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Globalization and the Corporate Power Structures
Global warfare sustains the Neoliberal Agenda and vice versa.
Neoliberalism broadly defined is not limited to a set of economic paradigms and structural reforms. What we are dealing with is an imperial project broadly serving powerful global overlapping interests:
Wall Street and the Global Banking Apparatus
The Military Industrial Complex,
Big Oil,
the Biotech conglomerates, Bayer-Monsanto et al
Big Pharma,
The Global Narcotics Economy and Organized Crime,
the Media Conglomerates and the Information and Communication Technology Giants.
The military agenda is geared towards supporting and endorsing these powerful interests groups. There is of course within these sectors, mounting conflict between global conglomerates, each of which have their lobby groups.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
NATO and the De Facto US Military Occupation of Western Europe
70 years ago NATO was born. In April 1949, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established what was designated as the doctrine of “Collective Security” under Art. 5 of the Washington Treaty.
NATO has a sordid history of aggression and war crimes:
Ever since its founding in April 1949, NATO has served as the vehicle to spur the arms race in the name of ‘peace through strength’. In that very same year, the Truman Administration in the United States secretly developed “Operation Dropshot’ to launch a devastating ‘first-strike’ against the former Soviet Union to completely obliterate that country. Throughout the ‘cold war’ years, the U.S. and its NATO allies always maintained an overwhelming military superiority over the USSR and the Warsaw Pact – a fact that they cynically concealed from public view at the time, but now readily admit. (Canadian Peace Congress)
The unspoken objective of NATO –which is of significance to our debate in Florence–, was to sustain under a different label, the de facto “military occupation” of Western Europe. The US not only continues to “occupy” World War II “axis countries” (Italy, Germany), it has used the NATO emblem to install US military bases throughout Western Europe, as well as in Eastern Europe in the wake of the Cold War, extending into the Balkans in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia.
Today, NATO consists of 29 member states, most of which have US military facilities on their territory, with the largest deployments of US forces in Germany and Italy. Bear in mind these are not NATO bases. The latter are limited to command and logistics: e.g. SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Casteau, Belgium, NATO Allied Command Transformation, Norfolk, Virginia
12 founding member states in 1949 Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,
Greece and Turkey (1952),
Germany (1955),
Spain (1982)
Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999),
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia (2004),
Albania and Croatia (2009),
Montenegro (2017)
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