We
confirm the continued importance of a strong transatlantic link and Alliance
solidarity as well as the significance of sharing responsibilities, roles, and
risks to meet the challenges North-American and European Allies face together .
. . we have confidently set ourselves the goal of NATO Forces 2020: modern,
tightly connected forces equipped, trained, exercised and commanded so that
they can operate together and with partners in any (emphaisis added) environment. [xxxvi]
NATO is quickly
emerging as the police force for the transnational corporate class. As the TCC
more fully emerged in the 1980s, coinciding with the collapse of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), NATO began broader operations. NATO first
ventured into the Balkans, where it remains, and then moved into Afghanistan.
NATO started a training mission in Iraq in 2005, has recently conducted
operations in Libya, and, as of July 2012, is considering military action in
Syria.
It
has become clear that the superclass uses NATO for its global security. This is
part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world,
wherby the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the
transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital
anywhere in the world. [xxxvii]
Sociologists William
Robinson and Jerry Harris anticipated this situation in 2000, when they
described "a shift from the social welfare state to the social control (police)
state replete with the dramatic expansion of public and private security
forces, the mass incarceration of the excluded populations (disproportionately
minorities), new forms of social apartheid . . . and anti-immigrant
legislation." [xxxviii]
Robinson and Harris's theory accurately predicts the agenda of today's global
superclass, including
-- President
Obama's continuation of the police state agendas of his executive predecessors,
George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush;
-- the
long-range global dominance agenda of the superclass, which uses US/NATO
military forces to discourage resisting states and maintain internal police
repression, in service of the capitalist system's orderly maintenance;
-- and
the continued consolidation of capital around the world without interference
from governments or egalitarian social movements. [xxxix]
Furthermore,
this agenda leads to the further pauperization of the poorest half of the
world's population, and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for everyone in
the second tier, and even some within the first tier. [xl]
It is a world facing economic crisis, where the neoliberal solution is to spend
less on human needs and more on security. [xli]
It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to
bankruptcy is to print more money through quantitative easing with trillions of
new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby
spending for destruction requires even more spending to rebuild, a cycle that
profits the TCC and its global networks of economic power. It is a world of
drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, and death and destruction, at home
and abroad.
As
Andrew Kollin states in State Power and
Democracy, "There is an Orwellian dimension to the Administration's (Bush
and later Obama) perspective, it chose to disregard the law, instead creating
decrees to legitimate illegal actions, giving itself permision to act without
any semblances of power sharing as required by the Constitution or
international law." [xlii]
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
4
3
