We Have a Right to Live

United States of Oil

It's time
for a name change
let's face the facts
the U.S.
is not really
a country
it is
instead
one big ass
fossil fuel
corporation

Climate change?
What the hell
is that?

In some respects
Trump
is more direct
as he without shame
places top
corporate operatives
in key
positions of power

In past administrations,
like Obama's,
there was more illusion
slight of hand
appearing
to be a democracy
but governing
on behalf of corporate
interests

Trump does not appear
to wish to hide
the mob's control
democracy is out
corporate execs in

So let's
just change
the name
and maybe the national anthem
too

'bombs bursting in air
grave proof that
the oil is
still there'

Bruce

Space Issues Talk in Visakhapatnam, India

Thanks to Will Griffin from Veterans for Peace who recorded this short talk of mine during our recent tour to India and Nepal.

This talk was in Visakhapatnam at the local university before students and staff in the foreign language department.

Along with me Global Network board members J. Narayana Rao, Dave Webb and Will Griffin also spoke at each event we did during the tour.

While in Visakhapatnam, following the space conference that was hosted by Gitam University, we did several days of speaking to high school, college and university students.  For several days we were doing three talks a day - this one was the last of that particular day taking place in the early evening.  By then we were all getting a bit worn out but tried to give each new talk all that we had.

Bruce

FDR & John Kerry Descendants of Drug Dealers

‘The China Opium Trade’

James Bradley is the author of the best-selling The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (Little Brown, 2015). In these excerpts from his interview with John Pilger, he describes how modern America was built on the ‘China trade’.

James Bradley: For most of American history, it was illegal for someone like me to know a Chinese. The Chinese came to America to mine gold and build the railroads, and Americans decided we didn’t like competition. So in 1882 we had the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which kept the Chinese out of the United States for about 100 years. Just at the point we were putting up the Statue of Liberty saying we welcome everybody, we were erecting a wall saying: ‘We welcome everybody except those Chinese.’

John Pilger: And yet, for the American elite in the 19th century, China was a goldmine.

JB: A goldmine of drugs. Warren Delano, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the American opium king of China; he was the biggest American opium dealer, second only to the British. Much of the east coast [establishment] of the United States – Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton – was born of drug money. The American industrial revolution was funded by huge pools of money – where did this come from? It came from illegal drugs in the biggest market in the world: China.

JP: So the grandfather of the most liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a drug runner?

JB: Yes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt never made much money in his life. He had public-service jobs that were very lowly paid, but he inherited a fortune from Warren Delano, his father. Now if you scratch anyone with the name Forbes, you’ll find opium money… such as John Forbes Kerry…

JP: That’s the present Secretary of State.

JB: Yes. His great-grandfather [Francis Blackwell Forbes] was an opium dealer. How big was opium money? Opium money built the first industrial city in the United States. It built the first five railroads. But it wasn’t talked about. It was called the China trade.

Trump and Space Weapons

 

The Pentagon's 'Rods from God' space weapons program may have new life under a Trump regime

“What the U.S. is up to will destabilize the world.”

By Karl Grossman

It is highly likely that the Trump administration will move to have the U.S. deploy weapons in space. If this happens, it will be profoundly destabilizing, setting off an arms race and, also likely, leading to war in space.

For decades there’s been interest by U.S. administrations—the Reagan administration with its “Star Wars” plan a leading example—in placing weapons in space. But that has alternated with some administrations more-or-less opposed, the Obama administration an example.

Still, no matter the administration, since work at the United Nations began in 1985 on a treaty seeking, as its title declares, the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, the U.S. has not supported it. Canada, Russia and China have been leaders in urging passage of this PAROS treaty, and there has been virtually universal backing from nations around the world. But by balking, U.S. administration after administration has prevented its passage.

With the Trump administration, more than non-support of the PAROS treaty is probable. A drive by the U.S. to weaponize space appears in the offing.

The weaponization of space has long been sought by the U.S. military. The U.S. Air Force Space Command and U.S. Space Command (now merged into the U.S. Strategic Command) have repeatedly described space as the “ultimate high ground.” There has been continued development of space weapons.

Atomic physicist Edward Teller, the main figure in developing the hydrogen bomb and instrumental in founding Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, pitched to Ronald Reagan, when he was governor of California visiting the lab, a plan of orbiting hydrogen bombs which became the initial basis for Reagan’s “Star Wars.” The bombs were to energize X-ray lasers. “As the bomb at the core of an X-ray battle station exploded, multiple beams would flash out to strike multiple targets before the entire station consumed itself in in a ball of nuclear fire,” explained New York Times journalist William Broad in his book Star Warriors.

Teller’s orbiting H-bomb scheme, code-named Excalibur, was finally dropped, in part, according to Broad, because another Reagan advisor, Army Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, felt the U.S. “public would never accept the placement of nuclear weapons in space.”

So there was a shift on “Star Wars to battle platforms having nuclear reactors or “super” plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generators on board that would provide the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and also laser weapons.

What kind of space weaponry might scientists and the military sell Trump on?

“Under Trump, GOP to Give Space Weapons Close Look,” was the headline of an article last month in Roll Call, a reliable 61-year-old Washington-based media outlet. The article said “Trump’s thinking on missile defense and military space programs have gotten next to no attention, as compared to the president-elect’s other defense proposals….But experts expect such programs to account for a significant share of what is likely to be a defense budget boost, potentially amounting to $500 billion or more in the coming decade.”

Intense support for the Republican president’s plans is anticipated from the GOP-dominated Congress. Roll Call noted that Representative Trent Franks, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and an Arizona Republican, “said the GOP’s newly strengthened hand in Washington means a big payday is coming for programs aimed at developing weapons that can be deployed in space.”

It quoted Franks as saying: “It was a Democrat mindset that caused us to step back from space-based defense assets to ostensibly not ‘weaponize space,’ while our enemies proceeded to do just that, and now, we find ourselves in a grave deficit.”

Read the rest of this important article here or here

She is Right on This One!

Prayers and Action Needed to Protect Mother Earth

Meet the New Secretary of Endless War

My thinking is that Trump will help bring on the inevitable collapse of the American empire.  If people and countries around the world have any good sense they will not follow the US over the cliff.

Trump represents the collective sickness of white supremacy, imperial over reach, arrogance, and undeserved sense of exceptionalism.

'Mad Dog' Mattis exudes this American sense of arrogance and entitlement.  His words to the Iraqi people repeatedly indicate this notion that 'we came, we conquered'.  Imagining him in the role of Secretary of War, armed with the biggest military in human history, is frightening.  Will he walk into a room full of Russian or Chinese leaders and figure he can order them to do this or that and threaten to 'brawl' if they do not comply?

It's mind blowing to consider.

The US is like a cowboy gambler with a black hat on a Mississippi riverboat playing cards.  The cowboy looks around and sees himself surrounded by those he has exploited for years.  He thinks his only way out is to start shooting – the law of the west.  That, I think, is essentially still the foreign and military policy of the US.  Its part arrogance and part fear that the world has woken up at last and is rejecting the cowboy mentality of ‘full spectrum dominance’.

Growing global poverty and the reality of climate change though are banging on Washington’s front door.  The corporations are trying to make money from climate change – their love for the dollar bill is so great that they cannot see beyond their lust for power and greed.  I call them pirates.

The pirates have buried a treasure chest in the US – it is our national treasury created by the taxes from the people’s hard work.  About 55% of every federal tax dollar under the discretion of Congress goes to the Pentagon.  America has become a war culture.  Our economy is addicted to military production.  People are increasingly  being indoctrinated to believe the ‘Muslims-Russians-Chinese’ are coming to attack us so we must spend even more on weapons for war and we must have the very best space technology system in place to 'protect' ourselves.  We are a paranoid nation – massive guilt and fear comes from our long legacy of corruption and genocide. 

The bottom line is that much of America has lost its soul.  By becoming a killer nation we've lost touch with the sacred around us - our Mother Earth and all the life that inhabits this wondrous planet.  Nothing much changes until we heal this collective broken spirit.

Native people are calling for more prayer as one way to reconnect with the goodness of the sacred.  We also need to speak the truth more than ever as the dark forces try to smother the light.

We cannot cower and shirk in fear during these coming days.  All life - the plants, the animals, the land, water, air, human life - depend on us standing tall in our own communities and speaking the truth.

Bruce

What Are We Doing to the Minds of Our Youth?

This video reveals the reality of America today.

Under corporate globalization of the world economy the Pentagon has been saying that every country will have a different role.  In America we will not make shoes, clothes, cars, TV's or cell phones anymore.  We will make war on behalf of corporate interests around the world.  The Pentagon calls it 'Security Export'.

The airshows, violent movies, military recruitment in our schools, and many other cultural avenues are all aimed at militarizing our culture.  The kids are being taught that violence is cool and normal.  The word 'freedom' comes to mean that the US, the 'exceptional' nation, is free to rape, kill and pillage around the world.

The mega-resource extraction corporations are out to take control of the world's remaining oil, natural gas, water and precious minerals.  In order to accomplish this greedy goal these corporations must have an ongoing supply of boots on the ground to do the fighting and killing on behalf of their interests.

Cutbacks in public education funding and loss of jobs across America ensure that the future generations have no real future.  But they've been repeatedly told that they can join the military, make good money, and have 'fun' while they 'see the world'.  The fact that suicides among returned war veterans is now at epidemic rates is not shared at these air shows.

It was announced just last week that the Navy's Blue Angels will come back to Brunswick, Maine next August 26-27 to do another air show.  We'll be out there protesting as we have in the past.

Thanks to Michael Hanes for making this video about our very sick culture.  He asks this important question, "What are we doing to the minds of our youth?"

Bruce

Who Wants to Control the World?

The Coming War on China is John Pilger's 60th film for ITV.

Pilger reveals what the news doesn't - that the world's greatest military power, the United States, and the world's second economic power, China, both nuclear-armed, are on the road to war.

Pilger's film is a warning and an inspiring story of resistance.

Huntsville: Global Network 25th Annual Space Conference

Pivot Toward War:

US Missile Defense

and the Weaponization of Space

25th Annual Space Organizing Conference & Protest

April 7-9, 2017

Huntsville, Alabama

Join us for the 25th anniversary of the Global Network at this important conference and protest in the community known as the ‘Pentagon of the South’.

Huntsville is the home of the Redstone Arsenal and the Space Command’s directorate for ‘missile defense’.  Huntsville is the manufacturing site for the PAC-3, SM-3 missile defense (MD) systems while the controversial THAAD is built in another part of Alabama.  Redstone Arsenal was the place where after WWII German rocket scientists were brought by the U.S., using their scientific and technological expertise to help create the US space and weapons programs.  The GN had a similar meeting in Huntsville in 2001.

The US is currently encircling Russia and China with MD systems based on Navy Aegis warships (SM-3 interceptor missiles) and with ground-based launchers (PAC-3 and THAAD).  These systems are the ‘shield’ that would be used to pick-off Russian or Chinese retaliatory strikes after a Pentagon first-strike attack.  MD systems were previously banned by the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty because they are destabilizing and give one side an advantage.  George W. Bush pulled the US out of the ABM Treaty in 2001 and since that time the US MD program has been on steroids.

This conference, to be held in the heartland of the conservative south, will be a great opportunity for peace groups everywhere to learn more about the role of US MD systems which could be key triggers to start WW III. Help the growing global movement against MD and space weapons build greater opposition to these destabilizing programs.

We invite peace groups worldwide to become co-sponsors of this timely conference and to send representatives to join the protest at Redstone Arsenal on April 7 and the conference on April 8-9.  Organizations interested in being listed as event co-sponsors are asked to pay $100 - $500 (whatever you can best afford).

More information about complete conference agenda will be available soon.  Send inquires to the GN at globalnet@mindspring.com or (207) 443-9502.

True Talk

Sunday Song