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

The Truth Behind Coronavirus Pandemic: COVID-19 Lockdown & The Economic Crash | London Real

 

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Notes: Why Destroy the Global Economic System During the Coronavirus Crisis (and replace it with another that better serves the Global Power Structure)?

  • Global Bankers will pull trillions of dollars of equity out of the economic system (stocks, real estate values, business values) to rollback the debt obligations of the international bankers (because of the nature of the debt-based monetary system)
  • Total Economic Shutdown will destroy millions of family businesses, small businesses and medium sized businesses leaving a larger share to the big, corporate players.
  • Total Economic Shutdown will drop millions of people in countries around the world to the very bottom of the economic ladder. This is economic suicide for We the People and a few thousand dollars of government subsidies will not restore even a fraction of the losses.
  • Don’t believe what you’re being told because somebody in a suit said so. Question authority and do your own independent research.
  • The Coronavirus crisis is not about public health or caring for the elderly.
  • The Global Power Structure doesn’t care one iota about the health and welfare of the elderly. Protecting the elderly is a convenient excuse to destroy the existing economic order and impose a New World Order run by an elite few at the top of the pyramid.
  • Who benefits? The Global Power Structure, or 1%, will be the one who will benefit.
  • What is the result? To impose a Global Technocracy run by experts, scientists, technocrats, politicians and artificial intelligence under their total control. Your every move will be watched and tracked. You will be plugged into “The Matrix”.
  • For this you can thank the Coronavirus panic and overreaction.

Source: London Real & YouTube

The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020” | Global Research

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Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: If the author of this article hadn’t worked for the World Bank and World Health Organization for decades I might have hesitated in publishing this article. But the premise for forced vaccinations are now more believable than ever as an objective of the Coronavirus crisis (engineered by the overreaction of global, national, state and local governments.

By Peter Koenig

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity.

“It seems, the more there is written about the causes of the Coronavirus – the more the written analyses are overshadowed by a propaganda and fear-mongering hype. Questions for the truth and arguments for where to look for the origins and how the virus may have spread and how to combat it, are lost in the noise of wanton chaos. But isn’t that what the “Black Men” behind this intended pandemic want – chaos, panic, hopelessness, leading to human vulnerability – a people becoming easy prey for manipulation?”

Today WHO declared the coronavirus COVID-19 a “pandemic” – when there is not the slightest trace of a pandemic. A pandemic might be the condition, when the death to infection rate reaches more than 12%. In Europe, the death rate is about 0.4%, or less. Except for Italy which is a special case, where the peak of the death rate was 6% (see below for further analysis).

China, where the death rate peaked only a few weeks ago at about 3%, is back to 0.7% – and rapidly declining, while China is taking full control of the disease – and that with the help of a not-spoken-about medication developed 39 years ago by Cuba, called “Interferon Alpha 2B (IFNrec)”, very effective for fighting viruses and other diseases, but is not known and used in the world, because the US under the illegal embargo of Cuba does not allow the medication to be marketed internationally.

WHO has most likely received orders from “above”, from those people who also manage Trump and the “leaders” (sic) of the European Union and her member countries, those who aim to control the world with force – the One World Order.

This has been on the drawing board for years. The final decision to go ahead NOW, was taken in January 2020 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos – behind very much closed doors, of course. The Gates, GAVI (an association of vaccination-promoting pharmaceuticals), Rockefellers, Rothschilds et al, they are all behind this decision – the implementation of Agenda ID2020.

After the pandemic has been officially declared, the next step may be – also at the recommendation either by WHO, or individual countries, “force vaccination”, under police and/or military surveillance. Those who refuse may be penalized (fines and / or jail – and force-vaccinated all the same).

If indeed force-vaccination will happen, another bonanza for Big Pharma, people really don’t know what type of cocktail will be put into the vaccine, maybe a slow killer, that acts-up only in a few years – or a disease that hits only the next generation – or a brain debilitating agent, or a gene that renders women infertile …. all is possible – always with the aim of full population control and population reduction. In a few years’ time, one doesn’t know, of course, where the disease comes from. That’s the level of technology our bio-war labs have reached (US, UK, Israel, Canada, Australia…).

Another hypothesis, at this point only a hypothesis, but a realistic one, is that along with the vaccination – if not with this one, then possibly with a later one, a nano-chip may be injected, unknown to the person being vaccinated. The chip may be remotely charged with all your personal data, including bank accounts – digital money. Yes, digital money that’s what “they” are aiming at, so you really have no control any more over your health and other intimate data, but also over your earnings and spending. Your money could be blocked, or taken away – as a ‘sanction’ for misbehavior, for swimming against the stream. You may become a mere slave of the masters. Comparatively, feudalism may appear like a walk in the park.

It’s not for nothing that Dr. Tedros, DG of WHO, said a few days ago, we must move towards digital money, because physical paper and coin money can spread diseases, especially endemic diseases, like the coronavirus. A precursor for things to come? – Or for things already here? – In many Scandinavian countries cash is largely banned and even a bar of chocalate can be paid only electronically.

We are moving towards a totalitarian state of the world. This is part of Agenda ID2020 – and these steps to be implemented now – prepared since long, including by the coronavirus computer simulation at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore on 18 October 2019, sponsored by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates, one of the chief advocates of vaccinations for everybody, especially in Africa – is also a huge advocate of population reduction. Population reduction is among the goals of the elite within the WEF, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgens – and a few more. The objective: fewer people (a small elite) can live longer and better with the reduced and limited resources Mother Earth is generously offering.

This had openly been propagated already in the 1960s and 70s by Henry Kissinger, Foreign Secretary in de Nixon Administration, a co-engineer of the Vietnam war, and main responsible for the semi-clandestine bombing of Cambodia, a genocide of millions of unarmed Cambodian civilians. Along with the CIA-Kissinger engineered coup on 9/11, 1973, in Chile, killing the democratically elected Salvador Allende and putting the military dictator Pinochet in power, Kissinger has committed war crimes. Today, he is a spokesman (so to speak) for Rockefeller and their  “Bilderberger Society”.

Two weeks after the computer simulation at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, that “produced” (aka simulated) 65 million deaths (!), the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan. By now it is almost certain that the virus was brought to Wuhan from outside, most likely from a bio-war lab in the US. See also this and this.

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity. GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, identifies itself on its website as a global health partnership of public and private sector organizations dedicated to “immunization for all”. GAVI is supported by WHO, and needless to say, its main partners and sponsors are the pharma-industry.

The ID2020 Alliance at their 2019 Summit, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, in September 2019 in New York, decided to roll out their program in 2020, a decision confirmed by the WEF in January 2020 in Davos. Their digital identity program will be tested with the government of Bangladesh. GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and “partners from academia and humanitarian relief” (as they call it), are part of the pioneer party.

Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020?

Here is what Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor of the Bangladesh government program, has to say:

“We are implementing a forward-looking approach to digital identity that gives individuals control over their own personal information, while still building off existing systems and programs. The Government of Bangladesh recognizes that the design of digital identity systems carries far-reaching implications for individuals’ access to services and livelihoods, and we are eager to pioneer this approach.”

Wow! Does Mr. Anir Chowdhury know what he is getting into?

Back to the Pandemic and the panic. Geneva, the European seat of the United Nations, including the headquarters of WHO, is basically shot down. Not unlike the lock-down that started in Venice and later expanded to northern Italy until a few days ago – and now the lock-down covers all of Italy. Similar lock-down may soon also be adopted by France – and other European vassal states to the Anglo-Zionist empire.

Numerous memoranda with similar panic-mongering contents from different UN agencies in Geneva are circulating. Their key message is – cancel all mission travel, all events in Geneva, visits to the Palais des Nations, the Geneva Cathedral, other monuments and museums. The latest directives, many agencies instruct their staff to work from home, not to risk contamination from public transportation.

This ambiance of panic and fear – outstrips any sense of reality, when the truth doesn’t matter. People can’t even think any more about the causes and what may be behind it. Nobody believes you (anymore), when you refer to Event 201, the coronavirus simulation, the Wuhan Military Games, the closing last August 7, of the high-security biological war lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland…. what could have at one point been an eye opener for many, today is sheer conspiracy theory. The power of propaganda. A destabilizing power – destabilizing countries and people, destroying economies, creating hardship for people who may lose their jobs, usually the ones who can least afford it.

Also, at this time it becomes increasingly important to remind people that the outbreak in China was targeting the Chinese genome. Did it later mutate to transgress the ‘borders’ of Chinese DNA? When did that happen, if it happened? Because at the beginning it was clear that even the infected victims in other parts of the world, were to 99.9% of Chinese descent.

What happened later, when the virus spread to Italy and Iran, is another issue, and opens the way to a number of speculations.

(i) There were various strains of the virus circulated in sequence – so as to destabilize countries around the world and to confound the populace and media, so that especially nobody of the mainstream may come to the conclusion that the first strain was targeting China in a bio-war.

(ii) In Iran, I have a strong suspicion that the virus was an enhanced form of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, man-made, broke out first in Saudi Arabia in 2012 , directed to the Arabic genome) – which was somehow introduced into government circles (by aerosol spray?) – with the goal of “Regime Change” by COVID19-caused death. Its Washington’s wishful thinking for at least the last 30 years.

(iii) In Italy – why Italy? – Maybe because Washington / Brussels wanted to hit Italy hard for having been officially the first country to sign a Belt and Road (BRI) accord with China (actually the first was Greece, but nobody is supposed to know that China came to the rescue of Greece, destroyed by Greece’s brothers, the EU members, mainly Germany and France).

(iv) The hype about the high death to infection rate in Italy, as of the time of this writing: 10,149 infections vs. 631 deaths = death rate of 6.2 (comparatively Iran: 8042 infections vs. 291 deaths = 3.6 death rate). The death rate of Italy is almost double that of Iran and almost ten-fold that of average Europe. (Are these discrepancies the result of failures in the establishing reliable data pertaining to “infections”, see our observations pertaining to Italy below).

Why? – Was is Italy being affected with virus panic? Was there a much stronger strain introduced to Italy?

The common flu in Europe in the 2019 / 2020 season, has apparently so far killed about 16,000 (in the US the death toll is, according to CDC between 14,000 and 32,000, depending on which CDC website you look at).

Could it be that among the Italian coronavirus deaths there were also common flu victims, as the affected victims are mostly elderly with respiratory preconditions? Also, symptoms are very similar between coronavirus and the common flu, and nobody questions and checks the official authorities’ narrative?

Maybe not all the coronavirus strains come from the same laboratory. A journalist from Berlin of Ukrainian origin, told me this morning that Ukraine is host to some 5 high security US bio-war labs. They test regularly new viruses on the population – yet, when strange diseases break out in the surroundings of the labs, nobody is allowed to talk about it. Something similar, she says, is happening in Georgia, where there are even more Pentagon / CIA bio-war labs – and where also new and strange diseases break out.

All of this makes the composite picture even more complicated. Overarching all is this super hype is profit driven, the quest for instant profit, instant benefits from the suffering of the people. This panic making is a hundred-fold of what it’s worth. What these kingpins of the underworld, who pretend to run the upper world, perhaps miscalculated, is that in today’s globalized and vastly outsourced world the west depends massively on China’s supply chain, for consumer goods, and for intermediary merchandise – and, foremost for medication and medical equipment. At least 80% of medication or ingredients for medication, as well as for medical equipment comes from China. The western China dependence for antibiotics is even higher, some 90%.  The potential impacts on health are devastating.

During the height of the COVID-19 epidemic China’s production apparatus for everything was almost shut-down. For deliveries that were still made, merchandise vessels were regularly and categorically turned back from many harbors all around the world. So, the west has tricked itself into a shortage-of-everything mode by waging a  de facto “economic war” on China. How long will it last? – Nobody knows, but China’s economy which was down by about half, has rapidly recovered to above 80% of what it was before the coronavirus hit. How long will it last to catch up with the backlog?

What is behind it all? – A total crackdown with artificially induced panic to the point where people are screaming “help, give us vaccinations, display police and military for our security” – or even if the public despair doesn’t go that far, it would be easy for the EU and US authorities to impose a military stage of siege for “health protection of the people”. In fact, CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta), has already designed harshly dictatorial directives for a “health emergency”.

Along with forced vaccination, who knows what would be contained in the cocktail of ‘’mini-diseases” injected, and what their long-term effects might be. Similar to those of GMOs, where all sorts of germs could be inserted without us, the commons, knowing?

We may indeed be just at the beginning of the implementation of ID2020 – which includes, forced vaccination, population reduction and total digital control of everybody – on the way to One World Order – and global financial hegemony – Full Spectrum Dominance, as the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) likes to call it.

A windfall for China. China has been purposely targeted for “economic destruction”, because of her rapidly advancing economy, an economy soon to overtake that of the now hegemon, the US of A, and because of China’s strong currency, the Yuan, also potentially overtaking the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency.

Both occurrences would mean the end of US dominance over the world. The coronavirus disease, now in more than 80 countries, has crashed the stock markets, a decline of at least 20% over the last few weeks – and rising; the feared consequences from the virus of an economic slow-down, if not recession, has slashed petrol prices within about two weeks almost in half. However, without China’s central bank interference, the Yuan’s value vis-à-vis the dollar has been rather stable, at around 7 Yuan to the dollar. That means, the Chinese economy, despite COVID-19, is receiving still much trust around the globe.

Advice to China – buy all the US and European corporate shares you can at current rock-bottom prices from the stock markets that collapsed by a fifth or more, plus buy lots of oil futures. When the prices recover, you have not only made billions, probably trillions from the west, but you also may own or hold significant and influence-yielding amounts of shares in most of the largest US and European corporations – and will be able to help call the shots of their future endeavors.

There is however, one little silver lining oscillating at the horizon full of dark clouds. It could miraculously be an awakening of consciousness of a critical mass that could put an end to it all. Although, we seem to be far from such a miracle, somewhere in a hidden corner of our brain, we all have a spark of consciousness left. We have the spiritual capacity to abandon the disaster path of western neoliberal capitalism, and instead espouse solidarity, compassion and love for each other and for our society. That may be the only way to break the gridlock and doom of western egocentric greed.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world, including in Palestine, in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Source: Global Research

Noam Chomsky: Sanders Threatens the Establishment by Inspiring Popular Movements| Truthout

Editor’s Note: While I don’t agree with Chomsky’s assertions that Trump committed numerous crimes (which were neither enumerated or specified even in the impeachment process), or that Trump naively be compared to Hitler, Chomsky’s analysis of the current political situation on the left is of great value.

The impeachment trial of Donald Trump for power abuses is winding down, with his acquittal all but ensured when the Senate reconvenes on Wednesday to vote on the articles of impeachment. Yet, his real crimes continue to receive scant attention, and it is Sen. Bernie Sanders who is regarded by the political establishment as the most dangerous politician because of his commitment to a just and equitable social order and a sustainable future. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the Davos meeting in January demonstrated the global elites’ ongoing commitment to unimpeded planetary destruction.

This is indeed the state of the contemporary U.S. political environment, as the great public intellectual Noam Chomsky points out in thisexclusive interview for Truthout.

C.J. Polychroniou: The impeachment trial of Donald Trump is nearly over, and what a farce it has been — something you had predicted from the start, which is also the reason why you thought that an impeachment inquiry was a rather foolish move on the part of the Democrats. With that in mind, what does this farcical episode tell us about the contemporary state of U.S. politics, and do you anticipate any political fallout in the 2020 election?

Noam Chomsky: It seemed clear from the outset that the impeachment effort could not be serious, and would end up being another gift by the Democrats to Trump, much as the Mueller affair was. Any doubts about its farcical nature were put to rest by its opening spectacle: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts struggling to keep a straight face while swearing in senators who solemnly pledged that they would be unmoved by partisan concerns, and at once proceeded as everyone know they would to behave and vote along strictly party lines. Could there be a clearer exhibition of pure farce?

Are the crimes discussed a basis for impeachment? Seems so to me. Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other deviants, along with tens of millions of Slav Untermenschen. But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species).

Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely.

Is that a wild and ludicrous exaggeration? Or the very simple and apparent truth? It’s not difficult to figure out the answer. We’ve discussed it often before. There is no need to review what is happening on Trump’s watch while he devotes every effort to accelerating the race to catastrophe, trailed by such lesser lights as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Australia’s Scott Morrison.

Every day brings new forebodings. We have just learned, for example, that the gigantic Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has been eroding from warm water below. The Washington Postdescribes this as “a troubling finding that could speed its melt in a region with the potential to eventually unleash more than 10 feetof sea-level rise,” adding, “Scientists already knew that Thwaites was losing massive amounts of ice more than 600 billion tonsover the past several decades, and most recently as much as 50 billion tons per year.It has now been confirmed, as suspected, thatthis was occurring because a layer of relatively warmer ocean water, which circles Antarctica below the colder surface layer, had moved closer to shore and begun to eat away at the glaciers themselves, affecting West Antarctica in particular.The chief scientist involved in the study warns that this may signalan unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise.

That’s today. Tomorrow will be something worse.

What’s causing the warmer water? No secret. This is only one of the likely irreversible tipping points that may be reached if “the Chosen One,” as he modestly describes himself, is granted another four years to carry out his project of global destruction.

We have just witnessed an extraordinary event at the January Davos meeting of the Masters of the Universe, as they are called; for Adam Smith, they were only “the masters of mankind,” but 250 years ago it was just British merchants and manufacturers.

The conference opened with Trump’s oration about what a fabulous creature he is. The encomium was interrupted only by a comment that we should not bealarmistabout the climate. His Magnificence was followed by the quiet and informed comments of a 17-year old girl instructing the heads of state, CEOs, media leaders and grand intellectuals about what it means to be a responsible adult.

Quite a spectacle.

Trump’s war on organized life on Earth is only the barest beginning. More narrowly, in recent days, the Chosen One has issued executive orders ridding the country of the plague of regulations that protect children from mercury poisoning and preserve the country’s water supplies and lands, along with other impediments to further enrichment of Trump’s primary constituency, extreme wealth and corporate power.

On the side, he has been casually proceeding to dismantle the last vestiges of the arms control regime that has provided some limited degree of security from terminal nuclear war, eliciting cheers from the military industry. And as we have just learned, the great pacifist who is committed to end interventions “dropped more bombs and other munitions in Afghanistan last year than any other year since documentation began in 2006, Air Force data shows.

He is also ramping up his acts of war which is what they are against Iran. I won’t even go into his giving Israel what the Israeli press calls “a gift to the right,” formally giving the back of his imperial hand to international law, the World Court, the UN Security Council and overwhelming international opinion, while shoring up the Evangelical vote for the 2020 election. The prerogative of supreme power.

In brief, the list of Trump’s crimes is immense, not least the worst crime in human history. But none merit a nod in the impeachment proceedings. This is hardly a novelty; rather the norm. The current proceedings are often compared with Watergate. Nixon’s hideous crimes were eliminated from the charges against him despite the efforts of Rep. Robert Frederick Drinan and a few others. The Nixon impeachment charges focused on his illegal acts to harm Democrats.

Any resemblance to the farce that is now winding up? Does it suggest some insight into what motivates the powerful?

Speaking of the 2020 election, the corporate Democratic establishment and the liberal media are once again mobilizing to undermine Bernie Sanders, even though he may very well be the most electable Democrat. First, can you summarize for us what you perceive to be the core of Sanders’s politico-ideological gestalt, and then explain what scares both conservatives and liberals the possibility of someone like Sanders leading the country?

The core of Sanders’spolitico-ideological gestaltis his long-standing commitment to the interests of the large majority of the population, not the top 0.1 percent (not 1 percent, 0.1 percent) who hold more than 20 percent of the country’s wealth, not the very rich who were the prime beneficiaries of the slow recovery from the 2008 disaster caused by financial capital. The U.S. achievement in this regard far surpasses that of other developed countries, so we learn from recently released studies, which show that in the U.S., 65 percent of the growth of the past decade went to the very rich; next in line was Germany, at 51 percent, then declining sharply. The same studies show that if current trends persist, in the next decade all growth in the U.S. will go to the rich.

The welfare of these sectors has never been Sanders’s concern.

The Democratic establishment and liberal media are hardly likely to look kindly on someone who forthrightly proclaims, I have no use for those regardless of their political partywho hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass…. Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.By right to work” laws, for example, or by hiring scabs, or by threatening to ship jobs to Mexico to undermine organizing efforts, to sample the bipartisan political leadership.

That’s surely the kind of socialist wild man whom the country is not ready to tolerate.

The wild man in this case is President Dwight Eisenhower, the last conservative president. His remarks are a good illustration of how far the political class has shifted to the right under Clintonite “New Democrats” and the Reagan-Gingrich Republicans. The latter have drifted so far off the political spectrum that they are ranked near neo-fascist parties in the international spectrum, well to the right of “conservatives.”

Even more threatening than Sanders’s proposals to carry forward New Deal-style policies, I think, is his inspiring a popular movement that is steadily engaged in political action and direct activism to change the social order — a movement of people, mostly young, who have not internalized the norms of liberal democracy: that the public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who are to be “spectators, not participants in action,” entitled to push a lever every four years but are then to return to their TV sets and video games while the “responsible men” look after serious matters.

This is a fundamental principle of democracy as expounded by prominent and influential liberal 20thcentury American intellectuals, who took cognizance of “the stupidity of the average man” and recognized that we should not be deluded by “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” They are not; we are — the “responsible men,” the “intelligent minority.” The “bewildered herd” must therefore be “put in their place” by “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent simplifications.” These are among the pronouncements of the most influential 20thcentury public intellectual, Walter Lippmann, in his “progressive essays on democracy”; Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science; and Reinhold Niebuhr, the admired “theologian of the (liberal) establishment.” All highly respected Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberals.

Inspiring a popular movement that violates these norms is a serious attack on democracy, so conceived, an intolerable assault against good order.

I believe we witnessed something similar in the last U.K. elections in the case of Jeremy Corbyn. Do you agree? And, if so, what does this tell us about liberal democracy, which is nowadays in serious trouble itself on account of the rise and spread of authoritarianism and the far right in many parts of the world?

There are definite similarities. Corbyn, a decent and honorable man, was subjected to an extraordinary flood of vilification and defamation, which he was unable to confront. At the same time, polls indicated that the policies that he put forth and that had led to a remarkable victory for Labour in 2017 remained popular. A special feature in the U.K. was Brexit, a matter I won’t go into here (my personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it is a serious blow to both Britain and the EU, and is likely to cause Britain — or what remains of it — to become even more of a vassal of the U.S. than it has been under Blair’s New Labour and the Tories, whose social and economic policies have caused the country great harm). Corbyn’s vacillation on the Brexit issue, which became a toxic one, surely contributed to the negative feelings about him that seem to have been a major factor in the electoral disaster for Labour, but it was only one.

As in the case of Sanders, I suspect that the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organization that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to far broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.

More generally, much of the world is aflame. As the men of Davos recognized with trepidation at their January meeting, the peasants are coming with their pitchforks: The neoliberal order they have imposed for the past 40 years, while ultra-generous to them and their class, has had a bitter impact on the general population. A leading theme at Davos was that the Masters must declare that they are changing their stance from service to the rich to attending to the concerns of “stakeholders” — working people and communities. Another theme was that while not “alarmists,” they acknowledge the threat of global warming.

The unstated implication is that there is no need for regulations and other actions about climate change: We Big Boys will take care of it. Greta Thunberg and the other children demonstrating out there can go back to school. And now that we see the flaws in our neoliberal model of capitalism, you can put aside all those disruptive political programs calling for health care, rights of workers, women, the poor. We’re taking care of it, so just go back to your private pursuits, keeping to democratic norms.

As the neoliberal order is visibly collapsing, it is giving rise to “morbid symptoms” (to borrow Gramsci’s famous phrase when the fascist plague was looming). Among these are the spread of authoritarianism and the far right that you mention. More generally, what we are witnessing is quite understandable anger, resentment and contempt for the political institutions that have implemented the neoliberal assault — but also the rise of activist movements that seek to overcome the ills of global society and to stem and reverse the race to destruction.

The confrontation could hardly have been exhibited more dramatically than by the appearance of Greta Thunberg immediately after the most powerful man in the worldthe leader in the race to destruction had admonished the Masters to disdain the “heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers” (virtually 100 percent of climate scientists) and to take up his wrecking ball.

Source: Truthout