Communism

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Opposition to Decoupling From China Misses the Problem of 5G | The Epoch Times

FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed Huawei logo is placed on glass above displayed US flag in this illustrationJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: After reading this expose’ I realized why the race for 5G dominance is also a race for which political system will prevail – capitalism or communism. China has taken the lead in 5G and already dominates the marketplace. Unless the USA steps up along with its telecommunications partners and has the ability to compete in a free market with China, it will lose the battle for freedom as well. This does not imply that I wholeheartedly support 5G especially with regards to the untested health and safety issues. Already we know that millimeter radiation damages human health, but the industry refuses to study or mitigate these. It’s a grand experiment which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths which were falsely attributed to COVID-19.

By Bonnie Evans

As calls to decouple U.S. industries from dependency on manufacturing in China are growing, President Donald Trump has helped prepare the ground for a shift from China by taking a more skeptical approach to relations with the regime in Beijing than his predecessors.

While globalists are pushing back against the efforts to decouple, the key telecommunications technology of 5G shows the limitations of their approach, according to one expert.

Opposing Views

The argument for protecting the deeply intertwined U.S.–China economic relationship is widely supported in some circles.

Last December, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who served the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, asked a gathering of the U.S.–China Business Council, “Are you ready for this?”

“The 20th century painted a shocking picture of industrial age destruction; do not assume that the cyber era of the 21st century is immune to crack-ups or catastrophes of equal or even greater scale,” Zoellick said.

“You need to decide whether you think the United States can still cooperate with China to mutual benefit while managing differences, and if so, how.”

The Financial Times said that Zoellick’s words “captured the fears—particularly within parts of Washington’s economic and foreign policy establishment—that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Beijing has paved the way for an irreversible ‘decoupling’ of the world’s two largest economies.”

Zoellick was responsible for completing the negotiations that brought China into the World Trade Organization.

Zoellick’s views are echoed by other trade and China specialists.

Harry G. Broadman, an economist who has worked in key U.S. government, international organization, private sector, and academic roles during his 30-plus-year career, wrote in Forbes in September 2019 that decoupling from China potentially presents “worldwide negative spillover impacts.”

Of those consequences, Broadman suggests, “technological bifurcation, which could fundamentally jeopardize harnessing global benefits from advances in science and technology,” is one of the riskiest aspects of taking the United States out of China.

In plain English, Broadman’s argument is that without globalization, which is largely underpinned by the U.S.–China relationship, technologies go their own way, developing standards and specifications for the regions in which they emerge, rather than under a globalized standard common throughout the world.

5G Domination the Danger

“He’s mistaken,” Robert Spalding said, referring to Broadman’s views on technological bifurcation. Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and architect of the U.S. National Security Strategy, which named China as an adversary. He is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, and author of the recent book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.”

The real danger, Spalding told The Epoch Times in an extensive interview, is in the ongoing struggle for dominance in fifth-generation—5G—mobile technology and standards that are already beginning to change how data is collected and used around the world.

“The U.S. was the first to develop the smartphone in 4G,” Spalding said. As a result, “we dominate the information market.”

But as the world moves into 5G, the risks are greater if the “concept of open data” and “open data markets” of those 4G networks are maintained. In Europe, the open data concept has already “created concern for privacy protection.”

In China, however, open data markets create a global opportunity.

“In the hands of China,” Spalding said, open data “lets the state take hold of power that Google and Amazon have.”

The “state” in China is led and run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“The ability of these companies to pinpoint your location and the things you’re doing and buying is incredibly powerful and counter to privacy concerns and counter to the principles of our liberal democracies,” Spalding said.

Spalding pointed out that “as Android and Apple become less of dominant players in 5G, now Tencent and Alibaba and DJI and Hikvision can begin to dominate that data space. So we move from a world centered on the U.S. to one centralized on Baidu and Tencent.”

All five companies are Chinese technology companies with ties to the CCP. Alibaba and Tencent generally rank in the top 10 internet companies in the world by market capitalization.

“That’s why he’s mistaken [about the problem of technological bifurcation]. It’s positive if we move to a data system that is focused on privacy and security and sovereignty and deploying secure 5G,” Spalding said.

Referring to Broadman, Spalding said that “what he’s advocating is that China dominate the technological space.”

China Sets Standards

Already, Spalding said, 3GPP, the umbrella body under which the key telecommunications standards organizations in the world operate and coordinate, is heavily dominated by China.

Since American network equipment manufacturers “are not expected to survive,” that leaves only four companies in the world that will make the networking equipment for the 5G future.

Those companies are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and China’s Huawei—all subject to the standards that are being so heavily influenced by Chinese technical specifications.

Functionally, therefore, Spalding points out that even though Ericsson and Nokia are Swedish and Finnish respectively, and Samsung is South Korean, they end up building the same system as Huawei.

“Essentially,” Spalding said, “everybody is building a Chinese network based on open data, not on a secure network. That’s why he’s incorrect. His theory promotes China,” Spalding said.

This means, Spalding said, that China’s “acquisition of intelligence” and “ability to influence societies” is greatly enhanced both in China and abroad, including in the United States.

Statistics from the Institute of Electronics and Electronic Engineers support Spalding’s claim.

In a March 17 post titled “Strategy Analytics: Huawei 1st among top 5 contributors to 3GPP 5G specs,” Alan Weissberger reports that “even though there are more than 600 member companies participating in 3GPP, their 5G specification process is actually led by only a few leading telecom companies. … New research from Strategy Analytics … finds that 13 companies contributed more than 78% 5G related papers and led 77% of the 5G related Work Items and Study Items.”

Of those 13, the top five are, in order, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and China Mobile.

Free Versus Centrally Resourced Trade

“By allowing China to be in the global trading system, you’re actually undermining the foundational premises” of that system, Spalding said. That global trading system has “a market-based approach to both capital allocation and trade.”

“China is not a market-based economy,” Spalding said. China, Spalding has said earlier, is not “a centrally planned economy, but it is centrally resourced.”

“When the state is providing resources and capital to a company, that’s not a market-based solution,” he said.

“Prices are set by China, not by the market.

“If you really want to have a free trading system … then China can’t be a part of it because they don’t believe in it.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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The Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus | The Epoch Times & NTD | Film [click image]

OriginVirus_PageTheme-1

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is a fine documentary with the utmost detail about how COVID-19 was created in a Wuhan bioweapons laboratory and debunks the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) version of reality which insists that it originated in the Huanan Seafood Market. Click here on on the above graphic to watch the film.

By Joshua Phillips, Investigative Reporter

As the world is gripped by the ongoing pandemic, many questions remain about the origin of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus—commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

Join Epoch Times senior investigative reporter Joshua Philipp as he explores the known facts surrounding the CCP virus and the global pandemic it caused.

In his investigation, Philipp explores the scientific data, and interviews top scientists and national security experts. And while the mystery surrounding the virus’s origin remains, much is learned about the CCP’s cover-up that led to the pandemic and the threat it poses to the world.

From the start of the virus outbreak in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not been forthcoming with information about the virus. In the early days of the outbreak, medical professionals who sounded the alarm were reprimanded by police for spreading “rumors.”

Initially, the CCP said the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Market, even though it knew patient zero had no connection with the market. Fearing that it might be held accountable for the worldwide pandemic, the CCP shifted its narrative to suggest that the virus originated in the United States and was brought to China by the U.S. military.

As a leading voice in covering China for the past 20 years, we understand very well the CCP’s deceptive nature and its history of cover-ups. With this outbreak, we saw a case of history repeating itself—in 2003, we exposed the CCP’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in China, far ahead of other media.

In this documentary, we present viewers with the known scientific data and facts surrounding the origin of the virus along with experts’ opinions. We don’t draw conclusions, but we point out that serious questions remain about the origins of the virus as well as the CCP’s handling of the outbreak.

Some of our viewers felt the documentary was taking a position on the origin of the virus, which was not our intent. The documentary has been slightly updated as of April 14 to better reflect our position, which is not to provide a definitive answer, but rather to present the known facts.

Source: The Epoch Times & NTD Films

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Controversial documentary suggests COVID-19 was ‘engineered’ for China’s world domination | MSN

Screen Shot 2020-06-29 at 8.13.30 AMEditor’s Note: This is a fine overview and summary of the film about the origins of the Wuhan virus.

By Jo-Est B. Tan

Part 1. The Story of The Seafood Market

The Wuhan Health Commission released an internal notice on December 30, 2019 saying, “There has been a continuous occurrence of pneumonia cases of unknown cause at Huanan Seafood Market”

Shortly afterward, the Wuhan Health Commission issued a public notice saying that new pneumonia cases were related to the seafood market, but did not transmit virus from human to human.

“Some medical institutions found a link between the pneumonia cases and the Huanan Seafood Market” but that “there was no evidence of ‘obvious human to human transmission’ and no infection among medical personnel.”

So on January 1, 2020, the Huanan Seafood market posted a notice of closure, and had a thorough clean up. Guan Yi, a Hong Kong expert mentioned that it was like they were trying to cover up a crime scene. Officials in Wuhan said that most of the pneumonia cases have had a history in the Huanan Seafood.

On January 26, 2020, the Institute of Virology of China, CDC said that 33 of the 585 environmental samples from Wuhan market had the novel coronavirus nucleic acid, and added that the virus came from wild animals in the market.

On January 24, The Lancet produced an article called Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China that suggested the virus might not have originated from the market.

The first author of the paper was Huang Chaolin, the Deputy Director of Jin Yin-tan Hospital, and this facility was the first to treat patients with the unknown pneumonia in Wuhan.

Dr. Sean Lin, former Lab Director of the Viral Disease Branch, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research said the symptom onset of the first patient was on December 1, 2019, and had no relation to the Huanan Seafood Market, and no epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases.

On December 10, 2019, there were 3 more cases, and 2 of the 3 cases had no relation to the Huanan Seafood Market.

Since December 15, 2019, a cluster of cases with a history of seafood market exposure have been reported. Soon after the December 10, 2019 analysis of 3 patients, there were 14 of 41 patients studied that were found to not have been to the Huanan Seafood Market.

Judy A. Mikovits, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and former Director of Lab of Antiviral Mechanism NCI, pointed out that a Lancet article said that patient zero was did not even go to the seafood market, and that there are no bats at the market or anywhere close. However, a high similarity of SARS CoV-2 nucleotide sequences were found with bat-related viruses.

But reports from NBC and Fox News have stated that bats are a likely source of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.

On Janaury 29, The Lancet said 50 of the 99 cases from Jin Yan-Tan, were unrelated to the market.

The New England Journal added that the 45 cases confirmed before January 1st have not been to the market. This information came from two authors who are doctors and medical experts from China.

Daniel Lucy, an epidemiologist from the University of Georgetown said that if the Lancet paper was accurate, the first case would have been infected as early as November 2019 because due to the incubation period of the virus.

This can only mean that the virus was spreading in different areas in Wuhan before the reports suggested that the pneumonia cases had a history of exposure to the seafood market that reportedly started on December 15.

The first panel of experts from the National Health Commission arrived in Wuhan on December 31, 2019. After investigating cases in Jin Yin-Tan hospital, they said that the initial criteria for a confirmed case are fever, history to the seafood market, and whole-genomer sequencing.

The second group of experts that consisted of Zhong Nanshan arrived on January 18th and revised the criteria. They questioned why exposure to the seafood market would be a criterion when one third of the cases were unrelated to that area.

Dr. Lin pointed out the existence of a clear outside source of the infection and possible malfeasance involved in the Chinese information that the CPP is trying to cover up.

“It can go a long way to covering up the actual source by imposing a false place and you’re not looking at the actual victims, then you’re only allowed to find your keys under the light post,” said Mikovits.

Asian Affairs Experts Columnist Gordon Chang thinks the reports of deaths and cases by China are highly ‘suspicious’.

“Beijing for six weeks, in December, in January, suppressed information of the epidemic and then when they officially acknowledged it on January 20, they then started a campaign of suppression of information.

“We know that because the central leading group that was announced on January 26 has a nine person roster, and it’s very heavy with propaganda officials.

“The vice chairman of the group is the Communist Party’s propaganda czar. It appears that the Party’s main goal here is suppression of information, controlling the narrative. That’s more important to them than actually ending the epidemic,” he said.

Part 2 The Mysterious Gene Sequence

China released the full genome sequence of the Wuhan novel coronavirus on January 10, and virologists worldwide started analyzing it.

On February 3, a paper by Zhang Yongzhen from the National Institute of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention and his team, along with the School of Public Health of Fudan University was published by Nature which claimed that the Wuhan coronavirus is closely related to CoVZC45 and CoVZXC21, which are viruses sampled from bats in Zhoushan by the People’s Liberation Army.

The Wuhan coronavirus has an 89.1% nucleotide similarity to the CoVZC45 and exhibits 100% amino acid similarity in the NSP7and E proteins.

Other scientists then used Blast, a program developed by the National Institute of Health and the National Center for Biotechnology Information to compare the viral sequence based on the data released by Chinese authorities on January 12, and the results match with Zhang’s findings.

Scientist Lu Roujian from Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published a paper in The Lancet on January 30 saying the Wuhan Virus has an 88% similarity to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses collected in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province.

Additionally, a 2018 paper says that scientists from the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command have confirmed that there are many SARS-like coronavirus in Zhoushan City which are referred to as Zhoushan virus.

Philipp explains that the Wuhan coronavirus is highly similar to a bat SARS-like coronavirus discovered by the Nanjing Military Research Institute with 100% amino acid similarity in NSP7 and the envelope protein (e protein).

With that information out, Dr. Lin thinks that this might have been created somewhere, just not in a natural environment.

“Hard to see a protein is 100% identical when the virus jumps species. That’s suggesting maybe the virus could be generated with a reverse engineer process.”

Mikovits says the similarity “can’t possibly be a natural mutation.”

“It almost certainly is a recombination event that was laboratory driven,” she said.

Philipp discovered that on January 21, “researchers from the Institute Pasteur Shangai Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper in Science China Life Sciences suggests that a key part of S protein of Wuhan virus has high homology with the SARS virus.”

The S proteins allow the virus to enter human cells.

“The S proteins are like little mushrooms attached to the surface of the virus. These are also known as spine proteins or spike proteins and are an important tool for the coronavirus to invade human cells.

“The S protein acts as a key which can unlock the lock on the surface of the cell and then invade the cell to propagate and destroy it.”

Dr. Lin says this is the reason for multiorgan failure.

“That’s probably one of the important reasons contributing to multiorgan failure. They can spread out in the human body much faster.”

Mikovits says the virus couldn’t possibly enter human cells without the S protein.

“That’s the lock and key. That’s going to be what drives it right through human cells.

“So now you’re allowing that access to human tissues because the spike proteins of the natural evolutionary strains don’t infect human cells at all.

“And clearly if that spike protein from SARS weren’t on the new COVID-19 or SARS2, it wouldn’t be able to enter human cells.”

This only shows that the virus was modified in a laboratory,

“This is evidence that it couldn’t’ go through the seafood market because how did you get that spike protein off the original SARS from bats or any other way.”

“It’s lab-derived,” she added.

The Shanghai P3 laboratory, which first shared the Wuhan coronavirus genome, was then ordered by authorities to stop operating on February 28. Professor Zhang Yongzhen and his team worked on this laboratory.

A February 26 report on Caixin, a media company associated with the CPP, says Zhang and his team isolated and completed the genome sequence of the unknown virus on January 5.

On the same day, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center this to the National Health Commission, and recommended prevention measures.

No response was given as of January 11, so the team publicized the sequence on virological.org, which is the first worldwide.

On January 1, the Hubei Health Committee ordered genome sequencing organizations saying “Existing virus samples must be destroyed. Information about the samples, related papers and related data are all prohibited from release”

The Chinese science community was basically told to keep quiet.

Chang thinks that the CPP is just plain dangerous.

“It’s the response to this virus is extremely troubling. It ignored it for six weeks. It allowed it to spread around China. This is dangerous, irresponsible behavior.”

Former US Air Force brigadier general Robert S. Spalding says that China is responsible for every COVID-19 case.

“Every person that it harms is directly attributable to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Part 3 The Discoveries of Dr. Shi Zhengli

Dr. Shi Zhengli, virologist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been studying bats and coronaviruses for many years and was the first to locate the key to how cross-species transmission can happen that would infect humans.

Zhengli has been researching about coronavirus since the 2003 outbreak. Since 2010, Zhengli and her team have been studying how coronaviruses can be transmitted to humans.

In 2010, Zhengli and her team finally published a paper showing how they discovered “the passageway for coronaviruses to enter human bodies.”

Another paper published by the same team in 2013 showed that they were able to successfully isolate 3 viruses from bats, and one of those had an S protein that integrated with human ACE-2 receptors, which only suggested that “direct human infection of SARS-like viruses to humans without the need for an intermediate host.”

Furthermore, in a 2015 paper, her team discussed a synthetic, and self-replicating Chimeric virus. This virus basically had the ability to allow for cross-species infection. Animals trials were also done on mice and subjects had lung damage that had no cure.

“Zhengli’s successful splicing of the SARS virus was a key to open the door to the cross-species transmission.”

Zhengli then mentioned she wanted experiments on primates.

“Her move to research on primates suggest this was to more closely simulate the infection of humans, with this new synthetic virus.”

This had the academic community concerned.

Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in France told Nature, “If the new virus escaped, nobody could project the trajectory.”

Mikovits thinks that this is just evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory.

“Her work proves the hypothesis that it could not possibly have been generated in a natural, zoonotic transmission but had to come from a hospital setting, the laboratory setting, the bio safety level 4 Wuhan research facility.”

On November 14, 2018, Zhengli gave a presentation called “Studies on Bat Coronavirus and its cross-species infection”. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University has since deleted reports of the study on their website.

Chang thinks that since China is blaming the US for the virus, the latter should just lay out the facts.

“The US needs to defend itself because China is propagating this narrative that we [US] spread the coronavirus to China.”

“The US needs to just come out with the facts about how China took coronavirus samples from Canada and the US, they sent them to Wuhan.”

Part 4 The Secret of the Wuhan P4 Laboratory

On February 3, Zhengli published a paper on Nature on February 3 saying the virus was of “probable bat origin”, and used the same key as SARS to infiltrate human bodies.

Zhengli added that the 2019-nCov genome sequence was 96.2% consistent with a bat coronavirus originating in Yunnan, China called RaTG13, suggesting the Wuhan virus comes from a natural source.

But it drew skepticism, as the outbreak started in Wuhan, the place where the P4 laboratory is located that has various similar viruses and might leakage might have happened. But the government decided to blame the seafood market, which doesn’t even sell bats.

Chinese authorities prevented international experts from joining the investigation and attacked doctors such as Li Wenliang who disclosed the outbreak for spreading rumors.

The big question is why would the CCP censor information if the virus did actually come from a natural source?

Chang says that the alleged origin of the virus is peculiar to say the least.

“Almost every disease that starts in China begins in Guangdong Province that surrounds Hong Kong in the south, but Wuhan is in the central portion of the country, and so this was extremely unusual.”

The Lab Origin theory can’t even be considered a conspiracy since no there is no definitive answer regarding the origin of the virus.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory to think that the coronavirus came from the Wuhan lab. And until we know [the truth], the theory about the lab origin is certainly something that we should consider.”

On January 2, an email from the Director-General from the institute said, “Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia. “

“National Health Commission clearly mandates that all detection, empirical data, results, and conclusions related to this outbreak cannot be published on self-media or social media, nor disclosed to any media (including state media) or collaborative organizations (including any technical services companies”

On January 21, ”a new drug, “Remdesivir” provided to China by the US for Wuhan Coronavirus treatment was patented by the Wuhan Institute of Virology”

During the month of February, a lot of things happened regarding the P4 laboratory.

  • On February 3, Dr. Wu Xiaohua blew the whistle using his real name that Shi Zhengli’s haphazard laboratory management may have led the Wuhan virus to leak from the lab.
  • On February 4, Chairman of Duoyi, Xu Bo, blew the whistle using his real name that the by Wuhan Institute of Virology was suspected of manufacturing and leaking the Wuhan virus
  • On February 7, “Top Biochemical Weapon Expert” of the People’s Liberation Army, Chen Wei, officially assumed control over the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 laboratory.
  • On February 14, Xi Jinping called for the inclusion of biosecurity into China’s national security framework, and to accelerate the introduction of a biosecurity law.
  • On February 15, the Institute refuted widely spread rumors on Chinese social media that female graduate Huang Yanling was patient zero, and had perished. However, Huang’s photo, CV, and thesis were all removed from the institute’s website, leaving only her name.
  • On February 17, Institute researcher Chen Quanjiao, blew the whistle using her real name that Director-General of the Institute, Wang Yanyi, was suspected of leaking the virus.

In addition, Dr. Francis Boyle, famous for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, said, “The novel coronavirus we’re facing here is an offensive biological warfare weapon.”

In 1999, the People’s Liberation Army published a book called “Unrestricted Warfare” discussing how weaker nations can fight against stronger nations in the context of modern warfare.

Author Qiao Liang wrote “After the first Taiwan Strait crisis, we realized that if Chinese and American military fought head on, we are at a disadvantage. Therefore we need a new strategy to help our military tilt the balance of power”

The Federation of American Scientists expressed concern saying that the CCP has advanced chemical warfare projects, including research, development, manufacturing, and weaponizing capabilities.

Spalding thinks China wants to be the best in biological weapons.

“I believe they have them. I think they want to be the most advanced nation on earth when it comes to biological weapons.”

Anthony Shaffer, former CIA trained officer says that China has some big plans.

“There’s a lot of concern about what China’s ambitions are regarding long term global domination.

“Their military doctrines indicated that they intend to be the dominant political and military force to Pacific Rim”

Chang says that the US should start defending itself since China has declared ‘war’,

“Last May, the communist party, through People’s Daily, carried a piece which said there was a “people’s war” against the United States. There is a war. China told us there’s one.”

Part 5 Facing The Pandemic

The virus has spread to 190 countries. Europe is now the center of the outbreak, and the US has called a state of national emergency.

Spalding emphasizes that China has a strong influence on many organizations, including the World Health Organization.

“All you have to do is look at the photo of Tedros (Adhanom, Director-General of WHO) and Xi (Jin Ping, Chinese president) shaking hands. It really is indicative of how China controls many of these international institutions.”

“You can see that the WHO is essentially following Chinese communist party’s guidelines.”

Chang similarly acknowledges how China is willing to go the extra mile to conceal essential information.

“From the very beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, the communist party has done its best to prevent the CDC and others from studying the origin of the disease.”

Mikovits says that the real fight is not against the virus, but against the CPP.

“The biggest issue is fighting a system that is determined to cover up and persecute anyone who reveals the truth behind.”

Chang thinks the same.

“Every country has diseases, but in China they become national emergencies and global emergencies because the real disease here is communism.”

Philipp also added that the scientists who suggested the lab theory declined to be interviewed and avoided questions regarding the virus.

Shaffer thinks the media such as those In the US have also been influenced by China because they wouldn’t discuss subjects that are sensitive to China being responsible for the deaths of thousands.

“In this case there is a lot of things not being said.”

Spalding says that this is because those media companies make a lot of money from China, and if they go against the country’s wishes, then they would suffer great consequences.

“Chinese communist party suppressing speech in the West because these companies make money from China. The CCP is going to punish them if they essentially publish this stuff. There is no other reason”

Chang thinks that China’s influence alone contributed to the spread of the virus.

“Communist Party is maligned and is grossly irresponsible. It has pressured governments to keep their borders open and it had to know that would result in the fast spread of coronavirus to other countries.”

“Chinese communism is evil.”

Source: MSN

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US Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Open Potential Lawsuits Against Chinese Regime Over Pandemic | The Epoch Times

CHINA-HEALTH-VIRUSBy Cathy He

A Republican congressman introduced a bill on April 3 that would make it easier for Americans to bring legal action against the Chinese regime for its role in causing the global pandemic.

The Chinese regime currently enjoys protection from lawsuits filed in U.S. courts under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, a legal rule that insulates countries from being sued in other countries’ courts. There are, however, exceptions to this rule found in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

Stop COVID Act, introduced by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), would amend FSIA to provide another exception to immunity, for any state that is found to have “intentionally or unintentionally, to have discharged a biological weapon … in the United States or such discharge results in the bodily injury of [a] United States citizen.”

The move comes amid growing calls by U.S. lawmakers to hold the Chinese regime accountable for its initial coverup of the CCP virus outbreak in Wuhan, which has since morphed into a global pandemic claiming tens of thousands of lives and devastating the world economy.

The Stop COVID Act will give our legal system the power to investigate the origin of the virus and, if found guilty hold accountable those responsible for creating and releasing it,”  Gooden said in a press release.

The legislation would pave the way for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the source of the virus, and file claims against the Chinese regime in the United States, the statement said.

The origin of the virus is still unknown. While Chinese authorities initially suggested that a live animal market in Wuhan was the source of the outbreak, officials have since steered away from this narrative. The first documented patient, a bedridden man in his 70s in Wuhan who showed symptoms on Dec. 1, did not have any contact with the market.

Meanwhile, Beijing has launched a global disinformation campaign to push the unfounded theory that the virus originated from outside China, in a bid to deflect blame over its mismanagement of the outbreak. One Chinese official has claimed, without providing evidence, that the virus was introduced to Wuhan by U.S. Army personnel.

US Lawsuits

Despite the potential barrier of sovereign immunity, several lawsuits were recently launched in domestic courts against the Chinese regime, seeking to hold it liable for the damage the CCP virus has caused to Americans.

One of them is a class action filed by Florida law firm The Berman Law Group in March. The firm, in a joint statement issued on April 3 with Lucas Compton, a Washington-based lobbying firm hired to do PR for the lawsuit, welcomed Gooden’s bill, saying it would “provide additional firepower to our legal position.”

But the firm maintained that the “lawsuit is not only enforceable in its current state, but addresses key legal components that are exceptions to the Foreign Sovereignty Immunities Act’s (FSIA) jurisdiction.”

The complaint says the action falls under two exceptions to FSIA: the “commercial activity” exception—that is, acts in connection with a commercial activity conducted outside the United States that cause a direct effect on the United States—and the exemption for death or harm caused by negligence or other tortious acts or omissions by a foreign state.

But Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter argued in a recent Bloomberg opinion piece that these exceptions are unlikely to be made out.

“The Florida class action suit asserts that the exception for commercial activities applies, but it’s not easy to see how,” Carter wrote.

With regards to the second exemption, “that section specifically bars any claim ‘based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function regardless of whether the discretion be abused.’ It’s hard to find a way around this restriction,” Carter wrote.

Matthew Moore, Berman Law’s class action attorney, told The Epoch Times that the restriction Carter mentions does not apply here because the regime acted “completely egregiously against humanity.”

“If they’ve hidden something of danger, then they don’t get to say that that was a discretionary act,” Moore said.

Though the first cluster of infections appeared in early to mid-December, Chinese authorities did not confirm the outbreak until Dec. 31, 2019. It was not until Jan. 20 that it confirmed human-to-human transmission of the virus. Prior to that, officials had described the outbreak as “preventable and controllable,” and said the risk of human-to-human transmission was low. Yet a January study of the first 425 cases of the disease in Wuhan found “there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019.”

At the same time, authorities also silenced Wuhan doctors who sought to warn their peers about the outbreak in late December. They were reprimanded by local police for “spreading rumors.”

Berman Law also plans on adding another FSIA exception to their lawsuit—the exemption for “terrorism,” Jeremy Alters, the chief strategist and non-attorney spokesperson of the firm’s lawsuit, told The Epoch Times.

“We have a virus that is well known to the Chinese government. They’re aware of its propensity to spread human-to-human rapidly. They’re aware of its propensity to harm people and to kill. They’re aware that it originated in the city,” Alters said. “They hid the information from us.”

He added that by the time the Chinese regime alerted the United States and other countries about the severity of the outbreak and initiated lockdown measures, it was already too late—5 million people had already left Wuhan, spreading the virus to other parts of China and overseas.

“How is that not … an act of intentional terror?” Alters said. “This is an act of bioterrorism.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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China Starts Mass Quarantines Again After Failing to Stop COVID-19: real death toll from the coronavirus in Wuhan, China may be over 40,000, more than 16 times the amount of deaths currently reported by China | Trending Politics

5e87b504daa4b7133According to a new breaking news report from Politico, China is once again implementing mass quarantines to combat the coronavirus outbreak after their initial quarantine failed.

“Henan province in central China has taken the drastic measure of putting a mid-sized county in total lockdown as authorities try to fend off a second coronavirus wave in the midst of a push to revive the economy,” Politico reported. “Curfew-like measures came into effect on Tuesday in Jia county, near the city of Pingdingshan, with the area’s roughly 600,000 residents told to stay home, according to a notice on the country’s official microblog account.”

This breaking news comes at the same time as a new report from Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield stated that the real death toll from the coronavirus in Wuhan, China may be over 40,000, more than 16 times the amount of deaths currently reported by China.

Check out what the The Washington Post reported:

The coronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe officially claimed 2,563 lives in Wuhan, where it began in a market that sold exotic animals for consumption. But evidence emerging from the city as it stirs from its two-month hibernation suggests the real death toll is exponentially higher. …

Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.

This bombshell report comes not much after Bloomberg News reported that U.S. intelligence officials shared a classified report with President Donald Trump stating that China had lied about how bad the coronavirus was in their country.

“China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete,” Bloomberg News reported. “Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.”

Vice President Mike Pence also spoke out on the matter: “The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming. What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”

Dr Deborah Birx, the head of the White House Coronavirus Response also spoke out, indicating that China may have lied about their coronavirus numbers.

“When you talk about could we have known something different, you know, I think all of us, I was overseas when this happened in Africa and I think when you look at the China data originally, and you said, there’s 80 million people, or 20 million people in Wuhan and 80 million people in Hubei, and they come up with the number of 50,000, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic,” Birx said.

Based on the information that China provided, Birx stated that she did not think that the coronavirus would escalate into a global pandemic.

“So, I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data” from China, Birx said.

Source: Trending Politics, Politico, Bloomberg & Washington Post

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Italians Take to the Streets to Protest New Mandatory Vaccination Law | Vaccine Impact

Vaccine-protests-ItalyBrian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

Readers from Italy have been contacting Health Impact News this past week (June, 2017), asking us to cover the massive demonstrations happening throughout Italy to protest a new mandatory vaccine law. This news has been censored from the U.S. corporate media.

Francesca Alesse, who worked with the VAXXED film team to get the film shown in Italy last year, writes:

In an unprecedented way, the decree-law proposed by the Minister of Health has been signed by the sitting Italian president Sergio Mattarella. Only four vaccines were mandatory in Italy, now that number triples to 12.

No other decree-law has moved so fast in the Italian legislative system, the reasons of such hurry are incomprehensible considering that the Istituto Superiore Di Sanità (the local version of the CDC) has declared that contrary to what stated in the decree itself there is no objective urgency. There are no epidemics, the number of cases of measles or meningitis in the current year have been substantially lower than the previous year.

Thousands of parents have protested the new law this past June 3rd,  protests and marches have taken place in 21 Italian cities spread across the nation. A national protest is scheduled for this Sunday June 11th.

The translated full text of the decree-law is found here.

Florence Protest

The new law apparently has severe consequences for parents who fail to comply, including the possibility of having their children taken away from them. In addition to public outcry, there appears to be strong political opposition to the law as well.

Elisabetta Bressan, an Italian commenting on Facebook writes:

Protests are going to increase here, as our Government has announced…  a law to introduce 12 mandatory vaccines. The law…. was announced by our Health Ministry to be as follows: 12 mandatory vaccination needed to have access to pre-school system (age 0-6): no vaccination, no enrollment, no exceptions; for mandatory school (age 0-16) if kids were not vaccinated parents should pay a penalty between 500€ and 7.500€ per year, if you cannot afford it, you’ll be refer to Jouvanile Court, that could suspend your parents rights to get your children vaccinated. A national protest is envisaged in Rome on June 11.

This will start within the next school year (September 2017); it has been calculated that more then 800,000 kids will need to receive a massive vaccination in a very little time.

As you know, Italy had been chosen in 2014 as leading Country for the WHO world vaccination campaign co-financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, therefore what happen here can affect also other countries.

In other comments posted on Facebook, Elisabetta Bressan suggests that the new mandatory vaccine law has strong financial connections to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which could benefit from over 1 billion euros invested in Italy over the next four years. She writes:

This is the press conference of Health Minister, Ms. Lorenzin explaining the DL https://www.facebook.com/mauriziolupi.it/videos/10155541295653694/

At the opening of the conference, all guests are presented to the press, including Dr. Ranieri Guerra, presented as Director General of Health Prevention of the Ministry of Health. (Man sitting on Ms. Lorenzin right)

His curriculum vitae is regularly published in the Government’s website:
http://www.salute.gov.it/…/CV…/CV_pubblicazioni_Guerra_n.pdf at page 6 you can see he is a member of Glaxo Smith-Kline Foundation board.

On the Foundation website http://www.fsk.it/la-fondazione/storia-della-fondazione/ you are provided with additional information:

In 1987, it was recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the ‘Center for Collaboration in the Training of Health Personnel’ and in 1997 as a ‘Hospitality Management Collaboration Center’ in Italy.

The Fsk.it website belongs To Smith Kline Foundation which is maintained thanks to the non-binding annual liberal loan of the founding partner GLAXOSMITHKLINE SpA, as well as the incomes of its own projects.

The members of the Board of Directors, as indicated here, are nominated by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of University and Research, the Ministry of the Economy, ISS, the State State Conference and GlaxoSmithKline SpA and they approve the FSK Activity Plan annually.

The members of the Board of Directors (including Mr. Ranieri Guerra) are appointed, among others, by:
– Ministry of Health, represented in the press conference by Minister Beatrice Lorenzin
– ISS,
– Higher Institute of Health, present in the person of Dr. Walter Ricciardi,
– the same GlaxoSmithKline S.p.A. Vaccines and drugs, Glaxo bets 1 billion on Italy
http://www.sanita24.ilsole24ore.com/…/vaccini-e-farmaci-gla…

Here we talk about an investment of 1 billion euros in Italy for the next 4 years, including 2016 and the years relating to the new National Vaccine Plan 2017/2019 so promoted by the Ministry of Health.

Source: Vaccine Impact

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To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China | Economic Times/India Times

wuhan-11-ap

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This pandemic was likely created from a bioweapons lab in Wuhan and the Chinese Communist Party is showing their true colors in dealing with this humanitarian crisis. The entire world will suffer consequences from this debacle and a global economic slowdown and economic reset is inevitable.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grassroots mobilization reminiscent of former Communist Chairman Mao Zedong’s mass crusades, not seen in China in decades.

China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.

The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grassroots mobilization reminiscent of former Communist Chairman Mao Zedong’s mass crusades, not seen in China in decades — esse ..

Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.

Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak. But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.

Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.

“Once the epidemic was disclosed, the central government put huge pressure on local officials,” Li said. “That triggered competition between regions, and local governments turned from overly conservative to radical.

“Even when the situation is relieved or if the mortality rate turns out not to be high, the government machine is unable to change direction or tune down,” she added.

China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.

Zhejiang province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000, and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000.

Authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.

At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu this past week, workers in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages that show their location data before being allowed to leave.

n app developed by a state-run maker of military electronics lets Chinese citizens enter their name and national ID number and be told whether they may have come in contact, on a plane, train or bus, with a carrier of the virus.

It is too early to say whether China’s strategy has contained the outbreak. With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts said that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.

“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”

In Zhejiang, one of China’s most developed provinces and home to Alibaba and other technology companies, people have written on social media about being denied entry to their own apartments in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Coming home from out of town, they said, they were asked to produce documents from landlords and employers or be left on the street.

For Nada Sun, who was visiting family in Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang, a health scare turned into a mandatory quarantine.

When Sun, 29, complained of tightness in her chest this month, her mother told her to go to the hospital. She did not have a high fever, yet the hospital gave her a battery of checks. All came back negative for the virus.

Even so, when she returned to her apartment, she was told that she would be quarantined for two weeks. She was also added to a group on the WeChat messaging app with a local Communist Party secretary and other volunteers in which she has to submit her temperature and location twice a day.

“I’m worried they have too much information,” Sun said.

The lockdowns are not necessarily oppressive. Many people in China have been happy to wall themselves off, ordering groceries online and working from home if they can. Some neighborhood officials act with a humane touch.

Bob Huang, a Chinese-born American living in northern Zhejiang, said the volunteers at his complex had helped chase down a man who stayed out overnight to drink, in violation of rules about how often people can step outside. Yet they also delivered food from McDonald’s to a quarantined family.

Huang, 50, has been able to dodge the restrictions by using a special pass from the property manager, and he has been driving around delivering protective face masks to friends. Some building complexes don’t let him in. Others take down his information.

A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Huang said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

Some parts of China have imposed other, often severe policies for fending off the epidemic.

Hangzhou has barred pharmacies from selling analgesics to force people with symptoms to seek treatment at hospitals. The eastern city of Nanjing requires anybody who takes a cab to show ID and leave contact information. Yunnan province wants all public places to display QR codes that people must scan with their phones whenever they enter or exit.

Many places have banned large gatherings. Police in Hunan province this month destroyed a mahjong parlor where they found more than 20 people playing the tile game.

With local governments deciding such policies largely on their own, China has become a vast patchwork of fiefs.

“It can be quite haphazard,” said Zhou Xun, a historian of modern China at the University of Essex in England. “A perfect plan on paper often turns into makeshift solutions locally.”

Officials seem to recognize that some local authorities have gone too far. This month, Chen Guangsheng, the deputy secretary-general of Zhejiang’s provincial government, called it “inappropriate” that some places had employed “simple and crude practices,” like locking people into their homes, to enforce quarantines.

National officials on Saturday urged towns and villages to remove unnecessary roadblocks and ensure the smooth transport of food and supplies.

Zhang Yingzi’s apartment complex in Hangzhou initially forbade anybody who had been out of town from entering. Later, the ban was adjusted to cover only people coming from Hubei province and the Zhejiang cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou, both of which have had many cases of the new virus.

“Banning everyone from out of town wasn’t realistic,” said Zhang, 29, an accountant. “There are so many of them, after all. Some needed to come back for work.”

Still, many in China are uneasy about loosening up virus controls too quickly.

Zhang Shu, 27, worries that her parents and neighbors are becoming cavalier about the virus, even as workers drive around her village near Wenzhou with loudspeakers telling people to stay home.

“Ordinary people are slowly starting to feel that the situation isn’t so horrible anymore,” she said. “They are restless.”

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The Game is Rigged | Counterpunch

32917978597_d9f4330dd6_cJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: We publish controversial articles to inspire critical thinking. This is written from an eco-marxist perspective and is a cogent analysis of the Democratic Party and power structures in general. We do not agree with their analysis of Trump, the Republican Party or the impeachment trial.

By Paul Street

Let’s not beat around the bush. The game is rigged. The fix is in.

I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Republican-controlled United States Senate and the fake-impeachment trial that body just concluded. I’m talking about their neoliberal enablers, the Democrats too.

Certain Depressing Things Explained

The deeply conservative corporate and imperialist Democratic Party politics and media complex is determined to deny the progressive neo-New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination.

So what if Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate most likely to organize the working- and lower-class the corporate Democrats – the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance (IOPFR)– have been betraying demobilizing for decades?

So what if this makes Sanders the most electable candidate against an incumbent president and a party that pose existential fascistic and ecocidal threats to what’s left of democracy, the republic, and life itself?

So what if Sanders’ key policy proposals, including Single Payer health insurance (health care as a human right) and a Green New Deal (to put millions to work trying to roll back the soulless capitalist destruction of livable ecology) are urgently required for the common good and human survival?

So what if Sanders’ proposals are conservative in relation to the savage scale of the inequality and environmental destruction neoliberal class rule has been inflicting for several decades on Americans and livable ecology?

So what if nearly half (47%) of Sanders supporters will not commit to voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if it isn’t Bernie, making it likely that any other candidate is likely to usher in the tragedy of a second Trump term?

The Democratic establishment is determined to stop Sanders at all costs. As I’ve been saying for years, the corporate Democrats prefer to lose to the ever more viciously right-wing Republicans and the demented fascist oligarch Trump than to the moderately left wing of their own party.

This is why the establishment Democrats and their many media allies (at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and elsewhere) have issued repeated dire warnings over the supposed “radical Leftism” and “extremism” of the mildly social-democratic Sanders.

It’s why Democratic Party-affiliated funders and media opened the campaign season by touting the clownish center-right dementia victim Joe Biden as their “front-runner.”

It’s why those funders and media shifted to the slimy Wall Street plaything Pete Butiggieg after Biden re-exposed himself and pseudo-liberal Kamala Harris proved unable to stand strong in the “pragmatic” center-right Clinton-Obama-Tony Blair-Emanuel Macron lane.

It’s why the establishment “liberal” media harps constantly on Sanders’ supposed un-electability even as polls show him solidly beating Trump.

It’s why former Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, former global derivatives trader and right-wing MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) host Stephanie (class-) Ruhle, and the noxious neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol recently joined forces on MSNBC to viciously denounce Sanders as “the worst candidate” to run against Trump.

It’s why the Democratic National Committee is working to reinstate the authoritarian veto power of unelected establishment “superdelegates” on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention – a move clearly driven by establishment fears that Sanders could accumulate enough delegates to sweep to a first ballot victory under current rules.

It’s the reason for the Elizabeth Warren-CNN hit job in the last Iowa Democratic presidential debate – the one where Warren and the cable network conspired to falsely smear Sanders as a sexist.

It’s why MSNBC and CNN went into overdrive trying to portray Sanders’ campaign as “divisive” after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Hillary Clinton’s malicious personal attacks on Sanders with an ill-timed reaction MSNBC blew up into “the boo heard around the world.”

It’s why MSNBC and CNN have played along with Hillary Clinton’s despicable and false claim thar Sanders didn’t work hard to help Mrs. Clinton’s (horrific and depressing) campaign during the 2016 general election.

It’s why the Democratic Party has changed its presidential debate qualification rules so that mega-billionaire and center-right Republocrat Mike Bloomberg can ascend to the top candidate stage on a magic carpet of money after skipping the campaign process in the early caucus and primary states.

It’s why the insufferable MSNBC bully Chris Matthews (the Ted Baxter of cable news) lost what little composure he has when Sanders’ campaign co-chair Nina Turner accurately called Bloomberg “an oligarch” (more on this amusing and revealing episode below).

It’s why the New York Times has been running deceptive commentaries warning falsely about the supposed “radical extremism,” “fiscal irresponsibility,” “rudeness” and “nonviability” of Sanders and his backers.

It’s why the California Democratic Party’s centrist managers are doing their best to make it difficult for independents to vote for Sanders, the state’s leading presidential candidate.

It’s probably why the Des Moines Register Star (which endorsed Elizabeth “Capitalist in my Bones” Warren) strangely decided not to release its usual “gold standard” Iowa poll of the state’s first-in-the-national caucus-goers prior to the big (and shockingly wrecked) event last Monday.

It’s why the Times, CNN, and MSNBC (the last outfit is broadcast media’s ground-zero for fake-progressive Wall Street centrism ) tout Butiggieg as the winner of Iowa’s spoiled caucus even though Sanders won the same number of state delegates and triumphed decisively in the popular vote (please see and disseminate Fairness and Accuracy in Media’s reflection on “How Corporate Media Makes Pete Look Like He’s Winning”).

It’s why CNN anchors smirkingly opine that Sanders “under-performed” and “failed to meet expectations” even after he won the Caucus.

Iowa Black-Apped

And it’s likely why the Iowa Caucus got app-f*#^ed, with the contest’s results rendered unavailable to the public for days. The deadly Shadow app’s “failure” and the mind-boggling dysfunction and confusion of the error-ridden count that followed (so extreme that we’ll probably never know the real numbers) robbed Sanders of a momentum-building election night victory speech – and gave Trump another reason to gloat about the pathetic nature of the Democratic Party.

It turns out that the Shadow app that crashed the Iowa Caucus and threw Sanders’ Iowa victory down the media memory hole was less than politically neutral. Hardly known for leftist conspiracy theorizing, USA Today offered some chilling reflections the morning after:

‘What’s this about Shadow and where did the app come from? The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., and issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. A LinkedIn profile for James Hickey lists him as COO of Shadow and an engineering manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Two other former Clinton campaign workers, former Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, co-founded Shadow…The New York Times has reported that ACRONYM – a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website – supported Shadow. Its founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, The Los Angeles Times reported….Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, who also worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expenses…’

It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, in an article titled “Tech Firm Started by Clinton Campaign Veterans Linked to Iowa Caucus Debacle”: “Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to disclosures to the FEC.”

So, Shadow, Inc. got money from Wall Street Pete (from the financial sector via Butiggieg, that is), a former consultant with the infamously dark and globalist McKinsey Company and a onetime U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer.

Further feeding the sense of the Iowa Caucus Debacle as a CIA/military intelligence Black Op, Butiggieg proclaimed himself the Iowa victor with zero precincts reporting last Monday night! How Juan Guaido was that?

It worked. The fact that Sanders won Iowa was turned into a public non-fact. The confusion bought Mayor Pete a couple of days to take some undeserved victory laps across the “liberal” media, boosting him in New Hampshire.

The Democrats Did “More to Undermine Faith in Our Elections than Russia Ever Could”

No talking head has captured the evil of it all more effectively and bitingly than The Hill’s Krystal Ball yesterday morning. Her comments merit transcription and lengthy quotation:

“Let [this sink in]: Twitter is doing a better, more accurate job of tabulating the results than the Democratic Party. What else might be wrong through incompetence, malice, or a combination of both, God only knows. But as if that’s not enough, after Pete claimed a fake victory thanks to the complicity of the Iowa Democratic Party and the media, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, they saved the best precincts for Bernie Sanders to be counted and included last, because of course they did. I’m sure it was all just a coincidence, though, guys. And meanwhile, a new tracking poll shows that Pete’s fake win in Iowa has given him a big boost in New Hampshire, lifting him 9 points in 3 days.”

“What is truly criminal to me, though, is this: the people who gave Bernie Sanders this hard-fought and well-deserved win are people like this: immigrant workers at a pork-processing plant, who had to fight to even be able to cast their ballots in a caucus that conflicted with their work schedule. They were the very first to vote and among the last to be counted. For four days, their voice and their vote were completely erased, as were the Latinos who participated in satellite caucuses and went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. It is absolutely outrageous.”

“Do you remember the endless, three-year rant at RussiaGate and over how a foreign power spending a million or two over a month on lousy, ungrammatical Facebook ads inside a billion dollar election was the biggest threat to our constitutional republic and was material to Hillary’s loss in 2016? Let’s be completely clear here. The Democratic Party in Iowa has done more to undermine faith in our elections than Russia ever could. Period. But don’t expect a Democratic House to hold months-long hearings into the Iowa Caucus debacle. Don’t expect any degree of self-reflection on the part of the party bosses and consultant grifters who deserve to be fired en masse. Instead, the same folks who think they should be able to take the nomination from Bernie with their Superdelegates, the same folks who tweak the process so it suits them, the same folks who are now leaking out partial wrong results in a mockery of manipulation masquerading as transparency…these people will continue to run the Democratic Party in Iowa and elsewhere until and unless an anti-establishment candidate like Bernie throws them all out. ….”

“… Single moms arranged babysitters to participate in this caucus. Nurses gave up shifts, lost 12 hours of pay to participate in this caucus. People rolled in with their wheelchairs. They weren’t with their kids or doing their college homework…Volunteers donated hundreds of thousands of hours of time. Banging on doors, hosting house parties, managing selfie lines, and all for what? So that all that time, all that energy could be turned into a giant joke that makes everyone who participated in the process feel like a fool….”

“People that we invite into this process are made a sacred promise that this activity s meaningful and necessary. And then to watch such manifest incompetence, cronyism, obfuscation, and selective disclosure in what is supposed to be the most critical election of our lifetime makes a joke out of democracy and spread cynicism like the Coranavirus of the civic soul…This whole democracy looks like a Potemkin Village farce where the GOP and Democratic Party insiders seem to almost laugh at the rubes who take this whole thing as serious and sacred.”

I’ve never had the same degree of faith n U.S. electoral politics that Ms. Ball (who would likely and wrongly consider me a victim and purveyor of cynicism) seems to have had in the past, but that is an extremely powerful denunciation of what happened to Sanders and his backers – and the democratic ideal – in Iowa this week.

(At least we know for certain that voters are ready to pull the rusty chain on Joe Pool Chain Biden. Too bad for the companies who were gearing up to mass produce record players for the poor in response to Joe “Record Players for the Poor” Biden’s promise of Vinyl New Deal.)

This is Who the Democrats Are

Butiggieg knows he’s never going to be president. “Alfred E. Neuman’s” role is to muddle public perceptions, screwing Warren and Sanders in the early states to help set up “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg (I am borrowing Trump’s frankly clever nicknames for these right-wing candidate), who is Wall Street’s next Great Stop Sanders Hope in the wake of “Sleepy Joe’s” predictable (and widely predicted) collapse.

MSNBC is cable news central for the IOPFR’s Campaign to Stop Sanders and Re-Elect the Neofascist Trump with Yet Another Centrist Neoliberal Creep. Two days ago, the network’s “Morning Joe” hosts used the very Iowa fiasco that their on-the-ground ideological comrades created to promote Bloomberg and Super Tuesday as the alternatives to “radical” Bernie and the early caucus and primaries. The “progressive” Kissingerian network (I’ve heard MSNBC hosts praise the blood-drenched war criminal Henry Kissinger on numerous occasions) didn’t try hide its corporatist agenda to any serious degree.

“Democrats,” a popular Internet meme featuring pictures of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi runs, “are afraid that American voters are going to interfere in the 2020 election.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party isn’t about social justice, democracy, and/or environmental sanity. It isn’t even primarily about winning elections. “History’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (as former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once accurately described the Democrats) is about serving “elite” corporate and financial sponsors above all, and those sponsors prefer a second fascistic Trump term to a mildly progressive first Sanders one.

Oligarchs “Take Advantage of a Broken and Dysfunctional System”

In an amusing and telling episode on MSNBC prior to the Caucus, Nina Turner told Chris Matthews that voters worry about “the oligarchs” who buy American elections. “Do you think Mike Bloomberg is an oligarch?!” an outraged Matthews asked. “He is,” Turner retorted. “He skipped Iowa. Iowans should be insulted. Buying his way into this race, period. The DNC changed the rules. They didn’t change it for Senator Harris. They didn’t change it for Senator Booker. They didn’t change it for Secretary Castro.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Matthews then incredulously asked Turner is she really believed Bloomberg purchased his way into the presidential debates – as if there is the slightest hint of a scintilla of an iota of a sliver of a wisp of a rumor of a scent of doubt about.

After Matthews finished idiotically interrogating Turner, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams turned to MSNBC pundit Jason Johnson. Johnson also disapproved of Ms. Turner’s description of the oligarch Bloomberg as an oligarch.

“Oligarchy, in our particular terminology,” Johnson intoned, “makes you think of a rich person who got their money off of oil in Russia, who is taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system.”

You can’t make shit like that up! No, Jason Johnson: imperialist, Russophobic, and American Exceptionalist doctrine and bad reporting make you think that way. Merriam-Webster defines “oligarchy” as: “government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” There’s an abundance of solid academic research showing that the United States today fits the definition very well. Here are four for Johnson to start with: Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What we Can Do About It (University of Chicago, 2018), Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with the United States as a leading case study); Paul Street, They Rule: They 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014).

Concerned about rich people “taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system”? Look no further than the world’s self-proclaimed “greatest democracy”! No other “democracy” in the so-called developed world remotely matches the United States of Dark Money when it comes to giving big donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system — winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process — this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 9 Asian-Pacific countries, 2 countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and 6 African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

Don’t take it from a radical eco-Marxist like me. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Page (Northwestern) and Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book mentioned above:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless… Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).”

The Table is Tilted: Beyond the Cynical Brilliance of George Carlin

It was nice of the professors to quantify and document what working-class Americans have always known: money talks, bullshit walks. My old Finish socialist Aunt Mary (a high school graduate who worked for decades as a department store clerk in downtown Elgin, Illinois) understood Page and Gilens’ point very well. In the famous words of George Carlin:

“There’s a reason education sucks and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.”

“They gotcha by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f***ed by the system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They don’t want that.”

“You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. …All day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe — what to think — and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.”

“…They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t…They don’t care about you – at all. At all, At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care … that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d**k that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream … ‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

The problem with Carlin’s brilliant rant is of course it’s extreme, well, cynicism. Millions upon millions of Americans do notice and do care. They aren’t asleep. They are capable of critical thinking. They very much want to un-rig the game, level the table, and change the system – make a people’s democratic revolution and save humanity. I run into and talk to and try to energize and learn and get energy from these people regularly. They haven’t surrendered to the American authoritarian-sexist-racist-nativist-nationalist-fascist nightmare yet.

I share with many of these people a basic underlying spiritual sense that giving up and letting the owners – our financial and political owners, yes – win is irrational and indeed morally corrupt. Let’s say the chances of collapsing the nation’s un-elected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, white-supremacism, and patriarchy are just 3 or 2 or even 1 in 10 (I think the real odds may be much higher). Why bring them down to zero by giving in to fatalism – to “it’s never going to change?” It makes no sense to give up: you lose nothing by believing in the possibility of democratic transformation and revolutionary change; you lose everything by not believing. Try some radical existentialism!

Tactical Support

Should people caucus and vote for Bernie in the rigged Democratic Party nomination process? Sure, for three reasons. First, there’s a(n admittedly slim) chance Sanders could prevail and lead the enactment of changes that would make a very positive difference in peoples’ lives and capacity to fight back against American Oligarchy, which is now taking significant steps towards openly authoritarian rule.

Second, doing some work with the Sanders campaign puts you in contact with masses of people who are changing all the time (like all phenomena), people-in-process who are capable of engaging on the critical topics of how and why we must move beyond the rigged games and systems that capture and depress our energies and how and why we must begin to organize for a real revolution.

Third, even if he doesn’t win, it’s good to make the screwing over of Sanders as transparent and instructive as possible. This could help motivate millions of Americans to break in revolutionary fashion from a “broken and dysfunctional [American] system” of class rule. It could help spark millions to join a people’s movement that works beneath and beyond the rigged elections cycle and system to heroically reclaim the commons and save humanity.

There’s a lot of good and potentially radical energy out there. It needs to go somewhere positive once the “coffin of class consciousness” (in the words of the radical historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box fails to deliver yes…yet once again. The capitalists hardly restrict their political pressure to the electoral process – just wait to see what happens if Sanders (somewhat miraculously) makes it into the White House. We must and can develop an anti-capitalist (and now anti-fascist) politics that fights back in ways that transcend those savagely time-staggered moments when our owners permit us to make marks next to the names of politicians who can generally be trusted to put their own interests above ours and those of the common good.

“Except for the rare few,” Howard Zinn once wrote, “our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.”

Source: Counterpunch

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Tucker Carlson: The New Way Forward Act | YouTube

Sponsored by 44 House Democrats insuring that criminals can move to the USA with impunity at U.S. taxpayer expense. This is the most horrendous piece of legislation ever proposed by the radical left/liberal cabal in the House of Representatives. This is  treason and should be reckoned with. None or these sponsors have any business staying in the U.S. Congress for one more term. 

Source: YouTube

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Writer of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act Shares His Thoughts On The Coronavirus | Collective Evolution

bioIN BRIEF

  • The Facts:Dr. Francis Boyle, a law professor who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, recently shared his thoughts about the Coronavirus.
  • Reflect On:Disease outbreaks are nothing new, and massive amounts of fear propaganda usually follow. Is this another ‘swine flu?’ Something that has emerged and will die down eventually?

Dr. Francis Boyle is an international law professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. He currently serves as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority. He was involved in developing the indictments against Slobodan Milosević for genocide and for other war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He is well known globally for representing the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, the Lakota Nation, as well as advising on several individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has been a force of good will, having counselled numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare. From 1991-92, he served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations.

He currently sits on the  Board of Directors of Amnesty International, as a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Furthermore, he drafted the U.S. domestic legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. It was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law.

He has a lot of knowledge on the topic of biological warfare, which is why it’s interesting to hear is thoughts and opinions on the Coronavirus.

Coronavirus

As stated in the interview below, he believes that the Coronavirus is a biological warfare weapon, and that it may have leaked out unintentionally. Regardless, he believes that pharmaceutical companies are set to profit off of this outbreak in a big way.

Dr. Boyle has come across information suggesting that Chinese scientists may have stolen this virus out of a lab in Winnipeg, where Canada tests a lot of their biological warfare weapons. He believes the virus then leaked out of a lab in Wuhan (BSL-4), in the wake of reports of previous reports of leaks coming out of this specific lab. The Wuhan BSL-4 lab is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.

A CBC news report maintains that, while there is truth that the lab in Winnipeg had some policy breaches with researchers who were Chinese nationals, it is not confirmed that this involved stealing the virus and bringing it to Wuhan. CBC maintains that the connection between this and the outbreak of the Coronavirus in Wuhan is  a ‘conspiracy theory.’

It appears that the Coronavirus that we are dealing with here is an offensive biological warfare weapon that leaked…I’m not saying it was done deliberately…I’m afraid that’s what we are dealing with today.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to this type of information, and these types of outbreaks, I’m reminded of the swine flu outbreak many years ago. There is a lot of ‘fear propaganda’ being put out by the media, and I personally don’t really pay much attention to it. I’m not saying it’s not dangerous, and it’s not a concern, I’m just saying that ultimately it’s a waste of time to worry.

At the end of the day, the best thing we can do for ourselves for protection is to simply optimize your health and boost your immune system. When it comes to this actual virus and it’s origins, I have not looked into it enough. I thought it was important to share the interview above from a knowledgeable individual in this area, as mainstream media doesn’t seem to go into this type of stuff despite the fact that it does seem like important and relevant information. Furthermore, it can be confusing when such a well read academic and researcher in the field shares information, yet mainstream media simply categorizes it as a conspiracy theory.

It’s always great to look at and listen to multiple sources of information when curious about a topic, especially when we are hit so hard with the same thing over and over again by big media. In my opinion, just as the swine flu, this outbreak will eventually die off. Hopefully.

Source: Collective Evolution