Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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Location: Brunswick, ME, United States

The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. @BruceKGagnon

Saturday, June 07, 2014

THE REAL STORY IN UKRAINE




Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe

Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine


by DIANA JOHNSTONE

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.


They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO.  This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.  He could underreact, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.


Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine.  The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.


In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course.  Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found.  Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias.  The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.


Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do.


U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry pontificated.  “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.


It Was All Planned at Yalta


 In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945.  The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski.  Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves.  The center of discussion was the “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with the West.  The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West.


Conspiracy against Russia?  Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear.


Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference.   Forbes reported at the time  on the “stark difference” between the Russian and Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with the EU but over its likely impact.”  In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports ccould only swell the deficit.  Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”.


The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.”


As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.


In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself.  Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong.  What went wrong first was that Yanukovych  got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union.  He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.


Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel


Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West.  The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.


It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics.  So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter too much.


It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow,  Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Habsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.


The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.”  Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder.  In any case, he was never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.


It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia.  In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position.  The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s role as bridge.  This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev.  A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.


But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.


Plan A and Plan B


U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue.  Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.


As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called “promoting democracy”).  This investment is not “for oil”, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.


What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, “Fuck the EU”.  But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions.  The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate.  Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but “Yats”.  And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.


Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea.  Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move to prevent this.

But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy.  If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster.  On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective.  Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.


Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media.  Suddenly, we are told that the “freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian expansionism”.  Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States.  But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge.  Never mind “communism”; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that.  The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.


The Protection Racket Returns


But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to “save Europe”,  which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe.  Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies.  The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union.  This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.


Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended.  So has the EU.  With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes.  The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states.  Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained.  Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.


Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat.  Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony.  The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.


Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine.  This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.


To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on “defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia’s natural gas sales  – stigmatized as a “way of exercising political pressure”, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent.  Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.


From D-Day to Dooms Day


Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade.  French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future.  In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.


Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue.  The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army.  If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.


Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis.  He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him.  But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.


Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the “old” Europeans.  Apparently abandoning all Europe’s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.


Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference?  All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn.


A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?


Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

Friday, June 06, 2014

THEY LOVE THEIR KIDS TOO



Retired Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff explains what military life really entails.

ATTACKING HOSPITALS?



The village of Krasny Liman near Slavyansk in the Donetsk region was heavily shelled by the Ukrainian army during Kiev's military operation Tuesday.

Then the day after the shelling the Vineyard of the Saker reported:

National guard/right sector [fascists] entered Railroad Hospital Krasni Liman and shot dead 37 wounded Donbas Army soldiers and civilians and at least 1 hospital worker. Confirmed.

Both of these actions by the Ukrainian military have to be breaking international law.  Bombing and then entering hospitals and killing the wounded?  This is sick shit.

Who is directing this operation?  Who is funding this operation?  Folks need to wake the F*** up and see the evil doings the US has their hands in.......Bowe Bergdahl is right!

Thursday, June 05, 2014

WE WERE LIED TO.....



Brock McIntosh interviewed from Washington, DC. He fought with Army National Guard in Afghanistan from November 2008 to August 2009. McIntosh was based near where Bowe Bergdahl was captured. McIntosh had later applied for conscientious objector status and joined Iraq Veterans Against the War.

REFUGEE CRISIS BEGINS



Heavy artillery strikes on Eastern Ukraine have left the area on the brink of a humanitarian crisis: activists say the water supply in several cities in the region has been cut off. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes and crossed the border with Russia - where temporary refugee camps have been set up. And even more are expected to come, as Paula Slier has been finding out.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Bowe Bergdahl prepares for graduation from basic training near Fort Benning in Georgia.
 

Rolling Stone magazine has done a big story on Bergdahl.  Below are some excerpts.  You can see the full story here

On June 27, 2009, he sent what would be his final e-mail­ to his parents. It was a lengthy message documenting his complete disillusionment with the war effort. He opened it by addressing it simply to "mom, dad."

"The future is too good to waste on lies," Bowe wrote. "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be american. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

The e-mail went on to list a series of complaints: Three good sergeants, Bowe said, had been forced to move to another company, and "one of the biggest shit bags is being put in charge of the team." His battalion commander was a "conceited old fool." The military system itself was broken: "In the US army you are cut down for being honest... but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to do what ever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank... The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools." The soldiers he actually admired were planning on leaving: "The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same."

In the second-to-last paragraph of the e-mail, Bowe wrote about his broader disgust with America's approach to the war – an effort, on the ground, that seemed to represent the exact opposite of the kind of concerted campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of average Afghans envisioned by counterinsurgency strategists. "I am sorry for everything here," Bowe told his parents. "These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live." He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP. "We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks... We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them."

Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read as a suicide note. "I am sorry for everything," he wrote. "The horror that is america is disgusting." Then he signed off with a final message to his mother and father. "There are a few more boxes coming to you guys," he said, referring to his uniform and books, which he had already packed up and shipped off. "Feel free to open them, and use them."

On June 27th, at 10:43 p.m., Bob Bergdahl responded to his son's final message not long after he received it. His subject line was titled: OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!

In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?

Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.

Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.

HE GONE INJUN



Bergdahl went injun
just like dances
with wolves

I went injun
in the Black Hills
and Badlands
the drums,
the history,
the present

Going injun means
you don't follow the
party line anymore
the Army story

Those on horses
and helicopters
are sent to kill
and steal lands

they demonize
the 'savages'
the 'commies'
the 'terrorists'
works every time

Bergdahl has stories
to tell
but who will listen?

The media and right-wing
charge
against Bergdahl
is intended to make
others fear doing
similar things
makes the public
afraid to hear
or feel
his words

My bet is Bergdahl
made some friends
amongst the 'enemies'
very christian
thing to do

His captors ended
their video with
the words
"Don't come back
to Afghanistan"

They were talking
to us
but Obama
and Mr. Big
decided to keep
10,000 US troops
and thousands
of NATO soldiers
and corporate
mercenaries there

The release of Bergdahl
a public relations stunt
to make the American
people think the war
in Afghan town
is over

in all the clamor
we miss the story
about
troops staying
in the dusty
'war zone'

The magician
at it again
got to watch
both his hands

Bergdahl gone
injun
the modern version

THIS ISSUE - LESLIE MANNING



The latest edition of This Issue features Leslie Manning.  Leslie is a Quaker and an active peace and social justice person and a member of the new group in Bath called Midcoast Citizens for Sustainable Economies.  She talks about the need for conversion/diversification of the military industrial complex in Maine and invites the public to attend a forum on the subject that will be held on June 27. Leslie formerly served as deputy director of the Bureau of Labor Standards for Maine’s Department of Labor during the previous administration.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

WHO SAID THAT?

Nazi from Right Sector signs up for the Ukraine National Guard to 'put every Russian in Krim to the knife'


Here are some words from others that I've come across in recent days.  First two are good and the last one reveals some of the thinking from inside the offices of Mr. Big.


Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a prominent role. That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law giving the French language official status, appointed a billionaire oligarch to run Quebec and signed an association agreement with a Russian-led trade bloc.
Just imagine…. If Russia had spent $5 billion on regime change in Canada and then a leading Canadian energy firm had appointed to its board of directors the son of a top Russian government politician.
  • Subrata Ghoshroy is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Ghoshroy had worked in the field of high-energy laser before he turned defence analyst and whistleblower against faked ‘Star Wars’ missile defence tests by US weapons contractors. At MIT, a private research university in the US city of Cambridge, he directs a project to promote nuclear stability in South Asia.  He says:

This vision of America – being a force for and doing good in the world – is really believed by the people and policy makers. But in many instances, or actually most instances, they are certainly doing the opposite. They don’t understand different cultures, the peculiarities of different societies and civilisations, so they see everything in this American way. “Our democracy, our form of democracy, is the right one” even though there are other civilisations that have lived for thousands of years.

The collapse of one super power, the Soviet Union, marked the beginning of the United States as a hyper power. Blind faith in technology fuelled unilateralism, variously termed as humanitarian, pre-emptive and regime change interventions. This hyper power is totally defying the United Nations, it is totally against everything. That has led to lawlessness in and out the country. “We don’t like the government in Iraq. So let’s go change it.”  But, I am optimistic that the post-Cold War order may be coming to an end.

Diplomacy is about give and take. U.S. policy is not diplomacy in that way. Yes, they have their diplomats who sit down across the table with the people of Iran or wherever. But the moment that their plan is not accepted, diplomacy is over. They will bomb. So they don’t care about diplomacy in the original sense of the term where you negotiate for a peaceful solution of give and take. Either, it’s my way or the highway.
  • Christopher R. Hill, former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was US Ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Macedonia, and Poland, a US special envoy for Kosovo, a negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, and the chief US negotiator with North Korea from 2005-2009, i.e. a big shot in the US imperial nomenklatura.  Hill shows his frustration with Russia not submitting to the authority of corporate globalization:

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and ongoing intimidation of Ukraine appears to mean the end of a 25-year period whose hallmark was an effort to bring Russia into greater alignment with Euro-Atlantic goals and traditions. Now the question is: What comes next? .... [the] new world order held for almost 25 years. Except for Russia’s brief war with Georgia in August 2008 (a conflict generally seen as instigated by reckless Georgian leadership), Russia’s acquiescence and commitment to the “new world order,” however problematic, was one of the great accomplishments of the post-Cold War era. Even Russia’s reluctance to support concerted Western action, such as in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990’s, was based on arguments that could be heard in other European countries. Russian democracy certainly had its share of flaws, but that hardly made it unique among post-communist countries.... Americans do need to understand the challenge they are facing from a Russia that no longer seems interested in what the West has been offering for the last 25 years: special status with NATO, a privileged relationship with the European Union, and partnership in international diplomatic endeavor....The Ukraine crisis is really a Russian crisis. Ukraine – whatever is eventually left of it – will increasingly become a Western country. Russia is showing no sign that it will follow suit.

NATO EXPANSION: FUNDAMENTAL BLUNDER



Former US Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) calls NATO expansion a "fundamental blunder". This is an excerpt from a Carnegie Council talk he gave on January 23, 2008.

So even in 2008 Bradley could see that NATO expansion was causing problems for Russia and in fact violated promises the US made to Russia at the time the Berlin Wall came down.

Russia should remember what the Indians said about the Great White Father in Washington.  The white man speaks with a forked tongue.

US GIVES UKRAINE GREEN LIGHT TO KILL THEIR OWN CITIZENS



Top Pentagon official has praised the way the Ukrainian military is dealing with anti-government forces. Assistant Defence Secretary Derek Chollet is in Kiev - and he says he's impressed with the work being done.

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

LET'S PLAY MONOPOLY


HIGH TECH DARK AGES


It's the high tech
dark ages
the future
takes us back
in time

the high tech
dark ages
candlelight
by laser
our chains
are in our minds
and attached
to our credit cards

the high tech
dark ages
everyone
gets watched
no discrimination
by the NSA
our new
big daddy

the high tech
dark ages
you can move
underground
or into a cave
the banks
have yet to
put a price
on darkness
but it won't be long

the high tech
dark ages
we can fly
into space
but can't,
or won't,
bother with
those suffering
back on terra firma

the high tech
dark ages
brought to you
by.....
now showing
in every theater

THE SYRIAN VOTE



With the opposition forces failing to unite, Syria is now turning into a huge battleground. The country is ready to elect a new President. Over 9,000 polling stations have been set up for some 15 million eligible voters. Despite the bloody civil conflict and threat of a wide spread boycott, many still want their voices to be heard. RT's Maria Finoshina has more

$1 BILLION MORE FOR WAR IN EUROPE



While Rome burns Obama is promising $1 billion to boost America's military presence in Eastern Europe. All as part of the US-NATO plan to encircle Russia.

The president says he'll send more troops and equipment to step up the region's security amid the Ukrainian crisis. The announcement came during his visit to Poland.

PRISONER OF WAR



We are all in some way prisoners of endless war......

Bowe Bergdahl, the last known American prisoner of war in Afghanistan, has been freed in a prison swap with the Taliban five years after his capture. Bergdahl was captured after reportedly walking off his base unarmed. He was said to have left a note claiming he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan, and was leaving to start a new life.

Bergdahl’s parents, Bob and Jani, had first revealed their son was the subject of prisoner swap negotiations three years ago when U.S.-Taliban talks broke down. In the lead-up to his son’s release, Bob Bergdahl spoke to The Guardian’s Sean Smith in an exclusive interview filmed around the Idaho countryside where the family lives. "I don’t think anybody can relate to the prisoners in Guantánamo more than our family, because it’s the same thing," Bob Bergdahl told Smith. "How could we have such a high standard of judicial process for horrible war criminals [during World War II] ... and yet now we can go for 10-11 years without even having judicial process? It’s just wrong."

NATO CONTINUES WAR PREPARATIONS AGAINST RUSSIA



US-NATO call it 'collective defense'.  I call it provocative and destabilizing offense.

NATO also uses the word 'inter-operability' which means all NATO countries buy weapons from the US military industrial complex and run them through the enormous Pentagon space warfare satellite system.  That ensures the US military controls everything but the bonus is they get the NATO member states to help pay for it.

US-NATO see their alliance as the global military arm of corporate capitalism.  It's the substitute for the United Nations which has that sticky and uncontrollable General Assembly where all the nations of the world have their chance to speak.  And that pain-in-the-ass Security Council where Russia and China can veto any motion to support attacks by the US and its war happy allies.

NATO clears all that away.  The US controls NATO and gets no push back from the 'members'.  What the US wants they get.

The US-NATO (appointed, approved, armed, directed, funded, propped-up, controlled) government in Kiev is stepping up air attacks on eastern Ukraine.  The video below shows the aftermath from yesterday's bombing of Lugansk City Administration Building in the center of Lugansk by a single Ukrainian Air Force Sukhoi ground attack airplane. The building is the titular headquarters of Donbas Republic but 95% of the offices and workers in that building are city administration workers, civilians doing their work for the citizens of Lugansk and most of whom have worked there for years. 



The US-NATO know that by killing civilians in eastern Ukraine they put enormous pressure on Russia to respond.  The NATO trap is being set and if Russia moves to protect the people in the east, just a few miles from the Russian border, then the stage will be set for all out war.

Monday, June 02, 2014

JOIN US IN BATH FOR GREAT DISCUSSION


JUST WORDS


The words
fit together
hand in glove
democracy
means capitalism
and capitalism
means democracy

Freedom means
free to pillage
and plunder
and kill
and grab resources
anywhere
anytime
on behalf
of Mr. Big

Freedom
means
you can buy
35 varities
of sausages,
or get the color
of the car
you most like,
or the big screen
TV

Freedom also means
Mr. Big can buy
election$
any time
politician$
are for $ale

there are serious limits
on what issues
election campaigns
can cover,
it's  clearly understood
by the candidates
inside the box

Freedom does not
bring
freedom of the press
or freedom to
occupy the town square
or to have
phone conversations
or email exchanges
that are truly private

Freedom,
democracy,
capital
all mean
the same
these days

So where can
truth
be found
when words
have no
real meaning?

GROWING PROBLEM OF SPACE JUNK



Tens of thousands of pieces of space debris are circling our planet at high speed, threatening to strike satellites and bring down the International Space Station. And some American experts even warn that in just 50 years time we might not be able to fly into space at all.

Sunday, June 01, 2014

FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE



The Truthseeker production folks called last week and invited me to do an interview for this weekend's edition of their show.  The topic is US-NATO 'Full Spectrum Dominance'.

Chicago friend Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO is also on the show.  I have so much respect for his intellect and honesty.  He must have a photographic mind  - I've seen few that can remember the loads of stuff that he does.

Near the end of the show they put on the screen our poster for Keep Space for Peace Week (October 4-11).  I was glad to see that.

SUNDAY SONG