We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, June 4, 2015

NATO’s Black Sea bloc gets busy [part 1 of 2]

Click here to access article by Andrew Korybko from Oriental Review.

There have been numerous articles reporting on separate aggressive actions of the US Empire aimed at Russia and China. These reports have provided details of NATO military training exercises, US supplied military weapons, subversive efforts, and formal alliance agreements. Part I of his report provides a useful overall perspective on the threats that Empire actions pose for Russia on the western front. Korybko organizes these anti-Russian actions into six blocks which make up three fronts--Arctic/Baltic, Eastern Europe, and the Black Sea. Most Americans are completely uninformed about these actions simply because corporate media rarely reports on them.
When one adds the Black Sea Bloc of Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Georgia to the previously mentioned Viking and Commonwealth Blocs of Greater Scandinavia and the former Polish conquests, a startling realization occurs – Pilsudski’s Intermarium ‘cordon sanitaire’ has finally been created. Stratfor’s George Friedman, who has advocated its revival, describes it as a belt of anti-Russian states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas, which is the pure geographic definition of the interlinked Viking-Commonwealth-Black Sea Bloc. This Intermarium allows NATO to form three separate fronts against Russian interests, targeting it from the Arctic/Baltic, Eastern Europe, and the Black Sea, respectively.

As an incidental strategic touch, however, it is the Black Sea Bloc, the weakest and least integrated of the three, that could ultimately destabilize Russian interests the most.