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....
We lecture and threaten Iran and North Korea about the evils of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the US routinely tests our own WMD's from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California. And there will soon be another "test firing" of a Minuteman III nuclear missile from that base.
A protest is planned at the time of the next launch of a Minuteman III from Vandenberg. The target of the rocket will be the Ronald Reagan missile test range, Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
The vigil will be held at the front gate of Vandenberg. The protest will continue until the rocket is launched.
The event is sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power is Space. Andrew Lichterman of the Western States Legal Foundation will be the keynote speaker at the front gate vigil.
We must become "dehypnotized" so we can see things as they are. The US uses the fear of other nuclear pipsqueak nations to get our own citizens to support massive US military buildups that are all about dominating the world.
If the US was genuine in wanting other nations to stop the development of their nuclear capability then we'd lead by example, as is required by the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and we'd get rid of our own evil WMD.
But alas we don't do the honorable thing and the world looks at our mad ramblings and says - you are a hypocritical nation.
Obama will travel to Russia on July 6 for meetings with President Dmitri Medvedev. The primary purpose of the meetings is to attempt to reduce nuclear weapons on both sides.
Today the US has about 5,500 nuclear warheads while Russia has about 3,900 of their own. Russia has said they were willing to reduce to a level of about 1,000.
There are two major sticking points though to negotiations. The first is US and NATO military expansion eastward which has resulted in the current surrounding of Russia. In recent years the Pentagon has built military bases in Romania and Bulgaria and will soon be adding more in Albania. NATO has expanded into Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia right on Russia’s border. The US next wants to bring the Ukraine and Georgia (both also bordering Russia) into the NATO military alliance.
On top of all that, the proposed Bush deployments, which Obama has yet to reject, of "missile defense" interceptors in Poland and a Star Wars radar facility in the Czech Republic only makes Russia more fearful of US intentions.
So with all that in mind can you imagine the sheer lunacy of Obama' s Secretary of War Robert Gates, in the video above, suggesting that we put a Star Wars radar facility in Russia? Oh joy, I'm sure Russia will be thrilled with this notion!?
Of course Russia rejected the idea as they well should. But it's an early indication at the bizarre negotiating position the US is taking at this point. You want to have successful nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia? Surround them and then suggest they let you put a radar inside their territory so it will be easier to hit them in a first-strike attack.
Report on California's economic implosion.....the solution you ask?
An end to social progress?
But California weapons production plants continue to hum along.....why not cut military spending and use that money to restore education, health care, and other needed programs?
* This video helps us get a bit wider view of the US role in Iran today. Last year, you might recall, Seymour Hersch at The New Yorker, reported on US funding of terrorists inside Iran and the placement of Army special forces troops in that country for destabilization missions. (Some would dare call it an invasion of sorts.)
* I just got the link to a speech I made in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida last March. You can see it here The speech was an overview of Obama's foreign policy.
* Speaking of Mr. Obama.....here are two updates in the Obama Watch department.
The Washington Post reports that, "A federal judge has sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney's statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret."
Secondly, you of course remember Mr. Obama's promise to bring transparency to Washington as part of his big sweep for change. Well it now appears that he has decided not to disclose the White House visitor logs. He doesn't want us to know which corporate hacks are meeting with him inside the "people's house". According to the group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "Taking the exact same position as the Bush administration, the Obama administration claimed the records are presidential, not agency records, and otherwise exempt in their entirety because of the possibility in some instances they could reveal information protected by the presidential communications privilege." They are suing Obama and expect to win the case.
* Lately I've been distributing a large number of Keep Space for Peace Week posters around the US and internationally. Space week is the time of year that we ask local groups and supporters to hold an event that will help build the public consciousness about the need to keep space free from weapons and war making. This year space week will be October 3-10. Our theme this year is that military space technology now coordinates all war on the Earth, like the satellites that direct drone attacks over Afghanistan and Pakistan, and should be considered space weapons. Be sure to let us know if you plan any kind of an event in your community during space week.
* Texas is a huge state and has many key space technology factories and installations but for some unknown reason the Global Network has had a hard time developing good organizing contacts there. But that appears to be changing. Just yesterday I made contact with one of the staff in a group called Texans for Peace and we are already at work.
One of the key places in Texas is the city of San Antonio. Global Network board member Loring Wirbel from Colorado Springs describes what is going on there this way:
"Bill Sulzman and I met with a friend of his from San Antonio about ten years ago, and we walked the National Security Agency (NSA) area called "Medina Annex," which has been there since the Reagan era. At the time, it was recognized to be one of the biggest NSA collection areas for processing (computers underground, no radomes), focused on Central America. Medina is still there. One year ago, San Antonio won the contract for what the NSA was originally calling "Storage Station Freedom", and is now called Texas Cryptological Center. It is midway between the main Lackland AFB and Medina, and it serves as a storage area for the NSA's massive needs to store voice and email before processing. The site is in an old Sony chip plant, and the site was found by the real estate agency that is known as "agency to the intelligence agencies," Corporate Office Properties Trust (really, COPT is a spook agency of sorts). Last month, the Air Force chose San Antonio as the headquarters for its Cyber Command and 24th Air Force, in charge of computer attack and defense. As you've probably seen in the flurry of recent NY Times articles, even though AF and Strategic Command will be nominally in charge of Cyber Command, the real boss will be the NSA - no surprise. Safe to say that San Antonio has eclipsed Buckley AFB in Colorado to be the largest overall NSA site in the US outside Baltimore."
Loring is our resident expert on space technology issues and we regularly lean on him to help us understand what is really going on inside the bowls of the space-tech world.
Italian peace activists in Vicenza invite American soldiers to go home. These are their words:
By now each fraction of our days is touched by the growing military presence in town. We got even used to several situations, almost without realizing it.
Since childhood, many of us have seen Camp Ederle as a common part of Vicenza, like Monte Berico, the Station, Corso Palladio …
We got so used to it that, year after year, the base enlarged eating up land right in front of us, without even noticing it.
In the area, almost doubled, occupied by Camp Ederle, the buildings are becoming taller now. There is a new season of growing volumes.
Exactly the same is happening at “Villaggiodella Pace”, trying to forget the heavy irony of this name.
For many of us, American cars with “AFI” plates were normal, just like now, when seeing a car with “ZA ...” plate we know that most likely it could have an American driver.
For a certain period of time we tolerated (with some protests) the noisy sound of the helicopters’ rotors, a noise that soon could come back with frequency, if we don’t stop it.
At a certain point, after months and months of drunkenness on “Dal Molin”, not forgetting Pluto – Fontega - San Rocco – COESPU – AFRICOM … it feels like we may have reached the limit of tolerance.
When you start to feel that the U.S. military presence is bothering even the fresh early morning walk, you start to say: “Hold on a minute, what’s going on ? We must say STOP IT”
This is probably why the spontaneous early morning presence of citizens around Monte Berico, as already experienced a few months ago, has come back.
The need to give them a clear message comes from deep inside: “U.S. soldiers, this is for you: GO HOME”.
They, the U.S. citizens, did something similar with the British 233 years ago. Don’t we have similar rights too?
* I'm taking it a bit slow today after working my tail off for the past week and a half on my two August speeches for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I spent one whole week doing research and then several days making notes and putting them in order. Then I did my first draft of the speech in a 12-hour blaze of mind dump and am quite pleased with what I came up with. Now I've got a couple local folks looking it over before I send it to a few others for their comments.
* Our Global Network friends in Albuquerque, New Mexico are holding a protest today about the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. They plan to "visit the three offices of our Congressional delegation to tell them to GROUND THE DRONES and to stop the development of the horrible laser and death ray weapons taking place now at Kirtland AFB."
* If you haven't yet seen the upgraded Global Network web site you should take a look at it here. The chairperson of our organization, Dave Webb from Leeds, England, is also our web master and has just done a total remake of the site. It's getting nice reviews.
* It's raining here today, I think the great flood is on the way. Forecasters predict rain everyday for the next week. The slugs are dancing in our garden.
I am sick to my stomach. I watched in total horror yesterday the sad performance by the Democratic Party as they begged, borrowed, and stole the votes to pass the $106 billion war supplemental in the House of Misrepresentatives.
One particularly disgusting moment was watching House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer (D-MD) stand up and invoke the name of Ronald Reagan to sell the war package.
Progressive blogger Jane Hamsher, meanwhile, reported on Monday that it appeared Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was "cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes." In the end, the White House got five Republicans to vote for the funding, including New York Republican John McHugh, the man President Obama nominated two weeks ago to be Army secretary.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote about the vote that "What repelled the Republicans from a vote to fund the war was hardly a sudden conversion to pacifism (in fact, their position was hypocritical). It was largely when the White House and Congressional Democratic leadership added a provision to the bill that will extend up to $100 billion in credits to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This sent many Republicans to the microphones to denounce the funding as a 'global bailout' and will undoubtedly be used as a campaign issue in 2010 to attack the Democrats who voted for the spending bill."
John Nichols at The Nationexplains the IMF bailout this way: "It's also the Democrats bailout of some of the biggest banks in Europe. Those banks are in financial trouble because they made risky -- and ultimately unsustainable -- loans in Eastern Europe. But, with an assist from the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress, the foreign banks will get a bailout, with U.S. tax dollars funneled through the IMF... With money from U.S. taxpayers, the IMF will protect the European banks, thus allowing the governments of France and Germany to spend precious resources on job-creation and social programs -- rather than bank bailouts."
Our two House members from Maine courageously voted against the war supplemental and IMF bank bailout. But there is not much pride in this hollow victory for us in Maine as we see the contemptible Democratic party only yield 32 votes out of 256 members in the House of Representatives. The first time this was voted on, before it went to the House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences, 51 Dems voted against it in the House. Thus 19 switched back in support of the supplemental this time, when it really counted, and proved that "party loyalty" comes before allegiance to their constituents or to the anti-war pledges they made to voters when they ran for office.
This vote yesterday ought to be the final straw for people who call themselves peace activists and still remain loyal to the Democrats. You'd think they would have felt this slap up-beside-their-heads but sadly many will go back for more. Those hard-headed folks now hold the key to ending these genocidal wars in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan. Until these Democratic Party worshipping "peaceniks" turn cold on the donkey party I'm afraid nothing much changes in America.
One of my favorite writers, Chris Hedges, in a new piece called The American Empire is Bankrupt, says:
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six- nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak... The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.
My son Julian has a favorite thinker/writer as well by the name of Slavoj Zizek who is a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia. Zizek, recently commenting on the victory of Obama, had this to say about the future:
The financial meltdown has made it impossible to ignore the blatant irrationality of global capitalism...Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, finding a cure for Aids, saving the starving children...All that can wait a bit, but 'Save the banks!' is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action...Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations - lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions, etc...The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown won't be the one that awakes us from a dream, but the one that will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry: not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the 'war on terror' and US interventionism in order to keep the economy running.
So now for the real purpose of the blog post...what do we do now? Just again yesterday someone asked me this question as people regularly do. My first reaction is dive in, take the Nestea plunge, and find your path. We each have a path. In my book I quote the Hopi Elders in Arizona who said:
It is time to speak your truth, each of you. Do not look outside yourself for the leader. There is a river flowing very fast. Trust the river has its destination. You must let go of the shore, push off into that river. Keep your eyes open and your heads above the water. See who is in there with you and celebrate. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves. We are the ones we have been waiting for...
While reading in bed last night I saw a great quote from Leo Tolstoy:
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
And might I add, serve the Mother Earth, protect her and we protect the future generations. So what we can do then could include some of the following:
Work to stop home evictions; help organize global trade unions, help organize global peace demonstrations; work to halt funding wars and call for conversion of the military industrial complex; create community-based banking institutions; live in an intentional community where you share living expenses with others; grow as much of your own food as possible; help educate those who can't read; work with the children who the society is abandoning; read more; sell a car in your household; make your own list of things you can do and have friends over for dinner to compare notes.
The bottom line is that social isolation must end. Every "man" for himself must end. And probably most importantly, the old business model of organizing that says "My issue is the most important" must end. All activists and organizers must connect the dots to show how all these issues are interrelated and that when one pulls on the loose threads the whole garment comes apart.
This date, June 12, 1982, lives in my memory. It is the day I began working on space issues.
Almost one million people demonstrated in New York City on that day against nuclear weapons. The nuclear freeze campaign took off like a bat out of hell right after that. It was a historic event.
I didn't go to the protest but instead watched the rally and speakers on C-SPAN from my little wooden bungalow in downtown Orlando, Florida. My son Julian was just one and a half years old at the time.
After the disarmament rally was over C-SPAN switched to a right-wing conference where Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham was speaking. At the time he was Ronald Reagan's head of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars as we called it.
Following Graham's formal speech he was taking questions from the audience and a guy asked him, "Hey, General they say there are almost a million people in NYC today protesting for disarmament. Aren't you worried about that?"
Without missing a beat Graham responded, "No, I think it's great. They are out there protesting against ICBM's and we're moving into space. They don't have a clue. Let them keep doing what they are doing."
In that very moment I became a peace in space activist. I hardly knew anything about space but I lived in Central Florida, just next door to the "space coast" at Cape Canaveral, so I began looking into the issue. The next year I went to work for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice and in that job took people to the space center over and over again to help expand the public consciousness about what the Pentagon planned for space. (More of their plans here too.)
So 27 years later we are still at it, trying to head the space warriors off at the pass as they used to say on the old TV cowboy movies.
Cindy Sheehan and Alex Jones talking about the essential question of our day - is the peace movement for real or is it nothing more than an agent of the Democratic Party?
The corporate power structure divides the people from one another - you are a conservative, you are a liberal.....while they fleece us.
It's a real lesson that when we stop demonizing each other we find areas where we can agree and find space to work together. Sure we don't always have to agree with each other on every issue, but the idea is to expand our movement strategically by finding alliances with people who share similar broad goals. In the case of Alex Jones, he is one of the leading voices for conservatives and libertarians (the Ron Paul people if you will) who is talking about oligarchy, endless war, empire, and loss of democracy. That is something to build on.
We had an excellent planning meeting on Afghanistan in Augusta, Maine yesterday led by CodePink activist Lisa Savage (on the right). Twenty-four activists came from across the state and we made plans to build a campaign in Maine to expand the public consciousness about the madness of the current US war policy in Central Asia.
It now appears that Maine's two representatives in the House of Representatives, Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree (on the left in the photo), are leaning against the war supplemental that is expected to be voted on early next week. If you haven't called your member of Congress yet please do so right away.
If Michaud and Pingree do stand up against the tremendous pressure coming from the Democratic party leadership and the White House on this vote then we have something to be proud of here in Maine. But next we must move our two Republican "moderate" senators which will be no easy task. They both now support "everything" to do with war.
During a break in the meeting yesterday one new friend, a dear man with a great loving heart, asked me if we could talk someday about how one avoids burnout due to an overwhelming sense of the sadness that comes from US endless war. I told him I'd love to and that I wanted to share a short story in the meantime that might be helpful.
I told him how years ago, while coordinating the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice, I was feeling very down one day while trying to carry the problems of this beautiful and sad world upon my shoulders. A wonderful Quaker friend, Al Geiger from Jacksonville, told me that I need not feel that it was my job to change everything, that in fact it was an impossibility. Instead, he told me, I had to let go of outcomes and just do my very best and release the rest. This very simple wisdom was liberating for me. It wasn't that I need not feel, or care, anymore. It was just that I didn't have to carry the whole load. He gave me permission to feel proud of my hard work and then to give way to the truth that I was only one person with limited ability to make everything change.
Polls now show of course that 70% of the American people want the US out of Iraq. But at the same time only 50% want our troops out of Afghanistan because many people are still sold on the fact that the long war there is the "good war." Some of that is because President Obama says so and many activists, having voted to put him in power, now feel they must support him.
Our meeting yesterday acknowledged that we have major challenges ahead of us to bring the other 50% of American citizens around on Afghanistan-Pakistan. That will no easy task. But we have to do the best we can and learn to live with (not accept) the rest.
This short news report is about resources in the Arctic region that are now becoming available for "extraction" due to the melting of the Arctic resulting from climate change.
There is going to be major conflict between the US and Russia over control of the Arctic. As this report says Russia has the largest land mass on the planet that connects with the Arctic. The US is now rounding up allies like Canada and Norway to challenge Russia for control of this region.
As fossil fuels decline around the planet this conflict will become more visible.
Makes one wonder again why the US refuses to put heavy emphasis into energy conservation here at home as well as dramatically expanding wind, solar, mass transit and the like. Despite all the talk about green jobs only a token amount of our national budget is going this way.
Instead the greatest percentage of our national treasury, what is left of it anyway, is going into expanding military operations worldwide to grab control of the world's remaining fossil fuels.
You'd almost start to think that the oil corporations were in control of making policy in Washington.........
This is the phone number to call in Washington to reach your Congressperson and Senator.
The final votes are coming soon on the $105 billion war funding bill for Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan
The leadership in the Democratic party are pushing their members hard to vote for the war funding bill (that now includes a mish-mash of other items like "cash for clunkers" which is a $4,500 credit for trading in your SUV, torture photos, Guantanamo detainees, the international monetary fund, and pandemic flu.)
The only way this madness will end is if you do something to help.....such as call your Congressperson now.......
* This photo above from Afghanistan haunts me. (Click on the photo for an even better view of it.) This is what we've done to that country since our "long war" against the people began in 2001. They did not have anything to do with 9-11, most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden has yet to be found. I've always, with tongue slightly in cheek, suggested someone check the basement of the White House. This war has to do with pipeline routes for moving Caspian Sea oil and natural gas. And it has to do with making sure that Russia and China can't easily move those resources where they'd like to. Congress is getting ready to appropriate more money for this war. I urge you to call your Congressional delegation now and say NO MORE WAR MONEY!
* I have been working for the past week on a couple of keynote speeches I've been invited to deliver in Hiroshima on August 1 and Nagasaki on August 8 by Mayor Akiba from Hiroshima. It's quite an honor to get that invitation and I've already got over 25 pages of notes. I've requested, and been getting, lots of advice from friends around the world on things I should focus on in the talks.
* A key date I am now tracking is July 6 which is when Obama will travel to Russia to meet with President Dmitri Medvedev for talks on nuclear disarmament. The public relations campaign between the two nations has been heating up lately as both sides have been posturing to try to gain some global image advantage which indicates to me that both countries recognize that the negotiations on Obama's "global zero" proposal will be a tough sell.
With NATO surrounding Russia and US proposals to put "missile defense" systems into Poland and the Czech Republic still on the table, Russia has made clear that they would be fools to get rid of their nukes. Throw in the recent talk by the Pentagon's StratCom about the "Prompt Global Strike" system (the military space plane) that would fly to the other side of the world in an hour and then drop a devastating first-strike conventional attack on Russia or China and you can begin to understand any hesitation.
The New York Times reports today the following on this story:
He [Secretary Gates] said Washington had put forward some options for collaboration, among them “putting [US] radars in Russia, having data-exchange centers in Russia.” He said at the July summit meeting between Mr. Obama and the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, that the leaders could “make some steps where they will partner with us and Poland and the Czech Republic in going forward with missile defense in this third site.” Moscow received the remarks coolly, with Mr. Nesterenko [Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman] commenting that they “reflect the U.S.’s wishful thinking, rather than the way things actually are.”
For Russia, any reconfiguration that preserves sites in Poland and the Czech Republic “is just window dressing,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, a political analyst.
“I’m not sure everyone in the U.S. understands how much is at stake as far as the Russians are concerned,” said Mr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The issue for the Russians is, what are the U.S.’s long-term intentions vis-Ã -vis Russia? And they are looking at missile defense for the answer to that question.”
An unwillingness to scrap the Eastern European facilities would be seen by hawks in Moscow as evidence that “the hidden agenda is to contain and destroy Russia,” he said.
"His name is Ezra Nawi. You've probably never heard of him...Ezra Nawi is one of Israel's most courageous human rights activists and without your help, he will likely go to jail in less than 30 days.
"His crime? He tried to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. These homes and the families who live in them have been under Israeli occupation for 42 years. They still live without electricity, running water and other basic services. They are continuously harassed by Jewish settlers and the military."
While in Cairo President Obama said there would never be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian people renounce violence. One has to wonder if Obama will equally call on Israel to renounce their violence, and injustice, against the occupied Palestinian people.
Top 10 Military Spenders in 2008 (in billions of dollars)
1. United States — $607.02 2. China — $84.93 3. France — $65.74 4. United Kingdom — $65.35 5. Russia — $58.66 6. Germany — $46.87 7. Japan — $46.38 8. Italy — $40.69 9. Saudi Arabia — $38.210 10. India — $30.0
From the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) annual report on global military spending Just gaze at those numbers for a moment.....how is it possible that Osama bin Laden is a threat to the U.S.?
Why is the U.S. now militarily surrounding Russia and China? How many in that list above are U.S. allies?
Is it any wonder that the roads and bridges in America are falling apart and that our public schools have to turn to the Pentagon for funding?
Is it possible to have a military empire and still build a loving and caring nation at home?
What does it say about the soul of America when we spend 54% of every federal tax dollar on the military while the public remains virtually silent about that very fact?
How is it possible to have a functioning democracy when both mainstream political parties are heavily funded by the same weapons corporations that receive this massive amount of money from Congress?
Why doesn't the media talk more about this breakdown in democracy and huge war funding?
Have we become hard-hearted about the fact that we live in a killing culture here in America?
I can't believe I missed this one. It's a couple weeks old but a really important 9-minute interview. It very effectively reveals what the real source of tensions between the US and Russia are all about. I've written about it often here on the blog but now you can hear it, with nice graphics too, from another respected source.
F. William Engdahl is an economist and author of the best selling book "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order." Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. He contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively. He is based in Germany.
