Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to …
The post Romanian Senator Diana Iovanovici-Sosoaca Is Receiving Death Threats from Kiev appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to …
The post Video: Towards WHO Totalitarianism? Dr. Reiner Fuellmich with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, James Roguski and Matthew Ehret appeared first on Global Research.
In this video interview, Michel Chossudovsky reviews the war crimes committed by US-NATO against numerous countries in the wake of World War II, as well as the “fake intelligence” and media propaganda used to justify the invasion …
The post Video: War and Crimes against Humanity. Michel Chossudovsky appeared first on Global Research.
Insulin and needles used for injection. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Eli Lilly agreed to significantly lower the price of its most common insulin products. Last week, Novo Nordisk followed suit and announced that it will be lowering prices on four of its most popular insulin products.
It’s positive news for many diabetics, and any development that grants easier access to insulin is cause for celebration. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the whole picture. Even the reduced prices are still prohibitive for some diabetics, and the products are still far more expensive than they are in other countries. Additionally, not all diabetics use the type of insulin suddenly put on sale. These remaining shortcomings reveal the fundamental problem: for-profit companies should not have ownership, and control the pricing, of this lifesaving drug.
The moves by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are not spontaneous acts of willing generosity. They’re a concession to activists who’ve waged a yearslong campaign to publicize the truth about the United States’ insulin problem. The situation is so bad that diabetics have resorted to rationing insulin and buying it on the black market. Six states, most recently California, are suing the three drug companies that dominate the market over the illegal practices that overcharge patients for insulin. Meanwhile, the insulin cap provisions in the recent Inflation Reduction Act are barely a Band-Aid on the out-of-control problem.
Most people think that the high price of insulin is explained by research and development costs. This claim has been resoundingly debunked. The motivation for high prices is profit for the major pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drug. Meanwhile, as reported in Jacobin, patient advocacy groups like the American Diabetes Association and JDRF are alarmingly compromised by their connection to profit-motivated companies, and representatives in government use our concerns as little more than a political football.
Thanks to the immense efforts of #insulin4all advocates, who are made up almost entirely of patients and their families, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are taking some first steps to address the problem they caused. But the cold, painful reality for every insulin-dependent patient in the United States remains that for-profit companies still set the price of our lifesaving medicine. These companies have made no commitments and are ultimately unaccountable to the insulin-dependent community: if they can cap the price today, they can uncap it tomorrow.
I’ve lived with type 1 diabetes since 2012 and have been a vocal #insulin4all advocate since 2018, when I walked into a pharmacy in Mexico and discovered I could buy my exact insulin for 95 percent less than what I was being charged in the United States. (To wit: a Novolog Flexpen, newly reduced to $140 in the United States, will only set you back about $15 in Mexico. It’s the same stuff.) I am motivated not least by the knowledge that, if the circumstances of my life were only slightly different, I could very well find myself in the position to ration insulin, at grave risk to my own life.
Rationing insulin really is a life-and-death gamble. In late summer 2021, my husband John got word that his old friend and fraternity brother from college was found dead, alone, in his apartment outside of Philadelphia. Like my husband, Troy was only forty-five years old. He had a sixteen-year-old son. His wife had died of a brain tumor twelve years before, when their son was only four.
Like many men in middle age, John and Troy had lost close contact in recent years despite having been close in college. When news of Troy’s death reached him without any specific details, John considered the worst, possibly a drug overdose. Troy had struggled with his mental health since losing his wife at such a young age. John traveled from our home in California to get together with some of the old college buddies back in Pennsylvania. That night, from the bar where he was gathering with the old crew, John called me. He told me that Troy had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes just six months before, and hadn’t told anyone except his brother.
John went on to explain that Troy had struggled in silence while learning how to use our volatile hormone, insulin, a difficult learning curve as anyone with type 1 diabetes can attest. Then came the tragic conclusion. “Troy died rationing his insulin,” John informed me. “He ran out of his prescription. . . . the bill for his insulin at the pharmacy that he didn’t pick up was almost $4,000. And the last text message he sent to his brother was: ‘This is no way to live.’”
This is, indeed, no way to live. Insulin rationing means a slow, painful death for the insulin-dependent, as organs — overwhelmed by toxic high blood sugars — start to shut down one by one. This generally starts with the kidneys, and ends with the brain. Being without insulin for even a short period of time causes untold damage to the entire body.
If you are unlucky enough to be diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the United States, you inevitably find yourself at the mercy of for-profit corporations. The misfortunes start to compound: bills pile up, and savings hemorrhage. And when you find yourself unable to pay nearly $4,000 to pick up a month’s worth of insulin — or simply sticker-shocked into paralysis — the shame of not being able to care for yourself burns like hell. Sometimes people are too afraid to ask for help. And sometimes there’s not even anyone to ask.
Enter Project Insulin, a recently founded nonprofit pharmaceutical company that aims to fundraise the $50 million needed to start manufacturing a biosimilar, or generic insulin. Eric Moyal, its founder, does not have type 1 diabetes, but his girlfriend Gabriella Fleischman does.
“I saw it as a fundraising issue,” Moyal told me from Boston on a recent Zoom call. He felt that an organization not motivated by profit would be able to “raise enough money to develop the drug, and then not push that price on the patient. . . . whatever it costs us to make the vials that are going out to patients, that’s what we’re going to charge.”
“We’re not trying to do a scientific breakthrough. We’re trying to change the financial model,” said Fleischman, who sits on the board of Project Insulin and is a PhD candidate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy. “The science is there. It’s open information. We can pay people to do it. Everything we need [to start manufacturing insulin] is there.”
What Project Insulin is doing is almost astonishingly simple. Sometimes its simplicity makes it hard for donors, who are used to funding start-ups aiming to disrupt industries with new moneymaking innovations, to see the proverbial forest for the trees. But Moyal, who approaches this project not just from a business standpoint but as a loving partner of someone with diabetes, is prepared to step up to the plate. “I think I’m the guy to raise $50 million,” he said. And if he succeeds, “there won’t be any pressure from shareholders to make as much money as humanly possible, which is unfortunately how it works with for-profit organizations.”
Project Insulin is encouraging us to expand our imagination for how we relate to medicine and its sources. For those of us with type 1 diabetes, insulin is more than personal. We inject it in order to live, we carry it with us everywhere, and we plan our lives around its availability and effects. We are genuinely insulin-dependent. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be dependent on for-profit corporations.
Being dependent on abusive corporate bullies is no way to live. We can change the funding and distribution model so that insulin is manufactured for our health, not for their profit. But first we have to allow ourselves to envision an alternative to the deadly status quo.
The SVB Private logo is displayed outside of a Silicon Valley Bank branch in Santa Monica, California on March 20, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
One of the great philosopher-artists of the 2000s and 2010s (though maybe not so much in recent years) once said, “No one man should have all that power,” and this nugget of wisdom has been ringing in my head over the past two weeks. In a Slack chat among prominent VCs and startup execs, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel orchestrated the beginnings of a bank run against one of the most influential banks and the financial backbone of the Bay Area tech scene, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), ultimately bringing the bank to its knees within days.
What happened with Silicon Valley Bank? Because banks don’t keep all their deposits on hand — deposits are used to provide loans or to buy various securities like bonds — they rely on depositors not all coming for their bags at once. But occasionally, a wave of withdrawals leads to banks panicking and liquidating their assets to cover newly withdrawn deposits — sparking further hysteria as everyone races to get their money out. Then down goes the bank, sending shockwaves across the economy.
This is more or less what happened to Silicon Valley Bank after Thiel advised his portfolio companies to pull their deposits out of SVB. Over the weekend, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) intervened, closing the nation’s sixteenth-largest bank and forcing it to liquidate its assets and make depositors whole. In a couple days, we saw the largest bank failure since the Great Recession and the collapse of Washington Mutual.
Following the collapse of SVB, spooked depositors at Signature Bank rushed to withdraw $10 billion, triggering a federal closure of both banks to contain the potential contagion. Stocks across the financial sector then plummeted throughout the United States and across the pond. The year had already been a rough one for Credit Suisse, its stock price slumping even before the SVB-induced crash. But once the heat turned up and depositors started fleeing, the Swiss Central Bank stepped in to provide a $54 billion bailout to keep Switzerland’s largest bank afloat.
In the subsequent days, the press watched the situation like a hawk. Who would be next? Were we in for another Great Recession? Would workers be able to get their next paychecks?
Yet the corporate media missed a key point: banks, when left to their own devices, will fail. SVB certainly wasn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Since the Great Recession over 560 banks have failed in the United States, often followed by Wall Street titans swallowing up their assets. Banks that were too big to fail in 2008 have grown still larger as the financial sector becomes more and more concentrated. Regulations meant to constrain financial chicanery have proven too weak to the task.
So the question is, what do we do moving forward? Do we continue to let the vultures prey on their dying competitors? Will the government keep having to bail out reckless banks?
In recent years, momentum has been growing for a different solution: publicly owned banks. A first-in-the-nation piece of legislation, the Public Banking Act passed in California in 2019, authorizing cities and regions across the state to begin establishing public banks. Other cities and states have seen public banking gain traction in its wake. The aim is to provide a stable banking source that, free from the whims of private capital, can finance ordinary people and their communities’ various economic needs.
There is currently only one public bank in the United States: the Bank of North Dakota (BND), founded in 1919. In its century-long history, the BND has been one of the most reliable banks in the country, especially during times of crisis. It weathered the storm of 2008 and processed more Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans than any other bank in the country in 2020. Where private banks have failed catastrophically, the Bank of North Dakota has been the picture of security.
How do public banks work? First, they marshal public capital to directly finance things like public infrastructure. Second, public banks are banks for banks. This means that they can hold public revenues and other assets and service a variety of institutions, but their primary function is to help local banks provide better services on better terms for their own customers. Public banks’ most common application is partnering with local financial institutions to provide very low-interest loans, so that local institutions can then deliver more affordable services to their members — if they need help getting loans for building affordable housing, buying homes, or installing solar panels or electric stoves in their homes. Third, because public banks have a relatively small and stable depositor base and are required to meet much higher collateralization requirements, they are less prone to bank runs and much more likely to have the liquidity to cover their deposits.
Following the pandemic-induced recession of 2020, representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Public Banking Act, which cleared the way for state or municipal governments across the country to set up state public banks. Three years later, despite growing energy from progressive activists, economists, and elected officials, BND remains the only public bank in the United States.
One of the most crucial elements behind SVB’s collapse was its inability to liquidate its assets on hand, largely treasury bonds. Though treasury bonds are typically seen as safe and liquid investments, SVB made the unfortunate decision to invest a titanic portion of its portfolio into government debt during the pandemic. Rapid interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve rendered the old bills far less valuable than the current ones; SVB then had to race to sell off its bonds well below their face value. Wall Street watched and waited, knowing that it would be able to seize an opportunity to buy off the bank’s assets at a much larger discount should SVB fall.
If San Francisco and the East Bay had public banks in place, there would’ve been more tools available to extend a lifeline to depositors and partner with local financial institutions to prevent the bank’s collapse. In response to SVB’s inability to sell its stable yet unattractive bonds, a public bank could have bought them at par (face value), given SVB a loan, or even bought shares in the bank, thus injecting capital while acquiring an ownership stake in the currently privately owned bank. Or if those options weren’t feasible, a public bank could partner with local credit unions to buy SVB’s assets rather than letting Wall Street swallow them all up.
Earlier this week, my credit union sent an email assuring me that my deposits were safe — as a member-owned bank, it prioritizes liquidity and security above higher yields. My first thought was, “How many people are panicking at the news? How many are terrified that if they don’t race to the bank to withdraw all their money, it’ll vanish while bank executives run away with bonuses on the way out the door?”
The Great Recession happened a whole generation ago. Children born during it and shortly after are approaching middle- and high-school age now, my own child included. Still, nothing has been done to fundamentally reform our financial system.
Public banking is a step toward the kind of change we need — rather than setting ourselves up for a future where our governments are wholly dependent on, and regularly bail out, the private banks.
The High Court acted on a petition accusing the prime minister of an illegal act for speaking publicly on judicial reform.
By JNS
Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, on Sunday gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one week to respond to a petition alleging that he violated a conflict of interest agreement in a speech he delivered Thursday on judicial reform.
The Jerusalem-based left-wing Movement for Quality Government in Israel filed the petition on Sunday, asking that the court punish Netanyahu with prison time or fines for the televised address to the nation.
“A prime minister who doesn’t obey the court and the provisions of the law is privileged and an anarchist. The prime minister will be forced to bow his head before the law and comply with the provisions of the law,” said Eliad Shraga, the head of the Movement for Quality Government, which leads the protest movement against the coalition’s legislative push to limit the powers of the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana must also respond to the petition by April 2, according to the ruling by Supreme Court President Esther Hayut.
Baharav-Miara on Friday characterized as “completely illegal” Netanyahu’s wading into efforts to reform the judiciary, claiming his doing so violates the conflict of interest agreement allowing him to govern while his trial on corruption charges is ongoing.
“In your speech last night, you referred to proposals regarding the judicial system, and in particular to the composition of the committee for the appointment of judges, and announced that you are now directly involved in these initiatives,” Baharav-Miara wrote in a letter to Netanyahu.
“In doing so, you violated the ruling of the Supreme Court that a prime minister accused of crimes must refrain from actions giving rise to reasonable fear of a conflict of interest between your personal interests relating to the proceedings and your role as premier. Your statement last night and any further actions by you that violate that agreement are completely illegal,” she said.
The 2020 agreement prevents Netanyahu from making senior law enforcement and judicial appointments or involving himself in associated legislative processes that could influence the outcome of his ongoing trial. However, the Knesset earlier Thursday passed a law barring the Supreme Court from declaring a sitting premier unfit to serve and thus forcing him to take a leave of absence.
Netanyahu on Thursday night addressed the nation amid mass civil disobedience aimed at thwarting the judicial reforms, saying that he will intervene to make them more balanced but adding that a law changing the makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee will be passed this week as planned.
The post Netanyahu given week to rebut claim he violated conflict of interest deal appeared first on World Israel News.
Dozens of people were killed and dozens injured in the Mississippi delta area, one of the country’s poorest, as a massive storm ripped through several towns Friday night. One man was killed after his trailer home flipped several times.
The post ‘TOWN IS GONE’: At least 26 dead after fatal tornadoes strike southern US appeared first on World Israel News.
Israeli initiative aims to help African countries bordering on the Sahara stop the climate change-fueled encroachment of the desert on arable land with a green buffer.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
As part of the fight against global climate change, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosted African participants of the “Desertec” training program, including representatives from countries which Israel does not have diplomatic relations with.
Desertec helps African countries deal with the challenge of the spread of the desert in the Sahara region and is aiming to create an 8,000 km long green buffer in the Sahel, an area of Africa where the ecosystem transitions from the Sahara Desert to the savannah.
Dubbed “The Great Green Wall,” the tree-planting initiative would stretch from Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Red Sea, to prevent the Sahara from continuing to expand southward.
Studies estimate that the Sahara is currently expanding at a rate of around 30 miles per decade.
The Great Green Wall, which will cross 22 countries, aims to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, create 10 million jobs. The resulting changes would also have plants capturing an estimated 250 million tons of carbon.
The group was invited to Israel to assist them by identifying and mapping water challenges in their region, while finding solutions combining Israeli knowledge and technologies, which have proven successful in the past in the fight against desertification in Israel.
Among the participants is the niece of Chad’s foreign minister, with whom Israel renewed diplomatic ties in recent years. Other countries represented included Djibouti, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “The threat of the desert poses a danger to many countries with climate change. Israel is fighting this threat at home and is contributing its experience and capabilities for the benefit of Africa. We will continue to deepen and strengthen our ties with countries that desire this for the sake of the prosperity and stability of the region.”
The post Israel helping Africa build ‘Great Green Wall’ to contain the Sahara appeared first on World Israel News.
Protesters prepare to deliver a notice of intent to recall Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office in San Jose, California on June 26, 2017. (Gary Reyes / Bay Area News Group via Getty Images)
In 2016, Brock Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault. The woman he’d assaulted, Chanel Miller, had been unconscious at the time; Turner assaulted her after a party, behind a dumpster on the Stanford University campus, where he was a freshman.
Before Judge Aaron Persky of Santa Clara County’s Superior Court decided the sentence, Miller read a statement, addressing Turner directly. She detailed how she had only gone to the party to spend time with her younger sister, and how she had gotten drunk because she’d forgotten how much her tolerance for alcohol had decreased since college. She said that the next thing she remembered shortly after arriving at the party was waking up in the hospital, covered in pine needles and bruises.
Turner was facing up to fourteen years in prison, but Judge Persky only sentenced him to six months in jail, as well as mandatory registry as a sex offender. Television commentators described the sentence as a “slap on the wrist for a privileged, white sexual offender at an elite university.” The blond-haired Stanford student, a star athlete on the school’s swim team, had gotten a few months; others with less privilege have received, for example, a life sentence for selling thirty dollars’ worth of marijuana.
Turner was released on September 2, 2016, after three months behind bars, an early release on account of good behavior. Outcry once again broke out: protesters greeted him outside the Santa Clara County jail upon his release. Hours after Turner’s release, another rally was held outside of the jail demanding the recall of Judge Persky. Nearly two years later, Persky became the first California judge to be recalled in more than eighty years, with 62 percent of voters favoring his recall.
The Recall: Reframed is a short documentary by Rebecca Richman Cohen that takes issue with the “Recall Persky” campaign. The film, now streaming on NBC’s Peacock platform, features interviews with people close to the Turner case who opposed the recall, arguing that while the campaign was done under the guise of a feminist push to rectify the justice system’s failure to treat sexual crimes with the gravity that they deserve, it actually became an impediment to substantive justice.
It’s true that there are few, if any, legal consequences for most perpetrators of sexual violence. Out of every one thousand sexual assaults in the United States, 310 are reported to the police; fifty of those reports lead to arrest, twenty-eight of those arrests will lead to a felony conviction, and twenty-five will end with incarceration. In other words, 975 of the alleged perpetrators of every one thousand sexual assaults walk free.
But the demand for harsher sentencing doesn’t rectify the problem. For starters, it would affect only those twenty-five perpetrators who serve time, not the 975 who don’t. Plus, it’s well-known by now that incarceration doesn’t affect everyone equally. Those who are the most likely to already be targeted by the criminal justice system — i.e., not the Brock Turners of the world — bear the brunt of longer sentences.
That isn’t a hypothetical. A study of six California counties found that judges immediately began extending the length of sentences by 30 percent across the board once the Recall Persky campaign began. The study’s authors estimate that the recall led to somewhere between eighty-eight and four hundred cumulative years of additional prison time in just those six counties.
“The effect wasn’t on the next Brock Turner,” says Charisse Domingo, community organizer at DeBug, a San Jose–based community organization that focuses on criminal, housing, and immigration justice. Instead, harsher sentencing hit the young working-class people who rely on organizations like hers.
Alaleh Kianerci, Chanel Miller’s lawyer in the Turner case, explains that she had fought for a longer sentence and told Judge Persky that she disagreed with his decision. But she, too, did not support the recall campaign.
“A lot of people were surprised that I opposed the recall,” says Kianerci. “There’s no one more vocal in defense of Chanel than I am, but the recall’s not the right way to protect future victims of sexual assault and prevent another Brock Turner from happening.
“Long sentences disproportionately affect people who are nothing like Brock Turner,” says Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration. Gruber explains the problem with “carceral feminism,” a term that refers to the reliance on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to resolve gendered or sexual violence.
“Increasing sentencing, broadening the definitions of crimes, and prosecuting more people?” she asks the camera. “We all have this imagination that it will get at the more powerful criminal offenders, but criminal law doesn’t equalize the world; criminal law does the opposite. Criminal law exacerbates inequality.”
That, too, should not be controversial. Disparities in sentencing are well documented: police are twice as likely to search black drivers, even as white drivers are more likely to be found with contraband, and federal judges sentence black men to an average of 19 percent longer prison terms than white men for comparable crimes. To equate accountability with longer prison sentences, and imagine that a more punitive approach will hurt the Brock Turners of the world rather than everyone else, is a delusion.
“It wasn’t that Brock Turner didn’t deserve the kind of careful analysis that the judge gave him,” says Domingo. “It’s that everyone does.”
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan shake hands as they greet one another before their presidential debate on the stage of the Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, October, 28, 1980. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
It seems like some small marker of cosmic justice that just as former US president Jimmy Carter lies in a hospice awaiting death, the long-alleged but never-proven political crime that sabotaged his reelection just got another, major piece of corroboration.
This is the original “October surprise”: the charge that Ronald Reagan, Carter’s Republican opponent in the 1980 presidential election, made a secret deal with the new, fundamentalist Iranian government to delay releasing the American hostages held in the wake of the revolution that brought it to power. The 444-day-long hostage crisis had become a major black mark on Carter’s presidency, and resolving it before the election would have given him a major, unexpected bump going into voting. Hence the phrase, “October surprise.”
Through it has long been charged that a Reagan campaign with victory in sight went behind the US government’s back to secretly reach out to the Iranians and prevent this bump from happening, this weekend, the New York Times published an explosive piece of evidence that backs it up. Ben Barnes, a former Texas politician, told the paper how he and his mentor — former Democratic Texas governor John Connally, who had run for the GOP nomination in 1980 and had a plum Reagan administration post in his eyes — traveled around the Middle East delivering a message to be relayed to Iranian leadership, that Reagan would give them a better deal when he won the presidency. Connally then briefed Reagan’s campaign chair, William Casey, about the effort upon returning home, according to Barnes.
While acknowledging that confirming the account is “problematic,” the Times did, to its credit, corroborate parts of the story. Four prominent Texans confirmed to the paper that Barnes had told them the story years earlier, and various personal records back up Barnes’s claims about his and Connally’s travel dates and locations, their contact with the Reagan campaign, and their meeting with Casey upon getting back.
Blindfolded American hostages being held by their Iranian captors, 1979. (Reuters via Wikimedia Commons)
But this is far from the only recent piece of reporting backing up the “October surprise” story. A little more than three years ago, the Times published another report that touched on the matter, this one charging that Chase Manhattan Corporation chair David Rockefeller (brother of GOP politician Nelson) and a team assembled at the bank “helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release.” Unlike the most recent Times piece, this report was based on documents that had been sealed until Rockefeller’s death, one of which was a letter from his chief of staff (incidentally, named Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco in 1981) to his family admitting he had “given [his] all” to sabotaging the Carter administration’s efforts “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise.’”
Former world leaders have also corroborated the story. As the Intercept’s Jon Schwarz pointed out on the occasion of the death of former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr (the country’s first following the revolution), the leader had written in his 1991 memoir that “Americans close to Reagan” had proposed to the nephew of Iran’s postrevolutionary supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini “a secret agreement between leaders,” and that in late October 1980, “everyone was openly discussing the agreement with the Americans on the Reagan team.” Twenty-two years later, Bani-Sadr again repeated this charge, adding that the deal between Khomeini and Reagan had prevented his and Carter’s efforts to resolve the crisis, with two of his advisors “executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of this secret.”
Others who have affirmed the existence of such a deal include former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir (who told the late Robert Parry that “of course” there was such an agreement) and former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat and one of his senior aides, who both affirmed that Republicans offered a deal to the Palestine Liberation Organization if they helped keep the hostages in Iran. Years later, Parry also discovered — in a converted women’s bathroom in the parking garage of a federal building — a report sent by Moscow to the House task force investigating the story, which similarly backed up the claims, and was left out of the task force’s final report.
In other words, there was good reason to believe the story long before this past weekend, but the latest reporting by the New York Times offers even more reason. Yet the “October surprise” was dismissed widely and confidently, often by being slapped with the instantly delegitimizing label of “conspiracy theory,” a term thrown around with breathless irresponsibility in the ironically named “post-truth” era. The evidence for the story was a “myth,” blared a 1991 Newsweek headline, the contents of which declared it a “conspiracy theory run wild,” while the New Republic confidently deemed it “a total fabrication.” (One of the coauthors of that story, Steven Emerson, later wound up on Fox spreading racist nonsense about Muslims controlling British cities).
“It never happened,” asserted the hard-right Daniel Pipes in George Mason University’s History News Network, claiming it was merely the “guilty pleasure of die-hard conspiracy theorists.” (Like Emerson, Pipes is also an anti-Muslim racist who warned about “massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene,” and once expressed concern that the “enfranchisement of American Muslims” would threaten Jews). As recently as 2012, a Daily Beast headline declared that the “October surprise” is “still getting debunked.”
In other words, according to all the “serious” people, the “October surprise” story was misinformation, a conspiracy theory, fake news, and so on . . . until more evidence came to light and it turned out it wasn’t. None of this should inspire confidence that the traditional gatekeepers of political discourse — politicians, the mainstream press, intellectuals in establishment circles, and the fact-checkers and government bureaucrats that treat their words as gospel — can be trusted to responsibly regulate “misinformation” and wield censorship powers, as many such figures long for these days.
It’s also a reminder that contrary to the fairytale the public is being fed by many of these same sources, US politics and the GOP were far from bastions of decency and righteousness until the dastardly Donald Trump came along and messed everything up. It was Reagan, the Republican president most often cast these days as Trump’s polar opposite, who carried out something close to treason to win an election, before carrying out a host of other crimes and outrages as president. Everything in our scandal-filled times is, sadly, part and parcel of decades of US political tradition.