CHINA

PEPE ESCOBAR—Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits. Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.

MATT EHRET—Another zero growth Trilateral Commission priest named Paul Volcker had only recently been appointed to head the Federal Reserve despite his repeated calls for a “controlled disintegration” of the U.S. economy when in 1979, his 20% interest rate hikes made capital investments into multi-year nuclear builds financially impossible for investors (especially when combined with the mountainous environmental impact red tape which added years onto the wait times of new constructions. Under these conditions, interest payments outpaced the actual cost of production and by the mid 1980s over 130 planned new reactor builds were cancelled. While it is popular to parrot the belief that it was the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown which resulted in the bad press and cancellation of new builds, the fact is that even before that event, 46 reactor builds had been cancelled between 1972 and 1979.

Alexander Mercouris discusses how China is no longer willing to take unending insults from the West, especially the US, and is now organising itself to respond in kind with its own information war capabilities. Also, as Special Addendum: A documentary on China’s transformation by PBS, the supposedly “mature and impartial” platform that never stoops to imperial propaganda. The fact is that PBS has also tangibly degenerated in the last two decades, and its prestige programs such as the Newshour and Frontline (inevitable given their corporate funding, staffing, etc.) have become only marginally less openly tendentious and mendacious than the regular commercial media. So they use the stiletto instead of the hammer, but the results are often the same: the conscious betrayal of truth. Be careful, therefore, as you watch this video. There’s the usual mix of lies and truths, with the latter often further massaged to diminish their impact.

STEPHEN GOWANS—If this plays out as it has in the past, the news media will report that the US intelligence community has concluded that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic. The key qualifier that the conclusion is based on no proof, will be quickly passed over and eventually forgotten, and the reality that the conclusion came from the intelligence community will be adduced as its substantiation, as if US spooks are impartial arbiters of all questions of consequence, and not part of a state apparatus that has a vested interest in discrediting a country Washington deems a near-peer competitor.

Former CIA case officer Ralph McGehee’s view of his former employer suggests what outcome we can expect from Biden’s ‘find me some evidence’ order to the intelligence community. “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a Central Intelligence Agency,” McGehee said. Instead, “it is the covert action arm of the president’s foreign policy advisers” whose role is “reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying” the president’s positions and activities. The CIA “shapes its intelligence … to support presidential policy.” McGehee concluded that disinformation is a large part of the intelligence community’s ambit, and the US population is “the primary target audience of its lies.”  

MATT EHRET—While China is the proud owner of a total of TWO BSL-4 labs (both within its own borders), a vast array of dozens of Pentagon-run bioweapons labs litter the international landscape. Exactly how many is hard to estimate as Alexei Mukhin (Director General of Russia’s Center for Political Information) stated in a May 2020 interview:

“According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, in the post-Soviet space, 65 American secret bio-laboratories operate: 15 – in Ukraine, 12 – in Armenia, 15 – in Georgia, 4 – in Kazakhstan. In the United States, such activity is prohibited . Accordingly, the Pentagon, in its own laws, is engaged in illegal activities (in spirit, not in letter). The goal is the creation of biological weapons directed against the peoples who inhabited the territory of the USSR.”

In 2018, investigative journalist Dilya Gaytandzhieva documented the Pentagon’s multibillion dollar budget that sustains bioweapons labs in 25 nations (and 11 within the USA itself) which grew exponentially since the December 2001 bioweaponized anthrax attack killed five Americans and justified a hyperbolic increase of bioweapon warfare to rise from $5 billion when Cheney’s Bioshield Act was passed in 2004 to over $50 billion today.