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, November 05, 2022

Return Imran Khan to power in Pakistan

 


 

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan (ousted in a coup directed by the US) made his first public address since he was shot during a protest march in the eastern city of Wazirabad.

Khan's protest march and rallies, which started last Friday, were peaceful until Thursday's attack. 

Khan accused Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Interior Minister and army Gen. Faisal Naseer of orchestrating the shooting, which hit Khan in the right leg, above the ankle.

History lesson: Nuclear city buried in Greenland

 


 

Tons of nuclear waste from a secret military operation are hiding underneath Greenland's Ice sheet. 



Friday, November 04, 2022

Phil Giraldi: 'We are addicted to war'

 


 

Former CIA agent Phil Giraldi tells the truth about US war mongering policies.

Former New Jersey Judge Andrew Napolitano is a Libertarian who regularly does videos in strong protest against the US war on Russia using Ukraine as the hammer.

Below a second interview with retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. He talks about Biden's stated plan to create a 'coalition of the willing' to enter Ukraine in order to fight Russia. Speculation suggests that the US, UK, Poland, Romania and others could make up this force. 

In addition the US-UK are resorting to regular terrorist activities aimed at Russia. See The GrayZone report on this story Leaked documents: British spies constructing secret terror army in Ukraine

 

 

And finally below Napolitano today interviews Scott Ritter about what US forces are currently doing inside of Ukraine. He asks Ritter if the Americans there are now prime targets?

I highly recommend watching all three of these interviews. Each are excellently presented by guys who know what they are talking about. They each speak about different aspects of the current US-UK-NATO war on Russia. 

I also respect Andrew Napolitano very much for having the deep concern about what our nation is doing. You can see the anguish on his face as he hears about the incredibly stupid and evil tactics that Washington-London-Brussels are using in a futile attempt to hang onto their fading imperial control of the planet. The west symbolizes the religion of money and power. They have a long history of smashing resistance to their control. Every day their list of enemies grows - beyond Russia and China - now to Iran, African continent, across the Middle East and into the Asia Pacific, and Central and South America. 

Mr. Big is running scared, but watch out. He carries a loaded bomb.

My heart aches and I keep holding my 'No War with Russia' sign on the street here in Brunswick. It is the least I can do. 

I wish I could fly like Superman by The Kinks spells it out for me.

Bruce

 


Colombia leaving the U.S. camp

 


 

Colombia’s first-ever left-wing leader Gustavo Petro took a historic trip to Venezuela, pledging regional unity following the anti-imperialist model of Simón Bolívar. 

Meeting with President Nicolás Maduro, Petro said it is “suicidal” to divide the countries, “because we are the same people,” in "historically one single Bolivarian nation, reunited."

Thursday, November 03, 2022

Russia/Ukraine grain deal story reviewed

 


 

By Gilbert Doctorow

Russian suspension of grain corridor for export of Ukrainian grain:  Discussion on Iran’s Press TV

Once again, I am grateful to the journalists at Iran’s Press TV for prompting me to focus my thoughts on a very significant development in international relations which I otherwise would have not taken the time to look into closely.  The case here is the decision of the Russian authorities to suspend, effectively to cancel the ‘grain corridor’ deal that had been brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to facilitate export of grain from Odessa, where it had been blocked by the Russian naval presence from the start of the Special Military Operation.

In the discussion on air, I spoke about the underlying reasons why Russia would have likely refused to extend the grain agreement beyond its scheduled expiration in mid-November irrespective of the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian commercial and military vessels in the Sevastopol harbor this past weekend which were the given justification for Russia pulling out of the grain deal early.

It bears mention that in Russia media there is considerable speculation on why exactly so much grain was in fact sent to Europe and not to the world’s needy countries: the argument is raised that the actual owners of much of the Ukrainian grain are Europeans who bought up vast tracts of arable land in Ukraine and have been the force behind its recent industrial farming for export.  

Update: See the latest twist on this story written by Pepe Escobar here

The Economic War 'bombing' Italy & Europe

 


By Manlio Dinucci (Associazione per un Mondo senza Guerre- CNGNN, Italy)

As the crisis worsens, the "Goldman Sachs government ", the powerful US investment bank, is strengthening in Europe: that is, the appointment of politicians belonging to the financial elite to high government positions. After Mario Draghi as head of the Italian government, another "Goldman Sachs man", Rishi Sunak, is put in charge of the British government: an expert in hedge funds, he married the daughter of an Indian billionaire who put him in charge of one of his financial companies. He has a similar career to French President Emmanuel Macron, who trained in the US investment  Rothschild bank.

These and other politicians, who at the same time hold key positions in the European Union, drag Europe into the abyss of crisis by playing Washington's game. Eurozone inflation marks another record hitting 10% in September. At the origin, there is a huge increase in gas prices, caused by the sanctions on Russia. Low-priced Russian gas is increasingly being replaced in the EU by expensive US liquefied natural gas (LNG) based on the reference price of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange controlled by a large US financial company. 

At the same time, Italy is prevented from importing cheap oil and gas from Libya, as the Italian government "recognizes" and finances the Tripoli puppet government  and declares the real Libyan government in Benghazi, "illegal". In the interview conducted by Michelangelo Severgnini, an important political exponent of Benghazi - Abdul Hadi Al-Huweej, former Foreign Minister of the Al-Thani Government, and secretary of the Libyan Future Party - declares that the Benghazi government can supply Italy with oil and gas at prices much lower than market prices and can offer Italian companies great job opportunities in Libya.

Hence the need for Italy on the one hand to abolish sanctions on Russia and reopen Russian gas imports, and on the other to make an economic agreement with Benghazi. To do this, Italy needs to come out of the military, economic, political, media, and ideological war - that is overwhelming our lives: a vital objective of the  ITALY OUT OF WAR Campaign which, launched a few days ago, is gathering growing support.  

The Campaign website is https://www.fuorilitaliadallaguerra.it/

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

Earth & Sky: Interview with Maine farmer on U.S. warmongering

 


 

Vegetable farmer Richard Rhames from Biddeford, Maine is interviewed by Bruce Gagnon on the latest Space Alert show.
 
In addition to running a family farm, Rhames is a long-time public access TV activist in Maine and is a respected commentator on US foreign policy.
 
He shares his concerns on the alarming possibility of this US-NATO proxy war against Russia (using Ukraine as the hammer) turning nuclear at any moment.
 
Rhames also discusses the recent letter sent by 30 Democratic party 'progressives' calling on President Biden to negotiate with Russia. The following day the Democratic representatives renounced their own letter - ostensibly because party leadership pushed back hard on the admittedly mild communication. 

U.S. Stop Interfering in Honduras’ Sovereignty!

 


 

Hondurans are moving forward, not backwards!


In November 2021, Hondurans and international observers like ourselves, were relieved that the U.S. government publicly accepted the Honduran election results, and the will of the Honduran people. The victory of Honduras’ first ever woman President, Xiomara Castro began the restoration of democracy in the country following nearly 13 years of a violent and corrupt dictatorship supported by multiple U.S. administrations.

Less than a year since President Castro took office, we are now alarmed by public statements, actions, and tweets from the U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu, State Department officials, and some members of the U.S. Senate that are actively interfering in Honduras’ internal affairs. These efforts appear to be aimed at undermining the new government and its policy agenda.

There are numerous examples of the tweets and statements pressuring Honduras about internal and foreign policy. On October 25, Ambassador Dogu spoke at a meeting of the Honduran American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham). She targeted Honduran initiatives passed or in discussion in Honduras’ National Congress that were part of President Castro’s election platform. She strongly criticized reforms and changes to coup-dictatorship laws in the energy sector and labor law. Dogu accused the Honduran government of eliminating incentives for business investment saying, “even in the US Congress there is worry about how foreign investment is being treated in Honduras”.

That statement refers to the overturning, by a unanimous vote in the new Congress, of the “Special Development Zones - ZEDES” law that allowed for the creation of private corporate ownership (outside the control of the Honduran government) of “charter” cities. Her statement can only be seen as State Department support for a letter from Senators Cardin (D-MD) and Hagerty (R-TN) backing one of those private ZEDE corporations, Honduras Próspera. The Senators' letter echoed extremely conservative critics of President Castro’s speech at the United Nations and called for the State Department to intervene against the Honduran government (and therefore against the Honduran Congressional vote) on behalf of Próspera. This direct U.S. intervention related to the ZEDEs comes as Honduras Próspera announces that it will begin an arbitration process under the Dominican Republic -Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), allegedly seeking lost investment.

 



The Honduran government has made clear its position on the importance of good bilateral relations and economic assistance from the US while strongly objecting to interference in domestic and international affairs. The issues are serious enough that the Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina, on request from President Castro, called the U.S. Ambassador to a meeting on October 31st to formally present their complaints and protests regarding the intervention.

Given the US history of interference in internal affairs in Honduras and support for coups d’états including the 2009 coup, public interventions such as the Cardin/Hagerty letter and Ambassador Dogu's statements are very dangerous for democracy in Honduras. The U.S. pressure on Congress, is occurring at a time when supporters of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, now facing trial in New York for narco trafficking, are echoing Dogu and the Senator's statements while calling for a new coup against the just-elected Castro presidency.

The U.S. owes a debt to the Honduran people for its support of the coup government for twelve years as Honduras was destroyed with massive violations of human rights, economic collapse, and the rending of the social fabric that displaced thousands who fled the country. We had hoped that seeing these results, the State Department would now respect Honduran sovereignty and the will of its people. However, it appears that they are not.

Once again, we call on the U.S. government to stop interfering in the domestic affairs of Honduras. If the U.S. is serious about the Biden administration's promise to get to the root causes of migration, then they should reflect on the lessons of history and not repeat it. The Honduran Solidarity Network in North America joins with the Honduran and international voices raised against attempts to push Honduras back towards the past! 

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Is China really our enemy?

 


 

The US, not China, is the aggressor. Christopher Black, a respected international lawyer, tells Finian Cunningham in an interview why the United States is actually the aggressor over Taiwan, not China. 

Black also discusses the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which essentially is an arm of the CIA - created to give it a nice glazed look.

Coming economic crisis

 


 


Jeffrey Sachs author of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Monday, October 31, 2022

Fucking A - the 'peace movement' divide

 

On May 2, 2014 hundreds of Nazis were sent into Odessa, Ukraine and set fire to the Trades Union Hall killing scores of Russian-ethnic activists who were gathering signatures calling for a 'federated' Ukraine where people in the Donbass region could speak Russian and have local autonomy still within the Ukrainian state. This petition effort was not acceptable to the new US imposed puppet regime in Kiev.
 

 

I started work in the 'peace movement' in 1982.

Over the years I've watched many different peace groups - national and local - come and go. I've also noted how some groups follow the Democratic Party line and some are more independent. Some of the reasons for these differences are the funding sources of the particular group. Some of the groups get funding from Dem party-aligned sources - wealthy donors and foundations dressed up to funnel corporate oligarch money and establish control over movement messaging and activities.

Years ago anti-nuclear activist Greg Mello in New Mexico told the story about the Ploughshares Fund based in California. They had sent a memo to potential grantees declaring that the word 'disarmament' would not longer fly. In the future 'arms control' would be the acceptable message. And so disarmament largely died across America. The Dems in Congress (due to their subservience to military industrial donors) wanted to get the pressure off their backs. So they had their funding operations switch the tune so to speak. Today the Congress refuses to support the nuclear ban treaty.

The former president of the Ploughshares Fund, Joseph Cirincione, unsurprisingly recently was quoted in the mainstream media bashing Russia and declaring his support for the US-NATO war using  Ukraine as a hammer. The puzzle all fits together if we just look at reality.  

A  more contemporary example of message control is centered around the war in Ukraine. Some 'leading' groups call for negotiations between the US, Russia and Ukraine. One knowledgeable friend writes: "We need peace talks now. More than that, we need NO more US weapons or military to Ukraine - a central demand of the [mainstream Peace in Ukraine] Coalition that is being forgotten. Has the [Democrat] Progressive Caucus won, with our demands being reduced to theirs, that is, negotiations alone?  US out of Ukraine NOW".

I'd even go so far by saying that many peace groups, nationally and even sometimes locally, are infested with corporate spies and provocateurs. I've had direct experience for years with this - especially when I lived and worked in Florida. The Martin Marietta weapons plant in Orlando was building the Pershing II nuclear missile that Washington deployed in Germany - aimed at the former Soviet Union. This was 1983. Martin Marietta called the local Orange County sheriff's surveillance agency and had them infiltrate our local group that was organizing protests outside the production facility.   

We later learned (from the lawyer who worked for the county spy agency and called me to warn that their infiltration of our group was illegal) that for several years the agency ran different spies thru our group. One of them once tried to sell me drugs, hoping for a sting that would destroy our credibility across the state.

 

 

What we have going on across the US today is a color revolution. Call it the 'Pink color rev'. Blacks are being pitted against whites. Urban vs rural. Men against women. Straight against gay. Environment vs growth. And it is being enabled and directed by the oligarchs through their funding of most social movements.

I recall one leading peace group in America in 2016 receiving a couple hundred thousand dollars from the George Soros foundation. Their task in return for the money? Go protest at Donald Trump rallies which ensured some level of conflict with the people participating in Trump's political event. Grow the divide. 

I closely followed the color revolution in Ukraine 2013-2014. I studied it afterward and say the fingerprints of CIA, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, and multiple US-EU 'progressive' foundations that funded the training, hiring, and directing of 'activists' in the Maidan Square in Kiev. I learned how some professors at academic institutions across the west were also funded to write about and teach the US-EU line on Ukraine. So-called 'Alternative media' was often funded as well to spit out the western messages. It was an extensive operation.

So it is no surprise now for me to witness the deep divisions over 'messaging' across the western 'peace movements'. A few folks are understanding the correct (fact based) story as to what is truly going on in Ukraine. Some others, long used to the largess bestowed upon them for loyalty to the Dem party line, are either suspiciously silent at the very moment when nuclear war could be triggered in a flash or they are playing the 'middle road' in order to appear studious and impartial. Go along to get along. They are essentially agents in my mind.

Some of these people I've known for years. Some of them I have successfully worked with on occasion. But money and/or social standing talk. 

I saw one comment in social media that I could relate to - it read:  "The Democrats ARE right now the leading Party of war, and it is a good thing that those for peace recognize that fact. No votes in November for those who voted for weapons to Ukraine - no matter the Party".

This is a sad bit for me to write about. Forty years of good faith organizing with anyone willing to work together in a respectful manner are now shot all to hell. It breaks my heart. But being socially accepted for many so-called activists trumps real talk.

But I also feel liberated to share this sordid story. It is a big part of the daily frustration and depression that I carry around. Maybe by naming it the weight will not be so heavy.

Some might also claim that philosophical issues around non-violence make it difficult to reach operational unity. My primary response to that point is to ask a direct question: Where were you since the US orchestrated coup in 2014 in Kiev? Where have you been during these last nine years of Nazi death squads being sent to eastern Ukraine to kill Russian-ethnics who live there? More than 14,000 killed and more than 34,000 wounded. Where was your non-violent concern then? 

Not a whimper of real truth from some of these so-called leaders. Fucking A.

Bruce 

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Strong message on Ukraine from a blog reader

 


 

 By David O. (NYC)

Just want to relay how much I appreciate and rely on reading “Organizing Notes.” Especially enjoyed your thoughts in the post, October 16, 2022, entitled: Seasons Change and So Did I. Your call for clear-headed analysis and incisive expression in this crucial moment we find ourselves in — challenging us to get beyond facile peace activism — got me thinking.

As someone who had the opportunity to do anti-war broadcasting on WBAI/Pacifica radio in NYC during the American invasion/full-bore occupation of Iraq, I must say it is shocking to witness — right, left and center — such callous insensitivity and inhumanity towards the major victim of western aggression today: Russia.

In contrast to the USA’s manifest criminal military adventurism of the past, the current conflict in Ukraine is treated as if it does not impose an immediate burden of moral culpability on America. Seemingly relieved — free to blame Russia for the war in Ukraine — it is evident that the present obsession with pointing the finger at Russia for this conflagration is rooted in a childish psychic need to believe that we, in the west, are not the bad guy. Many Americans — willfully incurious of the historical record, oblivious to the geo-strategic forces at work, quite happy to feel righteous and upstanding — have triumphantly glommed onto the notion that Russia is the great evil in the world today.

To claim that this is Putin’s war or Russia is the aggressor or Russia invaded Ukraine — or assert that Russia is the perpetrator of unprovoked war or contend that Russian imperialism is driving this conflict — is to ignore the train of lies, broken agreements and subterfuge effected by the West, to shut one’s eyes to the ground truth and, most appallingly, to bolster the very enterprise that lies at the core of this conflict: out-and-out slaughter of the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine.

In fact, an 8+ years long campaign of ethno-fascist state terror waged by a US-backed junta regime targeting the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine — tormenting, persecuting and inflicting mass-murder — has devastated the people of the region and absolutely foreclosed any possibility for the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass (and adjacent regions) to ever re-join the Ukrainian state. How easy it is to disregard the Russian experience and perspective if one never listens to testimony from the people subjected to constant terror, endless shelling and the bloodbaths that come to pass day after day… untold human suffering inflicted by the authorities in Kiev, fully funded by the West.  

 


This US/UK/EU/NATO orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion — a campaign that was sure to finally force Russia to engage, militarily, in a defensive action — is now being waged to draw Russia further into an interminable conflict in which the western powers hope to so de-stabilize the Russian state so as to precipitate its demise, fragmentation and geo-strategic looting.   

It is clear that vacuous calls for peace and a negotiated settlement will not be enough to bring public pressure to bear on the policy-makers in charge. However, if the concerned, peace-loving people of the United States and Europe were to rally behind a call for full international recognition of the liberated territories of eastern Ukraine, re-united with the Russian motherland, as the only acceptable framework for peaceful resolution of this conflict, perhaps public opinion could play a decisive role in ending this war. Otherwise, a vindictive, mean-spirited mentality will hold sway and the criminal impunity enjoyed by the western architects of this war will ensure that either interminable hostilities or the unchecked practice of genocide in the region, perpetrated by Ukraine, will proceed apace.

If one wishes to assign guilt for such a horrific happening as this war in Ukraine today, if one insists on casting blame, then the collective West — both leadership and consenting populaces — must be held responsible for every drop of blood shed. It is our autocratic elites and disempowered people who have masterminded and tolerated this decades long march, step by step, to unchecked militarism… without missing a beat.

Thanks again for all your work.

 

Update: When I posted this article on my Fazebook page I got a message stating I was banned for the next 60 days on the social media platform. So much for freedom and democracy in the USA!

Sunday song