By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, Truthout | Op-Ed
The leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the gently named but dangerous behemoth dominated by the United States – and history’s largest global military cohort – plan to meet in Chicago on May 20 and 21.
The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) was to have met in Chicago in mid-May as well, overlapping with NATO. Fearing massive protests, the G8 cancelled, retreating to Camp David, Maryland, chased out of town by a coalition of dissidents, activists and agitators.
Isolated and inaccessible, Camp David is where the “leaders” of the planet’s eight wealthiest countries belong – sequestered and remote, barricaded and cut off in every imaginable way. The Camp David move illuminates the elite’s isolation from the people they pretend to represent.
By the same token, NATO – a military alliance of 28 countries, – is the only major intergovernmental body without a basic information disclosure policy. It’s a closed cabal with an active PR front and zero engagement with the public it claims to protect.
From their separate berths, NATO and the G-8’s heads of state, intelligence personnel, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats – the 1 percent of the 1 percent – will conspire to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor, and the living planet to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.