Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments!

 There is evidence that Pfizer is routinely involved in bribing numerous politicians at the highest levels of  government.

Moreover, Pfizer has a criminal record. In 2009 Pfizer Inc. pleaded guilty to criminal charges. It was “The Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement” in the History of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The criminality surrounding the 2020-21 mRNA vaccine far surpasses the 2009 “fraudulent marketing” charges directed against Pfizer.

We bring to the attention of our readers this important and carefully documented study by Public Citizen on Pfizer’s contractual agreements with governments. Our Thanks to Public Citizen and author Zain Rizvi.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 22, 2021

Pfizer’s Power: “Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments”
By Zain Rizvi
Public Citizen, Oct 22, 2021

In February, Pfizer was accused of “bullying” governments in COVID vaccine negotiations in a groundbreaking story by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.[1] A government official at the time noted, “Five years in the future when these confidentiality agreements are over you will learn what really happened in these negotiations.”[2]

Public Citizen has identified several unredacted Pfizer contracts that describe the outcome of these negotiations. The contracts offer a rare glimpse into the power one pharmaceutical corporation has gained to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the worst public health crisis in a century. We describe six examples from around the world below.[3]

 

TABLE 1: SELECT PFIZER CONTRACTS REVIEWED[4]

Purchaser     Date     Type     Doses     Price Per Dose     Total Cost

Albania     Draft[5]     Draft Definitive Agreement     500,000     $12     $6 million
Brazil     03/15/21[6]     Definitive Agreement     100 million     $10     $1 billion
Colombia     02/02/21[7]     Definitive Agreement     10 million     $12     $120 million
Chile     12/01/20[8]     Definitive Agreement (Redacted)     10 million     Redacted     Redacted
Dominican Republic     10/29/20[9]     Binding Term Sheet[10]     8 million     $12     $96 million
European Commission     11/20/20[11]     Custom Advance Purchase Agreement     200 million     $18.6[12]     $3.7 billion
Peru     17/9/20[13]     Binding Term Sheet     10 million     $12     $120 million
United States     21/07/20[14]     Custom Advance Purchase Agreement (Redacted)     100 million     $19.5     $1.95 billion
United Kingdom     12/10/20[15]     Custom Advance Purchase Agreement (Redacted)     30 million     Redacted     Redacted

Pfizer’s demands have generated outrage around the world, slowing purchase agreements and even pushing back the delivery schedule of vaccines.[16] If similar terms are included as a condition to receive doses, they may threaten President Biden’s commitment to donate 1 billion vaccine doses.[17]

High-income countries have enabled Pfizer’s power through a favorable system of international intellectual property protection.[18] High-income countries have an obligation to rein in that monopoly power. The Biden administration, for example, can call on Pfizer to renegotiate existing commitments and pursue a fairer approach in the future. The administration can further rectify the power imbalance by sharing the vaccine recipe, under the Defense Production Act, to allow multiple producers to expand vaccine supplies.[19] It can also work to rapidly secure a broad waiver of intellectual property rules (TRIPS waiver) at the World Trade Organization.[20] A wartime response against the virus demands nothing less.

1. Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments.

In January, the Brazilian government complained that Pfizer was insisting on contractual terms in negotiations that were “unfair and abusive.”[21] The government pointed to five terms that it found problematic, ranging from a sovereign immunity waiver on public assets to a lack of penalties for Pfizer if deliveries were late. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism soon published a scathing story on Pfizer’s vaccine negotiations.[22]

Less than two months later, the Brazilian government accepted a contract with Pfizer that contains most of the same terms that the government once deemed unfair.[23] Brazil waived sovereign immunity; imposed no penalties on Pfizer for late deliveries; agreed to resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York; and broadly indemnified Pfizer for civil claims.[24]

The contract also contains an additional term not included in other Latin American agreements[25] reviewed by Public Citizen: The Brazilian government is prohibited from making “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of [the] Agreement” or commenting on its relationship with Pfizer without the prior written consent of the company.[26] Pfizer gained the power to silence Brazil.

Brazil is not alone. A similar nondisclosure provision is contained in the Pfizer contract with the European Commission and the U.S. government.[27] In those cases, however, the obligation applies to both parties.

For example, neither Pfizer nor the U.S. government can make “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of this Agreement, the transactions contemplated by it, or the relationship between the Pfizer and the Government hereunder, without the prior written consent of the other.”[28] The contract contains some exceptions for disclosures required by law. It is not clear from the public record whether Pfizer has elected to prohibit the U.S. from making any statements thus far. The E.C. cannot include in any announcement or disclosure the price per dose, the Q4 2020 volumes, or information that would be material to Pfizer without the consent of Pfizer.[29]

2. Pfizer Controls Donations.

Pfizer tightly controls supply.[30] The Brazilian government, for example, is restricted from accepting Pfizer vaccine donations from other countries or buying Pfizer vaccines from others without Pfizer’s permission.[31]  The Brazilian government also is restricted from donating, distributing, exporting, or otherwise transporting the vaccine outside Brazil without Pfizer’s permission.[32]

The consequences of noncompliance can be severe. If Brazil were to accept donated doses without Pfizer’s permission, it would be considered an “uncurable material breach” of their agreement, allowing Pfizer to immediately terminate the agreement.[33] Upon termination, Brazil would be required to pay the full price for any remaining contracted doses.[34]

3. Pfizer Secured an “IP Waiver” for Itself.

The CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, has emerged as a strident defender of intellectual property in the pandemic. He called a voluntary World Health Organization effort to share intellectual property to bolster vaccine production “nonsense” and “dangerous.”[35]  He said President Biden’s decision to back the TRIPS waiver on intellectual property was “so wrong.”[36] “IP, which is the blood of the private sector, is what brought a solution to this pandemic and it is not a barrier right now,” claims Bourla.[37]

But, in several contracts, Pfizer seems to recognize the risk posed by intellectual property to vaccine development, manufacturing, and sale. The contracts shift responsibility for any intellectual property infringement that Pfizer might commit to the government purchasers. As a result, under the contract, Pfizer can use anyone’s intellectual property it pleases—largely without consequence.

At least four countries are required “to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer” from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, damages, costs, and expenses related to vaccine intellectual property.[38] For example, if another vaccine maker sued Pfizer for patent infringement in Colombia, the contract requires the Colombian government to foot the bill. At Pfizer’s request, Colombia is required to defend the company (i.e., take control of legal proceedings.)[39] Pfizer also explicitly says that it does not guarantee that its product does not violate third-party IP, or that it needs additional licenses.

Pfizer takes no responsibility in these contracts for its potential infringement of intellectual property. In a sense, Pfizer has secured an IP waiver for itself. But internationally, Pfizer is fighting similar efforts to waive IP barriers for all manufacturers.[40]

4. Private Arbitrators, not Public Courts, Decide Disputes in Secret.

What happens if the United Kingdom cannot resolve a contractual dispute with Pfizer? A secret panel of three private arbitrators—not a U.K court—is empowered under the contract to make the final decision.[41] The arbitration is conducted under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Both parties are required to keep everything secret:

The Parties agree to keep confidential the existence of the arbitration, the arbitral proceedings, the submissions made by the Parties and the decisions made by the arbitral tribunal, including its awards, except as required by Law and to the extent not already in the public domain.[42]

The Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law.[43]

While ICC arbitration involving states is not uncommon, disputes involving high-income countries and/or pharmaceuticals appear to be relatively rare.[44] In 2012, 80% of state disputes were from Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and West Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.[45] The most common state cases were about the construction and operation of facilities.[46] In 2020, 34 states were involved in ICC arbitrations.[47] The nature of state disputes is not clear, but only between 5 to 7% of all new ICC cases, including those solely between private parties, were related to health and pharmaceuticals.[48]

Private arbitration reflects an imbalance of power. It allows pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer to bypass domestic legal processes. This consolidates corporate power and undermines the rule of law.

5. Pfizer Can Go After State Assets.

The decisions reached by the secret arbitral panels described above can be enforced in national courts.[49] The doctrine of sovereign immunity can sometimes, however, protect states from corporations seeking to enforce and execute arbitration awards.

Pfizer required Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive sovereign immunity.[50] In the case of Brazil, Chile and Colombia, for example, the government “expressly and irrevocably waives any right of immunity which either it or its assets may have or acquire in the future” to enforce any arbitration award (emphasis added).[51] For Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, this includes “immunity against precautionary seizure of any of its assets.”[52]

Arbitral award enforcement presents complex questions of law that depend on the physical location and type of state asset.[53] But the contract allows Pfizer to request that courts use state assets as a guarantee that Pfizer will be paid an arbitral award and/or use the assets to compensate Pfizer if the government does not pay.[54] For example, in U.S. courts, these assets could include foreign bank accounts, foreign investments, and foreign commercial property, including the assets of state-owned enterprises like airlines and oil companies.[55]

6. Pfizer Calls the Shots on Key Decisions.

What happens if there are vaccine supply shortages? In the Albania draft contract and the Brazil and Colombia agreement, Pfizer will decide adjustments to the delivery schedule based on principles the corporation will decide. Albania, Brazil, and Colombia “shall be deemed to agree to any revision.”[56]

Some governments have pushed back on Pfizer’s unilateral authority for other decisions. In South Africa, Pfizer wanted to have the “sole discretion to determine additional terms and guarantees for us to fulfill the indemnity obligations.”[57]South Africa deemed this “too risky” and a “potential risk to [their] assets and fiscus.”[58] After delays, Pfizer reportedly conceded to remove this “problematic term.”[59]

But others have not been as successful. As a condition to entering into the agreement, the Colombian government is required to “demonstrate, in a manner satisfactory to Suppliers, that Suppliers and their affiliates will have adequate protection, as determined in Suppliers’ sole discretion” (emphasis added) from liability claims.[60] Colombia is required to certify to Pfizer the value of the contingent obligations (i.e., potential future liability), and to start appropriating funds to cover the contingent obligations, according to a contribution program.[61]

Pfizer’s ability to control key decisions reflects the power imbalance in vaccine negotiations. Under the vast majority of contracts, Pfizer’s interests come first.
A Better Way

Pfizer’s dominance over sovereign countries poses fundamental challenges to the pandemic response. Governments can push back. The U.S. government, in particular, can exercise the leverage it holds over Pfizer to require a better approach. Empowering multiple manufacturers to produce the vaccine via technology transfer and a TRIPS waiver can rein in Pfizer’s power. Public health should come first.

***

Zain Rizvi is an expert on pharmaceutical innovation and access to medicines. He has provided technical assistance to state and national governments, coordinated civil society coalitions, and published on intellectual property, access to medicines and global health. He was a Gruber Fellow at SECTION27, a Johannesburg-based public interest organization. Zain obtained a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was student director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership. He has a bachelor’s degree from McMaster University and has published in medical and legal journals, including The Lancet and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.

The Specter of One World Government on the horizon!

Although it may sound like a conspiracy theory at this juncture, make no mistake about the oft-quoted "One World Government" (aka "New World Order") that is on the making with the target timeframe of 2030. We are fast approaching that sort of scenario with the "coronavirus scaremongering" being used as the dress rehearsal to subjugate people in preparation for the unfortunate transition. Australia's New South Wales state health officer Kerry Chant recently had a slip of tongue on this New World Order. Amazing, isn't it? Wake up people before it is too late!

The Specter of One World Government Looms Large
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig
American Thinker, Oct 20, 2021

The U.N.'s Agenda 2030 is still in place, and the clock is ticking toward its empowerment — only eight years and two-plus months to go.  This Agenda is for a new world government, which will implement the policies of the Agenda.

This new government on our horizon explains many of the failures in policies in these first months of the Biden administration.  The failures are based not so much on mistakes as on deliberate sabotage to weaken our country, dilute the power that undergirds our sovereignty, and prepare us to accept one-world government.

The seed ideas for Agenda 2030 began with Pres. Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations in his Fourteen Points at the end of WWI.  A community of nations could bring pressure for peace in the world that the treaty or alliance system could not do, as shown by the First World War.  While this idea took hold in Europe and other countries, it was unable to gain sufficient traction in the U.S. as it met with Republican resistance in the U.S. Senate on the grounds that it would lead to a dilution of U.S. sovereignty.

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, all right-thinking persons can see that Woodrow Wilson's first giant step toward globalism was rightly rejected.  The League was a complete failure in terms of bringing peace to the world.  To the German Nazi government, the League was a joke.  The Japanese left the League after their invasion of China was repudiated.  Yet Republican sway over U.S. governance became diminished by the four-time election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president of the U.S. and the hegemony of the Democrat party for twenty years from 1933 to 1953.

After WWII, the U.N. was conceived of as having duties and functions that the League did not have.  The U.N. would sustain the world in real ways with the establishment of the International Monetary Fund to strengthen currencies worldwide and the World Bank to finance and endorse vast construction projects.  These institutions would together foster peace and "community" in our fragmented world (whispers of the "it takes a village" cliché that would take hold decades later).  After all, is it not true that poverty is ultimately the cause of conflict in our world?

Yes, the U.S. and the other illogical leftists throughout the West and the other parts of the world bought into the Marxist idea that wars are caused by fierce competition for scarce resources.  Even the great Harvard economist Walt Rostow in the 1950s and 1960s had a vision of global financial institutions through the sponsorship of the U.N. as bringing the poorest countries to a "take-off stage."  There was only one problem with Prof. Rostow's well-researched and theoretically sound vision: take-off never happened.  All that great Harvard research was not worth the paper it was written on.  The wealth disparities among the developed world, the less developed countries (LDCs), and the less developed developing countries (LDDCs) persisted.

As a result of the perceived stratification of the world community, there was a paradigm shift in understanding the relations among the different wealth levels of societies.  Many on the left believed that if the whole world were one, then the destitution and resulting despair of the poorer countries could not be dismissed as a failure of local nation-state governments to enact good policies or to be less corrupt.  If, so to speak, all nations were under the same roof or same umbrella, the thought "that's their problem" could not easily obtain.

"Their problem" automatically would become "our problem," as we all are together under one government.  This is an updating of the idea first put forward in 18th-century France by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the best government is not the liberty-centered, individualistic, and rights-oriented government such as projected by John Locke; rather, the best government bypasses all exploitation by expressing the General Will — it is a vision that goes beyond mere teamwork, a vision of all for all.  Any type of individualism or personal achievement is bourgeois and undermines true progress.

That brings us to Agenda 2030.  This Agenda puts forward a plan for a new soft world government by the year 2030.  It was a plan adopted unanimously by the U.N. on September 25, 2015, and has 91 sections.  The Agenda covers every aspect of human experience and thus is a government without using the word government.  Instead of stressing the word "rights" throughout, as did the original U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the word "rights" appears only once in the Agenda, in Section 19.  Instead of "rights," the two buzzwords that appear throughout the Agenda are "needs" and "sustainability."  "Needs" resonates with the Marxist dictum "from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs."  Just as the more wealthy and advanced countries engage in various socialist and social welfare programs to meet the needs of their poorer citizens, the wealthier countries will feel more obligated and be expected to contribute much more to the needs of their fellow citizens in their new global state.  Trans-national identities of persons will replace national identities.  The needs of people will be uppermost in peoples' minds, not their location in the world, ethnicity, religion, customs, mores, diets, appearances, and gender identities.  All distinctions become subsumed under needs in this new vision of one world.

"Sustainability" also brings us into the sphere of commonality rather than differences.  We all occupy one environment.  Problems with the oceans near one place may have effects on air quality at another — distant — place.  We all have to breathe the air on Planet Earth.  We influence each other all over the world through carbon emissions and through our habits of waste disposal.  Natural resources may be available to some countries more than others, but insofar as we are all residents of one planet, those resources ultimately belong to all.  Sustainability according to this vision is a global issue, and it must be addressed as a global issue through a world government.

With this evolution of the U.N. before us, are we not better able to understand why the left is so comfortable with the collapse of our borders?  With the capture and availability of so much U.S. military equipment in Afghanistan?  With the overthrow of law and order in our cities so we look more and more like an unruly third-world country with each passing year?  With our budgets so inflated that currency inflation and collapse are almost a certainty?

Yes, this writer is proposing that these recent "mistakes" are connected with the goal of a one-world government, which has already been enunciated and was signed onto by the USA.  The disintegration we are facing in various sectors is, I believe, part of a move toward the collapse of our sovereignty in favor of a world government as outlined in Agenda 2030.

The nuclear proliferation empire of AQ Khan

He basically gave a few countries a necessary lifeline from the perspective of those countries. The proliferation issue wouldn’t be a thing if the US had not set a precedent by dropping nukes on people.

An interesting insight as per usual with Scott's OPED pieces. But nuclear non-proliferation is one of those things that is a good idea but is at the same time very questionable. The countries with nukes do not want other countries to get them to defend themselves against the countries with nukes. If non-proliferation were the actual goal then shouldn't the countries with nukes come together and reduce their stockpiles of the bombs?

The nuclear proliferation empire of AQ Khan – another CIA failure that continues to haunt the world
Scott Ritter
13 Oct, 2021

The death of Pakistan’s most infamous nuclear scientist has led to much reflection on his role in proliferating nuclear technology around the world. Little reflection is paid to the role of the CIA in allowing this to happen.

Abdul Qadeer Khan passed away aged 85 on October 10 from complications of Covid-19.

He was Pakistan’s best known nuclear scientist, whose success in acquiring sophisticated centrifuge technology used to enrich uranium has led many to anoint him with the sobriquet as the “Father of Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb” (Khan had nothing to do with weapons design or manufacture; that honor goes to Munir Ahmad Khan.) But there is little debate over the critical role that he played in making Pakistan’s dream of possessing a nuclear deterrent a reality – without the uranium enrichment technology AQ Khan acquired through his efforts, the Pakistan nuclear weapons program could not
have existed in its present form.

While taking nothing away from the skill and determination of Khan, the fact is that his efforts at technology acquisition, which focused on stealing blueprints and physical samples from URENCO, a European consortium based in the Netherlands which used centrifuges to enrich uranium for use in nuclear fuel. Khan worked at URENCO between 1972 and 1975.

In mid-1975, the Dutch security services began to suspect that Khan was a proliferation risk. The CIA, however, pressured the Dutch into not arresting Khan, but rather to continue to monitor him in hopes of gaining new intelligence about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. Khan and his family were able to elude Dutch/CIA surveillance and return to Pakistan in December 1975.

Armed with the limited intelligence that was acquired by monitoring Khan, the US government, at the time led by President Jimmy Carter, placed economic sanctions on Pakistan to pressure it into abandoning its plans for a nuclear weapon.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 changed this. According to Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Soviet invasion prompted “a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” Carter lifted sanctions and provided Pakistan with $400 million in military aid.

Cold War realities prompted the US to turn a blind eye toward Pakistan’s efforts to build an atomic bomb. The importance of this move cannot be overstated; in 2009, Khan told Pakistani television that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability. Given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did.”

Unencumbered by US sanctions and accompanying political pressure, Khan was able to assemble a massive smuggling operation which, by 1985, gave Pakistan the ability to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) using stolen centrifuge technology. Enough HEU was produced by 1987 to build a nuclear bomb.

The enrichment capabilities that had been acquired by Khan consisted of a relatively primitive design, known as the P-1, and a more sophisticated derivative, known as the P-2. Once Pakistan’s centrifuge center was up and running, Khan was sitting on an excess inventory of P-1 centrifuges and spare parts for the P-2. Using his smuggling network, he reached out to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria to sell them, as a package deal, the material and designs necessary to enrich weapons-grade uranium using centrifuges. These nations refused his offer, as did Iraq, in 1990.

Iran, on the other hand, agreed to purchase centrifuge parts and designs for both P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, ostensibly for a peaceful nuclear energy program (Iran’s efforts to acquire similar technology on the open market had been rebuffed by the US and Europe.)

The CIA was able to find out about the Iranian purchases and in 2003 undertook an operation to infiltrate the Khan network to track any future sales. In this way, the CIA was able to control the purchase by Libya of centrifuges and other information related to nuclear weapons manufacture (including a bomb design). When the shipment was interdicted on instructions by the CIA, the subsequent fallout prompted Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, to terminate his efforts at acquiring nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction capability.

The Khan network was far more successful in its efforts to transfer its purloined centrifuge technology to North Korea in 1998, an act which put North Korea on the path of eventually mastering the enrichment of uranium for use in its own family of nuclear weapons. The CIA had recruited a source inside a North Korean delegation dispatched to Pakistan in June 1998 to witness the Pakistan nuclear tests and finalize procurement, but this source was exposed and killed in Pakistan by Pakistani security forces, according to reports. Blinded by this loss, the CIA sat back helplessly while

Pakistani aircraft flew to North Korea with the centrifuges and designs that would be used to make North Korean nuclear bombs.

The success of Khan in acquiring sensitive centrifuge enrichment capability has been viewed as one of the greatest failures in the history of nuclear non-proliferation. Khan could have been stopped by the CIA but wasn’t. Instead, one bungled intelligence collection effort led to Pakistan and North Korea developing a nuclear weapons capability, and Iran developing an advanced uranium enrichment infrastructure which could be used to produce HEU usable in a nuclear weapon should Iran ever make that choice.

Around the world, nonproliferation experts mark the death of Khan by remembering his role in making Pakistan a nuclear power. Left unspoken is the role played by the CIA in proliferating nuclear weapons capability to Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, making its failure to order the arrest of Khan one of the greatest intelligence failures ever.

- - -
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

Democrats & Media want Facebook to censor!

 "Whistleblower" Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor   
Glenn Greenwald
Substack, Oct 6, 2021

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.

But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.

And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach." Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”

Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.

As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.

A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of "restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies "to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook's Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:

This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT's tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”

When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation's discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.

This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.

In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls "power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin's brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that "Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the "delete” or "ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:

    However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s. . . .

    Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….

    And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written poast, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.

As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment's "free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.

There is another issue raised by this week's events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be "modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.

Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess "misinformation” and "hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.

There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.

The medical-industrial complex is a threat to democracy!

Big Pharma has always been there. The big difference with COVID-1984 is that Big Pharma has now officially become a Military industrial complex, alongside the Intelligence industrial complex and Financial industrial complex. The militarization is new, the industrial complex threat, is not.

The socioeconomic term 'industrial complex' predates President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 popularization in 1961, when he warned of America's budding military industrial complex (MIC) arising entwined with Cold War I.

The MIC increasingly subverted civilian life, burdening civilian industrial complexes with a spectrum of ethical and even criminal abuses pretexted under national security war hubris, that would otherwise not be tolerated in 'normal' civilian peacetime. This process wasn't new either, already seen in the communist and fascist movements that supplanted liberal democracies in Russia, Spain, Germany and Italy.

Spies were then removed from military oversight, burdened as it was with civilian accountability. The creation of the CIA in 1947 also established the Intelligence Industrial Complex, which followed in the footsteps of the military in abusing power to gain influence.

The Epstein underage sex ring, for example, was an intel honey trap embedded into the entertainment industrial complex ('Hollywood', albeit based out of New York). That could never have persisted in a purely civilian socio-political economy where honest law enforcement was not compelled to look the other way.

An industrial complex is institutionalized business, protected from the free market ecosystem to instead serve not-as-marketable social and political goals. Removal from free market forces is accomplished by rigging the legal and social regulatory environments to remove public accountability.

Big Pharma, arose from successful market monopolies gaming and defying market forces, but was never innately military.

Medicine's social contract is to safeguard and protect human life and quality of life, not destroy them.

Prior to the MIC, civilian industry would meet civilian consumer demand, and military business was special-order based on whatever the military needed from civilian industry.

After the MIC, the military, empowered by taxpayer dollars and a skewed friendly regulatory environment, increasingly encroached on the civilian sphere, replacing civilian demand where not subverting civilian demand.

Fifth-generation hybrid warfare makes civilians both agents and objects of warfare over official soldiers and formal military infrastructure. Militarization of public life entails reduced civil liberties and political accountability, as if everyone were drafted into a paramilitary force.

For example, vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, are military/militarized police regimentation, not civilian regulation.

War - A Means to Justify the Transfer of Wealth From the Taxpayer to Private Sector Cronies and Enablers.

The MilitaryIC is faltering now, yes.
For the MedicalIC stealing Trillions from Taxpayers, through Western Governments, Doctors and Western Hospitalspushing prescription drugs has a ways yet to go to be defeated.
As People are not Educated enough to understand they need None of BigPharma's Drugs.
Curing People of their ailments makes very little money for doctors, etc., as then their Patients won't come back for more Drugs.

A known budget larger than the next 10 countries combined. We have the most dangerous and expensive military, espionage, terror system in the known universe. The Pharmacy Cabal is much worse in that they are using fear, propaganda and outright lies to turn 6 Billion people into Gene therapy experiments, and they are being assisted by corrupt politicians worldwide to do this evil. Once you get the jab it is irreversible and the long term effects are unknown. though based on short term results, premature death, and suffering far beyond the illness they supposedly treat will be the result.

The medical-industrial complex, like the military-industrial complex, is a threat to democracy
RT, 1 Sep, 2021

The public has caught on to the use of fear to shape opinion in support of costly wars that give free license for control under the guise of security. But now it’s falling for the same illusion from the medical-industrial complex.

Seeing the Taliban parading around Kabul looking like GI Joe in their newly acquired US battle fatigues, posing with the finest weaponry that American taxpayer money can buy, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of even the most ardent supporters of foreign military intervention.

And after seeing billions more flushed down the drain in a failed attempt to overthrow other governments – like Syria’s, where massive funding was provided for CIA and Pentagon programs to back ‘rebel’ proxy fighters against the Syrian army; or Iraq’s, which hasn’t brought about the kind of blindly pro-Western puppet government that the US and its allies had hoped for – public opinion in favor of these foreign military adventures is waning.

The notion of war being a catalyst for democracy has been repeatedly exposed as a false pretext. The biggest loser is the military-industrial complex, which thrives on making and selling weapons for these wars. With the public less prone to trusting Western leaders’ excuses for launching them, how will they continue to justify the transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to private sector cronies and enablers? War has always provided a blank check for spending – because apparently safety is like a Van Gogh painting, in that you can’t dare place an upper limit on its value. Until now, people have bought into the notion that allocating too little to the defense sector could represent an existential threat to their own wellbeing.

But now the public is catching on to the charade. They view the link between terrorism at home and war efforts abroad as increasingly tenuous, if not counterproductive. Even defense spending itself has pivoted in recent years, with industry leaders citing cyberwarfare as a greater threat than terrorism.

This pivot has allowed the defense industry to redirect spending to a sector cloaked in an even thicker fog of war, at a time when conventional battlefields and related lies have become too transparent for governments’ tastes. The general public largely lacks the ability to make sense of what’s happening in cyberspace. In cyberspace, even experts have trouble proving and providing reliable evidence of attack attribution. Cyberattacks are susceptible to being exploited as propaganda to support a government’s political objectives.

And as people grow increasingly dependent on technology and the internet for everything from shopping to self-promotion and social networking, it becomes easier for them to buy into the notion of sacrificing their privacy for the security of platforms of great perceived importance to their lives. Many users don’t much value their privacy anyway, given all the information that they’re willing to freely trade in exchange for some public attention from strangers.

And into this climate now comes the increasingly pervasive government-mandated electronic ‘health passes’ currently being rolled out worldwide, as one jurisdiction after another announces that people are required to get the anti-Covid jab – at least three of them now in some countries, such as Israel – in order to access everyday venues like gyms, restaurants, cinemas, or transportation.

A whole medical-industrial complex is now springing up around QR-code security, management, and verification, in lockstep with de facto mandatory Big Pharma jabs paid for by governments with taxpayer funds. The notion of medical confidentiality has been thrown out of the window, with waiters or security agents essentially deputized to control compliance.

The ease with which many people have become accustomed to oversharing everything online means that they mostly just shrug off any privacy invasion. The health pass has become their security blanket. They feel protected when they enter health pass venues, despite authorities admitting that jabbed patrons are quite capable of catching and transmitting the virus.

It’s not the collection of their information that these people should be worried about, but rather how governments may ultimately use their own information against them. They may be fine with sharing their jab status with waiters now, but what would happen if their online behavior suddenly impacted their daily lives? That’s exactly the case in China under the country’s social credit system, where online activity can result in your electronic pass curtailing access or, alternatively, rewarding you for falling into line with establishment whims.

It’s not the obvious traps of wars overseas that we have to worry about at this point, but rather the new schemes being set up at home which serve as cash cows for special interests at the expense of our most basic freedoms.

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By Rachel Marsden, columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

Natural immunity is more effective than vaxxed immunity

Now scientists have confirmed that natural immunity is more effective than vaxxed immunity, why can’t I have my freedoms back?
8 Oct, 2021

I’ve got immunity from having had the virus, so where’s my permanent health pass and end to testing hell? Governments are ignoring an avalanche of clinical studies proving the Covid-recovered could simply be left alone.

As someone who has recovered from Covid-19, I’m tired of spending the better part of a year now contending with brainwashed sheeple glued to every word of our flip-flopping, agenda peddling, manipulative government authorities trying to sell us on the idea that if you’ve already had the virus, you still need to get at least one approved anti-Covid jab.

The fact that governments can’t even agree on whether the Covid-recovered should get either one or two jabs to qualify for their government-issued QR code health pass, allowing them to live and travel freely as before this fiasco, should already make thinking people skeptical. Here in France, government propaganda requires the Covid-recovered to take just one jab to qualify for the national QR code health pass – which is insufficient for travel to my home country of Canada, which requires that all travelers be double-jabbed three months after any Covid infection.

But If I have evidence that my acquired immunity is equal to or superior to the jabs, then getting even a single dose implies potential risk for little or no reward – or even potential detriment. So why would I roll that dice? It's not like hospitals are filling up with the unjabbed Covid-recovered. So why aren't authorities acknowledging this and reacting accordingly to remove us from their jab treadmill.

An Israeli study is often cited to justify jabbing the Covid-recovered, claiming that they’re twice as protected from reinfection than if they relied solely on acquired immunity. But when you dig into the data, you realize that the odds of reinfection are already infinitesimal, and that two times nil is still nil.

Another study, published in the medical journal, Viruses, concluded that “compared with mRNA vaccination... natural infection induces a more robust humoral immune response,” meaning that the Covid-recovered have systems better primed with memory to respond to any future exposure even after blood antibody levels wane.

And in a bombshell undercover video sting published this week, Project Veritas revealed Chris Croce, a senior associate scientist at Pfizer, admitting on camera the advantage of acquired immunity over his company’s vaccine. “You’re protected most likely for longer since it’s a natural response,” Croce revealed.

Nick Karl, a Pfizer biochemist, told the undercover operative: “When somebody is naturally immune – like they got COVID – they probably have… more antibodies against the virus because what the vaccine is… that protein is just on the outside… It’s just one antibody against one specific part of the virus. When you actually get the virus, you’ll start producing antibodies against multiple pieces of virus, not only the outside portion but the inside portion, the actual virus, so your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”

Another article published last month on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s preprint server concluded: “While vaccinations are highly effective at protecting against infection and severe COVID-19 disease, our review demonstrates that natural immunity in COVID-recovered individuals is, at least, equivalent to the protection afforded by full vaccination of COVID-naïve populations. There is a modest and incremental relative benefit to vaccination in COVID-recovered individuals; however, the net benefit is marginal on an absolute basis.” The researchers recommended that “vaccination of COVID-recovered individuals should be subject to clinical equipoise and individual preference.”

And that’s not all. “Israelis who had an infection were more protected against the Delta coronavirus variant than those who had an already highly effective COVID-19 vaccine,” wrote Science Magazine of the benchmark Israeli study from August (while still, bizarrely, claiming vaccinations were “vital”). Since then, we’ve learned that the effectiveness of these ‘highly effective vaccines’ – like Pfizer/BioNTech’s – wanes after six months.

In Pfizrael, sorry, Israel – the primary ground for Covid-19 jab experimentation according to Dr. Philip Dormitzer, vice president and chief scientific officer at Pfizer, who called the country a “sort of laboratory” – a record explosion of Covid infection has resulted in calls for a FOURTH dose, even as the double-jabbed who haven’t yet received their third jab started losing their QR code health pass privileges this week.

It looks like endless jab hell. So how about just giving the Covid-recovered our lifelong health pass already and leaving us alone so we can ignore this circus and move on with our lives? Why are you holding us hostage? Let me take my own ‘jab’ at answering that.

What’s clearly lurking behind the reluctance of authorities to acknowledge acquired immunity is the fear that if they just decided to leave us alone while subjecting everyone else to their endless jab and pony show, then an increasing number of people would eventually decide to find a way to deliberately catch and recover from Covid so they could be left alone, too.

The authorities are literally going against the science and lying to victims of Covid in order to avoid creating a benefit that others might seek out at a potential risk. Except that they themselves are responsible for creating the restrictive system from which people are now literally seeking out infection to find relief – if only to acquire a health pass good for six months so they’re able to access everyday venues and basic freedoms.

As Sir Walter Scott once wrote in his epic poem: “O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!” So maybe stop manipulating people in a lousy attempt at social engineering and start actually following your beloved ‘science’, rather than cherry picking it to suit your corrupt narrative, you inept clowns.

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By Rachel Marsden, columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com