For Bill Gates, It’s “Moneypox”

 

For Bill Gates, It’s “Moneypox”: Simulation of Fictitious Monkeypox Virus Pandemic in March 2021, Goes Live in May 2022

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Latest Update June 1, 2022

***

Another Chapter of “Fake Science” is Unfolding

Say Goodbye to SARS-CoV-2, Say Hello to the Monkeypox Pathogen

Screenshot of November 4 2021 Article in Evening Standard

Possible “Monkeypox Terror Attacks” Announced by Bill Gates in November 2021

In a TV interview with Jeremy Hunt in early November 2021, Bill Gates warned  governments to prepare for simultaneous smallpox terror attacks in 10 airports:

“You say, OK, what if a bioterrorist brought smallpox to 10 airports? You know, how would the world respond to that? There’s naturally-caused epidemics and bioterrorism-caused epidemics that could even be way worse than what we experienced today”, he said (emphasis added)

Ten Countries, Ten Airports. (That’s Where the Testing Takes Place)

Compare that to the latest news report on May 19, 2022, more than six months later (emphasis added):

An unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox virus has officially spread to 10 countries outside of Africa, with 107 confirmed or suspected cases reported as of this writing, in the United Kingdom (9 cases), Portugal (34), Spain (32), France (1), Belgium (2), Sweden (1), Italy (3), Canada (22), the United States (2), and Australia (1). (WSWS, May 19, 2022)

To watch the video interview with Bill Gates click below


Video Interview with Michel Chossudovsky on Moneypox  Bill Gates


click lower right corner for fullscreen


Bill Gates’s February 2017 Warning of Bioterrorism: Deadly Strain of Smallpox Virus

This is not the first time that Bill Gates has warned governments of the dangers of a bioterrorist attack involving a deadly strain of the smallpox virus. The following announcement was made at the 2017 Munich Security Conference:

“The next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus … or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu.” (Munich Security Conference, February 2017, emphasis added)

Click Screen to access video:

Munich Security Conference, 2017

 “Investing Billions in Research”. For Bill Gates, It’s “Moneypox”

On November 4, 2021 Bill Gates warned governments “to prepare for future pandemics and smallpox terror attacks by investing billions in research and development”. 

Mr Gates made the warning during a Policy Exchange interview with the chair of the Health Select Committee Jeremy Hunt.

The Microsoft founder also called for the formation of a new billion-dollar World Health Organisation Pandemic Task Force.  

He said that countries like the US and the UK must spend “tens of billions” to fund the research.

“I’m hoping in five years, I can write a book called, ‘We ARE ready for the next pandemic’, but it’ll take tens of billions in R&D – the US and the UK will be part of that”, he said.

It’ll take probably about a billion a year for a pandemic Task Force at the WHO level, which is doing the surveillance and actually doing what I call ‘germ games’ where you practise.” (Evening Standard, emphasis added).

But there is more in this unfolding multibillion dollar monkeypox saga.

Is a New Fear Campaign in the Making?

The monkeypox simulation agenda was planned well in advance. It started in December 2020 with a meeting of senior U.S National security officials.

The Monkeypox Time Line

The Time Line is as follow:

  • December 2020: US National Security and Biological Weapons Experts’ Meeting under the auspices of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Planning and Formulation of a Simulation of a Monkeypox Pandemic,
  • July 2020: FDA approval of Smallpox and Monkeypox Vaccine, “first permitted commercial marketing or use of the product” in US. (For details see below)
  • March 2021 Tabletop Simulation of Fictitious Monkeypox Pandemic at Munich Security Conference 2021
  • November 2021. Bill Gates warns governments of the likelihood of a monkeypox terrorist attack (see statements above)
  • May 2022. WHO announcement. Towards a Monkeypox Pandemic? Unfolding Fear Campaign.
  • Commencing May 2022. The marketing of Smallpox vaccines, effective against monkeypox.
  • May 2022- : Ongoing propaganda in support of the WHO Pandemic Treaty (coupled with the QR Code).

December 2020: The Expert Planning of A Tabletop Simulation of a Monkeypox Virus Pandemic

As early as December 2020, a simulation of a monkeypox pandemic had been envisaged by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization, founded by former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner. 

Ted Turner has a close relationship with Bill Gates. He is a member of The Good Club which includes Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey and many more. The Good Club is known for its resolve to “Try to Shrink World’s Population” according to the WSJ.

 

The NTI National Security and Biotechnology Advisory Group

At the December 2020 meeting, the NTI convened a group of experts to “advise” on the tabletop exercise scenario. Among the experts were senior officials, scientists and experts in bioterrorism and national security,  from U.S. entities including the Department of Homeland Security, USAID, State Department, National Defense University, John Hopkins, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,  Department of Health and Human Services, etc.  (See page 27 of report)

“These experts participated as individuals—not as representatives of their respective organizations—and they do not necessarily endorse the recommendations in this report.”

March 2021: Fictional Exercise Scenario of a Deadly Monkeypox Virus Pandemic

A few months later following the December 2020 consultations, a Table Top Simulation of a: “fictional exercise scenario portrayed a deadly, global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus” was held by the NTI at the March 2021 Munich Security Conference: 

The following NTI report entitled:

Strengthening Global Systems to Prevent and Respond to High-Consequence Biological Threats: Results from the 2021 Tabletop Exercise Conducted in Partnership with the Munich Security Conference,

by Jaime M. Yassif, Ph.D., Kevin P. O’Prey, Ph.D., and Christopher R. Isaac, M.Sc.,

was undertaken by the Global Biological Policy and Programs, of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).

Generously Funded by Billionaire Philanthropy Foundation

The expert national security analysis, the report as well as the simulation exercise conducted under the auspices of the Munich Conference were generously funded by Open Philanthropy of which the main funder is multibillionaire Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook (together with Mark Zuckerberg)  and a friend of Bill Gates.

Billionaires fund billionaires. The grants allocated by OP to NTI’s Bio Security Program in February and May 2020 amounted to a modest $8.5 million.

A Note on the History of “Scenario Simulations” of Pandemics

Scenario Simulations of Pandemics were initiated  with Rockefeller’s “Lock Step Scenario” in 2010 which consisted in  the use of “scenario planning” as a means to carry out “global governance”.  In the  Rockefeller’s 2010 Report entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development Area” scenarios of Global Governance and the actions to be taken in the case of a Worldwide pandemic were contemplated.

More specifically, the report envisaged (p 18) the simulation of a Lock Step scenario including a global virulent influenza strain. The 2010 Rockefeller report was published in the immediate wake of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

And then in 2018, The Clade X Table Top Simulation was conducted under the auspices of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Clade X was described by its organizers as a day-long pandemic tabletop exercise the purpose of which “was to illustrate high level strategic decisions in the United States and the world … to prevent a pandemic”.

It was  “played by individuals prominent in the fields of national security or epidemic response”.

EVENT 201 (October 2019)

Clade X was followed by another tabletop simulation entitled Event 201 (also under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in October 2019). Event 201 pertained to a coronavirus epidemic entitled 2019-nCoV. 

Among the 201 John Hopkins table top scenario “players” were key personalities holding advisory and senior positions in a number of core organizations. Less than 3 months later,  these 201 “players” became actively involved in the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Monkeypox Scenario Exercise Summary

Below is the executive summary of the March NTI Simulation (emphasis added) followed by relevant excerpts as well as the list of participants.

It is worth noting that while the December 2020 team which formulated the simulation project were exclusively from the US focussing on issues of national security, the participants of the Table Top Scenario were from Big Pharma, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, WHO, UN, as well as representatives from the EU, China, Africa. (See list below)

In March 2021, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) partnered with the Munich Security Conference (MSC) to conduct a tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats. Conducted virtually, the exercise examined gaps in national and international biosecurity and pandemic preparedness architectures and explored opportunities to improve capabilities to prevent and respond to high-consequence biological events. Participants included 19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy.

The exercise scenario portrayed a deadly, global pandemic involving an unusual strain of monkeypox virus that emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months. Ultimately, the exercise scenario revealed that the initial outbreak was caused by a terrorist attack using a pathogen engineered in a laboratory with inadequate biosafety and biosecurity provisions and weak oversight.

By the end of the exercise, the fictional pandemic resulted in more than three billion cases and 270 million fatalities worldwide.

The Nature of the Simulation Borders on Ridicule: “Arnica Terrorists” Attack Brinia

The simulation has a geopolitical agenda. Terrorist attacks against Brinia, a sovereign nation-state.

Coincidence?  The simulation is consistent with Bill Gates’ prophetic announcements in the course of the last five years pertaining to a terrorist attack using a lab modified version of the smallpox virus  (See his 2017 and 2020 statements above):

Appendix B. Epidemiological Model Summary

Developed by Dr. Ellie Graeden Trae Wallace, Talus Analytics

The epidemiological elements of the exercise scenario were developed using a standard Susceptible– Exposed–Infectious–Recovered (SEIR) compartmentalized model. The model assumes no asymptomatic spread. The structure of the model is summarized in Figure B-1. A lab-modified version of monkeypox was intentionally released via aerosols in train stations in the fictional country of Brinia (population 250 million) by agents of a terrorist group operating in neighboring Arnica (population 75 million). [Arnica is a homeopathic medicine].

Through intentional modifications made by Arnican virology lab scientists sympathetic with the Arnican terrorists, this monkeypox strain is assumed to be more contagious than naturally occurring monkeypox— with a basic reproductive number (R0) for the modified strain of 3, as compared to 2.13 for the wildtype strain.11

The lab-modified strain is also engineered to be resistant to the smallpox vaccine.

Vaccine resistance is assumed to be driven by the introduction of the Interleukin-4 gene, as demonstrated in previous mousepox studies.12 We assume a case fatality rate of approximately 10 percent, which is consistent with previously described monkeypox outbreaks.13

When The “Real World” Resembles “The Scenario Simulation”

And it just so happens in the simulation that monkeypox was first reported on May 15, 2022, with 150 cases.

The release in Brinia results in 150 initial infections on May 15, 2022, and 10 inadvertently infected Arnicans. By June 1, travel from Brinia has seeded infections in the rest of the world.” (Monkeypox Simulation, emphasis added)

Below are the first “Two Moves” of the Simulated Scenario presented to the Munich Security Conference in March 2021. It identifies May 15 2022 as the commencement of the monkeypox epidemic, leading up to January 2023 (83 countries affected) to 70 million cases and 1.3 million deaths). (See page 10 of report)

 

Confirmed Cases Pertaining to the alleged “REAL” Monkeypox Outbreak

Visibly, May 15, 2022 as well as the 150 cases in the simulation bear a canny resemblance to the “REAL” press reports and WHO advisory concerning confirmed cases released in mid-May 2022.

According to the WHO:                 

Since 13 May 2022, cases of monkeypox have been reported to [the] WHO from 12 Member States that are not endemic for monkeypox virus, across three WHO regions. Epidemiological investigations are ongoing,  …

As of 21 May, 13:00, 92 laboratory confirmed cases, and 28 suspected cases of monkeypox with investigations ongoing, have been reported to WHO from 12 Member States that are not endemic for monkeypox virus, across three WHO regions. (emphasis added)

These figures of confirmed cases put forth by the WHO are questionable. They were allegedly detected by the PCR-Test, which cannot under any circumstances identify the monkeypox virus. Moreover the PCR test is no longer recognized as valid by the CDC.

all cases whose samples were confirmed by PCR [test] have been identified as being infected with the West African clade. (WHO) (emphasis added)

 

Fictitious Findings and Recommendations

To address these fictitious findings regarding the “Arnica terrorist attacks”, the players developed a series of far-reaching recommendations:

  • The WHO should establish a graded, transparent, international public health alert system.
  • Develop and institute national-level triggers for early, proactive pandemic response.
  • National governments must adopt a “no-regrets” approach to pandemic response, taking anticipatory action.
  • Establish an international entity dedicated to reducing emerging biological risks associated with rapid technology advances.
  • Develop a catalytic global health security fund to accelerate pandemic preparedness capacity building in countries around the world.

These recommendations (which in all likelihood were discussed in December 2020 by the National Security and Biotech advisors prior to the conduct of the Simulation Scenario) are intended to support the WHO Pandemic Treaty (coupled with the QR Code) which consists in establishing a global digital data bank which derogates the rights of individual member nation states. The pandemic treaty is intent upon establishing the contours of a system of “Global Governance” dominated by the financial establishment.

It should be noted that two key participants of the Monkeypox 2021 NTI simulation were involved in the John Hopkins 201 Scenario (October 2019) which consisted in the simulation of a novel corona virus 2019-nCoV pandemic. These included Dr. George Gao Fu, head of China’s CDC and Dr. Chris Elias, President of the Global Development Division of the Gates Foundation, both of whom played a key role in staging the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in early 2020.

And currently George Fu Gao is playing a key role in the implementation of China’s Zero Covid Strategy which has led to the lockdown of Shanghai in late March 2022, as well as in several other major urban areas.

 

A New Fear Campaign? Pandemic Preparedness in America. The Smallpox Vaccine Effective against Monkeypox

Governments have already placed orders for the delivery of smallpox vaccines effective against monkeypox

While there were only two confirmed cases in the US of monkeypox recorded on May 18, the US government had already signed a contract with Bavaria Nordic  consisting of an order of  “millions of doses of a vaccine that protects against the virus” (Forbes).

The terms of this contract were in all likelihood negotiated prior to the announcement of the outbreak of the 92 monkeypox cases by the WHO on May 13.

Bavarian Nordic, the biotech company that makes the vaccine, has announced a $119 million order placed by the U.S., with the option to buy $180 million more if it wants. Should that second option be exercised, it would work out to approximately 13 million doses.

The order will convert existing smallpox vaccines, which are also effective against monkeypox, into freeze-dried versions, which have a longer shelf life.

How long is the “pandemic” slated to last?

“The converted vaccines will be manufactured in 2023 and 2024”, according to Bavaria Nordic (May 18, 2022.

Screenshot from Bavaria Nordic Announcement

The Role of Johnson and Johnson?

What the media has failed to acknowledge is the relationship between Johnson and Johnson and Bavarian Nordic, the Danish Biotech Company.

Bavaria North was a Partner of J and J until May 10, 2022, 3 days prior to the WHO official announcement pertaining to the alleged monkeypox outbreak.

The Global Head of J and J and Jannsen’s Public Health R&D is Dr. Ruxandra Draghia Akli, who participated in the Table Top Simulation on behalf of Big Pharma. (See list of participants above). Was the smallpox monkeypox vaccine developed by Bavaria Nordic in partnership with J and J?

The earlier Patent was registered in the US by Bavarian North. It was reviewed and first permitted for commercial marketing by the FDA on July 14, 2020, nine months prior to the NTI sponsored Scenario Simulation in March 2021 at the Munich Security Conference

Live (U.S. Patent No. 7,335,364) from Bavarian Nordic A/S, and the USPTO requested FDA’s assistance in determining this patent’s eligibility for patent term restoration. In a letter dated July 14, 2020, FDA advised the USPTO that this human biological product had undergone a regulatory review period and that the approval of Smallpox and Monkeypox Vaccine, Live represented the first permitted commercial marketing or use of the product.

As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on January 11, 2016: Bavaria North acknowledges its relationship to Johnson and Johson. 

 

In China, Social Media has Gone Haywire

According to a Daily Mail Report

 

 

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Why America Needs War

 

Why America Needs War

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GR Editor’s Note:

This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003 in the immediate wake of the war on Iraq, by renowned historian and political scientist Dr. Jacques Pauwels, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

The article largely pertains to the presidency of George W. Bush.

A timely question: Why Does the Biden administration need war, including a $1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program?

War against Russia and China is currently on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

Numerous US led wars since the end of what is euphemistically called the post war era:

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen…  

It’s what the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) Calls America’s Long War?  

What is described in the PNAC document is the following, which reflects what is unfolding today before our very eyes in Ukraine:

ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for U.S. military forces:

• defend the American homeland;

• fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;

• perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;

• transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs;”

To carry out these core missions, we need to provide sufficient force and budgetary allocations. In particular, the United States must:

MAINTAIN NUCLEAR STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY, …

EXPLOIT THE “REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS”…

INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING …

The military agenda of the Biden Administration is consistent with the PNAC guidelines: an operation which consists in the deliberate destruction of sovereign countries resulting in millions of deaths.

And why do Americans support this military agenda? 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 5,  2022

*     *     *

Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason not completed, by his father at the time of the Gulf War; others believe that Bush Junior expected a short and triumphant war which would guarantee him a second term in the White House.

I believe that we must look elsewhere for an explanation for the attitude of the American President.

The fact that Bush is keen on war has little or nothing to do with his psyche, but a great deal with the American economic system. This system – America’s brand of capitalism – functions first and foremost to make extremely rich Americans like the Bush “money dynasty” even richer. Without warm or cold wars, however, this system can no longer produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed and powerful of America consider as their birthright.

The great strength of American capitalism is also its great weakness, namely, its extremely high productivity. In the historical development of the international economic system that we call capitalism, a number of factors have produced enormous increases in productivity, for example, the mechanization of the production process that got under way in England as early as the 18th century. In the early 20th century, then, American industrialists made a crucial contribution in the form of the automatization of work by means of new techniques such as the assembly line. The latter was an innovation introduced by Henry Ford, and those techniques have therefore become collectively known as “Fordism.” The productivity of the great American enterprises rose spectacularly.

For example, already in the 1920s, countless vehicles rolled off the assembly lines of the automobile factories of Michigan every single day. But who was supposed to buy all those cars? Most Americans at the time did not have sufficiently robust pocket books for such a purchase. Other industrial products similarly flooded the market, and the result was the emergence of a chronic disharmony between the ever-increasing economic supply and the lagging demand. Thus arose the economic crisis generally known as the Great Depression. It was essentially a crisis of overproduction. Warehouses were bursting with unsold commodities, factories laid off workers, unemployment exploded, and so the purchasing power of the American people shrunk even more, making the crisis even worse.

It cannot be denied that in America the Great Depression only ended during, and because of, the Second World War. (Even the greatest admirers of President Roosevelt admit that his much-publicized New Deal policies brought little or no relief.) Economic demand rose spectacularly when the war which had started in Europe, and in which the USA itself was not an active participant before 1942, allowed American industry to produce unlimited amounts of war equipment. Between 1940 and 1945, the American state would spend no less than 185 billion dollar on such equipment, and the military expenditures’ share of the GNP thus rose between 1939 and 1945 from an insignificant 1,5 per cent to approximately 40 per cent. In addition, American industry also supplied gargantuan amounts of equipment to the British and even the Soviets via Lend-Lease. (In Germany, meanwhile, the subsidiaries of American corporations such as Ford, GM, and ITT produced all sorts of planes and tanks and other martial toys for the Nazi’s, also after Pearl Harbor, but that is a different story.) The key problem of the Great Depression – the disequilibrium between supply and demand – was thus resolved because the state “primed the pump” of economic demand by means of huge orders of a military nature.

As far as ordinary Americans were concerned, Washington’s military spending orgy brought not only virtually full employment but also much higher wages than ever before; it was during the Second World War that the widespread misery associated with the Great Depression came to an end and that a majority of the American people achieved an unprecedented degree of prosperity. However, the greatest beneficiaries by far of the wartime economic boom were the country’s businesspeople and corporations, who realized extraordinary profits. Between 1942 and 1945, writes the historian Stuart D. Brandes, the net profits of America’s 2,000 biggest firms were more than 40 per cent higher than during the period 1936-1939. Such a “profit boom” was possible, he explains, because the state ordered billions of dollars of military equipment, failed to institute price controls, and taxed profits little if at all. This largesse benefited the American business world in general, but in particular that relatively restricted elite of big corporations known as “big business” or “corporate America.” During the war, a total of less than 60 firms obtained 75 per cent of all lucrative military and other state orders. The big corporations – Ford, IBM, etc. – revealed themselves to be the “war hogs,” writes Brandes, that gormandized at the plentiful trough of the state’s military expenditures. IBM, for example, increased its annual sales between 1940 and 1945 from 46 to 140 million dollar thanks to war-related orders, and its profits skyrocketed accordingly.

America’s big corporations exploited their Fordist expertise to the fullest in order to boost production, but even that was not sufficient to meet the wartime needs of the American state. Much more equipment was needed, and in order to produce it, America needed new factories and even more efficient technology. These new assets were duly stamped out of the ground, and on account of this the total value of all productive facilities of the nation increased between 1939 and 1945 from 40 to 66 billion dollar. However, it was not the private sector that undertook all these new investments; on account of its disagreeable experiences with overproduction during the thirties, America’s businesspeople found this task too risky. So the state did the job by investing 17 billion dollar in more than 2,000 defense-related projects. In return for a nominal fee, privately owned corporations were permitted to rent these brand-new factories in order to produce…and to make money by selling the output back to the state. Moreover, when the war was over and Washington decided to divest itself of these investments, the nation’s big corporations purchased them for half, and in many cases only one third, of the real value.

How did America finance the war, how did Washington pay the lofty bills presented by GM, ITT, and the other corporate suppliers of war equipment? The answer is: partly by means of taxation – about 45 per cent -, but much more through loans – approximately 55 per cent. On account of this, the public debt increased dramatically, namely, from 3 billion dollar in 1939 to no less than 45 billion dollar in 1945. In theory, this debt should have been reduced, or wiped out altogether, by levying taxes on the huge profits pocketed during the war by America’s big corporations, but the reality was different. As already noted, the American state failed to meaningfully tax corporate America’s windfall profits, allowed the public debt to mushroom, and paid its bills, and the interest on its loans, with its general revenues, that is, by means of the income generated by direct and indirect taxes. Particularly on account of the regressive Revenue Act introduced in October 1942, these taxes were paid increasingly by workers and other low-income Americans, rather than by the super-rich and the corporations of which the latter were the owners, major shareholders, and/or top managers. “The burden of financing the war,” observes the American historian Sean Dennis Cashman, “[was] sloughed firmly upon the shoulders of the poorer members of society.”

However, the American public, preoccupied by the war and blinded by the bright sun of full employment and high wages, failed to notice this. Affluent Americans, on the other hand, were keenly aware of the wonderful way in which the war generated money for themselves and for their corporations. Incidentally, it was also from the rich businesspeople, bankers, insurers and other big investors that Washington borrowed the money needed to finance the war; corporate America thus also profited from the war by pocketing the lion’s share of the interests generated by the purchase of the famous war bonds. In theory, at least, the rich and powerful of America are the great champions of so-called free enterprise, and they oppose any form of state intervention in the economy. During the war, however, they never raised any objections to the way in which the American state managed and financed the economy, because without this large-scale dirigist violation of the rules of free enterprise, their collective wealth could never have proliferated as it did during those years.

During the Second World War, the wealthy owners and top managers of the big corporations learned a very important lesson: during a war there is money to be made, lots of money. In other words, the arduous task of maximizing profits – the key activity within the capitalist American economy – can be absolved much more efficiently through war than through peace; however, the benevolent cooperation of the state is required. Ever since the Second World War, the rich and powerful of America have remained keenly conscious of this. So is their man in the White House today [2003, i.e. George W. Bush], the scion of a “money dynasty” who was parachuted into the White House in order to promote the interests of his wealthy family members, friends, and associates in corporate America, the interests of money, privilege, and power.

In the spring of 1945 it was obvious that the war, fountainhead of fabulous profits, would soon be over. What would happen then? Among the economists, many Cassandras conjured up scenarios that loomed extremely unpleasant for America’s political and industrial leaders. During the war, Washington’s purchases of military equipment, and nothing else, had restored the economic demand and thus made possible not only full employment but also unprecedented profits. With the return of peace, the ghost of disharmony between supply and demand threatened to return to haunt America again, and the resulting crisis might well be even more acute than the Great Depression of the “dirty thirties,” because during the war years the productive capacity of the nation had increased considerably, as we have seen. Workers would have to be laid off precisely at the moment when millions of war veterans would come home looking for a civilian job, and the resulting unemployment and decline in purchasing power would aggravate the demand deficit. Seen from the perspective of America’s rich and powerful, the coming unemployment was not a problem; what did matter was that the golden age of gargantuan profits would come to an end. Such a catastrophe had to be prevented, but how?

Military state expenditures were the source of high profits. In order to keep the profits gushing forth generously, new enemies and new war threats were urgently needed now that Germany and Japan were defeated. How fortunate that the Soviet Union existed, a country which during the war had been a particularly useful partner who had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Allies in Stalingrad and elsewhere, but also a partner whose communist ideas and practices allowed it to be easily transformed into the new bogeyman of the United States. Most American historians now admit that in 1945 the Soviet Union, a country that had suffered enormously during the war, did not constitute a threat at all to the economically and militarily far superior USA, and that Washington itself did not perceive the Soviets as a threat. These historians also acknowledge that Moscow was very keen to work closely together with Washington in the postwar era.

Indeed, Moscow had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from a conflict with superpower America, which was brimming with confidence thanks to its monopoly of the atom bomb. However, America – corporate America, the America of the super-rich – urgently needed a new enemy in order to justify the titanic expenditures for “defense” which were needed to keep the wheels of the nation’s economy spinning at full speed also after the end of the war, thus keeping profit margins at the required – or rather, desired – high levels, or even to increase them. It is for this reason that the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the American “military-industrial” complex, as President Eisenhower would call that elite of wealthy individuals and corporations that knew how to profit from the “warfare economy.”

In this respect, the Cold War exceeded their fondest expectations. More and more martial equipment had to be cranked out, because the allies within the so-called “free world”, which actually included plenty of nasty dictatorships, had to be armed to the teeth with US equipment. In addition, America’s own armed forces never ceased demanding bigger, better, and more sophisticated tanks, planes, rockets, and, yes, chemical and bacteriological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. For these goods, the Pentagon was always ready to pay huge sums without asking difficult questions. As had been the case during the Second World War, it was again primarily the large corporations who were allowed to fill the orders. The Cold War generated unprecedented profits, and they flowed into the coffers of those extremely wealthy individuals who happened to be the owners, top managers, and/or major shareholders of these corporations. (Does it come as a surprise that in the United States newly retired Pentagon generals are routinely offered jobs as consultants by large corporations involved in military production, and that businessmen linked with those corporations are regularly appointed as high-ranking officials of the Department of Defense, as advisors of the President, etc.?)

During the Cold War too, the American state financed its skyrocketing military expenditures by means of loans, and this caused the public debt to rise to dizzying heights. In 1945 the public debt stood at “only” 258 billion dollar, but in 1990 – when the Cold War ground to an end – it amounted to no less than 3.2 trillion dollar! This was a stupendous increase, also when one takes the inflation rate into account, and it caused the American state to become the world’s greatest debtor. (Incidentally, in July 2002 the American public debt had reached 6.1 trillion dollar.) Washington could and should have covered the cost of the Cold War by taxing the huge profits achieved by the corporations involved in the armament orgy, but there was never any question of such a thing. In 1945, when the Second World War come to an end and the Cold War picked up the slack, corporations still paid 50 per cent of all taxes, but during the course of the Cold War this share shrunk consistently, and today it only amounts to approximately 1 per cent.

This was possible because the nation’s big corporations largely determine what the government in Washington may or may not do, also in the field of fiscal policy. In addition, lowering the tax burden of corporations was made easier because after the Second World War these corporations transformed themselves into multinationals, “at home everywhere and nowhere,” as an American author has written in connection with ITT, and therefore find it easy to avoid paying meaningful taxes anywhere. Stateside, where they pocket the biggest profits, 37 per cent of all American multinationals – and more than 70 per cent of all foreign multinationals – paid not a single dollar of taxes in 1991, while the remaining multinationals remitted less than 1 per cent of their profits in taxes.

The sky-high costs of the Cold War were thus not borne by those who profited from it and who, incidentally, also continued to pocket the lion’s share of the dividends paid on government bonds, but by the American workers and the American middle class. These low- and middle-income Americans did not receive a penny from the profits yielded so profusely by the Cold War, but they did receive their share of the enormous public debt for which that conflict was largely responsible. It is they, therefore, who were really saddled with the costs of the Cold War, and it is they who continue to pay with their taxes for a disproportionate share of the burden of the public debt.

In other words, while the profits generated by the Cold War were privatized to the advantage of an extremely wealthy elite, its costs were ruthlessly socialized to the great detriment of all other Americans. During the Cold War, the American economy degenerated into a gigantic swindle, into a perverse redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the advantage of the rich and to the disadvantage not only of the poor and of the working class but also of the middle class, whose members tend to subscribe to the myth that the American capitalist system serves their interests. Indeed, while the wealthy and powerful of America accumulated ever-greater riches, the prosperity achieved by many other Americans during the Second World War was gradually eroded, and the general standard of living declined slowly but steadily.

During the Second World War America had witnessed a modest redistribution of the collective wealth of the nation to the advantage of the less privileged members of society. During the Cold War, however, the rich Americans became richer while the non-wealthy – and certainly not only the poor – became poorer. In 1989, the year the Cold War petered out, more than 13 per cent of all Americans – approximately 31 million individuals – were poor according to the official criteria of poverty, which definitely understate the problem. Conversely, today 1 per cent of all Americans own no less than 34 per cent of the nation’s aggregate wealth. In no major “Western” country is the wealth distributed more unevenly.

The minuscule percentage of super-rich Americans found this development extremely satisfactory. They loved the idea of accumulating more and more wealth, of aggrandizing their already huge assets, at the expense of the less privileged. They wanted to keep things that way or, if at all possible, make this sublime scheme even more efficient. However, all good things must come to an end, and in 1989/90 the bountiful Cold War elapsed. That presented a serious problem. Ordinary Americans, who knew that they had borne the costs of this war, expected a “peace dividend.”

They thought that the money the state had spent on military expenditures might now be used to produce benefits for themselves, for example in the form of a national health insurance and other social benefits which Americans in contrast to most Europeans have never enjoyed. In 1992, Bill Clinton would actually win the presidential election by dangling out the prospect of a national health plan, which of course never materialized. A “peace dividend” was of no interest whatsoever to the nation’s wealthy elite, because the provision of social services by the state does not yield profits for entrepreneurs and corporations, and certainly not the lofty kind of profits generated by military state expenditures. Something had to be done, and had to be done fast, to prevent the threatening implosion of the state’s military spending.

America, or rather, corporate America, was orphaned of its useful Soviet enemy, and urgently needed to conjure up new enemies and new threats in order to justify a high level of military spending. It is in this context that in 1990 Saddam Hussein appeared on the scene like a kind of deus ex machina. This tin-pot dictator had previously been perceived and treated by the Americans as a good friend, and he had been armed to the teeth so that he could wage a nasty war against Iran; it was the USA – and allies such as Germany – who originally supplied him with all sorts of weapons. However, Washington was desperately in need of a new enemy, and suddenly fingered him as a terribly dangerous “new Hitler,” against whom war needed to be waged urgently, even though it was clear that a negotiated settlement of the issue of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was not out of the question.

George Bush Senior was the casting agent who discovered this useful new nemesis of America, and who unleashed the Gulf War, during which Baghdad was showered with bombs and Saddam’s hapless recruits were slaughtered in the desert. The road to the Iraqi capital lay wide-open, but the Marines’ triumphant entry into Baghdad was suddenly scrapped. Saddam Hussein was left in power so that the threat he was supposed to form might be invoked again in order to justify keeping America in arms. After all, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union had shown how inconvenient it can be when one loses a useful foe.

And so Mars could remain the patron saint of the American economy or, more accurately, the godfather of the corporate Mafia that manipulates this war-driven economy and reaps its huge profits without bearing its costs. The despised project of a peace dividend could be unceremoniously buried, and military expenditures could remain the dynamo of the economy and the wellspring of sufficiently high profits. Those expenditures increased relentlessly during the 1990s. In 1996, for example, they amounted to no less than 265 billion dollars, but when one adds the unofficial and/or indirect military expenditures, such as the interests paid on loans used to finance past wars, the 1996 total came to approximately 494 billion dollar, amounting to an outlay of 1.3 billion dollar per day! However, with only a considerably chastened Saddam as bogeyman, Washington found it expedient also to look elsewhere for new enemies and threats. Somalia temporarily looked promising, but in due course another “new Hitler” was identified in the Balkan Peninsula in the person of the Serbian leader, Milosevic. During much of the nineties, then, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia provided the required pretexts for military interventions, large-scale bombing operations, and the purchase of more and newer weapons.

The “warfare economy” could thus continue to run on all cylinders also after the Gulf War. However, in view of occasional public pressure such as the demand for a peace dividend, it is not easy to keep this system going. (The media present no problem, as newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. are either owned by big corporations or rely on them for advertising revenue.) As mentioned earlier, the state has to cooperate, so in Washington one needs men and women one can count upon, preferably individuals from the very own corporate ranks, individuals totally committed to use the instrument of military expenditures in order to provide the high profits that are needed to make the very rich of America even richer. In this respect, Bill Clinton had fallen short of expectations, and corporate America could never forgive his original sin, namely, that he had managed to have himself elected by promising the American people a “peace dividend” in the form of a system of health insurance.

On account of this, in 2000 it was arranged that not the Clinton-clone Al Gore moved into the White House but a team of militarist hardliners, virtually without exception representatives of wealthy, corporate America, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, and of course George W. Bush himself, son of the man who had shown with his Gulf War how it could be done; the Pentagon, too, was directly represented in the Bush Cabinet in the person of the allegedly peace-loving Powell, in reality yet another angel of death. Rambo moved into the White House, and it did not take long for the results to show.

After Bush Junior had been catapulted into the presidency, it looked for some time as if he was going to proclaim China as the new nemesis of America. However, a conflict with that giant loomed somewhat risky; furthermore, all too many big corporations make good money by trading with the People’s Republic. Another threat, preferably less dangerous and more credible, was required to keep the military expenditures at a sufficiently high level. For this purpose, Bush and Rumsfeld and company could have wished for nothing more convenient than the events of September 11, 2001; it is extremely likely that they were aware of the preparations for these monstrous attacks, but that they did nothing to prevent them because they knew that they would be able to benefit from them. In any event, they did take full advantage of this opportunity in order to militarize America more than ever before, to shower bombs on people who had nothing to do with 9/11, to wage war to their hearts’ content, and thus for corporations that do business with the Pentagon to ring up unprecedented sales. Bush declared war not on a country but on terrorism, an abstract concept against which one cannot really wage war and against which a definitive victory can never be achieved. However, in practice the slogan “war against terrorism” meant that Washington now reserves the right to wage war worldwide and permanently against whomever the White House defines as a terrorist.

And so the problem of the end of the Cold War was definitively resolved, as there was henceforth a justification for ever-increasing military expenditures. The statistics speak for themselves. The 1996 total of 265 billion dollar in military expenditures had already been astronomical, but thanks to Bush Junior the Pentagon was allowed to spend 350 billion in 2002, and for 2003 the President has promised approximately 390 billion; however, it is now virtually certain that the cape of 400 billion dollar will be rounded this year. (In order to finance this military spending orgy, money has to be saved elsewhere, for example by cancelling free lunches for poor children; every little bit helps.) No wonder that George W. struts around beaming with happiness and pride, for he – essentially a spoiled rich kid of very limited talent and intellect – has surpassed the boldest expectations not only of his wealthy family and friends but of corporate America as a whole, to which he owes his job.

9/11 provided Bush with carte blanche to wage war wherever and against whomever he chose, and as this essay has purported to make clear, it does not matter all that much who happens to be fingered as enemy du jour. Last year, Bush showered bombs on Afghanistan, presumably because the leaders of that country sheltered Bin Laden, but recently the latter went out of fashion and it was once again Saddam Hussein who allegedly threatened America. We cannot deal here in detail with the specific reasons why Bush’s America absolutely wanted war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and not with, say, North Korea. A major reason for fighting this particular war was that Iraq’s large reserves of oil are lusted after by the US oil trusts with whom the Bushes themselves – and Bushites such as Cheney and Rice, after whom an oil tanker happens to be named – are so intimately linked. The war in Iraq is also useful as a lesson to other Third World countries who fail to dance to Washington’s tune, and as an instrument for emasculating domestic opposition and ramming the extreme right-wing program of an unelected president down the throats of Americans themselves.

The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. Right now, this addiction, this craving is being satisfied by means of a conflict against Iraq, which also happens to be dear to the hearts of the oil barons. However, does anybody believe that the warmongering will stop once Saddam’ scalp will join the Taliban turbans in the trophy display case of George W. Bush? The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the “axis of evil” countries: Iran, Syria, Lybia, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century, welcome to George W. Bush’s brave new era of permanent war!

Jacques R. Pauwels is historian and political scientist, author of ‘The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War’ (James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002). His book is published in different languages: in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Together with personalities like Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Robert Weil, Michel Collon, Peter Franssen and many others… he signed “The International Appeal against US-War”.


From the International Press on Saturday, March 22, 2003:

The cost to the United States of the war in Iraq and its aftermath could easily exceed $100 billion…Peace-keeping in Iraq and rebuilding the country’s infrastructure could add much more…The Bush administration has stayed tightlipped about the cost of the war and reconstruction…Both the White House and the Pentagon refused to offer any definite figures.
(The International Herald Tribune, 22/03/03)

It is estimated that the war against Iraq will cost approximately 100 billion dollar. In contrast to the Gulf War of 1991, whose cost of 80 million was shared by the Allies, the United States is expected to pay the entire cost of the present war…For the American private sector, i.e. the big corporations, the coming reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure will represent a business of 900 million dollar; the first contracts were awarded yesterday (March 21) by the American government to two corporations. (Guido Leboni, “Un coste de 100.000 millones de dolares,” El Mundo, Madrid, 22/03/03)

Video: Epstein’s “Black Book”

 

Video: Epstein’s “Black Book”

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Investigative reporter Nick Bryant (who was the first to get Epstein’s black book) and I introduce ourselves to Elon Musk as reporters who do care about investigating all things Epstein, including his clients, and explain why he thinks journalists like us do not exist.

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Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire


Boris Johnson: The Billionaires’ Useful Idiot

 

Boris Johnson: The Billionaires’ Useful Idiot

A broken prime minister is still in occupation of Downing Street thanks to a billionaire class that has a stranglehold over the governing political party

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Welcome to British politics this overcast summer day. 

A broken prime minister still in occupation of Downing Street and determined to stay there. This is a recipe for – at best – paralysis, at worst chaos.

More likely both. It’s hard to see what will make Boris Johnson quit.

The prime minister, remember, has powerful allies. Tuesday’s Daily Mail – Britain’s most well-drilled and powerful popular paper – is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand the near-term trajectory of British politics

It contains a series of brutal hatchet jobs on former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt – “Theresa May in trousers” – who the Mail accuses of leading the plotters. On its front page, the Mail lacerates the 148 Tory rebels for pressing the “self-destruct button by opening the door to Smirking Starmer’s coalition of chaos”.

The big newspaper proprietors – Murdoch, Rothermere and the Barclay family – remain loyal to Johnson. Admittedly The Times and the Telegraph are tougher than usual on Johnson this morning, but crucially there are no calls for him to quit.

Murdoch, Mail Newspapers and the Barclays are part of Johnson’s core political base. They all backed him to be Tory leader, all backed him in the 2019 general election, and all have protected Johnson during the harrowing political scandals that have dogged his premiership.

These newspaper magnates are still behind the prime minister today. While this remains the case, Johnson can hope to survive.

Unconditional support

The second half of the coalition backing Johnson are the billionaire Tory donors, who funded Brexit and now – in a mutation of democratic politics – effectively own Johnson’s Conservative Party. In an unprecedented direct intervention by the super-rich in British public life, these donors came together in defence of Johnson yesterday.

They wrote a letter, significantly given as an exclusive to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, awarding their unconditional support to Boris Johnson.

As the Sun emphasised, this letter was signed by some of the richest men in Britain including “billionaire JCB boss Lord Bamford, property magnate Sir Tony Gallagher and Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross.”

Other names, reported the Sun, “include multimillionaire financier Howard Shore and mega-rich Simon Reuben – who alongside brother David is worth £16bn.”

The letter, which emphasised the talking points of the Johnson political campaign, announced that Johnson enjoyed the “unwavering support” of the billionaires who signed it.

The authors of the letter seem to have felt no need to say out loud the unspoken threat that they would withhold funds from any Tory leader who dared to supplant Johnson.

But the Johnson campaign team felt no such inhibitions.

Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, went straight onto national TV and in a remarkable statement told Sky political editor Beth Rigby this: “The Conservative Party donors have said themselves that they aren’t going to support the party if the PM is removed. I think a number of MPs in marginal seats need to hear that, and need to understand what they’re doing: £80 million those donors have donated to the Conservative Party over recent times.”

We can only guess how many Tory MPs were terrified into supporting Johnson by this stark warning, amounting to an attempt at financial blackmail, that Tory donors would stop issuing cheques if they voted the wrong way last night.

But we can say for certain this was a dark moment in modern British democratic politics.

A misleading claim

A Tory cabinet minister setting out in stark terms that billionaires hold a stranglehold over the governing political party. I have never seen this openly stated by a senior, active Tory politician before.

This means it was a revelatory moment that ought, I believe, to redefine the way in which the Johnson premiership should be framed.

So far Johnson’s many media allies have presented the prime minister as a cheekie chappie with the common touch fighting a popular campaign against a distant liberal “elite”. Flawed for certain, a liar and a cheat, but always fighting for ordinary people.

That claim has always been misleading. From the start of his premiership, ex-journalist Johnson has been the creature of the big media owners acting in alliance with deracinated financial capital.

For all of his incompetence, falsehoods and lack of vision, Boris Johnson still has their support today. Over the coming weeks the British media will paint Britain’s ongoing political crisis as the story of an embattled prime minister fighting a desperate struggle for survival.

There’s some truth in that dramatic, easily comprehensible narrative. But much greater forces are at work.

The real enablers

Structural forces. Economic interests which Karl Marx, writing away in the library of the British Museum 150 years ago, would recognise. Or George Orwell writing about class conflict in the 1930s.

The billionaire class put their man, Boris Johnson, in Downing Street three years ago. He suits them well because he does what they want. Johnson is at the apex of a system of government that hands out contracts, supplies favours, slashes regulation, attacks the rule of law, reduces the rights of working people, and favours the marketplace above the state.

The brilliance of Boris Johnson is that he does all of this while pretending to be on the side of ordinary working people. That’s why the super-rich love Boris, the billionaire’s useful idiot.

For all his faults – let’s face it – Johnson was a shambles when he appeared on late-night British TV to declare victory after yesterday’s Tory leadership vote. Dishevelled. Gibbering. Incoherent.

This wounded prime minister blamed the media, shamelessly linked his fortunes to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and nonsensically claimed he had more supporters than when elected Tory leader three years.

It made for painful viewing. Johnson has not simply lost the support of more than one third of his parliamentary party.

He’s lost contact with reality, but not with the billionaires.

The real story of the next few desperate months is not whether Boris Johnson, a truly wretched and discredited political figure, can survive. It’s about whether the system of government in the interests of the super-rich he has come to represent can be overturned.

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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, was published in February 2021 and was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

Towards “Global NATO”: Britain’s Bumbling Foreign Policy Over Taiwan and Ukraine

 

Towards “Global NATO”: Britain’s Bumbling Foreign Policy Over Taiwan and Ukraine

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‘Global Nato’. Help Taiwan ‘defend itself’. Recover the ‘whole’ of Ukraine. Promote ‘the free world’ – UK foreign policy under Liz Truss has become a series of empty slogans from a declining power desperate to remain a major one.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign secretary Liz Truss has given at least three speeches saying the UK must enable Taiwan to “defend itself” against possible Chinese aggression.

Clearly, China and the island of 24 million Taiwanese lying 100 miles off its shore, is very much on the minds of British officials as they aid Ukraine’s military efforts against Moscow.

Maybe it’s China, the world’s coming superpower, they’re really wanting to deter in their determination to be seen to stop Russia.

Last November, in his first ever public speech, MI6 chief Richard Moore said: “Beijing’s growing military strength and the [Communist] Party’s desire to resolve the Taiwan issue, by force if necessary … pose a serious challenge to global stability and peace”.

But how far would or could the UK really go to “defend” Taiwan? The UK’s Attorney General, Suella Braverman, implies the UK will help it counter “hostile cyber activity” by China.

But a military threat is of a different order. The UK doesn’t recognise Taiwan as a state. Just 13 countries recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country for fear of upsetting relations with Beijing and its “One China” policy.

Like most countries, Whitehall has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and has no plans to recognise it. The Foreign Office says it has an “unofficial relationship, based on dynamic commercial, educational and cultural ties”.

The UK also has no formal defence ties with Taiwan. When asked over the years if the UK would consider lending military support to it, UK governments have repeated the position that UK policy backs a peaceful resolution between China and Taiwan.

‘Global Nato’

Truss’s bullish statements about defending Taiwan are as vacuous as those coming from Washington.

US President Biden warned in Tokyo last month that if China invaded Taiwan, the US would intervene militarily. This was an apparent departure from Washington’s traditional policy of “strategic ambiguity” and implicit recognition of Beijing’s policy towards the island.

His intervention was welcomed in Taiwan until the State Department quickly insisted that Biden’s unscripted comment in answer to a journalist’s question did not signify any change in US policy.

But when Liz Truss spoke in April about Taiwan being able to “defend itself” she invoked a new concept – a “Global Nato”.

“By that”, Truss said, “I don’t mean extending the membership to those from other regions. I mean that Nato must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats”. She could only have meant China.

The UK has been keen to display its military power to the Chinese. Last September, the UK sent a warship that was part of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier strike group, HMS Richmond, through the Taiwan strait for the first time since 2008.

In response, China accused Britain of having “evil intentions”.

The British government had already seized the opportunity presented by increased Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea to justify the £7.6 billion spent on building two aircraft carriers – the largest ships ever commissioned by the Royal Navy.

It sent one of them, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the Pacific. Yet the UK’s aircraft carrier, like all large warships, is extremely vulnerable to attack, especially from Chinese missiles.

A provocative naval show of force in the Pacific may make UK officials feel important. It may also make Beijing think again about the timing and nature of any attack on Taiwan, but in the end would surely make no difference to China’s commitment to achieve its objectives.

Ukraine

It’s not only on Taiwan but also on Ukraine that comments by Truss and other British ministers are empty rhetoric, counter-productive, and also dangerous.

To ingratiate themselves with Washington, take a sideswipe at the EU, and as a diversion from domestic crises, Boris Johnson and his foreign and defence secretaries are keen to be at the forefront of giving military support to Ukraine. They’ve been plying Ukraine with missiles and organising international arms shipments to Kyiv.

But while Ukraine needs arms to defend itself, it also needs progress towards implementing a peace agreement. Britain’s demand that Russia must withdraw from the whole of Ukraine – which by implication includes Crimea – slams the door on any peace settlement.

Even some former British military chiefs recognise Putin is never going to allow Ukraine to regain Crimea, which historically was part of Russia until a Soviet president gifted it to Ukraine in 1954.

An obvious outcome might be that the Donbas region remain in Ukraine but its people enjoy a wide degree of devolved power – something that might have been attainable before the invasion.

Then there are Truss’s seemingly endless comments about her foreign policy promoting the “free world”, “freedom and democracy” and “network of liberty”.

The claims are ludicrous as the UK deepens relations with the tyrannical Gulf states and, as Declassified has shown, backs most of the world’s repressive regimes.

Arms market

Taiwan has the advantage for Whitehall of being a burgeoning market for UK arms exports. These have taken off in the last five years: since 2017, Britain has sold £338m worth of military equipment to the island.

Perhaps the UK’s military-industrial complex, backed by officials, is more hopeful than fearful of increasing Chinese belligerency.

The US is also increasing its supplies of arms to Taiwan, albeit not on the scale it has to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. Yet western arms are unlikely to deter President Xi if he decided to attack Taiwan.

Taiwan’s military chiefs are following the war in Ukraine extremely closely, learning lessons. So, too, is Beijing.

The Taiwanese have seen how ambushes by small groups of militia and drones can destroy large military formations. Beijing has seen how vulnerable a ground invasion can be, with clear implications for amphibious operations.

The message is that an attack on Taiwan would require coordinated airborne and amphibious forces, accompanied by precise bombing.

Nato members, including the US, have so far shown they are unwilling to provoke Moscow into an even wider military conflict, and the US is likely not willing to intervene directly in a conflict with a nuclear power.

In any war over Taiwan, western warships would have to engage directly with the Chinese navy to prevent the island from being cut off and blockaded by China.

Sanctions

Europe is suffering an energy crisis partly because of sanctions imposed on Russian oil and gas and there are already cracks in the EU’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions take a long time and need to be well targeted to be effective.

Sanctions against China would have a much greater impact on the west’s economy given the importance of China in the market for rare earth products, electronics and consumer goods and more generally, global finance and investments.

A conflict involving Taiwan could have a devastating impact on the world’s supply of microchips.

Rather than bellicose belligerency, the UK Foreign Office should begin to understand what it can really achieve on the international stage, and who and what it can deter. It should give up its grandstanding claims and match policy to its rhetoric.

It should stop telling others to promote peace when it’s plainly more interested in war, and stop pretending it’s supporting human rights when it’s backing those repressing them.

What the public needs is for the West and the East to cooperate and confront such impending crises as climate change. What it doesn’t need is for pretentious great powers to strut the world stage bereft of real policies.

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Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.

Richard is a British editor, journalist and playwright, and the doyen of British national security reporting. He wrote for the Guardian on defence and security matters and was the newspaper’s security editor for three decades.

Featured image: HMS Richmond fires a missile on exercise in the Atlantic. (Photo: US Navy)

GLI EDUCATORI FALLITI EDUCANO IL FAILED STATE: Ministro Bianchi: “mascherine a scuola hanno valore educativo”

 

Ministro Bianchi: “mascherine a scuola hanno valore educativo”

Patrizio Bianchi
Patrizio Bianchi
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di Stefano Pezzola

Qualcuno mi dice: Perché posso andare in un ristorante o stare fra di noi ed invece a scuola devo portarla la mascherina? Perché a scuola ci si sta cinque ore” afferma in Ministro dell’Istruzione Patrizio Bianchi.

C’è un valore educativo in tutto questo. Noi abbiamo insegnato ai nostri ragazzi ad avere attenzione e rispetto per gli altri, non si può far passare il messaggio che togliere la mascherina sia un atto di liberazione. È un atto di responsabilità” ha aggiunto il Ministro partecipando all’evento Didacta presso la Fortezza da Basso di Firenze.

Una scelta soltanto politica?
Interpellata sul tema Maria Rita Gismondo, dell’ospedale Luigi Sacco, risponde che si tratta esclusivamente di una decisione politica. “Non ci sono dati scientifici che dimostrino che l’uso delle mascherine nei bambini abbassa il rischio di Covid“.
Giovanni Rezza invece, direttore generale della prevenzione sanitaria presso il ministero della Salute, a domanda scritta di un gruppo di legali che richiedevano di presentare gli studi che attestano i rischi/benefici calcolati sulla base dell’utilizzo giornaliero prolungato delle mascherine imposto sui minori dai 6 anni di età, che possa dimostrare l’utilità del dispositivo senza avere ripercussioni sulla salute psicofisica, ha risposto sinteticamente che “al riguardo si rappresenta che questa amministrazione per quanto di competenza non è in possesso della specifica documentazione richiesta”.

Gentilissimo Ministro Bianchi i ragazzi che al mattino a scuola tengono la mascherina e al pomeriggio vanno al centro commerciale senza e la sera in pizzeria ancora senza, non è una questione di valore educativo ma di coerenza scientifica e credo che la politica debba assumersi la responsabilità di tutto ciò.

GLI EDUCATORI FALLITI EDUCATORI DEL FAILED STATE

 

Mascherine, in classe si e al ristorante no. Perchè? Bianchi: “A scuola ci si sta 5 ore. Siamo arrivati in fondo. Serve cautela”

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Anche il Ministro dell’istruzione Patrizio Bianchi interviene in merito al dibattito sul togliere le mascherine in classe nelle ultime settimane di scuola. 

Il titolare di Viale Trastevere, partecipando all’evento Didacta, in corso alla Fortezza da Basso di Firenze, dice: “ci affidiamo al mondo della salute però io voglio ricordare un fatto: io ho voluto a settembre dell’anno scorso tornare tutti a scuola e sapete cosa è costato. E’ costato un confronto molto duro. Il patto era avere in cambio il massimo dell’attenzione e della prudenza. Non siamo ancora fuori”.

Bianchi prosegue: “Qualcuno mi dice: ‘Perché posso andare in un ristorante o stare fra di noi ed invece a scuola devo portarla la mascherina?’ Perché a scuola ci si sta cinque ore. Siamo già arrivati in fondo, un attimo di cautela“.

Secondo il Ministro dell’Istruzione, inoltre, “c’è un valore educativo in tutto questo – ha aggiunto -. Noi abbiamo insegnato ai nostri ragazzi di avere attenzione e rispetto per gli altri, non puoi far passare il messaggio via la mascherina come un atto di liberazione. E’ un atto di responsabilità, è diverso“. 

Nei giorni scorsi a portare avanti la richiesta di togliere le mascherine in classe nelle ultime settimane di scuola (e per gli esami di stato) è stato il sottosegretario Sasso.

“Personalmente – afferma Sasso – sarei per eliminare l’obbligo fin da ora, ma almeno all’esame di maturità studenti e insegnanti dovrebbero poter stare in classe senza più vincoli”.

Il deputato della Lega è stato il primo fra le file del Governo a sottolineare l’esigenza di abbandonare le mascherine in classe: “Come Lega – ha detto – lo stiamo chiedendo da diverse settimane, in considerazione sia del miglioramento dei dati epidemiologici sia della brusca impennata delle temperature, che soprattutto nel Mezzogiorno rende davvero difficile seguire le lezioni: oggi, in diversi centri, siamo abbondantemente oltre i 30 gradi“.

Anche dal dicastero della Salute arrivano però segnali nella stessa direzione: “credo che sia un atto di coerenza e anche un gesto di fiducia agli italiani – ha detto Andre Costa, sottosegretario alla Salute – Ritengo che quando i nostri ragazzi, i nostri bambini, sono a scuola durante le lezioni, e quindi seduti al proprio banco, sia questa una condizione nella quale si possa prevedere di togliere le mascherine”.

Anche perché – fa notare il sottosegretario alla Salute – i ragazzi che al mattino a scuola tengono la mascherina, al pomeriggio vanno al centro commerciale senza, quindi credo che sia una questione  anche di coerenza e credo che la politica si possa assumere questa responsabilità per fare questa scelta“.

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