by Hu Yuwei
and Cao Siqi via Global TimesMembers of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of the coronavirus, visit the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province. Photo: AFP
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said at a briefing on Friday that the summary findings of the mission team would be released soon in next week, with the full version of the report coming in the following weeks.
“Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study,” Tedros said. He said the team just concluded a “very important scientific exercise in very difficult circumstances.”
The WHO team has probed into four primary hypotheses over the virus sources, including direct transmission from animal-to-human, virus jumping to human through an intermediate host, frozen food route-related transmission and lab-related transmission, said Peter Ben Embarek, who leads the WHO team.
The mission has said its main hypotheses are that the virus originated in a bat, although there are several possible scenarios for how it passed to humans, possibly first by infecting another species of animal, media reported. Embarek claimed further surveys are needed, not only in China, to see if there are other types of animals to be reservoirs of the virusThe team has also identified vendors selling frozen animal products, some of which were imported products, in the Wuhan Huanan market, but it has not released any detailed conclusion on how the virus reached the seafood market, according to the WHO on Tuesday. Transmissions of coronavirus occurred elsewhere in the world along with the Wuhan Huanan seafood market in late 2019.
Those hypotheses existed also in some other countries which have revealed evidence of coronavirus cases earlier than the outbreak in Wuhan, Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital, told when ??the Global Times.
From the current investigation, it is unlikely that the coronavirus was homegrown in China. It is most likely that it was brought in from other countries by way of travelers or other means. WHO experts should look to Spain, Brazil and Italy for clues to cases reported earlier, Wang suggested.
Chinese netizens have suggested that some other countries like the US look back to detect the novel coronavirus on the influenza patients, as many have been doubting if the COVID-19 cases have been mixed among respiratory illnesses which have similar symptoms, including a mysterious e-cigarette-caused lung disease, in the US without being tested out.
Chinese experts suggested that some other biological labs in other places, such as US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, cannot be ruled out in the hypothesis on the virus source, as it has raised doubts the possible link between the institute and a series of deadly disease outbreaks, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has caused more than 481,000 deaths in the US.
Netizens also appealed for more investigations on mutant strains detected in the UK or other places to probe possible connection with the virus sources.
“The initial findings suggest the lab incident was extremely unlikely to introduce the virus into the human population,” Embarek said on Friday.
It also completely refutes the conspiracy theory raised by some anti-China hawks, like former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former US president Donald Trump, who has been accusing the Wuhan Institute of Virology of leaking the virus.
“It’s of course always possible that the virus is and was present in samples that have not yet been processed, or among viruses that have not yet been characterized,” Embarek said.
“But knowingly, apparently from all the labs we’ve talked with, nobody has seen this virus before,” whereas the scientists discovering new viruses would publish the findings immediately in the most common practice.
“Some of that work may lie outside the remit and scope of this mission. We have always said that this mission would not find all the answers, but it has added important information that takes us closer to understanding the origins of the virus,” Tedros said.
“Virus traceability investigation is a scientific issue. The investigation organized by WHO is not targeting any country, nor can it be preconceived. Even if a country is found to be the source country, it should not be blamed or become a tool for political attacks,” Wang stressed.
In an interview with CHD Chairman RFK, Jr., Vandana Shiva warns listeners that if we don’t fight back against Gates and his empire, “They will own everything. You will own nothing … no commons, no public good, no shared values.”
In an interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Vandana Shiva discusses how Bill Gates, along with Big Ag, Big Chemical, Big Food, Big Tech and Big Pharma are destroying Earth’s ecosystem and with it, our health.
Shiva, who has a Ph.D. in quantum physics, is founder of Navdanyan International, an organization dedicated to protecting seed and food sovereignty, and small farmers around the world.
Kennedy, chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense, and Shiva discuss how the Gates empire aims to control the food system, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s quest to make this the Decade of Vaccines.
Watch the interview here:
Read the transcript:
RFK, Jr. : This is my hero, Vandana Shiva, whom I have known for many, many years, who has been a role model for me, really. She’s about 40 IQ points smarter than I am. I found out because I was reading your biography today, and I didn’t know that you did your doctoral thesis on quantum physics. Was that what you studied in school at some point?
Vandana Shiva: Yes, that’s still what guides my work, the non-separation and the potential. Those are the two things that will get the mechanistic thinking out of the world. Yes, we are connected, and we all have potential, including civil disobedience.
RFK, Jr.: So Vandana Shiva: Shiva is currently the head of Navdanya, right?
Vandana Shiva: Navdanya, which means nine seeds.
RFK, Jr.: But I first ran into you when you were running the Chipko movement back in the 1980s, that’s when I first heard about you, and this extraordinary leader in India who was organizing women to protect forests and trees and all of that.
Vandana Shiva: Bobby, I wasn’t a leader. I was a student, and I was volunteering, and the leaders were the women and they were my professors. I always say, I went to University of Western Ontario for my Ph.D. to figure out quantum theory better, but I went to the Chipko University to figure out biodiversity. And Bobby, just the other day, the mafia has taken hold of David Attenborough to launch portfolio management on biodiversity, like portfolios on land ownership, as if value to biodiversity was not recognized by the Chipko women. I think that is the clash we are living through. The billionaires wanting to turn everything into their portfolio, and the ordinary people saying, “No, we want to protect our land.” Our farmers have been protesting now for six months for the land. That’s what they’re saying.
RFK, Jr.: I’ve seen on the international news these huge, vast gatherings of farmers now in India are marching on the cities. And so tell us, because I know you’re right in the middle of that … let me just introduce a little bit more about you. Shiva is one of the great grassroots leaders on the planet today. She has won every prize that you can win from people who care about grassroots women’s rights, about intellectual property and seeds, particularly, in GMOs, in forest protection, in chemical agriculture versus the agriculture than Vandana Shiva fights for, and has led us all in the wars against Monsanto. Hanging out with you for many, many years, I don’t even remember the first time we met, but she’s just an extraordinary, extraordinary leader. So, I want to talk to you about Bill Gates and about his purchase of the land, and his move to create a new feudalism on this planet, and to get the farmers off the land, and the billionaires onto it. And let’s talk first about current events and about what’s happening in India with these marches that you’re involved in.
Vandana Shiva: So Bobby, my life was around physics and quantum physics, and of course, the Chipko movement. I was, from a very young age, an ecological activist. But it was 1984 …
RFK, Jr.: Your dad was a forester, right?
Vandana Shiva: My father was a forest conservator. Yes, I learned a lot from him. And my mother was a refugee from the partition. When India was split by a line drawn on a map, and she said, “Well, I’ve done everything. I’ve broken every glass ceiling for women, and now I’ll be a farmer.” So she became a farmer, and my father was in the forest, and we lived between the farm and the forest. And they were wonderful people. I mean, their values, their life has given me all the values I live, of fearlessness, of truth, of never giving up, and loving nature very deeply. But my involvement in agriculture begins with 1984, when there were similar protests against the green revolution. Now, the green revolution was first implemented on Punjab …
RFK, Jr.: That was a program by the Rockefellers, originally, Rockefellers, right?
Vandana Shiva: Exactly, and the World Bank. So the World Bank, the USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], the Rockefellers. They had a package working for a while on how do you get to move these huge amounts of chemicals, the fertilizers, the pesticides after the wars. Those factories should have just shut down, and instead, the Rockefellers, who were very much involved in the IG Farben and Hitler experiments. I mean, there’s so much reports on that. The oil came from the Rockefellers. The chemical agriculture is a fossil fuel agriculture. They provided the oil, and the Germans provided the science and the Rockefellers, also the private bankers, provided the finance. And so after the war, it should have been an end to chemical warfare on this planet, and instead they worked on saying, “How do we change agriculture to make it more adapted to chemical.?” So, we have tall wheats, and tall rices and even animals are dual purpose.
The bullocks will pull the plow and the cows will give you milk. So we never do one dimensional thinking in India. And the fact that so many Indians are heading so many institutions is they’re living on the leftovers of multi-dimensional thinking, to push the world into one dimensional artificial intelligence thinking. But at that point, Barlow was picked up from DuPont defense labs to work on changing the plans. Now, the U.S. had stolen some wheat from Japan during the war, and there was rice from Indonesia, and they changed the plant, made the dwarf … I call it the civil disobedience of the plant. The plants were saying, “Don’t want you chemicals. Go away,” and they changed the plant. And this was all done by Norman Borlaug, who got a Nobel Peace Prize. In 1984, farmers are being shot. Farmers are being killed, and I’m seeing this was about to … It’s supposed to be about peace. He gets a Nobel Peace Prize. 20,000 people have died in Punjab.
So the protests of today are a continuity of protests we’ve had since 1991, which is a watershed for this neoliberal globalization imposed by the World Bank, which first got us into debt. I mean, that’s how the shylocks of the world work, right? Get it into debt, and then on the pound of flesh. And the laws that the farmers are fighting against are the pound of flesh that the World Bank had demanded in 1991, except that they were pushed back, and pushed back and pushed back. Right now, the protests are huge. Farmers aren’t stupid. Farmers know what they’re fighting against and they say, “We are fighting for the soul and the soil of India, because if we aren’t there as farmers, this civilization is dead. If we aren’t there as farmers, this soil is dead.” They’ve witnessed how the soil has been degraded with the chemical green revolution. They have witnessed the monoculture commodity farming for Pepsi, which is one model. So Pepsi came into India after 1984 and suicide started in the potato belts. Pepsi, for a 20 rupee package of potato, the farmer gets 0.04 paisa, which is an insignificant amount. So, when it’s chemical agriculture, GMO seeds and globalized trade by agribusiness and agro-processing industry, on average, farmers get 0.5 to 4% of what a consumer pays. But the consumer pays not just the price of that junk food in the package, they’re paying for the price of junk food in their health.
And that’s why the work you’re doing Bobby, on the issue of health, particularly children’s health. I see the industrial agriculture and industrial processing and the industrial mindset as invasions into our bodies. Earlier, it was happening indirectly, the cancers through the toxics. You’ve been fighting on the Monsanto cancer cases. All of that is an invasion into the body. But now there’s a conscious denial that there’s a harmony between the soils’ health, the plant health, our health. Our gut microbiome is a rain forest of diversity. And if it doesn’t receive diversity of food and it doesn’t receive fresh food, it is like a war against our gut microbiome, which is 90% of us in terms of biodiversity. We are 10% human, 90% other beings who keep us healthy, who make us. And the war against our bodies is at its last stages.
But it’s happening at a time when awareness on health is growing so much. Where awareness of biodiversity is growing so much. And now they’re thinking, “Oh, what we did when colonialism started, just change the mindset, call them barbarians, civilize them.” I mean, they’re basically carrying on the civilizing mission narrative. And that’s why I wrote my book, Oneness Vs. the 1%. I said, Bill Gates, keeps talking about innovation, all he’s doing is colonization. And I’ve basically shown how it’s colonization.
RFK, Jr.: Right. And that’s what I want to talk to you about. And I have a piece that I interviewed you for extensively that’s running in The Defender this week about Bill Gates’ new feudalism. The U.S. papers finally recognized the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening because they discovered suddenly that he was now the biggest owner of farmland in the United States of America. He did this health campaign to take over our farmland. Nobody knew he was doing it. He was buying it through shell companies, cascade investments and other means. And what I do in this article, with your help, is connect what he’s doing in this country. He’s also investing in Alphabet, which is a Google company and developing robotic farm workers that will replace farmers. He is developing artificial intelligence and stealing the knowledge as he did in India, from the little farmer. He put cameras in their homes, in their fields. He put sensors everywhere to figure out how they were using the seeds.
And then he took the seed banks, there’s 15 seed banks around the world that store all of the heritage seeds of humanity, 786,000 species of seeds. They’re there for humanity, for the commons, and he has taken over that seed bank, consolidated it and is now privatizing it and changing the genetic makeup of those seeds, making it so that they are chemically dependent so he can patent all of the life that has been developed over 20,000 years of agriculture on this planet.
I want to start telling this story about what happened during the green revolution, which was started by the Rockefellers, mainly in India and Mexico. Gates moved it in the early 2000s to Africa. Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation. And they started doing the same thing there. And it’s the same thing he did with vaccines. There’s a human problem, which he says is hunger or disease, and I’m going to solve it with my technology, which is GMO crops, patented seed, synthetic foods, chemical agriculture, pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizing monocultures.
And he went into 13 African nations and forced them to do commodity agriculture, to accept his inputs, built the supply chain and now there’s 131 million people starving in those nations. The starvation rate has gone up by 30%. And he is now trying to do the same thing to the rest of the world. And I know you’ve been active in Africa and fighting them there for many, many years. And that really helped alert the world about this. It’s not about farming, it’s not about food, it’s about taking over our land and giving us really unhealthy food.
Vandana Shiva: Bobby, you know better than anyone, how we are witnessing both the patterns of the old colonization of 500 years. And I think it’s very important that Black Lives Matter wakes up to the Gates empire, which is a racist empire. They might appoint at their heads or give a few jobs, but the mindset and the structural processes is where systems get decided.
While he’s using that old mindset, of course he’s using new tools, and the new tools are basically genetic engineering. And I’d started Navdanya, which means nine seeds, which is diversity, when I was called at a meeting in 1987 with the old poison cartel. “Now we own the seed, we’re not making enough money by selling chemicals, we’ve got to make it illegal for farmers to have seed. We will own seed as intellectual property and we’ll have an international cloak called the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property to force farmers to have GMO patency. I said, “But this is so wrong. This is an empire over life.” And I took a commitment, I’m going to save seeds. I want to work with our government on laws that say, plants, animals, seeds are not patentable.
RFK, Jr.: Let me interrupt you for a second because there’s a lot of people who listen to this who won’t understand why GMO seeds are connected to chemicals. And let me explain very briefly, what happened is, when DDT was banned in 1974, and it was Monsanto’s product, they bought another product called glyphosate. Somebody had taken this, it was a tank cleaner, somebody had thrown it out in the backyard and saw it killed all the grass. And Monsanto said, “This would be a good weedkiller.” It made it a weedkiller, marketed it as a wee killer. Farmers would have hundreds of farm workers wearing backpack sprayers, spraying the weeds in the cornfield before the corn got too big.
Then, in 1994, somebody put some of this glyphosate on the ground, and there was one weed that didn’t die. Monsanto took the gene out of that weed that made it resistant to glyphosate and they put it in corn. And now they had corn, that if you sprayed it with glyphosate it would not die. Well, now you can fire all those farm workers and you hire one airplane that saturates the entire landscape with glyphosate, and the only thing that lives is that GMO corn.
And that now is the biggest pesticide in the world. I think 80% of the pesticides in the world are that and they have now bred all kinds of all of our grains. And all of our food stuffs and fruits are now being genetically engineered so that they are resistant to Roundup, so that you can dump this stuff all over the landscape. What we find is the way that it kills plants is it sucks all the minerals out of them and destroys the building blocks of life. The foo that you get doesn’t have the minerals you need, you can have a full belly, but you can be dying of malnutrition. And that is one of the things that you really have articulated better than anybody.
Vandana Shiva: You’re so right. So whether it is the green revolution in India where Borlaug married chemical fertilizers to dwarf varieties of plants, or Monsanto steals basically already made Roundup glyphosate, makes it Roundup. And then they sued every company that was doing genetic engineering so they could buy them out. They never did any work. Monsanto, none of these companies have done any work. They’ve just sued, and sue, and sued. And the genetic engineering, and patents and chemicals go together.
And now the same Rockefellers that started the chemical industry with the IG Farben, and also started the entire irresponsible pharmaceuticals. You know, we’ve had medicine forever. And Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine.” Ayurveda says “that good food is the only medicine, and bad food has no medicine to cure the diseases it causes. It’s all known. A hundred years of bad … what is it called? There’s a lovely word for it, snake oil? Selling snake oil.
And now Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big IT, and big .. they call it FinTech, financial technology. It’s basically using digital speculative measures and portfolios, turning the land into a portfolio, the biodiversity into a portfolio, and thinking it’s some smart economics. And sadly, poor Attenborough went and said, “Ecologists don’t know biodiversity. Economists do.” because money-making … And Aristotle had said, “Economy is the art of living.” Chrematistics is the art of money making.
So now in the art of moneymaking is Big Ag, Big Food, Big Tech, Big Everyone wanting to get bigger like a cancer cell. And the new Gates Ag One is this convergence. It’s one year old. Last year in January, he announced it. And as he says, time is the enemy. When only stupid people think time is the enemy. Wise people know time is your friend that tests the best out of you. After all, Mr. Gates locked us all in for one year, and time has taught us what wonderful friendships and love is about. It has taught us about enoughness, and simplicity, what we can do without. They don’t realize there’s a living world out there. And I feel Mr. Gates, besides having the disease of the cancer cell, not knowing when to stop growing … Healthy cells know how to stop growing. I think he’s got a disease of power, and he has a disease of fear because … I said, why is this man so afraid of the tiniest microbe, and so afraid of the tiniest small farmer protesting on the Indian streets today? Why is he so afraid of a plant that breeds for free? And why is he so afraid of democracy that if India says no to GMO rice, the golden rice, a fake solution to gold blindness, or the Bt eggplant, which we threw out in 2001 through our government ministry, through seven public hearings, where the government listened to the farmers, and listened to the citizens and listened to the scientists.
RFK, Jr.: And those were GMO crops that he tried to force on India, and India threw them out. But he moved to Bangladesh and Pakistan with his GMO cotton. He doesn’t want anything except the GMOs.
Vandana Shiva: But he also moved the golden rice to the Philippines, for which there’s a huge movement, no golden rice. And this comes back to the seed issue. So when the green revolution was started and the Rockefellers and the World Bank were taking all the seeds from farmers to force them to have the green revolution seeds with chemicals, these 15 seed banks were created, and all our seeds lie in this. Now, Gates has taken control of this public system of seeds. And the rice seed bank in Philippines, where the work on golden rice was being done, the GMO golden rice, the reason it’s important for following that is one, all the seeds of rice are there. We have all 200,000 varieties of rice. And our top seed scientists refused to part with the seeds. They said, “This is our heritage. This was our civilization. We cannot let the World Bank get hold of it.” World Bank made sure he was removed from his position as the top scientists of his time, Dr. Richharia. He is my teacher. And so when Gates gets hold of the seed bank in the Philippines, and then he does golden rice, he’s now preparing. And this is where we need the civil disobedience, Bobby. We all need to join hands. This year World Food Day, Oct. 16, or before that Food Summit, which he has hijacked, let us do a civil disobedience against force feeding of bad food. Whether it be lab food, like Impossible Burger, or golden rice, because he’s preparing for biofortification to be made compulsory. And we’ve seen how he can make things compulsory.
RFK, Jr.: Let me explain what Vandana Shiva is saying about the Food Summit. Most of the people who watch this show know that in 2010, 2009, Bill Gates went in front of the United Nations, pledged $10 billion to the World Health Organization, and most of it ended up coming from government, not from him, but he put in a couple of billion. And he declared a decade of vaccines. Nobody paid much attention to him. But he was the first unelected official, with no diplomatic portfolio, who appeared before the United Nations and he made this declaration.
Immediately, he started putting all of these wheels spinning. He created all of these groups that fight anti-vaccination, and he started promoting vaccines all over the world … and he created all of these quasi-governmental organizations, CEPI [The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness] and PATH and GAVI, [the Vaccine Alliance] that everybody thinks are government, but they’re just Bill Gates. He took over the World Health Organization during this decade. Even the Financial Times said no decision is made at the World Health Organization that is not run through the Gates Foundation first. And in 2019, the World Health Organization comes out in January, and says that vaccine hesitancy is one of the 10 greatest threats to global health. Did they offer any scientific study to prove that? No. They just stated it. Immediately, the world fell in order. In 150 countries, legislatures, politicians who are on the payroll of big pharma and pushing vaccine mandates and abolishing exemptions.
In the United States, within three months, 100 bills in 50 states had been entered into the legislative process to mandate vaccines, and to ban exemptions … Adam Schiff, who’d been taking money from Gates, the head of the Intelligence Committee, comes forward and tells the social media CEOs, Pinterest, Facebook, Google, all of them, Instagram, YouTube, “You’ve got to start censoring vaccine misinformation.”
And then we had the roll up to 2020, and 2020 in January, right on time for his decade of vaccines, we get COVID. And Fauci, who’s his partner, puts $48 billion into pushing vaccines. Gates gets on TV every day saying, “Until everybody gets vaccinated, we have to stay locked down. We’re going to crash the global economy till all of you do what you’re told and get your vaccine.”
He paid for studies to kill ivermectin, to kill hydroxychloroquine, to discredit them. We’ve spent in our country $0 on any-virals, on off-the-shelf antivirals, researching them, vitamin D, all the things we know that reduce fatalities for COVID. None of that was studied. None of it was recommended. Instead, all of the money, $48 billion, went to vaccines.
Now, he’s reproducing that. He has succeeded with his Decade of Vaccines beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. And now, he’s gone on to part two, which he’s declared the Decade of Food, and he’s doing the same thing. It’s all chemical food. It’s synthetic food. He owns the Impossible Burgers, Beyond Beef all of these things, which are loaded with pesticides, and he’s trying to get the farmers off the farms, he’s taking over the farms with his robots and his artificial intelligence in India, in Africa, and now in the United States, and giving us unhealthy food, and it’s contributing to the chronic illnesses that are going to make us addicted to his medications. Oh, you know the rest of that story, Vandana Shiva, and you tell it better than anybody.
Vandana Shiva: Well, I think what people who love life and love freedom should be preparing for now is, A, the fact that yes, with this Gates Ag One, he wants one agriculture on a planet with so much diversity. Our wetlands with rice are very different from our dry lands with millets. Our barn systems of Bengali are very different from the desert systems of Rajasthan. And the one agriculture he wants is this externally driven system, where two of the chemicals after the wars are added, the GMOs, which became post 1990s with the WTO and they were spread and with the patenting. And now he wants to add digital agriculture farming without farmers. And of course the narrative today, just like then, it was, we grow great from air because we fixed nitrogen by burning fossil fuels. Well, that was a myth. They’ve ruined the land. They ruined the oceans. They ruined the climate, 300 times more deadly than carbon dioxide is the nitrous oxide that gets emitted from nitrogen fertilizers.
So they said the soil is empty. I call it terra nullius. That was the legal jurisprudence of the colonial time. Then they patented the seed and made it look like life is empty. I called it bio nullius. And Mr. Gates was creating his new empire. I call it mente nullius, empty minds. We’ll empty out the minds by mining data and patenting it and turning everyone into zombies and evaluating them and assigning them value. And as the research said, you will own nothing. They will own everything. You will own nothing. And it’ll all be theirs. So no commons, no public good, no shared values, just money, money, money in their hands, and them being an extractive machine.
So because since ’91, everything has been tried in the era that created Gates. He wasn’t as rich as he was ’til the deregulation of finance and deregulation of IT. The first WTO meeting he managed to become duty-free and tax-free for trade in information. That’s how all of these tech giants became so rich.
So now what, at that time, the WTO said seeds will be patented before that. And most seeds are not. The second thing was the Cargills will trade in agriculture and there’ll be no national sovereignty system to protect the rights to food. That’s what Indian farmers are fighting against right now. And the third was what they called sanitary and phytosanitary measures, which is ban good food and make junk food the only option. This is why we have chronic diseases.
Now, Gates is taking all of this to the next step. Oh, there were laws created to prevent me from stealing. I’ll do digital genomic mapping and undercut all the international laws. And on international trade in food, if movements are growing for real food and food sovereignty, let me create fake food in the labs and create starvation and hunger through lockdown. So there is no food and destroy the farmers and do farming without farmers. And why worry only about Pepsi and junk food and Coca-Cola? We’re also the world’s biggest polluters in plastic. No, no, no. What we now do is make totally fake food and we’ll make the right to good food a crime, just like a right to know your health, the right to have the right medicine, the right for entire societies to have deep medical knowledge, that all that is turned into a crime. We’ve seen this happen.
RFK, Jr.: Let me give people an example of what you’re talking about. Gates owns a big stake in Philip Morris, which owns Kraft Foods and also owns General Foods. And they make processed foods and they make American cheese singles and Cheez Whiz. Those are so devoid of nutrition that the government makes those companies put in vitamins, vitamin A, vitamin C, et cetera. There’s some vitamins in them. What Gates is doing now all across Africa, all across the world, is he’s passing laws, he’s buying off politicians and forcing through mandates for fortified food so that you will not be able to sell food in markets in Africa, unless it’s fortified. Well, the food, the goat cheese that the farmer makes in Masai Mara in Kenya does not need fortification. It already has all the nutrients we want in it, but that farmer will not be able to sell that goat cheese in his local market. Instead Cheez Whiz will be the monopoly there. And that’s one of the ways that he’s using what Vandana Shiva’s saying about illegalizing health or outlawing healthy food to open up these markets and compel us to eat his dirty filthy poisonous food.
Vandana Shiva: Two quick things, Bobby. Phillip Morris was also responsible for the high fructose corn syrup, that starts as synthetic sugar. That has caused cirrhosis in the liver in babies and is added to every food because it’s addictive. The second is, India is such a land of diversity and richness. We always said, Hindustan, diversity is our way. We have so many snacks and so many foods, you can’t taste the same thing in three places. It’s all unique. They banned all of this. I have watched it disappear. They’ve banned our cold press virgin oil mills. Five million were shut down in ’98 when Cargill and Monsanto wanted to dump GM Musoya. We’ve watched this happen. So it’s important to learn the lessons of the green revolution of globalization. And now see how the concentration of all of this in the hands of a Bill Gates is accelerating what was put in place and we should do everything we can to prevent a total takeover of our seed, our food, our freedom.
RFK, Jr.: Vandana Shiva, we’re out of time. Thank you very much. Tell people how they can support you in your work.
Vandana Shiva: Well, for anyone who’s listening, the first is, earlier at the farm, we had learning experiences of how to learn from the earth and grow good food. But we right now are having these as zoom courses. And you can go to the website of navdanya N-A-V-D-A-N-Y-A.org. You can become a seed warrior, a food warrior. Write to me at Vandana Shiva: shiva@gmail.com. And we also have an international program called Navdanya International, where we’ve just done a report, Gates to a Global Empire. You want to know more about what Gates is up to, read that report. It’s available for free download. And let us make this year the year of transition away from the Gates empire, to the freedom of all life on this planet and all people of this planet in all their freedoms and in all their diversity.
And by the way, my name is Shiva because my parents fought caste. And they said, “We want to take a name that’s not a caste name.” And so they took a name of a divinity and in Christianity, there’s a trinity, but we have millions of divinities. The grass is a divinity, and the soil is a divinity and the rivers are divinities and the mother Ganges is our mother. And it’s beautiful. India is so beautiful in recognizing the divine forces in all life, and you must, therefore, protect them. But we also have a Trinity and there’s Brahma the creator, Vishnu, the maintainer, and Shiva, who destroys bad systems to create new ones. Let’s join hands to create new systems.
RFK, Jr.: Perfect name for you, Vandana Shiva. Thank you for joining me. Follow Vandana Shiva and you can read my article in The Defender this week about our collaboration with Vandana Shiva. Thank you very much for joining us.
Lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, has penned a comprehensive account of Bill Gates’ attempt to monopolize and dominate global food production, labelling it “a dark form of philanthro-capitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”
Kennedy warns that “To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.””
Kennedy continues, “These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.”
Writing for his Children’s Health Defense group, Kennedy notes that “It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery.”
The article contains a raft of links documenting Gates’ “long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally”.
Throughout the essay, Kennedy notes how Gates has:
In partnering with companies like Monsanto and pushing GMOs, Kennedy charges that Gates is engaging in “Chemical warfare on human health.”
The piece also notes how Gates has pushed ‘faux’ global governmental agencies that he himself created “to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions,” including insect protein.
“Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children,” Kennedy writes.
Kennedy also covers the elite push for a ‘great reset’ “to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity.”
The article is a must read to understand how deeply embedded Bill Gates’ tentacles are in the control structures of the globe, and how every policy and program he is pushing is fundamentally anti-human.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been exposing this anti-human, anti-Earth agenda for some time, which is why he is relentlessly attacked and smeared by elite ‘think tanks’ and globalist organizations.
Calls for Kennedy to be cancelled and erased are sure to increase after this latest important salvo against Gates and his minions.
President Reagan famously touted America as a “shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” However, today in 2021, that beacon light has dimmed significantly, and most of America has become entirely consumed by COVID Mania, while the masses have surrendered their liberties due to a virus with a recovery rate of 99.8+%.
Although most Americans and their elected leaders have failed to uphold our sacred principles, there are still pockets of brave, freedom-loving Americans who seek to continue abiding by our founding ideals and their emphasis on the protection of individual rights.
Florida is the largest of the handful of currently-functioning “free states” that has lived up to the American principle as a beacon of liberty, in a nation that has surrendered to tyranny, corruption, & idiocracy. Floridians, along with Americans in only a few other states, live so much more freely than people in New York, California, and the dozens of other lockdown states, that we may as well be living in two different nations. Never in my life would I have imagined that so many Americans would surrender their precious freedoms in the name of a flu-like respiratory virus, but here we are.
Martin Luther King Jr famously reminded us that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Over the past several years, Americans had lived incredibly comfortable lives. With COVID-19 came a sudden crisis, and the ultimate test of fortitude. Tragically, most of our political leaders and “public health experts” not only failed that test, but then weaponized the situation to unleash terror and chaos upon the people who put their trust in them.
Governor Ron DeSantis is one of those leaders who has shined through challenge and controversy. Through the course of corona hysteria, he has acted admirably and bravely,using his platform and power as an anchor for the battle against the forces that seek to intrude upon our rights. Had he lost the gubernatorial race to a corrupt,degenerate politician named Andrew Gillum, there is no doubt that Florida would have been locked down at this moment, and millions of Floridians would be suffering under the weight of the COVID regime. DeSantis has almost single-handedly ensured that his constituents have been able to live free and prosper in a time of absolute chaos, corruption, and tyranny.
Sure, Florida is still far removed from where most of America was in 2019. Most businesses continue to require masks in indoor settings, and power hungry city mayors and county officials enjoy attempting to enforce draconian absurdity on their populations (DeSantis has signed executive orders to make sure these leaders cannot enforce criminal penalties against people who don’t abide by draconian COVID policies). Yet at least inside of Florida’s boundaries, you get the feeling that the momentum is heading in the direction of Team Reason. Restaurants, bars, shops, schools, and most entertainment venues are fully open, without destructive capacity limits or draconian curfews. Citizens are out and about instead of locked down in their homes, and people of all ages don’t often hesitate to have in-person gatherings and meetings. Life is becoming very normal again in Florida.
If you read the legacy media and watch establishment television channels, you probably have no idea that life is thriving in Florida. The media and corrupt, tyrannical politicians don’t want you to hear about the real COVID success story here. Having been open for many months, Florida is the ultimate control group to all of the madness happening around the country. Their COVID stats are objectively better than comparable lockdown states, so the media and “public health experts” have taken to endlessly smearing DeSantis with fake statistics and baseless innuendo.
In Florida, we even have a massive — albeit unreported in the media — “COVID refugee” population. These are Americans from lockdown states who made the semi-permanent, but quiet departure to Florida so that they could live a more normal life. Many don’t acknowledge their reason for being here, because doing so would be politically incorrect in a time when safety is the ultimate virtue and triumphs living one’s life to the fullest.
The “COVID refugees” claim that they’ll head back once things open back up. But will things actually return to normal? And when?
That much remains unclear. What is happening now in lockdown states seems more like a signal of what is to come permanently, and what is already here.
A new survey reported this week shows that only one in four respondents will stop wearing a mask after receiving the COVID vaccine. This speaks to an issue that isn’t going away soon.
Tragically, the Safety Regime might be here to stay. We are now one full year into lockdown madness. It is prudent, and inevitable, that more Americans will consider leaving their lockdown states for good, take advantage of federalism, and relocate to one of the handful of the states in America where you can still live free and thrive.
Tens of millions of Americans wasted a year of their lives hoping that their state or local government would “allow” them to return to normal life. The aspiring tyrants and power drunk ruling class have been granted unprecedented control over their populations, and there are no signs that they will return it to the people any time soon.
In Florida, we are so thankful that Gov. DeSantis and his team are defending our right to live our lives as we see fit. In doing so, Florida has become America’s brightest beacon light of liberty in a nation that remains hijacked by COVID tyranny.
Comment by Ken: “I live in the Free State of Florida. We were gifted Governor Desantis. I believe he knows the whole covid thing is a scam but he is trying to walk the middle road.
That said,,, the idiots here do not appreciate the gift as I would say over 90% are masked up,,, even very young children. The businesses do put up signs but the cops here have no desire to become mask cops and besides Desantis does not allow fines and jail.
These fines and incarceration other states do are about as unlawful as it gets. There are “NO LAWS” requiring masks, only silly “rules”. Masks don’t do jack,,, says so right on the box.
The city nearby has mask rules so we avoid it and their businesses. Let them go bankrupt over this fake disease.”
is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century.
Legitimate views about the effectiveness of lockdown are being silenced with accusations of Covid ‘denial’. The misuse of this powerful and emotive word, often associated with the Holocaust, is morally wrong and needs to stop.
These days, if you want to shut down critical or dissident views, all you need to do is shout ‘denier’. This morally charged scare word is often hurled at anyone who questions the efficacy of the current lockdown or any of the policies associated with it. Consequently, the term denial is used to delegitimise the view of someone who is sceptical about the lockdown.
For some time now, scepticism – an attitude associated with a questioning mind – has been targeted by would-be censors and treated as a marker for insidious behaviour. ‘How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous’ warns an academic in the Guardian.
The rhetorical strategy of attributing malevolent intent to scepticism is demonstrated by the decision of the Guardian to update its style guide by changing the usage of the term ‘climate sceptic’ to that of ‘climate denier’.
With its long-established religious connotation as an expression of heresy, denial communicates an act of mortal sin. This quasi-religious meaning is still conveyed by 21st century moral entrepreneurs. “I have seen Covid denial up close – it was a chilling experience,” writes a commentator.
In recent times, the term denial has mutated from its religious connotations to become an all-purpose secular sin. It has emerged as a turbo-charged moral crime because of its association with the Holocaust. The Holocaust is rightly recognised as a unique symbol of human evil.
Those who deny the existence of gas chambers and death camps are condemned as the personification of evil. Given the powerful association with moral corruption and evil, its memory is sadly exploited by moral crusaders to further their cause.
Activists know that when they accuse someone of being an ‘AIDS denier’, they will tap into the memory of the death camps. They understand that when they condemn someone as a ‘climate change denier’, they are able to manipulate the powerful emotions associated with people’s loathing for the Holocaust.
This self-conscious exploitation of the Holocaust was illustrated by a journalist for the online magazine Grist, who wanted to see global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals. With the tone of vitriol characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors, he noted that “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards,” adding “some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
During the pandemic, the rhetoric of denial has been frequently used to associate people who are sceptical of government policy with the sins of other types of denials. As one commentator explained: “Denial is pernicious and can have dire impacts. Climate change denial leads to lack of action that would preserve a healthy planet. Mask denial leads to increased spread of and mortality from the Covid virus. Denial of sexual abuse leads to horrific instances where an abuser is allowed to persist in their malfeasance for years because those responsible for the institutions in which they operated – schools, churches, companies, scouts, etc) refused to face the terrible reality that existed under their own roofs.”
From this perspective, denial itself, without regard to any specific object is pernicious. The targeting of denial has little to do with the distinct features of any specific issues. It is driven by a mood of intolerance towards those who are sceptical of the received wisdom.
The alarmist tone used to rebrand anyone sceptical of a lockdown policy as a denier makes it difficult for many people to openly voice their reservations on the predicament they face. A lockdown sceptic is not simply treated as someone with a different point of view but as a threat to the community. They are also condemned for having blood on their hands. They have “deadly beliefs” which constitute a threat to the survival of a community.
Sceptics are routinely portrayed as a danger to life and therefore, at the very least, they need to be ostracised, censored and humiliated. This sentiment was underlined by Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who characterised the views of a scientist who dissented from the lockdown consensus as “dangerous.”
Predictably, such an accusation serves as a prelude for demanding that this dangerous scientist should be prevented from having access to the media to voice his views. The association of danger with scepticism informs an editorial in the Guardian titled, ‘The Guardian view on Tory lockdown sceptics : a dangerous trend’.
Yet a sceptical attitude is essential in the middle of a pandemic when so much is at stake. People need to be able to voice their sentiments, make criticisms and offer suggestions without the fear of being charged with an act of heresy. Harnessing the creativity and the wisdom of the public requires the freedom of speech.
It is important to remember that it is not the sceptic but the moral entrepreneur who exploits the memory of the Holocaust by promiscuously using the word denial. Sceptics are not deniers, but affirmers of the necessity for asking questions in pursuit of the truth.
In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”
The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.
The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.
For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.
A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.
Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?
Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.
What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.
Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite that loathed him.
A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”
Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.
Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”
But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.
And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.
For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.
That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.
Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves.
The poisoned embrace between American elites and China began nearly 50 years ago when Henry Kissinger saw that opening relations between the two then-enemies would expose the growing rift between China and the more threatening Soviet Union. At the heart of the fallout between the two communist giants was the Soviet leadership’s rejection of Stalin, which the Chinese would see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet communist system—and thus it was a mistake they wouldn’t make.
Meanwhile, Kissinger’s geopolitical maneuver became the cornerstone of his historical legacy. It also made him a wealthy man selling access to Chinese officials. In turn, Kissinger pioneered the way for other former high-ranking policymakers to engage in their own foreign influence-peddling operations, like William Cohen, defense secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who greased the way for China to gain permanent most favored nation trade status in 2000 and become a cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The Cohen Group has two of its four overseas offices in China, and includes a number of former top officials, including Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who recently failed to disclose his work for the Cohen Group when he criticized the Trump administration’s “with us or against us” approach to China in an editorial. “The economic prosperity of U.S. allies and partners hinges on strong trade and investment relationships with Beijing,” wrote Mattis, who was literally being paid by China for taking exactly that position.
Yet it’s unlikely that Kissinger foresaw China as a cash cow for former American officials when he and President Richard M. Nixon traveled to the Chinese capital that Westerners then called Peking in 1972. “The Chinese felt that Mao had to die before they could open up,” says a former Trump administration official. “Mao was still alive when Nixon and Kissinger were there, so it’s unlikely they could’ve envisioned the sorts of reforms that began in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. But even in the 1980s China wasn’t competitive with the United States. It was only in the 1990s with the debates every year about granting China most favored nation status in trade that China became a commercial rival”—and a lucrative partner.
The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn.
Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.
In 1978, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of China. As mayor of America’s tech epicenter, her ties to China helped the growing sector attract Chinese investment and made the state the world’s third-largest economy. Her alliance with Jiang also helped make her investor husband, Richard Blum, a wealthy man. As senator, she pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by rationalizing China’s human rights violations, while her friend Jiang consolidated his power and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no local police,” Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,” the senator from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.”
Yet the past actually should have told Feinstein’s audience in Washington a different story. The United States didn’t trade with Moscow or allow Russians to make large campaign donations or enter into business partnerships with their spouses. Cold War American leadership understood that such practices would have opened the door to Moscow and allowed it to directly influence American politics and society in dangerous ways. Manufacturing our goods in their factories or allowing them to buy ours and ship them overseas would’ve made technology and intellectual property vulnerable.
But it wasn’t just about jeopardizing national security; it was also about exposing America to a system contradictory to American values. Throughout the period, America defined itself in opposition to how we conceived of the Soviets. Ronald Reagan was thought crass for referring to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” but trade and foreign policy from the end of WWII to 1990 reflected that this was a consensus position—Cold War American leadership didn’t want the country coupled to a one-party authoritarian state.
The industrialist Armand Hammer was famous because he was the American doing business with Moscow. His perspective was useful not because of his unique insights into Soviet society, politics, and business culture that he often shared with the American media, but because it was understood that he was presenting the views that the politburo wanted disseminated to an American audience. Today, America has thousands of Armand Hammers, all making the case for the source of their wealth, prestige, and power.
It started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to decouple human rights from trade status. He’d entered the White House promising to focus on human rights, in contrast to the George H.W. Bush administration, and after two years in office made an about face. “We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions were appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most.” Some Democrats, like then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, were opposed, while Republicans like John McCain supported Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, Robert E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become an ever larger and more important trading partner.”
More than two decades later, the number of American industries and companies that lobbied against Trump administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese technology from its American counterparts is a staggering measure of how closely two rival systems that claim to stand for opposing sets of values and practices have been integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well as Qualcommand other semiconductor manufacturers that fought to continue selling chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the other leg planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. To protect both halves of their business, they soft-sell the issue by calling China a competitor in order to obscure their role in boosting a dangerous rival.
Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.
“It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.
Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman for the trade group, “would have to stop.”
Even the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers.” The majority of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease, Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines. For example, in the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any version anywhere in the world.
In the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.”
Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.
The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.
Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.
The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. It’s no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.
For those who actually understood what the Chinese were doing, partisanship was a distinctly secondary concern. Chinese behavior was authentically alarming—as was the seeming inability of core American security institutions to take it seriously. “Through the 1980s, people who advanced the interests of foreign powers whose ideas were inimical to republican form of government were ostracized,” says a former Obama administration intelligence official. “But with the advent of globalism, they made excuses for China, even bending the intelligence to fit their preferences. During the Bush and Obama years, the standard assessment was that the Chinese have no desire to build a blue-water navy. It was inconvenient to their view. China now has a third aircraft carrier in production.”
Loathing Trump provided their political excuse, but the American security and defense establishment had their own interest in turning a blind eye to China. Twenty years of squandering men, money, and prestige on military engagements that began in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” have proved to be of little strategic value to the United States. However, deploying Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly benefited Beijing. Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil.
In Afghanistan, the large copper, metal, and minerals mines whose security American troops still ostensibly ensure are owned by Chinese companies. And because Afghanistan borders Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is worried that “after the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia.” In other words, American troops are deployed abroad in places like Afghanistan less to protect American interests than to provide security for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“There’s a belief that we are not in the same type of conflict with them as we were with the USSR,” says the former Obama official. “But we are.” The problem is that virtually all of the American establishment—which is centered in the Democratic Party—is firmly on the other side.
US Representative to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge shows Soviet “bug”, 1960, USA
The original was published in the magazine Smena, No. 1729, Nov. 2008, pp. 25-26. Translated by Alevtina Rea
In 1943, on his return from the Teheran conference, Stalin placed an important task before Beria: at all costs, to penetrate the working office of the U.S. ambassador, Averell Harriman. The ensuing operation, resulting in the successful eavesdropping of the office of the head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Moscow, became one of the classics of espionage. As the result of this operation, Stalin learned about decisions being decided over there even earlier than did the president of the United States. For eight years, the unique Soviet “bug” literally undermined the heraldic symbol of American freedom – the U.S. coat of arms – outlasting four ambassadors of the United States of America to Moscow.
Diplomatic relations between the USSR and the U.S.A. were established on November 16, 1933. From day one Soviet counterintelligence agents mounted a full-scale effort to penetrate the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
In 1938, charming agents of the 2nd Department of General Directorate of State Security of the NKVD – in essence, ballerinas from the Bolshoi Theater – managed to establish intimate working relationships with a number of high-ranking American diplomats. Moreover, the vigilance of the U.S. Marines, who guarded the Embassy’s premises, was constantly undermined by the NKVD’s sex-bombs – attractive Russian language instructors. In the course of mass onslaughts on the hearts of Americans greedy for free “strawberry,” the “gardeners” from the NKVD found out that the most protected area in the embassy were the upper floors. There were situated the offices of the political department, of military intelligence officers, cipher clerks, security officers, and, finally, the office of his Excellency the ambassador.
The NKVD’s attempts to eavesdrop on this special zone acquired a frenzied tempo, following information received in September 1941 from a NKVD agent of the 5th Department of the General Directorate of USSR State Security, nicknamed “Sergeant.” According to his report, the American Air Force attaché in Moscow was a German agent, passing on intelligence information about the Soviet Union to the Germans.
On December 17, 1943, Beria reported to the Boss that a microphone of unique design had been developed and successfully tested. However, installation was stalled because of the inaccessibility of the ambassador’s office. Even a big fire organized the day before – with the aid of “the swallows” who had won access to the premises – did not permit the NKVD agents to enter the embassy in the guise of firemen. Security was adamant: “The whole place can burn to the ground, but, in the name of the president of the United States, entrance to any outsiders is denied!”
After listening to what Beria had to say, Stalin reminded him that “there are no such fortresses, which cannot be taken by Bolsheviks.” Then, in his usual familiar, condescending manner, he suddenly asked: “Lavrentiy, did you ever hear of the Trojan horse?” By the Trojan horse Stalin meant – and Beria understood this instantly – the production of a listening device, camouflaged under any object which, being given to Harriman, would remain in his office.
About an hour afterward, two dozen souvenirs made of wood, bone and skin had been delivered to the reception area of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs’ office. Especially prominent was the large shield of a Scythian warrior, made of black alder; 6.6-ft mammoth tusks; “Ericsson” telephone equipment made of ivory, presented to Nicholas II by the Swedish king; and also a 3.3-ft high wastepaper basket made from an elephant foot.
After examining the exhibits, Beria summoned academics Axel Berg and Abram Ioffe for consultation. Under their leadership, a team of highly qualified professionals from the operational and technical NKVD department began the development, production and testing of a unique bug, one hitherto unknown in the annals of international espionage and the acquisition of state secrets from another another state.
This device was a passive listening device: there were neither power supply, nor any electronic elements that could be detected by technology available to the experts of the time. The device resembled a tadpole with a small tail – that is, a 4- to 5-inch antenna. The tadpole part was a diaphragm that could vibrate. From an exterior source the eavesdroppers would beam powerful microwaves pointed at the hidden device, forcing the diaphragm of the “tadpole” to resonate. If someone was speaking in the room, this would alter the resonant frequency of the antenna, which would send back its signal – the conversations in the office – to a receiver, which would be situated out of line with the powerful beam.
This microphone could operate indefinitely. A powerful transmitter sitting in an apartment across the street beamed a strong continuous microwave signal at a distance around 300 meters . Reception, decoding and tape-recording of the slightly altered signals was achieved by a sensitive receiver well out of the path of the beam from the transmitter so that the transmitted and received signals would not be superimposed, thus swamping the sensitive receiver. The entire geometric figure – transmitter, device and receiver were in the form of a isosceles triangle.
Transmitter and receiver were duly installed in two separate apartments on the upper floors of residential buildings, across the street, to the left and right of the U.S. Embassy. The previous tenants were of course evicted. Liberated in this manner the communal apartments were occupied by specialists from the technical-operational department of the NKVD, operating the equipment. On the balconies facing the American Embassy, laundry continued to be hung, as it had been before, and, on Sundays, women (sergeants of the State Security) shook out rugs and blankets – thus, literally blowing dust into the eyes of the embassy’s security officers.
The microphone bore the code name the “Chrysostom” [“Golden mouth”]. It should be noted that neither the technical designers nor the specific microphone manufacturers knew the intended target. All they knew is that it served the national security of the USSR.
Called for consultation, the leaders of the technical team were asked to advise on the feasibility of installing “Chrysostom” into one of the exhibits located in the office of the People’s Commissar. Their instant and unanimous verdict was that the proposed souvenirs were entirely impractical as shelters for the device. They explained that the specific design features of the microphone required a souvenir specifically adapted to it, but not vice versa. For this reason, they insisted on the installation of a microphone simultaneous with the production of a gift.
Such a gift was duly made.
Trojan horse in the American camp
On February 4-11, 1945, the Big Three – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – met for the Yalta conference in the Crimea and hashed out fateful decisions on the shape of postwar Europe. Simultaneously came resolution of the fate of Lavrentiy Beria – whether he would be a marshal. Such was the indomitable will of the Boss: “Microphone in the office of ambassador – then marshal’s epaulets on your shoulders, Lavrentiy!”
The stage presentation of “Chrysostom” to the American ambassador needed an appropriate setting. To this end, the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the pioneer camp “Artek” was planned on February 9. The day before, on February 8, deputy chairman of the People’s Commissariat – Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov – in the presence of Stalin, handed to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill the children’s invitation to visit them on the opening day of Artek. The desire of the young pioneers to see, at their holiday celebration, the president and the premier of their nation’s allies was appropriate expression of their deep gratitude for the assistance provided to children in the USSR during the war.
The calculation of the Minor Trio – Stalin, Molotov and Beria – was based on the assumption that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill, whatever whatever zeal they might have nourished to do so, would take this furlough from weightier duties during the already protracted Yalta Conference. Although the distance between Yalta and Artek was only 18 kilometers, during the war it required about two (!) hours to cover this distance on the bombed-out highway.
The strategists from the Minor Trio also knew that neither Edward Stettinius nor Sir Anthony Eden – the foreign ministers of the United States and Britain – would be able to leave their patrons in order to travel to the pioneer camp. Next in rank as candidates for a trip to the children’s celebration in Artek could only be the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, and his colleague from the U.K., Sir Archibald John Clark Kerr. These two were unable to reassign the mission to any of their deputies, because they got direct instructions – from the lips of Roosevelt and Churchill – to visit the Russian children.
The motorcade of the cars with foreign guests, led by the huge black, German-built Horch of Lavrentiy Beria, entered the territory of Artek and slowly moved toward the brigade of “Stalin’s falcons,” where was to take place the encounter of ambassadors with pioneers. There was music, smiles, and – despite the winter – fresh-cut roses, delivered by military aircraft from Sukhumi. The principals were guarded by two battalions of NKVD officers camouflaged as pioneer leaders.
At the finale of the welcoming ceremonies, Averell Harriman gave the pioneers a gift from the government of the United States – a check for $10,000. Sir Archibald Kerr – a check for 5,000 pounds. At this point, the orchestra struck up the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and the chorus of pioneers sang it in English. Harriman broke into tears. At the same moment, four pioneers carried in an enormous, wooden shield, the Great Seal of the United States of America. Amid a storm of applause, the director of Artek handed to the U.S. ambassador a passport-certificate of the Great Seal, signed by the Soviet head of state Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin.
Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin’s personal translator, translated the details of the certificate to the foreigners: sandalwood, boxwood, redwood, ivory palm, Persian ironwood, red and black wood, black alder – all these valuable species of wood had been used in the creation of the Great Seal.
Delighted by the gift and at a loss for words Harriman – perhaps for the first time in his commercial and diplomatic practice – said what he thought: “Where shall I place it? … Where to keep it? … I cannot take my eyes of it!”
Berezhkov, instructed the day before, said casually – his voice a murmur so Sir Archibald Kerr could not hear – “Just hang it in your office … The British will die of envy.”
Thus, in February 1945, “Chrysostom,” framed by the coat of arms of the United States, was safely installed on the top-secret floor of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The NKVD operation – codenamed “the Confession” – on the eavesdropping of meetings conducted by U.S. ambassadors, was successfully launched. By ambassadors? Yes! “Chrysostom” worked for eight years, surviving four ambassadors. It is noteworthy that every newly appointed head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Moscow would order a complete makeover of the office interior inherited from his predecessor – from inkstand to the parquet on the floor. However, the only non-replaceable object in the room was the Great Seal. Its artistic perfection had a hypnotic effect on America’s higher diplomats. Even the curtains on the windows and sofa and chair covers were selected to match the colors of the Soviet gift!
After it was eventually discovered in the Great Seal, the “Chrysostom” lived on. The Americans and British attempted to make copies. Work on making an analog of the Soviet “bug” by Americans was carried out in a secret laboratory in the Netherlands, under the code name “The Convenient Chair.” Simultaneously, English counterintelligence conducted its own research, codenamed “Satyr.”
The British advanced in research more than the Americans, but used a weaker microave beam, effective up to only 30 yards. The United States sat on their humiliating discovery for seven years. Then, in 1960, after the USSR brought down a U-2 spy plane with Gary Powers on board, Washington counterattacked, making public the Soviet listening device, which the Soviets had installed in the office of the American ambassador in Moscow.
Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, during the Organization’s emergency session on the U-2 crisis, showed the Great Seal of the United States, opened it, and demonstrated the “Chrysostom.” Later, the coat of arms and the miracle microphone were also demonstrated during the Security Council meeting. Primed by Soviet diplomats, India’s envoy jokingly asked for a copy of the microphone. Lodge was embarrassed, and the Great Seal with the embedded “bug – a shameful memento for U.S. security services – has never been exhibited since.
Currently, the “Chrysostom” is stored in the museum of the CIA in Langley.
Note by Igor Atamenenko via Counterpunch:
The actual inventor of the bug was a fascinating figure. Léon Theremin, born Lev Sergeyevich Termen, born in St. Petersburg in 1896. By his mid-teens, Theremin was doing advanced work in electronics, with important missions in radio communication during World War One. By 1920, he had invented the world’s first synthesizer, known as the Termenvox in the Soviet Union and as the “theremin” in the United States. He also developed a television receiver in the mid-1920s.
By the 1930s, he had settled in the United States, organizing the world’s first electronic concerts, and – divorcing his first wife Katya – marrying Lavinia Williams, a dancer in the American Negro Ballet. Money problems and bruising encounters with the IRS took him back, solo to the USSR in 1938, when the purges were at their height. For a while, it looked as though ongoing struggles with the IRS would have been the safer bet. Theremin was put in prison, later the Kolyma gold mines, and there were rumors of his execution. In fact, he was now in a sharashka, an advanced lab and design shop within the Gulag system, and worked alongside such famous figures as the aircraft designer, Tupolev and Korolyov, father of the Soviet space program.
In the team led by his former mentor in his youth, Abram Ioffe, he invented the “Chrysostom” as well as the Buran eavesdropping system, precursor to the modern laser microphone, using a low power infrared beam to pick up the sound vibrations in glass windows, allegedly used by Beria to spy on Stalin. Theremin supposedly kept tapes of these intercepts in his apartment. THeramin was given the Stalin prize in 1947. In later life, he toured the world with his daughter Kavina, daughter from a third and final marriage Maria Guschina. Keenly admired by Robert Moog, who made many Theramin instruments, he died at the age of 97, thus outlasting his “victim,” Averell Harriman, who had died in 1986 at the age of 95.
The CDC has done another data dump into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines.
The data goes through January 29, 2021, with 11,249 recorded adverse events, including 501 deaths following injections of the experimental COVID mRNA shots by Pfizer and Moderna.
Besides the recorded 501 deaths, there were 2443 visits to Emergency Room doctors, 156 permanent disabilities, and 1066 hospitalizations.
Almost 70% of the recorded deaths were among people over the age of 65.
As we have previously reported, because the VAERS reporting system is voluntary, studies show that less than 1% of all vaccine injuries and deaths are recorded.
A 2011 report by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated that fewer than one percent of all vaccine adverse events are reported to the government:
Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. (Source.)
When reading the accompanying notes from these cases that were reported to VAERS, it is clear that many healthcare professionals are reluctant to report these cases, probably fearing repercussions for doing so.
In some cases, family members filed the report because the healthcare facility refused to do so.
Some examples:
(VAERS ID # 913733) My grandmother died a few hours after receiving the moderna covid vaccine booster 1. While I don’t expect that the events are related, the treating hospital did not acknowledge this and I wanted to be sure a report was made.
(VAERS ID # 914621) Resident in our long term care facility who received first dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine on 12/22/2020, only documented side effect was mild fatigue after receiving. She passed away on 12/27/2020 of natural causes per report. Has previously been in & out of hospice care, resided in nursing home for 9+ years, elderly with dementia. Due to proximity of vaccination we felt we should report the death, even though it is not believed to be related.
(VAERS ID # 914895) Injection given on 12/28/20 – no adverse events and no issues yesterday; Death today, 12/30/20, approx.. 2am today (unknown if related – Administrator marked as natural causes)
It is important to note that the official CDC’s position on these recorded injuries and deaths in the VAERS database is that NONE of them are related to the COVID mRNA injections.
The CDC does not even have a category for “vaccine deaths,” and hence, there has never been a recorded incident on a death certificate of a vaccine death. See:
To admit that vaccines can cause death and injuries in some people would be bad business for the pharmaceutical industry.
And yet, the guidelines that the FDA published when they gave Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to these two experimental injections, make it very clear that these are experimental “vaccines” that are NOT approved by the FDA, that the efficacy and risks to these injections are UNKNOWN, and that there is a long list of possible side effects from these injections, including DEATH.
Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of the coronavirus, visit the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province. Photo: AFP
