Month: December 2020

A week ago Russia announced plans to impose tit-tor-tat sanctions on top German and other EU officials over their prior sanctions on Kremlin intelligence officials in the wake of the alleged state-sponsored poisoning of opposition activist and political figure Alexei Navalny in August.

Russia then imposed travel bans on EU officials from France, Germany and Sweden in particular – given these led the way in banning at least six high-level Russian officials from entering the EU (in Sweden’s case the lab which tested materials related to the Navalny case is located there). France and Germany had led the way in getting the EU punitive measures imposed on Russia. 

And there’s more in the tense and growing diplomatic standoff with EU countries: on Tuesday Moscow blacklisted multiple German intelligence and law enforcement figures – this time particularly in response to prior EU sanctions related to accusations the Kremlin was behind a major cyberattack on the Bundestag’s computer system in 2015.

“In response to the EU’s destructive actions, Moscow has decided to expand the blacklist of German nationals barred from entering Russia,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s blacklist announcement reads.

“In accordance with the diplomatic principle of reciprocity, Russia has blacklisted top officials from the law enforcement and intelligence agencies that belong to the German Defense Ministry,” it adds.

In a similar scenario to the more recent Navalny affair, Russia has said it’s repeatedly demanded evidence and access to the data which points to Russian citizens’ involvement in the Bundestag hack, but has been rebuffed by Berlin. Crucially, no less than the Head of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Igor Kostyukov, previously came under the EU travel ban related to the cyberattack.

“Their approach makes it clear that Berlin has never been interested in really investigating the so-called Russian hackers case and the entire situation was initially staged as another provocation against our country,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said further according to TASS.

EU officials have recently called Russia’s belated retributive sanctions on European officials “unjustified” and unfair. However, the Kremlin made clear in announcing its new blacklist that it reserves the right to “use response measures” in the future should Germany continue its confrontational approach.

Authored by Guillaume Durocher,

The year 2020 has seen signification changes and further centralization of power in the European Union. There appear to be three major causes for this:

1. British withdrawal from the EU which occurred on February 1, 2020.

2. The coronavirus crisis, whose lockdowns have inflicted tremendous damage on the European economy, particularly in southern Europe, annihilating in mere months years worth of effort to put government finances on a sustainable footing.

3. A more proactive European policy on the part of Germany.

Without Britain and Germany, the camp opposed to more EU spending was reduced to the “Frugal Four” that are Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, a coalition of smaller nations who lack the clout to block the ambitions of the Franco-German directorate. British withdrawal has deprived the EU of its second-biggest net financial contributor (some €10 billion annually) and of one of its biggest and most dynamic economics, but ultimately the Union has gained in cohesion.

Since the Second World War, the pace of European integration has always been set by the Franco-German engine. This remains the case, even as France has become the decidedly weaker partner. French President Emmanuel Macron has consistently pressured for a strengthening of the EU and Chancellor Angela Merkel – whose policies fluctuate according to factors beyond my understanding, presumably a mixture of German domestic politics and “legacy-building” for a politician on the cusp of retirement – has agreed.

The EU’s response to the coronavirus crisis, while uneven, has been decidedly more proactive and ambitious than during the financial-economic crisis that started in 2007. The European Central Bank (ECB), a de facto sovereign federal entity, has under Christine Lagarde launched a lending stimulus program worth a whopping €1,850 billion ($2,270 billion or 15.5% of eurozone GDP). This measure has allowed national governments, particularly in southern Europe, to continue borrowing from financial markets and escape (critics would say postpone) debilitating bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Germany has abandoned its decades-strong “red lines” opposing borrowing by the Union on financial markets. Berlin has agreed to an EU stimulus plan worth €750 billion to support economies devastated by the coronavirus crisis, particularly Italy and Spain. Significantly, €390 billion of this money will be in the form of grants, basically transfers, rather than mere re-lending to national governments. All the Frugal Four achieved in return was a negligible decrease of the regular EU budget (still worth around 1% of GDP).

Admittedly, thanks to the ECB’s action, national governments could already borrow at their leisure on financial markets. What’s more, the €750-billion plan will be spent over three years, amounting to annual stimulus of a mere 1.5% of GDP. This suggests the vast difference in agency between a de facto federal sovereign like the ECB (which can take action when a simple majority of its independent Governing Council agrees) as against the summits of national governments, each with their veto and sensitive electorate. Still, the new EU stimulus plan amounts to an unprecedented and instantaneous 150% increase in the EU budget for three years, no mean feat.

The new EU borrowing-stimulus plan is particularly significant for the following reasons:

1. The precedent having been set, European heads of state and government will likely be increasingly tempted in the future to find agreeable compromises through yet more apparently painless EU borrowing.

2. The EU borrowing will have to be repaid, creating pressure to establish new European taxes (referred officially in Eurocratese as “own resources,” a cold term intentionally designed to confuse European citizens, such is the price of consensus). The European Commission notably proposes a carbon tariff on imports, a tax on tech giants, and a financial transactions tax.

3. Like the United States of America, albeit on a much smaller scale, Europe’s Union conditions states’ access to its funds, thus the EU now will have increased means to bribe national governments to accept its norms.

The latter was the sticking point which led Hungary and Poland to threaten to veto both the regular EU budget for 2021-2027 and the creation of the new stimulus fund. Indeed, the European Parliament has demanded a “rule of law” mechanism to punish Hungary and Poland for their national-populist governments. The mood is suggested by Brussels’ recent decision to deprive several Polish cities of funds because of their creation of “anti-LGBT-ideology zones” (essentially declarations in favor of traditional marriage and pledges to not fund NGOs promoting homosexuality or transgenderism).

The Hungarian and Polish governments strike a balance between appealing to their national electorates’ conservative instincts, whether out of political opportunism or sincere belief, and attracting the ire of Brussels. Up to now, depriving a whole nation of EU funds could only occur with the unanimous support of all 26 other national governments. Naturally, Budapest and Warsaw could count on each other to veto any such proposal (occasionally joined by other central-eastern European allies, most recently Ljubljana).

Unlike their predecessors Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s – whose countries were net contributors to the European budget – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki were in no position to gridlock the Union as EU net financial transfers to their countries amount to between 2.5 and 4.5% of GDP (mostly going to farmers and local governments). Now, a supermajority of national governments representing 65% of the population and 55% of states may move to deprive a country of EU funding.

Orbán and Morawiecki did secure a significant concession however. Legally, cutting funding may only occur for instances of misuse of EU funds and not for general enforcement of “EU values.” In principle, the EU Parliament will not be able to economically blackmail Hungary and Poland simply because their governments do not promote homosexuality or accept migrants to the desired extent.

What’s more, the deprivation can only occur with a concurrent ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Admittedly, the ECJ, like other Western courts, has been known for plenty of legal creativity over the years. Nonetheless, given that the ECJ is made up of 27 equal independent judges, one from each member state including 11 central-eastern Europeans, this makes it less likely national-populist governments will be punished for ideological reasons as against legitimate accounting ones. (There appears to be significant corruption in Hungary, though this is difficult to gauge because the issue is systematically exaggerated by Orbán’s liberal opponents for political reasons.)

All these developments give some indication of the character of the emerging European Superstate, which creeps along imperceptibly year after year, though ultimately forms something substantial: as of today, a sovereign and influential market regulator and an effective trade bloc (as the British have learned), able to bring into its orbit much of its near abroad (notably in central-eastern Europe).

The French expression la construction européenne is perhaps the most appropriate: we witness especially the steady accumulation of norms and structures, the acquis, and the occasional creation of de facto federal actors (the ECB, the Commission’s Competition authorities, regulatory agencies for financial markets, medicines, or foods . . .).

As times goes on, the north-west European core of the EU looks likely to increasingly have the means to impose its norms on the southern and eastern periphery. Patriots in central-eastern Europe had better hope Western Europe takes an identitarian turn or they may have to choose between their wallets and their values.

Boris Johnson is bringing in the troops to help prepare British students to return to schools across the country after the winter holiday is over, even as his government continues to jack up new “Level 4” restrictions due to surging case numbers allegedly caused by a COVID strain that had mutated to become more infectious.

To help ensure that COVID-testing systems are up and running in British schools before they reopen next week, the Ministry of Defence is deploying 1.5K troops who will be tasked with assisting in the national endeavor. Students who are facing public exams this year are expected to return to classes on Jan. 4, with other students returning later in the month. However, as BoJo juggles the twin albatrosses of carrying the Brexit trade deal through a Wednesday high-wire vote in Parliament, along with managing the ongoing war at home against COVID-19 as daily case numbers see new record highs.

The PM is seeing growing pushback from certain groups – at least, according to Bloomberg – who have demanded more time to prepare for the return to in-person classes, something that has been a priority across Europe.

But a growing number of unions, politicians and scientists called for more time to prepare testing to prevent virus transmission in schools.

The number of new cases in the U.K. surged to a daily record of more than 41,000 on Monday and hospitalizations exceeded the peak recorded in the first wave in the spring, as a more virulent strain of the virus takes hold.

Johnson has made keeping schools open a key priority as he looks for ways to kick start the U.K. economy after months of restrictions left it facing its worst downturn for 300 years. Ministers threatened legal action to stop schools offering home learning before Christmas, but a government statement late Monday left open the possibility of that position being reversed in the new year.

Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis chain of academy schools, told BBC radio on Tuesday, that British schools should remain closed for another “week or two” to give them more time to prepare.

“We would ask government to pause, to come up with a clear strategy for the continuity of education,” Chalke said. “We think that if you really care about kids you would do this well — to invest now, to give time now makes sense.”

The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – better known as SAGE – advised Johnson to close secondary schools in January and consider another national lockdown, according to media reports published yesterday.

Even some of Johnson’s fellow Tories are starting to question the PM’s priorities.

Teachers and parents need a clear and definitive statement that schools will not be required to reopen in January until effective vaccination is made available to teaching staff. 1/2

— Sir Roger Gale MP (@SirRogerGale) December 28, 2020

Education is important but so are the lives and wellbeing of teachers and key working parents need time to plan for the care of their children. 2/2

— Sir Roger Gale MP (@SirRogerGale) December 28, 2020

Remember, keeping schools open has remained controversial since the government ordered closures back in March (which caused a national outrage over the UK’s ever-important university admission exams). But growing discontent over BoJo’s domestic priorities isn’t exactly reassuring, especially ahead of Wednesday’s last-minute Parliament vote on BoJo’s trade deal.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) scrambled its fighter jets over 400 times in Europe in 2020, chiefly to intercept approaching Russian military planes, the defense alliance said Monday.

Around 350 of these missions were in response to Russian military aircraft, NATO said in a statement. While this represents a “moderate” increase compared to 2019, it comes amid Russia’s growing military activity near the NATO perimeter.

“In recent years, we have seen an increased level of Russian military air activity close to the alliance’s borders,” NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu said in a statement.

One of the potential dangers posed by unannounced Russian military aircraft is to passenger planes flying in their vicinity.

“Russian military aircraft often do not transmit a transponder code indicating their position and altitude, do not file a flight plan, or do not communicate with air traffic controllers, posing a potential risk to civilian airliners,” the alliance said in a statement.

NATO maintains about 40 air surveillance radars and reporting hubs in Europe, with some 60 jets on duty at all times to respond to aircraft flouting international flying rules or in distress. The alliance scrambles its jets in response to airborne intruders and to civilian planes that lose contact with air-traffic control, for reasons such as technical problems or hijackings.

“We are always vigilant,” Lungescu said.

“NATO fighter jets are on duty around the clock, ready to scramble in case of suspicious or unannounced flights near the airspace of our allies. Air policing is an important way in which NATO provides security for our members.”

The alliance, made up of 30 member countries, operates on the basis of a system of mutual defense, where an attack on one country is met with a joint response. Another 20 countries, including Russia and a number of former Soviet Union republics, are members of the NATO Partnership for Peace program, which seeks to create trust between participating states through military-to-military cooperation on a number of fronts, including training and disaster response.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, at a session at the World Economic Forum last year exploring the future of the intergovernmental military alliance, spoke of “a Russia which is much more assertive, responsible for aggressive actions from the Kerch Strait to the streets of Salisbury using their agent there.”

Stoltenberg was referring to an incident in 2018 in the UK involving the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter by suspected Russian military intelligence officers using the deadly Novichok nerve agent. Russia denied any role in the incident, which sparked a crisis between the two countries and led to the expulsion of 23 known Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover in Britain.

“NATO’s role is today, fundamentally, the same as it was back in 1949,” Stoltenberg said at the time. “And that is that we protect and defend each other. That we really believe that we are safer together than apart.”

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”

– John Lennon

No doubt about it: 2020 – a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom – was the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for freedom.

Government corruption, tyranny, and abuse coupled with a Big Brother-knows-best mindset and the COVID-19 pandemic propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which nationwide lockdowns, egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians were accepted as the norm.

Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades and in the past year, in particular.

The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers that have been amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.

Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces continued to be a menace to the citizenry and the rule of law. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies acquired even more weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. Police officers were also given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons and subject them to forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.

The courts failed to uphold justice. With every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts more concerned with protecting government agents than upholding the rights of “we the people.” This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. A review of critical court rulings over the past two decades, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

COVID-19 allowed the Emergency State to expand its powers. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) could expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. While COVID-19 took a significant toll on the nation emotionally, physically, and economically, it also allowed the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, with talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, forced vaccinations, snitch tip lines and onerous lockdowns.

The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans have become sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

America became a red flag nation. Red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws generally push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States. Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

The cost of policing the globe drove the nation deeper into debt. America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense. The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Yet America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world. This is how a military empire occupies the globe. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is falling apart.

Free speech was dealt one knock-out punch after another. Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, shadow banning on the Internet, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good. On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow. The reasons for such censorship varied widely from political correctness, so-called safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of free speech.

The Deep State took over. The American system of representative government has been overthrown by the Deep State—a.k.a. the police state a.k.a. the military/corporate industrial complex—a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad. The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished. In its place is a shadow government, a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House. Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. This shadow government, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

The takeaway: Everything the founders of this country feared has come to dominate in modern America. “We the people” have been saddled with a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

So how do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs, and then locked down and stripped of any semblance of personal freedom?

No matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.

For that matter, protests and populist movements also haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.

So how do you not only push back against the government’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means?

You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics.

Take your cue from the Tenth Amendment and nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government.

For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants.

Nullification is one way of doing so.

America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.

Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.

The power to change things for the better rests with us, not the politicians.

As long as we continue to allow callousness, cruelty, meanness, immorality, ignorance, hatred, intolerance, racism, militarism, materialism, meanness and injustice—magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality—to trump justice, fairness and equality, there can be no hope of prevailing against the police state.

We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent and push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the police state is marching forward, more powerful than ever.

If there is to be any hope for freedom in 2021, it rests with “we the people.”