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The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Elaborating on the nature and necessity of a Socialist Republicanism is vital for our present movement. On this topic, Sam Thomas’s article “The Machiavellian State, Fascism and the Tribune of the Proletariat” both provides interesting insights and grounds for a further debate, that I feel should be given importance in the midst of our Communist organizations. Fundamentally, this can only be clarified by asking the question of the revolutionary past and its role in our present movement, what we inherit from past revolutionary classes and what makes ours the final struggle. In doing so, we must study the Republic as a demand through a lens of historical materialism, clarifying precisely how classes negate their republicanism as they become reactionary (something that we must vitally grasp to understand why the bourgeoisie has tolerated feudal remnants, monarchies, and wildly undemocratic political structures ever since the 19th century, especially where its power allowed it to dismiss anti-feudal alliances with the peasantry and the proto-proletariat, like in England and Germany), and understand the place of universalism and particularity in past and present class struggles. My goal in this letter is to do so by bringing to the question of Republicanism a revolutionary conception of time and the past, as present in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History ”.¹

As a demand, non-domination is inherently universalist. By seeing freedom as the capacity for all humans to understand and control the laws by which they live, any struggle for non-domination views itself as a struggle for class abolition, for an universalist state of things.

In centering non-domination as the defining demand of Republicanism, Machiavelli fundamentally links it with the struggle of the oppressed. For him, the defense of the Republic by the plebeians came exactly from oppression, from “being oppressed, or suspicion of having been oppressed.”²

As Historical Materialists, this notion of the struggle for non-domination arising from the “plebeians”, the dominated classes, allows us to “brush history against the grain”³ as Walter Benjamin theorized, understanding this fight for a Republic as an underground historical demand of the oppressed. Conversely, this allows us to acknowledge how a class’s turn towards a reactionary role is paralleled by an increasing anti-republicanism. This, along with the understanding of how the few bourgeois revolutions (with the Jacobin Republic being the primary example of this) were propelled towards radicalism by the peasantry and proto-proletariat,⁴ illuminates on the nature of bourgeois “republicanism” as devoid of the contents of the republican demand, ever since the historically reactionary era of Capital, tolerating and even upholding feudal political remnants, monarchies, and the persistence and integration of the aristocracy. Alongside this revolutionary conception of past struggles, Benjamin brought a certain conception of time to Marxism that I feel is vital to understand history. Instead of a merely formalistic conception of time, a rigid separation between past, present and future, he, influenced by a heretical interpretation of Jewish and Christian Theology, put forward an idea of Kairos, full historical time, where the past contains a certain quality of the present. This is even more present in revolutionary moments of history, where the oppressed seek to halt and destroy the present state of things. These historical moments encapsulate a certain totality, by their radical demands of universalism, charged with the present and the future.

Armed with these revolutionary understandings of both time and republicanism, we can conceive of the demand for a Republic as a battle-cry of oppressed classes, from the plebeians in Rome to the German rebelling peasants to the Sans-Culottes in the Jacobin Republic in their struggle for non-domination and universalism, wishing to halt the historical march of the oppressors and, in doing so, embodying an explosive historical totality. In the face of this, what is the duty we have to the past, and past oppressed classes, and how does inheriting this demand make our movement more revolutionary?

With this concept in mind, we have to understand these revolutionary moments, and the central demand of the oppressed in all its iterations, as explosive in embodying a full historical time, imbued with the present and future. To this powderkeg of revolutionary potential, Historical Materialism shall be a match, paving the way for a “leap in the open air of history, the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.”⁵ This translates into the need to study how the Republican demand changes in demand and moves through history, as different modes of production topple previously existing ones. Essentially, we need to study the more specific contents of the struggle for non-domination dialectically, through its contradictions and negations, to truly unearth the past’s revolutionary potential.

Before the proletariat, no other class could truly have an understanding of historical totality, of its place alongside the oppressed classes of the past, no other class could render the past legible for revolutionary praxis. However, the material conditions that allow the proletariat to recognize this necessity bring with them a consciousness that class abolition can only be realized through class dictatorship, that the universal can only be realized through the particular.

This results from the specific nature of wage labor as an economic relation not established through law, that determines the struggle of the proletariat as a political and economic fight aiming for conscious class dictatorship. As Rosa Luxemburg noted:

“All previous societies were based on an antagonism between an oppressing class and an oppressed class’. But in the preceding phases of modern society this antagonism was expressed in distinctly determined juridical relations and could, especially because of that, accord, to a certain extent, a place to new relations within the framework of the old.”⁶

In essence, the proletariat is the class that, while imbued with demands for universalism, is freed by its conditions to recognize how this can be attained. Its rule is republican in the sense that, as a process of class abolition, it is a real dictatorship of humankind’s interests. In Communism, as the free association of producers, we find a sublated form of the republic, a shedding of its content of non-domination from its state form. From this, it follows that, embodying the struggle for this state of affairs, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a process of contradiction, where “a being is at each moment itself and yet something else”⁷, realizing the content of the republican demand by wielding it in order to abolish its form. To do so is to redeem and realize the struggles of the past, to finally resolve the final struggle for a Res Publica passed down by the oppressed of the past, while not falling into any illusions regarding the need for class particularity as was present in these other classes.

On the question of the Tribune of the Proletariat, and how such a measure could be a great battle won in the class struggle, I have only some remarks to add. While we can force specific measures on the bourgeois state to pave the way for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, we have to recognize that such a thing can only be possible when the class struggle has been intensified and politicized. It is not the Tribune of the Proletariat that causes class struggle to grow and advance, it’s the growth and advance of the class struggle that can allow for a Tribune of the Proletariat. We cannot dismiss that such a measure could advance the class struggle, but we have to understand that in this reciprocal relationship the intensification of the class struggle is the primary and first factor. This also can be applied to Socialist presence in the bourgeois parlament. Too many parties see this relation backwards, not realizing the work that must be done to intensify and politicize the struggle of the working class before bourgeois parlament can be used in a revolutionary manner.

Fundamentally, for the struggle to implement a Tribune of the Proletariat to succeed, it’s vital that we first implement its embryonic forms into practice, in the small ways that we can. Building occupations, tribunes, and councils to organize our class and to win. On a smaller scale, victories in the struggle is necessary for us to be able to impose a Tribune of the Proletariat on the bourgeois state, as it requires a political, conscious and organized proletariat and a constant sharpening of its tactics by practice.

In essence, one of the most relevant questions of our current movement is how to create a reciprocal relation between theory and praxis, avoiding both from becoming ossified and arbitrary. In doing so, the nature of our relation to the past, to the history of the oppressed, and the nature of our demands is essential. I hope bringing forward Machiavelli’s theory of republicanism, among many others, can revitalize our understanding of what we’re fighting for, and spark debate and study over how these demands modify themselves historically. The proletariat is at a site of struggle that is both continuity and rupture with the past: our goal should be to infuse the past with a real sense of the future and present revolution, in order to both break from and realize this past, in ways that will be determined by the struggles of today.

Ari

 

 

The post Letter: On the Tribune of the Proletariat appeared first on Cosmonaut.

The University of Cape Coast Primary School in Cape Coast, Ghana.

Seth/Xinhua via Getty Images

• More and more countries are struggling to pay their debts.
• Almost 40% of the developing world is in serious debt trouble, especially in Africa.
• In addition to the growing debts, developing countries are also facing higher interest rates.

More and more countries in the developing world are facing a debt crisis, which could have a devastating impact on how they adjust to their skyrocketing populations.

According to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 3.3 billion people live in countries where the government spends more on debt interest payments than education or health.

“Half our world is sinking into a development disaster, fuelled by a crushing debt crisis,” Guterres said during a press conference this week, according to Al Jazeera, to introduce a new report on the state of the world’s debt, adding: “And yet, because most of these unsustainable debts are concentrated in poor countries, they are not judged to pose a systemic risk to the global financial system. This is a mirage. 3.3 billion people is more than a systemic risk. It’s a systemic failure.”

And that number is just going to keep skyrocketing. 

Nigeria, for example, is expected to nearly double its population by 2050, matching the United States as the third-largest country in the world. On the plus side, that population will be younger and should provide the workforce needed to move the country forward, especially in fields like tech. However, the risk is that Nigeria cannot keep up with the education needed for a young population that large.

According to the UN report, countries facing “high levels of debt” more than doubled from 22 in 2011 to 59 in just 11 years. The UN cites the typical needs of a developing country, exasperated by the COVID pandemic, rising housing costs, and climate change.

Another issue is that more and more debt in developing countries is held by private lenders who charge much higher interest rates. According to the UN, African countries pay four times more for loans than the US and eight times more than wealthy countries in Europe.

“Action will not be easy,” Guterres said. “But it is essential, and urgent.”

This is the kind of story I saw coming out of Australia 10 years ago. You can’t say we had no warning, it’s that people in power ignored it. Via the Washington Post:

The city’s hospitals and firefighters this week have been trying to help people who are seared by pavement that can register 160 degrees or hotter. They are treating patients whose temperatures are running as much as 10 degrees above normal by injecting them with frigid IV fluids, blasting them with evaporative cooling fans, and placing them in what look like small inflatable kayaks filled with ice.

Doctors at the burn center this week said they had 10 patients with contact burns serious enough to require hospitalization. The number of burn admissions has grown over the past decade, as temperatures have risen and days with extreme heat have become more common. In 2015, the hospital admitted 43 people during the summer months with burns. Last summer, that number rose to 85, and seven of the people died.

The most common cases, doctors here said, are elderly people who fall or those who are under the influence of fentanyl or other drugs and spend minutes or hours splayed on the pavement. Homeless people are particularly vulnerable.

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The evidence supporting Trump’s federal indictment demonstrates his unfitness to hold office, but that hasn’t convinced Republican elites.

Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories has given it a special know-how in imposing military control over civilians. Governments around the world admire its example — and are ever keener to import its repressive technologies.

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A police officer keeps watch from an observation tower at the Gilboa Prison in northern Israel on September 6, 2021. (Jalaa Marey / AFP via Getty Images)

Wars and occupations have long been testing grounds for technology, science, and surveillance. In a domain mostly controlled by the oppressor, subject populations are sure to find ingenious ways to rise up — but their captors also find new ways to subjugate them. This is the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Israel has maintained the longest occupation in modern times — fifty-six years and counting.

The Israeli state — and its closely aligned military-industrial complex — writes its own rule book. Its soldiers watch as extremist Jewish settlers launch pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank. Over one thousand Palestinians are held in indefinite detention without charge in Israeli jails.

Palestinian access to water is used as “a potent state-controlled weapon for the settler movement.” Meanwhile, Israeli arms companies promote their weapons with real footage in which Palestinian children are left injured.

But in the court of international opinion, the tide is turning against Israel. In May, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories denounced the “apartheid” system over which “colonial power” Israel rules Palestinians. Tens of millions of dollars are sent from the United States by registered charities to bankroll illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but the New York State Assembly will soon consider a bill that would prevent the tax-deductible practice.

As journalist, author, and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein writes in his latest book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, this permanent occupation has allowed Israel to “perfect the architecture of control” through weaponry, surveillance, and other means. He told Jacobin’s Mattha Busby how Israel is exporting this technology of death to democracies and despots around the world, clad with its ethno-nationalist ideology.

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Mattha Busby

In the book, you note that the occupation of the Palestinian territories has allowed Israel to perfect the architecture of control through various means, and that it is effectively exporting these methods in the form of weapons and tech sales, along with training and advice. Why is it so important to raise these issues today?

Antony Loewenstein

I’ve been visiting Palestine since 2005, reporting regularly from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and I lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020. I’ve written two books about the conflict and yet over the past five or so years I started seeing so much more evidence of Israeli surveillance tech being spread around the world. Israel’s brutal, deepening occupation is now the longest in modern times. But what Israel has done very cleverly, from its perspective, is to use the Palestinians as guinea pigs to test new methods of control and repression. So I’m talking about everything from so-called smart walls, to drones, to weapons, to spyware. The Israeli companies that are selling this equipment say that it’s been “battle-tested” on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere.

The majority of that technology is increasingly sold around the world by Israeli companies that are very, very close to the Israeli state. The occupation is exportable, and the tools that are used to maintain it are increasingly found in many other countries. The bottom line is that countless governments, both democracies and dictatorships, use Pegasus, the most sophisticated spyware (deployed on everyone from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to the late Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi), through which people can get access to your phone, and your information can be used, saved, and stored. Your phone and camera can be turned on, and essentially your phone becomes a surveillance tool. Beyond Pegasus, there are many other Israeli spyware companies operating today: facial recognition companies, biometric firms, and repression tech.

Mattha Busby

How do you know you’re not being surveilled?

Antony Loewenstein

The sad reality is that there’s no way to know if your phone has been hacked by Pegasus or any other spyware. Only a forensics team can determine if every detail of your life, including photos and sexting messages, have been compromised and viewed by others. So, beware! In reality, there’s no way to be 100 percent safe when using a mobile phone or any form of digital communication. Everything is hackable. Some journalists joke that the safest way to communicate with a source is by meeting in a field with no communication devices nearby. For most people, though, pushing for greater encryption on our devices is one way to try and ensure safe communication.

Mattha Busby

How do Israel’s actions lead other states to feel more legitimized in their own actions against oppressed communities?

Antony Loewenstein

I don’t think, for example, that Mexico is buying Israeli hacking tools because it wants to be an ethno-nationalist state. It wants to buy these tools because they’re effective in spying on dissidents and human rights workers. But in other countries like India, there’s a much more ideological affinity. Of course, India is not acting brutally in Kashmir because of Israel. But they have an intimate relationship due to an affinity: ethno-nationalists stick together. India under Modi wants to create a Hindu fundamentalist state where Muslims are discriminated against, as they already are today; there’s mass violence against Muslims, pogroms, an attempt in Kashmir to bring in many more Hindus. As Indian officials have said: akin to what Israel is doing in the West Bank, bringing in lots of Jews to settle the land. They’re inspiring each other and it very much reminds me of how Israel was behaving during apartheid South Africa, working together and sharing an ideological bond.

Hungary’s top leadership is openly antisemitic, but Israel doesn’t care. Why? Because these leaders see an ideological alignment.

Then there’s the idea that people on the far right, who are often neo-Nazis, admire a Jewish state. On the face of it, this seems absurd. Of course, they don’t like Jews, but what they see is this proud nation that has no care for human rights and is simply promoting and deepening an unapologetic, Jewish supremacist state. They want to create the same thing in their own countries: a hard-line, Christian majority state.

It also makes perfect sense that Israel is increasingly close to far-right countries like Hungary, which is only quasi-democratic. Its top leadership is openly antisemitic, but Israel doesn’t care. Why? Because these leaders see an ideological alignment. That, to me as a Jew, is totally outrageous, dangerous, and increases genuine antisemitism, when states like Israel collude with open antisemites.

Mattha Busby

One thing that really struck me in the book is how the chief censor of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Ariella Ben-Avraham — who was responsible for the unit that vets all stories related to foreign affairs and security prepublication — went to work for the rogue cyber-surveillance company NSO Group.

Antony Loewenstein

NSO Group is nominally a private company, but it’s essentially an arm of the Israeli state. Its most infamous tool is Pegasus. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Many other companies are now doing exactly the same thing: zero-click hacking into your smartphone. In the last few years, NSO has received a lot of bad press and been sanctioned by the Biden administration (though parts of the US security state still use Israeli spyware). For years, Israel used NSO as a diplomatic tool: Netanyahu would go to a certain, often repressive country and say, we want relations with you, or better relations, and dangle spyware or surveillance tech as a carrot.

Mattha Busby

And how does this technology relate to the occupation of the Palestinian territories?

Antony Loewenstein

The people behind NSO Group and many other weapons, spyware, or intelligence tech firms are mostly all IDF veterans. They’ve been part of something called Unit 8200, which is basically the surveillance and intelligence-gathering unit. These are people who have spent years and years surveilling Palestinians. The tools they create have been used against Palestinians in Palestine: there’s evidence from the last few years that it was used on key human rights activists in Palestine itself, and on some Israelis in Israel. The occupation always comes home eventually. Unit 8200 is like a production line; it’s basically training and encouraging individuals to surveil Palestinians. But the longer-term goal is also to create individuals who want to build the next generation of high-tech surveillance. Once they leave the military, they then develop these companies, whether it’s a weapon, drone, spyware, or hacking tools, and they remain close to the Israeli government. This means that the Israeli government can use those tools as a diplomatic weapon or threat.

Mattha Busby

You’ve ruffled feathers before. This caused you to be subjected to a “relentless vilification campaign” over your best-selling first book from 2006, My Israel Question, on the global Israel lobby and the diaspora’s complicity in the Israeli occupation. And for a question you asked in Jerusalem in 2016 to a senior Israeli minister, Yair Lapid, about how he felt about Israel potentially becoming a pariah in years to come in the footsteps of apartheid South Africa — a question that sparked calls for your deportation from Israel. Does this not all bother you?

Antony Loewenstein

Hopefully, my new book will receive a lot of interest. Some good; I’m sure some bad, which is the nature of media coverage of Palestine. In certain media circles in the West there is still an uncomfortableness, or awkwardness, about covering Palestine, regardless of how extreme Israeli politics become, how horrendous the occupation is, or how many Palestinians are killed. This is for two reasons. The Israel lobby is very powerful in these countries, and they attack media outlets for being critical of Israel. And there is still what I would call a liberal Zionist protection racket going on in the West to protect the image of Israel, despite it being labeled an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations. Many people have spent decades loving and protecting Israel; their life’s work is to support Israel. But that image is starting to crumble, because Israel itself is becoming so far right and fascistic. And public opinion is shifting toward Palestine in many Western states.

Mattha Busby

Israel is also one of the top ten exporters of arms and weaponry, which is particularly remarkable since it is about the ninety-first most populous country, with ten million people (fifteen million people under its control, if the occupied West Bank and Gaza are included). How did this happen?

Antony Loewenstein

Decades of occupation. Israel’s moral soul is deformed, because you can’t occupy a people for over half a century and not become compromised in all manners of life.

Israel’s moral soul is deformed, because you can’t occupy a people for over half a century and not become compromised in all manners of life.

9/11 really turbocharged the arms industry in Israel, because the Jewish state said to the world, “We’ve been fighting this war on terror for our whole existence, come and learn from us. This is how you do it.” You’ve had huge numbers of American police officers coming to Israel, hanging out with Israeli police, seeing what they’re doing, learning tactics; not that the American police need to learn racism from Israel, let’s be clear about that. But to choose to go to Israel, of all nations, to learn the so-called best tactics to fight a war on terror is concerning. You also had lots of Indian soldiers going to Israel in the last twenty years, including ones that are operating in Kashmir, learning from Israeli forces. A friend of mine, the writer Jeff Halper, calls this “Globalized Palestine”; what’s happening in Palestine is not staying there.

Mattha Busby

Are most of these weapons sold to countries who are allied or otherwise have some sort of affinity with Israel?

Antony Loewenstein

Gross human rights abuses aren’t an impediment to Israeli arms sales. The Jewish state has sold weapons to the junta in Myanmar and exported arms to the government in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The hyper-militarized society that Israel has created is appalling and racist — but it’s very attractive to a lot of countries. One major example is the US-Mexico border, or on Europe’s borders monitoring refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown by EU border force Frontex. Russia’s war against Ukraine has also revealed the European desire for Israel’s missile defense shields, tested in countless Israeli wars against Gaza.

Key surveillance equipment on the US-Mexico border is Israeli. It’s made by Elbit, which is Israel’s biggest defense company. There are huge surveillance towers all along the border. That’s not the only equipment that the United States uses, but it’s vital infrastructure. And how did that contract happen? Because Elbit says: “We achieved so much in Palestine, we can do the same for you, America, on your border.” The occupation is globalized and bleeds into many other areas around the world.

Israel has perfected the art of indefinite detention for Palestinians. There are currently over one thousand behind bars without charge, constant demolitions of Palestinian houses (a tactic now used by the Indian authorities), and a range of other high-tech repression including facial recognition and biometric tools. These are all used and tested in Palestine, and many Israeli companies then sell them to nations across the globe. The occupation is highly exportable.

Mattha Busby

What’s the future of global surveillance, and how does Israeli tech fit into it?

Antony Loewenstein

We’re entering an age where there’s going to be far more refugees globally, including climate refugees. A lot of countries are thinking about how they’re going to “protect” themselves. The border-industrial complex is real and worsening. Israel is going to benefit from this fear. Smart walls, high-tech repression, spyware, drones. It’s all there. Israel is currently the tenth-biggest arms dealer in the world. Growing global instability will likely benefit its defense sector. As a Jew, this is an awful legacy for a Jewish state that was born in the ashes of the Holocaust.

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House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.”

The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private, that lab escape was likely, while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public. 

The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”

When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth. 

All the files can be found here. A spokesperson for committee Republicans declined to comment. 

Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health. Later minutes showed that the consensus among the experts leaned toward a lab escape. Yet within days, they were circulating a draft — including to Fauci and Collins — that came to the opposite conclusion, the first draft of which had been finished the same day of the conference call. How and why that rapid turnaround occurred has been the subject of much debate and interrogation.

The authors have said, and repeated during Tuesday’s hearing, that new data had changed their minds, but the new Slack messages and emails show that their initial inclination toward a lab escape remained long past that time. 

Among the scientists testifying Tuesday was lead paper author Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. In a Slack exchange on February 2, 2020, between Andersen and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, it becomes clear how seriously the authors took the hypothesis that Covid may have leaked from a lab, rather than emerged through natural means, before they ultimately became dedicated to publicly dismissing it. 

“I believe RaTG13 is from Yuanan, which is about as far away from Wuhan as you can be and still be in China,” Andersen wrote, referring to a virus that produced Covid-like symptoms in miners in 2013, a strain that was later stored and researched at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “What are the chances of finding a viruses that are 96% identical given that distance? Seems strange given how many SARS-like viruses we have in bats.” 

Rambaut responded on Slack suggesting they back off such interrogation. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Still, said Rambaut, even though the truth would never emerge if a lab was responsible, the researchers had a responsibility, privately at least, to see what lessons could be learned to prevent a future lab escape. “I think it would be good idea to lay out these arguments for limited dissemination. And quite frankly so we can learn from it even if it wasn’t an escape,” he added.

That same day, after having put together the first draft of the paper, Andersen responded to two colleagues who wanted to conclusively rule out the lab scenario: “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely–it’s not some fringe theory.” 

But the paper they were drafting argued the opposite and would be used to label the possibility of a lab leak as a fringe conspiracy, confidently asserting, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, Andersen said repeatedly that Fauci and Collins had no role in influencing the paper. But Fauci’s shadow hangs over the conversation. “The idea of engineering and bioweapon is definitely not going away and I’m still getting pinged by journalists,” Andersen wrote on February 5, 2020. “I have noticed some of them starting to ask more broadly about ‘lab escape’ and for now I have just ignored them — there might be a time where we need to tackle that more directly head on, but I’ll let the likes of Jeremy [Farrar] and Tony [Fauci] figure out how to do that.” 

Farrar, a British biomedical researcher, was not listed as an author on the paper but was frequently referred to by Democrats during the hearing as the “father” of it. In the messages, he is seen sharing drafts of the paper with Fauci and Collins and asking the authors for edits, at one point in mid-February asking that a lab scenario be downgraded in their paper from “unlikely” to “improbable” — a change that Andersen, the lead author, agreed to. 

An email in the cache from Eddie Holmes, another one of the authors, alludes to “pressure from on high.” In reply to an email that isn’t included in the subcommittee’s report or the documents, Holmes writes, “Anyway, it’s done. Sorry the last bit had to be done without you…pressure from on high.” In previous exchanges, officials with the communications department at the NIH had been asking about the status of the submission. Taken as a whole, the messages undercut the claims that the NIH took a hands-off approach to the paper. 

The new documents also include a message from Nature — where the authors pitched the “Proximal Origin” paper before sending to Nature Medicine — explaining its rejection. Despite the paper leaning heavily toward a natural emergence and downplaying the potential of a lab leak, one Nature reviewer found that even leaving open the possibility of a lab escape would fuel conspiracy theorists, a Nature editor wrote to the authors. “Once the authors publish their new pangolin sequences, a lab origin will be extremely unlikely,” the reviewer had written.

Andersen pushed back against the rejection, assuring the Nature editor that their project had started with the goal of beating back “conspiracy” theories, but that the data and evidence made it impossible. “Had that been the case, we would of course have included that — but the more sequences we see from pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully) the more unlikely it seems that they’re the intermediate hosts,” Andersen responded in an email on February 20, 2020. “Unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s not possible given the data.”

The group edited their paper further to more strongly dismiss the possibility of a lab leak for its later submission to Nature Medicine. The journal’s publication of the paper just a month later effectively ended debate for a year or more as to the origin of the pandemic. 

The post House Republicans Accidentally Released a Trove of Damning Covid Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

Review of Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022). People in the United States generally have confidence in the country’s political system, believing that it has the capacity to solve meaningful problems. Conservatives and liberals alike sincerely respect what they consider the nation’s sacrosanct Constitution, established […]

President Joe Biden declared an emergency for all 14 counties in Vermont early Tuesday as the state received two months worth of rain in two days. The heavy rain and flooding in Vermont is the latest in an international series of flooding catastrophes from India and Japan to neighboring New York as warmer temperatures driven by the burning of fossil fuels allow the air to hold more moisture and…

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Lawsuit Bombshell: Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein Was “a Business Partner” with Members of JPMorgan’s Board of Directors

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2023 ~ For months now, the largest federally-insured bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, represented by WilmerHale, a law firm with more than 1,000 attorneys, has been attempting to bamboozle the American people with the narrative that it engaged in no wrongdoing when it provided millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade  – without following the legal mandate of reporting this suspicious account activity to law enforcement. Internal emails produced in discovery in two lawsuits against the bank in federal court in Manhattan show that the bank was well aware that Epstein was a known sexual predator of children as it doled out all of this cash – at times reaching $40,000 to $80,000 per month. The legal narrative that the WilmerHale attorneys crafted for the public and the media is this: … Continue reading →

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