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, December 04, 2021

Is US-NATO provoking Russia in Ukraine because of energy resources?

 


We are constantly told that tensions are rising dramatically between US-NATO and Russia over Ukraine.
 
What is actually driving the conflict along Russia's border these days?
 
GN board member Will Griffin again has produced another important video that takes us deep into the reasons for growing conflict between the US-NATO and Russia. (Ukraine is just a tool that is used by Washington to destabilize the region.)
 
In the end the video makes quite clear it is mostly about energy. Europe is in an energy crisis and Russia has built the Nordstream-2 pipeline to send natural gas to Germany and beyond. The US has long opposed this pipeline because Washington wants Europe to buy more expensive fracked (LNG) gas from the US - sent overseas via ships.
 
With the melting Arctic Sea it will be possible to drill for fossil fuels in that region. But Russia has the largest border with the Arctic. The video shares how the Rand Corporation (that compiled the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers) has created a plan to break Russia into smaller nations thus making it easier for western fossil fuel corporations to control the Arctic.
 
The US-NATO count on the western public to miss the real story driving these dangerous military escalations along Russia's borders.

Friday, December 03, 2021

An organizer’s dilemma


  What to do about the burning issue of our time?

 

I’ve been a political organizer since 1978 when I quit college to go to work for the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). After my training in California I was sent back to Florida, where I lived at the time, to organize Black and Hispanic fruit pickers.

An organizers primary job is to understand a particular issue well enough to be able to help the public grasp the concern so that they can react and help in some way to deal with the problem.

By nature I am a cautious person so going out on a limb is not my first inclination. I study things first, talk with others to get a reading on how they view the issue, then begin to form my own way of talking about it. Thus my hope is always to find a path to help move others (and myself) into reflection and ultimately action. But over the years I’ve learned that sometimes I have to step out no matter who is coming along with me if I think it is the right and timely thing to do.

The current controversy about covid, the jab, QR codes, mandates, lock-downs and growing social division has caused me many sleepless nights. I’ve been watching an inordinate number of videos (with doctors, scientists, patients, etc.), reading countless articles, watching protest videos from around the globe as increasing numbers reject the GreenPass mandates, and much more.

I’ve not taken any covid vaccines largely because I don’t trust Big Pharma. I’ve learned enough about how the system works – the boards and committees that ‘give approval’ for often untested vaccines are loaded with industry representatives who have serious conflicts of interest. The profits are enormous from new vaccines thus we see the demonization of proven off-patent medicines (like Ivermectin) that are cheap and thus a ‘threat’ to Big Pharma profits.

I don’t criticize anyone else for taking the vaccine or wearing a mask (my own wife Mary Beth reluctantly took the J & J jab). People do what they need to do. But at least I'd like to have a principled dialogue with people. I believe we all can learn from one another if we stay open.

That has turned out to be challenging at times – having honest and heartfelt discussions with friends and associates. Some people I know (from liberals to self-professed radicals) are unwilling to even have serious conversations.

Thus witnessing this current trend of clampdown on discussion and increasing government mandates has moved me to write this. I’ve made a list below of some experiences during my life that inform why I am generally suspicious of authority. I believe it is a survival technique.

I’ve learned to trust my heart, my mind, and my senses of smell and taste when it comes to various issues. Somethings just don’t smell or taste right to me. That leads me to undertake wider investigation. I am driven to learn, to understand, and to react as best I can.

 


  • Growing up in a military family we often moved. In the winter of 1962 we went from England to South Dakota (Ellsworth AFB). We arrived in our family station wagon in the middle of a blizzard and from the back seat of the car I noticed what I call ‘shot gun shacks’ – old wooden houses with lots of holes in them. I shuddered to think how cold anyone might be living in those flimsy houses. I later learned they were Native people – Lakota. This began an intense process of investigation about Lakota (and other tribes) culture, history, and current conditions. In this process I learned how the US Army gave native people smallpox-laden blankets in order to kill those living on lands the government wanted. This was genocide.

  • In 1963 I was 11 years old and in the lunchroom at my school when we were told that President John F. Kennedy had been killed. As I grew older I became an avid reader about independent  investigations of his assassination and have never swallowed the scripted story about Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone shooter. I’ve long believed the 'alternative story' that JFK was killed by the CIA and organized crime.
  • A few years after JFK’s death I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent so I could fight against organized crime. I felt that I needed to get a jump on the career and sent away for an FBI correspondence course I found in some publication. It was from this that I learned about fingerprints and other such things. But the most important thing I learned was M.O. – Modus Operandi – every criminal has one – a way of repeating their same bad behavior over and over again. I eventually decided (while watching cops beat up civil rights and anti-war protesters on TV) that I could not participate in ‘law enforcement’ and later concluded my peace & justice work is all about fighting corporate organized crime. I often look for the MO.
  • While in the Air Force (1971-1974) during the Vietnam War I read the ‘Pentagon Papers’ which was the inside history compiled by the Rand Corporation of the corruption and deceit by our government in selling the war to the public and to Congress. This left a huge mark on my soul.

 

  • While working for the UFW (1978-1980) we spent much time standing outside grocery stores trying to get shoppers to boycott iceberg lettuce and grapes in solidarity with striking farm workers in California. We’d talk to the public about the terrible way farm workers were exploited by the corporate growers and the pesticides that the buyers of these products were consuming. It was tough sledding as most people didn’t want to hear about it.
  • From 1980 to 1983 I organized in the Black community in urban Orlando, Florida around a slew of social justice issues. One day a Black man I knew quite well pulled me aside and thanked me for my work in his community. He told me, “Unlike many white people who come into our community you never tried to take from us.” But then he told me that I ought to go work where the real problem was. He said it was the white community that had their foot on the necks of Black people. He suggested I take on that challenge knowing that the only way to help the Black community was to change the white world. I agreed and thanked him.
  • So it was then that I began to organize full-time in the peace community – mostly among liberal white folks. They were largely college educated people, middle to upper class, often heavily ‘invested’ in the stock market and the 'system' and in the main largely reluctant to get too radical. They were often concerned about their social status - what might people think of them if they got too politically frisky? I will always remember a talk I did in Daytona Beach in the mid-1980’s on nuclear weapons where a white middle class woman stood up and said as she walked toward the door, “You expect me to go to my bridge club and talk about all of this? If I did that I’d lose all of my friends”. I learned then that many liberals come to such meetings for ‘political entertainment’ but when it comes to putting your body on the line there were far too many social costs.
  • Around this same time bottled water began to become ‘popular’. It was sort of a social status thing to walk around with some new brand name bottle of water. It was then that I thought someday these capitalists are going to have us buying gas masks so we can get clean air.

 


  • On June 12, 1982 after watching C-SPAN coverage of the massive protest in New York City against nuclear weapons, the network switched to a right-wing conference featuring Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, the head of Star Wars (Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative). In the Q & A someone asked about the protest going on in NYC and he said, “We are moving into space. They don’t have a clue. Let them keep doing what they are doing.” It was in that moment that I began researching the space issue and began taking people to the Kennedy Space Center to protest military space launches. Our first protest only had eight of us there. People were slow to respond. By 1987 we had well over 5,000 for a protest against the first-flight test of the Trident missile at the same spot. That taught me that it takes time for folks to come around. They want to see who else is getting involved before they stick their toe in the water. Again it’s in large part a sociological phenomenon.
  • In 1999 (during Bill Clinton’s time in the White House) the US-NATO launched a war on Yugoslavia in order to break that Communist nation up into smaller countries enabling the capitalist block to take control of the region. I tried to get people to protest this war (where the US-NATO dropped depleted uranium bombs) but a Democrat was in office so most liberals I was working with didn’t want to publicly stand against their preferred political leadership.
  • On 9-11 I was in the waiting room at the dentist office and watched the media coverage of planes crashing into the twin towers in New York on the TV. I could smell and taste this false flag event. My mind flashed back to the Pentagon Papers and other times in US history where our nation was led into a war. When I got home I pulled out my world atlas and began to study that little known country called Afghanistan.

 

  • In 2014 I was one of the few Americans in the peace movement that immediately began writing and commenting about the US orchestrated coup d’état (by Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Victoria Nuland) in Ukraine. I was sometimes called a commie and a fool – even by some people on the ‘left’. 
  • I went to Ukraine in 2016 and then to Russia and the Donbass after that to learn for myself what was really going on in the region. During the Trump years I didn’t buy the ‘Russia-gate’ bullshit pedaled by the corporate media and the leadership of the Democrat party.
  • Once the covid plandemic began I tried sharing some information with one long-time friend and they told me to ‘Fuck off’. At that point the right-left ‘divide and conquer’ was well underway in the US and around the globe. Some of my closest friends and peace associates (who ordinarily complain about corporate endless resource wars) suddenly were touting the line from New York Times (remember shock and awe in 2003?), Washington Post, CNN, NPR, BBC, MSNBC (particularly Rachel Maddow) and more. Some of them mocked me and have called me ‘anti-vaxer’ (which I am not) and ‘horse paste ingester’. I’d try to share what I learned from doctors, scientists and about people who had died from the covid vaccine but most people didn’t want to hear it.
  • Soon after covid vaccines became available I was at a local bakery in Bath (which had to recently close due to the lock-downs) and I noticed a man and woman my age bragging how they just got the jab. They felt so safe now as they ordered GMO-free pastries at the shop. That moment jumped out at me after recently watching a short video clip of Bill Gates and his wife describe how they were injecting little African kids in the arm with ‘GMO-based vaccines’.


  • I have five sisters. One of them, just a bit older than me, lives in Iowa and recently came down with covid. She has not taken the jab. She got a prescription for Ivermectin (which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015)  from a courageous doctor. Without that treatment (which is being used all over the world, particularly in poor countries that can’t afford the expensive Big Pharma vaccines) her life could be on the line.
  • I honor all those who dare raise uncomfortable questions about this covid bio-weapon that I believe was first created at the Fort Detrick US Army ‘Futures Command’ lab in Maryland. Anthony Fauci sold the ‘gain-of-function’ technology to China’s Wuhan laboratory where it was likely leaked - accidentally or not.  (Gain-of-function refers to experiments that intentionally modify a pathogen to create the ability to cause or worsen disease, enhance transmissibility, and/or create novel strains with potential to cause global spread in humans.) 

 


  • I honor those (on the right or the left) who show courage and challenge the profit-centered Big Pharma industry.
  • I honor Robert F. Kennedy Jr who has dared to challenge the ‘official line’ and daily takes hits from people who claim to be ‘progressive’ but don't appear able to see the writing on the wall. RFK Jr urges people to read the last chapter of his new book about Fauci where he clearly exposes the CIA, the military industrial complex and Big Pharma for working together to create this plandemic while making massive profit and destroying democracy.

 


  • I honor those who continue to publish articles and videos that question the mainstream corporate covid narrative and routinely get their posts removed from social media in the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’. Where is the ACLU on this growing mass surveillance program now underway with QR codes, mandates and lock-downs? How can this nation (and much of the world) consider themselves democratic anymore?
  • I end with a quote from the great philosopher (and New York Yankee baseball catcher) Yogi Berra who said, “You can take ‘em to the ballgame, but you can’t make ‘em go in.” 

That has become my organizing philosophy. I’ll keep trying….

Bruce 

Thursday, December 02, 2021

Washington calling the shots in Ukraine

 

US Army adviser in the middle while woman on right wears death squad patch on her arm

 

U.S. pushes Ukraine to relaunch Donbass conflict, while accusing Russia of wanting to attack

 

By Christelle Néant

The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR) has denounced the way in which the United States is trying to make people believe that Russia wants to attack Ukraine, while at the same time Washington is pushing Kiev to restart the Donbass war.

The head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, told a journalist from the Rossia 1 channel that behind the reports that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine lies Washington’s desire to push Kiev to attack the Donbass.

“The objective is to try to push the poorly controlled government in Kiev to reignite the conflict in eastern Ukraine. And for the US, Ukraine is just a consumable in this whole thing, but they want to reignite the conflict with renewed vigour. Of course we have to keep cool and strengthen our country’s defence capability,” he said.

 

One of the Ukrainian death squads - the Azov battalion displays their flags



The head of the SVR was also keen to deny reports that Russia wants to invade Ukraine. He said that the United States was pushing Kiev to attack the Donbass by spreading rumours about an alleged Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“I have to reassure everyone that nothing like that will happen. […] In general, everything that is happening now around this issue is, of course, a malicious propaganda action by the US State Department. The State Department is injecting these fakes, these lies to its allies, to the heads of the media and to the heads of the political centres in the United States so that they multiply and multiply and multiply these lies. And they have built a big bubble around it,” Naryshkin added.

And the injection of all this war hysteria around Russia and Ukraine is not only taking place in the media, but also through diplomatic channels.

According to the SVR, “the Western diplomatic corps in Ukraine has reportedly seen an increase in US activity aimed at gaining support from European allies to contain Russia“. It adds that “the tone of this dialogue is tougher“.

And to sow hysteria among Western countries, the US can count on the help of the British, who are not to be outdone in terms of Russophobia.

“In particular, a meeting of representatives of EU diplomatic missions in Ukraine was held in Kiev in mid-November this year, attended by senior US and British diplomats. Emissaries from Washington and London tried to create panic by continuing to manipulate false information about the imminent full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the subsequent occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russia. They insisted that EU countries should adopt a united approach. According to the American and British interpretation, this is the only way to save the Russophobic regime in Kiev,” says the SVR press service.


The secret services building in Kiev, Ukraine. Who really runs the country?



At the meeting, the US and Britain also called on European countries to supply energy to Ukraine, trying “to impose on the EU the costly responsibility of maintaining the viability of the Ukrainian economy amidst Ukraine’s unprecedented corruption, decaying energy infrastructure and rising energy prices“. EU countries thus find themselves “responsible for ensuring that Ukraine does not lose its economic resilience during the upcoming harsh winter“. As if the current energy crisis was not already a real quagmire for the EU countries, now they have to keep the Ukrainian Titanic afloat…

The problem is that “the EU states, which are themselves facing serious problems, do not want to feed the corrupt Ukrainian authorities“, because “Europe currently sees no prospect of Ukraine becoming a civilised and predictable partner“, says the SVR statement.

Moreover, the European diplomats “are aware that the Americans and the British are artificially fanning the flames of hysteria in order to present Russia as the culprit for all the problems if the adventurers in Kiev attack the Donbass“, while they “note that the Ukrainian authorities are themselves provoking tensions in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk“.

In other words, the European countries are not very keen to open their wallets, and even less so to go and fight for Ukraine against Russia.

And while the United States maintains the hysteria around a hypothetical invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Kiev continues to fuel the escalation in the Donbass. On 30 November 2021, for example, a civilian was injured in the Petrovsky district of Donetsk, DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic), as a result of Ukrainian army small arms fire.

The 34-year-old man was shot in the left thigh and taken to hospital in an extremely serious condition. The man, who is disabled from injuries sustained in 2015 in his own backyard from Ukrainian army mortar fire, received a gunshot wound, has a multi-dislocated open fracture of the lower third of his left femur, and is in shock. For the moment doctors do not know if they will be able to save him.

 

Ukrainian soldiers regularly display Nazi symbols. These are the troops that US-NATO are arming, training and directing.


On the same day, the Ukrainian army made another attempt to carry out a terrorist attack using drones against the village of Sakhanka in the south of the DPR.

Fortunately, the anti-aircraft defence forces of the People’s Militia prevented the two drones sent by the Ukrainian army from reaching the village. One of the two drones crashed behind the front line, but the second one fell on DPR territory. It was recovered, and like the drone of 24 November in Donetsk, this one was carrying an explosive charge with metal elements, in order to maim as many people as possible who might have been nearby.

While the United States maintains media hysteria by screaming about imaginary invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Kiev continues to reignite the conflict with war crimes and terrorist attacks against Donbass civilians. These are the facts that this shameless American propaganda is trying to conceal with disinformation and hysterical accusatory inversion. 

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Jabs, jail time or fines....

 


The clampdown is here folks.... freedom and liberty are slipping away....

Big Pharma now in charge of defining human and civil rights. Bad deal for the people.

 




Russian perspective on space arms race

 


Dr. Vladimir Kozin, PhD, Member, Russian Academy of Military Sciences, and Special Advisor to the Russian Presidential Administration discusses Anti-Satellite technology and dangers; space junk is a big global problem; the arms race in space.

Kozin has spoken at two Global Network annual space conferences over the years - one in Kiruna, Sweden and the other in Moscow.

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Hungarian Community for Peace on Refugee Crisis

 

 

The West caused its own refugee crisis
Resolution of the Hungarian Community for Peace
 

The relentless flow of refugees from North Africa, the Balkans and the East shows that the Western powers do not want to cope with the consequences of their imperial policies, migration. They are reluctant to acknowledge that migration cannot be stopped without ensuring normal living conditions in the country of refugees. 

The West does not want to give up the resources it owes to its wealth and prosperity at the cost of impoverishing others. He drinks the juice of his colonial and new colonial policies, endangering the security of allies who have nothing to do with colonization or migration caused by oppression, wars, or destruction. 

 


The recent extraordinary meeting of the Prime Ministers of the Visegrad Four in Budapest clearly reflected the vulnerability of Eastern Europe to the consequences of migration. The whip of flawed Western politics is snapping at us. The center uses Poland, Lithuania and Hungary as a buffer zone to protect itself and its prosperity. Yet the refugee crisis cannot be solved by raising new walls! All walls can be bypassed and demolished. Bridges would be needed instead of walls! Cooperation is needed instead of confrontation. 

It must be seen that the East does not take on the consequences of the West's bankruptcy policy, does not sustain, does not settle migrants instead of the West, but rather helps them get where they want to go.
 
It is feared that if they are admitted, more will come. If, on the other hand, they are not allowed in, they could besiege the western borders. We are already witnessing this situation. The solution would have been obvious, but for that we should cooperate with the East, not to succumb to blind anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian hatred, pursue a policy of sanctions and threatening. 

 

 

NATO itself is not suitable for this solution, as migration cannot be stopped by military means. This would pour oil on the fire. So what can be done? Choose between wall or bridge construction! 

For a migrant to stay at home, we need to help rebuild their homeland! It costs money. Lots of money. Not as much as the empire took from the subjugated peoples, but the prosperity of the West would also suffer. The West is trapped in its own politics! The way out would be equal cooperation, as wall and barbed wire are only seemingly cheaper than a perpetual state of siege of which we Eastern Europeans could become the main victims.

The Hungarian Community for Peace sees the solution to the refugee crisis in the West's involvement in the reconstruction of the war-torn Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. 

Above all, you must respect human rights, the right of others to a life worthy of human being! The EU needs to get out of the impasse, even if it costs a lot! It would be good not only for yourself but also for the world to finally move towards equal international cooperation instead of a policy of confrontation.


Budapest, 28 November 2021

Monday, November 29, 2021

Journalist Karl Grossman interviews Bruce Gagnon

 


Enviro Close-Up:  Bruce Gagnon and Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space interviewed by Karl Grossman.


The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space is the leading group internationally working to keep space for peace. In this Enviro Close-Up, Bruce Gagnon, its coordinator since it was established in 1992, details his impetus in challenging the turning of space into a war zone. He tells of hearing Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, head of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” declaring as nearly a million people protested in New York City against nuclear weapons, “we are moving into space. They don’t have a clue.” 

Now with the U.S. Space Force having been formed, the push by the U.S. to “control space and dominate space” continues intensely, says Gagnon. And this despite the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, put together by the U.S., the former Soviet Union and Great Britain, setting aside space for peaceful purposes. 

Gagnon speaks of the aerospace industry seeking to get the money to pay for the U.S. moving into space militarily by taking it from “entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what’s left of the social safety net.” He speaks of the links between space weaponization and the use of nuclear power in space. He discusses the many activities of the Global Network and how people can join in. 

And although from a military family, he tells of how he became an organizer for the United Farm Workers Union under Cesar Chavez leading to his decades as a peace advocate and organizer.

~ Journalism professor Karl Grossman (New York) and Bruce Gagnon have been working together on space issues since the late 1980's.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

A most important conversation




"Bobby Kennedy's book speaks truth at a time when health care becomes health harm and untruth rules through anti-science and fake news." 
~ Dr. Vandana Shiva, director of Navdanya and author of Oneness vs. the 1%
 

"The story of Dr. Fauci's rise and reign is really all about the absolute corruption of our major institutions - government, medicine, academia, and (above all) the press - by Big Pharma (and the Gates Foundation). Those of us who really do believe in science...now have this book to help rid the world of that corruption."
~ Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University; editor, News from Underground
 

I recently received RFK Jr.'s new book about Anthony Fauci in the mail - Mary Beth started reading it and we both watched this interview.

RFK Jr. has been demonized unfairly by the corporate dominated media. Is that any surprise? 
 
Think about how much advertising is done by Big Pharma and other corporate interests on TV.  Who owns most of the mainstream media? Think about Operation Mockingbird as well.

This is a story that is crucial to all of humanity about corruption, greed, deceit, criminality, arrogance, fascism and evil (which I don't say lightly).

How come the side that RFK Jr. represents gets so little real airtime - even on 'alternative media'?

Some people are reluctant to step into this conversation. I cannot dare to ignore this - my conscience won't allow me to remain silent. 
 
In this interview RFK Jr. suggests you read his last chapter first. I did that and found a well documented story that reveals how the CIA, military industrial complex, and Big Pharma have been working together for years to weaponize bio-labs, vaccines, and GreenPass mandates that are being used globally as a key strategy in the corporate clampdown on 'democracy' and the robbery of the public's treasury. This is high-tech piracy.

The evidence is overwhelming - all one has to do is open their heart and mind to see it.

I hope you will have the inquisitiveness and courage to watch this video and/or read the book.

Bruce 



Sunday song