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WATCH: Russia & Ukraine – What’s Really Happening? [Feb 23, 2022]

WATCH: Russia & Ukraine – What’s Really Happening? [Feb 23, 2022]

Uhuru Solidarity

February 22, 2022

 

“African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) Chair Jesse Nevel welcome special guest Chairman Omali Yeshitela for a discussion summing up the situation in Russia and Ukraine, from an African Internationalist point of view.”

Western Reporting – News From Nowhere

Tortilla con Sal

February 26, 2022

Stephen Sefton

 

There are three main senses in which practically no foreign affairs reporting by Western news media and NGOs is ever about the country ostensibly the subject of their reports. First, almost invariably the reporting is so selective and biased as to be in effect a fictional account of some notional place barely recognizable as the country in question. Secondly, any particular report is always and principally intended to serve the much larger false narrative of Western superiority and benevolence. Thirdly, the reports generally depend on some great comprehensive deceit offering false plausibility to other minor, more detailed untruths.

 

Apologies to John Heartfield’s “Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf”

 

In Ukraine, the massive deceit has been to ignore NATO country governments’ support for a fascist regime subordinate to followers of Nazism attacking its own Ukrainian citizens since 2014 with around 14,000 deaths, tens of thousands of wounded and hundreds of thousands people displaced. Those same NATO country governments destroyed Libya and almost destroyed Syria, falsely accusing those countries’ leaders of “killing their own people”. In Latin America, the catch-all big lie is that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are incompetent brutal dictatorships, when in fact their people-focused policies put to shame the desperate social reality prevalent in the countries of US allies like Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, or Honduras.

This reality is self-evident to anyone trying to report faithfully from any of the countries targeted as enemies by the ruling elites of North America and Europe, the respective government leaders they control and, too, their pscychological warfare media and NGO apparatus. Western media and NGOs systematically mislead their populations about international affairs based on three fundamental presuppostions:

  • -North American and European countries are highly morally principled
  • -The majority world generally benefits from Western good intentions
  • -Governments opposed to the West are bad and deserve to punished

 

Thus, accounts published in NATO country psychological warfare outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, El País, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, France 24, the BBC, CNN and so on and on, have barely anything to do with the region or country on which they feign to be reporting. Their role is to misinform Western populations about world events, criminalizing foreign governments so as to consolidate political support for North American and European crimes against the majority world. Domestically, their role is to suppress any trace of popular dissent threatening Western ruling elites’ power and control. Since at least the Iraq war, this inverse relationship has been very clear. Overseas, Western power and influence decline: at home, economic and political repression increase.

While events in Ukraine and elsewhere currently dominate global news, long standing Western aggression against smaller countries like, in Latin America, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela continues. Typical recent coverage of that aggression in the case of Nicaragua demonstrates how the negation of basic reporting integrity renders Western media and NGO accounts of foreign affairs practically worthless. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has been under comprehensive assault from Western media and NGOs ever since taking office in January 2007.

Mural by the Felicia Santizo Brigade of Panama, 1980. Photo: David Schwartz.

Its president, Daniel Ortega has won election after election with massive majorities. Prior to 2018 Nicaragua stood out in the region for its achievements reducing poverty, its economic growth and its political and social stability. Unable to win power with popular support via elections, the US and EU funded opposition promoted a failed coup attempt in 2018 during which opposition militants and thugs with firearms burned down public buildings, businesses and private homes and even preschools. They killed over 20 police officers wounding 400 officers.

They installed roadblocks as bases from which to terrorize local people, demanding money, searching and stealing people’s personal effects, assaulting government supporters, abusing women and girls.Those responsible for organizing that violent failed coup attempt tried to repeat it around last year’s elections. Before they could do so they were arrested and put on trial. As usual, reporting of this reality by Western media, NGOs and institutions inverted what happened, casting the traitorous opposition criminals as innocent and peaceful while portraying the Nicaraguan government as brutal and illegitimate. That mendacious inversion has facilitated every kind of false account of subsequent events.

So, for example, most recently, the New York Times reports the Nicaraguan authorities’ closure of six private universities for failing to satisfy regulatory requirements as if the government is shutting down the country’s private university sector as a whole. The NYT omits that Nicaragua has over 50 universities, the great majority of which are private and the authorities immediately set up three new public universities to guarantee good quality university education for the affected students with lower fees and more scholarships. Likewise, the NYT reports that hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans now live in Costa Rica, without explaining that this has been the case for decades rather than being any kind recent migratory phenomenon, as their report implies.

Practically all Western media reporting on Nicaragua deploys this kind of systematic deceit, sourcing their reports exclusively on Nicaragua’s plentiful opposition media outlets, almost all of which are funded directly or indirectly by US and allied governments. The most notorious of these outlets is Confidencial, which, despite receiving US government funding, is invariably described in Western reporting as being independent. North American and European NGOs and institutions collude in this bad faith reporting, reinforcing the deceitful Western consensus, especially around human rights related issues.

For example, people interested in environmental or indigenous peoples’ issues will look to NGOs like the Oakland Institute or Mongabay for trustworthy reporting. Both these organizations receive large donations from corporate owned funders. The Oakland Institute has been funded by the Howard Buffet Foundation specifically to report on Nicaragua. Mongabay, although a non profit entity, is itself a corporation whose president and chief executive officer is paid US$234,000 a year. Its income reached over US$4 million in 2020 dropping to US$2.4 million the following year. Mongabay has received numerous donations of over US$100,000 from bodies like the Walton Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), for example.

John Heatfield – “Peace and Fascism”. The dove of peace is transfixed by the fascist bayonet before the League of Nations building, whose white cross has become a Swastika

The role of these NGOs reporting on Nicaragua is thoroughly dishonest. Nicaragua has the most innovative and advanced system of indigenous people’s self government anywhere. Distorting this reality, the Oakland Institute has been shown to have claimed falsely that cattle farming for beef exports was the cause of murderous conflicts on indigenous peoples lands. Likewise, Mongabay has claimed government policy in Nicaragua incites invasion of indigenous peoples’ lands despite elected indigenous peoples leaders themselves contradicting that falsehood. This kind of false reporting by media and NGOs feeds into US controlled institutions like the Organization of American States or UN human rights bodies, rendering worthless those influential institutions’ own reports.

Writers like Cory Morningstar and Whitney Webb have explained in detail the underlying rationale for this systematic legitimization of falsehood by Western controlled international institutions, media and NGOs.The relentless psychological warfare offensive undermines national governments, promoting the predatory corporate driven social and environmental agenda aimed at privatizing nature itself and imposing relentless digital control on all aspects of human life. Western media outlets, NGOs and institutions avow transparency and accountability but that too is a contemptible, cynical lie. Anyone challenging the false consensus is either attacked or suppressed.

Corporate NGOs like Mongabay or major institutions like the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights never engage well informed challenges publicly. In part, this clear ethical failure stems from fear of having their falsity and bad faith exposed, but linked to that is a deeply anti-democratic determination to prevent a wider public from having the chance to make up their own minds based on broadly sourced information. The test of good faith for any information is whether the reporting outlet is honest in declaring its own bias and interests and at least acknowledges competing information sources. Western foreign affairs reporting outlets almost invariably fail that test, consistently and comprehensively, reducing themselves to pathetic instruments of psychological warfare.

 

[Stephen Sefton is a member of the Tortilla con Sal collective based in Nicaragua.]

 

A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom

A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom

Real Peoples Media

February 17, 2022

 

The following is a message from Onkwehon: we Grand River Mohawk women from the Turtle, Wolf and Bear clans to the people standing up for freedom against vaccine mandates.

“At this time I would like to remind you that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We would like to acknowledge all the ones who listened to their intuition, their gut feeling, in knowing that these vaccines weren’t a thing that resonated with their being.

Thank you for having the courage to say “No” and stand up for what you believe. Continue to be mindful of your thoughts as we enter into these next few days. You are awakened, you are the light, you are the love of humanity. Love will always prevail. Let’s continue to hold each other up as more truth and justice come to light.

This message is for all our sisters, brothers, and allies across Turtle Island and to our honored, age-old international relations.

We send love and gratitude to all of the brave men and women who are holding the line, uniting together with kindness and compassion in their hearts for freedom, so that truth and justice may prevail.

Canada is still a crime scene, and all will be held on genocide. Grand River Mohawks are alive and well. Mohawks still hold the original six international treaties, and we are in the centre of the Covenant Chain.

As women we must remind the Canadian government of their pledge to the Grand River Mohawks and to the Onkwehon: we way of life. The [emergency measures] announcement today by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a breach of this trust.

Women are the allodial title holders. Even if the courts wanted to, they cannot provide the Canadian Government with a casa somasos.

Universal laws are supreme law of the land and no legislative acts will ever supersede them. A formal notice will be sent to the Honorable Governor General Mary Simon ordering her to uphold her fiduciary responsibilities and invoke the appropriate Criminal Codes that we see fit under Royal Assent and international law. Implicating the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland, and the Premier of Ontario Doug Ford.

In peace, freedom, and truth, take care, stay safe. We love you.”

+++

Note: the Latin term “Nemo dat quod non habet” that appears as text in the video means “no one can give what they do not have.” It is a legal rule, sometimes called the nemo dat rule, that states that the purchase of a possession from someone who has no ownership right to it also denies the purchaser any ownership title to it. (Source: Wikipedia).

Message from Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, After Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen

Message from Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, After Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen

February 22, 2022

Candy Sero, trampled Mohawk Elder, has a single message for the world: “Hold the Line”.

Interview with Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, Prior to Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen on Horses

Interview with Candy Sero, Mohawk Elder, Prior to Being Trampled by Trudeau’s Henchmen on Horses

February 22, 2022

Candy Sero is a Tyendinaga Mohawk Wolf Clan grandmother. She is fifty-one years old. On Friday, February 18, 2022, Sero, who uses a walker, was among those injured when police, mounted on horseback, charged into a crowd of protesters. Sero has been on the front lines in Ottawa, supporting the protests against vaccine mandates and lock down restrictions, since shortly after they began. Like many others, she slept in in her car, in the freezing Ottawa temperatures.

The short interview by Monique Mackay, an independent Canadian journalist, was conducted prior to the horrific event.

“My heartfelt interview with Candy pleading you all come [] to Ottawa, she’s an Indigenous woman with the Mohawk territory fighting for FREEDOM.” [Monique Mackay, independent journalist: @independent_journalism_, Instagram]

LISTEN: Kanenhariyo (Mohawk War Chief) Discusses Ontario’s “State of Emergency” in response to Truckers Rebellion

LISTEN: Kanenhariyo (Mohawk War Chief) Discusses Ontario’s “State of Emergency” in response to Truckers Rebellion

February 12, 2022

 

“They’re liars. They’re lying. But they’re afraid. They’re weak right now. They’re weak, and they’re pretending that they’re strong. Stand up.”

Kanyenkehaka is a Mohawk War Chief from the Tehanakarineh family of the Bear Clan. His home is in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, but he currently resides at the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (near Hamilton, Ontario). He is an Onkwehon:we (Indigenous) man and belongs to the Kayenkehaka Nation, not the Canadian or English nation. His people have kept their ways and traditions, and despite generations of mistreatment at the hands of the Canadian government, they remain a separate, allied Nation with their own rights and responsibilities to creation.

 

“For all of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, maybe you’re new to this country. They didn’t teach you that Indigenous people own these lands. They’ll tell you that it’s theirs. It’s Canada’s wonderful free place. It was only free because they stole things. I’m talking to all the brown people in the cities that didn’t want to go and support the truckers because they thought they were racist. Well, the Liberal Government’s racist and so is the Conservative Government. The entire government of Canada is racist. And the RCMP are racist. Let’s face the facts the RCMP are just as much a culprit in the in the theft of the indigenous children that got sent to residential schools, because they were the collectors.”

 

 

Addressing Trudeau: “Maybe you didn’t, but I suspect you did, [have] the audacity to encourage the smear campaigns of swastika flags and white supremacy – but Canada’s built on white supremacy. Literally, built on white racism. The Canadian flag, that red and white maple flag has, as nasty of blood and history on it, as a swastika.”

 

 

“… well, it’s pretty simple. They said drop the mandates, and you need to quit. You can do that tomorrow… they want you to resign. They don’t have any confidence in you. You can’t even go anywhere in public without them throwing rocks at you and booing. Your people don’t love you. You can resign.”

 

 

“but that’s still our territory… Doug Ford, you don’t have any right to claim it, and you don’t have any right to make decisions, or to say ‘well, you can have your rights but we’re going to supersede them.'” ” The fuck you will.”

 

Support for Canadian Truckers Skyrockets – Alongside Vaccine Injuries in Canadian Children

Support for Canadian Truckers Skyrockets – Alongside Vaccine Injuries in Canadian Children

February 10, 2022

By Cory Morningstar

 

“Always guide and protect the children.”

 

— 1968, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah, political theorist and revolutionary

 

Image

Truckers Protest, Ottawa, Canada, February, 2022

On November 19, 2021, the Canadian Government authorized the Pfizer Comirnaty “vaccine” for  children 5-11 years of age.

As of January 28, 2022 (70 days since approval), there are now 1,453 reported vaccine adverse events (injuries) in children ages 5-17 years on the Canadian Government website. [age 5-11: 226, age 12-17: 1,227]

Of these injuries, in the 5-17 year old age bracket, 330 are categorized as serious. The categorization of “serious” includes death.

[There are 36,164 adverse event reports in total (see chart below). This number is now increasing at a rate of approximately 1,000 per week.]

Figure 3. Number of adverse event reports by age group up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=36,164)

Figure 3. Number of adverse event reports by age group up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=36,164)

 

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 5 to 11 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 5 to 11 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 12 to 17 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

Figure 2. Number of adverse event reports for people 12 to 17 years by vaccine name and dose number up to and including January 28, 2022 (n=225)

 

Canada’s population is over 38 million. The age bracket of 0-17 years represents approximately 7 million.

The deaths of children in Canada, with COVID-19, are as follows:

Up to and including February 4, 2022: deaths with COVID-19 (most, if not all, terminal illnesses or multiple co-morbidities), age 0-11 years: 19

Up to and including February 4, 2022: deaths with COVID-19 (most, if not all, terminal illnesses or multiple co-morbidities), age 12-19 years: 10

Here it must be noted that as of February 4, 2022, of the 33,717 deaths in Canada with COVID-19, 16,377 of these deaths (as of February 8, 2022) occurred in long-term care facilities. [1] [May 9, 2021, The Globe and Mail: Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’.]

Figure 7. Age and gender distribution of COVID-19 cases in Canada as of February 4, 2022, 8 am EST (n=33,717)

Figure 7. Age and gender distribution of COVID-19 cases in Canada as of February 4, 2022, 8 am EST (n=33,717)

 

This must be considered a small percentage of the actual injuries (both serious and “non-serious) due to the complicated/difficult task of filing reports and the actual number of reports being accepted or rejected. As this process if difficult and time consuming, one must contemplate if the “non-serious” category itself, is the minimizing of serious events. Here it must be noted that in 2017 the Canadian Government quietly announced that the funding of Health Canada by the pharmaceutical industry would increase to 90%. The fox is not only guarding the hen house, the fox owns the hen house.

According to the Canadian Government website, “an event is considered serious if it:

  • –results in death
  • –is life-threatening (an event/reaction in which the patient was at real, rather than hypothetical, risk of death at the time of the event/reaction)
  • –requires in-patient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization
  • –results in persistent or significant disability/incapacity, or
  • –results in a congenital anomaly/birth defect”

 

For children and people in their twenties and thirties, COVID-19 poses less risk of mortality than the flu. This has been understood and undisputed since the early days of the said pandemic. No, the “benefits” do not outweigh the risks.

“Under NO circumstances, under ANY circumstances should a young person EVER receive one of these vaccines. Let alone ever be pressured to receive a vaccine.”

 

Dr. Peter McCullough, renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist

 

“The denial of natural immunity after Covid disease is the worst unscientific folly in the past 75 years. How will universities and hospitals recover public trust after that? ”

 

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist, former Harvard Professor of Medicine

 

“I’m outraged by the fact, that we want to vaccinate children.”

 

Dr. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize-winning virologist

On January 17, 2022, Toronto resident Dan Hartman gave testimony to the Toronto Board of Health (meeting 33). Hartman shared what had happened to his son. After more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions, Sean Hartman, 17 years of age, took the Pfizer injection in order to play hockey. Sean died shortly after. The meeting was chaired by Joe Cressey, a Toronto City Councillor (representing Ward 10 Spadina—Fort York), who expressed his condolences. In an outrageous and cruel act of censorship, Dan Hartman’s testimony was edited out of the recorded meeting (a public document). The Twitter account @Answers4Sean, created by the grieving father looking for both answers and support, quickly vanished from Twitter.

Accounts of injuries and deaths slowly break through the walls of censorship in Canada and beyond. In Texas, Ernest Ramirez’s son, Ernest Ramirez Jr., was only 16 years old when he died, five days after receiving the Pfizer injection. [Testimony of Ernest Ramirez, whose son died of myocarditis following Pfizer vaccination.] In Argentina, Miriam Suárez’s 3-year old daughter Ámbar was injected on December 15, 2021. The toddler died one day later from sudden cardiac arrest. Like so many others, the mother was coerced. Ámbar would not have been allowed to go attend kindergarten without the injection due to a vaccine mandate.

Who will bear responsibility for serious injuries and deaths of healthy children who were never at risk? Members of Parliament that serve capital at the expense of people? Doctors in the pocket of the system? Trudeau in the pocket of the World Economic Forum? A secretariat slash think tank that represents the 100 most powerful corporations on the planet – including Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry?  The media owned/controlled  by the same entities? Pfizer, in control of Health Canada?

Never have we witnessed such blatant disregard for the emotional and physical well-being of children. The abuse of children re-wrapped in a political veneer of wokeness. We will never be forgiven by them, nor should we.

The injections, proven to be a spectacular failure, continue to be pushed, defended and celebrated. The collective psychological damage is unprecedented. We find ourselves adrift, in a sea of mass mental illness.

 

“Children are the only beings to whom we must accord privileges– they are the flowers of our life and it is for them that we make all the sacrifices so that they should live happily.”

 

— Amílcar Cabral, PAIGC

 

Sources:

COVID-19 daily epidemiology update:

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html

Reported side effects following COVID-19 vaccination in Canada:

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/

End Notes:

[1]

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

The convoy is despised by those who should support it

Unherd

February 9, 2022

By Malcom Kyeyune

 

A protester walks in front of parked trucks as demonstrators continue to protest the vaccine mandates implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on February 8, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.

This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”

OTTAWA, CANADA, FEBRUARY 3: Truckers continue their rally against coronavirus (COVID-19) measures and vaccine mandate in Ottawa, Canada on February 3, 2022. (Photo by Amru Salahuddien/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

 

Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

 

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

Paul Aubue: ‘This whole thing has been going on for two years and it seems everyday there’s something more. We don’t need a vaccine passport.’ Photograph: Amru Salahuddien/The Guardian

This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles. In Germany, the Left party Die Linke has endured several rounds of severe internal fighting and strife. As in the UK, the younger, more urban, more credentialed parts of the Left have fought a running battle — and thrown pies — against pro-worker “racists” such as Sahra Wagenknecht.

In Canada, that loathing has now turned into fear — and into outright hatred. The problem of the truckers is not really the honking (which the Guardian sniffily calls “crude behaviour“), because sooner or later, that honking will stop. The state of emergency will end. But the protests, significantly, have shown how confused and weak the opponents of the working classes are today.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.

For the Left, the problem of the truckers is their newfound political independence. Nostalgia really is a thing of the past now; the dinosaurs that were thought long extinct are back now, and they are hungry. Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a distant myth.

The real danger of any trucker’s strike, or any pilot’s walkout, or any fuel tax protest in Europe, is that every new confrontation sets a precedent: a precedent that says that the Gord Magills are done taking orders from the Nora Letos of the world.

 

[Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden]

As Workers Resist, the Left Recoils

That recent working class anti-vaccine mandate protests have been met with either silence or derision from the Left speaks volumes about their allegiances.

The Bellows

January 30, 2022

by Edwin Aponte

Photo by Leila Mechoui

 

If you consider yourself on the political Left, you might be forgiven for not knowing very much about the many acts of worker resistance against the COVID-19 vaccination mandates that have taken place all around the world over the last year. This is because the professional Left media and activist class—while happy to cover traditional strike action over union contract disputes, such as with last year’s John Deere Company and the more recent Kroger strike in the United States—have completely ignored comparable labor struggles undertaken by working people over an issue which defies contemporary cultural associations; leaping over most racial, gender, and social divisions.

By making social and economic participation contingent upon the taking of a speedily-developed medical product, average members of the global labor force are being placed in a dehumanizing position—either participate in the world’s largest clinical trial, or be cast into a life of social alienation and privation. Resistance to these vaccine mandates has been expressed through walkouts, picketing, coordinated sickoutsmass resignations, and most recently in Canada, massive truck convoys. And while COVID lockdown-related supply chain backups continue to play out, such revived worker militancy is adding to the already existing crises in the shipping, healthcare, and retail industries.

With such abundant unrest on the labor front it is interesting to note that the Left press appears more concerned with covering the class character of the sport of cricket, or asking whether or not it’s OK to laugh at the unvaccinated when they die of the COVID-19 virus.

This silence betrays the Left’s allergy to the varied social character of the working class as it actually exists in 2022. Any amount of social conservatism among the lower and working classes flies in the face of the Left’s condescending narrative of the downtrodden as the most morally dignified political subject. (After all, that is how the chattering class see themselves, and do they not have workers’ best interests in mind?)

The most spectacular anti-mandate protests of late have been seen in Canada, where a 50,000-strong truck convoy has wound its way from British Columbia to Ottawa in protest of a recently implemented regulation requiring all truckers returning from the United States to show proof of vaccination before they can re-enter the country. Even so, the demonstration has broadened to include Canadians of all working-class professions who have had it with pandemic restrictions in general, and with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in particular.

(Predictably, Left-wing activists have met these protests with insults, mockery and accusations of racism and fascism.)

Such political outbursts are reminiscent of a spate of similar demonstrations last year. In October, Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel over 2,000 flights during what was widely rumored on Twitter to be a coordinated anti-mandate sickout. (Hard evidence for a coordinated strike is elusive, however Southwest walked back its policy only days after the mass-cancelation incident.) In Quebec, despite stern demands from the Interprofessional Health Federation and the Order of Nurses, healthcare workers demonstrated against the province’s looming mandatory vaccine deadline, which would have put thousands out of work. As was the case with Southwest, Quebec’s health minister backed down and delayed its implementation by a month.

“It cannot be stressed enough that these workers have mobilized against corporate colossi.”

And it didn’t end there. Teachers and students all over the state of California staged a large-scale walkout. Target and Walmart workers coordinated sick absences, and countless police and state troopers—sometimes with the backing of their unions, sometimes not—have clashed with local governments over the policy. An In-and-Out burger restaurant was temporarily closed by the city of San Francisco because its employees were flagrantly in violation of mandate rules.

But the October 2021 protests reached beyond North America. In Europe, Italy’s “green pass”—a COVID-19 vaccine passport mandatory for all workers in the country—was met with intense pushback from dock workers in the port city of Trieste. Their demonstrations were countered by police water cannons and tear gas in what has been one the most violent anti-vaccine mandate protests in the world.

It cannot be stressed enough that these workers have mobilized against corporate colossi. Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca, make up the majority of the global vaccine market share. Johnson & Johnson, for example, reaped $766 million from its single-shot product in the first nine months of this year. But those numbers are nothing compared to what Moderna has reported. In August the company said that they had earned just under $4.2 billion from their own vaccine.

Absurd profits are but one aspect of big pharma’s power. Public Citizen, an American consumer advocacy group, published leaked Pfizer contracts last month demonstrating the company’s ability to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits,” by strong-arming states into accepting preferable terms, such as blocking countries from donating vaccine doses to other countries, unilaterally changing delivery schedules, and permitting public assets to be used as private collateral.

This isn’t to suggest that these workers are all protesting vaccine mandates out of any sort of conscious ideological opposition to corporate monopoly power. What matters is that it has typically been the Left that pushes back against this sort of exploitation. But recently the lawmakers of the major Left-liberal political parties (which, let’s be honest, all Left media outlets and even the most fringe activist movements are beholden to) have accepted huge sums in campaign cash from the pharmaceutical industry.

Conspicuously, in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election, big pharma flipped its decades-long strategy of primarily donating to conservative Republican lawmakers in favor of spending most of it on Democrats, instead.

As a result we have an ostensibly socialist publication like Jacobin arguing that, because we are already subject to a litany of more dramatic more dramatic intrusions upon our civil liberties (such as mandatory drug-testing for many workers and welfare recipients) and restrictions on freedom of movement for certain individuals under the pretext of “national security,” Americans may as well submit to a likewise invasive, but ultimately benign, state edict. In Canada the same argument is being made against the trucking protesters. Over in Spain, the communist website, Communia—usually among the better niche outlets—went out of its way to portray all COVID vaccine hesitancy as a type of reactionary anti-capitalism. That is to say, a movement composed of backward-looking reactionaries who only want to reverse those elements of capitalism which negatively affect them, while posturing as anti-capitalist more generally. Per their reasoning, resistance to these mandates signifies a desire for an individualist, a-la-carte style of capitalist domination. (As much as the term correctly applies to movements such as veganism and anti-GMO farming—you can’t turn back the march of technology—conflating the specificity of COVID-19 vaccination mandate resistance with all vaccine mandate resistance is dishonest and, frankly, anti-scientific.)

But the most alarming conflation made by the political Left apparatus is between anti-mandate protest action and domestic terrorism. In Chicago last year, Democratic mayor Lori Lightfoot accused the Fraternal Order of Police of trying to “induce an insurrection” by urging its police officers to ignore the order and risk disciplinary action from the city. It is true that such labor action runs afoul of the law, but it is also true that wildcat strikes and out-of-turn work stoppages are some of the most effective means of worker leverage.

Chicago’s police union ultimately asked the county court to step in, and eventually a temporary restraining order was issued against the mandate. But if the Lori Lightfoots of the political world do eventually succeed in getting their way, protesting workers may find themselves not only on the wrong side of the law, but under threat of serious and life-destroying criminal charges. The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about the “heightened” threat posed by “extremists” opposing vaccination, and President Joe Biden’s Justice Department went so far as to ask the FBI to keep a lookout for potential violence committed against school administrators and staff by concerned parents.

As we have seen from the legal proceedings of the January 6th Capitol protesters, politicians have no compunction about bringing the full force of the state on individuals who act out of line. Opposition to such brutality used to be the principled domain of the Left, and should be especially important now that their faction is in a relative position of power.

If the institutional Left is unwilling to lift a finger, then it is up to workers on all sides of the cultural and political divide to take it upon themselves to apply the appropriate amount of popular pressure, even at the risk of personal ruin. That the Left feels it has bigger fish to fry is on the one hand a grave betrayal of its historic rhetoric against capital, and on the other hand in keeping with its century-plus tendency to cozy up to the bourgeoisie when the going gets tough. Who needs them?

 

[Edwin Aponte is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn. He is the editor and publisher of the Bellows.]
Now is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class

Now is the Time for Mass Resignations from Within the Ruling Class

Brownstone Institute

January 30, 2022

By Jeffrey A Tucker

WKOG: Fueled by working class rather than foundation money – the growing global resistance is distinct/free from chains of non-profit industrial complex. Scores of those that attempt to undermine the resistance are tied into this very complex – willing instruments of their own oppression. To be fair, many confined within this complex are not willing instruments, rather they are oblivious to the invisible hand that feeds, that colonizes the mind and spirit. Mass resistance outside the control of the non-profit industrial complex is a true fear of the ruling class. No war but class war.

If there is a historical precedent for the truckers’ revolt in Canada, and the populist protests in so many other parts of the world, I would like to know what it is. It surely sets the record for convoy size, and it is historic for Canada. But there is much more going on here, something more fundamental. The two-year imposition of bio-fascist rule by diktat seems ever less tenable – the consent of the governed is being withdrawn – but what comes next seems unclear.

We now have two of the most restrictive “leaders” in the developed world (Justin Trudeau of Canada and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand) hiding in undisclosed locations, citing the need to quarantine following Covid exposure. Streets globally have filled up with people demanding an end to mandates and lockdowns, calling for accountability, pushing for resignations, denouncing privileged corporations, and crying out for a recognition of basic freedoms and rights.

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1487574467815657480

Note too that these movements are spontaneous and from “below:” they are populated mostly by the very workers whom governments shoved to face the pathogen two years ago, while the ruling class hid behind their laptops in their living rooms. It was the lockdowns that sharply divided the classes and the mandates that are imposing segregation. Now we are facing a modern allegory to the peasants’ revolt in the Middle Ages.

For a long time, the workers complied bravely but have been forced to accept medical shots they neither wanted nor believed they needed. And many are still being denied freedoms they took for granted only two years ago, their schools non-operational, businesses wrecked, places of entertainment closed or severely restricted. People turn on the radios and televisions to listen to lectures by ruling-class elites who claim to be channeling the science that always ends in the same theme: the rulers are in charge and everyone else must comply, no matter what is asked of them.

But then it became screamingly obvious to the world that none of it worked. It was a gigantic flop and the sky-high cases of late 2021 in most parts of the world put a fine point on it. They failed. It was all for naught. This clearly cannot continue. Something has to give. Something has to change, and this change probably will not wait for the next scheduled elections. What happens in the meantime? Where is this going?

We’ve seen what revolutions look like against monarchies (18th and 19th century), against colonial occupation, against totalitarian one-party states (1989-90), and against banana-republic strongmen (20th century). But what does revolution look like in developed democracies ruled by entrenched administrative states in which elected politicians serve as little more than veneer for bureaucracies?

Since John Locke, it is an accepted idea that people have the right to rule themselves and even to replace governments that go too far in denying that right. In theory, the problem of government overreach in democracy is solved by elections. The argument made for such a system is that it allows for peaceful change of a ruling elite, and this is far less socially costly than war and revolution.

There are many problems with matching theory and reality, among which that the people with the real power in the 21st century are not the people we elect but those who have gained their privileges through bureaucratic maneuvering and longevity.

There are many strange features of the last two years but one of them that stands out to me is how utterly undemocratic the trajectory of events has been. When they locked us down, for example, it was the decision of elected autocrats as advised by credentialled experts that were somehow sure that this path would make the virus go away (or something like that). When they imposed vaccination mandates, it was because they were sure that this was the right path for public health.

There were no polls. There was little if any input from legislatures at any level. Even from the first lockdowns in the US, occurring March 8, 2020 in Austin, Texas, there was no consultation with the city council. Neither were citizens asked. The wishes of the small business people were not solicited. The state legislature was left out entirely.

It was as if everyone suddenly presumed that the whole country would operate on an administrative/dictatorship model, and that the guidelines of health bureaucracies (with plans for lockdowns that hardly anyone even knew existed) trumped all tradition, constitutions, restrictions on state power, and public opinion generally. We all became their servants. This happened all over the world.

It suddenly became obvious to many people in the world that the systems of government we thought we had – responsive to the public, deferential to rights, controlled by courts – were no longer in place. There seemed to be a substructure that was hiding in plain sight until it suddenly took full control, to the cheers of the media and the presumption that this is just the way things are supposed to be.

 

Klaus Schwab, Founder, World Economic Forum: “What we are really proud of now, [is] the young generation. Like Prime Minister Trudeau, the President of Argentina, and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday, I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau. And I know that half of this cabinet, or even more than half of this cabinet, are actually [World Economic Forum] Young Global Leaders of the world.”

Years ago, I was hanging out in the building of a federal agency when there was a change of guard: a new administration appointed a new person to head it. The only change that the bureaucrats noticed was new portraits on the wall. Most of these people pride themselves in failing to notice. They know who is in charge and it is not the people we imagine to elect. They are there for life, and face none of the public scrutiny much less accountability that the politicians face daily.

Lockdowns and mandates gave them full power, not only over the one or two sectors they previously ruled but the whole of society and all of its functioning. They even controlled how many people we could have in our homes, whether our businesses could be open, whether we could worship with others, and dictate what precisely we are supposed to do with our own bodies.

 

Whatever happened to limits on power? The people who put together the systems of government in the 18th century that led to the most prosperous societies in the history of the world knew that restricting government was the key to a stable social order and growing economy. They gave us Constitutions and the lists of rights and the courts enforced them.

But at some point in history, the ruling class figured out certain workarounds to these restrictions. The administrative state with permanent bureaucrats could achieve things that legislatures could not, so they were gradually unleashed under various pretexts (war, depression, terror threats, pandemics). Moreover, governments gradually learned to outsource their hegemonic ambitions to the biggest businesses in the private sector, who themselves benefit from increasing the costs of compliance.

The circle has been completed by enlisting Big Media into the mix of control via access to the class of rulers, to receive and broadcast out the line of the day, and hurl insults at any dissidents within the population (“fringe,” etc.). This has created what we see in the 21st century: a toxic combination of Big Tech, Big Government, Big Media, all backed by various other industrial interests who benefit more from systems of control than they would from a free and competitive economy. Further, this cabal leveled a radical attack on civil society itself, closing churches, concerts, and civic groups.

We’ve been assured by David Hume (1711-1776) and Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. “Resolve to serve no more,” wrote Boetie, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall off his own weight and break into pieces.”

 

That’s inspiring but what does it mean in practice? What precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown? We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies. But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency.

One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.

The people on the streets today, and those willing to tell pollsters that they are fed up, are saying: no more. What does it mean for the ruling class not to get away with this nonsense anymore? Presuming that they do not resign, they do not call off the dogs of mandates and lockdowns, what is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then?

The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet.

[Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. tucker@brownstone.org]