Friday, October 16, 2026
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Disturbing study reveals connection between brain damage and hepatitis B vaccine

by Vicki Batts

The hepatitis B vaccine is routinely administered to newborns, often just a few short hours after birth. It’s a highly controversial practice; for many parents, the idea of vaccinating a delicate, newborn baby has been a hard pill to swallow. Now, new research confirms there is a link between the hepatitis B vaccine and brain damage.

While vaccine propagandists continue to claim that vaccines are “100 percent safe,” the science clearly shows otherwise. There is a mountain of evidence which demonstrates vaccines can, and do, cause harm to their recipients — and it is growing taller by the day.

The pharmaceutical industry and their puppets attack anyone who refuses to abide by their pro-vaccine narrative.Whether it’s the slandering of scientists who publish dissenting vaccine safety research or social media sites blocking anti-vaccine content, it’s clear that the “powers that be” want to stop vaccine skepticism from spreading. People who think for themselves and don’t do as they’re told are dangerous, after all.

Research links vaccine to brain damage

A team of scientists from the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Sun Yat-sen University in China have confirmed a link between the hepatitis B vaccine (HBV) and brain damage in animal models. Published in 2018 by the journal Cytokine, the researchers say their findings show HBV may have “adverse implications for brain development and cognition” in human infants.

The team reports that their past research has confirmed that neonatal HBV administration causes inflammation in the hippocampus region of the brain in mice, along with behavioral impairments.
According to the scientists, HBV induced an anti-inflammatory cytokine response which lasted four-to-five weeks. A specific cytokine, IL-4, was identified as the primary cytokine induced by the vaccine. The researchers then compared the effects of an IL-4 injection to HBV administration in mice — and concluded that the impairments produced by IL-4 were similar to that of HBV. The researchers write:
“In brief, these experiments showed that IL-4 mediates the delayed neurobehavioral impairments induced by neonatal hepatitis B vaccination, which involves the permeability of neonatal blood–brain barrier and the down-regulation of IL-4 receptor. This finding suggests that clinical events concerning neonatal IL-4 over-exposure, including neonatal hepatitis B vaccination and allergic asthma in human infants, may have adverse implications for brain development and cognition.”
Essentially, what this means is that HBV causes inflammation in the brain that is damaging to normal development and cognitive function. The team has identified overexposure to IL-4 as a cause of this damage.

And we are injecting defenseless babies with this toxic shot within just the first few days of life.
The vaccine sham
Vaccine propaganda is everywhere; whether its the flu shot, the MMR or the HPV vaccine, there’s no shortage of corrupt media pundits or physicians out there campaigning for Big Pharma.

In 2016, the value of the vaccine market was estimated to be around $24 billion. But by 2020, that market is expected to reach a staggering $61 billion. Is it really any surprise that the people who stand to profit most from vaccines insist that they are not only safe, but that they are mandatory?
The CDC pushes vaccine schedules as part of their “mission to promote health and prevent disease,” but what they aren’t telling the public is that even as a federal agency, they accept millions of dollars from Big Pharma every year.

Despite the disclaimers, the CDC does accept money from big business — through an organization known as The CDC Foundation. The foundation raised $42 million during 2016, collecting their dues from Merck, Pfizer and other massive companies that surely have an interest in keeping the CDC in their back pocket.

At every turn, it is clear that vaccine pushing has nothing to do with public health, and everything to do with corporate interests. See more coverage of the corrupt vaccine industry at Vaccines.news.
Sources for this article include:
NaturalHealth365.com
VaccineSafetyCommission.org
GlobalResearch.ca

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New cultural center for site of Mexico City army barracks

‘The biggest and most important artistic and cultural space in the world’

by the El Reportero’s news services

A new cultural center touted as the biggest in the world will be established on a military site in Mexico City, President López Obrador announced on Tuesday.

The president said that renowned artist Gabriel Orozco will direct the project in conjunction with the Secretariat of Culture and the Mexico City government.

The center will be built on an 800-hectare former military base that will become the fourth section of the Chapultepec Park.

“It’s going to be the biggest and most important artistic and cultural space in the world,” López Obrador said, adding that Orozco will not charge anything for his services.

A luxury real estate development had been planned for part of the site but López Obrador said last month that idea had been scrapped.

The president said today that the government already has the resources required to build the cultural center although he didn’t specify how much it would cost.

“Not a lot of funds will be needed because the creative side [of the project] is going to be provided voluntarily,” López Obrador said.

“We’ll seek not to waste resources, it’s not [a project of] buildings that will turn into white elephants,” he added.

López Obrador said that a detailed plan of the project, including its cost and how long it will take to complete, will be presented in two or three months.

Orozco, who said in 2015 that Mexico needed a contemporary art museum of the stature of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Paris’ Centre Pompidou or London’s Tate Museum, described the opportunity to coordinate the cultural center as an “honor.”

The federal government has made a point of returning space formally occupied by the government to the people of Mexico.

The president’s former official residence, Los Pinos, has already been turned into a cultural center, and metal barricades that prevented citizens from getting close to the National Palace were removed shortly after López Obrador took office on December 1.

Protesters with a range of grievances have since established makeshift camps cheek by jowl with the facade of the National Palace, located in Mexico City’s downtown opposite the zócalo, or central square.

Source: El Financiero (sp), Milenio (sp).

Cecilia Suárez and Santiago Segura will be the hosts of the PLATINO Awards
We now have the names of the hosts of the 6thAnnual Platino Awards for Ibero-American Cinema. Cecilia Suárez and Santiago Segura will be the Masters of Ceremonies of this year’s edition of the highly prestigious awards.

The Mexican actress and the Spanish actor and director will be the hosts of the ceremony, which will be held on May 12 in the Grand Tlachco de Xcaret Theatre, in Riviera Maya, Mexico. The award show will be broadcast across Latin American on TNT via pay per view and on the main national television channels in open mode.

In this spectacular venue in the Mexican Riviera, Cecilia Suárez and Santiago Segura will present a gala that year after year is making an impact internationally and is now a benchmark in the Ibero-American audiovisual industry. They will host what promises to be an exciting night.
As well as presenting the event, Mexican actress Cecilia Suárez will also be among the four nominees for her role in The House of Flowers.

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Uruguayans to enjoy originals by Pablo Picasso for the first time

by the El Reportero’s news services

Uruguayans since Friday have the possibility to appreciate first hand the creative genius of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso through 45 original works under exhibition in Montevideo up to June 30.

The National Director of Culture, Sergio Mautone, expressed the importance of hosting a very powerful exhibition of original paintings of the great Picasso.

He emphasized that this opportunity has paved the road ‘to implement some actions that are going to help Uruguay to bring from now on important pieces from renowned painters’.

The initiative to have Picasso’s works coming to Montevideo came from the Picassso-Paris National Museum, whose President Laurent Le Bon hosted this exhibition under Emmanuel Guigon’s curatorship, Director of the corresponding Museum in Barcelona and under French Embassy auspices.

Director of the Visual Arts Museum, which will host the exhibition, Enrique Aguerre, explained there will be a free day of the week, and always with that benefit for children under 12 and people with disabilities, while retirees will enjoy a significant discount.

He assured that also the students with teachers, who schedule visits, will have access without cost, and already ‘we have more than 14,000 with reservation’.

Harvard University appoints Chucho Valdés as Resident Teacher

The Office of Arts and the Jazz Band of Harvard University, United States, today named Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés as resident Jazz Master, due to his contribution to the development of said institution.

The appointment is granted to eminent artists linked to the entity with the aim of developing initiatives that provide new opportunities to university students, work directly with the classical repertoire and honor artists who have made a significant contribution to American music.

From April 8 to 12, Valdés – six-time winner of the Grammy Award and three of the Latin Grammy – will exchange with teachers and students as part of a meeting sponsored by the Arts Office and the Harvard Jazz Band, in association with the Program of Studies of Cuba and the Center David Rockefeller of the same house of high studies.

According to an official note on the university’s website, in addition to working and rehearsing, the musician will participate in a concert open to the public that under the title Puente Musical, will bring together several instrumentalists, among which the bassist Yunior Terry.

Valdés is one of the most influential figures of modern jazz, organic and personal style distills elements of the Afro-Cuban, classical, rock music tradition, among several.

The program in which the pianist will participate in Harvard is one of the most prestigious in the United States as it brings together distinguished artists in this art form whether world-renowned masters or emerging artists, honors them and allows connection with new generations.

In past editions have been named Resident Masters Benny Carter, Roy Haynes, Joe Lovano and Cassandra Wilson, who have played with the Harvard jazz bands for almost five decades.

The Arts Office maintains a recording archive of visiting artists in jazz, which is available to students and scholars through the Morse Music and Media Collection, the Lamont Library, as well as a collection of Tom Everett’s jazz manuscripts, at Eda Kuhn Loeb music library.

Iconic Latin alternative bands Aterciopelados & Los Amigos Invisibles announce U.S. tour
Internationally acclaimed bands, Colombian rock Aterciopelados and funk acid-jazz Venezuelan Los Amigos Invisibles, will be joining forces for a 10-city co-headlining tour for the first time together nationwide, kicking off at the Sony Hall in New York City on April 21st.

Three-time Latin Grammy winning and 2x Grammy nominated Aterciopelados, is one of the most important dynamic duos in the Latin American alternative music scene. Their latest album “Claroscura” (2018), praised by international media and awarded as the Best Alternative Album by the Latin Grammy.

Alongside Aterciopelados is Latin Grammy winning and 3x Grammy nominated group Los Amigos Invisibles, known for their blend of Afro-funk, disco, acid jazz and Latin rhythms. The band is one of the most recognized bands from Venezuela and the Latin American music scene, praised for their energetic live shows that have been presented worldwide in more than 60 countries.

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EstrellaTV Opens Its Doors to Students

Empowering the community through education

by the El Reportero’s news services

EstrellaTV kicked off this year’s effort on Feb. 11 by hosting 13 young students from The Orange County Community Housing Corporation (OCCHC).

The students, who participate in the organization’s SteppingUp College Awareness Program, had an opportunity to get a behind the scenes glimpse of how television broadcasting is made and the many career opportunities available in the industry.

Students were able to interact with on-air talent, producers and technical personnel as they navigated master control rooms and various studio sets, and got to experience a live taping of a news promo segment.

The Orange County Community Housing Corporation (OCCHC) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to transition extremely low-income families to greater self-sufficiency by assisting with housing and education.

French fire fighters and police officers certified the security of the Museum of Visual Arts in Uruguay for an exhibition of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso”s works, Culture Minister Maria Julio Muñoz confirmed.

The exhibition will take place from March 29 to June 30, as a result of an agreement signed on Feb. 14 between the Museum of Paris, which holds Picasso’s works, and the Uruguayan institution.
In order to reach the agreement, the two French agencies inspected the conditions of the museum that will exhibit Picasso’s paintings in Montevideo.

Muñoz made it clear that Montevideo will be only place in the Americas where the exhibition will take place, and it will tour other continents. She added that the museum was chosen because its director, Enrique Aguerre, enjoys great prestige among international artists.

Uruguayan Museum certified to host Picasso exhibition
French fire fighters and police officers certified the security of the Museum of Visual Arts in Uruguay for an exhibition of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso”s works, Culture Minister Maria Julio Muñoz confirmed.

The exhibition will take place from March 29 to June 30, as a result of an agreement signed on Feb. 14 between the Museum of Paris, which holds Picasso’s works, and the Uruguayan institution.
In order to reach the agreement, the two French agencies inspected the conditions of the museum that will exhibit Picasso’s paintings in Montevideo.

Muñoz made it clear that Montevideo will be only place in the Americas where the exhibition will take place, and it will tour other continents. She added that the museum was chosen because its director, Enrique Aguerre, enjoys great prestige among international artists.

Also in Uruguay:

Uruguayan wins Best Director Award at Sundance
Uruguayan Lucia Garibaldi wins the award for best director at the prestigious Sundance International Film Festival with the film The Sharks, the first one representing her country in this contest.
The young actress Romina Bentancur stars the film in the role of a teenager who lives on the Uruguayan coast and gets ready to receive a flood of tourists while facing the vicissitudes of amorous awakening.

Before the competition, she said, she proposed to work with non-professional actors and before choosing her, she saw about 50 videos, and discovered in her ‘one of those faces, those voices, those ways of moving that are always finding something new.’
Garibaldi, graduated from the Uruguayan Film School, thanked the official support she received to finish the film and announced that she has her second feature film, to be called The Last Queen.
She received this award a day after her compatriot Alvaro Brechner won in Seville the Goya for Best Screen Adaptation in the Uruguayan-Argentinean-Spanish co-production A Twelve-Year Night.
The actor Robert Redford founded the Sundance Festival in Utah, United States to open doors to quality art productions lacking powerful commercial scaffolding.

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Covert chemical warfare: 100,000 deaths a year

by Jon Rappoport

Medical News Today reports that, in 2011, there was a modest uptick in the number of prescriptions written in the US.

The increase brought the total to: 4.02 billion.

Yes, in 2011, doctors wrote 4.02 billion prescriptions for drugs in America.

That’s an average of roughly 13 prescriptions for each man, woman, and child.

That’s about one new prescription every month for every American.

The Medical News Today article concluded, “…the industry should be heartened by the growth of the number of prescriptions and spending.” Yes, I’m sure the drug industry is popping champagne corks.
We’re talking about prescriptions here. We’re not talking about the number of pills Americans took. We’re also not counting over-the-counter drugs or vaccine shots.

Pharmacopoeia, a 2011 exhibition at the British Museum, estimated that “the average number of pills a person takes in his or her own lifetime in the UK is 14,000.” That’s as a result of prescriptions. Including over-the-counter drugs, the 14,000 number would swell to 40,000 pills taken in a lifetime.
What are the effects of all these drugs?

We are looking at a supreme Trojan Horse that is rotting out America and all other countries from the inside. Wars, no wars, economic deprivation, economic prosperity, the drugs continue to do their work, debilitating and ruining and terminating lives.

Many sources can be cited to confirm this assessment.

On January 8th, 2001, the LA Times published an article by one of the best medical reporters in the business, Linda Marsa: “When Good Drugs Do Harm.” Marsa quoted researcher Dr. David Bates, who indicated that, in the US, there are 36 million serious adverse reactions to medical drugs per year.
On July 26, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the most stunning mainstream estimate of medical-drug damage in history: “Is US health really the best in the world?” The author was Dr. Barbara Starfield, a respected public-health researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Starfield concluded that medical drugs were killing Americans at the rate of 106,000 per year.
That’s a million deaths per decade.

This is a conservative sketch of the Trojan Horse that has been placed in the center of every country in the world.

The pharmaceutical juggernaut will continue, no doubt about it. The only question is, how many people will wake up and seek another way?
The destruction of societies by medical drugs goes far beyond what some people call “over-prescribing.” This isn’t just a tilt in the wrong direction. It isn’t simply errors of judgment compounded by the number of doctors dispensing medicines.

Those are all polite terms suggesting the situation can be corrected through a show of good will and better judgment. That will never happen.

Countries of the world are literally being assaulted by pharmaceutical companies and their foot-soldier doctors. It’s chemical warfare.

To even begin to see light at the end of the tunnel, hundreds of millions of people must add themselves to the rolls of those who already are pursuing better health through natural means.
We need an all-out rebellion against the Pharmacopoeia.

Not even the Nazis and their dearly beloved cartel, the monster IG Farben, dreamed of the day when the citizenry would line up and demand to ingest more and more life-destroying chemicals.

In case anyone thinks the FDA, the single agency responsible for certifying drugs as safe and effective, has “overlooked the problem,” Google “FDA, Why Learn About Adverse Drug Events.” You’ll find the following statements on the FDA’s own site:

“Over 2 MILLION serious ADRs [Adverse Drug Events] yearly; 100,000 DEATHS yearly.”
The only thing missing is:

“And we, the FDA, said the drugs were safe.”

(Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix).

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Why are Guatemalans seeking asylum? US policy is to blame

by Gabriel M Schivone

The death of seven-year-old Jakelin Caal in US custody follows decades of US-sponsored devastation in her home countryA grainy cellphone image from a small indigenous Guatemalan village shows seven-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, wearing a blue blouse and jeans and looking diffidently into the camera with her arms hanging at her sides. Not long after the photo was taken, she accompanied her father on the over 2,000-mile journey to try and reach the US. She died while in US border patrol custody after arriving at a New Mexico port of entry to claim asylum.

Traveling with a father, like Jakelin was, accounted for the main reasons small children were regularly separated under Barack Obama (the other reason being the mass incarceration program Operation Streamline), though Donald Trump outmatched his predecessor in sheer scale if not in practice.

The father and daughter fled their small village in Alta Verapaz, one of the areas targeted for annihilation during two successive, US-backed regimes over the Carter-Reagan years, atrocities that a 1999 UN truth commission deemed “acts of genocide” perpetrated against indigenous Mayan ethnic groups that included Jakelin’s Q’eqchi’ people. Of the 200,000 people killed, eight out of 10 were indigenous.

The targeted scale of death, contrasted by the lack of global action and public outcry, led a group of international lawyers to call the period a “silent holocaust”.

The term “holocaust” isn’t exaggerated. Just over 100 miles from Jakelin’s village, so many bodies were piling up that a Guatemalan military base in Huehuetenango (one of those that proliferated under Kennedy-era military funding programs) operated a crematorium to incinerate the bodies of “the disappeared”.

Guatemala’s unique national criminal trials in recent years, prosecuting lower soldiers, senior officers and heads of state, have implicated US national security doctrine, first instituted by Kennedy under the guise of fighting communism. US military and embassy officials over the years admitted to, even took credit for, the formation of informal death squads to assist military and security forces in the butchery.

An estimated 10,000 people alone were killed in the first three months after a March 1982 military coup by President Reagan’s favorite “man of great personal integrity”, General Efraín Ríos Montt, trained at Fort Bragg, whose forces averaged 19 massacres per month. Whole villages (over 400 were destroyed) were literally burned off the face of their earth and their inhabitants killed, often gruesomely.

When people started fleeing the nightmare in record numbers (also from US-backed forces in El Salvador), the Reagan administration stepped up border security with methods first tried and tested in Guatemala’s US counterinsurgency “laboratory”.

Reagan denied asylum claims wholesale to people like Jakelin and her father by referring to them as economic migrants unworthy of asylum, instead of taking responsibility for creating the conditions of political economy that encompass both migrants and refugees. By 1984 a mere 0.79% of Guatemalan asylum applicants had their requests grants and, by the next year, Reagan was deporting 1,000 Central Americans per month back to the death squads. Then, as today, US civil society sanctuary efforts began.

Jakelin’s mother recalls her daughter’s dream to send money home from the US, a dream she shared with other members of Guatemalan civil society who implored President Clinton in 1999 to relax immigration controls, which skyrocketed under his watch, so that these valuable remittances could continue. Clinton was in Guatemala City the day the UN released its report on Guatemala. Looking genocide survivors in the face, he admitted the decades of decisive US military assistance “was wrong” but flatly rejected their pleas for immigration reform, because, he said, “we must enforce our laws”.
Other forms of denial run deep. Obama’s former UN ambassador, Samantha Power, wrote an authoritative study on genocide, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, whose index fails to even list “Guatemala”. US-backed torture of Guatemala traces back to the Franklin D Roosevelt years and prior, but today conditions have only grown worse.

Every time the media fail to report this historical wreckage from which Jakelin’s people are still fleeing across the US-Mexico border; every time US officials fail to treat these survivors with compassion – indeed massive financial reparations would be more appropriate – contributes to an active case of genocide denial.

There’s a scene in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List where the protagonist Oskar Schindler watches, on horseback from the safety of a distant bluff, the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Nazi soldiers are killing people indiscriminately, yet Schindler can’t take his eyes off a little girl in a red coat, about the same age as Jakelin, who scuttles, unscathed, along the blood-soaked cobblestones – later to be seen in a pile of bodies. In a 2017 HBO documentary, Spielberg reflects that the red-coated little girl of Jakelin’s age “was less about what turned” Schindler’s sympathy and “more that the world turned a blind eye on the holocaust and the industrial process of wholesale murder”.

In other words, the Nazi holocaust was once, like Guatemala’s, a “silent” one.
While Jakelin, the little girl in the blue blouse, rates headlines for the time being, an enduring question remains. When will Guatemala’s suffering grow louder than the din of US interests – from Roosevelt to Kennedy to Reagan to Clinton to Obama to Trump – and fill the silence of inaction with demands for justice and accountability on this side of the border?

(Gabriel M Schivone is an immigration asylum sponsor and humanitarian aid volunteer on the Arizona/Mexico border).

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‘Nowhere to hold them’: exhausted migrants crowded under a bridge in Texas

The border agency, with no room elsewhere, has resorted to using an outdoor fenced space as a ‘transitional shelter’

by Edwin Delgado

Every day, thousands of people cross the Paso del Norte bridge between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. For the past two days, the small shaded area underneath the bridge has also been busy: hundreds of recently apprehended migrants are now spending hours out in the open behind a chain-link fence and razor wire.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says they are there due to the continued rise of mostly Central American migrants who have to be processed at various ports of entry and have generated a bottleneck.
“Due to the large volume of apprehensions within the El Paso station’s Area of Responsibility, the agency has undertaken additional measures to facilitate processing,” said CBP in a statement. “As [migrants] arrive at the processing facility, they are placed at the ‘tent’ to await their turn to be processed. This tent serves only as a transitional shelter and is not a temporary housing facility.”
The transitional shelter was put in place last month. This week, the fence and wire were installed amid a rise in the number of people being held.

On Wednesday afternoon, as the temperatures rose over 80F (26C), most of the migrants waiting to be processed sat along the edges of the shelter or lay down covered with foil sheets given to them by CBP.

Some of them looked away to avoid being photographed; others followed journalists who took photos and notes. Still others, exhausted from the long trek to the US, took a few minutes to rest and get a bit of sleep before the next leg of their journey.
A CBP spokesman, Ramiro Cordero, said he didn’t have an accurate estimate of the number of migrants at the shelter because it fluctuated every hour. But he said that as of 6am on Wednesday, CBP’s El Paso sector, which covers New Mexico and parts of west Texas, had approximately 3,500 migrants in custody. The sector is averaging 570 daily apprehensions this month, up from around 200 a day early last year. He noted the migrants in the shelter had been detained within the last 15 to 20 hours.
“We keep getting better and better at processing them,” Cordero said. “However, the numbers continue growing and growing. We don’t have anywhere else to hold them.”
Another CBP official, who asked not to be named, told the Guardian that if the current situation did not improve, CBP might have to release some of the migrants it processes into the streets rather than waiting for other agencies to pick them up.

CBP, which makes the apprehensions at the border, must wait for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to process migrants before releasing them to them. Ice also, at times, works with local non-government agencies to coordinate the release of some of the migrants into the community.

Only two blocks away from the bridge, the CBP commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, said at a news conference on Wednesday morning that the number of migrants coming to the US was unprecedented. He said on that morning CBP had more than 13,000 migrants in its custody; normally, it was closer to 4,000.

“This stark and increasing shift to more vulnerable populations, combined with the overwhelming numbers, and inadequate capacity to detain families and children at Ice and HHS, respectively, has created a humanitarian crisis,” McAleenan said. “In March, almost 40,000 children will come into CBP custody after completing a harrowing journey in the hands of violent and callous smugglers through Mexico. The danger of violent assault on that journey, the potential for a tragic incident in the crossing or in overwhelmed CBP facilities, or in transportation networks, is clear and present.”

He noted that 40 percent of CBP officers were focused on handling the influx of migrants.

As buses began to arrive at the shelter to take migrants who had been processed, others anxiously waited for their chance to, at the very least, be moved inside the CBP facility. (The Guardian).

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NPNA calls on eligible low-income immigrants to apply for citizenship as soon as possible

Trump administration moves closer to limiting eligibility for fee waivers for citizenship and other applications–a direct attack on 244,000+ elderly and working poor immigrants who apply for citizenship every year

Submitted by NPNA

The National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) strongly condemns the Trump administration’s decision today to move a step closer toward finalizing a federal regulation that would make it harder for hundreds of thousands of elderly, low-income, and working poor immigrants to afford citizenship. The regulation will also make it less affordable to apply for lawful permanent residence, temporary protected status, and employment authorization. In response, NPNA and partners are pledging to get one million new citizens by 2020 and to continue fighting the attacks from the administration.

The proposed regulation, which could be implemented as early as the end of May, would end the practice of allowing applicants who receive a means-tested benefit, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, to use that as proof that they cannot afford the high costs of naturalization fees, and, therefore, need a fee waiver.

The regulation is mean-spirited and would punish immigrants who utilize means-tested public benefits. It would limit a victory that NPNA and its members won during the previous administration, which allowed for fee waivers for citizenship and other applicants who could not afford the costly application fees.

“We condemn this latest move to punish low-income and elderly immigrants,” said Eva Millona, Co-Chair of NPNA and Executive Director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “If you love this country, are eligible to naturalize and of limited means, we urge you to seek help and file for citizenship as soon as possible before this Administration moves to limit your ability to qualify for the citizenship fee waiver. We have a patriotic obligation to support aspiring Americans prepared to raise their right hand to defend the Constitution, no matter their background or place of birth.”

In 2017, around 40 percent of citizenship applicants, over 370,000 people, filed for citizenship and requested a fee waiver. Over two-thirds of these lawful permanent residents requested the fee waiver using the proof of a means-tested benefit. This means that the proposed regulation would make it more difficult, if not impossible, for over 244,000 elderly and working poor immigrants per year to naturalize per year. In addition to other proposed regulations and practices, the backlog of nearly 740,000 citizenship applications before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and processing delays that exceed 30 months in certain offices, these roadblocks constitute a “Second Wall” of barriers to citizenship constructed by the current administration.

In response, NPNA and its partners across the nation pledge to tear down the “Second Wall” of barriers to citizenship and mobilize its communities and advocates to mobilize one million new citizens by 2020.

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The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) is Mexico’s most important independent union on the Left

Ten years ago, it was nearly destroyed. Today, its members are rebuilding through a new labor cooperative

by David Bacon

Mexico’s new President, Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), probably the only head of state to give two press conferences a day and then post them online, is accustomed to having his statements cause headlines.
Last week it was a reporter’s question that caused a hot controversy, seemingly intended to drive a wedge between AMLO and one of his most important labor allies, the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (Mexican Electrical Workers union, SME).

Reporter Rosa Elena Soto, of Acustik Noticias y La Neta Noticias, alleged corruption between Lopez Obrador’s predecessor and the union, over contracts for operating the huge Necaxa hydroelectric power station. “Many of these contracts have indications that they were plagued by corruption,” she charged.

In his response, AMLO called the union “possibly the most democratic union in Mexico’s history, until they viciously destroyed it in the neoliberal period.” Noting that its 44,000 members had been fired in 2009, he called for a solution to the conflict. Any corruption, he emphasized, wasn’t attributable to workers but to companies that took advantage of the situation. But López Obrador also called for consulting the discredited former leaders of the union, who had accepted government’s payoffs after the firings.

This response provoked outrage from the union’s leaders. SME General Secretary Martín Esparza replied: “We walked miles and miles in demonstrations, faced with dignity those who fired the workers. We did not sell out, even as our families suffered, and we didn’t just sit back with our arms folded and wait for answers. In fact, we proposed viable and novel solutions.”

That solution is a cooperative that has taken over many of the facilities where SME members formerly worked, including the Necaxa power station in the reporter’s question. This “novel solution” represents the union’s hope of putting back to work the thousands of electrical workers thrown into the street a decade ago.

When López Obrador carefully noted the union’s reputation, he was acknowledging the importance of its 100-year history on the Mexican left. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union, the oldest democratic union in Mexico, was founded in 1914 when the armies of Emiliano Zapata took Mexico City. Almost a century later, in 2009, the Felipe Calderón administration attempted to destroy the union and the nationalized company that employed its members. But thousands of the SME’s members refused to give up their union. Instead, they spent the next eight years en resistencia (in resistance).

This willingness to fight for principled labor policies is not only crucial to the country’s political left but has an impact across the border as well. Today, electrical workers in the U.S. work on an energy grid increasingly integrated with Mexico’s. To avoid the whipsawing and job competition familiar in industries like auto, U.S. unions will need Mexican partners with the kind of class-oriented unionism the SME has championed. That class-based unionism has a long history. In its new cooperative, that history is not only still alive, but has been adapted to the realities of an integrated economy dominated by pro-corporate reforms.

The origins of the SME’s class-based unionism

In 1898, the Compania Luz y Fuerza del Centro (the Power and Light Company of Central Mexico, LyF) was founded in Canada, and granted a concession by President Porfirio Díaz to generate, transmit, distribute, and sell electricity in central Mexico. In the middle of the Mexican Revolution, LyF workers organized the SME primarily because Mexican workers were paid much less than those working for the company from Canada and the United States.

In 1916, the SME organized Mexico’s first general strike. Union leaders were imprisoned and condemned to death, but their lives were ultimately spared after huge demonstrations. In 1936, the SME went on strike against the U.S., British, and Canadian owners of Luz y Fuerza. Mexico City went without electricity for ninety days, except for emergency medical services. The strike was successful and led to the negotiation of one of the most important labor contracts in Latin America. This contract preserved SME’s independence from the government, unlike other Mexican unions, and made it an important organization on the Mexican left.

In 1937, Amendment 27 of the Mexican Constitution made the oil and electrical industries the property of the state. Then, in 1949, the Comisión Federal de la Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission, CFE) was established to provide power to all of Mexico-except for the area served by LyF. Nevertheless, private companies like Luz y Fuerza continued to operate under government concessions.

In 1960, the SME began to push for the nationalization of electrical power. The Mexican government subsequently purchased 90 percent of LyF shares, making it a state-owned and operated company. Then-President Adolfo López Mateos added a paragraph to Article 27 determining that the Mexican government has the exclusive right to provide electricity to the country.

The Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de Electricidad de la República Mexicana (Sole Union of Mexican Electricity Workers, SUTERM), headed by Rafael Galván, was established in 1972 for CFE workers. Galván, however, was expelled from the union for opposing government policy. He then organized the Tendencia Democrática del SUTERM, (Democratic Tendency of SUTERM), whose leaders were all fired. The union consequently became a pillar of support for Mexico’s governing party, the PRI. Since then, the two unions have represented the two poles in Mexican labor: an independent democratic organization with left politics, and a bureaucratized union tied to the PRI and the government.

(This article has been shorten due to its length. Here’s the link to read the entire article: https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-rebirth-of-mexicos-electrical_7.html).

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Do humans have free will? Not if big tech wins

Dear readers:

As much as it sounds simple, as most of us would say, “of course I have free will, I can do whatever I want and say”. But actually you may find that it may not be true after you read this article written by investigative journalist and true seeker, James Corbett, one of my favorite writers in these times of mind-slavery. – Marvin Ramírez

Do humans have free will? Not if big tech wins!

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com

Do humans have free will?
That question has puzzled philosophers for millennia and has generated fierce debates. Perhaps the only thing more contentious than the question are the implications of its answer. If man has no free will, then how can there be moral responsibility?
But don’t worry, dear frazzled philosophers! You can now rest your weary heads because the question is about to be answered once and for all by the wizards of Silicon Valley.
What on earth am I talking about? To answer that question, let’s turn to Declare Your Independence, the radio show of Ernie Hancock of FreedomsPhoenix.com. Recently, Ernie had a fascinating conversation with Paul Rosenberg of FreemansPerspective.com. What’s fascinating about their discussion is how quickly the conversation turns from a dialogue about online censorship in the wake of the Christchurch shooting to Rosenberg ranting about the most important issue of our time:
“You need to protect your data to protect your own free will. I’m sorry if that sounds dramatic. I’m sorry if that sounds like I’m trying to be scary and all that, but that’s just the truth and somebody should say it!”
So how do we get from online censorship to the end of free will (assuming we ever really had it)? By way of Google’s selfish ledger, of course.
For those who may have missed it, “The Selfish Ledger” is an internal Google video that was leaked to The Verge last year, and it’s just about the creepiest thing imaginable. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a moment to watch it now.
In his article on the video, Rosenberg summarizes the video thusly:
• Google sees you as a “transient carrier.” That is, the data you produce is the essential being, and you’re a mere “container.”
• You shouldn’t really own your ledger (your most essential self), and they should insert information into your life.
• Google will choose what you should want and will modify your behavior accordingly. How? By offering you new options or even designing custom devices that you won’t be able to resist. They will make sure “your behavior” is “modified.”
• If this seems creepy to you, don’t worry; you’ll warm up to it over time.
• Google will guide you to what’s best for you. You can trust them; they love us and know what’s best for us all.
This is not an exaggeration. This is literally the message of the video.
Whether or not you believe yourself to be a mere “container” acting as a “transient carrier” of data or, you know, a pesky ontological object like a free human being with a soul, the video provides some serious food for thought. It is obviously the case that we are shaped by our experiences, and our past experiences (the data that Google tracks) help to determine our responses to future challenges.
Over time, and given enough analytical horsepower, someone tracking the data trail you leave behind (the places you go, the people you meet, the things you buy, the conversations you have, the questions you ask, the choices you make) can not only predict how you will act in the future; they can determine why you will act that way. And if they have that insight—the knowledge of what makes you tick, as it were—then it’s not difficult to start using that knowledge to prompt us in one direction or another. And, over time, if we can be prompted to make choices along a certain path we can end up at a predetermined destination, one that we ourselves never set out to reach.
In short, if we are nothing but biological robots reacting to stimuli along predictable paths, then we can have our software re-programmed by an outside agent that is custom-tailoring those stimuli for us. And, as this video announces, Google would like to be that agent.
Now this “Selfish Ledger” is Google’s video, so the idea seems like it’s Google’s alone, but of course this is not the case. All of the major tech companies are operating from similar principles.
This is why Facebook conducted its infamous “mood experiment” to see how tinkering with a person’s news feed could alter their feelings. It’s why Instagram is blocking “anti-vaccine” hashtags. It’s why Twitter and Facebook (and everyone else) is collecting data on everyone, even non-users, at all times. Heck, it’s why I now listen to Radiohead.
We are being shaped, our experiences directed, our choices made for us each and every day. And whether or not you ever believed in free will, there can be no doubt that as the cell doors close on our technological prison we have less and less say over our own decisions.
There are things we can do to help mitigate this, of course.
We can take online privacy seriously and really commit to not giving these companies any identifiable data that can be associated with us individually. But after seeing what it takes to really accomplish this, most will decide that it’s not worth the hassle.
We can try disconnecting from technology. Leaving our smartphones at home instead of taking it everywhere we go. Deleting our social media accounts. Going back to phone calls and in-person chats over texting and email. But more and more, our jobs (not to mention our social lives) depend on being online and accessible through the very types of social media services we are seeking to avoid.
We can do the little things that we can do to stop being controlled by our gadgets. Make a conscious effort to not click on the next “recommended video” or “you might also like” article. Turn off notifications. Disable location services. Stop Googling every question we have and stop plugging our ears with earphones at all times. But do these little actions make a difference in the long run?
And in the end, perhaps it’s not even our choice anymore (if it ever was). As a recent MIT study demonstrated, you only need the DNA of a small percentage of the public in order to trace the relationships between the entire population. Similarly, you don’t have to be on Facebook yourself in order for Zuckerberg and his minions to know all about you; as long as all your friends (or some percentage) are on there, chances are you’re in the Facebook database as a “shadow profile.”
So, unless you’re the Unabomber living on bugs and rainwater in some cabin in the woods, you’re in the matrix one way or another. And unless we as a society start asking and answering the hard questions about autonomy and free will in the age of total surveillance, there’s a good chance our children (or their children) will be nothing more than “transient carriers” for data that is being fed to you by the Big Tech monopolies.
After all, what choice do we have?

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