[Gipfelsoli Newsletter] Strasbourg/ Baden-Baden -- Stockholm -- Hokkaido

[International Newsletter]

- Germany Beefs up Security for NATO Summit
- Turn off the Stockholm Programme!
- The Festival is Over - Japan Resistance Report 2008
- In the Shadow of G8: Repression and Revolt in Japan
- Civil Unrest in America?

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Germany Beefs up Security for NATO Summit

The leaders of the 26 NATO states are due to gather in Germany on April
3 for a two-day summit co-hosted with France. Germany is putting in
place extensive security measures, including shutting down part of the
city of Kehl for a 10-minute photo-op.

With France and Germany preparing to host the summit of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the beginning of April, extensive
security measures are being prepared to protect the leaders of the 26
member states.

The south-western German cities of Kehl and Baden-Baden and the French
city of Strasbourg are co-hosting the gathering which will mark the 60th
anniversary of the alliance. An estimated 15,000 police officers are to
be deployed on the German side alone and the German army, the
Bundeswehr, is supporting the security operation with interceptor
planes, transport helicopters, paramedics, motorcycle escorts as well as
buses and other vehicles. However, the local police force in the state
of Baden-Württemberg have not asked the Defense Ministry in Berlin to
provide scout tanks or Tornado reconnaissance jets, whose deployment
caused such controversy during the G-8 meeting in the Baltic Sea resort
of Heligendamm two years ago. While the jets were supposed to keep an
eye out for signs of a possible terrorist attack it later emerged that
they had also been employed to spy on a camp of anti-globalization
protestors.

Alexander Bonde, a Green Party member of the German parliament, has
described the security measures planned for Kehl as "completely absurd"
and branded the gathering a "summit of impertinence." He says that
hundreds of citizens will be living under "quasi house arrest" in the
area around a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Rhine -- the location
of a group picture of the NATO heads of state. Local residents living
nearby will not be allowed to leave their homes between the Friday and
the Saturday morning without a police escort and even that is only
allowed in urgent cases and with prior consent. "Even for probably the
most costly photograph in history," says Bonde, "this expense is
completely excessive."

The photo-op, which will take place as the summit guests are transported
across the border from Baden-Baden to Strasbourg, is scheduled to last
10 minutes. During that time all traffic on the motorways and streets
nearby will be brought to a standstill while shipping on the Rhine will
also be halted for several hours.

That is not the only disruption the NATO meeting is due to cause to the
lives of local people. In order to ensure that enough police officers
are available for the operation all the soccer league matches that had
been scheduled to take place in the state of Baden-Württemberg on April
3 and 4 will now have to be postponed.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,612196,00.html


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Turn off the Stockholm Programme!
No Future for the "Future Group"!

Following Tampere 1999 and Hague 2004, the EU plans to decide the next
five-year plan on "Justice and Home Affairs" (JHA) this year.

After the implementation of data retention and new databases, the
creation of "Frontex" and the "European Security Research Programme" ,
the "harmonization" of terrorism laws and more surveillance of the
internet, next severe changes are foreseen to bet set in the new guideline.

Under swedish EU presidency in the second half of 2009, probably in
November or December, the ministers of interior and justice will meet to
agree the new "Stockholm Programme".

A self-announced "Future Group" of some of the ministers, initiated
under german EU presidency 2007, already published the wishlist
"European Home Affairs in an open world":

An EU population register, ‘remote’ forensic searches of computer hard
drives, internet surveillance systems, more implementation of satellites
and ‘drone’ planes for surveillance, automated exit-entry systems
operated by machines, autonomous targeting systems, risk assessment and
profiling systems, e-borders, passenger profiling systems, an EU
‘entry-exit’ system, joint EU expulsion flights, dedicated EU expulsion
planes, EU-funded detention centres and refugee camps in third countries
(even "overseas"), expansion of the para-military European Gendarmerie
Force, deployment of EU Battle Groups, crisis management operations in
Africa, permanent EU military patrols in the Mediterranean and Atlantic,
more power for EU agencies, interlinking of national police systems, an
EU criminal record, a permanent EU Standing Committee on internal
security (COSI) dealing with operational matters, more partnerships with
the security industry.

By 2014, the ministers wish to establish a "transatlantic security
partnership" between the EU and USA, that can be seen as a kind of
domestically NATO. NATO strategists on the other hand approach to
internal politics by claiming in the paper "Towards a grand strategy in
an uncertain world" that military could only supply "strong defence" if
there is a "strong homeland security".

This blog tries to collect calls, background texts, links, dates and
material in different languages for campaigning against the meeting in
Stockholm.

Continue and get more information in deutsch | english | francais |
italiano on http://stockholm.noblogs.org

Source: http://stockholm.noblogs.org


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The Festival is Over - Japan Resistance Report 2008

Japan can be described as a decaying high-tech quasi-corporatist island
state, hostile to many of its neighbouring countries. Several Japanese
companies which benefited from slave labour in WW2, Mitsubishi etc,
still operate. Japan is re-arming itself militarily and has never firmly
broke with its fascist & imperialist past, the state attempts to enforce
a high level of social control but even so, there does remain tumultuous
outbreaks of anarchy that no-one can predict occurring, moments of
incredible beauty, like Osaka in 13-21 June 2008, when an incident of
police brutality sparked fierce rioting in Kamagasaki, a working class
district.
The government is very repressive against the social movements in no
small part to the serious revolutionary disturbances of the 60’s & 70’s
onwards, with some underground autonomous groups still existing in
hiding today. Japan is not the stable, comfortable place that the media
tries to portray, and there are many people living a very precarious
life of poverty and exclusion.
Not only in violent response to repression was there was a stark
difference between the 6 day riot in Osaka and the anti-G8 events which
took place almost simultaneously in Hokkaido, northern most island of
the Japanese archipelago.

In Hokkaido a tiny number of anti-globalisation activists, socialists,
pacifists, environmentalists, NGOS, and of course, anarchists, were
systematically suppressed in Sapporo from the onset of the entire
organised counter-events. They were violently prevented on the most
minor terms from having a peaceful street demo with a sound-system
truck, the driver absurdly wrestled out by a posse of cops in a
characteristic move of attacking vulnerable demos where the cops feel
they can be aggressive and have the sanction of the media to do so. The
sound-demo in Tokyo was the usual suppressed event, despite the evident
rage of some of the people against the police restrictions.
Anti-globalisation academics flew in and flew out again, presentations
and counter-conferences were organised, promoting this or that new book
or hip social theory in venues where you usually had to pay to enter.
The spectacle was maintained, commodities were sold, careers were trod.
The media build-up to the G8 was extremely questionable, with mainstream
media meeting the German anti-G8 ‘Dissent’ delegation in the months
before the events at the air-port like movie-stars. Unfortunately the
‘Dissent’ delegation participated with the mainstream media, something
we completely disagree with, viewing it as counter-productive and
antagonistic to our hostility to the agenda of the corporations and
government. The media was customarily both hysterically curious and
dismissive, with the accompanying usual alerts to hold the image in the
mind of terrorists like the Japanese Red Army, Aum or Al-Qaeda.
The base population simply got on with their lives. In Osaka when a
day-worker was discovered beaten and tortured by the inner-city police
during the G8 clampdown period, the whole area lit up with unmediated
anti-police, anti-system rage, it didn’t matter so much that there was
also a secondary G8 ministers meeting happening at the time in the city,
we guess people were pretty angry. In addition the squatted parks around
the city act as semiautonomous areas of free space, with information and
material distribution,
so the news spread fast. There is a closeness to the people who have
known each other in a collective fight for some time and they know the
lay of the city to their advantage. Kamagasaki is a fighting working
class neighbourhood, they do not need to be convinced by a street-party
to dance. The anti-G8 events were characterised by a strong focus on
structure, on the logistics of organising an ‘event’. The actions
borrowed the structure of past anti-G8 action; in particular organisers
in Japan used their experience of the G8 in Germany the previous year.
We don’t doubt the sincerity of the people who spent so much time and
effort in organising the resistance against the G8, but for us this
structure was applied superficially. There was not much analysis of how
and why people wanted to act against the summit, or what the aims of
action were. There seemed to be a lack of preparation for an attack from
the cops and lack of de-centralised actions outside the central
sounddemo( s), which seemed to come from lack of initiatives and
conflictual attitude of solidarity on the part of the Japanese groups
and also internationals not sufficiently understanding the operating
environment. The international anti-G8 infotour for the G8 was
extensive, across many countries and continents, why was the
mobilisation so weak? Did it rely too much on a dependency for ‘outside’
numbers and pose a logistical complexity beyond the capabilities of the
organising initiative?
In contrast to the more spontaneously created, structureless rioting in
Osaka, the G8 action involved hierarchical organising. While on the
surface borrowing the structure of previous anti- G8 events, the idea of
leadership was very present in the organisation. The only way out is to
completely denounce their methods and their ambition, what exists of it.
Space seems significant in this, the lack of autonomous spaces in Japan
affected the mentality of organisation; without the actual physical
space to situation oneself in, it’s difficult to practice and build
nonhierarchical collective organising for a mass of people. Although
lacking in much action, the anti-G8 events did create some discussion
around the methods of organisation. The challenge of a small,
politically diverse, international group, trying to react against the G8
created an environment where there was no alternative but to engage as a
group, and discuss political tactics.
In Hokkaido anti-G8 camp, internationals were separated from the
decision making process and told that any action that was not approved
by the organisers would result in certain arrest, job loss and prison
(for the central organisers), therefore the usual putting pressure on
everyone to toe the line. Also the inappropriate plan to march 20 Km in
the countryside where there would be little chance to have any effect on
the actual proceedings of the G8 is irritating to say the least.
The lack of opportunity for discussion around the tactics chosen by the
central activist clique was dis-empowering and shows the weakness in the
adoption of structure without adequately thinking about content. Without
a collective confrontational position to capitalism on our own terms ,
our ‘resistance’ appears to amount to nothing but words, a gesture, a
trend, then back to our routines.
Unfortunately, as well as this superficial structure, the NoG8 action
was without a sense of spontaneity, raw feeling, passion, anger, or
catalyst for action, as was seen in Osaka. Combined with massive amounts
of self-repression, and the reality of a huge police presence, the
result was an event lacking in direction or power.

“Coming nowhere near to the goal of ’shutting down the summit’, the
protests were largely characterized by complacent marches in the shadow
of $280 million dollars spent on security and 21,000 police goons lined
up against a mere 1,000 or so protesters. From the beginning, the
organizers formally negotiated with the police and paid the price: the
marches passed nowhere near the meeting site and instead were forced
into routes through the countryside at obscene distances, epitomized by
a 22km daytime march through mountains and forest roads that only 100
people attended after the vast majority of participants denounced it and
refused to attend. Despite the ‘good behavior’ of the organizers, four
activists were nevertheless arrested for pathetically arbitrary reasons,
such as having three people at a time on the sound system float (only
two were allowed). Media coverage was mostly absent, even in
‘independent media’ despite the presence of hundreds of cameras. It is
safe to say that the protests were not noticed at all, and even on their
own limited terms were failures. Will there be people brave enough to
admit this?” anonymous rebel/datacide This is not so much just a
critique of some of our Japanese comrades as a critique of the Pavlovian
activist mindset whereby a generic response is rolled out regardless of
the specifics of people and place. What success the G8 protests achieved
was found in bringing together new interactions between Japanese
anti-capitalists and internationals.
What happened – or didn’t happen – in Japan is no surprise. An
international call out was produced because that is what was expected:
that is the model – unreflected, insupportable (in terms of
infrastructure) and inappropriate. The fact that Japan is, as a
political, social and subcultural entity, so extremely different from
those places where these summits have been held and attacked before
simply threw the poverty of the ritual into sharp relief.
So, for us the anti-G8 protests were characterised by massive
self-surveillance and self-repression, and difficulty in breaking out of
a sense of isolation and individualization. The ‘activist’ response to
the G8 was dis-empowering in contrast to the necessary, spontaneous
chaotic rioting in Osaka which was grounded in a reality of social
conflict against the conditions of a repressive daily life.

The G8 action and the Osaka riots highlighted a stark divide between
people pushed to a point of necessary action, and the ‘activist scene’,
where there is a feeling of having too much to lose to take action.
Comparably, this situation in Japan is suggestive of where the organised
‘activist scene’ in United Kingdom is at from an outsiders perspective:
revolving around structured events, without either a depth of analysis,
spontaneity or position of conflict, leading to an inactive ‘scene’ and
decaying ‘sub-culture’, without clear targets and ways to fight them.
Anarchists and other uncontrollables in Osaka felt it was pointless
going to Hokkaido, the struggle is in their city, most certainly away
from the concentrated forces of the enemy in a rural area. This is where
only those who readily control mass access to transport and personnel
can win the engagement due to the environment. They felt that also there
was an undiscovered element of ‘white supremacy’ in the assumption that
imported Anglo-Atlantic models will be the best ones for the Japanese
situation, and that ‘activist’ methods can be a symbolic theater that is
not based on collective action in the face of a repressive system, but
is a reaction to a temporary media event of authority. Also maybe only
more financially solvent North American and European activists have a
possibility to enter and this was not automatically available to closer
comrades in East Asia. This effects not only the amount of people who
come but also maybe the readiness for conflict, due to the heavy
sentences given out by the Japanese state, which are a different
reality, it is not a joke. Japanese prisons are notoriously harsh but
they are nothing compared to the realities of life in many prisons of
the majority world. When you add together the possibility of not
clearing immigration because of problems with visas, money, if you are
an international, and then heavy jail time for very minor actions, you
have to think very clearly about the situation you find yourself in. If
we face this much repression for centralized ‘legal’ ‘pacifist’ public
actions, we have to seriously think about the social terrain we find
ourselves in and how best to act.
In Japan, the problem is one of visibility, of having a visible
anti-capitalist/anarchist infrastructure, as the resources available to
the anti-capitalist movement are small, there are few infoshops,
collective housing projects, squats etc. The state uses media, secret
police, surveillance, manipulation, judicial harassment and imprisonment
in a thorough manner, anyone who is identified as a threat will find
themselves constantly on minor charges, house searches, this amounts to
personal harassment, stalking, it is intended to be injurious to the
mentality and so on, to hold people into keeping respectful of the
seemingly allencompassing power of the government. So, the G8 in Japan
was difficult to react against. Obviously G8 summits are organised in a
way that anyway tries to remove the possibility of sparks of conflict or
catalyst, such as holding them in remote rural locations. The
‘countryside’ in the industrialised world is always a ‘theme park’ or an
‘unforgiving advantage’ to those with superior technology, logistics and
control of movement.
Despite it’s problems, Osaka benefits from having a long-running class
struggle based practically on resisting the conditions of daylabour. The
revolt against capitalism is already a potential in the tens of
thousands of exploited who find themselves rolled over in this economy.
It consists in recognizing that the currency crisis is a result of the
search for capitalist value in the American markets since the fall of
the Soviet Union, and not a result of the particular failures of bank
policy in any one country. That’s where new allies, new struggles and
new praxis emerge from. The antiglobalization movement has been
stone-cold dead for years. The G8 protests were so far distanced from
actual on-the-ground praxis in Japan that it is difficult to think of
them apart from something like an anime convention.
The revolt against the industrialised world will not come from the
countryside now the majority of the world lives in cities, it comes from
within the contradictions and excluded zones of the mega-metropolis’
themselves, the most critical place to stop the economy, and seize
control of the streets.

Kamagasaki has been rebelling since the 1960s, but only rarely have
there been effective interventions there that have had the potential to
get bigger (most notably the new left interventions of the 70s, but even
that was really problematic). We have to find a way to overcome the
limitations of riots, to destroy not only the police station but the
economy, to push for a social war and the end of capitalism. To push a
situation of disparate anger into a position of class strength and
selforganisation. Repeatedly going to places of conflict where the
possibilities are defined by the agenda of the state we see as a
dangerous mistake, the ‘difficult’ condition of modern warfare is
‘urban’ precisely because this is the arena where our everyday lives are
made. Where the commodities are produced and sent forth, where the
utilities are run, where the octopus of cables multiples and spreads,
where the schools, hospitals, bureaucratic and financial houses are run.
This is what is at stake. For a future without capital & coercion. Some
anarchists always in exile.

Osaka comrade given prison term for riot

Greetings with indomitable soul
19th Nov 2008, comrade Y-San received an unjust sentence of 2 years and
2 months despite our struggle for his rescue. He has already been in
custody in Osaka prison, not knowing when and where he will be sent. He
says he wants to get out and come back even if it is only one day
earlier. We will continue to visit him with articles, keep a place for
him to come back and prepare ourselves for revenge.

(ABC Osaka/Free Workers Union)

Source: http://325collective.com/325_6.pdf

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In the Shadow of G8: Repression and Revolt in Japan

Over the past week and a half, an unprecedented political crackdown has
been enacted in advance of a series of economic summits around the
country. Despite this, the brave workers of Kamagasaki stood up against
the stiff security environment in riots against the brutal beating of a
day laborer over the past five days. The twin situations of repression
and revolt deserve to be examined in more detail.

Repression

In the run-up to the series of summits, over 40 people were arrested in
pre-emptive sweeps of broad left and anarchist groups.

On May 29th, 38 people were arrested at Hosei University in Tokyo at a
political assembly against the G8. These large-scale arrests were
carried out by over 100 public security agents after the students staged
after a march across campus protesting the summits.1 All of the
arrestees are still jailed, and among them are apparently some
leadership of the Chuukaku-ha Leninist organization, one of the largest
organizations of its kind in Japan.

On June 4th, Tabi Rounin, an active anarchist from the Kansai region,
was arrested on accusation of having his address registered at a
location other than where he was living. When arrested, his computer,
cell phone, political flyers and more was taken from him; these items
were used when detectives interrogated him, asking him about his
relationship to internationals possibly arriving for the G8, as well as
his activity around Osaka. He would be the first obviously political
arrest masked as routine police work.

On June 12th, an activist from the Kamagasaki Patrol (an Osaka squatter
and anti-capitalist group), was arrested for allegedly defrauding
lifestyle assistance payments. This person has been constantly followed
by plainclothes police and even helicopters during demonstrations.
Clearly, his arrest was planned with the idea of keeping him away from
the major anti-summit mobilizations and he will be held without bail for
the maximum of 23 until the summit is over. The office of an anarchist
organization called the Free Worker was raided in order to look for
'evidence' in this comrade's case.

The same day the Rakunan union in Kyoto was raided, with police officers
searching their offices and arresting two of their members on suspicion
of fraudulent unemployment insurance receipt. One of these two arrested
are accused of funneling money received from unemployment insurance to
the Asian Wide Campaign, which was organizing against the economic
summits. In the meantime, Osaka city mobilized thousands of police with
the pretext of preventing terrorism against the summit, setting up
inspection points and monitoring all around the city. But the
strengthened state high on its own power inevitably deployed it in
violence, and turned the day laborers of southern Osaka against it in riot.

Revolt

Kamagasaki is a traditionally day laborer neighborhood that has
experienced over thirty riots since the early 1960s. The last riot in
Kamagasaki was sparked in 1990 by police brutality and the exposure of
connections between the police and Yakuza gangs.

The causes this time were not much different. A man was arrested in a
shopping arcade near Kamagasaki and taken to the Nishinari police
station where he was punched repeatedly in the face by four detectives
one after another. Then he was kicked and hung upside down by rope to be
beaten some more.

He was released the next day and went to show his friends the wounds
from the beatings and the rope. This brought over 200 workers to
surround the police station and demand that the police chief come out
and apologize. Later people also started demanding that the four
detectives be fired. Met with steel shields and a barricaded police
station, the crowd began to riot, throwing stones and bottles into the
police station. Scraps with the riot police resulted in some of their
shields and equipment being temporarily seized. The riot stopped around
midnight with the riot police being backed into the police station. The
next day they brought over 35 police buses and riot vehicles into the
Naniwa police station with the intention of using these against the rioters.

During the riot, the police surveilled rioters from the top of the
police station, from plainclothes positions and from a helicopter. Riot
police with steel shields were deployed all around the neighborhood in
strategic places to charge in when the action kicked off. The workers
organizations which by the second day were maintaining the protest had
chosen a good time to do so because the police department proved
unwilling to unleash the direct, brutal charges seen in the 1990 riot
due to the international spotlight focused on them. On Saturday a police
infiltrator was found in the crowd, pushed up against a fence and
smashed in the head with a metal bar.

(A shield captured from cops by riot participants)

The riot has lasted since the 13th and every night there is a resumption
of hostility between the day laborers and the cops. Workers so far
refuse anything less than the fulfillment of their demands in light of
the police brutality incident. Despite the call from more 'moderate'
NGOs to 'stop the violence' there has been no let-up in hostility
towards the police, although the real level of violent confrontation is
not as strong as the weekend of the 13th-15th. The riot has been
characterized by the participation of young people as well as the older
day laborers in confrontation with the police. As the guarantors of
everyday exploitation under capitalism who have to assertively maintain
the constant dispossession of the urban working class, the police have
many enemies. This they are finding out every night.

Over the past couple of days there have been points where more than 500
people have gathered and rioted around the neighborhood. Police have
responded mainly by defending the Nishinari police station, their home
base, while getting back up from the local Naniwa police station, which
has a riot countermeasure practicing lot, and holds tens of anti-riot
vehicles. Despite this mighty arsenal, the police were perhaps surprised
when they deployed their tear gas cannon on the first day only to be met
with cries of joy and laughter. The use of force no longer has any spell
of intimidation, it is simply expected.

Still, the combined brutality of the police and their riot vehicles has
netted over 40 arrests (including of many young people), many injuries
and even blinded one worker with a direct shot of tear gas water to his
right eye.

The struggle here is inevitably limited by the particular situations of
day laborers, who are dispatched to their job sites and have no direct
access to the means of production that standard wage workers would. This
prevents them from for instance calling political strikes against police
brutality, and hitting powerful interests in the city where they really
hurt. As workers deprived of these means to struggle, the day laborers
will always have the riot as a method not only of collective defense but
for also forcing concessions from the city in the form of expanding
welfare access, creating jobs, backing off of eviction campaigns etc.
While these are more or less important gains strictly in terms of
survival, it is important to explore the possibilities of spreading the
antagonism of the Kamagasaki workers to the larger population of
exploited people in order to imagine doing away with this power
structure once and for all.

It is unclear exactly where the situation is headed, but we can know for
sure that the real repression in Kamagasaki will arrive after the
summits have ended and the focus is off of the Japanese government. Then
we will see the raids, the arrests and the scapegoating of particular
individuals for the righteous outburst of class violence that these
riots are. Instead of quietly accepting their fates as people to be
trampled upon, the participants have directly attacked the wardens of
wage labor who guarantee the violence of everyday slum life.

Overall, the ongoing repression against those involved in organizing
against the G8 summit as well as Kamagasaki should not convince anyone
that the ruling class here is once again afraid of the working class. In
repressing certain left groups organizing against the economic summits,
the Japanese government is more interested in preventing a movement from
emerging that starts to question capital at the macro level, than
actually attacking an existing one. On the other hand in Kamagasaki, the
state tries to deny the possibility of antagonism in a major metropole
and the visibility of this revolt, for fear of it spreading. This is why
most news reports have blacked out the ongoing riots in Kamagasaki. The
concreteness and universality of the Kamagasaki revolt truly threatens
to expand beyond the borders of police violence. Visitors to Kamagasaki
from near and far have over the past five days participated and found
their own struggle in riots fought by total strangers. The ruling class
fears and knows that it cannot control this horizontal sympathy and the
real practice of revolt that accompanies it.

Source:
http://www.325collective.com/social-control_repression-and-revolt-g8-japan.html


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Civil Unrest in America?

by José Miguel Alonso Trabanco

Eurasia is currently experiencing serious problems derived from
financial and economic difficulties such as unemployment, GDP negative
growth, currency depreciation, overall economic slowdown and so on.
Several members of both the European Union and NATO (Poland, Hungary,
Iceland come to mind) are already dealing with a considerable deal of
domestic discontent. Some States from the Former Soviet Union (notably
Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian Republics) and even Russia itself
are facing similar problems. Even Chinese government officials
acknowledge protests in the Chinese mainland, just like Professor
Michael Klare points out, which means that East Asia is by no means an
exception. As we shall see, financial and economic conditions are
equally grave in the American hemisphere, if not more so.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor and early
supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, has warned that civil
unrest on American soil is a possibility that should not be dismissed.
Brzezinski explains that “[the United States is] going to have millions
and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re
going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully
improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this
extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels
without historical precedent in America…” Brzezinski concludes with this
noteworthy remark “…hell, there could be even riots”.

The aforementioned means that the upper echelons of the American
political elite have realized that the current financial and economic
turmoil is not as bad as many experts had foreseen, they are well aware
that it is actually much worse and that things could really spiral out
of control if the present situation deteriorates even further. Indeed,
optimistic signs are nowhere to be found. Quite the contrary.

The full magnitude of the financial tsunami is clearly reflected in a
piece written by Barry Ritholtz, who states that the bailout plan
promoted by former US Secretary of the Treasury Henry “Hank” Paulson
amounts to a sum of money that is superior to the Louisiana Purchase,
the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Apollo Lunar Project, the Korean
War, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq and other large government
expenditures – combined (!). This illustrates that America’s top
policymakers (both Democratic and Republican) hold serious concerns
about the health of the American financial system and the American economy.

Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy (the largest in American history) was merely
the tip of the iceberg and economic and financial conditions have
dramatically worsened ever since. On January 22 2009, the Christian
Science Monitor published that the four largest U.S. banks “have lost
half of their value since January 2.” Moreover, in the period from
summer 2008 to March 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average index has
decreased more than 50%. Furthermore, during February 2009 alone, more
than 651 000 jobs were lost in the US, whose unemployment rate has now
reached 8.1 %, the highest in 26 years. Also, some US car manufacturers
(such as Ford, General Motors and Chrysler), once the pride of America’s
industry, are practically on life support.

Steve Lohr, from the New York Times, writes that “Some of the large
banks in the United States, according to economists and other finance
experts, are like dead men walking.” Indeed, there were only two
investment banks left: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and their
condition is not exactly solid because they have managed to survive by
becoming ordinary commercial banks. The Guardian reproduces an
assessment by Bill Isaac, an experienced financial expert; he claims
that the transformation of both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs is “a
shame because this country [the US] was built, in part, on risk-taking
by Goldman and Morgan and by a whole bunch of firms before them.” Karl
West, from the Daily Mail mentions that financial specialists warn that
mammoth bank Citigroup “could collapse”.

All of the above indicates that the much-feared financial meltdown is no
longer a distant and remote possibility because in fact it is already
taking place. However, this chaos might trigger some very serious and
preoccupying consequences. In order to have a clear understanding of
these implications, it is vital to take into account some reports that
were not given the proper amount of attention they deserved when they
were first published.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky observed that the US Army 3rd Infantry’s
1st Brigade Combat Team returned from Iraq some months ago. That
information is extremely disturbing because such military unit “may be
called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control”, according to
official sources. Now, what scenario could possibly require the
operational deployment of said units on American soil? Professor
Chossudovsky puts forward an intriguing hypothesis that must be borne in
mind. He argues that “Civil unrest resulting from from the financial
meltdown is a distinct possibility, given the broad impacts of financial
collapse on lifelong savings, pension funds, homeownership, etc”.

Shortly afterwards, the Centre for Research on Globalization website
posted an article written by Wayne Madsen. Mr. Madsen claims that a
highly confidential official report has been circulating among senior
members of the US Congress and their top advisors. The report has been
allegedly nicknamed as the “C & R document”. The author stipulates that
those letters stand for none other than “conflict” and “revolution”
because those scenarios are supposedly regarded by America’s
policymakers as plausible consequences triggered by a financial
meltdown. According to Mr. Madsen, the content of the document reveals
that severe financial chaos could spark a major war if Washington
refuses to honor its foreign debt and/or massive riots in US cities if
the American population does not accept a considerable tax increase.

For decades, overall political stability in the US was taken for
granted. However, as it has been pointed out, even senior American
statesmen are taking into consideration that financial volatility could
fuel a wave of discontent which could easily reach troubling
proportions. It seems that America itself is not immune from
“regime-threatening instability” as the Pentagon and the American
intelligence community terms it. It is likely that American government
officials have not dismissed the worst-case scenario. Indeed it looks
like they have been preparing accordingly.

Therefore, as has been scrutinized here, once one proceeds to connect
the dots a very dark picture begins to emerge, to say the least. An
all-encompassing cloud of uncertainty prevents us from formulating an
accurate forecast regarding what developments will occur and how they
will unfold during the next few months, let alone years. The only thing
that can be taken for granted and that one can be sure of is that the
unthinkable has now become thinkable.

José Miguel Alonso Trabanco is an independent writer based in Mexico
specialising in geopoltical and military affairs. He has a degree in
International Relations from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and
Higher Studies, Mexico City. His focus is on contemporary and historic
geopolitics, the world’s balance of power, the international system’s
architecture and the emergence of new powers.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12619