Mass vaccination for influenza a failed strategy, scientists admit… it simply doesn’t reduce influenza-related hospital admissions at all

Source: Mass vaccination for influenza a failed strategy, scientists admit… it simply doesn’t reduce influenza-related hospital admissions at all – NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

by: Russel Davis

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

(Natural News) Mass vaccination against the pandemic influenza A/H1N1 infection fell short on expected results, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. Researchers examined a cohort of 388,069 patients younger than 65 years old, who were given the H1N1 vaccination between November 2009 and January 2010 when the transmission of pandemic influenza was spreading rapidly.

The researchers used proportional hazards regression models to assess the efficacy of the pandemic vaccine. Study outcomes confirmed H1N1 and flu-related admissions diagnosed as the H1N1 infection. The experts then further arranged the models into four variables including age group, number of chronic illnesses, seasonal vaccine status and pandemic vaccine status. Data showed that coverage for both the pandemic influenza vaccine and the 2009-2010 seasonal influenza vaccine varied between age groups, with the lowest coverage rates found in the youngest age groups, aged 39 years and below.

Researchers also found that more than 80 percent of the cohort had only one diagnosed underlying condition. Vaccine uptake, which simultaneously increased for both pandemic and seasonal influenza vaccines, was higher when more chronic conditions were diagnosed. Furthermore, H1N1 infections also appeared to increase when more chronic conditions were identified.

More than a fifth of the cohort received at least one dose of the pandemic vaccine, 46 percent of whom took their first dose during the first week of the vaccine’s availability. Researchers also found that more than half of the people in the group received only one dose of the pandemic vaccine, while a little more than 40 percent received two doses.

Data also showed that nearly 135 of the participants received the 2009-10 seasonal influenza vaccine, 60 percent of whom received the shot prior to mass vaccination against pandemic influenza. Among those who received the pandemic vaccine, 52 percent were only given the pandemic vaccine, while 47.1 percent received both. Researchers also found that three percent of the cohort received seasonal vaccine only, while 76 percent did not receive any of the vaccines.

Results of the vaccination assessment

Researchers noted an increased likelihood of laboratory confirmed H1N1 infection during the first week after receiving the pandemic vaccine, with vaccine effectiveness at 112 percent, compared with patients who did not get the seasonal and pandemic flu shots.  However, researchers did not observe significant effectiveness from the pandemic vaccine during the following eight to 14 days. Study data also revealed that participants who received only the 2009-10 seasonal flu vaccine were at an increased risk of contracting laboratory confirmed H1N1 infection.

The study also found that the likelihood of contracting laboratory confirmed H1N1 infection was between 22 to 23 times higher in patients aged 0-19, compared with the older age group. Patients with more than one chronic illness were more likely to contract the infection than those with fewer underlying conditions.

Additional data revealed that vaccine effectiveness against H1N1-related hospitalization was estimated to be at 258 percent during the first week following receipt of the pandemic vaccine. However, researchers noted waning effectiveness during the following eight to 14 days. Patients who received only the seasonal flu vaccine were also at an increased risk of H1N1-related admission. The probability of hospitalization due to H1N1 infection was 18 times higher among patients aged 0 to 9, and about 10 times higher among patients aged 10 to 19. Patients aged 50 to 59 years also showed a two-fold increase in odds of being hospitalized compared with their older counterparts. The risk of admission also simultaneously increased with the number of underlying medical conditions.

Researchers also found patients who received only the pandemic vaccine showed outcomes similar to those who received both the pandemic and the seasonal vaccine. However, patients who received only the seasonal vaccine had increased odds of the infection.

“Among chronically ill people, this vaccine offered protection against laboratory-confirmed H1N1 infection but only offered non-significant protection against influenza-related hospital admissions confirmed as H1N1 infection. This finding is of public health relevance because the population of chronically ill people is a major target group for pandemic vaccinations,” researchers wrote.

Sources include:

BMJ.com

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

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Finian Cunningham: Trump Plays Russian Card Too

So, the Trump administration is warning European companies they face punitive sanctions if they continue doing business with Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas project.

Source: Trump Plays Russian Card Too – Sputnik International

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

Jan 15, 2019

© Photo: nord-stream2

So, the Trump administration is warning European companies they face punitive sanctions if they continue doing business with Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas project.

The latest American bullying act came with the US ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, writing to German companies to tell them of the danger of future economic penalties for participating in the ambitious gas pipeline project.

That was not the first time Grenell has issued such a warning. His boss, Donald Trump, has also previously made threatening sounds of economic sanctions against European companies involved in constructing Nord Stream 2.

Trump has castigated Germany in particular for allegedly being beholden to Russia owing to its abundant import of Russian gas and oil. When the Nord Stream 2 project — a 1,222-kilometer pipeline under the Baltic Sea — is finished within the next year, Germany will be able to double its gas consumption from Russia.

The Trump administration claims that this prodigious role for Russia as an energy supplier will give Moscow undue political leverage over Europe. Washington alleges that European national security is being undermined by dependence on Russian energy fuel.

Here is where a glaring contradiction emerges. Trump is warning Europe about an alleged Russian menace over its geopolitics. But hold on a moment. Isn’t Trump supposed to be a Russian puppet?

The relentless, and lately intensifying, narrative from Trump’s political enemies in the US is that he is a stooge for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times recently reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened a file on Trump back in 2017 probing into whether he was “working on behalf of the Russians”.

Then the Washington Post appeared to coordinate the pressure by also running reports that Trump had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep secret his conversations with Putin when the pair met at conferences. It was even claimed that Trump confiscated the notes taken by his interpreter after he met with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017.

These recent claims come on top of two congressional investigations and the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller — conducted over the past nearly two years — which allege that Trump colluded with Russia either wittingly or unwittingly to win the 2016 presidential election.

A phalanx of politicians and pundits in Washington have continually sought to paint Trump as some kind of surrogate for the Kremlin, giving “foreign enemy” Russia strategic sway over American politics and America’s European allies.

Sceptics point out that this fantastical depiction of Trump as a Russian puppet has never been substantiated with any evidence, despite the unremitting probes and media obsession. Even the New York Times admitted in its recent attempt to link Trump to Russia that there is no evidence.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the Russian collusion claims as “fake news”. In response to the recent reports in the New York Times and Washington Post, the president told reporters this week: “I don’t work for Russia!” He said the claims were a “big fat hoax”.

The evidence that Trump does not work for Russia is plain to see. If he were a stooge for Moscow then why is Trump trying his utmost to undermine Russia’s strategically important energy market in Europe?

Why is the American president and his envoy in Berlin portraying Russia as a malign actor towards European security if Trump were somehow in Putin’s pocket?

The sinister inference from Trump’s warnings to Europe over the Nord Stream 2 project is that Russia is a menace and a malignant power. Trump is thus using the “Russian Card”. That is, he is using the “bogeyman” demonization of Russia to blackmail Europe into spurning Russian energy supplies.

Of course, Trump is abusing a Cold War caricature of Russia for entirely self-serving American interests. He wants to discredit and displace Russia as a legitimate energy supplier to the European market so that the Americans can step in with their much more expensive and uncompetitive gas exports.

If Washington were to abide by free-market capitalism — as it claims to do — then American gas supplies to Europe would not stand a chance against Russia’s abundant and much more economical supply, especially after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is completed. What the Americans have to do — and Trump is brazenly making this pitch — is to use propaganda devices to warp the market in their favour.

Trump is playing the Russian Card as ruthlessly and as unscrupulously as any Cold Warrior in Washington.

Now, how is it plausible for any of his domestic enemies to maintain that Trump is a stooge for Moscow when he is trying to steal Russia’s lucrative energy market in Europe?

However, the contradiction works both ways. Yes, Trump’s political enemies are shown to be flogging a dead horse of a story about him being an agent for malign Russian interference in US and European politics. Trump himself dismisses that spurious fantasy.

Yet, Trump is shamelessly using a similar propaganda fiction about Russia being a villain when it comes to him touting for American energy business in Europe. Shame on all the American politicians.

The views and opinions expressed by the contributor do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

Finian Cunningham: It’s a Gas… Germany Outraged by US Colonial Arrogance

The glaring reality is it’s the Americans who are driving horses and coaches of interference through their supposed allies, who are evidently vassals.

Source: It’s a Gas… Germany Outraged by US Colonial Arrogance

Reproduced with permission

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Jan 15, 2019

It’s a Gas… Germany Outraged by US Colonial Arrogance

This time the outspoken US ambassador in Berlin may have gone too far to be ignored. The German government has denounced as a “provocation” letters that the American envoy sent to companies involved in the Nord Stream 2 project warning them of possible US sanctions.

The German government reportedly told the project companies to “ignore” the missives dispatched by Ambassador Richard Grenell.

Nord Stream 2 is the 1,222-kilometer pipeline being laid in the Baltic seabed which will greatly increase delivery of natural gas from Russia to Germany. It will double Germany’s import of Russian gas when complete. But the Trump administration has repeatedly voiced its objection to the project, claiming that it will give Moscow undue political leverage over Europe. Trump has warned of sanctions on participating companies, which include German and Austrian firms.

The flagrant ulterior agenda is seen as the US trying to undermine German-Russian energy trade, for the purpose of selling more expensive American liquefied natural gas to Europe. So much for American free-market capitalism!

Grenell’s letters to the German firms – received at the weekend – are viewed as an unprecedented threat to the nation’s conduct of private business. The US embassy denied it was a threat, saying the letters were merely stating Washington’s policy of imposing sanctions.

It is but the latest furore involving the maverick envoy who has been accused in the past of violating diplomatic protocol by meddling in Germany’s domestic affairs. German media have previously blasted Grenell for seeking “regime change” in Berlin because of his open support for the anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

When Grenell took up his diplomatic post in Berlin last May, he immediately provoked a political firestorm when he tweeted that German companies doing business with Iran “should wind down operations” or face punitive American sanctions. That was at the time President Trump pulled out of the international nuclear accord with Iran. “Never tell the host country what to do, if you want to stay out of trouble,” snapped Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington.

Only a few weeks after that dubious debut, Grenell gave an interview to the pro-Trump Breibart News outlet, boasting that he wanted to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”. That was taken as an endorsement of the AfD in Germany, which has emerged as a serious challenger to the political establishment in Berlin.

Martin Schulz, the former leader of the Social Democratic Party, was among several political figures who then demanded Grenell’s dismissal. “What this man is doing is unheard of in international diplomacy… he’s behaving like a colonial officer of the far-right,” said Schulz. He added a fair point by noting: “If a German ambassador were to say in Washington that he was there to boost the Democrats, he would have been kicked out immediately.”

Grenell’s high-profile media interventions concerning German politics and business do appear to constitute a brazen breach of the 1964 Vienna Convention which stipulates that diplomats must remain neutral on matters of policy concerning host nations. Officially, an ambassador’s role is to lobby discreetly on behalf of his government, and to always adopt a low-profile.

Of course, this would not be the first time that US embassies and envoys have violated the Vienna Convention in host countries. Washington habitually uses these outposts for fomenting regime change.

Richard Grenell, however, has openly flouted these norms and acted as an unabashed mouthpiece for Trump, echoing the president’s contempt for the German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The upshot, according to Der Spiegel, is that Grenell has become politically isolated in Berlin. Merkel “keeps him at a distance” and most politicians, except for the AfD, have shunned his contact.

After the latest controversy of writing warning letters to German companies, it may be the final straw for Berlin’s tolerance.

Already, the German media have been commenting on how the “trans-Atlantic partnership” is finished under Trump.

Business newspaper Handelsblatt commented previously: “Nothing in trans-Atlantic relations is normal any longer… Berlin has for too long clung to the illusion of trans-Atlantic normalcy… the era of close ties is now over”.

Moreover, there are increasing calls among German politicians and media for a “strategically autonomous Germany and Europe” unfettered by Washington’s policies.

Such a development is long overdue and its necessity long predates Trump. Since the end of the Second World War, Germany has resembled an occupied country for American military power and a subordinate to Washington’s political objectives. The primary objective has always been to prevent Germany from developing a natural partnership with Moscow, previously with the former Soviet Union, and subsequently the Russian Federation.

The absolute disregard for German sovereignty was perhaps best demonstrated not by the Trump administration, but during the presidency of Barack Obama when it emerged that American intelligence agencies were tapping the personal phone calls of Chancellor Merkel. If that’s not colonial arrogance, then what is?

Yet the German political and media establishment barely protested over that infringement by Washington on the country’s sovereignty and its leader.

What Trump and his cipher-envoy in Berlin have done is take the arrogance to an unbearably overt level. Trump has been kicking Germany for alleged “unfair trading practices”, denigrating Merkel over her refugee policy, browbeating Berlin to double its spend on NATO military budget, and lambasting German businesses for not complying with Washington’s hostile foreign policy towards Iran and Russia.

Trump in his boorish style is merely laying bare the long-presumed US hegemony over Germany. And it’s not a pretty sight. Berlin is being shamed into having to be seen to stand up to this American bullying.

The absurdity is that the US and its NATO acolytes have been foaming at the mouth for the last two years about alleged and unproven Russian interference in domestic politics of Western states. Whenever the glaring reality is it’s the Americans who are driving horses and coaches of interference through their supposed allies, who are evidently vassals.

India Just Staged The Biggest Strike In History As 200 Million Workers Took To The Streets

“The Indian Railway System Announced 63,000 Job Openings… 19 Million People Applied.“

In what may be the largest worker strike in history, last week India came to a halt for two days when at least 200 million workers – 16% of India’s entire population – in the country’s public, services, communications and agriculture sectors staged a strike across the country.

Source: India Just Staged The Biggest Strike In History As 200 Million Workers Took To The Streets | Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Mon, 01/14/2019

In what may be the largest worker strike in history, last week India came to a halt for two days when at least 200 million workers – about 16% of India’s 1.25 billion population – in the country’s public, services, communications and agriculture sectors staged a strike across the country organized by ten labor unions against what they called the anti-national and anti-worker policies of the BJP-led government, and against a new labor law that would undermine the rights of workers and unions.

The strike is a protest against new legislation that passed on 2 January, and is a de facto verdict on Prime Minister Narendra Modi providing an opportunity for millions of workers to protest against high prices and high levels of unemployment, something we touched upon in “The Indian Railway System Announced 63,000 Job Openings… 19 Million People Applied.“

John Dayal, general secretary of the All India Christian Council, told AsiaNews that the event was exceptional, “one of the largest ever organised in the country, planned in advance in every detail.” In his view, the most important thing is that it “is taking place on the eve of general elections that will mark the fate of the prime minister”.

While the massive strike took place in an overall context of calm, there were numerous incidents confirming that social anger in the world’s second most populous nation is also approaching a breaking point: protesters blocked several cities, clashes broke out and damage were reported; a 57-year-old woman died in in Mundagod, a city in northern Karnataka, during a local protest. In Maharashtra more than 5,000 workers blocked the Mumbai-Baroda-Jaipur-Delhi highway. In Puducherry (Pondicherry), on the east coast, protesters hurled stones at a Tamil Nadu state bus.  Transport services closed and rail services were disrupted in Kerala. In Odisha (Orissa), shops, schools, offices and markets shut down for 48 hours. In West Bengal, protesters burnt effigies of Prime Minister Modi.

The national strike was an initiative of the Central Trade Unions (CTU), which is an India-wide labor federation. Unions are opposed to the Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill of 2018 which modified the Trade Union Act of 1926.

Under the law, trade union recognition is mandatory at both at national and state level. However, workers believe that the new law grants the government discretionary power in recognizing labor organizations, effectively eliminating the current bargaining process involving employees, employers and the government.

Unions demanded the enactment of the Social Security Act to protect workers and a minimum wage of 24,000 rupees (more than US$ 340) for the unorganised transport sector.

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Workers in banking, insurance, healthcare, education, transport, electricity and coal mining also joined the strike. Student groups also protested as did farmers’ associations that have threatened to call a gramin hartal, a rural strike. Farmers have been protesting for months over the harsh conditions in the countryside, burdened by debt and an wave of suicides.

Tapan Sen, secretary general of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), one of the striking labor organisations, criticized Prime Minister Modi’s government for killing the work culture in the country’s public sectors by favoring private players in major manufacturing contracts.

Unions also alleged the government had failed to create jobs and grossly ignored unions’ 12-point charter of demands besides aggressively pushing for fixed-term employment and amendment to the Trade Union Act, all of which is against the interest of the workers, according to the Economic Times.

Addressing the media after the 2-day strike, Amarjeet Kaur of AITUC said around eight states witnessed a complete shutdown, largely in the northeast, Kerala, Bihar and Goa. There were over 20 crore workers who had joined the strike.

The massive strike comes at an critical inflection point for India, which is one of the world’s fastest growing economies, yet isn’t generating enough jobs for its educated young populace.

A recent Washington Post article estimated that the number of people in India between age of 15 and 34 is expected to hit 480 million by the year 2021. They have higher literacy levels and are staying in school longer than any other previous generation. The surge of youths could be an immense opportunity for the country, if it can find a way to put them to work. But the employment trends in the country remain gloomy.

An analysis performed by Azim Premji University shows that unemployment between 2011 and 2016 in nearly all Indian states was rising. The jobless rates for younger people and those with higher education also increased sharply. For instance, for college graduates, it grew from 4.1% to 8.4%.

Ajit Ghose, an economist at the Institute for Human Development in Delhi, said that the country needs to generate jobs not just for the 6 million to 8 million new workforce entrants annually, but also for people like women who are working less than they would be if they could get jobs at a decent wage. The same economist notes that India has about 104 million “surplus” workers.

Expanding the labor market that much is a tall task for any government, not just India. Modi’s track record of job creation also remains somewhat of a mystery, as the country hasn’t offered nationwide employment data since 2016. The ministries of labor and statistics have conducted surveys of Indian households, but the results have not been made public.

Amit Basole, an economist at Azim Premji University, said: “It’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll see any employment statistics come out before the 2019 elections.”

What happens after this unprecedented show of force by India’s workers? Probably more of the same: unions threatened to follow last week’s strike with an indefinite strike if government does not heed to their demands. The general secretary for one of the labor unions, HMS, said the unions collectively decided to go on indefinite strike if the government does not respond to the “historic” strike this time.

If that happens, India’s record as one of the world’s fastest growing economies will soon be tarnished. As for the bigger picture, one where general popular – and populist – discontent around the globe is rapidly spreading and affecting not only developed nations (Trump, Brexit, most of Europe), but also the developing world.

Whether the unions will get what they want is unclear, but one thing is certain: India’s even more populous neighbor, China, is very closely following these restive worker developments and hoping and praying that its own population does not get similar thoughts.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the first female US president

After eight years of Donald Trump, Americans will certainly be ready for some ‘radical’ change.

Source: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the first female US president | USA | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

by Carli Pierson

Jan 15, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a House of Representatives seat in the 2018 midterm elections in the US [Reuters/Carlos Barria]

 

Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 presidential race caused liberals across the United States to question whether the country was indeed ready for a woman president. Since then, there has been much speculation about various female politicians and celebrities running for office, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Kamala Harris, Oprah, Michelle Obama, and others. There have even been rumours that Hillary Clinton might run again.

I, however, don’t see any of these women making it to the White House. I think the first female president of the US will be New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC as she has come to be known). It may take her another six years to get there, but the youngest woman elected to the US Congress will win the presidency. Here is how and why.

Alexandria is not Hillary

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election but lost key swing states and, under our complicated and arguably unfair Electoral College system, this meant losing the presidency.

But the biggest political upset in recent US history cannot simply be blamed on the unfairness of the electoral system, under which countless Democrats managed to defeat opponents stronger, and more experienced, than Donald Trump.

Clinton lost the election because she failed to convince working-class voters that she would be able to understand and address their growing grievances. While she started her journey as a young, educated, idealistic feminist believing in social justice and equality, over the course of her life in the political limelight, she (and her husband) made a fortune of over $50m, including $21m in speaking fees she was paid by Wall Street businesses and other interest groups. She gradually became an unrelatable poster-child of corporate America’s greed. This, combined with the proliferation of fake news and misinformation provided by Trump’s campaign were the proverbial “nails in the coffin” for her presidential bid.

Unlike Clinton and most politicians for that matter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejected donations from corporate political action committees, or PACs. She didn’t take millions from Wall Street and then preach to blue-collar Americans that she understood their struggles. This helped her not to be perceived as a member of the Washington establishment like Clinton and her peers Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, for example.

Moreover, Clinton just offered middle-of-the-road policies that simply promised more of the same. By contrast, Ocasio-Cortez, as an out and proud democratic socialist, advocated for federally guaranteed jobs and “Medicare-For-All,” called for tuition-free public colleges and the dismantling of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With this, AOC made it clear that she offers a different kind of politics that is unadulterated by corporate and lobbyist connections. This is, in fact, what helped her defeat a 20-year incumbent and the fourth-ranking House Democrat, Joe Crowley, in the Democratic race for New York’s 14th Congressional District.

After she was sworn into Congress, she continued talking about progressive policies, calling for a return to John F Kennedy’s 70 percent tax on the wealthiest Americans and supporting a “Green New Deal”, a proposed economic programme addressing climate change and inequality. If Ocasio-Cortez continues down this path and successfully rejects cooptation by PACs, working-class Americans across party lines would undoubtedly be moved to vote for her.

AOC is also a master of grassroots organising and, while her actions convey that she is in touch with the challenges ordinary Americans face, her greatest asset may be her ability to connect with them in a way that feels genuine and not contrived. Millennials, for example, find AOC more relatable than any other potential presidential candidate. With her 2.37 million Twitter followers and growing, she is a skilled social media user who knows how to connect and communicate with the younger generation and will certainly be able to secure their vote. And in the coming decade, it increasingly seems that it will be the millennials who will become the most important voting bloc within the US electorate.

And finally, AOC was also able to capture the attention of the press and has already shown much skill in fending off public attacks. Even before she was sworn into office on January 3, conservatives had already launched a smear campaign against her, which is indicative of how much she scares them.

First, there was noise about the house she grew up in in a New York suburb; then much discussion about designer clothes she wore during a 2018 photo shoot. Just after her swearing-in, the right-wing news site The Daily Caller posted a fake picture of her in a bathtub. And then the conservative media tried to troll her with a video on the internet of her dancing in her college days. But this turned out to be a media boost for the freshman Congresswoman and she trolled them right back by making a wildly popular video of herself dancing into her Congress office.

With the election of Trump and AOC’s rise to stardom, one thing has become undoubtedly clear: US voters are desperate for new politics and fresh faces who can offer real change. And with her charisma, presence and political acumen, Ocasio-Cortez is able to tap into these sentiments. To put it in Trump’s words, Ocasio-Cortez is a “winner”, she is “winning”.

Her popularity in the press parallels Trump’s during his presidential bid in 2016 when he proved true the cliché “any press is good press”. Yes, it was thanks to the media’s obsession with him, both on the right and the left, that he remained a constant figure in the public eye, which ultimately paved the way for the unimaginable to happen – his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

The same is already proving true for AOC. She is the Democrat that Republicans (and even some Democrats) love to hate, and she will be all the better for it.

AOC will run in 2024 after eight years of Trump

Although Alexandria has much political potential, she is unlikely to run in 2020 and challenge Trump. After Clinton’s upset in 2016, the Democratic establishment does not want a socialist to run for president, who would be seen as “a radical” and would risk alienating more conservative Democrats.

The Democratic Party is more likely to nominate someone like former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who will stick to the traditional Democratic centre-left talking points: “compromise, compromise, compromise”. If that happens, Trump will certainly bully him into a corner on the campaign trail and during the debates and will go on to win the 2020 presidential election, to the despair and shame of millions of Americans. 

Another Trump presidency will certainly drag the country into deeper political, social and economic crises and will convince disillusioned voters once and for all that the Donald was never the man who could or even wanted to “drain the swamp”. It could finally be the wake-up call for millions of Americans to realise that they need to try something drastically different – something “radical”. That something, as Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly pointed out, could be what has already been done successfully in Scandinavian countries, for example. 

At the same time, these five years will also give AOC the time to understand how Washington works, build her political profile and prove herself as a house representative. She will also quietly make more allies in the Democratic Party and after her two-year-term as congresswoman is over, she may choose to move up the political ladder by running for office as a senator for her home state of New York, in order to broaden her political experience before a run for president in 2024.

Yes, it will take all of that for Ocasio-Cortez to win the 2024 Democratic nomination. I would even venture to predict that she will run on a ticket with a female vice-presidential candidate, perhaps Senator Kamala Harris, if the forces that are the Democratic National Committee (DNC) permit such a scandal. Don’t forget how the DNC buried Senator Bernie Sanders in his run for the nomination in 2016. But after eight years of Trumpism, I believe that America will make sure that doesn’t happen again to AOC.

But apart from resistance within the DNC, perhaps the greatest challenge Ocasio-Cortez will face along the way to 2024 is remaining true to herself and her principles and withstanding the ineluctable and incessant weathering of the lobbyists who effectively run Congress behind the scenes. In her 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, she admitted she is worried about how Washington would change her because it inevitably changes everyone.

If she manages to “survive” Washington and emerge stronger, the 2024 Democratic nomination for president definitely has “Ocasio-Cortez” written all over it. I, for one, will definitely vote for her.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carli Pierson

Carli Pierson is an attorney and writer. She lives and teaches international law in the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico.

In Canada, Saudi girl says couldn’t ‘study, work’ at home

A Saudi girl who recently fled her country and received asylum from Canada says she could not study, work, and “live a normal life” in hidebound Saudi Arabia.

Source: PressTV-In Canada, Saudi girl says couldn’t ‘study, work’ at home

http://www.presstv.com

Jan 15, 2019

Asylum seeker Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun (C), 18, smiles as she is introduced to the media at Toronto Pearson International Airport, alongside Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland (R), in Toronto, Canada, on January 12, 2019. (Photo by AFP)

A Saudi girl who recently fled her country and received asylum from Canada says she could not study, work, and “live a normal life” in hidebound Saudi Arabia.

Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, attracted the attention of the media as well as rights groups earlier this month when she barricaded herself in a Bangkok transit lounge hotel room after fleeing her family on January 5.

She said at the time that she had suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her family members and alleged they had tried to marry her off against her will, fearing that she would be in real danger if she was forced to return home.

“I’m afraid, my family WILL kill me,” she tweeted at the time.

‘The risk was worth it!’

On a request by the United Nations (UN)’s refugee agency, Canada on Friday granted the Saudi girl asylum. In her new home, she said she had been freed from the shackles imposed by the Riyadh regime on women.

Being in Canada is “a very good feeling,” Qunun said during an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Monday night, two days after arriving in Toronto from Bangkok.

“It’s something that is worth the risk I took,” she said, sitting in a classroom at a refugee center in downtown Toronto, where she had been greeted by the Canadian foreign minister and a phalanx of journalists on her arrival at the Toronto international airport on Saturday morning.

Qunun also said that she wanted to take English classes and go to college to study architecture, wondering how to harness her newly-found media stardom.

In the course of less than two weeks, she has gone from the highly restricted life of a woman in Hail, a city in Saudi Arabia’s northwestern part, to the life of an independent woman on the other side of the globe.

“I felt that I could not achieve my dreams that I wanted as long as I was still living in Saudi Arabia,” Qunun said, adding that she felt that she “was reborn” in her new home.

In Canada, “I will try things I haven’t tried. I will learn things I didn’t learn,” she further said in her CBC interview.

Saudi wrath?

Meanwhile, Qunun’s fleeing Saudi Arabia and receiving asylum from Canada seem to have infuriated Riyadh.

On Monday, Ahmad al-Jamiyah, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the pro-government Saudi daily newspaper Al Riyadh, said that Saudi Arabia had to expand Article 13 of the constitution so that the citizenship of all who receive political asylum from other countries and criticize the Saudi regime is revoked.

He stressed in an article, titled “The Revocation of Citizenship,” that the new modified version of Article 13 had to include all who “damage the reputation” of the Arab kingdom, mentioning Qunun by name as the latest such case.

Ottawa’s decision to grant the Saudi girl asylum comes at a delicate time. Canadian-Saudi relations have been strained since Ottawa demanded the immediate release of jailed activists in the Arab kingdom last year. In response, Saudi Arabia froze new trade with Canada and forced many Saudi students in the North American country to return home.

Refugees Are in the English Channel Because of Western Interventions in the Middle East

Source: Refugees Are in the English Channel Because of Western Interventions in the Middle East

Reproduced with permission

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Patrick Cockburn

January 15, 2019

 

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

A black rubber inflatable boat was found abandoned earlier this week on the shingle at Dungeness on the Kent coast. Eight men, reportedly Iranians or Kurds, were later found close to the beach or in the nearby village of Lydd.

An Iranian living in south London was later charged with helping the migrants to cross the Channel illegally from France to the UK.

Sea crossings by small numbers of asylum seekers are highly publicised because the short but dangerous voyage makes good television.

The number of migrants over a period of months is in the low hundreds, but politicians believe that the impact of their arrival is high, as was shown by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, rushing back from holiday and declaring the crossings “a major incident”.

Nobody forgets the effect of pictures of columns of Syrian refugees, far away from UK in central Europe, had on the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Three days after the little inflatable boat beached at Dungeness, the US secretary of state Mike Pompeo made a speech in Cairo outlining the Trump Middle East policy, which inadvertently goes a long way to explain how the dinghy got there. After criticising former president Obamafor being insufficiently belligerent, Pompeo promised that the US would “use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria; and that sanctions on Iran – and presumably Syria – will be rigorously imposed.

Just how this is to be done is less clear, but Pompeo insisted that the US will wage military and economic war in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, which inevitably means that normal life will be impossible in all of these places.

Though the US and its allies are unlikely to win any victories against Iran or Bashar al-Assad, the US can keep a permanent crisis simmering across a swathe of countries between the Pakistan border and the Mediterranean, thereby ensuring in the long term that a portion of the 170 million people living in this vast area will become so desperate that they will take every risk and spend the last of their money to flee to Western Europe. Keep in mind that these crises tend to cross-infect each other, so instability in Syria means instability in Iraq.

Given the seismic impact of migration fuelled by war or sanctions in the Middle East and North Africa on the politics of Europe over the last seven or eight years, it shows a high degree of self-destructive foolishness on the part of European governments not to have done more to restore peace. They have got away with it because voters have failed to see the linkage between foreign intervention and the consequent waves of immigrants from their ruined countries.

Yet the connection should be easy enough to grasp: in 2011, the Nato powers led by UK and France backed an insurgency in Libya that overthrew and killed Gaddafi. Libya was reduced to violent chaos presided over by criminalised militias, which opened the door to migrants from North and West Africa transiting Libya and drowning as they try to cross the Mediterranean.

In Syria, the US and UK long ago decided that they would be unable to get rid of Assad – indeed they did not really want to since they believed he would be replaced by al-Qaeda or Isis. But American, British and French policy makers were happy to keep the conflict bubbling to prevent Assad, Russia and Iran winning a complete victory. A result of prolonging the conflict is that the chance of the 6.5 million Syrian refugees ever returning home grows less by the year.

The economic devastation inflicted by these long wars is often underestimated because it is less visible and melodramatic than the ruins of Raqqa, Aleppo, Homs and Mosul. I was driving in northeast Syria last year, west of the Euphrates, through land that was once some of the most productive in the country, producing grain and cotton. But the irrigation canals were empty and for mile after mile the land has reverted to rough pasture. Our car kept stopping because the road was blocked by herds of sheep being driven by shepherds to crop the scanty grass as the area reverts to semi-desert because there is no electric power to pump water from the Euphrates.

The British and other governments try to distinguish between refugees seeking safety because of military action or because of economic hardship; yet they increasingly go together. Syria and Iran are both being subjected to tight economic sieges. But the casualties of sanctions – as was brutally demonstrated by the 13-year-long UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1990 and 2003 – are not the members of the regime but the civilian population. Mass flight becomes an unavoidable option.

Iraq never truly recovered from a period of sanctions during which its administrative, education and health systems were shattered and its best-educated people fled the country. The first casualties of sanctions are always on the margins and never those in power, who are the supposed target. An example of this was the re-imposition of US sanctions on Iran in 2018, which led to the exodus of 440,000 low paid Afghan workers who are not going to get jobs back in Afghanistan (where unemployment is 40 per cent) and who in many cases will therefore try to get to Europe.

Wars that are not concluded trigger waves of migrants even when there is no fighting because all sides need to recruit more soldiers from an unwilling population. In Syria, families are terrified of their sons of military age being conscripted not only by the Syrian army but by the Kurdish YPG military forces or al-Qaeda type militias.

There is a clear connection between western intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and the arrival of boat people on the beaches of southeast England. But much of the media does not highlight this and, by and large, voters do not seem to notice it.

David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy never suffered political damage from their ill-advised role in destroying the Libyan state. A couple of years later Cameron was pressing for Britain to join the US in air attacks on Syria, which would certainly not have got rid of Assad without a prolonged air campaign similar to those in Iraq and Libya.

The outcome of these interventions is not just the outflow of refugees from zones of conflict: the weakening or destruction of states in the region enables groups like al-Qaeda and Isis to find secure base areas where they can regroup their forces. A fragmented Syria is ideal for such purposes because the jihadis can dodge between rival powers. Pompeo’s bombast will be a welcome development for them.

The only solution in northeast Syria is for the US to withdraw militarily under an agreement whereby Turkey does not invade Syria, in return for the Syrian government backed by Russia absorbing the Kurdish quasi-state so hated by the Turks and giving it some degree of internationally guaranteed autonomy. Any other option is likely to provoke a Turkish invasion and two million Kurds in flight – a very few of whom will one day end up on the pebble beaches of Dungeness.

More articles by:Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn is the author of  The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.