Sandra Finley

Dec 122021
 
If you don’t want to contribute to building this global prison, you have to actually take action and change how and who you do business with, says Catherine Austin Fitts.

by Dr. Joseph Mercola, on Children’s Health Defense

The “Planet Lockdown Part 2” interview above features finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, founder of the Solari Report.

Story at-a-glance:

  • In 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government by the central banks. Our retirement funds have been looted and will within just a few years be nonexistent.
  • Historically, U.S. intelligence agencies have primarily worked on behalf of the central bankers.
  • Central bankers are now putting into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representation.
  • The central bankers, most of whom are technocrats, have created a breakaway society, a parallel society, in which they are above all law and control everything.
  • To combat their control system, we must first be able to see it for what it is and realize how it’s being used by us, to our own detriment.

 

The “Planet Lockdown Part 2” interview above features finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, founder of the Solari Report.

INSERT:  This is a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) posting.  There is an excellent interview (video) of Fitts.  I’ll try to get it inserted in here.  Having some trouble.  Suggest:  Find it on CHD – you will be rewarded.

Fitts has spent decades exposing corruption and fraud, both within the banking industry and government, and corruption and fraud are driving forces in the COVID pandemic as well. She got her start on Wall Street, where she had a successful career for over a decade.

In 1989, she became the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Bush administration. After 18 months, she resigned, but while there, she discovered how technology could make the financing of neighborhoods more productive.

“Government money was destroying neighborhoods, not helping them,” she says, but private entrepreneurs could take this new technology and finance privately. To that end, Fitts started an investment bank and broker dealer named Hamilton Securities Group.

A couple of years later, they were hired by the federal housing administration to be the lead financial adviser, which gave Fitts access to “incredibly rich databases about how the real estate, land and a lot of the mortgage financing and home building works in America’s 3,100 counties.”

Fitts continues:

“Then I entered a period where I litigated with the federal government for 11 years. The Department of Justice seized all the databases and all the software tools, and I litigated with the federal government. That’s [what] forced me to really dive into how the control systems were working.

“When I was in Wall Street, I saw how the financial control systems worked, but since so much is rigged through the central bank and through government, it gave me a chance to really see how government worked on the covert side, and how that related to Wall Street and Washington.”

Our retirement funds have been looted

In 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government, Fitts says. In essence, it was “a coup d’etat by financial means.”

She realized then the extent to which our government was siphoning — stealing — the money. “They were stealing everybody’s retirement,” Fitts says.

“Everybody’s going to retire in 20 or 30 years, but they were going to steal the money upfront. So, by the time we got to where we are now, the money would be gone and they could turn to everybody and say, ‘Well, we can’t really afford your retirement.’”

On Wall Street, you have markets and monetary policy run by the central banks, and then you have the electorate, which influences fiscal policy and the government. So, it’s a dual pillar system.

Markets are managed centrally. So, central banks, which control monetary policy, can simply print money, and the military then makes sure the money is taken up, which keeps everything liquid.

Fitts explains:

“The economic equation is: Can you make more money from printing than you have to spend on the military and making the system go? I’ll give you an example. In the 1980s, we had a period of tremendous monetary expansion.

“In the last year of the decade, in ‘89, there was a huge fight in the Dillon partnership [Dillon, Read & Co Inc.] about how much money should be paid to the traders for bonuses.

“I had a wonderful partner who did a study, showing that … if instead of having traders in the seats, we’d had chimpanzees, we would’ve made more money. It was very interesting because you’d go out to the Hamptons on the weekends and you’d … hear everybody talking about making fantastic amounts of money because they were brilliant and geniuses and smart and clever.

“But it wasn’t [because of their smarts]. It was just simply the monetary policy floating the boats … A lot of the money comes from economic warfare. So, [when] you pump up the dollar, you’re moving money out of the U.S. government. As we’re coming through this big change of globalization, you loan massive amounts of dollars.

“And then all of a sudden you pull all the loans. You throw them into a dead-end trap. You pull the money and then they get a crash. Now your dollar is high. So, you go and buy up everything on the cheap.

“The governance structure that existed before the financial coup was basically: You have the central banks running monetary policy, and then you have the sovereign government running fiscal policy.

“The citizens pay taxes to the sovereign government, and they elect representatives who have something say about how that fiscal money gets [divided] up.

“Then you have private central bankers and private interests who control monetary policy and are relatively independent of the fiscal. What we’ve seen [is that] … the less the government has information sovereignty and financial sovereignty, the more dependent it is on the central bankers.

“So, as the government have levered up with debt and lost their informational and financial sovereignty — part of this is what’s happened with digital technology — the central bankers have gotten more and more powerful.

“Since fiscal [year] 1998, we’ve had what I call the financial coup d’etat. So, in the United States, up to $100 trillion have been moved out. Dr. Skidmore and I did a study, and as of 2015, the number was $21 trillion …

“At that exact time, we had $20 trillion of debt. So, there was more money disappearing than there was debt. [So, they were taking that] money out. That’s the financial coup. Now that the money is out, you can collapse the government.”

Why central bankers are intentionally collapsing government

Importantly, Fitts stresses that government doesn’t have the power to make illegal transactions. The central banks — which are privately owned — must be involved in order for that to occur. The private banks “are doing it for them,” Fitts explains.

“So, we’ve now reached the point where the central banks are moving in and basically taking control of fiscal policy as well,” she says. “And this is why there’s such a big debate about election fraud.

“Essentially the computer systems are controls for the elections, and essentially, the citizens or taxpayers have lost any say. If you look at polls over the last 10 years, the citizens want the country to go to the right, and Congress votes to go to the left. That’s because increasingly these people are controlled and dependent on what the central bankers want.

“There’s a great interview that Chuck Schumer, the senator from New York did at the beginning of the Trump administration, where he basically said that if Trump thinks he’s going to contradict or defy the CIA, he’s dreaming; they have 50 ways from Sunday to get you. And traditionally, if you look at the U.S. intelligence agencies, they basically worked for the central bankers.

“So, what’s happening is we’re watching a reengineering of this fiscal line. You’re basically looking at the central bankers moving to put into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representation. That’s the trick, financially. How do you force the citizens to pay taxes with no representation?“Of course, they’re using the pandemic to roll in the system that will make it possible for them to achieve that. Naomi Wolf has done a very good job of describing this, and she said, ‘Vaccine passports are the end of human liberty in the west.’

“She’s right, because ultimately, what it’s going to evolve into is a financial transaction system where, if you don’t behave, the central banks can take money right out of your account. They can stop you from transacting.”

An example Fitts gives is, say the central bankers (read totalitarian rulers of the whole world) don’t want you to be able to travel. They want you to stay put where you are.

They can easily accomplish this, in this planned system, by programming your electric car such that it cannot operate past that five-mile boundary line.

They will also have full control over the function of money in this system, meaning they can decide what you are allowed to spend your money on. They could decide they don’t want you to have fresh food, so you can only use the central bank digital currency for processed food.

We’ve been lured to create our own prison

The central bankers are nothing if not clever when it comes to prototyping. They don’t do anything without first running many tests to see what will work best. But they don’t just hire top experts.

No, instead, they persuade the top developers that they can make a ton of money by developing these prototypes. They make it fun and innovative, allowing skilled people to come up with the ideas.

Once a successful prototype has been identified, they then build their own version of that. In the case of cryptocurrencies, their version is a central bank digital currency under centralized control.

Another part of the complete system is the smart grid, which was prototyped, developed and rolled out in recent years. The smart grid is, of course, a requirement for the surveillance apparatus that is at the heart of it all.

While all of these things, cryptocurrencies, the smart grid, artificial intelligence technologies and the like, are marketed as a way to make us all freer, the intended result is a global prison system where no one is free.

The good news here is that they must get the general population to build their own prisons. The answer then, is that once you see how it’s done, you can just stop. Stop building the prison walls. Stop building and contributing to the surveillance grid.

This could mean quitting your job if you work for a company that is involved in developing and building technologies intended for this control grid. But even if you don’t actually perform work that helps build it, you are still participating in the control grid structure by using surveillance tools like Facebook and Google.

By allowing smart meters to be installed in your home, by buying and using AI-based technologies and “smart” technologies, by allowing GPS tracking on your phone and so on.

If you don’t want to contribute to building this global prison, you have to actually take action and change how and who you do business with.

“If you look at a lot of the financial fraud over the last 20 years in the United States, the leader of that financial fraud in many cases was JPMorgan Chase. Yet statistics show that 50% of Americans bank or have credit cards or other relationships with JPMorgan Chase.

“In 1998, when I first realized what was happening with the mortgage fraud and JPMorgan Chase was at the heart of it, I was writing a check on a JPMorgan Chase banking account. And I said, ‘Why am I banking [with JPMorgan]? Why am I allowing my funds to be used as deposits to engineer financial fraud? I’ve got to come clean.’

“Forget about protesting. If tomorrow, everybody woke up and said, ‘You know, I’m not going to bank with the New York fed member banks,’ the change would be dramatic, because if you look at where we’re banking and who we’re working for and who we’re associating with, we’re helping them do this.

“Remember this is an all-digital system. One aspect of this is currency, but the other is a one-way mirror where you have 24/7 surveillance and data. So not only can I watch you 24/7 and collect data from your body, from your mind, from your activities, but then I can stop you from moving around spatially, or I can turn off your ability to transact.”

The control system and transaction system are one

As noted by Fitts, the system being built is both a control system and a transaction system. The transaction system, however, is not based on what we consider a real currency.

It’s actually the end of currencies, because in this system, you can never take the currency out of the bank and put it in your pocket. You can only conduct transactions that are validated and approved through and by the central bank.

Remember, the 24/7 surveillance system “can literally get the human race to be connected to the cloud, to the AI, the software and the robots,” Fitts says. “We’re talking about connecting the human race to a cloud where they teach the AI, the software and the robots, how to do their jobs.”

In short, we are actively engineering a future where we, humans, have been largely eliminated from the workplace.

Those who remain will be integrated with robotics. “In other words, whether I have a human do that job, or whether I have a robot do that job, I can manage them in the same system if I can have them all hooked up to the cloud and communicating with each other.”

Basically, what we’re looking at is transhumanism, and we’re quite literally dehumanizing ourselves. This system will also do away with markets, because what we think of as markets will be micromanaged and optimized through artificial intelligence and software.

What do you want?

Knowing this, the options become rather simple. As noted by Fitts, we can have a human civilization, or we can have an inhuman civilization. We can have a financial system where private monopoly controls the printing of money, or we can have a decentralized system.

I agree with Fitts, who states that the world she wants to live in is where the financial printing press has been decentralized, and where we are committed to human civilization — not a transhumanist one run by technocrats.

As crazy as this transhuman technocratic future may sound to the everyday person, it’s clear the technocrats believe their system can work.

“I think they believe it can work because of the one-way mirror,” Fitts says. “[Let’s say] you have a one-way year where you have 100% access to the data, 24/7, of all the people on this side of the mirror.

“Remember, once you engineer all this secret money in taxation without representation, they [the people] can’t see behind the mirror. The thing that punches a hole in the mirror is transparency about government money, and no taxation without representation.”

Creating a breakaway civilization

This is why the central bank takeover of the sovereign governments is so important, because this takeover allows them to create a system in which the two sides of the mirror are two entirely separate civilizations.

Those behind the mirror — you and I — cannot see what the technocrats are doing on the other side, while they can see every last thing we do and say. “You’re literally talking about a parallel universe,” Fitts says.

Those behind the mirror, the technocratic rulers, do not obey any law that applies to those of us on the other side of the mirror. They are not subject to the law. They have complete immunity from prosecution.

“They can engage in systematic violation of what you and I think of as the law, with impunity,” Fitts says. “And if you look at how much money has been moved out in the financial coup, they can literally become a parallel civilization.”

They’re trying to sell you on being a serf

 

 

The vaccine passport is clearly the tool of choice for the authoritarian globalists’ plan to deprive you and your family of your freedom and personal liberties. This financial coup is 20 years in the making.

They voted on the “direct reset” plan (aka The Great Reset), they wrote the plan, and have been implementing that plan, year by year, step by step.

We’re now in the end game, Fitts says, where they need to consolidate everything. Now, with their vote for The Great Reset, the central bankers made the decision to put 500 million people out of work over the next year alone.

“That’s the equivalent of dropping several nuclear bombs around the world. That’s financial warfare, and they made it intentionally,” Fitts says. “They made it knowingly. It was a plan. And what is very important to understand, when you think about this pandemic, is people are not dying from magic viruses.

“People are dying from tyranny, they’re dying from a great poisoning. That’s part of that tyranny, but our problem, and the thing we need to be afraid of, is tyranny. Because the tyranny needs, and is about to get much, much worse.

“It’s the passports and that system of central bank digital control that will give them the ability to do that. The world economic forum calls it The Great Reset, which is kind of the marketing … The World Economic Forum guys make it interesting and fashionable [to say] ‘In 2030, you own nothing, and you’re happy.’

“Now, what I hear is ‘It’s 2030, the direct reset has stolen all your money, taken all your assets, and they’ve got your mind-controlled.’ The Great Reset is to sell people on a vision of a world where the average person has a much smaller command on resources and assets, and is subject to complete central control.“Part of what you’re dealing with is that human beings crave coherence. And so, if you can put them in a state of incoherence, they will literally do anything they can to get back to coherence. It’s a torture mechanism. If you study torture, it’s a typical torture tactic

“That’s why you see all these people saying, ‘If you just accept the passports, you’ll be free. Or if you get the vaccination, you’ll be free. They have spent a fortune since World War II on figuring out how to use digital technology, telecommunications and media to implement mind control much more economically and much more broadly. And one of the things I think they’re very enthusiastic about how well it has worked.”

Watch the financial transactions

When will it stop working? When enough of us can see what they’re doing.

For example, it’s important to realize that, during this pandemic, people have been bought out of the labor market with federal assistance that pays them more than they were making while working.

This strategy has severely impeded small businesses from getting the labor they need to keep going, and according to Fitts, this is all part of the plan to bankrupt all small businesses.

Of course, the next step will be to require the COVID jab for anyone who wants to collect unemployment or other financial assistance, as the vaccine passport is combined and integrated with the new all-digital central bank transaction system.

Step by step, everyone is being herded into the new control system. But remember, we can stop it, because we’re doing it to ourselves.

The problem is, ending tyranny almost always requires some kind of sacrifice. End tyranny is rarely a comfortable or profitable venture. That said, there are countless ways to fight back.

Prayer war room and other suggestions

Fitts tells the story of a woman fighting corruption in her hometown. She was scared because taking it to the next level would require her to go public, and she was a very private person.

Fitts suggested she watch the film “War Room,” a Christian movie about prayer. “Start a war room and just fight them through prayer,” Fitts told her. Apparently, it worked wonders.

“So, there are many different ways to fight, and you could fight in a way that’s comfortable. Some people organize, some people are bringing lawsuits. Some people are lobbying. Some people are moving and going to another jurisdiction. Some people are pulling their money out of JPMorgan Chase.

“There are many different ways to do it. If you’re working for a big bank or big corporation, start working on building the skills and the resources and the wherewithal you need to start something yourself.

“Start learning. It’s called DIY — do it yourself.

“Start looking at your financial picture and figuring out … how you can collapse your income statement and your balance sheet to something which is much more resilient, locally, and doing it yourself.

“We don’t need to get mortgaged up and get dependent on the system. The third thing is, for God’s sakes, go out and get yourself a great bank. Particularly if you’re in the United States, there are lots of great banks and great bankers … who also don’t want the central bankers controlling everything.

“I know a lot of community bank presidents who don’t want to be controlled by the New York Fed … So, the first thing you need to do is swing your money out of — if you’re invested in the New York fed member banks, or in the big corporations that are running government this way — swing your money out of those stocks and start investing in building a local food system.

“Who’s your farmer, who’s your rancher? Where are you going to get high-quality fresh food? There is tremendous opportunity to build out the local, fresh food systems. If you take the time and have patience, there are very good investments to be had there.

“[Next, know] who’s your sheriff. The entire enforcement within a county area is controlled by the sheriff [in the U.S.], and in most counties, the sheriff is elected. Not all but most. The feds cannot come in and do an enforcement action unless the sheriff allows it to occur.

“[Why should you] care about who your state legislators are? Because the state legislators have the power to say no to the federal government, particularly if you’re not willing to escrow your taxes and get into this taxation without representation.

“So, go through your financial statement and your balance sheet and get the bad guys out of your money and start supporting the local guys who are willing to support the rule of law …

“I had a former client who called me and said, ‘I just sold a house, and I want to know, should I put the money into real estate or precious metals?’ And I said, what’s the point of having assets? If you don’t have an army to protect them, meaning if you don’t have litigators, state legislators and sheriffs who are willing to go protect your assets, your assets are worthless; you’ll lose them.

“So, she took the money and gave it to a group of litigators who were litigating some of what’s going on right now. Anytime you can make an investment that permanently reduces your expenses, you’re better off to do it yourself.

“So instead of paying your water bill, build a well. In other words, get your money out of financing the guys who are doing this to you, and get your money into financing yourself, your friends or people you know.

“Trust me, if tyranny controls everything, and tyranny can operate above the law, then nothing’s going to work.

“This is a war. And if we don’t stand up and fight it, now, there will be no way to wiggle around this. There’s no way to outplay it. There’s no place to run. There’s no place to go. So, you’ve got to stand and fight back …

“We have a choice. Everybody has a choice. So, stop building the prison, stop helping these guys and start creating friction. We don’t have to go along. And we’re the ones who are building the prison. So, you have to bring transparency to what’s going on, and then you have to take action.

“We’re not all going to make it out of this process alive. It’s war. That’s what happens in a war, but human liberty is worth fighting for.

“We’re living in a world where there are two visions, and the top 1% have a vision of us as a natural resource, [while] we have a vision of us as individuals with sovereign rights that come to us by divine authority.”

As noted by Fitts, these are two extraordinarily different visions. One option is a society where all people have the ability to exercise our potential. In the other, only a few get to exercise their potential, while the rest have no opportunity at all.

We’re in the end game. It’s all or nothing at this point. There’s no middle ground.

In the end, Fitts and I both believe the plan will fail, but ONLY if we all do our part to prevent it. What’s more, we also need to prepare for what comes after their plan fails. This too could be just as challenging. Fitts notes in conclusion:

“I tell people, while the Titanic is sinking, grab some planks and deck chairs and start building your ark, because these guys are going to make a huge mess. This is a mess. And if you look at what they’re trying to do, it’s very hard, it’s very complicated. I think it’s going to fail.”

Originally published by Mercola.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

 

Dec 122021
 

While Julian Assange endures an endless prison sentence for revealing atrocities perpetrated on innocents during the West’s endless wars, John Pilger turns his gaze to some of the officials, journalists and media outlets who have aided and abetted one of modern history’s greatest and most public episodes of torture.

When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.”

He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasised by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.

For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as “healthcare”, an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.

Julian Assange, pictured in 2011. (IMAGE: The Naked Ape, Flickr)
One day we were allowed to play Monopoly,” he said, “as therapy. That was our healthcare!”“This is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said.“Yes, only more insane.”Julian’s black sense of humour has often rescued him, but no more. The insidious torture he has suffered in Belmarsh has had devastating effects. Read the reports of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the clinical opinions of Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London and Dr Quentin Deeley, and reserve a contempt for America’s hired gun in court, James Lewis QC, who dismissed this as “malingering”.I was especially moved by the expert words of Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London. She told the Old Bailey last year that Julian’s intellect had gone from “in the superior, or more likely very superior, range” to “significantly below” this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and “perform in the low to average range”.At yet another court hearing in this shameful Kafkaesque drama, I watched him struggle to remember his name when asked by the judge to state it.For most of his first year in Belmarsh, Julian was locked up. Denied proper exercise, he strode the length of his small cell, back and forth, back and forth, for “my own half-marathon”, he told me. This reeked of despair. A razorblade was found in his cell. He wrote “farewell letters”. He phoned the Samaritans repeatedly.At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the brutality of his kidnapping from the embassy. When the glasses finally arrived at the prison, they were not delivered to him for days. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, wrote letter after letter to the prison governor protesting the withholding of legal documents, access to the prison library, the use of a basic laptop with which to prepare his case. The prison would take weeks, even months, to answer. (The governor, Rob Davis, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire).
Professor Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. (IMAGE: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. Julian could not call his American lawyers. From the start, he has been constantly medicated. Once, when I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say.

At last week’s High Court hearing to decide finally whether or not Julian would be extradited to America, he appeared only briefly by video link on the first day. He looked unwell and unsettled. The court was told he had been “excused” because of his “medication”. But Julian had asked to attend the hearing and was refused, said his partner Stella Moris. Attendance in a court sitting in judgement on you is surely a right.

This intensely proud man also demands the right to appear strong and coherent in public, as he did at the Old Bailey last year. Then, he consulted constantly with his lawyers through the slit in his glass cage. He took copious notes. He stood and protested with eloquent anger at lies and abuses of process.

The damage done to him in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh (whose brutal regime is celebrated in the latest Bond film) is beyond doubt.

But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt, and a quality of resistance and resilience that is heroism. It is this that may see him through the present Kafkaesque nightmare – if he is spared an American hellhole.

I have known Julian since he first came to Britain in 2009. In our first interview, he described the moral imperative behind WikiLeaks: that our right to the transparency of governments and the powerful was a basic democratic right. I have watched him cling to this principle when at times it has made his life even more precarious.

Almost none of this remarkable side to the man’s character has been reported in the so-called “free press” whose own future, it is said, is in jeopardy if Julian is extradited.

Julian Assange, pictured in the Equadorian embassy in 2014, with Ricardo Patiño, Ecuador’s then Foreign Minister. (IMAGE: David G Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador, Flickr)

Of course, but there has never been a ”free press”. There have been extraordinary journalists who have occupied positions in the “mainstream” – spaces that have now closed, forcing independent journalism on to the internet.

There, it has become a “fifth estate”, a samizdat of dedicated, often unpaid work by those who were honourable exceptions in a media now reduced to an assembly line of platitudes. Words like “democracy”, “reform”, “human rights” are stripped of their dictionary meaning and censorship is by omission or exclusion.

Last week’s fateful hearing at the High Court was “disappeared” in the “free press”. Most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgement on their right to know: their right to question and dissent.

Many Americans, if they know anything about the Assange case, believe a fantasy that Julian is a Russian agent who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. This is strikingly similar to the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justified the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of a million or more people.

They are unlikely to know that the main prosecution witness underpinning one of the concocted charges against Julian has recently admitted he lied and fabricated his “evidence”.

Neither will they have heard or read about the revelation that the CIA, under its former director, the Hermann Goering lookalike Mike Pompeo, had planned to assassinate Julian.  And that was hardly new. Since I have known Julian, he has been under threat of harm and worse.

On his first night in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, dark figures swarmed over the front of the embassy and banged on the windows, trying to get in. In the US, public figures – including Hillary Clinton, fresh from her destruction of Libya – have long called for Julian’s assassination. The current President Biden damned him as a “hi-tech terrorist”.

The former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, was so eager to please what she called “our best mates” in Washington that she demanded Julian’s passport be taken from him – until it was pointed out to her that this would be against the law. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a PR man, when asked about Assange, said, “He should face the music.”

It has been open season on the WikiLeaks’ founder for more than a decade. In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian’s work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.

Julian Assange, pictured in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2016. (IMAGE: Cancillería del Ecuador, Flickr)

Years of vituperative assaults on the man who refused to join their club followed. He was accused of failing to redact documents of the names of those considered at risk. In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.

Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.

The great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told the Old Bailey last year that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took “extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants”.

In 2013,  I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”

Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that “Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit”. His fears were an exaggeration, he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a “manhunt timeline”.

Luke Harding, who co-authored with Leigh the Guardian book that disclosed the password to a trove of diplomatic cables that Julian had entrusted to the paper, was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a line of police, he gloated on his blog, “Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh.”

Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, one of the key media characters in the betrayal of Julian Assange. (IMAGE: Flickr, Alessio Jacona)

The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the depths. “He really is the most massive turd,” wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met.

The editor who presided over this, Alan Rusbridger, has lately joined the chorus that “defending Assange protects the free press”. Having published the initial WikiLeaks revelations, Rusbridger must wonder if the Guardian’s  subsequent excommunication of Assange will be enough to protect his own skin from the wrath of Washington.

The High Court judges are likely to announce their decision on the US appeal in the new year. What they decide will determine whether or not the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation; in the land of Magna Carta this disgraceful case ought to have been hurled out of court long ago.

The missing imperative is not the impact on a collusive “free press”. It is justice for a man persecuted and wilfully denied it.

Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?

John Pilger is a regular contributor to New Matilda, and an award-winning Australian journalist and documentary film-maker. Some of his more famous works include Secret Country, Utopia and Cambodia: Year Zero.

Dec 122021
 

Listen up!

Jim Bronskill,  Canadian Press

If only Canadians would read the article, and take it seriously!  /Sandra

 

The federal privacy watchdog is warning Canadians about the growing threat of surveillance capitalism — the use of personal information by large corporations.

In his annual report tabled Thursday in Parliament, privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said state surveillance — a major concern after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — has been reined in somewhat in recent years.

Meanwhile, personal data has emerged as a highly valuable asset and no one has leveraged it better than the tech giants behind web searches and social media accounts, he said.

“Today, the privacy conversation is dominated by the growing power of tech giants like Facebook and Google, which seem to know more about us than we know about ourselves,” the report said. “Terms like surveillance capitalism and the surveillance economy have become part of the dialogue.”

The risks of surveillance capitalism were on full display in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, now the subject of proceedings in Federal Court because his office did not have the power to order Facebook to comply with its recommendations, Therrien said.

In addition, the law did not allow the commissioner to levy financial penalties to dissuade this kind of corporate behaviour.

Therrien, in his last year as privacy commissioner, is encouraging the federal government to make several improvements to planned legislation on private-sector data-handling practices when it is reintroduced in coming weeks.

Artificial intelligence, the newest frontier of surveillance capitalism, has immense promise in addressing some of today’s most pressing issues, but must be implemented in ways that respect privacy, equality and other human rights, Therrien cautioned.

“Our office’s investigation of Clearview AI’s use of facial recognition technology was an example of where commercial AI deployment fell significantly short of privacy laws.”

The commissioner found Clearview AI violated the private-sector privacy law by creating a databank of billions of images scraped from the internet without consent to fuel its commercial facial recognition software.

Digital technologies like AI, which rely on the collection and analysis of personal data, are at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution and are key to socio-economic development, the report said. “However, they pose major risks to rights and values.”

To draw value from data, the law should accommodate new, unforeseen, but responsible uses of information for the public good, the report added. But the additional flexibility should come within a rights-based framework, given frequent violations of human rights.

Therrien highlighted another trend – the increase in public-private partnerships and the use of corporate expertise to assist state organizations, for instance the RCMP’s association with Clearview AI.

Privacy issues arising from public-private partnerships were also evident in a number of government-led pandemic initiatives involving digital technologies in the last year, the report added. “These issues underscored the need for more consistency across the public and private sector laws.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 

THE PRIVACY COMMISSIONER’S NEWS RELEASE HAS SOME LINKS

To build a more resilient economy, Privacy Commissioner calls on government to make privacy law reform a priority

Last decade has shown benefits and real threats of technology. Respect for values and rights are the foundation for responsible innovation.

GATINEAU, QC, December 9, 2021 – Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien is calling on the government to use its renewed mandate to bring Canada into the modern era by adopting rights-based privacy laws that will reflect Canadian values and support responsible innovation. This would be consistent with the government’s intention in the last Speech from the Throne to grow a more resilient economy that works for everyone.

The final annual report of the Commissioner’s mandate was tabled in Parliament today. The report takes stock of the growing challenges for privacy and the best way forward.

The Commissioner says many key files during his mandate – the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and its impact on democracy, successive data breaches, growing use of facial recognition technology and risks of surveillance, ineffective consent policies and online reputation – identified key threats to privacy and other human rights, and consequently pointed to solutions.

“There is no doubt that the modern economy will increasingly depend on the value of data. The new Parliament must legislate to enable responsible innovation, but this should be done within a rights-based framework that recognizes the fundamental right to privacy. As a society, we must project our values into laws,” Commissioner Therrien says.

“I am encouraged by recent comments made by the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry about reintroducing an amended bill in the New Year.”

The Commissioner urges the government to act as recommended in a recent declaration of G7 Digital and Technology Ministers, who called for a “sustainable, inclusive and human-centric” approach to a post-pandemic prosperity “guided by our shared democratic values of open and competitive markets, strong safeguards including for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and international cooperation…”

In 2020, the government introduced a bill to update Canada’s federal private sector privacy law. It died on the order paper with the election call this summer. The Commissioner’s submission on the bill included some 60 recommendations aimed at ensuring it will do as intended and effectively protect the privacy rights of Canadians.

The government has also indicated its plans to update the federal law setting out privacy obligations in the public sector. It published a paper on possible reforms and completed a public consultation that will inform future legislation.

In recent letters to the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers and party leaders, Commissioner Therrien reiterated his commitment to support legislative reform that promotes the protection of rights as well as responsible innovation and economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic.

He noted that Canada’s privacy regime had already fallen behind the laws of many of its global trading partners, and now it is falling behind domestically, as the provinces step in to fill gaps.

Ontario and Quebec have already put forward proposals towards responsible digital innovation within a legal framework that recognizes privacy as a fundamental human right. Quebec recently passed Bill 64 and Ontario is in the midst of serious consultations about its own law.

“While these initiatives are excellent, they do not absolve the federal government from the responsibility to ensure all Canadians are protected in that manner,” the Commissioner says.

“Federal legislation that would achieve this goal would reassure citizens that they would receive similar protections throughout the country. It would also benefit commercial organizations by setting interoperable norms, reducing compliance costs and increasing competitiveness.”

The Commissioner has also called for common principles to be reflected in federal privacy laws for the public and private sectors. As we’ve seen with several pandemic-related initiatives and the RCMP’s use of Clearview’s facial recognition technology, this is particularly important given the growing reliance on public-private partnerships.

The Commissioner’s 2020-21 annual report also addresses other work under both federal laws. This includes statistical data on complaints and breaches, information about our business and government advisory work, as well as summaries of investigations.

The report discusses the federal government’s engagement with the OPC on a range of files, including numerous initiatives related to COVID-19, border controls and programs that provide benefits during the pandemic.

Related content

Annual report

Commissioner’s statement

Letters to the Prime Minister, Ministers and party leaders on privacy law reform

Submission of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2020

Backgrounder: Jurisdictional comparison: Privacy protections

Dec 072021
 

“This is pure Gestapoism!” said Alberta lawyer Jeff Rath.

(Related to earlier post:

2021-10-05 Lawyer Jeffrey Rath, letter to College of Physicians and Surgeons demanding resignations over mandated vaccines, Melanie Risdon, Western Standard)

 

by Melanie Risdon,  Western Standard

The office of a Calgary doctor was raided Thursday morning by College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA) officials searching for files of people for whom he granted COVID-19 exemptions.

 

And one of the files they accessed was of lawyer Jeffrey Rath — who has filed a lawsuit against the college over vaccine mandates.

 

And the family of a two-year-old whose file was seized says they are considering a lawsuit for the breach of privacy.

 

“They walked in this morning just after 8 a.m. and asked to do an inspection and review of my patient records for the last 180 days,” said Dr. Dan Botha, in an exclusive interview with the Western Standard.

 

Botha said there were two CPSA staff members — an administrator and a doctor — who handed him a one-page letter requesting he provide access to his patient files for the inspectors “under section 53.1 of the Health Professions Act (HPA).”

 

The letter indicated the inspection was to “ensure the issuance of medical exemptions for vaccination against COVID-19 are in adherence to the provincial vaccination exemption program, medical exemptions for face mask are in adherence to provincial public health orders and the prescribing of Ivermectin is in adherence with CPSA Standards of Practice.”

 

“You are expected to cooperate with the inspectors and provide them access to your office records,” said the letter.

 

“They wanted to know if I had written any exemption letters for the vaccine or masks or had been prescribing Ivermectin to my patients,” said Botha.

 

“I told them I had written two — one for a cancer patient of mine and another for a child who has Rett syndrome.”

 

Botha said his cancer patient was undergoing treatment and he had provided the patient with a three-month vaccine exemption until treatments were finished and the patient’s health could be reassessed.

 

He also said he provided a permanent mask exemption to a child he is treating with Rett Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that affects the way the brain develops, causing a progressive loss of motor skills and speech.

 

“I did prescribe Ivermectin with success for COVID-19 treatment with maybe 20 or so patients,” Botha confirmed, but added he stopped prescribing it when it was banned for use in treating COVID-19.

 

Botha said he gave the inspectors access to the information for the two patients he had written medical exemptions for and they asked him to leave his office.

 

“I continued to see patients while they were in my private office for about an hour,” said Botha, adding the pair left while he was with a patient.

 

Botha, clearly shaken by the events that unfolded, said he and his staff “work hard to look after the public” and claims his practice follows “very high standards.”

 

“We never speak against the vaccine here and always refer patients to the government website and encourage them to contact the government as well if they have any questions or concerns,” said Botha.

 

“I’ve been a physician for over 38 years and I’m not against any government policy, but this is starting to feel like harassment.”

 

Botha said he checked his computer and could see the inspectors had accessed 28 patient files, including the medical files for his patient, lawyer Rath.

 

“Out of the 10,000 files on my system, they specifically accessed Mr. Rath’s file along with others,” said Botha.

 

Rath, of Rath & Company, was outraged by the raid.

 

“CPSA just raided my doctor’s office and illegally accessed my own personal medical file without my consent,” said Rath.

 

“My GP called me to inform me that the CPSA had stormed his office this morning under section 53 of the Health Act to ‘randomly review some of his patient files’ and it just so happened that my file was one they randomly chose,” said an angry Rath.

 

“This is pure Gestapoism!”

 

Rath has actively challenged the CPSA on a number of occasions while representing medical professionals and clients who are pushing back against the mandatory vaccination policy.

 

Rath spoke with the mother of the child Botha had provided a mask exemption for shortly after the raid at the doctor’s office and said she has given her full consent for Rath to speak on her behalf.

 

“This child cannot sit unassisted and is in a constant state of respiratory distress,” quoted Rath on behalf of the mother.

 

“This mother has advised our office (Rath & Company) that she is contemplating legal action against the CPSA for the gross violation of her family’s right to medical privacy and the degree to which her family has been traumatized by this completely unethical and immoral conduct by the CPSA.”

 

Rath said he is “furious” with the CPSA.

 

“I am completely appalled by the CPSA investigators, including Jason MacDonald and Dr. Jeff Robinson, that they would think it’s appropriate to access the private medical file of an officer of the court who is engaged in litigation on behalf of my clients with the CPSA,” said Rath.

 

Botha, runs Rhythm Health, a family medical practice in southwest Calgary.

 

His website reads: “Dr. Dan Botha has been practicing medicine in Calgary for the past 25 years. In 1983 he graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery from the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.”

 

The Western Standard contacted the CPSA for comment and was provided with this statement from a CPSA spokeswoman:

 

“Under Part 3.1 of the Health Professions Act (HPA), CPSA has the authority to conduct unannounced on-site clinic inspections to confirm that physicians adhere to our Standards of Practice. These are being facilitated when a certain threshold is breached.

 

“As we’ve seen an increase in the number of concerns submitted from both regulated members and Albertans during the pandemic, CPSA felt it was important to take this approach, to ensure patients across the province are receiving safe and competent care that is compliant with public health measures.

 

“There are a number of outcomes that can occur from these inspections, such as a referral to CPSA’s Continuing Competence team for an educational intervention, or to the Professional Conduct department in cases where allegations of unprofessional conduct are substantiated. A practice restriction can be imposed on a physician’s practice permit in a number of different ways under the HPA, including as a result of an inspection. A practice restriction on a physician’s practice permit is public information available on the physician’s profile on the CPSA website.”

 

More to come…

 

Melanie Risdon is a reporter with the Western Standard

mrisdon@westernstandardonline.com

 

= = = = = = = = = =  =

Nov 25,  Western Standard

Opinion

SLOBODIAN: Kenney needs to stop ‘criminal’ searches of doctors’ offices

Do not relent on the demand for a criminal investigation and sue their sorry asses off.

Accessing medical files under allegedly false pretenses while a legal challenge is underway is despicable and can’t be legal.

This kind of medical “fascism” has no place in Canada.

Investigators for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA) went too far with what could be interpreted as either a shut-up tactic or dirt-digging hunt against Jeffrey Rath, a lawyer acting on behalf of several clients involved in litigation against the CPSA.

If the two CPSA investigators who raided a doctor’s office Thursday get away with this shockingly unethical stunt, then no one — vaccinated or unvaccinated — will be safe from these tyrants who think they have the authority to do whatever they want, rights and freedoms and privacy be damned.

This is utterly chilling. Jeff Rath, of Rath & Company, called it “medical fascism.” He’s right.

CPSA investigators Dr. Jeff Robinson and Jason MacDonald searched the files of Calgary family practitioner Dr. Dan Botha for patients he granted COVID-19 medical exemptions.

One of the few files — out of about 10,000 — they suspiciously accessed was Rath’s.

“We’re in active litigation with these people and they think they can send investors in to access my medical files,” Rath told Western Standard.

“I wonder how a judge would feel if a judge found out these people could go through a judge’s medical file while a hearing with regard to the College’s conduct was before that particular judge.”

You can bet Alberta Health Services (AHS) — which pushes the boundaries of its authority beyond acceptable limits — had its mitts on this.

Apparently, AHS didn’t let Premier Jason Kenney in on the plot.

“Neither the premier nor the Premier’s Office has any knowledge of the alleged events you describe. You’d need to contact the College of Physicians and Surgeons directly,” said spokesman Christine Myatt.

The investigators searched Botha’s files under the guise of a benign practice review they alleged was part of normal oversight procedures under the Health Professions Act.

Botha told Western Standard’s Melanie Risdon he was handed a one-page letter requesting he provide access to his patient files for the inspectors “under section 53.1 of the Health Professions Act (HPA).” It indicated the inspection was to “ensure the issuance of medical exemptions for vaccination against COVID-19 are in adherence to the provincial vaccination exemption program, medical exemptions for face mask are in adherence to provincial public health orders and the prescribing of Ivermectin is in adherence with CPSA Standards of Practice.”

This raid came from the CPSA, said Rath.

“I’ve sent several letters to the College of Physicians and Surgeons regarding concerns that my clients have with the CPSA basically interfering in doctor/patient relationships in Alberta. They’re telling doctors what they can and can’t prescribe, telling doctors what exceptions they can and can’t write,” said Rath.

“A week or so ago I wrote the College a letter saying how dare you tell doctors what medical exemptions they can’t write or threaten doctors with misconduct because they’ve written medical exemptions.

“The College replied: ‘Oh no, no, no, we’re not the ones coming up with these medical exemption restrictions, that’s coming from AHS.’ I said there’s an inherent conflict of interest in AHS setting out what the criteria are for medical exemptions to the vaccine and then having the College enforce it after the fact.”

On the heels of the raid, Rath fired off a letter demanding Robinson have his medical license suspended and that a criminal investigation be opened against both Robinson and MacDonald.

“As far as I’m concerned, they were illegally accessing my files under false pretenses that they were acting appropriately under the Health Professions Act.”

“Unless criminal charges are laid against those two so-called investigators, the CPSA itself is a criminal organization.”

Sadly, for the CPSA, there’s no dirt to be found in Rath’s medical file.

“There’s nothing in the damn thing anyway. It’s not like my doctor’s doing anything wrong regarding prescriptions. My privacy’s been violated. I feel personally violated. That invasion of my personal privacy is absolutely beyond belief.

“If they’re there — ostensibly conducting a random investigation of a doctor’s practice under the Health Professions Act to make sure that he’s conducting himself professionally with regard to mask exemptions or whatever — what business do they have targeting the medical file of a lawyer acting against the CPSA?”

“I grew up in a public health family. I’m watching what’s happening to the medical profession in this country and the complete lack of ethical conduct by the College of Physicians and Surgeons in this province. I don’t even recognize this to be my province anymore.”

Meanwhile, the family of a two-year-old whose file was seized is considering a lawsuit for the breach of privacy.

Botha, treating the child with Rett syndrome, has provided a permanent mask exemption.

“Think about the poor mother. You can imagine how that family suffered already and you’ve got agents of the CPSA poking around in her poor little daughter’s medical file to decide if Dr. Botha appropriately granted this little girl a masking exemption. This family’s being terrorized by the College,” said Rath.

Time for the terrorizing to stop. It started with pastors and now has progressed to target little girls and lawyers.

Who’s next? You?

Sue away.

What say you, Jason Kenney? Time to put a leash on these people.

Slobodian is the Senior Manitoba Columnist for the Western Standard
lslobodian@westernstandardonline.com

Nov 172021
 

Reply to a video sent to me.  You might be interested.

I am wary of this video – – is it clever propaganda?  (How Australia Is Crashing the World Economy And Taking Down China)

The creator  is a blogger.  But it’s by a blogger who’s bought and paid for?  It’s his job; he’s effectively an employee?   Hmmm  . . .

 

Right now,  what is being manufactured is a another wave of fear, close on the heels of covid.   Like covid, it comes in disguise.  I ran into it again a couple days ago,  took me a while to make sense of it – – anyhow,  You will have heard the messaging.

 

– – the “scarcity”,  “supply chains can’t deliver goods”,  crisis caused by “the supply of computer chips”,  the computer chips which by now are embedded EVERYWHERE into our Totally Tech society.   It’s going to be worse than 2007-08 Wall Street. “can’t get the parts needed”.  Missing one kind of chip,  cannot build the thing.  “huge labour shortage”,   “unloaded ships sitting in harbours”.

 

And who are the culprits?  The Chinese!   Largest chip manufacturer in the world is in Taiwan.  China’s “One China” policy.  China will invade Taiwan.  War.  And so on.

 

China is easy to make into a culprit because of the excesses of communism.  I do not defend them.  Nor do I defend the excesses of the Americans and their allies which includes Canada.

 

The stupidity of China under Mao (admitted) – – the forensics person who explains – –  the effectiveness of THE LIE is that there is always a “grain of truth” in the lies that the manipulator spins.  We’ve heard that little bit of truth somewhere – – and nod our heads in agreement with the propaganda.

 

Mao’s rule came to an end in 1976 when he died.   The incredible stupidity of what was done to the birds (not only sparrows) under Mao is almost 50 years old.    The blogger uses it well.

 

The incredible stupidity of what Canada has done to birds and insects (try “pollinators”) (one could also mention poisoning of “human beings”??), that Canada continues to do,  is a one-up-manship on the stupidity of China and the Sparrows under Mao??

 

But never mind that.

 

I believe there are flaws in the statements put forward in the video that point to it being a tool of propagandists

 

As I’ve mentioned before, we happened to have been in Wuhan the year before the Tianamen Square massacres in 1989.

 

Wuhan was a city of blackened buildings and blackened air from the burning of low-grade coal for heating.  And other coal for factories with no pollution controls.  We could not get out of Wuhan fast enough.  It was unimaginable that anyone would have to breathe air that was so thick with pollutants.  A City covered with a heavy grey blanket;  you could not tell the time of day because the sun could not penetrate the blanket.   And we were there in the SUMMER time.

 

Heavy use of the low-grade coal was in the winter for heating.  There was no air conditioning to create a demand for electricity in the summer.  Wuhan in the summertime had an earned reputation:  it was one of the 5 “Furnaces” of China.  Indeed it was.  The temperature was 45 degrees in still, thick, heat-trapping poisoned air.

 

China implemented projects to reduce air pollution:  Germany was a leader – – you may remember – – in beginning the transition to cleaner energy.  It was good for Germany’s economy.   China followed suit – –  also went into transitioning to alternate technologies (solar cells, windmill farms).

 

I described Wuhan – – it helped motivate the Chinese.  They are not  all stupid, ineffective, dangerous people.  They can be very pragmatic.

 

We happened to also take a boat down the Yangtze River, joining the tail-end – – some parts of the Yangtze, after 5,000 years of use for transportation – – no longer. 

 

The Chinese deemed hydro-electricity to be one of the answers to cleaner energy, especially needed with their goals for economic growth.  The “3 Gorges Dam” was (still is?) the world’s largest-capacity hydro-electricity dam.   Construction was completed by 2006.   The planning for the dam was known at least by 1988 when we were there.

 

So by 1988 the Chinese were taking ACTUAL major steps toward less dependence on dirty fossil fuels.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam       (Not that their choice of mega dams is without controversy.)

 

China produces most of the thermal coal (both black and brown) it burns, but imports coking coal to make high quality steel (from Australia, the example in the video – –  until there was a dispute between Australia and China.)

 

What else did the Chinese do?   – – – they invested in, for example, the Canadian Tar Sands – – “off-shoring” some of their air and water pollution to Canada.  A DELIBERATE strategy.   Did we care?  Oh no.  Our fossil fuel industry (not really Canadian) was happy to have their money; the governments too were happy, and really did not care about the serious polluting and poisonous effects on Canadian water resources.

 

Emissions were (still are?) “regulated” in a dishonest way by measuring Alberta smoke stacks in isolation one from the other – – never looking at cumulative impact.   Which was how “acid rain” came to be a problem through “downstream” air flows over northern Saskatchewan.   The acid rain treaty worked out between Canada and the U.S. when the Great Lakes were under great threat from industrial emissions in Ontario, somehow applied in Ontario, but not in less populated, and Indian-populated areas of the Canadian Shield.

The ship in the video marooned in China for almost a year loaded with Australian coal.   This video,  How Australia Is Crashing the World Economy And Taking Down China?  The creation of “us” versus “those bad guys”.   Well,  we can BOTH qualify for the title “bad guys”, can we not?  Very legitimately?    The Chinese show-cased cleaner air achievements at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.   How is Canada doing?

The “nuclear threat” from China? . . .  I am not convinced that China is a more potent threat than the USA and its allies.  Daniel Ellsberg, renowned “Pentagon Papers”  whistle blower (1971) published  The Doomsday Machine in 2017.  Sub-title  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

In 1971, because of the nature of the work he did, Ellsberg had to choose between whistle-blowing on the out-of-control American military and their nuclear war agenda   – or,  the other information he held – – truth about the Viet Nam War.

What was to him most important, most wrong, most dangerous and most in need of public disclosure was the American planning for war that would be waged with nuclear weapons and a “first strike” policy.

Revolution in the U.S. against the Viet Nam War was in full force.  In the end,  Ellsberg opted for the whistle-blowing to help bring the Viet Nam War to an end.

Today (2021) Ellsberg is 90 years old.  In his eighties, with assistance from his son,  he decided not to die before he did the whistle-blowing on the nuclear war planning; it remains a serious threat to planet Earth.

The Doomsday Machine (2017) is a critical, you could say scary, documentation of American military ethic and practice vis-à-vis nuclear weapons and the “communist threat”.   Not even American allies who live in countries on the other side of a political border with Russia or China will be spared – – the Americans embrace “first strike” with no room for re-consideration if an attack order moves down the chain-of-command.  Ellsberg documents  U.S. launch sites that effectively ring China and Russia.   China and Russia would be fools not to regard the Americans as highly dangerous to their survival.

To me it makes no difference under which tyranny you are a citizen.  It is foolish to be ignorant, and to be manipulated by propaganda.

You know the litany:   there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq;  but the cunning propaganda machine  manipulated people – –  THE LIE enabled the launch of the Iraq War in 2003.

But prior to that was the First Gulf War.

https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-great-lie-of-the-first-gulf-war/271486/

You may remember “THE GREAT LIE” of that War.  Even now I am astounded by how effective the 15-year old girl was in her acting, moving herself AND others to tears.

1990 – The Nayirah testimony

In her emotional testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.

  • A key inflection point (turning point) to move the American public and Congress toward supporting war in Iraq was the gruesome 1990 testimony of a Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah, who described how Iraqi troops killed 312 babies.
  • Problem was, Nayirah’s story was made up.

The coaching of Nayira al-Sabah was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Her testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.[1][2]

Prior to that – – – 1964.  There was no missile in the Bay of Tonkin, but the propaganda machine manipulated people – – THE BAY OF TONKIN LIE launched the Viet Nam War.

Lies about the War on Terror.   Whistle-blower Julian Assange.  And the recent (surprise!) investigative journalism by the New York Times documenting lies that buried 2019 atrocities.  The American military is clearly the terrorist force, committing illegal, terrorist acts that would put either the hate or flight into you or me.

And so the list goes on – – STRATEGIC LIE AFTER STRATEGIC LIE – – lots of them originating in the Government – Big Pharma complex.

What is it?   Do we WANT to be feeble-minded, quivering, fearful victims of manipulation and propaganda?

Figure it out:   Video  How Australia Is Crashing the World Economy And Taking Down China    A shipload of Australian coal marooned in China.

Take JUST ONE sphere where international cooperation is badly needed  – – Climate Change.  In whose interests is it to finger the Chinese as the bad guys?  To frustrate cooperation?

/Sandra

Nov 152021
 
My Gosh.  The New York Times actually did the investigative journalism that brings this Syrian story to light.   Good on them.
Many thanks to  Caitlin Johnstone, journalist, for placing it in context. 
US coverup of Syria massacre shows the danger of the Assange precedent
Julian Assange remains locked away in Belmarsh Prison.
Julian Assange remains locked away in Belmarsh Prison. (Image by Max Pixel at maxpixel.com)

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

 

Asked by The Times for a statement, Central Command gave the laughable justification that maybe those dozens of women and children killed in repeated bomb blasts were actually armed enemy combatants:

“This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.

I mean, how do you even address a defense like that? How do you get around the “Maybe those babies were ISIS fighters” defense?

Reading the report it becomes apparent how much inertia was thrown on attempts to bring the massacre to light and how easy it would have been for those attempts to succumb to the pressure and just give up, which naturally leads one to wonder how many other such incidents never see the light of day because attempts to expose them are successfully ground to a halt. The Times says the Baghuz massacre “would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged,” but it’s clear that that “acknowledged” bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

And it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into getting information like this in front of the public eye, and how important it is to do so, and how tenuous the ability to do so currently is.

 

Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.

The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.

This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.

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The original article can be found here

Nov 042021
 

I am indebted to Brian Peckford.  He brought Dr. Ponesse to my attention.

A professor of Ethics for 20 years, fired by Western University because of covid.  Listen to her!

(The text of her speech can be found at  https://brownstone.org/articles/do-not-give-up-your-rights-dr-julie-ponesses-remarkable-speech/)

Dr. Julie Ponesse | The Faith and Democracy Series

Nov 032021
 

Brian Peckford, former Premier of Newfoundland/Labrador is shocked by the loss of rights being experienced by Canadians, at the hands of their own governments and institutions.

VIDEO BELOW  – – journalist Lawton asks excellent questions.  The former premier has a reputation for straight-shooting.  He hits the mark with his call, in common language for a “Constitutional Reference“.

There is a measure to expedite this through the Courts . . . nobody is talking about this . . .”.

The current cases lined up in Canadian courts will receive decision in 4 to 5 YEARS.

A “Constitutional Reference” lands in the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in 6 months to a year.    A government asks the SCC:

      • Is what we are doing following the Constitution of this Country?
      • Is it following the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?”.

More on a “Reference”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_question

In Canadian law, a reference question or reference case .. is a submission by the federal or a provincial government to the courts asking for an advisory opinion on a major legal issue. Typically the question concerns the constitutionality of legislation.   . . .  

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Charter is being “violated and abused” by COVID policies:
former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford

By Andrew Lawton

Brian Peckford is the last living premier involved in the construction and adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Now, the former Newfoundland and Labrador premier says the Charter and parliamentary democracy are being “violated and abused” by governments whose pandemic policies have taken aim at freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and other Charter-guaranteed rights as well. As the Charter’s 40th anniversary nears, Peckford joined True North’s The Andrew Lawton Show to speak out about the “collective psychosis” he says is afflicting Canada.