.
Despite, or rather because of their massive piles of wealth, a recent report by ProPublica found that the top 25 billionaires in the US pay a lower tax rate than the average household. The super-rich paid just 3.4 percent in effective federal income taxes over the five years in which their collective wealth rose by $401 billion.
All of this is made possible by ongoing impoverishment of the population. As measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation hit a 13-year high of 5 percent in May, meaning real wages have declined every month for the last year, driven by month-on-month price increases for basic commodities and consumer goods.
During the pandemic, millions were thrown out of work with only the most limited assistance while millions more lost hours and wages. The economic crisis that hit the working class has dwarfed the Great Recession of 2008 and is only comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There were 7.6 million fewer jobs in May than in February 2020, before the pandemic’s impacts were felt in the economy.
Globally, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 345 million full-time jobs were lost globally due to the pandemic. The ILO notes in its global wage report for 2020 that without subsidies, the loss of wages would have been 6.5 percent. However, government assistance only compensated for 40 percent of losses. Workers all over the world have been set back significantly by the pandemic.
Amidst the mad rush to complete the full reopening of the US economy, with the dropping of all social distancing and masking requirements to push profits and CEO pay even higher into the stratosphere, more contagious and deadly variants of COVID-19 are circulating globally. With less than half of the US population fully vaccinated, conditions are set for a potential resurgence of the pandemic.
The pandemic is a “trigger event” that has exacerbated all the reactionary tendencies of capitalism. The monstrous rise of social inequality in the face of mass death combined with the rise of inflation and declining wages has primed the situation for a powerful offensive by the working class in the United States and internationally.
Already, thousands of workers have gone on strike at Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia and Warrior Met in Brookwood, Alabama in an effort to recoup years of lost wages. Steelworkers at ATI have been on strike for nearly three months, while 650 refinery workers have been locked out by ExxonMobil since May 1. In Sudbury, Canada, 2,600 miners are on strike against plans by Vale Inco to strip benefits from new hires.
The emergence of these militant struggles, which pit workers into ever more direct conflict with the corporatist trade unions, is only an initial expression of the massive social eruptions on the horizon.
If the past year and a half has demonstrated anything, it is that the interests of the vast majority of humanity are incompatible with the existence of a parasitic oligarchy and the social and economic system upon which this oligarchy rests. The combination of mass death and the accumulation of massive wealth demonstrates the necessity of the expropriation of the pandemic profiteers through the mobilization of the working class to take political power and abolish the capitalist system.
And this is why we are entering into another inflation period. Everything is going up in prices. The US’s debt is now unpayable. 9 trillion dollars is imaginary money. It does not exist.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/17/pers-j17.html
June 17, 2021
There is a clear conclusion to be drawn from the two-day meeting of the Federal Reserve’s policy-making committee, which concluded yesterday.
The world’s major central bank has indicated it will do nothing that could be construed as withdrawing support from the mountain of debt and fictitious capital its policies have created in the US and worldwide and will continue the flow of ultra-cheap money that has enabled the enrichment of a financial oligarchy to levels never before seen in history.
In the financial press, the indication by the Fed that it may start raising its base interest rate from virtually zero at the end of 2023 rather than in 2024, as had been previously indicated, was described as “hawkish.” But in fact, the Fed did not lift a finger to change its monetary policy.
The Fed’s program of asset purchasing, initiated in response to the freeze in financial markets in March 2020 with the onset of the pandemic, will continue at the rate of $120 billion a month.
In the lead-up to the meeting, the issue had been raised in financial circles about whether the Fed would begin to “taper” its financial asset purchases. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was at pains to offer reassurances that nothing would be done to upset the financial markets.
The standard for reducing the level of asset purchases was “a ways away,” he said, and while the Fed was “talking about tapering,” any move would be “orderly, methodical and transparent,” and communicated well in advance. This was, in effect, a guarantee to financial markets that at the very first sign of market turbulence any hint of ending support would be withdrawn.
Before the global financial crisis in 2008, the Fed held around $900 billion worth of financial assets on its books. That rose rapidly to more than $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing and then rose again to more than $8 trillion in 2020. It is now on course to reach at least $9 trillion by the end of this year.
The Fed’s policies, which have been followed by other major central banks, have had two effects. First, they have directly facilitated the transfer of wealth into the hands of a global corporate and financial oligarchy. Data published by Forbes in April showed that in 2020 alone the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by 60 percent from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion, described by the magazine as “the greatest acceleration of wealth in human history.”
Second, they have created a mountain of debt. Some indication of the extent of this process was outlined in an article in the Wall Street Journal this week. It noted that after issuing $1.7 trillion in bonds last year, nearly $600 million above the previous high, the total debt of US corporations at the end of March was $11.2 trillion, equivalent to around half of US gross domestic product.
The same situation exists in Europe, where thousands of companies are being sustained only by the zero interest rate policy of the European Central Bank and its financial asset purchases, as well as direct government support.
The extent of this operation was highlighted in recent comments by the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. “We do not want to abruptly cut our support and trigger dozens of thousands of bankruptcies,” he said.
The creation of a debt mountain is only one consequence of the Fed’s policies. The flood of ultra-cheap money into the global financial system has promoted a wave of speculation, ranging from commodities to housing, shares of stock and cryptocurrencies, to name some examples.
With Wall Street trading at record highs, price-earnings ratios on stocks, the traditional metric for assessing market valuations, have been climbing.
The yield on corporate junk bonds—those rated below investment-grade status—has fallen to all-time lows. This week, Bloomberg reported on a company that had floated a $500 million offering of junk bonds to purchase bitcoin and received a favourable rating from Moody’s because it has a “very low cost of borrowing.”
Commodities have been the centre of speculation, with prices swinging wildly. In May, lumber prices in the US rose to record highs and then plunged by 41 percent this month. Industrial commodities such as iron ore and copper have also been the subject of speculation, sending their prices to record highs.
According to the latest global data, house prices are rising at the fastest rate since before the global financial crisis of 2008, with New Zealand recording a 22 percent rise in the past year and the US seeing an increase of 13.5 percent.
It is vital for its ongoing struggles that the working class grasp the objective significance of this vast escalation of speculation promoted by the Fed and other central banks. Debt, corporate bonds and other financial assets are what Marx characterised as fictitious capital. That is, they do not have an inherent value. Rather, in the final analysis, they are a claim on the surplus value extracted from the working class in the production process.
The escalation of this mountain of fictitious capital has decisive implications for the development of the class struggle. It portends an immense intensification of the assault on the working class—the extraction of ever greater amounts of surplus value—to meet the claims of these assets.
During his presentation and question-and-answer session following the Fed meeting, Powell devoted considerable attention to inflation and the prospects for its increase.
The chief concern of the central bank is not price rises as such, but whether this brings about an upsurge of the working class in support of wage and other demands, and resistance to the “restructuring” of labour and working conditions to meet the relentless demands of finance capital to increase the flow of surplus value.
Powell indicated that the Fed stood ready to use its monetary policy tools if a permanent rise in inflation results in struggles for higher wages.
But monetary policy alone—higher interest rates to prevent so-called “overheating” in the economy—is not enough. Moreover, it contains the danger of setting off a financial crisis.
Other means, therefore, have to be developed, chief among which is the use of the trade union bureaucracy as the industrial police force of finance capital, a method being employed in the US and internationally.
Herein is the significance of the struggle waged by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections for the formation of rank-and-file committees and the development of an international alliance to advance the independent struggle of the working class against the suppression of wages organised by the trade union apparatuses.
These committees will go forward and develop to the extent that they are guided by an international socialist perspective. The deepening economic crisis has not only revealed the objective necessity for this program, it has also shattered the ideological nostrums advanced by the capitalist ruling class and all its agencies.
The central doctrine of the ruling elites, developed over centuries, is that the so-called capitalist free market operates like a law of nature and is the only viable, the only possible, form of socioeconomic organisation, and that a socialist program, based on the conscious control and regulation of the economy to meet human need, is therefore irrational.
The socialist movement has continually exposed this outlook, drawing out its absurdity: the claim that while mankind can probe the outer reaches of the universe and the inner structure of the atom and the mechanisms of life, it cannot consciously organise society.
Long ago refuted theoretically, the doctrines of the free market are now being torn to shreds in practice. The so-called free market has ceased to function. Without the daily ongoing intervention of the capitalist state, in the form of the Fed, it would collapse in an instant.
The state has now assumed the role of the chief economic organizer. The chief question today is in whose interests it will function. The present capitalist state, the instrument for the enrichment of the oligarchs and the impoverishment of the working class, must be overturned and a workers’ government established. That is the inherent logic of the struggles now unfolding.
Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/americas-soup-brained-president-says?fbclid=IwAR0VRfSvhQ-rxHiLeWptRi4J76ub4WfUY8zUFNHopy92pAhMUh9TV2w8pQw Caitlin Johnstone June 16, 2021 |
Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.
Listen to a reading of this article:https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?auto_play=false&buying=false&liking=false&download=false&sharing=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=false&show_playcount=false&show_user=true&hide_related=true&visual=false&start_track=0&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1070078008
During an astonishingly sycophantic press conference after the Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Biden posited an entirely hypothetical scenario about what the world would think of the United States if it were interfering in foreign elections and everybody knew it.
When AP’s Jonathan Lemire asked the president of the most powerful government in the world what “consequences” he’d threatened the Russian leader with should the Kremlin interfere in US elections going forward, Biden meandered his way through one of his signature not-quite-lucid word salads, and then said the following:
“Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”
The fact that the entire press corps did not erupt in side-splitting laughter at this ridiculous utterance is in itself proof that western news media is pure propaganda. The United States has directly interfered in scores of foreign elections since it began its ascent to global domination at the end of the second World War, to say nothing of all the coups, color revolutions, proxy conflicts and regime change military invasions it has also participated in during that time. The US openly interfered in Russia’s elections in the nineties, and literally just tried to stage a coup in Bolivia by interfering in its democratic process. The US is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.
This is not a secret, internationally or in the United States. Anyone who has done any learning about the US government’s actual behavior on the world stage knows this. Hell, a former CIA director openly joked about it on Fox News a few years ago.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham unsurprisingly introduced former CIA Director James Woolsey as “an old friend” in a 2018 interview about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, in which Woolsey unsurprisingly talked about how dangerous Russian “disinformation” is and Ingraham unsurprisingly said that everyone should actually be afraid of China. What was a bit surprising, though, was what happened at the end of the interview.
“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Ingraham asked in response to Woolsey’s Russia remarks.
“Oh, probably,” Woolsey said with a grin. “But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians we CIA-“
“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”
Woolsey smiled and said said “Well…”, followed by a joking incoherent mumble, adding, “Only for a very good cause.”
And then they both laughed.
The fact that not one person in the press pool questioned or criticized Biden’s outrageous remarks tells you everything you need to know about the western media and what its real function is. This is further illustrated by the rest of the behavior of these odious propagandists during the summit, which was illustrated quite well by the glowing praise of Democratic Party insider Andrea Chalupa on Twitter:
“The winners of #GenevaSummit2021 are the White House press corp,” Chalupa said. “Excellent questions confronting Putin and challenging Biden on holding a summit with a ruthless dictator. And they literally held their ground when shoved by Putin’s security and propagandists.”
That actually says it all. Western reporters are forbidden by their oligarchic owners from ever confronting power in any meaningful way; the closest they’re ever allowed to get to punching up is challenging the leaders of CIA-targeted governments, and demanding to know why their own officials aren’t being more hawkish and aggressive toward those leaders.
As RT’s Murad Gazdiev pointed out, “ABC, NBC, BBC, CNN, and many other Western outlets were invited for Putin’s press conference. No Russian media was invited to Biden’s press conference.” The whole thing was a navel-gazing, masturbatory cold war propaganda orgy where western “journalists” made up fantasies about their soup-brained leader staring down Putin, where they yelled nonsense about Alexei Navalny at the Russian president and then fangirled at Biden’s response.
Can anyone imagine a US corporate journalist screaming at Biden: “Why do you fear Assange so much?” Always easy to condemn the acts of the governments your country tells you to see as Enemy. Much harder – and way more meaningful – to challenge your own government’s repression.
Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.
Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.
This knowledge belongs to all humanity, not just one country. The USA is lying, as it knows about the aliens and have alien ships and alien bodies hidden away.
https://www.rt.com/usa/526661-ufo-government-extraterrestrial-extradimensional/
15 Jun, 2021
FILE PHOTO: A person carries signs outside a gate to Area 51, a secretive U.S. military base believed by UFO enthusiasts to hold government secrets about extra-terrestrials in Rachel, Nevada, U.S. September 20, 2019. © Reuters / Jim Urquhart
US officials have collected data on some “extraordinary” UFOs, Luis Elizondo, former director of the military’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a task force investigating these phenomena, told Washington Examiner.
It is “nothing more than an infinitesimally small possibility” that such objects could have been creations of some engineers from Russia, China or the US itself – as well as of any human civilization at all, Elizondo admitted, adding that they have been analyzed by various intelligence-collecting systems but no reasonable explanation for their existence has been found.
Now, the US government considers it a credible line of inquiry to treat these “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAPs as something “extraterrestrial” or even “extradimensional,” the former AATIP chief said. The former official also mentioned a possibility of the UFOs being a creation of some Earth-based “intelligence” that somehow managed to stay hidden from humanity all this time.
Elizondo also said that he was not briefed on any successful attempts to replicate technologies seen during UFO sightings by US engineers. The former official also rejected the idea that the US authorities have absolutely no evidence to suggest that the UFOs might be of alien origin.
The US government has evidence indicating that the most extraordinary UFOs are not “human-made machines,” he told Washington Examiner, while refusing to reveal any more information, citing security clearance obligations.
It is not the first revelation Elizondo has made to the press. Earlier in June, he told The Washington Post that UFOs demonstrate a keen interest in US nuclear facilities, adding that similar patterns have been observed in UFO sightings “overseas in other countries.”
His words come as the US Congress is still preparing to receive a report on UFO activity that had been ordered by former US President Donald Trump’s administration. Some abstracts from the report that is being compiled by the Pentagon show that the US military will neither deny nor confirm the extraterrestrial origin of the unidentified aerial phenomena, though.
The US military has recently confirmed several videos of UFOs to be authentic but provided no comments on the nature of the phenomena. Yet, top US officials who previously preferred to be tight-lipped on the issue somehow embraced the idea of the UFOs’ possible extraterrestrial origin as of late.
Former US President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, and several military officials have all offered comments along the lines of “we don’t know what they are, but we’re keeping an open mind.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/526755-western-sanctions-killing-syria/
Eva Bartlett
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
16 Jun, 2021
As Syrian analyst Kevork Almassian noted, “Were it not for the CIA regime change war, arming & training tens of thousands of multinational terrorists, draconian sanctions, foreign occupation of North & East, looting the oil & burning the wheat, Syria would’ve now a brilliant economy & high standard of living.”
When I first visited Syria in 2014, and in the years following, mortars and missiles fired from terrorist groups occupying eastern Ghouta pummeled Damascus on a daily basis. Likewise in government-controlled areas of Aleppo, and elsewhere around Syria.
Parents never knew if their children would return from school, or be shelled while at school. Untold numbers of Syrian civilians have been maimed over the past decade by such shelling, untold numbers more killed.
So one might expect that in 2021, with most of the terrorism in Syria eradicated, Syrians would have begun returning to the normal lives they had ten years prior. But the brutal sanctions have truly wrought hell on Syrians over the years, and under the latest ones, life has gotten exponentially worse.
Last year, I was in Syria for half of the year, after the borders closed due to Covid confusion. With ample time on my hands, I walked for hours around Damascus daily. One afternoon, wanting to get a good view of the city, I walked along narrow lanes going up the side of Qasioun mountain, encountering locals who spoke of community and supporting one another in hard times.
I had stopped to take a photo of the vista when a young girl’s voice called out to me. Shortly after, I was seated in her family’s humble sitting room, drinking cold water and talking with the family.
Only by chance did I learn that the father was ill with prostate cancer and suffering greatly for a want of affordable medications, increasingly difficult to get a hold of due to the sanctions. And that was in April, before the sadistically-named Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act came into effect months later.
I say sadistically, because these sanctions, while ostensibly intended to target the Syrian government and its allies in order to punish and discourage supposed “war crimes” against civilians, in reality inflict endless misery on those same Syrian civilians. This is, as I wrote, something former US envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, boasted about, reportedly saying that the sanctions “contributed to the collapse of the value of the Syrian pound.
It’s a pattern we’ve already seen with Western sanctions – in Venezuela, they have not only made people’s lives hell, but as I also wrote, have killed up to 40,000 Venezuelans in the span of one year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
A recent guest article in the Financial Times addressed Syria’s ongoing (and orchestrated) economic crisis, with particular attention to the sanctions, noting that 60% of Syrians are suffering from food insecurity.
That number might actually be significantly higher, as in a July 2020 article detailing the illegality of the sanctions, the author cited 83% of the population living below the poverty line. That article noted, of the Caesar sanctions:
“Unlike the pre-existing sanctions, they apply to transactions anywhere in the world that engage the Syrian Government or certain sectors of the Syrian economy, even when those transactions have no connection to the United States.
“Such sanctions cripple a state’s economy; disrupt the availability of food, medicines, drinking water, and sanitation supplies; interfere with the functioning of health and education systems; and undermine people’s ability to work.”
These are not unintended effects – they are the whole idea.
The FT article notes that after the Caesar Act came into effect, the Syrian pound, “lost almost 70% of its value against the dollar in the following months. This spurred an inflationary spiral affecting food prices, which more than tripled in 2020.”
And, in contrast to how the US pretends to “protect” Syrians with these sanctions, the Caesar Act is, “severely affecting the local economy especially in the construction, energy, and financial sectors, blocking any possibility of reconstruction in this phase of lower-intensity conflict.”
Although I continued to follow events in Syria after leaving in late September 2020, when I returned in the last week of May this year, even I was surprised at the skyrocketed cost of basic things. About half a kilo of hummus that was 400 Syrian pounds last year is 2,200 now. At the current official exchange rate of 2,500 that’s slightly less than a dollar – but the average salary in Syria is around 50-60,000 Syrian pounds/month.
The FT article noted a kilogram of beef “costs about a quarter of a public employee’s average monthly salary. For perspective, in Italy this translates as €700 per kg. In the UK? £300 per lb.”
I chatted with a friend who has just one child. He described spending 15,000 (about $6) on vegetables, that would last several days. That’s a quarter of his salary gone, and many expenses still to pay.
In the Midan district of Damascus—an area usually brimming with shoppers coming for the famous sweet shops there, but not crowded the day I went—a cigarette vendor I spoke with described how he struggles to provide food for his wife and two sons. Like the majority of Syrians, selling cigarettes is a second job for him. Some are working three jobs, morning to late evening, and still can’t make ends meet.
He spoke of the self-sufficiency Syria had prior to the war, how everyone had work, but now, people are suffocating.
“We are rationing! I used to buy a kilo of meat every month, but now I buy 200 grams. My salary is 55,000, and if I can earn 50,000 from this second work, I will have 100,000 Syrian pounds. But, this amount is still not enough.”
“Yesterday, I bought some yogurt, cheese, a box of mortadella (meat), and a box of tissues. I paid 11,000 Syrian pounds. This is for one day, and just breakfast.”
He said a dearth of fertilizers and insecticides, due to sanctions, is directly impacting the agricultural sector.
While in Damascus, I also met with French humanitarian, Pierre Le Corf, who has lived in Syria for six years, most of that time in Aleppo. Le Corf, working and living with some of the poorest and most affected Syrians in Aleppo, spoke of how the sanctions are designed to kill hope, in addition to killing civilians.
“You might not see people starving in the street, but that’s not what suffering is. People are suffering in silence. More and more, the youth are leaving the country, not because they want to leave Syria or feel oppressed, but because they feel that they have no hope anymore.
The currency went from 50 Syrian pounds [for a dollar, before the war] to 4,000 Syrian pounds. People work from morning to night, and at the end of the day, their kids might ask for a banana. One kilogram of bananas is 5,000 Syrian pounds. When you earn 60,000 a month…”
He spoke of the pressure the US puts on every company and person who deals with Syria, that they can be imprisoned, fined. “They are forcing companies to not work with Syria,” to isolate Syria.
“I know families for who I’m trying to figure out how to bring them medicines that they can’t find any more. A week ago, I went to bury a guy who we had been bringing medicine, because we couldn’t find it any more. It became 90,000 pounds a box, he needed four boxes a month. He needed more medicine and better treatment that we can’t have, because it’s forbidden. Forbidden why? Because they pretend it’s ‘double use’, maybe it could be used for the army. The people are paying the price, no one else.”
In an interview on Syria Insider, British journalist Vanessa Beeley condemned the sanctions against Syria, saying:
“Western governments are starving the Syrian people. They are depriving them of their right to return home, because the rebuilding process is being delayed. They are punishing the Syrian people for the resistance of the Syrian people against what they want to impose upon them. It’s nothing to do with the Syrian government or President Assad.”
Sanctions are never ever non-lethal practises. They are almost the most lethal of all weapons used in the hybrid war against the people of a targeted nation.
“At the same time as the sanctions are in place, the West is stealing the oil, burning the food resources, selling the food resources outside of Syria, all to deprive the Syrian people of their own resources, of the abundance of their own country.”
In a recent, detailed, presentation focussing on the sanctions, Beeley highlighted their effects not only on incomes, food, medicines, but also on fuel, industry, agriculture, health care and hospitals, electricity and water.
She aptly noted: “One could argue that the US Coalition is responsible for genocide in Syria under Genocide Convention article II (e) – deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1404332068474130436&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F526755-western-sanctions-killing-syria%2F&sessionId=7f94b7bb607dd03d113598e3ae7b623d18a3039c&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
In US President Joe Biden’s meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin today, perhaps among the scripted talking points there was tut tutting of Syria and Russia’s alleged preventing of humanitarian aid, a tired old trope debunked but still trumpeted by hypocrites in the West.
And while such integrity-devoid Western representatives launch accusation after accusation at Syria and Russia, it is abundantly clear that the suffering of Syrians is a product of the illegal war on Syria and the deadly, criminal, sanctions against the Syrian people.
It looks like people over the age of 60 in Australia are expendable
https://www.rt.com/news/526812-australia-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-over-60s/
17 Jun, 2021
FILE PHOTO: A health official draws a dose of the AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, at Infectious Diseases Hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka January 29, 2021. © REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte
The Australian Department of Health announced on Thursday that it will be limiting the AstraZeneca vaccine to over-60s, days after reports of the second death of someone who received the jab “likely linked” to blood clots.
In a statement released on the health ministry’s website, the Australian government said it had revised its previous guidance on the AstraZeneca vaccine “due to a higher risk and observed severity of thrombosis and thrombocytopenia syndrome” (TTS) in those aged 50-59.
While health officials recognize there are concerns about the side effects of the jab, they believe it is still appropriate to give it to over-60s, as the individual benefits of receiving the vaccine are greater in that age group due to the risk of experiencing severe illness from Covid-19.
The recent revision of the AstraZeneca guidance came after a 52-year-old woman in New South Wales died earlier in June after experiencing a “severe form” of blood clotting in the brain after her vaccination. Following the news of her death, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration investigated the situation and issued a report stating that her TTS was “likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
Since Australia began its inoculation rollout, health officials have recorded 60 confirmed and probable TTS cases in individuals who’ve received Covid-19 jabs, with 12 cases “linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
Going forward, the Australian government will make the Pfizer vaccine the preferred jab for individuals aged 16 to 60, despite the country only expecting to receive 40 million doses of it this year.
Australia had focused significantly on bolstering supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine, creating a facility that can produce 50 million doses locally. Addressing the new approach, Health Minister Greg Hunt said it would be a “challenge” for the country to adapt its rollout, which has already been slow. So far, Australia has only vaccinated 3% of its population of 25 million.
Australia’s decision is the latest blow to AstraZeneca, which has seen its Covid-19 vaccine face restrictions in a number of countries amid concerns about its reported links to blood clots. In May, Canada’s Ontario province halted the use of the vaccine pending review into its side effects, while Norwegian officials advised against using the jab altogether.
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June 16, 2021
Can you imagine what it would be like to not have a home? For many Americans, this is not something that they need to imagine because it is a daily reality. Nobody knows for sure how many homeless individuals there are in this country, but recent estimates range from “fewer than 600,000 to more than 1.5 million people”, and everyone agrees that the number has been growing. Even as the wealthy engage in wild bidding wars over the most desirable properties, more impoverished Americans are being forced into the streets with each passing day. There has always been homelessness in America, but here in 2021 it is rapidly becoming a crisis of epic proportions.
Ironically, the state with the worst problem is also the wealthiest state in the nation. At least 160,000 homeless people currently live in California, although many believe that official figure is way too low. The number of homeless in the state had been rising for years, and then the pandemic came along…
Tent-lined streets with belongings scattered everywhere. Infected wounds with bugs living inside. A man who hasn’t showered in over a decade. An 80-year-old woman who can’t feed herself. People who ride the metro rail lines because the trains are a safer place to sleep.
California’s homeless problem has been out of control for decades. Then came COVID-19.
In many California cities, tent cities have seemingly popped up everywhere these days. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the number of tent encampments in San Francisco alone has grown by 70 percent during the pandemic…
Tent encampments are typical sights under freeways and in areas such as skid row – a pocket of downtown Los Angeles known for its vast homeless population – but the pandemic, shutdowns and quarantines caused them to spread across the city. Encampments popped up in parking lots, neighborhood parks and outside schools, not only in Los Angeles but other parts of the state.
In San Francisco alone, tent encampments grew by 70% and became more visible across the city, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the entire world.
If this is happening now, how bad will things get when the U.S. economy really starts to fall apart?
The homelessness crisis continues to grow rapidly on the east coast as well. In New York City, many have become concerned about the “growing presence” of the homeless in Times Square…
An influx of homeless people into Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood after an emergency move by New York City to ease crowding in shelters has been a fact of pandemic life for the neighborhood since last spring.
Many of the newcomers, living in nearby hotel rooms contracted by the city, have been largely inconspicuous. But others with mental health and drug problems have become a growing presence in Hell’s Kitchen and adjacent Times Square.
Now that the pandemic is fading, many New Yorkers are quite eager to have the homeless removed from Times Square because the tourists are starting to return.
Needless to say, seeing hordes of homeless people laying in the streets is not good for business, and the increase in homelessness has also helped to fuel a dramatic rise in violent crime in the Times Square area…
The police precinct that includes Times Square and many of the hotels has seen a 183 percent spike in felony assaults and 173 percent spike in robberies so far this year compared to 2020, according to NYPD data.
As you can probably imagine, homelessness has been growing in the middle of the country too.
In Dallas, a large homeless camp was recently removed by authorities after local residents loudly complained…
The city of Dallas has removed a homeless camp after nearby residents complained it was putting their health and safety in jeopardy.
While some who called the camp home say they have no place to go, neighbors are grateful the city is finally responding. The sprawling homeless encampment was covered by a canopy of trees and located behind houses along Tres Logos Lane in northeast Dallas.
Nobody wants a homeless camp in their neighborhood, but where are those homeless people supposed to go?
They have to sleep somewhere.
But for now, residents of that particular neighborhood are just thrilled that those homeless people are no longer their problem. In fact, one local resident told the press that she is so happy that they are gone that she has “chills”…
“I am so excited, I am so happy, I have chills,” said resident Maria Sanchez. “It’s not just the homelessness that we’re talking about, its other individuals that are, you know, doing other illicit activities sketchy activities.”
So what happens if Maria Sanchez loses her current job and starts getting behind on her rent or mortgage payments?
Ultimately, the vast majority of Americans are just a few months away from being homeless themselves.
In fact, now that a nationwide eviction moratorium is ending, we are being told that millions more Americans could soon be forced out into the streets…
MILLIONS of renters face eviction as a nationwide ban is set to end in two weeks.
It comes as 5.7million Americans – nearly 14% of all renters nationwide – had fallen behind on their rent in April.
The study by the National Equity Atlas revealed that tenants owed nearly $20 billion in rent, with low-income people among those worst affected.
So as bad as things are now, they could soon get a whole lot worse.
Can you imagine what that would look like?
Sleeping on the streets is extremely dangerous, and vast numbers of homeless people end up dying. According to USA Today, more than 1,300 homeless people died in Los Angeles County alone in 2020…
The crisis in California has left a trail of death.
Some come from drug overdoses, violence or untreated illnesses that compound over time. Others come from suicide. These people die under freeways, along sidewalks and in alleys, hospitals and vehicles. More than 1,300 died last year in Los Angeles County alone. An additional 1,200 died the year before that.
During the pandemic, the federal government has borrowed and spent trillions and trillions of dollars, and the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into the financial system, and yet the suffering of those at the bottom of the economic food chain has gotten much, much worse.
Something is very wrong with that picture.
No matter what our leaders do, the homelessness crisis in this country just seems to keep escalating. Vast numbers of our fellow citizens will be sleeping on the streets tonight, and many more will soon be joining them.
“These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines,” Anne Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, said in a statement. “These vaccines were funded by public money and should be first and foremost a global public good, not a private profit opportunity.”
For the fifth time since the onset of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, the skyrocketing price of Moderna stock has produced a billionaire, but the vaccine is coming under increasing scrutiny for possible links to blood clots and heart inflammation.
By Megan Redshaw, J.D.
June 17, 2021
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(Children’s Health Defense) — For the fifth time since the onset of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, the skyrocketing price of Moderna stock has produced a billionaire.
Moderna President Dr. Stephen Hoge is the company’s latest shareholder and executive to join the “three-comma-club” — with an estimated $1.1 billion fortune.
Other club members are CEO Stéphane Bancel, chairman and cofounder of Noubar Afeyan, founding investor Timothy Springer and cofounder Robert Langer, Forbes reported.
Hoge, 45, joined Moderna in 2012 and owns 0.4% of Moderna stock — worth $365 million — in addition to about $685 million in options. Like the other Moderna shareholders, Hoge frequently sells stock — including $65.5 million worth (pre-tax) between March 2020 and April 2021.
Hoge is one of more than 40 new billionaires who made 10-figure fortunes with companies involved in the “battle against COVID.
Activists say this wealth generation highlights the stark inequality that has resulted from the pandemic, CNN reported.
“These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines,” Anne Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, said in a statement. “These vaccines were funded by public money and should be first and foremost a global public good, not a private profit opportunity.”
Since February 2020, Moderna’s share price has gained more than 700%. Over the past month alone, the company’s stock is up 29%. During this same timeframe, Moderna applied for Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its COVID vaccine in adolescents, and increased its forecasted production of vaccine in 2021, from 800 million doses to 1 billion.
Taxpayers foot the bill for vaccine research
As The Defender reported previously, Moderna’s COVID vaccine is funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Through its partnership with the U.S. government, Moderna received nearly $1 billion for research and development of its mRNA vaccine, and up to $1.525 billion for delivering 100 million doses, with an option for another 400 million.
According to Public Citizen, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) owns a 50% stake in Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, which the NIH helped develop under the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), run by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
As described in The People’s Vaccine, the U.S. government provided millions of dollars to Moderna as early as 2013 to help develop its mRNA technology. The NIH meanwhile was also developing new methods to target COVID spike proteins. When the new coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, the NIH worked with Moderna to design and test a vaccine.
The U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority provided Moderna an additional $483 million to further develop the vaccine and scale up manufacturing.
Fauci and the NIAID have a financial incentive to push Moderna’s vaccine over competitors’ COVID vaccines — because Fauci personally, and others on staff, have a financial stake in the Moderna vaccine. Fauci and four of his hand-selected deputies will split hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties with Moderna from sales of the vaccine.
Moderna continues to ignore problems with its vaccine
Moderna’s stock has risen steadily, and its top executives have benefited accordingly, despite a growing number of reports of injuries and deaths following the vaccine.
According to the latest data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 4, a total of 329,021 total adverse events were reported following COVID vaccines, including 5,888 deaths and 28,441 serious injury reports.
Of the 329,021 total vaccine injury reports, 152,262 were attributed to Moderna’s COVID vaccine, including 11,454 serious injuries and 2,241 reported deaths.
As The Defender reported this week, Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., died June 11 of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.
Scott received her second dose of Moderna on May 1, after which she developed heart complications which required her to have a heart transplant. Her doctors have not fully confirmed the cause of her death, but they said it appears Scott suffered from myocarditis — which according to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”
The Defender reported on June 15 that 21-year-old New Jersey student, Justin Harrington, suffered severe heart inflammation after receiving his second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.
Justin, whose school required him to get the vaccine in order to attend classes in the fall, experienced flu-like symptoms followed by heart pain within eight to 12 hours of receiving the vaccine.
“He has to wear a heart monitor and take four different medications for six months,” Justin’s father said. “He has to sleep propped up, can’t exert himself and he’s missing out on one of the most important times of his life.”
As recently as last week, Moderna said it has not found a link between its COVID vaccine and cases of a rare heart inflammation condition reported in young people who have received the shot.
The vaccine maker said in a statement it arrived at this conclusion after “carefully reviewing available safety data to date for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for cases of myocarditis and/or pericarditis.”
The CDC said during a June 10 meeting of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee the agency had identified 226 reports of heart inflammation that might meet its “working case definition” of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, The Defender reported last week.
According to the CDC, a total of 475 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis were recorded in patients 30 and younger who received an mRNA vaccine. The median age of people with myocarditis or pericarditis following the first dose was 30, and after the second dose, 24.
Moderna said it “will continue to closely monitor these reports and is actively working with public health and regulatory authorities to further assess this issue.”
“We clearly have an imbalance there,” said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office during the June 10 FDA meeting. The committee met to discuss safety issues surrounding the use of COVID vaccines in children as young as 6 months old.
The CDC has scheduled an emergency meeting of its advisers on June 18 to discuss higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines.
EU probes Moderna’s vaccine
On May 10, EU regulators called on Pfizer and Moderna to provide additional data related to the companies’ COVID vaccines and a potential link to heart inflammation, after the agency completed a safety review of all four COVID vaccines authorized for emergency use in the EU.
In a report issued May 7, PRAC disclosed its members were aware of cases of myocarditis and pericarditis following Pfizer vaccination. Regulators said they didn’t see an indication the vaccine caused these cases, but as a prevention, PRAC requested Pfizer provide further data, including an analysis of events according to age and gender in its next pandemic summary safety report and will consider if any other regulatory action is needed.
Because Moderna and Pfizer use the same mRNA technology for their vaccines, the committee asked Moderna to monitor for similar cases of heart inflammation.
mRNA vaccines also linked to blood clots
Doctors have warned both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also could cause blood clotting disorders, similar to those associated with the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca vaccines.
As The Defender reported in April, U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to that fact as far back as December 2020.
A study released in April by Oxford University found the number of people who developed CVST blood clots after COVID vaccines was about the same for Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, MarketWatch reported. (J&J is not approved for use in the EU, where the study originated).
A search in VAERS revealed 5,907 reports of blood clotting disorders between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 4. Of those, 2,017 reports were attributed to Moderna.
© June 16, 2021 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
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https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-16-investment-firms-vanguard-blackrock-media-big-pharma.html
by: S.D. Wells
June 16, 2021
(Natural News) The War is in full swing right now, make no mistake about it. We are in the trenches, defending our rights as natural health advocates, to not be jabbed with dangerous, highly experimental vaccines against our will. We are at a crux, and the psychological warfare “game,” should you lose it, has real consequences, including blood clotting and early death. Guess who owns the media and all the pandemic-panic messages you read and hear about? Two asset management firms. Just two. They own it all. All of MSM. All the fake news the sheeple obey, including the CDC’s Hitleresque propaganda.
Two firms, Vanguard and BlackRock, own the entire mass media and big pharma “complex”
Nothing shady going on here. Nothing to talk about here. Nothing worth looking into as far as businesses making up any news they want and having ZERO verification in place to prove it’s honest or even real. The products here, which are toxic, dirty vaccines that lead to health disorders almost immediately, are being promoted by the manufacturers with verbiage that is NOT backed up by science at all, with zero proper clinical tests run for safety or efficacy. Period.
This is what is meant by vaccine industrial complex. They answer to nobody. They ARE the regulatory agencies. Those top positions are revolving doors, back and forth, between firm executives and heads of the FDA, CDC, DHS, “Vaccine Command Center,” you name it. They run it. They are running the COVID-19 responses you see and hear right now. Everything that’s been proven dangerous, from wearing masks all day, to social distancing, to spraying antibacterial everything and wiping bleach everywhere, to getting vaccinated with blood-clotting mRNA experiments – it’s all been “in the name of public health,” and because “we’re all in this together.”
The Vaccine Propaganda Machine looks a lot like Hitler’s IG Farben
Vanguard and BlackRock are the top owners of four of the six largest media companies that control 90 percent of the mass messaging on TV, in newspapers, across ALL social media platforms, and they run all the major “news” and “Covid” websites you find when you Google or go to YouTube for information. These tycoons own 1600 American firms worth $9 trillion, and they’re the ones informing everyone about the fake vaccine “safety and efficacy” for the deadly China Flu jabs.
When Hitler came to power, his “right arm” was the pharma conglomerate that made the gas for the gas chambers, made chemical-laced vaccines to torture the Jewish prisoners with, and they made toxic pharmaceuticals. This was a major reason Hitler accomplished the takeover of so many other nations during his reign.
The US government has handed over all responsibility for Covid-19 “solutions” to the biggest pharma firms, who have horrendous track records for creating products that maim and kill Americans, and nobody ever goes to jail for the manufacturing, marketing or prescribing of these killer medicines and dirty vaccines.
Now they want us all to believe that no human can live for even a handful of years on planet Earth if they don’t get vaccinated for every virus that circulates the Globe, even the man-made ones.
These Big Pharma corporations make more money than most countries make. Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is worth more than New Zealand. In fact, J&J is the biggest pharma corporation on earth, and they’re trying to force medicate the world with toxic injections. They made $15 billion last year. You still think the vaccine is free because they care about you?
Pfizer is worth more than oil-giant Kuwait. Let that sink in for a minute, then carefully realize who’s pushing these “emergency use authorization” vaccines that have never been tested for safety or efficacy.
Visit CovidVaccineReactions.com if you already got a toxic Covid jab or two, including mRNA or “viral vector,” and you are experiencing side effects, blood clots or other adverse events. Then tune your internet frequency to Pandemic.news for updates on these crimes against humanity being delivered under the guise of inoculation.
Sources for this article include:
By Les Speed
Aliens, Stanley Kubrick, old knowledge, and we are all alien hybrids.