Immortal Technique on Occupy: “It’s not that we’re back, it’s that we never left” [video]
WeAreChange.org
May 2, 2012
Immortal Technique talks to Luke Rudkowski on May Day at Union Square.
COLD WAR II: From the Balkans to Central Asia: U.S.-NATO Prepare for New Cold War
by Rick Rozoff
Stop NATO
April 30, 2012
Though infrequently acknowledged if even given consideration, the current historical period remains what it has been for a quarter century, the post-Cold War era.
Beginning in earnest in 1991 with the near simultaneous disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – instantaneous in the first case, comparatively slower in the second, only complete with the independence of Montenegro in 2006 – the bipolar world ended with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the nonaligned one with the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The dissolution of the two nations, the only both multi-ethnic and multi-confessional countries in Europe, was accompanied by violent ethnic conflicts often reinforced by religious differences. In Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, the South Caucasus, the Russian North Caucasus and on the east bank of the Dniester River.
In many instances, in Serbian-majority areas of Croatia and Bosnia and in Transdniester, memories of World War II gave rise to legitimate fears of revanchism among populations that recalled the death camps and pogroms of Adolf Hitler’s allies in the early 1940s and witnessed the recrudescence of the ideologies, the irredentism and the political trappings that gave rise to them.
Transdniester refused to become part of post-Soviet Moldova as it foresaw both states being reabsorbed into Romania. Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Adjara, parts of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, didn’t desire to be included in the Republic of Georgia and majority-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh adopted a similar approach to post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The above are collectively known in certain circles as the frozen conflicts in former Soviet space.
The centrifugal dynamic reached more dangerous proportions when armed secessionist movements went beyond federal republics – the Leninist constitutions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia formally allowed for their independence under the proper conditions – and arose in autonomous republics, former autonomous republics and other regions: Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia and Kosovo and the Presevo Valley in Serbia. Northwestern Macedonia was the site of the same destabilization in 2001, the direct – and inevitable – result of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war against Yugoslavia two years earlier on behalf of Kosovo separatists.
The area collectively assailed by the above violence and national vivisection stretches from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea, north of the Broader (or Greater or New) Middle East which in turn begins in Mauritania and ends in Kazakhstan, from Africa’s Atlantic coast to China’s western border.
The ever more extensive breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, correlated with – and more than correlated with – the development of NATO as an expansionist, aggressive and bellicose regional and global military force.
Twenty-one nations and five smaller breakaway states (including Kosovo) where earlier there had been only two created that many more opportunities for the West to expand southward and eastward from Cold War-era NATO territory. Every one of the 21 former Soviet and Yugoslav federal republics is now either a full member of NATO or engaged in a partnership program. Thirteen of them have troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan.
Two recent announcements demonstrate the constantly increasing penetration and domination of the area that begins in Slovenia and ends in Azerbaijan, a swathe of land that on its eastern extreme borders Russia to its north and Iran to its south.
Recently NATO’s Allied Command Operations website announced the resumption of what had been annual military exercises employed to integrate partners in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
The dual exercise, Cooperative Longbow and Cooperative Lancer, respectively a command and a field exercise, will occur this year in Macedonia from May 21-29 with the participation of several NATO members – if the preceding versions are an indication, the U.S. Britain, Canada, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Turkey and others – and perhaps twice as many partnership adjuncts from the Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative programs. The exercise, like its predecessors, is based on a “crisis response” scenario and a United Nations mandate. Like Libya last year, for instance.
In the last Cooperative Longbow/Cooperative Lancer exercises, in Georgia in 2009, NATO members the U.S., Britain, Canada, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Albania participated. Longbow/Lancer 2009 was held less than nine months after the five-day war between Georgia and Russia in August 2008 and was also to have included NATO members Estonia and Latvia and twelve partnership nations.
This year’s version is slated to involve the largest number of Partnership for Peace states in any Longbow/Lancer exercises, thirteen: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Switzerland and Ukraine. NATO hasn’t yet disclosed which Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners will participate this year.
The first Longbow/Lancer exercises were held in Moldova in 2006 with seven NATO members, twelve Partnership for Peace nations (all of the above-mentioned except for Serbia, which joined the Partnership for Peace in that year) and Mediterranean Dialogue partner Israel. Mediterranean Dialogue member Morocco and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative members Qatar and the United Arab Emirates sent observers.
Cooperative Longbow/Lancer 2007 was conducted in Albania and the following year’s exercise in Armenia. All five nations – Moldova, Albania, Armenia, Georgia and Macedonia – are deeply involved, either on their own territory or in neighboring nations, in one or more of the conflicts discussed above. In 2009 Armenia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Serbia withdrew beforehand because of the Georgia-Russian war of a few months earlier and Estonia and Latvia did also because of an anti-government mutiny staged the day before the almost month-long exercise began.
What role the NATO and partnership troops may have played had the military uprising progressed further than it did can be easily imagined.
The U.S. Marine Corps’ Black Sea Rotational Force posted on its Facebook account (and to date nowhere else) that its six-month rotation for this year will “build enduring partnerships with 19 nations throughout Eastern Europe.” More accurately, as the Marine program formed two years ago identifies as its mission, in “the Black Sea, Balkan and Caucasus regions.”
Two years ago twelve nations were involved, by last year there were thirteen – Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine – and this year nineteen. The six new participating nations were not named.
Black Sea Rotational Force 2012 began its half-year-long deployment in Georgia by joining Agile Spirit 2012 in March at the Vaziani Training Area where the last Cooperative Longbow/Lancer exercises took place. Serbia may host its first military exercises with the force as well.
The U.S. Marine Corps is not only building bilateral and multilateral ties with nineteen countries in the Balkans, the Black Sea region and the Caucasus and other parts of the former Soviet Union, it is also consolidating NATO’s expansion into those areas with the ultimate aim of full Alliance membership for those not already among the bloc’s 28 member states.
It can be argued that the Cold War didn’t end, that the U.S. and NATO continue to wage it with wars and preparations for wars.
[hat tip: GlobalResearch.ca]
Fully Armed U.S. Troops Patrol Minnesota Neighborhood
Guard members previously hunted insurgents in Iraq
by Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
May 1, 2012
A photo showing fully armed U.S. National Guard troops patrolling a quiet residential street in Crookston, Minnesota has gone viral, once again underscoring concerns that Americans are being conditioned to accept the gradual imposition of martial law.
Although the photo is undated, Guard troops from the local Crookston Armory routinely take part in off-base exercises which train the local population to accept the sight of armed soldiers patrolling their neighborhoods as normal.
One such exercise in February 2011 dubbed “Urban Operations Training” involved military Humvees and 27 armed soldiers conducting a drill around the Bridge Street area of Crookston.
According to “Maggie,” the woman who took the photograph, when she started taking pictures of the troops one of them told her, “Just training Ma’am. Joining up with another patrol at the rally point.”
When Maggie asked why they were training on the streets of a quiet residential area, a younger soldier responded, “To be honest ma’am, I don’t know.”
Members of the same Guard unit shown on the photograph – Minnesota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company – have been deployed to Iraq where their duties would potentially have included rounding up alleged insurgents and taking them to prison camps, a frightening prospect given that the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act allows for American citizens to be similarly kidnapped and detained without trial.
National Guard troops are routinely involved in ‘urban warfare training’ drills but they usually take place within the confines of military bases. Many fear that the increasing presence of armed soldiers patrolling residential neighborhoods is a precursor to martial law.
Indeed, back in 2008 the Washington Post reported how 20,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq would be stationed inside America under Northcom for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011 onwards.
Northcom officials were forced to subsequently issue a denial after the Army Times initially reported that the troops would be used to deal “with civil unrest and crowd control.”
The use of U.S. troops in law enforcement duties is a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, which substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement unless under precise and extreme circumstances.
Section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
As Alex Jones exposed back in the late 1990’s, U.S. troops have been training to impose martial law for a considerable amount of time. During numerous urban warfare drills that Jones attended and reported on, troops were trained to raid, arrest and imprison U.S. citizens in detention camps as well as taking over public buildings and running checkpoints. During role playing exercises, actors playing prisoners would scream “I’m an American citizen, I have rights” as they were being dragged away by troops.
The fact that such drills are now set to involve Russian soldiers training on U.S. soil to hunt “terrorists” has also caused consternation.
Federal authorities in the United States have clearly been preparing for domestic civil unrest for a number of years. The Department of Homeland Security recently purchased a staggering 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets as well as bullet-proof checkpoint booths that include ‘stop and go’ lights.
The images below show U.S. troops and National Guard working with local police to incarcerate Americans into internment camps during drills Alex Jones covered in 1999 in Oakland, California.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
‘Police teargas Oakland protesters’ [video]
Russia Today
May 2, 2012
Around 400 protesters have been confronted by police who used tear gas, causing hundreds to scatter on May 1. Some activists blocked streets throughout the day and vandalized two banks, a news van and police vehicle. Nine people were taken into custody in Oakland, California, after hundreds of people took to the streets. Police reportedly used Taser against at least one of them. Officers ordered protesters out of the street after firing the tear gas and “flash-bang” grenades. RT’s correspondent Madina Kochenova has the latest from Los Angeles.
Blind Chinese Activist is US NED Proxy
Strategy of Tension: West Creates Eugenics Nightmare in China – then Celebrates Activists Fighting It.
by Tony Cartalucci
April 28, 2012 – Anytime the Western media becomes ecstatic over the activities of a so-called “rights advocate,” it is almost certain that they are either backed by convicted criminal, Wall Street speculator George Soros, or a recipient of US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds and support, or both. In the case of China’s Chen Guangcheng, allegedly blind and having recently escaped from house arrest in a rural Chinese town, it didn’t take long to trace his ties back to the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy.
Image: A visual representation of the National Endowment for Democracy’s corporate-financier ties found across their Board of Directors. Far from “human rights advocates,” they are in fact amongst the most vicious warmongers and violators of such rights – simply leveraging such issues to disguise what is in reality corporate-financier hegemonic expansion.
NED’s “Democracy Digest” celebrated Guangcheng’s “activism” and his use of “social media tools” in their 2011 article titled, “‘Extraordinary’ campaign for barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng.” Democracy Digest reveals that fake-Christian charity front ChinaAid and propaganda outlet China Digital Times, who have been Gunagcheng’s primary backers, are both NED grantees and that Guangcheng himself was the recipient of NED’s 2008 “Democracy Award.” This award has been more recently given to NED’s proxies used during the US-engineered “Arab Spring.”
Images: Top – 2008’s “Democracy Awards” presented to representatives of Chen Guangcheng. Bottom – In late 2011, Egyptian and Tunisian proxies receive their awards for helping the West topple sovereign governments and install client regimes – Tunisia in particular now sports a NED-funded “activist leader” as president.
Also mentioned in Democracy Digest’s article is the name of Council on Foreign Relations member Jerome Cohen as a “witness.” Cohen, of course, is providing “pro-bono” legal aid from the Council on Foreign Relations lined, Soros-funded “Freedom Now” organization for various dupes, stooges, and proxies of Wall Street and London. Readers may remember “Freedom Now” from their extensive involvement in supporting the Syrian opposition who triggered the current unrest now plaguing Syria, as well as being backers of Wall Street and London’s proxy in Myanmar (Burma), Aung San Suu Kyi. Freedom Now is also currently backing a leading Bahraini activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who was regional coordinator of “Frontline Defenders,” a Ford Foundation, Freedom House, American Jewish World Service, Soros Open Society Institute-funded “human rights” advocacy group. Al-Khawaja is now carrying out a “hunger strike” while in prison – part of a grander strategy to keep neighboring despotic regimes Saudi Arabia and Qatar loyal to the West’s agenda.
Image: Freedom Now’s corporate and foundation sponsors revealing that it, like so many others, is yet another Fortune 500 front carrying out the agenda of the monied elite under the guise of “humanitarian concerns.”
Freedom Now also backs a number of other Chinese proxies including Nobel Laureate and “human rights activist” Liu Xiaobo and Gao Zhisheng, both of whom are used to leverage the issues of human rights to undermine nationalist elements of China’s government while asserting the primacy of “international law” and the West’s “civil society” overlay across the vast East Asian nation-state.
“Blind Activist” Rails Against Policies of his Western Backers’ Creation
What makes the “blind activist” Chen Guangcheng different is that he has been allegedly fighting against China’s abhorrent population control methods, including forced sterilizations and abortions to maintain China’s draconian “one child policy.” The catch of course is, the corporate-financier oligarchs backing Guangcheng’s activism are also the architects of China’s population control programs in the first place, supported, defended, and whitewashed fully by the United Nations (see also here, and here), and even gloried in excruciating detail in current White House science adviser John P. Holdren’s 1,000+ page book, “Ecoscience.”
Indeed, the very practices carried out in China today were pioneered by Western corporate-funded foundations and government agencies like USAID’s forced-sterilization program in Peru during the late 90’s and the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation’s work in founding the Nazi’s eugenics cult, including the program Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele worked in before moving to the infamous Auschwitz death camp.
China’s brutal population control policies have been praised and lauded by people like Ted Turner who said during an interview with Diane Rehm (well worth listening to) that the Chinese “wisely instituted a one child policy” which he believes isn’t “draconian.”
Worst of all, is the gushing admiration David Rockefeller himself has shown for Maoism and the genocidal “great leap forward” that killed at least 45 million in 4 years, and up to 80 million in all. Rockefeller noted in a New York Times article titled “From a China Traveler” in 1973 that “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.” He considers the resulting policies “social innovations.”
The fact that David Rockefeller founded and chairs the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a globalist forum of which nearly all of America’s most influential politicians are members of and from which nearly all of America’s policy originates from, constituting the collective interests of Wall Street and London’s corporate-financier elite, are the very people now supporting Guangcheng’s “activism” reveals astounding hypocrisy perhaps so gargantuan its full shape fails to come into focus for most.
Indeed, the West’s support for Guangcheng isn’t because they believe the eugenics programs they have carefully constructed, meticulously propagated, and brutally claimed the lives of tens of millions with is now suddenly bad, but rather because Guangcheng represents a convenient point of leverage from which to undermine the Chinese government regarding an unpopular program the West itself has engineered. Feeding off of the warranted and legitimate backlash against China’s population control programs may be the loose shingle the West can use to blow the rest of the roof off – where concerns over “democracy” and “civil society” have fallen flat.
China’s best response would be to withdraw from its obligations at the UN and replace its unpopular population control policies with technical education, research and development and other pragmatic industry and technologically-based, rather than policy-based solutions to deal with China’s large population.
Meanwhile, the West continues to openly announce their intentions of encircling China, containing its military and economic rise, as it sabotages sovereignty and economic prosperity along its peripheries and destabilizes its economic partners across all of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The latest manifestation of this policy comes to us from US Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond Odierno who eagerly parrots talking points being peddled by the US State Department, which in turn are nearly decade-old plans drawn from corporate-funded think-tanks long planning to sabotage the rise of Asia and maintain another century of Western led global hegemony.
