War

We open GREEP zoom #252 with MAYOR HEIDE LAMPERT of Waldport, Oregon, a democratically elected official arrested by an armed fascist.

We follow with our Poet Laureate, MIMI GERMAN’s ode common decency, and to CLAIRE ELIZABETH HALL, words from Steven Kent for an esteemed and beloved County Commissioner.

We also honor the great HOWIE KLEIN, who truly made a difference for the better.

Indivisible’s AMY ANDERSON gives a critical report on an upcoming Congressional primary.

The great KARL GROSSMAN joins us to explain the four evil movers pushing the Venezuela assault, including oil, Epstein, Cuba and the petro-dollar.

From JENNIE GAGE we get a report on the MAGA response to this latest imperial war, which is full of tortured contradiction.

From Congressional candidate HARTZELL GRAY we hear a cry against colonialism and the class imperative to finally end it.

Radio talk host LYNN FEINERMAN offers a heart-felt stand for Marjorie Taylor Green and warns of the anti-female dimension to this fascist regime.

Media hero DAVID SALTMAN digs deep into the stock exchange’s role in laundering the petro-dollar throughout the decades.

Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin last week eagerly confirmed that all “Peaceful Atom” nuclear power plants are fair game for military destruction and that the ensuing apocalyptic fall-out is not really his concern.

As Reuters reported, “Putin on Thursday warned Ukraine that it was playing a dangerous game by striking the area near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and suggested that Moscow could retaliate against nuclear plants controlled by Ukraine.”

The six-reactor Zaporizhzhia complex is, noted Reuters “Europe’s largest [and] has been cut off from external power for more than a week and is being cooled by emergency diesel generators.”

Zaporizhzhia was captured by Russian forces in the early days of the 2022 invasion.

The global crisis it now embodies was foreseen 45 years ago by Bennett Ramberg, in his book “Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril.”

Although the nations of the world have pledged to respect a system of international law and global responsibility, the recent behavior of several countries provides a sharp challenge to this arrangement.

For over three years, the Russian government has conducted a brutal military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine―the largest and most devastating military operation in Europe since World War II. Defying Russia’s international obligations―including a peace treaty it signed with Ukraine, a ruling by the International Court of Justice demanding Russia halt its military operations in Ukraine, the UN Charter, and repeated UN General Assembly condemnations of Russian behavior by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations―the Putin regime has stubbornly persisted with Russia’s imperialist aggression against its smaller, weaker neighbor.

The United States and other nuclear powers are now moving closer to resuming nuclear weapons tests, decades after testing ended. This highly disturbing trend must be halted.

Since the atomic age, 2,056 nuclear weapons have been detonated, 528 of them above the ground. The United States and Soviet Union accounted for about 85% of these tests. The explosive power of atmospheric tests equaled 29,000 Hiroshima bombs. Airborne radioactive fallout circled the globe, re-entered the environment through precipitation, and entered human bodies through food and water.

Cold War bomb testing was part of a massive increase in the number of nuclear weapons, which peaked at more than 60,000. Kansas City plays a major part in their production, with the Kansas City National Security Campus manufacturing more than 80% of the non-nuclear components that go into our country’s stockpile.

After nuclear war as barely avoided during the Cuban missile crisis, public pressure convinced leaders to ban all above-ground tests in 1963 — a treaty that has never been violated.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2019

By Robert C. Koehler

How dare she question the sanctity of American militarism?

As national security adviser John Bolton declared last fall, the International Criminal Court constitutes “an assault on the constitutional rights of the American people and the sovereignty of the United States.”

That’s you and me that Bolton is speaking about, and the recent revocation of ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s visa — in the wake of her insistence on investigating, among other things, U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan — is just the latest step in the diplomatic war the United States has declared against the court since it was established in 2002.

I read the news – invasion of Iraq! twentieth anniversary! – and struggle to transcend the abstraction of my remorse. A million killed? Half a million? The mortality stats vary depending on the source’s politics.

But beyond the numbers looms an indifference that defines what is called “news.”

“Today, 20 years after the president ordered the airstrikes that rained down on Baghdad on the night of March 20, 2003, the war is widely seen in Washington’s power centers as a lesson in failed policymaking, one deeply absorbed if not thoroughly learned.”

Just reading those words – a paragraph in a New York Times analysis of the invasion, two decades later – instantly turns a citizen into a spectator. A lesson of failed policymaking! We’re talking about murdering children, for God’s sake, annihilating a social structure, driving millions of people out of their homes and shattering their lives. Somehow the term “failed policymaking” doesn’t do it justice.

September 19, 2021

To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples of the world:
To the Sixth in Mexico and abroad:
To the Networks of Resistance and Rebellion:

First: On September 11, 2021, in the early morning, while the Zapatista air delegation was in Mexico City, members of ORCAO – a paramilitary organization serving the Chiapas state government – kidnapped the compañeros Sebastián Nuñez Pérez and José Antonio Sánchez Juárez, autonomous authorities from the Good Government Council of Patria Nueva [New Homeland], Chiapas.

The ORCAO is a political-military organization with paramilitary characteristics: they have uniforms, equipment, weapons, and ammunition purchased with money they receive from [government-sponsored] “social programs”. They keep part of the money for themselves and use part of it to pay off government officials for reporting that they [the ORCAO] are complying with the terms of the social programs. They fire on the Zapatista community of Moisés y Gandhi every night with these weapons.

The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani

On Friday, 3 January, 2020, progressives in the United States and all peace-loving people throughout the world were horrified to learn that Donald Tromp had added to his long list of crimes and imbecilities by ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, who is a hero in his own country, Iran. The murder, which was carried out by means of a drone strike on Friday, immediately and drastically increased the probability of a new large-scale war in the Middle East and elsewhere. Against this background, I would like to review the history of oil-motivated attacks on Iran.

The desire to control Iran's oil

The Pentagon announced on September 20 that it would be sending hundreds of troopsto Saudi Arabia after attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. The attacks, which took place on September 14, “knocked out more than half of the [oil] output from the world's top exporter – five percent of the global oil supply,” according to Al Jazeera.

While Washington and Riyadh have provided little evidence that Iran is behind such an attack (Saudi Arabia even admitted the evidence provided to them via U.S. intelligence “wasn’t definitive”) the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have all deemed Iran to be the culprit.